EG Books

This is a good book for anybody who is doing music therapy and is learning how to improvise

I do wonder, why this book is so expensive !! Ofcourse it's grate that somebody have done this work to write all that down, but who is the one to get this terribul money for selling this book ? Anyway; very important book.

I am a psychologist working at Lund University Hospital i Sweden. We are a small childpsychiatric team working with somatically ill children and their families but also with children in families where one of the parents is fatally ill or dies. We also constitute part of the crises intervention program at the hospital in connection with accidents and suicide.

I was very happy to come across this boook. It is always nice to find that other professionals, working in this heavy field, are following the same guidelines as one self. What I especially find useful is the creative ideas giving new and good metaphors to work with younger children. In Sweden this is much of a new field but we experience a great need for this kind of knowledge and are giving a lot of lectures. The book offers new ways of reflecting upon the consequences of a parents or a siblings death and puts it into a reliable framwork of theory. Thanks a lot. By the way I am trying to write a popular book on the topic together with a journalist. Kati Falk,psychologist/psychotherapist

This is a short book, originally published in 1934, but contains a huge amount of detail and a large number of examples by the great composers. It is one of the most brilliant books I've ever read, but is also opinionated and closed-minded. Jonas's examples of Mozart in particular help me to understand the genius embedded in the simplicity of Mozart's style.

Jonas emphasizes the evolution of music as a tonal art-form and rejects all work more recent than Brahms. The first two chapters ("Music and Nature" and "The Artistic Formation of the Chord") I found riveting, but subsequent chapters were of a lesser standard. Some of the material in them was impossible for me to understand, despite taking a great deal of time to study the examples that were supposed to illustrate it. Some examples of the masters' work are presented only in chord form, with the reader being given no opportunity to take in their full merit. There are also many examples created synthetically by Schenker.

Much digestion of theory and listening to music in new light convinces me that Jonas and Schenker are right and conventional theory (which emphasizes chord progressions) is wrong. Jonas berates the French for ruining German music. He tediously lauds Brahms as the only composer who took the trouble to unlearn new developments in music in the second half of the 19th century. I believe that Jonas should have welcomed the music of Bruckner, Sibelius and Korngold, who (by my hearing at least) satisfy his ultimate test of writing a "living bass" that does not merely stamp a sequence of chords.

To me the book provides an excellent base for students to embark on study of the masterworks.

Hello. My name is Sophia. I am 17 years old and have been reading the book Jack and Jim:A Personal Journal of the 1970's for quite some time. It is an amazing story (if one can appreciate the words written). Jim Brogan really takes you back into the life of being a gay man in the 70's. In it, he explores homosexuality, bisexuality, friends, lovers, yoga, religion, death and more. It's really fantastic and I definately recommend it to anyone with an open mind.

This wonderful, colorful book of quilts is beautiful enough to be a coffee table book. But for the avid quilter, it's a feast for the eyes! I would give it a 5-star rating if the quiltmaking directions were rotary cutter friendly, but it's still very simple to read and understand.

This lavishly illustrated book has a small amount of text providing a basic history of lace from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, but its real strength is in its 100 high quality photographs of laces from the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection.

Alain Daniélou is known first of all for his musical semantics based not on notes but on intervals, hence not on punctual sounds but on the articulation of one note onto another to form an interval and then on the articulation of intervals one upon another. In this book of articles and studies brought together, some of them being unpublished before, he used his approach to further some other ideas. The basic principle is that an interval is the ratio produced by the frequencies of the two notes that define that interval. He tested and identified the psycho-mental effects of these intervals on listeners and connected them to three numerical elements appearing in such ratios (basically 2, 3 and 5). But he further brings into his approach an important inspiration from the old Sanskrit approach of music. We have to note here he assumes that this Vedic tradition is the oldest human musical tradition, is the basic and sole because only possible musical approach, and it has been kept in later Hinduist music. We can see here he is totally unaware of the fact that Sumerian music is at least one thousand if not one and a half thousand years older. Vedic music is not the original form of music. He also forgets that Hinduism is an old approach in India and he does not consider at all the Buddhist approach. All his symbolism with an ever present God as a creator would have to be challenged in the Buddhist understanding that there is no god and the world is not seen as created. Yet his symbolic approach that brings together musical notes, geometrical shapes, colors, animals, planets, basic elements, etc., ... and gods, is interesting if we let the divine elements out of a modern assimilation. The book is a lot more interesting when he shows how an interval has to go through an acoustic trip from the ear up into the brain and the mind to be interpreted and felt. Then his formal approach can lead to a new question he does not ask: are the effects of the intervals what they are because of the correspondence between the functional structures of these intervals and the brain cells that process the acoustic stimuli, and the stimuli of other senses? And further on, that could lead to the question: are the formal structural characteristics of sounds in agreement or disagreement with the same in a building (like in a church) that has perfect acoustics? In other words Danielou's agreement with the deistic and altogether rather purely experiential approach of the Hinduistic school limits his vision of his subject. What's more, that blocks him totally against any form of music posterior to let's say the romantics or at the latest Debussy. He rejects all music composed over the last hundred years that does not follow the basic musical principles from the Renaissance to the Impressionistic era. In fact he states that all Vedic vision of music is the acme of music and he rejects the western principles of harmony that triumphed at the end of the 15th century. There is not much left then except going back to an exiled Tibetan monastery in some lost Himalayan mountain. I don't think anyone wants to be that regressive. It could have been a marvelous book with a little distantiation from his hinduistic absolute reference.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

'Complete,' referred to her music career: here we found the complete lyrics of all her records since 1975 'Horses' to 2006 'Trampin'.' And she adds commentaries, small articles, very interesting to understand the recordings in its context: her thoughts, interests, musicians, etc.

And we found a superb photographs collection, too: Patti, musicians, rock concerts, manuscripts and typescripts, sleeves, poets, friends, family. The book's recommendable for the photographs in itself. (I would give it five stars)

Unfortunately there's no reference to the double CD compilation 'Land 1975-2002' (Arista 2002). Why? This compilation included Patti's songs that were published in the first time on its CD2: perhaps the 1974 single 'Piss Factory' (however there's a slightly different version in a photo of a typescript), the 1996 studio outtake 'Wander I Go', the 2001 live recording new song 'Higher Learning.' The lyrics of these songs aren't in the book; but the complete lyrics would be interesting for the non-English native tongue people, as me.

There's no foreword in the book so we don't know how she's selected lyrics and texts, and why did not be really a 'complete' lyrics compilation. (I gave it four stars).

This book is nice and compact. It is a good reference guide for health care practitioners.