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Books > Music > Theory of music & musicology
Drawing on the analogy between musical meaning-making and human
subjectivity, this book develops the concept of the acoustic self,
exploring the ways in which musical characterization and structure
are related to issues of subject-representation in the modernist
English novel. The volume is framed around three musical topics-the
fugue, absolute music, and Gesamtkunstwerk-arguing that these three
modes of musicalization address modernist dilemmas around selfhood
and identity. Varga reflects on the manifestations of the acoustic
self in examples from the works of E.M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, and
Virginia Woolf, and such musicians as Bach, Beethoven, Handel, and
Wagner. An additional chapter on jazz and electronic music
supplements these inquiries, pursuing the acoustic self beyond
modernism and thereby inciting further discussion and theorization
of musical intermediality, as well as recent sonic practices.
Probing the analogies in the complex interrelationship between
music, representation, and language in fictional texts and the
nature of human subjectivity, this book will appeal to students and
scholars interested in the interface of language and music, in such
areas as intermediality, multimodality, literary studies, critical
theory, and modernist studies.
A major new study piecing together the intriguing but fragmentary
evidence surrounding the lives of minstrels to highlight how these
seemingly peripheral figures were keenly involved with all aspects
of late medieval communities. Minstrels were a common sight and
sound in the late Middle Ages. Aristocrats, knights and ladies
heard them on great occasions (such as Edward I's wedding feast for
his daughter Elizabeth in 1296) and in quieter moments in their
chambers; town-dwellers heard and saw them in civic processions
(when their sound drew attention to the spectacle); and even in the
countryside people heard them at weddings, church-ales and other
parish celebrations. But who were the minstrels, and what did they
do? How did they live, and how easily did they make a living? How
did they perform, and in what conditions? The evidence is
intriguing but fragmentary, including literary and iconographic
sources and, most importantly, the financial records of royal and
aristocratic households and of towns. These offer many insights,
although they are often hard to fit into any coherent picture of
the minstrels' lives and their place in society. It is easy to see
the minstrels as peripheral figures, entertainers who had no
central place in the medieval world. Yet they were full members of
it, interacting with the ordinary people around them, as well as
with the ruling classes: carrying letters and important verbal
messages, some lending huge sums of money to the king (to finance
Henry V's Agincourt campaign in 1415, for instance), some regular
and necessary civic servants, some committing crimes or suffering
the crimes of others. In this book Rastall and Taylor bring to bear
the available evidence to enlarge and enrich our view of the
minstrel in late medieval society.
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.
Music, Sexuality and the Enlightenment explains how Mozart's music
for Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and CosA fan tutte 'sounds'
the intentions of Da Ponte's characters and their relationships
with one another. Mozart, by way of the infinitely generative and
beautiful logic of the sonata principle, did not merely interpret
Da Ponte's characterizations but lent them temporal, musical forms.
Charles Ford's analytic interpretation of these musical forms
concerns processes and structures in detail and at medium- to
long-term levels. He addresses the music of a wide range of arias
and ensembles, and develops original ways to interpret the two
largely overlooked operatic genres of secco recitative and finales.
Moreover, Ford presents a new method by which to relate musical
details directly to philosophical concepts, and thereby, the music
of the operas to the inwardly contradictory thinking of the
European Enlightenment. This involves close readings of late
eighteenth-century understandings of 'man' and nature, self and
other, morality and transgression, and gendered identities and
sexuality, with particular reference to contemporary writers,
especially Goethe, Kant, Laclos, Rousseau, Sade, Schiller, Sterne
and Wollstonecraft. The concluding discussion of the implied
futures of the operas argues that their divided sexualities, which
are those of the Enlightenment as a whole, have come to form our
own unquestioned assumptions about gender differences and
sexuality. This, along with the elegant and eloquent precision of
Mozart's music, is why Figaro, Giovanni and CosA still maintain
their vital immediacy for audiences today.
- Includes a number of interviews with diverse practitioners,
offering extensive case studies - Supplemented by a website to be
hosted and developed by the author, including videos, practice
files and additional interviews - Acts as a supplementary text to
the bestselling 'Dance Music Manual', which does not include a
section on performance/performance tech
* Describes the creative energy of two highly respected 20th
century artists, Iannis Xenakis both as engineer and composer, and
Roger Reynolds, Pulitzer prize winning musician in 1989 * Will
appeal to the professional sector of musicians and architects, and
students in both of these disciplines * Connects the creative path
of architecture and music, i.e., Xenakis' treatment of "light" in
an architectural context parallels his use of varying textural
density in his music. * Analyzes chamber works Achorripsis,
Thallein, and his string quartet, Tetras, which pertain to the
interactive house design
This volume is a journey through musics that emerged at the turn of
the 20th Century and were neither exclusively tonal nor serial.
