This Life of Sounds portrays an important and previously unexplored corner of the history of new music in America: the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts in the State University of New York at Buffalo. Composers Lukas Foss (the Center's founder), Lejaren Hiller, and Morton Feldman were the music directors over the life of "the Buffalo group," during the years 1964-1980. Based on Foss's plan, the Rockefeller Foundation provided annual fellowships for young composers and virtuoso instrumentalists to live in Buffalo for up to two years, thus creating a cadre of like-minded musicians who would spend their time studying, creating, and performing difficult - often controversial - new work. The now legendary group of musicians (some would say "musical outlaws") who participated in the Buffalo group included Pulitzer Prize winner George Crumb, Terry Riley, Cornelius Cardew, Maryanne Amacher, Frederic Rzewski, David Tudor, Julius Eastman, and many more. Composers John Cage, Jim Tenney, Iannis Xenakis and others all figure in the story as well. The book provides valuable accounts of the Center's influential concert series, Evenings for New Music, performed in Buffalo, New York and throughout Europe; its famous recording of Terry Riley's In C; the political activism of the time; and the intersection of academic, private, and institutional funding for the arts. Life magazine declared in an article about the 1965 Festival of the Arts Today titled, "Can This Be Buffalo?," "Buffalo exploded last month in a two-week avant garde festival that was bigger and hipper than anything ever held in Paris or New York..." The concerts, the festivals, and the adventurous musical climate attracted filmmakers and young visual artists resulting in what one person called "one of those kinds of places the way people talk about Vienna in 1900-1910."

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.

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 was the first attempt at a full length biography of Bach and a critical apreciation of his work as composer and performer. Translated by Walter Emery in 1941-1942 with introductory notes and two appendices, but not published in his lifetime. Walter Emery, musicologist, specialised in the works J.S. Bach.

The future of music archiving and search engines lies in deep learning and big data. Music information retrieval algorithms automatically analyze musical features like timbre, melody, rhythm or musical form, and artificial intelligence then sorts and relates these features. At the first International Symposium on Computational Ethnomusicological Archiving held on November 9 to 11, 2017 at the Institute of Systematic Musicology in Hamburg, Germany, a new Computational Phonogram Archiving standard was discussed as an interdisciplinary approach. Ethnomusicologists, music and computer scientists, systematic musicologists as well as music archivists, composers and musicians presented tools, methods and platforms and shared fieldwork and archiving experiences in the fields of musical acoustics, informatics, music theory as well as on music storage, reproduction and metadata. The Computational Phonogram Archiving standard is also in high demand in the music market as a search engine for music consumers. This book offers a comprehensive overview of the field written by leading researchers around the globe.

Burney is recognised as the great musical writer of his day. This is a facsimile reprint of the first edition in 1771.

Beyond its elucidation and critique of traditional 'notation-centric' musicology, this book's primary emphasis is on the negotiation and construction of meaning within the extended musical multimedia works of the classic British group Pink Floyd. Encompassing the concept albums that the group released from 1973 to 1983, during Roger Waters' final period with the band, chapters are devoted to Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Wish You Were Here (1975), Animals (1977), The Wall (1979) and The Final Cut (1983), along with Waters' third solo album Amused to Death (1993). This book's analysis of album covers, lyrics, music and film makes use of techniques of literary and film criticism, while employing the combined lenses of musical hermeneutics and discourse analysis, so as to illustrate how sonic and musical information contribute to listeners' interpretations of the discerning messages of these monumental musical artifacts. Ultimately, it demonstrates how their words, sounds, and images work together in order to communicate one fundamental concern, which-to paraphrase the music journalist Karl Dallas-is to affirm human values against everything in life that should conspire against them.

Exposing the depth of two major artists' philosophies, creative visions, stylistic tendencies, and contributions to their craft, this unprecedented comparative analysis synthesizes biographical material, critical interpretation, and selected exemplars of the writers' work. Smith reinterprets their work in a new and fascinating light, presenting Dylan as a songwriter of enigmatic wordplay and Springsteen as the melodramatic narrator of a specific community's life struggles.

Both songwriters have had unique responses to the celebrity singer/songwriter tradition begun by Woody Guthrie. Smith reveals the power of authorship and the creative drive necessary to negotiate an artistic vision through the complicated mechanisms of the world of commercial art. Both have discovered their own means of traveling this difficult terrain, and Smith probes their lives and work to reveal the myriad ways in which two distinct, equally significant artists have learned from and contributed to an ongoing and important American musical tradition.

When did Russia become "modern?" Historians of Russia - including even many Russian historians - have long tried to identify Russia's "modern" moment. While most scholars have looked to economic or ideological transitions, noted historian and critic Paul du Quenoy approaches the problem through culture, and specifically the performing arts, as told through the prism of one of its leading nineteenth-century practitioners, the composer and critic Alexander Serov. Born in 1820, Serov grew to adulthood under the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (1825-1855). Long disparaged as a dark and reactionary period of Russia's past, it instead offered many educational, cultural, and professional opportunities that conventional histories have failed to appreciate. Educated in law and tutored in music, Serov rose to become Russia's first significant music critic and a noted composer whose three operas won him fame and gestured toward the creation of a national style. Although his renown was fleeting after his untimely death in 1871, his life and observations provide a vital eyewitness account to a Russia poised to embrace a fresh and fully modern identity. In a new and revised edition prepared to mark the 150th anniversary of Serov's death, du Quenoy's pastiche of Russian life offers one of the best approaches to Russia's imperial past and its legacies today.

