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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
This pocket-sized dictionary presents current and correct notation
practices in an easy-to-use format. Generously illustrated and
concise, this book is essential to any musician looking for a handy
reference for the correct notation of music. A most welcome and
beneficial source for every musician, whether using a pencil or a
computer.
This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It
contains classical literature works from over two thousand years.
Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore
shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the
cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical
literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the
mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from
oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of
international literature classics available in printed format again
- worldwide.
Examining innovations in audience behaviour, musical ensembles and
mass-music movements, this book provides insight into how musical
performances contributed to emerging ideas about class and national
identity. Offering a fresh reading of bestselling fictional works
of the day, Weliver draws upon crowd theory, climate theory,
ethnology, science, music reviews and books by professional
musicians to demonstrate how these discourses were mutually
constitutive. This interdisciplinary undertaking will interest
those working in the fields of English literature, musicology,
social history and cultural studies.
The only things truly universal in music are those that are based
on biological and/or perceptual facts. Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale
focuses on perceptions of consonance and dissonance, which are
defined in the Harvard Dictionary of Music: "Consonance is used to
describe the agreeable effect produced by certain intervals as
against the disagreeable effect produced others. Consonance and
dissonance are the very foundation of harmonic music... consonance
represents the element of smoothness and repose, while dissonance
represents the no less important elements of roughness and
irregularity.a Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale begins by asking (and
answering) the question: How can we build a device to measure
consonance and dissonance? The remainder of the book describes the
impact of such a "dissonance metera on music theory, on synthesizer
design, on the construction of musical scales and tunings, on the
design of musical instruments, and introduces related compositional
techniques and new methods of musicological analyses. This new and
greatly revised edition of William Sethares' classic book includes
an attached CD-ROM that contains over three hours of sound examples
that demonstrate the ideas in action, as well as computer programs
that enable readers to conduct their own explorations. A new
chapter contains a detailed explanation of how the software works.
It incorporates several important simplifications over the full
presentation in the current Chapter 7 in order to allow it to
function in real time. Another new chapter describes the various
ways that the software can be used. New sections throughout the
book bring it up to date with the current state of the subject.
Tuning TimbreSpectrum Scale offers a unique analysis of the
relationship between the structure of sound and the structure of
scale and will be useful to musicians and composers who use
inharmonic tones and sounds. This includes a large percentage of
people composing and performing with modern musical synthesizers.
It will be of use to arrangers, musicologists, and others
interested in musical analysis. Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale
provides a unique approach to working with environmental sounds,
and there are clear applications for the use of inharmonic sounds
in film scoring. The book will also be of interest to engineers and
others interested in the design of audio devices such as musical
synthesizers, special effects devices, and keyboards.
Drawing on a passion for music, a remarkably diverse
interdisciplinary toolbox, and a gift for accessible language that
speaks equally to scholars and the general public, Jann Pasler
invites us to read as she writes "through" music, unveiling the
forces that affect our sonic encounters. In an extraordinary
collection of historical and critical essays, some appearing for
the first time in English, Pasler deconstructs the social, moral,
and political preoccupations lurking behind aesthetic taste.
Arguing that learning from musical experience is vital to our
understanding of past, present, and future, Pasler's work
trenchantly reasserts the role of music as a crucial contributor to
important public debates about who we can be as individuals,
communities, and nations.
The author's wide-ranging and perceptive approaches to musical
biography and history challenge us to rethink our assumptions about
important cultural and philosophical issues including national
identity and postmodern musical hybridity, material culture, the
economics of power, and the relationship between classical and
popular music. Her work uncovers the self-fashioning of modernists
such as Vincent d'Indy, Augusta Holmes, Jean Cocteau, and John
Cage, and addresses categories such as race, gender, and class in
the early 20th century in ways that resonate with experiences
today. She also explores how music uses time and constructs
narrative. Pasler's innovative and influential methodological
approaches, such as her notion of "question-spaces," open up the
complex cultural and political networks in which music
participates. This provides us with the reasons and tools to engage
with music in fresh and exciting ways.
In these thoughtful essays, music--whether beautiful or
cacophonous, reassuring or seemingly incomprehensible--comes alive
as a bearer of ideas and practices that offers deep insights into
how we negotiate the world. Here, Jann Pasler's Writing through
Music brilliantly demonstrates how music can be a critical lens to
focus the contemporary critical, cultural, historical, and social
issues of our time.
