Japan was the first non-Western nation to compete with the Western powers at their own game. The country’s rise to a major player on the stage of Western music has been equally spectacular. The connection between these two developments, however, has never been explored. How did making music make Japan modern? How did Japan make music that originated in Europe its own? And what happened to Japan’s traditional music in the process? Music and the Making of Modern Japan answers these questions. Discussing musical modernization in the context of globalization and nation-building, Margaret Mehl argues that, far from being a side-show, music was part of the action on centre stage. Making music became an important vehicle for empowering the people of Japan to join in the shaping of the modern world. In only fifty years, from the 1870s to the early 1920s, Japanese people laid the foundations for the country’s post-war rise as a musical as well as an economic power. Meanwhile, new types of popular song, fuelled by the growing global record industry, successfully blended inspiration from the West with musical characteristics perceived as Japanese. Music and the Making of Modern Japan represents a fresh contribution to historical research on making music as a major cultural, social, and political force.

This important 1990 book provides a comprehensive survey of English organ building during the most innovative fifty years in its history.

(Meredith Music Resource). A Composer's Insight, Volume 1 with a foreword by Michael Colgrass is the first in a five-volume series on major contemporary composers and their works for wind band. Included in this initial volume are rare, "behind-the-notes" perspectives acquired from personal interviews with each composer. An excellent resource for conductors, composers or enthusiasts interested in acquiring a richer musical understanding of the composers' training, compositional approach, musical influences and interpretative ideas. Features the music of: Timothy Broege, Michael Colgrass, Michael Daugherty, David Gillingham, John Harbison, Karel Husa, Alfred Reed and others.

Infused with a warm, affable tone, Making Music in Montessori is the Guide’s guide to music education, providing Montessori teachers all at once a snappy, practical handbook, music theory mentor, pedagogical manual, and resource anthology.The book’s goal: To give teachers confidence in music, so that when their children walk away from a lesson all fired up to compose their own music, their teacher will know how to guide them. Before Making Music in Montessori, teachers may have only dreamed of a classroom buzzing with children working, learning, and growing with music alongside all of the other subject areas in the Montessori curriculum. Now, it’s a reality. If children’s minds are a fertile field, then Making Music in Montessori will stir Montessori teachers of all musical backgrounds to don their overalls, roll up their sleeves, sow the musical seeds, and watch them blossom under their children’s flaming imagination.