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Books > Arts & Architecture
Screenwriters and film directors have long been fascinated by the
challenges of representing the listening experience on screen.
While music has played a central role in film narrative since the
conception of moving pictures, the representation of music
listening has remained a special occurrence. In Situated Listening:
The Sound of Absorption in Classical Cinema, author Giorgio
Biancorosso argues for a redefinition of the music listener as
represented in film. Rather than construct the listener as a
reverential concertgoer, music analyst, or gallery dweller, this
book instead shows how films offer a new way of thinking about
listening as distributed experience, an activity made public and
shareable across vast cultural spaces rather than an insular
motion. It shows how cinema functions as not only a reservoir of
established modes of listening, but also an agent in the
development of new listening practices. As Biancorosso argues, many
films have perpetuated a long-existing paradox of music as a means
of silencing. Consider an aggressive score overlaying battle scenes
or a romantic scene conveying unspoken intimacy. In the place of
conversational exchange exists a veil of sound in the form of
music, and Situated Listening explains why this function influences
both the course of interpretation and empathy experienced by film
spectators. By focusing on cinematic, physical, and emotional
scenery surrounding a character, viewers can recognize aspects of
their own lives, developing a deeper empathy for each fictional
character through real and shared listening practices.
This is the first book to tackle the diverse styles and multiple
histories of popular musics in India. It brings together fourteen
of the world's leading scholars on Indian popular music to
contribute chapters on a range of topics from the classic songs of
Bollywood to contemporary remixes, summarized by a reflective
afterword by popular music scholar Timothy Taylor. The chapters in
this volume address the impact of media and technology on
contemporary music, the variety of industrial developments and
contexts for Indian popular music, and historical trends in popular
music development both before and after the Indian Independence in
1947. The book identifies new ways of engaging popular music in
India beyond the Bollywood musical canon, and offers several case
studies of local and regional styles of music. The contributors
address the subcontinent's historical relationships with
colonialism, the transnational market economies, local governmental
factors, international conventions, and a host of other
circumstances to shed light on the development of popular music
throughout India. To illustrate each chapter author's points, and
to make available music not easily accessible in North America, the
book features an Oxford web music companion website of audio and
video tracks.
Music and the Broadcast Experience explores the complex ways in
which music and broadcasting have developed together throughout the
twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. It brings into
dialogue researchers working in media and music studies; explores
and develops crucial points of contact between studies of music in
radio and music in television; and investigates the limits,
persistence, and extensions of music broadcasting in the Internet
era. The book presents a series of case studies that address key
moments and concerns in music broadcasting, past and present,
written by leading scholars in the field, who hail from both media
and music studies. Unified by attentiveness both to musical sound
and meaning and to broadcasting structures, practices, audiences,
and discourses, the chapters in this collection address the
following topics: the role of live orchestral concerts and opera in
the early development of radio and their relation to ideologies of
musical uplift; the relation between production culture, music, and
television genre; the function of music in sponsored radio during
the 1930s; the fortunes of musical celebrity and artistic ambition
on television; questions of music format and political economy in
the development of online radio; and the negotiation of space,
community, and participation among audiences, online and offline,
in the early twenty-first century. The collection's ultimate aim is
to explore the usefulness and limitations of broadcasting as a
concept for understanding music and its cultural role, both
historically and today.
Electronic music instruments weren't called synthesizers until the
1950s, but their lineage began in 1919 with Russian inventor Lev
Sergeyevich Termen's development of the Etherphone, now known as
the Theremin. From that point, synthesizers have undergone a
remarkable evolution from prohibitively large mid-century models
confined to university laboratories to the development of musical
synthesis software that runs on tablet computers and portable media
devices.
Throughout its history, the synthesizer has always been at the
forefront of technology for the arts. In The Synthesizer: A
Comprehensive Guide to Understanding, Programming, Playing, and
Recording the Ultimate Electronic Music Instrument, veteran music
technology journalist, educator, and performer Mark Vail tells the
complete story of the synthesizer: the origins of the many forms
the instrument takes; crucial advancements in sound generation,
musical control, and composition made with instruments that may
have become best sellers or gone entirely unnoticed; and the basics
and intricacies of acoustics and synthesized sound. Vail also
describes how to successfully select, program, and play a
synthesizer; what alternative controllers exist for creating
electronic music; and how to stay focused and productive when faced
with a room full of instruments. This one-stop reference guide on
all things synthesizer also offers tips on encouraging creativity,
layering sounds, performance, composing and recording for film and
television, and much more.
