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Books > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
Unlike most jazz arranging books, which focus on the rudiments of arranging (transposition, ranges, notation, and so forth), this book deals with the real substance of arranging for small jazz ensembles, in addition to the rudiments. Rinzler devotes a chapter to each of the following arranging elements: intros, endings, accents/breaks/dynamics, time and tempo changes, style changes, form, rhythm section procedure, harmony and orchestration. Over a hundred musical examples demonstrate arranging techniques that apply to 147 jazz standards and modern compositions.
This book is about thinking in music. Music listeners who understand what they hear are thinking in music. Music readers who understand and visualize what they read are thinking in music. This book investigates the various ways musicians acquire those skills through an examination of the latest research in music perception and cognition, music theory, along with centuries of insight from music theorists, composers, and performers. Aural skills are the focus; the author also works with common works with common problems in both skills teaching and skills acquisition.
A century after his death Anton Bruckner still remains one of the most complex and enigmatic creative personalities of the nineteenth century. A leading avant-garde figure of his generation, he was an accomplished performer and teacher in addition to being a great composer; few people in the history of western music can boast his level of achievement in all these areas combined. This book, a collection of essays written by an international group of scholars, offers diverse theoretical and musicological perspectives on Bruckner the composer-teacher-performer. Facets of his formidable theoretical training and his application of it as part of the compositional process are explored. A variety of analytical methodologies is used to examine the Second through to the Ninth Symphonies, the heart of the composer's mature repertoire. Finally, aspects of Bruckner's career as a teacher and performer, his complex personality, his influence and dissemination of his music are considered.
Little is known about the ways in which early modern musical cultures were integrated within their broader urban environments. Building on recent trends within urban musicology, the authors of this volume aim to transcend descriptive overviews of institutions and actors involved with music within a given city. Instead, they consider the urban environment as the constitutive context for the making of music as a significant aspect of urban society and identity. Through selected case studies and by focusing on three musical circuits opera and theater music, sacred music, and secular songs this book contributes to a more effective understanding of music in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century urban societies in the southern Netherlands and beyond. Musicological and historical research perspectives are fruitfully integrated, as well as insights from theater scholarship and literary criticism. With attention to the musical life behind the traditional institutions, the circulation of repertoires, and musical cultures in peripheral urban environments or in cities in decay, Music and the City reveals the societal dimension of music in urban life."
Beethoven's piano sonatas are a cornerstone of the piano repertoire and favourites of both the concert hall and recording studio. The sonatas have been the subject of much scholarship, but no single study gives an adequate account of the processes by which these sonatas were composed and published. With source materials such as sketches and correspondence increasingly available, the time is ripe for a close study of the history of these works. Barry Cooper, who in 2007 produced a new edition of all 35 sonatas, including three that are often overlooked, examines each sonata in turn, addressing questions such as: Why were they written? Why did they turn out as they did? How did they come into being and how did they reach their final form? Drawing on the composer's sketches, autograph scores and early printed editions, as well as contextual material such as correspondence, Cooper explores the links between the notes and symbols found in the musical texts of the sonatas, and the environment that brought them about. The result is a biography not of the composer, but of the works themselves.
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.
Working on a musical is exciting for students, teachers, and the entire middle school community! As the first musical theater book especially for middle school productions, The Magic of Middle School Musicals provides a step-by-step guide for success. Bobetsky approaches planning and producing musicals in the context of a curricular unit of study and includes strategies for assessing student learning. Dr. Victor V. Bobetsky, a former New York City middle school music teacher, begins with advice on how to select a musical, obtain copyright permission, and arrange the music for middle school voices. He discusses strategies for teaching the music in the choral classroom, auditioning, casting, and rehearsal procedures. Practical suggestions show directors how to work with student actors, create choreography, and manage scenery, set design, costumes, lighting, and more. The Magic of Middle School Musicals gives music teachers the information and confidence they need to artistically adapt musicals from the American repertoire to the middle school level so that teachers, students, and audiences can experience and enjoy this unique, familiar, and musically expressive genre!
