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Books > Music > Theory of music & musicology
The sounds of spectators at football (soccer) are often highlighted
- by spectators, tourists, commentators, journalists, scholars,
media producers, etc. - as crucial for the experience of football.
These sounds are often said to contribute significantly to the
production (at the stadium) and conveyance (in televised broadcast)
of 'atmosphere.' This book addresses why and how spectator sounds
contribute to the experience of watching in these environments and
what characterizes spectator sounds in terms of their structure,
distribution and significance. Based on an examination of empirical
materials - including the sounds of football matches from the
English Premier League as they emerge both at the stadium and in
the televised broadcast - this book systematically dissects the
sounds of football watching.
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.
This book explores the nature and importance of sound in virtual
reality (VR). Approaching the subject from a holistic perspective,
the book delivers an emergent framework of VR sound. This framework
brings together numerous elements that collectively determine the
nature of sound in VR; from various aspects of VR technology, to
the physiological and psychological complexities of the user, to
the wider technological, historical and sociocultural issues.
Garner asks, amongst other things: what is the meaning of sound?
How have fictional visions of VR shaped our expectations for
present technology? How can VR sound hope to evoke the desired
responses for such an infinitely heterogeneous user base? This book
if for those with an interest in sound and VR, who wish to learn
more about the great complexities of the subject and discover the
contemporary issues from which future VR will surely advance.
David Lewin's Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations is
recognized as the seminal work paving the way for current studies
in mathematical and systematic approaches to music analysis. Lewin,
one of the 20th century's most prominent figures in music theory,
pushes the boundaries of the study of pitch-structure beyond its
conception as a static system for classifying and inter-relating
chords and sets. Known by most music theorists as GMIT, the book is
by far the most significant contribution to the field of systematic
music theory in the last half-century, generating the framework for
the transformational theory movement. Appearing almost twenty years
after GMIT's initial publication, this Oxford University Press
edition features a previously unpublished preface by David Lewin,
as well as a foreword by Edward Gollin contextualizing the work's
significance for the current field of music theory.
In the first book to examine the overlooked relationship between
musical improvisation and philosophical hermeneutics, Sam McAuliffe
asks: what exactly is improvisation? And how does it relate to our
being-in-the-world? Improvisation in Music and Philosophical
Hermeneutics answers these questions by investigating the
underlying structure of improvisation. McAuliffe argues that
improvising is best understood as attending and responding to the
situation in which one find itself and, as such, is essential to
how we engage with the world. Working within the hermeneutic
philosophical tradition - drawing primarily on the work of Martin
Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Jeff Malpas - this book provides
a rich and detailed account of the ways in which we are all already
experienced improvisers. Given the dominance of music in
discussions of improvisation, Part I of this book uses improvised
musical performance as a case study to uncover the ontological
structure of improvisation: a structure that McAuliffe demonstrates
is identical to the structure of hermeneutic engagement. Exploring
this relationship between improvisation and hermeneutics, Part II
offers a new reading of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics,
examining the way in which Gadamer's accounts of truth and
understanding, language, and ethics each possess an essentially
improvisational character. Working between philosophy and music
theory, Improvisation in Music and Philosophical Hermeneutics
unveils the hermeneutic character of musical performance, the
musicality of hermeneutic engagement, and the universality of
improvisation.
Between the physical world of vibration and the world of
consciously heard music lies a third area, which is the province of
the psychology of music. This introduction, first published in
1938, by the developer of the Seashore test of musical ability, is
a thorough survey of this field. A standard text for psychologists
specializing in the area, teachers, or interested musicologists.
A History of Western Choral Music explores the various genres, key
composers, and influential works essential to the development of
the western choral tradition. Author Chester L. Alwes divides this
exploration into two volumes which move from Medieval music and the
Renaissance era up to the 21st century. Volume II begins at the
transition from the Classical era to the Romantic, with an
examination of the major genres common to both periods. Exploring
the oratorio, part song, and dramatic music, it also offers a
thorough discussion of the choral symphony from Beethoven to
Mahler, through to the present day. It then delves into the choral
music of the twentieth century through discussions of the major
compositional approaches and philosophies that proliferated over
the course of the century, from impressionism to serialism,
neo-classicism to modernism, minimalism, and the avant-garde. It
also considers the emerging tendency towards nationalistic
composition amongst composers such as Bartok and Stravinsky, and
discusses in great detail the contemporary music of the United
States, and Great Britain. Framing discussion within the political,
religious, cultural, philosophical, aesthetic, and technological
contexts of each era, A History of Western Choral Music offers
readers specialized insight into major composers and works while
providing a cohesive understanding of choral music's place in
Western history.
