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Books > Music
Tonality and Transformation is a groundbreaking study in the
analysis of tonal music. Focusing on the listener's experience,
author Steven Rings employs transformational music theory to
illuminate diverse aspects of tonal hearing - from the infusion of
sounding pitches with familiar tonal qualities to sensations of
directedness and attraction. In the process, Rings introduces a
host of new analytical techniques for the study of the tonal
repertory, demonstrating their application in vivid interpretive
set pieces on music from Bach to Mahler. The analyses place the
book's novel techniques in dialogue with existing tonal
methodologies, such as Schenkerian theory, avoiding partisan debate
in favor of a methodologically careful, pluralistic approach. Rings
also engages neo-Riemannian theory-a popular branch of
transformational thought focused on chromatic harmony-reanimating
its basic operations with tonal dynamism and bringing them into
closer rapprochement with traditional tonal concepts. Written in a
direct and engaging style, with lively prose and plain-English
descriptions of all technical ideas, Tonality and Transformation
balances theoretical substance with accessibility: it will appeal
to both specialists and non-specialists. It is a particularly
attractive volume for those new to transformational theory: in
addition to its original theoretical content, the book offers an
excellent introduction to transformational thought, including a
chapter that outlines the theory's conceptual foundations and
formal apparatus, as well as a glossary of common technical terms.
A contribution to our understanding of tonal phenomenology and a
landmark in the analytical application of transformational
techniques, Tonality and Transformation is an indispensible work of
music theory.
Contents are: Study Points for Volume 2 * Chorus from Judas
Maccabaeus (G.F. Handel) * Musette, Gavotte II or the Musette from
English Suite III in G Minor for Klavier, BWV 808 (J.S. Bach) *
Hunters' Chorus from 3rd Act of the opera Der Freischutz (C.M. von
Weber) * Long, Long Ago (T.H. Bayly) * Waltz, Op. 39, No. 15 for
Piano (J. Brahms) * BourrA(c)e from Sonata in F Major for Oboe, HHA
IV/18, No. 8 (G.F. Handel) * The Two Grenadiers, Die beiden
Grenadier, Op. 49, No. 1 for Voice and Piano (R. Schumann) * Theme
from Witches' Dance (N. Paganini) * Gavotte from Mignon (A. Thomas)
* Gavotte (J.B. Lully) * Minuet in G, Wo0 10, No. 2 (L. van
Beethoven) * Minuet from Sei Quintetti per Archi No. 11, Op. 11,
No. 5 in E Major (L. Boccherini).
Keith Jarrett ranks among the most accomplished and influential
pianists in jazz history. His TheKoln Concert stands among the most
important jazz recordings of the past four decades, not only
because of the music on the record, but also because of the
remarkable reception it has received from musicians and
lay-listeners alike. Since the album's 1975 release, it has sold
over three million copies: a remarkable achievement for any jazz
record, but an unprecedented feat for a two-disc set of solo piano
performances featuring no well-known songs.
In Keith Jarrett's The Koln Concert, author Peter Elsdon seeks to
uncover what it is about this recording, about Keith Jarrett's
performance, that elicits such success. Recognizing The Koln
Concert as a multi-faceted text, Elsdon engages with it musically,
culturally, aesthetically, and historically in order to understand
the concert and album as a means through which Jarrett articulated
his own cultural and musical outlook, and establish himself as a
serious artist. Through these explorations of the concert as text,
of the recording and of the live performance, Keith Jarrett's The
Koln Concert fills a major hole in jazz scholarship, and is
essential reading for jazz scholars and musicians alike, as well as
Keith Jarrett's many fans."
Gioachino Rossini was one of the most influential, as well as one
of the most industrious and emotionally complex of the great
nineteenth-century composers. Between 1810 and 1829, he wrote 39
operas, a body of work, comic and serious, which transformed
Italian opera and radically altered the course of opera in France.
