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Books > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
The Musicality of Narrative Film is the first book to examine in
depth the film/music analogy. Using comparative analysis,
Kulezic-Wilson explores film's musical potential, arguing that
film's musicality can be achieved through various cinematic
devices, with or without music.
Hip-Hop Within and Without the Academy explores why hip-hop has
become such a meaningful musical genre for so many musicians,
artists, and fans around the world. Through multiple interviews
with hip-hop emcees, DJs, and turntablists, the authors explore how
these artists learn and what this music means in their everyday
lives. This research reveals how hip-hop is used by many
marginalized peoples around the world to help express their ideas
and opinions, and even to teach the younger generation about their
culture and tradition. In addition, this book dives into how
hip-hop is currently being studied in higher education and
academia. In the process, the authors reveal the difficulties
inherent in bringing this kind of music into institutional contexts
and acknowledge the conflicts that are present between hip-hop
artists and academics who study the culture. Building on the notion
of bringing hip-hop into educational settings, the book discusses
how hip-hop is currently being used in public school settings, and
how educators can include and embrace hip-hop s educational
potential more fully while maintaining hip-hop s authenticity and
appealing to young people. Ultimately, this book reveals how
hip-hop s universal appeal can be harnessed to help make general
and music education more meaningful for contemporary youth."
Mozart's emergence as a mature artist coincides with the rise to
prominence of the piano, an instrument that came alive under his
fingers and served as medium for many of his finest compositions.
In Mozart's Piano Music, William Kinderman reconsiders common
assumptions about Mozart's life and art while offering
comprehensive and incisive commentary on the solo music and
concertos. After placing Mozart's pianistic legacy in its larger
biographical and cultural context, Kinderman addresses the lively
gestural and structural aspects of Mozart's musical language and
explores the nature of his creative process. Incorporating the most
recent research throughout this encompassing study, Kinderman
expertly surveys each of the major genres of the keyboard music,
including the four-hand and two-piano works. Beyond examining
issues such as Mozart's earliest childhood compositions, his
musical rhetoric and expression, the social context of his Viennese
concertos, and affinities between his piano works and operas,
Kinderman's main emphasis falls on detailed discussion of selected
individual compositions.
Schubert's Workshop offers a fresh study of the composer's
compositional technique and its development, rooted in the author's
experience of realising performing versions of Franz Schubert's
unfinished works. Through close examination of Schubert's use of
technical and structural devices, Brian Newbould demonstrates that
Schubert was much more technically innovative than has been
supposed, and argues that the composer's technical discoveries
constitute a rich legacy of specific influences on later composers.
Providing rich new insights into the creative practice of one of
the major figures of classical music, this two-volume study
reframes our understanding of Schubert as an innovator who
constantly pushed at the frontiers of style and expression.
The newly emerged interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies
offers a sociopolitical analysis of disability, focusing on its
social construction, and shifting attention from biology to
culture. In the past fifteen years, disability-related scholarly
work has been undertaken in a variety of disciplines, and
disability now occupies a central place in cultural analysis, along
with well-established categories like race/ethnicity, gender,
sexuality, and class. The Oxford Handbook of Disability Studies
represents a comprehensive "state of current research" for the
field of Disability Studies and Music. The forty-two chapters in
the book span a wide chronological and geographical range, from the
biblical, the medieval, and the Elizabethan, through the canonical
classics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, up to
modernist styles and contemporary musical theater and popular
genres, with stops along the way in post-Civil War America, Ghana
and the South Pacific, and many other interesting times and places.
Disability is a broad, heterogeneous, and porous identity, and that
diversity is reflected in the variety of bodily conditions under
discussion here, including autism and intellectual disability,
deafness, blindness, and mobility impairment often coupled with
bodily deformity. Cultural Disability Studies has, from its
inception, been oriented toward physical and sensory disabilities,
and has generally been less effective in dealing with cognitive and
intellectual impairments and with the sorts of emotions and
behaviors that in our era are often medicalized as "mental
illness." In that context, it is notable that so many of these
essays are centrally concerned with madness, that broad and
ever-shifting cultural category. There is also in impressive
diversity of subject matter including YouTube videos, Ghanaian
drumming, Cirque du Soleil, piano competitions, castrati, medieval
smoking songs, and popular musicals. Amid this diversity of time,
place, style, medium, and topic, the chapters share two core
commitments. First, they are united in their theoretical and
methodological connection to Disability Studies, especially its
central idea that disability is a social and cultural construction.
