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Books > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
Musical references, allusions to music, and music stage directions abound in Shakespeare, ranging from simple trumpet flourishes to sophisticated, philosophical allegory. Music in Shakespeare: A Dictionary - the first of its kind - identifies all musical terms found in the Shakespeare canon. An A-Z of over 300 entries includes a definition of each musical term in its historical and theoretical context, and explores the extent of Shakespeare's use of musical imagery across the full range of his dramatic and poetic work. Music in Shakespeare: A Dictionary also analyses the usage of musical instruments and sound effects on the Shakespearean stage, providing descriptions of the instruments employed in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres. This is a comprehensive reference guide for scholars and students with interests ranging from the thematic and allegorical relevance of music in Shakespeare's works to the history of performance. It is also aimed at the growing number of directors and actors concerned with recovering the staging conditions of the early modern theatre. guides to the principal subject-areas covered by the plays and poetry of Shakespeare. The entries in the Dictionaries provide readers with a self-contained body of information about the topic under discussion, its occurrence and significance in Shakespeare's works, and its contemporary meanings. Entries range from a few lines in length to mini-essays, upward of 1000 words providing the opportunity to explore important literary of historical concept or idea in depth. Comprehensive bibliographies are also provided.
In this previously unpublished essay Schenker, one of the most influential music theorists of the twentieth century, turned his attention to the performer's role, arguing that the cult of the virtuoso has led to an overemphasis on technical display and discussing specific ways in which performers can better serve the composer's ideas.
Max Steiner's contribution to the formulation of early Hollywood scoring techniques is significant, particularly through his music for "King Kong" (1933) and "The Informer" (1935). The Academy Award winning score for "Now, Voyager "reflects the maturation of the composer's understanding of the dramatic function of music in film. The primary resources incorporated in the analysis include, from the Max Steiner collection at Brigham Young University, Steiner's letters and scrapbooks and his unpublished autobiography "Notes to You." In addition to contributing to the composer's own perspective on the music for this film and on scoring practice in general, these papers contribute to a broader debate about how films are interpreted and the part music plays in these schemes of criticism. This study of the film score occurs within the broader theoretical and historical debates currently characterizing film musicology and explores, from varied perspectives, how the score is meaningful and important to the film. Devoted to a single score, this study brings together for analysis all the contingent factors in the score's creation, use, and reception and will appeal to film music scholars and to scholars of music and of film. The scope of the analysis will also interest scholars involved in music in multi-disciplinary art forms, feminist musicologists and film scholars, and students of musical theater. Separate chapters discuss Steiner's musical background, his technique of film scoring, historical and critical contexts of the film, the music and its context, and an analysis of the score. Musical examples illustrate the text and an appendix of selected film scores by Steiner is included along with a selected bibliography.
This book is the first full-length study of the courtly love songs of the trouvere to address the central musical problems of the repertoire as a whole, embracing source studies, interpretation, historiography, and analysis. The argument of the book revolves around three axes, each of which is essential to the appreciation of the others: problems concerning the extant manuscript tradition; the crucial role of orality; and stylistic changes and plurality in the reperotire. For the first time, a full overview of the sources and notation is undertaken. This reveals the idiosyncrasies of individual manuscripts but, more importantly, it identifies two basic phases in the manuscript tradition. The study of melodic variants reveals the performance art that lies at the heart of the courtly grand chant; processes and techniques of variation are examined, bringing us to a closer understanding of the tenets of the melodic art of the early trouveres. A close study of select trouveres from the different generation reveals stylstic change and plurality, particularly in the melodic art which in some respects was less prescribed than the poetic texts. Consequently the courtly songs of the trouveres truly come alive in this book.
This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.
Collected Writings of the Orpheus Institute 6"We have developed a tremendous amount of what might best be referred to as journalistic knowledge concerning the ways that musicians of earlier periods thought about musical structures. Now that we have that knowledge, what might we do with it?" Joel LesterThe often complex connections and intersections between modal and tonal idioms and contrapuntal and harmonic organization during the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque era are considered from various perspectives in Towards Tonality. Prominent musicians and scholars from a wide range of fields testify here to their personal understanding of this significant time of shifts in musical taste. This collection of essays is based on lectures presented during the conference "Historical Theory, Performance, and Meaning in Baroque Music," organized by the International Orpheus Academy for Music and Theory in Ghent, Belgium."
Examining innovations in audience behaviour, musical ensembles and mass-music movements, this book provides insight into how musical performances contributed to emerging ideas about class and national identity. Offering a fresh reading of bestselling fictional works of the day, Weliver draws upon crowd theory, climate theory, ethnology, science, music reviews and books by professional musicians to demonstrate how these discourses were mutually constitutive. This interdisciplinary undertaking will interest those working in the fields of English literature, musicology, social history and cultural studies.
