Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
|||
Books > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
Through a theoretical and practical exploration of Jungian and post-Jungian concepts surrounding image, this book moves beyond the visual scope of imagery to consider the presence and expression of music and sound, as well as how the psyche encounters expanded images - archetypal, personal or cultural - on both conscious and unconscious levels. By closely examining music in film, Nagari considers music's complementary, enhancing, meaningful, and sometimes disruptive, contribution to expressive images. Chapters present a Jungian approach to music in film, highlighting how 'music-image' functions both independently and in conjunction with the visual image, and suggesting further directions in areas of research including music therapy and autism. Divided into three cumulative parts, Part I explores the Jungian psychological account of the music-image; Part II combines theory with practice in analysing how the auditory image works with the visual to create the 'film as a whole' experience; and Part III implements a specific understanding of three individual film cases of different genres, eras and styles as psychologically scrutinised 'case histories'. Music as Image will be of interest to academics and students in the fields of applied psychoanalysis and Jungian psychology, music, film and cultural studies. With implications for music therapy and other art-based therapies, it will also be relevant for practising psychotherapists.
Since the publication of the first edition of A Spectrum of Voices there have been significant advances in voice studies. Prominent members of the new generation of voice teachers join their voices with now-canonized teachings. Asking questions about technology, pedagogy, and stylistic changes within the field, Elizabeth L. Blades brings the wisdom from the past and present to voice students at all levels. A Spectrum of Voices draws from the brilliance and combined experience of an elite group of exemplary voice teachers, presenting interviews from more than twenty-five notable teachers, six of them new to this second edition. Voice teachers offer valuable insight into their teaching philosophies, the types of auxiliary training they recommend to their students, and how they structure their lessons. This second edition also addresses significant technological advances of the past twenty years, especially the impact on vocal performance and pedagogy. A quick-and-handy reference for the studio teacher, this book also serves as a text for vocal pedagogy courses and as an essential supplement for physiology and vocal mechanics, teachers and students of singing, music educators, and musical theater performers.
First published in 1990, this book was the first comprehensive study of Balzac's relationship to music, blending past scholarship with new perspectives to formulate an inclusive account. It begins by examining the contacts and experiences that shaped the musical side of Balzac's life. These left valuable and lasting impressions which often found their way into his writings, where he recorded a myriad of critical and musicological opinions - assessed primarily in relation to Gambara and Massimilla Doni. These discussions prepare the way for an analysis of Balzac two major musical persuasions: religious music and Beethoven. This book will be of interest to students of literature and music.
Since the publication of the first edition of A Spectrum of Voices there have been significant advances in voice studies. Prominent members of the new generation of voice teachers join their voices with now-canonized teachings. Asking questions about technology, pedagogy, and stylistic changes within the field, Elizabeth L. Blades brings the wisdom from the past and present to voice students at all levels. A Spectrum of Voices draws from the brilliance and combined experience of an elite group of exemplary voice teachers, presenting interviews from more than twenty-five notable teachers, six of them new to this second edition. Voice teachers offer valuable insight into their teaching philosophies, the types of auxiliary training they recommend to their students, and how they structure their lessons. This second edition also addresses significant technological advances of the past twenty years, especially the impact on vocal performance and pedagogy. A quick-and-handy reference for the studio teacher, this book also serves as a text for vocal pedagogy courses and as an essential supplement for physiology and vocal mechanics, teachers and students of singing, music educators, and musical theater performers.
Andreas Werckmeister (1645 - 1706), a late seventeenth-century German Lutheran organist, composer, and music theorist, is the last great advocate and defender of the Great Tradition in music, with its assumptions that music is a divine gift to humanity, spiritually charged yet rationally accessible, the key being a complex of mathematical proportions which govern and are at the root of the entire universe and all which that embraces. Thus understood, music is the audible manifestation of the order of the universe, allowing glimpses, sound-bites of the very Creator of a well-tempered universe, and of our relationship to each other, our environment, and the divine powers which placed us here. This is the subject matter of the conversation which Werckmeister wishes to have with us, his readers, particularly in his last treatise, the Musicalische Paradoxal-Discourse. But he does not make it easy for today's readers. He assumes certain proficiencies from his readers, including detailed biblical knowledge, a fluency in Latin, and a familiarity with treatises and publications concerning music, theology, and a number of related disciplines. He writes in a rather archaic German, riddled with obscure references which require a thorough explanation. With its extensive commentary and translation of the treatise, this book seeks to bridge Werckmeister's world with that of the twenty-first century. Werckmeister wrote for novice and professional musicians alike, an author who wanted to consider with his readers the basic and existential questions and issues regarding the wondrous art of music, questions as relevant then as they are now.
