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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Theory of music & musicology
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.
Starting in 1945 and continuing for the next twenty years, dozens of African American rhythm and blues artists made records that incorporated West Indian calypso. Some of these recordings were remakes or adaptations of existing calypsos but many were original compositions. Several, such as "Stone Cold Dead in de Market" by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan or "If You Wanna Be Happy" by Jimmy Soul, became major hits in both the rhythm and blues and pop music charts. While most remained obscurities, the fact that over 170 such recordings were made during this time period suggests that there was sustained interest in calypso among rhythm and blues artists and record companies during this era. Rhythm & Blues Goes Calypso explores this phenomenon starting with a brief history of calypso music as it developed in its land of origin, Trinidad and Tobago, the music's arrival in the United States, a brief history of the development of rhythm and blues, and a detailed description and analysis of the adaptation of calypso by African American R & B artists during the period 1945-1965. The book also seeks to make musical and cultural connections between the West Indian immigrant community and the broader African American community that produced this musical hybrid. While the number of such recordings was small compared to the total number of rhythm and blues recordings, calypso was a persistent and sometimes a major component of early rhythm and blues for at least two decades and deserves recognition as part of the history of African American popular music.
Singer-Songwriters and Musical Open Mics is an ethnographic exploration of New York City's live music events where musicians signup and perform short sets. This sociological study dispels the common assumption that open mics are culturally monolithic and reserved for novice musicians. Open mics allow musicians at different locations within their musical development and career to interactively perform, practice, and network with other musicians. Important themes in the book include: the tension between self and society in the creative process, issues of creative authenticity and authorship, and on-going cultural changes central to the Do-It-Yourself cultural zeitgeist of the early 21st century. The open mic's cultural antecedents include a radio format, folk hootenannies, and the jazz jam session. Drawing from multiple qualitative methods, Aldredge describes how open mics have etched a vital organizational place in the western and urban musical landscape. Open mics represent a creative place where the boundaries of practicing and performing seemingly blur. This allows for a range of social settings from more competitive, stratified, and homogenous music scenes to culturally diverse weekly events often stretching late into the night.
Brian Eno's seminal album Ambient 1: Music for Airports continues to fascinate and charm audiences, not only as a masterpiece of ambient music, but as a powerful and transformative work of art. Author John T. Lysaker situates this album in the context of twentieth-century art music, where its ambitions and contributions to avant garde music practice become even more apparent. To appreciate the album's multifaceted character, Lysaker advocates for "prismatic listening," an attentiveness that continually shifts registers in the knowledge that no single approach can grasp the work as a whole. Exploring each of the album's four tracks and their unique sonic arrangements, Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports argues that the album must be approached from at least three angles: as an ambient contribution to lived environments that draws upon cybernetics and the experiments of Erik Satie, as an exploration of what John Cage has termed the "activity of sounds," and as a work of conceptual art that asks us to think freshly about artistic creativity, listening, and the broad ecology of interactions that not only make art possible, but the full range of human meaning. If one listens in this way, Music for Airports becomes a sonic image that blurs the nature-culture distinction and rescues the most interesting concerns of avant-garde music from the social isolation of concert halls and performance spaces.
This volume presents essays on the theory, methodology, and disciplinary history of Systematic and Comparative Musicology as well as on concepts of current empirical research. Part 1 is devoted to Systematic Musicology which is viewed as a transdisciplinary approach to fundamental music research, on the one hand, and as a field of learning which is offered as an academic subject in universities, on the other. Part 1 also includes articles which illustrate modern research concepts many of which are based on experimental and other empirical methods as well as on computational and modelling approaches. The articles concern problems which range from acoustics and psychoacoustics to neuromusicology and music cognition. Part 2 addresses issues in Comparative Musicology and Ethnomusicology, for instance the relevance of comparative methods as applied to the study of non-western musical phenomena. Further, sound analysis combined with fieldwork as well as modelling based on ethnomathematical considerations are given special notice. Aspects of theory and disciplinary history are also covered in this section which moreover includes findings obtained from actual fieldwork.
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.
Provides examples that instructors can readily apply in their teaching, enabling deeper inclusion of Black composers in the music theory curriculum on a practical level This book includes discussion of a wide variety of genres, including: jazz and popular music (including R&B, funk, and pop), string quartets, piano pieces, concertos, symphonies, and art songs Addresses Black composers and musicians working in a wide range of musical styles, including classical and popular works
How is it possible to talk or write about music? What is the link between graphic signs and music? What makes music meaningful? In this book, distinguished scholar Leo Treitler explores the relationships among language, musical notation, performance, compositional practice, and patterns of culture in the presentation and representation of music. Treitler engages a wide variety of historical sources to discuss works from medieval plainchant to Berg s opera Lulu and a range of music in between."