In Ways of Listening, musicologist Eric Clarke explores musical
meaning, music's critical function in human lives, and the
relationship between listening and musical material. Clarke
outlines an "ecological approach" to understanding the perception
of music, arguing that the way we hear and understand music is not
simply a function of our brain structure or of the musical "codes"
given to us by culture, but must be considered within the physical
and social contexts of listening.
Revolutionary approaches to compositional practice and
musicological research have been associated with Otto Laske's work
for over a quarter of a century. Laske's scientific understanding
of the compositional process has made it possible to systematically
formalize computer-assisted and computer synthesized music. In this
book, international scholars survey new directions in compositional
and musicological practices as influenced by Laske's pioneering
work. These two seemingly independent areas of inquiry,
composition, and musicology, are presented as a comprehensive
integration. The essays offer an interdisciplinary examination of
issues imbued with ethnographic considerations of the musical
experience, research in perception and brain functions, the design
of computer-based neural networks that emulate human musical
activities, investigations into the psychological make-up of
artists, and a unique perspective on how computers are used in many
different areas of music. Compositional and cognitive musicological
research are placed in a historical perspective and accompanied
with contemporary issues surrounding this research. An interview
with Otto Laske and two of his own essays are also included.
This study of Otto Laske will appeal to musicologists and
students of music theory and composition. Its interdisciplinary
content will also interest scholars in a variety of fields
including electronic music, ethnomusicology, computer science,
artificial intelligence and other cognitive sciences, psychology,
and philosophy. Researchers will appreciate the comprehensive
bibliography of Laske's compositions and writings.
A few weeks after the reunification of Germany, Leonard Bernstein
raised his baton above the ruins of the Berlin Wall and conducted a
special arrangement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The central
statement of the work, that "all men will be brothers," captured
the sentiment of those who saw a brighter future for the newly
reunited nation. This now-iconic performance is a palpable example
of "musical monumentality" - a significant concept which underlies
our cultural and ideological understanding of Western art music
since the nineteenth-century. Although the concept was first raised
in the earliest years of musicological study in the 1930s, a
satisfying exploration of the "monumental" in music has not yet
been made. Alexander Rehding, one of the brightest young stars in
the field, takes on the task in Music and Monumentality, an
elegant, thorough treatment that will serve as a foundation for all
future discussion in this area.
Rehding sets his focus on the main players of the period within
the Austro-German repertoire -Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner, Brahms,
Bruckner and Mahler- as he unpacks a two-fold definition of
"musical monumentality." In the conventional sense, monumentality
is a stylistic property often described as 'grand, ' 'uplifting, '
and 'sublime' and rife with overpowering brass chorales, sparkling
string tremolos, triumphant fanfares, and glorious thematic
returns. Yet Rehding sees the monumental in music performing a
cultural task as well: it is employed in the service of
establishing national identity. Through a clear theoretical lens,
Rehding examines how grand sound effects are strategically employed
with the view to overwhelming audiences, how supposedly immutable
musical halls of fame change over time, how challenging musical
works are domesticated, how the highest cultural achievements are
presented in immediately consumable form-in a word, how German
music emerges as a unified cultural and musical brand.
Jean Sibelius's Violin Concerto is the story of Sibelius as
performer and composer, of violin performing traditions, of
histories of musical transmission, and of virtuosity itself. It
investigates the history and legacy of one of the most recorded
concertos in the violin repertoire. Sibelius, a celebrated and
influential composer of the late 19th and 20th centuries, was an
accomplished violinist, whose enduring interest in the instrument
has been paralleled by the broad success of the only concerto in
his oeuvre: his violin concerto (premiered in 1904 and revised in
1905). Considering how violinists engage with the work, author Tina
K. Ramnarine discusses technology's central role in the concerto's
transmission from Jascha Heifetz's seminal 1935 recording to
contemporary online performances, gender issues in violin solo
careers, and nature-based musical aesthetics that lead to thinking
about the ecology of virtuosity in an era of environmental crisis.
Beginning with Sibelius's early training as a violinist and his
aspirations as a performer, Ramnarine traces the dramatic
historical context of the violin concerto. It was composed as
Finland underwent a period of heightened self-determination,
nationalism, and protest against Russian imperial policies, and it
heralded intense political dynamics relating to Europe's East-West
border that have extended to the present. This story of the violin
concerto points to the notion of Sibelius - and the virtuoso more
generally - as a political figure.