His retirement from operatic composition in 1829, at the age of 37,
was widely assumed to be the act of a talented but lazy man. In
reality, political events and a series of debilitating illnesses
were the determining factors. After drafting the Stabat Mater in
1832, Rossini wrote no music of consequence for the best part of
twenty-five years, before the clouds lifted and he began composing
again in Paris in the late 1850s. During this glorious Indian
summer of his career, he wrote 150 songs and solo piano pieces his
'Sins of Old Age' and his final masterpiece, the Petite Messe
solennelle. The image of Rossini as a gifted but feckless
amateur-the witty, high-spirited bon vivant who dashed off The
Barber of Seville in a mere thirteen days-persisted down the years,
until the centenary of his death in 1968 inaugurated a process of
re-evaluation by scholars, performers, and writers. The original
1985 edition of Richard Osborne's pioneering and widely acclaimed
Rossini redefined the life and provided detailed analyses of the
complete Rossini oeuvre. Twenty years on, all Rossini's operas have
been staged and recorded, a Critical Edition of his works is well
advanced, and a scholarly edition of his correspondence, including
250 previously unknown letters from Rossini to his parents, is in
progress. Drawing on these past two decades of scholarship and
performance, this new edition of Rossini provides the most detailed
portrait we have yet had of one of the worlds best-loved and most
enigmatic composers.
In Spirit Song: Afro-Brazilian Religious Music and Boundaries,
ethnomusicologist Marc Gidal explains how and why a multi-faith
community in southern Brazil uses music to combine and segregate
three Afro-Brazilian religions: Umbanda, Quimbanda, and Batuque.
Spirit Song will be the first book in any language about the music
of Umbanda and its close relative Quimbanda-twentieth-century
fusions of European Spiritism, Afro-Brazilian religion, and Folk
Catholicism-as well as the first publication in English about the
music of the African-derived Batuque religion and "Afro-gaucho"
identity, a local term that celebrates the contributions of African
descendants to the cowboy culture of southernmost Brazil. Combining
ethnomusicology and symbolic boundary studies, Gidal advances a
theory of musical boundary-work: the use of music to reinforce,
bridge, or blur boundaries, whether for personal, social,
spiritual, or political purposes. The Afro-gaucho religious
community uses music and rituals to varisuly promote innovation and
egalitarianism in Umbanda and Quimbanda, whereas it reinforces
musical preservation and hierarchies in Batuque. Religious and
musical leaders carefully restrict the cosmologies, ceremonial
sequences, and sung prayers of one religion from affecting the
others so as to safeguard Batuque's African heritage. Members of
disenfranchised populations have also used the religions as
vehicles for empowerment, whether based on race-ethnicity, gender,
or religious belief; and innovations in ritual music reflect this
activism. Gidal explains these points by describing and
interpreting spirit-mediumship rituals and their musical
accompaniment, drawing on the perspectives of participants, with
video and audio examples available on the book's companion website.
The first book in English to explore music in Afro-Brazilian
religions, Spirit Song is a landmark study that will be of interest
to ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and religious studies
scholars.
Over the last century, developments in electronic music and art
have enabled new possibilities for creating audio and audio-visual
artworks. With this new potential has come the possibility for
representing subjective internal conscious states, such as the
experience of hallucinations, using digital technology. Combined
with immersive technologies such as virtual reality goggles and
high-quality loudspeakers, the potential for accurate simulations
of conscious encounters such as Altered States of Consciousness
(ASCs) is rapidly advancing. In Inner Sound, author Jonathan Weinel
traverses the creative influence of ASCs, from Amazonian chicha
festivals to the synaesthetic assaults of neon raves; and from an
immersive outdoor electroacoustic performance on an Athenian
hilltop to a mushroom trip on a tropical island in virtual reality.
Beginning with a discussion of consciousness, the book explores how
our subjective realities may change during states of dream,
psychedelic experience, meditation, and trance. Taking a broad view
across a wide range of genres, Inner Sound draws connections
between shamanic art and music, and the modern technoshamanism of
psychedelic rock, electronic dance music, and electroacoustic
music. Going beyond the sonic into the visual, the book also
examines the role of altered states in film, visual music, VJ
performances, interactive video games, and virtual reality
applications. Through the analysis of these examples, Weinel
uncovers common mechanisms, and ultimately proposes a conceptual
model for Altered States of Consciousness Simulations (ASCSs). This
theoretical model describes how sound can be used to simulate
various subjective states of consciousness from a first-person
perspective, in an interactive context. Throughout the book, the
ethical issues regarding altered states of consciousness in
electronic music and audio-visual media are also examined,
ultimately allowing the reader not only to consider the design of
ASCSs, but also the implications of their use for digital society.
