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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
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."
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.
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.
This book forms a basis and a starting point for a closer dialogue
between musicologists, anthropologists and psychologists to achieve
a better understanding of the cultural psychology of musical
experience. This is done by arranging a meeting point or an arena
in which different aspects of psychology and musicology touch and
encounters each other due to how the two fields might be defined
today. In line with this the book consists of a group of scholars
that have their feet solidly grounded in psychology, social science
or musicology, but at the same time have a certain interest in
uniting them. On this basis it is divided into five parts, which
investigates musical sensations, musical experiences, musical
transformations, musical fundamentals and the notion of a cultural
psychology of music. Thus another aim of this book is to prepare
the basis for a further growth of a cultural psychology that is
able to include the experiences of music as a basis for
understanding the ordinary human life. Thus this book should be of
interest for those who want to investigate the mysterious
intersection between music and psychology.
During the formative years of jazz (1890-1917), the Creoles of
Color-as they were then called-played a significant role in the
development of jazz as teachers, bandleaders, instrumentalists,
singers, and composers. Indeed, music penetrated all aspects of the
life of this tight-knit community, proud of its French heritage and
language. They played and/or sang classical, military, and dance
music, as well as popular songs and cantiques that incorporated
African, European, and Caribbean elements decades before early jazz
appeared. In Jazz a la Creole: French Creole Music and the Birth of
Jazz, author Caroline Vezina describes the music played by the
Afro-Creole community since the arrival of enslaved Africans in La
Louisiane, then a French colony, at the beginning of the eighteenth
century, emphasizing the many cultural exchanges that led to the
development of jazz. Vezina has compiled and analyzed a broad scope
of primary sources found in diverse locations from New Orleans to
Quebec City, Washington, DC, New York City, and Chicago. Two
previously unpublished interviews add valuable insider knowledge
about the music on French plantations and the danses Creoles held
in Congo Square after the Civil War. Musical and textual analyses
of cantiques provide new information about the process of their
appropriation by the Creole Catholics as the French counterpart of
the Negro spirituals. Finally, a closer look at their musical
practices indicates that the Creoles sang and improvised music
and/or lyrics of Creole songs, and that some were part of their
professional repertoire. As such, they belong to the Black American
and the Franco-American folk music traditions that reflect the rich
cultural heritage of Louisiana.
Exploring the nexus of music and religious education involves
fundamental questions regarding music itself, its nature, its
interpretation, and its importance in relation to both education
and the religious practices into which it is integrated. This
cross-disciplinary volume of essays offers the first comprehensive
set of studies to examine the role of music in educational and
religious reform and the underlying notions of music in early
modern Europe. It elucidates the context and manner in which music
served as a means of religious teaching and learning during that
time, thereby identifying the religio-cultural and intellectual
foundations of early modern European musical phenomena and their
significance for exploring the interplay of music and religious
education today.
Ludic Dreaming uses (sometimes fictional) dreams as a method for
examining sound and contemporary technoculture's esoteric
exchanges, refusing both the strictures of visually dominated logic
and the celebratory tone that so often characterizes the "sonic
turn." Instead, through a series of eight quasi-analytical essays
on the condition of listening, the book forwards a robust
engagement with sounds (human and nonhuman alike) that leverages
particularity in its full, radical singularity: what is a dream,
after all, if not an incipient physics that isn't held to the
scientific demand for repeatability? Thus, these studies declare
their challenge to the conventions of argumentation and situate
themselves at a threshold between theory and fiction, one that
encourages reader and writer alike to make lateral connections
between otherwise wildly incongruent subjects and states of
affairs. Put differently, Ludic Dreaming is a how-to book for
listening away from the seeming fatality of contemporary
technologies, which is to say, away from the seeming inevitability
of late capitalistic nihilism.
