The Routledge Companion to Music Cognition addresses fundamental questions about the nature of music from a psychological perspective. Music cognition is presented as the field that investigates the psychological, physiological, and physical processes that allow music to take place, seeking to explain how and why music has such powerful and mysterious effects on us. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of research in music cognition, balancing accessibility with depth and sophistication. A diverse range of global scholars-music theorists, musicologists, pedagogues, neuroscientists, and psychologists-address the implications of music in everyday life while broadening the range of topics in music cognition research, deliberately seeking connections with the kinds of music and musical experiences that are meaningful to the population at large but are often overlooked in the study of music cognition. Such topics include: Music's impact on physical and emotional health Music cognition in various genres Music cognition in diverse populations, including people with amusia and hearing impairment The relationship of music to learning and accomplishment in academics, sport, and recreation The broader sociological and anthropological uses of music Consisting of over forty essays, the volume is organized by five primary themes. The first section, "Music from the Air to the Brain," provides a neuroscientific and theoretical basis for the book. The next three sections are based on musical actions: "Hearing and Listening to Music," "Making and Using Music," and "Developing Musicality." The closing section, "Musical Meanings," returns to fundamental questions related to music's meaning and significance, seen from historical and contemporary perspectives. The Routledge Companion to

The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads begins where Francis Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads leaves off. Bronson has collected all available tunes for each of Child's ballads, annotated and organized them, with notes describing the history and development of each tune and tune family. This is an indispensable text for ballad scholars, performers, and students of the ballad tradition.

This text has been out of print since 1990; it was originally published by Solomon Press in 1987. Several experts in the field have verified that the information in the book remains constant; nothing has, or will, change in the basic science of musical sound. It explains the science of musical sound without the encumbrance of detailed mathematics. It will appeal to music lovers as well as students of music and students of physics. It can easily be promoted with our physics program.

approaches "the brand new normal" as the digitalization itself. The collection of research and studies explores and questions contemporary novelties in media and art related to the transformative effects of the digitalization. Featuring a broad range of topics, covering creative industries, video-on-demand services and film industry, representation of reality television in quality television,adaptations from theater to digital platforms, transformation of gender representations indigital, VR (Virtual Reality), digital festivals, player experience and engagement in video games, NFT (Non-Fungible Token), social media and crisis communication, digital self-presentation, digitalization of theater stage, new music trends in digital era, and audience development in classical music, this book is designed for scholars, researchers, intellectuals, media professionals, and artists.

Percival Kirby was one of the greatest South African musicologists and ethnomusicologists. Born in Scotland in 1887, after completing his studies at the Royal College of Music in London he came out to South Africa as the Music Organiser to the Natal Education Department. In 1920 he moved to Johannesburg as acting Professor of Music at the then University College. He was soon appointed Professor of Music and stayed at the University of the Witwatersrand for 30 years. Kirby was a conductor, timpanist, flautist, composer, teacher, musicologist, scientist and artist. As well as researching and writing on African music, he wrote the definitive book on the wreck of the Grosvenor.

Kirby was concerned about the demise of traditional cultural practices of African people. Whilst at Wits, he was encouraged by his colleagues, people like Raymond Dart and Louis Maingard, to make a comprehensive study of the musical practices of the indigenous peoples of southern Africa. Between 1923 and 1933, supported by several study grants, he travelled thousands of miles, undertook more than nine special expeditions as well as many shorter excursions in his ancient Model T Ford to places like Pietersburg and Potgietersrus, to the area then known as Sekhukhuneland, Transvaal, and to Swaziland and Botswana. He was hosted by local chiefs and taught to play the instruments he encountered. He managed to purchase many of them, and this collection is now known as the Kirby Collection and is housed at the South African College of Music, University of Cape Town.

The book Musical Instruments of the Native Races of South Africa, first published in 1934, was the culmination of these research trips. It has become the standard reference on indigenous South African musical instruments, but has been out of print for many years. This third edition, with a revised title, contains an introduction by Mike Nixon, Head of the Ethnomusicology and African Music programme at the South African College of Music, and new reproductions of the valuable historic photographs by Paff and others, but leaves Kirby’s original text unchanged.

In Pop Music and Hip Ennui: A Sonic Fiction of Capitalist Realism, Macon Holt provides the imaginative and analytical resources to think with contemporary pop music to investigate the ambivalences of contemporary culture and the potentials in it for change. Drawing on Kodwo Eshun's practice of Sonic Fiction and Mark Fisher's analytical framework of capitalist realism, Holt explores the multiplicities contained in contemporary pop from sensation to abstraction and from the personal to the political. Pop Music and Hip Ennui unravels the assumptions embedded in the cultural and critical analysis of popular music. In doing so, it provides new ways to understand the experience of listening to pop music and living in the sonic atmosphere it produces. This book neither excuses pop's oppressive tendencies nor dismisses the pleasures of its sensations.

