The music of Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), beloved by musicians and audiences since its debut, has been a difficult topic for scholars. The traditional stylistic categories of impressionism, symbolism, and neoclassicism, while relevant, have offered too little purchase on this fascinating but enigmatic work. In Ravel the Decadent, author Michael Puri provides an innovative and productive solution by locating the aesthetic origins of this music in the French Decadence and demonstrating the extension of this influence across the length of his oeuvre. From an array of Decadent topics Puri selects three--memory, sublimation, and desire--and uses them to delineate the content of this music, pinpoint its overlap with contemporary cultural discourse, and link it to its biographical context, as well as to create new methods altogether for the analysis and interpretation of music.
Ravel the Decadent opens by defining the main concepts, giving particular attention to memory and decadence. It then stakes out contrasting modes of memory in this music: a nostalgic mode that views the past as forever lost, and a more optimistic one that imagines its resurrection and reanimation. Acknowledging Ravel's lifelong identity as a dandy--a figure that embodies the Decadence and its aspiration toward the sublime--Puri identifies possible moments of musical self-portraiture before stepping back to theorize dandyism in European musical modernism at large. He then addresses the dialectic between desire and its sublimation in the pairing of two genres--the bacchanal and the idyl--and leverages the central trio of concepts to offer provocative readings of Ravel's two waltz sets, the Valses nobles et sentimentales and La valse. Puri concludes by invoking the same terms to identify a topic of "faun music" that promises to create new common ground between Ravel and Debussy. Rife with close readings that will satisfy the musicologist, Ravel the Decadent also suits a more general reader through its broadly humanistic key concepts, immersion in contemporary art and literature, and clarity of language.

This book shows how information theory, probability, statistics, mathematics and personal computers can be applied to the exploration of numbers and proportions in music. It brings the methods of scientific and quantitative thinking to questions like: What are the ways of encoding a message in music and how can we be sure of the correct decoding? How do claims of names hidden in the notes of a score stand up to scientific analysis? How many ways are there of obtaining proportions and are they due to chance? After thoroughly exploring the ways of encoding information in music, the ambiguities of numerical alphabets and the words to be found "hidden" in a score, the book presents a novel way of exploring the proportions in a composition with a purpose-built computer program and gives example results from the application of the techniques. These include information theory, combinatorics, probability, hypothesis testing, Monte Carlo simulation and Bayesian networks, presented in an easily understandable form including their development from ancient history through the life and times of J. S. Bach, making connections between science, philosophy, art, architecture, particle physics, calculating machines and artificial intelligence. For the practitioner the book points out the pitfalls of various psychological fallacies and biases and includes succinct points of guidance for anyone involved in this type of research. This book will be useful to anyone who intends to use a scientific approach to the humanities, particularly music, and will appeal to anyone who is interested in the intersection between the arts and science.With a foreword by Ruth Tatlow (Uppsala University), award winning author of Bach's Numbers: Compositional Proportion and Significance and Bach and the Riddle of the Number Alphabet."With this study Alan Shepherd opens a much-needed examination of the wide range of mathematical claims that have been made about J. S. Bach's music, offering both tools and methodological cautions with the potential to help clarify old problems." Daniel R. Melamed, Professor of Music in Musicology, Indiana University

Why don't Guitar Hero players just pick up real guitars? What happens when millions of people play the role of a young black gang member in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas? How are YouTube-based music lessons changing the nature of amateur musicianship? This book is about play, performance, and participatory culture in the digital age. Miller shows how video games and social media are bridging virtual and visceral experience, creating dispersed communities who forge meaningful connections by "playing along" with popular culture. Playing Along reveals how digital media are brought to bear in the transmission of embodied knowledge: how a Grand Theft Auto player uses a virtual radio to hear with her avatar's ears; how a Guitar Hero player channels the experience of a live rock performer; and how a beginning guitar student translates a two-dimensional, pre-recorded online music lesson into three-dimensional physical practice and an intimate relationship with a distant teacher. Through a series of engaging ethnographic case studies, Miller demonstrates that our everyday experiences with interactive digital media are gradually transforming our understanding of musicality, creativity, play, and participation.

