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Books > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
Combining approaches from reception studies and historical
musicology, this book demonstrates how the representation of music
at exhibitions drew the press and public into debates about music's
role in society. International exhibitions were among the most
significant cultural phenomena of the late nineteenth century.
These vast events aimed to illustrate, through displays of physical
objects, the full spectrum of the world's achievements, from
industry and manufacturing, to art and design. But exhibitions were
not just visual spaces. Music was ever present, as a fundamental
part of these events' sonic landscape, and integral to the visitor
experience. This book explores music at international exhibitions
held in Australia, India, and the United Kingdom during the 1880s.
At these exhibitions, music was codified, ordered, and all-round
'exhibited' in manifold ways. Displays of physical instruments from
the past and present were accompanied by performances intended to
educate or to entertain, while music was heard at exhibitors'
stands, in concert halls, and in the pleasure gardens that
surrounded the exhibition buildings. Music was depicted as a symbol
of human artistic achievement, or employed for commercial ends. At
times it was presented in nationalist terms, at others as a marker
of universalism. This book argues, by interrogating the multiple
ways that music was used, experienced, and represented, that
exhibitions can demonstrate in microcosm many of the broader
musical traditions, purposes, arguments, and anxieties of the day.
Its nine chapters focus on sociocultural themes, covering issues of
race, class, public education, economics, and entertainment in the
context of music, tracing these through the networks of
communication that existed within the British Empire at the time.
Examining, for the first time, the compositions of Johann Joseph
Fux in relation to his contemporaries Bach and Handel, The Musical
Discourse of Servitude presents a new theory of the late baroque
musical imagination. Author Harry White contrasts musical
"servility" and "freedom" in his analysis, with Fux tied to the
prevailing servitude of the day's musical imagination, particularly
the hegemonic flowering of North Italian partimento method across
Europe. In contrast, both Bach and Handel represented an autonomy
of musical discourse, with Bach exhausting generic models in the
mass and Handel inventing a new genre in the oratorio. A potent
critique of Lydia Goehr's seminal The Imaginary Museum of Musical
Works, The Musical Discourse of Servitude draws on Goehr's
formulation of the "work-concept" as an imaginary construct which,
according to Goehr, is an invention of nineteenth-century reception
history. White locates this concept as a defining agent of automony
in Bach's late works, and contextualized the "work-concept" itself
by exploring rival concepts of political, religious, and musical
authority which define the European musical imagination in the
first half of the eighteenth century. A major revisionist statement
about the musical imagination in Western art music, The Musical
Discourse of Servitude will be of interest to scholars of the
Baroque, particularly of Bach and Handel.
A pathbreaking study of the Parisian press's attempts to claim
Richard Wagner's place in French history and imagination during the
unstable and conflict-ridden years of the Third Reich. Richard
Wagner was a polarizing figure in France from the time that he
first entered French musical life in the mid nineteenth century.
Critics employed him to symbolize everything from democratic
revolution to authoritarian antisemitism. During periods of
Franco-German conflict, such as the Franco-Prussian War and World
War I, Wagner was associated in France with German nationalism and
chauvinism. This association has led to the assumption that, with
the advent of the Third Reich, the French once again rejected
Wagner. Drawing on hundreds of press sources and employing close
readings, this book seeks to explain a paradox: as the German
threat grew more tangible from 1933, the Parisian press insisted on
seeing in Wagner a universality that transcended his Germanness.
Repudiating the notion that Wagner stood for Germany, French
critics attempted to reclaim his role in their own national history
and imagination. Claiming Wagner for France: Music and Politics in
the Parisian Press, 1933-1944 reveals how the concept of a
universal Wagner, which was used to challenge the Nazis in the
1930s, was gradually transformed into the infamous collaborationist
rhetoric promoted by the Vichy government and exploited by the
Nazis between 1940 and 1944. Rachel Orzech's study offers a close
examination of Wagner's place in France's cultural landscape at
this time, contributing to our understanding of how the French
grappled with one of the most challenging periods in their history.
Vision dominates philosophical thinking about perception, and
theorizing about experience in cognitive science has traditionally
focused on a visual model. In a radical departure from established
practice, Casey O'Callaghan provides a systematic treatment of
sound and sound experience, and shows how thinking about audition
and appreciating the relationships between multiple sense
modalities can enrich our understanding of perception and the
mind.
Sounds proposes a novel theory of sounds and auditory perception.
Against the widely accepted philosophical view that sounds are
among the secondary or sensible qualities, O'Callaghan argues that,
on any perceptually plausible account, sounds are events. But this
does not imply that sounds are waves that propagate through a
medium, such as air or water. Rather, sounds are events that take
place in one's environment at or near the objects and happenings
that bring them about. This account captures the way in which
sounds essentially are creatures of time, and situates sounds in a
world populated by items and events that have significance for us.
