![]() |
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
||
|
Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
A musical phrase, or, for that matter, a musical unit of any size or shape, becomes an image whenever we imagine it to be invested with a content whose origins lie outside music. Such a content, according to the theory developed here, constitutes the image's conventional significance; it accounts for whatever strikes us about the image as having a common and familiar ring. That being so, the origins in question must be coincident with the fundamental ideas--the archetypes--that have been traditionally represented as underlying and unifying Western culture. As the theoretical constructs they are, arehctypes are never encountered directly. It is in the form of their local variants that we make contact with the archetypes, and it is at this local level that the present book sets its sights: style, the typical or shared element in the musical imagery of a time and place, is studies as a function of Zeitgeist, the complex of beliefs, values, and ideals of a community. The approach is both thematic and historical, in keeping with a key objective of archetypal criticism. Far from repudiating the popular notion that music expresses the human emotions, this study attempts to recast emotion theory by examining musical images for kinds of behavior from which we may infer not only emotion (pathos, effectus) but also personality (ethos). Ethical and affective distinctions are very sharply drawn, in an effort to clarify and widen the vocabulary of musical commentary, as well as to provide cultural and historical backing for contents long considered the cliches of musical expression.
In the mid 1920s, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote a song called "Ol' Man River" that combined the seriousness of a Negro spiritual with the crowd-pleasing power of a Broadway anthem. Inspired, according to Kern, by the voice of the African American singer Paul Robeson, "Ol' Man River" went on to great success in the Broadway musical Show Boat and became a signature song for Robeson, who turned the tune towards his own goals as an activist. But the story of "Ol' Man River" goes deeper than the curiosity of a song recorded by so many in so many different ways. For at the heart of Oscar Hammerstein's lyric is a clear-eyed vision of the black experience in American history. Anyone-black or white-who thought they should sing "Ol' Man River" has had to deal with the charged racial content of the song. Who Should Sing "Ol' Man River"? traces this aspect of "Ol' Man River's" course through American history, an at-times high-stakes journey where the African American struggle for dignity and equality came down to the lyrics of a popular song. However beyond Robeson and Show Boat, "Ol' Man River" also had a long and rich life in the world of popular music. An astonishing variety of singers and musicians from across the musical spectrum-from pop to jazz, opera to doo wop, rhythm and blues to gospel to reggae-all chose to perform or record it. Who Should Sing "Ol' Man River"?: The Lives of an American Song traces out the performance history of this remarkable song by listening closely to over two hundred recorded and filmed versions dating from the song's debut in 1927 to the present. Many famous pop singers made "Ol' Man River" a signature song; among them Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland: white performers who took up a lyric told from the black perspective. Important jazz artists such as Bix Biederbecke, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, Count Basie, and Keith Jarrett all played it. Opera singers-black and white, male and female-took it up as well. And a slew of surprising names from the first decades of rock and roll also recorded this inescapable tune, among them Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, the Temptations, Cher, and Rod Stewart.
Never has there been such an exciting time to be a music teacher. Band, choir, and orchestra are ubiquitous in schools and have come to be known as the primary mode that students experience music at the secondary level. Similarly, elementary school classrooms feature approaches by Orff, Kodaly, Dalcroze, and Music Learning Theory, among a host of others. But, what is next? In this enlightening guide, author Clint A. Randles provides music educators with the practical tools to turn their classrooms into student production studios. Addressing everything from a new conceptualization of the physical classroom space to the cables and other audio equipment no music educator should be without, Randles puts creativity, technology, recording arts, songwriting, music production, and live performance at the center of music classrooms.
A compiled set of studies in the contrapuntal style of harmony.
Music Sociology explores 16 different genres to demonstrate that music everywhere reflects social values, organisational processes, meanings and individual identity. Presenting original ethnographic research, the contributors use descriptions of subcultures to explain the concepts of music sociology, including the rituals that link people to music, the past and each other. Music Sociology introduces the sociology of music to those who may not be familiar with it and provides a basic historical perspective on popular music in America and beyond.
