Susan Tomes— A history of the piano in only 100 pieces—how can that be? Doesn’t the piano have one of the most extensive literatures of music written for any instrument? In reality, one would need thousands of choices to do justice to the piano music of the last 250 years.
Laura Tunbridge— In 1840, the Berlin publisher Heinrich Schlesinger published a short piano piece as the Dernière pensée musicale de Louis van Beethoven. It was not, in fact, Beethoven’s “last musical thought”; it was not even the first time it had been published. The same music had appeared in a supplement
Toyin Falola and Raphael Chijioke Njoku— The subject of Black music and its African cultural roots is arguably one of the most engaging topics in contemporary Africana studies, cultural anthropology, and ethnomusicology. It is compelling because the record of successes attained by Black music artists across the world is one
Charles Rosen— Proust’s grandmother was a woman of extremely modest, unpretentious demeanour, who never ventured to contradict anyone’s literary judgement: But on matters of which the rules and principles had been taught her by her mother, on the way to cook certain dishes, to play the sonatas of Beethoven, and to
Scott Timberg— When you ask people why they steal music, or why they don’t care about the collapse of the record industry, the more informed ones talk about the decadence of the labels themselves. Lowery, who teaches a course on the economics of music at the University of Georgia’s business school,
Follow The History of Rock ‘N’ Roll in Ten Songs on Facebook! In anticipation of the Saturday, May 31 broadcast of the 2014 Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall of Fame inductees, we are excited to announce cultural critic and Rolling Stone columnist Greil Marcus’ new book, The History of Rock ‘N’