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Books > Music > Theory of music & musicology > General
The MENC Handbook of Research on Music Learning, Volume 1:
Strategies brings together the best and most current research on
methods for music learning, focusing squarely on the profession's
empirical and conceptual knowledge of how students gain competence
in music at various ages and in different contexts. The collection
of chapters, written by the foremost figures active in the field,
takes a broad theoretical perspective on current, critical areas of
research, including music development, music listening and reading,
motivation and self-regulated learning in music, music perception,
and movement. The book's companion volume, Applications, builds an
extensive and solid position of practice upon the frameworks and
research presented here.
From the Romantic era onwards, music has been seen as the most quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time. Through its play of themes and recurrence of events, music has the ability to stylise in multiple ways our temporal relation to the world, with far-reaching implications for modern conceptions of memory, subjectivity, personal and collective identity, and history. Time, as philosophers, scientists and writers have found throughout history, is notoriously hard to define. Yet music, seemingly bound up so intimately with the nature of time, might well be understood as disclosing aspects of human temporality unavailable to other modes of inquiry, and accordingly was frequently granted a privileged position in nineteenth-century thought. The Melody of Time examines the multiple ways in which music relates to, and may provide insight into, the problematics of human time. Each chapter explores a specific theme in the philosophy of time as expressed through music: the purported timelessness of Beethoven's late works or the nostalgic impulses of Schubert's music; the use of music by philosophers as a means to explicate the aporias of temporal existence or as a medium suggestive of the varying possible structures of time; and, a reflection of a particular culture's sense of historical progress or the expression of the intangible spirit behind the course of human history itself. Moving fluidly between cultural context and historical reception, competing philosophical theories of time and close reading of the repertoire, Benedict Taylor argues for the continued importance of engaging with music's temporality in understanding the significance of music within society and human experience. At once historical, analytical, critical, and ultimately hermeneutic, The Melody of Time provides both fresh insight into many familiar nineteenth-century pieces and a rich theoretical basis for future research.
With his extensive three-volume investigation, the author has newly drawn the image of Gustav Mahler for our time. Should Mahler's symphonies really be categorized as "absolute music"? - Little-known manuscript sources contain significant hints to the contrary: programmatic titles and catchwords or phrases, mottos, literary allusions, associations, sighs, exclamations. Mahler fully understood his symphonies as "erlebte Musik", music of experience, as autobiography in notes, and as expressions of his "weltanschauung". All the symphonies, including the purely instrumental ones, can be traced back to programs that Mahler originally made public, but suppressed later on. A knowledge of the programmatic ideas provides access to a hitherto barely sensed interior metaphysical world that is of crucial importance for an adequate interpretation of the works. This first volume uncovers the complexity of relations between Mahler's wide-ranging reading and education, his aesthetics and his symphonic creation. About the German edition of this book: "One of the most thoroughgoing and comprehensive investigations of Gustav Mahler's work and world to date." (Norddeutscher Rundfunk) "The way in which Mahler's literary background, his education, and his aesthetic and philosophical maxims are presented here indeed opens up a new approach." (Die Musikforschung)
The Culture of AIDS in Africa enters into the many worlds of
expression brought forth across this vast continent by the ravaging
presence of HIV/AIDS. Africans and non-Africans, physicians and
social scientists, journalists and documentarians share here a
common and essential interest in understanding creative expression
in crushing and uncertain times. They investigate and engage the
social networks, power relationships, and cultural structures that
enable the arts to convey messages of hope and healing, and of
knowledge and good counsel to the wider community. And from Africa
to the wider world, they bring intimate, inspiring portraits of the
performers, artists, communities, and organizations that have
shared with them their insights and the sense they have made of
their lives and actions from deep within this devastating epidemic.
This collection of original essays is in tribute to the work of Derek Scott on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. As one of the leading lights in Critical Musicology, Scott has helped shape the epistemological direction for music research since the late 1980s. There is no doubt that the path taken by the critical musicologist has been a tricky one, leading to new conceptions, interactions, and heated debates during the past two decades. Changes in musicology during the closing decades of the twentieth century prompted the establishment of new sets of theoretical methods that probed at the social and cultural relevance of music, as much as its self-referentiality. All the scholars contributing to this book have played a role in the general paradigmatic shift that ensued in the wake of Kerman's call for change in the 1980s. Setting out to address a range of approaches to theorizing music and promulgating modes of analysis across a wide range of repertories, the essays in this collection can be read as a coming of age of critical musicology through its active dialogue with other disciplines such as sociology, feminism, ethnomusicology, history, anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, aesthetics, media studies, film music studies, and gender studies. The volume provides music researchers and graduate students with an up-to-date authoritative reference to all matters dealing with the state of critical musicology today.
