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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General

Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music (Paperback): Brian Hulse Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music (Paperback)
Brian Hulse; Nick Nesbitt
R1,693 Discovery Miles 16 930 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

It is the contention of the editors and contributors of this volume that the work carried out by Gilles Deleuze, where rigorously applied, has the potential to cut through much of the intellectual sedimentation that has settled in the fields of music studies. Deleuze is a vigorous critic of the Western intellectual tradition, calling for a 'philosophy of difference', and, despite its ambitions, he is convinced that Western philosophy fails to truly grasp (or think) difference as such. It is argued that longstanding methods of conceptualizing music are vulnerable to Deleuze's critique. But, as Deleuze himself stresses, more important than merely critiquing established paradigms is developing ways to overcome them, and by using Deleuze's own concepts this collection aims to explore that possibility.

Elements Of Human Voice (Hardcover): Julian Chengjun Chen Elements Of Human Voice (Hardcover)
Julian Chengjun Chen
R2,894 Discovery Miles 28 940 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

This is a self-contained monograph on human voice. It systematically expounds a theory of voice production initiated by Leonhard Euler, through an analysis of large amount of human voice data, especially simultaneously acquired voice signals and electroglottograph signals, as well as temporal variations of pressures directly below and above the vocal folds. Its contents include the physics and physiology of human voice production, parametrical representations of voice signals, and technology applications. Background knowledge on general acoustics and mathematical tools pertinent to quantitative descriptions of human voice are explained in detail.Readers of this monograph include researchers, practitioners and students in the fields of physiology and medicine, acoustics, computer science, telecommunication, acoustic phonetics, and vocal music.

Loading the Silence: Australian Sound Art in the Post-Digital Age (Paperback): Linda Ioanna Kouvaras Loading the Silence: Australian Sound Art in the Post-Digital Age (Paperback)
Linda Ioanna Kouvaras
R1,743 Discovery Miles 17 430 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

The experimentalist phenomenon of 'noise' as constituting 'art' in much twentieth-century music (paradoxically) reached its zenith in Cage's ('silent' piece) 4'33 . But much post-1970s musical endeavour with an experimentalist telos, collectively known as 'sound art', has displayed a postmodern need to 'load' modernism's 'degree zero'. After contextualizing experimentalism from its inception in the early twentieth century, Dr Linda Kouvaras's Loading the Silence: Australian Sound Art in the Post-Digital Age explores the ways in which selected sound art works demonstrate creatively how sound is embedded within local, national, gendered and historical environments. Taking Australian music as its primary - but not sole - focus, the book not only covers discussions of technological advancement, but also engages with aesthetic standpoints, through numerous interviews, theoretical developments, analysis and cultural milieux for a contemporary Australian, and wider postmodern, context. Developing new methodologies for synergies between musicology and cultural studies, the book uncovers a new post-postmodern aesthetic trajectory, which Kouvaras locates as developing over the past two decades - the altermodern. Australian sound art is here put firmly on the map of international debates about contemporary music, providing a standard reference and valuable resource for practitioners in the artform, music critics, scholars and educators.

There's a Place For Us: The Musical Theatre Works of Leonard Bernstein (Paperback): Helen Smith There's a Place For Us: The Musical Theatre Works of Leonard Bernstein (Paperback)
Helen Smith
R1,684 Discovery Miles 16 840 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Leonard Bernstein was the quintessential American musician. Through his careers as conductor, pianist, teacher and television personality he became known across the US and the world, his flamboyance and theatricality making him a favourite with audiences, if not with critics. However, he is perhaps best remembered as a composer, particularly of the musical West Side Story, and for songs such as 'America', 'Tonight' and 'Somewhere'. Dr Helen Smith takes an in-depth look at all eight of Bernstein's musical theatre works, from the early On the Town written by the 26-year-old composer at the start of his career, to his second and last opera A Quiet Place in 1983; in between these two pieces he composed music for Trouble in Tahiti, Wonderful Town, Candide, West Side Story, Mass and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. These works are analysed and considered against a background of musical and social context, as well as looking at Bernstein's other orchestral, choral and chamber works. One important aspect examined is Bernstein's use of motifs in his theatre compositions, which takes them out of the realms of Broadway and into the sphere of symphonic writing. Smith provides an indispensable overview of the musical theatre works of an eclectic composer, and shows what it is that constitutes the Bernstein 'sound'.

Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music (Paperback): Sally Macarthur Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music (Paperback)
Sally Macarthur
R1,684 Discovery Miles 16 840 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music opens up a new way of thinking about the absence of women's music. It does not aim to find 'a solution' in a liberal feminist sense, but to discover new potentialities, new possibilities for thought and action. Sally Macarthur encourages us, with the assistance of Deleuze, and feminist-Deleuzian work, to begin the important work of imagining what else might be possible, not in order to provide answers but to open up the as yet unknown. The power of thought - or what Deleuze calls the 'virtual' - opens up new possibilities. Macarthur suggests that the future for women's 'new' music is not tied to the predictable and known but to futures beyond the already-known. Previous research concludes that women's music is virtually absent from the concert hall, and yet fails to find a way of changing this situation. Macarthur finds that the flaw in the recommendations flowing from past research is that it envisages the future from the standpoint of the present, and it relies on a set of pre-determined goals. It thus replicates the present reality, so reinforcing rather than changing the status quo. Macarthur challenges this thinking, and argues that this repetitive way of thinking is stuck in the present, unable to move forward. Macarthur situates her argument in the context of current dominant neoliberal thought and practice. She argues that women have generally not thrived in the neoliberal model of the composer, which envisages the composer as an individual, autonomous creator and entrepreneur. Successful female composers must work with this dominant, modernist aesthetic and exploit the image of the neo-romantic, entrepreneurial creator. This book sets out in contrast to develop a new conception of subjectivity that sows the seeds of a twenty-first-century feminist politics of music.

Composing the Modern Subject: Four String Quartets by Dmitri Shostakovich (Paperback): Sarah Reichardt Composing the Modern Subject: Four String Quartets by Dmitri Shostakovich (Paperback)
Sarah Reichardt
R1,743 Discovery Miles 17 430 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Since the publication of Solomon Volkov's disputed memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, the composer and his music has been subject to heated debate concerning how the musical meaning of his works can be understood in relationship to the composer's life within the Soviet State. While much ink has been spilled, very little work has attempted to define how Shostakovich's music has remained so arresting not only to those within the Soviet culture, but also to Western audiences - even though such audiences are often largely ignorant of the compositional context or even the biography of the composer. This book offers a useful corrective: setting aside biographically grounded and traditional analytical modes of explication, Reichardt uncovers and explores the musical ambiguities of four of the composer's middle string quartets, especially those ambiguities located in moments of rupture within the musical structure. The music is constantly collapsing, reversing, inverting and denying its own structural imperatives. Reichardt argues that such confrontation of the musical language with itself, though perhaps interpretable as Shostakovich's own unique version of double-speak, also poignantly articulates the fractured state of a more general form of modern subjectivity. Reichardt employs the framework of Lacanian psychoanalysis to offer a cogent explanation of this connection between disruptive musical process and modern subjectivity. The ruptures of Shostakovich's music become symptoms of the pathologies at the core of modern subjectivity. These symptoms, in turn, relate to the Lacanian concept of the real, which is the empty kernel around which the modern subject constructs reality. This framework proves invaluable in developing a powerful, original hermeneutic understanding of the music. Read through the lens of the real, the riddles written into the quartets reveal the arbitrary and contingent state of the musical subject's constructed reality, reflecting pathologies ende

Kaija Saariaho: Visions, Narratives, Dialogues (Paperback): Jon Hargreaves Kaija Saariaho: Visions, Narratives, Dialogues (Paperback)
Jon Hargreaves
R1,684 Discovery Miles 16 840 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Kaija Saariaho is internationally recognized as a leading figure in contemporary music, enjoying a well-deserved reputation for works that are both creatively original and of considerable appeal. Her music communicates with a refreshingly broad audience, and this special achievement deserves careful consideration. In the first symposium book in English to be dedicated exclusively to this single figure, scholars from both the UK and Saariaho's native Finland bring a range of perspectives to her richly varied output. Uncovering the compositional, historical, cultural and sociological issues that have resulted in such critical acclaim lies at the heart of this collection of essays. Saariaho's approach to composition is an interdisciplinary one; it embraces a number of art forms - visual, literary and musical - in works that explore a creative dialogue between image, continuity and time. While such diversity is readily accommodated in a multi-authored collection, the consistency of an underlying compositional identity and integrity is also an important trait. The grouping of these essays into three strands - 'visions', 'narratives' and 'dialogues' - reflects the wide range of Saariaho's creative preoccupations while subscribing to a carefully structured succession of commentaries.

