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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Theory of music & musicology
Released in 2008, J-pop trio Perfume's GAME shot to the top of
Japanese music charts and turned the Hiroshima trio into a
household name across the country. It was also a high point for
techno-pop, the genre's biggest album since the heyday of Yellow
Magic Orchestra. This collection of maximalist but emotional
electronic pop stands as one of the style's finest moments, with
its influence still echoing from artists both in Japan and from
beyond. This book examines Perfume's underdog story as a group long
struggling for success, the making of GAME, and the history of
techno-pop that shaped it. 33 1/3 Global, a series related to but
independent from 33 1/3, takes the format of the original series of
short, music-basedbooks and brings the focus to music throughout
the world. With initial volumes focusing on Japanese and Brazilian
music, the series will also include volumes on the popular music of
Australia/Oceania, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and more.
Using cine-ethnomusicology as a focus, Cineworlding introduces
readers to ways of thinking eco-cinematically. Screens are
omnipresent, we carry digital cinema production equipment in our
pockets, but this screen-based technological revolution has barely
impacted social science scholarship. Mixing existential
phenomenological fiction about social science digital cinema
research practice followed by theoretical reflection and discussion
of methods, this book has emerged from a decade-long inquiry into
cineworlding and a desire to help others produce digital media to
engage creatively with the digital networks that surround us.
From the Tin Pan Alley 32-bar form, through the cyclical forms of
modal jazz, to the more recent accumulation of digital layers,
beats, and breaks in Electronic Dance Music, repetition as both an
aesthetic disposition and a formal property has stimulated a
diverse range of genres and techniques. From the angles of
musicology, psychology, sociology, and science and technology, Over
and Over reassesses the complexity connected to notions of
repetition in a variety of musical genres. The first edited volume
on repetition in 20th- and 21st-century popular music, Over and
Over explores the wide-ranging forms and use of repetition - from
large repetitive structures to micro repetitions - in relation to
both specific and large-scale issues and contexts. The book brings
together a selection of original texts by leading authors in a
field that is, as yet, little explored. Aimed at both specialists
and neophytes, it sheds important new light on one of the
fundamental phenomena of music of our times.
Sonic Rupture applies a practitioner-led approach to urban
soundscape design, which foregrounds the importance of creative
encounters in global cities. This presents an alternative to those
urban soundscape design approaches concerned with managing the
negative health impacts of noise. Instead, urban noise is
considered to be a creative material and cultural expression that
can be reshaped with citywide networks of sonic installations. By
applying affect theory the urban is imagined as an unfolding of the
Affective Earth, and noise as its homogenous (and homogenizing)
voice. It is argued that noise is an expressive material with which
sonic practitioners can interface, to increase the creative
possibilities of urban life. At the heart of this argument is the
question of relationships: how do we augment and diversify those
interconnections that weave together the imaginative life and the
expressions of the land? The book details seven sound installations
completed by the author as part of a creative practice research
process, in which the sonic rupture model was discovered. The sonic
rupture model, which aims to diversify human experiences and urban
environments, encapsulates five soundscape design approaches and
ten practitioner intentions. Multiple works of international
practitioners are explored in relation to the discussed approaches.
Sonic Rupture provides the domains of sound art, music, creative
practice, urban design, architecture and environmental philosophy
with a unique perspective for understanding those affective forces,
which shape urban life. The book also provides a range of practical
and conceptual tools for urban soundscape design that can be
applied by the sonic practitioner.
Through a transnational, comparative and multi-level approach to
the relationship between youth, migration, and music, the aesthetic
intersections between the local and the global, and between agency
and identity, are presented through case studies in this book.
Transglobal Sounds contemplates migrant youth and the impact of
music in diaspora settings and on the lives of individuals and
collectives, engaging with broader questions of how new modes of
identification are born out of the social, cultural, historical and
political interfaces between youth, migration and music. Thus,
through acts of mobility and environments lived in and in-between,
this volume seeks to articulate between musical transnationalism
and sense of place in exploring the complex relationship between
music and young migrants and migrant descendant's everyday lives.
Breaking is the first and most widely practiced hip-hop dance in
the world today, with an estimated one million participants taking
part in this dynamic, multifaceted artform. Yet, despite its global
reach and over 40 years of existence, historical treatments of the
dance have largely neglected the African Americans who founded it.
Dancer and scholar Serouj "Midus" Aprahamian offers, for the first
time, a detailed look into the African American beginnings of
breaking in the Bronx, New York, during the 1970s. Given the
pivotal impact the dance had on hip-hop's formation, this book also
challenges numerous myths and misconceptions that have permeated
studies of hip-hop culture's emergence. Aprahamian draws on
untapped archival material, primary interviews, and detailed
descriptions of early breaking to bring this buried history to
life, with a particular focus on the early aesthetic development of
the dance, the institutional settings in which hip-hop was
conceived, and the movement's impact on sociocultural conditions in
New York throughout the 1970s. By featuring the overlooked
first-hand accounts of over 50 founding b-boys and b-girls, this
book also shows how indebted breaking is to African American
culture and interrogates the disturbing factors behind its
historical erasure.
Translating for Singing discusses the art and craft of translating
singable lyrics, a topic of interest in a wide range of fields,
including translation, music, creative writing, cultural studies,
performance studies, and semiotics. Previously, such translation
has most often been discussed by music critics, many of whom had
neither training nor experience in this area. Written by two
internationally-known translators, the book focusses mainly on
practical techniques for creating translations meant to be sung to
pre-existing music, with suggested solutions to such linguistic
problems as those associated with rhythm, syllable count, vocal
burden, rhyme, repetition and sound. Translation theory and
translations of lyrics for other purposes, such as surtitles, are
also covered. The book can serve as a primary text in courses on
translating lyrics and as a reference and supplementary text for
other courses and for professionals in the fields mentioned. Beyond
academia, the book is of interest to professional translators and
to librettists, singers, conductors, stage directors, and audience
members.
Although David Bowie has famously characterized himself as a "leper
messiah," a more appropriate moniker might be "rock god" someone
whose influence has crossed numerous sub-genres of popular and
classical music and can at times seem ubiquitous. By looking at key
moments in his career (1972, 1977-79, 1980-83, and 1995-97) through
several lenses--theories of sub-culture, gender/sexuality studies,
theories of sound, post-colonial theory, and performance studies
Waldrep will examine Bowie's work in terms not only of his auditory
output but his many reinterpretations of it via music videos,
concert tours, television appearances, and occasional movie roles.
Future Nostalgia will look at all aspects of Bowie's
career--musical recordings, live concerts, music videos, film
performances, and television appearance--in an attempt to trace
Bowie's contribution to the performative paradigms that constitute
contemporary rock music.
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