This book offers a series of essays that show the integrated role that musical structure (including harmony, melody, rhythm, meter, form, and musical association) plays in making sense of what transpires onstage in musicals. Written by a group of music analysts who care deeply about musical theater, this collection provides new understanding of how musicals are put together, how composers and lyricists structure words and music to complement one another, and how music helps us understand the human relationships and historical and social contexts. Using a wide range of musical examples, representing the history of musical theater from the 1920s to the present day, the book explores how music interacts with dramatic elements within individual shows and other pieces within and outside of the genre. These essays invite readers to consider issues that are fundamental both to our understanding of musical theater and to the multiple ways we engage with music.

Music theorists labelled the musical art of the 1330s and 1340s as 'new' and 'modern'. A close reading of writings on music theory and the polyphonic repertory from the first half of the fourteenth century reveals a modern musical art that arose due to specific innovations in music notation. The French ars nova employed as its theoretical fundament a new system for arranging musical time proposed by the astronomer and mathematician Jean des Murs. Challenging prevailing accounts of the ars nova, this book presents the 'new art' within the intellectual context of its time, revises the datings of Jean des Murs's writings on music theory, and presents the intersection of theory and practice for a crucial era in the history of music. Through contemporaneous accounts, Desmond explores how individuals were involved in 'changing' music in early fourteenth-century France, and the technical developments they pursued that precipitated this stylistic change.

"The Craft of Modal Counterpoint" is the companion book to Benjamin's "The Craft of Tonal Counterpoint," recently republished in a second edition by Routledge. Modal counterpoint is the style of composition that was employed until the "tonal" revolution pioneered by Bach; it is the basis for most Early Music.
Benjamin, a composer and pedagogue, offers a complete analysis of this important musical style. He begins by covering general aspects of the style, then covers in detail two, three, and four-part counterpoint. The Motet, an important form of vocal composition in this period, is studied separately. The book concludes with a brief anthology of key scores, 15 in all, for the student to study further. Also includes 132 musical examples.

This lively and lucid introduction to the philosophy of music concentrates on the issues that illuminate musical listening and practice. It examines the conceptual debates relevant to the understanding and performing of music and grounds the philosophy to practical matters throughout. Ideal for a beginning readership with little philosophical background, the author provides an overview of the central debates enlivened by a real sense of enthusiasm for the subject and why it matters. The book begins by filling in the historical background and offers readers a succinct summary of philosophical thinking on music from the Ancient Greeks to Eduard Hanslick and Edmund Gurney. Chapter 2 explores two central questions: what is it that makes music, or, to be precise, some pieces of music, works of art? And, what is the work of music per se? Is it just what we hear, the performance, or is it something over and above that, something we invent or discover? Chapter 3 discusses a problem pecullar to music and one at the heart of philosophical discussion of it, can music have a meaning? And if so, what can it be? Chapter 4 considers whether music can have value. Are there features about music that make it good, features which can be specified in criteria? Is a work good if and only if it meets with the approval of an ideally qualified listener? How do we explain differences of opinion? Indeed, why do we need to make judgements of the relative value of pieces of music at all? This engaging and stimulating book will be of interest to students of aesthetics, musical practitioners and the general reader looking for a non-technical treatment of the subject.

Philosophy of Music is for anyone who has ever wondered whether or not music means anything or why some music is thought to be more significant than other music. It is a lively and lucid introduction to the aesthetics of music and to the issues that illuminate musical listening, understanding and practice. The book assumes no philosophical training on the part of its readers, only an interest in music and our reactions to it. It provides an authoritative analysis of the central issues, enlivened with a real sense of enthusiasm for the subject and its importance. At the heart of the book lie three key questions: What is the work of music? Can it have meaning? Can music have value? R. A. Sharpe guides the reader through the philosophical arguments and conceptual debates surrounding these questions while anchoring the discussion throughout to instances and examples from Western classical music and jazz. Unlike some other accounts of the philosophy of music, which view music as a branch of metaphysics, raising questions about sounds, tones and musical movement, Sharpe's approach is problem-orientated and the questions he raises are predominantly questions about the value of music, about the individuality of our assessments and about the way in which we prize music for its power to move us. He argues persuasively, and controversially for a philosopher, that when it comes to music philosophical analysis has its limitations and that one should not be surprised that the aesthetics of music can harbour contradictions and that our judgement of the value of music may be impossible to make internally consistent. This engaging and stimulating book will be of wide interest to music-lovers, critics, practitioners alike as well as students of aesthetics looking for a non-technical treatment of the subject.

