Befiddled

Befiddled
Author: Pedro de Alcantara
Publisher: Yearling
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2009-05-06
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0307514056

Becky Cohen has a rough life. She’s an outsider everywhere she goes: shunned and mocked at school, at her violin lessons, and at home by her disapproving mother. Her only true friend is her brilliant little brother, newspaper-loving Benjy. She dreams of becoming a great violinist, but at the group lessons she’s forced to take at the Y, Becky panics and plays badly. Then Becky meets Mr. Freeman, her building’s handyman. He has a lot to teach her about becoming a musician, and being a friend. Gradually, Becky begins speaking her mind more often, and finds that people are actually listening. Then Mr. Freeman tells Becky about a local performing arts high school’s scholarship contest. With the lessons learned from Mr. Freeman and Benjy, can Becky overcome her fears and play what’s in her heart?

Backtracked

Backtracked
Author: Pedro De Alcantara
Publisher: Laurel Leaf
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2010
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0440239907

While playing a dangerous subway prank, a fifteen-year-old slacker falls through a time-travel vortex and is transported to different time periods in twentieth-century New York City, where he learns firsthand about hardship.

Integrated Practice

Integrated Practice
Author: Pedro de Alcantara
Publisher:
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2011
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0195317076

To be a musician is to "speak music." When you have something to say and the means to say it, your gestures and sounds become both meaningful and free. Offering an innovative, comprehensive approach to musicians' health and wellbeing, Integrated Practice gives you the tools to combine total-body awareness with a deep and practical understanding of the rhythmic structure of the musical language, so that you can use the musical text itself as your guide toward psychophysical and creative freedom. The book shows you how to establish an imaginative dialogue between the relatively inflexible structure of music and your individual personality as a singer, instrumentalist, or conductor, and it explains how you can use the acoustic phenomenon of the harmonic series to make big, beautiful sounds with little muscular effort. Integrated Practice comes with more than a hundred and fifty exercises demonstrated by video and audio clips on an extensive companion website that will inform your daily practice, improvising, rehearsing, and performing. With this array of resources for every learning style, Integrated Practice is the essential handbook to personal achievement in successful, expressive musical performance.

The Prophecy Machine

The Prophecy Machine
Author: Neal Barrett, Jr.
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2016-06-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Hooters, Hatters, and menacing evil Even in a mystical world where centuries ago animals were magically changed into humans, the land of Makasar us considered strange. Its two major religions are Hatters and Hooters. During the day, Hatters, wearing hats of course, wander about jabbing pointy sticks into bystanders. The night is ruled by the Hooters, who hoot and set fire to people and things. Hospitality is considered a capital crime. And Newlies, the humanize animals, are treated lower than scum. So when Finn, the Master Lizard Maker, finds himself stranded in Makasar-along with his lover, an attractive Newlies named Letitia, and the grandest, most magical creation of his illustrious career, a talking, thinking, rather cantankerous mechanical lizard named Julia Jessica Slagg-his first thought is a quick exit. But the Nuccis-strongman son, mad father, and ever madder grandfather-have other plans for Finn and his loyal companions. There's an odd machine in their basement that needs fixing, and who better to do it than a Master Lizard Maker? There's more here than meets the eye, however, and Finn soon realizes that the future he faces could be very dark indeed.

Indirect Procedures

Indirect Procedures
Author: Pedro de Alcantara
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2013-06-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0199874824

A musician's life is filled with many stressful situations: passing auditions, rehearsing and performing with difficult partners, sitting for long hours in uncomfortable chairs, going on stage to face audiences large and small, who may or may not be receptive to the performance they are presented. And yet many musicians are able to surmount these looming obstacles with grace and balance, to find satisfaction and artistry in their music and build productive and lasting careers. Indirect Procedures will guide you around these obstacles and along that path to becoming a balanced and successful musician. Based on the work of Frederick Matthias Alexander, this book is a thorough and practical approach to the issues of musicians' health and wellbeing. Author Pedro de Alcantara introduces concepts and exercises for musicians to let go of excessive tensions, stay focused, and direct their energies as they handle the challenges of practicing, rehearsing, and performing. Complemented by an extensive, easy-to-use companion website, and working alongside Integrated Practice, this new edition of Indirect Procedures is an invaluable and essential resource for today's musicians to learn to sing, play, and conduct with less effort and stronger results.

Claws

Claws
Author: Dan Greenburg
Publisher: Random House Books for Young Readers
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2009-03-25
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0307483010

When Cody is 14, he runs away from home, leaving behind his abusive mother, and flees across the country. He doesn’t stop until he hits Texas and the Sam Houston Tiger Ranch. Under the guidance of Sunny, the ranch’s owner, he cares for the animals in ways he never imagined. He feeds them a diet of raw, bloody meat. He cleans out their cages. He takes them for exercise. He finds out how to get a tiger to back down, and when he should back down himself. But there is another lesson Cody has to learn—sometimes people are harder to handle than tigers.