This book explores the emerging area of microtonality through an examination of the tuning theories of Erv Wilson. It is the first publication to offer a broad discussion of this influential theorist whose innovations have far-reaching ramifications for microtonal tuning systems. This study addresses the breadth and complexity of Wilson's work by focusing on his microtonal keyboard designs as a means to investigate his tuning concepts and their practical applications. Narushima examines materials ranging from historical and experimental tunings to instrument design, as well as musical applications of mathematical theories and multidimensional geometry. The volume provides an analysis of some of Wilson's most significant theoretical ideas, including the Scale Tree, Moments of Symmetry, Constant Structures, and Combination-Product Sets. These theories offer ways to conceptualize musical scales as patterns with structural integrity and whose shapes can be altered to produce infinitely varying forms. The book shows how these structural properties can be used to map scales onto a microtonal keyboard by providing step-by-step guidelines and clearly illustrated examples. Most importantly, it brings together theoretical and practical methods of tuning to enable composers, performers, and instrument designers to explore previously uncharted areas of microtonality, making a significant contribution to the fields of music theory, composition and music technology.
The Sound of Ontology: Music as a Model for Metaphysics explores connections between Western art music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the ideas that dominated philosophy leading up to and during that period. In the process of establishing John Cage as Richard Wagner's heir via Arnold Schoenberg, the author discovers that the old metaphysics of representation is still in charge of how we think about music and about experience in general. Instead of settling for the positivist definition of music as mere sound framed by time, LaFave provides a phenomenology of music that reveals pitch as the ontological counterpart to frequency, and music as a vehicle for understanding how, as Heidegger observed, the Being of "things of value" are invariably grounded in the Being of "things of nature." Numerous musical examples and a poem by Wallace Stevens illustrate LaFave's case that hierarchy is intrinsic to this understanding. Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy is brought to bear alongside Heidegger's phenomenological ontology to show that not only music, but reality itself, depends on a play of interlocking hierarchies to effect the nature-value connection, making aesthetics first philosophy.
This collection of essays, first published in 1987, provides a sociological treatment of many musical forms - rock, jazz, classical - with special emphasis on the perspective of the practising musician. Among the topics covered are the legal structures governing musical production and the question of copyright; recording and production technology; the social character of musical style; and the impact of lyrical content, considered socially and historically.
This book is a love letter to the artists, scenes, and sounds defining North Carolina's extraordinary contributions to American popular music. David Menconi spent three decades immersed in the state's music, where traditions run deep but the energy expands in countless directions. Menconi shows how working-class roots and rebellion tie North Carolina's Piedmont blues, jazz, and bluegrass to beach music, rock, hip-hop, and more. From mill towns and mountain coves to college-town clubs and the stage of American Idol, Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk, Step It Up and Go celebrates homegrown music just as essential to the state as barbecue and basketball. Spanning a century of history from the dawn of recorded music to the present, and with sidebars and photos that help reveal the many-splendored glory of North Carolina's sonic landscape, this is a must-read for every music lover.
An Introduction to Effective Music Teaching: Artistry and Attitude provides the prospective teacher with front-line tested strategies and approaches that are based on current research and the author's three decades of service as a public school music educator, department chairman, and public school district music administrator. Starting with a brief overview of the history of music education in public schools, Alfred Townsend gives the reader a deeper understanding of the importance of music education to all students, gifted or not. Readers then examine artistry (command of content and mastery of methods) and the ABCs of teacher attitude, the critical component that unlocks learning for many students. With an open and accessible writing style, Dr. Townsend reviews the six components of effective teaching, showing that artistry and attitude can be combined to fuel student learning and teacher leadership. Using all of this information, the reader constructs a personal, practical philosophy of music teaching and learning that will form the basis for his or her instruction. Readers will also experience artistry and attitude in action through well written case studies of effective teachers. With increasingly diverse student populations teachers now face, this book provides music teachers with ways to interact effectively with students of all backgrounds, attitudes, and talent.
