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THE great film music of Oscar-winning composer John Barry has long been admired by Derby banker Gareth Bramley. "The first Barry record I purchased was the Persuaders TV theme single which I bought from Selectadisc in Nottingham in the mid-1970s – and from that moment I was a fan," says Gareth. John Barry, best known for his music for the James Bond films, has also composed classic scores for movies such as Dances With Wolves and Out of Africa. Full Story
Scarecrow Press will release the autobiography of six-time Academy Award® nominated composer Lalo Schifrin this summer. Mission Impossible: My Life in Music, edited by Richard Palmer, is a journey from Schifrin's formative years in Argentina to the classical and jazz atmospheres in Paris in the 1950s; from his jazz career with Dizzy Gillespie to his development as a film composer. Organized in eight parts, the book reflects on Schifrin's cosmopolitan experience providing impressions and vignettes of the extraordinary people with whom he worked. His music bridges three styles-jazz, classical, and film/TV-his autobiography offers insights on all three genres, as well as politics, literature, and travel. It includes over 30 photos, appendixes listing Schifrin's works, a discography, and an audio CD featuring some of Schifrin's greatest compositions. As a young man in his native Argentina, Lalo Schifrin received classical training in music and studied law. He came from a musical family, and his father was the concertmaster of the Philharmonic Orchestra of Buenos Aires at the Teatro Colon. After his studies at the Paris Conservatory, Schifrin returned to Argentina and formed his own big concert band. Dizzy Gillespie heard Schifrin perform and asked him to become his pianist, arranger, and composer. In 1958, Schifrin moved to the United States and began his remarkable career. Since then Schifrin's career has taken him in many directions. As a jazz musician he performed and recorded with Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, Count Basie, Dee Dee Bridgewater, and George Benson. His classical activities include Zubin Mehta, The Three Tenors, Rostropovich, Barenboim, and others. His longtime involvement in both the jazz and symphonic worlds came together in 1993 as pianist and conductor for his on-going series of "Jazz Meets the Symphony" recordings, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and jazz stars like Ray Brown, Grady Tate, Jon Faddis, Paquito D'Rivera and James Morrison. Schifrin has written over 100 film and television scores including Mission Impossible, Mannix, Cool Hand Luke, Bullitt, The Cincinnati Kid, Amityville Horror, four of the Dirty Harry films, and more recently Abominable and the Rush Hour trilogy. To date, Lalo Schifrin has won four Grammys® (twenty-one nominations) , one Cable ACE Award, and six Academy Award® nominations....Available Here
[photo, Lang Lang, left with your editor]
LISTEN LINK: All Things Considered, July 16, 2008 - Chinese pianist Lang Lang, at age 26, is one of the most visible, in-demand classical musicians in the world today. His concerts usually sell out (he recently played to an audience of 63,000 in New York's Central Park) and he's sold more than a million copies of his CDs and videos. | Journey of a Thousand Miles: My Story (Hardcover)
Scientists may finally have discovered the secret of Stradivarius violins. In a study published yesterday in Public Library of Science ONE, Dutch researchers ran five of the peerless instruments, made in the early 18th century by Italian craftsman Antonio Stradivari and synonymous with harmonic perfection, through a CT scanner. MORE | ON THE WEB | IMAGES | SHOP Antonio Stradivari
One of the best classical bio books is THE LIVES OF THE GREAT COMPOSERS by the late New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg. The New York Times writes: A smooth, closely woven sequence of brief biographies . . . set in a surrounding continuum of depth and breadth which reflects the author's solid musical culture, his erudition, his command of socio-historic background, and his long experience in every kind and degree of performance is exceptional. 
In "The Great Transformation of Musical Taste," William Weber traces the development of the musical canon we revere today – music, for the most part, composed by creative geniuses long dead. Audiences today prefer old works to new. How did this change come about?...MORE | SHOP William Weber
“Alex Ross has produced an introduction to twentieth-century music that is also an absorbing story of personalities and events that is also a history of modern cultural forms and styles that is also a study of social, political, and technological change. The Rest Is Noise is cultural history the way cultural history should be written: a single strong narrative operating on many levels at once. What more do you want from a book? That it be intelligently, artfully, and lucidly written? It’s those things, too.” —Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club “You don't have to be an aficionado of modern music to love this book: Alex Ross’s extraordinary gifts as a writer, his deep knowledge of music, and his fresh forays into cultural history make The Rest is Noise a complete delight.” —Jean Strouse, author of Morgan: American Financier “The Rest Is Noise reads like a sprawling, intense novel, one of utopian dreams, doom, and consolation, with the most extraordinary cast of characters from music and history alike. A great, inspiring ride.” —Osvaldo Golijov
After Beethoven died, many Viennese music fans were able to clip a keepsake of a lock of his hair, but only one has been preserved with all the proper provenance to show it as authentic. The story of that lock of hair is the backbone of a riveting slice of history in _Beethoven's Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientific Mystery Solved_ (Broadway Books) by Russell Martin. Martin has told three stories in his book, intercalating them in chapters that come to a pleasing whole. The first story is a fine capsule biography of Beethoven himself. Within the biography, Martin tells us much about the composer's medical problems, increasing our wonder of how such an afflicted man could have produced works of such profound concentration and joy. The second story within the book is about the fate of the wandering lock of hair as it passed to the heirs of the young musician who clipped it, and how it formed part of the story of the Holocaust, turning up in Denmark in 1943. Eventually it was sold at Sothebys in 1994, to a couple of non-musician fans of Beethoven, one of whom donated his share to the university Beethoven center he had started, and one who made his strands available for medical testing. The hair snipped by Beethoven's young friend was able to tell its story a hundred and seventy years later, giving a probable explanation for Beethoven's ailments.BUY Beethoven's Hair
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