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Books > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
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.
What makes a song sound foreign? What makes it sound "American," or
Brazilian? Caetano Veloso's 2004 American songbook album, A Foreign
Sound, is a meditation on these questions-but in truth, they were
questions he'd been asking throughout his career. Properly heard,
the album throws a wrench into received ideas regarding the global
hegemony of US popular music, and also what constitutes the
Brazilian sound. This book takes listeners back through some of
Veloso's earlier considerations of American popular music, and
forward to his more recent experiments, in order to explore his
take on the relationship between US and Brazilian musical idioms.
33 1/3 Global, a series related to but independent from 33 1/3,
takes the format of the original series of short, music-basedbooks
and brings the focus to music throughout the world. With initial
volumes focusing on Japanese and Brazilian music, the series will
also include volumes on the popular music of Australia/Oceania,
Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and more.
The Shubert name has been synonymous with Broadway for almost as
long as Broadway entertainment itself. With seventeen Broadway
theatres including the Ambassador, the Music Box, and the Winter
Garden, The Shubert Organization perpetuates brothers Lee and Jacob
Shubert's business legacy. In The Shuberts and Their Passing Shows:
The Untold Tale of Ziegfeld's Rivals, author Jonas Westover
investigates beyond the Shuberts' business empire into their early
revues and the centrifugal role they played in developing American
theatre as an art form. The Shubert-produced revues, titled Passing
Shows, were terrifically popular in the teens and twenties,
consistently competing with Florenz Ziegfeld's Follies for the
greatest numbers of stars, biggest spectacles, and ultimately the
largest audiences. The Shuberts and Their Passing Shows is the
first-ever book to unpack the colorful history of the productions,
delving into their stars, costumes, stagecraft, and orchestration
in unprecedented detail. Providing a fresh and exciting window into
American theatrical history, Westover traces the fascinating
history of the Shuberts' revue series, presented annually from
1912-1924, and covers more broadly the glorious days of early
Broadway. In addition to its compelling history of Broadway's
Golden Age, The Shuberts and Their Passing Shows also provides a
revisionary argument about the overarching history of the revue.
Bolstered by a rich collection of documents in the Shubert Theater
Archive, Westover argues against the popular misconception that the
Shubert's competitor, producer Florenz Ziegfield - responsible for
the better-known Follies - was the sole proprietor of Broadway
audiences. As Westover proves, not only were the Passing Shows as
popular as the Follies but also a key component in a history of the
revue that is vastly more complex than previous scholarship has
shown. The Shuberts and Their Passing Shows brings to fruition
years of original research and invaluable insights into the gilded
formation of present day Broadway.
Originally published London, 1924. Contents Include: The Serenade
at Caserta - "Les Indes Galantes" - The King and the Nightingale -
Biography etc. Many of the earliest books, particularly those
dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and
increasingly expensive. Home Farm Books are republishing these
classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using
the original text and artwork.
This volume is designed as an introduction to the science of music
for advanced students of music and psychology, music teachers,
professional musicians, and general readers interested in the
scientific approach to the understanding and appreciation of beauty
in music.
Written by an experienced drummer and philosopher, "Groove" is a
vivid and exciting study of one of music's most central and
relatively unexplored aspects. Tiger C. Roholt explains why
grooves, which are forged in music's rhythmic nuances, remain
hidden to some listeners. He argues that grooves are not graspable
through the intellect nor through mere listening; rather, grooves
are disclosed through our "bodily "engagement with music. We grasp
a groove bodily by moving with music's pulsations. By invoking the
French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's notion of "motor
intentionality," Roholt shows that the "feel" of a groove, and the
understanding of it, are two sides of a coin: to "get" a groove
just is to comprehend it bodily and to feel that embodied
comprehension.