They fall between these labels as they are metatonal, being both
with and after tonality, in their reconstruction of external codes
and gestures of Common Practice music in new and idiosyncratic
ways. The composers and works considered are approached from
analytic, cultural, creative, and performance angles by
musicologists, performers and composers to enable a deeper reading
of these musics by scholars and students alike. Works include those
by Frank Bridge, Ferruccio Busoni, Mikalojus Konstantinas
Ciurlionis, Rebecca Clarke, John Foulds, Percy Grainger, Mary Howe,
Carl Nielsen, Franz Schreker, Erwin Schulhoff, Cyril Scott and
Alexander Scriabin. In the process of engaging with this book the
reader, will find an enrichment to their own understanding of music
at the turn of the 20th Century.
A curated collection of Enlightenment operas, paintings, and
literary works that were all marked by the "Telemacomania" scandal,
a furious cultural frenzy with dangerous political stakes.
Imaginatively structured as a guided tour, Opera and the Politics
of Tragedy captures the tumultuous impact of the so-called
Telemacomania crisis through its key artifacts: literary pamphlets,
spoken dramas, paintings, engravings, and opera librettos (drammi
per musica). Prominently featured in the gallery are two operas
with direct ties to this aesthetic and political war: Mozart and
Cigna-Santi's Mitridate (1770) and Mozart and Varesco's Idomeneo
(1781). Reading and listening across the Enlightenment's cultural
spaces (its new public museums, its first encyclopedias, and its
ever-controversial operatic theater), this book showcases the
Enlightenment's disorderly historical revisionism alongside its
progressive politics to expose the fertile creativity that can
emerge out of the ambiguous space between what is "ancient" and
what is "modern."
- Highly accessible and code-free introduction to game audio,
suitable for a wide range of undergraduate courses, such as music
production, sound design and composition - Accompanied by
eresources, including downloadable projects for each chapter - A
great addition to our growing catalogue of game audio titles
1. This study gives book readers a broader understanding of what
engagement with a literary text historically is, not just a private
reading experience, but a living, every changing communal oral
experience. 2. The book shifts the basic focus of epic studies from
the codified texts of standard Western epics to the living
tradition of generally unknown Mongol oral heroic epics and from
isolated textual analysis to investigations of the creative
interaction of singer and audience in a live performance. 3. It
provides literature students with reference material about modern
oral poetic research as focused on a work's content, narrative
scale, social dimensions, cultural significance, performance
strategies and modes of transmission. 4. It provides researchers of
oral poetry and communication with theoretical approaches and
practical guidelines for field and textual investigations based on
relationships between inherited text and performance, performer and
audience. 5. It provides seasoned epic scholars with first-hand
information on Mongol oral epic, especially on lengthy epics'
structures and incorporation of smaller poems, on singers'
innovative use of traditional material, and on the strengths and
weaknesses of Chinese oral epic research.
The Routledge Handbook of Music Signification captures the richness
and complexity of the field, presenting 30 essays by recognized
international experts that reflect current interdisciplinary and
cross-disciplinary approaches to the subject. Examinations of music
signification have been an essential component in thinking about
music for millennia, but it is only in the last few decades that
music signification has been established as an independent area of
study. During this time, the field has grown exponentially,
incorporating a vast array of methodologies that seek to ground how
music means and to explore what it may mean. Research in music
signification typically embraces concepts and practices imported
from semiotics, literary criticism, linguistics, the visual arts,
philosophy, sociology, history, and psychology, among others. By
bringing together such approaches in transparent groupings that
reflect the various contexts in which music is created and
experienced, and by encouraging critical dialogues, this volume
provides an authoritative survey of the discipline and a
significant advance in inquiries into music signification. This
book addresses a wide array of readers, from scholars who
specialize in this and related areas, to the general reader who is
curious to learn more about the ways in which music makes sense.
