An updated reissue of what, along with England's Dreaming, has become the acknowledged seminal work on punk. Cain was at every major gig and interviewed all of the acts at the time. He was viewed as an 'insider' and his access was unrivalled. This book is a vibrant and fast-paced trip through an extraordinary year. Includes major new interviews with Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten, Strangler Hugh Cornwell and Rat Scabies of The Damned.

What did rap music and hip hop culture inherit from the spirituals, classic blues, ragtime, classic jazz, and bebop? What did rap music and hip hop culture inherit from the Black Women's Club Movement, New Negro Movement, Harlem Renaissance, Hipster Movement, and Black Muslim Movement? How did black popular music and black popular culture between 1900 and the 1950s influence white youth culture, especially the Lost Generation and the Beat Generation, in ways that mirror rap music and hip hop culture's influence on contemporary white youth music, culture, and politics? In Hip Hop's Amnesia award-winning author, spoken-word artist, and multi-instrumentalist Reiland Rabaka answers these questions by rescuing and reclaiming the often-overlooked early twentieth century origins and evolution of rap music and hip hop culture. Hip Hop's Amnesia is a study about aesthetics and politics, music and social movements, as well as the ways in which African Americans' unique history and culture has consistently led them to create musics that have served as the soundtracks for their socio-political aspirations and frustrations, their socio-political organizations and nationally-networked movements. The musics of the major African American social and political movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were based and ultimately built on earlier forms of "African American movement music." Therefore, in order to really and truly understand rap music and hip hop culture we must critically examine both classical African American musics and the classical African American movements that these musics served as soundtracks for. This book is primarily preoccupied with the ways in which post-enslavement black popular music and black popular culture frequently served as a soundtrack for and reflected the grassroots politics of post-enslavement African American social and political movements. Where many Hip Hop Studies scholars have made clever allusions to the ways that rap music and hip hop culture are connected to and seem to innovatively evolve earlier forms of black popular music and black popular culture, Hip Hop's Amnesia moves beyond anecdotes and witty allusions and earnestly endeavors a full-fledged critical examination and archive-informed re-evaluation of "hip hop's inheritance" from the major African American musics and movements of the first half of the twentieth century: classic blues, ragtime, classic jazz, swing, bebop, the Black Women's Club Movement, the New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance, the Bebop Movement, the Hipster Movement, and the Black Muslim Movement.

A group of resourceful kids start "solution-seekers.com," a website where "cybervisitors" can get answers to questions that trouble them. But when one questioner asks the true meaning of Christmas, the kids seek to unravel the mystery by journeying back through the prophecies of the Old Testament. What they find is a series of "S" words that reveal a "spectacular story " With creative characters, humorous dialogue and great music, The "S" Files is a children's Christmas musical your kids will love performing.

This book explores the web of pitch relations that generates the musical language of non-serialized twelve-tone music and supplies both the analytical materials and methods necessary for analyses of a vast proportion of the 20th century musical repertoire. It does so in a simple, clear, and systematic manner to promote an easily accessible and global understanding of this music. Since the chromatic scale is the primary source for the pitch materials of 20th-century music, common sub-collections of the various modes and interval cycles serve as the basis for their mutual transformation. It is precisely this peculiarity of the non-serialized twelve-tone system that allows for an array of pitch relations and modal techniques hitherto perceived difficult if not impossible to analyze. Susanni and Antokoletz present the principles, concepts, and materials employed for analysis using a unique theoretic-analytical approach to the new musical language. The book contains a large number of original analyses that explore a host of composers including Ives, Stravinsky, Bartok, Messiaen, Cage, Debussy, Copland, and many more, providing insight into the music of the tonal revolution of the twentieth century and contributing an important perspective to how music works in general.

Beginning in the second half of the fifteenth century, under the patronage of the Gonzaga family, the northern Italian city of Mantua became a vibrant center for visual art, theatre, and music. The performance at the Gonzaga court of Poliziano's Fabula di Orfeo, around 1480, marked the beginning of secular music theatre. The use of musical numbers within the drama anticipated the beginnings of opera at Florence a century later, as well as the first masterpiece of the genre, Monteverdi's La favola d'Orfeo at Mantua in 1607. Mantua reached the zenith of its artistic distinction during the reign of Duke Vincenzo I, between 1587 and 1612. During this time, Wert and Gastoldi were joined at the court by the important Jewish composer Salamone Rossi and, most notably, by Monteverdi. The premieres of his Orfeo and Arisanna made the Gonzaga court, for that brief period, the most important center in the development of opera. In Music at the Gonzaga Court in Mantua, Donald C. Sanders discusses musical composition at the court in the context of the brilliant visual art that provided such a conducive environment. Sanders also traces the history of this very colorful family and their relationships with the emperors, kings, and popes who shaped modern Europe. Part history, part musicology, Sanders' analysis spans the fifteenth century through the seventeenth century, filling informative gaps with details essential for students in courses on Renaissance or Baroque music, or in more specialized courses on madrigal, opera, or liturgical music. Music at the Gonzaga Court in Mantua is also important reading for knowledgeable musical amateurs and anyone with interest in Italian history and arts."