The first book of its kind, Gender & Rock introduces readers to
how gender operates in multiple sites within rock culture,
including its music, lyrics, imagery, performances, instruments,
and business practices. Additionally, it explores how rock culture,
despite a history of regressive gender politics, has provided a
place for musicians and consumers to experiment with alternate
identities and ways of being. Drawing on feminist and queer
scholarship in popular music studies, musicology, cultural studies,
sociology, performance studies, literary analysis, and media
studies, Gender & Rock provides readers with a survey of the
topics, theories, and methods necessary for understanding and
conducting analyses of gender in rock culture. Via an
intersectional approach, the book examines how the gendering of
particular roles, practices, technologies, and institutions within
rock culture is related to discourses of race, sexuality, age, and
class.
Though the distance between opera and popular music seems immense
today, a century ago opera was an integral part of American popular
music culture, and familiarity with opera was still a part of
American "cultural literacy." During the Ragtime era, hundreds of
humorous Tin Pan Alley songs centered on operatic subjects-either
directly quoting operas or alluding to operatic characters and
vocal stars of the time. These songs brilliantly captured the
moment when popular music in America transitioned away from its
European operatic heritage, and when the distinction between low-
and high-brow "popular" musical forms was free to develop, with all
its attendant cultural snobbery and rebellion.
Author Larry Hamberlin guides us through this large but
oft-forgotten repertoire of operatic novelties, and brings to life
the rich humor and keen social criticism of the era. In the early
twentieth-century, when new social forces were undermining the view
that our European heritage was intrinsically superior to our native
vernacular culture, opera-that great inheritance from our European
forebearers-functioned in popular discourse as a signifier for
elite culture. Tin Pan Opera shows that these operatic novelty
songs availed this connection to a humorous and critical end.
Combining traditional, European operatic melodies with the new and
American rhythmic verve of ragtime, these songs painted vivid
images of immigrant Americans, liberated women, and upwardly
striving African Americans, striking emblems of the profound
transformations that shook the United States at the beginning of
the American century.
In Spectacular Men, Sarah E. Chinn investigates how working class
white men looked to the early American theatre for examples of
ideal manhood. Theatre-going was the primary source of
entertainment for working people of the early Republic and the
Jacksonian period, and plays implicitly and explicitly addressed
the risks and rewards of citizenship. Ranging from representations
of the heroes of the American Revolution to images of doomed
Indians to plays about ancient Rome, Chinn unearths dozens of plays
rarely read by critics. Spectacular Men places the theatre at the
center of the self-creation of working white men, as voters, as
workers, and as Americans.
Fashion History: A Global View proposes a new perspective on
fashion history. Arguing that fashion has occurred in cultures
beyond the West throughout history, this groundbreaking book
explores the geographic places and historical spaces that have been
largely neglected by contemporary fashion studies, bringing them
together for the first time. Reversing the dominant narrative that
privileges Western Europe in the history of dress, Welters and
Lillethun adopt a cross-cultural approach to explore a vast array
of cultures around the globe. They explore key issues affecting
fashion systems, ranging from innovation, production and
consumption to identity formation and the effects of colonization.
Case studies include the cross-cultural trade of silk textiles in
Central Asia, the indigenous dress of the Americas and of Hawai'i,
the cosmetics of the Tang Dynasty in China, and stylistic
innovation in sub-Saharan Africa. Examining the new lessons that
can be deciphered from archaeological findings and theoretical
advancements, the book shows that fashion history should be
understood as a global phenomenon, originating well before and
beyond the fourteenth century European court, which is continually,
and erroneously, cited as fashion's birthplace. Providing a fresh
framework for fashion history scholarship, Fashion History: A
Global View will inspire inclusive dress narratives for students
and scholars of fashion, anthropology, and cultural studies.
