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Books > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding
Approaches widens the scope of analytical approaches for popular
music by incorporating methods developed for analyzing contemporary
art music. This study endeavors to create a new analytical paradigm
for examining popular music from the perspective of developments in
contemporary art music. "Expanded approaches" for popular music
analysis is broadly defined as as exploring the pitch-class
structures, form, timbre, rhythm, or aesthetics of various forms of
popular music in a conceptual space not limited to the domain of
common practice tonality but broadened to include any applicable
compositional, analytical, or theoretical concept that illuminates
the music. The essays in this collection investigate a variety of
analytical, theoretical, historical, and aesthetic commonalities
popular music shares with 20th and 21st century art music. From
rock and pop to hip hop and rap, dance and electronica, from the
1930s to present day, this companion explores these connections in
five parts: Establishing and Expanding Analytical Frameworks
Technology and Timbre Rhythm, Pitch, and Harmony Form and Structure
Critical Frameworks: Analytical, Formal, Structural, and Political
With contributions by established scholars and promising emerging
scholars in music theory and historical musicology from North
America, Europe, and Australia, The Routledge Companion to Popular
Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches offers nuanced and detailed
perspectives that address the relationships between concert and
popular music.
WINNER OF THE 2019 SOCIETY OF ETHNOMUSICLOGY ELLEN KOSKOFF PRIZE
FOR EDITED COLLECTIONS The Routledge Companion to the Study of
Local Musicking provides a reference to how, cross-culturally,
musicking constructs locality and how locality is constructed by
the musicking that takes place within it, that is, how people
engage with ideas of community and place through music. The term
"musicking" has gained currency in music studies, and refers to the
diverse ways in which people engage with music, regardless of the
nature of this engagement. By linking musicking to the local, this
book highlights the ways in which musical practices and discourses
interact with people's everyday experiences and understandings of
their immediate environment, their connections and commitment to
that locality, and the people who exist within it. It explores what
makes local musicking "local." By viewing musicking from the
perspective of where it takes place, the contributions in this
collection engage with debates on the processes of musicking,
identity construction, community-building and network formation,
competitions and rivalries, place and space making, and
local-global dynamics.
The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art presents an overview of the
issues, methods, and approaches crucial for the study of sound in
artistic practice. Thirty-six essays cover a variety of
interdisciplinary approaches to studying sounding art from the
fields of musicology, cultural studies, sound design, auditory
culture, art history, and philosophy. The companion website hosts
sound examples and links to further resources. The collection is
organized around six main themes: Sounding Art: The notion of
sounding art, its relation to sound studies, and its evolution and
possibilities. Acoustic Knowledge and Communication: How we
approach, study, and analyze sound and the challenges of writing
about sound. Listening and Memory: Listening from different
perspectives, from the psychology of listening to embodied and
technologically mediated listening. Acoustic Spaces, Identities and
Communities: How humans arrange their sonic environments, how this
relates to sonic identity, how music contributes to our
environment, and the ethical and political implications of sound.
Sonic Histories: How studying sounding art can contribute
methodologically and epistemologically to historiography. Sound
Technologies and Media: The impact of sonic technologies on
contemporary culture, electroacoustic innovation, and how the way
we make and access music has changed. With contributions from
leading scholars and cutting-edge researchers, The Routledge
Companion to Sounding Art is an essential resource for anyone
studying the intersection of sound and art.
This book looks at the role of popular music in constructing the
myth of the First World War. Since the late 1950s over 1,500
popular songs from more than forty countries have been recorded
that draw inspiration from the War. National Myth and the First
World War in Modern Popular Music takes an inter-disciplinary
approach that locates popular music within the framework of 'memory
studies' and analyses how songwriters are influenced by their
country's 'national myths'. How does popular music help form memory
and remembrance of such an event? Why do some songwriters stick
rigidly to culturally dominant forms of memory whereas others seek
an oppositional or transnational perspective? The huge range of
musical examples include the great chansonniers Jacques Brel and
Georges Brassens; folk maestros including Al Stewart and Eric
Bogle; the socially aware rock of The Kinks and Pink Floyd; metal
legends Iron Maiden and Bolt Thrower and female iconoclasts
Diamanda Galas and PJ Harvey.