"Taken as a trilogy, consent not to be a single being is a monumental accomplishment: a brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for blackness as a category of analysis."-Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination In Black and Blur-the first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy consent not to be a single being-Fred Moten engages in a capacious consideration of the place and force of blackness in African diaspora arts, politics, and life. In these interrelated essays, Moten attends to entanglement, the blurring of borders, and other practices that trouble notions of self-determination and sovereignty within political and aesthetic realms. Black and Blur is marked by unlikely juxtapositions: Althusser informs analyses of rappers Pras and Ol' Dirty Bastard; Shakespeare encounters Stokely Carmichael; thinkers like Kant, Adorno, and Jose Esteban Munoz and artists and musicians including Thornton Dial and Cecil Taylor play off each other. Moten holds that blackness encompasses a range of social, aesthetic, and theoretical insurgencies that respond to a shared modernity founded upon the sociological catastrophe of the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonialism. In so doing, he unsettles normative ways of reading, hearing, and seeing, thereby reordering the senses to create new means of knowing.
German music critic and opera producer Paul Bekker (1882-1937) is a rare example of a critic granted the opportunity to turn his ideas into practice. In this first full-length study of Bekker in English, Nanette Nielsen investigates Bekker's theory and practice in light of ethics and aesthetics, in order to uncover the ways in which these intersect in his work and contributed to the cultural and political landscape of the Weimar Republic. By linking Beethoven's music to issues of freedom and individuality, as he argues for its potential to unify the masses, Bekker had already in 1911 begun to construct the ethical framework for his musical sociology and opera aesthetics. Nielsen discusses some of the complex (and conflicting) layers of modernism and conservatism in Bekker that would have a continued presence in his work and its reception throughout his career. Bekker's demands for a 'practical ethics' led to his criticisms of metaphysically grounded approaches to aesthetics, and his ethical views are put into further relief in a sketch of the development of his music phenomenology in the 1920s. Nielsen unravels the complex intersections between Bekker's ethics and his opera aesthetics in connection with his practice as an Intendant at the Wiesbaden State Theatre (1927-1932), offering a critical reading of an opera staged during his tenure: Hugo Herrmann's Vasantasena (1930). Further works are considered in light of the theoretical framework underpinning the book, inspired by several intersections between ethics and aesthetics encountered in Bekker's work.
Bessie Smith occupies a unique place in the history of American music. She was one of the first undisputed artists to come from the American vernacular tradition of the twentieth century, and as a woman, she was a figure of extraordinary power. She organized and led her own touring companies, wrote some of her repertoire, controlled her many relationships (romantic and otherwise), and even negotiated her own contracts. This type of agency was virtually unheard of in the popular music industry during the first half of the century, and Smith is often cited as a major influence on artists who sought to manage their work and reputation. Her musical output comprises a long series of recordings done between 1923 and 1933, all of which feature her vocal range, musical ability, and emotional power. Her band included some of the best black musicians of the day. In Experiencing Bessie Smith, John Clark chronicles Bessie Smith's vital contribution to and influence on music, the music industry, and the recording industry. While her recording career lasted only a decade, she toured long before setting her music to vinyl, with much of her early career amply documented. Singers from Billie Holiday to Janis Joplin were influenced by her work, and both musicians and music lovers today continue to be entranced by her unmistakable style.