Modern Moves traces the movement of American social dance styles
between black and white cultural groups and between immigrant and
migrant communities during the early twentieth century. Its central
focus is New York City, where the confluence of two key demographic
streams - an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe and the
growth of the city's African American community particularly as it
centered Harlem - created the conditions of possibility for hybrid
dance forms like blues, ragtime, ballroom, and jazz dancing. Author
Danielle Robinson illustrates how each of these forms came about as
the result of the co-mingling of dance traditions from different
cultural and racial backgrounds in the same urban social spaces.
The results of these cross-cultural collisions in New York City, as
she argues, were far greater than passing dance trends; they in
fact laid the foundation for the twentieth century's social dancing
practices throughout the United States. By looking at dance as
social practice across conventional genre and race lines, this book
demonstrates that modern social dancing, like Western modernity
itself, was dependent on the cultural production and labor of
African diasporic peoples - even as they were excluded from its
rewards. A cornerstone in Robinson's argument is the changing role
of the dance instructor, which was transformed from the proprietor
of a small-scale, local dance school at the end of the nineteenth
century to a member of a distinct, self-identified social industry
at the beginning of the twentieth. Whereas dance studies has been
slow to connect early twentieth century dancing with period racial
politics, Modern Moves departs radically from prior scholarship on
the topic, and in so doing, revises social and African American
dance history of this period. Recognizing the rac(ial)ist
beginnings of contemporary American social dancing, it offers a
window into the ways that dancing throughout the twentieth century
has provided a key means through which diverse groups of people
have navigated shifting socio-political relations through their
bodily movement. Modern Moves asserts that the social practice of
modern dancing, with its perceived black origins, empowered
displaced people such as migrants and immigrants to grapple with
the effects of industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of
North American modernity. Far more than simple appropriation, the
selling and practicing of "black" dances during the 1910s and 1920s
reinforced whiteness as the ideal racial status in America through
embodied and rhetorical engagements with period black stereotypes.
Music in the California missions was a pluralistic combination of
voices and instruments, of liturgy and spectacle, of styles and
functions-and even of cultures-in a new blend that was non-existent
before the Franciscan friars made their way to California beginning
in 1769. This book explores the exquisite sacred music that
flourished on the West Coast of America when it was under Spanish
and Mexican rule; it delves into the historical, cultural,
biographical, and stylistic aspects of California mission music
during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book
explores how mellifluous plainchant, reverent hymns, spunky
folkloric ditties, "classical" music in the style of Haydn, and
even Native American drumming were interwoven into a tapestry of
resonant beauty. Aspects of music terminology, performance
practice, notation, theory, sacred song, hymns, the sequence, the
mass, and pageantry are addressed. Russell draws upon hundreds of
primary documents in California, Mexico, Madrid, Barcelona, London,
and Mallorca, and it is through the melding together of this
information from geographically separated places that he brings the
mystery of California's mission music into sharper focus. In
addition to extensive musical analysis, the book also examines such
things as cultural context, style, scribal attribution,
instructions to musicians, government questionnaires, invoices, the
liturgy, architectural space where performances took place,
spectacle, musical instruments, instrument construction, shipping
records, travelers' accounts, letters, diaries, passenger lists,
baptismal and burial records, and other primary source material.
Within this book one finds considerablebiographical information
about Junipero Serra, Juan Bautista Sancho, Narciso Duran,
Florencio Ibanez, Pedro Cabot, Martin de Cruzelaegui, Ignacio de
Jerusalem, and Francisco Javier Garcia Fajer. Furthermore, it
contains five far-reaching appendices: a Catalogue of Mission
Sources; Photos of Missions and Mission Manuscripts (with over 150
color facsimiles); Translations of Primary Texts; Music Editions
(that are performance-ready); and an extensive Bibliography.