Robert P. Morgan is one of a small number of music theorists
writing in English who treat music theory, and in particular
Schenkerian theory, as part of general intellectual life. Morgan's
writings are renowned within the field of music scholarship: he is
the author of the well-known Norton volume Twentieth-Century Music,
and of additional books relating to Schenkerian and other theory,
analysis and society. This volume of Morgan's previously published
essays encompasses a broad range of issues, including historical
and social issues and is of importance to anyone concerned with
modern Western music. His specially written introduction treats his
writings as a whole but also provides additional material relating
to the articles included in this volume.
Music and Transcendence explores the ways in which music relates to
transcendence by bringing together the disciplines of musicology,
philosophy and theology, thereby uncovering congruencies between
them that have often been obscured. Music has the capacity to take
one outside of oneself and place one in relation to that which is
'other'. This 'other' can be conceived in an 'absolute' sense,
insofar as music can be thought to place the self in relation to a
divine 'other' beyond the human frame of existence. However, the
'other' can equally well be conceived in an 'immanent' (or secular)
sense, as music is a human activity that relates to other cultural
practices. Music here places the self in relation to other people
and to the world more generally, shaping how the world is
understood, without any reference to a God or gods. The book
examines how music has not only played a significant role in many
philosophical and theological accounts of the nature of existence
and the self, but also provides a valuable resource for the
creation of meaning on a day-to-day basis.
It was Carl Dahlhaus who coined the phrase 'dead time' to describe
the state of the symphony between Schumann and Brahms. Christopher
Fifield argues that many of the symphonies dismissed by Dahlhaus
made worthy contributions to the genre. He traces the root of the
problem further back to Beethoven's ninth symphony, a work which
then proceeded to intimidate symphonists who followed in its
composer's footsteps, including Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann.
In 1824 Beethoven set a standard that then had to rise in response
to more demanding expectations from both audiences and the musical
press. Christopher Fifield, who has a conductor's intimacy with the
repertory, looks in turn at the five decades between the mid-1820s
and mid-1870s. He deals only with non-programmatic works, leaving
the programme symphony to travel its own route to the symphonic
poem. Composers who lead to Brahms (himself a reluctant symphonist
until the age of 43 in 1876) are frequently dismissed as epigones
of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schumann but by investigating their
symphonies, Fifield reveals their respective brands of originality,
even their own possible influence upon Brahms himself and in so
doing, shines a light into a half-century of neglected nineteenth
century German symphonic music.
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.
Why do we value music? Many people report that listening to music
is one of life's most rewarding activities. In Critique of Pure
Music, James O. Young seeks to explain why this is so. Formalists
tell us that music is appreciated as pure, contentless form. On
this view, listeners receive pleasure, or a pleasurable 'musical'
emotion, when they explore the abstract patterns found in music.
Music, formalists believe, does not arouse ordinary emotions such
as joy, melancholy or fear, nor can it represent emotion or provide
psychological insight. Young holds that formalists are wrong on all
counts. Drawing upon the latest psychological research, he argues
that music is expressive of emotion by resembling human expressive
behaviour. By resembling human expressive behaviour, music is able
to arouse ordinary emotions in listeners. This, in turn, makes
possible the representation of emotion by music. The representation
of emotion in music gives music the capacity to provide
psychological insight-into the emotional lives of composers, and
the emotional lives of individuals from a variety of times and
places. And it is this capacity of music to provide psychological
insight which explains a good deal of the value of music, both
vocal and purely instrumental. Without it, music could not be
experienced as profound. Philosophers, psychologists, musicians,
musicologists, and music lovers will all find something of interest
in this book.
