Perspectives on the Performance of French Piano Music offers a range of approaches central to the performance of French piano music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors include scholars and active performers who see performance not as an independent activity but as a practice enriched by a wealth of historical and analytical approaches. To underline the usefulness of contextual understanding for performance, each author highlights the choices performers must confront with examples drawn from particular repertoires and composers. Topics explored include editorial practice, the use of early recordings, emergent disciplines such as analysis-and-performance, and traditions passed down from teacher to student. Themes that emerge demonstrate the importance of editions as a form of communication, the challenges of notation, the significance of detail and of deeper continuity, the importance of performing and teaching traditions, and the influence of cross disciplinary frameworks. A link to a set of performed examples on the Brigham Young University-Hawai'i website allows readers to hear and compare performances and interpretations of the music discussed. The volume will appeal to musicologists and analysts interested in performance, performers, students, and piano teachers.

Music theory is often seen as independent from - even antithetical to - performance. While music theory is an intellectual enterprise, performance requires an intuitive response to the music. But this binary opposition is a false one, which serves neither the theorist nor the performer. In Interpreting Chopin Alison Hood brings her experience as a performer to bear on contemporary analytical models. She combines significant aspects of current analytical approaches and applies that unique synthetic method to selected works by Chopin, casting new light on the composer's preludes, nocturnes and barcarolle. An extension of Schenkerian analysis, the specific combination of five aspects distinguishes Hood's method from previous analytical approaches. These five methods are: attention to the rhythms created by pitch events on all structural levels; a detailed accounting of the musical surface; 'strict use' of analytical notation, following guidelines offered by Steve Larson; a continual concern with what have been called 'strategies' or 'premises'; and an exploration of how recorded performances might be viewed in terms of analytical decisions, or might even shape those decisions. Building on the work of such authors as William Rothstein, Carl Schachter and John Rink, Hood's approach to Chopin's oeuvre raises interpretive questions of central interest to performers.

Heinrich Schenker: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography concerning both the nature of primary sources related to the composer and the scope and significance of the secondary sources which deal with him, his compositions, and his influence as a composer and theorist.

Music cultures today in rural and urban Mongolia and Inner Mongolia emerge from centuries-old pastoralist practices that were reshaped by political movements in the twentieth century. Mongolian Sound Worlds investigates the unique sonic elements, fluid genres, social and spatial performativity, and sounding objects behind new forms of Mongolian music--forms that reflect the nation's past while looking towards its globalized future. Drawing on fieldwork in locations across the Inner Asian region, the contributors report on Mongolia's genres and musical landscapes; instruments like the morin khuur, tovshuur, and Kazakh dombyra; combined fusion band culture; and urban popular music. Their broad range of concerns include nomadic herders' music and instrument building, ethnic boundaries, heritage-making, ideological influences, nationalism, and global circulation. A merger of expert scholarship and eyewitness experience, Mongolian Sound Worlds illuminates a diverse and ever-changing musical culture. Contributors: Bayarsaikhan Badamsuren, Otgonbaayar Chuulunbaatar, Andrew Colwell, Johanni Curtet, Charlotte D'Evelyn, Tamir Hargana, Peter K. Marsh, K. Oktyabr, Rebekah Plueckhahn, Jennifer C. Post, D. Tserendavaa, and Sunmin Yoon

More than forty years after the composer's death, the music of Roberto Gerhard (1896-1970) continues to be recorded and performed and to attract international scholarly interest. The Roberto Gerhard Companion is the first full length scholarly work on this composer noted for his sharp intellect and original, exploring mind. This book builds on the outcomes of two recent international conferences and includes contributions by scholars from Spain, the USA and UK. The essays collected here explore themes and trends within Gerhard's work, using individual or groups of works as case studies. Among the themes presented are the way Gerhard's work was shaped by his Catalan heritage, his education under Pedrell and Schoenberg, and his very individual reaction to the latter's teaching and methods, notably Gerhard's very distinctive approach to serialism. The influence of these and other cultural and literary figures is an important underlying theme that ties essays together. Exiled from Catalonia from 1939, Gerhard spent the remainder of his life in Cambridge, England, composing a string of often ground-breaking compositions, notably the symphonies and concertos composed in the 1950s and 1960s. A particular focus in this book is Gerhard's electronic music. He was a pioneer in this genre and the book will contain the first rigorous studies of this music as well as the first accurate catalogue of this electronic output. His ground-breaking output of incidental music for radio and the stage is also given detailed consideration.

