How do we understand culture and shape its future? How do we cross the bridge between culture as ideas and feelings and physical, cultural objects, all this within the endless variety and complexity of modern and traditional societies? This book proposes a Physical Culture Theory, taking culture as a self-organizing impulse pattern of electric forces. Bridging the gap to consciousness, the Physical Culture Theory proposes that consciousness content, what we think, hear, feel, or see is also just this: spatio-temporal electric fields. Music is a perfect candidate to elaborate on such a Physical Culture Theory. Music is all three, musical instrument acoustics, music psychology, and music ethnology. They emerge into living musical systems like all life is self-organization. Therefore the Physical Culture Theory knows no split between nature and nurture, hard and soft sciences, brains and musical instruments. It formulates mathematically complex systems as Physical Models rather than Artificial Intelligence. It includes ethical rules for maintaining life and finds culture and arts to be Human Rights. Enlarging these ideas and mathematical methods into all fields of culture, ecology, economy, or the like will be the task for the next decades to come.

A defense of Schenkerian analysis of tonality in music. A wide range of music -- from Bach to Mozart and Brahms -- is marked by its use of some form of what is generally called "tonality": the tendency of music to focus melodically on some stable pitch or tonic and for its harmony to use functional triads. Yet few terms in music theory are more enigmatic than that seemingly simple word "tonality." Matthew Brown's Explaining Tonality: Schenkerian Theory and Beyond considers a number of disparate ways in which functional tonality has been understood. In particular, it focuses on the comprehensive theory developed by Heinrich Schenker in his monumental three-part treatise Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien [1906-1935]. Schenker systematically investigated the ways in which lines and chords behave both locally within individual tonal phrases and globally across entire compositions. Explaining Tonality shows why Schenker was able to elucidate tonal relationships so successfully and the many advantages that his explanations have over those of his rivals. In addition, it proposes some ways in which Schenker's approach can be extended to tonal features in works from before Bach [such as Monteverdi] and after Brahms [such as Debussy, Stravinsky, and much popular music of today]. Along the way, the book explores six methodological criteria that help in building, testing, and evaluatinga plausible theory of tonality or, indeed, any other musical phenomenon: accuracy, scope, fruitfulness, consistency, simplicity, and coherence. It reveals how understanding the tonality of a piece can shed light on other aspects of musical composition. And, in conclusion, it describes some ways in which Schenkerian theory might fruitfully develop in the future. Matthew Brown is Professor of Music Theory at the Eastman School of Music, Universityof Rochester, and author of Debussy's "Iberia" [Oxford University Press].

This book introduces the topics of Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment, and social demography in Western art musics and demonstrates their historical and sociological importance. The essays in this book explore the concepts of "existential irony" and "sanctification," which have been mentioned or discussed by music scholars, historians, and musicologists only either in connection with specific composers' works (Shostakovich's, in the case of "existential irony") or very parenthetically, merely in passing in the biographies of composers of "classical" musics. This groundbreaking work illustrates their generality and sociological sources and correlates in contemporary Western art musics.

Musica Naturalis delivers the first systematic account of speculative music theory as a discursive horizon for literary poetics. The title refers to the late medieval French poet Eustache Deschamps, whose 1392 treatise on verse writing, L'Art de Dictier, famously casts verse as "natural music" in explicit distinction to song, which Deschamps defines as "artificial." Philipp Jeserich links the significance of the speculative branch of medieval musicology to literary theory and literary production, opening up a field of study that has been largely neglected. Beginning with Augustine and Boethius, he traces the discourse of speculative music theory to the late fifteenth century, giving attention to medieval Latin and vernacular sources. Ultimately, Jeserich calls for the conservatism of Deschamps' poetics and develops a new perspective on the poetics and poetry of the Grands rhetoriqueurs. Given Jeserich's reliance on the intellectual inheritance of late medieval French poetics and poetry, this book will appeal to English-speaking specialists of Old and Middle French, as well as scholars of the French Renaissance. It will also interest English language medievalists of several other disciplines: intellectual historians and specialists of English, as well as scholars of Italian and Iberian literature.

