This book forms a basis and a starting point for a closer dialogue between musicologists, anthropologists and psychologists to achieve a better understanding of the cultural psychology of musical experience. This is done by arranging a meeting point or an arena in which different aspects of psychology and musicology touch and encounters each other due to how the two fields might be defined today. In line with this the book consists of a group of scholars that have their feet solidly grounded in psychology, social science or musicology, but at the same time have a certain interest in uniting them. On this basis it is divided into five parts, which investigates musical sensations, musical experiences, musical transformations, musical fundamentals and the notion of a cultural psychology of music. Thus another aim of this book is to prepare the basis for a further growth of a cultural psychology that is able to include the experiences of music as a basis for understanding the ordinary human life. Thus this book should be of interest for those who want to investigate the mysterious intersection between music and psychology.

Jewish Contiguities and the Soundtrack of Israeli History revolutionizes the study of modern Israeli art music by tracking the surprising itineraries of Jewish art music in the move from Europe to Mandatory Palestine and Israel. Leaving behind cliches about East and West, Arab and Jew, this book provocatively exposes the legacies of European antisemitism and religious Judaism in the making of Israeli art music.
Shelleg introduces the reader to various aesthetic dilemmas involved in the emergence of modern Jewish art music, ranging from auto-exoticism through the hues of self-hatred to the disarticulation of Jewish musical markers. He then considers part of this musics' translocation to Mandatory Palestine, studying its discourse with Hebrew culture, and composers' grappling with modern and Zionist images of the self. Unlike previous efforts in the field, Shelleg unearths the mechanism of what he calls "Zionist musical onomatopoeias," but more importantly their dilution by the non-western Arab Jewish oral musical traditions (the same traditions Hebrew culture sought to westernize and secularize).
And what had begun with composers' movement towards the musical properties of non-western Jewish musical traditions grew in the 60s and 70s to a dialectical return to exilic Jewish cultures. In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, which reaffirmed Zionism's redemptive and expansionist messages, Israeli composers (re)embraced precisely the exilic Jewish music that emphasized Judaism's syncretic qualities rather than its territorial characteristics. In the 70s, therefore, while religious Zionist circles translated theology into politics and territorial maximalism, Israeli composers deterritorialized the national discourse by a growing return to the spaces shared by Jews and non-Jews, devoid of Zionist appropriations."

Ludic Dreaming uses (sometimes fictional) dreams as a method for examining sound and contemporary technoculture's esoteric exchanges, refusing both the strictures of visually dominated logic and the celebratory tone that so often characterizes the "sonic turn." Instead, through a series of eight quasi-analytical essays on the condition of listening, the book forwards a robust engagement with sounds (human and nonhuman alike) that leverages particularity in its full, radical singularity: what is a dream, after all, if not an incipient physics that isn't held to the scientific demand for repeatability? Thus, these studies declare their challenge to the conventions of argumentation and situate themselves at a threshold between theory and fiction, one that encourages reader and writer alike to make lateral connections between otherwise wildly incongruent subjects and states of affairs. Put differently, Ludic Dreaming is a how-to book for listening away from the seeming fatality of contemporary technologies, which is to say, away from the seeming inevitability of late capitalistic nihilism.

Here translated for the first time, Jean-Jacques Nattiez's widely hailed comparative guide to the techniques of music analysis focuses on a single vivid passage from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. The field of musicology has in recent decades branched out to incorporate methods from a wide range of other fields. But, when scholars examine a musical work, to what extent should they emphasize immanent (purely internal) features, and to what extent historical, cultural, psychological, or aesthetic networks of meanings associated with those features? Finally, what specific analytical method should be chosen, given that various methods can lead to seemingly incompatible results? Jean-Jacques Nattiez, a renowned figure in music theory, musicology, and ethnomusicology, here examines numerous contending approaches that have been applied to the English-horn melody heard in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. His aim is to offer thereby a methodological guide and compendium that will allow specialists and students alike to navigate the multiplicity of theoretical orientations in musicology. Analytical models proposed by Heinrich Schenker, Nicolas Ruwet, Leonard B. Meyer, Fred Lerdahl, and other notable figures in the field of music analysis are discussed. Some of the analytical sketches by these scholars were previously unpublished and are presented to the public for the first time in the present book. The author also considers insights from the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis. An examination of Wagner's wide-ranging musical sources (Venetian gondolier songs and Swiss shepherd songs) leads to acutely relevant passages in writings by Rousseau, Goethe, and Schopenhauer. The book culminates in Nattiez's own interpretation of the relationship between vocal and instrumental music in Tristan and Isolde. Jean-Jacques Nattiez is professor emeritus of musicology at the Universite de Montreal.