Coping with trauma and the losses of World War I was a central
concern for French musicians in the interwar period. Almost all of
them were deeply affected by the war as they fought in the
trenches, worked in military hospitals, or mourned a friend or
relative who had been wounded, killed, or taken prisoner. In
Resonant Recoveries, author Jillian C. Rogers argues that French
modernist composers processed this experience of unprecedented
violence by turning their musical activities into locations for
managing and performing trauma. Through analyses of archival
materials, French medical, philosophical, and literary texts, and
the music produced between the wars, Rogers frames World War I as a
pivotal moment in the history of music therapy. When musicians and
their audiences used music to remember lost loved ones, perform
grief, create healing bonds of friendship, and find consolation in
soothing sonic vibrations and rhythmic bodily movements, they
reconfigured music into an embodied means of consolation-a healer
of wounded minds and bodies. This in-depth account of the profound
impact that postwar trauma had on French musical life makes a
powerful case for the importance of addressing trauma, mourning,
and people's emotional lives in music scholarship. This is an open
access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and
offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access
locations.
Winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, Rock & Roll
Hall of Fame Winner of the American Book Award, Before Columbus
Foundation Winner of the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award Winner
of the MAAH Stone Book Award A Pitchfork Best Music Book of the
Year A Rolling Stone Best Music Book of the Year A Boston Globe
Summer Read "Brooks traces all kinds of lines...inviting voices to
talk to one another, seeing what different perspectives can offer,
opening up new ways of looking and listening." -New York Times "A
wide-ranging study of Black female artists, from elders like Bessie
Smith and Ethel Waters to Beyonce and Janelle Monae...Connecting
the sonic worlds of Black female mythmakers and truth-tellers."
-Rolling Stone "A gloriously polyphonic book." -Margo Jefferson,
author of Negroland How is it possible that iconic artists like
Aretha Franklin and Beyonce can be both at the center and on the
fringe of the culture industry? Daphne Brooks explores more than a
century of music archives to bring to life the critics, collectors,
and listeners who have shaped our perceptions of Black women both
on stage and in the recording studio. Liner Notes for the
Revolution offers a startling new perspective, informed by the
overlooked contributions of other Black women artists. We discover
Zora Neale Hurston as a sound archivist and performer, Lorraine
Hansberry as a queer feminist critic of modern culture, and Pauline
Hopkins as America's first Black female cultural commentator.
Brooks tackles the complicated racial politics of blues music
recording, song collecting, and rock and roll criticism in this
long overdue celebration of Black women musicians as radical
intellectuals.
Using Schumann's Eichendorff Liederkreis as the primary example, this book sheds new light on the structure of nineteenth century song cycles and on the Schumann's particular response to the problem of musical coherence in large scale works. Drawing on analysis, literary criticism, and source studies, this book argues for a new conception of the nineteenth-century song cycle. Rather than a unified whole, the cycle is seen as a fragmentary and open-ended form that enables Schumann to express the romantic themes of transcendence and ineffability in musical terms. THe book begins with a general discussion of the cycle as a genre. The heart of the book is a series of closely argued analyses of five of the Eichendorff songs, with particular attention on the relationship between text and music. Ferris concludes by setting the Liederkreis within the context of Schumann's other 1840 song cycles.
This classic has outlived its original title, but not its
usefulness.
This Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music provides detailed and
authoritative articles for the most important composers, concepts,
genres, music educators, performers, theorists, writings, and works
of cultivated music in Europe and the Americas during the period
1789-1914. The roster of biographical entries includes not only
canonical composers such as Beethoven, Berlioz, Brahms, Chopin,
Faure, Grieg, Liszt, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Mussorgsky, Rossini,
Schubert, Robert Schumann, Sibelius, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Verdi,
Wagner, and Wolf, but also less-well-known distinguished
contemporaries of those composers (among them George Whitefield
Chadwick, Cecile Chaminade, Ernesto Elorduy, Chiquinha Gonzaga,
Fanny Hensel, C. H. Parry, and Clara Schumann, to name but a few).
