Jon George provides piano students with pleasing melodies, fun titles, and great sounds with no hand position changes. Several of the pieces include duet accompaniments for the teacher or an older student. A variety of five-finger hand positions are used making this an ideal collection for helping the beginning student to work on developing note reading facility while simultaneously enhancing sight-reading skills. This valuable addition to teaching literature is found on many state MTA lists.

Grocery lists. Checklists. To-do lists. Lots of people love--and live by--lists. And parents are no exception. Today's families are busier than ever, and moms don't have the time or energy to search and scramble for the parenting information they are desperately seeking: How much should my child be sleeping at this age? What toys will most benefit my child? What items are truly essential in furnishing a nursery? What questions should I ask a potential caregiver? What are the signs of a family-friendly restaurant? The answers to these questions and more than a hundred others are at a mom's fingertips with A Mom's Ultimate Book of Lists. This handy, practical reference guide will save time, money, and sanity for today's busy women.

Vols. for 1898-1968 include a directory of publishers.

Programming the Absolute discusses the notorious opposition between absolute and program music as a true dialectic that lies at the heart of nineteenth-century German music. Beginning with Beethoven, Berthold Hoeckner traces the aesthetic problem of musical meaning in works by Schumann, Wagner, Liszt, Mahler, and Schoenberg, whose private messages and public predicaments are emblematic for the cultural legacy of this rich repertory. After Romanticism had elevated music as a language "beyond" language, the ineffable spurred an unprecedented proliferation of musical analysis and criticism. Taking his cue from Adorno, Hoeckner develops the idea of a "hermeneutics of a moment," which holds that musical meaning crystallizes only momentarily--in a particular passage, a progression, even a single note. And such moments can signify as little as a fleeting personal memory or as much as the whole of German music. Although absolute music emerged with a matrix of values--the integrity of the subject, the aesthetic autonomy of art, and the intrinsic worth of high culture--that are highly contested in musicology today, Hoeckner argues that we should not completely discard the ideal of a music that continues to offer moments of transcendence and liberation. Passionately and artfully written, Hoeckner's quest for an "essayistic musicology" displays an original intelligence willing to take interpretive risks. It is a provocative contribution to our knowledge about some of Europe's most important music--and to contemporary controversies over how music should be understood and experienced.