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Books > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
Popular music and masculinity have rarely been examined through the
lens of research into monstrosity. The discourses associated with
rock and pop, however, actually include more ‘monsters’ than
might at first be imagined. Attention to such individuals and
cultures can say things about the operation of genre and gender,
myth and meaning. Indeed, monstrosity has recently become a growing
focus of cultural theory. This is in part because monsters raise
shared concerns about transgression, subjectivity, agency, and
community. Attention to monstrosity evokes both the spectre of
projection (which invokes familial trauma and psychoanalysis) and
shared anxieties (that in turn reflect ideologies and beliefs). By
pursuing a series of insightful case studies, Scary Monsters
considers different aspects of the connection between music, gender
and monstrosity. Its argument is that attention to monstrosity
provides a unique perspective on the study of masculinity in
popular music culture.
This was the first attempt at a full length biography of Bach and a
critical apreciation of his work as composer and performer.
Translated by Walter Emery in 1941-1942 with introductory notes and
two appendices, but not published in his lifetime. Walter Emery,
musicologist, specialised in the works J.S. Bach.
The future of music archiving and search engines lies in deep
learning and big data. Music information retrieval algorithms
automatically analyze musical features like timbre, melody, rhythm
or musical form, and artificial intelligence then sorts and relates
these features. At the first International Symposium on
Computational Ethnomusicological Archiving held on November 9 to
11, 2017 at the Institute of Systematic Musicology in Hamburg,
Germany, a new Computational Phonogram Archiving standard was
discussed as an interdisciplinary approach. Ethnomusicologists,
music and computer scientists, systematic musicologists as well as
music archivists, composers and musicians presented tools, methods
and platforms and shared fieldwork and archiving experiences in the
fields of musical acoustics, informatics, music theory as well as
on music storage, reproduction and metadata. The Computational
Phonogram Archiving standard is also in high demand in the music
market as a search engine for music consumers. This book offers a
comprehensive overview of the field written by leading researchers
around the globe.
Burney is recognised as the great musical writer of his day. This
is a facsimile reprint of the first edition in 1771.
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.
Exposing the depth of two major artists' philosophies, creative
visions, stylistic tendencies, and contributions to their craft,
this unprecedented comparative analysis synthesizes biographical
material, critical interpretation, and selected exemplars of the
writers' work. Smith reinterprets their work in a new and
fascinating light, presenting Dylan as a songwriter of enigmatic
wordplay and Springsteen as the melodramatic narrator of a specific
community's life struggles.
Both songwriters have had unique responses to the celebrity
singer/songwriter tradition begun by Woody Guthrie. Smith reveals
the power of authorship and the creative drive necessary to
negotiate an artistic vision through the complicated mechanisms of
the world of commercial art. Both have discovered their own means
of traveling this difficult terrain, and Smith probes their lives
and work to reveal the myriad ways in which two distinct, equally
significant artists have learned from and contributed to an ongoing
and important American musical tradition.
When did Russia become "modern?" Historians of Russia - including
even many Russian historians - have long tried to identify Russia's
"modern" moment. While most scholars have looked to economic or
ideological transitions, noted historian and critic Paul du Quenoy
approaches the problem through culture, and specifically the
performing arts, as told through the prism of one of its leading
nineteenth-century practitioners, the composer and critic Alexander
Serov. Born in 1820, Serov grew to adulthood under the reign of
Tsar Nicholas I (1825-1855). Long disparaged as a dark and
reactionary period of Russia's past, it instead offered many
educational, cultural, and professional opportunities that
conventional histories have failed to appreciate. Educated in law
and tutored in music, Serov rose to become Russia's first
significant music critic and a noted composer whose three operas
won him fame and gestured toward the creation of a national style.
Although his renown was fleeting after his untimely death in 1871,
his life and observations provide a vital eyewitness account to a
Russia poised to embrace a fresh and fully modern identity. In a
new and revised edition prepared to mark the 150th anniversary of
Serov's death, du Quenoy's pastiche of Russian life offers one of
the best approaches to Russia's imperial past and its legacies
today.
In this first monograph on E. T. A. Hoffmann and opera, Francien
Markx examines Hoffmann's writings on opera and the challenges they
pose to established narratives of aesthetic autonomy, the search
for a national opera, and Hoffmann's biography. Markx discusses
Hoffmann's lifelong fascination with opera against the backdrop of
eighteenth-century theater reform, the creation of national
identity, contemporary performance practices and musical and
aesthetic discourses as voiced by C. M. von Weber, A. W. Schlegel,
Heine, and Wagner, among others. The book reconsiders the
traditional view that German opera followed a deterministic
trajectory toward Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk and reveals a
cosmopolitan spirit in Hoffmann's operatic vision, most notably
exemplified by his controversial advocacy for Spontini in Berlin.
