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Books > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General

Punk Rock - Music Is the Currency of Life (Paperback): Mindy Clegg Punk Rock - Music Is the Currency of Life (Paperback)
Mindy Clegg
R644 R604 Discovery Miles 6 040 Save R40 (6%) Ships in 18 - 22 working days
The Ballad of Tommy Lipuma (Hardcover): Ben Sidran The Ballad of Tommy Lipuma (Hardcover)
Ben Sidran
R680 Discovery Miles 6 800 Ships in 18 - 22 working days
Music, Politics, and Nationalism In Latin America - Chile During the Cold War Era (Hardcover): Jedrek Mularski Music, Politics, and Nationalism In Latin America - Chile During the Cold War Era (Hardcover)
Jedrek Mularski
R2,404 Discovery Miles 24 040 Ships in 18 - 22 working days
Critique of Authenticity (Hardcover): Thomas Claviez Critique of Authenticity (Hardcover)
Thomas Claviez
R1,846 Discovery Miles 18 460 Ships in 18 - 22 working days
Atlanta Pop in the '50s, '60s & '70s - The Magic of Bill Lowery (Paperback): Andy Lee White, John M. Williams Atlanta Pop in the '50s, '60s & '70s - The Magic of Bill Lowery (Paperback)
Andy Lee White, John M. Williams
R512 R481 Discovery Miles 4 810 Save R31 (6%) Ships in 18 - 22 working days
Heinrich Schenker: Selected Correspondence (Hardcover, Annotated Ed): Ian Bent, David Bretherton, William Drabkin Heinrich Schenker: Selected Correspondence (Hardcover, Annotated Ed)
Ian Bent, David Bretherton, William Drabkin
R910 Discovery Miles 9 100 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Brings together in one volume the full text of some 450 letters in first-time English translation, organized into sections each prefaced by an introduction. All the letters are fully annotated and they yield information about Viennese society, culture and politics of the time. The work of Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935), widely regarded as the most important music theorist of the twentieth century, has shaped the teaching of music theory in the United States profoundly and influenced theorists there, in Europe, and throughout the world. Living and working in Vienna, Schenker maintained a vigorous correspondence with a large circle of professional musicians, writers, music critics, institutions, administrators, patrons, friends, and pupils. A large part of his correspondence was preserved after his death: some 7,000 letters, postcards, telegrams, etc., to and from 400 correspondents. His diaries record the fabric of his personal life and his activities asa private music teacher and writer; they also provide a detailed commentary on historical and political events and offer a window on to the conditions of life in Vienna. Taken together, these documents contribute vividly to the picture of cultural life in Vienna, and elsewhere, from the perspective of a Jewish intellectual and his circle of musical and artistic friends. Heinrich Schenker: Selected Correspondence represents a concise edition ofsome of the theorist's most important and revelatory letters and diary entries. It offers the full text of some 450 letters in English translation, organized into sections devoted to various aspects of his professional life: teaching, writing, administration, and maintaining contact with an ever widening circle including Ferruccio Busoni, Julius Roentgen, Otto Erich Deutsch, Alphons von Rothschild, Paul von Klenau, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Paul Hindemith, MorizViolin, John Petrie Dunn, and Hans Weisse. Extracts from the diaries provide a summary of important parts of the correspondence that do not survive. The volume includes a detailed exposition of the editorial method, biographicalnotes on correspondents, and a substantial general introduction. Each of the sections is prefaced by an introduction which provides essential historical context, and the letters and diary entries are fully annotated. IAN BENT is Emeritus Professor of Music at Columbia University in New York, and lives in the United Kingdom. DAVID BRETHERTON is Lecturer in Music at the University of Southampton. WILLIAM DRABKIN is Professorof Music at the University of Southampton. CONTRIBUTORS: Marko Deisinger, Martin Eybl, Christoph Hust, Kevin C. Karnes, John Koslovsky, Lee Rothfarb, John Rothgeb, Hedi Siegel, Arnold Whittall

Eleanor Smith's Hull House Songs - The Music of Protest and Hope in Jane Addams's Chicago (Hardcover): Graham... Eleanor Smith's Hull House Songs - The Music of Protest and Hope in Jane Addams's Chicago (Hardcover)
Graham Cassano, Rima Lunin Schultz, Jessica Payette
R5,584 Discovery Miles 55 840 Ships in 18 - 22 working days