1) First published book on the revival of Cornish music and dance and the first extended history of music and dance in Cornwall. 2) Based on a combination of qualitative fieldwork and expert interviews, and a meticulous study of the historical and revival material

DIY House Shows and Music Venues in the US is an interdisciplinary study of house concerts and other DIY (‘do-it-yourself’) music venues in the US, such as warehouses, all-ages clubs and guerrilla shows, with its primary focus on West Coast American DIY locales. Focusing on DIY houses, music venues, social spaces, and local and translocal cultural geographies, the author examines how American DIY communities constitute themselves in relation to their social and spatial environment. The ethnographic approach shows the inner-workings of American DIY culture, and how the particular people within particular places strive to achieve a social ideal of an "intimate" community.

Music Theory Essentials offers an antidote to music theory textbooks that are overly long and dense. Focusing on the essentials, this text provides a clear-cut guide to the key concepts of music theory. Beginning with no assumptions about music theory knowledge, the book covers the core elements of music fundamentals, diatonic and chromatic harmony, post-tonal theory, and popular music in a single concise volume. Emphasizing critical thinking skills, this book guides students through conceptualizing musical concepts and mastering analytic techniques. Each chapter concludes with a selection of applications designed to enhance engagement: Exercises allow students to apply and practice the skills and techniques addressed in the chapter. Brain Teasers challenge students to expand their musical understanding by thinking outside the box. Exploring Music offers strategies for students to apply learned concepts to the music they are currently learning or listening to. Thinking Critically encourages students to think more deeply about music by solving problems and identifying and challenging assumptions. A companion website provides answers to book exercises, additional downloadable exercises, and audio examples. Straightforward and streamlined, Music Theory Essentials is a truly concise yet comprehensive introduction to music theory that is accessible to students of all backgrounds.

Based upon Cantometrics: An Approach to the Anthropology of Music (1976), by Alan Lomax, Songs of Earth: Aesthetic and Social Codes in Music is a contemporary guide to understanding and exploring Cantometrics, the system developed by Lomax and Victor Grauer for analyzing the formal elements of music related to human geography and sociocultural patterning. This carefully constructed cross-cultural study of world music revealed deep-rooted performance patterns and aesthetic preferences and their links with environmental factors and ancient socioeconomic practices. This new and updated edition is for anyone wishing to understand and more deeply appreciate the forms and sociocultural contexts of the musics of the world's peoples, and it is designed to be used by both scholars and laypeople. Part One of the book consists of a practical guide to using the Cantometrics system, a course with musical examples to test one's understanding of the material, a theoretical framework to put the methodology in context, and an illustration of the method used to explore the roots of popular music. Part Two includes guides to four other analytical systems that Lomax developed, which focus on orchestration, phrasing and breath management, vowel articulation, instrumentation, and American popular music. Part Three provides resources for educators who wish to use the Cantometrics system in their classrooms, a summary of the findings and hypotheses of Lomax's original research, and a discussion of Cantometrics' criticisms, applications, and new approaches, and it includes excerpts of Lomax's original writings about world song style and cultural equity.

This book comprises twelve articles which cover a range of topics from musical instrument acoustics to issues in psychoacoustics and sound perception as well as neuromusicology. In addition to experimental methods and data acquisition, modeling (such as FEM or wave field synthesis) and numerical simulation plays a central role in studies addressing sound production in musical instruments as well as interaction of radiated sound with the environment. Some of the studies have a focus on psychoacoustic aspects in regard to virtual pitch and timbre as well as apparent source width (for techniques such as stereo or ambisonics) in music production. Since musical acoustics imply subjects playing instruments or singing in order to produce sound according to musical structures, this area is also covered including a study that presents an artificial intelligent agent capable to interact with a real ('analog') player in musical genres such as traditional and free jazz.

"On and Off the Bandstand" is a study of American history, invention, and culture that focuses on the evolution of popular music. Efforts to keep the best of the bandstand alive in the twentieth century, as well as today, are enthusiastically celebrated.

Before reliable lighting and central heating, entertainment mainly occurred outdoors. Without microphones, a band performance was the centerpiece of choice for numerous celebrations. Outstanding conductors and musicians were major celebrities in their day. The basic instrumentation and musical language remained the same for over a hundred years-even as the venues moved indoors. Without breaks in continuity, each phase moved smoothly to the next, and newer artists respected their forbearers and cherished their accomplishments. Marching bands, concert bands, ragtime bands, and swing bands are still here today, but they have retired to the background.

