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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
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.
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 Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding
Approaches widens the scope of analytical approaches for popular
music by incorporating methods developed for analyzing contemporary
art music. This study endeavors to create a new analytical paradigm
for examining popular music from the perspective of developments in
contemporary art music. "Expanded approaches" for popular music
analysis is broadly defined as as exploring the pitch-class
structures, form, timbre, rhythm, or aesthetics of various forms of
popular music in a conceptual space not limited to the domain of
common practice tonality but broadened to include any applicable
compositional, analytical, or theoretical concept that illuminates
the music. The essays in this collection investigate a variety of
analytical, theoretical, historical, and aesthetic commonalities
popular music shares with 20th and 21st century art music. From
rock and pop to hip hop and rap, dance and electronica, from the
1930s to present day, this companion explores these connections in
five parts: Establishing and Expanding Analytical Frameworks
Technology and Timbre Rhythm, Pitch, and Harmony Form and Structure
Critical Frameworks: Analytical, Formal, Structural, and Political
With contributions by established scholars and promising emerging
scholars in music theory and historical musicology from North
America, Europe, and Australia, The Routledge Companion to Popular
Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches offers nuanced and detailed
perspectives that address the relationships between concert and
popular music.
Unique yet diverse in its approach, The Crucifixion in Music
examines how text is set in music through the specific
musicological period from 1680 to 1800. The treatise focuses
specifically on the literary text of the Crucifixus from the Credo
of the Ordinary of the Roman Catholic Mass. Combining analytical
theory and method to address musical rhetoric, semiotics, and
theory, author Jasmin Cameron follows the Crucifixion through many
settings in Baroque and Classical music. In this first title in
Scarecrow Press's new series, Contextual Bach Studies, Cameron
studies musical representations of the text, first through a
discussion that establishes a theoretical framework, then by
applying the framework to individual case studies, such as Johann
Sebastian Bach's B Minor Mass. By studying the musical
representation of the text, and the concepts and contexts to which
the words refer, Cameron examines the way the treatment of a
literary text fuses into a recognizable musical tradition that
composers can follow, develop, modify, or ignore. With equal time
given to the settings of the Crucifixus by composers before and
after Bach's time, the reader is provided with a fuller historical
context for Bach's genius. Cameron also combines the beliefs of
past theorists with those of today, reaching a common ground among
them, and providing a basis and analytical framework for further
study.
Presents thirteen studies that engage with the notion of formal
function in a variety of ways Among the more striking developments
in contemporary North American music theory is the renewed
centrality of issues of musical form (Formenlehre). Formal
Functions in Perspective presents thirteen studies that engage with
musical form in a variety of ways. The essays, written by
established and emerging scholars from the United States, the
United Kingdom, Canada, and the European continent, run the
chronological gamut from Haydn and Clementito Leibowitz and Adorno;
they discuss Lieder, arias, and choral music as well as symphonies,
concerti, and chamber works; they treat Haydn's humor and
Saint-Saens's politics, while discussions of particular pieces
range from Mozart's arias to Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht. Running
through the essays and connecting them thematically is the central
notion of formal function. CONTRIBUTORS: Brian Black, L. Poundie
Burstein, Andrew Deruchie, Julian Horton, Steven Huebner, Harald
Krebs, Henry Klumpenhouwer, Nathan John Martin, Francois de
Medicis, Christoph Neidhoefer, Julie Pedneault-Deslauriers, Giorgio
Sanguinetti, Janet Schmalfeldt, Peter Schubert, Steven Vande
Moortele Steven Vande Moortele is assistant professor of music
theory at the University of Toronto. Julie Pedneault-Deslauriers is
assistant professor of music at the University of Ottawa. Nathan
John Martin is assistant professor of music at the University of
Michigan.
