Unquestionably the founding work of minimalism in musical composition, Terry Riley's In C (1964) challenges the standards of imagination, intellect, and musical ingenuity to which "classical" music is held. Only one page of score in length, it contains neither specified instrumentation nor parts. Its fifty-three motives are compact, presented without any counterpoint or evident form. The composer gave only spare instructions and no tempo. And he assigned the work a title that's laconic in the extreme. At the same moment of its composition, Elliott Carter was working on his Concerto for Piano, a work Stravinsky was to hail as a masterpiece. Having almost completed Laborinthus II, Luciano Berio would soon start the Sinfonia. Karlheinz Stockhausen had just finished Momente. In context of these other works, and of the myriad of compositional styles and trends which preceded them, In C stands the whole idea of musical "progress" on its head.
Forty years later, In C continues to receive regular performances every year by professionals, students, and amateurs, and has had numerous recordings since its 1968 LP premiere. Welcoming performers from a vast range of practices and traditions, from classical to rock to jazz to non-Western, these recordings range from the Chinese Film Orchestra of Shanghai -- on traditional Chinese instruments -- to the Hungarian 'European Music Project' group, joined by two electronica DJs manipulating the Pulse. In C rouses audiences while all the while projecting an inner serenity that suggests Cage's definition of music's purpose -- "to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influence."
Setting the stage for a most intriguing journey into the world of minimalism, Robert Carl's Terry Riley's In C argues that the work holds its place in the canon because of the very challenges it presents to "classical" music. He examines In C in the context of its era, its grounding in aesthetic practices and assumptions, its process of composition, presentation, recording, and dissemination. By examining the work's significance through discussion with performers, composers, theorists, and critics, Robert Carl explores how the work's emerging performance practice has influenced our very ideas of what constitutes art music in the 21st century.

This book introduces the topics of Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment, and social demography in Western art musics and demonstrates their historical and sociological importance. The essays in this book explore the concepts of "existential irony" and "sanctification," which have been mentioned or discussed by music scholars, historians, and musicologists only either in connection with specific composers' works (Shostakovich's, in the case of "existential irony") or very parenthetically, merely in passing in the biographies of composers of "classical" musics. This groundbreaking work illustrates their generality and sociological sources and correlates in contemporary Western art musics.

In "This Is America": Race, Gender, and Politics in America's Musical Landscape, Katie Rios argues that prominent American artists and musicians build encoded gestures of resistance into their works and challenge the status quo. These artists offer both an interpretation and a critique of what "This Is America" means. Using Childish Gambino's video for "This Is America" as a starting point, Rios considers how elements including clothing, hairstyles, body movements, gaze, lighting effects, distortion, and word play symbolize American dissonance. From Laurie Anderson's presence in challenging authority and playing with traditional gender roles in her works, to the Black female feminism and social activism of Beyonce, Rhiannon Giddens, and Janelle Monae, to hip hop as resistance in the age of Trump, to sonic and visual variety in the musical Hamilton, the subjects are as powerful as they are topical. Rios explores the ways in which artists relate to and represent underrepresented groups, especially groups that are not traditionally perceived as having a majority voice. The encoded resistances recur across performances and video recordings so that they begin to become recognizable as repeated acts of resistance directed at injustices based on a number of categories, including race, gender, class, religion, and politics.

Far from its sites of origin in the Global North, metal music thrives in the hands of musicians, fans, and scholars throughout other geographies of the world. Metal in the Global South, the latter defined as a geographical and symbolic space marked by the colonial dynamics of modernity, shines through in Defiant Sounds: Heavy Metal Music in the Global South. The volume brings together authors working from and/or with the Global South to reflect on the roles of metal music throughout their respective regions. With contributions spanning Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Oceania, and Indigenous Nations, the essays position metal music at the epicenter of region-specific experiences of oppression marked by colonialism, ethnic extermination, political persecution, and war. More importantly, the authors stress how metal music is used throughout the Global South to face these oppressive experiences, foster hope, and promote an agenda that seeks to build a better world. It may be that metal's greatest contribution to human emancipation will be in the years to come, in places its originators never imagined. This volume offers evidence of that contribution already taking place in the geographical and symbolic space that we respectfully and emphatically call the Distorted South.