In this groundbreaking study, D. R. M. Irving reconnects the
Philippines to current musicological discourse on the early modern
Hispanic world. For some two and a half centuries, the Philippine
Islands were firmly interlinked to Latin America and Spain through
transoceanic relationships of politics, religion, trade, and
culture. The city of Manila, founded in 1571, represented a vital
intercultural nexus and a significant conduit for the regional
diffusion of Western music. Within its ethnically diverse society,
imported and local musics played a crucial role in the
establishment of ecclesiastical hierarchies in the Philippines and
in propelling the work of Roman Catholic missionaries in
neighboring territories. Manila's religious institutions resounded
with sumptuous vocal and instrumental performances, while an annual
calendar of festivities brought together many musical traditions of
the indigenous and immigrant populations in complex forms of
artistic interaction and opposition.
Multiple styles and genres coexisted according to strict
regulations enforced by state and ecclesiastical authorities, and
Irving uses the metaphors of European counterpoint and enharmony to
critique musical practices within the colonial milieu. He argues
that the introduction and institutionalization of counterpoint
acted as a powerful agent of colonialism throughout the Philippine
Archipelago, and that contrapuntal structures were reflected in the
social and cultural reorganization of Filipino communities under
Spanish rule. He also contends that the active appropriation of
music and dance by the indigenous population constituted a
significant contribution to the process of hispanization. Sustained
"enharmonic engagement" between Filipinos and Spaniards led to the
synthesis of hybrid, syncretic genres and the emergence of
performance styles that could contest and subvert hegemony.
Throwing new light on a virtually unknown area of music history,
this book contributes to current understanding of the globalization
of music, and repositions the Philippines at the frontiers of
research into early modern intercultural exchange.
In Strategies for Success in Musical Theatre, veteran musical
director and teacher Herbert Marshall provides an essential how-to
guide for teachers or community members who find themselves in
charge of music directing a show. Stepping off the podium, Marshall
offers practical and often humorous real-world advice on managing
auditions; organizing rehearsals; working with a choir,
choreographer, and leads; how to run a sitzprobe, a technical
rehearsal, and a dress rehearsal; how to manage the cast and crew
energy for a successful opening night; and ways to end the
experience on a high note for all involved. Throughout the book,
Marshall emphasizes the importance of learning through performance
and the beauty of a group united in a common goal. In doing so, he
turns what can appear as a never-ending list of tasks and demand
for specialized knowledge into a manageable, educational, and
ultimately engaging and fun experience for all. Because the
techniques in Marshall's book have been thoroughly workshopped and
classroom tested, they are based in proven pedagogy and will be of
particular use for the music director in acting as a teaching
director: someone imparting theatrical knowledge to his or her cast
and production staff. Marshall provides both extended and
abbreviated timelines, flexible to fit any director's needs.
Marshall's book is a greatly beneficial resource for music
education students and teachers alike, giving an insightful glimpse
into the range of possibilities within a music educator's career.
Musicians and actors with varying levels of skill and experience
will be able to grow simultaneously through Marshall's innovative
teaching plans. Through collaborative techniques, steps in the book
serve to educate both director and student. Thoroughly illustrated
with charts, diagrams, and scores, Strategies for Success in
Musical Theatre is an ideal companion for all who work with school
and community based musical theater productions.