Ombra is the term which applies to an operatic scene involving the appearance of an oracle or demon, witches, or ghosts. Such scenes can be traced back to the early days of opera and were commonplace in the seventeenth century in Italy and France. Operas based on the legends of Orpheus, Iphigenia, and Alcestis provide numerous examples of ombra and extend well into the eighteenth century. Clive McClelland's Ombra: Supernatural Music in the Eighteenth Century is an in-depth examination of ombra and is many influences on classical music performance. McClelland reveals that ombra scenes proved popular with audiences not only because of the special stage effects employed, but also due to increasing use of awe-inspiring musical effects. By the end of the eighteenth century the scenes had come to be associated with an elaborate set of musical features including slow, sustained writing, the use of flat keys, angular melodic lines, chromaticism and dissonance, dotted rhythms and syncopation, tremolando effects, unexpected harmonic progressions, and unusual instrumentation, especially involving trombones. It is clearly distinct from other styles that exhibit some of these characteristics, such as the so-called 'Sturm und Drang' or 'Fantasia.' Futhermore, parallels can be drawn between these features and Edmund Burke's 'sublime of terror, ' thus placing ombra music on an important position in the context of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory.

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.

Designed as a tribute to Robert Garfias, who has conducted field work in more cultures than any other living ethnomusicologist, this volume explores the originating encounter in field work of ethnomusicologists with the musicians and musical traditions they study. The nineteen contributors provide case studies from nearly every corner of the world, including biographies of important musicians from the Philippines, Turkey, Lapland, and Korea; interviews with, and reports of learning from, musicians from Ireland, Bulgaria, Burma, and India; and analyses of how traditional musicians adapt to the encounter with modernity in Japan, India, China, Turkey, Afghanistan, Morocco, and the United States. The book also provides a window into the history of ethnomusicology since all the contributors have had a relationship with the University of Washington, home to one of the oldest programs in ethnomusicology in the United States. Inspired by the example of Robert Garfias, they are all indefatigable field researchers and among the leading authorities in the world on their particular musical cultures. The contributions illustrate the core similarities in their approach to the discipline of ethnomusicology and at the same time deal with a remarkably wide range of perspectives, themes, issues, and theoretical questions. Readers should find this collection of essays a fascinating, indeed surprising, glimpse into an important aspect of the history of ethnomusicology.

Despite the ups and downs of his personal life and professional career-even in the face of deafness-Beethoven remained remarkably consistent in his most basic convictions about his art. This inner consistency, the music historian Mark Evan Bonds argues, provides the key to understanding the composer's life and works. Beethoven approached music as he approached life, weighing whatever occupied him from a variety of perspectives: a melodic idea, a musical genre, a word or phrase, a friend, a lover, a patron, money, politics, religion. His ability to unlock so many possibilities from each helps explain the emotional breadth and richness of his output as a whole, from the heaven-storming Ninth Symphony to the eccentric Eighth, and from the arcane Great Fugue to the crowd-pleasing Wellington's Victory. Beethoven's works, Bonds argues, are a series of variations on his life. The iconic scowl so familiar from later images of the composer is but one of many attitudes he could assume and project through his music. The supposedly characteristic furrowed brow and frown, moreover, came only after his time. Discarding tired myths about the composer, Bonds proposes a new way of listening to Beethoven by hearing his music as an expression of his entire self, not just his scowling self.

John Adams's opera, Nixon in China, is one of the most frequently performed operas in the contemporary literature. Timothy A. Johnson illuminates the opera and enhances listeners' and scholars' appreciation for this landmark work. This music-analytical guide presents a detailed, in-depth analysis of the music tied to historical and political contexts. The opera captures an important moment in history and in international relations, and a close study of it from an interdisciplinary perspective provides fresh, compelling insights about the opera. The music analysis takes a neo-Riemannian approach to harmony and to large-scale harmonic connections. Musical metaphors drawn between harmonies and their dramatic contexts enrich this approach. Motivic analysis reveals interweaving associations between the characters, based on melodic content. Analysis of rhythm and meter focuses on Adams's frequent use of grouping and displacement dissonances to propel the music forward or to illustrate the libretto. The book shows how the historical depiction in the opera is accurate, yet enriched by this operatic adaptation. The language of the opera is true to its source, but more evocative than the words spoken in 1972-due to Alice Goodman's marvelous, poetic libretto. And the music transcends its repetitive shell to become a hierarchically-rich and musically-compelling achievement.