In this first monograph on E. T. A. Hoffmann and opera, Francien Markx examines Hoffmann's writings on opera and the challenges they pose to established narratives of aesthetic autonomy, the search for a national opera, and Hoffmann's biography. Markx discusses Hoffmann's lifelong fascination with opera against the backdrop of eighteenth-century theater reform, the creation of national identity, contemporary performance practices and musical and aesthetic discourses as voiced by C. M. von Weber, A. W. Schlegel, Heine, and Wagner, among others. The book reconsiders the traditional view that German opera followed a deterministic trajectory toward Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk and reveals a cosmopolitan spirit in Hoffmann's operatic vision, most notably exemplified by his controversial advocacy for Spontini in Berlin.

Honoring God and the City is a documentary history of musical activities at Venetian lay confraternities from their origins in the thirteenth century to their suppression in the early nineteenth, demonstrating the vital role they played in the cultural life of Venice.

Minas Gerais is a state in southeastern Brazil deeply connected to the nation's slave past and home to many traditions related to the African diaspora. Addressing a wide range of traditions helping to define the region, ethnomusicologist Jonathon Grasse examines the complexity of Minas Gerais by exploring the intersections of its history, music, and culture. Instruments, genres, social functions, and historical accounts are woven together to form a tapestry revealing a cultural territory's development. The deep pool of Brazilian scholarship referenced in the book, with original translations by the author, cites over two hundred Portuguese-language publications focusing on Minas Gerais. This research was augmented by fieldwork, observations, and interviews completed over a twenty-five-year period and includes original photographs, many taken by the author. Hearing Brazil: Music and Histories in Minas Gerais surveys the colonial past, the vast hinterland countryside, and the modern, twenty-first-century state capital of Belo Horizonte, the metropolitan region of which is today home to over six million. Diverse legacies are examined, including an Afro-Brazilian heritage, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liturgical music of the region's "Minas Baroque," the instrument known as the viola, a musical profile of Belo Horizonte, and a study of the regionalist themes developed by the popular music collective the Clube da Esquina (Corner Club) led by Milton Nascimento with roots in the 1960s. Hearing Brazil champions the notion that Brazil's unique role in the world is further illustrated by regionalist studies presenting details of musical culture.

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).

Sebastien Erard's (1752-1831) inventions have had an enormous impact on instruments and musical life and are still at the foundation of piano building today. Drawing on an unusually rich set of archives from both the Erard firm and the Erard family, author Robert Adelson shows how the Erard piano played an important and often leading role in the history of the instrument, beginning in the late eighteenth century and continuing into the final decades of the nineteenth. The Erards were the first piano builders in France to prioritise the more sonorous grand piano, sending gifts of their new model to both Haydn and Beethoven. Erard's famous double-escapement action, which improved the instrument's response while at the same time producing a more powerful tone, revolutionised both piano construction and repertoire. Thanks to these inventions, the Erard firm developed close relationships with the greatest pianist composers of the nineteenth century, including Hummel, Liszt, Moscheles and Mendelssohn. The book also presents new evidence concerning Pierre Erard's homosexuality, which helps us to understand his reluctance to found a family to carry on the Erard tradition, a reluctance that would spell the end of the golden era of the firm and lead to its eventual demise. The book closes with the story of Pierre's widow Camille, who directed the firm from 1855 until 1889. Her influential position in the male-dominated world of instrument building was unique for a woman of her time.

This is the largest life-and-works of Musorgsky ever to have appeared outside Russia. Musorgsky created stunning masterpieces in such creations as his opera Boris Godunov and piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition - yet his life was tragic. It is this pathetic tale, interlaced with critical discussion of music, that is this book's concern.

An accessible exploration of an important and understudied music theory topic, Swain's book examines the dimensional technique of analyzing harmonic rhythm. Simply defined, harmonic rhythm is the relationship between changes in harmony and perceived changes in rhythm. This phenomenon plays a large role in shaping the texture and style of much of Western music, from Renaissance polyphonic pieces to the works of Debussy. In Harmonic Rhythm, Joseph Swain revists this neglected theoretical concept, providing a clear and thorough explanation of how harmonic theory works. Using a small core of repeated musical examples, Swain explores the theory's crucial components including functional and non functional harmonies, harmonic tension and harmonic speed. In addition, swain outlines a method for "dimensional analysis" of musical works; taking both ryhthm and harmony into account, he shows readers how to achieve a more thorough understanding of and appreciation for the texture of music.

What is experimental music today? This book offers an up to date survey of this field for anyone with an interest, from seasoned practitioners to curious readers. This book takes the stance that experimental music is not a limited historical event, but is a proliferation of approaches to sound that reveals much about present-day experience. An experimental work is not identifiable by its sound alone, but by the nature of the questions it poses and its openness to the sounding event. Experimentation is a way of working. It pushes past that which is known to discover what lies beyond it, finding new knowledge, forms, and relationships, or accepting a state of uncertainty. For each of these composers and sound artists, craft is developed and transformed in response to the questions they bring to their work. Scientific, perceptual, or social phenomena become catalysts in the operation of the work. These practices are not presented according to a chronology, a set of techniques, or social groupings. Instead, they are organized according to the content areas that are their subjects, including resonance, harmony, objects, shapes, perception, language, interaction, sites, and histories. Musical materials may be subject, among other treatments, to systemization, observation, examination, magnification, fragmentation, translation, or destabilization. These restless and exploratory modes of engagement have continued to develop over recent decades, expanding the scope of both musical practice and listening.