Without Beethoven, music as we know it wouldn't exist. Who was this
titan of world culture? Through 100 recordings, Lebrecht brings to
life the composer as we've never seen him before. Unruly, offensive
and hopeless in so much of his life, yes, but driven to a fault and
devoted to his art, conquering deafness to compose some of the
towering works of our culture. Along the way, we encounter the
great musicians who have taken on the challenge of Beethoven, in
all their glories and foibles. In this revealing, unique biography,
Beethoven emerges as a cornerstone of the modern world. All
recordings are freely available on Idagio and YouTube.
This book looks at the historic and contemporary links between
music's connection to emotions and men's supposed discomfort with
their own emotional experience. Looking at music tastes and
distaste, it demonstrates how a sociological analysis of music and
gender can actually lead us to think about emotions and gender
inequalities in different ways.
A lively, engaging guide to music around the world, from prehistory
to the present Human beings have always made music. Music can move
us and tell stories of faith, struggle, or love. It is common to
all cultures across the world. But how has it changed over the
millennia? Robert Philip explores the extraordinary history of
music in all its forms, from our earliest ancestors to today's
mass-produced songs. This is a truly global story. Looking to
Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, and beyond, Philip reveals how
musicians have been brought together by trade and migration and
examines the vast impact of colonialism. From Hildegard von Bingen
and Clara Schumann to Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin, great
performers and composers have profoundly shaped music as we know
it. Covering a remarkable range of genres, including medieval
chant, classical opera, jazz, and hip hop, this Little History
shines a light on the wonder of music-and why it is treasured
across the world.
The idea of American musical theatre conjures up images of bright
lights and big city, but its lifeblood is found in local and
amateur productions at schools, community theatres, summer camps,
and more. In Beyond Broadway, author Stacy Wolf considers the
widespread presence and persistence of musical theatre in U.S.
culture, and examines it as a live, pleasurable, participatory
experience of creating, watching, and listening. Why does local
musical theatre flourish in America? Why do so many Americans
passionately engage in a century-old artistic practice that
requires intense, person-to-person collaboration? Why do audiences
flock to see musicals in their hometowns? How do corporations like
Disney and Music Theatre International enable musical theatre's
energetic movement through American culture? Touring from Maine to
California, Wolf visits elementary schools, a middle school
performance festival, afterschool programs, high schools, summer
camps, state park outdoor theatres, community theatres, and dinner
theatres, and conducts over 200 interviews with practitioners and
spectators, licensors and Disney creatives. In Beyond Broadway,
Wolf tells the story of musical theatre's abundance and longevity
in the U.S. as a thriving, joyful activity that touches millions of
lives.
Distinguished music theorist and composer David Lewin (1933-2003)
applies the conceptual framework he developed in his earlier,
innovative Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations to the
varied repertoire of the twentieth century in this stimulating and
illustrative book. Analyzing the diverse compositions of four
canonical composers--Simbolo from Dallapiccola's Quaderno musicale
di Annalibera; Stockhausen's Klavierstuck III; Webern's Op. 10, No.
4; and Debussy's Feux d'articifice --Lewin brings forth structures
which he calls "transformational networks" to reveal interesting
and suggestive aspects of the music. In this complementary work,
Lewin stimulates thought about the general methodology of musical
analysis and issues of large-scale form as they relate to
transformational analytic structuring. Musical Form and
Transformation, first published in 1993 by Yale University Press,
was the recipient of an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award.
Igor Stravinsky left behind a complex heritage of music and ideas.
There are many examples of discrepancies between his literate
statements about music and musicians and his musical compositions
and activity. Per Dahl presents a model of communication that
unveils a clear and logical understanding of Stravinsky's heritage,
based on the extant material available. From this, Dahl argues the
case for Stravinsky's music and his ideas as separate entities,
representing different modes of communication. As well as
describing a triangular model of communication, based on a tilted
and extended version of Ogden's triangle, Dahl presents an
empirical investigation of Stravinsky's vocabulary of signs and
expressions in his published scores - his communicative mode
towards musicians. In addition to simple statistics, Dahl compares
the notation practice in the composer's different stylistic epochs
as well as his writing for different sizes of ensembles. Dahl also
considers Stravinsky's performances and recordings as modes of
communication to investigate whether the multi-layered model can
soften the discrepancies between Stravinsky the literary and
Stravinsky the musician.
Becoming Noise Music tells the story of noise music in its first 50
years, using a focus on the music's sound and aesthetics to do so.
