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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
The sociology of music is a young discipline, and this book
addresses the issues, demonstrating that there are a number of
different musics-differing not only in how tonal material is used
and how the music is structured but also in the role musical
activity plays in social life.
In 1997 the rap group Racionais MCs (the 'Rational' MCs) recorded
the album Sobrevivendo no Inferno (Surviving in Hell), subsequently
changing the hip-hop scene in Sao Paulo and firmly establishing
itself as the point of reference for youth across Brazil. In an era
when rappers needed to defend the very idea that their work was
indeed music and a time when neighborhoods such as Capao Redondo,
from where Racionais frontman Mano Brown hailed, often topped
homicide statistics, Sobrevivendo empowered as it provoked. As one
journalist noted, "the underworld of Sao Paulo's working-class
suburbs is dominated by cheap thrills and provides little space for
representation." Sobrevivendo changed all of that; a brutal but
invigorating imagination was born. The lure of Sobrevivendo is the
particular combination of word and sound that powerfully involves
listeners, especially those millions of young Brazilians who live
in the neighborhoods on the periphery of Brazil's megacities. This
book celebrates the 25-year anniversary of Sobrevivendo by
representing the album's power not only within the hip-hop
community but also in other cultural domains such as cinema and
literature. The author also provides his own narrative spins on the
sentiment of Sobrevivendo, thus making the book a creative mix of
cultural analysis and inspired testimony.
Collaborative Insights provides new perspectives informed by
interdisciplinary thinking on musical care throughout the life
course. In this book, volume editors Katie Rose M. Sanfilippo and
Neta Spiro define musical care as the role that music - music
listening as well as music-making - plays in supporting any aspect
of people's developmental or health needs, for example physical and
mental health, cognitive and behavioural development, and
interpersonal relationships. Musical care is relevant to several
types of music, approach, and setting, and through the introduction
of that new term musical care, the authors prioritise the element
of care that is shared among these otherwise diverse contexts and
musical activities, celebrating the nuanced interweaving of theory
and practice. The multifaceted nature of musical care requires
reconciling perspectives and expertise from different fields and
disciplines. This book shows interdisciplinary collaboration in
action by bringing together music practitioners and researchers to
write each chapter collaboratively to discuss musical care from an
interdisciplinary perspective and offer directions for future work.
The life course structure, from infancy to end of life, highlights
the connections and themes present in approach, context, and
practices throughout our lives. Thus, the book represents both the
start of a conversation and a call to action, inspiring new
collaborations that provide new insights to musical care in its
many facets.
Since the mid-twentieth century, Zoltan Kodaly's
child-developmental philosophy for teaching music has had
significant positive impact on music education around the world,
and is now at the core of music teaching in the United States and
other English speaking countries. The Kodaly Today handbook series
is the first comprehensive system to update and apply the Kodaly
concepts to teaching music in elementary school classrooms. Kodaly
in the First Grade Classroom provides teachers with a step-by-step
road map for developing children's performance, creative movement,
and literacy skills in an organic and thoughtful manner. Through
six years of field-testing with music kindergarten teachers in the
United States, Great Britain, and Hungary (the home country of
Zoltan Kodaly), authors Micheal Houlahan and Philip Tacka have
developed a methodology specifically for 21st century classrooms.
Houlahan and Tacka use the latest research findings in cognition
and perception to create a system not only appropriate for the
developmental stages of first grade students but also one which
integrates vertically between elementary music classes. The methods
outlined in this volume encourage greater musical ability and
creativity in children by teaching them to sing, move, play
instruments, and develop music literacy skills. In addition, Kodaly
in the First Grade Classroom promotes critical thinking, problem
solving, and collaboration skills. Although the book uses the
Kodaly philosophy, its methodology has also been tested by teachers
certified in Orff and Dalcroze, and has proven an essential guide
for teachers no matter what their personal philosophy and specific
training might be. Numerous children's songs are incorporated into
Kodaly in the First Grade Classroom, as well as over 35 detailed
lesson plans that demonstrate how music and literacy curriculum
goals are transformed into tangible musical objectives. Scholarly
yet practical and accessible, this volume is sure to be an
essential guide for kindergarten and early childhood music teachers
everywhere.
In 1877, Ruskin accused Whistler of 'flinging a pot of paint in the
public's face'. Was he right? After all, Whistler always denied
that the true function of art was to represent anything. If a
painting does not represent, what is it, other than mere paint,
flung in the public's face? Whistler's answer was simple: painting
is music - or it is poetry. Georges Braque, half a century later,
echoed Whistler's answer. So did Braque's friends Apollinaire and
Ponge. They presented their poetry as music too - and as painting.