In Eleanor Smith's Hull House Songs: The Music of Protest and Hope in Jane Addams's Chicago, the authors republish Hull House Songs (1916), together with critical commentary. Hull-House Songs contains five politically engaged compositions written by the Hull-House music educator, Eleanor Smith. The commentary that accompanies the folio includes an examination of Smith's poetic sources and musical influences; a study of Jane Addams's aesthetic theories; and a complete history of the arts at Hull-House. Through this focus upon aesthetic and cultural programs at Hull-House, the authors identify the external, and internalized, forces of domination (class position, racial identity, patriarchal disenfranchisement) that limited the work of the Hull-House women, while also recovering the sometimes hidden emancipatory possibilities of their legacy. With an afterword by Jocelyn Zelasko.

The Birth of Breaking - Hip-Hop History from the Floor Up (Hardcover): Serouj "Midus" Aprahamian The Birth of Breaking - Hip-Hop History from the Floor Up (Hardcover)
Serouj "Midus" Aprahamian
R2,205 Discovery Miles 22 050 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Breaking is the first and most widely practiced hip-hop dance in the world today, with an estimated one million participants taking part in this dynamic, multifaceted artform. Yet, despite its global reach and over 40 years of existence, historical treatments of the dance have largely neglected the African Americans who founded it. Dancer and scholar Serouj "Midus" Aprahamian offers, for the first time, a detailed look into the African American beginnings of breaking in the Bronx, New York, during the 1970s. Given the pivotal impact the dance had on hip-hop's formation, this book also challenges numerous myths and misconceptions that have permeated studies of hip-hop culture's emergence. Aprahamian draws on untapped archival material, primary interviews, and detailed descriptions of early breaking to bring this buried history to life, with a particular focus on the early aesthetic development of the dance, the institutional settings in which hip-hop was conceived, and the movement's impact on sociocultural conditions in New York throughout the 1970s. By featuring the overlooked first-hand accounts of over 50 founding b-boys and b-girls, this book also shows how indebted breaking is to African American culture and interrogates the disturbing factors behind its historical erasure.

Senses of Vibration - A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (Hardcover, New): Shelley Trower Senses of Vibration - A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (Hardcover, New)
Shelley Trower
R3,339 Discovery Miles 33 390 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

This is a pioneering study of the phenomenon of vibration and its history and reception through culture. The study of the senses has become a rich topic in recent years. "Senses of Vibration" explores a wide range of sensory experience and makes a decisive new contribution to this growing field by focussing not simply on the senses as such, but on the material experience - vibration - that underpins them. This is the first book to take the theme of vibration as central, offering an interdisciplinary history of the phenomenon and its reverberations in the cultural imaginary. It tracks vibration through the work of a wide range of writers, including physiologists (who thought vibrations in the nerves delivered sensations to the brain), physicists (who claimed that light, heat, electricity and other forms of energy were vibratory), spiritualists (who figured that spiritual energies also existed in vibratory form), and poets and novelists from Coleridge to Dickens and Wells. "Senses of Vibration" is a work of scholarship that cuts through a range of disciplines and will reverberate for many years to come.

33 Revolutions Per Minute - A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day (Paperback): Dorian Lynskey 33 Revolutions Per Minute - A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day (Paperback)
Dorian Lynskey
R617 R571 Discovery Miles 5 710 Save R46 (7%) Ships in 18 - 22 working days

From one of the United Kingdom's most prominent music critics, a page-turning and wonderfully researched history of 33 songs that have transformed the world through the twentieth century and beyond.

When pop music meets politics, the results are often thrilling, sometimes life-changing, and never simple. The protest songs of such great artists as Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, U2, Public Enemy, Fela Kuti, R.E.M., Rage Against the Machine, and the Clash represent pop music at its most charged and relevant, providing the soundtrack and informing social change since the 1930s. They capture the attention and passions of listeners, force their way into the news, and make their presence felt from the streets to the corridors of power.