This collection of original essays is in tribute to the work of Derek Scott on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. As one of the leading lights in Critical Musicology, Scott has helped shape the epistemological direction for music research since the late 1980s. There is no doubt that the path taken by the critical musicologist has been a tricky one, leading to new conceptions, interactions, and heated debates during the past two decades. Changes in musicology during the closing decades of the twentieth century prompted the establishment of new sets of theoretical methods that probed at the social and cultural relevance of music, as much as its self-referentiality. All the scholars contributing to this book have played a role in the general paradigmatic shift that ensued in the wake of Kerman's call for change in the 1980s. Setting out to address a range of approaches to theorizing music and promulgating modes of analysis across a wide range of repertories, the essays in this collection can be read as a coming of age of critical musicology through its active dialogue with other disciplines such as sociology, feminism, ethnomusicology, history, anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, aesthetics, media studies, film music studies, and gender studies. The volume provides music researchers and graduate students with an up-to-date authoritative reference to all matters dealing with the state of critical musicology today.

Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century seeks to understand recent German history and contemporary German culture through its sounds and musics, noises and silences, using the means and modes of the emerging field of Sound Studies. German soundscapes present a particularly fertile field for investigation and understanding, Feiereisen and Hill argue, due to such unique factors in Germany's history as its early and especially cacophonous industrialization, the sheer loudness of its wars, and the possibilities of shared noises in its division and reunification. Organized largely but not strictly chronologically, chapters use the unique contours of the German aural experience to examine how these soundscapes - the sonic environments, the ever-present arrays of noises with which everyone lives - ultimately reveal the possibility of "national" sounds. Together the chapters consider the acoustic national identity of Germany, or the cultural significance of sounds and silence, since the development and rise of sound-recording and sound-disseminating technologies in the early 1900s Chapters draw examples from a remarkably broad range of contexts and historical periods, from the noisy urban spaces at the turn of the twentieth century to battlefields and concert halls to radio and television broadcasting to the hip hop soundscapes of today. As a whole, the book makes a compelling case for the scholarly utility of listening to them. An online "Bonus Track" of teaching materials offers instructors practical tips for classroom use.

The MENC Handbook of Research on Music Learning, Volume 2: Applications brings together the best and most current research on best practice for music learning, focusing squarely on the profession's empirical and conceptual knowledge of how students gain competence in music at various ages and in different contexts. The collection of chapters, written by the foremost figures active in the field, addresses a range of best practices for approaching current and important areas in the field, including cognition and perception, music listening, vocal/choral learning, and the needs of special learners. The book's companion volume, Strategies, provides the solid theoretical framework and extensive research upon which these practices stand.
Throughout both volumes in this essential set, focus is placed on the musical knowledge and musical skills needed to perform, create, understand, reflect on, enjoy, value, and respond to music. A key point of emphasis rests on the relationship between music learning and finding meaning in music, and as music technology plays an increasingly important role in learning today, chapters move beyond exclusively formal classroom instruction into other forms of systematic learning and informal instruction.
Either individually or paired with its companion Volume 1: Strategies, this indispensable overview of this growing area of inquiry will appeal to students and scholars in Music Education, as well as front-line music educators in the classroom.

The MENC Handbook of Research on Music Learning, Volume 1: Strategies brings together the best and most current research on methods for music learning, focusing squarely on the profession's empirical and conceptual knowledge of how students gain competence in music at various ages and in different contexts. The collection of chapters, written by the foremost figures active in the field, takes a broad theoretical perspective on current, critical areas of research, including music development, music listening and reading, motivation and self-regulated learning in music, music perception, and movement. The book's companion volume, Applications, builds an extensive and solid position of practice upon the frameworks and research presented here.
Throughout both volumes in this essential set, focus is placed on the musical knowledge and musical skills needed to perform, create, understand, reflect on, enjoy, value, and respond to music. A key point of emphasis rests on the relationship between music learning and finding meaning in music, and as music technology plays an increasingly important role in learning today, chapters move beyond exclusively formal classroom instruction into other forms of systematic learning and informal instruction.
Either individually or paired with its companion Volume 2: Applications, this indispensable overview of this growing area of inquiry will appeal to students and scholars in Music Education, as well as front-line music educators in the classroom.

