A missed phone call. A misheard word. An indiscernible noise. All these can make the difference between life and death. Failures to listen are frequently at the root of the marginalization and exclusion of certain forms of life. Audibility decides livability. Shattering Biopolitics elaborates for the first time the intimate and complex relation between life and sound in recent European philosophy, as well as the political stakes of this entanglement. Nowhere is aurality more pivotal than in the dialogue between biopolitical theory and deconstruction about the power over and of life. Closer inspection of these debates reveals that the main points of contention coalesce around figures of sound and listening: inarticulate voices, meaningless sounds, resonant echoes, syncopated rhythms, animal cries, bells, and telephone rings. Shattering Biopolitics stages a series of "over-hearings" between Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben who often mishear or completely miss hearing in trying to hear too much. Notions of power and life are further diffracted as Helene Cixous, Catherine Malabou, and Jean-Luc Nancy join in this high-stakes game of telephone. This self-destructive character of aurality is akin to the chanciness and risk of death that makes life all the more alive for its incalculability. Punctuating the book are a series of excurses on sound-art projects that interrogate aurality's subordination and resistance to biopower from racialized chokeholds and anti-migrant forensic voice analysis to politicized speech acts and activist practices of listening. Shattering Biopolitics advances the burgeoning field of sound studies with a new, theoretically sophisticated analysis of the political imbrications of its object of inquiry. Above all, it is sound's capacity to shatter sovereignty, as if it were a glass made to vibrate at its natural frequency, that allows it to amplify and disseminate a power of life that refuses to be mastered.

In Together, Somehow, Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta examines how people find ways to get along and share a dancefloor, a vibe, and a sound. Drawing on time spent in the minimal techno and house music subscenes in Chicago, Paris, and Berlin as the first decade of the new millennium came to a close, Garcia-Mispireta explains this bonding in terms of what he calls stranger-intimacy: the kind of warmth, sharing, and vulnerability between people that happens surprisingly often at popular electronic dance music parties. He shows how affect lubricates the connections between music and the dancers. Intense shared senses of sound and touch help support a feeling of belonging to a larger social world. However, as Garcia-Mispireta points out, this sense of belonging can be vague, fluid, and may hide exclusions and injustices. By showing how sharing a dancefloor involves feeling, touch, sound, sexuality, and subculture, Garcia-Mispireta rethinks intimacy and belonging through dancing crowds and the utopian vision of throbbing dancefloors.

How gangsta rap shocked America, made millions, and pulled back the curtain on an urban crisis. How is it that gangsta rap-so dystopian that it struck aspiring Brooklyn rapper and future superstar Jay-Z as "over the top"-was born in Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood, surf, and sun? In the Reagan era, hip-hop was understood to be the music of the inner city and, with rare exception, of New York. Rap was considered the poetry of the street, and it was thought to breed in close quarters, the product of dilapidated tenements, crime-infested housing projects, and graffiti-covered subway cars. To many in the industry, LA was certainly not hard-edged and urban enough to generate authentic hip-hop; a new brand of black rebel music could never come from La-La Land. But it did. In To Live and Defy in LA, Felicia Viator tells the story of the young black men who built gangsta rap and changed LA and the world. She takes readers into South Central, Compton, Long Beach, and Watts two decades after the long hot summer of 1965. This was the world of crack cocaine, street gangs, and Daryl Gates, and it was the environment in which rappers such as Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Eazy-E came of age. By the end of the 1980s, these self-styled "ghetto reporters" had fought their way onto the nation's radio and TV stations and thus into America's consciousness, mocking law-and-order crusaders, exposing police brutality, outraging both feminists and traditionalists with their often retrograde treatment of sex and gender, and demanding that America confront an urban crisis too often ignored.