But meanwhile, composers such as Satie and Stravinsky were
presenting their own art - music - as if it transposed the values
of painting or of poetry. The fundamental principle of this
intermedial aesthetic, which bound together an extraordinary
fraternity of artists in all media in Paris, from 1885 to 1945, was
this: we must always think about the value of a work of art, not
within the logic of its own medium, but as if it transposed the
value of art in another medium. Peter Dayan traces the history of
this principle: how it created our very notion of 'great art', why
it declined as a vision from the 1960s and how, in the 21st
century, it is fighting back.
Norris presents a series of closely linked chapters on recent
developments in epistemology, philosophy of language, cognitive
science, literary theory, musicology and other related fields.
While to this extent adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Norris
also very forcefully challenges the view that the academic
"disciplines" as we know them are so many artificial constructs of
recent date and with no further role than to prop up existing
divisions of intellectual labour. He makes his case through some
exceptionally acute revisionist readings of diverse thinkers such
as Derrida, Paul de Man, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, Michael Dummett and
John McDowell. In each instance Norris stresses the value of
bringing various trans-disciplinary perspectives to bear while
none-the-less maintaining adequate standards of area-specific
relevance and method. Most importantly he asserts the central role
of recent developments in cognitive science as pointing a way
beyond certain otherwise intractable problems in philosophy of mind
and language.
Analytical and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music presents
intriguing explanations of extraordinary musical creations from
diverse cultures across the world. All the authors are experts,
deeply engaged in the traditions they describe. They recount the
contexts in which the music is created and performed, and then hone
in on elucidating how the music works as sound in process.
Accompanying the explanatory prose is a wealth of diagrams,
transcriptions, recordings, and (online) multimedia presentations,
all intended to convey the richness, beauty, and ingenuity of their
subjects. The music ranges across geography and cultures--court
music of Japan and medieval Europe, pagode song from Brazil, solos
by the jazz pianist Thelonius Monk and by the sitar master
Budhaditya Mukherjee, form-and-timbre improvisations of a Boston
sound collective, South Korean folk drumming, and the ceremonial
music of indigenous cultures in North American and Australia--much
of which has never been so thoroughly analyzed before. Thus the
essays diversify and expand the scope of this book's companion
volume, Analytical Studies in World Music, to all inhabited
continents and many of its greatest musical traditions. An
introduction and an afterword point out common analytical
approaches, and present a new way to classify music according to
its temporal organization. Two special chapters consider the
juxtaposition of music from different cultures: of world music
traditions and popular music genres, and of Balinese music and
European Art music, raising provocative questions about the musical
encounters and fusions of today's interconnected world. For
everyone listening in wonderment to the richness of world music,
whether listener, creator, or performer, this book will be an
invaluable resource and a fount of inspiration.
Classic book originally published in 1760. After the memoirs there
is a Catalogue of Works and Observations on the Works of George
Frederic Handel.
Existential semiotics is a new paradigm which combines classical
semiotics with continental philosophy. It does not mean a return to
existentialism, albeit philosophers from Hegel and Kierkegaard to
Heidegger, Jaspers and Sartre are its sources of inspiration. It
introduces completely new sign categories and concepts to the
field, recasting the whole of semiotics, communication and
signification as integral to a transcendental art. The volume
contains essays on music, the voice, silence, calligraphy,
metaphysics, myth, aesthetics, entropy, cultural heritage, film,
the Bible, among other subjects.
Do You Believe in the Power of Rock & Roll? is a history of
alternative rock from John Robb, with the music still ringing in
his ears. This collection follows John's journey from the late
1970s, when he was first caught up in punk's high-octane thrill, to
the present day, via the early days of the rave scene, the birth of
electronic and techno, and myriad bands that spun off on their own
idiosyncratic paths. John was the first person to write about
Nirvana, he coined the term Britpop, and he documented the Stone
Roses' rise out of Manchester before anyone else was interested. He
was at every pivotal gig, and has interviewed every key player in
the business, including Jordan, the queen of punk, founding father
of new American rock Steve Albini, goth-rock guitarist Daniel Ash,
infamous Oasis co-founder Noel Gallagher, and music greats like
Lemmy and Poly Styrene. Few others have witnessed first-hand so
many important moments of the last forty years of rock history.
Here, they come together to form the essential history of a
personal quest to document the ever-changing soundtrack of the
modern world.