A pathbreaking study of the Parisian press's attempts to claim Richard Wagner's place in French history and imagination during the unstable and conflict-ridden years of the Third Reich. Richard Wagner was a polarizing figure in France from the time that he first entered French musical life in the mid nineteenth century. Critics employed him to symbolize everything from democratic revolution to authoritarian antisemitism. During periods of Franco-German conflict, such as the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, Wagner was associated in France with German nationalism and chauvinism. This association has led to the assumption that, with the advent of the Third Reich, the French once again rejected Wagner. Drawing on hundreds of press sources and employing close readings, this book seeks to explain a paradox: as the German threat grew more tangible from 1933, the Parisian press insisted on seeing in Wagner a universality that transcended his Germanness. Repudiating the notion that Wagner stood for Germany, French critics attempted to reclaim his role in their own national history and imagination. Claiming Wagner for France: Music and Politics in the Parisian Press, 1933-1944 reveals how the concept of a universal Wagner, which was used to challenge the Nazis in the 1930s, was gradually transformed into the infamous collaborationist rhetoric promoted by the Vichy government and exploited by the Nazis between 1940 and 1944. Rachel Orzech's study offers a close examination of Wagner's place in France's cultural landscape at this time, contributing to our understanding of how the French grappled with one of the most challenging periods in their history.

From the Romantic era onwards, music has been seen as the most quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time. Through its play of themes and recurrence of events, music has the ability to stylise in multiple ways our temporal relation to the world, with far-reaching implications for modern conceptions of memory, subjectivity, personal and collective identity, and history. Time, as philosophers, scientists and writers have found throughout history, is notoriously hard to define. Yet music, seemingly bound up so intimately with the nature of time, might well be understood as disclosing aspects of human temporality unavailable to other modes of inquiry, and accordingly was frequently granted a privileged position in nineteenth-century thought. The Melody of Time examines the multiple ways in which music relates to, and may provide insight into, the problematics of human time. Each chapter explores a specific theme in the philosophy of time as expressed through music: the purported timelessness of Beethoven's late works or the nostalgic impulses of Schubert's music; the use of music by philosophers as a means to explicate the aporias of temporal existence or as a medium suggestive of the varying possible structures of time; and, a reflection of a particular culture's sense of historical progress or the expression of the intangible spirit behind the course of human history itself. Moving fluidly between cultural context and historical reception, competing philosophical theories of time and close reading of the repertoire, Benedict Taylor argues for the continued importance of engaging with music's temporality in understanding the significance of music within society and human experience. At once historical, analytical, critical, and ultimately hermeneutic, The Melody of Time provides both fresh insight into many familiar nineteenth-century pieces and a rich theoretical basis for future research.

Sulke Vriende Is Skaars bevat die geannoteerde briefkorrespondensie tussen twee seminale figure in die Suid-Afrikaanse Westerse kunsmusiek. Dit is die eerste keer dat briefwisseling binne die Suid-Afrikaanse musiekgeskiedenisskrywing gepubliseer word en is ’n publikasie wat ’n noemenswaardige bydra tot die dissipline van Suid-Afrikaanse musiekhistoriografie, asook tot Afrikaner- en apartheidshistoriografie, sal maak.

Dit toon die belangrikheid aan van verdere navorsing oor die geïnstitusionaliseerde posisie van wit kunsmusiek in Suid-Afrika. Benewens die briewe, word belangrike foto’s, afskrifte van faksimilees, telegramme en ander vorme van korrespondensie geplaas en groot klem geplaas op die visuele voorkoms van die boek.

Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image examines the choreographic in cinema - the way choreographic elements inform cinematic operations in dancefilm. It traces the history of the form from some of its earliest manifestations in the silent film era, through the historic avant-garde, musicals and music videos to contemporary experimental short dancefilms. In so doing it also examines some of the most significant collaborations between dancers, choreographers, and filmmakers.
The book also sets out to examine and rethink the parameters of dancefilm and thereby re-conceive the relations between dance and cinema. Dancefilm is understood as a modality that challenges familiar models of cinematic motion through its relation to the body, movement and time, instigating new categories of filmic performance and creating spectatorial experiences that are grounded in the somatic. Drawing on debates in both film theory (in particular ideas of gesture, the close up, and affect) and dance theory (concepts such as radical phrasing, the gestural anacrusis and somatic intelligence) and bringing these two fields into dialogue, the book argues that the combination of dance and film produces cine-choreographic practices that are specific to the dancefilm form. The book thus presents new models of cinematic movement that are both historically informed and thoroughly interdisciplinary.

As the sound-producing mechanism for the bassoon, the reed is a vital component in the sound of the entire instrument. While pre-manufactured reeds are widely available for purchase at music stores, this one-size-fits-all option hardly does justice to the unique needs of the musician and the piece. Many bassoonists, including seasoned professional bassoonist Eric Arbiter, instead choose to craft their own reeds. A nuanced and difficult craft to master, reed-making involves specialized machinery and necessitates special attention to the thickness, and even topography, of the reed itself. When done correctly, however, this process results in a reed that not only produces a more beautiful sound, but also holds up to even the most demanding musical performances. In The Way of Cane, Arbiter demystifies this process for bassoonists of all levels of experience. Drawing from his decades-long experience as both musician and reed-maker, Arbiter provides a comprehensive yet accessible overview of the craft, from the differing sound qualities produced by changing the dimensions of the reed's blades to the changes in the reed's behaviors as it passes through cycles of wetting and drying during production. Small changes in each of these variables, Arbiter explains, contribute to the ultimate goal of producing a bassoonist's ideal sound. With step-by-step instructions, detailed photos that further illuminate the reed-making process, and a companion website featuring the author's own recordings. The Way of Cane emphasizes the importance of the reed to the bassoon's sound, as well as the harmony between reed and musician.

Approaching disability as a cultural construction rather than a medical pathology, this book studies the impact of disability and concepts of disability on composers, performers, and listeners with disabilities, as well as on discourse about music and works of music themselves. For composers with disabilities--like Beethoven, Delius, and Schumann--awareness of the disability sharply inflects critical reception. For performers with disabilities--such as Itzhak Perlman and Evelyn Glennie--the performance of disability and the performance of music are deeply intertwined. For listeners with disabilities, extraordinary bodies and minds may give rise to new ways of making sense of music. In the stories that people tell about music, and in the stories that music itself tells, disability has long played a central but unrecognized role. Some of these stories are narratives of overcoming-the triumph of the human spirit over adversity-but others are more nuanced tales of accommodation and acceptance of life with a non-normative body or mind. In all of these ways, music both reflects and constructs disability.

With his extensive three-volume investigation, the author has newly drawn the image of Gustav Mahler for our time. Should Mahler's symphonies really be categorized as "absolute music"? - Little-known manuscript sources contain significant hints to the contrary: programmatic titles and catchwords or phrases, mottos, literary allusions, associations, sighs, exclamations. Mahler fully understood his symphonies as "erlebte Musik", music of experience, as autobiography in notes, and as expressions of his "weltanschauung". All the symphonies, including the purely instrumental ones, can be traced back to programs that Mahler originally made public, but suppressed later on. A knowledge of the programmatic ideas provides access to a hitherto barely sensed interior metaphysical world that is of crucial importance for an adequate interpretation of the works. This first volume uncovers the complexity of relations between Mahler's wide-ranging reading and education, his aesthetics and his symphonic creation. About the German edition of this book: "One of the most thoroughgoing and comprehensive investigations of Gustav Mahler's work and world to date." (Norddeutscher Rundfunk) "The way in which Mahler's literary background, his education, and his aesthetic and philosophical maxims are presented here indeed opens up a new approach." (Die Musikforschung)