Dimensions of Energy in Shostakovich's Symphonies (Paperback): Michael Rofe Dimensions of Energy in Shostakovich's Symphonies (Paperback)
Michael Rofe
R1,743 Discovery Miles 17 430 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Shostakovich's music is often described as being dynamic, energetic. But what is meant by 'energy' in music? After setting out a broad conceptual framework for approaching this question, Michael Rofe proposes various potential sources of the perceived energy in Shostakovich's symphonies, describing also the historical significance of energeticist thought in Soviet Russia during the composer's formative years. The book is in two parts. In Part I, examples are drawn from across the symphonies in order to demonstrate energy streams within various musical dimensions. Three broad approaches are adopted: first, the theories of Boleslav Yavorsky are used to consider melodic-harmonic motion; second, Boris Asafiev's work, with its echoes of Ernst Kurth, is used to describe form as a dynamic process; and third, proportional analysis reveals numerous symmetries and golden sections within local and large-scale temporal structures. In Part II, the multi-dimensionality of musical energy is considered through case studies of individual movements from the symphonies. This in turn gives rise to broader contextualised perspectives on Shostakovich's work. The book ends with a detailed examination of why a piece of music might contain golden sections.

Schnittke Studies (Hardcover): Gavin Dixon Schnittke Studies (Hardcover)
Gavin Dixon
R4,823 Discovery Miles 48 230 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) was arguably the most important Russian composer since Shostakovich, and his music has generated a great deal of academic interest in the years since his death. Schnittke Studies provides a variety of perspectives on the composer and his music. The field is currently diverse and vibrant, and this book demonstrates the range of academic approaches being applied to Schnittke's work and the insights they provide, covering: polystylism, for which Schnittke is best known, the significance of the composer's Christian faith, and detailed formal analyses of key works, with connections drawn between the apparently divergent periods of the composer's career. This book has been prepared as a memorial to Professor Alexander Ivashkin, a leading scholar in the field, who died in 2014, and will be of interest not only to those studying Schnittke's music, but also those with an interest in late Soviet-era music in general.

Lost in the Grooves - Scram's Capricious Guide to the Music You Missed (Hardcover): Kim Cooper, David Smay Lost in the Grooves - Scram's Capricious Guide to the Music You Missed (Hardcover)
Kim Cooper, David Smay
R4,381 Discovery Miles 43 810 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Do you remember these great pop stars and their hits? Deerhoof's The Man, The King, The Girl Butch Hancock's West Texas Waltzes and Dust Blown Tractor Tunes, Swamp Dogg's Cuffed, Collared and Tagged, Michael Head's TheMagical World Of The Strands, John Trubee's TheCommunists Are Coming to Kill Us, John Phillips's WolfKing of L.A., and Michel Magne's Moshe MouseCrucifiction?You will when you read Lost in theGrooves, a fascinating guide to the back alleys off the pop music superhighway. Pop music history is full of little-known musicians, whose work stands defiantly alone, too quirky, distinctive, or demented to appeal to a mass audience. This book explores the nooks and crannies of the pop music world, unearthing lost gems from should-have-been major artists (Sugarpie DeSanto, Judee Sill), revisiting lesser known works by established icons (Marvin Gaye's post-divorce kissoff album, Here MyDear; The Ramones' Subterranean Jungle), and spotlighting musicians who simply don't fit into neat categories (k. mccarty, Exuma). The book's encyclopedic alphabetical structure throws off strange sparks as disparate genres and eras rub against each other: folk-psych iconoclasts face louche pop crooners; outsider artists set their odd masterpieces down next to obscurities from the stars; lo-fi garage rock cuddles up with the French avant-garde; and roots rock weirdoes trip over bubblegum. This book will delight any jukebox junkie or pop culture fan.