33 Revolutions Per Minute is a history of protest music embodied in 33 songs that span seven decades and four continents, from Billie Holiday crooning "Strange Fruit" before a shocked audience to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young paying tribute to the Vietnam protesters killed at Kent State in "Ohio," to Green Day railing against President Bush and twenty-first-century media in "American Idiot." With the aid of exclusive new interviews, Dorian Lynskey explores the individuals, ideas, and events behind each song. This expansive survey examines how music has engaged with racial unrest, nuclear paranoia, apartheid, war, poverty, and oppression, offering hope, stirring anger, inciting action, and producing songs that continue to resonate years down the line, sometimes at great cost to the musicians involved.

For the audience who embraced Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise, Bob Dylan's Chronicles, or Simon Reynolds's Rip It Up and Start Again, 33 Revolutions Per Minute is an absorbing and moving account of 33 songs that made history.

Alfred's Basic Piano Library Theory, Bk 1b (Staple bound): Willard A Palmer, Morton Manus, Amanda Vick Lethco Alfred's Basic Piano Library Theory, Bk 1b (Staple bound)
Willard A Palmer, Morton Manus, Amanda Vick Lethco
R233 Discovery Miles 2 330 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Designed to coordinate page-by-page with the Lesson Books. Contains enjoyable games and quizzes that reinforce the principles presented in the Lesson Books. Students can increase their musical understanding while they are away from the keyboard.

The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical (Hardcover): Robert Gordon, Olaf Jubin The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical (Hardcover)
Robert Gordon, Olaf Jubin
R4,260 Discovery Miles 42 600 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical provides a comprehensive academic survey of British musical theatre offering both a historical account of the musical's development from 1728 and a range of in-depth critical analyses of the unique forms and features of British musicals, which explore the aesthetic values and sociocultural meanings of a tradition that initially gave rise to the American musical and later challenged its modern pre-eminence. After a consideration of how John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) created a prototype for eighteenth-century ballad opera, the book focuses on the use of song in early nineteenth century theatre, followed by a sociocultural analysis of the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan; it then examines Edwardian and interwar musical comedies and revues as well as the impact of Rodgers and Hammerstein on the West End, before analysing the new forms of the postwar British musical from The Boy Friend (1953) to Oliver! (1960). One section of the book examines the contributions of key twentieth century figures including Noel Coward, Ivor Novello, Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber, director Joan Littlewood and producer Cameron Macintosh, while a number of essays discuss both mainstream and alternative musicals of the 1960s and 1970s and the influence of the pop industry on the creation of concept recordings such as Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) and Les Miserables (1980). There is a consideration of "jukebox" musicals such as Mamma Mia! (1999), while essays on overtly political shows such as Billy Elliot (2005) are complemented by those on experimental musicals like Jerry Springer: the Opera (2003) and London Road (2011) and on the burgeoning of Black and Asian British musicals in both the West End and subsidized venues. The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical demonstrates not only the unique qualities of British musical theatre but also the vitality and variety of British musicals today.

Oliver! - A Dickensian Musical (Hardcover): Marc Napolitano Oliver! - A Dickensian Musical (Hardcover)
Marc Napolitano
R1,389 Discovery Miles 13 890 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

When the show was first produced in 1960, at a time when transatlantic musical theatre was dominated by American productions, Oliver already stood out for its overt Englishness. But in writing Oliver , librettist and composer Lionel Bart had to reconcile the Englishness of his Dickensian source with the American qualities of the integrated book musical. To do so, he turned to the musical traditions that had defined his upbringing: English music hall, Cockney street singing, and East End Yiddish theatre. This book reconstructs the complicated biography of Bart's play, from its early inception as a pop musical inspired by a marketable image, through its evolution into a sincere Dickensian adaptation that would push English musical theatre to new dramatic heights. The book also addresses Oliver 's phenomenal reception in its homeland, where audiences responded to the musical's Englishness with a nationalistic fervor. The musical, which has more than fulfilled its promise as one of the most popular English musicals of all time, remains one of the country's most significant shows.
Author Marc Napolitano shows how Oliver 's popularity has ultimately exerted a significant influence on two separate cultural trends. Firstly, Bart's adaptation forever impacted the culture text of Dickens's Oliver Twist; to this day, the general perception of the story and the innumerable allusions to the novel in popular media are colored heavily by the sights, scenes, sounds, and songs from the musical, and virtually every major adaptation of from the 1970s on has responded to Bart's work in some way. Secondly, Oliver helped to move the English musical forward by establishing a post-war English musical tradition that would eventually pave the way for the global dominance of the West End musical in the 1980s. As such, Napolitano's book promises to be an important book for students and scholars in musical theatre studies as well as to general readers interested in the megamusical.

