|
|
Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
What happens in our unconscious minds when we listen to, produce or
perform popular music? The Unconscious - a much misunderstood
concept from philosophy and psychology - works through human
subjects as we produce music and can be traced through the music we
engage with. Through a new collaboration between music theorist and
philosopher, Smith and Overy present the long history of the
unconscious and its related concepts, working systematically
through philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche,
psychoanalysts such as Freud and Lacan, to theorists such as
Deleuze and Kristeva. The theories offered are vital to follow the
psychological complexity of popular music, demonstrated through
close readings of individual songs, albums, artists, genres, and
popular music practices. Among countless artists, Listening to the
Unconscious draws from Prince to Sufjan Stevens, from Robyn to Xiu
Xiu, from Joanna Newsom to Arcade Fire, from PJ Harvey to LCD Sound
System, each of whom offer exciting inroads into the fascinating
worlds of our unconscious musical minds. And in return, theories of
the unconscious can perhaps takes us deeper into the heart of
popular music.
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.
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.
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.
The last half-decade has seen the rapid and expansive development
of video game music studies. As with any new area of study, this
significant sub-discipline is still tackling fundamental questions
concerning how video game music should be approached. In this
volume, experts in game music provide their responses to these
issues. This book suggests a variety of new approaches to the study
of game music. In the course of developing ways of conceptualizing
and analyzing game music it explicitly considers other critical
issues including the distinction between game play and music play,
how notions of diegesis are complicated by video game
interactivity, the importance of cinema aesthetics in game music,
the technicalities of game music production and the relationships
between game music and art music traditions. This collection is
accessible, yet theoretically substantial and complex. It draws
upon a diverse array of perspectives and presents new research
which will have a significant impact upon the way that game music
is studied. The volume represents a major development in game
musicology and will be indispensable for both academic researchers
and students of game music.
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.
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.
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.
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger
Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain
imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed
pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we
have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting,
preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger
Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and
hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone
The early years of the Franco regime saw the formation of a strong
governmental propaganda apparatus. Through expansive press laws
that solidified state control over public and private media outlets
alike, the Franco government directly influenced what information
was made available to the public. While music critics and
journalists were by no means free from government control and
direction, music criticism under the Franco regime did not adhere
to any official party "line" on music. Indeed, music criticism
often demonstrated a diversity of opinion and ideological belief
that runs counter to many common assumptions about journalism under
fascist regimes. In Music Criticism and Music Critics in Early
Francoist Spain, Eva Moreda Rodriguez presents a kaleidoscopic
portrait of the diverse and often divergent writings of music
critics in the early years of the Franco regime. Although she does
not shy away from the thorny issues of propaganda and censorship,
Moreda Rodriguez considers other factors that shaped the
journalistic discourse surrounding music. Political rivalries,
ideological diversity within musical "conservatism," as well as the
explicit and implicit expectations of the Franco government all
influenced the diverse landscape of music criticism. Moreover, the
central issues that music critics were concerned with during
Francoism's early years-modernist music, Spanish early music,
traditional music, and music's role in organizing the state-had
already been at the center of debates within the press for several
decades. Carefully selecting contemporary writings by well-known
music critics, Moreda Rodriguez contextualizes music criticism
written during the Franco regime within the broader intellectual
history of Spain from the nineteenth century onwards. The first
critical study of the musical press of Francoist Spain in the
broader cultural and social fabric of the regime, Music Criticism
and Music Critics in Early Francoist Spain is an essential resource
for musicologists interested in 20th-century Spain, as well as
Hispanists interested in the early Franco regime.
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.
As a composer, Hector Berlioz embodied his century as the
quintessential Romantic artist. Niccolo Paganini called him
"Beethoven's only heir," and for a young Richard Wagner, he was
dazzling as a composer, orchestra conductor, and critic. But
Berlioz was known as much for his writings as for his music, and
for decades Berlioz scholars have stressed the need for a good
English-language anthology of his criticism. Featuring new
translations and commentary by Katherine Kolb and Samuel N.