The Music Theory in Practice series has helped more than one million musicians worldwide to learn about the notation and theory of music. Now fully revised, this workbook remains the best way to prepare for ABRSM's Grade 3 Theory of Music Exam. Features a clear explanation of music notation, many worked examples and practice exercises, definitions of important words and concepts, specimen exam questions and helpful tips for students. As well as supporting the ABRSM Theory syllabus, this workbook also provides an excellent resource for anyone wishing to develop general music literacy skills.
Transnational Memory and Popular Culture in East and Southeast Asia explores the significance of transnational popular culture in the formation and mediation of collective memories across the region. It looks at case studies including: the politics of cinematic remembering of Hong Kong films on Southeast Asia, the digital and holographic enshrinement of departed celebrities like Wong Kar Kui, Bruce Lee and Teresa Teng and the dredging of personal memories of the encounters with the Korean Wave in Singapore. In addition, it explores how cultural memories are used as focal points of staging cultural revival and movements in Singapore and Taiwan. Contrary to the assumptions of the importance of newness in modern popular culture productions, the continued relevance of this otherwise dated material reflects the significance of these texts in the development and strengthening of collective cultural memories. The discussion of such issues has often been grounded geo-spatially on the "national" and contemporary contexts, this volume will develop a more temporalized and transnational perspective in the shaping of otherwise local cultural identifications.
This text provides the first comprehensive examination of pictographic notation. Pictographic musical notation represents the relevant instruments themselves rendered visually rather than verbally. Used most extensively in contemporary publications between the 1950s and 1980s, its popularity has waned in recent years. This expertly researched work displays the resourcefulness and inventiveness of 20th century orchestrators. Providing a detailed examination of pictographic score notation, this unique book passes over 60 years of contemporary composition and score publications. Divided into three sections, this work describes instrumental pictographs, stage diagrams, and pictographic performance directives. In addition to the thoroughly researched information and extensive technique illustrations, commentary on individual examples and frequent cross-referencing of related examples, differentiate this work from other journal articles and notation texts.
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.
Contemplating Shostakovich marks an important new stage in the understanding of Shostakovich and his working environment. Each chapter covers aspects of the composer's output in the context of his life and cultural milieu. The contributions uncover 'outside' stimuli behind Shostakovich's works, allowing the reader to perceive the motivations behind his artistic choices; at the same time, the nature of those choices offers insights into the workings of the larger world - cultural, social, political - that he inhabited. Thus his often ostensibly quirky choices are revealed as responses - by turns sentimental, moving, sardonic and angry - to the particular conditions, with all their absurdities and contradictions, that he had to negotiate. Here we see the composer emerging from the role of tortured loner of older narratives into that of the gregarious and engaged member of his society that, for better and worse, characterized the everyday reality of his life. This invaluable collection offers remarkable new insight, in both depth and range, into the nature of Shostakovich's working circumstances and of his response to them. The collection contains the seeds for a wide range of new directions in the study of Shostakovich's works and the larger contexts of their creation and reception.
Since rock's beginnings, there have been groupies. These chosen few women who bed, but not often wed, the musicians of their dreams are almost as much a part of music history as the musicians themselves. Pamela Des Barres, the world's foremost supergroupie, here offers an all-access backstage pass to the world of rock stars and the women who love them. Having had her own affairs with legends such as Keith Moon and Jimmy Page--as documented in her bestselling memoir "I'm with the Band"--Pamela now turns the spotlight onto other women who have found their way into the hearts and bedrooms of some of the world's greatest musicians. In "Let's Spend the Night Together, "she tells, in their own words, the stories of these amazing women who went way beyond the one-night stand. Here you'll get to know 24 outrageous groupies, including - Tura Satana, Miss Japan Beautiful, who taught Elvis how to dance and gave him lessons in lovemaking - Cassandra Peterson, aka Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, who tangled with Tom Jones in Sin City - Soulful Miss Mercy, who discovered that not only does the rest of the world listen to Al Green while making love--so does Al Green - Cynthia Plaster Caster, who redefined art and made history when Jimi Hendrix plunged his member into her plaster mold - The mysterious Miss B, who reveals Kurt Cobain's penchant for lip gloss and pantyhose - and over a dozen more
Shostakovich's music is often described as being dynamic, energetic. But what is meant by 'energy' in music? After setting out a broad conceptual framework for approaching this question, Michael Rofe proposes various potential sources of the perceived energy in Shostakovich's symphonies, describing also the historical significance of energeticist thought in Soviet Russia during the composer's formative years. The book is in two parts. In Part I, examples are drawn from across the symphonies in order to demonstrate energy streams within various musical dimensions. Three broad approaches are adopted: first, the theories of Boleslav Yavorsky are used to consider melodic-harmonic motion; second, Boris Asafiev's work, with its echoes of Ernst Kurth, is used to describe form as a dynamic process; and third, proportional analysis reveals numerous symmetries and golden sections within local and large-scale temporal structures. In Part II, the multi-dimensionality of musical energy is considered through case studies of individual movements from the symphonies. This in turn gives rise to broader contextualised perspectives on Shostakovich's work. The book ends with a detailed examination of why a piece of music might contain golden sections.
