Listening to Art Song: An Introduction offers an easy-to-read, fresh perspective on the remarkably diverse musical genre of art song. As the ultimate expression of the human singing voice, song has provided succor and entertainment to humanity in many forms since the dawn of civilization. Margaret Olson examines art song's development, outlines the elements that comprise it, offers ideas on how to effectively listen to it, provides brief biographical sketches of key art song composers, and lists important recordings in the Italian, French, German, British, and American art song traditions. By instructing readers in how to evaluate art songs, Olson informs and enhances the art song experience for listeners. Listening to Art Song is the ideal text for any student studying voice or anyone interested in the genre of song.

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 Eight of the eleven essays presented here are previously unpublished, and the book includes two appendices which provide Kivy's responses to criticism.

This book takes as its historical point of departure the radical appearance in 1779 of technically difficult keyboard music in a set of six sonatas (Op. 2) by Muzio Clementi. The difficult passages contained in this opus are unique amongst keyboard music published for a market that was understood at the time to consist almost entirely of female amateur keyboardists. Previously actively discouraged from practicing or improving their skills due to the restrictive ideologies in place, Clementi's music increasingly affords female pianists a new kind of musical expression. Clementi and the woman at the piano: Virtuosity and the market for music in eighteenth-century London maps the social, musical, and gendered implications of technically difficult music and helps to underline important changes in Enlightenment culture and keyboard practice. Clementi's activities initiated the now familiar and modern concepts of repetitive musical practice, the work-concept, virtuosity itself, and the division between amateur and professional. Additionally, Clementi promotes a radical new mode of expression for female pianists that is at first highly controversial but slowly gains acceptance due to a widespread promotion of his music, instruments, and methods. Clementi's career is in many respects a perfect case study for the tensions between Enlightenment thinking and new Romantic ideologies.

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.

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

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.

This is the first monograph on the Polish composer Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860-1941). It aspires to be part of the process of restoring his compositional legacy to European musical culture. Reinterpreting the legend surrounding the great Pole, the study is based on Paderewskis works that are listed in the Paderewski catalogue, but also includes sketches, unfinished pieces and student exercises. Raba's analysis and interpretation of the composer's work is carried out in formal-structural, stylistic-critical and aesthetic contexts, revising the image of the composer, that has been distorted in the historical reception of his oeuvre.

In seventeenth century Italy, overcrowding, violent political uprising, and plague led an astonishing number of abandoned and orphaned children to overwhelm the cities. Out of the piety of private citizens and the apathy of local governments, the system of conservatori was created to house, nurture, and train these fanciulli vaganti (roaming children) to become hatters, shoemakers, tailors, goldsmiths, cabinet makers, and musicians - a range of practical trades that might sustain them and enable them to contribute to society. Conservatori were founded across Italy, from Venice and Florence to Parma and Naples, many specializing in a particular trade. Four music conservatori in Naples gained particular renown for their exceptional training of musicians, both performers and composers, all boys. By the eighteenth century, the graduates of the Naples conservatories began to spread across Europe, with some 600 boys formerly in residence beginning to dominate the European musical world. Other conservatories in the country - including the Paris Conservatory - began to imitate the principles of the Naples' conservatory's training, known as the partimento tradition. The daily lessons and exercises associated with this tradition were largely lost-until author Robert Gjerdingen discovered evidence of them in the archives of conservatories across Italy and the rest of Europe. Compellingly narrated and richly illustrated, Child Composers in the Old Conservatory follows the story of these boys as they undergo rigorous training with the conservatory's maestri and eventually become maestri themselves, then moves forward in time to see the influence of partimenti in the training of such composers as Claude Debussy and Colette Boyer. Advocating for the revival of partimenti in modern music education, the book explores the tremendous potential of this tradition to enable natural musical fluency for students of all ages learning the craft today.

Designed to coordinate page-by-page with Lesson Book 1B. Contains enjoyable games and quizzes that reinforce the principles presented in the Lesson Book. Students can increase their musical understanding while they are away from the keyboard.