Democracy of Sound is the first book to examine music piracy in the
United States from the dawn of sound recording to the rise of
Napster and online file-sharing. It asks why Americans stopped
thinking of copyright as a monopoly-a kind of necessary evil-and
came to see intellectual property as sacrosanct and necessary for
the prosperity of an "information economy." Recordings only became
eligible for federal copyright in 1972, following years of struggle
between pirates, musicians, songwriters, broadcasters, and record
companies over the right to own sound. Beginning in the 1890s, the
book follows the competing visions of Americans who proposed ways
to keep obscure and noncommercial music in circulation, preserve
out-of-print recordings from extinction, or simply make records
more freely and cheaply available. Genteel jazz collectors swapped
and copied rare records in the 1930s; radicals pitched piracy as a
mortal threat to capitalism in the 1960s, while hip-hop DJs from
the 1970s onwards reused and transformed sounds to create a freer
and less regulated market for mixtapes. Each challenged the idea
that sound could be owned by anyone. The conflict led to the
contemporary stalemate between those who believe that "information
wants to be free" and those who insist that economic prosperity
depends on protecting intellectual property. The saga of piracy
also shows how the dubbers, bootleggers, and tape traders forged
new social networks that ultimately gave rise to the social media
of the twenty first century. Democracy of Sound is a colorful story
of people making law, resisting law, and imagining how law might
shape the future of music, from the Victrola and pianola to iTunes
and BitTorrent.
In this book author Cathy Benedict challenges and reframes
traditional ways of addressing many of the topics we have come to
think of as social justice. Offering practical suggestions for
helping both teachers and students think philosophically (and thus
critically) about the world around them, each chapter engages with
important themes through music making and learning as it presents
scenarios, examples of dialogue with students, unit ideas and
lesson plans geared toward elementary students (ages 6-14).
Taken-for-granted subjects often considered beyond the
understanding of elementary students such as friendship, racism,
poverty, religion, and class are addressed and interrogated in such
a way that honours the voice and critical thinking of the
elementary student. Suggestions are given that help both teachers
and students to pause, reflect and redirect dialogue with questions
that uncover bias, misinformation and misunderstandings that too
often stand in the way of coming to know and embracing difference.
Guiding questions, which anchor many curricular mandates, are used
throughout in order to scaffold critical and reflective thinking
beginning in the earliest grades of elementary music education.
Where does social justice reside? Whose voice is being heard and
whose is being silenced? How do we come to think of and construct
poverty? How is it that musics become used the way they are used?
What happens to songs initially intended for socially driven
purposes when their significance is undermined? These questions and
more are explored encouraging music teachers to embrace a path
toward socially just engagements at the elementary and middle
school levels.
The thirty-two Piano Sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven form one of
the most important segments of piano literature. In this
accessible, compact, and comprehensive guidebook, renowned
performer and pedagogue Stewart Gordon presents the pianist with
historical insights and practical instructional tools for
interpreting the pieces. In the opening chapters of Beethoven's 32
Piano Sonatas, Gordon illuminates the essential historical context
behind common performance problems, discussing Beethoven's own
pianos and how they relate to compositional style and demands in
the pieces, and addressing textual issues, performance practices,
and nuances of the composer's manuscript inscriptions. In outlining
patterns of structure, sonority, keyboard technique, and emotional
meaning evident across Beethoven's compositional development,
Gordon provides important background and technical information key
to understanding his works in context. Part II of the book presents
each sonata in an outline-chart format, giving the student and
teacher ready access to essential information, interpretive
choices, and technical challenges in the individual works, measure
by measure, all in one handy reference source. In consideration of
the broad diversity of today's Beethoven interpreters, Gordon
avoids one-size-fits-all solutions or giving undue weight to his
own tastes and preferences. Instead, he puts the choices in the
hands of the performers, enabling them to create their own personal
relationship with the music and a more powerful performance.
Kenneth Hamilton's book engagingly and lucidly dissects the
oft-invoked myth of a Great Tradition, or Golden Age of Pianism. It
is written both for players and for members of their audiences by a
pianist who believes that scholarship and readability can go
hand-in-hand. Hamilton discusses in meticulous yet lively detail
the performance-style of great pianists from Liszt to Paderewski,
and delves into the far-from-inevitable development of the piano
recital. He entertainingly recounts how classical concerts evolved
from exuberant, sometimes riotous events into the formal, funereal
trotting out of predictable pieces they can be today, how an often
unhistorical "respect for the score" began to replace pianists'
improvisations and adaptations, and how the clinical custom arose
that an audience should be seen and not heard. Pianists will find
food for thought here on their repertoire and the traditions of its
performance. Hamilton chronicles why pianists of the past did not
always begin a piece with the first note of the score, nor end with
the last. He emphasizes that anxiety over wrong notes is a
relatively recent psychosis, and playing entirely from memory a
relatively recent requirement. Audiences will encounter a vivid
account of how drastically different are the recitals they attend
compared to concerts of the past, and how their own role has
diminished from noisily active participants in the concert
experience to passive recipients of artistic benediction from the
stage. They will discover when cowed listeners eventually stopped
applauding between movements, and why they stopped talking loudly
during them. The book's broad message proclaims that there is
nothing divinely ordained about our own concert-practices,
programming and piano-performance styles. Many aspects of the
modern approach are unhistorical-some laudable, some merely
ludicrous. They are also far removed from those fondly, if
deceptively, remembered as constituting a Golden Age.
