For more than 150 years, individuals have traveled the countryside with pen, paper, tape recorders, and even video cameras to document versions of songs, music, and stories shared by communities. As technologies and methodologies have advanced, the task of gathering music has been taken up by a much broader group than scholars. The resulting collections created by these various people can be impacted by the individual collectors' political and social concerns, cultural inclinations, and even simple happenstance, demonstrating a crucial yet underexplored relationship between the music and those preserving it.Collecting Music in the Aran Islands, a critical historiographical study of the practice of documenting traditional music, is the first to focus on the archipelago off the west coast of Ireland. Deirdre NI Chonghaile argues for a culturally equitable framework that considers negotiation, collaboration, canonization, and marginalization to fully understand the immensely important process of musical curation. In presenting four substantial, historically valuable collections from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she illustrates how understanding the motivations and training (or lack thereof) of individual music collectors significantly informs how we should approach their work and contextualize their place in the folk music canon.

Basso continuo accompaniment calls upon a complex tapestry of harmonic, rhythmic, compositional, analytical and improvisational skills. The evolving knowledge that underpinned the performance of basso continuo was built up and transmitted from the late 1500s to the second half of the eighteenth century, when changes in instruments together with the assertion of control by composers over their works brought about its demise. By tracing the development of basso continuo over time and across the regions of Italy where differing practices emerged, Giulia Nuti accesses this body of musical usage. Sources include the music itself, introductions and specific instructions and requirements in song books and operas, contemporary accounts of performances and, in the later period of basso continuo, description and instruction offered in theoretical treatises. Changes in instruments and instrumental usage and the resulting sounds available to composers and performers are considered, as well as the altering relationship between the improvising continuo player and the composer. Extensive documentation from both manuscript and printed sources, some very rare and others better known, in the original language, followed by a precise English translation, is offered in support of the arguments. There are also many musical examples, transcribed and in facsimile. Giulia Nuti provides both a scholarly account of the history of basso continuo and a performance-driven interpretation of how this music might be played.

Alternately praised as "an American original" and lampooned as an arbiter of kitsch, the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton has been the subject of myriad monographs and journal articles, remaining almost as controversial today as he was in his own time. Missing from this literature, however, is an understanding of the profound ways in which sound figures in the artist's enterprises. Prolonged attention to the sonic realm yields rich insights into long-established narratives, corroborating some but challenging and complicating at least as many. A self-taught and frequently performing musician who invented a harmonica tablature notation system, Benton was also a collector, cataloguer, transcriber, and distributor of popular music. In Thomas Hart Benton and the American Sound, Leo Mazow shows that the artist's musical imagery was part of a larger belief in the capacity of sound to register and convey meaning. In Benton's pictorial universe, it is through sound that stories are told, opinions are voiced, experiences are preserved, and history is recorded.

In this magisterial volume, Harvey Sachs, author of the highly acclaimed biography Toscanini, takes readers into the heart of ten great works of classical music-works that have endured because they were created by composers who had a genius for drawing music out of their deepest wellsprings. These masters-Mozart and Beethoven; Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Verdi and Brahms; Sibelius, Prokofiev and Stravinsky-communicated their life experiences through music and through music they universalised the intimate. By expanding our perceptions of these ten pieces-composed in the years between 1784 and 1966-Sachs, in lush, exquisite prose, invites us to consider why music stimulates, disturbs, exalts and consoles us. He has lived with these masterpieces for a lifetime and his descriptions of them and the dramatic lives of the composers who wrote them bring a heightened dimension to the musical perceptions of readers who may be casual listeners, students, professional musicians or anyone in between.

"Orchestration: An Anthology of Composer's Writings" is designed to be a primary or ancillary text for college-level music majors. Although there are several "how to" textbooks aimed at this market, there is little available that traces the history of orchestration through the writings of composers themselves. By collecting writings from the 19th century to today, Mathews illuminates how orchestration has grown and developed, as well as presenting a wide variety of theories that have been embraced by the leading practitioners in the field.
The book begins with a general essay about the history of the study of orchestration, as well as the leading theories of the last two centuries. The collection then traces the history of orchestration, beginning with Beethoven's Orchestra (with writings by Berlioz, Wagner, Gounod, Mahler, and others), the 19th century (Mahler, Gevaert, Strauss) the fin de siecle (on the edge of musical modernism; writings by Berlioz, Jadassohn, Delius, and Rimsky Korsakov), early modern (Busoni, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Grainger, and others), and high modern (Carter, Feldman, Reich, Brant). Many of these pieces have never been translated into English before; some only appeared in small journals or the popular press and have never appeared in a book; and none have ever been collected in one place.
The study of orchestration is a key part of all students of music theory and composition. "Orchestration: An Anthology of Composer's Writings "provides a much needed resource for these students, filling a gap in the literature.