Porphyry's Commentary, the only surviving ancient commentary on a technical text, is not merely a study of Ptolemy's Harmonics. It includes virtually free-standing philosophical essays on epistemology, metaphysics, scientific methodology, aspects of the Aristotelian categories and the relations between Aristotle's views and Plato's, and a host of briefer comments on other matters of wide philosophical interest. For musicologists it is widely recognised as a treasury of quotations from earlier treatises, many of them otherwise unknown; but Porphyry's own reflections on musical concepts (for instance notes, intervals and their relation to ratios, quantitative and qualitative conceptions of pitch, the continuous and discontinuous forms of vocal movement, and so on) and his snapshots of contemporary music-making have been undeservedly neglected. This volume presents the first English translation and a revised Greek text of the Commentary, with an introduction and notes designed to assist readers in engaging with this important and intricate work.

This book addresses the analysis of musical sounds from the viewpoint of someone at the intersection between physicists, engineers, piano technicians, and musicians. The study is structured into three parts. The reader is introduced to a variety of waves and a variety of ways of presenting, visualizing, and analyzing them in the first part. A tutorial on the tools used throughout the book accompanies this introduction. The mathematics behind the tools is left to the appendices. Part Two provides a graphical survey of the classical areas of acoustics that pertain to musical instruments: vibrating strings, bars, membranes, and plates. Part Three is devoted almost exclusively to the piano. Several two- and three-dimensional graphical tools are introduced to study various characteristics of pianos: individual notes and interactions among them, the missing fundamental, inharmonicity, tuning visualization, the different distribution of harmonic power for the various zones of the piano keyboard, and potential uses for quality control. These techniques are also briefly applied to other musical instruments studied in earlier parts of the book. For physicists and engineers there are appendices to cover the mathematics lurking beneath the numerous graphs and a brief introduction to Matlab (R) which was used to generate these graphs. A website accompanying the book (https://sites.google.com/site/analysisofsoundsandvibrations/) contains: - Matlab (R) scripts - mp3 files of sounds - references to YouTube videos - and up-to-date results of recent studies

At the dawn of the 1990s, as the United States celebrated its victory in the Cold War and sole superpower status by waging war on Iraq and proclaiming democratic capitalism as the best possible society, the 1990s underground punk renaissance transformed the punk scene into a site of radical opposition to American empire. Nazi skinheads were ejected from the punk scene; apathetic attitudes were challenged; women, Latino, and LGBTQ participants asserted their identities and perspectives within punk; the scene debated the virtues of maintaining DIY purity versus venturing into the musical mainstream; and punks participated in protest movements from animal rights to stopping the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal to shutting down the 1999 WTO meeting. Punk lyrics offered strident critiques of American empire, from its exploitation of the Third World to its warped social relations. Numerous subgenres of punk proliferated to deliver this critique, such as the blazing hardcore punk of bands like Los Crudos, propagandistic crust-punk/dis-core, grindcore and power violence with tempos over 800 beats per minute, and So-Cal punk with its combination of melody and hardcore. Musical analysis of each of these styles and the expressive efficacy of numerous bands reveals that punk is not merely simplistic three-chord rock music, but a genre that is constantly revolutionizing itself in which nuances of guitar riffs, vocal timbres, drum beats, and song structures are deeply meaningful to its audience, as corroborated by the robust discourse in punk zines.

