"Taken as a trilogy, consent not to be a single being is a monumental accomplishment: a brilliant theoretical intervention that might be best described as a powerful case for blackness as a category of analysis."-Brent Hayes Edwards, author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination In Black and Blur-the first volume in his sublime and compelling trilogy consent not to be a single being-Fred Moten engages in a capacious consideration of the place and force of blackness in African diaspora arts, politics, and life. In these interrelated essays, Moten attends to entanglement, the blurring of borders, and other practices that trouble notions of self-determination and sovereignty within political and aesthetic realms. Black and Blur is marked by unlikely juxtapositions: Althusser informs analyses of rappers Pras and Ol' Dirty Bastard; Shakespeare encounters Stokely Carmichael; thinkers like Kant, Adorno, and Jose Esteban Munoz and artists and musicians including Thornton Dial and Cecil Taylor play off each other. Moten holds that blackness encompasses a range of social, aesthetic, and theoretical insurgencies that respond to a shared modernity founded upon the sociological catastrophe of the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonialism. In so doing, he unsettles normative ways of reading, hearing, and seeing, thereby reordering the senses to create new means of knowing.

This book explores the emerging area of microtonality through an examination of the tuning theories of Erv Wilson. It is the first publication to offer a broad discussion of this influential theorist whose innovations have far-reaching ramifications for microtonal tuning systems. This study addresses the breadth and complexity of Wilson's work by focusing on his microtonal keyboard designs as a means to investigate his tuning concepts and their practical applications. Narushima examines materials ranging from historical and experimental tunings to instrument design, as well as musical applications of mathematical theories and multidimensional geometry. The volume provides an analysis of some of Wilson's most significant theoretical ideas, including the Scale Tree, Moments of Symmetry, Constant Structures, and Combination-Product Sets. These theories offer ways to conceptualize musical scales as patterns with structural integrity and whose shapes can be altered to produce infinitely varying forms. The book shows how these structural properties can be used to map scales onto a microtonal keyboard by providing step-by-step guidelines and clearly illustrated examples. Most importantly, it brings together theoretical and practical methods of tuning to enable composers, performers, and instrument designers to explore previously uncharted areas of microtonality, making a significant contribution to the fields of music theory, composition and music technology.

This book is based on the scale types that are necessary to master and understand the chord/scale relationships found in many styles of music. By keeping things simple and uncluttered, each page consists of only one scale type, drawn on a bass guitar neck with the correct fingering - a vital part of organising the hands. The more organised the hands, the easier it is to play. The arpeggio shape is also super-imposed over the corresponding scale in order to create an understanding of the chord/scale relationship. This is better explained with diagrams and not notation; however, because it is a good idea to associate finger positions with their notational equivalents, notation is also included. The simple but comprehensive jazz theory section will help the student gain a deeper understanding of harmony and further insight into how to apply the scales found in this book.

The story of the Minneapolis musicians who were unexpectedly summoned to re-record half of the songs on Bob Dylan's most acclaimed album When Bob Dylan recorded Blood on the Tracks in New York in September 1974, it was a great album. But it was not the album now ranked by Rolling Stone as one of the ten best of all time. “When something’s not right, it’s wrong,� as Dylan puts it in “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go�—and something about that original recording led him to a studio in his native Minnesota to re-record five songs, including “Idiot Wind� and “Tangled Up in Blue.� Six Minnesota musicians participated in that two-night recording session at Sound 80, bringing their unique sound to some of Dylan’s best-known songs—only to have their names left off the album and their contribution unacknowledged for more than forty years. This book tells the story of those two nights in Minneapolis, introduces the musicians who gave the album so much of its ultimate form and sound, and describes their decades-long fight for recognition.   Blood in the Tracks takes readers behind the scenes with these “mystery� Minnesota musicians: twenty-one-year-old mandolin virtuoso Peter Ostroushko; drummer Bill Berg and bass player Billy Peterson, the house rhythm section at Sound 80; progressive rock keyboardist Gregg Inhofer; guitarist Chris Weber, who owned The Podium guitar shop in Dinkytown; and Kevin Odegard, whose own career as a singer-songwriter had paralleled Dylan’s until he had to take a job as a railroad brakeman to make ends meet. Through in-depth interviews and assiduous research, Paul Metsa and Rick Shefchik trace the twists of fate that brought these musicians together and then set them on different paths in its wake: their musical experiences leading up to the December 1974 recording session, the divergent careers that followed, and the painstaking work required to finally obtain the official credit that they were due.    A rare look at the making—or remaking—of an all-time great album, and a long overdue recognition of the musicians who made it happen, Blood in the Tracks brings to life a transformative moment in the history of rock and roll, for the first time in its true context and with its complete cast of players.