Authorship and Greek Song: Authority, Authenticity, and Performance - Studies in Archaic and Classical Greek Song, Vol. 3... Authorship and Greek Song: Authority, Authenticity, and Performance - Studies in Archaic and Classical Greek Song, Vol. 3 (English, Greek, To, Hardcover)
Egbert J. Bakker
R3,992 Discovery Miles 39 920 Ships in 18 - 22 working days

Authorship and Greek Song is a collection of papers dealing with various aspects of authorship in the song culture of Ancient Greece. In this cultural context the idea of the poet as author of his poems is complicated by the fact that poetry in archaic Greece circulated as songs performed for a variety of audiences, both local and "global" (Panhellenic). The volume's chapters discuss questions about the importance of the singers/performers; the nature of the performance occasion; the status of the poet; the authority of the poet/author and/or that of the performer; and the issues of authenticity arising when poems are composed under a given poet's name. The volume offers discussions of major authors such as Pindar, Sappho, and Theognis.

Southern Sounds from the North (Hardcover): Richard L. Doran Southern Sounds from the North (Hardcover)
Richard L. Doran
R888 Discovery Miles 8 880 Ships in 10 - 15 working days
That's Got 'Em! - The Life and Music of Wilbur C. Sweatman (Hardcover): Mark Berresford That's Got 'Em! - The Life and Music of Wilbur C. Sweatman (Hardcover)
Mark Berresford
R2,908 Discovery Miles 29 080 Ships in 18 - 22 working days

Wilbur C. Sweatman (1882-1961) is one of the most important, yet unheralded, African American musicians involved in the transition of ragtime into jazz in the early twentieth century. In "That's Got 'Em ," Mark Berresford tracks this energetic pioneer over a seven-decade career. His talent transformed every genre of black music before the advent of rock and roll--"pickaninny" bands, minstrelsy, circus sideshows, vaudeville (both black and white), night clubs, and cabarets. Sweatman was the first African American musician to be offered a long-term recording contract, and he dazzled listeners with jazz clarinet solos before the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's so-called "first jazz records."

Sweatman toured the vaudeville circuit for over twenty years and presented African American music to white music lovers without resorting to the hitherto obligatory "plantation" costumes and blackface makeup. His bands were a fertile breeding ground of young jazz talent, featuring such future stars as Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, and Jimmie Lunceford. Sweatman subsequently played pioneering roles in radio and recording production. His high profile and sterling reputation in both the black and white entertainment communities made him a natural choice for administering the estate of Scott Joplin and other notable black performers and composers.

"That's Got 'Em " is the first full-length biography of this pivotal figure in black popular culture, providing a compelling account of his life and times.

The Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure (Hardcover): Roger Mantie, Gareth Dylan Smith The Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure (Hardcover)
Roger Mantie, Gareth Dylan Smith
R4,705 Discovery Miles 47 050 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Music has been a vital part of leisure activity across time and cultures. Contemporary commodification, commercialization, and consumerism, however, have created a chasm between conceptualizations of music making and numerous realities in our world. From a broad range of perspectives and approaches, this handbook explores avocational involvement with music as an integral part of the human condition. The chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure present myriad ways for reconsidering and refocusing attention back on the rich, exciting, and emotionally charged ways in which people of all ages make time for making music. The contexts discussed are broadly Western, including an eclectic variety of voices from scholars across fields and disciplines, framing complex and multifaceted phenomena that may be helpfully, enlighteningly, and perhaps provocatively framed as music making and leisure. This volume may be viewed as an attempt to reclaim music making and leisure as a serious concern for, amongst others, policy makers, scholars, and educators who perhaps risk eliding some or even most of the ways in which music - a vital part of human existence - is integrated into the everyday lives of people. As such, this handbook looks beyond the obvious, asking readers to consider anew, "What might we see when we think of music making as leisure?"

