Music, Sexuality and the Enlightenment explains how Mozart's music for Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and CosA fan tutte 'sounds' the intentions of Da Ponte's characters and their relationships with one another. Mozart, by way of the infinitely generative and beautiful logic of the sonata principle, did not merely interpret Da Ponte's characterizations but lent them temporal, musical forms. Charles Ford's analytic interpretation of these musical forms concerns processes and structures in detail and at medium- to long-term levels. He addresses the music of a wide range of arias and ensembles, and develops original ways to interpret the two largely overlooked operatic genres of secco recitative and finales. Moreover, Ford presents a new method by which to relate musical details directly to philosophical concepts, and thereby, the music of the operas to the inwardly contradictory thinking of the European Enlightenment. This involves close readings of late eighteenth-century understandings of 'man' and nature, self and other, morality and transgression, and gendered identities and sexuality, with particular reference to contemporary writers, especially Goethe, Kant, Laclos, Rousseau, Sade, Schiller, Sterne and Wollstonecraft. The concluding discussion of the implied futures of the operas argues that their divided sexualities, which are those of the Enlightenment as a whole, have come to form our own unquestioned assumptions about gender differences and sexuality. This, along with the elegant and eloquent precision of Mozart's music, is why Figaro, Giovanni and CosA still maintain their vital immediacy for audiences today.

This is an essential book for all performers and students of Classical and Romantic music. Problems of performing practice did not disappear with the death of Handel. This book is the first to examine the changing relationship, during the period 1750-1900, between what composers committed to paper and what performers were expected to play.

From the Foreword by Sir Roger Norrington:

`This is the book we have been waiting for ... Music-making must always involve guesses and inspirations, creative hunches and improvised strategies, above all, instinct and imagination. But if we don't have all the answers, the least we can do is to set out on our journey with the right questions. These questions and indeed many of the possible answers, Clive Brown gives in wonderful profusion. I cannot recommend this book too highly.'

- Provides an accessible introduction to the field of music cognition. - Written by a leading researcher in the interdisciplinary field that gives us fundamental insights in the cognitive mechanisms underlying musicality - Will appeal to those taking courses on the Psychology of Music or Auditory Perception, from the fields of Psychology and Music

This collection of original essays is in tribute to the work of Derek Scott on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. As one of the leading lights in Critical Musicology, Scott has helped shape the epistemological direction for music research since the late 1980s. There is no doubt that the path taken by the critical musicologist has been a tricky one, leading to new conceptions, interactions, and heated debates during the past two decades. Changes in musicology during the closing decades of the twentieth century prompted the establishment of new sets of theoretical methods that probed at the social and cultural relevance of music, as much as its self-referentiality. All the scholars contributing to this book have played a role in the general paradigmatic shift that ensued in the wake of Kerman's call for change in the 1980s. Setting out to address a range of approaches to theorizing music and promulgating modes of analysis across a wide range of repertories, the essays in this collection can be read as a coming of age of critical musicology through its active dialogue with other disciplines such as sociology, feminism, ethnomusicology, history, anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, aesthetics, media studies, film music studies, and gender studies. The volume provides music researchers and graduate students with an up-to-date authoritative reference to all matters dealing with the state of critical musicology today.

An updated reissue of what, along with England's Dreaming, has become the acknowledged seminal work on punk. Cain was at every major gig and interviewed all of the acts at the time. He was viewed as an 'insider' and his access was unrivalled. This book is a vibrant and fast-paced trip through an extraordinary year. Includes major new interviews with Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten, Strangler Hugh Cornwell and Rat Scabies of The Damned.

A framework for understanding the deep archive of Black performance in the digital era In an era of Big Data and algorithms, our easy access to the archive of contemporary and historical Blackness is unprecedented. That iterations of Black visual art, such as Bert Williams's 1916 silent film short "A Natural Born Gambler" or the performances of Josephine Baker from the 1920s, are merely a quick YouTube search away has transformed how scholars teach and research Black performance. While Black Ephemera celebrates this new access, it also questions the crisis and the challenge of the Black musical archive in a moment when Black American culture has become a global export. Using music and sound as its primary texts, Black Ephemera argues that the cultural DNA of Black America has become obscured in the transformation from analog to digital. Through a cross-reading of the relationship between the digital era and culture produced in the pre-digital era, Neal argues that Black music has itself been reduced to ephemera, at best, and at worst to the background sounds of the continued exploitation and commodification of Black culture. The crisis and challenges of Black archives are not simply questions of knowledge, but of how knowledge moves and manifests itself within Blackness that is obscure, ephemeral, fugitive, precarious, fluid, and increasingly digital. Black Ephemera is a reminder that for every great leap forward there is a necessary return to the archive. Through this work, Neal offers a new framework for thinking about Black culture in the digital world.