Why does poetry appeal to music? Can music be said to communicate, as language does? What, between music and poetry, is it possible to translate? These fundamental questions have remained obstinately difficult, despite the recent burgeoning of word and music studies. Peter Dayan contends that the reasons for this difficulty were worked out with extraordinary rigour and consistency in a French literary tradition, echoed by composers such as Berlioz and Debussy, which stretches from Sand to Derrida. Their writing shows how it is both necessary and futile to look for music in poetry, or for poetry in music: necessary, because each art defines itself by reference to what it is not, and cannot be, in order to point to an idealized totality outside itself; futile, because the musicality of poetry, like the poetic meaning of music, must remain as elusive as that idealized totality; its distance is the very condition of the art. Thus is generated a subtle but unmistakable general definition of the nature of art which has proved uniquely able to survive all the probings of poststructuralism. That definition of art is inseparable from a disturbingly effective scepticism towards all forms of explication and explanation in critical discourse, so it is doubtless not surprising that critics in general have done their best to ignore it. But by bringing out what Sand, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Proust, Debussy, Berlioz, Barthes, and Derrida all do in the same way as they work on the limits of the analogy between music and literature, this book shows how it is possible, productive, illuminating, and fascinating to work on those limits; though to do so, as we find repeatedly, in Chopin's dreams as in Derrida's 'tombeaux', requires us to have the courage to face, in music, our literal death, and the limits of our intelligence.

The history of Macon, Georgia, has an exceptional soundtrack, and Something in the Water provides a lively narrative of the city's musical past from its founding in 1823 to 1980. For generations, talented musicians have been born in or passed through Macon's confines. Some lived and died in obscurity, while others achieved international stardom. From its pioneer origins to the modern era, the city has produced waves of talent with amazing consistency, representing a wide range of musical genres including country, classical, jazz, blues, big band, soul, and rock. As the book points out, the city's influence stretches far beyond the borders of Georgia, and its musical imprint on the United States and the world is significant. The story of music in Macon includes a vast, eclectic cast of characters, such as the city's first music ""celebrity"" Sidney Lanier, entertainment entrepreneur Charles Douglass, jazz age divas Lucille Hegamin and Lula Whidby, big band singers Betty Barclay and the Pickens Sisters, rock and roll founding father Little Richard Penniman, rhythm and blues icons James Brown and Otis Redding, local country star Eugene ""Uncle Ned"" Stripling, Capricorn Records founders Phil Walden and Frank Fenter, and The Allman Brothers Band, one of the most popular groups of the rock era. Something in the Water also offers a treatment of Macon's leading entertainment venues, both past and present, like Ralston Hall, the Grand Opera House, and the Douglass Theater, along with local institutions such as Wesleyan College, Mercer University, and the Georgia Academy for the Blind, which trained generations of music students.

In The Discourse of Musicology, Giles Hooper considers a number of issues central to recent debates about the nature and direction of contemporary musicology. The first part of the book seeks to situate and critically rethink the alleged 'postmodern' turn in musical scholarship. Then, in attempting to overcome some of the problems typically associated with postmodern theory, Hooper draws on the work of JA1/4rgen Habermas in order to interpret musicology as a form of institutionalized discourse and to propose a normative framework for the kind of knowledge in which it can legitimately issue. The second part of the book focuses on the concepts of 'mediation' and the 'music itself' and engages with the work of influential critical theorist, Theodor Adorno, and the contemporary musicologist, Lawrence Kramer. Finally Hooper compares and contrasts a number of different approaches to Mahler's Ninth Symphony. The author's underlying aim throughout is to question whether, and how, it is possible to develop a mode of musicological enquiry that is both epistemologically robust and at the same time capable of answering the demand that it demonstrate its social, political and ethical relevance.

