In short, gloriously inventive essays, Whiting Award-winning author Amy Leach's The Everybody Ensemble invites us to see and celebrate our oddball, interconnected world Humans, please turn your guns into kazoos. Are you feeling dismay, despair, disillusion? Need a break from the ho-hum, the hopeless, and the hurtful? Feel certain that there’s a version of our world that doesn’t break down into tiny categories of alliance but brings everybody together into one clattering, sometimes discordant but always welcoming chorus of glorious pandemonium? Amy Leach, the celebrated author of the transcendent Things That Are, invites you into The Everybody Ensemble, an effervescent tonic of a book. These short, wildly inventive essays are filled with praise songs, poetry, ingenious critique, soul-lifting philosophy, music theory, and whimsical but scientific trips into nature. Here, you will meet platypuses, Tycho Brahe and his moose, barnacle goslings, medieval mystics, photosynthetic bacteria, and a wholly fresh representation of the biblical Job. Equal parts call to reason and to joy, this book is an irrepressible celebration of our oddball, interconnected world. The Everybody Ensemble delivers unexpected wisdom and a wake-up call that sounds from within. For readers of Ross Gay, Eula Biss, Anne Lamott, Annie Dillard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and even Lewis Carroll, these twenty-four essays will be a perfect match.

Essays by a Whiting Award winner: “Like a descendant of Lewis Carroll and Emily Dickinson . . . one of the most exciting and original writers in America.” —Yiyun Li, author of Must I Go Things That Are takes jellyfish, fainting goats, and imperturbable caterpillars as just a few of its many inspirations. In a series of essays that progress from the tiniest earth dwellers to the most far-flung celestial bodies—considering the similarity of gods to donkeys, the inexorability of love and vines, the relations of exploding stars to exploding sea cucumbers—Amy Leach rekindles a vital communion with the wild world, dormant for far too long. Things That Are is not specifically of the animal, the human, or the phenomenal; it is a book of wonder, one the reader cannot help but leave with their perceptions both expanded and confounded in delightful ways. This debut collection comes from a writer whose accolades precede her: a Whiting Award, a Rona Jaffe Award, a Best American Essays selection, and a Pushcart Prize, all received before her first book-length publication. Things That Are marks the debut of an entirely new brand of nonfiction writer, in a mode like that of Ander Monson, John D’Agata, and Eula Biss, but a new sort of beast entirely its own. “Explores fantastical and curious subjects pertaining to natural phenomena . . . for those interested in looking at the natural world through the lens of a fairy tale, this is a bonbon of a book.” —Kirkus Reviews

Housed on the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the University Musical Society is one of the oldest performing arts presenters in the country. A past recipient of the National Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest public artistic honor, UMS connects audiences with wide-ranging performances in music, dance, and theater each season.Between 1987 and 2017, UMS was led by Ken Fischer, who over three decades pursued an ambitious campaign to expand and diversify the organization’s programming and audiences—initiatives inspired by Fischer’s overarching philosophy toward promoting the arts, “Everybody In, Nobody Out.” The approach not only deepened UMS’s engagement with the university and southeast Michigan communities, it led to exemplary partnerships with distinguished artists across the world. Under Fischer’s leadership, UMS hosted numerous breakthrough performances, including the Vienna Philharmonic’s final tour with Leonard Bernstein, appearances by then relatively unknown opera singer Cecilia Bartoli, a multiyear partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and artists as diverse as Yo-Yo Ma, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Elizabeth Streb, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Though peppered with colorful anecdotes of how these successes came to be, this book is neither a history of UMS nor a memoir of Fischer’s significant accomplishments with the organization. Rather it is a reflection on the power of the performing arts to engage and enrich communities—not by handing down cultural enrichment from on high, but by meeting communities where they live and helping them preserve cultural heritage, incubate talent, and find ways to make community voices heard.

A detailed road map for wealth managers who want to build an ensemble firm or team and achieve sustained growth, profitability and high valuations Why do ten percent of wealth management firms grow faster than the rest of the industry, often despite the turbulence of the markets? The answer, according to industry consultant and researcher, P. Palaveev, is that the most successful firms are those which, create and promote a team-based service model that serves as the foundation of their enterprise. Find out how and why a team-based service model can play a decisive role in the future growth and sustained success of your wealth management firm Discover the key factors for building a successful ensemble firm and profit from the best practices top team-based firms employ Profit from the author's years of experience working with the world's top wealth management firms and the data he has compiled as a pre-eminent industry researcher Learn about the various organizational structures, partnership models and career path options and how to put them to work building an ensemble practice Get the lowdown on how the savviest traditional broker-dealer firms have formed dynamic ensemble teams within their organizations and learn of the results they've achieved

Ensemble Theatre Making: A Practical Guide is the first comprehensive diagnostic handbook for building, caring for and maintaining ensemble. Successful ensembles don't happen by chance: they can be created, nurtured and maintained through specific actions taken by ensemble leaders and members. Ensemble Theatre Making provides a thorough step-by-step process to consistently achieve the collaborative dynamic that leads to the group trust, commitment and sacrifice necessary for the success of a common goal.

(Berklee Guide). The definitive text used for the time-honored Chord Scales course at Berklee College of Music, this book concentrates on scoring for every possible ensemble combination and teaches performers and arrangers how to add color, character and sophistication to chord voicings. Topics covered include: selecting appropriate harmonic tensions, understanding jazz harmony, overcoming harmonic ambiguity, experimenting with unusual combinations and non-traditional alignments, and many more. The accompanying audio includes performance examples of several different arranging techniques.

Connecting the black music tradition with the black activist tradition, Party Music brings both into greater focus than ever before and reveals just how strongly the black power movement was felt on the streets of black America. Interviews reveal the never-before-heard story of the Black Panthers' R&B band the Lumpen and how five rank-and-file members performed popular music for revolutionaries. Beyond the mainstream civil rights movement that is typically discussed are the stories of the Black Panthers, the Black Arts Movement, the antiwar activism, and other radical movements that were central to the impulse that transformed black popular music—and created soul music.