Simply put, Billy Boy Arnold is one of the last men standing from the Chicago blues scene's raucous heyday. What's more, unlike most artists in this electrifying melting pot, who were Southern transplants, Arnold-a harmonica master who shared stages with Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, and Howlin' Wolf, plus a singer and hitmaker in his own right who first recorded the standards "I Wish You Would" and "I Ain't Got You"-was born right here and has lived nowhere else. This makes his perspective on Chicago blues, its players, and its locales all the rarer and all the more valuable. Arnold has witnessed musical generations come and go, from the decline of prewar country blues to the birth of the electric blues and the worldwide spread of rock and roll. Working here in collaboration with writer and fellow musician Kim Field, he gets it all down. The Blues Dream of Billy Boy Arnold is a remarkably clear-eyed testament to more than eighty years of musical love and creation, from Arnold's adolescent quest to locate the legendary Sonny Boy Williamson, the story of how he named Bo Diddley Bo Diddley, and the ups and downs of his seven-decade recording career. Arnold's tale-candidly told with humor, insight, and grit-is one that no fan of modern American music can afford to miss.

Robert P. Morgan is one of a small number of music theorists writing in English who treat music theory, and in particular Schenkerian theory, as part of general intellectual life. Morgan's writings are renowned within the field of music scholarship: he is the author of the well-known Norton volume Twentieth-Century Music, and of additional books relating to Schenkerian and other theory, analysis and society. This volume of Morgan's previously published essays encompasses a broad range of issues, including historical and social issues and is of importance to anyone concerned with modern Western music. His specially written introduction treats his writings as a whole but also provides additional material relating to the articles included in this volume.

Popular Music and the Postcolonial addresses the often-overlooked relationship between the fields of popular music and postcolonial studies, and it has implications for ethnomusicology, cultural and literary studies, history, sociology, and political economy. Popular music in its many forms exploded in popularity, following developments in sound technology and shifting population demographics, in the 1960s, the era of radical agitation against empires in the global south but also within the very heart of Europe. Popular music aided in fostering and documenting such resistance to violent oppression and in liberating the hearts and minds of the colonized. This collection offers a timely intervention in this field, showing popular music's role in defining or undermining certain colonial and postcolonial nations, in expanding and complicating the domain of postcolonial theorists-including the "founder" of postcolonial studies Edward Said-and in decolonizing the ears of its diverse, sometimes antagonistic, audiences. This book was originally published as a special issue of Popular Music and Society.

In studies of gender and sexuality in popular music, the concept of difference is often a crucial analytic used to detect social agency; however, the alternative analytic of ambiguity has never been systematically examined. While difference from heterosexual norms is taken to be the multivalent sign of resistance, oppression, and self-invention, it can lead to inflated claims of the degree and power of difference. This book offers critically-oriented case studies that examine the theory and politics of ambiguity. Ambiguity means that there are both positive and negative implications in any gender and sexuality practices, both sameness and difference from heteronormativity, and unfixed possibility in the diverse nature of discourse and practice (rather than just "difference" among fixed multiplicities). Contributors present a diverse array of approaches through music, sound, psyche, body, dance, performance, race, ethnicity, power, discourse, and history. A wide variety of popular music genres are broached, including gay circuit remixes, punk rock, Goth music, cross-dress performance, billboard 100 songs, global pop, and nineteenth-century minstrelsy. The authors examine the ambiguities of performance and reception, and address the vexed question of whether it is possible for genuinely new forms of gender and sexuality to emerge musically. This book makes a distinctive contribution to studies of gender and sexuality in popular music, and will be of interest to fields including Popular Music Studies, Musicology/Ethnomusicology, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, and Media Studies.