After Sound considers contemporary art practices that reconceive music beyond the limitation of sound. This book is called After Sound because music and sound are, in Barrett's account, different entities. While musicology and sound art theory alike typically equate music with pure instrumental sound, or absolute music, Barrett posits music as an expanded field of artistic practice encompassing a range of different media and symbolic relationships. The works discussed in After Sound thus use performance, text scores, musical automata, video, social practice, and installation while they articulate a novel aesthetic space for a radically engaged musical practice. Coining the term "critical music," this book examines a diverse collection of art projects which intervene into specific political and philosophical conflicts by exploring music's unique historical forms. Through a series of intimate studies of artworks surveyed from the visual and performing arts of the past ten years-Pussy Riot, Ultra-red, Hong-Kai Wang, Peter Ablinger, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, and others-After Sound offers a significant revision to the way we think about music. The book as a whole offers a way out of one of the most vexing deadlocks of contemporary cultural criticism: the choice between a sound art effectively divorced from the formal-historical coordinates of musical practice and the hermetic music that dominates new music circles today.

Why are some popular musical forms and performers universally reviled by critics and ignored by scholars-despite enjoying large-scale popularity? How has the notion of what makes "good" or "bad" music changed over the years-and what does this tell us about the writers who have assigned these tags to different musical genres? Many composers that are today part of the classical "canon" were greeted initially by bad reviews. Similarly, jazz, country, and pop musics were all once rejected as "bad" by the academy that now has courses on these and many other types of music. This book addresses why this is so through a series of essays on different musical forms and performers. It looks at alternate ways of judging musical performance beyond the critical/academic nexus, and suggests new paths to follow in understanding what makes some music "popular" even if it is judged to be "bad." For anyone who has ever secretly enjoyed ABBA, Kenny G, or disco, "Bad Music" will be a guilty pleasure!

This book is a pioneering attempt to explore the fascinating and hardly known realm of reciting poetry in medieval and Renaissance Italy. The study of more than 50 treatises on both music and poetry, as well as other literary sources and documents from the period between 1300 and 1600, highlights above all the practice of parlar cantando («speaking through singing - the term found in De li contrasti, a fourteenth-century treatise on poetry) as rooted in the art of reciting verses. Situating the practice of parlar cantando in the context of late medieval poetic delivery, the author sheds new light on the origin and history of late Renaissance opera style, which their inventors called stile recitativo, rappresentativo or, exactly, parlar cantando. The deepest roots of the Italian tradition of parlar cantando are thus revealed, and the cultural background of the birth of opera is reinterpreted and revisited from the much broader perspective of what appears to be the most important Italian mode of music making between the age of Dante and Petrarch and the beginning of Italian opera around 1600.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky remains to this day one of the most-performed Russian composers. Based on recent studies and source editions, this book demonstrates the close interrelationship between Tchaikovsky's life and his work. The author portrays the versatility of the musician who died at the mere age of 53 under controversial circumstances in St. Petersburg. About the German edition of this book: "[...] Constantin Floros devotes himself initially to the biography and then to the compositional oeuvre, divided according to genre and supplemented by concrete illustrations, thus giving greater significance to the music." (Forum Musikbibliothek 27, 2006) "[...] the music gets more weight of its own in the more detailed analyses - illustrated with revealing note citations - which yet always remain readily accessible." (Steffen A. Schmidt, Das Orchester 02/2007)

In an extraordinary story unfolding across two hundred years, Kristina Gaddy uncovers the banjo's key role in Black spirituality, ritual and rebellion. Through meticulous research in diaries, letters, archives and art, she traces the banjo's beginnings from the seventeenth century, when enslaved people of African descent created it from gourds or calabashes and wood. Gaddy shows how the enslaved carried this unique instrument as they were transported and sold by slaveowners throughout the Americas, to Suriname, the Caribbean and the colonies that became US states, including Louisiana, South Carolina, Maryland and New York. African Americans came together at rituals where the banjo played an essential part. White governments, rightfully afraid that the gatherings could instigate revolt, outlawed them without success. In the mid-nineteenth century, Blackface minstrels appropriated the instrument for their bands, spawning a craze. Eventually the banjo became part of jazz, bluegrass and country, its deepest history forgotten.

Ever since Alfred Brendel bid farewell to the concert stage after six decades of performing, he has been passing on his insight and experience in the form of lectures, readings and master-classes. This reader for lovers of the piano distils his musical and linguistic eloquence and vast knowledge, and will prove invaluable to anyone with an interest in the technique, history and repertoire of the piano.

Erudite, witty, enlightening and deeply personal, A Pianist’s A to Z is the ideal book for all piano lovers, musicians and music aficionados: rarely has the instrument been described in such an entertaining and intelligent fashion.

Is there such a thing as women's music? Do women write and listen to music differently than men do? While recognizing that the differences among women are as distinct as the differences between genders, this bold new study examines gender's influence on music. The author's unique analytical strategy shows, in its application to actual musical compositions, that there is a fluid relationship between the music and the analyst, between the text and the context, and that 20th-century music is inextricably bound to notions of gender that transcend aesthetics.

Much of the work on women's music to date has failed to deal critically with the actual compositions, settling instead for more biographical or sociological approaches. In this respect, this work fills an important void. Using many concrete examples and careful analyses of the work of such undervalued composers as Alma Mahler-Werfel, Anne Boyd, and Moya Henderson, it grounds the abstract firmly, and fascinatingly, in the practical.

This monograph offers a comprehensive study of the topos of the malmariee or the unhappily married woman within the thirteenth-century motet repertory, a vocal genre characterized by several different texts sounding simultaneously over a foundational Latin chant. Part I examines the malmariee motets from three vantage points: (1) in light of contemporaneous canonist views on marriage; (2) to what degree the French malmariee texts in the upper voices treat the messages inherent in the underlying Latin chant through parody and/or allegory; and (3) interactions among upper-voice texts that invite additional interpretations focused on gender issues. Part II investigates the transmission profile of the motets, as well as of their refrains, revealing not only intertextual refrain usage between the motets and other genres, but also a significant number of shared refrains between malmariee motets and other motets. Part II furthermore offers insights on the chronology of composition within a given intertextual refrain nexus, and examines how a refrain's meaning can change in a new context. Finally, based on the transmission profile, Part II argues for a lively interest in the topos in the 1270s and 1280s, both through composition of new motets and compilation of earlier ones, with Paris and Arras playing a prominent role.

This book provides a broad introduction to the scientific and psychological study of music, exploring how music is processed by our brains, affects us emotionally, shapes our personal and cultural identities, and can be used in therapeutic and educational contexts. Why are some people tone deaf and others musical savants? What do our musical preferences say about our personality and the culture in which we were raised? Why do certain songs remind us so strongly of particular people, places, or events? How can music be therapeutically used to help those with autism, Parkinson's, and other medical conditions? The Science and Psychology of Music: From Beethoven at the Office to Beyonce at the Gym answers these and other questions. This book provides a broad and accessible introduction to the fascinating field of music psychology. Despite its name, music psychology includes a number of fields, including neuroscience, psychology, social psychology, sociology, and health. Through a collection of thematically organized chapters, readers will discover how our brains recognize elements of music, how music can affect us and shape our identities, and the many real-world applications for such information. Explores a topic that is of great interest to both psychology students and the general public through accessible and engaging content Provides a conceptual framework for readers and through a multi-part format allows them to focus their attention on their particular areas of interest Furthers readers' understanding of how music can affect our wellbeing as it includes both our physical and psychological health Reflects the subject knowledge of contributing experts in a wide variety of academic disciplines

Almost fifty years since his passing, the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams continues to captivate audiences around the world, evoking the sound and spirit of folksong, and the image of rural landscape. In Vaughan Williams on Music, we read the composer in his own words, as he pursues two related ambitions: to create his own musical language, and to make early twentieth-century England a musical nation. Music lovers, students, and researchers alike will find in this volume a substantial collection of the composer's writings which either went unpublished or have been unavailable since their initial publication. The book contains 102 items written by the composer between 1897 and the year of his death, 1958, including articles for musical magazines, transcripts of broadcasts, obituary notices, and program notes. This wide-ranging material illuminates Vaughan Williams's work as a composer, and highlights his numerous other roles as an active supporter of amateur music-makers, a leader in the folksong revival, educator, performer, campaigner for English music, and polemicist. By addressing a variety of topics, Vaughan Williams reveals the complex and volatile political, musical, and cultural contexts in which he worked over a period of six decades. In these circumstances, Vaughan Williams demonstrates the breadth of his knowledge and the depth of his understanding, and his commitment to communicating with a wide audience. His writings are purposely accessible to reach this audience, permeated with central themes of originality, folksong, a sense of history, and the importance of self-expression. Moreover, the collection reveals the emergence of Vaughan Williams's aesthetics of music during the early 1900s, as he came to terms with the legacy of Brahms and Wagner in order to develop his personal musical idiom. Vaughan Williams on Music is a significant resource for scholars of both British music and the history of British culture, as well as an enjoyable read for all who love Vaughan Williams's music.

Musica ficta is the practice of sharpening or flattening certain notes to avoid awkard intervals in medieval and Renaissance music. This collection gathers Margaret Bent's influential writings on this controversial subject from the past thirty years. Bent analyses what scholarship has produced in the last thirty years, and corrects and clarifies her own positions.

The manuscript Seville, Biblioteca Colombina y Capitular 5-2-25, a composite of dozens of theoretical treatises, is one of the primary witnesses to late medieval music theory. Its numerous copies of significant texts have been the focus of substantial scholarly attention to date, but the shorter, unattributed, or fragmentary works have not yet received the same scrutiny. In this monograph, Cook demonstrates that a small group of such works, linked to the otherwise unknown Magister Johannes Pipudi, is in fact much more noteworthy than previous scholarship has observed. The not one but two copies of De arte cantus are in fact one of the earliest known sources for the Libellus cantus mensurabilis, purportedly by Jean des Murs and the most widely copied music theory treatise of its day, while Regulae contrapunctus, Nota quod novem sunt species contrapunctus, and a concluding set of notes in Catalan are early witnesses to the popular Ars contrapuncti treatises also attributed to des Murs. Disclosing newly discovered biographical information, it is revealed that Pipudi is most likely one Johannes Pipardi, familiar to Cardinal Jean de Blauzac, Vicar-General of Avignon. Cook provides the first biographical assessment for him and shows that late fourteenth-century Avignon was a plausible chronological and geographical milieu for the Seville treatises, hinting provocatively at a possible route of transmission for the Libellus from Paris to Italy. The monograph concludes with new transcriptions and the first English translations of the treatises.

Sound Inventions is a collection of 34 articles taken from Experimental Musical Instruments, the seminal journal published from 1984 through 1999. In addition to the selected articles, the editors have contributed introductory essays, placing the material in cultural and temporal context, providing an overview of the field both before and after the time of original publication. The Experimental Musical Instruments journal contributed extensively to a number of sub-fields, including sound sculpture and sound art, sound design, tuning theory, musical instrument acoustics, timbre and timbral perception, musical instrument construction and materials, pedagogy, and contemporary performance and composition. This book provides a picture of this important early period, presenting a wealth of material that is as valuable and relevant today as it was when first published, making it essential reading for anyone researching, working with or studying sound.

Schoenberg's Op.23 for solo piano, written between 1920 and 1923, represented a move from his atonal music of the preceding twelve years to 12-note music. In this analysis of the five pieces which make up Op.23, Kathryn Bailey discusses the ways in which Schoenberg clearly explores new ideas in these pieces in the context of his old style. Op.23 marked the development of a new way of organizing pitches and establishing centres of gravity in the absence of tonality; but it was also an extension of what had gone before. While moving on from Op.23 was not a big step for Schoenberg, it represented a climacteric in the history of musical composition. It was a long time before anyone outside of Schoenberg's circle would be able to see past the revolutionary idea of composing from a single pre-determined arrangement of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale to notice that in most ways this New Music answered the same conditions and fulfilled the same expectations that music had for generations.

Released in 1986, Hunters and Collectors' album Human Frailty is one of the most important Australian albums of the last two decades of the twentieth century. It was pivotal in the group's career and marked the group's move into pub rock. It is unashamedly concerned with love and desire. The album challenged traditional understandings of Australian masculinity while playing music to predominantly male audiences. No other Australian group would have dared, or indeed been able, to get their audience to roar 'You don't make me feel like a woman anymore,' the culminating line off Hunan Frailty's first track, and the first single taken from the album, "Say Goodbye". The second track on the album, "Throw Your Arms Around Me" has become an Australian standard, an anthem sung drunkenly more by women than men, in pubs, at weddings and similar occasions. Human Frailty is an album that transcended the critical categories of its time.

Modern scholars have often portrayed the method of hexachordal solmization - the sight-singing method introduced by the 11th-century monk Guido of Arezzo - as the diatonic foundation of early music. Stefano Mengozzi challenges this view by examining a representative sample of the primary sources of solmization theory from Guido of Arezzo to Gioseffo Zarlino. These texts show that six-syllable solmization was only an option for sight-singing that never imposed its operational 'sixth-ness' onto the diatonic system, already grounded on the seven pitch letters. It was primarily through the agency of several 'classicizing' theorists of the humanist era that the six syllables came to be mistakenly conceived as a fundamental diatonic structure - a 'hexachord' built from the 'tetrachord' of the Ancient Greeks. The book will be of particular interest to readers seeking to deepen their knowledge of medieval and Renaissance musical thought with an eye to major intellectual trends of the time.

The knowledge of note reading, intervals, rhythm, music symbols and terms, and the ability to listen are essential to the development of a strong foundation for the piano student. This THEORY book was written to help provide this foundation by giving students reinforcement of the concepts presented in the LESSONS book of the DAVID CARR GLOVER METHOD FOR PIANO. As the students advance in their ability to play the piano, the THEORY book will help give them a better understanding of the music they are performing. The pages are designed to be interesting and fun for the students in order to spark their enthusiasm and increase their motivation.