'Eye hEar The Visual in Music' employs the concept of the visual in proximate relation to music, producing a tension: 'is it not the case that there is a gulf between painting and music, between the visible and the audible? One is full of colour and light yet silent; one is invisible and marvellously noisy.' Such a belief, this book argues, betrays an ideological constraint on music, desiccating it to sound, and art to vision. The starting point of this study is more hybrid (and hydrating): that music is never employed without numerous and complex intersections with the visual. By involving the concept of synaesthesia, the book evokes music's multi-sensory nature, stops it from sounding alone, and offers music as a subject for art historians. Music bleeds into art and visuality, in its graphic depiction in notation, in the theatre of performance, its sights and sites. This book looks at music in its absolute guise as a model for art; at notation and the conductor as the silent visual fulcra around which music circulates; at the music and image of Erik Satie; at the concert hall as white cube; at the symphonic film '2001: A Space Odyssey'; and at the liminality of John Cage and Andy Warhol.
In Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space James Gordon Williams reframes the nature and purpose of jazz improvisation to illuminate the cultural work being done by five creative musicians between 2005 and 2019. The political thought of five African American improvisers-trumpeters Terence Blanchard and Ambrose Akinmusire, drummers Billy Higgins and Terri Lyne Carrington, and pianist Andrew Hill-is documented through insightful, multilayered case studies that make explicit how these musicians articulate their positionality in broader society. Informed by Black feminist thought, these case studies unite around the theory of Black musical space that comes from the lived experiences of African Americans as they improvise through daily life. The central argument builds upon the idea of space-making and the geographic imagination in Black Geographies theory. Williams considers how these musicians interface with contemporary social movements like Black Lives Matter, build alternative institutional models that challenge gender imbalance in improvisation culture, and practice improvisation as joyful affirmation of Black value and mobility. Both Terence Blanchard and Ambrose Akinmusire innovate musical strategies to address systemic violence. Billy Higgins's performance is discussed through the framework of breath to understand his politics of inclusive space. Terri Lyne Carrington confronts patriarchy in jazz culture through her Social Science music project. The work of Andrew Hill is examined through the context of his street theory, revealing his political stance on performance and pedagogy. All readers will be elevated by this innovative and timely book that speaks to issues that continue to shape the lives of African Americans today.
This volume of essays draws together recent work on historical music theory of the Renaissance. The collection spans the major themes addressed by Renaissance writers on music and highlights the differing approaches to this body of work by modern scholars, including: historical and theoretical perspectives; consideration of the broader cultural context for writing about music in the Renaissance; and the dissemination of such work. Selected from a variety of sources ranging from journals, monographs and specialist edited volumes, to critical editions, translations and facsimiles, these previously published articles reflect a broad chronological and geographical span, and consider Renaissance sources that range from the overtly pedagogical to the highly speculative. Taken together, this collection enables consideration of key essays side by side aided by the editor's introductory essay which highlights ongoing debates and offers a general framework for interpreting past and future directions in the study of historical music theory from the Renaissance.
Rhythm and Transforms is a book that explores rhythm in music, its structure and how we perceive it. The book will be bought by engineers interested in acoustic signal processing as well as musicians, composers and computer scientists. Anyone interested in the scientific basis of music from psychologists to the designers of electronic musical instruments will be interested in this book.
Metaphysics and Music in Adorno and Heidegger explains how two notoriously opposed German philosophers share a rethinking of the possibility of metaphysics via notions of music and waiting. This is connected to the historical materialist project of social change by way of the radical Italian composer Luigi Nono.
The study of musical composition has been marked by a didactic, technique-based approach, focusing on the understanding of musical language and grammar -harmony, counterpoint, orchestration and arrangement - or on generic and stylistic categories. In the field of the psychology of music, the study of musical composition, even in the twenty-first century, remains a poor cousin to the literature which relates to musical perception, music performance, musical preferences, musical memory and so on. Our understanding of the compositional process has, in the main, been informed by anecdotal after-the-event accounts or post hoc analyses of composition. The Act of Musical Composition: Studies in the Creative Process presents the first coherent exploration around this unique aspect of human creative activity. The central threads, or key themes - compositional process, creative thinking and problem-solving - are integrated by the combination of theoretical understandings of creativity with innovative empirical work.