From stars like Britney Spears and Mariah Carey to classic icons like Yoko Ono, female musicians have long been the target of double standards and toxic labels in the media and pop culture: liar, crazy, snake, diva, slut, b*tch. These words can hurt all of us. The popular expression "sticks and stones" is wildly wrong. And the wounds are everywhere. Lily Hirsch confronts the full range of this sexist labeling as well as the repercussions, concentrating on the experiences of Yoko Ono, Courtney Love, Britney Spears, FKA twigs, Taylor Swift, Kesha, Mariah Carey, and Ariana Grande, among many others. While men can make outrageous backstage demands, women like Carey are punished as "divas." A sign of supposed genius for men, "crazy" is a word of condemnation for many women-with legal ramifications in Spears' case. Hirsch dives into the world of these women, looking at their personal lives, relationships and breakups, music, media coverage, public reception, as well as the origins of these toxic labels and how they have caused serious damage. With this focus, the book reveals the inner workings of misogyny and invites us to think about these remarkable women on their own terms-showing us how women have fought back too, sometimes reclaiming these words and their own story through music.

What happens in our unconscious minds when we listen to, produce or perform popular music? The Unconscious - a much misunderstood concept from philosophy and psychology - works through human subjects as we produce music and can be traced through the music we engage with. Through a new collaboration between music theorist and philosopher, Smith and Overy present the long history of the unconscious and its related concepts, working systematically through philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, psychoanalysts such as Freud and Lacan, to theorists such as Deleuze and Kristeva. The theories offered are vital to follow the psychological complexity of popular music, demonstrated through close readings of individual songs, albums, artists, genres, and popular music practices. Among countless artists, Listening to the Unconscious draws from Prince to Sufjan Stevens, from Robyn to Xiu Xiu, from Joanna Newsom to Arcade Fire, from PJ Harvey to LCD Sound System, each of whom offer exciting inroads into the fascinating worlds of our unconscious musical minds. And in return, theories of the unconscious can perhaps takes us deeper into the heart of popular music.

This volume examines the use of Black popular culture to engage, reflect, and parse social justice, arguing that Black popular culture is more than merely entertainment. Moving beyond a focus on identifying and categorizing cultural forms, the authors examine Black popular culture to understand how it engages social justice, with attention to anti-Black racism. Black Popular Culture and Social Justice takes a systematic look at the role of music, comic books, literature, film, television, and public art in shaping attitudes and fighting oppression. Examining the ways in which artists, scholars, and activists have engaged, discussed, promoted, or supported social justice - on issues of criminal justice reform, racism, sexism, LGBTQIA rights, voting rights, and human rights - the book offers unique insights into the use of Black popular culture as an agent for change. This timely and insightful book will be of interest to students and scholars of race and media, popular culture, gender studies, sociology, political science, and social justice.

Popular music, today, has supposedly collapsed into a 'retromania' which, according to leading critic Simon Reynolds, has brought a 'slow and steady fading of the artistic imperative to be original.' Meanwhile, in the estimation of philosopher Alain Badiou, a significant political event will always require 'the dictatorial power of a creation ex nihilo'. Everywhere, it seems, at least amongst commentators of a certain age and type, pessimism prevails with regards to the predominant aesthetic preferences of the twenty first century: popular music, supposedly, is in a rut. Yet when, if ever, did the political engagement kindled by popular music amount to more than it does today? The sixties? The punk explosion of the late 1970s? Despite an on-going fixation upon these periods in much rock journalism and academic writing, this book demonstrates that the utilisation of popular music to promote political causes, on the one hand, and the expression of dissent through the medium of 'popular song', on the other hand, remain widely in practice today. This is not to argue, however, for complacency with regards to the need for expressions of political dissent through popular culture. Rather, the book looks carefully at actual usages of popular music in political processes, as well as expressions of political feeling through song, and argues that there is much to encourage us to think that the demand for radical change remains in circulation. The question is, though, how necessary is it for politically-motivated popular music to offer aesthetic novelty?

