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Books > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
Focusing on Messiaen's relation to history - both his own and the history he engendered - the Messiaen Perspectives volumes convey the growing understanding of his deep and varied interconnections with his cultural milieux. Messiaen Perspectives 1: Sources and Influences examines the genesis, sources and cultural pressures that shaped Messiaen's music. Messiaen Perspectives 2: Techniques, Influence and Reception analyses Messiaen's compositional approach and the repercussions of his music. While each book offers a coherent collection in itself, together these complementary volumes elucidate how powerfully Messiaen was embedded in his time and place, and how his music resonates ever more today. Messiaen Perspectives 2: Techniques, Influence and Reception explores Messiaen's imprint on recent musical life. The first part scrutinizes his compositional technique in terms of counterpoint, spectralism and later piano music, while the second charts ways in which Messiaen's influence is manifest in the music and careers of Ohana, Xenakis, Murail and Quebecois composers. The third part includes case studies of Messiaen's reception in Italy, Spain and the USA. The volume also includes an ornithological catalogue of Messiaen's birds, collates information on the numerous 'tombeaux' pieces he inspired, and concludes with a Critical Catalogue of Messiaen's Musical Works.
Contemplating Shostakovich marks an important new stage in the understanding of Shostakovich and his working environment. Each chapter covers aspects of the composer's output in the context of his life and cultural milieu. The contributions uncover 'outside' stimuli behind Shostakovich's works, allowing the reader to perceive the motivations behind his artistic choices; at the same time, the nature of those choices offers insights into the workings of the larger world - cultural, social, political - that he inhabited. Thus his often ostensibly quirky choices are revealed as responses - by turns sentimental, moving, sardonic and angry - to the particular conditions, with all their absurdities and contradictions, that he had to negotiate. Here we see the composer emerging from the role of tortured loner of older narratives into that of the gregarious and engaged member of his society that, for better and worse, characterized the everyday reality of his life. This invaluable collection offers remarkable new insight, in both depth and range, into the nature of Shostakovich's working circumstances and of his response to them. The collection contains the seeds for a wide range of new directions in the study of Shostakovich's works and the larger contexts of their creation and reception.
'Eye hEar The Visual in Music' employs the concept of the visual in proximate relation to music, producing a tension: 'is it not the case that there is a gulf between painting and music, between the visible and the audible? One is full of colour and light yet silent; one is invisible and marvellously noisy.' Such a belief, this book argues, betrays an ideological constraint on music, desiccating it to sound, and art to vision. The starting point of this study is more hybrid (and hydrating): that music is never employed without numerous and complex intersections with the visual. By involving the concept of synaesthesia, the book evokes music's multi-sensory nature, stops it from sounding alone, and offers music as a subject for art historians. Music bleeds into art and visuality, in its graphic depiction in notation, in the theatre of performance, its sights and sites. This book looks at music in its absolute guise as a model for art; at notation and the conductor as the silent visual fulcra around which music circulates; at the music and image of Erik Satie; at the concert hall as white cube; at the symphonic film '2001: A Space Odyssey'; and at the liminality of John Cage and Andy Warhol.
The New Bruckner provides a valuable study of Bruckner's music, focusing on the interaction of biography, textual scholarship, reception history and analysis. Dr Dermot Gault conveys a broad chronological narrative of Bruckner's compositional development, interpolating analytical commentaries on the works and critical accounts of the notoriously complex and editorial issues. Gault corrects longstanding misconceptions about the composer's revision process, and its relationship with the early editions and widely-held critical opinions. Bruckner's constantly evolving engagement with symphonic form is traced by taking each revision in due order, rather than by taking each symphony on its own, and by relating the symphonies to other mature works such as the Te Deum, the three great Masses, and the Quintet, and argues that Bruckner's music became more organic and less schematic as the result of his revisions. The book will be essential reading for those studying Bruckner's compositions, the complex history of their reception, and late Romantic music in general.
Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction presents new insights into the study of musical rhythm through investigations of the micro-rhythmic design of groove-based music. The main purpose of the book is to investigate how technological mediation - in the age of digital music production tools - has influenced the design of rhythm at the micro level. Through close readings of technology-driven popular music genres, such as contemporary R&B, hip-hop, trip-hop, electro-pop, electronica, house and techno, as well as played folk music styles, the book sheds light on how investigations of the musical-temporal relationships of groove-based musics might be fruitfully pursued, in particular with regard to their micro-rhythmic features. This book is based on contributions to the project Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction (RADR), a five-year research project running from 2004 to 2009 that was funded by the Norwegian Research Council.