Artistic Practice as Research in Music: Theory, Criticism, Practice brings together internationally renowned scholars and practitioners to explore the cultural, institutional, theoretical, methodological, epistemological, ethical and practical aspects and implications of the rapidly evolving area of artistic research in music. Through various theoretical positions and case studies, and by establishing robust connections between theoretical debates and concrete examples of artistic research projects, the authors discuss the conditions under which artistic practice becomes a research activity; how practice-led research is understood in conservatoire settings; issues of assessment in relation to musical performance as research; methodological possibilities open to music practitioners entering academic environments as researchers; the role of technology in processes of musical composition as research; the role and value of performerly knowledge in music-analytical enquiry; issues in relation to live performance as a research method; artistic collaboration and improvisation as research tools; interdisciplinary concerns of the artist-researcher; and the relationship between the affordances of a musical instrument and artistic research in musical performance. Readers will come away from the book with fresh insights about the theoretical, critical and practical work being done by experts in this exciting new field of enquiry.
The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches widens the scope of analytical approaches for popular music by incorporating methods developed for analyzing contemporary art music. This study endeavors to create a new analytical paradigm for examining popular music from the perspective of developments in contemporary art music. "Expanded approaches" for popular music analysis is broadly defined as as exploring the pitch-class structures, form, timbre, rhythm, or aesthetics of various forms of popular music in a conceptual space not limited to the domain of common practice tonality but broadened to include any applicable compositional, analytical, or theoretical concept that illuminates the music. The essays in this collection investigate a variety of analytical, theoretical, historical, and aesthetic commonalities popular music shares with 20th and 21st century art music. From rock and pop to hip hop and rap, dance and electronica, from the 1930s to present day, this companion explores these connections in five parts: Establishing and Expanding Analytical Frameworks Technology and Timbre Rhythm, Pitch, and Harmony Form and Structure Critical Frameworks: Analytical, Formal, Structural, and Political With contributions by established scholars and promising emerging scholars in music theory and historical musicology from North America, Europe, and Australia, The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches offers nuanced and detailed perspectives that address the relationships between concert and popular music.
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 frenchpianomusic.com 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.
Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image examines the
choreographic in cinema - the way choreographic elements inform
cinematic operations in dancefilm. It traces the history of the
form from some of its earliest manifestations in the silent film
era, through the historic avant-garde, musicals and music videos to
contemporary experimental short dancefilms. In so doing it also
examines some of the most significant collaborations between
dancers, choreographers, and filmmakers.
Covers the entire mixing process – from fundamental concepts to advanced techniques Features new sections on console emulation, the loudness war, LUFS targets, and DIY mastering, as well as updated figures and illustrations throughout Offers a robust companion website featuring over 2,000 audio samples as well as Pro Tools/ Multitrack Audio Sessions
Today, no matter where you are in the world, you can turn on a radio and hear the echoes and influences of Chicago house music. Do You Remember House? tells a comprehensive story of the emergence, and contemporary memorialization of house in Chicago, tracing the development of Chicago house music culture from its beginnings in the late '70s to the present. Based on expansive research in archives and his extensive conversations with the makers of house in Chicago's parks, clubs, museums, and dance studios, author Micah Salkind argues that the remediation and adaptation of house music by crossover communities in its first decade shaped the ways that Chicago producers, DJs, dancers, and promoters today re-remember and mobilize the genre as an archive of collectivity and congregation. The book's engagement with musical, kinesthetic, and visual aspects of house music culture builds from a tradition of queer of color critique. As such, Do You Remember House? considers house music's liberatory potential in terms of its genre-defiant repertoire in motion. Ultimately, the book argues that even as house music culture has been appropriated and exploited, the music's porosity and flexibility have allowed it to remain what pioneering Chicago DJ Craig Cannon calls a 'musical Stonewall' for queers and people of color in the Windy City and around the world.
There is growing recognition and understanding of music's fundamentally spatial natures, with significances of space found both in the immediacy of musical practices and in connection to broader identities and ideas around music. Whereas previous publications have looked at connections between music and space through singular lenses (such as how they are linked to ethnic identities or how musical images of a city are constructed), this book sets out to explore intersections between multiple scales and kinds of musical spaces. It complements the investigation of broader power structures and place-based identities by a detailed focus on the moments of music-making and musical environments, revealing the mutual shaping of these levels. The book overcomes a Eurocentric focus on a typically narrow range of musics (especially European and North American classical and popular forms) with case studies on a diverse set of genres and global contexts, inspiring a range of ethnographic, text-based, historical, and practice-based approaches.
