Music Books News This Week (9 March)

Music Books News This Week (9 March)

A round-up of new and recent music books of interest.

Penderyn Music Book Prize shortlist; book on concert photography; Routledge publish new book on traditional music in Scotland; Andrew Lloyd Webber publishes memoir; first book on music in Cork in eighteenth and nineteenth century. Please send information on new music books to editor [at] journalofmusic.com.

The Penderyn Music Book Prize has announced its 2018 shortlist tonight. Organised by Richard Thomas, founder of the Laugharne Weekend Festival, it is the only book prize specifically for international music titles including history, theory, biography, autobiography. The winner will be announced at the festival on 8 April where they will be presented with a cheque for £1000 and a bottle of Penderyn Single Cask Whisky. The Laugharne Festival takes place from 6 to 8 April in South Wales.

This year’s seven shortlisted titles are:

Billy Bragg – Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World (Faber)
Chris Difford – Some Fantastic Place: My Life In and Out of Squeeze (Weidenfeld & Nicholson)
Peggy Seeger – First Time Ever: A Memoir (Faber)
Joe Hagan – Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine (Canongate)
Stuart Cosgrove – Memphis 68: The Tragedy of Southern Soul (The Soul Trilogy) (Polygon)
Cosey Fanni Tutti – Art Sex Music (Faber)
David Hepworth – Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars, 1955–1994 (Transworld)

The judging panel is bass guitarist Jah Wobble, writer and broadcaster Laura Barton, percussionist with Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds James Sclavunos, comedian Simon Day, broadcaster, producer and author Gemma Cairney, and Jason Williamson of The Sleaford Mods.

Visit www.thelaugharneweekend.com

The Beginners Guide to Concert Photography: A Step-By-Step Manual into the World Of Music Photography
Matthias Hombauer
Independently published
Publication date: 1 March 2018

Chapters include: myths about concert photography; gear and tools of the trade; camera settings that work; during and after the concert; building your portfolio.

https://goo.gl/KJ527r

Understanding Scotland Musically: Folk, Tradition and Policy
Edited by Simon McKerrell and Gary West
Routledge
Publication date: 20 February 2018

Scottish traditional music has been through a successful revival in the mid-twentieth century. This volume brings together a range of authors that sets out to explore the increasingly plural notions of Scotland as found in traditional music and what constitutes ‘traditional’ music today.

https://goo.gl/TY2eFu

Unmasked
Andrew Lloyd Webber
HarperCollins
Publication date: 8 March 2018

The son of a music professor and a piano teacher, Andrew Lloyd Webber reveals his artistic influences, from Rodgers and Hammerstein and the pop and rock music of the 1960s to Puccini, P. G. Wodehouse and T. S. Eliot. Recording several decades of British and American musical theatre, Unmasked looks back at the development of Lloyd Webber’s works and his collaborations with Tim Rice, Robert Stigwood, Harold Prince, Cameron Mackintosh and Trevor Nunn.

https://goo.gl/TUSrbT

Music and Society in Cork, 1700–1900
Susan O’Regan
Cork University Press
Publication date: February 2018

Music and Society in Cork, 1700–1900 presents, for the first time, an in-depth and wide-ranging study of public musical life in Cork from the early eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. Includes discussion of  touring performers, military and yeomanry bands, visiting theatre companies, the cathedral of St Fin Barre, the proliferation of songs by Thomas Moore and the appearance of the Irish harp in concerts, visits by Paganini and Liszt,  choral societies, and the development of the local music infrastructutre including a municipal school of music and an opera house. Susan O’Regan lectures in Music History at CIT Cork School of Music.

https://goo.gl/vGxV3N

Published on 9 March 2018

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