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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music
For a brief time in a Europe threatened and then occupied by Nazi Germany, jazz was heard as ubiquitously as rock ' n' roll is today. In a personal search for the story of that time, Mike Zwerin spent two years traveling across Europe talking with individuals who performed and enjoyed jazz in Hitler's dark shadow, including the Ghetto Swingers, a Jewish jazz band that "toured" Auschwitz and Theresienstadt; the Luftwaffe pilot who listened to Glenn Miller while bombing London; Django Reinhardt, the brilliant guitarist who refused to flee Nazi-controlled France; and many others.
One of the most fascinating figures of seventeenth-century music, composer and singer Antonia Padoani Bembo (c.1640 - c.1720) was active in both Venice and Paris. Her work provides a unique cross-cultural window into the rich musical cultures of these cities, yet owing to her clandestine existence in France, for almost three centuries Bembo's life was shrouded in mystery. In this first-ever biography, Clare Fontijn unveils the enthralling and surprising story of a remarkable woman who moved in the musical, literary, and artistic circles of these European cultural centers. Rebuffed in the attempt to divorce her abusive husband, Bembo fled to Paris, leaving her children in Venice. Joining ranks with composers glorifying Louis XIV, her song charmed the Sun King and won over his court's sympathy to the cause of women. She obtained his sponsorship to live in a semi-cloistered community in Paris, where she wrote music for the spiritual and worldly needs of the royal family. Offering fine examples of sacred and secular vocal repertory for chamber settings and large ensembles, Bembo's oeuvre reveals her preoccupation with female agency through dynamic portrayals of such powerful figures as the Virgin Mary and the Duchess of Burgundy. The genres in which she worked-love song, opera, motet, cantata, trio sonata, and air-testify to the magic of her voice and to her place alongside Strozzi, Jacquet de La Guerre, and other major women composers of her time. Expertly engaging with musicology, history, and gender studies, Claire Fontijn tells the story of a brave and daring woman while providing a valuable key to a long-hidden treasure trove of music. A groundbreaking biography, Desperate Measures details the compelling life and music of a woman with courage, determination, and talent who thrived within the dictates of society and culture.
In The Score, The Orchestra, and the Conductor, internationally-renowned conducting instructor Gustav Meier presents his practical approach to preparing an orchestral score for rehearsal and performance. Well-illustrated with numerous music examples, charts, figures, and tables, Meier's methods, grounded in the rich body of his collected experience as a music director and teacher of conducting students, are explained in great detail. Meier covers all aspects of conducting from experimenting without the orchestra to creating signals that produce the desired sound. The methods he describes offer specific and readily applicable advice for virtually every musical and technical decision that occurs in the important phase between when a conductor first decides upon a specific score and the first rehearsal with an orchestra. And from ear training to working with musicians to programming, he also offers his expertise on the day-to-day aspects of conducting and musical performance. The Score, The Orchestra, and the Conductor will be an indispensable and often-read contribution to the library of every music director and conducting student.
Intimate, anecdotal, and spell-binding, Singing Out offers a fascinating oral history of the North American folk music revivals and folk music. Culled from more than 150 interviews recorded from 1976 to 2006, this captivating story spans seven decades and cuts across a wide swath of generations and perspectives, shedding light on the musical, political, and social aspects of this movement. The narrators highlight many of the major folk revival figures, including Pete Seeger, Bernice Reagon, Phil Ochs, Mary Travers, Don McLean, Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, Ry Cooder, and Holly Near. Together they tell the stories of such musical groups as the Composers' Collective, the Almanac Singers, People's Songs, the Weavers, the New Lost City Ramblers, and the Freedom Singers. Folklorists, musicians, musicologists, writers, activists, and aficionados reveal not only what happened during the folk revivals, but what it meant to those personally and passionately involved. For everyone who ever picked up a guitar, fiddle, or banjo, this will be a book to give and cherish. Extensive notes, bibliography, and discography, plus a photo section.