Music and the Modern Condition: Investigating the Boundaries (Paperback): Ljubica Ilic Music and the Modern Condition: Investigating the Boundaries (Paperback)
Ljubica Ilic
R1,655 Discovery Miles 16 550 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Two crucial moments in the formation and disintegration of musical modernity and the musical canon occurred at the turn of the seventeenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Dr Ljubica Ilic provides a fresh and close look at these moments, exploring the ways musical compositions shift to and away from ideological structures identified with modernity. The focus is on European art music whose grand narrative, defined by tonality and teleological development, begins in the seventeenth century and ends with twentieth-century modernisms. This particular musical "language game" coincides with historical changes in the phenomenological understanding of space and selfhood. A key concept of the book concerns musical compositions that remain without proper conclusions: if the wholesome (musical) work is a manifestation of wholesome subjectivity, the pieces Ilic explores deny it, reflecting conflict of the individual with previous beliefs, with contexts, and even within the self as the basic modern condition. The musical work is, in this case, still bounded and well-defined, but fractured by the incapability or refusal to satisfactorily conclude: the implicit cut forced upon it changes the expected musical flow or - speaking in spatial terms - it influences the musical form. By using the metaphor of space, Ilic explores: how the existence of a separate self as a primary feature of Western modernity becomes negotiated through awareness of the subject's own independence and individuality; innerness as something entirely separate from its surroundings; and the collective space of social interaction. Seeing musical storytelling as a metaphoric representation of selfhood, and modernity as a historical continuum, Ilic examines the boundaries and relationships between the musical work, the subject, and modern European history.

The Music of Hugh Wood (Paperback): Edward Venn The Music of Hugh Wood (Paperback)
Edward Venn
R1,544 Discovery Miles 15 440 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

The Music of Hugh Wood provides the first ever in-depth study of this well-known, yet only briefly documented composer. Over the years, Wood (b. 1932) has produced a sizeable oeuvre that explores the established genres of symphony, concerto, and quartet on the one hand, and songs and choruses on the other. Underpinned by an awareness of recent philosophical, theoretical and analytical concepts, Dr Edward Venn highlights both the technical basis of Wood's music and the expressive force of his work. In doing so, a picture emerges of Wood as an artist of considerable merit and power. The eclectic blend of national and international influences in the music of Hugh Wood combine to create an individual and distinctive musical language all his own. The book provides an overview of Wood's style, focussing on his engagement with modernism and the melodic, rhythmic, harmonic and formal characteristics of his musical language. From here a more detailed consideration of Wood's development as a composer is advanced, in which his technical development is illustrated alongside an exploration of various aspects of musical meaning embodied in his works. In the process, numerous analytical strategies ranging from formalist to narrative structures are utilized, demonstrating the fecundity and expressivity of Wood's music.

Michael Nyman: Collected Writings (Paperback): Pwyll Ap Sion Michael Nyman: Collected Writings (Paperback)
Pwyll Ap Sion
R1,743 Discovery Miles 17 430 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

For over three decades Michael Nyman's music has succeeded in reaching beyond the small community of contemporary music aficionados to a much wider range of listeners. An important element in unlocking the key to Nyman's success lies in his writings about music, which preoccupied him for over a decade from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. During this time Nyman produced over 100 articles, covering almost every conceivable musical style and genre - from the Early Music revival and the West's interest in 'world' music, or from John Cage and minimalism to rock and pop. Nyman initiated a number of landmark moments in the course of late twentieth-century music along the way: he was one of the first to critique the distinction between the European avant-garde and the American experimental movement; he was the first to coin the term 'minimalism' in relation to the music of (then largely unknown) Steve Reich and Terry Riley, and later Philip Glass; the first to seriously engage with the music of the English experimental tradition and the importance of Cornelius Cardew, and to identify the importance of Art Colleges in nurturing and developing a radical alternative to modernism; and one of the first writers to grasp the significance of post-minimalists such as Brian Eno and Harold Budd, and to realize how these elements could be brought together into a new aesthetic vision for his own creative endeavours, which was formulated during the late 1970s and early 80s. Much of what transformed and defined Nyman's musical character may be found within the pages of this volume of his writings, comprehensively edited and annotated for the first time, and including previously unpublished material from Nyman's second interview with Steve Reich in 1976. There is also much here to engage the minds of those who are interested in pre-twentieth century music, from Early and Baroque music (Handel and Purcell in particular) to innovative features in Haydn, spatial elements in Berlioz, or Bruckner and Mahler's symphonic works.

