Impossible Music

In a class for the newly deaf, former musician Simon meets G and his quest to create an entirely new form of music helps him better understand her, himself, and his relationship to the hearing world.

Accompanying audio CD features some of Schifrin's compositions: Mission : impossible (from Firebird), Sketches of Miles (from More jazz meets the symphony), Tango del atardecer (from Letters from Argentina), Ins and outs (from Ins and Outs and Lalo live at the Blue Note), Montuno (from Latin jazz suite), Shifting gears (from Bullitt), Kyrie (from Jazz mass), Charlie Parker : the firebird (from Firebird), and Tocata (from Gillespiana).

When progressive rock band King Crimson released Starless and Bible Black in 1974, very few recognized the astonishing virtuosity captured in the album's 11-minute instrumental capstone, "Fracture." Three minutes into the piece, guitarist Robert Fripp begins playing a quiet, non-stop barrage of notes called a "moto perpetuo," an Italian term for "perpetual motion." Fripp's moto perpetuo requires intense right-hand string-skipping, and picking capabilities only a handful of guitarists around the world possess. Musician Anthony Garone was challenged by his father to learn Fracture in 1998. As a 16-year-old who practiced six or more hours every day, he could not understand why he could play other technical pieces of music, but not Fracture. Over the years, he published blog posts and videos about his efforts. Garone kept working in isolated frustration until he enrolled in a week-long guitar instruction course led by Fripp in rural Mexico in 2015. That week was transformative. It was in Mexico that Garone learned the mechanics of Fripp's very unique right-hand technique. To properly play Fracture, Garone had to re-learn how to play guitar, sit, stand, and breathe. It would also require meditation and a new way of using his body. Following many months of remedial guitar practice, Garone re-trained himself to play guitar. In 2016, he was finally able to play small pieces of Fracture without any pain or frustration. He documented his progress, work, and learnings on his Make Weird Music YouTube channel in a series called Failure to Fracture. The videos garnered hundreds of thousands of views and praise from Fripp himself, who wrote "Fracture is impossible to play, cf. Anthony Garone." Failure to Fracture (the book) captures Garone's transformative 22-year journey. The story begins with his time as a teenager developing a friendship with guitar hero Steve Vai in 1996. It ends with video performances of both Fracture and the even more difficult "sequel" composition, FraKctured, written and performed in Fripp's own New Standard Tuning. It is a book about achieving the impossible, overcoming one's limitations, and retraining the mind and body.

In this book, Stephanie J. Shaw brings a new understanding to one of the great documents of American and black history. While most scholarly discussions of The Souls of Black Folk focus on the veils, the color line, double consciousness, or Booker T. Washington, Shaw reads Du Bois' book as a profoundly nuanced interpretation of the souls of black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. Demonstrating the importance of the work as a sociohistorical study of black life in America through the turn of the twentieth century and offering new ways of thinking about many of the topics introduced in Souls, Shaw charts Du Bois' successful appropriation of Hegelian idealism in order to add America, the nineteenth century, and black people to the historical narrative in Hegel's philosophy of history. Shaw adopts Du Bois' point of view to delve into the social, cultural, political, and intellectual milieus that helped to create The Souls of Black Folk.

This anthology of 25 scholarly articles offers a broad historical overview of the history, definition, and scope of ethnomusicology. The essays range from early summaries of the field's subject matter and state of research to later, comprehensive discussions spanning the discipline at large, its intellectual history, and future prospects. Ethnomusicology surveys the field, its methods, philosophy, and goals, and is well-suited for use as an introductory text. SPECIAL FEATURES The study of non-Western, or world music, which is the subject of this anthology, is currently one of the hottest areas in music education * Covers key historical, methodological, and theoretical topics from the early part of the century to the mid-1980s, providing a scholarly overview to research topics. * Collects in a single volume articles that come from a wide variety of sources. Suitable for Courses in Ethnomusicology/Multiculturalism in Music, Introduction to Music, Music History, World Music, Cultural and Social Anthropology, Folk Music, and Folklore and Myth.