Who's Next?

SKU: GI.G-10054

ISBN 9781622774548.

We all need creativity in our lives. It is key to our happiness. Music, according to author Clint Randles, is one of the best ways to feed our longing for self-growth through engagement in creative processes. And music brings us together for the purpose of making beauty with sound. It provides us with a pathway to the good life. In To Create, Randles answers the critical question: What can I do with my time that will give me the best chance at achieving daily happiness? This amazing book unpacks what it means to engage in creative processes. Since story is the best way of feeding our imagination, the book unfolds by way of life stories that express the author’s unique perspective of the hero’s journey. Along the way, Randles inspires us to think about creativity and music as a pursuit that is not only truly worthy, but accessible. He addresses rules for creative performance, what we can learn from exceptional musicians and teachers, the link between spirituality and creativity, understanding our own stories in light of the meta-story, and the art of trust and starting small. To Create is a book that is unlike anything written on the topic—entertaining, wise, inspiring, and layered. It is for anyone who is interested in pursuing creativity through music but can’t quite figure out how or where to start. States Randles: “It is my hope that you will be able to imagine the good life through music, that you will be inspired To Create!” Clint Randles, PhD, is Associate Professor of Music Education at the University of South Florida, husband, father, multi-instrumentalist, and passionate lover of music.   Full of resonating stories, To Create is a profoundly pedagogical book about potential pathways into life’s learnings through and in music. To Create seeks and embraces the value embodied in the multiple, individual, and sociocultural authoring of diverse creativities. By analogising the good life (‘eidaimonia’), with lived-through experiences by which our desire (and drive) to create, to grow, to navigate, and to achieve extraordinary things in life is inextricably linked, Clint Randles stories his own journey of being awakened ‘To Create,’ by creating and living ‘the good life’ in and through the symbiotic domains of music and music education. —Pamela Burnard, Professor of Arts, Creativities and Educations     University of Cambridge, UK To Create is the rare achievement that seamlessly blends how-to curriculum with why-so philosophy, making the case that creative activity is an essential right that all children deserve from an education in music. Randles’ vivid illustrations prod us to think differently about teaching when well-being—when the good life—is both destination and design. —Randall Everett Allsup, Professor of Music Education     Teachers College Columbia University Randles takes readers on a real and figurative road trip during which he demonstrates how to live life to its fullest by embracing creativity and repeating a mantra of possibility. He shows us how the good life is achievable, walking readers through deeply personal accounts of creativity in everyday situations over a lifetime. This book binds the individual and cultural, imaginative and practical, tangible and intangible, light and dark, yin and yang. It’s all about the power of three, weaving through everything the vital, intangible element of spirituality, energy, chi to achieve eudaimonia. Through the lens of his experiences as a musician and teacher, the author celebrates relentlessness and hard work, providing a window into what it means to engage in the good life. Open that window to hear life’s call to adventure! —Gareth Dylan Smith, Assistant Professor of Music Education     Boston University Professor Randles’ stimulating book prompts memory of the seminal work of Joseph Schumpeter who suggested the importance of creative deconstruction in a democracy. Both authors focus on attaining the good life through a fuller understanding of the logic of the process of change—change that is driven by knowledgeable and innovative entrepreneurs. The immediate application of Randles’ suggested dynamic creativity processes applies to both teacher education and professional development, although both he and Schumpeter advance general ideas in creativity designed to achieve the highest level of human growth. —Richard Colwell, Professor Emeritus of Music Education     University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign In recent years, Aristotle’s concept of ‘Eudaimonia’—meaning Happiness in the robust sense of full human flourishing (a life of joy, fellowship, self-growth, meaningfulness, ethical ‘good work,’ and more)—has entered and transformed the philosophy and practice of music education. To Create: Imagining the Good Life through Music is a highly original, emotional, practical, and exciting journey through the natures and values of creativity in/for music education and life itself. —David J. Elliott, Professor of Music and Music Education     New York University.

SKU: UT.QC-4

ISBN 9788881094783. 6.5 x 9.5 inches.

Saggi di Jean-Pierre Bartoli, Alan Davison, Therese Ellsworth, Erik Entwistle, Jeremy Eskenazy, Michaela Freemanová, Stephan D. Lindeman, Rudolf Rasch, Renato Ricco, Jeanne Roudet, David Rowland, Massimiliano Sala, Laure Schnapper, Rohan H. Stewart-MacDonald, Marie Sumner Lott


The career of Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760-1812) was notable for its peripateticism. Starting out in his native Bohemia Dussek spent periods of time in Germany and the Netherlands, settling in London for about ten years in the 1790s, progressing to Hamburg and ending his days in Paris. Although his activities centred on the piano, like so many musicians of his day Dussek branched out from performing and composing to encompass teaching, publishing and instrument retail, with varying success. A plethora of reviews and biographical accounts attest to Dussek’s renown throughout Europe as a pianist and composer, particularly when it came to sensitive and cantabile playing; and he interacted with some of the most eminent musicians, artists and political figures of his time. Dussek’s reputation declined sharply in the nineteenth century, however, and with the exception of isolated revivals of his work, for instance in London in the mid-nineteenth century, he has remained on the verge of obscurity in the minds of many musicians and music-lovers until the present day: even his well-known innovation of placing the piano sideways-on to the audience to display his striking profile is often mistakenly attributed to Franz Liszt. Although Dussek has provided the subject of a number of student dissertations over the years, in the published literature he has largely been restricted to cameo appearances or brief entries in historical surveys.
The bicentennial anniversary of Dussek’s death provides a fitting occasion for bringing together scholars from all parts of the world to produce the first multi-author, multi-lingual study of the composer. Several chapters deal with aspects of Dussek’s biography and iconography that receive only sparse treatment elsewhere; others survey the different branches of his output, including the piano sonatas, the piano concertos, the chamber music with and without harp and the three String Quartets, Op. 60, which are currently enjoying a revival via recordings and a new edition.
This book has two fundamental aims. One is to stimulate renewed interest in, and debate about, a less than celebrated – one might say unjustly neglected – figure. The other aim is to approach Dussek’s multi-facetted, geographically diverse career as an interface between ourselves and the music business at the beginning of the nineteenth century, whose complexity and vicissitudes emanated from the sociological dynamics and political events with which Dussek was, to an almost unique degree, inextricably associated. The highs and lows of Dussek’s career, the surviving contemporary accounts of Dussek the performer and composer, and the letters he exchanged with colleagues in several nations vividly portray the struggles of a worldly, ambitious, versatile and extremely perspicacious musician striving to carve out a place of eminence and material security for himself. This meant negotiating the complex progression, underway at this point in history, from the patronage system to the emergence of the artist as a socially and financially autonomous entity.