Books (Paper)

Hey everyone, I just wanted to let all of you know that I have a new book out! It's titled "Sight-Reading Skills for the Mallet Percussionist" and it's published by K. Wylie Publications. For those of you who don't know me, I teach at multiple schools with students from 6th grade up through university. This is a project I've been working on a long time and it's finally finished.

I hope you will forgive the shameless plug, but I thought I'd let everyone know. Here's a link for it:

Fortune's Fool is the story of the record industry from about 1990 to the present, mostly by following the career of Edgar Bronfman, who got bored being a scion of the Seagram Liquor fortune and decided to take the company into the entertainment business. He eventually becomes (and still is, I believe) head of Warner Music.

If you're trying to make a living in music, you absolutely must read this book. Written by Berklee technology maven David Kusek and cyber-licensing expert Gerd Leanhard, this is a comprehensive examination of the state of the music industry and a highly optimistic (from the artists' point of view) projection of its future (far less optimistic from the record companies' point of view).

First off, the title is a bait-and-switch. The Beatles aren't mentioned in any substance until the last chapter of the book. The book is really about its subtitle: "An Alternative History of American Popular Music", and judged on that content it's a great read. It covers the American popular music scene in loving detail from about 1890 through 1970, with colorful anecdotes, musical analysis, movers and shakers behind the scenes, and thoughtful analysis of the economic, social and technical factors behind many of the changes in popular music.