Punk rock may have started in the United Kingdom and United States but it certainly didn't stay in either country. The genre flew around the globe like a contagion, touching off simultaneous movements in nearly every market imaginable: Japan, Yugoslavia, the Philippines, South Africa, New Zealand, Chile, Mexico, Poland, Burma, Singapore, and Turkey, among countless others. Performing punk rock in many of these places wasn't just rebellious, it was legitimately dangerous, thanks to regimes far more oppressive and brutal than what existed in the West. Brave Punk World immerses readers in these foreign scenes, describing the lifestyles and art of passionate, hard-charging groups who remain secret to the punk majority but who are just as crucial as the Ramones or the Sex Pistols. James Greene, Jr. explores Brazilian bands like Ulster who angrily protested and openly mocked their region's cruel dictatorship, Germans such as Slime who see many of their songs still banned to this day, the Algerian-by-way-of-France performers Carte de Sejour who had an alleged hand in inspiring the landmark Clash hit "Rock The Casbah," and a galaxy of other punk groups from more exotic locales. Punk diehards and travel enthusiasts with a taste for chaos will enjoy the country-by-country cultural explorations and wild stories offered within these pages.
Since Gyoergy Ligeti's death in 2006, there has been a growing acknowledgement of how central he was to the late twentieth-century cultural landscape. This collection is the first book devoted to exploring the composer's life and music within the context of his East European roots, revealing his dual identities as both Hungarian national and cosmopolitan modernist. Contributors explore the artistic and socio-cultural contexts of Ligeti's early works, including composition and music theory, the influence of East European folk music, notions of home and identity, his ambivalent attitude to his Hungarian past and his references to his homeland in his later music. Many of the valuable insights offered profit from new research undertaken at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, while also drawing on the knowledge of long-time associates such as the composer's assistant, Louise Duchesneau. The contributions as a whole reveal Ligeti's thoroughly cosmopolitan milieu and values, and illuminate why his music continues to inspire new generations of performers, composers and listeners.
Overturning the inherited belief that popular music is unrefined, Form as Harmony in Rock Music brings the process-based approach of classical theorists to popular music scholarship. Author Drew Nobile offers the first comprehensive theory of form for 1960s, 70s, and 80s classic rock repertoire, showing how songs in this genre are not simply a series of discrete elements, but rather exhibit cohesive formal-harmonic structures across their entire timespan. Though many elements contribute to the cohesion of a song, the rock music of these decades is built around a fundamentally harmonic backdrop, giving rise to distinct types of verses, choruses, and bridges. Nobile's rigorous but readable theoretical analysis demonstrates how artists from Bob Dylan to Stevie Wonder to Madonna consistently turn to the same compositional structures throughout rock's various genres and decades, unifying them under a single musical style. Using over 200 transcriptions, graphs, and form charts, Form as Harmony in Rock Music advocates a structural approach to rock analysis, revealing essential features of this style that would otherwise remain below our conscious awareness.
Music, Time, and Its Other explores the relation between the enigmatic character of our temporal experiences and music's affective power. By taking account of competing concepts of time, Savage explains how music refigures dimensions of our experiences through staking out the borderlines between time and eternity. He examines a range of musical expressions that reply to the deficiency born from the difference between time and an order that exceeds or surpasses it and reveals how affective tonalities of works by Bach, Carolan, Debussy, Schoenberg, Messiaen, and Glass augment our understanding of our temporal condition. Reflections on the moods and feelings to which music gives voice counterpoint philosophical investigations into the relation between music's power to affect us and the force that the present has with respect to the initiatives we take. Music, Time, and Its Other thus sets out a new approach to music, aesthetics, politics, and the critical roles of judgment and imagination.
From prehistoric bone flutes to pipe organs to digital synthesizers, instruments have been important to musical cultures around the world. Yet, how do instruments affect musical organization? And how might they influence players' bodies and minds? Music at Hand explores these questions with a distinctive blend of music theory, psychology, and philosophy. Practicing an instrument, of course, builds bodily habits and skills. But it also develops connections between auditory and motor regions in a player's brain. These multi-sensory links are grounded in particular instrumental interfaces. They reflect the ways that an instrument converts action into sound, and the ways that it coordinates physical and tonal space. Ultimately, these connections can shape listening, improvisation, or composition. This means that pianos, guitars, horns, and bells are not simply tools for making notes. Such technologies, as creative prostheses, also open up possibilities for musical action, perception, and cognition. Throughout the book, author Jonathan De Souza examines diverse musical case studies-from Beethoven to blues harmonica, from Bach to electronic music-introducing novel methods for the analysis of body-instrument interaction. A companion website supports these analytical discussions with audiovisual examples, including motion-capture videos and performances by the author. Written in lucid prose, Music at Hand offers substantive insights for music scholars, while remaining accessible to non-specialist readers. This wide-ranging book will engage music theorists and historians, ethnomusicologists, organologists, composers, and performers-but also psychologists, philosophers, media theorists, and anyone who is curious about how musical experience is embodied and conditioned by technology.