Musical biography has rarely been an object of theoretical and methodological reflection. Our present-day perception of the lives of prominent composers and performers of the past has been largely formed by cultural and political assumptions of nineteenth-century biographers and their twentieth-century followers. While older biographies are being scrutinized for veracity and updated with new evidence, their historiographical premisses and narrative techniques remain largely unchallenged. The epistemological upheavals in the humanities since the 1960s have generated a body of theoretical thought that has undermined many of the assumptions of traditional biography. Consequently, many of these assumptions have lost their hold as viable underpinnings for present-day scholarly biography. For example, the accumulation of facts is no longer believed to bring us closer to an understanding of the subject; nor are the traditional views of the unified self and the self as a foundational idea taken for granted. This volume brings together musicologists and historians who explore, through individual case studies, the rich potential of these new theories for writing musical lives. theories illuminate our critical reassessment of older biographies-and the interpretations of musical works these biographies were used to construe-and help forge new approaches to musical biography. The authors also explore the functions musical biographies served in different historical contexts, the relevance of biography for musical criticism, the reliability of archival evidence, the ethics of biography, the demands placed on biography by feminist and gender history, and the new possibilities offered by cinema. The contributors to this volume challenge the view that biography has little importance for music history, analysis, and criticism. Collectively, they reassert biography's centrality and relevance, and demonstrate biography's potential to speak not only to the crucial questions that music analysis and criticism raise, and to questions of music as a formative experience, but also to more general epistemological questions about the nature of music history itself.

The musical human: without a doubt, this vision of the human species as naturally musical has become the most enduring legacy John Blacking bequeathed to ethnomusicology. The image aptly embodies his preoccupations, which integrated theoretical and methodological issues within the discipline with a deep concern for the physical and psychological well-being of humanity. Blacking believed sincerely in the power of music, and he contended that people's general health depended upon the musical opportunities made available to them. For this reason, he placed great importance upon ethnomusicology, the discipline that investigates the way different societies around the world organize their musical activities, and the impact of these diverse alternatives upon the people involved in them. Each essay draws upon distinct aspects of Blacking's writings but complements them with quite different sets of sources. Themes include the role of fieldwork in the postmodern era; the role of music amongst subaltern communities existing in a rapidly changing social environment with particular reference to Vendaland; the manipulation of traditional performance settings in pursuit of political or social strategies; children's music acquisition as an indicator of the innate musical capacity of humans; the biology of music making; the creation of pleasure, pain and power during dance; cognitive processes and the social consequences of the power of music, and a consideration of the method of applying ethnomusicological research methods to Western art music. In this way, the volume provides fresh assessments of Blacking's work, taking up his challenge to push the boundaries of ethnomusicology into new territories.

First published in 1998, this volume is the first book to focus on the American symphony. Neil Butterworth surveys the development of the symphony in the United States from early European influences in the last century to the present day, and asks why American composers have shown such allegiance to a musical form which their European contemporaries appear to have discarded. An overview of the growth of musical societies in America during the eighteenth century and the establishment of the first professional orchestras during the early part of the nineteenth century is followed by chronological analyses of the works of those composers who have played important parts in the progress of symphony in the United States, from Charles Ives, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, to contemporary figures such as William Bolcom and John Harbison. Complete with a comprehensive catalogue of symphonies and an extensive discography, this book is an indispensable reference work.

First published in 1998, this broad survey includes a large number of musical illustrations and provides an indispensable guide for both students and teachers. Hexachords and solmization syllables formed the foundations of musical language during the sixteenth century. Yet, owing to changes over time in music education and style, there no longer exists widespread general knowledge of hexachords. Without this awareness it is impossible to appreciate fully the music of the most important composers of the Renaissance such as Palestrina, Lasso and Monteverdi. This book is the first attempt to fill such a gap in our understanding of hexachords and how they were employed in late-Renaissance music. Lionel Pike's research covers the period from Willaert to Dowland (c. 1530-1600) and examines the ways in which the uses of hexachords developed in the hands of different composers. The book concludes with an investigation of English examples of hexachords in vocal and instrumental music.

1956 was a year of transition in Poland, and an important year for Polish music. This year saw the beginning of a political thaw - sometimes called the Polish October - in communist Poland. It was also the year of the establishment of the 'Warsaw Autumn' International Festival of Contemporary Music. This was a time of great artistic ferment in Polish music, which also deeply influenced symphonic thinking. The year 1956 is thus an appropriate starting point for Beata Boleslawska's study of the contemporary Polish symphonic tradition. Boleslawska investigates the influential Polish avant-garde, illuminating the ways in which new musical means and ideas influenced symphonic music and the genre of the symphony in the music of such important composers as Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994), Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki (1933-2010) and Krzysztof Penderecki (b. 1933). Referring to the main elements of the European tradition, as well as examining briefly the symphonic activity in Poland before 1956, the book concentrates on the symphonic writing in the context of avant-garde trends, represented by the so-called 'Polish school of composers', as well as on its later redefinitions proposed by Polish composers up to the present day.

