The title coinage of this book, stimulacra, refers to the fundamental capacity of literary narrative to stimulate our minds and senses by simulating things through words. Musical stimulacra are passages of fiction that readers are empowered to transpose into mental simulations of music. The book theorizes how fiction can generate musical experience, explains what constitutes that experience, and explores the musical dimensions of three American novels: William T. Vollmann's Europe Central (2005), William H. Gass's Middle C (2013), and Richard Powers's Orfeo (2014). Musical Stimulacra approaches fiction's music from a readerly perspective. Instead of looking at how novels forever fail to compensate for music's physical, structural, and affective properties, the book concentrates on what literary narrative can do musically. Negotiating common grounds for cognitive audionarratology and intermediality studies, Musical Stimulacra builds its case on the assumption that, among other things, fiction urges us to listen-to musical words and worlds.

Educational Change and the Secondary School Music Curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand provides a fascinating case study in educational change. The music curriculum has been greatly affected by deep cultural and economic forces such as the growth of popular music's importance in young people's lives, by demands for inclusive and multicultural education, and not least by advances in technology that promise to invigorate all aspects of teaching and learning. This book brings together the work of a number of leading music education scholars and teachers from Aotearoa/New Zealand to both explore these issues and to share case studies of practice: both the positive changes and the unintended consequences. Each chapter focuses on a current issue in music education and the final chapter contains responses from a number of practitioners to the issues raised by the authors, drawing together the practical and theoretical dimensions of the book.

This book studies recent music in the western classical tradition, offering a critique of current analytical/theoretical approaches and proposing alternatives. The critique addresses the present fringe status of recent music sometimes described as crossover, postmodern, post-classical, post-minimalist, etc. and demonstrates that existing descriptive languages and analytical approaches do not provide adequate tools to address this music in positive and productive terms. Existing tools and concepts were developed primarily in the mid-20th century in tandem with the high modernist compositional aesthetic, and they have changed little since then. The aesthetics of music composition, on the other hand, have been in constant transformation. Lochhead proposes new ways to conceive musical works, their structurings of musical experience and time, and the procedures and goals of analytic close reading. These tools define investigative procedures that engage the multiple perspectives of composers, performers, and listeners, and that generate conceptual modes unique to each work. In action, they rebuild a conceptual, methodological, and experiential place for recent music. These new approaches are demonstrated in analyses of four pieces: Kaija Saariaho's Lonh (1996), Sofia Gubaidulina's Second String Quartet (1987), Stacy Garrop's String Quartet no.2, Demons and Angels (2004-05), and Anna Clyne's "Choke" (2004). This book defies the prediction of classical music's death, and will be of interest to scholars and musicians of classical music, and those interested in music theory, musicology, and aural culture.

It is the first monograph in which the concertos of all composers active in this field in the Republic of Venice in the years 1695-1740 are methodically discussed. The Venetian instrumental concerto from Vivaldi's time is portrayed here through an extensive and thorough survey of the most complete and representative musical material that allowed for the making of conclusions as to its typology, form, style and technique. The concertos discussed here include 974 works by fifteen composers active in Venice, Brescia, Bergamo and Padua. Such an approach not only gives an exhaustive but also a more objective view on the history of the Baroque concerto in its Venetian variant. It shows Vivaldi's work in a new and broad context, which allows us to better understand its unique character.

Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Song Cycles: Analytical Pathways Toward Performance presents analyses of fourteen song cycles composed after the turn of the twentieth century, with a focus on offering ways into the musical and poetic structure of each cycle to performers, scholars, and students alike. Ranging from familiar works of twentieth-century music by composers such as Schoenberg, Britten, Poulenc, and Shostakovich to lesser-known works by Van Wyk, Sviridov, Wheeler, and Sanchez, this collection of essays captures the diversity of the song cycle repertoire in contemporary classical music. The contributors bring their own analytical perspectives and methods, considering musical structures, the composers' selection of texts, how poetic narratives are expressed, and historical context. Informed by music history, music theory, and performance, Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Song Cycles offers an essential guide into the contemporary art-music song cycle for performers, scholars, students, and anyone seeking to understand this unique genre.