Song & Social Change in Latin America offers seven essays from a diverse group of scholars on the topic of music as a reflection of the many social-political upheavals throughout Latin America from the 20th century to the present. Topics covered include: the Tropicalia movement in Brazil, the Nueva Cancion in Central America, Rock in Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Peru, the Vallenato in Colombia, Trova in Cuba, and urban music of Puerto Rico in the mid-20th century. The collection also includes five interviews from prominent and up-and-coming musicians -Ruben Blades, Roy Brown, Habana Abierta, Ana Tijoux, and Mare- representing a variety of musical genres and political issues in Central America, the Caribbean, South America, and Mexico.

Hermeneutics and Music Criticism forges new perspectives on aesthetics, politics and contemporary interpretive strategies. By advancing new insights into the roles judgment and imagination play both in our experiences of music and its critical interpretation, this book reevaluates our current understandings of music's transformative power. The engagement with critical musicologists and philosophers, including Adorno, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, provides a nuanced analysis of the crucial issues affecting the theory and practice of music criticism. By challenging musical hermeneutics' deployment as a means of deciphering social values and meanings, Hermeneutics and Music Criticism offers an answer to the long-standing question of how music's expression of moods and feelings affects us and our relation to the world.

The Language of the Modes provides a study of modes in early music through eight essays, each dealing with a different aspects of modality. The volume codifies all known theoretical references to mode, all modally ordered musical sources, and all modally cyclic compositions. For many music students and listeners, the "language of the modes" is a deep mystery, accustomed as we are to centuries of modern harmony. Wiering demystifies the modal world, showing how composers and performers were able to use this structure to create compelling and beautiful works. This book will be an invaluable source to scholars of early music and music theory. in early music through eight essays, each dealing with a different aspects of modality. It codifies all known theoretical references to mode, all modally ordered musical sources, and all modally cyclic compositions. This book will be an invaluable source to scholars of early music.

The music of Tchaikovsky remains as much loved in the twenty-first century as it was a hundred years ago. But it has so much more to offer than luscious orchestration and tuneful melodies. In Experiencing Tchaikovsky: A Listener's Companion, historian and scholar David Schroeder looks beyond traditional views of Tchaikovsky to explore the dramatic impact of his music by walking readers through the remarkable range of works by this great Russian composer. Drawing on a select, but highly representative, group of compositions from Tchaikovsky's vast output, from his groundbreaking ballet Swan Lake to his great opera Eugene Onegin, Experiencing Tchaikovsky: A Listener's Companion offers in-depth explorations without technical jargon. In addition to looking at his ballets and some of his operas, Schroeder probes the many other genres in which Tchaikovsky worked, from his chamber music pieces and symphonies to his other orchestral works and concertos. Throughout, Schroeder draws connections among the works, painting a fuller, more coherent picture of Tchaikovsky through his thematic interests, musical techniques, sonic signatures, and literary and cultural focuses. For context, Schroeder describes the works of personal significance for the composer through such contemporary literature as Tchaikovsky's letters to Nadezhda von Meck, the wealthy patroness whom he never met. Experiencing Tchaikovsky: A Listener's Companion is for anyone who left a ballet performance whistling themes from Swan Lake or humming melodies from The Nutcracker. It is the ideal work for concertgoers, music students, opera buffs, ballet enthusiasts, and anyone who appreciates this musical master.

This book tells the story of how a regional Chinese theatrical form, Shanghai Yue Opera, evolved from the all-male 'beggar's song' of the early twentieth century to become the largest all-female opera form in the nation, only to face increasing pressure to survive under Chinese political and economic reforms in the new millennium. Previous publications have focused mainly on the historical development of Chinese theatre, with emphasis placed on Beijing opera. This is the first book to take an interdisciplinary approach to the story of the Shanghai Yue Opera, bringing history, arts management, central and regional government policy, urbanisation, gender, media, and theatre artistic development in one. Through the story of the Shanghai Yue Opera House market reform this book facilitates an understanding of the complex Chinese political economic situation in post-socialist China. This book suggests that as state art institutions are key organs of the Communist party gaining legitimacy, the vigorous evolution and struggle of the Shanghai Yue Opera house in fact directly mirrors the Communist Party internal turmoil in the new millennium to gain its own legitimacy and survival.

