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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Theory of music & musicology
This book explores the fascinating and intimate relationship
between music and physics. Over millennia, the playing of, and
listening to music have stimulated creativity and curiosity in
people all around the globe. Beginning with the basics, the authors
first address the tonal systems of European-type music, comparing
them with those of other, distant cultures. They analyze the
physical principles of common musical instruments with emphasis on
sound creation and particularly charisma. Modern research on the
psychology of musical perception - the field known as
psychoacoustics - is also described. The sound of orchestras in
concert halls is discussed, and its psychoacoustic effects are
explained. Finally, the authors touch upon the role of music for
our mind and society. Throughout the book, interesting stories and
anecdotes give insights into the musical activities of physicists
and their interaction with composers and musicians.
Setting opera within a variety of contexts - social, aesthetic,
historical - Lindenberger illuminates a form that has persisted in
recognizable shape for over four centuries. The study examines the
social entanglements of opera, for example the relation of Mozart's
Abduction from the Seraglio and Verdi's Il trovatore to its initial
and later audiences. It shows how modernist opera rethought the
nature of theatricality and often challenged its viewers by means
of both musical and theatrical shock effects. Using recent
experiments in neuroscience, the book demonstrates how different
operatic forms developed at different periods to create new ways of
exciting a public. Lindenberger considers selected moments of
operatic history from Monteverdi's Orfeo to the present to study
how the form has communicated with its diverse audiences. Of
interest to scholars and operagoers alike, this book advocates and
exemplifies opera studies as an active, emerging area of
interdisciplinary study.
"Hymns to the Silence" is a thoroughly informed and enlightened
study of the art of a pop music maverick that will delight fans the
world over.In 1991, Van Morrison said, "Music is spiritual, the
music business isn't". Peter Mills' groundbreaking book
investigates the oppositions and harmonies within the work of Van
Morrison, proceeding from this identified starting point."Hymns to
the Silence" is a detailed investigative study of Morrison as
singer, performer, lyricist, musician and writer with particular
attention paid throughout to the contradictions and tensions that
are central to any understanding of his work as a whole.The book
takes several intriguing angles. It looks at Morrison as a writer,
specifically as an Irish writer who has recorded musical settings
of Yeats poems, collaborated with Seamus Heaney, Paul Durcan and
Gerald Dawe, and who regularly drops quotes from James Joyce and
Samuel Beckett into his live performances. It looks at him as a
singer, at how he uses his voice as an interpretive instrument. And
there are chapters on his use of mythology, on his stage
performances, and on his continuing fascination with America and
its musical forms.
Examining, for the first time, the compositions of Johann Joseph
Fux in relation to his contemporaries Bach and Handel, The Musical
Discourse of Servitude presents a new theory of the late baroque
musical imagination. Author Harry White contrasts musical
"servility" and "freedom" in his analysis, with Fux tied to the
prevailing servitude of the day's musical imagination, particularly
the hegemonic flowering of North Italian partimento method across
Europe. In contrast, both Bach and Handel represented an autonomy
of musical discourse, with Bach exhausting generic models in the
mass and Handel inventing a new genre in the oratorio. A potent
critique of Lydia Goehr's seminal The Imaginary Museum of Musical
Works, The Musical Discourse of Servitude draws on Goehr's
formulation of the "work-concept" as an imaginary construct which,
according to Goehr, is an invention of nineteenth-century reception
history. White locates this concept as a defining agent of automony
in Bach's late works, and contextualized the "work-concept" itself
by exploring rival concepts of political, religious, and musical
authority which define the European musical imagination in the
first half of the eighteenth century. A major revisionist statement
about the musical imagination in Western art music, The Musical
Discourse of Servitude will be of interest to scholars of the
Baroque, particularly of Bach and Handel.