Music is one of the most distinctive cultural characteristics of
Latin American countries. But, while many people in the United
States and Europe are familiar with musical genres such as salsa,
merengue, and reggaeton, the musical manifestations that young
people listen to in most Latin American countries are much more
varied than these commercially successful ones that have entered
the American and European markets. Not only that, the young people
themselves often have little in common with the stereotypical image
of them that exists in the American imagination.
The vast majority of singers with a degree in performance are un- or under-employed in their field. Despite the fact that talented singers are discovered every day, there are far too few jobs in the field of classical music to accommodate all of them, a problem evidenced by regular reports of opera companies and symphony orchestras closing their doors. Young classical singers, particularly recent graduates of music programs, need not only artistic ability, but also intelligence and an acute business sense to navigate the world of professional singing. In The 21st-Century Singer: Bridging the Gap Between the University and the World, author Susan Mohini Kane has created a user-friendly guide for these recent graduates. Kane combines the benefits of an instructional manual with those of a self-reflective workbook to provide emerging classical singers with both practical and inspirational advice. She begins with a section on self-evaluation, allowing readers to define what motivates their desire to sing professionally and reflect on their passions, before moving on to career advice. In the sections that follow, Kane presents a variety of career paths, such as singing, teaching, and consulting-realistic alternatives to the rise to stardom as an "overnight sensation" that so few will experience-and provides the reader with the tools to develop a concrete plan for whichever path they decide to pursue. Other sections offer instruction on how to develop support systems, train oneself holistically, and take advantage of the newest technological resources available for professional self-promotion. With its dual emphasis on artistic motivation and modern-day business sense, The 21st-Century Singer will prove an essential text for anyone pursuing a professional singing career.
What was the role of mousike, the realm of the Muses, in Greek life? More wide-ranging in its implications than the English 'music', mousike lay at the heart of Greek culture, and was often indeed synonymous with culture. In its commonest form, it represented for the Greeks a seamless complex of music, poetic word, and physical movement, encompassing a vast array of performances - from small-scale entertainment in the private home to elaborate performances involving the entire community. Yet the history of the field, particularly in anglophone scholarship, has been hitherto narrowly conceived, and the broader cultural significance of mousike largely ignored. Focusing mainly on classical Athens these new and specially commissioned essays analyse the theory and practice of musical performance in a variety of social contexts and demonstrate the centrality of mousike to the values and ideology of the polis. The so-called 'new musical revolution' in late fifth-century Athens receives serious treatment in this volume for the first time. A major theme of the book is the musical and mousike dimension of Greek religion, rarely analysed in its own right. The ethical and philosophical aspects of Athenian mousike are another central concern, with the figure of the dancing philosopher as an emblem of music's role in intellectual life. The book as a whole provides an integrated cultural analysis of central aspects of Greek mousike, which will be of interest to classical scholars, to cultural historians, and to anyone concerned with understanding the power of music as a cultural phenomenon.
In the last decades of the 17th century, the feast of Christmas in Lutheran Germany underwent a major transformation when theologians and local governments waged an early modern "war on Christmas," discouraging riotous pageants and carnivalesque rituals in favor of more personal and internalized expressions of piety. Christmas rituals, such as the "Heilig Christ" plays and the rocking of the child (Kindelwiegen) were abolished, and Christian devotion focused increasingly on the metaphor of a birth of Christ in the human heart. John Sebastian Bach's Christmas Oratorio, composed in 1734, both reflects this new piety and conveys the composer's experience living through this tumult during his own childhood and early career. Markus Rathey's book is the first thorough study of this popular masterpiece in English. While giving a comprehensive overview of the Christmas Oratorio as a whole, the book focuses on two themes in particular: the cultural and theological understanding of Christmas in Bach's time and the compositional process that led Bach from the earliest concepts to the completed piece. The cultural and religious context of the oratorio provides the backdrop for Rathey's detailed analysis of the composition, in which he explores Bach's compositional practices, for example, his reuse and parodies of movements that had originally been composed for secular cantatas. The book analyzes Bach's original score and sheds new light on the way Bach wrote the piece, how he shaped musical themes, and how he revised his initial ideas into the final composition.
Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era chronicles the shifting relationships between ideas about time in music and science from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Centered on theories of musical meter, the book investigates the interdependence between theories of meter and conceptualizations of time from the age of Zarlino to the invention of the metronome. These formulations have evolved throughout the history of Western music, reflecting fundamental reevaluations not only of music but also of time itself. Drawing on paradigms from the history of science and technology and the history of philosophy, author Roger Mathew Grant illustrates ways in which theories of meter and time, informed by one another, have manifested themselves in the field of music. During the long eighteenth century, treatises on subjects such as aesthetics, music theory, mathematics, and natural philosophy began to reflect an understanding of time as an absolute quantity, independent of events. This gradual but conclusive change had a profound impact on the network of ideas connecting time, meter, character, and tempo. Investigating the impacts of this change, Grant explores the timekeeping techniques - musical and otherwise - that implemented this conceptual shift, both technologically and materially. Bringing together diverse strands of thought in a broader intellectual history of temporality, Grant's study fills an unexpected yet conspicuous gap in the history of music theory, and is essential reading for music theorists and composers as well as historical musicologists and practitioners of historically informed performance.
All normal human beings alive in the last fifty thousand years appear to have possessed, in Mark Turner's phrase, "irrepressibly artful minds." Cognitively modern minds produced a staggering list of behavioral singularities--science, religion, mathematics, language, advanced tool use, decorative dress, dance, culture, art--that seems to indicate a mysterious and unexplained discontinuity between us and all other living things. This brute fact gives rise to some tantalizing questions: How did the artful mind emerge? What are the basic mental operations that make art possible for us now, and how do they operate? These are the questions that occupy the distinguished contributors to this volume, which emerged from a year-long Getty-funded research project hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. These scholars bring to bear a range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives on the relationship between art (broadly conceived), the mind, and the brain. Together they hope to provide directions for a new field of research that can play a significant role in answering the great riddle of human singularity.
On January 16, 1938 Benny Goodman brought his swing orchestra to America's venerated home of European classical music, Carnegie Hall. The resulting concert - widely considered one of the most significant events in American music history - helped to usher jazz and swing music into the American cultural mainstream. This reputation has been perpetuated by Columbia Records' 1950 release of the concert on LP. Now, in Benny Goodman's Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert, jazz scholar and musician Catherine Tackley provides the first in depth, scholarly study of this seminal concert and recording. Combining rigorous documentary and archival research with close analysis of the recording, Tackley strips back the accumulated layers of interpretation and meaning to assess the performance in its original context, and explore what the material has come to represent in its recorded form. Taking a complete view of the concert, she examines the rich cultural setting in which it took place, and analyzes the compositions, arrangements and performances themselves, before discussing the immediate reception, and lasting legacy and impact of this storied event and album. As the definitive study of one of the most important recordings of the twentieth-century, Benny Goodman's Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert is a must-read for all serious jazz fans, musicians and scholars.
In Statistics in Music Education Research, author Joshua Russell explains the process of using a range of statistical analyses from inception to research design to data entry to final analysis using understandable descriptions and examples from extant music education research. He explores four main aspects of music education research: understanding logical concepts of statistical procedures and their outcomes; critiquing the use of different procedures in extant and developing research; applying the correct statistical model for not only any given dataset, but also the correct logic determining which model to employ; and reporting the results of a given statistical procedure clearly and in a way that provides adequate information for the reader to determine if the data analysis is accurate and interpretable. While it is written predominately for graduate students in music education courses, Statistics in Music Education Research will also help music education researchers and teachers of music educators gain a better understanding of how parametric statistics are employed and interpreted in music education.