Beginning in the late 1970s as an offshoot of disco and punk,
dance-punk is difficult to define. Also sometimes referred to as
disco-punk and funk-punk, it skirts, overlaps, and blurs into other
genres including post-punk, post-disco, new wave, mutant disco, and
synthpop. This book explores the historical and cultural conditions
of the genre as it appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s and
then again in the early 2000s, and illuminates what is at stake in
delineating dance-punk as a genre. Looking at bands such as Gang of
Four, ESG, Public Image Ltd., LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture, and Le
Tigre, this book examines the tensions between and blurring of the
rhetoric and emotion in dance music and the cynical and ironic
intellectualizing associated with post-punk.
Designed to coordinate page-by-page with the Lesson Books. Contains
enjoyable games and quizzes that reinforce the principles presented
in the Lesson Books. Students can increase their musical
understanding while they are away from the keyboard.
Adventures of a Jazz Age Lawyer is the lively story of legal giant
Nathan Burkan, whose career encapsulated the coming of age of the
institutions, archetypes, and attitudes that define American
popular culture. With a client list that included Charlie Chaplin,
Al Jolson, Frank Costello, Victor Herbert, Mae West, Gloria Morgan
Vanderbilt, Arnold Rothstein, and Samuel Goldwyn, Burkan was "New
York's Spotlight Lawyer" for more than three decades. He was one of
the principal authors of the epochal Copyright Act of 1909 and the
guiding spirit behind the American Society of Composers, Authors,
and Publishers (Ascap), which provided the first practical means
for songwriters to collect royalties for public performances of
their works, revolutionizing the music business and the sound of
popular music. While the entertainment world adapted to the
disruptive technologies of recorded sound, motion pictures, and
broadcasting, Burkan's groundbreaking work laid the legal
foundation for the Great American Songbook and the Golden Age of
Hollywood, and it continues to influence popular culture today.
Gary A. Rosen tells stories of dramatic and uproarious courtroom
confrontations, scandalous escapades of the rich and famous, and
momentous clashes of powerful political, economic, and cultural
forces. Out of these conflicts, the United States emerged as the
world's leading exporter of creative energy. Adventures of a Jazz
Age Lawyer is an engaging look at the life of Nathan Burkan, a
captivating history of entertainment and intellectual property law
in the early twentieth century, and a rich source of new
discoveries for anyone interested in the spirit of the Jazz Age.
Music as a narrative drama is an intriguing idea, which has
captured explicit music theoretical attention since the nineteenth
century. Investigations into narrative characters or personae has
evolved into a sub-field-musical agency. In this book, Palfy
contends that music has the potential to engage us in social
processes and that those processes can be experienced as a social
interaction with a musical agent. She explores the overlap between
the psychological processes in which we participate in order to
understand and engage with people, and those we engage in when we
listen to music. Thinking of musical agency as a form of social
process is quite different from existing theoretical frameworks for
agency. It implies that we come to musical analysis by way of
intuition-that our ideas are already partially formed based on our
experience of the piece (and what it makes us feel or how it makes
us sense it as any other) when we choose to analyze and interpret
it. Palfy's focus on social processes is a very effective way to
pinpoint when and why it is that our attention is captured and
engaged by musical agents.
Discovering Music Theory is a suite of workbooks and corresponding
answer books that offers all-round preparation for the updated
ABRSM Music Theory exams from 2020, including the new online
papers. This full-colour workbook will equip students of all ages
with the skills, knowledge and understanding required for the ABRSM
Grade 4 Music Theory exam. Written to make theory engaging and
relevant to developing musicians of all ages, it offers: -
straightforward explanations of all new concepts - progressive
exercises to build skills and understanding, step by step -
challenge questions to extend learning and develop music-writing
skills - helpful tips for how to approach specific exercises -
ideas for linking theory to music listening, performing and
instrumental/singing lessons - clear signposting and progress
reviews throughout - a sample practice exam paper showing you what
to expect in the new style of exams from 2020 As well as fully
supporting the ABRSM theory syllabus, Discovering Music Theory
provides an excellent resource for anyone wishing to develop their
music literacy skills, including GCSE and A-Level candidates, and
adult learners.
