Coming Fall 2024
Tchaikovsky's Empire: A New Life of Russia's Greatest Composer
London: Yale University Press, 2024
Tchaikovsky is famous for all the wrong reasons. Portrayed as a hopeless romantic, a suffering melancholic, or a morbid obsessive, the Tchaikovsky we think we know is a shadow of the fascinating reality. It is all too easy to forget that he composed an empire’s worth of music, and navigated the imperial Russian court to great advantage.
In this iconoclastic biography, celebrated author Simon Morrison re-creates Tchaikovsky’s complex world. His life and art were framed by Russian national ambition, and his work was the emanation of an imperial subject: kaleidoscopic, capacious, cosmopolitan, decentred.
Morrison reexamines the relationship between Tchaikovsky’s music, personal life, and politics; his support of Tsars Alexander II and III; and his engagement with the cultures of the imperial margins, in Ukraine, Poland, and the Caucasus.Tchaikovsky’s Empireunsettles everything we thought we knew—and gives us a vivid new appreciation of Russia’s most popular composer.
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"A glimpse of the woman behind the chiffon and provides us with insights into our generation's most iconic femaile singer"
- Walter Egan, Music Producer, Songwriter, artist
A stunning musical biography of Stevie Nicks that paints a portrait of an artist, not a caricature of a superstar.
Reflective and expansive, Mirror in the Sky situates Stevie Nicks as one of the finest songwriters of the twentieth century.
This biography from distinguished music historian Simon Morrison examines Nicks as a singer and songwriter before and beyond her career with Fleetwood Mac, from the Arizona landscape of her childhood to the strobe-lit Night of 1000 Stevies celebrations.
The book uniquely:
- Analyzes Nicks's craft—the grain of her voice, the poetry of her lyrics, the melodic and harmonic syntax of her songs.
- Identifies the American folk and country influences on her musical imagination that place her within a distinctly American tradition of women songwriters.
- Draws from oral histories and surprising archival discoveries to connect Nicks's story to those of California's above- and underground music industries, innovations in recording technology, and gendered restrictions.
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