How does musical harmony engage listeners in relations of desire? Where does this desire come from? Author Kenneth Smith seeks to answer these questions by analyzing works from the turn of the twentieth- century that are both harmonically enriched and psychologically complex. Desire in Chromatic Harmony yields a new theory of how chromatic chord progressions direct the listener on intricate journeys through harmonic space, mirroring the tensions of the psyche found in Schopenhauer, Freud, Lacan, Lyotard, and Deleuze. Smith extends this mode of enquiry into sophisticated music theory, while exploring philosophically engaged European and American composers such as Richard Strauss, Alexander Skryabin, Josef Suk, Charles Ives, and Aaron Copland. Focusing on harmony and chord progression, the book drills down into the diatonic undercurrent beneath densely chromatic and dissonant surfaces. From the obsession with death and mourning in Suk's asrael Symphony to an exploration of "perversion" in Strauss's elektra; from the Sufi mysticism of Szymanowski's Song of the Night to the failed fantasy of the American dream in Copland's The Tender Land, Desire in Chromatic Harmony cuts a path through the dense forests of chromatic complexity, revealing the psychological make-up of post-Wagnerian psychodynamic music.
An accessible exploration of an important and understudied music theory topic, Swain's book examines the dimensional technique of analyzing harmonic rhythm. Simply defined, harmonic rhythm is the relationship between changes in harmony and perceived changes in rhythm. This phenomenon plays a large role in shaping the texture and style of much of Western music, from Renaissance polyphonic pieces to the works of Debussy. In Harmonic Rhythm, Joseph Swain revists this neglected theoretical concept, providing a clear and thorough explanation of how harmonic theory works. Using a small core of repeated musical examples, Swain explores the theory's crucial components including functional and non functional harmonies, harmonic tension and harmonic speed. In addition, swain outlines a method for "dimensional analysis" of musical works; taking both ryhthm and harmony into account, he shows readers how to achieve a more thorough understanding of and appreciation for the texture of music.
Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy examines the capacity of musiciking to cultivate ecological literacy, approaching eco-literate music pedagogy through philosophical and autoethnographical lenses. Building on the principle that music contributes uniquely to human ecological thinking, this volume tracks the course of eco-literate music pedagogy while guiding the discussion forward: What does it mean to embrace the impulse to teach music for ecological literacy? What is it like to theorize eco-literate music pedagogy? What is learned through enacting this pedagogy? How do the impulsion, the theorizing, and the enacting relate to one another? Music education for ecological consciousness is experienced in local places, and this study explores the theory underlying eco-literate music pedagogy in juxtaposition with the author's personal experiences. The work arrives at a new philosophy for music education: a spiritual praxis rooted in soil communities, one informed by ecology's intrinsic value for non-human being and musicking. Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy adds to the emerging body of music education literature considering ecological and environmental issues.
This in-depth musicological and critical study examines how Bernard Herrmann's score for Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" plays a crucial role in the articulation and development of the filM's narrative and how it affects readings of the film. Herrmann's collaboration with Hitchcock spanned eleven years and nine films, and Herrmann's film score for "Vertigo" is widely regarded as being one of his finest. Cooper considers the development of Herrmann's career up to 1958, providing a detailed discussion of his musical style. The explicit information about the structure of Herrmann's music is based on a study of Herrmann's autograph score. Cooper examines not only the context of the filM's production, but also its reception and critical readings of the film. In addition, this study explores how the effects track co-operates with Herrmann's non-diegetic and diegetic score and concludes with a detailed musicological study. The author advances a new theory, in his discussion of signification, about the establishment of meaning in film music through association with images on the screen. This sophisticated musicological approach will appeal to film music and film communication scholars.