Volume 13 deals with the interaction of music and politics, considering a broad range of genres, authors, composers, and artists in Germany since the nineteenth century. A particularly iconic image of German Reunification is that of Mstislav Rostropovich playing from J. S. Bach's cello suites in front of the Berlin Wall on November 11, 1989. Thirty years on, it is timely to reconsider the cross-fertilization of music and politics within the German-speaking context. Frequently employed as a motivational force, a propaganda tool, or even a weapon, music can imbue a sense of identity and belonging, triggering both comforting and disturbing memories. Playing a key role in the formation of Heimat and "Germanness," it serves ideological, nationalistic, and propagandistic purposes conveying political messages and swaying public opinion. This volume brings together essays by historians, literary scholars, and musicologists on topics concerning the increasing politicization of music, especially since the nineteenth century. They cover a broad spectrum of genres, musicians, and thinkers, discussing the interplay of music and politics in "classical" and popular music: from the rediscovery and repurposing of Martin Luther in nineteenth-century Germany to the exploitation of music during the Third Reich, from the performative politics of German punk and pop music to the influence of the events of 1988/89 on operatic productions in the former GDR - up to the relevance of Ernst Bloch in our contemporary post-truth society.

How should one interpret music of another century? What standards should be applied to an eighteenth century harpsichord work, for instance, being performed on a piano? Keyboard ""methods""--systematic approaches to training, touch, and interpretation--did not evolve until the nineteenth century, and written methodologies are few. Drawing on primary sources, the author has compiled a detailed analysis of such keyboard ""methods"" as existed in Europe in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Most were developed by Couperin, C.P.E. Bach, Turk, J.S. Bach, Mozart, Chopin and Liszt. Also discussed, with translations from their writings and their critics', are the detailed theoretical works by Kullak and Lussy. Analysis shows which techniques had been adapted from earlier practice and which were original to the composer, demonstrating the evolution of the various methods. Techniques useful in the interpretation of period material, and which still have important applications today, are pointed out.

All people, in no matter what culture, must be able to place their music firmly in the context of the totality of their beliefs, experiences, and activities, for without such ties, music cannot exist. This means that there must be a body of theory connected with any music system--not necessarily a theory of the structure of music sound, although that may be present as well, but rather a theory of what music is, what it does, and how it is coordinated with the total environment, both natural and cultural, in which human beings move. The Flathead Indians of Western Montana (just over 26,000 in number as of the 2000 census) inhabit a reservation consisting of 632,516 acres of land in the Jocko and Flathead Valleys and the Camas Prairie country, which lie roughly between Evaro and Kalispell, Montana. The reservation is bounded on the east by the Mission Range, on the west by the Cabinet National Forest, on the south by the Lolo National Forest, and on the north by an arbitrary line, approximately bisecting Flathead Lake about twenty-four miles south of Kalispell. The area is one of the richest agricultural regions in Montana, and fish and game are abundant. The Flathead are engaged in stocking, timbering, and various agricultural enterprises. For the Flathead, the most important single fact about music and its relationship to the total world is its origin in the supernatural sphere. All true and proper songs, particularly in the past, owe their origin to a variety of contacts experienced by humans with beings which, though a part of this world, are superhuman and the source of both individual and tribal powers and skills. Thus a sharp distinction is drawn by the Flathead between what they call "make-up" and all other songs. Merriam's pioneering work in the relationship of ethnography and musicology remains a primary source in this field in anthropology.

In what ways does listening to music shape everyday perception? Is music particularly effective in promoting shifts in consciousness? Is there any difference perceptually between contemplating one's surroundings and experiencing a work of art? Everyday Music Listening is the first book to focus in depth on the detailed nature of music listening episodes as lived mental experiences. Ruth Herbert uses new empirical data to explore the psychological processes involved in everyday music listening scenarios, charting interactions between music, perceiver and environment in a diverse range of real-world contexts. Findings are integrated with insights from a broad range of literature, including consciousness studies and research into altered states of consciousness, as well as ideas from ethology and evolutionary psychology, suggesting that a psychobiological capacity for trancing is linked to the origins of making and receiving of art. The term 'trance' is not generally associated with music listening outside ethnomusicological studies of strong experiences, yet 'hypnotic-like' involvements in daily life have long been recognized by hypnotherapy researchers. The author argues that multiply distributed attention - prevalent in much contemporary listening- does not necessarily indicate superficial engagement. Music emerges as a particularly effective mediator of experience. Absorption and dissociation, as manifestations of trancing, are self-regulatory processes, often operating at the level of unconscious awareness, that support individuals' perceptions of psychological health. This fascinating study brings together research and theory from a wide range of fields to provide a new framework for understanding the phenomenology of music listening in a way that will appeal to both specialist academic audiences and a broad general readership.

