Titles in The Listener’s Companion: A Scarecrow Press Music Series provide readers with a deeper understanding of key musical genres and the work of major artists and composers. Aimed at nonspecialists, each volume explains in clear and accessible language how to listen to works from particular artists, composers, and genres. Looking at the context in which the music appeared as well as its form, authors explore with readers the environments in which key musical works were written and performed—from a 1950s bebop concert at the Village Vanguard to a performance of Handel’s Messiah in eighteenth-century Germany. Along with his contemporaries Chopin and Wagner, Verdi is among the few composers whose place in the musical pantheon is based almost entirely upon the mastery of a single genre. This is largely owing to his staggering output in a career that lasted over fifty years. Several of his operas occupy the nucleus of the modern repertoire, and Verdi almost single-handedly maintained the Italian lyric tradition against the tide of Wagnerian music drama. In his final years, he virtually reinvented Italian opera. Indeed, Verdi’s life and music came to be so intimately associated with the Italian unification movement known as the Risorgimento that he is still revered as a great national figure in his homeland. In Experiencing Verdi: A Listener’s Companion, Donald Sanders combines biography with simple, concise musical analysis. Summarizing the evolution of Italian opera and the bel canto tradition that prevailed at the beginning of Verdi’s career, Sanders takes readers on a leisurely tour of eleven of Verdi’s most important operas and of the Manzoni Requiem and concludes with a look at Verdi’s influence on later composers like Giacomo Puccini, his place in the modern repertoire, and his role as an Italian patriot. With a timeline, glossary of basic musical terms, and selected reading and listening recommendations, Experiencing Verdi will engage opera lovers at all levels, from those just starting to listen, learn, and enjoy to musical devotees.

Jessica Verdi, the author of My Life After Now and The Summer I Wasn't Me, returns with a heartbreaking and poignant novel of grief and guilt that reads like Nicholas Sparks for teens. It's all Ryden's fault. If he hadn't gotten Meg pregnant, she would have never stopped her chemo treatments and would still be alive. Instead he's failing fatherhood one dirty diaper at a time. And it's not like he's had time to grieve while struggling to care for their infant daughter, start his senior year, and earn the soccer scholarship he needs to go to college. The one person who makes Ryden feel like his old self is Joni. She's fun and energetic—and doesn't know he has a baby. But the more time they spend together, the harder it becomes to keep his two worlds separate. Finding one of Meg's journals only stirs up old emotions. Ryden's convinced Meg left other notebooks for him to find, some message to help his new life make sense. But how is he going to have a future if he can't let go of the past? "Ryden's story is a moving illustration of how sometimes you have to let go of the life you planned to embrace the life you've been given. A strong, character-driven story that teen readers will love."—Carrie Arcos, National Book Award Finalist for Out of Reach

Experiencing Mahler surveys the symphonies and major song sets of Gustav Mahler, presenting them not just as artworks but as vivid and deeply felt journeys. Mahler took the symphony, perhaps the most tradition-bound genre in Western music, and opened it to the widest span of human experience. He introduced themes of love, nature, the chasmic depth of midnight, making peace with death, facing rebirth, seeking one’s creator, and being at one with God. Arved Ashby offers the non-specialist a general introduction into Mahler’s seemingly unbounded energy to investigate the elements that make each work an experiential adventure—one that has redefined the symphonic genre in new ways. In addition to the standard nine symphonies, Ashby discusses Das Lied von der Erde, the three most commonly heard song sets (the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Kindertotenlieder, and Rückert-Lieder), and the unfinished Tenth Symphony (in Cooke’s edition). Experiencing Mahler is a far-reaching and often provocative search for meaning in the music of one of the most beloved composers of all time.

Prologue : Verdi and his audience -- War -- Prayer -- Romance -- Sexuality -- Marriage -- Death -- Laughter.