Number 10 Sound: The Musical Way 10 the Scientific Revolution is a
collection of twelve essays by writers from the fields of
musicology and the history of science. The essays show the idea of
music held by Euro th pean intellectuals who lived from the second
half of the 15 century to the th early 17: physicians (e. g.
Marsilio Ficino), scholars of musical theory (e. g. Gioseffo
Zarlino, Vincenzo Galilei), natural philosophers (e. g. Fran cis
Bacon, Isaac Beeckman, Marin Mersenne), astronomers and mathema
ticians (e. g. Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei ). Together with
other people of the time, whom the Reader will meet in the course
of the book, these intellectuals share an idea of music that is far
removed from the way it is commonly conceived nowadays: it is the
idea of music as a science whose object-musical sound--can be
quantified and demonstrated, or enquired into experimentally with
the methods and instruments of modem scientific enquiry. In this
conception, music to be heard is a complex, variable structure
based on few simple elements--e. g. musical intervals-, com bined
according to rules and criteria which vary along with the different
ages. However, the varieties of music created by men would not
exist if they were not based on certain musical models--e. g. the
consonances-, which exist in the mind of God or are hidden in the
womb of Nature, which man discovers and demonstrates, and finally
translates into the lan guage of sounds."
Nevermind, Achtung Baby, Use Your Illusion 1&2 - the 90s saw
some classic albums produced by artists such as Nirvana, U2, Gun n'
Roses and Red Hot Chili Peppers, as well as a resurgence in country
music popularized by Shania Twain and Garth Brooks. Combining
information from both the US and UK charts provided by the
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and British
Phonographic Industry (BPI), 100 Best Selling Albums of the 90s
features chart-topping work from Michael Jackson, Puff Daddy and
Green Day. Each album entry is accompanied by the original sleeve
artwork - front and back - and is packed full of facts and
recording information, including a complete track listing, musician
and production credits, and an authoritative commentary on the
record and its place in cultural history. Soundtracks featured
include the 60s and 70s hits on Forrest Gump, the Elton John/Tim
Rice songs in The Lion King, and the orchestral score for Titanic
(and Celine Dion's Oscar-winning My Heart Will Go On). Other
stand-out albums include the Eagles' reforming to make Hell Freezes
Over and Eric Clapton's Unplugged, a career revival for him in the
popular 90s back-to-basics semi-acoustic series. With vinyl sales
now at their highest in 25 years, 100 Best Selling Albums of the
90s is an expert celebration of popular music from Sheryl Crow to
Shania Twain, from the Spice Girls to the Backstreet Boys, from
Gloria Estefan to Michael Jackson to Lauryn Hill.
'I'm going to camp out on the land ... try and get my soul free'.
So sang Joni Mitchell in 1970 on 'Woodstock'. But Woodstock is only
the tip of the iceberg. Popular music festivals are one of the
strikingly successful and enduring features of seasonal popular
cultural consumption for young people and older generations of
enthusiasts. From pop and rock to folk, jazz and techno, under
stars and canvas, dancing in the streets and in the mud, the
pleasures and politics of the carnival since the 1950s are
discussed in this innovative and richly-illustrated collection. The
Pop Festival brings scholarship in cultural studies, media studies,
musicology, sociology, and history together in one volume to
explore the music festival as a key event in the cultural landscape
- and one of major interest to young people as festival-goers
themselves and as students.
This book provides an in-depth introduction and overview of current
research in computational music analysis. Its seventeen chapters,
written by leading researchers, collectively represent the
diversity as well as the technical and philosophical sophistication
of the work being done today in this intensely interdisciplinary
field. A broad range of approaches are presented, employing
techniques originating in disciplines such as linguistics,
information theory, information retrieval, pattern recognition,
machine learning, topology, algebra and signal processing. Many of
the methods described draw on well-established theories in music
theory and analysis, such as Forte's pitch-class set theory,
Schenkerian analysis, the methods of semiotic analysis developed by
Ruwet and Nattiez, and Lerdahl and Jackendoff's Generative Theory
of Tonal Music. The book is divided into six parts, covering
methodological issues, harmonic and pitch-class set analysis, form
and voice-separation, grammars and hierarchical reduction, motivic
analysis and pattern discovery and, finally, classification and the
discovery of distinctive patterns. As a detailed and up-to-date
picture of current research in computational music analysis, the
book provides an invaluable resource for researchers, teachers and
students in music theory and analysis, computer science, music
information retrieval and related disciplines. It also provides a
state-of-the-art reference for practitioners in the music
technology industry.