What does it mean to think of Western Art music - and the Austro-German contribution to that repertory - as a tradition? How are men and masculinities implicated in the shaping of that tradition? And how is the writing of the history (or histories) of that tradition shaped by men and masculinities? This book seeks to answer these and other questions by drawing both on a wide range of German-language writings on music, sound and listening from the so-called long nineteenth century (circa 1800-1918), and a range of critical-theoretical texts from the post-war continental philosophical and psychoanalytic traditions, including Lacan, Zizek, Serres, Derrida and Kittler. The book is focussed in particular on bringing the object of historical writing itself into scrutiny by engaging in what Zizek has called a 'historicity' or a way of writing about the past that not merely acknowledges the ahistorical kernel of historical writing, but brings that kernel into the light of day, takes account of it and puts it into play. The book is thus committed to a kind of historical writing that is open-ended - though not ideologically naA-ve - and that does not fix or stabilize the nature of the relationship between so-called 'primary' and 'secondary' texts. The book consists of an introduction, which places the study of classical music and the Austro-German tradition within broader debates about the value of that tradition, and four extensive case studies: an analysis of the cultural-historical category of listening around 1800; a close reading of A. B. Marx's Beethoven monograph of 1859; a consideration of Heinrich Schenker's attitudes to the mob and the vernacular more broadly and an examination, through Franz Kafka, of the figure of Mahler's body.

.cs7CED571B{text-align: left;text-indent:0pt;padding:0pt 0pt 0pt 0pt;margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0pt}.cs5EFED22F{color: #000000;background-color: transparent;font-family: Times New Roman; font-size:12pt; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; }.csA62DFD6A{color: #000000;background-color: transparent;font-family: Times New Roman; font-size:12pt; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; }In applying the term folk music to the music they were collecting, early nineteenth-century Swedish folklorists saturated it with the cultural currency of romantic nationalism. These collectors promoted the music as the essence of the rural peasant folk, and thus of the nation; the tradition it represented was ancient, invested with the power of nature itself. Since that time, folk music has retained its symbolic value, while at the same time the national romantic narrative has broken down due to its being politically problematic as well as factually unsustainable. Research that has been done on rural peasant music in the intervening years reveals that it was never particularly ancient nor nationally uniform, nor truly distinguishable from popular or art musics. Swedish Folk Music in the Twenty-First Century: On the Nature of Tradition in a Folkless Nation, by David Kaminsky, examines the struggle of present-day Swedish folk musicians and dancers to maintain the cultural currency of their genre while simultaneously challenging the historical fallacies and ideological agenda upon which that currency was originally based. The notion of Swedish cultural purity once championed by nineteenth-century folklorists has been dismissed by serious scholars and now marks the discourse of the anti-immigrant extreme right, alienating it from the academic-savvy center/left-leaning folk music subculture of today. Kaminsky's study is especially relevant today, given the rise of the anti-immigrant extreme right in Sweden, and their efforts to preserve culturally pure Swedish folk music at the expense of existing multicultural government initiatives.

Interpreting Music Video introduces students to the musical, visual, and sociological aspects of music videos, enabling them to critically analyze a multimedia form with a central place in popular culture. With highly relevant examples drawn from recent music videos across many different genres, this concise and accessible book brings together tools from musical analysis, film and media studies, gender and sexuality studies, and critical race studies, requiring no previous knowledge. Exploring the multiple dimensions of music videos, this book is the perfect introduction to critical analysis for music, media studies, communications, and popular culture.

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.

This volume contains articles most of which present empirical studies in the field of systematic musicology. Contributions in particular deal with aspects of melody including modeling and computer-assisted analysis as well as with various issues in sound and music perception, musical acoustics and psychoacoustics. Topics range from loudness perception in ‘Techno’ music to sound radiation in classical singing styles, and from timbre research to wave field synthesis and room acoustics. One focus of this volume is on pop and rock music, another is on ethno and folk music. In addition to empirical investigations, theoretical and methodological issues are addressed including some fundamental concepts in ethnomusicology and folk music scholarship.