Disability both shapes and is shaped by culture, including musical
culture. Second, these essays individually and collectively make
the case that disability is not something at the periphery of
culture and music, but something central to our art and to our
humanity.
This is a facsimile of the first edition, printed for the Author,
in Edinburgh in 1721.
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Funknology
(Hardcover)
Jimi Calhoun
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R840
R729
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Sounding Off brings together a selection of essays on philosophy of
music written by Peter Kivy--the leading expert on the subject. The
essays fall into four groups, corresponding to Kivy's major
interests. Part I contains two essays on the nature of musical
genius. In Part II, three essays take up the subject of
authenticity in performance, and explore what Kivy terms "the
authenticity of interpretation." Part III contains four essays
concerning the much discussed issues of musical representation and
musical meaning. Finally, Part IV consists of three essays on the
"pure musical parameters": these are essays on "music alone" or
"absolute music"--music as the pure, formal structure of
(sometimes) expressive sound. Eight of the eleven essays presented
here are previously unpublished, and the book includes two
appendices which provide Kivy's responses to criticism.
Josephine Lang (1815-80) was one of the most gifted, respected,
prolific, and widely published song composers of the nineteenth
century, yet her life and works have remained virtually unknown.
Now, this carefully researched, compelling, and poignant study
recognizes the composer for her remarkable accomplishments.
Based on years of study of unpublished letters, musical
autographs, reviews, and the autobiographical poetry of Lang's
husband, Reinhold Kostlin, the biographical portions of the book
offer a stunning portrait of the composer as a woman and an artist.
In-depth musical analyses interwoven with the biography will be
illuminating to scholars and to musicians of all skill levels. The
analyses reveal Lang's sensitivity to her chosen poetic texts, as
well as the validity of her claim that her songs were her diary;
the authors demonstrate that many of the songs are directly
connected to the events of Lang's life. The analyses are
illustrated by an abundance of musical examples, including a number
of complete songs. A companion CD, on which the authors have
recorded 30 songs by Lang, complements the text.
This book explains the state of the art in the use of the discrete
Fourier transform (DFT) of musical structures such as rhythms or
scales. In particular the author explains the DFT of pitch-class
distributions, homometry and the phase retrieval problem, nil
Fourier coefficients and tilings, saliency, extrapolation to the
continuous Fourier transform and continuous spaces, and the meaning
of the phases of Fourier coefficients. This is the first textbook
dedicated to this subject, and with supporting examples and
exercises this is suitable for researchers and advanced
undergraduate and graduate students of music, computer science and
engineering. The author has made online supplementary material
available, and the book is also suitable for practitioners who want
to learn about techniques for understanding musical notions and who
want to gain musical insights into mathematical problems.
Traditionally, Wagnerian scholarship has always treated the Ring
and Parsifal as two separate works. The Redeemer Reborn: Parsifal
as the Fifth Opera of Wagner's Ring shows how Parsifal is in fact
actually the fifth opera of the Ring. Schofield explains in detail
how these five musical dramas portray a single, unbroken story
which begins at the start of Das Rheingold when Wotan breaks a
branch from the World Ash-tree and Alberich steals the gold of the
Rhine, thus separating Spear and Grail, and ends with the reunion
of the Spear and Grail in the temple of Monsalvat at the end of
Parsifal. Schofield explains how and why the four main characters
of the Ring are reborn in the opera Parsifal, needing to complete
in Parsifal the spiritual journey begun in the Ring. He also shows
how the redemption that is not attained in the process of the Ring
is finally realized in the events of Parsifal.
U2's significant career far exceeds that of most average successful
rock bands, with a prolific output of thirteen well-received studio
albums and a sometimes relentless touring schedule. The band is
famous for uniquely drawing together music, art, faith, and
activism, all within a lucrative career that has given each of
these elements an unusual degree of social and cultural resonance.
Broad-minded musically and intellectually, U2'soutput is
thematically rich, addressing a slew of topics, from questions of
faith to anxieties about commercialism to outright political
statements. With one of the largest fan bases in the history of
rock music, U2 and their work require contextualization and
exploration. In U2: Rock 'n' Roll to Change the World, Timothy D.
Neufeld takes up this challenge. Neufeld explores U2's move from
the youthful idealism of a band barely able to play instruments
through its many phases of artistic expression and cultural
engagement to its employment of faith and activism as a foundation
for its success. This book outlines how U2 reshaped the very
musical and even political culture that had originally shaped it,
demonstrating through close readings of its musical work the
dynamic interplay of artistic expression and social engagement.