This book argues that Bruno Mars is uniquely positioned to borrow from his heritage and experiential knowledge as well as his musical talent, performative expertise, and hybrid identities (culturally, ethnically, and racially) to remix music that can create "new music nostalgia." Melinda Mills attends to the ways that Mars is precariously positioned in relation to all of the racial and ethnic groups that constitute his known background and argues that this complexity serves him well in the contemporary moment. Engaging in the performative politics of blackness allows Mars to advocate for social justice by employing his artistic agency. Through his entertainment and the everyday practice of joy, Mars models a way of moving through the world that counters its harsh realities. Through his music and perfomance, Mars provides a way for a reconceptualization of race and a reimagining of the future.

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.

Written by one of the most prominent thinkers in sound studies, Amplifications presents a perspective on sound narrated through the experiences of a sound artist and writer. A work of reflective philosophy, Amplifications sits at the intersection of history, creative practice, and sound studies, recounting this narrative through a series of themes (rattles, echoes, recordings, etc.). Carter offers a unique perspective on migratory poetics, bringing together his own compositions and life's works while using his personal narrative to frame larger theoretical questions about sound and migration.

Joachim Burmeister's early seventeenth-century treatise on the making of music is generally acknowledged to be central to the understanding of Baroque musical practice: it was the first systematically to explore the connection between rhetoric and music that became a cornerstone of Baroque musical thought. But until now neither a reliable modern edition nor a full translation of this seminal work has existed. This much-needed edition by Benito V. Rivera contains a critical transcription of the Latin text and an annotated translation on facing pages. In a lengthy introduction to the book, Rivera reviews Burmeister's two earlier treatises on musical composition, analyzes Musical Poetics as a whole, and places it within its historical context. An appendix to the edition reproduces the passages of music cited by Burmeister, greatly facilitating the interpretation of Burmeister's explanations of the rhetorical figures. The book will be of interest to music historians and theorists as well as to scholars of rhetoric.

This book explores the relationships between rock and roll, social protest, and authenticity to consider how rock and roll could function as social protest music. The author begins by discussing the nature and origins of rock and roll and the nature of social protest and social protest music within the wider context of the evolution of the commercial music industry and the social and technological infrastructure developed for the mass dissemination of popular music. This discussion is followed by an examination of the causes of the public disapproval originally expressed toward rock and roll, and how they illuminate its social protest and subversive quality. By further investigating the nature of authenticity and its relationship to social protest and to commercialization, the author considers how social protest and commercialization are antithetical. This conclusion, if correct, has broad implications for human culture in advanced industrial society.

Is there such a thing today as music that's meaningfully new? In our contemporary era of remixing and retro styles, cynics and romantics alike cry "It's all been done before" while record labels and media outlets proclaim that everything is new. Coded into our daily conversations about popular music, newness as an artistic and cultural value is too often taken for granted. Nothing Has Been Done Before instigates a fresh debate about newness in American pop, rock 'n' roll, rap, folk, and R&B made since the turn of the millennium. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach that combines music criticism, philosophy, and the literary essay, Robert Loss follows the stories of a diverse cast of musicians who seek the new by wrestling with the past, navigating the market, and speaking politically. The transgressions of Bob Dylan's "Love and Theft". The pop spectacle of Katy Perry's 2015 Super Bowl halftime show. Protest songs against the war in Iraq. Nothing Has Been Done Before argues that performance heard in a historical context always creates a possibility for newness, whether it's Kendrick Lamar's multi-layered To Pimp a Butterfly, the Afrofuturist visions of Janelle Monae, or even a Guided By Voices tribute concert in a local dive bar. Provocative and engaging, Nothing Has Been Done Before challenges nothing less than how we hear and think about popular music-its power and its potential.

Electro swing is a relatively recent musical style and scene which combines the music of the swing era with that of the age of electronic dance music. Chris Inglis considers key questions about electro swing’s place in contemporary society, including what it may mean for a contemporary genre to be so reliant upon the influences of the past; the different ways in which jazz may be presented to a modern audience; how one may go about defining jazz in today's postmodern world; and how this emergent genre may be analysed in terms of the wider issues of race and class consumption.

Ever hear of a butt splice? A cover? An iron mother? A biscuit? These were terms used in the heyday of vinyl records, from 1949 to the mid-1980s. This colorful and almost forgotten language was once used by record producers, label owners, disc jockeys, jukebox operators, record distributors, and others in the music industry. Their language is collected in this dictionary. Each entry offers both an explanation of a term's meaning as well as its context and use in the history of the record business.