Part One focuses on the emergence and stabilization of noise music
across the 1980s and 1990s, whilst Part Two explores noise in the
twenty-first century. Each chapter contextualizes - tells the story
- of the music under discussion before describing and interpreting
its sound and aesthetic. Stephen Graham uses the idea of 'becoming'
to capture the unresolved 'dialectical' tension between 'noise'
disorder and 'musical' order in the music itself; the experiences
listeners often have in response; and the overarching 'story' or
'becoming' of the genre that has taken place in this first fifty or
so years. The book therefore doubles up on becoming: it is about
both the becoming it identifies in, and the larger, genre-making
process of the becoming of, noise music. On the latter count, it is
the first scholarly book to focus in such depth and breadth on the
sound and story of noise music, as opposed to contextual questions
of politics, history or sociology. Relevant to both musicology and
noise audiences, Becoming Noise Music investigates a vital but
analytically underexplored area of avant-garde musical practice.
Immersion is the new orthodoxy. Within the production, curation and
critique of sound art, as well as within the broader fields of
sound studies and auditory culture, the immersive is routinely
celebrated as an experiential quality of sound, the value of which
is inherent yet strengthened through dubious metaphysical
oppositions to the visual. Yet even within the visual arts an
acoustic condition grounded in Marshall McLuhan's metaphorical
notion of acoustic space underwrites predispositions towards
immersion. This broad conception of an acoustic condition in
contemporary art identifies the envelopment of audiences and
spectators who no longer perceive from a distance but immanently
experience immersive artworks and environments. Immanence and
Immersion takes a critical approach to the figures of immersion and
interiority describing an acoustic condition in contemporary art.
It is argued that a price paid for this predisposition towards
immersion is often the conceptual potency and efficacy of the work
undertaken, resulting in arguments that compound the
marginalisation and disempowerment of practices and discourses
concerned with the sonic. The variously phenomenological,
correlational and mystical positions that support the predominance
of the immersive are subject to critique before suggesting that a
stronger distinction between the often confused concepts of
immersion and the immanence might serve as a means of breaking with
the figure of immersion and the circle of interiority towards
attaining greater conceptual potency and epistemological efficacy
within the sonic arts.
Music for Life: Music Participation and Quality of Life of Senior
Citizens presents a fresh, new exploration of the impact of musical
experiences on the quality of life of senior citizens, and charts a
new direction in the facilitation of the musical lives of people of
all ages. Authors Fung and Lehmberg clearly define the issues
surrounding music education, music participation, quality of life,
and senior citizens, discussing the most relevant research from the
fields of music education, adult learning, lifelong learning,
gerontology, medicine, music therapy, and interdisciplinary
studies. At the heart of the book is Evergreen Town, a retirement
community in the southeastern U.S.A., that serves as the backdrop
for three original research studies. The first of these is in two
phases, a survey and a focus group interview, that examines the
histories and rationales for the music participations and
non-participations of community residents. The second and third
case studies take an in-depth look at a church choir and a
bluegrass group, two prominent musical groups in the community, and
include the perspectives of the authors themselves as group members
and participant-observers. Fung and Lehmberg conclude with a
challenge for the profession of music education: to act on this
research and on the current advances in the field, to enable all
people to benefit from the richness of music as a substantial
contributor to quality of life.
Discover music that dared to be different, risked reputations and
put careers in jeopardy - causing fascination and intrigue in some
and rejection and scorn in others. This is what happens when people
take tradition and rip it up. MusicQuake tells the stories of 50
pivotal albums and performances that shook the world of modern
music - chronicling the fascinating tales of their creation,
reception and legacy. Tracing enigmatic composers, risque
performers and radical songwriters - this books introduces the
history of 20th century music in a new light. From George Gershwin
and John Cage to Os Mutantes and Fela Kuti; from Patti Smith and
The Slits to Public Enemy and Missy Elliott - by discussing each
entry within the context of its creation, the book will give
readers true insight into why each moment was so pivotal and tell
the stories surrounding the most exciting music ever produced. Some
were shocking, others confusing, beautiful and surreal; some were
scorned on release, others were chart toppers; and yet more
inspired entire movements and generations of new musicians. These
cutting-edge works, which celebrate novelty, technology and
innovation, help define what music is today - acting as prime
examples of how powerful songs can be. This book is from the
Culture Quake series, which looks into iconic moments of culture
which truly created paradigm shifts in their respective fields.
Also available are ArtQuake, FilmQuake and FashionQuake.