An insightful examination of the impact of the Civil Rights
Movement and African Independence on jazz in the 1950s and 60s,
Freedom Sounds traces the complex relationships among music,
politics, aesthetics, and activism through the lens of the hot
button racial and economic issues of the time. Ingrid Monson
illustrates how the contentious and soul-searching debates in the
Civil Rights, African Independence, and Black Power movements
shaped aesthetic debates and exerted a moral pressure on musicians
to take action. Throughout, her arguments show how jazz musicians'
quest for self-determination as artists and human beings also led
to fascinating and far reaching musical explorations and a lasting
ethos of social critique and transcendence.
Across a broad body of issues of cultural and political relevance,
Freedom Sounds considers the discursive, structural, and practical
aspects of life in the jazz world in the 1950s and 1960s. In
domestic politics, Monson explores the desegregation of the
American Federation of Musicians, the politics of playing to
segregated performance venues in the 1950s, the participation of
jazz musicians in benefit concerts, and strategies of economic
empowerment. Issues of transatlantic importance such as the effects
of anti-colonialism and African nationalism on the politics and
aesthetics of the music are also examined, from Paul Robeson's
interest in Africa, to the State Department jazz tours, to the
interaction of jazz musicians such Art Blakey and Randy Weston with
African and African diasporic aesthetics.
Monson deftly explores musicians' aesthetic agency in synthesizing
influential forms of musical expression from a multiplicity of
stylistic andcultural influences--African American music, popular
song, classical music, African diasporic aesthetics, and other
world musics--through examples from cool jazz, hard bop, modal
jazz, and the avant-garde. By considering the differences between
aesthetic and socio-economic mobility, she presents a fresh
interpretation of debates over cultural ownership, racism, reverse
racism, and authenticity.
Freedom Sounds will be avidly read by students and academics in
musicology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, popular music, African
American Studies, and African diasporic studies, as well as fans of
jazz, hip hop, and African American music.
Heinrich Schutz (1585-1672) was the most important and influential
German composer of the seventeenth century. Director of music at
the electoral Saxon court in Dresden, he was lauded by his German
contemporaries as "the father of our modern music," as "the Orpheus
of our time." Yet despite the esteem in which his music is still
held today, Schutz himself and the rich cultural environment in
which he lived continue to be little known or understood beyond the
linguistic borders of his native Germany.
Drawing on original manuscript and print sources, A Heinrich Schutz
Reader brings the composer to life through more than 150 documents
by or about Heinrich Schutz, from his earliest studies under
Giovanni Gabrieli to accounts of his final hours. Editor and
translator Gregory S. Johnston penetrates the archaic script,
confronts the haphazard orthography and obsolete vocabulary, and
untangles the knotted grammatical constructions and syntax to
produce translations that allow English speakers, as never before,
to engage the composer directly.
Most of the German, Latin and Italian documents included in this
volume appear for the first time in English translation. A number
of these texts have not even been printed in their original
language. Dedications and prefaces of his printed music, letters
and memoranda, poetry and petitions, travel passes and contracts,
all offer immediate and unabridged access to the composer's life.
To habituate the reader ever more in Schutz's world, the entries
are richly annotated with biographical detail; clarifications of
professional relationships and ancestral lines; information on
geographic regions, domains, cities, courts and institutions; and
references to biblical, classical and contemporary literary
sources.
