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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
Schubert's Workshop offers a fresh study of the composer's compositional technique and its development, rooted in the author's experience of realising performing versions of Franz Schubert's unfinished works. Through close examination of Schubert's use of technical and structural devices, Brian Newbould demonstrates that Schubert was much more technically innovative than has been supposed, and argues that the composer's technical discoveries constitute a rich legacy of specific influences on later composers. Providing rich new insights into the creative practice of one of the major figures of classical music, this two-volume study reframes our understanding of Schubert as an innovator who constantly pushed at the frontiers of style and expression.
The translation of the third volume of Syntagma musicum, a multi-volume work by German composer and theorist Michael Praetorius (1571-1621). Volume III deals with terminolgy and performance practice, and offers us the most detailed commentary available from the 17th century about the performance of particular pieces of music. Praetorius is the most often quoted and excerpted writer on performance practice. In his translation, Kite=Powell has worked with a notoriously difficult syntax to produce a definitive English edition of this important work.
When the story of modernity is told from a theological perspective, music is routinely ignored - despite its pervasiveness in modern culture and the manifold ways it has been intertwined with modernity's ambivalent relation to the Christian God. In conversation with musicologists and music theorists, in this collection of essays Jeremy Begbie aims to show that the practices of music and the discourses it has generated bear their own kind of witness to some of the pivotal theological currents and counter-currents shaping modernity. Music has been deeply affected by these currents and in some cases may have played a part in generating them. In addition, Begbie argues that music is capable of yielding highly effective ways of addressing and moving beyond some of the more intractable theological problems and dilemmas which modernity has bequeathed to us. Music, Modernity, and God includes studies of Calvin, Luther and Bach, an exposition of the intriguing tussle between Rousseau and the composer Rameau, and an account of the heady exaltation of music to be found in the early German Romantics. Particular attention is paid to the complex relations between music and language, and the ways in which theology, a discipline involving language at its heart, can come to terms with practices like music, practices which are coherent and meaningful but which in many respects do not operate in language-like ways.
Drawing upon the past two decades of burgeoning literature in philosophy of music, this study offers a comprehensive, critical analysis of what is entailed in performance interpretation. It argues that integrity and other virtues offset the harm that virtuosity and rigid historical authenticity can impose on the perceptive judgment required of excellent musical interpretation. Proposed are challenging and provocative reassessments of the appropriate roles for virtuosity and historical authenticity in musical performance. Acknowledging the competitive ethos of the contemporary music scene, it details the kind of character a performer needs to develop in order to withstand those pressures and to achieve interpretive excellence. Performers are encouraged to examine and explore the ethical dimension of their art against their responsibilities to the diverse patrons they serve. Professional and student performers and instructors will appreciate this practical discussion of the ethical challenges performers confront when interpreting musical works. The ethical discourse applies to instrumental performance studies, the history and theory of music, general music pedagogy, and philosophy of music courses.
The elements of music, musical values, the relationship of music to the other ancient arts--all of these subjects are explored as Polin discusses the musical heritage of the ancient Near East.
This rigorous book is a complete and up-to-date reference for the Csound system from the perspective of its main developers and power users. It explains the system, including the basic modes of operation and its programming language; it explores the many ways users can interact with the system, including the latest features; and it describes key applications such as instrument design, signal processing, and creative electronic music composition. The Csound system has been adopted by many educational institutions as part of their undergraduate and graduate teaching programs, and it is used by practitioners worldwide. This book is suitable for students, lecturers, composers, sound designers, programmers, and researchers in the areas of music, sound, and audio signal processing.