Shostakovich in Dialogue - Form, Imagery and Ideas in Quartets 1-7 (Paperback): Judith Kuhn Shostakovich in Dialogue - Form, Imagery and Ideas in Quartets 1-7 (Paperback)
Judith Kuhn
R1,743 Discovery Miles 17 430 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

A thorough examination of Shostakovich's string quartets is long overdue. Although they can justifiably lay claim to being the most significant and frequently performed twentieth-century oeuvre for that ensemble, there has been no systematic English-language study of the entire cycle. Judith Kuhn's book begins such a study, undertaken with the belief that, despite a growing awareness of the universality of Shostakovich's music, much remains to be learned from the historical context and an examination of the music's language. Much of the controversy about Shostakovich's music has been related to questions of meaning. The conflicting interpretations put forth by scholars during the musicological 'Shostakovich wars' have shown the impossibility of fixing a single meaning in the composer's music. Commentators have often heard the quartets as political in nature, although there have been contradictory views as to whether Shostakovich was a loyal communist or a dissident. The works are also often described as vivid narratives, perhaps a confessional autobiography or a chronicle of the composer's times. The cycle has also been heard to examine major philosophical issues posed by the composer's life and times, including war, death, love, the conflict of good and evil, the nature of subjectivity, the power of creativity and the place of the individual - and particularly the artist - in society. Soviet commentaries on the quartets typically describe the works through the lens of Socialist-Realist mythological master narratives. Recent Western commentaries see Shostakovich's quartets as expressions of broader twentieth-century subjectivity, filled with ruptures and uncertainty. What musical features enable these diverse interpretations? Kuhn examines each quartet in turn, looking first at its historical and biographical context, with special attention to the cultural questions being discussed at the time of its writing. She then surveys the work's reception history, and follows with a critical discussion of the quartet's architectural and harmonic features. Using the new tools of Sonata Theory, Kuhn provides a fresh analytical approach to Shostakovich's music, giving valuable and detailed insights into the quartets, showing how the composer's mastery of form has enabled these works to be heard as active participants in the Soviet and Western cultural discourses of their time, while remaining compelling and relevant to twenty-first-century listeners.

Composition, Chromaticism and the Developmental Process - A New Theory of Tonality (Paperback): Henry Burnett Composition, Chromaticism and the Developmental Process - A New Theory of Tonality (Paperback)
Henry Burnett
R1,743 Discovery Miles 17 430 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Musicology, having been transmitted as a compilation of disparate events and disciplines, has long necessitated a 'magic bullet', a 'unified field theory' so to speak, that can interpret the steady metamorphosis of Western art music from late medieval modality to twentieth-century atonality within a single theoretical construct. Without that magic bullet, discussions of this kind are increasingly complicated and, to make matters worse, the validity of any transformational models and ideas of the natural evolution of styles is questioned and even frowned upon today as epitomizing a grotesque teleological bigotry. Going against current thinking, Henry Burnett and Roy Nitzberg claim that the teleological approach to observing stylistic change is still valid when considered from the purely compositional perspective. The authors challenge the traditional understanding of development, and advance a new theory of eleven-pitch tonality as it relates to the corpus of Western composition. The book plots the evolution of tonality and its bearing on style and the compositional process itself. The theory is not based on the diatonic aspect of the various tonal systems exploited by composers; rather, the theory is chromatically based - the chromatically inflected octave being the source not only of a highly ingenious developmental dialectic, but also encompassing the moment-to-moment progression of the musical narrative itself. Even the most profound teachings of Schenker, and the often startlingly original and worthwhile speculations of Riemann, Tovey, Dahlhaus and others, still provide no theory of development and so are ultimately unable to unite the various tendrils of the compositional organism into a unified whole. Burnett and Nitzberg move beyond existing theory and analysis to base their theory from the standpoint of chromatic 'pitch fields'. These fields are the specific chromatic pitch choices that a composer uses to inform and design a complete composition, utilizing specific chromatic inflections to control a large-scale working out process that is the very essence of 'development'. In short, the authors claim that a chromatic background that coexists with a diatonic contrapuntal background may define the process of compositional development. These chromatic and diatonic events are the two genus expressions of slowly unfolding tonic octaves.

