"Classical Music For Dummies is perfect for anyone who loves music. It's also a funny, authoritative guide to expanding your musical horizons--and to learning how the world's greatest composers laid the groundwork for every piece of music written since."--Amazon.com.

For anyone who has been intimidated, overwhelmed, or just plain confused by what they think opera is, WHO'S AFRAID OF OPERA? offers a lively, readable guide to what author Michael Walsh describes as "the greatest art form yet invented by humankind." From opera's origins in Renaissance Italy to The Who's rock odyssey "Tommy" and Stephen Sondheim's "Into the Woods," Walsh explores what opera is and what it's not, what makes a great singer, and why it...

Psychiatrist Andrew Marlow, 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....

Fred Plotkin, an internationally respected writer and teacher and former performance manager of the Metropolitan Opera, introduces listeners, whatever their level of musical knowledge, to all the riches of opera, the fastest growing of all the performing arts

Uses the subjects of well-known paintings to introduce the numbers from one to twenty.

With a lifetime of experience, profound knowledge and understanding, and heartwarming appreciation, an internationally celebrated conductor and teacher answers the questions: Why should I listen to classical music? How can I get the most from the listening experience?

Can you find the hidden details in these American paintings, prints, and textiles from The Metropolitan Museum of Art? Includes "Washington Crossing the Delaware," by Emmanuel Leutze; "Across the Continent: "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way"," by Frances Flora Bond Palmer for Currier & Ives; "The Last Moments of John Brown," by Thomas Hovenden; "Thanksgiving Turkey," by Grandma Moses; "The Photographer," by Jacob Lawrence; and "Street Story...

The ultimate guide to classical composers and their music-for both the novice and the experienced listener Music, according to Aaron Copland, can thrive only if there are "gifted listeners." But today's listeners must choose between classical and rock, opera and rap, and the choices can seem overwhelming at times. In The Essential Canon of Classical Music, David Dubal comes to the aid of the struggling listener and provides a cultural-literacy handbook...