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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Theory of music & musicology
This book offers an in-depth study of the globalization of contemporary South Korean idol pop music, or K-Pop, visiting K-Pop and its multiple intersections with political, economic, and cultural formations and transformations. It provides detailed insights into the transformative process in and around the field of Korean pop music since the 1990s, which paved the way for the recent international rise of K-Pop and the Korean Wave. Fuhr examines the conditions and effects of transnational flows, asymmetrical power relations, and the role of the imaginary "other" in K-Pop production and consumption, relating them to the specific aesthetic dimensions and material conditions of K-Pop stars, songs, and videos. Further, the book reveals how K-Pop is deployed for strategies of national identity construction in connection with Korean cultural politics, with transnational music production circuits, and with the transnational mobility of immigrant pop idols. The volume argues that K-Pop is a highly productive cultural arena in which South Korea's globalizing and nationalizing forces and imaginations coincide, intermingle, and counteract with each other and in which the tension between both of these poles is played out musically, visually, and discursively. This book examines a vibrant example of contemporary popular music from the non-Anglophone world and provides deeper insight into the structure of popular music and the dynamics of cultural globalization through a combined set of ethnographic, musicological, and cultural analysis. Widening the regional scope of Western-dominated popular music studies and enhancing new areas of ethnomusicology, anthropology, and cultural studies, this book will also be of interest to those studying East Asian popular culture, music globalization, and popular music.
First Published in 1998. This book is the first resource guide to published materials on Scott Joplin and encompasses a wide variety of items having to do with the man, his Iife, his music, and his influence on ragtime throughout the twentieth century. This guide includes articles and listings on festivals, concerts, clubs or societies, individual performers, performing groups, radio, television, and film as well as bibliography on Joplin and ragtime in general.
Fluxus was a pivotal movement in redefining art's role and the artist's identity in the contemporary world, so that its aesthetics - as well as many of its gimmicks - have become so deeply embedded in our social setting that we now no longer realize where they originally came into being. Fluxus has been described as the most radical and experimental art movement of the 1960s, challenging conventional thinking on art and culture. It had a central role in the birth of such key contemporary art forms as concept art, installation, performance art, intermedia and video. The amount of Fluxus-related scholarly activity has increased since 2009, when New York's Museum of Modern Art acquired the world's largest collection of Fluxus works, the Lila and Gilbert Silverman Collection, and this in turn led to a series of exhibitions, first at MoMA and subsequently at other institutions worldwide. Focusing on Japanese artists involved in Fluxus, the book proposes a new understanding of this movement which, in spite of its anti-academicism, its aversion to authorial identity and the ephemeral character of its output, is "the best documented and best cross-indexed art movement in history," (Nam June Paik 1994, 77). The book presents postwar Japanese radical avant-garde and the related and highly refined discourse and debate behind it, enlightening crucial if less known aspects of (local) Fluxus history and theory.
It is the first monograph in which the concertos of all composers active in this field in the Republic of Venice in the years 1695-1740 are methodically discussed. The Venetian instrumental concerto from Vivaldi's time is portrayed here through an extensive and thorough survey of the most complete and representative musical material that allowed for the making of conclusions as to its typology, form, style and technique. The concertos discussed here include 974 works by fifteen composers active in Venice, Brescia, Bergamo and Padua. Such an approach not only gives an exhaustive but also a more objective view on the history of the Baroque concerto in its Venetian variant. It shows Vivaldi's work in a new and broad context, which allows us to better understand its unique character.
For over 150 years the concept of "sonata form" lay at the heart of
European instrumental music. Now, in Elements of Sonata Theory,
musicologist James Hepokoski and music theorist Warren Darcy
rethink its basic principles. Considering not only sonatas but also
chamber music, symphonies, overtures, and concertos, their study
outlines a new, updated paradigm for understanding the
compositional choices present in the instrumental works of Haydn,
Mozart, Beethoven, and their contemporaries. It also lays down an
indispensable foundation for those working with later adaptations
and deformations of these musical structures in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.
This text comprises of reviews of work relating to music and mind. It presents a range of approaches from the psychological through the computational, to the musicological. The reviews were selected from papers submitted at the Third International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition Liege 1994 to illustrate the wide range of perspectives now being adopted in studying how humans make and respond to music. The book is divided ino five sections. The first part illustrates the role of analysis and ethnomusicology in understanding cultural determinants of musical behaviour. The second part charts what is known about aquisition of musical competence, from pre-birth through to the expert performer. The evidence accumulated about specific areas of the brain which control musical thinking and behaviour is examined in Part Three. The fourth part examines how neurological, behavioural and artificial intelligence approaches are converging to shed light on processes in auditory perception. Finally, Part Five highlights the important developments in how we conceptualize the way in which musical structures are represented in the mind.