This volume gathers together a cross-section of essays and book chapters dealing with the ways in which musicians and their music have been pressed into the service of political, nationalist and racial ideologies. Arranged chronologically according to their subject matter, the selections cover Western and non-Western musics, as well as art and popular musics, from the eighteenth century to the present day. The introduction features detailed commentaries on sources beyond those included in the volume, and as such provides an invaluable and comprehensive reading list for researchers and educators alike. The volume brings together for the first time seminal articles written by leading scholars, and presents them in such a way as to contribute significantly to our understanding of the use and abuse of music for ideological ends.
General Music: Dimensions of Practice is a practical guide for music teachers and teaching artists who strive to teach music holistically. The book begins by framing general music as a holistic music education that is comprehensive, meaningful, and relevant to diverse learners in school and community settings. It is followed by chapters that are organized into one of four dimensions of music practice: performing, connecting, creating, and responding. Chapter authors share creative and innovative teaching ideas, for both elementary and secondary school students, that focus on a wide range of topics, including: songwriting, composing, improvising, singing, moving, playing, listening, analyzing, contextualizing, and connecting. Each chapter provides (a) a rationale for a given area of music study, establishing its importance and relevance; (b) a research or theoretical background, to inform and guide practice; and (c) a pedagogical model or framework illustrated through lesson ideas, curriculum units, or vignettes. The ideas in this book seek to inspire and guide teachers as they build comprehensive music programs that are informed by students and communities.
This book is an intellectual and cultural history about one of the most striking phenomena in all of nineteenth-century culture-namely, the interaction of nationalism and music. Nearly all the nation-building movements that swept across Europe in that century found some of their most influential and lasting expressions through the art of nationalist composers who took an active part in those movements. The political, intellectual, and artistic story behind some of the greatest musical works of the time and the artists who created them is the book's focus. Beginning with a theoretical explanation of the relationship between nationalism and music, three composers then come forward to stand at the center of the analysis: Richard Wagner in Gemany, Bedrich Smetana in the Czech lands, and Edvard Grieg in Norway. Their political and artistic projects to create a national music for their countries are the topic of the second chapter. The third chapter explores in detail the essential role that folk music played in nationalism as an attempt to fuse artistically the urban and rural populations into one national whole. The fourth chapter discusses the conflicts within nationalist movements over foreign artistic influence on the national culture. The international dimensions of nationalist music are the subject of the fifth chapter, examining Wagner's, Smetana's, and Grieg's aspirations for their art to represent their nations to the world. Finally, the concluding chapter offers a sweeping overview of nationalist composers and their works for a probing historical summary of music's contribution to nation building. As one of the very few broad, comparative studies of nationalist music, Music Makes the Nation is an essential resource for students and scholars in history and musicology. In addition, as a groundbreaking analysis of the socio-political functions of nationalist music, the book will be of interest to those studying nationalism and political science.
From the turn of the century to the 1960s, the songwriters of Tin Pan Alley were synonymous with American popular music. Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart-even today these giants remain household names, their musicals regularly revived, their methods and styles analyzed and imitated, and their songs the bedrock of jazz and cabaret. In this new edition of The Poets of Tin Pan Alley, authors Philip Furia and Laurie Patterson offer a unique perspective on these great songwriters, showing how their poetic lyrics were as important as their brilliant music in shaping a golden age of American popular song. Furia and Patterson continue the tradition of great perception and understanding established in the first edition as they explore the deft rhymes, inventive imagery, and witty solutions these songwriters used to breathe new life into rigidly established genres. They devote full chapters to such greats as Irving Berlin, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Oscar Hammerstain II, Howard Dietz, E.Y. Harburg, Dorothy Fields, Leo Robin, and Johnny Mercer. They also offer a comprehensive survey of other lyricists who wrote for the sheet-music industry, Broadway, Hollywood, and Harlem nightclub revues. This was the era that produced The New Yorker, Don Marquis, Dorothy Parker, and E.B. White-and the book places Tin Pan Alley lyrics firmly in this fascinating historical context. In these pages, the lyrics emerge as an important element of American modernism, as the lyricists, like the great modernist poets, took the American vernacular and made it sing.