How have men used art music? How have they listened to and brandished the musical forms of the Western classical tradition and how has music intervened in their identity formations? This collection of essays addresses these questions by examining some of the ways in which men, music and masculinity have been implicated with each other since the Middle Ages. Feminist musicologies have already dealt extensively with music and gender, from the 'phallocentric' tendencies of the Western tradition, to the explicit marginalization of women from that tradition. This book builds on that work by turning feminist critical approaches towards the production, rhetorical engagement and subversion of masculinities in twelve different musical case studies. In other disciplines within the arts and humanities, 'men's studies' is a well-established field. Musicology has only recently begun to address critically music's engagement with masculinity and as a result has sometimes thereby failed to recognize its own discursive misogyny. This book does not seek to cover the field comprehensively but, rather, to explore in detail some of the ways in which musical practices do the cultural work of masculinity. The book is structured into three thematic sections: effeminate and virile musics and masculinities; national masculinities, national musics; and identities, voices, discourses. Within these themes, the book ranges across a number of specific topics: late medieval masculinities; early modern discourses of music, masculinity and medicine; Renaissance Italian masculinities; eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas of creativity, gender and canonicity; masculinity, imperialist and nationalist ideologies in the nineteenth century, and constructions of the masculine voice in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century opera and song. While the case studies are methodologically disparate and located in different historical and geographical locations, they all share a common concern for a critical revaluation of the role of masculinity (in all its varied representations) in art music practices.
The baryton is a unique string instrument that provides both bowed melody and plucked accompaniment simultaneously. It emerged in the Baroque era as a solo, self-accompanying viol and was later adopted as a virtuoso melodic instrument to enhance the dramatic arias of the day. A History of the Baryton and Its Music: King of Instruments, Instrument of Kings is the only reference available on this intriguing instrument. This presents a detailed history of the baryton, guidance on playing technique, information on its design and manufacture, descriptions and photos of extant instruments, and a repertoire of hitherto unpublished music. Carol A. Gartrell details the origins and development of the baryton through the instruments that have survived, and through a unique collection of music representing different styles and genres. In addition to a bibliography and an index, the book concludes with two galleries containing an extensive inventory: the first provides detailed descriptions of all extant instruments and more than 20 photographs, while the second gallery catalogs extant manuscripts and supplies a representative selection of complete transcriptions, illustrating the range and variety of baryton music and providing musicians with previously unpublished music they could perform. Complete with a selected discography of baryton recordings, A History of the Baryton and Its Music is an interesting and necessary resource for the musicologist, organologist, and performer.
Transnational Memory and Popular Culture in East and Southeast Asia explores the significance of transnational popular culture in the formation and mediation of collective memories across the region. It looks at case studies including: the politics of cinematic remembering of Hong Kong films on Southeast Asia, the digital and holographic enshrinement of departed celebrities like Wong Kar Kui, Bruce Lee and Teresa Teng and the dredging of personal memories of the encounters with the Korean Wave in Singapore. In addition, it explores how cultural memories are used as focal points of staging cultural revival and movements in Singapore and Taiwan. Contrary to the assumptions of the importance of newness in modern popular culture productions, the continued relevance of this otherwise dated material reflects the significance of these texts in the development and strengthening of collective cultural memories. The discussion of such issues has often been grounded geo-spatially on the "national" and contemporary contexts, this volume will develop a more temporalized and transnational perspective in the shaping of otherwise local cultural identifications.
Transnational Memory and Popular Culture in East and Southeast Asia explores the significance of transnational popular culture in the formation and mediation of collective memories across the region. It looks at case studies including: the politics of cinematic remembering of Hong Kong films on Southeast Asia, the digital and holographic enshrinement of departed celebrities like Wong Kar Kui, Bruce Lee and Teresa Teng and the dredging of personal memories of the encounters with the Korean Wave in Singapore. In addition, it explores how cultural memories are used as focal points of staging cultural revival and movements in Singapore and Taiwan. Contrary to the assumptions of the importance of newness in modern popular culture productions, the continued relevance of this otherwise dated material reflects the significance of these texts in the development and strengthening of collective cultural memories. The discussion of such issues has often been grounded geo-spatially on the "national" and contemporary contexts, this volume will develop a more temporalized and transnational perspective in the shaping of otherwise local cultural identifications.