A thorough examination of Shostakovich's string quartets is long
overdue. Although they can justifiably lay claim to being the most
significant and frequently performed twentieth-century oeuvre for
that ensemble, there has been no systematic English-language study
of the entire cycle. Judith Kuhn's book begins such a study,
undertaken with the belief that, despite a growing awareness of the
universality of Shostakovich's music, much remains to be learned
from the historical context and an examination of the music's
language. Much of the controversy about Shostakovich's music has
been related to questions of meaning. The conflicting
interpretations put forth by scholars during the musicological
'Shostakovich wars' have shown the impossibility of fixing a single
meaning in the composer's music. Commentators have often heard the
quartets as political in nature, although there have been
contradictory views as to whether Shostakovich was a loyal
communist or a dissident. The works are also often described as
vivid narratives, perhaps a confessional autobiography or a
chronicle of the composer's times. The cycle has also been heard to
examine major philosophical issues posed by the composer's life and
times, including war, death, love, the conflict of good and evil,
the nature of subjectivity, the power of creativity and the place
of the individual - and particularly the artist - in society.
Soviet commentaries on the quartets typically describe the works
through the lens of Socialist-Realist mythological master
narratives. Recent Western commentaries see Shostakovich's quartets
as expressions of broader twentieth-century subjectivity, filled
with ruptures and uncertainty. What musical features enable these
diverse interpretations? Kuhn examines each quartet in turn,
looking first at its historical and biographical context, with
special attention to the cultural questions being discussed at the
time of its writing. She then surveys the work's reception history,
and follows with a critical discussion of the quartet's
architectural and harmonic features. Using the new tools of Sonata
Theory, Kuhn provides a fresh analytical approach to Shostakovich's
music, giving valuable and detailed insights into the quartets,
showing how the composer's mastery of form has enabled these works
to be heard as active participants in the Soviet and Western
cultural discourses of their time, while remaining compelling and
relevant to twenty-first-century listeners.
Opera in Performance elucidates the performative dimension of
contemporary opera productions. What are the most striking and
decisive moments in a performance? Why do we respond so strongly to
stagings that transform familiar scenes, to performers' bodily
presence, and to virtuosic voices as well as ill-disposed ones?
Drawing on phenomenology and performance theory, Clemens Risi
explains how these moments arise out of a dialogue between
performers and the audience, representation and presence, the
familiar and the new. He then applies these insights in critical
descriptions of his own experiences of various singers, stagings,
and performances at opera houses and festivals from across the
German-speaking world over the last twenty years. As the first book
to focus on what happens in performance as such, this study shifts
our attention to moments that have eluded articulation and provides
tools for describing our own experiences when we go to the opera.
This book will particularly interest scholars and students in
theater and performance studies, musicology, and the humanities,
and may also appeal to operagoers and theater professionals.
Digital Scenography in Opera in the Twenty-First Century is the
first definitive study of the use of digital scenography in Western
opera production. The book begins by exploring digital
scenography's dramaturgical possibilities and establishes a
critical framework for identifying and comparing the use of digital
scenography across different digitally enhanced opera productions.
The book then investigates the impacts and potential disruptions of
digital scenography on opera's longstanding production conventions,
both on and off the stage. Drawing on interviews with major
industry practitioners, including Paul Barritt, Mark Grimmer,
Donald Holder, Elaine J. McCarthy, Luke Halls, Wendall K.
Harrington, Finn Ross, S. Katy Tucker, and Victoria 'Vita' Tzykun,
author Caitlin Vincent identifies key correlations between the use
of digital scenography in practice and subsequent impacts on
creative hierarchies, production design processes, and
organisational management. The book features detailed case studies
of digitally enhanced productions premiered by Dutch National
Opera, Komische Oper Berlin, Opera de Lyon, The Royal Opera, Covent
Garden, San Francisco Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Theatre Royal de la
Monnaie, The Metropolitan Opera, Victorian Opera, and Washington
National Opera.
Heitor Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras demonstrates how the
composer achieved his own Brazilian neoclassical style in a group
of works, nine suites in total, that is arguably one of the best
examples of homage to J.S. Bach's music in the twentieth century.
In this book, the corpus of Bachianas Brasileiras is contextualised
and critically examined according to its structure and intertextual
aspects, as well as its relationship to Bach's music, Brazilian
popular music, and other works by contemporaries of Villa Lobos. A
range of musical examples illustrate instances of the selected
topics in the works, encompassing urban Brazilian popular music
such as the choro, Brazilian northeast and afro rhythms, and
citation of folkloric melodies. Dudeque's comprehensive examination
of the Bachianas Brasileiras will be invaluable for scholars and
researchers of music theory and analysis.
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