For several decades, Scott Burnham has sought to bring a ready ear and plenty of humanistic warmth to musicological inquiry. Sounding Values features eighteen of his essays on mainstream Western music, music theory, aesthetics and criticism. In these writings, Burnham listens for the values-aesthetic, ethical, intellectual-of those who have created influential discourse about music, while also listening for the values of the music for which that discourse has been generated. The first half of the volume confronts pressing issues of historical theory and aesthetics, including intellectual models of tonal theory, leading concepts of sonata form, translations of music into poetic meaning, and recent rifts and rapprochements between criticism and analysis. The essays in the second half can be read as a series of critical appreciations, engaging some of the most consequential reception tropes of the past two centuries: Haydn and humor, Mozart and beauty, Beethoven and the sublime, Schubert and memory.

The Routledge Companion to Aural Skills Pedagogy offers a comprehensive survey of issues, practice, and current developments in the teaching of aural skills. The volume regards aural training as a lifelong skill that is engaged with before, during, and after university or conservatoire studies in music, central to the holistic training of the contemporary musician. With an international array of contributors, the volume captures diverse perspectives on aural-skills pedagogy, and enables conversation between different regions. It addresses key new developments such as the use of technology for aural training and the use of popular music. This book will be an essential resource and reference for all university and conservatoire instructors in aural skills, as well as students preparing for teaching careers in music.

An innovative contribution to Scriabin studies, covering aspects of Scriabin's life, personality, beliefs, training, creative output, and interaction with contemporary Russian culture. This book is an innovative contribution to Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) studies, covering aspects of Scriabin's life, personality, beliefs, training, creative output, as well as his interaction with contemporary Russian culture. It offers new and original research from leading and upcoming Russian music scholars. Key Scriabin topics such as mysticism, philosophy, music theory, contemporary aesthetics, and composition processes are covered. Musical coverage spans the composer's early, middle and late period. All main repertoire is being discussed: the piano miniatures and sonatas as well as the symphonies. In more detail, chapters consider: Scriabin's part in early twentieth-century Russia's cultural climate; how Scriabin moved from early pastiche to a style much more original; the influence of music theory on Scriabin's idiosyncratic style; the changing contexts of Scriabin performances; new aspects of reception studies. Further chapters offer: a critical understanding of how Scriabin's writings sit within the traditions of Mysticism as well as French and Russian Symbolism; a new investigation into his creative compositional process; miniaturism and its wider context; a new reading of the composer's mysticism and synaesthesia. Analytical chapters reach out of the score to offer an interpretative framework; accepting new approaches from disability studies; investigating the complex interaction of rhythm and metre and modal interactions, the latent diatonic 'tonal function' of Scriabin's late works, as well as self-regulating structures in the composer's music.

Interpreting Music Video introduces students to the musical, visual, and sociological aspects of music videos, enabling them to critically analyze a multimedia form with a central place in popular culture. With highly relevant examples drawn from recent music videos across many different genres, this concise and accessible book brings together tools from musical analysis, film and media studies, gender and sexuality studies, and critical race studies, requiring no previous knowledge. Exploring the multiple dimensions of music videos, this book is the perfect introduction to critical analysis for music, media studies, communications, and popular culture.

Interpreting Music Video introduces students to the musical, visual, and sociological aspects of music videos, enabling them to critically analyze a multimedia form with a central place in popular culture. With highly relevant examples drawn from recent music videos across many different genres, this concise and accessible book brings together tools from musical analysis, film and media studies, gender and sexuality studies, and critical race studies, requiring no previous knowledge. Exploring the multiple dimensions of music videos, this book is the perfect introduction to critical analysis for music, media studies, communications, and popular culture.

Where does music come from? What kind of agency does a song have? What is at the root of musical pleasure? Can music die? These are some of the questions the Greeks and the Romans asked about music, song, and the soundscape within which they lived, and that this book examines. Focusing on mythical narratives of metamorphosis, it investigates the aesthetic and ontological questions raised by fantastic stories of musical origins. Each chapter opens with an ancient text devoted to a musical metamorphosis (of a girl into a bird, a nymph into an echo, men into cicadas, etc.) and reads that text as a meditation on an aesthetic and ontological question, in dialogue with 'contemporary' debates - contemporary with debates in the Greco-Roman culture that gave rise to the story, and with modern debates in the posthumanities about what it means to be a human animal enmeshed in a musicking environment.

