Enhanced ebook (includes audio) Xiaomi will never forget the magical sounds she heard one hot summer evening when the power went out in her family’s apartment building. It happened at day’s end while her parents were preparing dinner. Her father lit candles while suggesting they take out their musical instruments and descend to the yard to perform for their neighbors. He played the erhu and her mother the accordion while she danced. The songs made their way into each home, and soon, everyone joined the concert, laughing and singing under the moonlight: a joyful, music celebration that brought them together. Recordings of the narrated story and the performance of the theme song included.

While New Wave pop music was dominating the charts in the early 1980s, one band made up of a trio of throwback-loving musicians from the suburbs of Massapequa, Long Island—guitarist/singer Brian Setzer, drummer Slim Jim Phantom, and bassist Lee Rocker—returned rockabilly to the international pop charts as the Stray Cats, releasing such infectious Top 10 singles “Rock This Town,” “Stray Cat Strut,” and “(She’s) Sexy + 17.” Over forty years and many classic studio and live albums later, the Stray Cats still epitomize the spirit of the founding fathers of rock and roll—a coolness that never goes out of style. Howling to the Moonlight on a Hot Summer Night: The Story of the Stray Cats tells the full story of the band’s history and catalog as musicians. It not only celebrates the Cats as one of the most successful rock revival groups, but follows their exploits as a throwback act in the years when MTV was still new, going on to enjoy long-lived popularity in rockabilly culture across the globe from Massapequa to Memphis and beyond.

During the nineteenth century, New Orleans thrived as the epicenter of classical music in America, outshining New York, Boston, and San Francisco before the Civil War and rivaling them thereafter. While other cities offered few if any operatic productions, New Orleans gained renown for its glorious opera seasons. Resident composers, performers, publishers, teachers, instrument makers, and dealers fed the public's voracious cultural appetite. Tourists came from across the United States to experience the city's thriving musical scene. Until now, no study has offered a thorough history of this exciting and momentous era in American musical performance history. John H. Baron's Concert Life in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans impressively fills that gap. Baron's exhaustively researched work details all aspects of New Orleans's nineteenth-century musical renditions, including the development of orchestras; the surrounding social, political, and economic conditions; and the individuals who collectively made the city a premier destination for world-class musicians. Baron includes a wide-ranging chronological discussion of nearly every documented concert that took place in the Crescent City in the 1800s, establishing Concert Life in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans as an indispensable reference volume.

Jewish conductor Hermann Levi strove for excellence and recognition as a composer and conductor of classical music in 19th-century Germany. He unerringly devoted himself to the orchestral performance of works by the two major figures of the time: Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner. In spite of the anti-Semitic atmosphere, Levi saw the conducting of Wagner's works as a major calling: one that pinnacled in the premier performance of Parsifal in Bayreuth. In this biography, newly translated into English by Cynthia Klohr, opera scholar and conductor Fritjof Haas surveys the life and work of this remarkable individual. Born of a long line of rabbis and raised on the ideals of political emancipation of Europe's Jews, Levi sought to break the social constraints and boundaries imposed upon him because of his religious heritage by the power brokers of the classical music scene. Like so many German Jews of his generation, Levi struggled nearly all his life to dissolve the battle between personal lot and social prejudice. Drawing on the wealth of material from the "Leviana" repository in Munich, Germany, Haas artfully weaves together Levi's personal history with his musical milieu to paint a portrait of this ambitious and ambivalent figure in the world of 19th-century German music. This work will be of special interest to musicologists, musicians, opera fans, classical music listeners, and historians and scholars of Judaic studies.

Important American periodical dating back to 1850.