The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical provides a comprehensive academic survey of British musical theatre offering both a historical account of the musical's development from 1728 and a range of in-depth critical analyses of the unique forms and features of British musicals, which explore the aesthetic values and sociocultural meanings of a tradition that initially gave rise to the American musical and later challenged its modern pre-eminence. After a consideration of how John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) created a prototype for eighteenth-century ballad opera, the book focuses on the use of song in early nineteenth century theatre, followed by a sociocultural analysis of the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan; it then examines Edwardian and interwar musical comedies and revues as well as the impact of Rodgers and Hammerstein on the West End, before analysing the new forms of the postwar British musical from The Boy Friend (1953) to Oliver! (1960). One section of the book examines the contributions of key twentieth century figures including Noel Coward, Ivor Novello, Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber, director Joan Littlewood and producer Cameron Macintosh, while a number of essays discuss both mainstream and alternative musicals of the 1960s and 1970s and the influence of the pop industry on the creation of concept recordings such as Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) and Les Miserables (1980). There is a consideration of "jukebox" musicals such as Mamma Mia! (1999), while essays on overtly political shows such as Billy Elliot (2005) are complemented by those on experimental musicals like Jerry Springer: the Opera (2003) and London Road (2011) and on the burgeoning of Black and Asian British musicals in both the West End and subsidized venues. The Oxford Handbook of the British Musical demonstrates not only the unique qualities of British musical theatre but also the vitality and variety of British musicals today.

Blackstar Theory takes a close look at David Bowie's ambitious last works: his surprise 'comeback' project The Next Day (2013), the off-Broadway musical Lazarus (2015) and the album that preceded the artist's death in 2016 by two days, Blackstar. The book explores the swirl of themes that orbit and entangle these projects from a starting point in musical analysis and features new interviews with key collaborators from the period: producer Tony Visconti, graphic designer Jonathan Barnbrook, musical director Henry Hey, saxophonist Donny McCaslin and assistant sound engineer Erin Tonkon. These works tackle the biggest of ideas: identity, creativity, chaos, transience and immortality. They enact a process of individuation for the Bowie meta-persona and invite us to consider what happens when a star dies. In our universe, dying stars do not disappear - they transform into new stellar objects, remnants and gravitational forces. The radical potential of the Blackstar is demonstrated in the rock star supernova that creates a singularity resulting in cultural iconicity. It is how a man approaching his own death can create art that illuminates the immortal potential of all matter in the known universe.

CLASSICAL COOKS: A GASTROHISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC by Ira Braus The expression, "Classical music is an acquired taste" takes on new meaning in Ira Braus's Classical Cooks: A Gastrohistory of Western Music. Unlike most classical music guides, Classical Cooks links music and food synaesthetically. Synaesthesia means experiencing one sense modality by stimulating another, such as "hearing" colors. Music and food, as my book shows, are close enough aesthetically, so that we can enjoy them synaesthetically. The book correlates the respective musical and culinary talents of composers living between 1350 and 2000; it also suggests ways for listeners to distinguish composers' styles by way of gastro-musical association. Classical Cooks complements a recent line of books dealing with food and culture, e.g., The Toulouse Lautrec Cookbook, Keats's Porridge, and Jazz Cooks. To be sure, American orchestras, like the Boston Symphony and New York Philharmonic, have published recipes contributed by their players. But no substantial anthology of composer recipes has thus far appeared. Classical Cooks has Three Courses, plus Dessert. Course 1, "Why Musicians Love to Talk Shop in the Kitchen," matches food categories with musical ones. Take fat. Musicians associate fat with lush, full-bodied orchestration as we hear in, say, Hollywood scores of the 1950s. These composers learned their craft from lipid composers like Puccini and Debussy. Puccini's "fat," mellifluous as it is, may be compared to olive oil - clear, fruity, digestible, while Debussy's is voluptuous, like butter - filmy, artery-clogging, and delectable. Course 2, "A Gastrohistory of Music in Documents" offers accounts of composers as gastro-nomes. Beethoven's culinary disasters are juxtaposed with Rossini's haute cuisine, so haute in fact, that one of his recipes ("Tournedos Rossini") appears in Larousse Gastronomique. One also reads stories of Liszt's food-fights with his pupils and of his chiding the American pianist, Amy Fay, for "making an omelette" when playing wrist-bending passages in his piano music. Course 3, "You Eat What you Compose, or, Will the Real Mozart Please Stand Up?" addresses riddles of music history: how knowledge of Mozart's favorite foods -- liver dumplings and sauerkraut -- might revise his popular image as a composer of "sweet" music, e.g. Eine kleine Nachtmusik; how a gastronomic kinship between J.S. Bach and Brahms -- their love of herring -- might reflect their dense musical expression, as well as Brahms's composing minuets and sarabandes during the mid-1800s; and how knowing Ravel's preference for "hot" food helps us to distinguish the sound of his music from the more understated style of Debussy. Dessert comprises "The Well-Tempered Cuisinier: Twenty-four Pastries and Foods from the Classical Cooks." Readers will find here a combination of recipes and menus suitable for diverse musical occasions (concert receptions, composer birthdays, opera caf entres).