Johnston opens a door for researchers and scholars across a broad
range of disciplines, and at the same time provides an historical
complement and literary companion for anyone who has come to
appreciate the beauty of Schutz's music."
Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality argues that the
modern cultural practices of hearing and testing have emerged from
a long interrelationship. Since the early nineteenth century,
auditory test tools (whether organ pipes or electronic tone
generators) and the results of hearing tests have fed back into
instrument calibration, human training, architecture, and the
creation of new musical sounds. Hearing tests received a further
boost around 1900 as a result of injury compensation laws and state
and professional demands for aptitude testing in schools,
conservatories, the military, and other fields. Applied at large
scale, tests of seemingly small measure-of auditory acuity, of
hearing range-helped redefine the modern concept of hearing as
such. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the
epistemic function of hearing expanded. Hearing took on the dual
role of test object and test instrument; in the latter case, human
hearing became a gauge by which to evaluate or regulate materials,
nonhuman organisms, equipment, and technological systems. This book
considers both the testing of hearing and testing with hearing to
explore the co-creation of modern epistemic and auditory cultures.
The book's twelve contributors trace the design of ever more
specific tests for the arts, education and communication, colonial
and military applications, sociopolitical and industrial endeavors.
Together, they demonstrate that testing as such became an enduring
and wide-ranging cultural technique in the modern period, one that
is situated between histories of scientific experimentation and
many fields of application.
In the early seventeenth century, enthusiasm for the violin swept
across Europe-this was an instrument capable of bewitching
virtuosity, with the power to express emotions in a way only before
achieved with the human voice. With this new guide to the Baroque
violin, and its close cousin, the Baroque viola, distinguished
performer and pedagogue Walter Reiter puts this power into the
hands of today's players. Through fifty lessons based on the
Reiter's own highly-renowned course at The Royal Conservatory of
the Hague, The Baroque Violin & Viola, Volume II provides a
comprehensive exploration of the period's rich and varied
repertoire. The lessons in Volume II cover the early
seventeenth-century Italian sonata, music of the French Baroque,
the Galant style, and the sonatas of composers like Schmelzer,
Biber, and Bach. Practical exercises are integrated into each
lesson, and accompanied by rich video demonstrations on the book's
companion website. Brought to life by Reiter's deep insight into
key repertoire based on a lifetime of playing and teaching, The
Baroque Violin & Viola, Volume II: A Fifty-Lesson Course will
enhance performances of professional and amateur musicians alike.
Black Sabbath is currently on The End Tour," which they have
proclaimed as their final concert tour . Iron Man chronicles the
story of both pioneering guitarist Tony Iommi and legendary band
Black Sabbath, dubbed The Beatles of heavy metal" by Rolling Stone
. Iron Man reveals the man behind the icon yet still captures
Iommi's humour, intelligence, and warmth. He speaks honestly and
unflinchingly about his rough-and-tumble childhood, the accident
that almost ended his career, his failed marriages, personal
tragedies, battles with addiction, band mates, famous friends,
newfound daughter, and the ups and downs of his life as an artist.
Everything associated with hard rock happened to Black Sabbath
first: the drugs, the debauchery, the drinking, the dungeons, the
pressure, the pain, the conquests, the company men, the contracts,
the combustible drummer, the critics, the comebacks, the singers,
the Stonehenge set, the music, the money, the madness, the metal.
Music- and style-centred youth cultures are now a familiar aspect
of everyday life in countries as far apart around the globe as
Nepal and Jamaica, Hong Kong and Israel, Denmark and Australia.
This lucid and original text provides a lively and wide-ranging
account of the relationship between popular music and youth culture
within the context of debates about the spatial dimensions of
identity. It begins with a clear and comprehensive survey, and
critical evaluation, of the existing body of literature on youth
culture and popular music developed by sociologists and cultural
and media theorists. It then develops a fresh perspective on the
ways in which popular music is appropriated as a cultural resource
by young people, using as a springboard a series of original
ethnographic studies of dance music, rap, bhangra and rock.