Although writers on film music frequently allude to specific parts of scores, comprehensive examinations of entire scores have been rare. In addition, most analyses of scores composed for the screen are discussed outside of their cinematic context. To best understand the role that music plays in the production of a motion picture, however, it benefits the viewer to consider all of the elements that comprise the film experience. In The Synergy of Film and Music: Sight and Sound in Five Hollywood Films, Peter Rothbart examines a handful of motion pictures to convey how a variety of elements work together to create a singular experience. Rothbart considers the aural and visual aspects of five representative films: West Side Story, Psycho, Empire of the Sun, Altered States, and American Beauty. After reviewing the various roles that music can serve in a film as well as an overview of the film scoring process, the book looks at each film, examining them one musical cue at a time, so that the reader can watch the film while reading about each cue in real time.In these analyses, timecode markings from commercial DVDs are provided in the margins alongside the text, which allow the reader to correlate to the second the on-screen drama under discussion in the book. Rothbart explains how the music is used in a specific cue and why the decision was made to use that particular musical idea at that moment. Consequently, film music aficionados-as well as students and composers of film music-can gain real world perspective on how music is used in conjunction with the other elements. In this way, the author raises awareness of music's relationship to virtually every other aspect of cinema-dialogue, sound effects, costuming, set design, and cinematography-to deepen the viewer's experience. Written in a deliberately non-technical way, this book is intended for anyone interested in film to easily follow along. At the same time, the information given can be of great benefit for the professional filmmaker or composer, since they can see with great detail how each cue unfolds along with all of the visual elements of the film.This unique analysis makes The Synergy of Film and Music a fascinating and instructive volume that both casual viewers and students of cinema will appreciate.
In The Discourse of Musicology, Giles Hooper considers a number of issues central to recent debates about the nature and direction of contemporary musicology. The first part of the book seeks to situate and critically rethink the alleged 'postmodern' turn in musical scholarship. Then, in attempting to overcome some of the problems typically associated with postmodern theory, Hooper draws on the work of JA1/4rgen Habermas in order to interpret musicology as a form of institutionalized discourse and to propose a normative framework for the kind of knowledge in which it can legitimately issue. The second part of the book focuses on the concepts of 'mediation' and the 'music itself' and engages with the work of influential critical theorist, Theodor Adorno, and the contemporary musicologist, Lawrence Kramer. Finally Hooper compares and contrasts a number of different approaches to Mahler's Ninth Symphony. The author's underlying aim throughout is to question whether, and how, it is possible to develop a mode of musicological enquiry that is both epistemologically robust and at the same time capable of answering the demand that it demonstrate its social, political and ethical relevance.
Questions about variation, similarity, enumeration, and classification of musical structures have long intrigued both musicians and mathematicians. Mathematical models can be found from theoretical analysis to actual composition or sound production. Increasingly in the last few decades, musical scholarship has incorporated modern mathematical content. One example is the application of methods from Algebraic Combinatorics, or Topology and Graph Theory, to the classification of different musical objects. However, these applications of mathematics in the understanding of music have also led to interesting open problems in mathematics itself.The reach and depth of the contributions on mathematical music theory presented in this volume is significant. Each contribution is in a section within these subjects: (i) Algebraic and Combinatorial Approaches; (ii) Geometric, Topological, and Graph-Theoretical Approaches; and (iii) Distance and Similarity Measures in Music.
Music has long been a way in which visually impaired people could gain financial independence, excel at a highly-valued skill, or simply enjoy musical participation. Existing literature on visual impairment and music includes perspectives from the social history of music, ethnomusicology, child development and areas of music psychology, music therapy, special educational needs, and music education, as well as more popular biographical texts on famous musicians. But there has been relatively little sociological research bringing together the views and experiences of visually impaired musicians themselves across the life course. Insights in Sound: Visually Impaired Musicians' Lives and Learning aims to increase knowledge and understanding both within and beyond this multifaceted group. Through an international survey combined with life-history interviews, a vivid picture is drawn of how visually impaired musicians approach and conceive their musical activities, with detailed illustrations of the particular opportunities and challenges faced by a variety of individuals. Baker and Green look beyond affiliation with particular musical styles, genres, instruments or practices. All 'levels' are included: from adult beginners to those who have returned to music-making after a gap; and from 'regular' amateur and professional musicians, to some who are extraordinarily 'elite' or 'successful'. Themes surrounding education, training, and informal learning; notation and ear playing; digital technologies; and issues around disability, identity, opportunity, marginality, discrimination, despair, fulfilment, and joy surfaced, as the authors set out to discover, analyse, and share insights into the worlds of these musicians.
Features King Oliver, Gunther Schuller, Fats Waller, and black college bands.