Music and Transcendence explores the ways in which music relates to transcendence by bringing together the disciplines of musicology, philosophy and theology, thereby uncovering congruencies between them that have often been obscured. Music has the capacity to take one outside of oneself and place one in relation to that which is 'other'. This 'other' can be conceived in an 'absolute' sense, insofar as music can be thought to place the self in relation to a divine 'other' beyond the human frame of existence. However, the 'other' can equally well be conceived in an 'immanent' (or secular) sense, as music is a human activity that relates to other cultural practices. Music here places the self in relation to other people and to the world more generally, shaping how the world is understood, without any reference to a God or gods. The book examines how music has not only played a significant role in many philosophical and theological accounts of the nature of existence and the self, but also provides a valuable resource for the creation of meaning on a day-to-day basis.
Particularly since the 1950s, cars and popular music have been constantly associated. As complementary goods and intertwined technologies, their relationship has become part of a widely shared experience-one that connects individuals and society, private worlds and public spheres. Popular Music and Automobiles aims to unpack that relationship in more detail. It explores the ways in which cars and car journeys have shaped society, as well as how we have shaped them. Including both broad synergies and specific case studies, Popular Music and Automobiles explores how attention to an ongoing relationship can reveal insights about the assertion and negotiation of identity. Using methods of enquiry that are as diverse as the topics they tackle, its contributors closely consider specific genders, genres, places and texts.
Looking and Listening: Conversations between Modern Art and Music invites the art and music lover to place these two realms of creative endeavor in an open dialog with one another. While the worlds of music and visual art often seem to take separate path, they are commonly parallel ones. In Looking and Listening, conductor and art connoisseur Brenda Leach takes unique pairings of well-known visual art works and musical compositions from the 20th century to identify the shared sources of inspiration, as well as similarities in theme, style and technique to explore the historical and cultural influences on the great artists and composers in the 20th century. For readers, Looking and Listening asks and answers: What does jazz have in common with paintings by Stuart Davis and Piet Mondrian? How did Gershwin s Rhapsody in Blue impact the work of artist Arthur Dove? How did painter Georgia O Keeffe and composer Aaron Copland capture the spirit of a youthful America entering the 20th century in their works? What did Kandinsky and Schoenberg share in their artistic visions? Leach takes readers on a whirlwind tour of the lives of these artists and others, surveying many of the key movements in the 20th century, from pop art to minimalism, cubism to atonalism, by comparing representative works from modern master of the visual arts and music. Leach s refreshing and innovation approach will interest those passionate over 20th century art and music and is ideal for any student or instructor, museum docent or music programmer seeking to draw the lines of connection between these two art forms."
Ubiquitous Musics offers a multidisciplinary approach to the pervasive presence of music in everyday life. The essays address a variety of situations in which music is present alongside other activities and does not demand focused attention from (sometimes involuntary) listeners. The contributors present different theoretical perspectives on the increasing ubiquity of music and its implications for the experience of listening. The collection consists of nine essays divided into three sections: Histories, Technologies, and Spaces. The first section addresses the historical origins of functional music and the debates on how reproduced music, including a wide range of styles and genres, spread so quickly across so many environments. The second section focuses on more contemporary sound technologies, including mobile phones in India, the role of visible playback technology in film, and listening to portable digital players. The final section reflects on settings such as malls, stores, gyms, offices and cars in which ubiquitous musics are often present, but rarely thought about. This last section - and ultimately the whole collection - seeks to foster a wider understanding of listening practices by lending a fresh, critical ear.
Artistic Practice as Research in Music: Theory, Criticism, Practice brings together internationally renowned scholars and practitioners to explore the cultural, institutional, theoretical, methodological, epistemological, ethical and practical aspects and implications of the rapidly evolving area of artistic research in music. Through various theoretical positions and case studies, and by establishing robust connections between theoretical debates and concrete examples of artistic research projects, the authors discuss the conditions under which artistic practice becomes a research activity; how practice-led research is understood in conservatoire settings; issues of assessment in relation to musical performance as research; methodological possibilities open to music practitioners entering academic environments as researchers; the role of technology in processes of musical composition as research; the role and value of performerly knowledge in music-analytical enquiry; issues in relation to live performance as a research method; artistic collaboration and improvisation as research tools; interdisciplinary concerns of the artist-researcher; and the relationship between the affordances of a musical instrument and artistic research in musical performance. Readers will come away from the book with fresh insights about the theoretical, critical and practical work being done by experts in this exciting new field of enquiry.
