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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
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.
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.
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.
A prolific music theorist and critic as well as an established composer, Johannes Mattheson remains surprisingly understudied. In this important study, Margaret Seares places Mattheson's Pieces de clavecin (1714) in the context of his work as a public intellectual who encouraged German musicians and their musical public to eschew what he saw as the hidebound traditions of the past, and instead embrace a universalism of style and expression derived from contemporary currents in music of the leading European nations. Beginning with the early non-musical writings by Mattheson, Seares places them in the context of the cosmopolitan city-state of Hamburg, before moving to a detailed study of his first major musical treatise Das neu-erAffnete Orchestre of 1713, in which he espoused his views about the musics of the past and present and, in particular, the characteristics of the musics of Germany, Italy, France and England. This latter section of the treatise, Part III, is edited and translated into English in the book's appendix - the first such translation available. Seares then moves on to an evaluation of the Pieces de clavecin as a work in which Mattheson reflects in musical terms the themes of modernism (in the sense of A la mode) and universalism that are such a strong part of his writings of the period, and a work that represents an important precursor for the keyboard suites of Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Frideric Handel.
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.
John Wallis (1616-1703), was one of the foremost British mathematicians of the seventeenth century, and is also remembered for his important writings on grammar and logic. An interest in music theory led him to produce translations into Latin of three ancient Greek texts - those of Ptolemy, Porphyry and Bryennius - and involved him in discussions with Henry Oldenburg, the Secretary of the Royal Society, Thomas Salmon and other individuals as his ideas developed. The texts presented in this volume cover the relationship of ancient and modern tuning theory, the building of organs, the phenomena of resonance, and other musical topics.
The two volumes of The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies
consolidate an area of scholarly inquiry that addresses how
mechanical, electrical, and digital technologies and their
corresponding economies of scale have rendered music and sound
increasingly mobile-portable, fungible, and ubiquitous. At once a
marketing term, a common mode of everyday-life performance, and an
instigator of experimental aesthetics, "mobile music" opens up a
space for studying the momentous transformations in the production,
distribution, consumption, and experience of music and sound that
took place between the late nineteenth and the early twenty-first
centuries. Taken together, the two volumes cover a large swath of
the world-the US, the UK, Japan, Brazil, Germany, Turkey, Mexico,
France, China, Jamaica, Iraq, the Philippines, India, Sweden-and a
similarly broad array of the musical and nonmusical sounds
suffusing the soundscapes of mobility.
This book provides a selection of annotated translations from Ernst Kurth's three best-known publications: Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts (1917), Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners 'Tristan' (1920), and Bruckner (1925). Kurth's contemporaries considered these books to be pioneering studies in the music of J. S. Bach, Wagner and Bruckner. Professor Rothfarb's extensive introductory essay discusses the intellectual and socio-cultural environment in which Kurth was writing, referring to aspects of the early twentieth-century cultural renewal movements and to intellectual developments of the day in phenomenology, aesthetics and psychology. By reading Kurth against the cultural-intellectual background provided in the essay and commentaries, today's music historians and theorists can round out their picture of music theory in the early twentieth century.
Race, politics, and opera production during apartheid South Africa intersect in this historiographic work on the Eoan Group, a "coloured" cultural organization that performed opera in the Cape. The La Traviata Affair charts Eoan's opera activities from the group's inception in 1933 until the cessation of their productions by 1980. It explores larger questions of complicity, compromise, and compliance; of assimilation, appropriation, and race; and of "European art music" in situations of "non-European" dispossession and disenfranchisement. Performing under the auspices of apartheid, the group's unquestioned acceptance of and commitment to the art of opera could not redeem it from the entanglements that came with the political compromises it made. Uncovering a rich trove of primary source materials, Hilde Roos presents here for the first time the story of one of the premier cultural agencies of apartheid South Africa.
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.
Like other major music genres, ska reflects, reveals, and reacts to the genesis and migration from its Afro-Caribbean roots and colonial origins to the shores of England and back across the Atlantic to the United States. Without ska music, there would be no reggae or Bob Marley, no British punk and pop blends, no American soundtrack to its various subcultures. In Ska: The Rhythm of Liberation, Heather Augustyn examines how ska music first emerged in Jamaica as a fusion of popular, traditional, and even classical musical forms. As a genre, it was a connection to Africa, a means of expression and protest, and a respite from the struggles of colonization and grinding poverty. Ska would later travel with West Indian immigrants to the United Kingdom, where British youth embraced the music, blending it with punk and pop and working its origins as a music of protest and escape into their present lives. The fervor of the music matched the energy of the streets as racism, poverty, and violence ran rampant. But ska called for brotherhood and unity. As series editor and pop music scholar Scott Calhoun notes: "Like a cultural barometer, the rise of ska indicates when and where social, political, and economic institutions disappoint their people and push them to re-invent the process for making meaning out of life. When a people or group embark on this process, it becomes even more necessary to embrace expressive, liberating forms of art for help during the struggle. In its history as a music of freedom, ska has itself flowed freely to wherever people are celebrating the rhythms and sounds of hope." Ska: The Rhythm Liberation should appeal to fans and scholars alike-indeed, any enthusiast of popular music and Caribbean, American, and British history seeking to understand the fascinating relationship between indigenous popular music and cultural and political history. Devotees of reggae, jazz, pop, Latin music, hip hop, rock, techno, dance, and world beat will find their appreciation of this remarkable genre deepened by this survey of the origins and spread of ska.