"The Music of the Netherlands Antilles: Why Eleven Antilleans Knelt before Chopin's Heart" is not your usual musical scholarship. In October 1999, eleven Antilleans attended the service held to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Frederic Chopin's death. This service, held in the Warsaw church where the composer's heart is kept in an urn, was an opportunity for these Antilleans to express their debt of gratitude to Chopin, whose influence is central to Antillean music history. Press coverage of this event caused Dutch novelist and author Jan Brokken (b. 1949) to start writing this book, based on notes he took while living on Curacao from 1993 to 2002.

Anyone hoping to discover an overlooked chapter of Caribbean music and music history will be amply rewarded with this Dutch-Caribbean perspective on the pan-Caribbean process of creolization. On Curacao, the history and legacy of slavery shaped culture and music, affecting all the New World. Brokken's portraits of prominent Dutch Antillean composers are interspersed with cultural and music history. He puts the Dutch Caribbean's contributions into a broader context by also examining the nineteenth-century works by pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk from New Orleans and Manuel Saumell from Cuba. Brokken explores the African component of Dutch Antillean music--examining the history of the rhythm and music known as "tambu" as well as American jazz pianist Chick Corea's fascination with the tumba rhythm from Curacao. The book ends with a discussion of how recent Dutch Caribbean adaptations of European dance forms have shifted from a classical approach to contemporary forms of Latin jazz."

Humming is a ubiquitous and mundane act many of us perform. The fact that we often hum to ourselves, to family members, or to close friends suggests that humming is a personal, intimate act. It can also be a powerful way in which people open up to others and share collective memories. In religious settings such as Tibetan chanting, humming offers a mesmerising sonic experience. Then there are hums that resound regardless of human activity, such as the hums of impersonal objects and man-made or natural phenomena. The first sound studies book to explores the topic of humming, Humming offers a unique examination of the polarising categories of hums, from hums that are performed only to oneself, that are exercised in religious practice, that claim healing, and that resonate with our bodies, to hums that can drive people to madness, that emanate from cities and towns, and that resound in the universe. By acknowledging the quirkiness of hums within the established discourse in sound studies, Humming takes a truly interdisciplinary view on this familiar yet less-trodden sonic concept in sound studies.

This is a pioneering study of the phenomenon of vibration and its history and reception through culture. The study of the senses has become a rich topic in recent years. "Senses of Vibration" explores a wide range of sensory experience and makes a decisive new contribution to this growing field by focussing not simply on the senses as such, but on the material experience - vibration - that underpins them. This is the first book to take the theme of vibration as central, offering an interdisciplinary history of the phenomenon and its reverberations in the cultural imaginary. It tracks vibration through the work of a wide range of writers, including physiologists (who thought vibrations in the nerves delivered sensations to the brain), physicists (who claimed that light, heat, electricity and other forms of energy were vibratory), spiritualists (who figured that spiritual energies also existed in vibratory form), and poets and novelists from Coleridge to Dickens and Wells. "Senses of Vibration" is a work of scholarship that cuts through a range of disciplines and will reverberate for many years to come.

