The elements of music, musical values, the relationship of music to the other ancient arts--all of these subjects are explored as Polin discusses the musical heritage of the ancient Near East.

In this book, perspectives in psychology, aesthetics, history and philosophy are drawn upon to survey the value given to sad music by human societies throughout history and today. Why do we love listening to music that makes us cry? This mystery has puzzled philosophers for centuries and tends to defy traditional models of emotions. Sandra Garrido presents empirical research that illuminates the psychological and contextual variables that influence our experience of sad music, its impact on our mood and mental health, and its usefulness in coping with heartbreak and grief. By means of real-life examples, this book uses applied music psychology to demonstrate the implications of recent research for the use of music in health-care and for wellbeing in everyday life.

With its 1.5 million words Blur is the biggest electronic corpus of nonstandard English. The present study describes the stages in the design, the compilation, and the editing of Blur and attempts to gauge its linguistic profit. This is done both from a theoretical perspective - blues poetry vs. natural speech, representativeness, validity - and from an analytical perspective in particular qualitative, quantitative, and comparative analyses of morphological, morphosyntactic, and syntactic features. The findings indicate that Blur provides an outstandingly rich and reliable documentation of the vernaculars spoken by African Americans between the Civil War and World War II. The more than 1,000 illustrative examples presented throughout this study attest to the correctness of this statement.

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has held musical audiences captive for close to two centuries. Few other musical works hold such a prominent place in the collective imagination; each generation rediscovers the work for itself and makes it its own. Honing in on the significance of the symphony in contemporary culture, this book establishes a dialog between Beethoven's world and ours, marked by the earthshattering events of 1789 and of 1989. In particular, this book outlines what is special about the Ninth in millennial culture. In the present day, music is encoded not only as score but also as digital technology. We encounter Beethoven 9 flashmobs, digitally reconstructed concert halls, globally synchonized performances, and other time-bending procedures. The digital artwork 9 Beet Stretch even presents the Ninth at glacial speed over twenty-four hours, challenges our understanding of the symphony, and encourages us to confront the temporal dimension of Beethoven's music. In the digital age, the Ninth emerges as a musical work that is recomposed and reshaped-and that is robust enough to live up to such treatment-continually adapting to a changing world with changing media.

Now you can have over 100 of the most useful chords right at your fingertips. This chart gives you all the basic chords in every key. Each chord is shown in standard music notation and as an easy-to-read piano keyboard diagram. Fingerings are given for each chord. Also included is a clear description of inverting chords.

Winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Winner of the American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation Winner of the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award Winner of the MAAH Stone Book Award A Pitchfork Best Music Book of the Year A Rolling Stone Best Music Book of the Year A Boston Globe Summer Read "Brooks traces all kinds of lines...inviting voices to talk to one another, seeing what different perspectives can offer, opening up new ways of looking and listening." -New York Times "A wide-ranging study of Black female artists, from elders like Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters to Beyonce and Janelle Monae...Connecting the sonic worlds of Black female mythmakers and truth-tellers." -Rolling Stone "A gloriously polyphonic book." -Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland How is it possible that iconic artists like Aretha Franklin and Beyonce can be both at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry? Daphne Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to bring to life the critics, collectors, and listeners who have shaped our perceptions of Black women both on stage and in the recording studio. Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective, informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women artists. We discover Zora Neale Hurston as a sound archivist and performer, Lorraine Hansberry as a queer feminist critic of modern culture, and Pauline Hopkins as America's first Black female cultural commentator. Brooks tackles the complicated racial politics of blues music recording, song collecting, and rock and roll criticism in this long overdue celebration of Black women musicians as radical intellectuals.

Contributions by Alberto Brodesco, James Cody, Andrea Cossu, Anne Margaret Daniel, Jesper Doolard, Nina Goss, Jonathan Hodgers, Jamie Lorentzen, Fahri OE z, Nick Smart, and Thad Williamson Bob Dylan is many things to many people. Folk prodigy. Rock poet. Quiet gentleman. Dionysian impresario. Cotton Mather. Stage hog. Each of these Dylan creations comes with its own accessories, including a costume, a hairstyle, a voice, a lyrical register, a metaphysics, an audience, and a library of commentary. Each Bob Dylan joins a collective cast that has made up his persona for over fifty years. No version of Dylan turns out uncomplicated, but the postmillennial manifestation seems peculiarly contrary-a tireless and enterprising antiquarian; a creator of singular texts and sounds through promiscuous poaching; an artist of innovation and uncanny renewal. This is a Dylan of persistent surrender from and engagement with a world he perceives as broken and enduring, addressing us from a past that is lost and yet forever present. Tearing the World Apart participates in the creation of the postmillennial Bob Dylan by exploring three central records of the twenty-first century-"Love and Theft" (2001), Modern Times (2006), and Tempest (2012)-along with the 2003 film Masked and Anonymous, which Dylan helped write and in which he appears as an actor and musical performer. The collection of essays does justice to this difficult Bob Dylan by examining his method and effects through a disparate set of viewpoints. Readers will find a variety of critical contexts and cultural perspectives as well as a range of experiences as members of Dylan's audience. The essays in Tearing the World Apart illuminate, as a prism might, its intransigent subject from enticing and intersecting angles.