Sounding Off brings together a selection of essays on philosophy of music written by Peter Kivy--the leading expert on the subject. The essays fall into four groups, corresponding to Kivy's major interests. Part I contains two essays on the nature of musical genius. In Part II, three essays take up the subject of authenticity in performance, and explore what Kivy terms "the authenticity of interpretation." Part III contains four essays concerning the much discussed issues of musical representation and musical meaning. Finally, Part IV consists of three essays on the "pure musical parameters": these are essays on "music alone" or "absolute music"--music as the pure, formal structure of (sometimes) expressive sound. Eight of the eleven essays presented here are previously unpublished, and the book includes two appendices which provide Kivy's responses to criticism.
Listening is a social process. Even apparently trivial acts of listening are expert performances of acquired cognitive and bodily habits. Contemporary scholars acknowledge this fact with the notion that there are "auditory cultures." In the fourth century BCE, Greek philosophers recognized a similar phenomenon in music, which they treated as a privileged site for the cultural manufacture of sensory capabilities, and proof that in a traditional culture perception could be ordered, regular, and reliable. This approachable and elegantly written book tells the story of how music became a vital topic for understanding the senses and their role in the creation of knowledge. Focussing in particular on discussions of music and sensation in Plato and Aristoxenus, Sean Gurd explores a crucial early chapter in the history of hearing and gently raises critical questions about how aesthetic traditionalism and sensory certainty can be joined together in a mutually reinforcing symbiosis.
The political has always been part of popular music, but how does that play out in today's musical and political landscape? Mixing Pop and Politics: Political Dimensions of Popular Music in the 21st Century provides an innovative exploration of the complex politics of popular music in its contemporary formations. Amid the shifting paradigms of power in the 2020s, the chapters in this book go beyond the idea of popular music as protest to explore how resistance, subversion, containment, and reconciliation all interact in the popular music realm. Covering a wide range of international artists and genres, from South African hip-hop to Polish punk, and addressing topics such as climate change and environmentalism, feminism, diasporic identity, political parties, music-making as labour, the far right, conservatism and nostalgia, and civic engagement, the contributors expand our understanding of how popular music is political. For students and scholars of music, popular culture, and politics, the volume offers a broad, exciting snapshot of the latest scholarship on contemporary popular music and politics.
Like other major music genres, ska reflects, reveals, and reacts to the genesis and migration from its Afro-Caribbean roots and colonial origins to the shores of England and back across the Atlantic to the United States. Without ska music, there would be no reggae or Bob Marley, no British punk and pop blends, no American soundtrack to its various subcultures. In Ska: The Rhythm of Liberation, Heather Augustyn examines how ska music first emerged in Jamaica as a fusion of popular, traditional, and even classical musical forms. As a genre, it was a connection to Africa, a means of expression and protest, and a respite from the struggles of colonization and grinding poverty. Ska would later travel with West Indian immigrants to the United Kingdom, where British youth embraced the music, blending it with punk and pop and working its origins as a music of protest and escape into their present lives. The fervor of the music matched the energy of the streets as racism, poverty, and violence ran rampant. But ska called for brotherhood and unity. As series editor and pop music scholar Scott Calhoun notes: "Like a cultural barometer, the rise of ska indicates when and where social, political, and economic institutions disappoint their people and push them to re-invent the process for making meaning out of life. When a people or group embark on this process, it becomes even more necessary to embrace expressive, liberating forms of art for help during the struggle. In its history as a music of freedom, ska has itself flowed freely to wherever people are celebrating the rhythms and sounds of hope." Ska: The Rhythm Liberation should appeal to fans and scholars alike-indeed, any enthusiast of popular music and Caribbean, American, and British history seeking to understand the fascinating relationship between indigenous popular music and cultural and political history. Devotees of reggae, jazz, pop, Latin music, hip hop, rock, techno, dance, and world beat will find their appreciation of this remarkable genre deepened by this survey of the origins and spread of ska.