The zheng zither is one of the most popular instruments in contemporary China. It is commonly regarded as a solo instrument with a continuous tradition dating back to ancient times. But in fact, much of its contemporary solo repertory is derived from several different regional folk ensemble repertories of the mid-twentieth century. Since the setting up of China's modern conservatories, the zheng has been transformed within these new contexts of professional music-making. Over the course of the twentieth century, these regional folk repertories were brought into the performance traditions of modern regional zheng schools. From this basis, a large new zheng repertory was created by conservatory musicians, combining aspects of Western classical music with folk music materials. With the 'opening up' of China's economy since the 1980s, the zheng has been brought into the wider stage of international music-making which includes contemporary art music compositions by overseas based Chinese composers and commercial world music works by Western composers. Through a series of case studies, this book explores how the transformation of the Chinese zheng has constantly responded to its changing social context, critiquing the long-standing arguments concerning 'authenticity' in the development of tradition. This work arises out of, and reflects on, the research methodologies known as performance as research. As an insider to the tradition, brought up within China's zheng society, a trained and practising zheng performer, this study is largely drawn from the author's own experiences of practising and performing the music in question; her study also draws on fieldwork, as well as primary and secondary written sources in Chinese and English. This book is accompanied by downloadable resources which contain audio visual materials relating to the author's fieldwork and zheng performances by different zheng musicians.

Langston Collin Wilkins returns to the city where he grew up to illuminate the complex relationship between place, identity, and music in Houston’s hip hop culture. Interviews with local rap artists, producers, and managers inform an exploration of how artists, audiences, music, and place interact to create a heritage that musicians negotiate in a variety of ways. Street-based musicians, avant-garde underground rappers, and Christian artists offer candid views of the scene while Wilkins delves into related aspects like slab, the area’s hip hop-related car culture. What emerges is a portrait of a dynamic reciprocal process where an artist, having identified with and embodied a social space, reproduces that space in a performance even as the performance reconstructs the social space. A vivid journey through a southern hip hop bastion, Welcome 2 Houston offers readers an inside look at a unique musical culture.

In this magisterial volume, Harvey Sachs, author of the highly acclaimed biography Toscanini, takes readers into the heart of ten great works of classical music-works that have endured because they were created by composers who had a genius for drawing music out of their deepest wellsprings. These masters-Mozart and Beethoven; Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Verdi and Brahms; Sibelius, Prokofiev and Stravinsky-communicated their life experiences through music and through music they universalised the intimate. By expanding our perceptions of these ten pieces-composed in the years between 1784 and 1966-Sachs, in lush, exquisite prose, invites us to consider why music stimulates, disturbs, exalts and consoles us. He has lived with these masterpieces for a lifetime and his descriptions of them and the dramatic lives of the composers who wrote them bring a heightened dimension to the musical perceptions of readers who may be casual listeners, students, professional musicians or anyone in between.

**Finalist in the Outstanding Music Education Resource Category for the 2023 Music & Drama Education Awards** The Symphony: From Mannheim to Mahler is a fascinating and accessible guide that considers the development of the symphony from a number of different perspectives: analytical, historical, and critical. Exploring important milestones, touchpoints, events, key works, and the composers that surround the genre, it also includes a composer timeline, detailed case studies and comprehensive music examples. This handy and informative book is ideal for GCSE, A-Level, and undergraduate music students, as well as anyone wanting to study and learn more about the genre. Christopher Tarrant is Lecturer in Music Analysis at Newcastle University. He received his PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London and now teaches and writes about concert music of the long nineteenth century with a special emphasis on theory of form and the Nordic symphony. Christopher is also a violinist and conductor. Natalie Wild is Director of Research and Deputy Director of Music at the Music in Secondary Schools Trust (MiSST). Her research focuses on the role a classical music education can play in breaking down social barriers. Natalie has taught both GCSE and A-Level Music for many years as Head of Music in various inner-city schools.

This book tells the story of how a regional Chinese theatrical form, Shanghai Yue Opera, evolved from the all-male 'beggar's song' of the early twentieth century to become the largest all-female opera form in the nation, only to face increasing pressure to survive under Chinese political and economic reforms in the new millennium. Previous publications have focused mainly on the historical development of Chinese theatre, with emphasis placed on Beijing opera. This is the first book to take an interdisciplinary approach to the story of the Shanghai Yue Opera, bringing history, arts management, central and regional government policy, urbanisation, gender, media, and theatre artistic development in one. Through the story of the Shanghai Yue Opera House market reform this book facilitates an understanding of the complex Chinese political economic situation in post-socialist China. This book suggests that as state art institutions are key organs of the Communist party gaining legitimacy, the vigorous evolution and struggle of the Shanghai Yue Opera house in fact directly mirrors the Communist Party internal turmoil in the new millennium to gain its own legitimacy and survival.