The only things truly universal in music are those that are based on biological and/or perceptual facts. Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale focuses on perceptions of consonance and dissonance, which are defined in the Harvard Dictionary of Music: "Consonance is used to describe the agreeable effect produced by certain intervals as against the disagreeable effect produced others. Consonance and dissonance are the very foundation of harmonic music... consonance represents the element of smoothness and repose, while dissonance represents the no less important elements of roughness and irregularity.a Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale begins by asking (and answering) the question: How can we build a device to measure consonance and dissonance? The remainder of the book describes the impact of such a "dissonance metera on music theory, on synthesizer design, on the construction of musical scales and tunings, on the design of musical instruments, and introduces related compositional techniques and new methods of musicological analyses. This new and greatly revised edition of William Sethares' classic book includes an attached CD-ROM that contains over three hours of sound examples that demonstrate the ideas in action, as well as computer programs that enable readers to conduct their own explorations. A new chapter contains a detailed explanation of how the software works. It incorporates several important simplifications over the full presentation in the current Chapter 7 in order to allow it to function in real time. Another new chapter describes the various ways that the software can be used. New sections throughout the book bring it up to date with the current state of the subject. Tuning TimbreSpectrum Scale offers a unique analysis of the relationship between the structure of sound and the structure of scale and will be useful to musicians and composers who use inharmonic tones and sounds. This includes a large percentage of people composing and performing with modern musical synthesizers. It will be of use to arrangers, musicologists, and others interested in musical analysis. Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale provides a unique approach to working with environmental sounds, and there are clear applications for the use of inharmonic sounds in film scoring. The book will also be of interest to engineers and others interested in the design of audio devices such as musical synthesizers, special effects devices, and keyboards.
Drawing on a passion for music, a remarkably diverse
interdisciplinary toolbox, and a gift for accessible language that
speaks equally to scholars and the general public, Jann Pasler
invites us to read as she writes "through" music, unveiling the
forces that affect our sonic encounters. In an extraordinary
collection of historical and critical essays, some appearing for
the first time in English, Pasler deconstructs the social, moral,
and political preoccupations lurking behind aesthetic taste.
Arguing that learning from musical experience is vital to our
understanding of past, present, and future, Pasler's work
trenchantly reasserts the role of music as a crucial contributor to
important public debates about who we can be as individuals,
communities, and nations.
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.
In Ways of Listening, musicologist Eric Clarke explores musical meaning, music's critical function in human lives, and the relationship between listening and musical material. Clarke outlines an "ecological approach" to understanding the perception of music, arguing that the way we hear and understand music is not simply a function of our brain structure or of the musical "codes" given to us by culture, but must be considered within the physical and social contexts of listening.
A few weeks after the reunification of Germany, Leonard Bernstein
raised his baton above the ruins of the Berlin Wall and conducted a
special arrangement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The central
statement of the work, that "all men will be brothers," captured
the sentiment of those who saw a brighter future for the newly
reunited nation. This now-iconic performance is a palpable example
of "musical monumentality" - a significant concept which underlies
our cultural and ideological understanding of Western art music
since the nineteenth-century. Although the concept was first raised
in the earliest years of musicological study in the 1930s, a
satisfying exploration of the "monumental" in music has not yet
been made. Alexander Rehding, one of the brightest young stars in
the field, takes on the task in Music and Monumentality, an
elegant, thorough treatment that will serve as a foundation for all
future discussion in this area.
Jean Sibelius's Violin Concerto is the story of Sibelius as performer and composer, of violin performing traditions, of histories of musical transmission, and of virtuosity itself. It investigates the history and legacy of one of the most recorded concertos in the violin repertoire. Sibelius, a celebrated and influential composer of the late 19th and 20th centuries, was an accomplished violinist, whose enduring interest in the instrument has been paralleled by the broad success of the only concerto in his oeuvre: his violin concerto (premiered in 1904 and revised in 1905). Considering how violinists engage with the work, author Tina K. Ramnarine discusses technology's central role in the concerto's transmission from Jascha Heifetz's seminal 1935 recording to contemporary online performances, gender issues in violin solo careers, and nature-based musical aesthetics that lead to thinking about the ecology of virtuosity in an era of environmental crisis. Beginning with Sibelius's early training as a violinist and his aspirations as a performer, Ramnarine traces the dramatic historical context of the violin concerto. It was composed as Finland underwent a period of heightened self-determination, nationalism, and protest against Russian imperial policies, and it heralded intense political dynamics relating to Europe's East-West border that have extended to the present. This story of the violin concerto points to the notion of Sibelius - and the virtuoso more generally - as a political figure.
