• Kanye West: in just a few short years, he has emerged as one of music's premiere behind-the-scenes hitmakers. But it took a near-fatal car crash—and one of the year's most inventive songs—for him to take center stage

• MTNA: Music Teachers National Association

• MTNA Bylaws - Music Teachers National Association

• Celebrating certification - parents on why they chose a Nationally Certified Teacher of Music

• Directory of summer programs - music programs - Directory

• The Music Lesson, by Katharine Weber, New York, Crown Publishers, 1998; 178 pages, $21 hardcover. - Review - book review

• MTNA bylaws - Music Teachers National Association

High fidelity - Words and Music: a history of pop in the shape of a city - Book Review

Some years ago, I was in the habit of playing a slightly pretentious parlour game with my journalist friends. It involved imagining how some of popular culture's more bizarre manifestations might have been pitched to their corporate backers. One of the most amusing examples was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Just imagine: "It's a cartoon about biped reptiles who live in city sewers. They're named after Renaissance painters. They're martial arts experts and they survive on slices of pizza. Oh, and they take their orders from a giant mouse."

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Various The Rough Guide to the Music of France - Brief Article - Sound Recording Review

Like the other countries throughout continental Europe, France now has a thriving folk/roots movement. The eclectic French scene supports everything from electric folk-rock bands to bal musette revivalists, Breton dance and pipe bands, gypsy jazzers, and 21st century multi-ethnic fusion pioneers. This collection includes tastes of all those (and more). In fact, there's even an Edith Piaf track.

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An equal contest. . - The Back Half: Spring Books - Parallels and Paradoxes: explorations in music and society - book review

In his recently revised autobiography, Daniel Barenboim recalls how he first met Edward Said in a London hotel lobby in 1993 and how the two men soon became intimate friends. It was not, you might think, a given. There are all sorts of reasons why a Jewish musician, brought up in Israel in the postwar years, might not have bonded with a Palestinian intellectual who has often been in trouble for his forthright criticisms of Israel. As it was, they clicked -- and this book of conversations between the unlikely friends is the result.

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Novel of the week. . - Books - Dirt Music - book review

The fishermen of White Point, on Australia's wild western seaboard, do not take kindly to poachers - especially those who steal their women as well as their lobster quota. Luther Fox learns this to his cost when he finds his truck and boat-trailer trashed and his dog shot dead. Lu clears off pretty sharpish, packing his swag and hitchhiking upstate to hide away in the wilderness. This is familiar Tim Winton territory: the tensions between the individual and the community solitude and gregariousness, man and the elements. But Dirt Music is also a love story. At least, it is a story of lovers forced apart before they can discover if love is possible - because, in fleeing, Lu leaves behind Georgie Jutland, a woman trapped in a loveless relationship with Jim Buckridge,

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Books in Brief. - 'Temperament: The Idea That Solved Music's Greatest Riddle' - book review

What do Pythagoras, Euclid, the 2nd-century b.c. Chinese thinker Huai Nan Tzu, Boethius, Giotto, Descartes, Shakespeare, Newton, Kepler, Rousseau, and contemporary composer Philip Glass have in common? Stuart Isacoff -- pianist, composer, and founding editor of Piano Today -- has woven them into a magnificent story about a great shift in the musical world that took place across centuries and engaged the attention of the Church, the academy, and every branch of the humanities. There are some things that seem so natural, so well established, that we cannot imagine them being any other way. Such is the case with temperament -- the way pianos (and other keyboard instruments) are tuned and how music sounds to our ear.

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