Grime music has been central to British youth culture since the beginning of the 21st century. Performed by MCs and DJs, it is an Afrodiasporic form that developed on street corners, on pirate radio and at raves. Level Up: Live Performance and Creative Process in Grime Music offers the first long-form ethnographic study of grime practice; it questions how and why artists do what they do; and it asks what this can tell us about creative process and improvisation more widely. Based on research conducted from 2015 to 2020 in London's grime scene-facilitated by the author's long-standing role as a DJ and broadcaster-this book explores the form's emergence before taking a magnifying glass to the contemporary scene and its performance protocol, exploring the practice of key artists and their crews living and working in the city. The resultant model of creative interaction provides a comprehensive mapping of collective social learning in London's informal cityscape, offering new ways to conceptualise improvisatory practice within ensembles.
This textbook is a product of William Bennett's work in developing and teaching a course on the physics of music at Yale University to a diverse audience of musicians and science students in the same class. The book is a culmination of over a decade of teaching the course and weaves together historical descriptions of the physical phenomena with the author's clear interpretations of the most important aspects of the science of music and musical instruments. Many of the historical examples are not found in any other textbook available on the market. As the co-inventor of the Helium-Neon laser, Prof. Bennett's knowledge of physics was world-class. As a professor at one of the most prestigious liberal-arts universities in the world, his appreciation for culture and humanities shines through. The book covers the basics of oscillations, waves and the analysis techniques necessary for understanding how musical instruments work. All types of stringed instruments, pipe organs, and the human voice are covered in this volume. A second volume covers the remaining families of musical instruments as well as selected other topics. Readers without a background in acoustics will enjoy learning the physics of the Science of Musical Sound from a preeminent scientist of the 20th century. Those well versed in acoustics will discover wonderful illustrations and photographs depicting familiar concepts in new and enlightening ways.
Electro swing is a relatively recent musical style and scene which combines the music of the swing era with that of the age of electronic dance music. Chris Inglis considers key questions about electro swing’s place in contemporary society, including what it may mean for a contemporary genre to be so reliant upon the influences of the past; the different ways in which jazz may be presented to a modern audience; how one may go about defining jazz in today's postmodern world; and how this emergent genre may be analysed in terms of the wider issues of race and class consumption.
Reveals the brilliant musical and pedagogical thinking of the famed eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Neapolitan composer and teacher of royal students. Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816) was one of the most important composers of opera in the eighteenth century. His operas were performed throughout Europe, and his fame led to appointments as a maestro di cappella and composer at prominent European courts. This book is the first study to address his work as a teacher of composition and what we would today call music theory. The practice of partimento (figured or unfigured bass lines) was an integral part of the training of musicians at the renowned conservatories in eighteenth-century Naples. By employing these often-unprepossessing partimento bass lines, young musicians learned the techniques of variation, improvisation, and composition while seated at the harpsichord. Paisiello's Regole per bene accompagnare il Partimento (Rules for Harpsichordists; 1782) survives in both autograph and printed forms. It contains forty-six partimenti that have long been considered the core of his pedagogic oeuvre. However, two recently discovered manuscripts contain a further forty-one unknown partimenti, notated as two- and three-part disposizioni (realizations). The present study offers numerous insights gleaned from the surviving sources and bolsters our understanding of how to perform the music of Paisiello and his contemporaries: music that has often survived in an incomplete form. These findings are relevant not just for keyboard players but also for singers, instrumentalists, and anyone interested in the inner workings of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music.
Building on several decades of research, this book develops a comprehensive music theory designed to make sense of several essential components of tonality. The book contributes to a wealth of methodologies in music theory, making it of broad interest to music scholars and students. Each chapter concludes with additional practice activities, allowing for easy adaptation to various pedagogical purposes.
Unquestionably the founding work of minimalism in musical
composition, Terry Riley's In C (1964) challenges the standards of
imagination, intellect, and musical ingenuity to which "classical"
music is held. Only one page of score in length, it contains
neither specified instrumentation nor parts. Its fifty-three
motives are compact, presented without any counterpoint or evident
form. The composer gave only spare instructions and no tempo. And
he assigned the work a title that's laconic in the extreme. At the
same moment of its composition, Elliott Carter was working on his
Concerto for Piano, a work Stravinsky was to hail as a masterpiece.
Having almost completed Laborinthus II, Luciano Berio would soon
start the Sinfonia. Karlheinz Stockhausen had just finished
Momente. In context of these other works, and of the myriad of
compositional styles and trends which preceded them, In C stands
the whole idea of musical "progress" on its head.