Sound coming from outside the field of vision, from somewhere beyond, holds a privileged place in the Western imagination. When separated from their source, sounds seem to manifest transcendent realms, divine powers, or supernatural forces. According to legend, the philosopher Pythagoras lectured to his disciples from behind a veil, and two thousand years later, in the age of absolute music, listeners were similarly fascinated with disembodied sounds, employing various techniques to isolate sounds from their sources. With recording and radio came spatial and temporal separation of sounds from sources, and new ways of composing music.
Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice explores the phenomenon of acousmatic sound. An unusual and neglected word, "acousmatic" was first introduced into modern parlance in the mid-1960s by avant garde composer of musique concrete Pierre Schaeffer to describe the experience of hearing a sound without seeing its cause. Working through, and often against, Schaeffer's ideas, Brian Kane presents a powerful argument for the central yet overlooked role of acousmatic sound in music aesthetics, sound studies, literature, philosophy and the history of the senses. Kane investigates acousmatic sound from a number of methodological perspectives -- historical, cultural, philosophical and musical -- and provides a framework that makes sense of the many surprising and paradoxical ways that unseen sound has been understood. Finely detailed and thoroughly researched, Sound Unseenpursues unseen sounds through a stunning array of cases -- from Bayreuth to Kafka's "Burrow," Apollinaire to %Zi%zek, music and metaphysics to architecture and automata, and from Pythagoras to the present-to offer the definitive account of acousmatic sound in theory and practice.
The first major study in English of Pierre Schaeffer's theory of "acousmatics," Sound Unseen is an essential text for scholars of philosophy of music, electronic music, sound studies, and the history of the senses."

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.

The Second Edition of Teaching Music to Students with Special Needs offers updated accounts of music educators' experiences, featured as vignettes throughout the book. An accompanying Practical Resource includes lesson plans, worksheets, and games for classroom use. As a practical guide and reference manual, Teaching Music to Students with Special Needs, Second Edition addresses special needs in the broadest possible sense to equip teachers with proven, research-based curricular strategies that are grounded in both best practice and current special education law. Chapters address the full range of topics and issues music educators face, including parental involvement, student anxiety, field trips and performances, and assessment strategies. The book concludes with an updated list of resources, building upon the First Edition's recommendations.

Provides an introduction to the basic elements in harmony and musical structure. Covers the basics of rhythm and tempo, an introduction to pitch, intervals and transposition, articulation, ornaments, and reiterations.

The Tempered scale proposed in 1482 as a practical solution to discords was only introduced and applied 240 years later by J. S. Bach. Since then, this scale has ruled the tone frequencies in all variety of chords. Due to its simple conception, small imperfections in harmony are unavoidable. Now a new musical scale is proposed, and this book details the new concepts and features and their application in the manufacture of musical instruments, to introduce the new sounds in harmony to the world market. The Natural Set of forty-seven elements was the beginning of the research. The M comma, the smallest consonance that can be distinguished by the ear, together with J and U, allowed the attainment of the Natural Progression of Musical Cells, while its 624 elements led to the discovery of K and P semitone factors to establish the Piagui octave. The proper sequence of eight K and four P replace the twelve T factors of the Tempered intonation. The origins of K and P are the ten tone frequencies found in the Pythagoras and Aristoxenus heptatonic scales. Piagui and Tempered chord wave peaks of basic twenty-four triads are drawn by computer to demonstrate the true concords and discords respectively.

With The Archive of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin. Catalogue a complete catalogue of the music archive of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin is now available for the first time since the archive, which disappeared during World War II, was rediscovered in 1999. (The whole work is complete in English and German). Since 2001 the more than 260,000 pages of music manuscripts, copies and first prints (from 17th to early 19th cent.) were revised by two musicologists which compiled an index of shelf marks and an index of composers. Thus detailed searches in the holdings of the archive (which were filmed since 2002 in severeal parts on microfiche at K. G. Saur) are possible for the first time. The Catalogue lists 9,735 works of 1.008 different composers. It provides also a concordance signature - microfiche and therefore serves as a cumulated guide to the microfiche editions, all the more the registers have been revised and improved. The unique collection is introduced by a number of articles by the following musicologists: Axel Fischer (Archive of the Sing-Akademie, Berlin), Christoph Henzel (Hochschule fur Musik, Wurzburg), Klaus Hortschansky (University of Munster), Matthias Kornemann (Archive of the Sing-Akademie, Berlin), Ulrich Leisinger (Mozarteum, Salzburg), Mary Oleskiewicz (University of Massachusetts Boston), Ralph-J. Reipsch (Zentrum fur Telemann-Pflege und -Forschung, Magdeburg), Tobias Schwinger (Berlin).

