A practical guide to professional orchestration featuring recorded musical examples performed by Henry Mancini. Included in the book are sections on the woodwinds, brass, the rhythm section and the string section. A recording is included to follow along with the printed scores.

Broadway's top orchestrators - Robert Russell Bennett, Don Walker, Philip J. Lang, Jonathan Tunick - are names well known to musical theatre fans, but few people understand precisely what the orchestrator does. The Sound of Broadway Music is the first book ever written about these unsung stars of the Broadway musical whose work is so vital to each show's success. The book examines the careers of Broadway's major orchestrators and follows the song as it travels from the composer's piano to the orchestra pit. Steven Suskin has meticulously tracked down thousands of original orchestral scores, piecing together enigmatic notes and notations with long-forgotten documents and current interviews with dozens of composers, producers, conductors and arrangers. The information is separated into three main parts: a biographical section which gives a sense of the life and world of twelve major theatre orchestrators, as well as incorporating briefer sections on another thirty arrangers and conductors; a lively discussion of the art of orchestration, written for musical theatre enthusiasts (including those who do not read music); a biographical section which gives a sense of the life and world of twelve major theatre orchestrators, as well as incorporating briefer sections on another thirty arrangers and conductors; and an impressive show-by-show listing of more than seven hundred musicals, in many cases including a song-by-song listing of precisely who orchestrated what along with relevant comments from people involved with the productions. Stocked with intriguing facts and juicy anecdotes, many of which have never before appeared in print, The Sound of Broadway Music brings fascinating and often surprising new insight into the world of musical theatre.

(Amadeus). Score reading provides insights into the musical structure of a work that are difficult to obtain from merely listening. Many listeners and amateurs derive great pleasure from following a performance with score in hand to help them better understand the intricacies of what they are hearing. This guide includes practice examples of increasing difficulty taken from scores of well-known works from various periods.

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

The popularity of cartoon music, from Carl Stalling's work for Warner Bros. to Disney sound tracks and "The Simpsons"' song parodies, has never been greater. This lively and fascinating look at cartoon music's past and present collects contributions from well-known music critics and cartoonists, and interviews with the principal cartoon composers. Here Mark Mothersbaugh talks about his music for "Rugrats," Alf Clausen about composing for "The Simpsons," Carl Stalling about his work for Walt Disney and Warner Bros., Irwin Chusid about Raymond Scott's work, Will Friedwald about "Casper the Friendly Ghost," Richard Stone about his music for "Animaniacs," Joseph Lanza about "Ren and Stimpy," and much, much more.

Sound and Score brings together music expertise from prominent international researchers and performers to explore the intimate relations between sound and score and the artistic possibilities that this relationship yields for performers, composers and listeners. Considering "notation" as the totality of words, signs, and symbols encountered on the road to an accurate and effective performance of music, this book embraces different styles and periods in a comprehensive understanding of the complex relations between invisible sound and mute notation, between aural perception and visual representation, and between the concreteness of sound and the iconic essence of notation. Three main perspectives structure the analysis: a conceptual approach that offers contributions from different fields of enquiry (history, musicology, semiotics), a practical one that takes the skilled body as its point of departure (written by performers), and finally an experimental perspective that challenges state-of-the-art practices, including transdisciplinary approaches in the crossroads to visual arts and dance.