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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
A special issue of New German Critique The posthumous publication
of Theodor W. Adorno's works on music continues to reveal the
special relationship between music and philosophy in his thinking.
These important works have not, however, received as much scholarly
attention as they deserve. Contributors to this issue seek to
provide insight into some of the key themes raised in these works,
including the sociology of musical genre, the historical
transformation of music from the "heroic" or high-bourgeois era to
late modernity, the meaning of both performance and listening in
the era of mass communication, and the specific challenges or
deformations of the radio on musical form, a theme that implicates
many of the digital practices of our own age. There is much left to
discover in these new publications, and they pose again, with
renewed vigor, the question of Adorno's Aktualitat-his polyvalent,
untranslatable term for, among other things, the intellectual
relationship between the present and the past. Contributors Daniel
K. L. Chua, Lydia Goehr, Peter E. Gordon, Martin Jay, Brian Kane,
Max Paddison, Alexander Rehding, Fred Rush, Martin Scherzinger
The present volume is a double edition in English and Arabic about
the art of ornamentations in the performance of the Arabic qanun
(psaltery), and a historical document spanning more than one
hundred years. It is based on George Sawa's experience as an artist
and performer, as well as the experience of his teachers and their
teachers. For the latter, Dr Sawa used his recollections of what
his teachers said about their teachers, as well as recordings made
by European companies that recorded their works on 78 rpm at the
beginning of the 20th century. .
The revised edition of Sync or Swarm promotes an ecological view of
musicking, moving us from a subject-centered to a system-centered
view of improvisation. It explores cycles of organismic
self-regulation, cycles of sensorimotor coupling between organism
and environment, and cycles of intersubjective interaction mediated
via socio-technological networks. Chapters funnel outward, from the
solo improviser (Evan Parker), to nonlinear group dynamics (Sam
Rivers trio), to networks that comprise improvisational
communities, to pedagogical dynamics that affect how individuals
learn, completing the hermeneutic circle. Winner of the Society for
Ethnomusicology's Alan Merriam prize in its first edition, the
revised edition features new sections that highlight
electro-acoustic and transcultural improvisation, and concomitant
issues of human-machine interaction and postcolonial studies.
Bella Ciao is the album that kick-started the Italian folk revival
in the mid-1960s, made by Il Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano, a group of
researchers, musicians, and radical intellectuals. Based on a
contested music show that debuted in 1964, Bella Ciao also featured
a double version of the popular song of the same title, an
anti-Fascist anthem from World War II, which was destined to become
one of the most sung political songs in the world and translated
into more than 40 languages. The book reconstructs the history and
the reception of the Bella Ciao project in 1960s' Italy and, more
broadly, explores the origins and the distinctive development of
the Italian folk revival movement through the lens of this pivotal
album.
Once the domain of a privileged few, the art of record production
is today within the reach of all. The rise of the ubiquitous DIY
project studio and internet streaming have made it so. And while
the creative possibilities available to everyday musicians are
seemingly endless, so too are the multiskilling and project
management challenges to be faced. In order to demystify the
contemporary popular-music-making phenomenon, Marshall Heiser
reassesses its myriad processes and wider sociocultural context
through the lens of creativity studies, play theory and cultural
psychology. This innovative new framework is grounded in a diverse
array of creative-practice examples spanning the CBGBs music scene
to the influence of technology upon modern-day music. First-hand
interviews with Jerry Harrison (Talking Heads), Bill Bruford (King
Crimson, Yes) and others whose work has influenced the way records
are made today are also included. Popular Music, Power and Play is
as thought provoking as it will be indispensable for scholars,
practitioners and aficionados of popular music and the arts in
general.