Situates the controversial narrative of 'The English Musical Renaissance' within its wider historical context. Throughout the nineteenth century a fierce debate about the future of English music was raging in Britain. Just as English music was appearing to advance in quality, the impact of Richard Wagner altered the course of the debate. Alarmed at the Wagnerian influence on English composers, critics expressed relief when that influence appeared to abate, and then presented English music as the antidote to Wagnerian decadence. However, the optimism that England was in a position to lead the musical world was short-lived and a new generation of critics found English composition - with the exception of Elgar - severely lacking. The book identifies themes such as materialism and nationalism that emerged during the debate. It also places the narrative of 'The English Musical Renaissance' within its rightful wider historical context.

(Berklee Press). When you think of jazz composers, who comes to mind? Jelly Roll Morton, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Bob Brookmeyer. This book is about what they (and many others) do. Jazz composition has evolved into a disciplined art that often evidences great emotional depth and breadth of sophistication. Berklee College of Music legend Ted Pease demystifies the processes involved in writing jazz tunes and in composing episodic and extended jazz works. Jazz Composition: Theory and Practice is a by-product of Pease's 25 years of teaching jazz composition. The accompanying CD helps demonstrate melody, harmony and rhythmic elements of jazz and also includes a variety of music-writing exercises focused on learning these same elements to help you begin producing your own effective jazz compositions.

Masterful transcriptions include Rossini's "La Danza," Bach's "Organ Fantasy and Fugue in G minor," Beethoven's "Joyous gathering of the peasants" from the "Pastorale" Symphony, Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" and "Dance of the Elves" from A Midsummer Night's Dream, "The Trout" and "Erlkonig" by Schubert, the "Polonaise" from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, and many others.

WInner of the Best First Book from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Winner of the Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award Winner of the Ann Saddlemyer Award from the Canadian Association for Theatre Research Reimagining how we understand and write about the Indigenous listening experience​ Hungry Listening is the first book to consider listening from both Indigenous and settler colonial perspectives. A critical response to what has been called the “whiteness of sound studies,� Dylan Robinson evaluates how decolonial practices of listening emerge from increasing awareness of our listening positionality. This, he argues, involves identifying habits of settler colonial perception and contending with settler colonialism’s “tin ear� that renders silent the epistemic foundations of Indigenous song as history, law, and medicine.  With case studies on Indigenous participation in classical music, musicals, and popular music, Hungry Listening examines structures of inclusion that reinforce Western musical values. Alongside this inquiry on the unmarked terms of inclusion in performing arts organizations and compositional practice, Hungry Listening offers examples of “doing sovereignty� in Indigenous performance art, museum exhibition, and gatherings that support an Indigenous listening resurgence. Throughout the book, Robinson shows how decolonial and resurgent forms of listening might be affirmed by writing otherwise about musical experience. Through event scores, dialogic improvisation, and forms of poetic response and refusal, he demands a reorientation toward the act of reading as a way of listening. Indigenous relationships to the life of song are here sustained in writing that finds resonance in the intersubjective experience between listener, sound, and space. 

For a century and more, the idea of democracy has fuelled musicians' imaginations. Seeking to go beyond music's proven capacity to contribute to specific political causes, musicians have explored how aspects of their practice embody democratic principles. This may involve adopting particular approaches to compositional material, performance practice, relationships to audiences, or modes of dissemination and distribution. Finding Democracy in Music is the first study to offer a wide-ranging investigation of ways in which democracy may thus be found in music. A guiding theme of the volume is that this takes place in a plurality of ways, depending upon the perspective taken to music's manifold relationships, and the idea of democracy being entertained. Contributing authors explore various genres including orchestral composition, jazz, the post-war avant-garde, online performance, and contemporary popular music, as well as employing a wide array of theoretical, archival, and ethnographic methodologies. Particular attention is given to the contested nature of democracy as a category, and the gaps that frequently arise between utopian aspiration and reality. In so doing, the volume interrogates a key way in which music helps to articulate and shape our social lives and our politics.