Improvisation, despite its almost ubiquitous presence in many art forms, is notoriously misunderstood and mysterious. Although earlier strands of American philosophy and art emphasized what might be called improvisational practices, it was during the modernist period that improvisational practice and theory began to make a significant impact on art and culture, specifically via the African American musical forms of jazz and blues. This musical development held important consequences for the larger artistic, cultural, and political life of America as a whole and, eventually, the world. The historical convergence of jazz and philosophical currents like pragmatism in American culture provides the framework for Wallace's discussion of improvisation in literary modernism. Focusing on poets ranging from Gertrude Stein to Langston Hughes, Wallace's work provides a fresh perspective on the complex circuits of modernist culture. Improvisation and The Making of American Literary Modernism will be of interest to scholars of poetry, music, American and modernist studies, and race and ethnic studies.

Understanding Post-Tonal Music is a student-centered textbook that explores the compositional and musical processes of twentieth-century post-tonal music. Intended for undergraduate or general graduate courses on the theory and analysis of twentieth-century music, this book will increase the accessibility of post-tonal music by providing students with tools for understanding pitch organization, rhythm and meter, form, texture, and aesthetics. By presenting the music first and then deriving the theory, Understanding Post-Tonal Music leads students to greater understanding and appreciation of this challenging and important repertoire. The updated second edition includes new "Explorations" features that guide students to engage with pieces through listening and a process of exploration, discovery, and discussion; a new chapter covering electronic, computer, and spectral musics; and additional coverage of music from the twenty-first century and recent trends. The text has been revised throughout to enhance clarity, both by streamlining the prose and by providing a visual format more accessible to the student.

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.

Popular music has long understood that human rights, if attainable at all, involve a struggle without end. The right to imagine an individual will, the right to some form of self-determination and the right to self-legislation have long been at the forefront of popular music's approach to human rights. At a time of such uncertainty and confusion, with human rights currently being violated all over the world, a new and sustained examination of cultural responses to such issues is warranted. In this respect music, which is always produced in a social context, is an extremely useful medium; in its immediacy music has a potency of expression whose reach is long and wide. Contributors to this significant volume cover artists and topics such as Billy Bragg, punk, Fun-da-Mental, Willie King and the Liberators, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the Anti-Death Penalty movement, benefit concerts, benefit albums, Gil Scott-Heron, Bruce Springsteen, Wounded Knee and Native American political resistance, Tori Amos, Joni Mitchell, as well as human rights in relation to feminism. A second volume covers World Music.

This book studies the effects of repetitive musical rhythm on the brain and nervous system, and in doing so integrates diverse fields including ethnomusicology, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, religious studies, music therapy, and human health. It presents aspects of musical rhythm and biological rhythms, and in particular rhythmic entrainment, in a way that considers cultural context alongside theoretical research and discussions of potential clinical and therapeutic implications. Considering the effects of drumming and other rhythmic music on mental and bodily functioning, the volume hypothesizes that rhythmic music can have a dramatic impact on mental states, sometimes catalyzing profound changes in arousal, mood, and emotional states via the stimulation of changes in physiological functions like the electrical activity in the brain. The experiments presented here make use of electroencephalography (EEG), galvanic skin response (GSR), and subjective measures to gain insight into how these mental states are evoked, what their relationship is to the music and context of the experience, and demonstrate that they are happening in a consistent and reproducible fashion, suggesting clinical applications. This comprehensive volume will appeal to scholars in cognition, ethnomusicology, and music perception who are interested in the therapeutic potential of music.

Why do people attach importance to the wordless language we call music? "Musical Cognition" suggests that music is a game. In music, our cognitive functions such as perception, memory, attention, and expectation are challenged; yet, as listeners, we often do not realize that the listener plays an active role in reaching the awareness that makes music so exhilarating, soothing, and inspiring. In reality, the author contends, listening does not happen in the outer world of audible sound, but in the inner world of our minds and brains. Recent research in the areas of psychology and neuro-cognition allows Honing to be explicit in a way that many of his predecessors could not. His lucid, evocative writing style guides the reader through what is known about listening to music while avoiding jargon and technical diagrams. With clear examples, the book concentrates on underappreciated musical skills--"sense of rhythm" and "relative pitch"--skills that make us musical creatures. Research on how living creatures respond to music supports the conviction that all humans have a unique, instinctive attraction to music. "Musical Cognition "includes a selection of intriguing examples from recent literature exploring the role that an implicit or explicit knowledge of music plays when one listens to it. The scope of the topics discussed ranges from the ability of newborns to perceive a beat, to the unexpected musical expertise of ordinary listeners. The evidence shows that music is second nature to most human beings--biologically and socially. View the book trailer View the book's website - see videos, images, sample materials, and the author's blog and Twitter feed.