A fully updated edition of the leading reference work on musical
key characteristics during the Baroque, Classical and Romantic
periods. This is a revised second edition of Dr. Steblin's
important work on key characteristics, first published in 1983 by
UMI Research Press and re-issued by the University of Rochester
Press in 1996. The revision has been limited to athorough
correction and update of the material in the first edition, so as
to not disrupt the content and organization, for which the book has
been praised as a significant and noteworthy reference for both
scholars and research students alike. The book discusses the
extra-musical meanings associated with various musical keys by
ancient Greek and medieval-renaissance theorists and in particular
composers and writers on music in the Baroque, Classical,and early
Romantic periods. Chapters focus on Mattheson's extensive key
descriptions from 1713, the Rameau-Rousseau and Marpurg-Kirnberger
controversies regarding unequal versus equal temperaments, and
C.F.D. Schubart's influential list based on the sharp-flat
[bright-dark] principle of key-distinctions. Rita Katherine Steblin
is a world-renowned music scholar, living and working in Vienna.
Robert P. Morgan is one of a small number of music theorists
writing in English who treat music theory, and in particular
Schenkerian theory, as part of general intellectual life. Morgan's
writings are renowned within the field of music scholarship: he is
the author of the well-known Norton volume Twentieth-Century Music,
and of additional books relating to Schenkerian and other theory,
analysis and society. This volume of Morgan's previously published
essays encompasses a broad range of issues, including historical
and social issues and is of importance to anyone concerned with
modern Western music. His specially written introduction treats his
writings as a whole but also provides additional material relating
to the articles included in this volume.
Working on a musical is exciting for students, teachers, and the
entire middle school community! As the first musical theater book
especially for middle school productions, The Magic of Middle
School Musicals provides a step-by-step guide for success. Bobetsky
approaches planning and producing musicals in the context of a
curricular unit of study and includes strategies for assessing
student learning. Dr. Victor V. Bobetsky, a former New York City
middle school music teacher, begins with advice on how to select a
musical, obtain copyright permission, and arrange the music for
middle school voices. He discusses strategies for teaching the
music in the choral classroom, auditioning, casting, and rehearsal
procedures. Practical suggestions show directors how to work with
student actors, create choreography, and manage scenery, set
design, costumes, lighting, and more. The Magic of Middle School
Musicals gives music teachers the information and confidence they
need to artistically adapt musicals from the American repertoire to
the middle school level so that teachers, students, and audiences
can experience and enjoy this unique, familiar, and musically
expressive genre!
This is the first comprehensive book-length introduction to the
philosophy of Western music that fully integrates consideration of
popular music and hybrid musical forms, especially song. Its
author, Andrew Kania, begins by asking whether Bob Dylan should
even have been eligible for the Nobel Prize in Literature, given
that he is a musician. This motivates a discussion of music as an
artistic medium, and what philosophy has to contribute to our
thinking about music. Chapters 2-5 investigate the most commonly
defended sources of musical value: its emotional power, its form,
and specifically musical features (such as pitch, rhythm, and
harmony). In chapters 6-9, Kania explores issues arising from
different musical practices, particularly work-performance (with a
focus on classical music), improvisation (with a focus on jazz),
and recording (with a focus on rock and pop). Chapter 10 examines
the intersection of music and morality. The book ends with a
consideration of what, ultimately, music is. Key Features Uses
popular-song examples throughout, but also discusses a range of
musical traditions (notably, rock, pop, classical, and jazz)
Explains both philosophical and musical terms when they are first
introduced Provides publicly accessible Spotify playlists of the
musical examples discussed in the book Each chapter begins with an
overview and ends with questions for testing comprehension and
stimulating further thought, along with suggestions for further
reading
This book looks at the role of popular music in constructing the
myth of the First World War. Since the late 1950s over 1,500
popular songs from more than forty countries have been recorded
that draw inspiration from the War. National Myth and the First
World War in Modern Popular Music takes an inter-disciplinary
approach that locates popular music within the framework of 'memory
studies' and analyses how songwriters are influenced by their
country's 'national myths'. How does popular music help form memory
and remembrance of such an event? Why do some songwriters stick
rigidly to culturally dominant forms of memory whereas others seek
an oppositional or transnational perspective? The huge range of
musical examples include the great chansonniers Jacques Brel and
Georges Brassens; folk maestros including Al Stewart and Eric
Bogle; the socially aware rock of The Kinks and Pink Floyd; metal
legends Iron Maiden and Bolt Thrower and female iconoclasts
Diamanda Galas and PJ Harvey.