This collection brings together an anthology of articles by Thomas Christensen, one of the leading historians of music theory active today. Published over the span of the past 25 years, the selected articles provide a historical conspectus about a range of vital topics in the history of music theory, focusing in particular upon writings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Christensen examines a variety of theorists and their arguments within the intellectual and musical contexts of their time, in the process highlighting the diverse and idiosyncratic nature of the discipline of music theory itself. In the first section of the book Christensen offers general reflections on the meaning and interpretation of historical music theories, with especial attention paid to their value for music theorists today. The second section of the book contains a number of articles that consider the catalytic role of the thorough bass in the development of harmonic theory during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the final two sections of the anthology, focus turns to the writings of several individual music theorists, including Marin Mersenne, Seth Calvisius, Johann Mattheson, Johann Nicolaus Bach, Denis Diderot and Johann Nichelmann. The volume includes essays from hard-to-find publications as well as newly-translated material and the articles are prefaced by a new, wide-ranging autobiographical essay by the author that offers a broad re-assessment of his historical project. This book is essential reading for music theorists and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century musicologists.

This book examines the functional place of music in contemporary European philosophy of the 20th and 21st centuries. The chapters explore the musical dimensions of lesser known figures as well as well-known philosophical figures in relation to their lesser-known musical dimensions. Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Ranciere and Alain Badiou, for example, are central figures in debates concerning phenomenology, postmodernism and political philosophy. Their musical writings, however, have been largely overlooked. Of those discussed here whose musical writings have gained some currency - Ernst Bloch, Theodor W. Adorno, Jean-Luc Nancy, Edward Said, and Slavoj Zizek - music mostly constitutes but a partial aspect of their overall philosophical output. These chapters attempt to supplement the gap, raising more prominently than hitherto the question concerning music in this philosophical milieu. The collection represents some of the distinctive recent work of an emerging generation of American-based music scholars tackling the relationship between philosophy and music in a qualitatively new way. While this intellectual output cannot be easily summarized, one detects certain features. If what was once called "New Musicology" in the 1990s can be characterized by a turn to literary theory and philosophy - treated as sources of (mostly nonjudgmental) inspiration - we find here, instead, a new body of work that turns the tables on the relation between music and philosophy. Instead of bringing philosophy to musicology, this work critically analyzes how music inhabits philosophy itself, and then assesses the ethical and political dimensions of these philosophical positions and their relation to lived history. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Music Review.

The musical leitmotif, having reached a point of particular forcefulness in the music of Richard Wagner, has remained a popular compositional device up to the present day. In this book, Matthew Bribitzer-Stull explores the background and development of the leitmotif, from Wagner to the Hollywood adaptations of The Lord of The Rings and the Harry Potter series. Analyzing both concert music and film music, Bribitzer-Stull explains what the leitmotif is and establishes it as the union of two aspects: the thematic and the associative. He goes on to show that Wagner's Ring cycle provides a leitmotivic paradigm, a model from which we can learn to better understand the leitmotif across style periods. Arguing for a renewed interest in the artistic merit of the leitmotif, Bribitzer-Stull reveals how uniting meaning, memory, and emotion in music can lead to a richer listening experience and a better understanding of dramatic music's enduring appeal.

Musical culture in Jewish communities in early modern Italy was much more diverse than researchers originally thought. An interdisciplinary reassessment, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy evaluates the social, cultural, political, economic, and religious circumstances that shaped this community, especially in light of the need to recognize individual experiences within minority populations. Contributors draw from rich materials, topics, and approaches as they explore the inherently diverse understandings of music in daily life, the many ways that Jewish communities conceived of music, and the reception of and responses to Jewish musical culture. Highlighting the multifaceted experience of music within Jewish communities, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy sheds new light on the place of music in complex, previously misunderstood environments.