Sounds are not ethereal, mysterious entities.
O'Callaghan's account of sounds and their perception discloses far
greater variety among the kinds of things we perceive than
traditional views acknowledge. But more importantly, investigating
sounds and audition demonstrates that considering other sense
modalities teaches what we could not otherwise learn from thinking
exclusively about the visual. Sounds articulates a powerful account
of echoes, reverberation, Doppler effects, and perceptual
constancies that surpasses the explanatory richness of alternative
theories, and also reveals a number ofsurprising cross-modal
perceptual illusions. O'Callaghan argues that such illusions
demonstrate that the perceptual modalities cannot be completely
understood in isolation, and that the visuocentric model for
theorizing about perception --according to which perceptual
modalities are discrete modes of experience and autonomous domains
of philosophical and scientific inquiry--ought to be abandoned.
For more than 150 years, individuals have traveled the countryside
with pen, paper, tape recorders, and even video cameras to document
versions of songs, music, and stories shared by communities. As
technologies and methodologies have advanced, the task of gathering
music has been taken up by a much broader group than scholars. The
resulting collections created by these various people can be
impacted by the individual collectors' political and social
concerns, cultural inclinations, and even simple happenstance,
demonstrating a crucial yet underexplored relationship between the
music and those preserving it.Collecting Music in the Aran Islands,
a critical historiographical study of the practice of documenting
traditional music, is the first to focus on the archipelago off the
west coast of Ireland. Deirdre NI Chonghaile argues for a
culturally equitable framework that considers negotiation,
collaboration, canonization, and marginalization to fully
understand the immensely important process of musical curation. In
presenting four substantial, historically valuable collections from
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she illustrates how
understanding the motivations and training (or lack thereof) of
individual music collectors significantly informs how we should
approach their work and contextualize their place in the folk music
canon.
The Critical Nexus confronts an important and vexing enigma of
early writings on music: why chant, which was understood to be
divinely inspired, needed to be altered in order to work within the
then-operative modal system. To unravel this mystery, Charles
Atkinson creates a broad framework that moves from Greek harmonic
theory to the various stages in the transmission of Roman chant,
citing numerous music treatises from the sixth to the twelfth
century. Out of this examination emerges the central point behind
the problem: the tone-system advocated by writers coming from the
Greek harmonic tradition was not suited to the notation of chant
and that this basic incompatibility led to the creation of new
theoretical constructs. By tracing the path of subsequent
adaptation at the nexus of tone-system, mode, and notation,
Atkinson promises new and far-reaching insights into what mode
meant to the medieval musician and how the system responded to its
inherent limitations.
Through a detailed examination of the major musical treatises from
the sixth through the twelfth centuries, this text establishes a
central dichotomy between classical harmonic theory and the
practices of the Christian church. Atkinson builds the foundation
for a broad and original reinterpretation of the modal system and
how it relates to melody, grammar, and notation. This book will be
of interest to all musicologists, music theorists working on mode,
early music specialists, chant scholars, and medievalists
interested in music.
Today, country music enjoys a national fan base that transcends
both economic and social boundaries. Sixty years ago, however, it
was primarily the music of rural, working-class whites living in
the South and was perceived by many Americans as hillbilly music.
In Smile When You Call Me a Hillbilly, Jeffrey J. Lange examines
the 1940s and early 1950s as the most crucial period in country
music s transformation from a rural, southern folk art form to a
national phenomenon. In his meticulous analysis of changing
performance styles and alterations in the lifestyles of listeners,
Lange illuminates the acculturation of country music and its
audience into the American mainstream. Dividing country music into
six subgenres (progressive country, western swing, postwar
traditional, honky-tonk, country pop, and country blues), Lange
discusses the music s expanding appeal. As he analyzes the
recordings and comments of each of the subgenre s most significant
artists, including Roy Acuff, Bob Wills, Bill Monroe, Hank
Williams, and Red Foley, he traces the many paths the musical form
took on its road to respectability. Lange shows how along the way
the music and its audience became more sophisticated, how the
subgenres blended with one another and with American popular music,
and how Nashville emerged as the country music hub. By 1954, the
transformation from hillbilly music to country music was complete,
precipitated by the modernizing forces of World War II and realized
by the efforts of promoters, producers, and performers.
Challenges the longstanding perception that modernist composers
made art, not money, and that those who made money somehow failed
to make art. Patrons have long appeared as colorful, exceptional
figures in music history, but this book recasts patrons and
patronage as creative forces that shaped the sounds and meanings of
new French music between the world wars. Far from mere sources of
funding, early twentieth-century patrons collaborated closely with
composers, treating commissions for new music as opportunities to
express their own artistry. Patrons developed new pathways to
participate in music-making, going beyond commissions to establish
ballet companies, manage performance venues, and establish state
programs. The impressive variety of patronage activities led to an
explosion of new music as well as new styles and -isms, indelibly
marking the repertoire that this book examines, including a number
of pieces frequently heard in concert halls today. In addition to
offering new perspectives on well-known French repertoire, this
book challenges conceptions of patronage as a bygone phenomenon.