Critical Essays in Popular Musicology is an essential reference
work which reproduces in facsimile form many of the most important
and innovative journal articles and papers in the field, along with
an introductory overview by the editor Allan Moore. The volume is
designed to improve access to the most significant, concise
English-language writing, which articulates and demonstrates some
of the key constituents of a popular musicology. It avoids those
pieces which have been published in other collections. The essays
are divided into two parts - those that articulate the key
questions of popular musicology, which discuss contexts for
addressing texts, and those that demonstrate the discipline in
practice, which actually address those texts. This is a valuable
volume for libraries expanding their collections in musicology and
popular music studies and will provide scholars and graduate
students with a convenient and authoritative reference source.
This book celebrates Madvillainy as a representation of two genius
musical minds melding to form one revered supervillain. A product
of circumstance, the album came together soon after MF DOOM's
resurgence and Madlib's reluctant return from avant-garde jazz to
hip-hop. Written from the alternating perspectives of three fake
music journalist superheroes-featuring interviews with Wildchild,
M.E.D., Walasia, Daedalus, Stones Throw execs, and many other real
individuals involved with the album's creation-this book blends
fiction and non-fiction to celebrate Madvillainy not just as an
album, but as a folkloric artifact. It is one specific retelling of
a story which, like Madvillain's music, continues to spawn infinite
legends.
Fifth-century Athenian musical and political theorist Damon was the
first to study music's psychological, behavioural, and political
effects, profoundly influencing debates on music theory throughout
antiquity. Considered by Isokrates to be the most intelligent
Athenian of his age, Damon worked alongside Perikles during the
most vibrant decades of Athens' democracy. Probably using
fourth-century BC sources, Olympiodoros records that 'Damon taught
Perikles the songs through which Perikles harmonized the city'.
However, musical and political entanglements caused this
teacher-theorist to be ostracized from Athens for ten years, at the
height of Perikles' power. Reconstructing Damon is the first
comprehensive study of the most important theorist of music and
poetic meter in ancient Athens, detailing his extensive influence,
and providing the first systematic collection, translation, and
critical examination of all ancient testimonia for him. In doing
so, this volume makes an important contribution to a number of key
fields, including classical Greek music and music theory,
fifth-century philosophy (particularly the sophists), political
history including the growth of democracy, and the life and career
of Perikles.
Breaking the global record for streams in a single day, nearly 10
million people around the world tuned in to hear Kendrick Lamar's
sophomore album in the hours after its release. To Pimp a Butterfly
was widely hailed as an instant classic, garnering laudatory album
reviews, many awards, and even a canonized place in Harvard's W. E.
B. Du Bois archive. Why did this strangely compelling record
stimulate the emotions and imaginations of listeners? This book
takes a deep dive into the sounds, images, and lyrics of To Pimp a
Butterfly to suggest that Kendrick appeals to the psyche of a
nation in crisis and embraces the development of a radical
political conscience. Kendrick breathes fresh life into the Black
musical protest tradition and cultivates a platform for loving
resistance. Combining funk, jazz, and spoken word, To Pimp a
Butterfly's expansive sonic and lyrical geography brings a high
level of innovation to rap music. More importantly, Kendrick's
introspective and philosophical songs compel us to believe in a
future where, perhaps, we gon' be alright.
Making quality moving pictures has never been easier or more
affordable, and the proliferation and ease of access to digital
recording devices has prompted scores of amateurs to record and
post videos to YouTube and the like. Paradoxically, however,
scoring and arranging music for motion pictures is, in many ways,
more complicated now than ever before, requiring extensive
knowledge of notation, arranging, recording, and mixing software
and multi-component DAW workstations. In Composing for Moving
Pictures: The Essential Guide, author Jason Gaines offers practical
tools with which to navigate the increasingly complex environment
of movie music composition. He addresses both the principles of
composition for moving pictures and the technologies which drive
music composition, performance, and recording in an integrated and
comprehensive fashion. The guide takes readers from square one -
how technology can facilitate, rather than hinder, creativity in
scoring - and then moves into the basics of working with MIDI files
and on to more advanced concepts such as arranging, mixing, and
integrating surround sound. Gaines illustrates each step of the
process with screen shots and explanations in the form of program
tutorials. Later chapters offer tips on budgeting out studio
sessions, hiring music copyists, and presenting one's work to (and
negotiating contracts with) clients. A section of appendices
includes a glossary, a guide to keyboard shortcuts, and references
to official software program documentation, as well as interviews
with industry veterans. Composing for Moving Pictures fills a hole
in literature on film scoring in the digital age and will prove to
be an invaluable resource for music educators at the university and
secondary level. Amateur composers will also delight in this
easy-to-use guidebook.
1) First published book on the revival of Cornish music and dance
and the first extended history of music and dance in Cornwall. 2)
Based on a combination of qualitative fieldwork and expert
interviews, and a meticulous study of the historical and revival
material
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