Honoring God and the City is a documentary history of musical activities at Venetian lay confraternities from their origins in the thirteenth century to their suppression in the early nineteenth, demonstrating the vital role they played in the cultural life of Venice.
Minas Gerais is a state in southeastern Brazil deeply connected to
the nation's slave past and home to many traditions related to the
African diaspora. Addressing a wide range of traditions helping to
define the region, ethnomusicologist Jonathon Grasse examines the
complexity of Minas Gerais by exploring the intersections of its
history, music, and culture. Instruments, genres, social functions,
and historical accounts are woven together to form a tapestry
revealing a cultural territory's development. The deep pool of
Brazilian scholarship referenced in the book, with original
translations by the author, cites over two hundred
Portuguese-language publications focusing on Minas Gerais. This
research was augmented by fieldwork, observations, and interviews
completed over a twenty-five-year period and includes original
photographs, many taken by the author. Hearing Brazil: Music and
Histories in Minas Gerais surveys the colonial past, the vast
hinterland countryside, and the modern, twenty-first-century state
capital of Belo Horizonte, the metropolitan region of which is
today home to over six million. Diverse legacies are examined,
including an Afro-Brazilian heritage, eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century liturgical music of the region's "Minas
Baroque," the instrument known as the viola, a musical profile of
Belo Horizonte, and a study of the regionalist themes developed by
the popular music collective the Clube da Esquina (Corner Club) led
by Milton Nascimento with roots in the 1960s. Hearing Brazil
champions the notion that Brazil's unique role in the world is
further illustrated by regionalist studies presenting details of
musical culture.
CLASSICAL COOKS: A GASTROHISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC by Ira Braus The
expression, "Classical music is an acquired taste" takes on new
meaning in Ira Braus's Classical Cooks: A Gastrohistory of Western
Music. Unlike most classical music guides, Classical Cooks links
music and food synaesthetically. Synaesthesia means experiencing
one sense modality by stimulating another, such as "hearing"
colors. Music and food, as my book shows, are close enough
aesthetically, so that we can enjoy them synaesthetically. The book
correlates the respective musical and culinary talents of composers
living between 1350 and 2000; it also suggests ways for listeners
to distinguish composers' styles by way of gastro-musical
association. Classical Cooks complements a recent line of books
dealing with food and culture, e.g., The Toulouse Lautrec Cookbook,
Keats's Porridge, and Jazz Cooks. To be sure, American orchestras,
like the Boston Symphony and New York Philharmonic, have published
recipes contributed by their players. But no substantial anthology
of composer recipes has thus far appeared. Classical Cooks has
Three Courses, plus Dessert. Course 1, "Why Musicians Love to Talk
Shop in the Kitchen," matches food categories with musical ones.
Take fat. Musicians associate fat with lush, full-bodied
orchestration as we hear in, say, Hollywood scores of the 1950s.
These composers learned their craft from lipid composers like
Puccini and Debussy. Puccini's "fat," mellifluous as it is, may be
compared to olive oil - clear, fruity, digestible, while Debussy's
is voluptuous, like butter - filmy, artery-clogging, and
delectable. Course 2, "A Gastrohistory of Music in Documents"
offers accounts of composers as gastro-nomes. Beethoven's culinary
disasters are juxtaposed with Rossini's haute cuisine, so haute in
fact, that one of his recipes ("Tournedos Rossini") appears in
Larousse Gastronomique. One also reads stories of Liszt's
food-fights with his pupils and of his chiding the American
pianist, Amy Fay, for "making an omelette" when playing
wrist-bending passages in his piano music. Course 3, "You Eat What
you Compose, or, Will the Real Mozart Please Stand Up?" addresses
riddles of music history: how knowledge of Mozart's favorite foods
-- liver dumplings and sauerkraut -- might revise his popular image
as a composer of "sweet" music, e.g. Eine kleine Nachtmusik; how a
gastronomic kinship between J.S. Bach and Brahms -- their love of
herring -- might reflect their dense musical expression, as well as
Brahms's composing minuets and sarabandes during the mid-1800s; and
how knowing Ravel's preference for "hot" food helps us to
distinguish the sound of his music from the more understated style
of Debussy. Dessert comprises "The Well-Tempered Cuisinier:
Twenty-four Pastries and Foods from the Classical Cooks." Readers
will find here a combination of recipes and menus suitable for
diverse musical occasions (concert receptions, composer birthdays,
opera caf entres).