This textbook enhances preservice and practicing music educators' understanding of ways to successfully engage children in music composition. It offers both a rationale for the presence of composition in the music education program and a thorough review of what we know of children's compositional practices to date. Minds On Music offers a solid foundation for planning and implementing composition lessons with students in grades PreK-12.
Christian Wolff is a composer who has followed a distinctive path often at the centre of avant-garde activity working alongside figures such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Cornelius Cardew. In a career spanning sixty years, he has produced a significant and influential body of work that has aimed to address, in a searching and provocative manner, what it means to be an experimental and socially aware artist. This book provides a wide-ranging introduction to a composer often overlooked despite his influence upon many of the major figures in new music since the 1950s from Cage to John Zorn to the new wave of experimentalists across the globe. As the first detailed analysis of the music of this prolific and highly individual composer, Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff contains contributions from leading experts in the field of new and experimental music, as well as from performers and composers who have worked with Wolff. The reception of Wolff's music is discussed in relation to the European avant-garde and also within the context of Wolff's association with Cage and Feldman. Music from his earliest compositions of the 1950s, the highly indeterminate scores, the politically-inspired pieces up to the most recent works are discussed in detail, both in relation to their compositional techniques, general aesthetic development, and matters of performance. The particular challenges and aesthetic issues arising from Wolff's idiosyncratic notations and the implications for performers are a central theme. Likewise, the ways in which Wolff's political persuasions - which arguably account for some of the notational methods he chooses - have been worked out through his music, are examined. With a foreword by his close associate Michael Parsons, this is a valuable addition to experimental music literature.
As Robert Schumann put it, 'Only few works are as clearly stamped with their author's imprint as his'. This book explores Schubert's stylistic traits in a series of chapters each discussing an individual 'fingerprint' with case studies drawn principally from the piano and chamber music. The notion of Schubert's compositional fingerprints has not previously formed the subject of a book-length study. The features of his personal style considered here include musical manifestations of Schubert's 'violent nature', the characteristics of his thematic material, and the signs of his 'classicizing' manner. In the process of the discussion, attention is given to matters of form, texture, harmony and gesture in a range of works, with regard to the various 'fingerprints' identified in each chapter. The repertoire discussed includes the late string quartets, the String Quintet, the E flat Piano Trio and the last three piano sonatas. Developing ideas which she first proposed in a series of journal articles and contributions to symposia on Schubert, Professor Wollenberg takes into account recent literature by other scholars and draws together her own researches to present her view of Schubert's 'compositional personality'. Schubert emerges as someone exerting intellectual control over his musical material and imbuing it with poetic resonance.
Joanna Newsom, Will Oldham (a.k.a. 'Bonnie Prince Billy'), and Devendra Banhart are perhaps the best known of a generation of independent artists who use elements of folk music in contexts that are far from traditional. These (and other) so called 'new folk' artists challenge our notions of 'finished product' through their recordings, intrinsically guided by practices and rhetoric inherited from punk. This book traces a fractured trajectory that includes Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Bob Dylan, psych-folk of the sixties (from Vashti Bunyan to John Fahey), lo-fi and outsider recordings (from Captain Beefheart and The Residents to Jandek, Daniel Johnston and Smog), and recent experimental folk (Animal Collective, Six Organs of Admittance, Charalambides) to contextualise the first substantial consideration of new folk. In the process, Encarnacao reviews the literature on folk and punk to argue that tropes of authenticity, though constructions, carry considerable power in the creation and reception of recorded works. New approaches to music require new analytical tools, and through the analysis of some 50 albums, Encarnacao introduces the categories of labyrinth, immersive and montage forms. This book makes a compelling argument for a reconsideration of popular music history that highlights the eternal compulsion for spontaneous, imperfect and performative recorded artefacts.
For Olivier Messiaen, music was a way of expressing his faith. He considered it his good fortune to have been born a Catholic and declared that 'the illumination of the theological truths of the Catholic faith is the first aspect of my work, the noblest and no doubt the most useful'. Messiaen is one of the most widely performed and recorded composers of the twentieth-century and his popularity is increasing, but the theological component of his music has so far largely been neglected, or dealt with superficially, and continues to provide a serious impediment to understanding and appreciating his music for some of his audience. Messiaen the Theologian makes a significant contribution to Messiaen studies by providing cultural and historical context to Messiaen's theology. An international array of Messiaen scholars cover a wide variety of topics including Messiaen's personal spirituality, the context of Catholicism in France in the twentieth century, and comparisons between Messiaen and other artists such as Dante and T.S. Eliot. Interdisciplinary methodologies such as exegesis, theological studies and analysis are used to contribute to the understanding of several major works including A0/00clairs sur l'au-delA!..., Sept HaA-kaA- and Saint FranAois d'Assise. By approaching Messiaen and his music from such important and original perspectives, this book will be of interest not only to musicians and theologians, but also to readers interested in the connection between spirituality and the arts.