Keith Hatschek tells the story of three determined artists: Louis
Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and Iola Brubeck and the stand they took
against segregation by writing and performing a jazz musical titled
The Real Ambassadors. First conceived by the Brubecks in 1956, the
musical's journey to the stage for its 1962 premiere tracks
extraordinary twists and turns across the backdrop of the civil
rights movement. A variety of colorful characters, from Broadway
impresarios to gang-connected managers, surface in the compelling
storyline. During the Cold War, the US State Department enlisted
some of America's greatest musicians to serve as jazz ambassadors,
touring the world to trumpet a so-called "free society." Honored as
celebrities abroad, the jazz ambassadors, who were overwhelmingly
African Americans, returned home to racial discrimination and
deferred dreams. The Brubecks used this double standard as the
central message for the musical, deploying humor and pathos to
share perspectives on American values. On September 23, 1962, The
Real Ambassadors's stunning debut moved a packed arena at the
Monterey Jazz Festival to laughter, joy, and tears. Although
critics unanimously hailed the performance, it sadly became a
footnote in cast members' bios. The enormous cost of reassembling
the star-studded cast made the creation impossible to stage and
tour. However, The Real Ambassadors: Dave and Iola Brubeck and
Louis Armstrong Challenge Segregation caps this jazz story by
detailing how the show was triumphantly revived in 2014 by Jazz at
Lincoln Center. This reaffirmed the musical's place as an integral
part of America's jazz history and served as an important reminder
of how artists' voices are a powerful force for social change.
Shortlisted for the 2021 Prime Minister's Literary Award for
Australian History. Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and
Dance 1930-1970 offers a rethinking of recent Australian music
history. In this open access book, Amanda Harris presents accounts
of Aboriginal music and dance by Aboriginal performers on public
stages. Harris also historicizes the practices of non-Indigenous
art music composers evoking Aboriginal music in their works,
placing this in the context of emerging cultural institutions and
policy frameworks. Centralizing auditory worlds and audio-visual
evidence, Harris shows the direct relationship between the limits
on Aboriginal people's mobility and non-Indigenous representations
of Aboriginal culture. This book seeks to listen to Aboriginal
accounts of disruption and continuation of Aboriginal cultural
practices and features contributions from Aboriginal scholars
Shannon Foster, Tiriki Onus and Nardi Simpson as personal
interpretations of their family and community histories.
Contextualizing recent music and dance practices in broader
histories of policy, settler colonial structures, and
postcolonizing efforts, the book offers a new lens on the
development of Australian musical cultures. The ebook editions of
this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license
on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Australian
Research Council.
How did Melbourne earn its place as one of the world's 'music
cities'? Beginning with the arrival of rock 'n' roll in the 1950s,
this book explores the development of different sectors of
Melbourne's popular music ecosystem in parallel with broader
population, urban planning and media industry changes in the city.
The authors draw on interviews with Melbourne musicians, venue
owners and policy-makers, documenting their ambitions and
experiences across different periods, with accompanying spotlights
on the gendered, multicultural and indigenous contexts of playing
and recording in Melbourne. Focusing on pop and rock, this is the
first book to provide an extensive historical lens of popular music
within an urban cultural economy that in turn investigates the
contemporary nature and challenges of urban music activities and
policy.
This collection of seventeen essays newly identifies contributions
to musical culture made by women before 1500 across Europe. You
will learn about repertoire from such diverse locations as Iceland,
Spain, and Italy, and encounter examples of musicianship from the
gender-fluid professional musicians at the Islamicate courts of
Syria to the nuns of Barking Abbey in England. The book shows that
women drove musical patronage, dissemination, composition, and
performance, including within secular and ecclesiastical contexts,
and also reflects on the reception of medieval women's musical
agency by both medieval poets and by modern recording artists.
Contributors are David Catalunya, Lisa Colton, Helen Dell, Annemari
Ferreira, Rachel Golden, Gillian L. Gower, Anna Kathryn Grau,
Carissa M. Harris, Louise McInnes, Lisa Nielson, Lauren
Purcell-Joiner, Megan Quinlan, Leah Stuttard, Claire Taylor Jones,
Melissa Tu, Angelica Vomera, and Anne Bagnall Yardley.
Robert Lachmann's letters to Henry George Farmer, from the years
1923-38, provide insightful glimpses into his life and his
progressive research projects. From an historical perspective, they
offer critical data concerning the development of comparative
musicology as it evolved in Germany during the early decades of the
twentieth century. The fact that Lachmann sought contact with
Farmer can be explained from their mutual, yet diverse interests in
Arab music, particularly as they were then considered to be the
foremost European scholars in the field. During the 1932 Cairo
International Congress on Arab Music, they were selected as
presidents of their respective committees.