In Robert Ward's The Crucible: Creating an American Musical Nationalism, Robert Paul Kolt explores the life of the American composer Robert Ward through an examination of his most popular and enduring work, The Crucible. Focusing on the musical-linguistic relationships within the opera, Kolt demonstrates Ward's unique synthesis of text and music, one that lends itself to the perception of American musical nationalism. This book contains the most thorough and in-depth biography of Ward yet in print. Based on interviews with the composer, Kolt presents new information about Ward's life and career, focusing on his opera and examining the formation and construction of The Crucible's libretto and score, in turn offering new insights into the process of composing an opera. Kolt observes how the libretto's linguistic aspects helped Ward formulate the opera's melodic and rhythmic musical material. A detailed and unique analysis of the opera, particularly the musical and linguistic techniques Ward employed, demonstrates how these techniques lend themselves to the opera's reception as a work of American musical nationalism. The book also provides yet unpublished information on Arthur Miller's play, examining how it came to be written and soon after became the basis for Ward's work. Several appendixes provide a fuller picture, including a deleted scene from Miller's play and Ward's version of the scene, a chronological overview of the Salem Witchcraft Trials, and illustrations and photo reproductions from Ward's manuscript.

German music critic and opera producer Paul Bekker (1882-1937) is a rare example of a critic granted the opportunity to turn his ideas into practice. In this first full-length study of Bekker in English, Nanette Nielsen investigates Bekker's theory and practice in light of ethics and aesthetics, in order to uncover the ways in which these intersect in his work and contributed to the cultural and political landscape of the Weimar Republic. By linking Beethoven's music to issues of freedom and individuality, as he argues for its potential to unify the masses, Bekker had already in 1911 begun to construct the ethical framework for his musical sociology and opera aesthetics. Nielsen discusses some of the complex (and conflicting) layers of modernism and conservatism in Bekker that would have a continued presence in his work and its reception throughout his career. Bekker's demands for a 'practical ethics' led to his criticisms of metaphysically grounded approaches to aesthetics, and his ethical views are put into further relief in a sketch of the development of his music phenomenology in the 1920s. Nielsen unravels the complex intersections between Bekker's ethics and his opera aesthetics in connection with his practice as an Intendant at the Wiesbaden State Theatre (1927-1932), offering a critical reading of an opera staged during his tenure: Hugo Herrmann's Vasantasena (1930). Further works are considered in light of the theoretical framework underpinning the book, inspired by several intersections between ethics and aesthetics encountered in Bekker's work.

Since Gyoergy Ligeti's death in 2006, there has been a growing acknowledgement of how central he was to the late twentieth-century cultural landscape. This collection is the first book devoted to exploring the composer's life and music within the context of his East European roots, revealing his dual identities as both Hungarian national and cosmopolitan modernist. Contributors explore the artistic and socio-cultural contexts of Ligeti's early works, including composition and music theory, the influence of East European folk music, notions of home and identity, his ambivalent attitude to his Hungarian past and his references to his homeland in his later music. Many of the valuable insights offered profit from new research undertaken at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, while also drawing on the knowledge of long-time associates such as the composer's assistant, Louise Duchesneau. The contributions as a whole reveal Ligeti's thoroughly cosmopolitan milieu and values, and illuminate why his music continues to inspire new generations of performers, composers and listeners.

