What is this fleeting experience that sometimes hits us when we listen to music? Through several short essays adapted from lectures given at Vanderbilt University between 2008 and 2012, author Joshua McGuire answers this question while exploring what it takes to become better listeners of music. McGuire's premise is that listening to music in a fuller way shows us a fuller way to live, clarifying the way we listen to everything. Ironically, better listening involves a recognition of the absence of time experienced amidst profound silence. After all, the purpose of music is to bring us to silence. “As we listen, we become the silence in which music happens. We disappear.”

Lawrence knows in every fiber of his soul that he was meant to be a famous concert pianist, but the road to his pinnacle of success--performance on the stage at Carnegie Hall--is a steep and winding one, full of obstacles and family tragedy.

This study of the hidden side of music and its subtle effects is one of the most detailed books ever written on the subject.

(Music Pro Guides). Today, musical composition for films is more popular than ever. In professional and academic spheres, media music study and practice are growing; undergraduate and postgraduate programs in media scoring are offered by dozens of major colleges and universities. And increasingly, pop and contemporary classical composers are expanding their reach into cinema and other forms of screen entertainment. Yet a search on Amazon reveals at least 50 titles under the category of film music, and, remarkably, only a meager few actually allow readers to see the music itself, while none of them examine landmark scores like Vertigo , To Kill a Mockingbird , Patton , The Untouchables , or The Matrix in the detail provided by Scoring the Screen: The Secret Language of Film Music . This is the first book since Roy M. Prendergast's 1977 benchmark, Film Music: A Neglected Art , to treat music for motion pictures as a compositional style worthy of serious study. Through extensive and unprecedented analyses of the original concert scores, it is the first to offer both aspiring composers and music educators with a view from the inside of the actual process of scoring-to-picture. The core thesis of Scoring the Screen is that music for motion pictures is indeed a language , developed by the masters of the craft out of a dramatic and commercial necessity to communicate ideas and emotions instantaneously to an audience. Like all languages, it exists primarily to convey meaning . To quote renowned orchestrator Conrad Pope (who has worked with John Williams, Howard Shore, and Alexandre Desplat, among others): "If you have any interest in what music 'means' in film, get this book. Andy Hill is among the handful of penetrating minds and ears engaged in film music today."

"Compiles most of [the author's] long-running comic series of the same name, serialized in the largest Chicago alternative weekly, the 'Chicago reader,' every other week, for over a decade"--An author's not

It is April, 1555, and Juana I of Castile, the Spanish queen known as "la loca," has died after forty-seven years in forced seclusion at Tordesillas. Her last musician, Juan de Granada, refuses to depart with the other servants, forcing two functionaries of the Holy Office of the Inquisition to interrogate him in the now-empty palace. But is it really empty? Or is there, as Holy Office suspects, a heretic hidden on the premises, a converso secretly practicing the forbidden rites of Judaism? Only Juan knows the answer, and his subversive tale is at once a ballad of lost love and a last gambit to save a life--and a rich cultural and spiritual tradition on the verge of erasure. "Radiant, passionate, deeply intelligent and intensely moving, this brilliant novel brings alive a place and time surprisingly resonant with our own. Love and music burn like a laser through these glorious pages." -Andrea Barrett "In The Secret Music of Tordesillas, the fabulously gifted Marjorie Sandor tells the absorbing story of a Jewish musician and his queen, both living precarious lives in the tumultuous world of the Spanish Inquisition. Sandor's lustrous prose resonates like the music she so eloquently describes and her characters are exquisitely complicated. Reading these gorgeous pages, I felt that I too had taken up residence in some castle full of dark corners." -Margot Livesey "An historical novel of striking imagination and lyricism, this sly tale of sixteenth-century Spain, with its secrets and masks involving the interrelationships of Catholics, Muslims and Jews, has an uncanny bearing on our own country's diversity tensions. It is a pleasure to have another of Marjorie Sandor's delicious fictions: she is writing at the top of her form." -Phillip Lopate "I found Marjorie Sandor's The Secret Music at Tordesillas irresistible, as appealing for its grand romantic adventure as it is for its clear-eyed exploration of culture, tradition, and identity. Its narrative-replete with hidden Jews, palace intrigue, a captive queen, a hopeless love-is rendered in a prose as intoxicating as the ancient music that informs it. This is history in the form of a haunting song." -Steve Stern

The Secret in Medieval Literature explores the many secret agents, actions, creatures, and other beings influencing human existence. Medieval poets had a clear sense of the alternative dimension (the secret) and allowed it to enter quite frequently into their texts.