This volume contains articles most of which present empirical studies in the field of systematic musicology. Contributions in particular deal with aspects of melody including modeling and computer-assisted analysis as well as with various issues in sound and music perception, musical acoustics and psychoacoustics. Topics range from loudness perception in ‘Techno’ music to sound radiation in classical singing styles, and from timbre research to wave field synthesis and room acoustics. One focus of this volume is on pop and rock music, another is on ethno and folk music. In addition to empirical investigations, theoretical and methodological issues are addressed including some fundamental concepts in ethnomusicology and folk music scholarship.
It was Carl Dahlhaus who coined the phrase 'dead time' to describe the state of the symphony between Schumann and Brahms. Christopher Fifield argues that many of the symphonies dismissed by Dahlhaus made worthy contributions to the genre. He traces the root of the problem further back to Beethoven's ninth symphony, a work which then proceeded to intimidate symphonists who followed in its composer's footsteps, including Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann. In 1824 Beethoven set a standard that then had to rise in response to more demanding expectations from both audiences and the musical press. Christopher Fifield, who has a conductor's intimacy with the repertory, looks in turn at the five decades between the mid-1820s and mid-1870s. He deals only with non-programmatic works, leaving the programme symphony to travel its own route to the symphonic poem. Composers who lead to Brahms (himself a reluctant symphonist until the age of 43 in 1876) are frequently dismissed as epigones of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schumann but by investigating their symphonies, Fifield reveals their respective brands of originality, even their own possible influence upon Brahms himself and in so doing, shines a light into a half-century of neglected nineteenth century German symphonic music.
Both in opera studies and in most operatic works, the singing body is often taken for granted. In Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body, Jelena Novak reintroduces an awareness of the physicality of the singing body to opera studies. Arguing that the voice-body relationship itself is a producer of meaning, she furthermore posits this relationship as one of the major driving forces in recent opera. She takes as her focus six contemporary operas - La Belle et la Bete (Philip Glass), Writing to Vermeer (Louis Andriessen, Peter Greenaway), Three Tales (Steve Reich, Beryl Korot), One (Michel van der Aa), Homeland (Laurie Anderson), and La Commedia (Louis Andriessen, Hal Hartley) - which she terms 'postoperas'. These pieces are sites for creative exploration, where the boundaries of the opera world are stretched. Central to this is the impact of new media, a de-synchronization between image and sound, or a redefinition of body-voice-gender relationships. Novak dissects the singing body as a set of rules, protocols, effects, and strategies. That dissection shows how the singing body acts within the world of opera, what interventions it makes, and how it constitutes opera's meanings.
Josephine Lang (1815-80) was one of the most gifted, respected,
prolific, and widely published song composers of the nineteenth
century, yet her life and works have remained virtually unknown.
Now, this carefully researched, compelling, and poignant study
recognizes the composer for her remarkable accomplishments.
David Bowie: Critical Perspectives examines in detail the many layers of one of the most intriguing and influential icons in popular culture. This interdisciplinary book brings together established and emerging scholars from a wide variety of backgrounds, including musicology, sociology, art history, literary theory, philosophy, politics, film studies and media studies. Bowie's complexity as a singer, songwriter, producer, performer, actor and artist demands that any critical engagement with his overall work must be interdisciplinary and wide-ranging in its scope. The chapters are organised around the key themes of 'textualities', 'psychologies', 'orientalisms', 'art and agency' and 'performing and influencing' in Bowie's work. This comprehensive book contributes a great deal to the study of popular music, performance, gender, religion, popular media and celebrity.
Taking a cue from Erving Goffman's classic work, Asylums, Tia DeNora develops a novel interdisciplinary framework for music, health and wellbeing. Considering health and illness both in medical contexts and in the often-overlooked realm of everyday life, DeNora argues that these identities are by no means mutually exclusive. Moreover, she suggests that the promotion of health and more specifically, mental health, involves a great deal more than a concern with medication, genetic predispositions, clinical and neuro-scientific procedures. Adopting a holistic, interactionist focus, Music Asylums reconnects states of wellness and wellbeing to encounters with others and - critically - to opportunities for aesthetic experience. Building on DeNora's earlier work on music as a technology of self in everyday life, the book presents music as an active ingredient of action, identity, capacity and consciousness. From there, it suggests that access to, and evaluation of, music is an important ethical matter. Intended for scholars and practitioners in psychiatry and psychology, palliative care, socio-music studies, music psychology and the allied health professions, Music Asylums showcases music's role in the existential project of being and staying well, mentally and physically, from moment-to-moment and across all realms of social life.