This book shows how information theory, probability, statistics,
mathematics and personal computers can be applied to the
exploration of numbers and proportions in music. It brings the
methods of scientific and quantitative thinking to questions like:
What are the ways of encoding a message in music and how can we be
sure of the correct decoding? How do claims of names hidden in the
notes of a score stand up to scientific analysis? How many ways are
there of obtaining proportions and are they due to chance? After
thoroughly exploring the ways of encoding information in music, the
ambiguities of numerical alphabets and the words to be found
"hidden" in a score, the book presents a novel way of exploring the
proportions in a composition with a purpose-built computer program
and gives example results from the application of the techniques.
These include information theory, combinatorics, probability,
hypothesis testing, Monte Carlo simulation and Bayesian networks,
presented in an easily understandable form including their
development from ancient history through the life and times of J.
S. Bach, making connections between science, philosophy, art,
architecture, particle physics, calculating machines and artificial
intelligence. For the practitioner the book points out the pitfalls
of various psychological fallacies and biases and includes succinct
points of guidance for anyone involved in this type of research.
This book will be useful to anyone who intends to use a scientific
approach to the humanities, particularly music, and will appeal to
anyone who is interested in the intersection between the arts and
science.With a foreword by Ruth Tatlow (Uppsala University), award
winning author of Bach's Numbers: Compositional Proportion and
Significance and Bach and the Riddle of the Number Alphabet."With
this study Alan Shepherd opens a much-needed examination of the
wide range of mathematical claims that have been made about J. S.
Bach's music, offering both tools and methodological cautions with
the potential to help clarify old problems." Daniel R. Melamed,
Professor of Music in Musicology, Indiana University
The Evolution of Electronic Dance Music establishes EDM's place on
the map of popular music. The book accounts for various
ambiguities, variations, transformations, and manifestations of
EDM, pertaining to its generic fragmentation, large geographical
spread, modes of consumption and, changes in technology. It focuses
especially on its current state, its future, and its borders -
between EDM and other forms of electronic music, as well as other
forms of popular music. It accounts for the rise of EDM in places
that are overlooked by the existing literature, such as Russia and
Eastern Europe, and examines the multi-media and visual aspects
such as the way EDM events music are staged and the specificity of
EDM music videos. Divided into four parts - concepts, technology,
celebrity, and consumption - this book takes a holistic look at the
many sides of EDM culture.
In The Sound of Nonsense, Richard Elliott highlights the importance
of sound in understanding the 'nonsense' of writers such as Lewis
Carroll, Edward Lear, James Joyce and Mervyn Peake, before
connecting this noisy writing to works which engage more directly
with sound, including sound poetry, experimental music and pop. By
emphasising sonic factors, Elliott makes new and fascinating
connections between a wide range of artistic examples to ultimately
build a case for the importance of sound in creating, maintaining
and disrupting meaning.
Nicole Grimes provides a compellingly fresh perspective on a series
of Brahms's elegiac works by bringing together the disciplines of
historical musicology, German studies, and cultural history. Her
exploration of the expressive potential of Schicksalslied, Nanie,
Gesang der Parzen, and the Vier ernste Gesange reveals the
philosophical weight of this music. She considers the German
tradition of the poetics of loss that extends from the
late-eighteenth-century texts by Hoelderlin, Schiller and Goethe
set by Brahms, and includes other philosophical and poetic works
present in his library, to the mid-twentieth-century aesthetics of
Adorno, who was preoccupied as much by Brahms as by their shared
literary heritage. Her multifaceted focus on endings - the end of
tonality, the end of the nineteenth century, and themes of loss in
the music - illuminates our understanding of Brahms and lateness,
and the place of Brahms in the fabric of modernist culture.