The composer and pianist Michael Finnissy (b. 1946) is an unmistakeable presence in the British and international new music scene, both for his immeasurable generosity as prolific composer for many different types of musicians, major advocate for the works of others, and performer and conductor who has also been a driving force behind ensembles; he was also President of the International Society for Contemporary Music from 1990 to 1996. His vast and enormously varied output confounds those who seek easy categorisations: once associated strongly with the 'new complexity', Finnissy is equally known as composer regularly engaged with many different folk musics, for working with amateur and community musicians, for a long-term engagement with sacred music, or as an advocate of Anglo-American 'experimental' music. Twenty years ago, a large-scale volume entitled Uncommon Ground: The Music of Michael Finnissy gave the first major overview of the output of any 'complex' composer. This new volume brings a greater plurality of perspectives and critical sensibility to bear upon an output which is almost twice as large as it was when the earlier book was published. A range of leading contributors - musicologists, composers, performers and others - each grapple with particular questions relating to Finnissy's music, often in ways which raise questions relating more widely to new music, and provide theoretical foundations for further of study both of Finnissy and other composers.

The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a flourishing of the string quartet, often represented as a smooth and logical progression from first violin-dominated homophony to a more equal conversation between the four voices. Yet this progression was neither as smooth nor as linear as previously thought, as Mara Parker illustrates in her examination of the string quartet during this period. Looking at a wide variety of string quartets by composers such as Pleyel, Distler and Filtz, in addition to Haydn and Mozart, the book proposes a new way of describing the relationships between the four instruments in different works. Broadly speaking, these relationships follow one of four patterns: the 'lecture', the 'polite conversation', the 'debate', and the 'conversation'. In focusing on these musical discourses, it becomes apparent that each work is the product of its composer's stylistic choices, location, intended performers and intended audience. Instead of evolving in a strict and universal sequence, the string quartet in the latter half of the eighteenth century was a complex genre with composers mixing and matching musical discourses as circumstances and their own creative impulses required.

Theory Essentials for Today's Musician offers a review of music theory that speaks directly and engagingly to modern students. Rooted in the tested pedagogy of Theory for Today's Musician, the authors have distilled and reorganized the concepts from the thirty-three chapters of their original textbook into twenty-one succinct, modular chapters that move from the core elements of harmony to further topics in form and 20th-century music. A broad coverage of topics and musicals styles-including examples drawn from popular music-is organized into four key parts: Basic Tools Chromatic Harmony Form and Analysis The 20th Century and Beyond Theory Essentials features clear and jargon-free (yet rigorous) explanations appropriate for students at all levels, ensuring comprehension of concepts that are often confusing or obscure. An accompanying workbook provides corresponding exercises, while a companion website presents streaming audio examples. This concise and reorganized all-in-one package-which can be covered in a single semester for a graduate review, or serve as the backbone for a briefer undergraduate survey-provides a comprehensive, flexible foundation in the vital concepts needed to analyze music. PURCHASING OPTIONS Textbook and Workbook Package (Paperback): 9781138098756 Textbook Only (Hardback): 9781138708815 Textbook Only (Paperback): 9781138708822 Textbook Only (eBook): 9781315201122 Workbook Only (Paperback): 9781138098749 Workbook Only (eBook): 9781315103839

Do you remember these great pop stars and their hits? Deerhoof's "The Man," "The King," "The Girl" Butch Hancock's West Texas Waltzes and "Dust Blown Tractor Tunes," Swamp Dogg's "Cuffed, Collared and Tagged," Michael Head's "The Magical World Of The Strands," John Trubee's "The Communists Are Coming to Kill Us, "John Phillips's "Wolf King of L.A., and" Michel Magne's "Moshe Mouse Crucifiction"?" "You will when you read" Lost in the Grooves," a fascinating guide to the back alleys off the pop music superhighway.
Pop music history is full of little-known musicians, whose work stands defiantly alone, too quirky, distinctive, or demented to appeal to a mass audience. This book explores the nooks and crannies of the pop music world, unearthing lost gems from should-have-been major artists (Sugarpie DeSanto, Judee Sill), revisiting lesser known works by established icons (Marvin Gaye's post-divorce kissoff album, "Here My Dear"; The Ramones' "Subterranean Jungle"), and spotlighting musicians who simply don't fit into neat categories (k. mccarty, Exuma). The book's encyclopedic alphabetical structure throws off strange sparks as disparate genres and eras rub against each other: folk-psych iconoclasts face louche pop crooners; outsider artists set their odd masterpieces down next to obscurities from the stars; lo-fi garage rock cuddles up with the French avant-garde; and roots rock weirdoes trip over bubblegum. This book will delight any jukebox junkie or pop culture fan.