Putting forward an extensive new argument for a humanities-based approach to big-data analysis, The Music in the Data shows how large datasets of music, or music corpora, can be productively integrated with the qualitative questions at the heart of music research. The author argues that as well as providing objective evidence, music corpora can themselves be treated as texts to be subjectively read and creatively interpreted, allowing new levels of understanding and insight into music traditions. Each chapter in this book asks how we define a core music-theory topic, such as style, harmony, meter, function, and musical key, and then approaches the topic through considering trends within large musical datasets, applying a combination of quantitative analysis and qualitative interpretation. Throughout, several basic techniques of data analysis are introduced and explained, with supporting materials available online. Connecting the empirical information from corpus analysis with theories of musical and textual meaning, and showing how each approach can enrich the other, this book provides a vital perspective for scholars and students in music theory, musicology, and all areas of music research.

Music, Time, and Its Other explores the relation between the enigmatic character of our temporal experiences and music's affective power. By taking account of competing concepts of time, Savage explains how music refigures dimensions of our experiences through staking out the borderlines between time and eternity. He examines a range of musical expressions that reply to the deficiency born from the difference between time and an order that exceeds or surpasses it and reveals how affective tonalities of works by Bach, Carolan, Debussy, Schoenberg, Messiaen, and Glass augment our understanding of our temporal condition. Reflections on the moods and feelings to which music gives voice counterpoint philosophical investigations into the relation between music's power to affect us and the force that the present has with respect to the initiatives we take. Music, Time, and Its Other thus sets out a new approach to music, aesthetics, politics, and the critical roles of judgment and imagination.

Rick Soshensky presents a groundbreaking introduction to music's power to heal and transform, weaving collections of uplifting case studies from music therapy practices with ideas from spiritual traditions, philosophies, psychological theorists, and music therapy theorists and researchers. Going beyond just theoretical and clinical information, The Music Therapy Studio: How Music Heals and Transforms Lives centers the stories and experiences of people with disabilities-marginalized people for whom the world allows little time or place but whose extraordinary musical journeys teach us about the unseen depths and indomitably of the human spirit. In conversational tone, Soshensky introduces the concept of the music therapy studio and investigates core concepts in music-centered approaches to music therapy: the experience of music as a creative art with clients has intrinsic value that supersedes diagnostic labeling and behavioral goal-setting. Through the music therapy studio, Soshensky finds hidden potential for connection and produces touching moments of music and meaning through the healing process. The result is unique and inspiring text that leads us towards a deeper understanding and appreciation of music therapy and music's spiritual benefits.

This is the first complete survey of the historical pitch standards used by musicians during the last four centuries. Written from a practical perspective and addressed to performers it is the first book to attach frequency values to pitch names and describe where, when, and why various historical pitch levels were used. It surveys a period from the 16th century to the present and focuses on Italy, France, Germany, the northern and southern Netherlands, and the Habsburg Lands, following the developments in the design and function of instruments and how they influenced and were influenced by pitch changes. The History of Performing Pitch explores the relationships between pitches like Chorton, Cammerton, and Consort-Pitch and what pitch frequencies they represented at various times and places. It also examines what effect pitch differences had on musical notation and choice of key, and discusses practical considerations musicians would have had to make when transposing, especially with regards to the range of singers' voices. What distinguishes this book from previous pitch studies is that it has been written since the rise of the early music revival within the context of the growing understanding of how "early" instruments work. This development has provided a new source of empirical information not previously available, which allows this book to base its conclusions on a much larger and more relevant sample than has ever been possible before. It refers to the original pitches of some 1,382 historical instruments, including cornetts, Renaissance flutes, traversos, recorders, clarinets, organs, pitchpipes, and automatic instruments from all over Europe and compares this information with music and written texts. While this study avoids categorical answers where historical information is not yet sufficient to justify them, it locates a number of historical pitch levels, discovers several that were previously unnoticed, and disproves several common myths about pitch.