A new history of twentieth-century North Africa, that gives voice to the musicians who defined an era and the vibrant recording industry that carried their popular sounds from the colonial period through decolonization. If twentieth-century stories of Jews and Muslims in North Africa are usually told separately, Recording History demonstrates that we have not been listening to what brought these communities together: Arab music. For decades, thousands of phonograph records flowed across North African borders. The sounds embedded in their grooves were shaped in large part by Jewish musicians, who gave voice to a changing world around them. Their popular songs broadcast on radio, performed in concert, and circulated on disc carried with them the power to delight audiences, stir national sentiments, and frustrate French colonial authorities. With this book, Christopher Silver provides the first history of the music scene and recording industry across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and offers striking insights into Jewish-Muslim relations through the rhythms that animated them. He traces the path of hit-makers and their hit records, illuminating regional and transnational connections. In asking what North Africa once sounded like, Silver recovers a world of many voices—of pioneering impresarios, daring female stars, cantors turned composers, witnesses and survivors of war, and national and nationalist icons—whose music still resonates well into our present.

Music After Deleuze explores how Deleuzian concepts offer interesting ways of thinking about a wide range of musics. The concepts of difference, identity and repetition offer novel approaches to Western art music from Beethoven to Boulez and Bernhard Lang as well as jazz improvisation, popular and sacred music. The concepts of the 'rhizome', the 'assemblage' and the 'refrain' enable us to think of the specificity of musical works as the meeting of productive forces, for example in the contemporary opera of Dusapin and the experimental music theatre of Aperghis. The concepts of smooth and striated space form the starting point for musical and political reflections on pitch in Western and Eastern music. Deleuze's notion of time as multiple illumines the distinctive conceptions of musical time found in Debussy, Messiaen, Boulez, Carter and Grisey. Finally, the innovative semiotic theory forged in Deleuze-Guattarian philosophy offers valuable insights for a semiotics capable of engaging with the innovative, molecular music of Lachenmann, Aperghis and Levinas.

The study of music within multimedia contexts has become an increasingly active area of scholarly research. However, the application of such studies to musical genres outside the 'classical' film canon, or in television and other media remains largely unexplored in any detail. Tristian Evans demonstrates how postminimal music interacts with other media forms, focusing on the film music by Philip Glass, but also taking into account works by other composers such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley, John Adams and others inspired by minimalist and postminimal practices. Additionally, Evans develops innovative ways of analysing this music, based on an interdisciplinary approach, and draws on research from areas that include philosophy, linguistics and film theory. The book offers one of the first in-depth studies of Philip Glass's music for film, considering The Hours and Dracula, Naqoyqatsi, Notes on a Scandal and Watchmen, while examining re-applications of the music in new cinematic and televisual contexts. The book will appeal to musicologists but also to those working in the fields of film music, cultural studies, media studies and multimedia.

This book offers a detailed examination of the literary influences behind the experimental music of five twentieth-century Italian composers: Luigi Dallapiccola, Bruno Maderna, Luciano Berio, Giacomo Manzoni and Armando Gentilucci.

Concepts of Time in Post-War European Music gives a historical and philosophical account of the discussions of the nature of time and music during the mid-twentieth century. The nature of time was a persistent topic among composers in Paris and Darmstadt in the decades after World War II, one which influenced their musical practice and historical relevance. Based on the author's specialized knowledge of the relevant philosophical discourses, this volume offers a balanced critique of these composers' attempts at philosophizing about time. Touching on familiar topics such as Adorno's philosophy of music, the writings of Boulez and Stockhausen, and Messiaen's theology, this volume uncovers specific relationships among varied intellectual traditions that have not previously been described. Each chapter provides a philosophical explanation of specific problems that are relevant for interpreting the composer's own essays or lectures, followed by a musical analysis of a piece of music which illustrates central theoretical concepts. This is a valuable study for scholars and researchers of music theory, music history, and the philosophy of music.

The first history of keyboard improvisation in European music in the postclassical and romantic periods, Free Play: Fantasies of Improvisation in Nineteenth-Century Music documents practices of improvisation on the piano and the organ, with a particular emphasis on free fantasies and other forms of free playing. Case studies of performers such as Abbe Vogler, J. N. Hummel, Ignaz Moscheles, Robert Schumann, Carl Loewe, and Franz Liszt describe in detail the motives, intentions, and musical styles of the nineteenth century's leading improvisers. Grounded in primary sources, the book further discusses the reception and valuation of improvisational performances by colleagues, audiences, and critics, which prompted many keyboardists to stop improvising. Author Dana Gooley argues that amidst the decline of improvisational practices in the first half of the nineteenth century there emerged a strong and influential "idea" of improvisation as an ideal or perfect performance. This idea, spawned and nourished by romanticism, preserved the aesthetic, social, and ethical values associated with improvisation, calling into question the supposed triumph of the "work."