The band era was accompanied by some remarkable innovations, such as sound recording and radio. These technologies played a crucial role and receive considerable attention as the story unfolds. In addition to its historical contributions, "On and Off the Bandstand" pays tribute to a handful of dedicated individuals who have become advocates for the music of their parents' and grandparents' time.

This book explores the relationships between rock and roll, social protest, and authenticity to consider how rock and roll could function as social protest music. The author begins by discussing the nature and origins of rock and roll and the nature of social protest and social protest music within the wider context of the evolution of the commercial music industry and the social and technological infrastructure developed for the mass dissemination of popular music. This discussion is followed by an examination of the causes of the public disapproval originally expressed toward rock and roll, and how they illuminate its social protest and subversive quality. By further investigating the nature of authenticity and its relationship to social protest and to commercialization, the author considers how social protest and commercialization are antithetical. This conclusion, if correct, has broad implications for human culture in advanced industrial society.

Music offers a unique opportunity to better understand the organization of the human brain. Like language, music exists in all human societies. Like language, music is a complex, rule-governed activity that seems specific to humans, and associated with a specific brain architecture. Yet unlike most other high-level functions of the human brain--and unlike language--music is a skil at which only a minority of people become proficient. The study of music as a major brain function has for some time been relatively neglected. Just recently, however, we have witnessed an explosion in research activities on music perception and performance that correlates in the human brain. This volume brings together an outstanding collection of international authorities--from the fields of music, neuroscience, psychology, and neurology--to describe the amazing advances being made in understanding the complex relationship between music and the brain.

Colombia has the largest black population in the Spanish-speaking world, but Afro-Colombians have long remained at the nation's margins. Their recent irruption into the political, social, and cultural spheres is tied to appeals to cultural difference, dramatized by the traditional music of Colombia's majority-black Southern Pacific region, often called currulao. Yet that music remains largely unknown and unstudied despite its complexity, aesthetic appeal, and social importance. Rites, Rights & Rhythms: A Genealogy of Musical Meaning in Colombia's Black Pacific is the first book-length academic study of currulao, inquiring into the numerous ways it has been used: to praise the saints, to grapple with modernization, to dramatize black politics, to perform the nation, to generate economic development and to provide social amelioration in a context of war. Author Michael Birenbaum Quintero draws on both archival and ethnographic research to trace these and other understandings of how currulao has been understood, illuminating a history of struggles over the meanings of currulao that are also struggles over the meanings of blackness in Colombia. Moving from the eighteenth century to the present, Rites, Rights & Rhythms asks how musical meaning is made, maintained, and sometimes abandoned across historical contexts as varied as colonial slavery, twentieth-century national populism, and neoliberal multiculturalism. What emerges is both a rich portrait of one of the hemisphere's most important and understudied black cultures and a theory of history traced through the performative practice of currulao.

Bernhard Lang: Critical Guides to Contemporary Composers offers a critical guide and introduction to the work of Austrian composer Bernhard Lang (b. 1957). It identifies the phenomenon of repetition as a central concern in Lang's thinking and making. The composer's artistic practice is identified as one of 'loop aesthetics': a creative poetics in which repetition serves not only as methodology, but also as material, language, and subject matter. The book is structured around the four central thematic nodes of philosophy, music, theatre, and politics. After introducing Lang as a composer whose work is thoroughly influenced by philosophical thought, the book develops a typology of musical repetition as it is explored and activated in Lang's oeuvre. Pointing towards the several repetitions within the performance of Lang's works, the book explores the heavily trans-medial nature of the repeat across domains such as literature, dance, and theatre. Finally, the book investigates Lang's use of textual quotation and musical borrowing. Christine Dysers is a musicologist specialising in contemporary music aesthetics. Her research centres around repetition, politics, absence, the liminal, and the uncanny. This is the first full-length study of the works of Bernhard Lang and is a new volume in the Critical Guides to Contemporary Composers series from Intellect.

This book collects research contributions concerning quantitative approaches to characterize originality and universality in language. The target audience comprises researchers and experts in the field but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students. Creativity might be considered as a morphogenetic process combining universal features with originality. While quantitative methods applied to text and music reveal universal features of language and music, originality is a highly appreciated feature of authors, composers, and performers. In this framework, the different methods of traditional problems of authorship attribution and document classification provide important insights on how to quantify the unique features of authors, composers, and styles. Such unique features contrast, and are restricted by, universal signatures, such as scaling laws in word-frequency distribution, entropy measures, long-range correlations, among others. This interplay between innovation and universality is also an essential ingredient of methods for automatic text generation. Innovation in language becomes relevant when it is imitated and spread to other speakers and musicians. Modern digital databases provide new opportunities to characterize and model the creation and evolution of linguistic innovations on historical time scales, a particularly important example of the more general problem of spreading of innovations in complex social systems. This multidisciplinary book combines scientists from various different backgrounds interested in quantitative analysis of variations (synchronic and diachronic) in language and music. The aim is to obtain a deeper understanding of how originality emerges, can be quantified, and propagates.