Guillaume de Machaut was the foremost poet-composer of his time. Studies look at all aspects of his prodigious output. Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377) is regarded as the greatest French poet-composer of the middle ages, as he was during his lifetime. A trained secretary, with a passion for collecting, copying and ordering his own work, the numberof surviving notated musical works attributed to him far exceeds that of any of his contemporaries. All the main genres of song - lais, virelais, balades, and rondeaux - together with Machaut's motets, and his famous Masscycle are considered here from a variety of perspectives. These incorporate the latest scholarly understanding of both Machaut's poetry and music, and the material form they take when notated in the surviving manuscripts. The bookthus presents a detailed picture of the current range of interpretative approaches to Machaut's music, focusing variously on counterpoint, musica ficta, text setting, musico-poetic meanings, citation and intertextuality, tonality, and compositional method. Several of Machaut's works are discussed by a pair of contributors, who reach conclusions at times mutually reinforcing or complementary, at times contradictory and mutually exclusive. That Machaut's music thrives on such constructive debate and disagreement is a tribute to his scope as an artist, and his musico-poetic achievement. Contributors: JENNIFER BAIN, MARGARET BENT, CHRISTIAN BERGER, JACQUES BOOGAART,THOMAS BROWN, ALICE V. CLARK, JANE E. FLYNN, JEHOASH HIRSHBERG, KARL KUEGLE, ELIZABETH EVA LEACH, DANIEL LEECH-WILKINSON, ETER M. LEFFERTS, WILLIAM PETER MAHRT, KEVIN N. MOLL, VIRGINIA NEWES, YOLANDA PLUMLEY, OWEN REES, ANNE STONE. ELIZABETH EVA LEACH lectures in music at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The use of technology in music and education can no longer be described as a recent development. Music learners actively engage with technology in their music making, regardless of the opportunities afforded to them in formal settings. This volume draws together critical perspectives in three overarching areas in which technology is used to support music education: music production; game technology; musical creation, experience and understanding. The fourteen chapters reflect the emerging field of the study of technology in music from a pedagogical perspective. Contributions come not only from music pedagogues but also from musicologists, composers and performers working at the forefront of the domain. The authors examine pedagogical practice in the recording studio, how game technology relates to musical creation and expression, the use of technology to create and assess musical compositions, and how technology can foster learning within the field of Special Educational Needs (SEN). In addition, the use of technology in musical performance is examined, with a particular focus on the current trends and the ways it might be reshaped for use within performance practice. This book will be of value to educators, practitioners, musicologists, composers and performers, as well as to scholars with an interest in the critical study of how technology is used effectively in music and music education.

What makes a distant oboe's wail beautiful? Why do some kinds of music lift us to ecstasy, but not others? How can music make sense to an ear and brain evolved for detecting the approaching lion or tracking the unsuspecting gazelle? Lyrically interweaving discoveries from science, psychology, music theory, paleontology, and philosophy, Robert Jourdian brilliantly examines why music speaks to us in ways that words cannot, and why we form such powerful connections to it. In clear, understandable language, Jourdian expertly guides the reader through a continuum of musical experience: sound, tone, melody, harmony, rhythm, composition, performance, listening, understanding--and finally to ecstasy. Along the way, a fascinating cast of characters brings Jourdian's narrative to vivid life: "idiots savants" who absorb whole pieces on a single hearing, composers who hallucinate entire compositions, a psychic who claims to take dictation from long-dead composers, and victims of brain damage who can move only when they hear music. Here is a book that will entertain, inform, and stimulate everyone who loves music--and make them think about their favorite song in startling new ways.What makes a distant oboes wail beautiful? Why do some kinds of music lift us to ecstasy, but not others? How can music make sense to an ear and brain evolved for detecting the approaching lion or tracking the unsuspecting gazelle? Lyrically interweaving discoveries from science, psychology, music theory, paleontology, and philosophy, Robert Jourdian brilliantly examines why music speaks to us in ways that words cannot, and why we form such powerful connections to it.

In clear, understandable language, Jourdian expertly guides the reader through a continuum of musical experience: sound, tone, melody, harmony, rhythm, composition, performance, listening, understanding--and finally to ecstasy. Along the way, a fascinating cast of characters brings Jourdians narrative to vivid life: idiots savants who absorb whole pieces on a single hearing, composers who hallucinate entire compositions, a psychic who claims to take dictation from long-dead composers, and victims of brain damage who can move only when they hear music. Here is a book that will entertain, inform, and stimulate everyone who loves music--and make them think about their favorite song in startling new ways.