From an array of prominent activists including Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko to renowned performers and oral poets such as Johnny Dyani and Samuel Mqhayi, the Eastern Cape region plays a unique role in the history of South African protest politics and creativity. The Spirit of Resistance in Music and Spoken Word of South Africa's Eastern Cape concentrates on the Eastern Cape's contribution to the larger narrative of the connection between creativity, mass movements, and the forging of a modern African identity and focuses largely on the amaXhosa population. Lindsay Michie explores Eastern Cape performance artists, activists, organizations, and movements that used inventive and historical means to raise awareness of their plight and brought pressure to bear on the authorities and systems that caused it, all the while exhibiting the depth, originality, and inspiration of their culture.
It seems self-evident that music plays more than just an aesthetic role in contemporary society. In addition, music's social, political, emancipatory, and economical functions have been the subject of much recent research. Given this, it is surprising that the subject of ethics has often been neglected in discussions about music. The various forms of engagement between music and ethics are more relevant than ever, and require sustained attention. Music and Ethics examines different ways in which music can 'in itself' - in a uniquely musical way - contribute to theoretical discussions about ethics as well as concrete moral behaviour. We consider music as process, and music-making as interaction. Fundamental to our understanding is music's association with engagement, including contact with music through the act of listening, music as an immanent critical process that possesses profound cultural and historical significance, and as an art form that can be world-disclosive, formative of subjectivity, and contributive to intersubjective relations. Music and Ethics does not offer a general musico-ethical theory, but explores ethics as a practical concept, and demonstrates through concrete examples that the relation between music and ethics has never been absent.
How was Africa seen by the West during the colonial period? How do
Europeans and Americans conceive of Africa in today's postcolonial
era? Such questions have preoccupied anthropologists, historians,
and literary scholars for years. But few have asked the reverse:
how did--and do--Africans see Europe and the United States? Fewer
still have wondered how Western images of Africa and African
representations of the West might mirror one another.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the cross-pollenization of world musical materials and practices has accelerated precipitously, due in large part to advances in higher-speed communications and travel. We live now in a world of global musical practice that will only continue to blossom and develop through the twenty-first century and beyond. Yet music theory as an academic discipline is only just beginning to respond to such a milieu. Conferences, workshops and curricula are for the first time beginning to develop around the theme of 'world music theory', as students, teachers and researchers recognize the need for analytical concepts and methods applicable to a wider range of human musics, not least the hybrid musics that influence (and increasingly define) more and more of the world's musical practices. Towards a Global Music Theory proposes a number of such concepts and methods stemming from durational and acoustic relationships between 'twos' and 'threes' as manifested in various interrelated aspects of music, including rhythm, melody, harmony, process, texture, timbre and tuning, and offers suggestions for how such concepts and methods might be applied effectively to the understanding of music in a variety of contexts. While some of the bases for this foray into possible methods for a twenty-first century music theory lie along well established acoustical and psycho-acoustical lines, Dr Mark Hijleh presents a broad attempt to apply them conceptually and comprehensively to a variety of musics in a relevant way that can be readily apprehended and applied by students, scholars and teachers.
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.
Australian by birth but a longtime resident of Great Britain, David Lumsdaine (b.1931) is central to both Australian and British modernism. During the early 1970s Australian musical modernism was at its height. Lumsdaine and his Australian contemporaries were engaged with practices from multiple places, producing music that displays the attributes of their disparate influences; in so doing they formed a new conception of what it meant to be an Australian composer. The period is similarly important in Britain, for it saw the rise to prominence of composers such as Birtwistle, Davies, Goehr, Gilbert, Wood, Cardew and many others who were Lumsdaine's contemporaries, colleagues and friends. Hooper presents here a series of analyses of Lumsdaine's compositions, focusing on works written between 1966 and 1980. At the early end of this period is Kelly Ground, for solo piano. One of Lumsdaine's first acknowledged works, Kelly Ground connects explicitly with the music of high modernism, employing ideas about temporality as espoused by Ligeti, Stockhausen and Boulez, to form a new ritual for the (now mythical) Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. Hooper places Lumsdaine's music in the context of Australian and British avant-gardes, and reveals its elegance, lyricism and technical virtuosity.