Helie Salomon's Scientia artis musice (1274), is a practical manual devoted to basic concepts, psalmody, vocal pedagogy, the musical hand in singing, clefs as indicators of the tone (mode) to which a piece belongs, and practical instruction in the singing of four-voice parallel organum. Joseph Dyer presents the first, much-needed, modern edition of Salomon's treatise, accompanied by a full English translation, comprehensive introduction and commentary. This edition corrects errors in the 1784 edition of Martin Gerbert, includes the music of chants omitted by Gerbert from the tonary, and makes available reproductions in colour of the eight illustrations in the treatise.

The sounds of music and the German language have played a significant role in the developing symbolism of the German nation. In light of the historical division of Germany into many disparate political entities and regional groups, German artists and intellectuals of the 19th and early 20th centuries conceived of musical and linguistic dispositions as the nation's most palpable common ground. According to this view, the peculiar sounds of German music and of the German language provided a direct conduit to national identity, to the deepest recesses of the German soul. So strong is this legacy of sound is still prevalent in modern German culture that philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, in a recent essay, did not even hesitate to describe post-wall Germany as an "acoustical body." This volume gathers the work of scholars from the US, Germany, and the United Kingdom to explore the role of sound in modern and postmodern German cultural production. Working across established disciplines and methodological divides, the essays of Sound Matters investigate the ways in which texts, artists, and performers in all kinds of media have utilized sonic materials in order to enforce or complicate dominant notions of German cultural and national identity. Nora M. Alter is Professor of German, Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida. She is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (Indiana UP, 1996) and Projecting History: German Non-Fiction Film 1967-2000, (University of Michigan Press, 2002). Lutz Koepnick is Associate Professor of German, Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (The University of Nebraska Press, 1999), for which he received the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures in 2000.

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.
Based on years of study of unpublished letters, musical autographs, reviews, and the autobiographical poetry of Lang's husband, Reinhold Kostlin, the biographical portions of the book offer a stunning portrait of the composer as a woman and an artist.
In-depth musical analyses interwoven with the biography will be illuminating to scholars and to musicians of all skill levels. The analyses reveal Lang's sensitivity to her chosen poetic texts, as well as the validity of her claim that her songs were her diary; the authors demonstrate that many of the songs are directly connected to the events of Lang's life. The analyses are illustrated by an abundance of musical examples, including a number of complete songs. A companion CD, on which the authors have recorded 30 songs by Lang, complements the text.

The study of music in commercials is well-suited for exploring the persuasive impact that music has beyond the ability to entertain, edify, and purify its audience. This book focuses on music in commercials from an interpretive text analytical perspective, answering hitherto neglected questions: What characterizes music in commercials compared to other commercial music and other music on TV? How does music in commercials relate to music outside the universe of commercials? How and what can music in commercials signify? Author Nicolai Graakjaer sets a new benchmark for the international scholarly study of music on television and its pervading influence on consumer choice.

The notion of the individual creator, a product in part of the Western romantic ideal, is now troubled by accounts and explanations of creativity as a social construct. While in collectivist cultures the assimilation (but not the denial) of individual authorship into the complexities of group production and benefit has been a feature, the notion of the lone individual creator has been persistent. Systems theories acknowledge the role of others, yet at heart these are still individual views of creativity - focusing on the creative individual drawing upon the work of others rather than recognizing the mutually constitutive elements of social interactions across time and space. Focusing on the domain of music, the approach taken in this book falls into three sections: investigations of the people, processes, products, and places of collaborative creativity in compositional thought and practice; explorations of the ways in which creative collaboration provides a means of crossing boundaries between disciplines such as music performance and musicology; and studies of the emergence of creative thought and practice in educational contexts including that of the composer and the classroom. The volume concludes with an extended chapter that reflects on the ways in which the studies reported advance understandings of creative thought and practice. The book provides new perspectives to our understandings of the role of collaborative thought and processes in creative work across the domain of music including: composition, musicology, performance, music education and music psychology.