From Afro Sheen to Theaster Gates and from Soul Train to Chance the Rapper, Black Chicago draws sustenance from a culture rooted in self-determination, aspiration, and hustle. In Energy Never Dies, Ayana Contreras embarks on a journey to share the implausible success stories and breathtaking achievements of Black Chicago's artists and entrepreneurs. Past and present generations speak with one another, maintaining a vital connection to a beautiful narrative of Black triumph and empowerment that still inspires creativity and pride. Contreras weaves a hidden history from these true stories and the magic released by undervalued cultural artifacts. As she does, the idea that the improbable is always possible emerges as an indestructible Afro-Optimism that binds a people together. Passionate and enlightening, Energy Never Dies uses the power of storytelling to show how optimism and courage fuel the dreams of Black Chicago.
This book explores historical and philosophical connections between music, leisure, and education. Specifically, it considers how music learning, teaching, and participation can be reconceptualized in terms of leisure. Taking as its starting point "the art of living" and the ethical question of how one should live, the book engages a wide range of scholarship to problematize the place of non-professional music-making in historical and contemporary (Western) conceptions of the good life and the common good. Part I provides a general background on music education, school music, the work ethic, leisure studies, recreation, play, and conduct. Part II focuses on two significant currents of thought and activity during the Progressive Era in the United States, the settlement movement and the recreation movement. The examination demonstrates how societal concerns over conduct (the "threat of leisure") and differing views on the purpose of music learning and teaching led to a fracturing between those espousing generalist and specialist positions. The four chapters of Part III take readers through considerations of happiness (eudaimonia) and the good life, issues of work-life balance and the play spirit, leisure satisfaction in relation to consumerism, individualism, and the common good, and finally, parenting logics in relation to extracurriculars, music learning, and serious leisure.
Music education has historically had a tense relationship with social justice. One the one hand, educators concerned with music practices have long preoccupied themselves with ideas of open participation and the potentially transformative capacity that musical interaction fosters. On the other hand, they have often done so while promoting and privileging a particular set of musical practices, traditions, and forms of musical knowledge, which has in turn alienated and even excluded many children from music education opportunities. Teaching multicultural practices, for example, has historically provided potentially useful pathways for music practices that are widely thought to be socially just. However, curricula often map alien musical values onto other musics and in so doing negate the social value of these practices, grounding them in a politics of difference wherein "recognition of our difference" limits the push that might take students from tolerance to respect and to renewed understanding and interaction. The Oxford Handbook of Social Justice in Music Education provides a comprehensive overview and scholarly analyses of the major themes and issues relating to social justice in musical and educational practice and scholastic inquiry worldwide. The first section of the handbook conceptualizes social justice while framing its pursuit within broader social, historical, cultural, and political contexts and concerns. Authors in the succeeding sections of the handbook fill out what social justice entails for music teaching and learning in the home, school, university, and wider community as they grapple with issues of inclusivity and diversity, alienation, intolerance, racism, ableism, and elitism, or relating to urban and incarcerated youth, immigrant and refugee children, and, more generally, cycles of injustice that might be perpetuated by music pedagogy. The concluding section of the handbook offers specific and groundbreaking practical examples of social justice in action through a variety of educational and social projects and pedagogical practices that might inspire and guide those wishing to confront and attempt to ameliorate musical or other inequity and injustice. Consisting of 42 chapters by authors from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, Finland, Greece, The Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States, the handbook will be of interest to a wide audience, ranging from undergraduate and graduate music education majors and faculty in music and other disciplines and fields to parents and other interested members of the public wishing to better understand what is social justice and why and how its pursuit in and through music education matters.
In this book, scholars and artists explore the relation between electronic music and bodily expression from perspectives including aesthetics, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, dance and interactive performance arts, sociology, computer music and sonic arts, and music theory, transgressing disciplinary boundaries and established beliefs. The historic decoupling of action and sound generation might be seen to have distorted or even effaced the expressive body, with the retention of performance qualities via recoupling not equally retaining bodily expressivity. When, where, and what is the body expressed in electronic music then? The authors of this book reveal composers, performers, improvisers and listeners bodies, as well as the works and technologies figurative bodies as a rich source of expressive articulation. Bringing together humanities scholarship and musical arts contingent upon new media, the contributors offer inspiring thought and critical reflection for all those seriously engaged with the aesthetics of electronic music, interactive performance, and the body 's role in aesthetic experience and expression. Performativity is not only seen as being reclaimed in live electronic music, interactive arts, and installations; it is also exposed as embodied in the music and the listeners themselves.
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. |
You may like...
Electrochemical Engineering: Emerging…
Heather Wright
Hardcover
|