What does it mean for poetry and music to turn to each other, in the shadow of the Holocaust, as a means of aesthetic self-reflection? How can their mutual mirroring, of such paramount importance to German Romanticism, be reconfigured to retain its validity after the Second World War? These are the core questions of Axel Englund's book, which is the first to address the topic of Paul Celan and music. Celan, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who has long been recognized as one of the most important poets of the German language, persistently evoked music and song in his oeuvre, from the juvenilia to the posthumous collections. Conversely, few post-war writers have inspired as large a body of contemporary music, including works by Harrison Birtwistle, Gyoergy Kurtag, Wolfgang Rihm, Peter Ruzicka and many others. Through rich close readings of poems and musical compositions, Englund's book engages the artistic media in a critical dialogue about the conditions of their existence. In so doing, it reveals their intersection as a site of profound conflict, where the very possibility of musical and poetic meaning is at stake, and confrontations of aesthetic transcendentality and historical remembrance are played out in the wake of twentieth-century trauma.

The musicological study of popular music has developed, particularly over the past twenty years, into an established aspect of the discipline. The academic community is now well placed to discuss exactly what is going on in any example of popular music and the theoretical foundation for such analytical work has also been laid, although there is as yet no general agreement over all the details of popular music theory. However, this focus on the what of musical detail has left largely untouched the larger question - so what? What are the consequences of such theorization and analysis? Scholars from outside musicology have often argued that too close a focus on musicological detail has left untouched what they consider to be more urgent questions related to reception and meaning. Scholars from inside musicology have responded by importing into musicological discussion various aspects of cultural theory. It is in that tradition that this book lies, although its focus is slightly different. What is missing from the field, at present, is a coherent development of the what into the so what of music theory and analysis into questions of interpretation and hermeneutics. It is that fundamental gap that this book seeks to fill. Allan F. Moore presents a study of recorded popular song, from the recordings of the 1920s through to the present day. Analysis and interpretation are treated as separable but interdependent approaches to song. Analytical theory is revisited, covering conventional domains such as harmony, melody and rhythm, but does not privilege these at the expense of domains such as texture, the soundbox, vocal tone, and lyrics. These latter areas are highly significant in the experience of many listeners, but are frequently ignored or poorly treated in analytical work. Moore continues by developing a range of hermeneutic strategies largely drawn from outside the field (strategies originating, in the most part, within psychology and philosophy) but still deeply r

This book explores the web of pitch relations that generates the musical language of non-serialized twelve-tone music and supplies both the analytical materials and methods necessary for analyses of a vast proportion of the 20th century musical repertoire. It does so in a simple, clear, and systematic manner to promote an easily accessible and global understanding of this music. Since the chromatic scale is the primary source for the pitch materials of 20th-century music, common sub-collections of the various modes and interval cycles serve as the basis for their mutual transformation. It is precisely this peculiarity of the non-serialized twelve-tone system that allows for an array of pitch relations and modal techniques hitherto perceived difficult if not impossible to analyze. Susanni and Antokoletz present the principles, concepts, and materials employed for analysis using a unique theoretic-analytical approach to the new musical language. The book contains a large number of original analyses that explore a host of composers including Ives, Stravinsky, Bartok, Messiaen, Cage, Debussy, Copland, and many more, providing insight into the music of the tonal revolution of the twentieth century and contributing an important perspective to how music works in general.

An Introduction to Effective Music Teaching: Artistry and Attitude provides the prospective teacher with front-line tested strategies and approaches that are based on current research and the author's three decades of service as a public school music educator, department chairman, and public school district music administrator. Starting with a brief overview of the history of music education in public schools, Alfred Townsend gives the reader a deeper understanding of the importance of music education to all students, gifted or not. Readers then examine artistry (command of content and mastery of methods) and the ABCs of teacher attitude, the critical component that unlocks learning for many students. With an open and accessible writing style, Dr. Townsend reviews the six components of effective teaching, showing that artistry and attitude can be combined to fuel student learning and teacher leadership. Using all of this information, the reader constructs a personal, practical philosophy of music teaching and learning that will form the basis for his or her instruction. Readers will also experience artistry and attitude in action through well written case studies of effective teachers. With increasingly diverse student populations teachers now face, this book provides music teachers with ways to interact effectively with students of all backgrounds, attitudes, and talent.

