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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
"Hymns to the Silence" is a thoroughly informed and enlightened
study of the art of a pop music maverick that will delight fans the
world over.In 1991, Van Morrison said, "Music is spiritual, the
music business isn't". Peter Mills' groundbreaking book
investigates the oppositions and harmonies within the work of Van
Morrison, proceeding from this identified starting point."Hymns to
the Silence" is a detailed investigative study of Morrison as
singer, performer, lyricist, musician and writer with particular
attention paid throughout to the contradictions and tensions that
are central to any understanding of his work as a whole.The book
takes several intriguing angles. It looks at Morrison as a writer,
specifically as an Irish writer who has recorded musical settings
of Yeats poems, collaborated with Seamus Heaney, Paul Durcan and
Gerald Dawe, and who regularly drops quotes from James Joyce and
Samuel Beckett into his live performances. It looks at him as a
singer, at how he uses his voice as an interpretive instrument. And
there are chapters on his use of mythology, on his stage
performances, and on his continuing fascination with America and
its musical forms.
In Resonant Matter, Lutz Koepnick considers contemporary sound and
installation art as a unique laboratory of hospitality amid
inhospitable times. Inspired by Ragnar Kjartansson’s nine-channel
video installation The Visitors (2012), the book explores
resonance—the ability of objects to be affected by the vibrations
of other objects—as a model of art’s fleeting promise to make
us coexist with things strange and other. In a series of nuanced
readings, Koepnick follows the echoes of distant, unexpected, and
unheard sounds in twenty-first century art to reflect on the
attachments we pursue to sustain our lives and the walls we need to
tear down to secure possible futures. The book’s nine chapters
approach The Visitors from ever-different conceptual angles while
bringing it into dialogue with the work of other artists and
musicians such as Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Guillermo Galindo, Mischa
Kuball, Philipp Lachenmann, Alvien Lucier, Teresa Margolles,
Carsten Nicolai, Camille Norment, Susan Philipsz, David Rothenberg,
Juliana Snapper, and Tanya Tagaq. With this book, Koepnick situates
resonance as a vital concept of contemporary art criticism and
sound studies. His analysis encourages us not only to expand our
understanding of the role of sound in art, of sound art, but to
attune our critical encounter with art to art’s own resonant
thinking.
Popular music and masculinity have rarely been examined through the
lens of research into monstrosity. The discourses associated with
rock and pop, however, actually include more ‘monsters’ than
might at first be imagined. Attention to such individuals and
cultures can say things about the operation of genre and gender,
myth and meaning. Indeed, monstrosity has recently become a growing
focus of cultural theory. This is in part because monsters raise
shared concerns about transgression, subjectivity, agency, and
community. Attention to monstrosity evokes both the spectre of
projection (which invokes familial trauma and psychoanalysis) and
shared anxieties (that in turn reflect ideologies and beliefs). By
pursuing a series of insightful case studies, Scary Monsters
considers different aspects of the connection between music, gender
and monstrosity. Its argument is that attention to monstrosity
provides a unique perspective on the study of masculinity in
popular music culture.
In The Sound of Nonsense, Richard Elliott highlights the importance
of sound in understanding the 'nonsense' of writers such as Lewis
Carroll, Edward Lear, James Joyce and Mervyn Peake, before
connecting this noisy writing to works which engage more directly
with sound, including sound poetry, experimental music and pop. By
emphasising sonic factors, Elliott makes new and fascinating
connections between a wide range of artistic examples to ultimately
build a case for the importance of sound in creating, maintaining
and disrupting meaning.
Facsimile reprint of "The Seventh edition, Corrected and Elarged.
Printed by W. Godbid, for J. Playford at his Shop in the Temple
near the Church. 1674."
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
Accustomed to being centre stage, international award-winning
singer Ian Bostridge, like so many performers, spent much of 2020
and 2021 unable to take part in live music. It led him to question
an identity previously defined by communicating directly with
audiences. This enforced silence allowed Bostridge the opportunity
to explore the backstories of some of the many works that he has
performed - works such as Claudio Monteverdi's seventeenth-century
masterpiece Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and Schumann's
ever popular song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben. The complex world of
a single song by Ravel from the Chansons madecasses has always
haunted and unnerved Bostridge, while his immersion in Benjamin
Britten's confrontations with death, in life and art, have given
him much food for thought. Based on his Berlin Family Lectures,
delivered at the University of Chicago in the Spring of 2020,
Bostridge guides us on a fascinating journey beneath the surface of
these iconic works. His underlying questions as a performer drive
the narrative: what does it mean for audiences when a singer
inhabits these roles? And what does a performer's own identity
subtract from or add to the identities inherent in the works
themselves?
The future of music archiving and search engines lies in deep
learning and big data. Music information retrieval algorithms
automatically analyze musical features like timbre, melody, rhythm
or musical form, and artificial intelligence then sorts and relates
these features. At the first International Symposium on
Computational Ethnomusicological Archiving held on November 9 to
11, 2017 at the Institute of Systematic Musicology in Hamburg,
Germany, a new Computational Phonogram Archiving standard was
discussed as an interdisciplinary approach. Ethnomusicologists,
music and computer scientists, systematic musicologists as well as
music archivists, composers and musicians presented tools, methods
and platforms and shared fieldwork and archiving experiences in the
fields of musical acoustics, informatics, music theory as well as
on music storage, reproduction and metadata. The Computational
Phonogram Archiving standard is also in high demand in the music
market as a search engine for music consumers. This book offers a
comprehensive overview of the field written by leading researchers
around the globe.