An in-depth study of the Bulgarian harmonic system is long overdue. More than two decades since the Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares choir was awarded a Grammy (1990), there is no scholarly study of the captivating sounds of Bulgarian vertical sonorities. Kalin Kirilov traces the gradual formation of a unique harmonic system that developed in three styles of Bulgarian music: village music from the 1930s to the 1990s, wedding music from the 1970s to 2000, and choral arrangements (obrabotki) - creations of the socialist period (1944-1989), popularized by Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares. Kirilov classifies the different approaches to harmony and situates them in their historical and cultural contexts, establishing new systems for analysis. In the process, he introduces a new system for the categorization of scales. Kirilov argues that the ready-made concepts that are frequently forced onto Bulgarian music - 'westernization', 'socialist' or 'Middle Eastern influence', are not only outdated but also too vague to be of use in understanding the sophisticated modal and harmonic systems found in Bulgarian music. As an insider who has performed, composed and arranged this music for 30 years, Kirilov is uniquely qualified to interpret it for an international audience.

Music and Transcendence explores the ways in which music relates to transcendence by bringing together the disciplines of musicology, philosophy and theology, thereby uncovering congruencies between them that have often been obscured. Music has the capacity to take one outside of oneself and place one in relation to that which is 'other'. This 'other' can be conceived in an 'absolute' sense, insofar as music can be thought to place the self in relation to a divine 'other' beyond the human frame of existence. However, the 'other' can equally well be conceived in an 'immanent' (or secular) sense, as music is a human activity that relates to other cultural practices. Music here places the self in relation to other people and to the world more generally, shaping how the world is understood, without any reference to a God or gods. The book examines how music has not only played a significant role in many philosophical and theological accounts of the nature of existence and the self, but also provides a valuable resource for the creation of meaning on a day-to-day basis.

Chopin's twenty-four Preludes remain as mysterious today as when they were newly published. What prompted Franz Liszt and others to consider Chopin's Preludes to be compositions in their own right rather than introductions to other works? What did set Chopin's Preludes so drastically apart from their forerunners? What exactly was 'the morbid, the feverish, the repellent' that Schumann heard in Opus 28, in that 'wild motley' of 'strange sketches' and 'ruins'? Why did Liszt and another, anonymous, reviewer publicly suggest that Lamartine's poem Les Preludes served as an inspiration for Chopin's Opus 28? And, if that is indeed the case, how did the poem affect the structure and the thematic contents of Chopin's Preludes? And, lastly, is Opus 28 a random assortment of short pieces or a cohesive cycle? In this monograph, richly illustrated with musical examples, Anatole Leikin combines historical perspectives, hermeneutic and thematic analyses, and a range of practical implications for performers to explore these questions and illuminate the music of one of the best loved collections of music for the piano.

The Safavid era (1501-1722) is one of the most important in the history of Persian culture, celebrated especially for its architecture and art, including miniature paintings that frequently represent singers and instrumentalists. Their presence reflects a sophisticated tradition of music making that was an integral part of court life, yet it is one that remains little known, for the musicological literature of the period is rather thin. There is, however, a significant exception: the text presented and analysed here, a hitherto unpublished and anonymous theoretical work probably of the middle of the sixteenth century. With a Sufi background inspiring the use of the nay as a tool of theoretical demonstration, it is exceptional in presenting descriptive accounts of the modes then in use and suggesting how these might be arranged in complex sequences. As it also gives an account of the corpus of rhythmic cycles it provides a unique insight into the basic structures of art-music during the first century of Safavid rule.

Sound positions individuals as social subjects. The presence of human beings, animals, objects, or technologies reverberates into the spaces we inhabit and produces distinct soundscapes that render social practices, group associations, and socio-cultural tensions audible. The Acoustics of the Social on Page and Screen unites interdisciplinary perspectives on the social dimensions of sound in audiovisual and literary environments. The essays in the collection discuss soundtracks for shared values, group membership, and collective agency, and engage with the subversive functions of sound and sonic forms of resistance in American literature, film, and TV.

Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Song Cycles: Analytical Pathways Toward Performance presents analyses of fourteen song cycles composed after the turn of the twentieth century, with a focus on offering ways into the musical and poetic structure of each cycle to performers, scholars, and students alike. Ranging from familiar works of twentieth-century music by composers such as Schoenberg, Britten, Poulenc, and Shostakovich to lesser-known works by Van Wyk, Sviridov, Wheeler, and Sanchez, this collection of essays captures the diversity of the song cycle repertoire in contemporary classical music. The contributors bring their own analytical perspectives and methods, considering musical structures, the composers' selection of texts, how poetic narratives are expressed, and historical context. Informed by music history, music theory, and performance, Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Song Cycles offers an essential guide into the contemporary art-music song cycle for performers, scholars, students, and anyone seeking to understand this unique genre.

Outside and Inside: Representations of Race and Identity in White Jazz Autobiography is the first full-length study of key autobiographies of white jazz musicians. White musicians from a wide range of musical, social, and economic backgrounds looked to black music and culture as the model on which to form their personal identities and their identities as professional musicians. Their accounts illustrate the triumphs and failures of jazz interracialism. As they describe their relationships with black musicians who are their teachers and peers, white jazz autobiographers display the contradictory attitudes of reverence and entitlement, and deference and insensitivity that remain part of the white response to black culture to the present day. Outside and Inside features insights into the development of jazz styles and culture in the urban meccas of twentieth-century jazz in New Orleans, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Reva Marin considers the autobiographies of sixteen white male jazz instrumentalists, including renowned swing-era bandleaders Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Charlie Barnet; reed instrumentalists Mezz Mezzrow, Bob Wilber, and Bud Freeman; trumpeters Max Kaminsky and Wingy Manone; guitarist Steve Jordan; pianists Art Hodes and Don Asher; saxophonist Art Pepper; guitarist and bandleader Eddie Condon; and New Orleans-style clarinetist Tom Sancton. While critical race theory informs this work, Marin argues that viewing these texts simply through the lens of white privilege does not do justice to the kind of sustained relationships with black music and culture described in the accounts of white jazz autobiographers. She both insists upon the value of insider perspectives and holds the texts to rigorous scrutiny, while embracing an expansive interpretation of white involvement in black culture. Marin opens new paths for study of race relations and racial, ethnic, and gender identity formation in jazz studies.

The Musical Matrix Reloaded proposes a striking new scenario for the music of Beethoven and Schubert in the contemporary world. It draws on the theory of Multiple Worlds in physics, and on sci-fi and movies, as powerful contemporary models of alternative realities to explain radical features of interpolation, dislocation, and ultimately of return. Confronting familiar assumptions about Beethoven's and Schubert's music as long-range consonance, the book proposes instead that musical action is predicated on an underlying disruptive energy, Nietzsche's Dionysian disruptive background re-interpreted in the contemporary world. When it breaks through the musical surface, it dislocates continuity and re-routes tonal narrative into new, unforeseen directions. These unforeseen paths enable us to glimpse in Beethoven's and Schubert's music the beautiful, and often haunting, reality of another world.

The Ordo Virtutum, Hildegard von Bingen's twelfth-century music-drama, is one of the first known examples of a large-scale composition by a named composer in the Western canon. Not only does the Ordo's expansive duration set it apart from its precursors, but also its complex imagery and non-biblical narrative have raised various questions concerning its context and genre. As a poetic meditation on the fall of a soul, the Ordo deploys an array of personified virtues and musical forces over the course of its eighty-seven chants. In this ambitious analysis of the work, Michael C. Gardiner examines how classical Neoplatonic hierarchies are established in the music-drama and considers how they are mediated and subverted through a series of concentric absorptions (absorptions related to medieval Platonism and its various theological developments) which lie at the core of the work's musical design and text. This is achieved primarily through Gardiner's musical network model, which implicates mode into a networked system of nodes, and draws upon parallels with the medieval interpretation of Platonic ontology and Hildegard's correlative realization through sound, song, and voice.