Sebastien Erard's (1752-1831) inventions have had an enormous
impact on instruments and musical life and are still at the
foundation of piano building today. Drawing on an unusually rich
set of archives from both the Erard firm and the Erard family,
author Robert Adelson shows how the Erard piano played an important
and often leading role in the history of the instrument, beginning
in the late eighteenth century and continuing into the final
decades of the nineteenth. The Erards were the first piano builders
in France to prioritise the more sonorous grand piano, sending
gifts of their new model to both Haydn and Beethoven. Erard's
famous double-escapement action, which improved the instrument's
response while at the same time producing a more powerful tone,
revolutionised both piano construction and repertoire. Thanks to
these inventions, the Erard firm developed close relationships with
the greatest pianist composers of the nineteenth century, including
Hummel, Liszt, Moscheles and Mendelssohn. The book also presents
new evidence concerning Pierre Erard's homosexuality, which helps
us to understand his reluctance to found a family to carry on the
Erard tradition, a reluctance that would spell the end of the
golden era of the firm and lead to its eventual demise. The book
closes with the story of Pierre's widow Camille, who directed the
firm from 1855 until 1889. Her influential position in the
male-dominated world of instrument building was unique for a woman
of her time.
This is the largest life-and-works of Musorgsky ever to have appeared outside Russia. Musorgsky created stunning masterpieces in such creations as his opera Boris Godunov and piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition - yet his life was tragic. It is this pathetic tale, interlaced with critical discussion of music, that is this book's concern.
An accessible exploration of an important and understudied music theory topic, Swain's book examines the dimensional technique of analyzing harmonic rhythm. Simply defined, harmonic rhythm is the relationship between changes in harmony and perceived changes in rhythm. This phenomenon plays a large role in shaping the texture and style of much of Western music, from Renaissance polyphonic pieces to the works of Debussy. In Harmonic Rhythm, Joseph Swain revists this neglected theoretical concept, providing a clear and thorough explanation of how harmonic theory works. Using a small core of repeated musical examples, Swain explores the theory's crucial components including functional and non functional harmonies, harmonic tension and harmonic speed. In addition, swain outlines a method for "dimensional analysis" of musical works; taking both ryhthm and harmony into account, he shows readers how to achieve a more thorough understanding of and appreciation for the texture of music.
What is experimental music today? This book offers an up to date
survey of this field for anyone with an interest, from seasoned
practitioners to curious readers. This book takes the stance that
experimental music is not a limited historical event, but is a
proliferation of approaches to sound that reveals much about
present-day experience. An experimental work is not identifiable by
its sound alone, but by the nature of the questions it poses and
its openness to the sounding event. Experimentation is a way of
working. It pushes past that which is known to discover what lies
beyond it, finding new knowledge, forms, and relationships, or
accepting a state of uncertainty. For each of these composers and
sound artists, craft is developed and transformed in response to
the questions they bring to their work. Scientific, perceptual, or
social phenomena become catalysts in the operation of the work.
These practices are not presented according to a chronology, a set
of techniques, or social groupings. Instead, they are organized
according to the content areas that are their subjects, including
resonance, harmony, objects, shapes, perception, language,
interaction, sites, and histories. Musical materials may be
subject, among other treatments, to systemization, observation,
examination, magnification, fragmentation, translation, or
destabilization. These restless and exploratory modes of engagement
have continued to develop over recent decades, expanding the scope
of both musical practice and listening.
This in-depth musicological and critical study examines how
Bernard Herrmann's score for Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" plays a
crucial role in the articulation and development of the filM's
narrative and how it affects readings of the film. Herrmann's
collaboration with Hitchcock spanned eleven years and nine films,
and Herrmann's film score for "Vertigo" is widely regarded as being
one of his finest. Cooper considers the development of Herrmann's
career up to 1958, providing a detailed discussion of his musical
style. The explicit information about the structure of Herrmann's
music is based on a study of Herrmann's autograph score.
Cooper examines not only the context of the filM's production,
but also its reception and critical readings of the film. In
addition, this study explores how the effects track co-operates
with Herrmann's non-diegetic and diegetic score and concludes with
a detailed musicological study. The author advances a new theory,
in his discussion of signification, about the establishment of
meaning in film music through association with images on the
screen. This sophisticated musicological approach will appeal to
film music and film communication scholars.
Perone considers all aspects of musical form and its analysis
with the broadest possible historical and stylistic palette in this
comprehensive bibliography. The form and analysis treatises
chapters include publication, original language, English
translation, reprint, and bibliographic information for book-length
works (including master's theses and doctoral dissertations) that
deal with questions of musical form and musical analysis in a
significant way. A number of treatises that were substantially
revised at some point are included in both forms. More than 2,000
entries are included in this major contribution to the study of the
form and analysis of music.
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