Classical music has a reputation for being stuffy, boring, and largely inaccessible, but Burton-Hill is here to change that. An award-winning writer, broadcaster and musician, with a deep love of the art form she wants everyone to feel welcome at the classical party, and her desire to share her passion for its diverse wonders inspired this unique, enlightening, and expertly curated treasury. As she says, “The only requirements for enjoying classical...

Three stories, each around a particular Matisse painting.

With style, wit, and expertise, Leonard Bernstein shares his love and appreciation for music in all its varied forms in The Infinite Variety of Music, illuminating the deep pleasure and sometimes subtle beauty it offers. He begins with an "imaginary conversation" with George Washington entitled "The Muzak Muse" in which he argues the values of actively listening to music by learning how to read notes, as opposed to simply hearing music in a concert...

"Artists are expert lookers: they have learned to pay attention. The rest of us spend most of our time on auto-pilot, rushing from place to place, our overfamiliarity blinding us to the marvellous, life-affirming phenomena of our world. But that doesn't have to be the case. In his inimitable engaging style, Will Gompertz takes us into the minds of artists--from contemporary stars to old masters, the well-known to the lesser-so, and from around the...

Introduces readers to classical music and includes activities that will immerse children in musical tradition.

Photographs from around the world celebrate the universal joy that kids get from making music, whether they're playing instruments, clapping their hands, stomping their feet, or singing. Music can help express one child's feelings--or it can bring a whole community together.

From the chief architect of the Pandora Radio's Music Genome Project comes a definitive and groundbreaking examination of how your mind, body, and upbringing influence the music you love. Everyone loves music. But what is it that makes music so universally beloved and have such a powerful effect on us? In this sweeping and authoritative book, Dr. Nolan Gasser--a composer, pianist, and musicologist, and the chief architect of the Music Genome Project,...

"In The Writer's Crusade, author Tom Roston examines the connection between Vonnegut's life and Slaughterhouse-Five. Did Vonnegut suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? Did Billy Pilgrim? Roston probes Vonnegut's work, his personal history, and discarded drafts of the novel, as well as original interviews with the writer's family, friends, scholars, psychologists, and other novelists including Karl Marlantes, Kevin Powers, and Tim O'Brien. The...

From the Bodleian, the Folger and the Smithsonian to the fabled libraries of Middle Earth and other fictional libraries, Kells explores the bookish places that capture our imaginations. The result is a fascinating and engaging exploration of libraries as places of beauty and wonder, a celebration of books as objects and an account of the deeply personal nature of these hallowed spaces.

Psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe, devoted to his profession and the painting hobby he loves, has a solitary but ordered life. When renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient, Marlow finds that order destroyed. Desperate to understand the secret that torments the genius, he embarks on a journey that leads him into the lives of the women closest to Oliver and a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism....