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Books > Music > Theory of music & musicology
This collection of essays offers a historical reappraisal of what musical modernism was, and what its potential for the present and future could be. It thus moves away from the binary oppositions that have beset twentieth-century music studies in the past, such as those between modernism and postmodernism, between conceptions of musical autonomy and of cultural contingency and between formalist-analytical and cultural-historical approaches. Focussing particularly on music from the 1970s to the 1990s, the volume assembles approaches from different perspectives to new music with a particular emphasis on a critical reassessment of the meaning and function of the legacy of musical modernism. The authors include scholars, musicologists and composers who combine culturally, socially, historically and aesthetically oriented approaches with analytical methods in imaginative ways.
This book comprises twelve articles which cover a range of topics from musical instrument acoustics to issues in psychoacoustics and sound perception as well as neuromusicology. In addition to experimental methods and data acquisition, modeling (such as FEM or wave field synthesis) and numerical simulation plays a central role in studies addressing sound production in musical instruments as well as interaction of radiated sound with the environment. Some of the studies have a focus on psychoacoustic aspects in regard to virtual pitch and timbre as well as apparent source width (for techniques such as stereo or ambisonics) in music production. Since musical acoustics imply subjects playing instruments or singing in order to produce sound according to musical structures, this area is also covered including a study that presents an artificial intelligent agent capable to interact with a real ('analog') player in musical genres such as traditional and free jazz.
The discovery and application of abstract musical properties has had a prominent role in compositional and theoretical literature during the past 40 years, and an accumulation of source material has been produced that makes a single cross-referenced source essential for standard working procedures. Abstract musical properties, most often associated with analytical or compositional systems, are presented here in an unbiased context that allows the reader freedom of association and interpretation. This type of reference is an important tool for anyone who uses set-class analysis in coursework, or independent thesis research. This book is intended to help verify musical intuition and has an immediate practical application for composers and theorists curious about intervallic properties and transformational potentials of any pitch-class set. It can provide supplemental material for coursework involving theory, analysis, and stylistic awareness of compositional or analytical styles, and also for learning and confirming economical presentations characteristic of recent music-theoretical literature. Organized in two parts, the first is a profile of all set-classes in charts allowing quick comparisons among them, including set-class reference tables, set-classes arranged by ascending interval-class vectors, and a summary of transformational invariances. The second part focuses on individual set-classes, listing its contents, subsets, and significant references to the collection in musical or theoretical literature. Internal segmentations of each set-class that are more structurally informative and memorizable than prime-forms are offered. Three appendices, an extensive bibliography, an index of selected analytical viewpoint and styles, and an index of terms are also included.
Beginning in the 1930s, men and a handful of women came from
India's many communities-Marathi, Parsi, Goan, North Indian, and
many others--to Mumbai to work in an industry that constituted in
the words of some, "the original fusion music." They worked as
composers, arrangers, assistants, and studio performers in one of
the most distinctive popular music and popular film cultures on the
planet. Today, the songs played by Mumbai's studio musicians are
known throughout India and the Indian diaspora under the popular
name "Bollywood," but the musicians themselves remain, in their own
words, "behind the curtain"--the anonymous and unseen performers of
one of the world's most celebrated popular music genres.
As the turbulent 60's began to fade into the calmer 70's, a coterie of young singers, songwriters, musicians, artists, and poets began to congregate, musically on the stage of The New Bijou Theater - the Springfield, Missouri nightclub that would become the loose-knit group's home. What started as an informal weekly gathering, quickly morphed into a formal band. Dubbed the Family Tree, they became a favorite of the local counter-culture, as well as a continuation of the tradition-rich, Springfield music scene - which, until recently, included the Ozark Jubilee (the nation's first televised country music show). Though unprofitable at the time, they stuck to their guns and their original songs. When a rough tape of an early Bijou gig caught the ear of music mogul, John Hammond, it culminated in a 26-song studio demo, which caught the ear of A&M executive, David Anderle. The group signed with the label, changed their name to its present moniker, and whisked off to London to record their debut album under the tutelage of Glyn Johns. The album contained "If You Want to Get to Heaven." Their subsequent album, recorded in rural Missouri, contained "Jackie Blue." Both songs remain staples on 'classic rock' radio. By the early 80's, the Ozark Mountain Daredevils found themselves right where the Family Tree had stood a decade before - in Springfield with no record deal. They did, though, find themselves with legions of loyal fans around the world. Amidst personnel changes, personal turmoils and a cornucopia of tales from the rock-n-roll highway, the next twenty years were spent 'on the road'. Though continuing to write, they could garner little interest among the rapidly modernizing music industry - a situation many long-haired, long-named hippie bands of the 70's find themselves in. Their music, though, lives in the hearts of their fans.
"Maybe you won't like steel band. It's possible. But it's been said that the Pied Piper had a steel band helping him on his famous visit to Hamelin." When the US Navy distributed this press release, anxieties and tensions of the impending Cold War felt palpable. As President Eisenhower cast his gaze towards Russia, the American people cast their ears to the Atlantic south, infatuated with the international currents of Caribbean music. Today, steelbands have become a global phenomenon; yet, in 1957 the exotic sound and the unique image of the US Navy Steel Band was one-of-a-kind. Could calypso doom rock `n' roll? Band founder Admiral Daniel V. Gallery thought so and envisioned his steelband knocking "rock 'n' roll and Elvis Presley into the ash can." From 1957 until their disbandment in 1999, the US Navy Steel Band performed over 20,000 concerts worldwide. In 1973, the band officially moved headquarters from Puerto Rico to New Orleans and found the city and annual Mardi Gras tradition an aptmusical and cultural fit. The band brought a significant piece of Caribbean artistic capital-calypso and steelband music-to the American mainstream. Its impact on the growth and development of steelpan music in America is enormous. Steelpan Ambassadors uncovers the lost history of the US Navy Steel Band and provides an in-depth study of its role in the development of the US military's public relations, its promotion of goodwill, its recruitment efforts after the Korean and VietnamWars, its musical and technological innovations, and its percussive propulsion of the American fascination with Latin and Caribbean music over the past century.
Mozart's emergence as a mature artist coincides with the rise to prominence of the piano, an instrument that came alive under his fingers and served as medium for many of his finest compositions. In Mozart's Piano Music, William Kinderman reconsiders common assumptions about Mozart's life and art while offering comprehensive and incisive commentary on the solo music and concertos. After placing Mozart's pianistic legacy in its larger biographical and cultural context, Kinderman addresses the lively gestural and structural aspects of Mozart's musical language and explores the nature of his creative process. Incorporating the most recent research throughout this encompassing study, Kinderman expertly surveys each of the major genres of the keyboard music, including the four-hand and two-piano works. Beyond examining issues such as Mozart's earliest childhood compositions, his musical rhetoric and expression, the social context of his Viennese concertos, and affinities between his piano works and operas, Kinderman's main emphasis falls on detailed discussion of selected individual compositions.
The Musicality of Narrative Film is the first book to examine in depth the film/music analogy. Using comparative analysis, Kulezic-Wilson explores film's musical potential, arguing that film's musicality can be achieved through various cinematic devices, with or without music.
In the 1940s and '50s, Richard Dyer-Bennet (1913-1991) was among the best known and most respected folk singers in America. Paul O. Jenkins tells, for the first time, the story of Dyer-Bennet, often referred to as the "Twentieth-Century Minstrel." Dyer-Bennet's approach to singing sounded almost foreign to many American listeners. The folk artist followed a musical tradition in danger of dying out. The Swede Sven Scholander was the last European proponent of minstrelsy and served as Dyer-Bennet's inspiration after the young singer traveled to Stockholm to meet him one year before Scholander's death. Dyer-Bennet's achievements were many. Nine years after his meeting with Scholander, he became the first solo performer of his kind to appear in Carnegie Hall. This book argues Dyer-Bennet helped pave the way for the folk boom of the mid-1950s and early 1960s, finding his influence in the work of Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and many others. It also posits strong evidence that Dyer-Bennet would certainly be much better known today had his career not been interrupted midstream by the anticommunist, Red-scare blacklist and its ban on his performances..
In 1947 the theologian and musicologist Friedrich Smend published a study which claimed that J. S. Bach regularly employed the natural-order number alphabet (A=1 to Z=24) in his works. Smend provided historical evidence and music examples to support his theory which demonstrated that by this means Bach incorporated significant words into his music, and provided himself with a symbolic compositional scheme. Since then many people have taken up Smend’s theory, interpreting numbers of bars and notes in Bach scores according to the natural-order alphabet. By presenting a thorough survey of different number alphabets and their uses in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany, Dr Tatlow investigates the plausibility of Smend’s claims. Her new evidence fundamentally challenges Smend’s conclusions and the book sounds a note of caution to all who continue to use his number-alphabet theory. Dr Tatlow’s painstaking research will fascinate all those with an interest in the music of J. S. Bach and German Baroque culture, and will be of particular importance for music historians and analysts.
This book bridges the existing gap between film sound and film music studies by bringing together scholars from both disciplines who challenge the constraints of their subject areas by thinking about integrated approaches to the soundtrack. As the boundaries between scoring and sound design in contemporary cinema have become increasingly blurred, both film music and film sound studies have responded by expanding their range of topics and the scope of their analysis beyond those traditionally addressed. The running theme of the book is the disintegration of boundaries, which permeates discussions about industry, labour, technology, aesthetics and audiovisual spectatorship. The collaborative nature of screen media is addressed not only in scholarly chapters but also through interviews with key practitioners that include sound recordists, sound designers, composers, orchestrators and music supervisors who honed their skills on films, TV programmes, video games, commercials and music videos.
Sounding Off brings together a selection of essays on philosophy of music written by Peter Kivy--the leading expert on the subject. The essays fall into four groups, corresponding to Kivy's major interests. Part I contains two essays on the nature of musical genius. In Part II, three essays take up the subject of authenticity in performance, and explore what Kivy terms "the authenticity of interpretation." Part III contains four essays concerning the much discussed issues of musical representation and musical meaning. Finally, Part IV consists of three essays on the "pure musical parameters": these are essays on "music alone" or "absolute music"--music as the pure, formal structure of (sometimes) expressive sound. Eight of the eleven essays presented here are previously unpublished, and the book includes two appendices which provide Kivy's responses to criticism.
Western opera is a globalized and globalizing phenomenon and affords us a unique opportunity for exploring the concept of "orientalism," the subject of literary scholar Edward Said's modern classic on the topic. Nicholas Tarling's Orientalism and the Operatic World places opera in the context of its steady globalization over the past two centuries. In this important survey, Tarling first considers how the Orient appears on the operatic stage in Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States before exploring individual operas according to the region of the "Orient" in which the work is set. Throughout, Tarling offers key insights into such notable operas as George Frideric Handel's Berenice, Giuseppe Verdi's Aida, Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly, Pietro Mascagni's Iris, and others. Orientalism and the Operatic World argues that any close study of the history of Western opera, in the end, fails to support the notion propounded by Said that Westerners inevitably stereotyped, dehumanized, and ultimately sought only to dominate the East through art. Instead, Tarling argues that opera is a humanizing art, one that emphasizes what humanity has in common by epic depictions of passion through the vehicle of song. Orientalism and the Operatic World is not merely for opera buffs or even first-time listeners. It should also interest historians of both the East and West, scholars of international relations, and cultural theorists.
James H. Donelan describes how two poets, a philosopher and a composer - Hoelderlin, Wordsworth, Hegel and Beethoven - developed an idea of self-consciousness based on music at the turn of the nineteenth century. This idea became an enduring cultural belief: the understanding of music as an ideal representation of the autonomous creative mind. Against a background of political and cultural upheaval, these four major figures - all born in 1770 - developed this idea in both metaphorical and actual musical structures, thereby establishing both the theory and the practice of asserting self-identity in music. Beethoven still carries the image of the heroic composer today; this book describes how it originated in both his music and in how others responded to him. Bringing together the fields of philosophy, musicology, and literary criticism, Donelan shows how this development emerged from the complex changes in European cultural life taking place between 1795 and 1831.
This book explains the state of the art in the use of the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of musical structures such as rhythms or scales. In particular the author explains the DFT of pitch-class distributions, homometry and the phase retrieval problem, nil Fourier coefficients and tilings, saliency, extrapolation to the continuous Fourier transform and continuous spaces, and the meaning of the phases of Fourier coefficients. This is the first textbook dedicated to this subject, and with supporting examples and exercises this is suitable for researchers and advanced undergraduate and graduate students of music, computer science and engineering. The author has made online supplementary material available, and the book is also suitable for practitioners who want to learn about techniques for understanding musical notions and who want to gain musical insights into mathematical problems.
This is a facsimile of the first edition, printed for the Author, in Edinburgh in 1721.
Sound is an integral part of contemporary art. Once understood to be a marginal practice, increasingly we encounter sound in art exhibitions through an array of sound making works in various art forms, at times played to very high audio levels. However, works of art are far from the only thing one might hear: music performances, floor talks, exhibition openings and the noisy background sounds that emanate from the gallery cafe fill contemporary exhibition environments. Far from being hallowed spaces of quiet reflection, what this means is that galleries have swiftly become very noisy places. As such, a straightforward consideration of artworks alone can then no longer account for our experiences of art galleries and museums. To date there has been minimal scholarship directed towards the intricacies of our experiences of sound that occur within the bounds of this purportedly 'visual' art space. Kelly addresses this gap in knowledge through the examination of historical and contemporary sound in gallery environments, broadening our understanding of artists who work with sound, the institutions that exhibit these works, and the audiences that visit them. Gallery Sound argues for the importance of all of the sounds to be heard within the walls of art spaces, and in doing so listens not only to the deliberate inclusion of sound within the art gallery in the form of artworks, performances, and music, but also to its incidental sounds, such as their ambient sounds and the noise generated by audiences. More than this, however, Gallery Sound turns its attention to the ways in which the acoustic characteristics specific to gallery spaces have been mined by artists for creative outputs, ushering in entirely new art forms.