Discussion concerning the 'musicality' of Samuel Beckett's writing now constitutes a familiar critical trope in Beckett Studies, one that continues to be informed by the still-emerging evidence of Beckett's engagement with music throughout his personal and literary life, and by the ongoing interest of musicians in Beckett's work. In Beckett's drama and prose writings, the relationship with music plays out in implicit and explicit ways. Several of his works incorporate canonical music by composers such as Schubert and Beethoven. Other works integrate music as a compositional element, in dialogue or tension with text and image, while others adopt rhythm, repetition and pause to the extent that the texts themselves appear to be 'scored'. But what, precisely, does it mean to say that a piece of prose or writing for theatre, radio or screen, is 'musical'? The essays included in this book explore a number of ways in which Beckett's writings engage with and are engaged by musicality, discussing familiar and less familiar works by Beckett in detail. Ranging from the scholarly to the personal in their respective modes of response, and informed by approaches from performance and musicology, literary studies, philosophy, musical composition and creative practice, these essays provide a critical examination of the ways we might comprehend musicality as a definitive and often overlooked attribute throughout Beckett's work.

This volume examines the global influence and impact of DIY cultural practice as this informs the production, performance and consumption of underground music in different parts of the world. The book brings together a series of original studies of DIY musical activities in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Oceania. The chapters combine insights from established academic writers with the work of younger scholars, some of whom are directly engaged in contemporary underground music scenes. The book begins by revisiting and re-evaluating key themes and issues that have been used in studying the cultural meaning of alternative and underground music scenes, notably aspects of space, place and identity and the political economy of DIY cultural practice. The book then explores how the DIY cultural practices that characterize alternative and underground music scenes have been impacted and influenced by technological change, notably the emergence of digital media. Finally, in acknowledging the over 40-year history of DIY cultural practice in punk and post-punk contexts, the book considers how DIY cultures have become embedded in cultural memory and the emotional geographies of place. Through combining high-quality data and fresh conceptual insights in the context of an international body of work spanning the disciplines of popular-music studies, cultural and media studies, and sociology the book offers a series of innovative new directions in the study of DIY cultures and underground/alternative music scenes. This volume will be of particular interest to undergraduate students in the above-mentioned fields of study, as well as an invaluable resource for established academics and researchers working in these and related fields.

This volume brings together analyses of works by thirteen Russian composers from across the twentieth century, showing how their approaches to tonality, modernism, and serialism forge forward-looking paths independent from their Western counterparts. Russian music of this era is widely performed, and much research has situated this repertoire in its historical and social context, yet few analytical studies have explored the technical aspects of these composers' styles. With a set of representative analyses by leading scholars in music theory and analysis, this book for the first time identifies large-scale compositional trends in Russian music since 1900. The chapters progress by compositional style through the century, and each addresses a single work by a different composer, covering pieces by Rachmaninoff, Myaskovsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Mansurian, Roslavets, Mosolov, Lourie, Tcherepnin, Ustvolskaya, Denisov, Gubaidulina, and Schnittke. Musicians, scholars, and students will find here a starting point for research and analysis of these composers' works and gain a richer understanding of how to listen to and interpret their music.

In the summer of 1978, the B-52's conquered the New York underground. A year later, the band's self-titled debut album burst onto the Billboard charts, capturing the imagination of fans and music critics worldwide. The fact that the group had formed in the sleepy southern college town of Athens, Georgia, only increased the fascination. Soon, more Athens bands followed the B-52's into the vanguard of the new American music that would come to be known as "alternative," including R.E.M., who catapulted over the course of the 1980s to the top of the musical mainstream. As acts like the B-52's, R.E.M., and Pylon drew the eyes of New York tastemakers southward, they discovered in Athens an unexpected mecca of music, experimental art, DIY spirit, and progressive politics--a creative underground as vibrant as any to be found in the country's major cities. In Athens in the eighties, if you were young and willing to live without much money, anything seemed possible. Cool Town reveals the passion, vitality, and enduring significance of a bohemian scene that became a model for others to follow. Grace Elizabeth Hale experienced the Athens scene as a student, small-business owner, and band member. Blending personal recollection with a historian's eye, she reconstructs the networks of bands, artists, and friends that drew on the things at hand to make a new art of the possible, transforming American culture along the way. In a story full of music and brimming with hope, Hale shows how an unlikely cast of characters in an unlikely place made a surprising and beautiful new world.