This introduction provides students and scholars with the information and skills they need when studying composers' sketches.

Black Sea Sketches is a portrait of some of the diverse musical cultures surrounding the Black Sea and in its hinterlands. Its six separate chapters follow a very broad trajectory from close-ups of traditional music (chapters 1-4) towards wide-angle studies of art music (chapters 5-6), and each of them opens windows to big, border-crossing themes about music and place. A wide variety of repertoires is discussed: ancient layers of polyphonic music, bardic songs, traditional music from the coasts and mountains, the sacred music of Islam and Orthodox Christianity, the art music of Europe and West Asia, and present-day popular music ‘scenes’. The usual practice is for each chapter to begin with a Black Sea coastal location before reaching out into the hinterlands. The result is a collection of six relatively discrete essays on different locations and topics, but with underlying thematic continuities, and offering a wide-ranging commentary on cultural difference. Firmly grounded in ethnographic and documentary research, this is an important study for scholars and researchers of Ethnomusicology, as also of Caucasian and Russian/East European Studies.

Erik Satie (1866-1925) was a quirky, innovative and enigmatic composer whose impact has spread far beyond the musical world. As an artist active in several spheres - from cabaret to religion, from calligraphy to poetry and playwriting - and collaborator with some of the leading avant-garde figures of the day, including Cocteau, Picasso, Diaghilev and René Clair, he was one of few genuinely cross-disciplinary composers. His artistic activity, during a tumultuous time in the Parisian art world, situates him in an especially exciting period, and his friendships with Debussy, Stravinsky and others place him at the centre of French musical life. He was a unique figure whose art is immediately recognisable, whatever the medium he employed. Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature explores many aspects of Satie's creativity to give a full picture of this most multifaceted of composers. The focus is on Satie's philosophy and psychology revealed through his music; Satie's interest in and participation in artistic media other than music, and Satie's collaborations with other artists. This book is therefore essential reading for anyone interested in the French musical and cultural scene of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The solos in Romantic Sketches, Book 1, will delight pianists who favor the Romantic style. Playing with musical expression is an important skill used in making music and is much more than just playing the notes on the printed page. Music written in the Romantic style is the perfect choice for developing this skill. These short, musical sketches will encourage students to play with nuance and sensitivity. Titles: * A Fond Farewell * Little Song * Medieval Festival * Morning Light * The Perfect Rose * Promises * Shadow Dance * Special Moments * Starlight Prelude * A Story from Long Ago * Summertime Waltz * Sun Showers

This artbook and music project is a collaboration between father and son that explores the relationship between the two mediums. In this book you will find the painted and sketched works of Jeff Stobbe, and sheet music for original compositions by Scott Stobbe. The life drawings of Santa Cruz artist Jeff Stobbe explore representation through line work and abstract expressionism through color. He captures not only the movement of the objective figure, but also the emotion of the subjective being, through facial expressions, posture, and use of color. There is a sense of playfulness in his work that offers an interactive experience for the viewer's imagination. The music of New Orleans based guitarist and composer Scott Stobbe encompasses sounds from around the globe, all the while maintaining a signature quality that is unmistakably his own. With roots in Brazilian music, Balkan music, swing and free improvisation, Scott's approach to composition is grounded yet unlimited by genre boundaries. As a multi-instrumentalist himself, Scott uses his knowledge of instrumental range to write cohesive parts that honor the innate qualities of each instrument involved. The recordings of these songs feature world-class musicians who are all a part of a larger world-music community based out of the Bay Area.

Opening with an account of print portraiture facilitating Franz Liszt's celebrity status and concluding with Riot Grrrl's noisy politics of feminism and performance, this interdisciplinary anthology charts the relationship between music and the visual arts from late Romanticism and the birth of modernism to 'postmodernism', while crossing from Western art to the Middle East. Focused on music as a central experience of art and life, these essays scrutinize 'the musicalisation of art' focusing on the visual and performing arts and detailing significant instances of intra-art relations between c. 1840 and the present day. Essays reflect on the aesthetic relationships of music to painting, performance and installation, sound-and- silence, time-and-space. The insistent influence of Wagner is considered as well as the work and ideas of Manet, Satie and Cage, Thomas Wilfred, La Monte Young and Eliasson. What distinguishes these studies are the convictions that music is never alone and that a full understanding of the “isms” of the last two hundred years is best achieved when music's influential presence in the visual arts is acknowledged and interrogated.