Bennett's original research material is carefully contextualised
within a wider international literature on youth styles, local
spaces and popular music but it serves to illustrate graphically
how styles of music and their attendant stylistic innovations are
appropriated and `lived out' by young people in particular social
spaces. Music, Bennett argues, is produced and consumed by young
people in ways that both inform their sense of self and also serve
to construct the social world in which their identities operate.
With its comprehensive coverage of youth and music studies and its
important new insights, Popular Music and Youth Culture is
essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students in
sociology, cultural studies, media studies and popular music
studies. Dr ANDY BENNETT is lecturer in Sociology at the University
of Kent at Canterbury. He has published articles on aspects of
youth culture, popular music, local identity and music and
ethnicity in a number of journals, including Sociological Review,
Media Culture and Society and Popular Music. He is currently
co-editing a book on guitar cultures.
Although La Monte Young is one of the most important composers of
the late twentieth century, he is also one of the most elusive.
Generally recognized as the patriarch of the minimalist
movement-Brian Eno once called him "the daddy of us all"-he
nonetheless remains an enigma within the music world. Early in his
career Young eschewed almost completely the conventional musical
institutions of publishers, record labels, and venues, in order to
create compositions completely unfettered by commercial concerns.
At the same time, however, he exercised profound influence on such
varied figures as Terry Riley, Cornelius Cardew, Andy Warhol, Yoko
Ono, David Lang, Velvet Underground, and entire branches of
electronica and drone music. For half a century he and his partner
and collaborator, Marian Zazeela, have worked in near-seclusion in
their Tribeca loft, creating works that explore the furthest
extremes of conceptual audacity, technical sophistication,
acoustical complexity, and overt spirituality. Because Young gives
interviews only rarely, and almost never grants access to his
extensive archives, his importance as a composer has heretofore not
been matched by a commensurate amount of scholarly scrutiny. Draw A
Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte
Young stands as the first monograph to examine Young's life and
work in detail. The book is a culmination of a decade of research,
during which the author gained rare access to the composer and his
archives. Though loosely structured upon the chronology of the
composer's career, the book takes a multi-disciplinary approach
that combines biography, musicology, ethnomusicology, and music
analysis, and illuminates such seemingly disparate aspects of
Young's work as integral serialism and indeterminacy, Mormon
esoterica and Vedic mysticism, and psychedelia and psychoacoustics.
The book is a long-awaited, in-depth look at one of America's most
fascinating musical figures.
On New Year's Day 1953, Hank Williams-numbed by a deadly
combination of whiskey and narcotics-died in the back seat of his
Cadillac en route to a performance in Canton, Ohio. He was only
twenty nine years old at the time of his death and his passing
appeared to bring his rags-to-riches success and destructive
lifestyle to an abrupt end. Few figures before or since have cast
as long or as broad a shadow over American popular music. Today,
Hank Williams is considered by many to be the greatest singer and
songwriter in the history of country music, and it is the
combination of his remarkable musical achievements, his tumultuous
personal life, and his tragic and still-mysterious demise that make
him such a compelling historical figure. As volume demonstrates,
Williams's death was the beginning of an equally gripping second
act: for more than sixty years, an ever-lengthening parade of
journalists, family and friends, musical contemporaries,
biographers, historians and scholars, fans, and novelists have
attempted to capture in words the man, the artist, and the legend.
The Hank Williams Reader, the first book of its kind devoted to
this giant of American music, collects more than sixty of the most
compelling, insightful, and historically significant of these
writings. The selections cover a broad assortment of themes and
perspectives, ranging from heartfelt reminiscences and shocking
tabloid exposes to thoughtful meditations and critical essays.
Featured authors include Hank Williams, Jr., Bob Dylan, Steve
Earle, David Halberstam, Greil Marcus, Rick Bragg, and Lee Smith,
to name but a few. The Hank Williams Reader also features a lengthy
interpretive introduction and the most extensive bibliography of
Williams-related writings ever published. Over time, writers have
sought to explain Williams in a variety of ways, and in tracing
these shifting interpretations, this anthology chronicles his
cultural transfiguration from star-crossed hillbilly singer to
enduring American icon.
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