Mark Gridley, "Review of Shall We Play That One Together? The Life and Art of Jazz Piano Legend Marian McPartland by Paul de Barros," Notes 70, no. 4 (June 2014): 682-684.

Jazz journalist Paul de Barros has given us a marvelously comprehensive and unblinking account of jazz pianist Marian McPartland's life and work. It is the first commercially published biography of this famous woman and the definitive work on the subject.

Richard Taruskin, "Review of Musical Cultures in Seventeenth-Century Russia by Claudia R. Jensen," Notes 67, no. 2 (December 2010): 295-298.

My brightest memory of a most memorable occasion—the 1985 AMS/CMS/SEM/SMT plenary meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, the first omnibus joint meeting of its kind—is of a paper by a Princeton graduate student, Claudia R. Jensen, with a wordy but otherwise unassuming title, "An Early Circle of Fifths: Nikolai Diletskii's Grammatika musikiiskago peniia (A Grammar of Musical Song)." It turned out that Diletskii's circle was not just an early one, but the earliest one on record.

Thomas Bauman, "Review of How the West Was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford by Kathryn Kalinak," Notes 66, no. 2 (December 2009): 278-279.

Students of music and film already owe a debt to Kathryn Kalinak, and this volume significantly deepens that debt. Based on painstaking archival research and guided by a clearly defined thesis, it offers a model for serious work in an arena still in its intellectual adolescence and with more than its share of quirky, unfocused, and self-indulgent studies.