"A History of Rock and Dance Music " is the second edition of what is arguably the most comprehensive history of the genre ever published. When the first edition came out, it marked the first time that someone had written a history of rock music without paying attention to the charts. It was meant as a history of the great ideas introduced by rock musicians over 50 years of relentless innovation (regardless of how many copies they sold). The new edition continues the story to the first decade of the new century. It maintains a multidisciplinary approach, starting with the genres that existed before rock n roll and ending with the many genres that have been born since the 1990s, including dance music and electronic/digital styles. The author's background in classical music and science gives it a unique flavor, crossing boundaries and questioning stereotypes. "A History of Rock Music" was the first book in a bold project to synthesize the music of the 20th century. "A History of Rock Music" and "A History of Popular Music", by the same authors, are the complementary pieces of this project. Volume 1 covers the period from 1951 to 1989.
Piero Scaruffi is a poet, cognitive scientist, cultural historian and free thinker.
Born in Italy in 1955, he published two collections of poems, "L'Ultimo" ("The Last One") and "Dialogo degli Amanti" ("Dialogue of the Lovers") before switching to the English language. Each won a national award.
After graduating in 1982 in Mathematics from the University of Turin with a thesis on quarks, he relocated to Silicon Valley to work in the software industry, pioneering Internet-based applications, and later conducting research on Artificial Intelligence at Olivetti's Technology Center and at Stanford University. He has lectured in three continents on Cognitive Science and History of Knowledge, whose readers were eventually compiled as "A Brief History of Knowledge" (2011), and has published several scientific books, notably "The Nature of Consciousness" (2006). His book "Il Terzo Secolo/ The Third Century" (1997), an analysis of the USA society, structured like a hyper-document, made the Italian best-sellers' list. In the meantime he reviewed music and cinema, at first for magazines and later for his own website. His main books on music are: "A History of Jazz Music 1900-2000" (2007), "A History of Popular Music before Rock Music" (2007), and "A History of Rock and Dance Music" (2009). His website offers about 6,000 profiles of musicians and more than 20,000 reviews of albums.
He pioneered Internet-based journalism. In 1985 he started his first e-zine, distributed by e-mail over the Internet. Between 1986 and 1990 he created an online database, downloadable via ftp. In 1995 that database mutated into his own website: www.scaruffi.com.
He has organized several interdisciplinary cultural events in the Bay Area, culminating with the Leonardo Art Science Evenings (LASERs) on behalf of Leonardo ISAST and in collaboration with San Francisco State Univ, University of San Francisco and SETI Institute.
Having spent three decades in Silicon Valley, in 2011 he published "A History of Silicon Valley" from the founding of Stanford to the age of social networking.
An avid traveler who spends months on the road, he has visited more than 120 countries of the world.
All along he continued writing the poems and essays that were collected in his book "Synthesis" (2009).