Famously reclusive and secretive, North Korea can be seen as a theatre that projects itself through music and performance. The first book-length account of North Korean music and dance in any language other than Korean, Songs for "Great Leaders" pulls back the curtain on this theatre for the first time. Renowned ethnomusicologist Keith Howard moves from the first songs written in the northern part of the divided Korean peninsula in 1946 to the performances in February 2018 by a North Korean troupe visiting South Korea for the Pyeongchang Winter Olympic Games. Through an exceptionally wide range of sources and a perspective of deep cultural competence, Howard explores old revolutionary songs and new pop songs, developments of Korean instruments, the creation of revolutionary operas, and mass spectacles, as well as dance and dance notation, and composers and compositions. The result is a nuanced and detailed account of how song, together with other music and dance production, forms the soundtrack to the theater of daily life, embedding messages that tell the official history, the exploits of leaders, and the socialist utopia yet-to-come. Based on fieldwork, interviews, and resources in private and public archives and libraries in North Korea, South Korea, China, North America and Europe, Songs for "Great Leaders" opens up the North Korean regime in a way never before attempted or possible.

How are our ability and motivation to be creative shaped by the world around us? Why does creativity seem to flourish in some environments, while others seem to stifle it? Many societies value creativity as an abstract concept and many, perhaps even most, individuals feel an internal drive to be creative; however, tremendous social pressures restrict individuals' development of creative skill sets, engagement in creative activities, and willingness to take creative risks. Becoming Creative explores how social and cultural factors enable or inhibit creativity in music. Author Juniper Hill integrates perspectives from ethnomusicology, education, sociology, psychology, and performance studies, while prioritizing the voices of practicing musicians and music educators. Insights are drawn from ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with classical, jazz, and traditional musicians in South Africa, Finland, and the US. By comparing and analysing these musicians' personal experiences, Becoming Creative deepens our understanding of the development and practice of musical creativity, the external factors that influence it, and strategies for enhancing it. Hill reveals the common components of how musical creativity is experienced across these cultures and explains why creativity might not always be socially desirable. She identifies ideal creativity-enabling criteria - specific skills sets, psychological traits and states, and access to opportunities and authority - and illustrates how these enablers of creativity are fostered or thwarted by a variety of beliefs, attitudes, learning methods, social relationships, institutions, and social inequalities. In addition to theoretical contributions, many sections have direct applications for practice, especially the examination of formal and informal strategies for overcoming inhibitors of creativity. Becoming Creative is for scholars, artists, educators, and anyone wishing to better understand and support creative development in today's world.

Nikos Skalkottas is perhaps the last great 'undiscovered' composer of the twentieth century. In the 1920s he was a promising young violinist and composer in Berlin, and a student of Schoenberg, who included him among his most gifted pupils. It was only after his return to Greece in 1933 that Skalkottas became an anonymous and obscure figure, working in complete isolation until his death in 1949. Most of his works remained unpublished and unperformed during his lifetime, and although he is largely known for his folkloristic tonal pieces, Skalkottas in fact concentrated predominantly on developing an idiosyncratic dodecaphonic musical language. Eva Mantzourani provides here a comprehensive study of this fascinating yet under-researched composer. The book, lavishly illustrated with musical examples, is divided into three parts. Part I comprises a critical biography that, by drawing extensively on his letters and other writings, reappraises the image of Skalkottas with which we are often presented. The main focus of the book, however, is on Skalkottas's twelve-note compositional processes, since these characterize the majority of his output, and are neither well-known nor fully understood. Part II presents the structural and technical features of his twelve-note technique, particularly the different types of sets and their manipulation, and his approach to musical forms. Part III consists of analytical case studies of several works, presented chronologically, which thus provide a diachronic framework within which Skalkottas's dodecaphonic compositional development can be more effectively viewed. This book underlines Nikos Skalkottas's importance as a composer with a distinctive artistic personality, whose work contributed to the development of twelve-note compositional practice, and who deserves a more significant position within the Western art music canon than that to which he is often assigned.

Designed as a tribute to Robert Garfias, who has conducted field work in more cultures than any other living ethnomusicologist, this volume explores the originating encounter in field work of ethnomusicologists with the musicians and musical traditions they study. The nineteen contributors provide case studies from nearly every corner of the world, including biographies of important musicians from the Philippines, Turkey, Lapland, and Korea; interviews with, and reports of learning from, musicians from Ireland, Bulgaria, Burma, and India; and analyses of how traditional musicians adapt to the encounter with modernity in Japan, India, China, Turkey, Afghanistan, Morocco, and the United States. The book also provides a window into the history of ethnomusicology since all the contributors have had a relationship with the University of Washington, home to one of the oldest programs in ethnomusicology in the United States. Inspired by the example of Robert Garfias, they are all indefatigable field researchers and among the leading authorities in the world on their particular musical cultures. The contributions illustrate the core similarities in their approach to the discipline of ethnomusicology and at the same time deal with a remarkably wide range of perspectives, themes, issues, and theoretical questions. Readers should find this collection of essays a fascinating, indeed surprising, glimpse into an important aspect of the history of ethnomusicology.

As Robert Schumann put it, 'Only few works are as clearly stamped with their author's imprint as his'. This book explores Schubert's stylistic traits in a series of chapters each discussing an individual 'fingerprint' with case studies drawn principally from the piano and chamber music. The notion of Schubert's compositional fingerprints has not previously formed the subject of a book-length study. The features of his personal style considered here include musical manifestations of Schubert's 'violent nature', the characteristics of his thematic material, and the signs of his 'classicizing' manner. In the process of the discussion, attention is given to matters of form, texture, harmony and gesture in a range of works, with regard to the various 'fingerprints' identified in each chapter. The repertoire discussed includes the late string quartets, the String Quintet, the E flat Piano Trio and the last three piano sonatas. Developing ideas which she first proposed in a series of journal articles and contributions to symposia on Schubert, Professor Wollenberg takes into account recent literature by other scholars and draws together her own researches to present her view of Schubert's 'compositional personality'. Schubert emerges as someone exerting intellectual control over his musical material and imbuing it with poetic resonance.

At the end of his life, Pierre Schaeffer commented that his musical and sound experiments had attempted to go beyond 'do-re-mi'. This had a direct bearing on EinstA1/4rzende Neubauten's musical philosophy and work, with the musicians always striving to extend the boundaries of music in sound, instrumentation and purpose. The group are one of the few examples of 'rock-based' artists who have been able to sustain a breadth and depth of work in a variety of media over a number of years while remaining experimental and open to development. Jennifer Shryane provides a much-needed analysis of the group's important place in popular/experimental music history. She illustrates their innovations with found- and self-constructed instrumentation, their Artaudian performance strategies and textual concerns, as well as their methods of independence. EinstA1/4rzende Neubauten have also made a consistent and unique contribution to the development of the independent German Language Contemporary Music scene, which although often acknowledged as influential, is still rarely examined.

John Adams's opera, Nixon in China, is one of the most frequently performed operas in the contemporary literature. Timothy A. Johnson illuminates the opera and enhances listeners' and scholars' appreciation for this landmark work. This music-analytical guide presents a detailed, in-depth analysis of the music tied to historical and political contexts. The opera captures an important moment in history and in international relations, and a close study of it from an interdisciplinary perspective provides fresh, compelling insights about the opera. The music analysis takes a neo-Riemannian approach to harmony and to large-scale harmonic connections. Musical metaphors drawn between harmonies and their dramatic contexts enrich this approach. Motivic analysis reveals interweaving associations between the characters, based on melodic content. Analysis of rhythm and meter focuses on Adams's frequent use of grouping and displacement dissonances to propel the music forward or to illustrate the libretto. The book shows how the historical depiction in the opera is accurate, yet enriched by this operatic adaptation. The language of the opera is true to its source, but more evocative than the words spoken in 1972-due to Alice Goodman's marvelous, poetic libretto. And the music transcends its repetitive shell to become a hierarchically-rich and musically-compelling achievement.