This book explores the power music has to address health inequalities and the social determinants of health and wellbeing. It examines music participation as a determinant of wellbeing and as a transformative tool to impact on wider social, cultural and environmental conditions. Uniquely, in this volume health and wellbeing outcomes are conceptualised on a continuum, with potential effects identified in relation to individual participants, their communities but also society at large. While arts therapy approaches have a clear place in the text, the emphasis is on music making outside of clinical contexts and the broader roles musicians, music facilitators and educators can play in enhancing wellbeing in a range of settings beyond the therapy room. This innovative edited collection will be of great interest to scholars and practitioners of music, social services, medical humanities, education and the broader health field in the social and medical sciences.

Reveals the brilliant musical and pedagogical thinking of the famed eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Neapolitan composer and teacher of royal students. Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816) was one of the most important composers of opera in the eighteenth century. His operas were performed throughout Europe, and his fame led to appointments as a maestro di cappella and composer at prominent European courts. This book is the first study to address his work as a teacher of composition and what we would today call music theory. The practice of partimento (figured or unfigured bass lines) was an integral part of the training of musicians at the renowned conservatories in eighteenth-century Naples. By employing these often-unprepossessing partimento bass lines, young musicians learned the techniques of variation, improvisation, and composition while seated at the harpsichord. Paisiello's Regole per bene accompagnare il Partimento (Rules for Harpsichordists; 1782) survives in both autograph and printed forms. It contains forty-six partimenti that have long been considered the core of his pedagogic oeuvre. However, two recently discovered manuscripts contain a further forty-one unknown partimenti, notated as two- and three-part disposizioni (realizations). The present study offers numerous insights gleaned from the surviving sources and bolsters our understanding of how to perform the music of Paisiello and his contemporaries: music that has often survived in an incomplete form. These findings are relevant not just for keyboard players but also for singers, instrumentalists, and anyone interested in the inner workings of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music.

Psychedelic music is a fascinating yet under-researched field of study. This thought-provoking collection offers a broad introduction to the fi eld of psychedelic music studies, bringing together scholarly work on psychedelic music in genres like rock, folk, electronic dance music and pop. Through an expanded purview on psychedelic music, an emerging trend in research, the collection affords students and academics alike an introduction to a rich, multi-faceted field. The contributing authors explore a range of different facets of musical psychedelia: its transgressive and transcendent aspects, its foregrounding of timbre and texture, the way it changes our perception of time, its influence on “non-psychedelic� music, key composition and production techniques that composers and musicians use in its creation, how it is mediated by different places and spaces, and the interplay between psychedelic visual and sonic aesthetics. This interdisciplinary work reveals both commonalities in musical psychedelic experiences and the contestation inherent in a fi eld of study that juxtaposes music of different genres and eras with a variety of theoretical approaches and methodologies. In broadening the scope of psychedelic music research, the collection not only makes for varied and absorbing reading on the subject level but also stimulates reflexive thought about interdisciplinary research.

This essay collection, devoted to exploring the richness of Christian musical traditions in the Americas, reflects the distinctive critical perspectives of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music, an association of scholars dedicated to exploring the intersections of Christian faith and musical scholarship. Now in our sixteenth year, we seek to celebrate our work in the world and bring it to a larger audience by offering a cross- section of the most outstanding scholarship from an international array of writers. The proposed collection follows a first collection published to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the Society (Exploring Christian Song, M. Jennifer Bloxam and AndrewShenton, editors, Lexington Books, 2017). That first volume focused on Christian song in a variety of different contexts. Our proposed collection surveys a broad geographical areaand demonstrates the enormous diversity of music-making and scholarship within that area. While there are some studies that focus on a single country or region and its sacred music (see the literature survey below), this will be the first collection to present a representative cross-section of the range of sacred music in the Americas and the approaches to studying them in context. The essays in this collection are ecumenical, reflecting the breadth of Christian traditions. The essays include several by distinguished senior scholars in the field (including David Music, Baylor University; and Jeff Warren, Quest University, Canada). Several essays are by noted specialists in the field (including Jesse Karlsberg, Emory University; and Cathy Ann Elias, DePaul University), and several by younger scholars (including Hannah Denecke, Florida State University; and Natasha Walsh, York University, Canada). SCSM is particularly keen to promote the work of students. The work of these rising stars thus appears alongside the work of veteran scholars working in the area of Christian sacred music, ensuring a stimulating mix of subjects, viewpoints, and methodologies.