In recent years, music theory educators around the country have
developed new and innovative teaching approaches, reintroducing a
sense of purpose into their classrooms. In this book, author and
veteran music theory educator Jennifer Snodgrass visits several of
these teachers, observing them in their music theory classrooms and
providing lesson plans that build upon their approaches. Based on
three years of field study spanning seventeen states, coupled with
reflections on her own teaching strategies,Teaching Music Theory:
New Voices and Approaches highlights real-life teaching approaches
from effective (and sometimes award-winning) instructors from a
wide range of institutions: high schools, community colleges,
liberal arts colleges, and conservatories. Throughout the book,
Snodgrass focuses on topics like classroom environment,
collaborative learning, undergraduate research and professional
development, and curriculum reform. She also emphasizes the
importance of a diverse, progressive, and inclusive teaching
environment throughout, from encouraging student involvement in
curriculum planning to designing lesson plans and assessments so
that pedagogical concepts can easily be transferred to the applied
studio, performance ensemble, and other courses outside of music.
An accessible and valuable text designed with the needs of both
students and faculty in mind,Teaching MusicTheoryprovides teachers
with a vital set of tools to rejuvenate the classroom and produce
confident, empowered students.
John Taverner's lectures on music constitute the only extant
version of a complete university course in music in early modern
England. Originally composed in 1611 in both English and Latin,
they were delivered at Gresham College in London between 1611 and
1638, and it is likely that Taverner intended at some point to
publish the lectures in the form of a music treatise. The lectures,
which Taverner collectively titled De Ortu et Progressu Artis
Musicae ("On the Origin and Progress of the Art of Music"),
represent a clear attempt to ground musical education in humanist
study, particularly in Latin and Greek philology. Taverner's
reliance on classical and humanist writers attests to the
durability of music's association with rhetoric and philology, an
approach to music that is too often assigned to early Tudor
England. Taverner is also a noteworthy player in the
seventeenth-century Protestant debates over music, explicitly
defending music against Reformist polemicists who see music as an
overly sensuous activity. In this first published edition of
Taverner's musical writings, Joseph M. Ortiz comprehensively
introduces, edits, and annotates the text of the lectures, and an
appendix contains the existing Latin version of Taverner's text. By
shedding light on a neglected figure in English Renaissance music
history, this edition is a significant contribution to the study of
musical thought in Renaissance England, humanism, Protestant
Reformism, and the history of education.
The idea of a global history of music may be traced back to the
Enlightenment, and today, the question of a conceptual framework
for a history of music that pays due attention to global
relationships in music is often raised. But how might a historical
interpretation of those relationships proceed? How should it
position, or justify, itself? What would 'Western music' look like
in an account of music history that aspires to be truly global? The
studies presented in this volume aim to promote post-European
historical thinking. They are based on the idea that a global
history of music cannot be one single, hegemonic history. They
rather explore the paradigms and terminologies that might describe
a history of many different voices. The chapters address historical
practices and interpretations of music in different parts of the
world, from Japan to Argentina and from Mexico to India. Many of
these narratives are about relations between these cultures and the
Western tradition; several also consider socio-political and
historical circumstances that have affected music in the various
regions. The book addresses aspects that Western musical
historiography has tended to neglect even when looking at its own
culture: performance, dance, nostalgia, topicality, enlightenment,
the relationships between traditional, classical, and pop musics,
and the regards croises between European, Asian, or Latin American
interpretations of each other's musical traditions. These studies
have been derived from the Balzan Musicology Project Towards a
Global History of Music (2013-2016), which was funded by the
International Balzan Foundation through the award of the Balzan
Prize in Musicology to the editor, and designed by music historians
and ethnomusicologists together. A global history of music may
never be written in its entirety, but will rather be realised
through interaction, practice, and discussion, in all parts of the
world.
Contents--What is Modern Music--and Why have People Never Liked It,
at First?; Music has Always Told How People Think and Act;
Dissonance--the Salt and Pepper of Music; Acoustics and the
Development of Harmony; Impressionism--Debussy and His Followers;
Schoenberg and Atonality; Music Written in Two or More Keys at
Once--Polytonality; Back to Bach--Neoclassicism; Music for Everday
use--Gebrauchsmusik; From Plain Song to Jazz--A Story of Rhythms;
Tone Clusters, Quarter Tones, Percussive and Electronic Music; The
Composer and the Public; Selected Reading List; Selected
Recordings; Index.