The aim of the volume is to show in which sense the study of culture, literature and the arts can contribute to a better understanding of human cognition. The collection of essays is questioning whether culture is exclusively human and discusses evolutionary substrates of narrative and the interfaces between culture, stories and cognition. The contributions examine the cognitive strengths and weaknesses of literary reading and analyse other techniques of sense-making in the arts through imagined dialogues and the experience of ambiguity. The final contributions are dealing with musical cognition, the relation between music, aesthetics and cognition.

Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy examines the capacity of musiciking to cultivate ecological literacy, approaching eco-literate music pedagogy through philosophical and autoethnographical lenses. Building on the principle that music contributes uniquely to human ecological thinking, this volume tracks the course of eco-literate music pedagogy while guiding the discussion forward: What does it mean to embrace the impulse to teach music for ecological literacy? What is it like to theorize eco-literate music pedagogy? What is learned through enacting this pedagogy? How do the impulsion, the theorizing, and the enacting relate to one another? Music education for ecological consciousness is experienced in local places, and this study explores the theory underlying eco-literate music pedagogy in juxtaposition with the author's personal experiences. The work arrives at a new philosophy for music education: a spiritual praxis rooted in soil communities, one informed by ecology's intrinsic value for non-human being and musicking. Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy adds to the emerging body of music education literature considering ecological and environmental issues.

Offers expansive and intersecting understandings of erotic subjectivity, intimacy, and trauma in performance ethnography and in institutional and disciplinary settings. Focused on research within Africa and the African diaspora, contributors to this volume think through the painful iterations of trauma, systemic racism, and the vestiges of colonial oppression as well as the processes of healing and emancipation that emerge from wounded states. Their chapters explore an acoustemology of intimacy, woman-centered eroticism generated through musical performance, desire and longing in ethnographic knowledge production, and listening as intimacy. On the other end of the spectrum, authors engage with and question the fetishization of race in jazz; examine conceptions of vulgarity and profanity in movement and dance-ethnography; and address pain, trauma, and violation, whether physical, spiritual, intellectual, or political. Authors in this volume strive toward empathetic, ethical, and creative ethnographic engagements that summon vulnerability and healing. They propose pathways to aesthetic, discursive transformation by reorienting conceptions of knowledge as emergent, performative, and sonically enabled. The resulting book explores sensory knowledge that is frequently left unacknowledged in ethnographic work, advancing conversations about performed sonic and somatic modalities through which we navigate our entanglements as engaged scholars.

In the decade following the success of Waiting for Godot (1952), Samuel Beckett wrote some of his most absorbing work for radio. These plays display the author's appreciation of the essential properties of radio broadcasting. They also highlight a profound musicality which, while evident in his novels, poetry and plays, is particularly noteworthy in this medium. This book is an analysis of the contribution made to radio drama by Beckett. In these plays, he is concerned with themes of human isolation and the frailty of memory and communication. He identified radio as an ideal medium for the presentation of these themes and the development of drama which could transcend the limitations of realism. Beckett used music as an essential component of his radio output for a variety of purposes. In this study, the author argues that, while Beckett's radio plays are suffused with a bleak sense of disintegration of language, music offers a sense of optimism. A variety of musical and performance perspectives is utilised to gain a greater appreciation of these radio plays.