What does it mean for poetry and music to turn to each other, in the shadow of the Holocaust, as a means of aesthetic self-reflection? How can their mutual mirroring, of such paramount importance to German Romanticism, be reconfigured to retain its validity after the Second World War? These are the core questions of Axel Englund's book, which is the first to address the topic of Paul Celan and music. Celan, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who has long been recognized as one of the most important poets of the German language, persistently evoked music and song in his oeuvre, from the juvenilia to the posthumous collections. Conversely, few post-war writers have inspired as large a body of contemporary music, including works by Harrison Birtwistle, Gyoergy Kurtag, Wolfgang Rihm, Peter Ruzicka and many others. Through rich close readings of poems and musical compositions, Englund's book engages the artistic media in a critical dialogue about the conditions of their existence. In so doing, it reveals their intersection as a site of profound conflict, where the very possibility of musical and poetic meaning is at stake, and confrontations of aesthetic transcendentality and historical remembrance are played out in the wake of twentieth-century trauma.
From Rolling Stone, the definitive and lavishly illustrated companion book to one of the most popular and hotly debated lists in the world of musicWhen Rolling Stone publishes a list, the world listens. The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list was first established in 2003 and the lineup was updated in 2012, polling the industry's most celebrated artists, producers, industry executives, and journalists to create the definitive ranking. As a companion to the original 2003 list, Rolling Stone and Wenner Books published the bestselling 500 Greatest Albums coffee table book. In 2020 Rolling Stone started from scratch with a completely new 500 Greatest Albums list, voted on by the biggest names in music-including Beyonce, Billie Eilish, and Taylor Swift, to name a few. As expected, the new list caused a huge splash across the music and entertainment industries, sparking major conversation and debate around the list, and generating more than 125 million page views on RollingStone.com in the first month of launch.In partnership with Abrams, Rolling Stone has created the definitive companion book to reflect the all-new 2020 list, telling the stories behind all 500 albums through incredible Rolling Stone photography, original album art, Rolling Stone's unique critical commentary, breakout pieces on the making of key albums, archival interview content, and a celebrity introduction.
In recent years an almost overwhelming number of books have appeared on various aspects of American folk music and its history. Before 1970, most comprised collections of songs with a sprinkling of biographical information on noted performers. Over the last decade, however, scholars, journalists, and folk artists themselves have contributed biographies and autobiographies, instructional books and historical surveys, sociological studies and ethnographic analyses of this musical genre. 100 Books Every Folk Music Fan Should Own by performer and historian Dick Weissman finally offers a reliable route through the growing sea of book-length studies, establishing for future scholars a foundation for their research. Beginning with early 20th century collections of folk songs, it brings readers to the present by selecting for exploration modern studies of important events, critical collections of primary sources, the most significant musical instruction guides, and in-depth studies of traditional and contemporary American folk musicians.For each title selected, Weissman provides his own brief summary of its contents and assessment of its significance for the reader-whether fan or scholar. Folk music fans, scholars, and students of the American folk music tradition-indeed, any intelligent reader seeking guidance on the best books in the field-will want a copy of this vital work.
Despite the incredible diversity in Brahms's scherzo-type movements, there has been no comprehensive consideration of this aspect of his oeuvre. Professor Ryan McClelland provides an in-depth study of these movements that also contributes significantly to an understanding of Brahms's compositional language and his creative dialogue with musical traditions. McClelland especially highlights the role of rhythmic-metric design in Brahms's music and its relationship to expressive meaning. In Brahms's scherzo-type movements, McClelland traces transformations of primary thematic material, demonstrating how the relationship of the initial music to its subsequent versions creates a musical narrative that provides structural coherence and generates expressive meaning. McClelland's interpretations of the expressive implications of Brahms's fascinatingly intricate musical structures frequently engage issues directly relevant to performance. This illuminating book will appeal to music theorists, musicologists working on nineteenth-century instrumental music and performers.
It seems self-evident that music plays more than just an aesthetic role in contemporary society. In addition, music's social, political, emancipatory, and economical functions have been the subject of much recent research. Given this, it is surprising that the subject of ethics has often been neglected in discussions about music. The various forms of engagement between music and ethics are more relevant than ever, and require sustained attention. Music and Ethics examines different ways in which music can 'in itself' - in a uniquely musical way - contribute to theoretical discussions about ethics as well as concrete moral behaviour. We consider music as process, and music-making as interaction. Fundamental to our understanding is music's association with engagement, including contact with music through the act of listening, music as an immanent critical process that possesses profound cultural and historical significance, and as an art form that can be world-disclosive, formative of subjectivity, and contributive to intersubjective relations. Music and Ethics does not offer a general musico-ethical theory, but explores ethics as a practical concept, and demonstrates through concrete examples that the relation between music and ethics has never been absent.