In what ways does listening to music shape everyday perception? Is music particularly effective in promoting shifts in consciousness? Is there any difference perceptually between contemplating one's surroundings and experiencing a work of art? Everyday Music Listening is the first book to focus in depth on the detailed nature of music listening episodes as lived mental experiences. Ruth Herbert uses new empirical data to explore the psychological processes involved in everyday music listening scenarios, charting interactions between music, perceiver and environment in a diverse range of real-world contexts. Findings are integrated with insights from a broad range of literature, including consciousness studies and research into altered states of consciousness, as well as ideas from ethology and evolutionary psychology, suggesting that a psychobiological capacity for trancing is linked to the origins of making and receiving of art. The term 'trance' is not generally associated with music listening outside ethnomusicological studies of strong experiences, yet 'hypnotic-like' involvements in daily life have long been recognized by hypnotherapy researchers. The author argues that multiply distributed attention - prevalent in much contemporary listening- does not necessarily indicate superficial engagement. Music emerges as a particularly effective mediator of experience. Absorption and dissociation, as manifestations of trancing, are self-regulatory processes, often operating at the level of unconscious awareness, that support individuals' perceptions of psychological health. This fascinating study brings together research and theory from a wide range of fields to provide a new framework for understanding the phenomenology of music listening in a way that will appeal to both specialist academic audiences and a broad general readership.

Musicians are continually 'in the making', tapping into their own creative resources while deriving inspiration from teachers, friends, family members and listeners. Amateur and professional performers alike tend not to follow fixed routes in developing a creative voice: instead, their artistic journeys are personal, often without foreseeable goals. The imperative to assess and reassess one's musical knowledge, understanding and aspirations is nevertheless a central feature of life as a performer. Musicians in the Making explores the creative development of musicians in both formal and informal learning contexts. It promotes a novel view of creativity, emphasizing its location within creative processes rather than understanding it as an innate quality. It argues that such processes may be learned and refined, and furthermore that collaboration and interaction within group contexts carry significant potential to inform and catalyze creative experiences and outcomes. The book also traces and models the ways in which creative processes evolve over time. Performers, music teachers and researchers will find the rich body of material assembled here engaging and enlightening. The book's three parts focus in turn on 'Creative learning in context', 'Creative processes' and 'Creative dialogue and reflection'. In addition to sixteen extended chapters written by leading experts in the field, the volume includes ten 'Insights' by internationally prominent performers, performance teachers and others. Practical aids include abstracts and lists of keywords at the start of each chapter, which provide useful overviews and guidance on content. Topics addressed by individual authors include intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics, performance experience, practice and rehearsal, 'self-regulated performing', improvisation, self-reflection, expression, interactions between performers and audiences, assessment, and the role of academic study in performers' development.

What does it mean to think of Western Art music - and the Austro-German contribution to that repertory - as a tradition? How are men and masculinities implicated in the shaping of that tradition? And how is the writing of the history (or histories) of that tradition shaped by men and masculinities? This book seeks to answer these and other questions by drawing both on a wide range of German-language writings on music, sound and listening from the so-called long nineteenth century (circa 1800-1918), and a range of critical-theoretical texts from the post-war continental philosophical and psychoanalytic traditions, including Lacan, Zizek, Serres, Derrida and Kittler. The book is focussed in particular on bringing the object of historical writing itself into scrutiny by engaging in what Zizek has called a 'historicity' or a way of writing about the past that not merely acknowledges the ahistorical kernel of historical writing, but brings that kernel into the light of day, takes account of it and puts it into play. The book is thus committed to a kind of historical writing that is open-ended - though not ideologically naA-ve - and that does not fix or stabilize the nature of the relationship between so-called 'primary' and 'secondary' texts. The book consists of an introduction, which places the study of classical music and the Austro-German tradition within broader debates about the value of that tradition, and four extensive case studies: an analysis of the cultural-historical category of listening around 1800; a close reading of A. B. Marx's Beethoven monograph of 1859; a consideration of Heinrich Schenker's attitudes to the mob and the vernacular more broadly and an examination, through Franz Kafka, of the figure of Mahler's body.

