The Music Man Sr.
On Show May 20-21, 2015
BookList compiled by Gere Staff
(all summaries are publisher’s summaries)
American Tapestry: Music for Wind Band
By: Richard Shuster, Lone Star Wind Orchestra and Eugene Migliaro Corporon
CD 781.68 Lon
John Williams' arrangement of the Star-Spangled Banner sets the stage for this collection of American works for wind band spanning 100 years. Featuring traditional compositions from the likes of George Gershwin, Howard Hanson, Robert Russell Bennett and J.
Battle of the Bands Series
Artie Shaw vs. Benny Goodman – Glenn Miller vs. Tommy Dorsey – Gil Evans vs. Charles Mingus
781.65 Bat
“Battle of the Bands” at ballrooms and night spots around the country were a staple of the big band era. You could hear two bands for the price of one, and watch the best musicians from the very best bands try to outshine each other. RCA Victor revives that excitement with this ‘Showdown” series, created its own cutting contests in a make-believe ballroom from the fabulous RCA Victor Big Bands Archives.
Pops on the March
By: John Williams and the Boston Pops Orchestra
CD 784.8 Bos
Made up entirely of marches, this recording by the Boston Pops Orchestra conducted by John Williams illustrates the variety that is possible within the march form. The recording also reflects the format of a Boston Pops concert, which usually begins with a classical section and then comes up to the present with orchestral arrangements of contemporary popular music.
Strike Up the Band: Marches from Around the World
By: Band of the Royal Swedish Air Force
784.8 Ban
This wide-ranging collection of favorite marches from around the world spans a period of 100 years, from Schubert' Marche militaire No. 1, indelibly associated with Christmas Eve, Disney and Santa' workshop, to Coates' The Dam Busters used in the 1954 film of the same name. Other favorites include Sousa’s The Liberty Bell, used as the signature tune for the BBC comedy Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Alford’s Colonel Bogey from the film The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Under the Double Eagle by ‘the Austrain march king’, Josef Franz Wagner.
I Love a Parade
By: The Boston Pops Orchestra and John Williams
784.8 Bos
No summary available.
Marrying Mozart
By: Stephanie Cowell
Cowell
Amadeus meets Little Women in this irresistibly delightful historical novel by award-winning author Stephanie Cowell. The year is 1777 and the four Weber sisters, daughters of a musical family, share a crowded, artistic life in a ramshackle house. While their father scrapes by as a music copyist and their mother secretly draws up a list of prospective suitors in the kitchen, the sisters struggle with their futures, both marital and musical—until twenty-one-year-old Wolfgang Mozart walks into their lives. Bringing eighteenth-century Europe to life with unforgiving winters, yawning princes, scheming parents, and the enduring passions of young talent, Stephanie Cowell’s richly textured tale captures a remarkable historical figure—and the four young women who engage his passion, his music, and his heart.
La’s Orchestra Saves the World
By: Alexander McCall Smith
McCall Smith
A heart-warming stand alone novel about the life-affirming powers of music and company during a time of war, from the best-selling and beloved author of The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency.
Song of the Thin Man
By: William Powell and Myrna Loy
DVD Song of the Thin Man
At a charity gambling benefit aboard the S.S. Fortune, the tables are hot, the jazz is hotter and before you know it, a bandleader's body is growing cold. They're playing your song, Nick and Nora Charles! William Powell and Myrna Loy return as the married sleuths, rousting suspects out of bed for 4 AM interrogations while trying to fathom the bebop argot of '40s jazz jive.
Nashville Chrome
By: Rick Bass
Bass
A richly imagined story of the Browns, real-life singers who were once the biggest thing on the American country music scene. A wrenching meditation on the complexities of fame and of one forgotten family who experienced them firsthand.
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall
By: Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro
Five interconnected stories in which music is an intrinsic theme follow the struggles of a once-popular singer desperate for a comeback, a songwriter who is unwittingly involved in a failing marriage, and a jazz musician who wrongly believes that plastic surgery will secure his career.
Before the Poison
By: Peter Robinson
Robinson (M)
Through the years of success in Hollywood composing music for the world's most lauded films, Chris always promised his wife they would return to the Yorkshire Dales one day. Now, after his wife's death, Chris feels he must not forget his promise. Back in the Dales, he rents an isolated house that will allow him the space to come to terms with his grief and the quiet to allow him to compose his piano sonata. But when he finds that the house was the scene of a murder in the 1950s, and that the convicted murderer was one of the last women hanged in England, he finds himself increasingly distracted by the events of sixty years.
Leningrad: Siege and Symphony
By: Brian Moynahan
784.184 ShoYm
Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony was first played in the city of its birth on 9 August, 1942. There has never been a first performance to match it. Pray God, there never will be again. Almost a year earlier, the Germans had begun their blockade of the city. Already many thousands had died of their wounds, the cold, and most of all, starvation. The assembled musicians--scrounged from frontline units and military bands, for only twenty of the orchestra's 100 players had survived--were so hungry, many feared they'd be too weak to play the score right through. In these, the darkest days of the Second World War, the music and the defiance it inspired provided a rare beacon of light for the watching world. In Leningrad: Siege and Symphony, Brian Moynahan sets the composition of Shostakovich's most famous work against the tragic canvas of the siege itself and the years of repression and terror that preceded it. In vivid and compelling detail he tells the story of the cruelties heaped by the twin monsters of the twentieth century on a city of exquisite beauty and fine minds, and of its no less remarkable survival. Weaving Shostakovich's own story and that of many others into the context of the maelstrom of Stalin's purges and the brutal Nazi invasion of Russia, Leningrad: Siege and Symphony is a magisterial and moving account of one of the most tragic periods in history.