Understanding Post-Tonal Music is a student-centered textbook that explores the compositional and musical processes of twentieth-century post-tonal music. Intended for undergraduate or general graduate courses on the theory and analysis of twentieth-century music, this book will increase the accessibility of post-tonal music by providing students with tools for understanding pitch organization, rhythm and meter, form, texture, and aesthetics. By presenting the music first and then deriving the theory, Understanding Post-Tonal Music leads students to greater understanding and appreciation of this challenging and important repertoire. The updated second edition includes new "Explorations" features that guide students to engage with pieces through listening and a process of exploration, discovery, and discussion; a new chapter covering electronic, computer, and spectral musics; and additional coverage of music from the twenty-first century and recent trends. The text has been revised throughout to enhance clarity, both by streamlining the prose and by providing a visual format more accessible to the student.

This book develops ways of discussing musical practices to articulate a new approach to understanding connections between recordings, singers, and singing. Centred around materials from the mid-twentieth century, this book focuses on a time when composers and performers were questioning the idea of authorship within their musical practice. Materials drawn upon include recordings, scores, archival content, visual art, interviews, and liner notes to develop a rich conception of practices of performance. Analysis of performances include recordings of singers such as Cathy Berberian, Linda Hirst, Lore Lixenberg, Angelika Luz, and Meredith Monk. Compositions by Cathy Berberian, Luciano Berio, John Cage, and Manuel De Falla are considered. The book utilizes these sources to examine the collective way in which singers and composers form practices as multiple, transforming, emergent, and not hierarchical. The book articulates - with a detailed, close consideration of specific instances in recordings and scores - a relational understanding of performance. This book will be useful reading for students and scholars of music analysis, musicology, performance practice, and twentieth century vocal music.

Taking a cue from Erving Goffman's classic work, Asylums, Tia DeNora develops a novel interdisciplinary framework for music, health and wellbeing. Considering health and illness both in medical contexts and in the often-overlooked realm of everyday life, DeNora argues that these identities are by no means mutually exclusive. Moreover, she suggests that the promotion of health and more specifically, mental health, involves a great deal more than a concern with medication, genetic predispositions, clinical and neuro-scientific procedures. Adopting a holistic, interactionist focus, Music Asylums reconnects states of wellness and wellbeing to encounters with others and - critically - to opportunities for aesthetic experience. Building on DeNora's earlier work on music as a technology of self in everyday life, the book presents music as an active ingredient of action, identity, capacity and consciousness. From there, it suggests that access to, and evaluation of, music is an important ethical matter. Intended for scholars and practitioners in psychiatry and psychology, palliative care, socio-music studies, music psychology and the allied health professions, Music Asylums showcases music's role in the existential project of being and staying well, mentally and physically, from moment-to-moment and across all realms of social life.

Singing and Dictation for Today's Musician expands the Today's Musician family of textbooks to encompass the essential elements of musicianship and aural skills training. Featuring chapters that correspond to the organization of Theory for Today's Musician, this new textbook complements the theory text to offer a complete curriculum package, allowing students and instructors to reinforce written theory skills with relevant musicianship exercises. Combining sight singing and dictation in a single volume, this new textbook underscores the value of combining the human senses in understanding the intellectual and analytic concepts of music theory. Features of this text include: Flexibility for the instructor in using moveable or fixed "Do," scale degree numbers, and neutral syllables for singing Both singing and dictation exercises included in each unit, allowing the two skills to be fully integrated Companion website with audio recordings and instructor keys for the exercises, at www.routledge.com/cw/mccarthy Units match the pacing and order of topics in Theory for Today's Musician, allowing the texts to be easily used in sync. Beginning with fundamentals and continuing up through twentieth-century materials, Singing and Dictation for Today's Musician allows instructors to closely align their teaching of musicianship and aural skills with the written theory curriculum, enhancing student understanding of core music principles.

Ubiquitous Musics offers a multidisciplinary approach to the pervasive presence of music in everyday life. The essays address a variety of situations in which music is present alongside other activities and does not demand focused attention from (sometimes involuntary) listeners. The contributors present different theoretical perspectives on the increasing ubiquity of music and its implications for the experience of listening. The collection consists of nine essays divided into three sections: Histories, Technologies, and Spaces. The first section addresses the historical origins of functional music and the debates on how reproduced music, including a wide range of styles and genres, spread so quickly across so many environments. The second section focuses on more contemporary sound technologies, including mobile phones in India, the role of visible playback technology in film, and listening to portable digital players. The final section reflects on settings such as malls, stores, gyms, offices and cars in which ubiquitous musics are often present, but rarely thought about. This last section - and ultimately the whole collection - seeks to foster a wider understanding of listening practices by lending a fresh, critical ear.