In this concise and engaging analysis of rock music, music theorist
Ken Stephenson explores the features that make this internationally
popular music distinct from earlier music styles. The author offers
a guided tour of rock music from the 1950s to the present,
emphasizing the theoretical underpinnings of the style and, for the
first time, systematically focusing not on rock music's history or
sociology, but on the structural aspects of the music itself. What
structures normally happen in rock music? What theoretical systems
or models might best explain them? The book addresses these
questions and more in chapters devoted to phrase rhythm, scales,
key determination, cadences, harmonic palette and succession, and
form. Each chapter provides richly detailed analyses of individual
rock pieces from groups including Chicago; the Beatles; Emerson,
Lake, and Palmer; Kansas; and others. Stephenson shows how rock
music is stylistically unique, and he demonstrates how the features
that make it distinct have tended to remain constant throughout the
past half-century and within most substyles. For music students at
the college level and for practicing rock musicians who desire a
deeper understanding of their music, this book is an essential
resource.
Many people know the tale: In 1814 Francis Scott Key witnessed the
British bombardment of Fort McHenry and the heroism of America's
defenders; seeing the American flag still flying at first light
inspired him to pen his famous lyric. What people don't know,
however, is how a topical broadside ballad rose to become the
nation's anthem and today's magnet for controversy. In O Say Can
You Hear? Mark Clague brilliantly weaves together the stories of
the song and nation it represents. The book examines the origins of
both words and music, alternate lyrics and translations and the
song's use in sports, at times of war and for political protest. It
shows how the song's meaning reflects-and is reflected by-the
United States' quest to become a more perfect union. From victory
song to hymn of sacrifice and object of protest, the story of Key's
song is the story of America itself.
Is there really such a thing as Jewish music? And how does it
survive as a practice of worship and cultural expression even in
the face of the many brutal aesthetic and political challenges of
modernity? In Jewish Music and Modernity, Philip V. Bohlman imparts
these questions with a new light that transforms the very
historiography of Jewish culture in modernity.
Based on decades of fieldwork and archival study throughout the
world, Bohlman intensively examines the many ways in which music
has historically borne witness to the confrontation between modern
Jews and the world around them. Weaving a historical narrative that
spans from the end of the Middle Ages to the Holocaust, he moves
through the vast confluence of musical styles and repertories. From
the sacred and to the secular, from folk to popular music, and in
the many languages in which it was written and performed, he
accounts for areas of Jewish music that have rarely been considered
before. Jewish music, argues Bohlman, both survived in isolation
and transformed the nations in which it lived. When Jews and Jewish
musicians entered modernity, authenticity became an ideal to be
supplanted by the reality of complex traditions. Klezmer music
emerged in rural communities cohabited by Jews and Roma; Jewish
cabaret resulted from the collaborations of migrant Jews and
non-Jews to the nineteenth-century metropoles of Berlin and
Budapest, Prague and Vienna; cantors and composers experimented
with new sounds. The modernist impulse from Felix Mendelssohn to
Gustav Pick to Arnold Schoenberg and beyond became possible because
of the ways music juxtaposed aesthetic and cultural differences.
Jewish Music and Modernity demonstrateshow borders between
repertories are crossed and the sound of modernity is enriched by
the movement of music and musicians from the peripheries to the
center of modern culture. Bohlman ultimately challenges readers to
experience the modern confrontation of self and other anew.
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(un)Common Sounds
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Robert Arking, Sooi Ling Tan; Foreword by William A. Dyrness
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Originally published in 1943, Models for Beginners in Composition
represents one of Arnold Schoenberg's earliest attempts at reaching
a broad American audience through his pedagogical ideas. The
novelty of this book was its streamlined approach, basing all
aspects of composition including motivic design, harmony, and the
construction of themes on the two-measure phrase. This newly
revised edition by Gordon Root incorporates many of Schoenberg's
corrections to the original manuscript. It also includes a
significant commentary elucidating the evolution of Schoenberg's
pedagogical approach. In its function as a practical manual for the
American classroom, Models for Beginners in Composition is unique
among Schoenberg's texts. The current Commentary explores
Schoenberg's experience as a teacher at UCLA while tracing the
development of the two-measure phrase as the main component of his
pedagogical method. It demonstrates the way in which Schoenberg
simultaneously preserved and adapted European ideas about tonal
theory and pedagogy when he came to America, a give and take that
allowed for increased theoretical originality and scope. Models for
Beginners in Composition established the two-measure phrase as one
of the most significant of Schoenberg's contributions to American
music education. This new edition, with Schoenberg's corrections
and newly added commentary, allows readers to utilize and explore
the text in greater depth. Students of composition, Schoenberg
scholars, music theorists, and historians of music theory alike
will no doubt welcome this new edition.