This first book-length study of D. H. Lawrence's lifelong engagement with music surveys his extensive musical interests and how these permeate his writing, while also situating Lawrence within a growing body of work on music and modernism. A twin focus considers the music that shaped Lawrence's novels and poetry, as well as contemporary developments in music that parallel his quest for new forms of expression. Comparisons are made with the music of Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Wagner, and British composers, including Bax, Holst and Vaughan Williams, and with the musical writings of Forster, Hardy, Hueffer (Ford), Nietzsche and Pound. Above all, by exploring Lawrence and music in historical context, this study aims to open up new areas for study and a place for Lawrence within the field of music and modernism.

This book explores the meaning and value of music in children's lives, based upon their expressed thoughts and actual musicking behaviors in school and at play. Blending standard education field experiences with ethnomusicological techniques, Campbell demonstrates how music is personally and socially meaningful to children and what values they place on particular musical styles, songs, and functions. She explores musical behaviors in various contextual settings-in the outdoor garden of the Lakeshore Zebras' preschool, in Mr. Roberts' fifth grade classroom, on a school bus, at home with the Anderson family, in the Rundale School cafeteria, at the Toys and More Store. She documents in narrative forms some of the "songs in their heads", balancing music learned with music "made", and intentional, purposeful music with natural music behavior. From age three to tween-age, children are particularized by gender race, ethnicity, and class, and their soundscapes are described for the contexts, functions, and meanings they make of music in their lives. Treading through the individual cases and conversations is the image of the "universal child" children's culture that transcends localities, separates them from adults, and defines them as their own community of shared beliefs and practices. Songs in Their Heads is a vivid and engaging book that brides the disciplines of music education, ethnomusicology, and folklore. Designed as a text or supplemental text in a variety of music education methods courses, as well as a reference for music specialists and classroom teachers, this book will also appeal to parents interested in understand and enhancing music making in their own children.

What does sound, whether preserved or lost, tell us about nineteenth-century wartime? Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense pursues this question through the many territories affected by the Crimean War, including Britain, France, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Dagestan, Chechnya, and Crimea. Examining the experience of listeners and the politics of archiving sound, it reveals the close interplay between nineteenth-century geographies of empire and the media through which wartime sounds became audible-or failed to do so. The volume explores the dynamics of sound both in violent encounters on the battlefield and in the experience of listeners far-removed from theaters of war, each essay interrogating the Crimean War's sonic archive in order to address a broad set of issues in musicology, ethnomusicology, literary studies, the history of the senses and sound studies.

Musical leadership is associated with a specific profession-the conductor-as well as being a colloquial metaphor for human communication and cooperation at its best. This book examines what musical leadership is, by delving into the choral conductor role, what goes on in the music-making moment and what it takes to do it well. One of the unique features of the musical ensemble is the simultaneity of collective discipline and individual expression. Music is therefore a potent laboratory for understanding the leadership act in the space between leader and team. The musical experience is used to shed light on leading and following more broadly, by linking it to themes such as authority, control, empowerment, intersubjectivity, sensemaking and charisma. Jansson develops the argument that musical leadership involves the combination of strong power and deep sensitivity, a blend that might be equally valid in other leadership domains. Aesthetic knowledge and musical perception therefore offer untapped potential for leadership and organisational development outside the art domain.

Today, no matter where you are in the world, you can turn on a radio and hear the echoes and influences of Chicago house music. Do You Remember House? tells a comprehensive story of the emergence, and contemporary memorialization of house in Chicago, tracing the development of Chicago house music culture from its beginnings in the late '70s to the present. Based on expansive research in archives and his extensive conversations with the makers of house in Chicago's parks, clubs, museums, and dance studios, author Micah Salkind argues that the remediation and adaptation of house music by crossover communities in its first decade shaped the ways that Chicago producers, DJs, dancers, and promoters today re-remember and mobilize the genre as an archive of collectivity and congregation. The book's engagement with musical, kinesthetic, and visual aspects of house music culture builds from a tradition of queer of color critique. As such, Do You Remember House? considers house music's liberatory potential in terms of its genre-defiant repertoire in motion. Ultimately, the book argues that even as house music culture has been appropriated and exploited, the music's porosity and flexibility have allowed it to remain what pioneering Chicago DJ Craig Cannon calls a 'musical Stonewall' for queers and people of color in the Windy City and around the world.