The state of contemporary music is dizzyingly diverse in terms of
style, media, traditions, and techniques. How have trends in music
developed over the past decades? Music Composition in the 21st
Century is a guide for composers and students that helps them
navigate the often daunting complexity and abundance of resources
and influences that confront them as they work to achieve a
personal expression. From pop to classical, the book speaks to the
creative ways that new composers mix and synthesize music, creating
a music that exists along a more continuous spectrum rather than in
a series of siloed practices. It pays special attention to a series
of critical issues that have surfaced in recent years, including
harmony, the influence of minimalism, the impact of technology,
strategies of "openness," sound art, collaboration, and
improvisation. Robert Carl identifies an emerging common practice
that allows creators to make more informed aesthetic and technical
decisions and also fosters an inherently positive approach to new
methods.
The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical provides a comprehensive
academic survey of British musical theatre offering both a
historical account of the musical's development from 1728 and a
range of in-depth critical analyses of the unique forms and
features of British musicals, which explore the aesthetic values
and sociocultural meanings of a tradition that initially gave rise
to the American musical and later challenged its modern
pre-eminence. After a consideration of how John Gay's The Beggar's
Opera (1728) created a prototype for eighteenth-century ballad
opera, the book focuses on the use of song in early nineteenth
century theatre, followed by a sociocultural analysis of the comic
operas of Gilbert and Sullivan; it then examines Edwardian and
interwar musical comedies and revues as well as the impact of
Rodgers and Hammerstein on the West End, before analysing the new
forms of the postwar British musical from The Boy Friend (1953) to
Oliver! (1960). One section of the book examines the contributions
of key twentieth century figures including Noel Coward, Ivor
Novello, Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber, director Joan Littlewood
and producer Cameron Macintosh, while a number of essays discuss
both mainstream and alternative musicals of the 1960s and 1970s and
the influence of the pop industry on the creation of concept
recordings such as Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) and Les Miserables
(1980). There is a consideration of "jukebox" musicals such as
Mamma Mia! (1999), while essays on overtly political shows such as
Billy Elliot (2005) are complemented by those on experimental
musicals like Jerry Springer: the Opera (2003) and London Road
(2011) and on the burgeoning of Black and Asian British musicals in
both the West End and subsidized venues. The Oxford Handbook of the
British Musical demonstrates not only the unique qualities of
British musical theatre but also the vitality and variety of
British musicals today.
CLASSICAL COOKS: A GASTROHISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC by Ira Braus The
expression, "Classical music is an acquired taste" takes on new
meaning in Ira Braus's Classical Cooks: A Gastrohistory of Western
Music. Unlike most classical music guides, Classical Cooks links
music and food synaesthetically. Synaesthesia means experiencing
one sense modality by stimulating another, such as "hearing"
colors. Music and food, as my book shows, are close enough
aesthetically, so that we can enjoy them synaesthetically. The book
correlates the respective musical and culinary talents of composers
living between 1350 and 2000; it also suggests ways for listeners
to distinguish composers' styles by way of gastro-musical
association. Classical Cooks complements a recent line of books
dealing with food and culture, e.g., The Toulouse Lautrec Cookbook,
Keats's Porridge, and Jazz Cooks. To be sure, American orchestras,
like the Boston Symphony and New York Philharmonic, have published
recipes contributed by their players. But no substantial anthology
of composer recipes has thus far appeared. Classical Cooks has
Three Courses, plus Dessert. Course 1, "Why Musicians Love to Talk
Shop in the Kitchen," matches food categories with musical ones.
Take fat. Musicians associate fat with lush, full-bodied
orchestration as we hear in, say, Hollywood scores of the 1950s.
