Magic enjoyed a vigorous revival in sixteenth-century Europe, attaining a prestige lost for over a millennium and becoming, for some, a kind of universal philosophy. Renaissance music also suggested a form of universal knowledge through renewed interest in two ancient themes: the Pythagorean and Platonic "harmony of the celestial spheres" and the legendary effects of the music of bards like Orpheus, Arion, and David. In this climate, Renaissance philosophers drew many new and provocative connections between music and the occult sciences. In Music in Renaissance Magic, Gary Tomlinson describes some of these connections and offers a fresh view of the development of early modern thought in Italy. Raising issues essential to postmodern historiography—issues of cultural distance and our relationship to the others who inhabit our constructions of the past —Tomlinson provides a rich store of ideas for students of early modern culture, for musicologists, and for historians of philosophy, science, and religion. "A scholarly step toward a goal that many composers have aimed for: to rescue the idea of New Age Music—that music can promote spiritual well-being—from the New Ageists who have reduced it to a level of sonic wallpaper."—Kyle Gann, Village Voice "An exemplary piece of musical and intellectual history, of interest to all students of the Renaissance as well as musicologists. . . . The author deserves congratulations for introducing this new approach to the study of Renaissance music."—Peter Burke, NOTES "Gary Tomlinson's Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others examines the 'otherness' of magical cosmology. . . . [A] passionate, eloquently melancholy, and important book."—Anne Lake Prescott, Studies in English Literature

The exciting pieces in these collections are designed to entertain, reinforce and enhance the important music and technical skills being studied during the early levels. Students will develop their own magical imaginations with the repertoire contained in this series.

A new ribbon appears as Mama Bird teaches Baby Bird each note of the scale.

Presents six stories about Airy Fairy, a student at Fairy Gropplethorpe's Academy for Good Fairies who always gets everything wrong and keeps getting into trouble as she tries to best her enemy, Scary Fairy, and succeed at magic.

Young readers can sing along with Po as she sings a magical song that changes everything around to her favorite color, red.

Why is musical mimesis so much a part of the cultural world of indigenous Filipinos? What does it tell us about their musical sensibilities and their social world? This book addresses these issues through a study of the relations between musical poetics, myth, and magic in the musical and spiritual lives of T'boli men and women from the highlands of southwestern Mindanao. Manolete Mora's study shows that musical mimesis is an intrinsic part of the cultural process of interpreting, articulating, making, and remaking the world. More significantly, it suggests that musical mimesis is intimately linked to a moral universe that is grounded in reciprocity. Musical mimesis is a way of establishing contact, fusion and identity with the other, and this is possible because of the existence of concepts of knowledge and being that are fundamentally different from our own. This book embraces wide-ranging ethnographic materials and issues that will be of interest to the musicologist, anthropologist, and student of Southeast Asian folklore and cross-cultural aesthetics.

The role of natural magic in the rise of seventeenth-century experimental science has been the subject of lively controversy for several decades. Now Penelope Gouk introduces a new element into the debate: how music mediated between these two domains. Arguing that changing musical practice in sixteenth-century Europe affected seventeenth-century English thought on science and magic, she maps the various relationships among these apparently separate disciplines.Gouk explores these relationships in several ways. She adopts the methods of social geography to discuss the disciplinary, social, and intellectual overlapping of music, science, and natural magic. She gives a historical account of the emergence of acoustics in English science, the harmonically based physics of Robert Hooke, and the position of harmonics within Newton's transformation of natural philosophy. And she provides a gallery of images in which contemporary representations of instruments, practices, and concepts demonstrate the way in which,musical models informed and transformed those of natural philosophy. Gouk shows that as the "occult" features of music became subject to the new science of experimentation, and as their causes became evident, so natural magic was pushed outside the realms of scientific discourse.

"Scratching around at home on an acoustic guitar, singing into my phone with these funny little rough ideas. All of a sudden, it turns into something beautiful or complete... it's a fascinating thing. It's magic." -- Paul Weller In Magic: A Journal of Song, Paul Weller gives the first and definitive account of his illustrious songwriting career, recounting a lifetime of lyrics in Weller's most candid and intimate commentary to date. As one of the most innovative and remarkable songwriters of the last fifty years, Paul Weller has proved to be the ultimate shapeshifter, moving from the Jam's punk sensibilities to the genre-defying Style Council, and later through a remarkable 30-year solo career. Alongside Lennon and McCartney, Weller is one of few artists that has attained a UK number one album over five consecutive decades, and he's also received career defining awards from the BRITs (Lifetime Achievement Award), NME Awards (Godlike Genius Award) and a GQ Award for Songwriter of the Year. The book chronicles a lifetime worth of lyrics with impressive clarity. We follow Weller through his upbringing on Stanley Road and founding the Jam in his teenage years, creating the Style Council alongside keyboardist Mick Talbot, and later into his 16-album solo career, including stories behind iconic albums such as Stanley Road and Wild Wood, as well as his latest album, Fat Pop Vol. 1. Magic presents 130 of Weller's finest lyrics to date, accompanied by an illuminating commentary which sees him give unprecedented insight into his life and lyrics, as told to GQ editor and author, Dylan Jones OBE, in their first collaboration. "Paul Weller has proved that he is not only beyond reproach, in some senses he is quite possibly without equal." -- Dylan Jones "The thing I have discovered is that music in its truest sense is beyond any trend or movement or category." -- Paul Weller

MARCH is Community Social Services Awareness month! Is your organization looking for service project ideas? An increasing number of schools, workplaces, and organizations are doing family service projects as a way to make positive change in their communities. The 101 projects in Doing Good Together answer this growing demand for family service with hands-on projects focused on easing poverty, promoting literacy, supporting the troops, helping the environment, and more.