Masculinity and Western Musical Practice (Paperback): Kirsten Gibson Masculinity and Western Musical Practice (Paperback)
Kirsten Gibson
R1,566 Discovery Miles 15 660 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

How have men used art music? How have they listened to and brandished the musical forms of the Western classical tradition and how has music intervened in their identity formations? This collection of essays addresses these questions by examining some of the ways in which men, music and masculinity have been implicated with each other since the Middle Ages. Feminist musicologies have already dealt extensively with music and gender, from the 'phallocentric' tendencies of the Western tradition, to the explicit marginalization of women from that tradition. This book builds on that work by turning feminist critical approaches towards the production, rhetorical engagement and subversion of masculinities in twelve different musical case studies. In other disciplines within the arts and humanities, 'men's studies' is a well-established field. Musicology has only recently begun to address critically music's engagement with masculinity and as a result has sometimes thereby failed to recognize its own discursive misogyny. This book does not seek to cover the field comprehensively but, rather, to explore in detail some of the ways in which musical practices do the cultural work of masculinity. The book is structured into three thematic sections: effeminate and virile musics and masculinities; national masculinities, national musics; and identities, voices, discourses. Within these themes, the book ranges across a number of specific topics: late medieval masculinities; early modern discourses of music, masculinity and medicine; Renaissance Italian masculinities; eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas of creativity, gender and canonicity; masculinity, imperialist and nationalist ideologies in the nineteenth century, and constructions of the masculine voice in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century opera and song. While the case studies are methodologically disparate and located in different historical and geographical locations, they all share a common concern for a critical revaluation of the role of masculinity (in all its varied representations) in art music practices.

Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Paperback): Anne Danielsen Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Paperback)
Anne Danielsen
R1,570 Discovery Miles 15 700 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction presents new insights into the study of musical rhythm through investigations of the micro-rhythmic design of groove-based music. The main purpose of the book is to investigate how technological mediation - in the age of digital music production tools - has influenced the design of rhythm at the micro level. Through close readings of technology-driven popular music genres, such as contemporary R&B, hip-hop, trip-hop, electro-pop, electronica, house and techno, as well as played folk music styles, the book sheds light on how investigations of the musical-temporal relationships of groove-based musics might be fruitfully pursued, in particular with regard to their micro-rhythmic features. This book is based on contributions to the project Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction (RADR), a five-year research project running from 2004 to 2009 that was funded by the Norwegian Research Council.

Towards a Global Music Theory - Practical Concepts and Methods for the Analysis of Music Across Human Cultures (Paperback):... Towards a Global Music Theory - Practical Concepts and Methods for the Analysis of Music Across Human Cultures (Paperback)
Mark Hijleh
R1,735 Discovery Miles 17 350 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the cross-pollenization of world musical materials and practices has accelerated precipitously, due in large part to advances in higher-speed communications and travel. We live now in a world of global musical practice that will only continue to blossom and develop through the twenty-first century and beyond. Yet music theory as an academic discipline is only just beginning to respond to such a milieu. Conferences, workshops and curricula are for the first time beginning to develop around the theme of 'world music theory', as students, teachers and researchers recognize the need for analytical concepts and methods applicable to a wider range of human musics, not least the hybrid musics that influence (and increasingly define) more and more of the world's musical practices. Towards a Global Music Theory proposes a number of such concepts and methods stemming from durational and acoustic relationships between 'twos' and 'threes' as manifested in various interrelated aspects of music, including rhythm, melody, harmony, process, texture, timbre and tuning, and offers suggestions for how such concepts and methods might be applied effectively to the understanding of music in a variety of contexts. While some of the bases for this foray into possible methods for a twenty-first century music theory lie along well established acoustical and psycho-acoustical lines, Dr Mark Hijleh presents a broad attempt to apply them conceptually and comprehensively to a variety of musics in a relevant way that can be readily apprehended and applied by students, scholars and teachers.