Based upon Cantometrics: An Approach to the Anthropology of Music (1976), by Alan Lomax, Songs of Earth: Aesthetic and Social Codes in Music is a contemporary guide to understanding and exploring Cantometrics, the system developed by Lomax and Victor Grauer for analyzing the formal elements of music related to human geography and sociocultural patterning. This carefully constructed cross-cultural study of world music revealed deep-rooted performance patterns and aesthetic preferences and their links with environmental factors and ancient socioeconomic practices. This new and updated edition is for anyone wishing to understand and more deeply appreciate the forms and sociocultural contexts of the musics of the world's peoples, and it is designed to be used by both scholars and laypeople. Part One of the book consists of a practical guide to using the Cantometrics system, a course with musical examples to test one's understanding of the material, a theoretical framework to put the methodology in context, and an illustration of the method used to explore the roots of popular music. Part Two includes guides to four other analytical systems that Lomax developed, which focus on orchestration, phrasing and breath management, vowel articulation, instrumentation, and American popular music. Part Three provides resources for educators who wish to use the Cantometrics system in their classrooms, a summary of the findings and hypotheses of Lomax's original research, and a discussion of Cantometrics' criticisms, applications, and new approaches, and it includes excerpts of Lomax's original writings about world song style and cultural equity.

In Pop Music and Hip Ennui: A Sonic Fiction of Capitalist Realism, Macon Holt provides the imaginative and analytical resources to think with contemporary pop music to investigate the ambivalences of contemporary culture and the potentials in it for change. Drawing on Kodwo Eshun's practice of Sonic Fiction and Mark Fisher's analytical framework of capitalist realism, Holt explores the multiplicities contained in contemporary pop from sensation to abstraction and from the personal to the political. Pop Music and Hip Ennui unravels the assumptions embedded in the cultural and critical analysis of popular music. In doing so, it provides new ways to understand the experience of listening to pop music and living in the sonic atmosphere it produces. This book neither excuses pop's oppressive tendencies nor dismisses the pleasures of its sensations.

The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads begins where Francis Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads leaves off. Bronson has collected all available tunes for each of Child's ballads, annotated and organized them, with notes describing the history and development of each tune and tune family. This is an indispensable text for ballad scholars, performers, and students of the ballad tradition.

Hailed by the New Grove Dictionary of Music (2nd edition) as "the most original and far-ranging theorist of his generation," David Lewin (1933-2003) explored for over four decades how composers in the German tradition set poetry and drama to music. He conceived Studies in Music with Text as a unified collection, reproducing papers on music by Mozart, Schubert, Wagner, Schoenberg, and Babbitt, many of which have become classics in the fields of music theory and historical musicology. He also included new analytical essays on Mozart, Wagner, and Schubert, and provided fresh readings of selected songs by Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann, and Johannes Brahms.
The analyses collected here focus on how the music, from its small details to its large formal schemes, engages the poetic and dramatic dynamics of the works at hand, and how music and text enact each other reciprocally. A recurrent topic is the theatricality of texted music for the concert as well as operatic stage, and Lewin's perspectives offer many interpretive insights and conceptual perspectives for the musical performer. A methodological eclectic, Lewin cultivated a magisterial command of historical theories and thought deeply about how those theories could inform contemporary understanding. Analytical models by Zarlino, Schenker, Riemann, Rameau, and Babbitt are brought into play, and the range of poetic and dramatic questions that emerge are explored, concerning inter alia psychological and social identity, the relation of psychological inner worlds to phenomenal reality, and the narrowly biographical and broadly historical conditions of artistic creation. As it illuminates the richness and profundity of the language/musicpartnership, Studies in Music with Text offers incisive thinking about the scope--and limitations--of descriptive and analytical discourse about music.

