Music as Dream: Essays on Giacinto Scelsi showcases recent scholarly criticism on the music and philosophy of the brilliantly original composer Giacinto Scelsi. In this collection, Franco Sciannameo and Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini select and translate into English for the first time essays that reflect the evolution of recent scholarship on Scelsi’s musical compositions. Music as Dream opens with “The Scelsi Case,” which erupted shortly after Scelsi’s death in 1988 when composer Vieri Tosatti claimed ownership of his works. This quarrel reached its zenith in the pages of PianoTime’s March 1989 issue, where musicologist Guido Zaccagnini questioned a group of noted composers, writers, and arts managers about whether a composer can claim sole authorship for a work accomplished in collaboration with others. The essays are wide-ranging in scope. French musicologist Michelle Biget-Mainfroy, a specialist in “gestural” piano writing, offers an in-depth study of Scelsi’s complex piano output; Gianmario Borio looks at Scelsi’s “Sound as Compositional Process”; Alessandra Montali examines and details Scelsi’s theoretical and literary writings; Luciano Martinis and Franco Sciannameo explore the lives and whereabouts of obscure composers Giacinto Sallustio, Walther Klein, and Richard Falk, who were Scelsi’s collaborators until the early 1940s when Tosatti took sole charge; Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini elaborates on Scelsi’s most important composition of his first period, presenting a tour-de-force that pieces together its complex story through research at the newly organized Scelsi Archive at the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi in Rome; and Friedrich Jaecker’s and Sandro Marrocu’s essays also draw on research conducted at the archive of Fondazione. Finally, an updated bibliography and discography conclude the book

The complete Dream Songs--hypnotic, seductive, masterful--as thrilling to read now as they ever were John Berryman's The Dream Songs are perhaps the funniest, saddest, most intricately wrought cycle of oems by an American in the twentieth century. They are also, more simply, the vibrantly sketched adventures of a uniquely American antihero named Henry. Henry falls in and out of love, and is in and out of the hospital; he sings of joy and desire, and of beings at odds with the world. He is lustful; he is depressed. And while Henry is breaking down and cracking up and patching himself together again, Berryman is doing the same thing to the English language, crafting electric verses that defy grammar but resound with an intuitive truth: "if he had a hundred years," Henry despairs in "Dream Song 29," "& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time / Henry could not make good." This volume collects both 77 Dream Songs, which won Berryman the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, and their continuation, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which was awarded the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize in 1969. The Dream Songs are witty and wild, an account of madness shot through with searing insight, winking word play, and moments of pure, soaring elation. This is a brilliantly sustained and profoundly moving performance that has not yet-and may never be-equaled.

In this acclaimed picture book bursting with vibrance and rhythm, a girl dreams of playing the drums in 1930s Cuba, when the music-filled island had a taboo against female drummers.

Fifty years after the Grateful Dead was formed, the band still exerts a powerful influence over hundreds of thousands of fans around the world. Today, an entire generation of Deadheads who have never experienced a live Dead show are still drawn to the music and the complex and colorful subculture that has grown up around it. In This Is All a Dream We Dreamed, Blair Jackson and David Gans, two of the most well-respected chroniclers of the Dead, reveal the band's story through the words of its members and their creative collaborators, as well as a number of diverse fans, stitching together a multitude of voices into a seamless oral tapestry. Woven into this musical saga is an examination of the subculture that developed into its own economy, touching fans from all walks of life, from penniless hippies to celebrities, and at least one U.S. vice president. The book traces the band's evolution from its folk/bluegrass beginnings through the Jug Band craze, an early incarnation as Rolling Stones wannabes, feral psychedelic warriors, the Americana jam band that blazed through the '70s, to the shockingly popular but still iconoclastic stadium-filling band of later years. The Dead broke every rule of the music business along the way, taking risks and venturing into new territory as they fused inspired ideas and techniques with intuition and fearlessness to create a sound-and a business model-unlike anything heard and seen before.

During the 1930s, swing bands combined jazz and popular music to create large-scale dreams for the Depression generation, capturing the imagination of America's young people, music critics, and the music business. Swingin' the Dream explores that world, looking at the racial mixing-up and musical swinging-out that shook the nation and has kept people dancing ever since. "Swingin' the Dream is an intelligent, provocative study of the big band era, chiefly during its golden hours in the 1930s; not merely does Lewis A. Erenberg give the music its full due, but he places it in a larger context and makes, for the most part, a plausible case for its importance."—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World "An absorbing read for fans and an insightful view of the impact of an important homegrown art form."—Publishers Weekly "[A] fascinating celebration of the decade or so in which American popular music basked in the sunlight of a seemingly endless high noon."—Tony Russell, Times Literary Supplement

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the genre-defying icon Ben Folds comes a memoir that is as nuanced, witty, and relatable as his cult-classic songs. “A Dream About Lightning Bugs reads like its author: intelligent, curious, unapologetically punk, and funny as hell.”—Sara Bareilles NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND PASTE Ben Folds is a celebrated American singer-songwriter, beloved for songs such as “Brick,” “You Don’t Know Me,” “Rockin’ the Suburbs,” and “The Luckiest,” and is the former frontman of the alternative rock band Ben Folds Five. But Folds will be the first to tell you he’s an unconventional icon, more normcore than hardcore. Now, in his first book, Folds looks back at his life so far in a charming and wise chronicle of his artistic coming of age, infused with the wry observations of a natural storyteller. In the title chapter, “A Dream About Lightning Bugs,” Folds recalls his earliest childhood dream—and realizes how much it influenced his understanding of what it means to be an artist. In “Measure Twice, Cut Once” he learns to resist the urge to skip steps during the creative process. In “Hall Pass” he recounts his 1970s North Carolina working-class childhood, and in “Cheap Lessons” he returns to the painful life lessons he learned the hard way—but that luckily didn’t kill him. In his inimitable voice, both relatable and thought-provoking, Folds digs deep into the life experiences that shaped him, imparting hard-earned wisdom about both art and life. Collectively, these stories embody the message Folds has been singing about for years: Smile like you’ve got nothing to prove, because it hurts to grow up, and life flies by in seconds. Praise for A Dream About Lightning Bugs “Besides being super talented, and an incredibly poignant and multifaceted musician, Ben Folds is a fantastic author. I couldn’t put this book down—and not just because I taped it to my hand. Ben takes us into his mind and into his process from the very beginnings of his childhood to where he is today—one of the greatest musicians and writers that has ever graced the art.”—Bob Saget

Offers a collection of poems with themes ranging from race, memory, and Southern culture to African American celebrities including Richard Pryor, Muhammad Ali, and Nat King Cole.