The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight features twenty-one conversations with musicians who have had at least fifty years of professional experience, and several as many as seventy-five. In all, these voices reflect some seventeen hundred years' worth of paying dues. Appealing to casual fans and jazz aficionados alike, these interviews have been carefully, but minimally edited by Peter Zimmerman for sense and clarity, without changing any of the musicians' actual words. Five of the interviewees-Dick Hyman, Jimmy Owens, Sonny Rollins, Clark Terry, and Yusef Lateef-have received the National Endowment for the Arts' prestigious Jazz Masters Fellowship, attesting to their importance and ability. While not official masters, the rest are veteran performers willing to share their experiences and knowledge. Artists such as David Amram, Charles Davis, Clifford Jordan, Valery Ponomarev, and Sandy Stewart, to name a few, open their hearts and memories and reveal who they are as people. The musicians interviewed for the book range in age from their early seventies to mid-nineties. Older musicians started their careers during the segregation of the Jim Crow era, while the youngest came up during the struggle for civil rights. All grapple with issues of race, performance, and jazz's rich legacies. In addition to performing, touring, and recording, many have composed and arranged, and others have contributed as teachers, historians, studio musicians, session players, producers, musicians' advocates, authors, columnists, poets, and artists. The interviews in The Jazz Masters are invaluable primary material for scholars and will appeal to musicians inspired by these veterans' stories and their different approaches to music.
Cyril Scott once described Percy Grainger as a `lovable eccentric'. The Australian-American pianist, composer, ethnologist, and aspiring `all-round man' was, however, more eccentric to his own age than to ours. His views on the environment, food, the body, participatory democracy, and sex all anticipated by several decades views more typical of the mid-late twentieth century. Prolific as a composer, performer, and recording artist, Grainger was an indefatigable writer. This selection of forty-six essays about the production, promotion, and propagation of music is drawn from his over 150 public writings. Written between the turn of the century and the early 1950s, these essays reveal Grainger's youthful compositional plans, his ideas about piano technique, and his enduring high regard for the music of Edvard Grieg, Frederick Delius, and `Frankfurt Group' colleagues Cyril Scott, Roger Quilter, and Henry Balfour Gardiner. Grainger on Music also pursues his evolving thoughts about Nordic music, `Free Music', instrumental usage, and his occasional suggestions for musical development in Australia and the United States.
Perfect Harmony and Melting Strains assembles interdisciplinary essays investigating concepts of harmony during a transitional period, in which the Pythagorean notion of a harmoniously ordered cosmos competed with and was transformed by new theories about sound - and new ways of conceptualizing the world. From the perspectives of philosophy, literary scholarship, and musicology, the contributions consider music's ambivalent position between mathematical abstraction and sensibility, between the metaphysics of harmony and the physics of sound. Essays examine the late medieval and early modern history of ideas concerning the nature of music and cosmic harmony, and trace their transformations in early modern musico-literary discourses. Within this framework, essays further offer original readings of important philosophical, literary, and musicological works. This interdisciplinary volume brings into focus the transformation of a predominant Renaissance worldview and of music's scientific, theological, literary, as well as cultural conceptions and functions in the early modern period, and will be of interest to scholars of the classics, philosophy, musicology, as well as literary and cultural studies.
Improvisation, despite its almost ubiquitous presence in many art forms, is notoriously misunderstood and mysterious. Although earlier strands of American philosophy and art emphasized what might be called improvisational practices, it was during the modernist period that improvisational practice and theory began to make a significant impact on art and culture, specifically via the African American musical forms of jazz and blues. This musical development held important consequences for the larger artistic, cultural, and political life of America as a whole and, eventually, the world. The historical convergence of jazz and philosophical currents like pragmatism in American culture provides the framework for Wallace's discussion of improvisation in literary modernism. Focusing on poets ranging from Gertrude Stein to Langston Hughes, Wallace's work provides a fresh perspective on the complex circuits of modernist culture. Improvisation and The Making of American Literary Modernism will be of interest to scholars of poetry, music, American and modernist studies, and race and ethnic studies.