Music, Sexuality and the Enlightenment explains how Mozart's music for Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and CosA fan tutte 'sounds' the intentions of Da Ponte's characters and their relationships with one another. Mozart, by way of the infinitely generative and beautiful logic of the sonata principle, did not merely interpret Da Ponte's characterizations but lent them temporal, musical forms. Charles Ford's analytic interpretation of these musical forms concerns processes and structures in detail and at medium- to long-term levels. He addresses the music of a wide range of arias and ensembles, and develops original ways to interpret the two largely overlooked operatic genres of secco recitative and finales. Moreover, Ford presents a new method by which to relate musical details directly to philosophical concepts, and thereby, the music of the operas to the inwardly contradictory thinking of the European Enlightenment. This involves close readings of late eighteenth-century understandings of 'man' and nature, self and other, morality and transgression, and gendered identities and sexuality, with particular reference to contemporary writers, especially Goethe, Kant, Laclos, Rousseau, Sade, Schiller, Sterne and Wollstonecraft. The concluding discussion of the implied futures of the operas argues that their divided sexualities, which are those of the Enlightenment as a whole, have come to form our own unquestioned assumptions about gender differences and sexuality. This, along with the elegant and eloquent precision of Mozart's music, is why Figaro, Giovanni and CosA still maintain their vital immediacy for audiences today.
For centuries, the augmented sixth sonority has fascinated composers and intrigued music analysts. Here, Dr Mark Ellis presents a series of musical examples illustrating the 'evolution' of the augmented sixth and the changing contexts in which it can be found. Surprisingly, the sonority emerged from one of the last remnants of modal counterpoint to survive into the tonal era: the Phrygian Cadence. In the Baroque period, the 'terrible dissonance' was nearly always associated with negative textual imagery. Charpentier described the augmented sixth as 'poignantly expressive'. J. S. Bach considered an occurrence of the chord in one of his forebear's motets 'remarkably bold'. During Bach's composing lifetime, the augmented sixth evolved from a relatively rare chromaticism to an almost commonplace element within the tonal spectrum; the chord reflects particular chronological and stylistic strata in his music. Theorists began cautiously to accept the chord, but its inversional possibilities proved particularly contentious, as commentaries by writers as diverse as Muffat, Marpurg and Rousseau reveal. During the eighteenth century, the augmented sixth became increasingly significant in instrumental repertoires - it was perhaps Vivaldi who first liberated the chord from its negative textual associations. By the later eighteenth century, the chord began to function almost as a 'signpost' to indicate important structural boundaries within sonata form. The chord did not, however, entirely lose its darker undertone: it signifies, for example, the theme of revenge in Mozart's Don Giovanni. Romantic composers uncovered far-reaching tonal ambiguities inherent in the augmented sixth. Chopin's Nocturnes often seem beguilingly simple, but the surface tranquillity masks the composer's strikingly original harmonic experiments. Wagner's much-analyzed 'Tristan Chord' resolves (according to some theorists) on an augmented sixth. In Tristan und Isolde, the chord's mercurial character - its tonal ambivalence - symbolizes the 'distortion of reality' induced by the Magic Potion. As Schoenberg wrote, the chord of the augmented sixth stands 'on the fringes of tonality'. The book concludes with a discussion of the role of the chord in the decay of the tonal system, and its 'afterlife' in the post-tonal era. This book will appeal to music analysts by providing a chronological framework for further stylistic and harmonic analysis. To ensure its accessibility in graduate classes, the author includes a straightforward introduction to the augmented sixth and its theoretical background.
Mathemusical Conversations celebrates the understanding of music through mathematics, and the appreciation of mathematics through music. This volume is a compilation of the invited talks given at the Mathemusical Conversations workshop that took place in Singapore from 13-15 February 2015, organized by Elaine Chew in partnership with Gerard Assayag for the scientific program and with Bernard Lanskey for the artistic program. The contributors are world experts and leading scholars, writing on the intersection of music and mathematics. They also focus on performance and composition, two topics which are foundational both to the understanding of human creativity and to the creation of tomorrow's music technologies. This book is essential reading for researchers in both music and mathematics. It will also appeal more broadly to scholars, students, musicians, and anyone interested in new perspectives on the intimate relationship between these two universal human activities.