Coping with trauma and the losses of World War I was a central concern for French musicians in the interwar period. Almost all of them were deeply affected by the war as they fought in the trenches, worked in military hospitals, or mourned a friend or relative who had been wounded, killed, or taken prisoner. In Resonant Recoveries, author Jillian C. Rogers argues that French modernist composers processed this experience of unprecedented violence by turning their musical activities into locations for managing and performing trauma. Through analyses of archival materials, French medical, philosophical, and literary texts, and the music produced between the wars, Rogers frames World War I as a pivotal moment in the history of music therapy. When musicians and their audiences used music to remember lost loved ones, perform grief, create healing bonds of friendship, and find consolation in soothing sonic vibrations and rhythmic bodily movements, they reconfigured music into an embodied means of consolation-a healer of wounded minds and bodies. This in-depth account of the profound impact that postwar trauma had on French musical life makes a powerful case for the importance of addressing trauma, mourning, and people's emotional lives in music scholarship. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
Using Schumann's Eichendorff Liederkreis as the primary example, this book sheds new light on the structure of nineteenth century song cycles and on the Schumann's particular response to the problem of musical coherence in large scale works. Drawing on analysis, literary criticism, and source studies, this book argues for a new conception of the nineteenth-century song cycle. Rather than a unified whole, the cycle is seen as a fragmentary and open-ended form that enables Schumann to express the romantic themes of transcendence and ineffability in musical terms. THe book begins with a general discussion of the cycle as a genre. The heart of the book is a series of closely argued analyses of five of the Eichendorff songs, with particular attention on the relationship between text and music. Ferris concludes by setting the Liederkreis within the context of Schumann's other 1840 song cycles.
This classic has outlived its original title, but not its usefulness.
This Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music provides detailed and authoritative articles for the most important composers, concepts, genres, music educators, performers, theorists, writings, and works of cultivated music in Europe and the Americas during the period 1789-1914. The roster of biographical entries includes not only canonical composers such as Beethoven, Berlioz, Brahms, Chopin, Faure, Grieg, Liszt, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Mussorgsky, Rossini, Schubert, Robert Schumann, Sibelius, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Wagner, and Wolf, but also less-well-known distinguished contemporaries of those composers (among them George Whitefield Chadwick, Cecile Chaminade, Ernesto Elorduy, Chiquinha Gonzaga, Fanny Hensel, C. H. Parry, and Clara Schumann, to name but a few). Significant literary and cultural topics such as Goethe's Faust and Wagner's theoretical writings of the 1850s, as well as entries on other cultural luminaries who significantly influenced music's Romanticisms - among them J. S. Bach, Goethe, Haydn, Handel, Heine, Mozart, Schiller, and Shakespeare - are also included. Entries on important institutions (conservatory, orpheon, Mannerchor), concepts (biographical fallacy, copyright, exoticism, feminism, nationalism, performance practice), and political caesurae and movements (First and Second French Empire, First, Second, and Third French Republic, Franco-Prussian War, Revolutions of 1848, Risorgimento) round out the dictionary section. Like other volumes in this series, this book's more than 500 entries are preceded by an introductory essay that explains the essential concepts necessary for understanding and exploring further the vast and complex musical landscape of Romanticism, plus a detailed Chronology. Concluding the volume is an extensive bibliography that lists the most important source-critical series of editions of Romantic music, important general writings on the period and its music, and composer-by-composer bibliographies.
What does music have to say about modernity? How can this apparently unworldly art tell us anything about modern life? In Out of Time, author Julian Johnson begins from the idea that it can, arguing that music renders an account of modernity from the inside, a history not of events but of sensibility, an archaeology of experience. If music is better understood from this broad perspective, our idea of modernity itself is also enriched by the specific insights of music. The result is a rehearing of modernity and a rethinking of music - an account that challenges ideas of linear progress and reconsiders the common concerns of music, old and new. If all music since 1600 is modern music, the similarities between Monteverdi and Schoenberg, Bach and Stravinsky, or Beethoven and Boulez, become far more significant than their obvious differences. Johnson elaborates this idea in relation to three related areas of experience - temporality, history and memory; space, place and technology; language, the body, and sound. Criss-crossing four centuries of Western culture, he moves between close readings of diverse musical examples (from the madrigal to electronic music) and drawing on the history of science and technology, literature, art, philosophy, and geography. Against the grain of chronology and the usual divisions of music history, Johnson proposes profound connections between musical works from quite different times and places. The multiple lines of the resulting map, similar to those of the London Underground, produce a bewildering network of plural connections, joining Stockhausen to Galileo, music printing to sound recording, the industrial revolution to motivic development, steam trains to waltzes. A significant and groundbreaking work, Out of Time is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of music and modernity.
This monograph offers a unique analysis of social protest in popular music. It presents theoretical descriptions, methodological tools, and an approach that encompasses various fields of musicology, cultural studies, semiotics, discourse analysis, media studies, and political and social sciences. The author argues that protest songs should be taken as a musical genre on their own. He points out that the general approach, when discussing these songs, has been so far that of either analyzing the lyrics or the social context. For some reason, the music itself has been often overlooked. This book attempts to fill this gap. Its central thesis is that a complete overview of these repertoires demands a thorough interaction among contextual, lyrical, and musical elements together. To accomplish this, the author develops a novel model that systemizes and investigates musical repertoires. The model is then applied to four case studies, those, too, chosen among topics that are little (or not at all) frequented by scholars. |
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