The series of Theory Workbooks is designed to provide a practical guide to ABRSM's higher-grade Theory exams from 1999 onwards. Theory Workbook Grade 6 describes the nature of the questions set on theory papers for the grade and explains clearly how to tackle them. A step-by-step guide is given to answering the questions on harmony and melodic composition and suggested answers and responses are analysed. Several samples round off these chapters, providing ample opportunity for the student to put theory into practice immediately . The context questions are prefaced by an introduction outlining the knowledge tested in the exam; these chapters contain a total of twelve sample extracts, each accompanied by many relevant questions, with answers given at the back of the book. This workbook focuses very precisely on the skills and knowledge needed at Grade 6 and will provide candidates with the tools to approach the paper positively and sit it successfully.

Is there such a thing today as music that's meaningfully new? In our contemporary era of remixing and retro styles, cynics and romantics alike cry "It's all been done before" while record labels and media outlets proclaim that everything is new. Coded into our daily conversations about popular music, newness as an artistic and cultural value is too often taken for granted. Nothing Has Been Done Before instigates a fresh debate about newness in American pop, rock 'n' roll, rap, folk, and R&B made since the turn of the millennium. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach that combines music criticism, philosophy, and the literary essay, Robert Loss follows the stories of a diverse cast of musicians who seek the new by wrestling with the past, navigating the market, and speaking politically. The transgressions of Bob Dylan's "Love and Theft". The pop spectacle of Katy Perry's 2015 Super Bowl halftime show. Protest songs against the war in Iraq. Nothing Has Been Done Before argues that performance heard in a historical context always creates a possibility for newness, whether it's Kendrick Lamar's multi-layered To Pimp a Butterfly, the Afrofuturist visions of Janelle Monae, or even a Guided By Voices tribute concert in a local dive bar. Provocative and engaging, Nothing Has Been Done Before challenges nothing less than how we hear and think about popular music-its power and its potential.

The principal purpose of topics in musicology has been to identify meaning-bearing units within a musical composition that would have been understood by contemporary audiences and therefore also by later receivers, albeit in a different context and with a need for historically aware listening. Since Leonard Ratner (1980) introduced the idea of topics, his relatively simple ideas have been expanded and developed by a number of distinguished authors. Topic theory has now become a well-established branch of musicology, often embracing semiotics, but its relationship to performance has received less attention. Musical Topics and Musical Performance thus focuses on the interface of theory and practice, and investigates how an appreciation of topical presence in a work may prompt interpretative thoughts for a potential performer as well as how performers have responded to such a presence in practice. The chapters focus on music from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries with case studies drawn from composers as diverse as Beethoven, Scriabin and Peter Eoetvoes. Using both scores and recordings, the book presents a variety of original and innovative perspectives on the subject from a range of distinguished authors, and addresses a neglected area of musicology and musical performance.

This text has been out of print since 1990; it was originally published by Solomon Press in 1987. Several experts in the field have verified that the information in the book remains constant; nothing has, or will, change in the basic science of musical sound. It explains the science of musical sound without the encumbrance of detailed mathematics. It will appeal to music lovers as well as students of music and students of physics. It can easily be promoted with our physics program.

Written by one of the most prominent thinkers in sound studies, Amplifications presents a perspective on sound narrated through the experiences of a sound artist and writer. A work of reflective philosophy, Amplifications sits at the intersection of history, creative practice, and sound studies, recounting this narrative through a series of themes (rattles, echoes, recordings, etc.). Carter offers a unique perspective on migratory poetics, bringing together his own compositions and life's works while using his personal narrative to frame larger theoretical questions about sound and migration.