Joe Davis, the focus of "The Melody Man" enjoyed a 50-year
career in the music industry, which covered nearly every aspect of
the business. He hustled sheet music in the 1920s, copyrighted
compositions by artists as diverse as Fats Waller, Carson Robison,
Otis Blackwell, and Rudy Vallee, oversaw hundreds of recording
session, and operated several record companies beginning in the
1940s. Davis also worked fearlessly to help insure that black
recording artists and song writers gained equal treatment for their
work.
Much more than a biography, this book is an investigation of the
role played by music publishers during much of the twentieth
century. Joe Davis was not a music "great" but he was one of those
individuals who enabled "greats" to emerge. A musician, manager,
and publisher, his long career reveals much about the nature of the
music industry and offers insight into how the industry changed
from the 1920s to the 1970s. By the summer of 1924, when Davis was
handling the "Race talent" for Ajax records, he had already worked
in the music business for most of a decade and there was more than
five decades of musical career ahead of him. The fact that his
fascinating life has gone so long under-appreciated is remedied by
the publication of Never Sell A Copyright.
Originally published in England, in 1990, Never Sell a
Copyright: Joe Davis and His Role in the New York Music Scene,
1916-1978 was never released in the United States and available in
a very limited print run in England. The author, noted blues
scholar and folklorist Bruce Bastin, has worked with fellow music
scholar Kip Lornell to completely update, condense, and improve the
book for this first-ever American edition.
COWBOYS AND INDIES is the story of the 'record men' - the mavericks
and moguls who have shaped the music industry from the first sound
machines of the 1850s through to today's digital streams. Men like
John Hammond, who discovered Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Leonard
Cohen; Sam Phillips and Berry Gordy, founders of the Sun and Motown
labels; Chris Blackwell, who brought Bob Marley and reggae music
into the mainstream; Geoff Travis who built Rough Trade and
launched The Smiths; or genre-busting producer Rick Rubin, who
recorded Run DMC, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Johnny Cash. Gareth
Murphy has drawn on more than 100 interviews with music business
legends, as well as extensive archive research, to bring us the
behind-the-scenes stories of how music gets made and sold. He
explains, too, how the industry undergoes regular seismic changes.
We may think the digital revolution is a big deal, but in the 1920s
the arrival of radio and the Wall Street Crash wiped out 95 per
cent of record sales. But, as we all know, you can't stop the music
...
In Recording History, Peter Martland uses a range of archival
sources to trace the genesis and early development of the British
record industry from1888 to 1931. A work of economic and cultural
history that draws on a vast range of quantitative data, it surveys
the commercial and business activities of the British record
industry like no other work of recording history has before.
Martland s study charts the successes and failures of this industry
and its impact on domestic entertainment. Showcasing its many
colorful pioneers from both sides of the Atlantic, Recording
History is first and foremost an account of The Gramophone Company
Ltd, a precursor to today s recording giant EMI, and then the most
important British record company active from the late 19th century
until the end of the second decade of the twentieth century.
Martland s history spans the years from the original inventors
through industrial and market formation and final take-off
including the riveting battle in recording formats. Special
attention is given to the impact of the First World War and the
that followed in its wake. Scholars of recording history will find
in Martland s study the story of the development of the recording
studio, of the artists who made the first records (from which some
like Italian opera tenor Enrico Caruso earned a fortune), and the
change records wrought in the relationship between performer and
audience, transforming the reception and appreciation of musical
culture. Filling a much-needed gap in scholarship, Recording
History documents the beginnings of the end of the contemporary
international record industry."
Afrosonic Life explores the role sonic innovations in the African
diaspora play in articulating methodologies for living the
afterlife of slavery. Developing and extending debates on Afrosonic
cultures, the book attends to the ways in which the acts of
technological subversion, experimentation and production complement
and interrupt the intellectual project of modernity. Music making
processes such as dub, turntablism, hip-hop dj techniques and the
remix, innovate methods of expressing subjecthoods beyond the
dominant language of Western "Man" and the market. These sonic
innovations utilize sound as a methodology to institute a
rehumanizing subjectivity in which sound dislodges the hierarchical
ordering of racial schemas. Afrosonic Life is invested in
excavating and elaborating the nuanced and novel ways of music
making and sound creation found in the African diaspora.
