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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
Most die-hard Brazilian music fans would argue that Getz/Gilberto,
the iconic 1964 album featuring "The Girl from Ipanema," is not the
best bossa nova record. Yet we've all heard "The Girl from Ipanema"
as background music in a thousand anodyne settings, from cocktail
parties to telephone hold music. So how did Getz/Gilberto become
the Brazilian album known around the world, crossing generational
and demographic divides? Bryan McCann traces the history and making
of Getz/Gilberto as a musical collaboration between leading figure
of bossa nova Joao Gilberto and Philadelphia-born and New
York-raised cool jazz artist Stan Getz. McCann also reveals the
contributions of the less-understood participants (Astrud
Gilberto's unrehearsed, English-language vocals; Creed Taylor's
immaculate production; Olga Albizu's arresting,
abstract-expressionist cover art) to show how a perfect balance of
talents led to not just a great album, but a global pop sensation.
And he explains how Getz/Gilberto emerged from the context of Bossa
Nova Rio de Janeiro, the brief period when the subtle harmonies and
aching melodies of bossa nova seemed to distill the spirit of a
modernizing, sensuous city. 33 1/3 Global, a series related to but
independent from 33 1/3, takes the format of the original series of
short, music-based books and brings the focus to music throughout
the world. With initial volumes focusing on Japanese and Brazilian
music, the series will also include volumes on the popular music of
Australia/Oceania, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and more.
""Is there jazz in China?"" This is the question that sent author
Eugene Marlow on his quest to uncover the history of jazz in China.
Marlow traces China's introduction to jazz in the early 1920s, its
interruption by Chinese leadership under Mao in 1949, and its
rejuvenation in the early 1980s with the start of China's opening
to the world under Premier Deng Xiaoping. Covering a span of almost
one hundred years, Marlow focuses on a variety of subjects--the
musicians who initiated jazz performances in China, the means by
which jazz was incorporated into Chinese culture, and the musicians
and venues that now present jazz performances. Featuring unique,
face-to-face interviews with leading indigenous jazz musicians in
Beijing and Shanghai, plus interviews with club owners, promoters,
expatriates, and even diplomats, Marlow marks the evolution of jazz
in China as it parallels China's social, economic, and political
evolution through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.
Also featured is an interview with one of the extant members of the
Jimmy King Big Band of the 1940s, one of the first major
all-Chinese jazz big bands in Shanghai. Ultimately, Jazz in China:
From Dance Hall Music to Individual Freedom of Expression is a
cultural history that reveals the inexorable evolution of a
democratic form of music in a Communist state.
From the mid-1950s through the 1960s, Hungarian composer Gyoergy
Ligeti went through a remarkable period of stylistic transition,
from the emulation of his fellow countryman Bela Bartok to his own
individual style at the forefront of the Western-European
avant-garde. Through careful study of the sketches and drafts, as
well as analysis of the finished scores, Metamorphosis in Music
takes a detailed look at this compositional evolution. Author
Benjamin R. Levy includes sketch studies created through
transcriptions and reproductions of archival material-much of which
has never before been published-providing new, detailed information
about Ligeti's creative process and compositional methods. The book
examines all of Ligeti's compositions from 1956 to 1970, analyzing
little-known and unpublished works in addition to recognized
masterpieces such as Atmospheres, Aventures, the Requieim, and the
Chamber Concerto. Discoveries from Ligeti's sketches, prose, and
finished scores lead to an enriched appreciation of these already
multifaceted works. Throughout the book, Levy interweaves sketch
study with comments from interviews, counterbalancing the
composer's own carefully crafted public narrative about his work,
and revealing lingering attachments to older forms and insights
into the creative process. Metamorphosis in Music is an essential
treatment of a central figure of the musical midcentury, who found
his place in a generation straddling the divide between the modern
and post-modern eras.