Why are so few women composers known to the general public and even fewer of their works studied and performed? More than one musicologist told the author that they are not "famous" enough to be considered! So then, can a woman who studied with Boulanger and Messiaen, who won the coveted Paris Conservatory Prize in Composition, who received the highest awards her country can bestow, and who produced some of the finest teaching musicians on the globe qualify as "famous"? This book is about one who can and does: Erzsebet Szonyi, a Hungarian "Renaissance woman", who, in spite of a repressive regime's attempts to contain her, ended up wielding an international artistic and pedagogical influence. Readers interested in music education, women's and family studies, Kodaly studies, Classical education, theory and composition, musicology, creative processes, educational psychology, and the history and sociology of pre- and postwar Central Europe will find A Tear in the Curtain: The Musical Diplomacy of Erzsebet Szonyi: Musician, Composer, Teacher of Teachers to be a compelling read. One is left to contemplate what society should actually expect from the education of its citizens. In this book, readers clearly hear Erzsebet Szonyi's own voice as she describes her journey through unimaginable joys, sorrows, and personal challenges to emerge as a muse for our age. More like her are needed; perhaps through her life story we can learn how to raise them. The message is clear: Fame is a life lived in the service of others.
Institutions in Recife, Brazil, have restructured subsidies in favor of encouraging musicians to become more entrepreneurial. Falina Enriquez explores how contemporary and traditional musicians in the fabled musical city have negotiated these intensified neoliberal cultural policies and economic uncertainties. Drawing on years of fieldwork, Enriquez shows how forcing artists to adopt "neutral" market solutions reinforces, and generates, overlapping racial and class-based inequalities. Lacking the social and financial resources of their middle-class peers, working-class musicians find it difficult to uphold institutional goals of connecting the city's cultural roots to global markets and consumers. Enriquez also links the artists' situation to that of cultural and creative workers around the world. As she shows, musical sponsorship in Recife and the contemporary gig economy elsewhere employ processes that, far from being neutral, uphold governmental and corporate ideologies that produce social stratification. Rich and vibrant, The Costs of the Gig Economy offers a rare English-language portrait of the changing musical culture in Recife.
During the past two decades, there has emerged a growing need to reconsider the objects, axioms and perspectives of writing music history. A certain suspicion towards Francois Lyotard's grand narratives, as a sign of what he diagnosed as our 'postmodern condition', has become more or less an established and unquestioned point of departure among historians. This suspicion, at its most extreme, has led to a radical conclusion of the 'end of history' in the work of postmodern scholars such as Jean Baudrillard and Francis Fukuyama. The contributors to Critical Music Historiography take a step back and argue that the radical view of the 'impossibility of history', as well as the unavoidable ideology of any history, are counter-productive points of departure for historical scholarship. It is argued that metanarratives in history are still possible and welcome, even if their limitations are acknowledged. Foucault, Lyotard and others should be taken into account but systematized viewpoints and methods for a more critical and multi-faceted re-evaluation of the past through research are needed. As to the metanarratives of music history, they must avoid the pitfalls of evolutionism, hagiography, and teleology, all hallmarks of traditional historiography. In this volume the contributors put these methods and principles into practice. The chapters tackle under-researched and non-conventional domains of music history as well as rethinking older historiographical concepts such as orientalism and nationalism, and consequently introduce new concepts such as occidentalism and transnationalism. The volume is a challenging collection of work that stakes out a unique territory for itself among the growing body of work on critical music history.
Most classical musicians, whether in orchestral or ensemble situations, will have to face a piece by composers such as Ligeti, Messiaen, Varese or Xenakis, while improvisers face music influenced by Dave Holland, Steve Coleman, Aka Moon, Weather Report, Irakere or elements from the Balkans, India, Africa or Cuba. Rafael Reina argues that today's music demands a new approach to rhythmical training, a training that will provide musicians with the necessary tools to face, with accuracy, more varied and complex rhythmical concepts, while keeping the emotional content. Reina uses the architecture of the South Indian Karnatic rhythmical system to enhance and radically change the teaching of rhythmical solfege at a higher education level and demonstrates how this learning can influence the creation and interpretation of complex contemporary classical and jazz music. The book is designed for classical and jazz performers as well as creators, be they composers or improvisers, and is a clear and complete guide that will enable future solfege teachers and students to use these techniques and their methodology to greatly improve their rhythmical skills. An accompanying website of audio examples helps to explain each technique. For examples of composed and improvised pieces by students who have studied this book, as well as concerts by highly acclaimed karnatic musicians, please copy this link to your browser: http://www.contemporary-music-through-non-western-techniques.com/pages/1587-video-recordings |
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