Alfred's Basic Adult All-in-One Course is designed for use with an instructor for the beginning student looking for a truly complete piano course. It is a greatly expanded version of Alfred's Basic Adult Piano Course that will include lesson, theory, technic and additional repertoire in a convenient, "all-in-one" format. This comprehensive course adds such features as isometric hand exercises, finger strengthening drills, and written assignments that reinforce each lesson's concepts. There is a smooth, logical progression between each lesson, a thorough explanation of chord theory and playing styles, and outstanding extra songs, including folk, classical, and contemporary selections. At the completion of this course, the student will have learned to play some of the most popular music ever written and will have gained a good understanding of basic musical concepts and styles. The CD has accompaniments to support the student's playing of the exercises and songs found in the Level 1 book. Titles: Alouette * Alpine Melody * Amazing Grace * Au Claire de la Lune * Aunt Rhody * Auld Lang Syne * Aura Lee * The Bandleader * Beautiful Brown Eyes * Blow the Man Down * Blues for Wynton Marsalis * Brother John * Caf? Vienna * The Can-Can * Chasing the Blues Away * Chiapanecas * Cockles and Mussels * The Cuckoo * Day is Done * Dueling Harmonics * The Entertainer * A Friend Like You * Go Down, Moses * Good King Wenceslas * Good Morning to You * Good People * Got Those Blues * Greensleeves * Happy Birthday to You * Harmonica Rock * Harp Song * Here's a Happy Song * He's Got the Whole World in His Hands * I'm Gonna Lay My Burden Down * Jericho * Jingle Bells * Joy to the World * Kum-ba-yah * Largo (Dvorak) * Lavender's Blue * Lightly Row * Little Brown Jug * Liza Jane * London Bridge * Lone Star Waltz * Love Somebody * Lullaby * The Marine's Hymn * Mary Ann * Merrily We Roll Along * Mexican Hat Dance * Michael, Row the Boat Ashore * Money Can't Buy Everything * My Fifth * Ode
Today, Claude Debussy's position as a central figure in twentieth-century concert music is secure, and scholarship has long taken for granted the enduring musical and aesthetic contributions of his compositions. Yet this was not always the case. Unknown to many concert-goers and music scholars is the fact that for years after his death, Debussy's musical aesthetic was perceived as outmoded, decadent, and even harmful for French music. In Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation, Marianne Wheeldon examines the vicissitudes of the composer's posthumous reception in the 1920s and 30s, and analyzes the confluence of factors that helped to overturn the initial backlash against his music. Rather than viewing Debussy's artistic greatness as the cause of his enduring legacy, she considers it instead as an effect, tracing the manifold processes that shaped how his music was received and how its aesthetic worth was consolidated. Speaking to readers both within and beyond the domain of French music and culture, Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation enters into dialogue with research in the sociology of reputation and commemoration, examining the collective nature of the processes of artistic consecration. By analyzing the cultural forces that came to bear on the formation of Debussy's legacy, Wheeldon contributes to a greater understanding of the inter-war period-the cultural politics, debates, and issues that confronted musicians in 1920s and 30s Paris-and offers a musicological perspective on the subject of reputation building, to date underrepresented in recent writings on reputation and commemoration in the humanities. Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation is an important new study, groundbreaking in its methodology and in its approach to musical influence and cultural consecration.
While qualitative research has become increasingly popular in music education over the last decade, there is no source that explains the terms, approaches and issues associated with this method. In The Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research in American Music Education, editor Colleen Conway and the contributing music educators will provide that clarification, as well as models of qualitative studies within various music education disciplines. The handbook outlines the history of qualitative research in music education and explores the contemporary use of qualitative approaches in examining issues related to music teaching and learning. It includes 32 chapters and is divided into five parts. Part I defines qualitative research and examines historical, philosophical and ethical issues associated with its use in music education. Part II discusses ways of approaching qualitative research including: case study, ethnography, phenomenology, narrative inquiry, practitioner inquiry, and mixed methods. Ways of collecting and analyzing data are examined in the third part of the text (observations, interviews, document analysis, music as data and technology). Part IV examines various music teaching and learning contexts that have been studied using qualitative approaches including: early childhood, general, instrumental-band, instrumental-string, choral, preservice and inservice teacher education, adult and community settings, student with exceptionalities, underserved populations, and world music. The final section of the book tackles permission to conduct research, teacher qualitative research, publishing qualitative research and direction for the future. An ambitious and much-needed volume, this handbook will stand as a key resource for drawing meaning from the experiences of students and teachers in music classrooms and communities.
