David Hajdu
Author
Pub. Date
[2020]
Description
"An oral history of a (fictitious) musical phenomenon. Celebrated music critic and cultural historian David Hajdu unravels the mystery of a one of-a-kind artist, a pianist with a rare neurological condition that enables her to make music that is nothing less than pure, unmediated emotional expression. Her name is Adrianne Geffel, praised as "the Geyser of Grand Street" and the "Queen of Bleak Chic." Yet despite her renown, she curiously vanished from...
Author
Pub. Date
[2008]
Description
In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created--in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. No sooner had this new culture emerged than it was beaten down by church groups, community bluestockings, and a McCarthyish Congress--only to resurface with a crooked smile on its face in Mad magazine.-- From publisher description.
Author
Pub. Date
2016.
Description
A personal, idiosyncratic history of popular music that also may well be definitive, from the revered music critic
From the age of song sheets in the late nineteenth-century to the contemporary era of digital streaming, pop music has been our most influential laboratory for social and aesthetic experimentation, changing the world three minutes at a time.
In Love for Sale, David Hajdu-one of the most respected critics and music historians of our...
Author
Pub. Date
1997.
Description
Billy Strayhorn (1915-67) was one of the greatest composers in the history of American music, the creator of a body of work that includes such standards as "Take the 'A' Train." Yet all his life Strayhorn was overshadowed by his friend and collaborator Duke Ellington, with whom he worked for three decades as the Ellington Orchestra's ace songwriter and arranger. A "definitive" corrective (USA Today) to decades of patchwork scholarship and journalism...
Pub. Date
2019.
Description
In The Peanuts Papers, thirty-three writers and artists reflect on the deeper truths of Schulzs deceptively simple comic, its impact on their lives and art and on the broader culture. These enchanting, affecting, and often quite personal essays show just how much Peanuts means to its many admirersand the ways it invites us to ponder, in the words of Sarah Boxer, zhow to survive and still be a decent human beingy in an often bewildering world. Featuring...