Discovering Music Theory is a suite of workbooks and corresponding
answer books that offers all-round preparation for the updated
ABRSM Music Theory exams from 2020, including the new online
papers. This full-colour workbook will equip students of all ages
with the skills, knowledge and understanding required for the ABRSM
Grade 5 Music Theory exam. Written to make theory engaging and
relevant to developing musicians of all ages, it offers: -
straightforward explanations of all new concepts - progressive
exercises to build skills and understanding, step by step -
challenge questions to extend learning and develop music-writing
skills - helpful tips for how to approach specific exercises -
ideas for linking theory to music listening, performing and
instrumental/singing lessons - clear signposting and progress
reviews throughout - a sample practice exam paper showing you what
to expect in the new style of exams from 2020 As well as fully
supporting the ABRSM theory syllabus, Discovering Music Theory
provides an excellent resource for anyone wishing to develop their
music literacy skills, including GCSE and A-Level candidates, and
adult learners.
Sonic Writing explores how contemporary music technologies trace
their ancestry to previous forms of instruments and media. Studying
the domains of instrument design, musical notation, and sound
recording under the rubrics of material, symbolic, and signal
inscriptions of sound, the book describes how these historical
techniques of sonic writing are implemented in new digital music
technologies. With a scope ranging from ancient Greek music theory,
medieval notation, early modern scientific instrumentation to
contemporary multimedia and artificial intelligence, it provides a
theoretical grounding for further study and development of
technologies of musical expression. The book draws a bespoke
affinity and similarity between current musical practices and those
from before the advent of notation and recording, stressing the
importance of instrument design in the study of new music and
projecting how new computational technologies, including machine
learning, will transform our musical practices. Sonic Writing
offers a richly illustrated study of contemporary musical media,
where interactivity, artificial intelligence, and networked devices
disclose new possibilities for musical expression. Thor Magnusson
provides a conceptual framework for the creation and analysis of
this new musical work, arguing that contemporary sonic writing
becomes a new form of material and symbolic design--one that is
bound to be ephemeral, a system of fluid objects where technologies
are continually redesigned in a fast cycle of innovation.
Connecting four centuries of political, social, and religious
history with fieldwork and language documentation, A Transatlantic
History of Haitian Vodou analyzes Haitian Vodou's African origins,
transmission to Saint-Domingue, and promulgation through song in
contemporary Haiti. Split into two sections, the African chapters
focus on history, economics, and culture in Dahomey, Allada, and
Hueda while scrutinizing the role of Europeans in fomenting
tensions. The political, military, and slave trading histories of
the kingdoms in the Bight of Benin reveal the circumstances of
enslavement, including the geographies, ethnicities, languages, and
cultures of enslavers and enslaved. The study of the spirits,
rituals, structure, and music of the region's religions sheds light
on important sources for Haitian Vodou. Having royal, public, and
private expressions, Vodun spirit-based traditions served as
cultural systems that supported or contested power and enslavement.
At once suppliers and victims of the European slave trade, the
people of Dahomey, Allada, and Hueda deeply shaped the emergence of
Haiti's creolized culture. The Haitian chapters focus on Vodou's
Rada Rite (from Allada) and Gede Rite (from Abomey) through the
songs of Rasin Figuier's Vodou Lakay and Rasin Bwa Kayiman's Guede,
legendary rasin compact discs released on Jean Altidor's Miami
label, Mass Konpa Records. All the Vodou songs on the discs are
analyzed with a method dubbed "Vodou hermeneutics" that harnesses
history, religious studies, linguistics, literary criticism, and
ethnomusicology in order to advance a scholarly approach to Vodou
songs.
Using cine-ethnomusicology as a focus, Cineworlding introduces
readers to ways of thinking eco-cinematically. Screens are
omnipresent, we carry digital cinema production equipment in our
pockets, but this screen-based technological revolution has barely
impacted social science scholarship. Mixing existential
phenomenological fiction about social science digital cinema
research practice followed by theoretical reflection and discussion
of methods, this book has emerged from a decade-long inquiry into
cineworlding and a desire to help others produce digital media to
engage creatively with the digital networks that surround us.