More than eighty years have passed since Edgard Varese s catalytic work for percussion ensemble, "Ionisation," was heard in its New York premiere. A flurry of pieces for this new medium dawned soon after, challenging the established truths and preferences of the European musical tradition while setting the stage for percussion to become one of the most significant musical advances of the twentieth century. This 'revolution', as John Cage termed it, was a quintessentially modernist movement - an exploration of previously undiscovered sounds, forms, textures, and styles. However, as percussion music has progressed and become woven into the fabric of Western musical culture, several divergent paths, comprised of various traditions and a multiplicity of aesthetic sensibilities, have since emerged for the percussionist to pursue.

This edited collection highlights the progressive developments that continue to investigate uncharted musical grounds. Using historical studies, philosophical insights, analyses of performance practice, and anecdotal reflections authored by some of today's most engaged performers, composers, and scholars, this book aims to illuminate the unique destinations found in the artistic journey of the modern percussionist."

Performing in musical ensembles provides a remarkable opportunity for interaction between people. When playing a piece of music together, musicians contribute to the creation of an artistic work that is shaped through their individual performances. However, even though ensembles are a large part of musical activity, questions remain as to how they function. In Embodied Knowledge in Ensemble Performance, Murphy McCaleb explores the processes by which musicians interact with each other through performance. McCaleb begins by breaking down current models of ensemble interaction, particularly those that rely on the same kind of communication found in conversation. In order to find a new way of describing this interaction, McCaleb considers the nature of the information being shared between musicians during performance. Using examples from postgraduate ensembles at Birmingham Conservatoire as well as his own reflective practice, he examines how an understanding of the relationship between musicians and their instruments may affect the way performers infer information within an ensemble. Drawing upon research from musicology, occupational psychology, and philosophy, and including downloadable resources of excerpts from rehearsals and performances, Embodied Knowledge provides an holistic approach to ensemble research in a manner accessible to performers, researchers and teachers.

This collection of previously published articles, chapters and keynotes traces both the theoretical contribution of Lucy Green to the emergent field of the sociology of music education, and her radical 'hands-on' practical work in classrooms and instrumental studios. The selection contains a mixture of material, from essays that have appeared in major journals and books, to some harder-to-find publications. It spans issues from musical meaning, ideology, identity and gender in relation to music education, to changes and challenges in music curricula and pedagogy, and includes Green's highly influential work on bringing informal learning into formal music education settings. A newly-written introduction considers the relationship between theory and practice, and situates each essay in relation to some of the major influences, within and beyond the field of music education, which affected Green's own intellectual journey from the 1970s to the present day.

In 1969, five young Englishmen calling themselves King Crimson altered the course of rock music. With guitar virtuoso Robert Fripp at the helm, the progressive rock band flouted the conventions of rock 'n' roll while battling music business practices. For nearly five decades, King Crimson has continued to innovate and influence the music world, spawning many groundbreaking collaborations and inspiring other acclaimed bands, from Genesis and Yes to Nirvana and Radiohead. Fifty Shades of Crimson tells the stories of this unique group and its leader, Robert Fripp, over the course of five remarkable decades. Tracing the arc of King Crimson's history-beginning with its initial rise to fame after supporting the Rolling Stones at Hyde Park and the release of its album In the Court of the Crimson King in 1969-this book chronicles how King Crimson became one of the most influential bands of its era. It also highlights Fripp's many collaborations (with Brian Eno, Andy Summers, and many others) and the bands that King Crimson members went on to form, including Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Foreigner, UK, and Asia. Cycling through countless members, and rejecting Elton John and Bryan Ferry along the way, King Crimson has released many highly acclaimed albums and maintained a large global following. There are numerous spurious claims about bands changing the course of music, but Fripp and the members of King Crimson have done so several times over! Now, in Fifty Shades of Crimson, fans can get the behind-the-scene details of rock history in the making.

1) The contingencies and complexity of social engagement and activism as they constitute a turn toward ethics is the central focus 2) Readers are stimulated to trace ethical themes as they resonate across multiple chapters, emerging and conflicting in widely contrasting social situations, 3) Presents the first substantial body of ideas about where ethnomusicology currently stands as a discipline in relation to ethical concerns, how it got there, and, most importantly, where it needs to go in the years directly ahead.