"Spencer brings together many independent strands of the Harlem Renaissance that have not been joined previously to propose a new theory of the epoch. This book is an important contribution to the history of African American music in the twentieth century". -- John Graziano, City University of New York "His splendid reexamination of the Harlem Renaissance is a critical study meriting serious consideration from all persons concerned with American cultural history". -- Dominique-Rene de Lerma, Lawrence University Boldly conceived and compellingly argued, this revisionist work offers a new interpretation of the Harlem Renaissance by focusing on its music. Jon Michael Spencer challenges the emphasis of earlier studies -- which tended to bypass music in favor of literature -- as well as their general conclusion that the Renaissance was a failure because it offered an inadequate solution to the old problem of racism. Spencer's discussion encompasses the music and writings of a wide range of important figures, including William Grant Still, James Weldon Johnson, Roland Hayes, Alain Locke, and R. Nathaniel Dett. He argues that the singular accomplishment of the Harlem Renaissance composers and musicians was to achieve a "two-tiered mastery": their work drew on the "mood and spirit" of African American folk music while mastering the forms and techniques of the European classical tradition. Spencer also contends that the Harlem Renaissance extended for three decades beyond the 1920s. He thus contests assertions that the arrival of the Great Depression effectively ended the Renaissance, as issues of economic survival subsumed artistic aspirations. In positing a much longer period for theRenaissance and offering evidence for it, Spencer argues that this flowering of African American creative endeavor constitutes a major cultural legacy that can only be described as a resounding success.
In the past, theorists have separated metre from rhythm, seeing metre as a static grid and rhythm as a fluid grouping of notes and figures. Meter as Rhythm offers a new theory of metre in which metre and rhythm are no longer oppposed. Arguing against the mathematical and structuralist approaches to musical analysis, Hasty provides an alternative view which affirms the spontaneity and openness of musical experience as something fully temporal and processive, rather than as a mere container of rhythm. Combining speculative, psychological, and music-analytic perspectives and drawing on philosophers of process, Hasty integrates technical analytical details -- using examples from the early seventeenth century to mid-twentieth century - with larger aesthetic issues.
Contributions by Alberto Brodesco, James Cody, Andrea Cossu, Anne Margaret Daniel, Jesper Doolard, Nina Goss, Jonathan Hodgers, Jamie Lorentzen, Fahri OE z, Nick Smart, and Thad Williamson Bob Dylan is many things to many people. Folk prodigy. Rock poet. Quiet gentleman. Dionysian impresario. Cotton Mather. Stage hog. Each of these Dylan creations comes with its own accessories, including a costume, a hairstyle, a voice, a lyrical register, a metaphysics, an audience, and a library of commentary. Each Bob Dylan joins a collective cast that has made up his persona for over fifty years. No version of Dylan turns out uncomplicated, but the postmillennial manifestation seems peculiarly contrary-a tireless and enterprising antiquarian; a creator of singular texts and sounds through promiscuous poaching; an artist of innovation and uncanny renewal. This is a Dylan of persistent surrender from and engagement with a world he perceives as broken and enduring, addressing us from a past that is lost and yet forever present. Tearing the World Apart participates in the creation of the postmillennial Bob Dylan by exploring three central records of the twenty-first century-"Love and Theft" (2001), Modern Times (2006), and Tempest (2012)-along with the 2003 film Masked and Anonymous, which Dylan helped write and in which he appears as an actor and musical performer. The collection of essays does justice to this difficult Bob Dylan by examining his method and effects through a disparate set of viewpoints. Readers will find a variety of critical contexts and cultural perspectives as well as a range of experiences as members of Dylan's audience. The essays in Tearing the World Apart illuminate, as a prism might, its intransigent subject from enticing and intersecting angles.