Rosenberg, Berlioz on Music: Selected Criticism 1824-1837 is that
volume. Berlioz's centrality as a critic results from his literary
brilliance, his location in Paris - the music capital of the
nineteenth century - and his 28-year tenure at the powerful Journal
des debats. As one of its founding editors and principal writers,
Berlioz contributed about 250 articles to the publication. Berlioz
on Music comprises articles from the first 14 years of Berlioz's
public writings, given in chronological order and, with few
exceptions, in their entirety. Following chronology affords an
overview of Berlioz's evolution as critic and of a key phase in the
development of modern musical culture. The volume also presents
explanatory data in engagingly composed introductions and
footnotes, which elucidate Berlioz's references to persons, musical
and literary works, historical events, and more. The reader is
allowed to follow musical events during one of the richest periods
in French cultural history, including the revolutionary decade
surrounding 1830, a year marked by Victor Hugo's victory for the
Romantics in the Classical bastion of the Theatre-Francais, by the
premiere of Berlioz's Fantastic Symphony, and by the toppling of
the Restoration monarchy. The result is an engaging collection of
Berlioz's lively prose, presented with scholarly rigor and rendered
in accessible English. Music historians, both professional and
amateur, as well 19th century European history enthusiasts will
find Berlioz on Music a compelling introduction to one of the
richest periods of French culture.
Translating for Singing discusses the art and craft of translating
singable lyrics, a topic of interest in a wide range of fields,
including translation, music, creative writing, cultural studies,
performance studies, and semiotics. Previously, such translation
has most often been discussed by music critics, many of whom had
neither training nor experience in this area. Written by two
internationally-known translators, the book focusses mainly on
practical techniques for creating translations meant to be sung to
pre-existing music, with suggested solutions to such linguistic
problems as those associated with rhythm, syllable count, vocal
burden, rhyme, repetition and sound. Translation theory and
translations of lyrics for other purposes, such as surtitles, are
also covered. The book can serve as a primary text in courses on
translating lyrics and as a reference and supplementary text for
other courses and for professionals in the fields mentioned. Beyond
academia, the book is of interest to professional translators and
to librettists, singers, conductors, stage directors, and audience
members.
Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History
revolutionizes the study of modern Israeli art music by tracking
the surprising itineraries of Jewish art music in the move from
Europe to Mandatory Palestine and Israel. Leaving behind cliches
about East and West, Arab and Jew, this book provocatively exposes
the legacies of European antisemitism and religious Judaism in the
making of Israeli art music.
Shelleg introduces the reader to various aesthetic dilemmas
involved in the emergence of modern Jewish art music, ranging from
auto-exoticism through the hues of self-hatred to the
disarticulation of Jewish musical markers. He then considers part
of this musics' translocation to Mandatory Palestine, studying its
discourse with Hebrew culture, and composers' grappling with modern
and Zionist images of the self. Unlike previous efforts in the
field, Shelleg unearths the mechanism of what he calls "Zionist
musical onomatopoeias," but more importantly their dilution by the
non-western Arab Jewish oral musical traditions (the same
traditions Hebrew culture sought to westernize and secularize).
And what had begun with composers' movement towards the musical
properties of non-western Jewish musical traditions grew in the 60s
and 70s to a dialectical return to exilic Jewish cultures. In the
aftermath of the Six-Day War, which reaffirmed Zionism's redemptive
and expansionist messages, Israeli composers (re)embraced precisely
the exilic Jewish music that emphasized Judaism's syncretic
qualities rather than its territorial characteristics. In the 70s,
therefore, while religious Zionist circles translated theology into
politics and territorial maximalism, Israeli composers
deterritorialized the national discourse by a growing return to the
spaces shared by Jews and non-Jews, devoid of Zionist
appropriations."