This book explores the way in which singing can foster experiences of belonging through ritual performance. Based on more than two decades of ethnographic, pedagogical and musical research, it is set against the backdrop of "the new Ireland" of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Charting Ireland's growing multiculturalism, changing patterns of migration, the diminished influence of Catholicism, and synergies between indigenous and global forms of cultural expression, it explores rights and rites of belonging in contemporary Ireland. Helen Phelan examines a range of religious, educational, civic and community-based rituals including religious rituals of new migrant communities in "borrowed" rituals spaces; baptismal rituals in the context of the Irish citizenship referendum; rituals that mythologize the core values of an educational institution; a ritual laboratory for students of singing; and community-based festivals and performances. Her investigation peels back the physiological, emotional and cultural layers of singing to illuminate how it functions as a potential agent of belonging. Each chapter engages theoretically with one of five core characteristic of singing (resonance, somatics, performance, temporality, and tacitness) in the context of particular performed rituals. Phelan offers a persuasive proposal for ritually-framed singing as a valuable and potent tool in the creation of inclusive, creative and integrated communities of belonging.
Olney Hymns in Three Books; Book I On Select Texts of Scripture; Book II On Occasional Subjects; Book III On the Rise, Progress, Changes, and Comforts of the Spiritual Life. Includes categories such as Sacramental Hymns, Prayer, Creation, Conflict, Comfort, Dedication and Surrender.
In Landscape of the Now, author Kent De Spain takes readers on a deep journey into the underlying processes and structures of postmodern movement improvisation. Based on a series of interviews with master teachers who have developed unique approaches that are taught around the world - Steve Paxton, Simone Forti, Lisa Nelson, Deborah Hay, Nancy Stark Smith, Barbara Dilley, Anna Halprin, and Ruth Zaporah - this book offers the rare opportunity to find some clarity in what is often a complex and confusing experience. After more than 20 years of research, De Spain has created an extensive list of questions that explore issues that arise for the improviser in practice and performance as well as resources that influence movements and choices. Answers to these questions are placed side by side to create dialog and depth of understanding, and to see the range of possible approaches experienced improvisers might explore. In its nineteen chapters, Landscape of the Now delves into issues like the influence of an audience on an improviser's choices or how performers "track" and use their experience of the moment. The book also looks at the role of cognitive skills, memory, space, emotion, and the senses. One chapter offers a rare opportunity for an honest discussion of the role of various forms of spirituality in what is seen as a secular dance form. Whether read from cover to cover or pulled apart and explored a subject at a time, Landscape of the Now offers the reader a kind of map into the mysterious realm of human creativity, and the wisdom and experience of artists who have spent a lifetime exploring it.
More than any rock artist since The Beatles, Radiohead's music inhabits the sweet spot between two extremes: on the one hand, music that is wholly conventional and conforms to all expectations of established rock styles, and, on the other hand, music so radically experimental that it thwarts any learned notions. While averting mainstream trends but still achieving a significant level of success in both US and UK charts, Radiohead's music includes many surprises and subverted expectations, yet remains accessible within a framework of music traditions. In Everything in its Right Place: Analyzing Radiohead, Brad Osborn reveals the functioning of this reconciliation of extremes in various aspects of Radiohead's music, analyzing the unexpected shifts in song structure, the deformation of standard 4/4 backbeats, the digital manipulation of familiar rock 'n' roll instrumentation, and the expected resolutions of traditional cadence structures. Expanding on recent work in musical perception, focusing particularly on form, rhythm and meter, timbre, and harmony, Everything in its Right Place treats Radiohead's recordings as rich sonic ecosystems in which a listener participates in an individual search for meaning, bringing along expectations learned from popular music, classical music, or even Radiohead's own compositional idiolect. Radiohead's violations of these subjective expectation-realization chains prompt the listener to search more deeply for meaning within corresponding lyrics, biographical details of the band, or intertextual relationships with music, literature, or film. Synthesizing insights from a range of new methodologies in the theory of pop and rock, and specifically designed for integration into music theory courses for upper level undergraduates, Everything in its Right Place is sure to find wide readership among scholars and students, as well as avid listeners who seek a deeper understanding of Radiohead's distinctive juxtapositional style.