All people, in no matter what culture, must be able to place their music firmly in the context of the totality of their beliefs, experiences, and activities, for without such ties, music cannot exist. This means that there must be a body of theory connected with any music system--not necessarily a theory of the structure of music sound, although that may be present as well, but rather a theory of what music is, what it does, and how it is coordinated with the total environment, both natural and cultural, in which human beings move. The Flathead Indians of Western Montana (just over 26,000 in number as of the 2000 census) inhabit a reservation consisting of 632,516 acres of land in the Jocko and Flathead Valleys and the Camas Prairie country, which lie roughly between Evaro and Kalispell, Montana. The reservation is bounded on the east by the Mission Range, on the west by the Cabinet National Forest, on the south by the Lolo National Forest, and on the north by an arbitrary line, approximately bisecting Flathead Lake about twenty-four miles south of Kalispell. The area is one of the richest agricultural regions in Montana, and fish and game are abundant. The Flathead are engaged in stocking, timbering, and various agricultural enterprises. For the Flathead, the most important single fact about music and its relationship to the total world is its origin in the supernatural sphere. All true and proper songs, particularly in the past, owe their origin to a variety of contacts experienced by humans with beings which, though a part of this world, are superhuman and the source of both individual and tribal powers and skills. Thus a sharp distinction is drawn by the Flathead between what they call "make-up" and all other songs. Merriam's pioneering work in the relationship of ethnography and musicology remains a primary source in this field in anthropology.

Co-published by MENC: The National Association for Music Education. A History of American Music Education covers the history of American music education, from its roots in Biblical times through recent historical events and trends. It describes the educational, philosophical, and sociological aspects of the subject, always putting it in the context of the history of the United States. It offers complete information on professional organizations, materials, techniques, and personalities in music education.

Popular music has long understood that human rights, if attainable at all, involve a struggle without end. The right to imagine an individual will, the right to some form of self-determination and the right to self-legislation have long been at the forefront of popular music's approach to human rights. At a time of such uncertainty and confusion, with human rights currently being violated all over the world, a new and sustained examination of cultural responses to such issues is warranted. In this respect music, which is always produced in a social context, is an extremely useful medium; in its immediacy music has a potency of expression whose reach is long and wide. Contributors to this significant volume cover artists and topics such as Billy Bragg, punk, Fun-da-Mental, Willie King and the Liberators, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the Anti-Death Penalty movement, benefit concerts, benefit albums, Gil Scott-Heron, Bruce Springsteen, Wounded Knee and Native American political resistance, Tori Amos, Joni Mitchell, as well as human rights in relation to feminism. A second volume covers World Music.

Jazz Improvisation Using Simple Melodic Embellishment teaches fundamental concepts of jazz improvisation, highlighting the development of performance skills through embellishment techniques. Written with the college-level course in mind, this introductory textbook is both practical and comprehensive, ideal for the aspiring improviser, focused not on scales and chords but melodic embellishment. It assumes some basic theoretical knowledge and level of musicianship while introducing multiple techniques, mindful that improvisation is a learned skill as dependent on hard work and organized practice as it is on innate talent. This jargon-free textbook can be used in both self-guided study and as a course book, fortified by an array of interactive exercises and activities: musical examples performance exercises written assignments practice grids resources for advanced study and more! Nearly all musical exercises-presented throughout the text in concert pitch and transposed in the appendices for E-flat, B-flat, and bass clef instruments-are accompanied by backing audio tracks, available for download via the Routledge catalog page along with supplemental instructor resources such as a sample syllabus, PDFs of common transpositions, and tutorials for gear set-ups. With music-making at its core, Jazz Improvisation Using Simple Melodic Embellishment implores readers to grab their instruments and play, providing musicians with the simple melodic tools they need to "jazz it up."

A long-needed overview of, and guide to, the principles behind the treatises on music theory written in ancient Greece and Rome and continuing through the Middle Ages. Long recognized as a foundation of musical composition, criticism, pedagogy, and appreciation, the literature of ancient and medieval music theory has maintained its strong position in the academic curriculum up to the present day. Now blessed with fine English translations of many of the ancient and medieval authors, modern students of music theory have advantages that their predecessors lacked just a few generations ago. Yet the ancient writings by themselves do not yield to easy comprehension. They need expository help. In this collection of fifteen topical essays, the author offers a contribution to that educational goal. Covering a dense theoretical literature from the classical period of ancient Greece to the sixteenth century of the Common Era, these essays present a detailed examination of subjects of concern not only to specialists in the history of theory, but to scholars of the general history ofancient Greek music and the liturgical plainchant of the medieval West. More than just a collection of specialized studies or a syllabus of obligatory learning, these essays present a persistent reflection on the timelessness of theoretical questions that engaged our musical forebears and that still engage us today. The author's approach is perennialist. It teaches us things about our musical heritage that never go away.