Music Writing Literature, from Sand via Debussy to Derrida (Paperback): Peter Dayan Music Writing Literature, from Sand via Debussy to Derrida (Paperback)
Peter Dayan
R1,655 Discovery Miles 16 550 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Why does poetry appeal to music? Can music be said to communicate, as language does? What, between music and poetry, is it possible to translate? These fundamental questions have remained obstinately difficult, despite the recent burgeoning of word and music studies. Peter Dayan contends that the reasons for this difficulty were worked out with extraordinary rigour and consistency in a French literary tradition, echoed by composers such as Berlioz and Debussy, which stretches from Sand to Derrida. Their writing shows how it is both necessary and futile to look for music in poetry, or for poetry in music: necessary, because each art defines itself by reference to what it is not, and cannot be, in order to point to an idealized totality outside itself; futile, because the musicality of poetry, like the poetic meaning of music, must remain as elusive as that idealized totality; its distance is the very condition of the art. Thus is generated a subtle but unmistakable general definition of the nature of art which has proved uniquely able to survive all the probings of poststructuralism. That definition of art is inseparable from a disturbingly effective scepticism towards all forms of explication and explanation in critical discourse, so it is doubtless not surprising that critics in general have done their best to ignore it. But by bringing out what Sand, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Proust, Debussy, Berlioz, Barthes, and Derrida all do in the same way as they work on the limits of the analogy between music and literature, this book shows how it is possible, productive, illuminating, and fascinating to work on those limits; though to do so, as we find repeatedly, in Chopin's dreams as in Derrida's 'tombeaux', requires us to have the courage to face, in music, our literal death, and the limits of our intelligence.

Still Songs: Music In and Around the Poetry of Paul Celan (Paperback): Axel Englund Still Songs: Music In and Around the Poetry of Paul Celan (Paperback)
Axel Englund
R1,655 Discovery Miles 16 550 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

What does it mean for poetry and music to turn to each other, in the shadow of the Holocaust, as a means of aesthetic self-reflection? How can their mutual mirroring, of such paramount importance to German Romanticism, be reconfigured to retain its validity after the Second World War? These are the core questions of Axel Englund's book, which is the first to address the topic of Paul Celan and music. Celan, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who has long been recognized as one of the most important poets of the German language, persistently evoked music and song in his oeuvre, from the juvenilia to the posthumous collections. Conversely, few post-war writers have inspired as large a body of contemporary music, including works by Harrison Birtwistle, Gyoergy Kurtag, Wolfgang Rihm, Peter Ruzicka and many others. Through rich close readings of poems and musical compositions, Englund's book engages the artistic media in a critical dialogue about the conditions of their existence. In so doing, it reveals their intersection as a site of profound conflict, where the very possibility of musical and poetic meaning is at stake, and confrontations of aesthetic transcendentality and historical remembrance are played out in the wake of twentieth-century trauma.

New Music and the Claims of Modernity (Paperback): Alastair Williams New Music and the Claims of Modernity (Paperback)
Alastair Williams
R1,655 Discovery Miles 16 550 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Since 1945 the emphasis in new music has lain in a desire for progress, a concept challenged by postmodernist aesthetics. In this study, Alastair Williams identifies and explores the recurring issues and problems presented by post-war music. Part one examines the German philosopher, Theodor Adorno's portrayal of modernity and his understanding of modernism in music. This is followed by a survey of the developments in music from late Beethoven to Schoenberg, the two composers whose works provided the main anchor points for Adorno's philosophy of music. Parts two and three indicate the ways in which Adorno's aesthetics are pertinent to an understanding of new music. Part two comprises a close examination of the music of Pierre Boulez and John Cage, composers who represent extreme, though related, aspects of contemporary music thought: the primacy of structure versus dissolution. Williams' views the music of Ligeti as an exploration of the interface between these two extremes, personifying Adorno's advocation of an aesthetic which attempts to embrace all its dissimilar parts. In part three the consequences of modernism and the aesthetic approaches of Derrida and de Mann are considered, together with the music of Wolfgang Rihm. Williams concludes with a survey of contemporary music and the postmodernist desire to include a range of compositional references.

Transnational Memory and Popular Culture in East and Southeast Asia - Amnesia, Nostalgia and Heritage (Hardcover): Liew Kai... Transnational Memory and Popular Culture in East and Southeast Asia - Amnesia, Nostalgia and Heritage (Hardcover)
Liew Kai Khiun
R3,428 Discovery Miles 34 280 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Transnational Memory and Popular Culture in East and Southeast Asia explores the significance of transnational popular culture in the formation and mediation of collective memories across the region. It looks at case studies including: the politics of cinematic remembering of Hong Kong films on Southeast Asia, the digital and holographic enshrinement of departed celebrities like Wong Kar Kui, Bruce Lee and Teresa Teng and the dredging of personal memories of the encounters with the Korean Wave in Singapore. In addition, it explores how cultural memories are used as focal points of staging cultural revival and movements in Singapore and Taiwan. Contrary to the assumptions of the importance of newness in modern popular culture productions, the continued relevance of this otherwise dated material reflects the significance of these texts in the development and strengthening of collective cultural memories. The discussion of such issues has often been grounded geo-spatially on the "national" and contemporary contexts, this volume will develop a more temporalized and transnational perspective in the shaping of otherwise local cultural identifications.