Complementing a dwindling cast of aristocratic patrons were new
ranks of music publishers, impresarios, state bureaucrats, opera
directors, and others capitalizing on their savings, social
connections, and artistic vision to bring new music into the world.
In chapters on French discourse around patronage, aristocratic
commissions, the stimulus provided by the interwar dance craze,
music publishing, the Paris Opera, state intervention in French
musical life, and transatlantic musical exchanges, the book blends
cultural history with primary source study and music analysis. It
not only improves our understanding of French musical life and
culture during the early twentieth century but also supplies us
with essential insights into the ways modern music emerged at the
intersection of music composition, aesthetic and national politics,
and the creative labor of patrons.
This best-selling text gives music majors and minors a solid
foundation in the theory of music. It strengthens their musical
intuition, builds technical skills, and helps them gain
interpretive insights. The goal of the text is to instruct readers
on the practical application of knowledge. The analytical
techniques presented are carefully designed to be clear,
uncomplicated, and readily applicable to any repertoire. The
two-volume format ensures exhaustive coverage and maximum support
for students and faculty alike. Volume I serves as a general
introduction to music theory while Volume II offers a survey of the
theoretical underpinnings of musical styles and forms from
Gregorian Chant through the present day. The supplemental
instructor's materials provide clear-cut solutions to assignment
materials. Music in Theory and Practice is a well-rounded textbook
that integrates the various components of musical structure and
makes them accessible to students at the undergraduate level.
Long a taboo subject among critics, rhythm finally takes center
stage in this book's dazzling, wide-ranging examination of diverse
black cultures across the New World. Martin MunroOCOs
groundbreaking work traces the centralOCoand contestedOCorole of
music in shaping identities, politics, social history, and artistic
expression. Starting with enslaved African musicians, Munro takes
us to Haiti, Trinidad, the French Caribbean, and to the civil
rights era in the United States. Along the way, he highlights such
figures as Toussaint Louverture, Jacques Roumain, Jean Price-Mars,
The Mighty Sparrow, Aim(r) C(r)saire, Edouard Glissant, Joseph
Zobel, Daniel Maximin, James Brown, and Amiri Baraka. Bringing to
light new connections among black cultures, Munro shows how rhythm
has been both a persistent marker of race as well as a dynamic
force for change at virtually every major turning point in black
New World hist
Musical Understandings presents an engaging collection of essays on
the philosophy of music, written by Stephen Davies--one of the most
distinguished philosophers in the field. He explores a range of
topics in the philosophy of music, including how music expresses
emotion and what is distinctive to the listener's response to this
expressiveness; the modes of perception and understanding that can
be expected of skilled listeners, performers, analysts, and
composers and the various manners in which these understandings can
be manifest; the manner in which musical works exist and their
relation to their instances or performances; and musical
profundity. As well as reviewing the work of philosophers of music,
a number of the chapters both draw on and critically reflect on
current work by psychologists concerning music. The collection
includes new material, a number of adapted articles which allow for
a more comprehensive, unified treatment of the issues at stake, and
work published in English for the first time.
In The Sound of Nonsense, Richard Elliott highlights the importance
of sound in understanding the 'nonsense' of writers such as Lewis
Carroll, Edward Lear, James Joyce and Mervyn Peake, before
connecting this noisy writing to works which engage more directly
with sound, including sound poetry, experimental music and pop. By
emphasising sonic factors, Elliott makes new and fascinating
connections between a wide range of artistic examples to ultimately
build a case for the importance of sound in creating, maintaining
and disrupting meaning.
In late eighteenth-century Vienna and the surrounding Habsburg
territories, over 50 minor-key symphonies by at least 11 composers
were written. These include some of the best-known works of the
symphonic repertoire, such as Haydn's 'Farewell' Symphony and
Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550. The driving energy,
intense pathos and restlessness of these compositions demand close
attention and participation from the listener, and pose urgent
questions about meaning and interpretation.
In response to these questions, The Viennese Minor-Key Symphony in
the Age of Haydn and Mozart combines historical perspectives with
recent developments in music analysis to shed new light on this
distinctive part of the repertoire. Through an intertextual,
analytical approach, author Matthew Riley treats the minor-key
symphony as a subgenre of several strands, reconstructing the
compositional world it occupied. His work enables signals to be
understood, puts characteristic strategies in clear relief, and
ultimately reveals the significance this music held for both
composers and listeners of the time. Riley gives us a fresh picture
of the familiar masterpieces of Haydn and Mozart, while also
focusing on lesser known composers.
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger
Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain
imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed
pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we
have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting,
preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger
Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and
hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone
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