The use of technology in music and education can no longer be described as a recent development. Music learners actively engage with technology in their music making, regardless of the opportunities afforded to them in formal settings. This volume draws together critical perspectives in three overarching areas in which technology is used to support music education: music production; game technology; musical creation, experience and understanding. The fourteen chapters reflect the emerging field of the study of technology in music from a pedagogical perspective. Contributions come not only from music pedagogues but also from musicologists, composers and performers working at the forefront of the domain. The authors examine pedagogical practice in the recording studio, how game technology relates to musical creation and expression, the use of technology to create and assess musical compositions, and how technology can foster learning within the field of Special Educational Needs (SEN). In addition, the use of technology in musical performance is examined, with a particular focus on the current trends and the ways it might be reshaped for use within performance practice. This book will be of value to educators, practitioners, musicologists, composers and performers, as well as to scholars with an interest in the critical study of how technology is used effectively in music and music education.
This unique collaboration between a musicologist and two pianists - all experts in Russian music - takes a fresh look at the supercharged music and polarizing reception of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. From his Chopin-inspired miniatures to his genre-bending symphonies and avant-garde late works, Scriabin left a unique mark on music history. Scriabin's death centennial in 2015 brought wider exposure and renewed attention to this pioneering composer. Music lovers who are curious about Scriabin have been torn between specialized academic studies and popular sources that glamorize his interests and activities, often at the expense of historical accuracy. This book bridges the divide between these two branches of literature, and brings a modern perspective to his music and legacy. Drawing on archival materials, primary sources in Russian, and recently published books and articles, Part One details the reception and performance history of Scriabin's solo piano and orchestral music. High quality recordings are recommended for each piece. Part Two explores four topics in Scriabin's reception: the myths generated by Scriabin's biographers, his claims to synaesthesia or "color-hearing," his revival in 1960s America as a proto-Flower Child, and the charges of anti-Russianness leveled against his music. Part Three investigates stylistic context and performance practice in the piano music, and considers the domains of sound, rhythm, and harmony. It offers interpretive strategies for deciphering Scriabin's challenging scores at the keyboard. Students, scholars, and music enthusiasts will benefit from the historical insights offered in this interdisciplinary book. Armed with this knowledge, readers will be able to better appreciate the stylistic innovations and colorful imagination of this extraordinary composer.
AWARD WINNER OF THE 2018 SOCIETY OF ETHNOMUSICLOGY ELLEN KOSKOFF PRIZE This volume is the first sustained examination of the complex perspectives that comprise ecomusicology-the study of the intersections of music/sound, culture/society, and nature/environment. Twenty-two authors provide a range of theoretical, methodological, and empirical chapters representing disciplines such as anthropology, biology, ecology, environmental studies, ethnomusicology, history, literature, musicology, performance studies, and psychology. They bring their specialized training to bear on interdisciplinary topics, both individually and in collaboration. Emerging from the whole is a view of ecomusicology as a field, a place where many disciplines come together. The topics addressed in this volume-contemporary composers and traditional musics, acoustic ecology and politicized soundscapes, material sustainability and environmental crisis, familiar and unfamiliar sounds, local places and global warming, birds and mice, hearing and listening, biomusic and soundscape ecology, and more-engage with conversations in the various realms of music study as well as in environmental studies and cultural studies. As with any healthy ecosystem, the field of ecomusicology is dynamic, but this edited collection provides a snapshot of it in a formative period. Each chapter is short, designed to be accessible to the nonspecialist, and includes extensive bibliographies; some chapters also provide further materials on a companion website: http://www.ecomusicology.info/cde/. An introduction and interspersed editorial summaries help guide readers through four current directions-ecological, fieldwork, critical, and textual-in the field of ecomusicology. |
You may like...
Marabi Nights - Jazz, 'Race' and Society…
Christopher Ballantine
Paperback
(1)
|