Putting forward an extensive new argument for a humanities-based approach to big-data analysis, The Music in the Data shows how large datasets of music, or music corpora, can be productively integrated with the qualitative questions at the heart of music research. The author argues that as well as providing objective evidence, music corpora can themselves be treated as texts to be subjectively read and creatively interpreted, allowing new levels of understanding and insight into music traditions. Each chapter in this book asks how we define a core music-theory topic, such as style, harmony, meter, function, and musical key, and then approaches the topic through considering trends within large musical datasets, applying a combination of quantitative analysis and qualitative interpretation. Throughout, several basic techniques of data analysis are introduced and explained, with supporting materials available online. Connecting the empirical information from corpus analysis with theories of musical and textual meaning, and showing how each approach can enrich the other, this book provides a vital perspective for scholars and students in music theory, musicology, and all areas of music research.

The composer and pianist Michael Finnissy (b. 1946) is an unmistakeable presence in the British and international new music scene, both for his immeasurable generosity as prolific composer for many different types of musicians, major advocate for the works of others, and performer and conductor who has also been a driving force behind ensembles; he was also President of the International Society for Contemporary Music from 1990 to 1996. His vast and enormously varied output confounds those who seek easy categorisations: once associated strongly with the 'new complexity', Finnissy is equally known as composer regularly engaged with many different folk musics, for working with amateur and community musicians, for a long-term engagement with sacred music, or as an advocate of Anglo-American 'experimental' music. Twenty years ago, a large-scale volume entitled Uncommon Ground: The Music of Michael Finnissy gave the first major overview of the output of any 'complex' composer. This new volume brings a greater plurality of perspectives and critical sensibility to bear upon an output which is almost twice as large as it was when the earlier book was published. A range of leading contributors - musicologists, composers, performers and others - each grapple with particular questions relating to Finnissy's music, often in ways which raise questions relating more widely to new music, and provide theoretical foundations for further of study both of Finnissy and other composers.

Singer-Songwriters and Musical Open Mics is an ethnographic exploration of New York City's live music events where musicians signup and perform short sets. This sociological study dispels the common assumption that open mics are culturally monolithic and reserved for novice musicians. Open mics allow musicians at different locations within their musical development and career to interactively perform, practice, and network with other musicians. Important themes in the book include: the tension between self and society in the creative process, issues of creative authenticity and authorship, and on-going cultural changes central to the Do-It-Yourself cultural zeitgeist of the early 21st century. The open mic's cultural antecedents include a radio format, folk hootenannies, and the jazz jam session. Drawing from multiple qualitative methods, Aldredge describes how open mics have etched a vital organizational place in the western and urban musical landscape. Open mics represent a creative place where the boundaries of practicing and performing seemingly blur. This allows for a range of social settings from more competitive, stratified, and homogenous music scenes to culturally diverse weekly events often stretching late into the night.

This book studies the working efficacy of Leonard Cohen's song Hallelujah in the context of today's network culture. Especially as recorded on YouTube, k.d. lang's interpretation(s) of Cohen's Hallelujah, embody acoustically and visually/viscerally, what Nietzsche named the 'spirit of music'. Today, the working of music is magnified and transformed by recording dynamics and mediated via Facebook exchanges, blog postings and video sites. Given the sexual/religious core of Cohen's Hallelujah, this study poses a phenomenological reading of the objectification of both men and women, raising the question of desire, including gender issues and both homosexual and heterosexual desire. A review of critical thinking about musical performance as 'currency' and consumed commodity takes up Adorno's reading of Benjamin's analysis of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction as applied to music/radio/sound and the persistent role of 'recording consciousness'. Ultimately, the question of what Nietzsche called the becoming-human-of-dissonance is explored in terms of both ancient tragedy and Beethoven's striking deployment of dissonance as Nietzsche analyses both as playing with suffering, discontent, and pain itself, a playing for the sake not of language or sense but musically, as joy.