This edited book covers many topics in musicological literature, gathering various approaches to music studies that encapsulate the vivid relation music has to society. It focusses on repertoires and geographical areas that have not previously been well frequented in musicology. As readers will see, music has many roles to play in society. Music can be a generator of social phenomena, or a result of them; it can enhance or activate social actions, or simply co-habit with them. Above all, music has a stable position within society, in that it actively participates in it. Music can either describe or prescribe social aspects; musicians may have a certain position/role in society (e.g., the "popstar" as fashion leader, spokesman for political issues, etc.). Depending on the type of society, music may have a certain "meaning" or "function" (music does not mean the same thing everywhere in the world). Lastly, music can define a society, and it is not uncommon for it to best define a particular historical moment. Case-studies in this work provide visibility for musical cultures that are rarely exposed in the dominant musicological discourse. Several contributions combine musicological analysis with "insider-musician" points of view. Some essays in the collection address the cultural clash between certain types of music/musicians and the respective institutional counterparts, while certain contributing authors draw on experimental research findings. Throughout this book we see how musics are socially significant, and - at the same time - that societies are musically significant too. Thus the book will appeal to musicologists, cultural scholars and semioticians, amongst others.

The guitarist and composer Pat Metheny ranks among the most popular and innovative jazz musicians of all time. In Pat Metheny: The ECM Years, 1975-1984, Mervyn Cooke offers the first in-depth account of Metheny's early creative period, during which he recorded eleven stunningly varied albums for the pioneering European record label ECM (Edition of Contemporary Music). This impressive body of recordings encompasses both straight-ahead jazz playing with virtuosic small ensembles and the increasingly complex textures and structures of the Pat Metheny Group, a hugely successful band also notable for its creative exploration of advanced music technologies which were state-of-the-art at the time. Metheny's music in all its shapes and forms broke major new ground in its refusal to subscribe to either of the stylistic poles of bebop and jazz-rock fusion which prevailed in the late 1970s. Through a series of detailed analyses based on a substantial body of new transcriptions from the recordings, this study reveals the close interrelationship of improvisation and pre-composition which lies at the very heart of the music. Furthermore, these analyses vividly demonstrate how Metheny's music is often conditioned by a strongly linear narrative model: both its story-telling characteristics and atmospheric suggestiveness have sometimes been compared to those of film music, a genre in which the guitarist also became active during this early period. The melodic memorability for which Metheny's compositions and improvisations have long been world-renowned is shown to be just one important element in an unusually rich and flexible musical language that embraces influences as diverse as bebop, free jazz, rock, pop, country & western, Brazilian music, classical music, minimalism, and the avant-garde. These elements are melded into a uniquely distinctive soundworld which, above all, directly reflects Metheny's passionate belief in the need to refashion jazz in ways which can allow it to speak powerfully to each new generation of youthful listeners.

The first book of its kind, Gender & Rock introduces readers to how gender operates in multiple sites within rock culture, including its music, lyrics, imagery, performances, instruments, and business practices. Additionally, it explores how rock culture, despite a history of regressive gender politics, has provided a place for musicians and consumers to experiment with alternate identities and ways of being. Drawing on feminist and queer scholarship in popular music studies, musicology, cultural studies, sociology, performance studies, literary analysis, and media studies, Gender & Rock provides readers with a survey of the topics, theories, and methods necessary for understanding and conducting analyses of gender in rock culture. Via an intersectional approach, the book examines how the gendering of particular roles, practices, technologies, and institutions within rock culture is related to discourses of race, sexuality, age, and class.

Noise is so often a 'stench in the ear' - an unpleasant disturbance or an unwelcome distraction. But there is much more to noise than what greets the ear as unwanted sound. Beyond Unwanted Sound is about noise and how we talk about it. Weaving together affect theory with cybernetics, media histories, acoustic ecology, geo-politics, sonic art practices and a range of noises, Marie Thompson critiques both the conservative politics of silence and transgressive poetics of noise music, each of which position noise as a negative phenomenon. Beyond Unwanted Sound instead aims to account for a broader spectrum of noise, ranging from the exceptional to the banal; the overwhelming to the inaudible; and the destructive to the generative. What connects these various and variable manifestations of noise is not negativity but affectivity. Building on the Spinozist assertion that to exist is to be affected, Beyond Unwanted Sound asserts that to exist is to be affected by noise.

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.