Beethoven Symphonies Revisited guides the reader -- music student, concert goer, or general music lover -- through the movements in a way that renews the novelty and excitement that listeners must have felt at the first performances. Stylistic discussion concentrates on the unusual features of each symphony, placing each individual work in the context of Beethovens musical advancement and circumstances. His musical innovations are explored, and his contribution to the genre assessed. Thirty author-annotated musical pages elaborate and exemplify. The essential building blocks of key, tonality, metre, rhythm and instrumentation are discussed in detail. The authors purpose is twofold: to bring together major research findings and at the same time offer detailed descriptive analyses of all nine symphonies. The approach is singular in its emphasis on the symphonies in the context of performance practice of the time, especially musical direction; the importance of the wind instruments (especially horns) and kettle drums; how counterpoint features in various passages in all the symphonies except the Sixth and Eighth, and how this was influenced by Beethovens strict training in species counterpoint. New evaluations are offered, especially for the Second, Eighth and Ninth symphonies. The books multi-faceted approach will be invaluable not only for conductors and music students at all levels, but for all concert goers and music lovers who wish to gain insight into the musical intricacies developed and enhanced by Beethovens symphonic journey. Illustrations: 30 annotated musical score pages comprising 99 examples linked to text explanations; autographed manuscripts; performance venues; and instruments of the period.

Master musical skills quickly and easily! From classical music to new age, hard rock, and pop, music has always played an important role in everyday life. Whether you're an intermediate musician or an aspiring music major, The Everything Essential Music Theory Book is a guide to mastering one of the most important tools for every musician: musical understanding. This compact, portable volume covers all the basics, including: The construction of chords and scales How to understand rhythm and time signatures How keys are identified and organized Creating harmonization and melody With each clear and easy-to-understand chapter, musician and educator Marc Schonbrun takes you through the essentials of music theory--the very glue that holds music together.

Music scholarship has been rethinking its understanding of Franz Schubert and his work. How might our modern aesthetic values and historical knowledge of Schubert's life affect how we interpret his music? Schubert's Instrumental Music and Poetics of Interpretation demonstrates how updated analysis of Schubert and his instrumental works reveals expressive meaning. In six chapters, each devoted to one or two of Schubert's pieces, René Rusch explores alternate forms of unity and coherence, offers critical assessments of biographical and intertextual influence, investigates narrative, and addresses the gendering of the composer and his music. Rusch's comparative analyses and interpretations address four significant areas of scholarly focus in Schubert studies, including his use of chromaticism, his unique forms, the impact of events in his own life, and the influence of Beethoven. Drawing from a range of philosophical, hermeneutic, historical, biographical, theoretical, and analytical sources, Schubert's Instrumental Music and Poetics of Interpretation offers readers a unique and innovative foray into the poetics of contemporary analysis of Schubert's instrumental music and develops new ways to engage with his repertoire.

Mixtape Nostalgia: Culture, Memory, and Representation analyzes the role of the mixtape as a site of collective memory tied to youth culture, community identity, and sharing music. The author looks at the history of the mixtape from the early 1980s and the rise of the cassette as a fundamental aspect of the music industry. She discusses the continued contemporary appeal of the mixtape as musicians, novelists, memoirists, playwrights, and even podcasters have used it as a metaphor for connection and identity. The book shows how creators use the iconography of the mixtape cassette to create ephemera which speaks to the appreciation of the tangible and the analog. The desire to find connection through sharing a physical artifact permeates the various creative uses of the mixtape. From blockbuster films to mixtape throw pillows, Burns highlights the appreciation music lovers have for tangibly sharing music and the emotions it brings.