This book is an attempt at a new interpretation of Stravinsky’s thoughts about music and art, an interpretation made in dialogue with the philosophy of new music and 19th-century artistic ideas. It is also a proposal for a new method of analysing the construction of his musical masterpieces (for example a proposal of new formal sound-units: partons with perceptual invariance), a method in-spired by research into cognitive psychology. Furthermore, in the analysis of Stravinsky’s music, the author emphasises its connection with the Eastern and Western traditions of European culture and links with Plato’s triad of values.
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.
This significant volume moves music-historical research in the direction of deconstructing the national grand narratives in music history, of challenging the national paradigm in methodology, and thinking anew about cultural traffic, cultural transfer and cosmopolitanism in the musical past. The chapters of this book confront, or subject to some kind of critique, assumptions about the importance of the national in the musical past. The emphasis, therefore, is not so much on how national culture has been constructed, or how national cultural institutions have influenced musical production, but, rather, on the way the national has been challenged by musical practices or audience reception.
Eric Bogle has written many iconic songs that deal with the futility and waste of war. Two of these in particular, 'And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda' and 'No Man's Land (a.k.a. The Green Fields of France)', have been recorded numerous times in a dozen or more languages indicating the universality and power of their simple message. Bogle's other compositions about the First World War give a voice to the voiceless, prominence to the forgotten and personality to the anonymous as they interrogate the human experience, celebrate its spirit and empathise with its suffering. This book examines Eric Bogle's songs about the Great War within the geographies and socio-cultural contexts in which they were written and consumed. From Anzac Day in Australia and Turkey to the 'The Troubles' in Northern Ireland and from small Aboriginal communities in the Coorong to the influence of prime ministers and rock stars on a world stage, we are urged to contemplate the nature and importance of popular culture in shaping contemporary notions of history and national identity. It is entirely appropriate that we do so through the words of an artist who Melody Maker described as 'the most important songwriter of our time'.
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.
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.
Musical leadership is associated with a specific profession-the conductor-as well as being a colloquial metaphor for human communication and cooperation at its best. This book examines what musical leadership is, by delving into the choral conductor role, what goes on in the music-making moment and what it takes to do it well. One of the unique features of the musical ensemble is the simultaneity of collective discipline and individual expression. Music is therefore a potent laboratory for understanding the leadership act in the space between leader and team. The musical experience is used to shed light on leading and following more broadly, by linking it to themes such as authority, control, empowerment, intersubjectivity, sensemaking and charisma. Jansson develops the argument that musical leadership involves the combination of strong power and deep sensitivity, a blend that might be equally valid in other leadership domains. Aesthetic knowledge and musical perception therefore offer untapped potential for leadership and organisational development outside the art domain.
More than eighty years have passed since Edgard Varese's catalytic work for percussion ensemble, Ionisation, was heard in its New York premiere. A flurry of pieces for this new medium dawned soon after, challenging the established truths and preferences of the European musical tradition while setting the stage for percussion to become one of the most significant musical advances of the twentieth century. This 'revolution', as John Cage termed it, was a quintessentially modernist movement - an exploration of previously undiscovered sounds, forms, textures, and styles. However, as percussion music has progressed and become woven into the fabric of Western musical culture, several divergent paths, comprised of various traditions and a multiplicity of aesthetic sensibilities, have since emerged for the percussionist to pursue. This edited collection highlights the progressive developments that continue to investigate uncharted musical grounds. Using historical studies, philosophical insights, analyses of performance practice, and anecdotal reflections authored by some of today's most engaged performers, composers, and scholars, this book aims to illuminate the unique destinations found in the artistic journey of the modern percussionist.
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.
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.
Greek Rebetiko from a Psychocultural Perspective: Same Songs Changing Minds examines the ways in which audiences in present-day Greece and Turkey perceive and use the Greek popular song genre rebetiko to cultivate specific cultural habits and identities. In the past, rebetiko has been associated chiefly with the lower strata of Greek society. But Daniel Koglin approaches the subject from a different perspective, exploring the mythological and ritual aspects of rebetiko, which intellectual elites on both sides of the Aegean Sea have adapted to their own world views in our age of globalized consumption. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods from ethnomusicology, ritual studies, conceptual history and music psychology, Koglin casts light on the role played by national perceptions in the processes of music production and consumption. His analysis reveals that rebetiko persistently oscillates between conceptual categories: it is a music both ours and theirs, marginal and mainstream, joyful and grievous, sacred and profane. The study culminates in the thesis that this semantic multistability is not only a key concept to understanding the ongoing popularity of rebetiko in Greece, and its recent renaissance in Turkey, but also a fundamental aspect of the human experience on the south-eastern borders of Europe.
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. |
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