Joe Davis, the focus of "The Melody Man" enjoyed a 50-year
career in the music industry, which covered nearly every aspect of
the business. He hustled sheet music in the 1920s, copyrighted
compositions by artists as diverse as Fats Waller, Carson Robison,
Otis Blackwell, and Rudy Vallee, oversaw hundreds of recording
session, and operated several record companies beginning in the
1940s. Davis also worked fearlessly to help insure that black
recording artists and song writers gained equal treatment for their
work.
Much more than a biography, this book is an investigation of the
role played by music publishers during much of the twentieth
century. Joe Davis was not a music "great" but he was one of those
individuals who enabled "greats" to emerge. A musician, manager,
and publisher, his long career reveals much about the nature of the
music industry and offers insight into how the industry changed
from the 1920s to the 1970s. By the summer of 1924, when Davis was
handling the "Race talent" for Ajax records, he had already worked
in the music business for most of a decade and there was more than
five decades of musical career ahead of him. The fact that his
fascinating life has gone so long under-appreciated is remedied by
the publication of Never Sell A Copyright.
Originally published in England, in 1990, Never Sell a
Copyright: Joe Davis and His Role in the New York Music Scene,
1916-1978 was never released in the United States and available in
a very limited print run in England. The author, noted blues
scholar and folklorist Bruce Bastin, has worked with fellow music
scholar Kip Lornell to completely update, condense, and improve the
book for this first-ever American edition.
In Recording History, Peter Martland uses a range of archival
sources to trace the genesis and early development of the British
record industry from1888 to 1931. A work of economic and cultural
history that draws on a vast range of quantitative data, it surveys
the commercial and business activities of the British record
industry like no other work of recording history has before.
Martland s study charts the successes and failures of this industry
and its impact on domestic entertainment. Showcasing its many
colorful pioneers from both sides of the Atlantic, Recording
History is first and foremost an account of The Gramophone Company
Ltd, a precursor to today s recording giant EMI, and then the most
important British record company active from the late 19th century
until the end of the second decade of the twentieth century.
Martland s history spans the years from the original inventors
through industrial and market formation and final take-off
including the riveting battle in recording formats. Special
attention is given to the impact of the First World War and the
that followed in its wake. Scholars of recording history will find
in Martland s study the story of the development of the recording
studio, of the artists who made the first records (from which some
like Italian opera tenor Enrico Caruso earned a fortune), and the
change records wrought in the relationship between performer and
audience, transforming the reception and appreciation of musical
culture. Filling a much-needed gap in scholarship, Recording
History documents the beginnings of the end of the contemporary
international record industry."
Afrosonic Life explores the role sonic innovations in the African
diaspora play in articulating methodologies for living the
afterlife of slavery. Developing and extending debates on Afrosonic
cultures, the book attends to the ways in which the acts of
technological subversion, experimentation and production complement
and interrupt the intellectual project of modernity. Music making
processes such as dub, turntablism, hip-hop dj techniques and the
remix, innovate methods of expressing subjecthoods beyond the
dominant language of Western "Man" and the market. These sonic
innovations utilize sound as a methodology to institute a
rehumanizing subjectivity in which sound dislodges the hierarchical
ordering of racial schemas. Afrosonic Life is invested in
excavating and elaborating the nuanced and novel ways of music
making and sound creation found in the African diaspora.
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