Siegfried the mouse and his family withstand adversity and celebrate Christmas in the church where Silent Night was composed adn sung for the first time.

SILENT NIGHT brings to life one of the most unlikely and touching events in the annals of war. In the early months of WWI, on Christmas Eve, men on both sides left their trenches, laid down their arms, and joined in a spontaneous celebration with their new friends, the enemy. For a brief, blissful time, remembered since in song and story, a world war stopped. Even the participants found what they were doing incredible. Germans placed candle-lit Christmas trees on trench parapets and warring soldiers sang carols. In the spirit of the season they ventured out beyond their barbed wire to meet in No Man's Land, where they buried the dead in moving ceremonies, exchanged gifts, ate and drank together, and joyously played football, often with improvised balls. The truce spread as men defied orders and fired harmlessly into the air. But, reluctantly, they were forced to re-start history's most bloody war. SILENT NIGHT vividly recovers a dreamlike event, one of the most extraordinary of Christmas stories.

A villainous rat evicts a mouse family on Christmas Eve, but a young boy and Papa Mouse make things turn out all right.

Also Available: Orchestral Music Online This fourth edition of the highly acclaimed, classic sourcebook for planning orchestral programs and organizing rehearsals has been expanded and revised to feature 42% more compositions over the third edition, with clearer entries and a more useful system of appendixes. Compositions cover the standard repertoire for American orchestra. Features from the previous edition that have changed and new additions include: · Larger physical format (8.5 x 11 vs. 5.5 x 8.5) · Expanded to 6400 entries and almost 900 composers (only 4200 in 3rd Ed.) · Merged with the American Symphony Orchestra League's OLIS (Orchestra Library Information Service) · Enhanced specific information on woodwind & brass doublings · Lists of required percussion equipment for many works · New, more intuitive format for instrumentation · More contents notes and durations of individual movements · Composers' citizenship, birth and death dates and places, integrated into the listings · Listings of useful websites for orchestra professionals

Created to assist small libraries, parents and teachers in selecting essential books for their collection, Core Collection for Small Libraries lists over 400 titles deemed appropriate for children and young adults.

Bruccoli Great War Collection at the University of South Carolina: An Illustrated Catalogue provides a reference tool for the study of one of the great watershed moments in history on both sides of the Atlantic serving historians, researchers, and collectors.

Artists today are at a crossroads. With funding for the arts and humanities endowments perpetually under attack, and school districts all over the United States scrapping their art curricula altogether, the place of the arts in our civic future is uncertain to say the least. At the same time, faced with the problems of the modern world—from water shortages and grave health concerns to global climate change and the now constant threat of terrorism—one might question the urgency of this waning support for the arts. In the politically fraught world we live in, is the “felt” experience even something worth fighting for? In this soul-searching collection of vignettes, Patrick Summers gives us an adamant, impassioned affirmative. Art, he argues, nurtures freedom of thought, and is more necessary now than ever before. As artistic director of the Houston Grand Opera, Summers is well positioned to take stock of the limitations of the professional arts world—a world where the conversation revolves almost entirely around financial questions and whose reputation tends toward elitism—and to remind us of art’s fundamental relationship to joy and meaning. Offering a vehement defense of long-form arts in a world with a short attention span, Summers argues that art is spiritual, and that music in particular has the ability to ask spiritual questions, to inspire cathartic pathos, and to express spiritual truths. Summers guides us through his personal encounters with art and music in disparate places, from Houston’s Rothko Chapel to a music classroom in rural China, and reflects on musical works he has conducted all over the world. Assessing the growing canon of new operas performed in American opera houses today, he calls for musical artists to be innovative and brave as opera continues to reinvent itself. This book is a moving credo elucidating Summers’s belief that the arts, especially music, help us to understand our own humanity as intellectual, aesthetic, and ultimately spiritual.

Retells the Norse myth of Siegfried and the Nibelungen.