These composers learned their craft from lipid composers like
Puccini and Debussy. Puccini's "fat," mellifluous as it is, may be
compared to olive oil - clear, fruity, digestible, while Debussy's
is voluptuous, like butter - filmy, artery-clogging, and
delectable. Course 2, "A Gastrohistory of Music in Documents"
offers accounts of composers as gastro-nomes. Beethoven's culinary
disasters are juxtaposed with Rossini's haute cuisine, so haute in
fact, that one of his recipes ("Tournedos Rossini") appears in
Larousse Gastronomique. One also reads stories of Liszt's
food-fights with his pupils and of his chiding the American
pianist, Amy Fay, for "making an omelette" when playing
wrist-bending passages in his piano music. Course 3, "You Eat What
you Compose, or, Will the Real Mozart Please Stand Up?" addresses
riddles of music history: how knowledge of Mozart's favorite foods
-- liver dumplings and sauerkraut -- might revise his popular image
as a composer of "sweet" music, e.g. Eine kleine Nachtmusik; how a
gastronomic kinship between J.S. Bach and Brahms -- their love of
herring -- might reflect their dense musical expression, as well as
Brahms's composing minuets and sarabandes during the mid-1800s; and
how knowing Ravel's preference for "hot" food helps us to
distinguish the sound of his music from the more understated style
of Debussy. Dessert comprises "The Well-Tempered Cuisinier:
Twenty-four Pastries and Foods from the Classical Cooks." Readers
will find here a combination of recipes and menus suitable for
diverse musical occasions (concert receptions, composer birthdays,
opera caf entres).
Brings together in one volume the full text of some 450 letters in
first-time English translation, organized into sections each
prefaced by an introduction. All the letters are fully annotated
and they yield information about Viennese society, culture and
politics of the time. The work of Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935),
widely regarded as the most important music theorist of the
twentieth century, has shaped the teaching of music theory in the
United States profoundly and influenced theorists there, in Europe,
and throughout the world. Living and working in Vienna, Schenker
maintained a vigorous correspondence with a large circle of
professional musicians, writers, music critics, institutions,
administrators, patrons, friends, and pupils. A large part of his
correspondence was preserved after his death: some 7,000 letters,
postcards, telegrams, etc., to and from 400 correspondents. His
diaries record the fabric of his personal life and his activities
asa private music teacher and writer; they also provide a detailed
commentary on historical and political events and offer a window on
to the conditions of life in Vienna. Taken together, these
documents contribute vividly to the picture of cultural life in
Vienna, and elsewhere, from the perspective of a Jewish
intellectual and his circle of musical and artistic friends.
Heinrich Schenker: Selected Correspondence represents a concise
edition ofsome of the theorist's most important and revelatory
letters and diary entries. It offers the full text of some 450
letters in English translation, organized into sections devoted to
various aspects of his professional life: teaching, writing,
administration, and maintaining contact with an ever widening
circle including Ferruccio Busoni, Julius Roentgen, Otto Erich
Deutsch, Alphons von Rothschild, Paul von Klenau, Wilhelm
Furtwangler, Paul Hindemith, MorizViolin, John Petrie Dunn, and
Hans Weisse. Extracts from the diaries provide a summary of
important parts of the correspondence that do not survive. The
volume includes a detailed exposition of the editorial method,
biographicalnotes on correspondents, and a substantial general
introduction. Each of the sections is prefaced by an introduction
which provides essential historical context, and the letters and
diary entries are fully annotated. IAN BENT is Emeritus Professor
of Music at Columbia University in New York, and lives in the
United Kingdom. DAVID BRETHERTON is Lecturer in Music at the
University of Southampton. WILLIAM DRABKIN is Professorof Music at
the University of Southampton. CONTRIBUTORS: Marko Deisinger,
Martin Eybl, Christoph Hust, Kevin C. Karnes, John Koslovsky, Lee
Rothfarb, John Rothgeb, Hedi Siegel, Arnold Whittall
In Eleanor Smith's Hull House Songs: The Music of Protest and Hope
in Jane Addams's Chicago, the authors republish Hull House Songs
(1916), together with critical commentary. Hull-House Songs
contains five politically engaged compositions written by the
Hull-House music educator, Eleanor Smith. The commentary that
accompanies the folio includes an examination of Smith's poetic
sources and musical influences; a study of Jane Addams's aesthetic
theories; and a complete history of the arts at Hull-House. Through
this focus upon aesthetic and cultural programs at Hull-House, the
authors identify the external, and internalized, forces of
domination (class position, racial identity, patriarchal
disenfranchisement) that limited the work of the Hull-House women,
while also recovering the sometimes hidden emancipatory
possibilities of their legacy. With an afterword by Jocelyn
Zelasko.