Perfect Harmony and Melting Strains assembles interdisciplinary essays investigating concepts of harmony during a transitional period, in which the Pythagorean notion of a harmoniously ordered cosmos competed with and was transformed by new theories about sound - and new ways of conceptualizing the world. From the perspectives of philosophy, literary scholarship, and musicology, the contributions consider music's ambivalent position between mathematical abstraction and sensibility, between the metaphysics of harmony and the physics of sound. Essays examine the late medieval and early modern history of ideas concerning the nature of music and cosmic harmony, and trace their transformations in early modern musico-literary discourses. Within this framework, essays further offer original readings of important philosophical, literary, and musicological works. This interdisciplinary volume brings into focus the transformation of a predominant Renaissance worldview and of music's scientific, theological, literary, as well as cultural conceptions and functions in the early modern period, and will be of interest to scholars of the classics, philosophy, musicology, as well as literary and cultural studies.
This book examines the post-1960s era of popular music in the Anglo-Black Atlantic through the prism of historical theory and methods. By using a series of case studies, this book mobilizes historical theory and methods to underline different expressions of alternative music functioning within a mainstream musical industry. Each chapter highlights a particular theory or method while simultaneously weaving it through a genre of music expressing a notion of alternativity-an explicit positioning of one's expression outside and counter to the mainstream. Historical Theory and Methods through Popular Music seeks to fill a gap in current scholarship by offering a collection written specifically for the pedagogical and theoretical needs of those interested in the topic.
This book uncovers how music experience-live and recorded-is changing along with the use of digital technology in the 2000s. Focussing on the Nordic region, this volume utilizes the theory of mentalization: the capacity to perceive and interpret what others are thinking and feeling, and applies it to the analysis of mediated forms of agency in popular music. The rise of new media in music production has enabled sound recording and processing to occur more rapidly and in more places, including the live concert stage. Digital technology has also introduced new distribution and consumption technologies that allow record listening to be more closely linked to the live music experience. The use of digital technology has therefore facilitated an expanding range of activities and experiences with music. Here, Yngvar Kjus addresses a topic that has a truly global reach that is of interest to scholars of musicology, media studies and technology studies.
If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, you'd do best to hone your chops and avoid cliches (like the one that begins this sentence) by learning from the prime movers." How to Write About Music" offers a selection of the best writers on what is perhaps our most universally beloved art form. Selections from the critically-acclaimed 33 1/3 series appear alongside new interviews and insights from authors like Jonathan Lethem, Carl Wilson and Kim Cooper." How to Write About Music "includes primary sources of inspiration from a variety of go-to genres such as: the album review, the personal essay, the blog post and the interview along with tips, writing prompts, and advice from the writers themselves. An extensive further reader section accompanies each chapter for a complete picture of contemporary music writing.Music critics of the past and the present offer inspiration through their work on artists like Neutral Milk Hotel, J.Dilla, The Rolling Stones, Joy Division, Lana Del Rey, Nirvana, Nas, Radiohead and countless others." How to Write About Music" is an invaluable tool for anyone who has ever dreamed of getting their music writing published and a pleasure for anyone who loves to read about music.
Beyond its elucidation and critique of traditional 'notation-centric' musicology, this book's primary emphasis is on the negotiation and construction of meaning within the extended musical multimedia works of the classic British group Pink Floyd. Encompassing the concept albums that the group released from 1973 to 1983, during Roger Waters' final period with the band, chapters are devoted to Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977), The Wall (1979) and The Final Cut (1983), along with Waters' third solo album Amused to Death (1993). This book's analysis of album covers, lyrics, music and film makes use of techniques of literary and film criticism, while employing the combined lenses of musical hermeneutics and discourse analysis, so as to illustrate how sonic and musical information contribute to listeners' interpretations of the discerning messages of these monumental musical artifacts. Ultimately, it demonstrates how their words, sounds, and images work together in order to communicate one fundamental concern, which-to paraphrase the music journalist Karl Dallas-is to affirm human values against everything in life that should conspire against them. |
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