AWARD WINNER OF THE 2018 SOCIETY OF ETHNOMUSICLOGY ELLEN KOSKOFF PRIZE This volume is the first sustained examination of the complex perspectives that comprise ecomusicology-the study of the intersections of music/sound, culture/society, and nature/environment. Twenty-two authors provide a range of theoretical, methodological, and empirical chapters representing disciplines such as anthropology, biology, ecology, environmental studies, ethnomusicology, history, literature, musicology, performance studies, and psychology. They bring their specialized training to bear on interdisciplinary topics, both individually and in collaboration. Emerging from the whole is a view of ecomusicology as a field, a place where many disciplines come together. The topics addressed in this volume-contemporary composers and traditional musics, acoustic ecology and politicized soundscapes, material sustainability and environmental crisis, familiar and unfamiliar sounds, local places and global warming, birds and mice, hearing and listening, biomusic and soundscape ecology, and more-engage with conversations in the various realms of music study as well as in environmental studies and cultural studies. As with any healthy ecosystem, the field of ecomusicology is dynamic, but this edited collection provides a snapshot of it in a formative period. Each chapter is short, designed to be accessible to the nonspecialist, and includes extensive bibliographies; some chapters also provide further materials on a companion website: http://www.ecomusicology.info/cde/. An introduction and interspersed editorial summaries help guide readers through four current directions-ecological, fieldwork, critical, and textual-in the field of ecomusicology.

Looking at musical globalization and vocal music, this collection of essays studies the complex relationship between the human voice and cultural identity in 20th- and 21st-century music in both East Asian and Western music. The authors approach musical meaning in specific case studies against the background of general trends of cultural globalization and the construction/deconstruction of identity produced by human (and artificial) voices. The essays proceed from different angles, notably sociocultural and historical contexts, philosophical and literary aesthetics, vocal technique, analysis of vocal microstructures, text/phonetics-music-relationships, historical vocal sources or models for contemporary art and pop music, and areas of conflict between vocalization, "ethnicity," and cultural identity. They pinpoint crucial topical features that have shaped identity-discourses in art and popular musical situations since the1950s, with a special focus on the past two decades. The volume thus offers a unique compilation of texts on the human voice in a period of heightened cultural globalization by utilizing systematic methodological research and firsthand accounts on compositional practice by current Asian and Western authors.

Corporations engage young people and musicians in brand-building activities. These activities unfold in media-dense social spaces. Social networking sites, the user-generated content of web 2.0, live music events, digital cameras and cell phones are all used in constructing valuable brands. This book addresses the integration of popular music culture, corporate branding, and young people's mediated cultural practices. These intersections provide a rich site for examining how young people build brands within spaces and practices that they perceive as meaningful. The book is based on extensive ethnographic empirical research, drawing on participant observation, textual analysis and interviews with young people, musicians, marketers and other participants in the cultural industries. Contemporary theories of marketing and branding are brought together with critical and cultural accounts of mediated social life. The book explores the distinctive concerns and debates of these different perspectives and the lively interface between them.

This is a long-awaited reissue of Jerrold Levinson's 1990 book Music, Art, and Metaphysics, which gathers together the writings that made him a leading figure in contemporary aesthetics. Most of the essays are distinguished by a concern with metaphysical questions about artworks and their properties, but other essays address the problem of art's definition, the psychology of aesthetic response, and the logic of interpreting and evaluating works of art. The focus of about half of the essays is the art of music, the art of greatest interest to Levinson throughout his career. Many of the essays have been very influential, being among the most cited in contemporary aesthetics and having become essential references in debates on the definition of art, the ontology of art, emotional response to art, expression in art, and the nature of art forms.

From Rolling Stone, the definitive and lavishly illustrated companion book to one of the most popular and hotly debated lists in the world of musicWhen Rolling Stone publishes a list, the world listens. The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list was first established in 2003 and the lineup was updated in 2012, polling the industry's most celebrated artists, producers, industry executives, and journalists to create the definitive ranking. As a companion to the original 2003 list, Rolling Stone and Wenner Books published the bestselling 500 Greatest Albums coffee table book. In 2020 Rolling Stone started from scratch with a completely new 500 Greatest Albums list, voted on by the biggest names in music-including Beyonce, Billie Eilish, and Taylor Swift, to name a few. As expected, the new list caused a huge splash across the music and entertainment industries, sparking major conversation and debate around the list, and generating more than 125 million page views on RollingStone.com in the first month of launch.In partnership with Abrams, Rolling Stone has created the definitive companion book to reflect the all-new 2020 list, telling the stories behind all 500 albums through incredible Rolling Stone photography, original album art, Rolling Stone's unique critical commentary, breakout pieces on the making of key albums, archival interview content, and a celebrity introduction.