Many practical books for music educators who work with special
needs students focus on students' disabilities, rather than on the
inclusive classroom more generally. In Including Everyone: Creating
Music Classrooms Where All Children Learn, veteran teacher and
pedagogue Judith Jellison offers a new approach that identifies
broader principles of inclusive music instruction writ large. As
she demonstrates in this aptly-titled book, the perceived
impediments to successfully including the wide diversity of
children in schools in meaningful music instruction often stem not
from insurmountable obstacles but from a lack of imagination. How
do teachers and parents create diverse musical communities in which
all children develop skills, deepen understanding, and cultivate
independence in a culture of accomplishment and joy? Including
Everyone equips music teachers with five principles of effective
instruction for mixed special needs / traditional settings that are
applicable in both classroom and rehearsal rooms alike. These five
guidelines lay out Jellison's argument for a new way to teach music
that shifts attention away from thinking of children in terms of
symptoms. The effective teacher, argues Jellison, will strive to
offer a curriculum that will not only allow the child with a
disability to be more successful, but will also apply to and
improve instruction for typically developing students. In this
compelling new book, Judith Jellison illustrates what it takes to
imagine, create, and realize possibilities for all children in ways
that inspire parents, teachers, and the children themselves to take
part in collaborative music making. Her book helps readers
recognize how this most central component of human culture is one
that allows everyone to participate, learn, and grow. Jellison is a
leader in her field, and the wealth of knowledge she makes
available in this book is extensive and valuable. It should aid her
peers and inspire a new generation of student teachers.
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The Musical Playground is a new and fascinating account of the
musical play of school-aged children. Based on fifteen years of
ethnomusicological field research in urban and rural school
playgrounds around the globe, Kathryn Marsh provides unique
insights into children's musical playground activities across a
comprehensive scope of social, cultural, and national contexts.
With a sophisticated synthesis of ethnomusicological and music
education approaches, Marsh examines sung and chanted games,
singing and dance routines associated with popular music and sports
chants, and more improvised and spontaneous chants, taunts, and
rhythmic movements. The book's index of more than 300 game genres
is a valuable reference to readers in the field of children's
folklore, providing a unique map of game distribution across an
array of cultures and geographical locations. On the companion
website, readers will be able to view on streamed video, field
recordings of children's musical play throughout the wide range of
locations and cultures that form the core of Marsh's study,
allowing them to better understand the music, movement, and textual
characteristics of musical games and interactions. Copious notated
musical examples throughout the book and the website demonstrate
characteristics of game genres, children's generative practices,
and reflections of cultural influences on game practice, and
valuable, practical recommendations are made for developing
pedagogies which reflect more child-centred and less Eurocentric
views of children's play, musical learning, and musical creativity.
Marsh brings readers to playgrounds in Australia, Norway, the USA,
the United Kingdom, and Korea, offering them an important and
innovative study of how children transmit, maintain, and transform
the games of the playground. The Musical Playground will appeal to
practitioners and researchers in music education, ethnomusicology,
and folklore.
Initially branching out of the European contradance tradition, the
danzon first emerged as a distinct form of music and dance among
black performers in nineteenth-century Cuba. By the early
twentieth-century, it had exploded in popularity throughout the
Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean basin. A fundamentally hybrid music
and dance complex, it reflects the fusion of European and African
elements and had a strong influence on the development of later
Latin dance traditions as well as early jazz in New Orleans.
Danzon: Circum-Caribbean Dialogues in Music and Dance studies the
emergence, hemisphere-wide influence, and historical and
contemporary significance of this music and dance phenomenon.
Co-authors Alejandro L. Madrid and Robin D. Moore take an
ethnomusicological, historical, and critical approach to the
processes of appropriation of the danzon in new contexts, its
changing meanings over time, and its relationship to other musical
forms. Delving into its long history of controversial
popularization, stylistic development, glorification, decay, and
rebirth in a continuous transnational dialogue between Cuba and
Mexico as well as New Orleans, the authors explore the production,
consumption, and transformation of this Afro-diasporic performance
complex in relation to global and local ideological discourses. By
focusing on interactions across this entire region as well as
specific local scenes, Madrid and Moore underscore the extent of
cultural movement and exchange within the Americas during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, and are thereby able to
analyze the danzon, the dance scenes it has generated, and the
various discourses of identification surrounding it as elements in
broader regional processes. Danzon is a significant addition to the
literature on Latin American music, dance, and expressive culture;
it is essential reading for scholars, students, and fans of this
music alike."