Humming (Hardcover): Suk Jun Kim Humming (Hardcover)
Suk Jun Kim
R2,521 Discovery Miles 25 210 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Humming is a ubiquitous and mundane act many of us perform. The fact that we often hum to ourselves, to family members, or to close friends suggests that humming is a personal, intimate act. It can also be a powerful way in which people open up to others and share collective memories. In religious settings such as Tibetan chanting, humming offers a mesmerising sonic experience. Then there are hums that resound regardless of human activity, such as the hums of impersonal objects and man-made or natural phenomena. The first sound studies book to explores the topic of humming, Humming offers a unique examination of the polarising categories of hums, from hums that are performed only to oneself, that are exercised in religious practice, that claim healing, and that resonate with our bodies, to hums that can drive people to madness, that emanate from cities and towns, and that resound in the universe. By acknowledging the quirkiness of hums within the established discourse in sound studies, Humming takes a truly interdisciplinary view on this familiar yet less-trodden sonic concept in sound studies.

Selected Essays on Intermediality by Werner Wolf (1992-2014) - Theory and Typology, Literature-Music Relations, Transmedial... Selected Essays on Intermediality by Werner Wolf (1992-2014) - Theory and Typology, Literature-Music Relations, Transmedial Narratology, Miscellaneous Transmedial Phenomena (Hardcover)
Werner Wolf; Edited by Walter Bernhart
R5,938 Discovery Miles 59 380 Ships in 18 - 22 working days

This volume collects twenty-two major essays by Werner Wolf published between 1992 and 2014, which have contributed to establishing 'intermediality' as an internationally recognized research field, providing a widely accepted typology of the field and opening intermedial perspectives on areas as varied as narratology, metareferentiality and iconicity.

The Process That Is the World - Cage/Deleuze/Events/Performances (Hardcover): Joe Panzner The Process That Is the World - Cage/Deleuze/Events/Performances (Hardcover)
Joe Panzner
R3,988 Discovery Miles 39 880 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

The Process That Is the World grapples with John Cage not just as a composer, but as a philosopher advocating for an ontology of difference in keeping with the kind posited by Gilles Deleuze. Cage's philosophy is not simply a novel method for composition, but an extensive argument about the nature of reality itself, the construction of subjects within that reality, and the manner in which subjectivity and a self-creative world exist in productive tension with one another. Over the course of the study, these themes are developed in the realms of the ontology of a musical work, performance practices, ethics, and eventually a study of Cagean politics and the connection between aesthetic experience and the generation of new forms of collective becoming-together. The vision of Cage that emerges through this study is not simply that of the maverick composer or the "inventor of genius," but of a thinker and artist responding to insights about the world-as-process as it extends through the philosophical, artistic, and ethical registers: the world as potential for variance, reinvention, and permanent revolution.

Transcending Dystopia - Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945-1989 (Hardcover): Tina Fruhauf Transcending Dystopia - Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945-1989 (Hardcover)
Tina Fruhauf
R1,680 Discovery Miles 16 800 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

By the end of the Second World War, Germany was in ruins and its Jewish population so gravely diminished that a rich cultural life seemed unthinkable. And yet, as surviving Jews returned from hiding, the camps, and their exiles abroad, so did their music. Transcending Dystopia tells the story of the remarkable revival of Jewish musical activity that developed in postwar Germany against all odds. Author Tina Fruhauf provides a kaleidoscopic panorama of musical practices in worship and social life across the country to illuminate how music contributed to transitions and transformations within and beyond Jewish communities in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Drawing on newly unearthed sources from archives and private collections, this book covers a wide spectrum of musical activity-from its role in commemorations and community events to synagogue concerts and its presence on the radio-across the divided Germany until the Fall of the Wall in 1989. Fruhauf's use of mobility as a conceptual framework reveals the myriad ways in which the reemergence of Jewish music in Germany was shaped by cultural transfer and exchange that often relied on the circulation of musicians, their ideas, and practices within and between communities. By illuminating the centrality of mobility to Jewish experiences and highlighting how postwar Jewish musical practices in Germany were defined by politics that reached across national borders to the United States and Israel, this pioneering study makes a major contribution to our understanding of Jewish life and culture in a transnational context.