Music theory is often seen as independent from - even antithetical to - performance. While music theory is an intellectual enterprise, performance requires an intuitive response to the music. But this binary opposition is a false one, which serves neither the theorist nor the performer. In Interpreting Chopin Alison Hood brings her experience as a performer to bear on contemporary analytical models. She combines significant aspects of current analytical approaches and applies that unique synthetic method to selected works by Chopin, casting new light on the composer's preludes, nocturnes and barcarolle. An extension of Schenkerian analysis, the specific combination of five aspects distinguishes Hood's method from previous analytical approaches. These five methods are: attention to the rhythms created by pitch events on all structural levels; a detailed accounting of the musical surface; 'strict use' of analytical notation, following guidelines offered by Steve Larson; a continual concern with what have been called 'strategies' or 'premises'; and an exploration of how recorded performances might be viewed in terms of analytical decisions, or might even shape those decisions. Building on the work of such authors as William Rothstein, Carl Schachter and John Rink, Hood's approach to Chopin's oeuvre raises interpretive questions of central interest to performers.
Richard Dawkins's formulation of the meme concept in his 1976 classic The Selfish Gene has inspired three decades of work in what many see as the burgeoning science of memetics. Its underpinning theory proposes that human culture is composed of a multitude of particulate units, memes, which are analogous to the genes of biological transmission. These cultural replicators are transmitted by imitation between members of a community and are subject to mutational-evolutionary pressures over time. Despite Dawkins and several others using music in their exemplifications of what might constitute a meme, these formulations have generally been quite rudimentary, even naA-ve. This study is the first musicologically-orientated attempt systematically to apply the theory of memetics to music. In contrast to the two points of view normally adopted in music theory and analysis - namely those of the listener and the composer - the purpose of this book is to argue for a distinct and illuminating third perspective. This point of view is metaphorical and anthropomorphic, and the metaphor is challenging and controversial, but the way of thinking adopted has its basis in well-founded scientific principles and it is capable of generating insights not available from the first two standpoints. The perspective is that of the (selfish) replicated musical pattern itself, and adopting it is central to memetics. The approach taken is both theoretical and analytical. Starting with a discussion of evolutionary thinking within musicology, Jan goes on to cover the theoretical aspects of the memetics of music, ranging from quite abstract philosophical speculation to detailed consideration of what actually constitutes a meme in music. In doing so, Jan draws upon several approaches current in music theory, including Schenkerism and Narmour's implication-realization model. To demonstrate the practical utility of the memetic perspective, Chapter 6 applies it analytically, tracing the transmission o
This collection of essays and interviews addresses important theoretical, philosophical and creative issues in Western art music at the end of the twentieth- and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Edited by Max Paddison and Irene Deliege, the book offers a wide range of international perspectives from prominent musicologists, philosophers and composers, including Celestin Deliege, Pascal Decroupet, Richard Toop, Rudolf Frisius, Alastair Williams, Herman Sabbe, FranAois Nicolas, Marc Jimenez, Anne Boissiere, Max Paddison, Hugues Dufourt, Jonathan Harvey, and new interviews with Pierre Boulez, Brian Ferneyhough, Helmut Lachenmann, and Wolfgang Rihm. Part I is mainly theoretical in emphasis. Issues addressed include the historical rationalization of music and technology, new approaches to the theorization of atonal harmony in the wake of Spectralism, debates on the 'new complexity', the heterogeneity, pluralism and stylistic omnivorousness that characterizes music in our time, and the characterization of twentieth-century and contemporary music as a 'search for lost harmony'. The orientation of Part II is mainly philosophical, examining concepts of totality and inclusivity in new music, raising questions as to what might be expected from an autonomous contemporary musical logic, and considering the problem of the survival of the avant-garde in the context of postmodernist relativism. As well as analytic philosophy and cognitive psychology, critical theory features prominently, with theories of social mediation in music, new perspectives on the concept of musical material in Adorno's late aesthetic theory, and a call for 'an aesthetics of risk' in contemporary art as a means 'to reassert the essential role of criticism, of judgment, and of evaluation as necessary conditions to bring about a real public debate on the art of today'. Part III offers creative perspectives, with new essays and interviews from important contemporary composers who have mad
United in their indebtedness to the scholarship of Raymond Monelle, an international group of contributors, including leading authorities on music and culture, come together in this state of the art volume to investigate different ways in which music signifies. Music semiotics asks what music signifies as well as how the signification process takes place. Looking at the nature of musical texts and music's narrativity, a number of the essays in this collection delve into the relationship between music and philosophy, literature, poetry, folk traditions and the theatre, with opera a genre that particularly lends itself to this mode of investigation. Other contributions look at theories of musical markedness, metaphor and irony, using examples and specific musical texts to serve as case studies to validate their theoretical approaches. Musical works discussed include those by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, Stravinsky, BartA(3)k, Xenakis, Kutavicius and John Adams, offering stimulating discussions of music that attest to its beauty as much as to its intellectual challenge. Taking Monelle's writing as a model, the contributions adhere to a method of logical argumentation presented in a civilized and respectful way, even - and particularly - when controversial issues are at stake, keeping in mind that contemplating the significance of music is a way to contemplate life itself.