Ranging from the medieval period to the present day, this is a brief history of church music as it has developed through the English tradition. Described as "a quick journey", it provides a broad historical survey rather than an in-depth study of the subject, and also predicts likely future trends.
Electronic music evokes new sensations, feelings, and thoughts in both composers and listeners. Opening the door to an unlimited universe of sound, it engages spatialization as an integral aspect of composition and focuses on sound transformation as a core structural strategy. In this new domain, pitch occurs as a flowing and ephemeral substance that can be bent, modulated, or dissolved into noise. Similarly, time occurs not merely as a fixed duration subdivided by ratios, but as a plastic medium that can be generated, modulated, reversed, warped, scrambled, and granulated. Envelope and waveform undulations on all time scales interweave to generate form. The power of algorithmic methods amplify the capabilities of music technology. Taken together, these constitute game-changing possibilities. This convergence of technical and aesthetic trends prompts the need for a new text focused on the opportunities of a sound oriented, multiscale approach to composition of electronic music. Sound oriented means a practice that takes place in the presence of sound. Multiscale means an approach that takes into account the perceptual and physical reality of multiple, interacting time scales-each of which can be composed. After more than a century of research and development, now is an appropriate moment to step back and reevaluate all that has changed under the ground of artistic practice. Composing Electronic Music outlines a new theory of composition based on the toolkit of electronic music techniques. The theory consists of a framework of concepts and a vocabulary of terms describing musical materials, their transformation, and their organization. Central to this discourse is the notion of narrative structure in composition-how sounds are born, interact, transform, and die. It presents a guidebook: a tour of facts, history, commentary, opinions, and pointers to interesting ideas and new possibilities to consider and explore.
Tracing Tangueros offers an inside view of Argentine tango music in the context of the growth and development of the art form's instrumental and stylistic innovations. Rather than perpetuating the glamorous worldwide conceptions that often only reflect the tango that left Argentina nearly 100 years ago, authors Kacey Link and Kristin Wendland trace tango's historical and stylistic musical trajectory in Argentina, beginning with the guardia nueva's crystallization of the genre in the 1920s, moving through tango's Golden Age (1925-1955), and culminating with the "Music of Buenos Aires" today. Through the transmission, discussion, examination, and analysis of primary sources currently unavailable outside of Argentina, including scores, manuals of style, archival audio/video recordings, and live video footage of performances and demonstrations, Link and Wendland frame and define Argentine tango music as a distinct expression possessing its own musical legacy and characteristic musical elements. Beginning by establishing a broad framework of the tango art form, the book proceeds to move through twelve in-depth profiles of representative tangueros (tango musicians) within the genre's historical and stylistic trajectory. Through this focused examination of tangueros and their music, Link and Wendland show how the dynamic Argentine tango grows from one tanguero linked to another, and how the composition techniques and performance practices of each generation are informed by that of the past.
Novice music teachers and music education students struggle to form an identity that synthesizes 'musician' with 'music teacher,' and to separate themselves from their prior experiences to think critically about music-making and music instruction. Throughout this text, readers are encouraged to both reject and reflect upon their prior experience and are provided with new frameworks of understanding about both music-making and music instruction, as they form a new personal philosophy of musicianship and pedagogy. Ultimately, the purpose of this text is to provide foundational knowledge for subsequent learning as students become both musician and music pedagogue.
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