Who Needs Classical Music? considers the value of classical music in contemporary society, arguing that it remains distinctive because it works in quite different ways to the other music that surrounds us. Johnson maintains that music is more than just 'a matter of taste'; while some music serves as a background noise or supplies entertainment, other music functions as art. Challenging dominant assumptions about the relativism of cultural judgements, the book aims to restore some types of music to the status of aesthetic text.
The definitive survey, combining current scholarship with a vibrant
narrative. Carefully informed by feedback from dozens of scholars,
it remains the book that students and teachers trust to explain
what's important, where it fits and why it matters. Peter
Burkholder weaves a compelling story of people, their choices and
the western musical tradition that emerged. From chant to hip-hop,
he connects past to present to create a context for tomorrow's
musicians.
Music in the Galant Style is an authoritative and readily
understandable study of the core compositional style of the
eighteenth century. Gjerdingen adopts a unique approach, based on a
massive but little-known corpus of pedagogical workbooks used by
the most influential teachers of the century, the Italian
partimenti. He has brought this vital repository of compositional
methods into confrontation with a set of schemata distilled from an
enormous body of eighteenth-century music, much of it known only to
specialists, formative of the "galant style."
We can hear the universe! This was the triumphant proclamation at a
February 2016 press conference announcing that the Laser
Interferometer Gravity Observatory (LIGO) had detected a "transient
gravitational-wave signal." What LIGO heard in the morning hours of
September 14, 2015 was the vibration of cosmic forces unleashed
with mind-boggling power across a cosmic medium of equally
mind-boggling expansiveness: the transient ripple of two black
holes colliding more than a billion years ago. The confirmation of
gravitational waves sent tremors through the scientific community,
but the public imagination was more captivated by the sonic
translation of the cosmic signal, a sound detectable only through
an act of carefully attuned listening. As astrophysicist Szabolcs
Marka remarked, "Until this moment, we had our eyes on the sky and
we couldn't hear the music. The skies will never be the same."
Taking in hand this current "discovery" that we can listen to the
cosmos, Andrew Hicks argues that sound-and the harmonious
coordination of sounds, sources, and listeners-has always been an
integral part of the history of studying the cosmos. Composing the
World charts one constellation of musical metaphors, analogies, and
expressive modalities embedded within a late-ancient and medieval
cosmological discourse: that of a cosmos animated and choreographed
according to a specifically musical aesthetic. The specific
historical terrain of Hicks' discussion centers upon the world of
twelfth-century philosophy, and from there he offers a new
intellectual history of the role of harmony in medieval
cosmological discourse, a discourse which itself focused on the
reception and development of Platonism. Hicks illuminates how a
cosmological aesthetics based on the "music of the spheres" both
governed the moral, physical, and psychic equilibrium of the human,
and assured the coherence of the universe as a whole. With a rare
convergence of musicological, philosophical, and philological
rigor, Hicks presents a narrative tour through medieval cosmology
with reflections on important philosophical movements along the
way, raising connections to Cartesian dualism, Uexkull's
theoretical biology, and Deleuze and Guattari's musically inspired
language of milieus and (de)territorialization. Hicks ultimately
suggests that the models of musical cosmology popular in late
antiquity and the twelfth century are relevant to our modern
philosophical and scientific undertakings. Impeccably researched
and beautifully written, Composing the World will resonate with a
variety of readers, and it encourages us to rethink the role of
music and sound within our greater understanding of the universe.
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