Uncurating Sound performs, across five chapters, a deliberation
between art, politics, knowledge and normativity. It foregrounds
the perfidy of norms and engages in the curatorial as a colonial
knowledge project, whose economy of exploitation draws a straight
line from Enlightenment's desire for objectivity, through sugar,
cotton and tobacco, via lives lost and money made to the violence
of contemporary art. It takes from curation the notion of care and
thinks it through purposeful inefficiency as resistance: going
sideways and another way. Thus it moves curation through the double
negative of not not to "uncuration": untethering knowledge from the
expectations of reference and a canonical frame, and reconsidering
art as political not in its message or aim, but by the way it
confronts the institution. Looking at Kara Walker's work, the book
invites the performance of the curatorial via indivisible
connections and processes. Reading Kathy Acker and Adrian Piper it
speculates on how the body brings us to knowledge beyond the
ordinary. Playing Kate Carr and Ellen Fullman it re-examines
Modernism's colonial ideology, and materialises the vibrational
presence of a plural sense. Listening to Marguerite Humeau and
Manon de Boer it avoids theory but agitates a direct knowing from
voice and hands, and feet and ears that disorder hegemonic
knowledge strands in favour of local, tacit, feminist and
contingent knowledges that demand like Zanele Muholi's photographs,
an ethical engagement with the work/world.
Sonic Rupture applies a practitioner-led approach to urban
soundscape design, which foregrounds the importance of creative
encounters in global cities. This presents an alternative to those
urban soundscape design approaches concerned with managing the
negative health impacts of noise. Instead, urban noise is
considered to be a creative material and cultural expression that
can be reshaped with citywide networks of sonic installations. By
applying affect theory the urban is imagined as an unfolding of the
Affective Earth, and noise as its homogenous (and homogenizing)
voice. It is argued that noise is an expressive material with which
sonic practitioners can interface, to increase the creative
possibilities of urban life. At the heart of this argument is the
question of relationships: how do we augment and diversify those
interconnections that weave together the imaginative life and the
expressions of the land? The book details seven sound installations
completed by the author as part of a creative practice research
process, in which the sonic rupture model was discovered. The sonic
rupture model, which aims to diversify human experiences and urban
environments, encapsulates five soundscape design approaches and
ten practitioner intentions. Multiple works of international
practitioners are explored in relation to the discussed approaches.
Sonic Rupture provides the domains of sound art, music, creative
practice, urban design, architecture and environmental philosophy
with a unique perspective for understanding those affective forces,
which shape urban life. The book also provides a range of practical
and conceptual tools for urban soundscape design that can be
applied by the sonic practitioner.
Released in 2008, J-pop trio Perfume's GAME shot to the top of
Japanese music charts and turned the Hiroshima trio into a
household name across the country. It was also a high point for
techno-pop, the genre's biggest album since the heyday of Yellow
Magic Orchestra. This collection of maximalist but emotional
electronic pop stands as one of the style's finest moments, with
its influence still echoing from artists both in Japan and from
beyond. This book examines Perfume's underdog story as a group long
struggling for success, the making of GAME, and the history of
techno-pop that shaped it. 33 1/3 Global, a series related to but
independent from 33 1/3, takes the format of the original series of
short, music-basedbooks and brings the focus to music throughout
the world. With initial volumes focusing on Japanese and Brazilian
music, the series will also include volumes on the popular music of
Australia/Oceania, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and more.
From the Tin Pan Alley 32-bar form, through the cyclical forms of
modal jazz, to the more recent accumulation of digital layers,
beats, and breaks in Electronic Dance Music, repetition as both an
aesthetic disposition and a formal property has stimulated a
diverse range of genres and techniques. From the angles of
musicology, psychology, sociology, and science and technology, Over
and Over reassesses the complexity connected to notions of
repetition in a variety of musical genres. The first edited volume
on repetition in 20th- and 21st-century popular music, Over and
Over explores the wide-ranging forms and use of repetition - from
large repetitive structures to micro repetitions - in relation to
both specific and large-scale issues and contexts. The book brings
together a selection of original texts by leading authors in a
field that is, as yet, little explored. Aimed at both specialists
and neophytes, it sheds important new light on one of the
fundamental phenomena of music of our times.
Through a transnational, comparative and multi-level approach to
the relationship between youth, migration, and music, the aesthetic
intersections between the local and the global, and between agency
and identity, are presented through case studies in this book.
Transglobal Sounds contemplates migrant youth and the impact of
music in diaspora settings and on the lives of individuals and
collectives, engaging with broader questions of how new modes of
identification are born out of the social, cultural, historical and
political interfaces between youth, migration and music. Thus,
through acts of mobility and environments lived in and in-between,
this volume seeks to articulate between musical transnationalism
and sense of place in exploring the complex relationship between
music and young migrants and migrant descendant's everyday lives.
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