Musical Instruments

Melvin Berman's varied experience as a much sought after pedagogue as well as a performing oboist of international repute make him eminently qualified to write a book about oboe reed making. Having recorded over 15 albums, performed on the soundtracks of more than 200 films, participated in, literally, hundreds of television and radio broadcasts, …

The Chinese instrumentation is unquestionably the largest and most diverse of any civilization, ancient or modern. Inscriptions on tortoise shells and cow bones from more than 3000 years ago recorded various instruments including drums, stone chimes, and panpipes. In this volume, Thrasherdiscusses the evolution of Chinese musical instruments, detai …

For every Canadian who loves the piano ....
Remember those early piano lessons?
The joy of accomplishing your first piano solo?
The anxiety of the recital?
Gathering in song around an old upright with family and friends?

Downright Upright is a thorough and loving treatment of the Canadian piano, its development and social impact.

1991 marked the 175t …

Keyboard improvisation is often considered the domain of the musical genius, a perception created no doubt by masters from Bach and Mozart to Liszt. The capacity to express one's musical thoughts spontaneously and coherently, however, presumes neither a virtuosic command of the instrument nora sublime command of compositional theory. Assuming only …

The work is the result of over thirty years of oral fieldwork among the last Gaels in Cape Breton, for whom piping fit unself-consciously into community life, as well as an exhaustive synthesis of Scottish archival and secondary sources. Reflecting the invaluable memories of now-deceased new world Gaelic lore-bearers, John Gibson shows that traditi …

Every object around us contains the history of all the people and places that brought it here. But rarely is that history explored. In this book, instead of breaking an object apart to reveal those stories, they are told by building the object a guitar named Storyteller from scratch.The text and illustrations reveal the rich lives of the people, pl …

This is a study of the manufacture of brass instruments, particularly the trumpet, in Nuremberg during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book begins with a brief history of the instrument and the city where it was made, and an introduction to the changes in style, shape, andornamentation which occurred over more than two hundred years. …