Musicians are continually 'in the making', tapping into their own creative resources while deriving inspiration from teachers, friends, family members and listeners. Amateur and professional performers alike tend not to follow fixed routes in developing a creative voice: instead, their artistic journeys are personal, often without foreseeable goals. The imperative to assess and reassess one's musical knowledge, understanding and aspirations is nevertheless a central feature of life as a performer. Musicians in the Making explores the creative development of musicians in both formal and informal learning contexts. It promotes a novel view of creativity, emphasizing its location within creative processes rather than understanding it as an innate quality. It argues that such processes may be learned and refined, and furthermore that collaboration and interaction within group contexts carry significant potential to inform and catalyze creative experiences and outcomes. The book also traces and models the ways in which creative processes evolve over time. Performers, music teachers and researchers will find the rich body of material assembled here engaging and enlightening. The book's three parts focus in turn on 'Creative learning in context', 'Creative processes' and 'Creative dialogue and reflection'. In addition to sixteen extended chapters written by leading experts in the field, the volume includes ten 'Insights' by internationally prominent performers, performance teachers and others. Practical aids include abstracts and lists of keywords at the start of each chapter, which provide useful overviews and guidance on content. Topics addressed by individual authors include intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics, performance experience, practice and rehearsal, 'self-regulated performing', improvisation, self-reflection, expression, interactions between performers and audiences, assessment, and the role of academic study in performers' development.
Is music a language of the emotions? How do recorded pop songs differ from works created for live performance? Is John Cage's silent piece, 4'33", music? Stephen Davies's new book collects some of his most important papers on central topics in the philosophy of music. As well as perennial questions, Davies addresses contemporary controversies, including the impact of modern technology on the presentation and reception of both new and old musical works. These essays, two of them new and previously unpublished, are self-standing but thematically connected, and will be of great interest to philosophers, aestheticians, and to theorists of music and art.
The Tempered scale proposed in 1482 as a practical solution to discords was only introduced and applied 240 years later by J. S. Bach. Since then, this scale has ruled the tone frequencies in all variety of chords. Due to its simple conception, small imperfections in harmony are unavoidable. Now a new musical scale is proposed, and this book details the new concepts and features and their application in the manufacture of musical instruments, to introduce the new sounds in harmony to the world market. The Natural Set of forty-seven elements was the beginning of the research. The M comma, the smallest consonance that can be distinguished by the ear, together with J and U, allowed the attainment of the Natural Progression of Musical Cells, while its 624 elements led to the discovery of K and P semitone factors to establish the Piagui octave. The proper sequence of eight K and four P replace the twelve T factors of the Tempered intonation. The origins of K and P are the ten tone frequencies found in the Pythagoras and Aristoxenus heptatonic scales. Piagui and Tempered chord wave peaks of basic twenty-four triads are drawn by computer to demonstrate the true concords and discords respectively.
Despite its rather forbidding name, the `Chromatic Fourth' is one of the most familiar short themes in virtually all western music over the four hundred years before the middle of our century. It is a sequence of six notes that can be heard in a huge variety of ways, most originally, effectively, and beautifully in the work of the greatest composers, from the madrigalists to Stravinsky, from Byrd to Bartok, with telling examples in the operas of Monteverdi, Mozart, and Wagner, or in the keyboard music of Bull, Bach, and Schubert. Although the existence of the chromatic fourth has long been recognized, and occasionally mentioned by music historians, this is the first thorough-going attempt to trace its likely origins and its evolution over four hundred years. With over 200 music examples, Peter Williams demonstrates the theme's wonderful variety, and shows that it was used by composers not only as a means of emotional expression, but also as a structural device.
Through engaging scholarly essays written by various authors, American Popular Culture and the Beatles illuminates the synergetic relationship between American popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s and the iconic rock band The Beatles. In Part I of the collection, students learn how the emergence of rock and roll in the United States brought about a cultural and musical shift that paved the way for The Beatles. Thought-provoking essays explore why teenagers were so drawn to rock and roll, how American performers elevated the rock and roll genre, and how American music provided a strong foundation for the creation of The Beatles. Part II examines the impact of American rock and roll on Britain in the 1960s, with special emphasis on the appropriation of American music by British artists. Dedicated readings explore the evolving attitudes toward the American South via musical trends, the emergence of skiffle music, and how British rock and rollers also paved the way for The Beatles. The final part explores the influence The Beatles had on American popular culture, speaking to the band's meteoric and unexpected rise to fame, the hysteria and obsession that fueled Beatlemania, and the group's relationship to counterculture and the revolutionary ideals of the late 1960s. American Popular Culture and the Beatles is an ideal textbook for courses in music history and popular culture.
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