Over the past 30 years, musicologists have produced a remarkable
new body of research literature focusing on the lives and careers
of women composers in their socio-historical contexts. But detailed
analysis and discussion of the works created by these composers are
still extremely rare. This is particularly true in the domain of
music theory, where scholarly work continues to focus almost
exclusively on male composers. Moreover, while the number of
performances, broadcasts, and recordings of women's compositions
has unquestionably grown, they remain significantly
underrepresented in comparison to music by male composers.
Addressing these deficits is not simply a matter of rectifying a
scholarly gender imbalance: the lack of knowledge surrounding the
music of women composers means that scholars, performers, and the
general public remain unfamiliar with a large body of exciting
repertoire. Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers: Concert
Music from 1960-2000 is the first to appear in an exciting a four
volume series devoted to the work of women composers across Western
art music history. Each chapter, many by leading music theorists,
opens with a brief biographical sketch of the composer before
presenting an in-depth critical-analytic exploration of a single
representative composition, linking analytical observations with
questions of meaning and sociohistorical context. Chapters are
grouped thematically by analytical approach into three sections,
each of which places the analytical methods used in the essays that
follow into the context of late twentieth-century ideas and trends.
Featuring rich analyses and detailed study by the most reputed
music theorists in the field, along with brief biographical
sketches for each composer, this collection brings to the fore the
essential repertoire of a range of important composers, many of
whom otherwise stand outside the standard canon.
Although David Bowie has famously characterized himself as a "leper
messiah," a more appropriate moniker might be "rock god" someone
whose influence has crossed numerous sub-genres of popular and
classical music and can at times seem ubiquitous. By looking at key
moments in his career (1972, 1977-79, 1980-83, and 1995-97) through
several lenses--theories of sub-culture, gender/sexuality studies,
theories of sound, post-colonial theory, and performance studies
Waldrep will examine Bowie's work in terms not only of his auditory
output but his many reinterpretations of it via music videos,
concert tours, television appearances, and occasional movie roles.
Future Nostalgia will look at all aspects of Bowie's
career--musical recordings, live concerts, music videos, film
performances, and television appearance--in an attempt to trace
Bowie's contribution to the performative paradigms that constitute
contemporary rock music.
During the early medieval Islamicate period (800-1400 CE),
discourses concerned with music and musicians were wide-ranging and
contentious, and expressed in works on music theory and philosophy
as well as literature and poetry. But in spite of attempts by
influential scholars and political leaders to limit or control
musical expression, music and sound permeated all layers of the
social structure. Lisa Nielson here presents a rich social history
of music, musicianship and the role of musicians in the early
Islamicate era. Focusing primarily on Damascus, Baghdad and
Jerusalem, Lisa Nielson draws on a wide variety of textual sources
written for and about musicians and their professional/private
environments - including chronicles, literary sources, memoirs and
musical treatises - as well as the disciplinary approaches of
musicology to offer insights into musical performances and the
lives of musicians. In the process, the book sheds light onto the
dynamics of medieval Islamicate courts, as well as how slavery,
gender, status and religion intersected with music in courtly life.
It will appeal to scholars of the Islamicate world and historical
musicologists.
In Arthur Upham Pope and A New Survey of Persian Art, fourteen
scholars explore the legacy of Arthur Upham Pope (1881-1969) by
tracing the formation of Persian art scholarship and
connoisseurship during the twentieth century. Widely considered as
a self-made scholar, curator, and entrepreneur, Pope was credited
for establishing the basis of what we now categorize broadly as
Persian art. His unrivalled professional achievement, together with
his personal charisma, influenced the way in which many scholars
and collectors worldwide came to understand the art, architecture
and material culture of the Persian world. This ultimately resulted
in the establishment of the aesthetic criteria for assessing the
importance of cultural remains from modern-day Iran. With
contributions by Lindsay Allen, Sheila S. Blair, Jonathan M. Bloom,
Talinn Grigor, Robert Hillenbrand, Yuka Kadoi, Sumru Belger Krody,
Judith A. Lerner, Kimberly Masteller, Cornelia Montgomery, Bernard
O'Kane, Keelan Overton, Laura Weinstein, and Donald Whitcomb.
|
|