How far can the relationship between music and politics be used to
promote a more peaceful world? That is the central question which
motivates this challenging new work. Combining theory from renowned
academics such as Johan Galtung, Cindy Cohen and Karen Abi-Ezzi
with compelling stories from musicians like Yair Dalal, the book
also includes an exclusive interview with folk legend Pete Seeger.
In each instance, practical and theoretical perspectives have been
combined in order to explore music's role in conflict
transformation.The book is divided into five sections. The first,
'Frameworks', reflects indepth on the connections between music and
peace, while the second, 'Music and Politics', discusses the actual
impact of music on society. The third section, 'Healing and
Education' offers specific examples of the transformative power of
music in prisons and other settings of conflict-resolution, while
the fourth, 'Stories from the Field', tells true stories about
music's impact in the Middle East and elsewhere. Finally,
'Reflections' encourages the reader to consider a personal
evaluation of the work with a view to further explorations of the
capacity of music to promote peace-building.
In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed film music author Kevin
Donnelly offers the first sustained theorization of synchronization
in sound film. Donnelly addresses the manner in which the lock of
the audio and the visual exerts a perceptible synergy, an aesthetic
he dubs occult: a secret and esoteric effect that can dissipate in
the face of an awareness of its existence. Drawing upon theories of
sound from Sergei Eisenstein to Pierre Schaeffer to Michel Chion,
the book investigates points of synchronization as something like
repose, providing moments of comfort in a potentially threatening
environment that can be fraught with sound and image stimuli.
Correspondingly, lack of synchrony between sound and images is
characterized as potentially disturbing for the viewer, a
discomfort that signals moments of danger. From this perspective,
the interplay between the two becomes the central dynamic of
audio-visual culture more generally, which, as Donnelly argues,
provides a starting point for a new understanding of audio/visual
interactions. This fresh approach to the topic is discussed in
theoretical and historical terms as well as elaborated through
analysis of and reference to a broad selection of films and their
soundtracks including, among others, Singin' in the Rain, Saw,
Shanghai Express, and Assault on Precinct 13.
Critiques and calls for reform have existed for decades within
music education, but few publications have offered concrete
suggestions as to how things might be done differently. Motivated
by a desire to do just that, College Music Curricula for a New
Century considers what a more inclusive, dynamic, and socially
engaged curriculum of musical study might look like in
universities. Editor Robin Moore creates a dialogue among faculty,
administrators, and students about what the future of college music
instruction should be and how teachers, institutions, and
organizations can transition to new paradigms. Including
contributions from leading figures in ethnomusicology, music
education, theory/composition, professional performance, and
administration, College Music Curricula for a New Century addresses
college-level curriculum reform, focusing primarily on performance
and music education degrees, and offer ideas and examples for a
more inclusive, dynamic, and socially engaged curriculum of applied
musical study. This book will appeal to thoughtful faculty looking
for direction on how to enact reform, to graduate students with
investment in shaping future music curricula, and to administrators
who know change is on the horizon and seek wisdom and practical
advice for implementing change. College Music Curricula for a New
Century reaches far beyond any musical subdiscipline and addresses
issues pertinent to all areas of music study.
The vast majority of films produced by Mumbai's commercial Hindi
language film industry - known world-wide as Bollywood - feature
songs as a central component of the cinematic narrative. While many
critics have addressed the visual characteristics of these song
sequences, very few have engaged with their aurality and with the
meanings that they generate within the film narrative and within
Indian society at large. Because the film songs operate as powerful
sonic ambassadors to individual and cultural memories in India and
abroad, however, they are significant and carefully-constructed
works of art. Bollywood Sounds focuses on the songs of Indian films
in their historical, social, and commercial contexts. Author Jayson
Beaster-Jones walks the reader through the highly collaborative
songs, detailing the contributions of film directors, music
directors and composers, lyricists, musicians, and singers. A vital
component of film promotion on broadcast media, Bollywood songs are
distributed on soundtracks by music companies, and have long been
the most popular music genre in India - even among listeners who
rarely see the movies. Through close musical and multimedia
analysis of more than twenty landmark compositions, Bollywood
Sounds illustrates how the producers of Indian film songs mediate a
variety of influences, musical styles, instruments, and performance
practices to create this distinctive genre. Beaster-Jones argues
that, even from the moment of its inception, the film song genre
has always been in the unique position of demonstrating
cosmopolitan orientations while maintaining discrete sound and
production practices over its long history. As a survey of the
music of seventy years of Hindi films, Bollywood Sounds is the
first monograph to provide a long-term historical insights into
Hindi film songs, and their musical and cinematic conventions, in
ways that will appeal both to scholars and newcomers to Indian
cinema.
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