Fear and loathing

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K. Robert Schwarz

Minimalism is arguably the most popular style of concert music that the late-twentieth century has produced, appealing to the widest possible audience - fans of rock, jazz and classical music. But the minimalist aesthetic has not been lacking in controversy. To its detractors, it is maddeningly repetitive and single-minded, no better than pop music masquerading as art. To its adherents, it is ecstatic and vibrant, combining classical, popular and non-Western elements to create a style that restores the severed link between composer and audience. The two best-known minimalist composers, Americans Philip Glass and Steve Reich, are world-famous figures. But they can only properly be understood in the context of their predecessors (La Mome Young and Terry Riley) and their successors (John Adams, Meredith Monk, and Europeans such as Michael Nyman, Louis Andriessen, and Arvo Part). This book, the first overview of minimalism aimed at a general public, traces the lives of the minimalist composers, discusses their most significant works, and examines the artistic milieu from which they emerged.

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Anne Newlands

Canada's most renowned artists, the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson, celebrated the country's wild beauty. They saw in the untamed land a reflection of the national spirit, and called themselves "adventurers in paint." For decades, their work has been instantly familiar to Canadians. But in the early part of the 20th century, these artists were engaged in a struggle for acceptance, mocked by critics and the public alike. In The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson, author Anne Newlands explores the ambitions and visions of the artists, capturing the cultural and historical realities of their time and bringing to life their artistic response to the Canadian wilderness. The book is illustrated with 40 color works of landscapes, portraits and urban scenes, as well as black and white archival photographs. Readers are introduced to the artists as well as their locations -- turn-of-the-century Toronto, Ontario's wilderness, the Rocky Mountains and the Arctic. Writing with insight and enthusiasm, Anne Newlands offers an informative introduction to the lives, the work and the times of these important artists.

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John Hatcher

This is the first critical biography of Laurence Binyon (1869-1943), one of the most remarkable scholar-artists in British cultural history. Binyon is best remembered today for his 1914 Great War elegy 'For the Fallen', carved on countless war graves and recited annually at Remembrance Sunday services, but his importance extends well beyond this one famous poem. In fact, Binyon was a poet, dramatist, translator, art historian, and critic, whose influence in a wide range of fields is only now beginning to be recognized. During his forty-year career at the British Museum, he built a world reputation as a pioneering scholar and interpreter of Eastern art, one of the first to challenge the West's myopic assumption that it held a monopoly on beauty and truth. Revealing the subtle continuities between the poet and East West mediator, this fascinating study of his life and work restores Binyon to his rightful place in British cultural history, as one of the most benign and quietly influential voices of the early twentieth century.

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Peter Held

Presents a series of essays about the life and accomplishments of the Japanese American artitst, describing her work as a potter, her incorporation of Eastern and Western techniques, and her transition into abstract sculpture and installation art.