In "This Is America": Race, Gender, and Politics in America's Musical Landscape, Katie Rios argues that prominent American artists and musicians build encoded gestures of resistance into their works and challenge the status quo. These artists offer both an interpretation and a critique of what "This Is America" means. Using Childish Gambino's video for "This Is America" as a starting point, Rios considers how elements including clothing, hairstyles, body movements, gaze, lighting effects, distortion, and word play symbolize American dissonance. From Laurie Anderson's presence in challenging authority and playing with traditional gender roles in her works, to the Black female feminism and social activism of Beyonce, Rhiannon Giddens, and Janelle Monae, to hip hop as resistance in the age of Trump, to sonic and visual variety in the musical Hamilton, the subjects are as powerful as they are topical. Rios explores the ways in which artists relate to and represent underrepresented groups, especially groups that are not traditionally perceived as having a majority voice. The encoded resistances recur across performances and video recordings so that they begin to become recognizable as repeated acts of resistance directed at injustices based on a number of categories, including race, gender, class, religion, and politics.
Far from its sites of origin in the Global North, metal music thrives in the hands of musicians, fans, and scholars throughout other geographies of the world. Metal in the Global South, the latter defined as a geographical and symbolic space marked by the colonial dynamics of modernity, shines through in Defiant Sounds: Heavy Metal Music in the Global South. The volume brings together authors working from and/or with the Global South to reflect on the roles of metal music throughout their respective regions. With contributions spanning Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Oceania, and Indigenous Nations, the essays position metal music at the epicenter of region-specific experiences of oppression marked by colonialism, ethnic extermination, political persecution, and war. More importantly, the authors stress how metal music is used throughout the Global South to face these oppressive experiences, foster hope, and promote an agenda that seeks to build a better world. It may be that metal's greatest contribution to human emancipation will be in the years to come, in places its originators never imagined. This volume offers evidence of that contribution already taking place in the geographical and symbolic space that we respectfully and emphatically call the Distorted South.
From stars like Britney Spears and Mariah Carey to classic icons like Yoko Ono, female musicians have long been the target of double standards and toxic labels in the media and pop culture: liar, crazy, snake, diva, slut, b*tch. These words can hurt all of us. The popular expression "sticks and stones" is wildly wrong. And the wounds are everywhere. Lily Hirsch confronts the full range of this sexist labeling as well as the repercussions, concentrating on the experiences of Yoko Ono, Courtney Love, Britney Spears, FKA twigs, Taylor Swift, Kesha, Mariah Carey, and Ariana Grande, among many others. While men can make outrageous backstage demands, women like Carey are punished as "divas." A sign of supposed genius for men, "crazy" is a word of condemnation for many women-with legal ramifications in Spears' case. Hirsch dives into the world of these women, looking at their personal lives, relationships and breakups, music, media coverage, public reception, as well as the origins of these toxic labels and how they have caused serious damage. With this focus, the book reveals the inner workings of misogyny and invites us to think about these remarkable women on their own terms-showing us how women have fought back too, sometimes reclaiming these words and their own story through music.
What happens in our unconscious minds when we listen to, produce or perform popular music? The Unconscious - a much misunderstood concept from philosophy and psychology - works through human subjects as we produce music and can be traced through the music we engage with. Through a new collaboration between music theorist and philosopher, Smith and Overy present the long history of the unconscious and its related concepts, working systematically through philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, psychoanalysts such as Freud and Lacan, to theorists such as Deleuze and Kristeva. The theories offered are vital to follow the psychological complexity of popular music, demonstrated through close readings of individual songs, albums, artists, genres, and popular music practices. Among countless artists, Listening to the Unconscious draws from Prince to Sufjan Stevens, from Robyn to Xiu Xiu, from Joanna Newsom to Arcade Fire, from PJ Harvey to LCD Sound System, each of whom offer exciting inroads into the fascinating worlds of our unconscious musical minds. And in return, theories of the unconscious can perhaps takes us deeper into the heart of popular music.
This volume examines the use of Black popular culture to engage, reflect, and parse social justice, arguing that Black popular culture is more than merely entertainment. Moving beyond a focus on identifying and categorizing cultural forms, the authors examine Black popular culture to understand how it engages social justice, with attention to anti-Black racism. Black Popular Culture and Social Justice takes a systematic look at the role of music, comic books, literature, film, television, and public art in shaping attitudes and fighting oppression. Examining the ways in which artists, scholars, and activists have engaged, discussed, promoted, or supported social justice - on issues of criminal justice reform, racism, sexism, LGBTQIA rights, voting rights, and human rights - the book offers unique insights into the use of Black popular culture as an agent for change. This timely and insightful book will be of interest to students and scholars of race and media, popular culture, gender studies, sociology, political science, and social justice. |
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