Increasing numbers of children and adolescents internationally are
being diagnosed with secondary health problems (e.g.,
overweight-obesity, diabetes, asthma, anxiety, etc.) due in part,
or at least related to, a lack of physical activity. Children and
adolescents with various forms of special needs (for example,
children and adolescents with physical or intellectual
disabilities, children and adolescents from disadvantaged social
backgrounds and children and adolescents with chronic illnesses)
seem to be particularly at risk for secondary health problems,
which in the end limit their social participation and inclusion, as
well as their ability to achieve their full potential and to lead
happy and fulfilling lives. For these children and adolescents,
involvement in regular physical activities (including fitness
activities and sports) may have far reaching benefits. For
instance, organized physical activities are known to represent an
effective vehicle for interventions for children and adolescents
with special needs who do not seem to benefit as much as others
from more traditional, verbal-oriented approaches. Organized
physical activities (in or out of school) further provide these
children and adolescents with opportunities to interact in a
positive manner with prosocial peers and adults who may serve as
positive role models for them. There is currently a paucity of
research about physical activities that effectively include
children and adolescents with a range of special needs or research
that identifies evidence-based strategies that seed success in
maximizing the involvement in, and the positive biopsychosocial
outcomes associated with, the practice of physical activity. This
dearth of research is impeding progress in addressing the
biopsychosocial disadvantage that these children and adolescents
encounter, the development of new solutions for enabling full
potential, and ensuring that children and adolescents with special
needs not only succeed, but also flourish in life. This volume
includes examples of theory, research, policy, and practice that
will advance our understanding of how best to encourage these
children and adolescents to participate regularly in physical
activity, how to maximize the biopsychosocial benefits of
involvement in physical activities, and how to ensure that these
physical activities are inclusive for children and adolescents with
special needs. The focus will be placed on research-derived
physical activity practices that seed success for children and
adolescents with special needs, and new directions in theory,
research, and practice that have implications for enhancing
physical activity practices with at-risk children and adolescents.
The themes covered in this volume include: Strategies to maximise
participation of children and adolescents with special needs in
physical activity as a global priority; Strategies to maximise the
social inclusion of children and adolescents with special needs in
general physical activities; Effective physical education
strategies to enhance biopsychosocial outcomes for children and
adolescents with special needs; Advancing the practice of educators
and coaches to cultivate the social inclusion and participation in
physical activity of children and adolescents with special needs;
and Challenging the meaning and implementation of inclusive
practices in physical education globally.
It is common to hear people say rock and roll music has lost its
edge. Disillusioned by the sound of modern pop radio, many fans
wonder why a revolutionary voice has not yet emerged to define
these tumultuous times the way Bob Dylan, The Clash, and Public
Enemy once did. In many people's minds, rock and roll is dead,
killed off by Britney Spears and an MTV that has taken the music
out of television.
"Rock 'N' Politics" aims to breathe new life into the spirit of
rock and roll. It explains how the virtues of great political
action are present in great rock music. By surveying the
contemporary music scene in chapters about Bruce Springsteen, Green
Day, Bono, Madonna, indie rock, and OutKast, "Rock 'N' Politics"
reveals how rock music recently lost touch with its political
ambitions and explains how musicians and fans can-and must-restore
rock and roll's revolutionary voice.
In an era characterized by lackluster rock music and uninspiring
politics, "Rock 'N' Politics" captures the excitement of
world-changing rock and roll for a generation longing for music
that matters. Written with intelligence and a passion for rock and
roll music from all styles and eras, "Rock 'N' Politics" offers
readers a new perspective on a subject crucial to our times.
This was the first attempt at a full length biography of Bach and a
critical apreciation of his work as composer and performer.
Translated by Walter Emery in 1941-1942 with introductory notes and
two appendices, but not published in his lifetime. Walter Emery,
musicologist, specialised in the works J.S. Bach.
Muhidin Maalim Gurumo and Hassan Rehani Bitchuka are two of
Tanzania's most well-known singers in the popular music genre known
as muziki wa dansi (literally, 'music for dancing'), a variation of
the Cuban-based rhumba idiom that has been enormously impactful
throughout central, eastern, and western Africa in the contemporary
era. This interview-based dual biography investigates the lives and
careers of these two men from an ethnomusicological and historical
perspective. Gurumo had a career spanning fifty years before his
death in 2014. Bitchuka has been singing professionally for
forty-five years. The two singers, affectionately called mapacha
("the twins") by their colleagues, worked together as partners for
thirty years from 1973-2003. This study situates these exemplary
individuals as creative agents in a local cultural context,
showcasing interviews, narratives, and nostalgic reminiscences
about musical life lived under Colonialism, state Socialism, and
current politics in the global neoliberal democratic milieu. The
book adds to a growing body of work about popular music in Dar es
Salaam and shines a light on these artists' creative processes, the
choices they have made regarding rare resources, their styles and
efficacy in conflict resolution, and their own memories regarding
the musical art they have created.
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