One of Oprah Daily's 20 Favorite Books of 2021 * Selected as one of
Pitchfork's Best Music Books of the Year "One of the best books of
its kind in decades." -The Wall Street Journal An epic achievement
and a huge delight, the entire history of popular music over the
past fifty years refracted through the big genres that have defined
and dominated it: rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance
music, and pop Kelefa Sanneh, one of the essential voices of our
time on music and culture, has made a deep study of how popular
music unites and divides us, charting the way genres become
communities. In Major Labels, Sanneh distills a career's worth of
knowledge about music and musicians into a brilliant and omnivorous
reckoning with popular music-as an art form (actually, a bunch of
art forms), as a cultural and economic force, and as a tool that we
use to build our identities. He explains the history of slow jams,
the genius of Shania Twain, and why rappers are always getting in
trouble. Sanneh shows how these genres have been defined by the
tension between mainstream and outsider, between authenticity and
phoniness, between good and bad, right and wrong. Throughout, race
is a powerful touchstone: just as there have always been Black
audiences and white audiences, with more or less overlap depending
on the moment, there has been Black music and white music,
constantly mixing and separating. Sanneh debunks cherished myths,
reappraises beloved heroes, and upends familiar ideas of musical
greatness, arguing that sometimes, the best popular music isn't
transcendent. Songs express our grudges as well as our hopes, and
they are motivated by greed as well as idealism; music is a
powerful tool for human connection, but also for human antagonism.
This is a book about the music everyone loves, the music everyone
hates, and the decades-long argument over which is which. The
opposite of a modest proposal, Major Labels pays in full.
This book explores the relationship between words and music in
contemporary texts, examining, in particular, the way that new
technologies are changing the literature-music relationship. It
brings an eclectic and novel range of interdisciplinary theories to
the area of musico-literary studies, drawing from the fields of
semiotics, disability studies, musicology, psychoanalysis, music
psychology, emotion and affect theory, new media, cosmopolitanism,
globalization, ethnicity and biraciality. Chapters range from
critical analyses of the representation of music and the musical
profession in contemporary novels to examination of the forms and
cultural meanings of contemporary intermedia and multimedia works.
The book argues that conjunctions between words and music create
emergent structures and meanings that can facilitate culturally
transgressive and boundary- interrogating effects. In particular,
it conceptualises ways in which word-music relationships can
facilitate cross-cultural exchange as musico-literary
miscegenation, using interracial sexual relationships as a
metaphor. Smith also inspects the dynamics of improvisation and
composition, and the different ways they intersect with
performance. Furthermore, the book explores the huge changes that
computer-based real-time algorithmic text and music generation are
making to the literature-music nexus. This volume provides
fascinating insight into the relationship between literature and
music, and will be of interest to those fields as well as New Media
and Performance Studies.
Music-Dance explores the identity of choreomusical work, its
complex authorship and its modes of reception as well as the
cognitive processes involved in the reception of dance performance.
Scholars of dance and music analyse the ways in which a musical
score changes its prescriptive status when it becomes part of a
choreographic project, the encounter between sound and motion on
stage, and the intersection of listening and seeing. As well as
being of interest to musicologists and choreologists considering
issues such as notation, multimedia and the analysis of
performance, this volume will appeal to scholars interested in
applied research in the fields of cognition and neuroscience. The
line-up of authors comprises representative figures of today's
choreomusicology, dance historians, scholars of twentieth-century
composition and specialists in cognitive science and performance
studies. Among the topics covered are multimedia and the analysis
of performance; the notational practice of choreographers and the
parallel attempts of composers to find a graphic representation for
musical gestures; and the experience of dance as a paradigm for a
multimodal perception, which is investigated in terms of how the
association of sound and movement triggers emotions and specific
forms of cognition.
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