The flourishing of religious or spiritually-inspired music in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries remains largely unexplored. The engagement and tensions between modernism and tradition, and institutionalized religion and spirituality are inherent issues for many composers who have sought to invoke spirituality and Otherness through contemporary music. Contemporary Music and Spirituality provides a detailed exploration of the recent and current state of contemporary spiritual music in its religious, musical, cultural and conceptual-philosophical aspects. At the heart of the book are issues that consider the role of secularization, the claims of modernity concerning the status of art, and subjective responses such as faith and experience. The contributors provide a new critical lens through which it is possible to see the music and thought of Cage, Ligeti, Messiaen, Stockhausen as spiritual music. The book surrounds these composers with studies of and by other composers directly associated with the idea of spiritual music (Harvey, Gubaidulina, MacMillan, Part, Pott, and Tavener), and others (Adams, Birtwistle, Ton de Leeuw, Ferneyhough, Ustvolskaya, and Vivier) who have created original engagements with the idea of spirituality. Contemporary Music and Spirituality is essential reading for humanities scholars and students working in the areas of musicology, music theory, theology, religious studies, philosophy of culture, and the history of twentieth-century culture.
Beyond its elucidation and critique of traditional 'notation-centric' musicology, this book's primary emphasis is on the negotiation and construction of meaning within the extended musical multimedia works of the classic British group Pink Floyd. Encompassing the concept albums that the group released from 1973 to 1983, during Roger Waters' final period with the band, chapters are devoted to Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977), The Wall (1979) and The Final Cut (1983), along with Waters' third solo album Amused to Death (1993). This book's analysis of album covers, lyrics, music and film makes use of techniques of literary and film criticism, while employing the combined lenses of musical hermeneutics and discourse analysis, so as to illustrate how sonic and musical information contribute to listeners' interpretations of the discerning messages of these monumental musical artifacts. Ultimately, it demonstrates how their words, sounds, and images work together in order to communicate one fundamental concern, which-to paraphrase the music journalist Karl Dallas-is to affirm human values against everything in life that should conspire against them.
The understanding of music involves the mastery of its various layers of meaning. Sometimes this meaning can be acquired through human insight; at other times, it can be learned. The central concern of Musical Knowledge is the tension between intuitive and analytical ways of making sense of the world. Keith Swanwick examines this relationship on three levels: in considering music as a way of knowing; as the apparent predicament between qualitative and quantitative research paradigms; and as a tension in education. Keith Swanwick guides his reader from a theoretical exploration of musical knowledge, through an examination of ways of researching the musical experience to a concluding section which will be of direct practical help to teachers. He suggests ways in which music education can be a vital transaction, giving examples across a range of music teaching, including school classroom and instrumental studios. The book will be of interest to anyone who makes or responds to music.
The book explores two radical changes of cultural and social paradigm that determined the World after 1945 - Modernism and Postmodernism. From the cataclysmic atmosphere emerged the second wave of Modernism. In art this attitude was manifested in the form of a radical break with the aesthetic and stylistic characteristics of prior generations. In architecture the International Style was born, meanwhile similar "universality" was also a characteristic of musical serialism. From the beginning of the 1970s the wheels again began to turn in the other direction. The powerful destructive will of modernism increasingly waivered, and the period after modernism - postmodernism - began. The book answers questions related to the reasons for these turnarounds, their consequences and their implications. |
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