Sweet Thing - The History and Musical Structure of a Shared American Vernacular Form (Hardcover): Nicholas Stoia Sweet Thing - The History and Musical Structure of a Shared American Vernacular Form (Hardcover)
Nicholas Stoia
R1,872 Discovery Miles 18 720 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

As children, many of us learn to sing, "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands." But despite the familiarity of this tune, few of us realize that what we're singing is actually part of a pervasive - and centuries-old - musical scheme. This particular pattern, the "Sweet Thing" scheme, has generated a large group of songs spanning a broad range of topics, genres, and time periods, but all related through a specific stanzaic form. Early twentieth-century blues songs "My Babe" and "Motherless Children," country songs "Peg and Awl" and "Crawdad Song," and gospel songs "Pure Religion" and "This Train" use this form, along with popular songs like Ray Charles's "I Got a Woman," The Beatles's "One After 909," and the Velvet Underground's "I'm Waiting for the Man." Sweet Thing: The History and Musical Structure of a Shared American Vernacular Form studies one of the most productive and enduring shared musical resources in North American vernacular music. Author Nicholas Stoia offers the most comprehensive examination to date of the long history of the "Sweet Thing" scheme, exploring how it made its way from sixteenth-century Scotland to eighteenth-century British broadside ballads to nineteenth-century American ragtime. Stoia also examines the form in various contexts, including early blues and country music, and moving forward to rhythm and blues, soul, and rock music, connecting these modern forms to their ancient roots. Through this close look at a ubiquitous musical from, Sweet Thing shows us how it has linked listeners and musicians alike across the boundaries of genre, race, and even time.

Foundations of Musical Grammar (Hardcover): Lawrence M Zbikowski Foundations of Musical Grammar (Hardcover)
Lawrence M Zbikowski
R1,224 Discovery Miles 12 240 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

In recent years, music theorists have been increasingly eager to incorporate findings from the science of human cognition and linguistics into their methodology. In the culmination of a vast body of research undertaken since his influential and award-winning Conceptualizing Music (OUP 2002), Lawrence M. Zbikowski puts forward Foundations of Musical Grammar, an ambitious and broadly encompassing account on the foundations of musical grammar based on our current understanding of human cognitive capacities. Musical grammar is conceived of as a species of construction grammar, in which grammatical elements are form-function pairs. Zbikowski proposes that the basic function of music is to provide sonic analogs for dynamic processes that are important in human cultural interactions. He focuses on three such processes: those concerned with the emotions, the spontaneous gestures that accompany speech, and the patterned movement of dance. Throughout the book, Zbikowski connects cognitive research with music theory for an interdisciplinary audience, presenting detailed musical analyses and summaries of the basic elements of musical grammar.

Four-Handed Monsters - Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth-Century Culture (Hardcover): Adrian Daub Four-Handed Monsters - Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth-Century Culture (Hardcover)
Adrian Daub
R913 Discovery Miles 9 130 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

In the course of the nineteenth century, four-hand piano playing emerged across Europe as a popular pastime of the well-heeled classes and of those looking to join them. Nary a canonic work of classical music that was not set for piano duo, nary a house that could afford not to invest in them. Duets echoed from the student bedsit to the Buckingham Palace, resounded in schools and in hundreds of thousands of bourgeois parlors. Like no other musical phenomenon it could cross national, social and economic boundaries, bringing together poor students with the daughters of the bourgeoisie, crowned heads with penniless virtuosi, and the nineteenth century often regarded it with extreme suspicion for that very reason. Four-hand piano playing was often understood as a socially acceptable way of flirting, a flurry of hands that made touching, often of men and women, not just acceptable but necessary. But it also became something far more serious than that, a central institution of the home, mediating between inside and outside, family and society, labor and leisure, nature and nurture. And writers, composers, musicians, philosophers, journalists, pamphleteers and painters took note: in the art, literature and philosophy of the age, four-hand playing emerged as a common motif, something that allowed them to interrogate the very nature of the self, the family, the community and the state. In the four hands rushing up and down the same keyboard the nineteenth century espied, or thought espy, an astonishing array of things. Four-Handed Monsters tells the story of that practice, but also the story of the astonishing array of things the nineteenth century read into it.

The Polyphony of Life (Hardcover): Andreas Pangritz The Polyphony of Life (Hardcover)
Andreas Pangritz; Edited by John W. De Gruchy, John Morris
R794 R687 Discovery Miles 6 870 Save R107 (13%) Ships in 18 - 22 working days
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