The Music Makers

London: W.H. ALLEN / VIRGIN BOOKS. Very Good/Very Good. 1980. Hard Cover. 12" BY 12" Tall 0491028830 Due to weight I can only supply this book to a UK address. No extra postage will be asked for above our standard charge. Editorial Director Victor Stevenson Editor Clive Unger-Hamilton. Foreword by The Earl of Harewood. Everyone loves and listens to music-whether it's on the radio, on records, in the concert hall, club, or disco, in the church or in the theatre-whether it's Gregorian chant, Renaissance madrigals, grand opera, the piano sonatas of Beethoven, Scott Joplin's rags, Mingus or Tatum, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, or the difficult cerebral modern music of Pierre Boulez or George Crumb. THE MUSIC MAKERS, spanning the entire history of music from its earliest origins to the present day, has been created for all these music lovers. Large in format, lavishly illustrated, and carefully researched, it presents for the first time in one volume our entire Western musical heritage. More than a thousand years of the history of music and its performance are related in about one thousand succinct and personal biographies of the men and women who have made and are making music: the composers, the virtuoso instrumentalists, the singers, conductors, and impresarios, the craftsmen of musical instruments and their modern counterparts, the recording technicians. The entries are arranged chronologically to tell the story of Western music. Each major section begins with a stimulating essay setting the musical, historical, and social ambience of the period it introduces. In the entries that follow the reader will discover the personal foibles, the successes, and the tragedies of musicians' lives-the conductor who died of gangrene after piercing his foot with a huge baton, the organist forced to marry his predecessor's daughter in order to secure his job, and the composers who died in poverty yet left legacies of music that enrich our lives. .