Geistliche Lieder und Psalmen, 1567, was compiled and published by
Johann Leisentrit, a Roman Catholic priest who from 1559 to the
time of his death in 1586, was Dean at the Cathedral of St. Peter's
in Bautzen, a town in southeastern Germany. His hymnbook appeared
in three complete editions (1567, 1573, 1584), and in abridged
editions in 1575, 1576, and 1589. By adapting the vernacular hymn,
a genre created by Protestant reformers, Leisentrit hoped to bring
back to the "true church" (wahrglaubiger Christlicher Kirchen)
those who had defected to Lutheranism. This was a formidable
ambition because his diocese was located adjacent to the
Moravian-Bohemian regions where the Protestant movement was born
and remained vital. Containing approximately 260 texts set to 175
notated melodies, many borrowed from Protestant sources and adapted
to serve Roman Catholic objectives, Leisentrit's book was the
second Catholic hymnbook to be published in the sixteenth century.
It surpassed its Protestant and Catholic precursors in scope and
provided a model for the profusion of hymnbooks of numerous
confessions that appeared in Germany in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries . Wetzel and Heitmeyer present their study in
two parts: The first comprises six contextual chapters that survey
earlier German achievements in hymnody, provide analyses of the
texts and music in Leisentrit's book, and assess his achievement
within the volatile environment of the Counter Reformation. The
second gives the melodies in modern notation along with the first
stanzas of the texts; provides detailed concordances and references
to sources that identify textual and musical provenances; and
concludes with six appendixes to facilitate scholarly
cross-references. Fourteen of the seventy wood engravings from
Leisentrit's book, many of which are visual representations of the
prevailing confessional conflicts, are given in enlarged
reproductions. The authors provide the only comprehensive study in
English of a unique religious figure and his efforts to achieve
confessional reconciliation in the decades following the Council of
Trent. They add to a more accurate interpretation of the
relationship between Lutherans and Catholics in the sixteenth
century and support the hypothesis that some Lutherans remained
more liturgically formal than their Catholic contemporaries.
When many people think of African music, the first ideas that come
to mind are often of rhythm, drums, and dancing. These perceptions
are rooted in emblematic African and African-derived genres such as
West African drumming, funk, salsa, or samba and, more importantly,
essentialized notions about Africa which have been fueled over
centuries of contact between the "West," Africa, and the African
diaspora. These notions, of course, tend to reduce and often
portray Africa and the diaspora as primitive, exotic, and
monolithic. In Africanness in Action, author Juan Diego Diaz
explores this dynamic through the perspectives of Black musicians
in Bahia, Brazil, a site imagined by many as a diasporic epicenter
of African survivals and purity. Black musicians from Bahia, Diaz
argues, assert Afro-Brazilian identities, promote social change,
and critique racial inequality by creatively engaging essentialized
tropes about African music and culture. Instead of reproducing
these notions, musicians demonstrate agency by strategically
emphasizing or downplaying them.
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Lost Nashville
(Paperback)
Elizabeth K Goetsch; Foreword by Betsy Phillips
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R533
R492
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Few Mexican musicians in the twentieth century achieved as much
notoriety or had such an international impact as the popular singer
and songwriter Agustin Lara (1897-1970). Widely known as "el flaco
de oro" ("the Golden Skinny"), this remarkably thin fellow was
prolific across the genres of bolero, ballad, and folk. His most
beloved "Granada," a song so enduring that it has been covered by
the likes of Mario Lanza, Frank Sinatra, and Placido Domingo, is
today a standard in the vocal repertory. However, there exists very
little biographical literature on Lara in English. In AgustinLara:
A Cultural Biography, author Andrew Wood's informed and informative
placement of Lara's work in a broader cultural context presents a
rich and comprehensive reading of the life of this significant
musical figure. Lara's career as a media celebrity as well as
musician provides an excellent window on Mexican society in the
mid-twentieth century and on popular culture in Latin America. Wood
also delves into Lara's music itself, bringing to light how the
composer's work unites a number of important currents in Latin
music of his day, particularly the bolero. With close musicological
focus and in-depth cultural analysis riding alongside the
biographical narrative, Agustin Lara: A Cultural Biography is a
welcome read to aficionados and performers of Latin American
musics, as well as a valuable addition to the study of modern
Mexican music and Latin American popular culture as a whole."
