In 2004, the original Broadway production of Wicked earned 10 Tony nominations, including best musical. Based on the best-selling novel by Gregory Maguire, the show continues to run on Broadway and has touring companies throughout the United States and around the world. In Wicked: A Musical Biography, author Paul Laird explores the creation of this popular Broadway musical through an examination of draft scripts, interviews with major figures, and the study of primary musical sources such as sketches, drafts, and completed musical scores. Laird brings together an impressive amount of detail on the creation of Wicked, including a look at Maguire's novel, as well as the original source material, The Wizard of Oz. This volume also offers a history of the show's genesis along with examinations of the draft scenarios and scripts that demonstrate the show's development. Laird also explores Stephen Schwartz's life and work, providing an analysis of the composer and lyricist's work on the show through song drafts, sketches, and musical examples. Laird also surveys the show's critical reception in New York and London, noting how many critics failed to appreciate its qualities or anticipate its great success. The unusual nature of Wicked's story—dominated by two strong female leads—is also placed in the context of Broadway history. A unique look into a successful Broadway production, Wicked: A Musical Biography will be of interest to musicologists, theatre scholars, students, and general readers alike.

A concise musical biography traces the Beastie Boys' story from the New York punk scene through a blockbuster career that spans more than 20 years. Ever since they hit the big time with their 1986 rock/rap debut Licensed to Ill, the first rap album to reach #1 on the Billboard 200, the Beastie Boys have been a cultural bellwether, the likes of which was unseen before or since. Their association with MTV made the Beasties instant poster children for an unprecedented phase of integration, both musical and racial. Their music, a pastiche of sounds that spans decades and genres, influenced the course of popular music and continues to do so today. Beastie Boys: A Musical Biography tells the story of the band, from its beginnings through its ongoing critical and commercial success. Fans can read about the group's origins, the training of its members, its awards and accomplishments, and its influence on pop culture. Authoritative yet concise, this lively overview covers everything from the band's unique sound to their collaborations with leading filmmakers on their award-winning videos.

Here is an up-to-date, thoroughly researched biography of the world's most popular pop-punk band. Green Day is almost certainly the world's most popular pop-punk band. How they got there is the subject of Green Day: A Musical Biography, the first book to follow the band from their beginnings through the spring 2009 release of 21st Century Breakdown. Tracing the band's evolution from fiercely independent punks to a global powerhouse, Green Day starts with the members' earliest musical influences and upbringing and the founding of the punk club 924 Gilman Street that shaped their sense of community. Discussion of their conflicted feelings about signing to a major label explores the classic rock 'n' roll conundrum of "selling out," while details of their decline and 2004 rebirth offer an inspirational story of artistic rejuvenation. Interviews with the band members and key figures in their lives, excerpted from punk 'zines and other publications, offer a perspective on their methods of self-promotion and the image they have chosen to project over time.

Musical biography has rarely been an object of theoretical and methodological reflection. Our present-day perception of the lives of prominent composers and performers of the past has been largely formed by cultural and political assumptions of nineteenth-century biographers and their twentieth-century followers. While older biographies are being scrutinized for veracity and 'updated' with new evidence, their historiographical premisses and narrative techniques remain largely unchallenged. The epistemological upheavals in the humanities since the 1960s have generated a body of theoretical thought that has undermined many of the assumptions of traditional biography. Consequently, many of these assumptions have lost their hold as viable underpinnings for present-day scholarly biography. For example, the accumulation of facts is no longer believed to bring us closer to an understanding of the subject; nor are the traditional views of the unified self and the self as a foundational idea taken for granted. This volume brings together musicologists and historians who explore, through individual case studies, the rich potential of these new theories for writing musical lives. The authors of this volume examine how the insights provided by these theories illuminate our critical reassessment of older biographies - and the interpretations of musical works these biographies were used to construe - and help forge new approaches to musical biography. The authors also explore the functions musical biographies served in different historical contexts, the relevance of biography for musical criticism, the reliability of archival evidence, the ethics of biography, the demands placed on biography by feminist and gender history, and the new possibilities offered by cinema. The contributors to this volume challenge the view that biography has little importance for music history, analysis, and criticism. Collectively, they reassert biography's centrality and relevance, and dem

No one composer is at the centre of this fascinating story, but a larger picture emerges of a shift in musical scenery, from the world of the innocent Romanticism of Berlioz and Schumann to the more potent musical politics of Wagner, and of his antidote (as many saw him), Brahms. Why 1853? For many leading composers this year brought far-reaching changes to their lives: Brahms emerged from obscurity to celebrity, Schumann ceased to be an active composer, and both Berlioz and Wagner became active again after long silences. By limiting the perspective to a single year yet extending it to a group of musicians, their constant interconnections become the central motif: Brahms meets Berlioz and Liszt as well as Schumann; Liszt is a constant link in every chain; Joachim is close to all of them; Wagner is on everyone's mind. No one composer is at the centre of the story, but a network of musicians spreads across the map of Europe from London and Paris to Leipzig and Zurich. Music in 1853 shows how musicians were now more closely connected than ever before, through the constant exchange of letters and the rapidly expanding railway network. The book links geography and day-to-day events to show how international the European musical scene had become. A larger picture emerges of a shift in musical scenery, from the world of the innocent Romanticism of Berlioz and Schumann to the more potent musical politics of Wagner and of his antidote (as many saw him) Brahms. HUGH MACDONALD is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University, St Louis. He has authored books on Skryabin and Berlioz and has previously published Beethoven's Century: Essays on Composers and Themes with Boydell/URP.