Breaking is the first and most widely practiced hip-hop dance in
the world today, with an estimated one million participants taking
part in this dynamic, multifaceted artform. Yet, despite its global
reach and over 40 years of existence, historical treatments of the
dance have largely neglected the African Americans who founded it.
Dancer and scholar Serouj "Midus" Aprahamian offers, for the first
time, a detailed look into the African American beginnings of
breaking in the Bronx, New York, during the 1970s. Given the
pivotal impact the dance had on hip-hop's formation, this book also
challenges numerous myths and misconceptions that have permeated
studies of hip-hop culture's emergence. Aprahamian draws on
untapped archival material, primary interviews, and detailed
descriptions of early breaking to bring this buried history to
life, with a particular focus on the early aesthetic development of
the dance, the institutional settings in which hip-hop was
conceived, and the movement's impact on sociocultural conditions in
New York throughout the 1970s. By featuring the overlooked
first-hand accounts of over 50 founding b-boys and b-girls, this
book also shows how indebted breaking is to African American
culture and interrogates the disturbing factors behind its
historical erasure.
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 2 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.
This is a pioneering study of the phenomenon of vibration and its
history and reception through culture. The study of the senses has
become a rich topic in recent years. "Senses of Vibration" explores
a wide range of sensory experience and makes a decisive new
contribution to this growing field by focussing not simply on the
senses as such, but on the material experience - vibration - that
underpins them. This is the first book to take the theme of
vibration as central, offering an interdisciplinary history of the
phenomenon and its reverberations in the cultural imaginary. It
tracks vibration through the work of a wide range of writers,
including physiologists (who thought vibrations in the nerves
delivered sensations to the brain), physicists (who claimed that
light, heat, electricity and other forms of energy were vibratory),
spiritualists (who figured that spiritual energies also existed in
vibratory form), and poets and novelists from Coleridge to Dickens
and Wells. "Senses of Vibration" is a work of scholarship that cuts
through a range of disciplines and will reverberate for many years
to come.
When the show was first produced in 1960, at a time when
transatlantic musical theatre was dominated by American
productions, Oliver already stood out for its overt Englishness.
But in writing Oliver , librettist and composer Lionel Bart had to
reconcile the Englishness of his Dickensian source with the
American qualities of the integrated book musical. To do so, he
turned to the musical traditions that had defined his upbringing:
English music hall, Cockney street singing, and East End Yiddish
theatre. This book reconstructs the complicated biography of Bart's
play, from its early inception as a pop musical inspired by a
marketable image, through its evolution into a sincere Dickensian
adaptation that would push English musical theatre to new dramatic
heights. The book also addresses Oliver 's phenomenal reception in
its homeland, where audiences responded to the musical's
Englishness with a nationalistic fervor. The musical, which has
more than fulfilled its promise as one of the most popular English
musicals of all time, remains one of the country's most significant
shows.
Author Marc Napolitano shows how Oliver 's popularity has
ultimately exerted a significant influence on two separate cultural
trends. Firstly, Bart's adaptation forever impacted the culture
text of Dickens's Oliver Twist; to this day, the general perception
of the story and the innumerable allusions to the novel in popular
media are colored heavily by the sights, scenes, sounds, and songs
from the musical, and virtually every major adaptation of from the
1970s on has responded to Bart's work in some way. Secondly, Oliver
helped to move the English musical forward by establishing a
post-war English musical tradition that would eventually pave the
way for the global dominance of the West End musical in the 1980s.
As such, Napolitano's book promises to be an important book for
students and scholars in musical theatre studies as well as to
general readers interested in the megamusical.
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