Taken together, these comprehensive volumes offer an authoritative account of the music of Africa. One of the most prominent experts on the subject, Gerhard Kubik draws on his extensive travels and three decades of study in many parts of the continent to compare and contrast a wealth of musical traditions from a range of cultures.

In the first volume, Kubik describes and examines xylophone playing in southern Uganda and harp music from the Central African Republic; compares multi-part singing from across the continent; and explores movement and sound in eastern Angola. And in the second volume, he turns to the cognitive study of African rhythm, Yoruba chantefables, the musical Kachamba family of Malaŵi, and African conceptions of space and time.
Each volume features an extensive number of photographs and is accompanied by a compact disc of Kubik's own recordings. Erudite and exhaustive, "Theory of African Music" will be an invaluable reference for years to come.

On March 1, 1954, the US military detonated "Castle Bravo," its most powerful nuclear bomb, at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Two days later, the US military evacuated the Marshallese to a nearby atoll where they became part of a classified study, without their consent, on the effects of radiation on humans. In Radiation Sounds Jessica A. Schwartz examines the seventy-five years of Marshallese music developed in response to US nuclear militarism on their homeland. Schwartz shows how Marshallese singing draws on religious, cultural, and political practices to make heard the deleterious effects of US nuclear violence. Schwartz also points to the literal silencing of Marshallese voices and throats compromised by radiation as well as the United States' silencing of information about the human radiation study. By foregrounding the centrality of the aural and sensorial in understanding nuclear testing's long-term effects, Schwartz offers new modes of understanding the relationships between the voice, sound, militarism, indigeneity, and geopolitics.

This definitive encyclopaedic work explores the origins of percussion through the development of the early drums and xylophones right up to the wide range of modern instruments and the sounds they make. James Blades covers these early developments globally from China and the Far East, India and Tibet, the early civilisations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome and Persia through to mediaeval and renaissance Europe. He continues to examine the role of percussion in the classical and romantic orchestras and finally looks at the ways composers have pushed the boundaries in modern music. Each chapter has its own photographs, illustrations and bibliography and there are comprehensive indices referencing all the composers and works discussed. This extended edition includes two important new chapters. The first covers the rise of the solo percussionist and is written by the world's leading practitioner and one of Blades' former pupils, Dame Evelyn Glennie, who also contributes a new Foreword, while recent developments in orchestral percussion are covered by Neil Percy, Head of Timpani and Percussion at the Royal Academy of Music and Principal Percussionist of the London Symphony Orchestra.

Combining approaches from reception studies and historical musicology, this book demonstrates how the representation of music at exhibitions drew the press and public into debates about music's role in society. International exhibitions were among the most significant cultural phenomena of the late nineteenth century. These vast events aimed to illustrate, through displays of physical objects, the full spectrum of the world's achievements, from industry and manufacturing, to art and design. But exhibitions were not just visual spaces. Music was ever present, as a fundamental part of these events' sonic landscape, and integral to the visitor experience. This book explores music at international exhibitions held in Australia, India, and the United Kingdom during the 1880s. At these exhibitions, music was codified, ordered, and all-round 'exhibited' in manifold ways. Displays of physical instruments from the past and present were accompanied by performances intended to educate or to entertain, while music was heard at exhibitors' stands, in concert halls, and in the pleasure gardens that surrounded the exhibition buildings. Music was depicted as a symbol of human artistic achievement, or employed for commercial ends. At times it was presented in nationalist terms, at others as a marker of universalism. This book argues, by interrogating the multiple ways that music was used, experienced, and represented, that exhibitions can demonstrate in microcosm many of the broader musical traditions, purposes, arguments, and anxieties of the day. Its nine chapters focus on sociocultural themes, covering issues of race, class, public education, economics, and entertainment in the context of music, tracing these through the networks of communication that existed within the British Empire at the time.

In 1677 a slim quarto volume was published anonymously as A Philosophical Essay of Musick. Written by Francis North (1637-85), chief justice of the Common Pleas, the Essay is in the form of a legal case argued from an hypothesis. Utilising the pendulum as his hypothesis, North provided a rationale from mechanics for the emerging new musical practice we now call 'tonality'. He also made auditory resonance the connecting link between acoustical events in the external world and the musical meanings the mind makes on the basis of sensory perception. Thus began the modern philosophy of music that culminated with the work of Hermann von Helmholtz. As a step towards understanding this tradition, Jamie C. Kassler examines the 1677 Essay in its historical context. After assessing three seventeenth-century criticisms of it and outlining how one critic developed some implications in the Essay, she summarises the basic principles that have guided the modern philosophy of music from its beginnings in the 1677 Essay. The book includes an annotated edition of the Essay as well as the comments of the three critics.