Few Mexican musicians in the twentieth century achieved as much notoriety or had such an international impact as the popular singer and songwriter Agustin Lara (1897-1970). Widely known as "el flaco de oro" ("the Golden Skinny"), this remarkably thin fellow was prolific across the genres of bolero, ballad, and folk. His most beloved "Granada," a song so enduring that it has been covered by the likes of Mario Lanza, Frank Sinatra, and Placido Domingo, is today a standard in the vocal repertory. However, there exists very little biographical literature on Lara in English. In AgustinLara: A Cultural Biography, author Andrew Wood's informed and informative placement of Lara's work in a broader cultural context presents a rich and comprehensive reading of the life of this significant musical figure. Lara's career as a media celebrity as well as musician provides an excellent window on Mexican society in the mid-twentieth century and on popular culture in Latin America. Wood also delves into Lara's music itself, bringing to light how the composer's work unites a number of important currents in Latin music of his day, particularly the bolero. With close musicological focus and in-depth cultural analysis riding alongside the biographical narrative, Agustin Lara: A Cultural Biography is a welcome read to aficionados and performers of Latin American musics, as well as a valuable addition to the study of modern Mexican music and Latin American popular culture as a whole."

The first monograph of the life and oeuvre of Marcin Mielczewski (d. 1651) presents the best known Polish composer of seventeenth-century Europe. During the 1990s, while exploring a newly accessible collection of music manuscripts from Silesia (the Sammlung Bohn) held in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, the author found 37 compositions signed M.M., which she ascribed to Mielczewski. This discovery, representing more than half the composer's known legacy, fuelled a considerable rise in interest in Mielczewski's output among musicologists and musicians. In this book, the current state of knowledge about Marcin Mielczewski's life and work is presented within the context of the musical patronage of King Ladislaus IV Vasa of Poland and his brother, Bishop Charles Ferdinand.

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."

Discussion concerning the 'musicality' of Samuel Beckett's writing now constitutes a familiar critical trope in Beckett Studies, one that continues to be informed by the still-emerging evidence of Beckett's engagement with music throughout his personal and literary life, and by the ongoing interest of musicians in Beckett's work. In Beckett's drama and prose writings, the relationship with music plays out in implicit and explicit ways. Several of his works incorporate canonical music by composers such as Schubert and Beethoven. Other works integrate music as a compositional element, in dialogue or tension with text and image, while others adopt rhythm, repetition and pause to the extent that the texts themselves appear to be 'scored'. But what, precisely, does it mean to say that a piece of prose or writing for theatre, radio or screen, is 'musical'? The essays included in this book explore a number of ways in which Beckett's writings engage with and are engaged by musicality, discussing familiar and less familiar works by Beckett in detail. Ranging from the scholarly to the personal in their respective modes of response, and informed by approaches from performance and musicology, literary studies, philosophy, musical composition and creative practice, these essays provide a critical examination of the ways we might comprehend musicality as a definitive and often overlooked attribute throughout Beckett's work.

This monograph is an authoritative study of the oeuvre of one of the most important composers of our time. For the first time, Ligeti's key works are presented in the context of their drafts and sketches. His personal and artistic development is set forth and illuminated, and his principal compositions are analyzed and reinterpreted, based on detailed studies of the scores and drafts, as well as on personal conversations with the composer. In addition, numerous questions concerning today's composing are raised and discussed. Music does not have to be puristic: Ligeti's spheres of interest are close to universal, embracing history, natural science, and visual arts, as well as music of diverse eras and ethnicities. This expanded world of the musical comprises not just tones and sounds, speech and music, the vocal and the instrumental: Ligeti conceives music as a cosmos of acoustic form.