Experiencing Alice Cooper: A Listener’s Companion takes a long overdue look at the music and stage act of rock music’s self-styled arch-villain. A provocateur from the very start of his career in the mid-1960s, Alice Cooper, aka Vince Furnier, son of a lay preacher in the Church of Jesus Christ, carved a unique path through five decades of rock’n’roll. Despite a longevity that only a handful of other artists and acts can match, Alice Cooper remains a difficult act and artist to pin down and categorize. During the last years of the 1960s and the heydays of commercial success in the 1970s, Cooper's groundbreaking theatricality, calculated offensiveness, and evident disregard for the conventions of rock protocols sowed confusion among his critics and evoked outrage from the public. Society’s watchdogs demanded his head, and Cooper willingly obliged at the end of each performance with his on-stage self-guillotining. But as youth anthem after youth anthem - “I’m Eighteen,” “School’s Out,” “Elected,” “Department of Youth”—rang out in his arena concerts the world over and across airwaves, fans flocked to experience Cooper’s unique brand of rock. Critics searched for proper descriptions: “pantomime,” “vaudeville,” “retch-rock,” “Grand Guignol.” In 1973 Cooper headlined in Time magazine as “Schlock Rock’s Godzilla.” In Experiencing Alice Cooper: A Listener’s Companion, Ian Chapman surveys Cooper’s career through his twenty-seven studio albums (1969-2017). While those who have written about Cooper have traditionally kept their focus on the stage spectacle, too little attention has been paid to Cooper’s recordings. Throughout, Chapman argues that while Cooper may have been rock’s most accomplished showman, he is first and foremost a musician, with his share of gold and platinum albums to vouch for his qualifications as a musical artist.

Saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Ornette Coleman, along with pianist Cecil Taylor, was one of the founding forces of the Free Jazz movement which took the music world by storm in the 1950s and 60s. His brilliance as an instrumentalist at first positioned him as a polarizing figure, but eventually brought him recognition as an American original and international jazz treasure. Jazz drummer Michael Stephans explores the personal challenges Coleman faced, the music he created from one decade to the next, and the incredibly positive attitude he maintained in the face of so much negativity throughout his life. Revealing how Coleman became an iconic, enigmatic figure not only in jazz, but in much of contemporary improvisational music, Stephans weaves together analysis of Coleman’s recordings with interviews of those who knew Coleman best. Experiencing Ornette Coleman: A Listener's Companion encourages both jazz devotees and readers with little knowledge of the music to trace the inspirational journey of this now-seminal figure from his early years through the beginnings of the new millennium. Along the way, readers will learn about the music and motivations of the free jazz movement while experiencing an utterly human story of artistic genius and expression.

Experiencing Jewish Music in America: A Listener's Companion offers an easy-to-read and new perspective on the remarkably diverse landscape that comprises Jewish music in the United States. This much-needed survey on the art of listening to and enjoying this dynamic and diverse musical culture invites listeners curious about the many types of music in its connection to Jewish life. Experiencing Jewish Music in America is intended to encourage further reading about, listening to, and viewing of this portion of America’s musical heritage, and provide listeners with the tools to understand and appreciate this body of work. This volume is designed to appeal to listeners of all stripes, regardless of ability to read music, and of religious or cultural background. Experiencing Jewish Music in America offers insights into an extensive range of musical genres and styles that have been central to the Jewish experience, beginning with the arrival of the first Jewish immigrants in the sixteenth century and the chanting of the Torah, to the sounds of pop today. It lays the groundwork for the listener’s understanding of music in its relation to Jewish studies by exploring the wide range of venues in which this music has appeared, from synagogue to street to stage to screen. Each chapter offers selected case studies where these unique forms of music were—and still can be—heard, seen, and experienced. This book gives readers unique insights into the challenges of classifying Jewish music, while it traces its history and development on American soil and outlines “ways of listening” so readers can draw clear connections to Jewish culture. The volume thus brings together American Jewish history, the story of American and Jewish music, and the roles of the individuals important to both. It offers the reader tools to identify, evaluate, and appreciate the musical genres, and reflect the growing interest of the past decade in the academic study of Jewish music.