In Resonant Matter, Lutz Koepnick considers contemporary sound and
installation art as a unique laboratory of hospitality amid
inhospitable times. Inspired by Ragnar Kjartansson’s nine-channel
video installation The Visitors (2012), the book explores
resonance—the ability of objects to be affected by the vibrations
of other objects—as a model of art’s fleeting promise to make
us coexist with things strange and other. In a series of nuanced
readings, Koepnick follows the echoes of distant, unexpected, and
unheard sounds in twenty-first century art to reflect on the
attachments we pursue to sustain our lives and the walls we need to
tear down to secure possible futures. The book’s nine chapters
approach The Visitors from ever-different conceptual angles while
bringing it into dialogue with the work of other artists and
musicians such as Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Guillermo Galindo, Mischa
Kuball, Philipp Lachenmann, Alvien Lucier, Teresa Margolles,
Carsten Nicolai, Camille Norment, Susan Philipsz, David Rothenberg,
Juliana Snapper, and Tanya Tagaq. With this book, Koepnick situates
resonance as a vital concept of contemporary art criticism and
sound studies. His analysis encourages us not only to expand our
understanding of the role of sound in art, of sound art, but to
attune our critical encounter with art to art’s own resonant
thinking.
Much controversy surrounds Schenker's mature theory and its attempt
to explain musical pitch motion. Becoming Heinrich Schenker brings
a new perspective to Schenker's theoretical work, showing that
ideas characteristic of his mature theory, although in many
respects fundamentally different, developed logically out of his
earlier ideas. Robert P. Morgan provides an introduction to
Schenker's mature theory and traces its development through all of
his major publications, considering each in detail and with
numerous music examples. Morgan also explores the relationship
between Schenker's theory and his troubled ideology, which
crucially influenced the evolution of his ideas and was heavily
dependent upon both the empirical and idealist strains of
contemporary German philosophical thought. Relying where possible
on quotations from Schenker's own words, this book offers a
balanced approach to his theory and a unique overview of this
central music figure, generally considered to be the most prominent
music theorist of the twentieth century.
Popular music and masculinity have rarely been examined through the
lens of research into monstrosity. The discourses associated with
rock and pop, however, actually include more ‘monsters’ than
might at first be imagined. Attention to such individuals and
cultures can say things about the operation of genre and gender,
myth and meaning. Indeed, monstrosity has recently become a growing
focus of cultural theory. This is in part because monsters raise
shared concerns about transgression, subjectivity, agency, and
community. Attention to monstrosity evokes both the spectre of
projection (which invokes familial trauma and psychoanalysis) and
shared anxieties (that in turn reflect ideologies and beliefs). By
pursuing a series of insightful case studies, Scary Monsters
considers different aspects of the connection between music, gender
and monstrosity. Its argument is that attention to monstrosity
provides a unique perspective on the study of masculinity in
popular music culture.
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger
Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain
imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed
pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we
have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting,
preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger
Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and
hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone
Joe Davis, the focus of "The Melody Man" enjoyed a 50-year
career in the music industry, which covered nearly every aspect of
the business. He hustled sheet music in the 1920s, copyrighted
compositions by artists as diverse as Fats Waller, Carson Robison,
Otis Blackwell, and Rudy Vallee, oversaw hundreds of recording
session, and operated several record companies beginning in the
1940s. Davis also worked fearlessly to help insure that black
recording artists and song writers gained equal treatment for their
work.
Much more than a biography, this book is an investigation of the
role played by music publishers during much of the twentieth
century. Joe Davis was not a music "great" but he was one of those
individuals who enabled "greats" to emerge. A musician, manager,
and publisher, his long career reveals much about the nature of the
music industry and offers insight into how the industry changed
from the 1920s to the 1970s. By the summer of 1924, when Davis was
handling the "Race talent" for Ajax records, he had already worked
in the music business for most of a decade and there was more than
five decades of musical career ahead of him. The fact that his
fascinating life has gone so long under-appreciated is remedied by
the publication of Never Sell A Copyright.
Originally published in England, in 1990, Never Sell a
Copyright: Joe Davis and His Role in the New York Music Scene,
1916-1978 was never released in the United States and available in
a very limited print run in England. The author, noted blues
scholar and folklorist Bruce Bastin, has worked with fellow music
scholar Kip Lornell to completely update, condense, and improve the
book for this first-ever American edition.
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