More than thirty years after The Beatles split up, the music of
Lennon, McCartney and Harrison lives on. What exactly were the
magical ingredients of those legendary songs? why are they still so
influential for today's bands? This groundbreaking book sets out to
exlore The Beatles' songwriting techniques in a clear and readable
style. It is aimed not only at musicians but anyone who has ever
enjoyed the work of one of the most productive and successful
songwriting partnerships of the 20th century. Author Dominic Pedler
explains the chord sequences, melodies and harmonies that made up
The Beatles' self penned songs and how they uncannily complemented
the lyrical themes. He also assesses the contributions that rhythm,
form and arrangement made to the Beatles unique sound. Throughout
the book the printed music of the Beatles' songs appears alongside
the text, illustrating the authors explanations. The Songwriting
Secrets of The Beatles is an essential addition to Beatles
literature - a new and perceptive analysis of the music itself
itself as performed by what Paul McCartney still calls 'a really
good, tight little band'.
If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, you'd do
best to hone your chops and avoid cliches (like the one that begins
this sentence) by learning from the prime movers." How to Write
About Music" offers a selection of the best writers on what is
perhaps our most universally beloved art form. Selections from the
critically-acclaimed 33 1/3 series appear alongside new interviews
and insights from authors like Jonathan Lethem, Carl Wilson and Kim
Cooper." How to Write About Music "includes primary sources of
inspiration from a variety of go-to genres such as: the album
review, the personal essay, the blog post and the interview along
with tips, writing prompts, and advice from the writers themselves.
An extensive further reader section accompanies each chapter for a
complete picture of contemporary music writing.Music critics of the
past and the present offer inspiration through their work on
artists like Neutral Milk Hotel, J.Dilla, The Rolling Stones, Joy
Division, Lana Del Rey, Nirvana, Nas, Radiohead and countless
others." How to Write About Music" is an invaluable tool for anyone
who has ever dreamed of getting their music writing published and a
pleasure for anyone who loves to read about music.
Sound is an integral part of contemporary art. Once understood to
be a marginal practice, increasingly we encounter sound in art
exhibitions through an array of sound making works in various art
forms, at times played to very high audio levels. However, works of
art are far from the only thing one might hear: music performances,
floor talks, exhibition openings and the noisy background sounds
that emanate from the gallery cafe fill contemporary exhibition
environments. Far from being hallowed spaces of quiet reflection,
what this means is that galleries have swiftly become very noisy
places. As such, a straightforward consideration of artworks alone
can then no longer account for our experiences of art galleries and
museums. To date there has been minimal scholarship directed
towards the intricacies of our experiences of sound that occur
within the bounds of this purportedly 'visual' art space. Kelly
addresses this gap in knowledge through the examination of
historical and contemporary sound in gallery environments,
broadening our understanding of artists who work with sound, the
institutions that exhibit these works, and the audiences that visit
them. Gallery Sound argues for the importance of all of the sounds
to be heard within the walls of art spaces, and in doing so listens
not only to the deliberate inclusion of sound within the art
gallery in the form of artworks, performances, and music, but also
to its incidental sounds, such as their ambient sounds and the
noise generated by audiences. More than this, however, Gallery
Sound turns its attention to the ways in which the acoustic
characteristics specific to gallery spaces have been mined by
artists for creative outputs, ushering in entirely new art forms.
Breaking new ground in the field of Sound Studies, this book
provides an in-depth study of the culture and physicality of
dancehall reggae music. The reggae sound system has exerted a major
influence on music and popular culture. Every night, on the streets
of inner city Kingston, Jamaica, Dancehall sessions stage a
visceral, immersive and immensely pleasurable experience of sonic
dominance for the participating crowd. "Sonic Bodies" concentrates
on the skilled performance of the crewmembers responsible for this
signature of Jamaican music: the audio engineers designing,
building and fine-tuning the hugely powerful "set" of equipment;
the selectors choosing the music tracks played; and, MCs (DJs) on
the mic hyping up the crowd. Julian Henriques proposes that these
dancehall "vibes" are taken literally as the periodic movement of
vibrations, and offers an analysis of how a sound system operates -
not only at auditory, but also at corporeal and sociocultural
frequencies. "Sonic Bodies" formulates a fascinating auditory
critique of visual dominance and the dualities inherent in ideas of
image, text or discourse. This innovative book questions the
assumptions that reason resides only in the mind, that
communication is an exchange of information and that meaning is
only ever representation.
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