In Renaissance Rome, ancient ruins were preserved as often as they
were mined for their materials. Although the question of what to
preserve and how continued to be subject to debate, preservation
acquired renewed force and urgency in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries as the new papal capital rose upon the ruins of the
ancient city. Preservation practices became more focused and
effective in Renaissance Rome than ever before.
The Ruin of the Eternal City offers a new interpretation of the
ongoing life of ancient buildings within the expanding early modern
city. While historians and archaeologists have long affirmed that
early modern builders disregarded the protection of antiquity, this
study provides the first systematic analysis of preservation
problems as perceived by the Renaissance popes, the civic
magistrates, and ordinary citizens. Based on new evidence and
recent conservation theory, this compelling study explores how
civic officials balanced the defense of specific sites against the
pressing demands imposed by population growth, circulation, and
notions of urban decorum. Above all, the preservation of antiquity
remained an indispensable tool to advance competing political
agendas in the papal capital. A broad range of preservation
policies and practices are examined at the half-ruined Colosseum,
the intact Pantheon, and the little-known but essential Renaissance
bridge known as the Ponte Santa Maria.
Rome has always incorporated change in light of its glorious past
as well as in the more pragmatic context of contemporary
development. Such an investigation not only reveals the complexity
of preservation as a contested practice, but also challenges us to
rethink the way people in the past understood history itself.
Rethinking Britten offers a fresh portrait of one of the most
widely performed composers of the 20th century. In twelve essays, a
diverse group of contributors--both established authorities and
leading younger voices--explore a significant portion of Benjamin
Britten's extensive oeuvre across a range of genres, including
opera, song cycle, and concert music. Well informed by earlier
writings on the composer's professional career and private life,
Rethinking Britten also uncovers many fresh lines of inquiry, from
the Lord Chamberlain's last-minute censorship of the Rape of
Lucretia libretto to psychoanalytic understandings of Britten's
staging of gender roles; from the composer's delight in schoolboy
humor to his operatic revival of Purcellian dance rhythms; from his
creative responses to Cold-War-era internationalism to his dealings
with BBC Television. Each essay blends awareness of overarching
contexts with insights into particular expressive achievements.
Balancing biographical, archival, and analytic commentary with
cultural and historical criticism, Rethinking Britten broadens the
interpretive context surrounding all phases of Britten's career and
is essential reading for scholars and fans alike.
In Shapes of American Ballet: Teachers and Training before
Balanchine, Jessica Zeller introduces the first few decades of the
twentieth century as an often overlooked, yet critical period for
ballet's growth in America. While George Balanchine is often
considered the sole creator of American ballet, numerous European
and Russian emigres had been working for decades to build a
national ballet with an American identity. These pedagogues and
others like them played critical yet largely unacknowledged roles
in American ballet's development. Despite their prestigious ballet
pedigrees, the dance field's exhaustive focus on Balanchine has led
to the neglect of their work during the first few decades of the
century, and in this light, this book offers a new perspective on
American ballet during the period immediately prior to Balanchine's
arrival. Zeller uses hundreds of rare archival documents to
illuminate the pedagogies of several significant European and
Russian teachers who worked in New York City. Bringing these
contributions into the broader history of American ballet recasts
American ballet's identity as diverse-comprised of numerous
Euro-Russian and American elements, as opposed to the work of one
individual. This new account of early twentieth century American
ballet is situated against a bustling New York City backdrop, where
mass immigration through Ellis Island brought the ballet from
European and Russian opera houses into contact with a variety of
American forms and sensibilities. Ballet from celebrated
Euro-Russian lineages was performed in vaudeville and blended with
American popular dance styles, and it developed new characteristics
as it responded to the American economy. Shapes of American Ballet
delves into ballet's struggle to define itself during this rich
early twentieth century period, and it sheds new light on ballet's
development of an American identity before Balanchine.
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