by Amy Nathan ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 22, 2018
Perfect for either novices or lapsed performers who want to embrace music but aren’t sure how.
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Making music isn’t just for professionals, according to this guide that aims to make the joys of playing and singing accessible to adults.
Nathan (The Young Musician’s Survival Guide, 2008, etc.), a prolific author of books for children and their parents, turns her attention to adults who want to incorporate music into their lives. Unfortunately, she writes, “many people aren’t aware of the range of music-making options that are available for people who choose not to pursue music professionally.” In this encouraging, engaging volume, she quickly dispels the notion that being musical requires innate talent or years of rigorous training that must begin in childhood. To discover how “avocational” musicians manage to make time for playing, singing, and composing, she assembled a panel of 363 amateur performers who either completed open-ended questionnaires or shared their experiences in interviews. This trove of diverse, real-life stories helps turn this book from what could have been a ho-hum, how-to manual into an inspirational guide. Readers can easily see how people of wide-ranging ages, backgrounds, and levels of musical expertise have found outlets for their creativity and passion. After a brief overview of the advantages of “Keeping On with Music,” which include cognitive benefits, social connections, and reduced stress, she discusses how three broad categories make it work. First are those who began playing as children and never stopped. Though dreams of performing professionally have been abandoned, these individuals have joined choirs, amateur ensembles, and semipro orchestras. There are also those who played in the past but gave it up for a time only to return, as well as adults who are new to making music (or at least new to their chosen instruments). She touches on the unique challenges each of these groups faces, from poor teachers and time constraints to lack of practice space and the belief that one is simply not good enough to play or sing. Throughout, the emphasis is on the pleasure that can come from making music, whatever one’s skill level.
Perfect for either novices or lapsed performers who want to embrace music but aren’t sure how.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-19-061158-3
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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