Significant literary and cultural topics such as Goethe's Faust and
Wagner's theoretical writings of the 1850s, as well as entries on
other cultural luminaries who significantly influenced music's
Romanticisms - among them J. S. Bach, Goethe, Haydn, Handel, Heine,
Mozart, Schiller, and Shakespeare - are also included. Entries on
important institutions (conservatory, orpheon, Mannerchor),
concepts (biographical fallacy, copyright, exoticism, feminism,
nationalism, performance practice), and political caesurae and
movements (First and Second French Empire, First, Second, and Third
French Republic, Franco-Prussian War, Revolutions of 1848,
Risorgimento) round out the dictionary section. Like other volumes
in this series, this book's more than 500 entries are preceded by
an introductory essay that explains the essential concepts
necessary for understanding and exploring further the vast and
complex musical landscape of Romanticism, plus a detailed
Chronology. Concluding the volume is an extensive bibliography that
lists the most important source-critical series of editions of
Romantic music, important general writings on the period and its
music, and composer-by-composer bibliographies.
What does music have to say about modernity? How can this
apparently unworldly art tell us anything about modern life? In Out
of Time, author Julian Johnson begins from the idea that it can,
arguing that music renders an account of modernity from the inside,
a history not of events but of sensibility, an archaeology of
experience. If music is better understood from this broad
perspective, our idea of modernity itself is also enriched by the
specific insights of music. The result is a rehearing of modernity
and a rethinking of music - an account that challenges ideas of
linear progress and reconsiders the common concerns of music, old
and new. If all music since 1600 is modern music, the similarities
between Monteverdi and Schoenberg, Bach and Stravinsky, or
Beethoven and Boulez, become far more significant than their
obvious differences. Johnson elaborates this idea in relation to
three related areas of experience - temporality, history and
memory; space, place and technology; language, the body, and sound.
Criss-crossing four centuries of Western culture, he moves between
close readings of diverse musical examples (from the madrigal to
electronic music) and drawing on the history of science and
technology, literature, art, philosophy, and geography. Against the
grain of chronology and the usual divisions of music history,
Johnson proposes profound connections between musical works from
quite different times and places. The multiple lines of the
resulting map, similar to those of the London Underground, produce
a bewildering network of plural connections, joining Stockhausen to
Galileo, music printing to sound recording, the industrial
revolution to motivic development, steam trains to waltzes. A
significant and groundbreaking work, Out of Time is essential
reading for anyone interested in the history of music and
modernity.
This monograph offers a unique analysis of social protest in
popular music. It presents theoretical descriptions, methodological
tools, and an approach that encompasses various fields of
musicology, cultural studies, semiotics, discourse analysis, media
studies, and political and social sciences. The author argues that
protest songs should be taken as a musical genre on their own. He
points out that the general approach, when discussing these songs,
has been so far that of either analyzing the lyrics or the social
context. For some reason, the music itself has been often
overlooked. This book attempts to fill this gap. Its central thesis
is that a complete overview of these repertoires demands a thorough
interaction among contextual, lyrical, and musical elements
together. To accomplish this, the author develops a novel model
that systemizes and investigates musical repertoires. The model is
then applied to four case studies, those, too, chosen among topics
that are little (or not at all) frequented by scholars.
This book celebrates Madvillainy as a representation of two genius
musical minds melding to form one revered supervillain. A product
of circumstance, the album came together soon after MF DOOM's
resurgence and Madlib's reluctant return from avant-garde jazz to
hip-hop. Written from the alternating perspectives of three fake
music journalist superheroes-featuring interviews with Wildchild,
M.E.D., Walasia, Daedalus, Stones Throw execs, and many other real
individuals involved with the album's creation-this book blends
fiction and non-fiction to celebrate Madvillainy not just as an
album, but as a folkloric artifact. It is one specific retelling of
a story which, like Madvillain's music, continues to spawn infinite
legends.
More than thirty years after The Beatles split up, the music of
Lennon, McCartney and Harrison lives on. What exactly were the
magical ingredients of those legendary songs? why are they still so
influential for today's bands? This groundbreaking book sets out to
exlore The Beatles' songwriting techniques in a clear and readable
style. It is aimed not only at musicians but anyone who has ever
enjoyed the work of one of the most productive and successful
songwriting partnerships of the 20th century. Author Dominic Pedler
explains the chord sequences, melodies and harmonies that made up
The Beatles' self penned songs and how they uncannily complemented
the lyrical themes. He also assesses the contributions that rhythm,
form and arrangement made to the Beatles unique sound. Throughout
the book the printed music of the Beatles' songs appears alongside
the text, illustrating the authors explanations. The Songwriting
Secrets of The Beatles is an essential addition to Beatles
literature - a new and perceptive analysis of the music itself
itself as performed by what Paul McCartney still calls 'a really
good, tight little band'.
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