This entirely new volume of NOHM reflects scholarship and performative experiences of late-medieval music in the second half of the 20th century. . It addresses important subject areas that were omitted or undervalued in the previous series: Muslim and Jewish Music, (c.1000-c.1500), liturgical office chant (c.1300-c.1500), dance music (c.1300-c.1530), instrumental music (c.1300-c.1520), Polyphonic music in Central Europe (c. 1300-c.1520), music theory of the 14th and 15th centuries, humanism and the 'rebirth' of the arts. The book offers solid foundational knowledge in these fields as well as new interpretations and many new documents.

Brazilian music has been central to Brazil's national brand in the U.S. and U.K. since the early-1960s. From bossa nova in 1960s jazz and film, through the 1970s fusion and funk scenes, the world music boom of the late 1980s and the bossa nova remix revival at the turn of the millennium, and on to Brazilian musical distribution and branding in the streaming music era, Bossa Mundo: Brazilian Music in Transnational Media Industries focuses on watershed moments of musical breakthrough, exploring what the music may have represented in a particular historical moment alongside its deeper cultural impact. Through a discussion of the political meaning of mass-mediated music, author K. E. Goldschmitt argues for a shift in scholarly focus-from viewing music as simply a representation of Otherness to taking into account the broader media environment where listeners and intermediaries often have conflicting priorities. Goldschmitt demonstrates that the mediation of Brazilian music in an increasingly crowded transnational marketplace has lasting consequences for the creative output celebrated by Brazil. Like other culturally rich countries in Latin America-such as Cuba, Mexico, and Argentina-Brazil has captured the imagination of people in many parts of the world through its music, driving tourism and international financial investment, while increasing the country's prominence on the world stage Nevertheless, stereotypes of Brazilian music persist, especially those that valorize racial difference. Featuring interviews with key figures in the transnational circulation of Brazilian music, and in-depth discussions of well-known Brazilian musicians alongside artists who redefine what it means to be a Brazilian musician in the twenty-first century, Bossa Mundo shows the pernicious effects of branding racial diversity on musicians and audiences alike.

A uniquely complete and up-to-date collection of the surviving remains of ancient Greek music (fifth century BC to third or fourth century AD) as preserved in ancient notation on inscriptions, papyri, and medieval manuscripts. Each item is accompanied, where feasible, with a transcription into modern musical notation and an explanatory commentary. Good-quality photographs are provided in most cases.

Peter Kivy presents a selection of his new and recent writings on the philosophy of music, a subject to which he has for many years been one of the most eminent contributors. In his distinctively elegant and informal style, Kivy explores such topics as musicology and its history, the nature of musical works, and the role of emotion in music, in a way that will attract the interest of philosophical and musical readers alike.

In The Sonic Persona, Holger Schulze undertakes a critical study of some of the most influential studies in sound since the 19th century in the natural sciences, the engineering sciences, and in media theory, confronting them with contemporary artistic practices, with experimental critique, and with disturbing sonic experiences. From Hermann von Helmholtz to Miley Cyrus, from FLUXUS to the Arab Spring, from Wavefield Synthesis to otoacoustic emissions, from premillennial clubculture to postdemocratic authoritarianism, from signal processing to human echolocation: This book presents a fundamental critique concerning recent sound theories and their anthropological concepts - and proposes an alternate, a more plastic, a visceral framework for research in the field of a cultural anthropology of sounding and listening. This anthropology of sound takes its readers and listeners on a research expedition to the multitude of alien humanoids and their surprising sonic personae: in dynamic and generative tension between predetermined auditory dispositives, miniscule and not seldomly ignored sound practices, and idiosyncratic sensory corpuses: a critique of the senses. I'm going to prove the impossible really exists.