Brings together in one volume the full text of some 450 letters in first-time English translation, organized into sections each prefaced by an introduction. All the letters are fully annotated and they yield information about Viennese society, culture and politics of the time. The work of Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935), widely regarded as the most important music theorist of the twentieth century, has shaped the teaching of music theory in the United States profoundly and influenced theorists there, in Europe, and throughout the world. Living and working in Vienna, Schenker maintained a vigorous correspondence with a large circle of professional musicians, writers, music critics, institutions, administrators, patrons, friends, and pupils. A large part of his correspondence was preserved after his death: some 7,000 letters, postcards, telegrams, etc., to and from 400 correspondents. His diaries record the fabric of his personal life and his activities asa private music teacher and writer; they also provide a detailed commentary on historical and political events and offer a window on to the conditions of life in Vienna. Taken together, these documents contribute vividly to the picture of cultural life in Vienna, and elsewhere, from the perspective of a Jewish intellectual and his circle of musical and artistic friends. Heinrich Schenker: Selected Correspondence represents a concise edition ofsome of the theorist's most important and revelatory letters and diary entries. It offers the full text of some 450 letters in English translation, organized into sections devoted to various aspects of his professional life: teaching, writing, administration, and maintaining contact with an ever widening circle including Ferruccio Busoni, Julius Roentgen, Otto Erich Deutsch, Alphons von Rothschild, Paul von Klenau, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Paul Hindemith, MorizViolin, John Petrie Dunn, and Hans Weisse. Extracts from the diaries provide a summary of important parts of the correspondence that do not survive. The volume includes a detailed exposition of the editorial method, biographicalnotes on correspondents, and a substantial general introduction. Each of the sections is prefaced by an introduction which provides essential historical context, and the letters and diary entries are fully annotated. IAN BENT is Emeritus Professor of Music at Columbia University in New York, and lives in the United Kingdom. DAVID BRETHERTON is Lecturer in Music at the University of Southampton. WILLIAM DRABKIN is Professorof Music at the University of Southampton. CONTRIBUTORS: Marko Deisinger, Martin Eybl, Christoph Hust, Kevin C. Karnes, John Koslovsky, Lee Rothfarb, John Rothgeb, Hedi Siegel, Arnold Whittall

This book discusses the relationship between Greek Orthodox ecclesiastical music and laiko (popular) song in Greece. Laiko music was long considered a lesser form of music in Greece, with rural folk music considered serious enough to carry the weight of the ideologies founded within the establishment of the contemporary Greek state. During the 1940s and 1950s, a selective exoneration of urban popular music took place, one of its most popular cases being the originating relationships between two extremely popular musical pieces: Vasilis Tsitsanis’s “Synnefiasmeni Kyriaki” (Cloudy Sunday) and its descent from the hymn “Ti Ypermacho” (The Akathist Hymn). During this period the connection of these two pieces was forged in the Modern Greek conscience, led by certain key figures in the authority system of the scholarly world. Through analysis of these pieces and the surrounding contexts, Ordoulidis explores the changing role and perception of popular music in Greece.

When the show was first produced in 1960, at a time when transatlantic musical theatre was dominated by American productions, Oliver already stood out for its overt Englishness. But in writing Oliver , librettist and composer Lionel Bart had to reconcile the Englishness of his Dickensian source with the American qualities of the integrated book musical. To do so, he turned to the musical traditions that had defined his upbringing: English music hall, Cockney street singing, and East End Yiddish theatre. This book reconstructs the complicated biography of Bart's play, from its early inception as a pop musical inspired by a marketable image, through its evolution into a sincere Dickensian adaptation that would push English musical theatre to new dramatic heights. The book also addresses Oliver 's phenomenal reception in its homeland, where audiences responded to the musical's Englishness with a nationalistic fervor. The musical, which has more than fulfilled its promise as one of the most popular English musicals of all time, remains one of the country's most significant shows.
Author Marc Napolitano shows how Oliver 's popularity has ultimately exerted a significant influence on two separate cultural trends. Firstly, Bart's adaptation forever impacted the culture text of Dickens's Oliver Twist; to this day, the general perception of the story and the innumerable allusions to the novel in popular media are colored heavily by the sights, scenes, sounds, and songs from the musical, and virtually every major adaptation of from the 1970s on has responded to Bart's work in some way. Secondly, Oliver helped to move the English musical forward by establishing a post-war English musical tradition that would eventually pave the way for the global dominance of the West End musical in the 1980s. As such, Napolitano's book promises to be an important book for students and scholars in musical theatre studies as well as to general readers interested in the megamusical.

One of "The Telegraph"'s Best Music Books 2011

Alex Ross's award-winning international bestseller, "The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century," has become a contemporary classic, establishing Ross""as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians." Listen to This," which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essay""in which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music, ""showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at" The New Yorker." These pieces, dedicated to classical and popular""artists alike, are at once erudite and lively. In a previously unpublished""essay, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music""history--from Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelin--through a few""iconic bass lines of celebration and lament. He vibrantly sketches""canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi, and Brahms; gives""us in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Bjork""and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark""high school and indie-rock hipsters in Beijing.
Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross shows how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. Witty, passionate, and brimming with insight, "Listen to This "teaches us how to listen more closely.