A year after the end of the Second World War, the first International Summer Course for New Music took place in the Kranichstein Hunting Lodge, near the city of Darmstadt in Germany. The course, commonly referred to later as the Darmstadt course, was intended to familiarize young composers and musicians with the music that, only a few years earlier, had been denounced as degenerate by the Nazi regime, and it soon developed into one of the most important events in contemporary music. Having returned to Germany in 1949 from exile in the United States, Adorno was a regular participant at Darmstadt from 1950 on. In 1955 he gave a series of lectures on the young Schoenberg, using the latter's work to illustrate the relation between tradition and the avant-garde. Adorno's three double-length lectures on the young Schoenberg, in which he spoke as a passionate advocate for the composer whom Boulez had declared dead, were his first at Darmstadt to be recorded on tape. The relation between tradition and the avant-garde was the leitmotif of the lectures that followed, which continued over the next decade. Adorno also dealt in detail with problems of composition in contemporary music, and he often accompanied his lectures with off-the-cuff musical improvisations. The five lecture courses he gave at Darmstadt between 1955 and 1966 were all recorded and subsequently transcribed, and they are published here for the first time in English. This volume is a unique document on the theory and history of the New Music. It will be of great value to anyone interested in the work of Adorno and critical theory, in German intellectual and cultural history, and in the history of modern music.
Being Time invites a deep consideration of the personal experience of temporality in music, focusing on the perceptual role of the listener. Through individual case studies, this book centers on musical works that deal with time in radical ways. These include pieces by Morton Feldman, James Saunders, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Ryoji Ikeda, Toshiya Tsunoda, Laurie Spiegel and Andre O. Moeller. Multiple perspectives are explored through a series of encounters, initially between an individual and a work, and subsequently with each author's varying experiences of temporality. The authors compare their responses to features such as repetition, speed, duration and scale from a perceptual standpoint, drawing in reflections on aspects such as musical memory and anticipation. The observations made in this book are accessible and relevant to readers who are interested in exploring issues of temporality from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives.
Since his arrival in New York in 1961, Bob Dylan has always been something of a mystery. He has worn a variety of masks that have delighted, puzzled, amused, and angered his many audiences. He has been poet, rocker, preacher, trickster, and prophet, and he has filled all these personas with songs and different voices. Nonetheless, Dylan has always been perceived as an authentic artist. Andrea Cossu brings the making of Bob Dylan to center stage in this new book, which offers a strikingly fresh explanation of Dylan and the changes he made throughout his career. Cossu s enjoyable descriptions of key Dylan performances show us how Dylan created his authenticity through performance, and how the many attempts to make Bob Dylan have often involved the interaction between the artist, his public image, and his many audiences.Touching on four different periods and tours from his first days in Greenwich Village to his electric turn at Newport, from the Rolling Thunder Revue and Dylan s born-again years to his late career the book offers a striking vision of how Dylan built his image and learned to live with its burden, painting a unique and coherent new portrait of the artist. A select number of books were printed with the incorrect index. We apologize for this mistake and have posted the final index for your convenience."
Since his arrival in New York in 1961, Bob Dylan has always been something of a mystery. He has worn a variety of masks that have delighted, puzzled, amused, and angered his many audiences. He has been poet, rocker, preacher, trickster, and prophet, and he has filled all these personas with songs and different voices. Nonetheless, Dylan has always been perceived as an authentic artist. Andrea Cossu brings the making of Bob Dylan to center stage in this new book, which offers a strikingly fresh explanation of Dylan and the changes he made throughout his career. Cossu s enjoyable descriptions of key Dylan performances show us how Dylan created his authenticity through performance, and how the many attempts to make Bob Dylan have often involved the interaction between the artist, his public image, and his many audiences.Touching on four different periods and tours from his first days in Greenwich Village to his electric turn at Newport, from the Rolling Thunder Revue and Dylan s born-again years to his late career the book offers a striking vision of how Dylan built his image and learned to live with its burden, painting a unique and coherent new portrait of the artist. A select number of books were printed with the incorrect index. We apologize for this mistake and have posted the final index for your convenience." |
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