Timbre is among the most important and the most elusive aspects of
music. Visceral and immediate in its sonic properties, yet also
considered sublime and ineffable, timbre finds itself caught up in
metaphors: tone "color", "wet" acoustics, or in Schoenberg's words,
"the illusory stuff of our dreams." This multi-disciplinary
approach to timbre assesses the acoustic, corporeal, performative,
and aesthetic dimensions of tone color in Western music practice
and philosophy. It develops a new theorization of timbre and its
crucial role in the epistemology of musical materialism through a
vital materialist aesthetics in which conventional binaries and
dualisms are superseded by a vibrant continuum. As the aesthetic
and epistemological questions foregrounded by timbre are not
restricted to isolated periods in music history or individual
genres, but have pervaded Western musical aesthetics since early
Modernity, the book discusses musical examples taken from both
"classical" and "popular" music. These range, in "classical" music,
from the Middle Ages through the Baroque, the belcanto opera and
electronic music to saturated music; and, in "popular" music, from
indie through soul and ballad to dark industrial.
This book explores an album of popular music with a remarkable
significance to a violent wave of postcolonial tensions in the
Netherlands in the 1970s. Several "actions" were claimed by a small
number of first-generation descendants of ca. 12,500 reluctant
migrants from the young independent state of Indonesia (former
Dutch East Indies). Transferred in 1951, this culturally coherent
group consisted of ex-Royal Dutch Colonial Army personnel and their
families. Their ancient roots in the Moluccan archipelago and their
protestant-christian faith defined their minority image. Their
sojourn should have been temporary, but frustratingly turned out to
be permanent. At the height of strained relations, Massada rose to
the occasion. Astaganaga (1978) is a telling example of the will to
negotiate a different diasporic Moluccan identity through uplifting
contemporary sounds.
Sonata form is the most commonly encountered organizational plan in
the works of the classical-music masters, from Haydn, Mozart, and
Beethoven to Schubert, Brahms, and beyond. Sonata Theory, an
analytic approach developed by James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy in
their award-winning Elements of Sonata Theory (2006), has emerged
as one of the most influential frameworks for understanding this
musical structure. What can this method from "the new Formenlehre"
teach us about how these composers put together their most iconic
pieces and to what expressive ends? In this new Sonata Theory
Handbook, Hepokoski introduces readers step-by-step to the main
ideas of this approach. At the heart of the book are close readings
of eight individual movements - from Mozart's Piano Sonata in
B-flat, K. 333, to such structurally complex pieces as Schubert's
"Death and the Maiden" String Quartet and the finale of Brahms's
Symphony No 1 - that show this analytical method in action. These
illustrative analyses are supplemented with four updated
discussions of the foundational concepts behind the theory,
including dialogic form, expositional action zones, trajectories
toward generically normative cadences, rotation theory, and the
five sonata types. With its detailed examples and deep engagements
with recent developments in form theory, schema theory, and
cognitive research, this handbook updates and advances Sonata
Theory and confirms its status as a key lens for analyzing sonata
form.
The field of Sound Studies has changed and developed dramatically
over the last two decades involving a vast and dizzying array of
work produced by those working in the arts, social sciences and
sciences. The study of sound is inherently interdisciplinary and is
undertaken both by those who specialize in sound and by others who
wish to include sound as an intrinsic and indispensable element in
their research. This is the first resource to provide a wide
ranging, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary investigation and
analysis of the ways in which researchers use a broad range of
methodologies in order to pursue their sonic investigations. It
brings together 49 specially commissioned chapters that ask a wide
range of questions including; how can sound be used in current
academic disciplines? Is sound as a methodological tool
indispensable for Sound Studies and what can sound artists
contribute to the discourse on methodology in Sound Studies? The
editors also present 3 original chapters that work as provocative
‘sonic methodological interventions’ prefacing the 3 sections
of the book.
If given another chance to write for the series, which albums would
33 1/3 authors focus on the second time around? This anthology
features compact essays from past 33 1/3 authors on albums that
consume them, but about which they did not write. It explores often
overlooked and underrated albums that may not have inspired their
33 1/3 books, but have played a large part in their own musical
cultivation. Questions central to the essays include: How has this
album influenced your worldview? How does this album intersect with
your other creative and critical pursuits? How does this album
index a particular moment in cultural history? In your own personal
history? Why is the album perhaps under-the-radar, or a buried
treasure? Why can't you stop listening to it? Bringing together 33
1/3's rich array of writers, critics, and scholars, this collection
probes our taste in albums, our longing for certain tunes, and our
desire to hit repeat--all while creating an expansive "must-listen"
list for readers in search of unexplored musical territories.
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