In recent years, scholars and musicians have become increasingly interested in the revival of musical improvisation as it was known in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. This historically informed practice is now supplanting the late Romantic view of improvised music as a rhapsodic endeavour-a musical blossoming out of the capricious genius of the player-that dominated throughout the twentieth century. In the Renaissance and Baroque eras, composing in the mind (alla mente) had an important didactic function. For several categories of musicians, the teaching of counterpoint happened almost entirely through practice on their own instruments. This volume offers the first systematic exploration of the close relationship among improvisation, music theory, and practical musicianship from late Renaissance into the Baroque era. It is not a historical survey per se, but rather aims to re-establish the importance of such a combination as a pedagogical tool for a better understanding of the musical idioms of these periods. The authors are concerned with the transferral of historical practices to the modern classroom, discussing new ways of revitalising the study and appreciation of early music. The relevance and utility of such an improvisation-based approach also changes our understanding of the balance between theoretical and practical sources in the primary literature, as well as the concept of music theory itself. Alongside a word-centred theoretical tradition, in which rules are described in verbiage and enriched by musical examples, we are rediscovering the importance of a music-centred tradition, especially in Spain and Italy, where the music stands alone and the learner must distil the rules by learning and playing the music. Throughout its various sections, the volume explores the path of improvisation from theory to practice and back again.
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.
Kaija Saariaho is internationally recognized as a leading figure in contemporary music, enjoying a well-deserved reputation for works that are both creatively original and of considerable appeal. Her music communicates with a refreshingly broad audience, and this special achievement deserves careful consideration. In the first symposium book in English to be dedicated exclusively to this single figure, scholars from both the UK and Saariaho's native Finland bring a range of perspectives to her richly varied output. Uncovering the compositional, historical, cultural and sociological issues that have resulted in such critical acclaim lies at the heart of this collection of essays. Saariaho's approach to composition is an interdisciplinary one; it embraces a number of art forms - visual, literary and musical - in works that explore a creative dialogue between image, continuity and time. While such diversity is readily accommodated in a multi-authored collection, the consistency of an underlying compositional identity and integrity is also an important trait. The grouping of these essays into three strands - 'visions', 'narratives' and 'dialogues' - reflects the wide range of Saariaho's creative preoccupations while subscribing to a carefully structured succession of commentaries.
Musical biography has rarely been an object of theoretical and methodological reflection. Our present-day perception of the lives of prominent composers and performers of the past has been largely formed by cultural and political assumptions of nineteenth-century biographers and their twentieth-century followers. While older biographies are being scrutinized for veracity and 'updated' with new evidence, their historiographical premisses and narrative techniques remain largely unchallenged. The epistemological upheavals in the humanities since the 1960s have generated a body of theoretical thought that has undermined many of the assumptions of traditional biography. Consequently, many of these assumptions have lost their hold as viable underpinnings for present-day scholarly biography. For example, the accumulation of facts is no longer believed to bring us closer to an understanding of the subject; nor are the traditional views of the unified self and the self as a foundational idea taken for granted. This volume brings together musicologists and historians who explore, through individual case studies, the rich potential of these new theories for writing musical lives. The authors of this volume examine how the insights provided by these theories illuminate our critical reassessment of older biographies - and the interpretations of musical works these biographies were used to construe - and help forge new approaches to musical biography. The authors also explore the functions musical biographies served in different historical contexts, the relevance of biography for musical criticism, the reliability of archival evidence, the ethics of biography, the demands placed on biography by feminist and gender history, and the new possibilities offered by cinema. The contributors to this volume challenge the view that biography has little importance for music history, analysis, and criticism. Collectively, they reassert biography's centrality and relevance, and dem
The experimentalist phenomenon of 'noise' as constituting 'art' in much twentieth-century music (paradoxically) reached its zenith in Cage's ('silent' piece) 4'33 . But much post-1970s musical endeavour with an experimentalist telos, collectively known as 'sound art', has displayed a postmodern need to 'load' modernism's 'degree zero'. After contextualizing experimentalism from its inception in the early twentieth century, Dr Linda Kouvaras's Loading the Silence: Australian Sound Art in the Post-Digital Age explores the ways in which selected sound art works demonstrate creatively how sound is embedded within local, national, gendered and historical environments. Taking Australian music as its primary - but not sole - focus, the book not only covers discussions of technological advancement, but also engages with aesthetic standpoints, through numerous interviews, theoretical developments, analysis and cultural milieux for a contemporary Australian, and wider postmodern, context. Developing new methodologies for synergies between musicology and cultural studies, the book uncovers a new post-postmodern aesthetic trajectory, which Kouvaras locates as developing over the past two decades - the altermodern. Australian sound art is here put firmly on the map of international debates about contemporary music, providing a standard reference and valuable resource for practitioners in the artform, music critics, scholars and educators.