Transnational Memory and Popular Culture in East and Southeast Asia - Amnesia, Nostalgia and Heritage (Paperback): Liew Kai... Transnational Memory and Popular Culture in East and Southeast Asia - Amnesia, Nostalgia and Heritage (Paperback)
Liew Kai Khiun
R1,209 Discovery Miles 12 090 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Transnational Memory and Popular Culture in East and Southeast Asia explores the significance of transnational popular culture in the formation and mediation of collective memories across the region. It looks at case studies including: the politics of cinematic remembering of Hong Kong films on Southeast Asia, the digital and holographic enshrinement of departed celebrities like Wong Kar Kui, Bruce Lee and Teresa Teng and the dredging of personal memories of the encounters with the Korean Wave in Singapore. In addition, it explores how cultural memories are used as focal points of staging cultural revival and movements in Singapore and Taiwan. Contrary to the assumptions of the importance of newness in modern popular culture productions, the continued relevance of this otherwise dated material reflects the significance of these texts in the development and strengthening of collective cultural memories. The discussion of such issues has often been grounded geo-spatially on the "national" and contemporary contexts, this volume will develop a more temporalized and transnational perspective in the shaping of otherwise local cultural identifications.

Schubert's Fingerprints: Studies in the Instrumental Works (Paperback): Susan Wollenberg Schubert's Fingerprints: Studies in the Instrumental Works (Paperback)
Susan Wollenberg
R1,684 Discovery Miles 16 840 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

As Robert Schumann put it, 'Only few works are as clearly stamped with their author's imprint as his'. This book explores Schubert's stylistic traits in a series of chapters each discussing an individual 'fingerprint' with case studies drawn principally from the piano and chamber music. The notion of Schubert's compositional fingerprints has not previously formed the subject of a book-length study. The features of his personal style considered here include musical manifestations of Schubert's 'violent nature', the characteristics of his thematic material, and the signs of his 'classicizing' manner. In the process of the discussion, attention is given to matters of form, texture, harmony and gesture in a range of works, with regard to the various 'fingerprints' identified in each chapter. The repertoire discussed includes the late string quartets, the String Quintet, the E flat Piano Trio and the last three piano sonatas. Developing ideas which she first proposed in a series of journal articles and contributions to symposia on Schubert, Professor Wollenberg takes into account recent literature by other scholars and draws together her own researches to present her view of Schubert's 'compositional personality'. Schubert emerges as someone exerting intellectual control over his musical material and imbuing it with poetic resonance.

Music, Sexuality and the Enlightenment in Mozart's Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte (Paperback): Charles Ford Music, Sexuality and the Enlightenment in Mozart's Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi fan tutte (Paperback)
Charles Ford
R1,522 Discovery Miles 15 220 Ships in 12 - 17 working days

Music, Sexuality and the Enlightenment explains how Mozart's music for Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and CosA fan tutte 'sounds' the intentions of Da Ponte's characters and their relationships with one another. Mozart, by way of the infinitely generative and beautiful logic of the sonata principle, did not merely interpret Da Ponte's characterizations but lent them temporal, musical forms. Charles Ford's analytic interpretation of these musical forms concerns processes and structures in detail and at medium- to long-term levels. He addresses the music of a wide range of arias and ensembles, and develops original ways to interpret the two largely overlooked operatic genres of secco recitative and finales. Moreover, Ford presents a new method by which to relate musical details directly to philosophical concepts, and thereby, the music of the operas to the inwardly contradictory thinking of the European Enlightenment. This involves close readings of late eighteenth-century understandings of 'man' and nature, self and other, morality and transgression, and gendered identities and sexuality, with particular reference to contemporary writers, especially Goethe, Kant, Laclos, Rousseau, Sade, Schiller, Sterne and Wollstonecraft. The concluding discussion of the implied futures of the operas argues that their divided sexualities, which are those of the Enlightenment as a whole, have come to form our own unquestioned assumptions about gender differences and sexuality. This, along with the elegant and eloquent precision of Mozart's music, is why Figaro, Giovanni and CosA still maintain their vital immediacy for audiences today.

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