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Books > Music > Other types of music > Sacred & religious music
Fiddled out of Reason is a study of several poems spanning the life
and career of Joseph Addison, who, along with John Dryden,
Alexander Pope, Ambrose Philips, Isaac Watts, and many British
poets of the turn of the eighteenth century, helped to cultivate a
broad new current of nonliturgical "hymnic" verse that became
immensely popular across that century, though it has eluded
critical notice until now. The texts the book examines-Addison's
St. Cecilia's Day odes (1692, 1699), his libretto for the opera
Rosamond (1707), and a sequence of five hymnic works in The
Spectator (1712)-precede by twenty-five years John Wesley's
publication of the first hymnal for use in the Church of England.
The book argues that "secular" hymnic works such as Addison's
emerged alongside religio-political controversies and anxieties
about British national identity, morality, and expressions of
"enthusiastic" passions. Church and Tory interests largely rejected
hymnic verse, claiming it would only "fiddle" unwitting readers
"out of their reason" and reignite the dangerous fervor of
Revolution-era Nonconformity and Dissent. As is evident from his
poetry, Addison, a moderate Whig, ardently opposed this view,
arguing that the hymnic could in fact be a portal to national and
individual amelioration. After an introductory chapter exploring
period conceptions of hymnic poetry and the highly contested term
"hymn" itself, the argument proceeds through three sections to
trace the hymnic's upward trajectory through Addison's early,
mid-period, and mature verse. The book devotes the lion's share of
its attention to the last of these three, which includes the
five-poem Spectator sequence (a poem from the sequence, "The
Spacious Firmament on High," will be familiar to many readers).
Indeed, in addition to offering new readings of hymnic works by
Dryden and Pope, Fiddled out of Reason provides the first extended
critical treatment of these five important poems. Publication of
the book coincides with the 300th anniversary of Addison's death
and with the appearance of a new Oxford edition of Addison's
nonperiodical writings.
Christ Church cathedral is an Anglican cathedral in a catholic
country. Musical and archival sources (the most extensive for any
Irish cathedral) provide a unique perspective on the history of
music in Ireland. Christ Church has had a complex and varied
history as the cathedral church of Dublin, one of two Anglican
cathedrals in the capital of a predominantly Catholic country and
the church of the British administration in Ireland before1922. An
Irish cathedral within the English tradition, yet through much of
its history it was essentially an English cathedral in a foreign
land. With close musical links to cathedrals in England, to St
Patrick's cathedral in Dublin, and to the city's wider political
and cultural life, Christ Church has the longest documented music
history of any Irish institution, providing a unique perspective on
the history of music in Ireland. Barra Boydell, a leading authority
on Irish music history, has written a detailed study drawing on the
most extensive musical and archival sources existing for any Irish
cathedral. The choir, its composers and musicians, repertoire and
organs are discussed within the wider context of city and state,
and of the religious and political dynamics which have shaped
Anglo-Irish relationships since medieval times. More than just a
history of music at one cathedral, this book makesan important
contribution to English cathedral music studies as well as to Irish
musical and cultural history. BARRA BOYDELL is Senior Lecturer in
Music, National University of Ireland, Maynooth.
Between the first and last words of a black gospel song, musical
sound acquires spiritual power. During this unfolding, a variety of
techniques facilitate musical and physical transformation. The most
important of these is a repetitive musical cycle known by names
including the run, the drive, the special, and the vamp. Through
its combination of reiteration and intensification, the vamp turns
song lyrics into something more potent. While many musical
traditions use vamps to fill space, or occupy time in preparation
for another, more important event, in gospel, vamps are the main
event. Why is the vamp so central to the black gospel tradition?
What work-musical, cultural, and spiritual-does the gospel vamp do?
And what does the vamp reveal about the transformative power of
black gospel more broadly? This book explores the vamp's essential
place in black gospel song, arguing that these climactic musical
cycles turn worship services into transcendent events. A defining
feature of contemporary gospel, the vamp links individual
performances to their generic contexts. An exemplar of African
American musical practice, the vamp connects gospel songs to a
venerable lineage of black sacred expression. As it generates
emotive and physical intensity, the vamp helps believers access an
embodied experience of the invisible, moving between this world and
another in their musical practice of faith. The vamp, then, is a
musical, cultural, and religious interface, which gives vent to a
system of belief, performance, and reception that author Braxton D.
Shelley calls the Gospel Imagination. In the Gospel Imagination,
the vamp offers proof that musical sound can turn spiritual power
into a physical reality-a divine presence in human bodies.
The Ramayana, one of the two pre-eminent Hindu epics, has played a
foundational role in many aspects of India's arts and social norms.
For centuries, people learned this narrative by watching,
listening, and participating in enactments of it. Although the
Ramayana's first extant telling in Sanskrit dates back to ancient
times, the story has continued to be retold and rethought through
the centuries in many of India's regional languages, such as Hindi,
Tamil, and Bengali. The narrative has provided the basis for
enactments of its episodes in recitation, musical renditions,
dance, and avant-garde performances. This volume introduces
non-specialists to the Ramayana's major themes and complexities, as
well as to the highly nuanced terms in Indian languages used to
represent theater and performance. Two introductions orient readers
to the history of Ramayana texts by Tulsidas, Valmiki, Kamban,
Sankaradeva, and others, as well as to the dramaturgy and
aesthetics of their enactments. The contributed essays provide
context-specific analyses of diverse Ramayana performance
traditions and the narratives from which they draw. The essays are
clustered around the shared themes of the politics of caste and
gender; the representation of the anti-hero; contemporary
re-interpretations of traditional narratives; and the presence of
Ramayana discourse in daily life.
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