Despite Messiaen's position as one of the greatest technical innovators of the twentieth century, his musical language has not been comprehensively defined and investigated. The composer's 1944 theoretical study, The Technique of My Musical Language, expounds only its initial stages, and while his posthumously published Traite de rythme, de couleur, et d'ornithologie contains detailed explanations of selected techniques, in most cases the reader is left to define these more precisely by observing them in the context of Messiaen's analyses of his own works. Technical processes are nevertheless in many cases the primary components of a work or movement. For instance, personnages dominate 'Joie du sang des etoiles' from the TurangalA (R)la-symphonie, and in certain cases, such as 'L'echange' from the Vingt regards sur l'Enfant-Jesus, the process (asymmetric augmentation) is the only structuring element present. Given this reliance on idiosyncratic techniques, clear comprehension of the music is impossible without a detailed knowledge of Messiaen's methods. Gareth Healey charts their development and interconnections, considers their relationship with formal structures, and applies them in refined and extended form to works for which Messiaen himself left no published analysis.
There is a strong tradition of literary analyses of the musical artwork. Simply put, all musicology - any writing about music - is an attempt at making analogies between what happens within the world of sound and language itself. This study considers this analogy from the opposite perspective: authors attempting to structure words using musical forms and techniques. It's a viewpoint much more rarely explored, and none of the extant studies of novelists' musical techniques have been done by musicians. Can a novel follow the form of a symphony and still succeed as a novel? Can musical counterpoint be mimicked by words on a page? Alan Shockley begins looking for answers by examining music's appeal for novelists, and then explores two brief works, a prose fugue by Douglas Hofstadter, and a short story by Anthony Burgess modeled after a Mozart symphony. Analyses of three large, emblematic attempts at musical writing follow. The much debated 'Sirens' episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, which the author famously likened to a fugue, Burgess' largely ignored Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements, patterned on Beethoven's Eroica, and Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which Shockley examines as an attempt at composing a fully musicalized language. After these three larger analyses, Shockley discusses two quite recent brief novels, William Gaddis' novella Agape Agape and David Markson's This is not a novel, proposing that each of these confounding texts coheres elegantly when viewed as a musically-structured work. From the perspective of a composer, Shockley offers the reader fresh tools for approaching these dense and often daunting texts.
Nikos Skalkottas is perhaps the last great 'undiscovered' composer of the twentieth century. In the 1920s he was a promising young violinist and composer in Berlin, and a student of Schoenberg, who included him among his most gifted pupils. It was only after his return to Greece in 1933 that Skalkottas became an anonymous and obscure figure, working in complete isolation until his death in 1949. Most of his works remained unpublished and unperformed during his lifetime, and although he is largely known for his folkloristic tonal pieces, Skalkottas in fact concentrated predominantly on developing an idiosyncratic dodecaphonic musical language. Eva Mantzourani provides here a comprehensive study of this fascinating yet under-researched composer. The book, lavishly illustrated with musical examples, is divided into three parts. Part I comprises a critical biography that, by drawing extensively on his letters and other writings, reappraises the image of Skalkottas with which we are often presented. The main focus of the book, however, is on Skalkottas's twelve-note compositional processes, since these characterize the majority of his output, and are neither well-known nor fully understood. Part II presents the structural and technical features of his twelve-note technique, particularly the different types of sets and their manipulation, and his approach to musical forms. Part III consists of analytical case studies of several works, presented chronologically, which thus provide a diachronic framework within which Skalkottas's dodecaphonic compositional development can be more effectively viewed. This book underlines Nikos Skalkottas's importance as a composer with a distinctive artistic personality, whose work contributed to the development of twelve-note compositional practice, and who deserves a more significant position within the Western art music canon than that to which he is often assigned. |
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