An eclectic study of wide-ranging but carefully chosen case studies and examples, from nineteenth century literature, through 1930s Broadway and film, to twentieth and twenty- first century jazz and popular music. Six thematically- linked but stand-alone chapters ensure the book can be employed in a variety of music, cultural studies, arts, humanities, and social sciences courses No immediate or direct competitors, especially in terms of the book's particular theoretical and analytical approach, its historical and cultural breadth, its diverse musical and cultural references, and its original and challenging insights

The concept of intertextuality - namely, the meaning generated by interrelations between different texts - was coined in the 1960s among literary theorists and has been widely applied since then to many other disciplines, including music. Intertextuality in Music: Dialogic Composition provides a systematic investigation of musical intertextuality not only as a general principle of musical creativity but also as a diverse set of devices and techniques that have been consciously developed and applied by many composers in the pursuit of various artistic and aesthetic goals. Intertextual techniques, as this collection reveals, have borne a wide range of results, such as parody, paraphrase, collage and dialogues with and between the past and present. In the age of sampling and remix culture, the very notion of intertextuality seems to have gained increased momentum and visibility, even though the principle of creating new music on the basis of pre-existing music has a long history both inside and outside the Western tradition. The book provides a general survey of musical intertextuality, with a special focus on music from the second half of the twentieth century, but also including examples ranging from the nineteenth century to the second decade of the twenty-first century. The volume is intended to inspire and stimulate new work in intertextual studies in music.

This book provides an interdisciplinary focus on music, memory, and ageing by examining how they intersect outside of a formal therapeutic context or framework and by offering a counter-narrative to age as decline. It contributes to the development of qualitative research methodologies by utilizing and reflecting on methods for studying music, memory, and ageing across diverse and interconnected contexts. Using the notion of inheritance to trouble its core themes of music, memory, ageing, and methodology, it examines different ways in which the concept of inheritance is understood but also how it commonly refers to the practice of passing on, and the connections this establishes across time and space. It confronts the ageist discourses that associate popular music predominantly with youth and that focus narrowly, and almost exclusively, on music's therapeutic function for older adults. By presenting research which examines various intersections of music and ageing outside of a therapeutic context or framework, the book brings a much-needed intervention.

Joachim Burmeister's early seventeenth-century treatise on the making of music is generally acknowledged to be central to the understanding of Baroque musical practice: it was the first systematically to explore the connection between rhetoric and music that became a cornerstone of Baroque musical thought. But until now neither a reliable modern edition nor a full translation of this seminal work has existed. This much-needed edition by Benito V. Rivera contains a critical transcription of the Latin text and an annotated translation on facing pages. In a lengthy introduction to the book, Rivera reviews Burmeister's two earlier treatises on musical composition, analyzes Musical Poetics as a whole, and places it within its historical context. An appendix to the edition reproduces the passages of music cited by Burmeister, greatly facilitating the interpretation of Burmeister's explanations of the rhetorical figures. The book will be of interest to music historians and theorists as well as to scholars of rhetoric.

This book develops ways of discussing musical practices to articulate a new approach to understanding connections between recordings, singers, and singing. Centred around materials from the mid-twentieth century, this book focuses on a time when composers and performers were questioning the idea of authorship within their musical practice. Materials drawn upon include recordings, scores, archival content, visual art, interviews, and liner notes to develop a rich conception of practices of performance. Analysis of performances include recordings of singers such as Cathy Berberian, Linda Hirst, Lore Lixenberg, Angelika Luz, and Meredith Monk. Compositions by Cathy Berberian, Luciano Berio, John Cage, and Manuel De Falla are considered. The book utilizes these sources to examine the collective way in which singers and composers form practices as multiple, transforming, emergent, and not hierarchical. The book articulates - with a detailed, close consideration of specific instances in recordings and scores - a relational understanding of performance. This book will be useful reading for students and scholars of music analysis, musicology, performance practice, and twentieth century vocal music.