Miles Davis, supremely cool behind his shades. Billie Holiday, eyes closed and head tilted back in full cry. John Coltrane, one hand behind his neck and a finger held pensively to his lips. These iconic images have captivated jazz fans nearly as much...

Just after World War I, the musical style called jazz began a waterborne journey outward from that quintessential haven of romance and decadence, New Orleans. For the first time in any organized way, steam-driven boats left town during the summer mon...

No image of prerevolutionary Russian Jewish life is more iconic than the fiddler on the roof. But in the half century before 1917, Jewish musicians were actually descending from their shtetl roofs and streaming in dazzling numbers to Russia's new cla...

Artistic and musical creativity thrived in the Venetian Republic between the early 16th century and the close of the 18th century. The city-state was known for its superb operas and splendid balls, and the acoustics of the architecture led to complex...

Today, jazz is considered high art, America's national music, and the catalog of its recordings – its discography – is often taken for granted. But behind jazz discography is a fraught and highly colorful history of research, fanaticism, and the inte...

Without scenery, costumes, and stage action, an opera would be little more than a concert. But in the audience, we know little (and think less) about the enormous efforts of those involved in bringing an opera to life – by the stagehands who shift sc...

Best known for the challenging four-opera cycle "The Ring of the Nibelung", Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was a conductor, librettist, theater director, and essayist, in addition to being the composer of some of the most enduring operatic works in histo...

The production of Wagner's operas is fiercely debated. In this groundbreaking stage history Patrick Carnegy vividly evokes the – often scandalous – great productions that have left their mark not only on our understanding of Wagner but on modern thea...

The understanding of sound underwent profound changes with the advent of laboratory science in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. New techniques of sound visualization and detection, the use of electricity to generate sound, and the emergence of...

Exploring Peru's lively music industry and the studio producers, radio DJs, and program directors that drive it, "Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars" is a fascinating account of the deliberate development of artistic taste. Focusing on popula...