Grime music has been central to British youth culture since the beginning of the 21st century. Performed by MCs and DJs, it is an Afrodiasporic form that developed on street corners, on pirate radio and at raves. Level Up: Live Performance and Creative Process in Grime Music offers the first long-form ethnographic study of grime practice; it questions how and why artists do what they do; and it asks what this can tell us about creative process and improvisation more widely. Based on research conducted from 2015 to 2020 in London's grime scene-facilitated by the author's long-standing role as a DJ and broadcaster-this book explores the form's emergence before taking a magnifying glass to the contemporary scene and its performance protocol, exploring the practice of key artists and their crews living and working in the city. The resultant model of creative interaction provides a comprehensive mapping of collective social learning in London's informal cityscape, offering new ways to conceptualise improvisatory practice within ensembles.

Building on several decades of research, this book develops a comprehensive music theory designed to make sense of several essential components of tonality. The book contributes to a wealth of methodologies in music theory, making it of broad interest to music scholars and students. Each chapter concludes with additional practice activities, allowing for easy adaptation to various pedagogical purposes.

The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads begins where Francis Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads leaves off. Bronson has collected all available tunes for each of Child's ballads, annotated and organized them, with notes describing the history and development of each tune and tune family. This is an indispensable text for ballad scholars, performers, and students of the ballad tradition.

Based upon Cantometrics: An Approach to the Anthropology of Music (1976), by Alan Lomax, Songs of Earth: Aesthetic and Social Codes in Music is a contemporary guide to understanding and exploring Cantometrics, the system developed by Lomax and Victor Grauer for analyzing the formal elements of music related to human geography and sociocultural patterning. This carefully constructed cross-cultural study of world music revealed deep-rooted performance patterns and aesthetic preferences and their links with environmental factors and ancient socioeconomic practices. This new and updated edition is for anyone wishing to understand and more deeply appreciate the forms and sociocultural contexts of the musics of the world's peoples, and it is designed to be used by both scholars and laypeople. Part One of the book consists of a practical guide to using the Cantometrics system, a course with musical examples to test one's understanding of the material, a theoretical framework to put the methodology in context, and an illustration of the method used to explore the roots of popular music. Part Two includes guides to four other analytical systems that Lomax developed, which focus on orchestration, phrasing and breath management, vowel articulation, instrumentation, and American popular music. Part Three provides resources for educators who wish to use the Cantometrics system in their classrooms, a summary of the findings and hypotheses of Lomax's original research, and a discussion of Cantometrics' criticisms, applications, and new approaches, and it includes excerpts of Lomax's original writings about world song style and cultural equity.

Boy Bands and the Performance of Pop Masculinity provides a history of the boy band from the Beatles to One Direction, placing the modern male pop group within the wider context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular music and culture. Offering the first extended look at pop masculinity as exhibited by boy bands, this volume links the evolving expressions of gender and sexuality in the boy band to wider economic and social changes that have resulted in new ways of representing what it is to be a man. The popularity of boy bands is unquestionable, and their contributions to popular music are significant, yet they have attracted relatively little study. This book fills that gap with chapters exploring the challenges of defining the boy band phenomenon, its origins and history from the 1940s to the present, the role of management and marketing, the performance of gender and sexuality, and the nature of fandom and fan agency. Throughout, the author illuminates the ways in which identity politics influence the production and consumption of pop music and shows how the mainstream pop of boy bands can both reinforce and subvert gender and class hierarchies.

Generally speaking, the philosophy of music hitherto can be said to approach music, as it were, from above or from outside. Music, thus envisaged, can be "absolute" or "sounding forms in motion". It can be expression, have a linguistic meaning, tell a story, be a manifestation of "the world as will and conceptualization", and mirror society's inward contradictions. Music is seen as an activity, sometimes as interactivity, not least through an anthropological approach in which prominence is given to its origins. This work is an attempt to reverse the argument, by taking the phenomenon of tone as the starting point to work the way up to an understanding of the phenomenon of music, to make a philosophy of tone the foundation of a philosophy of music. Such thoughts were already present in the author's previous works, but, being available only in Swedish, will be enlarged here.

What does it mean to talk about musical coherence at the end of a century characterised by fragmentation and discontinuity? How can the diverse influences which stand behind the works of many late twentieth-century composers be reconciled with the singular immediacy of the experiences that they can create? How might an awareness of the distinctive ways in which these experiences are generated and controlled affect the way we listen to, reflect upon and write about this music? Mark Hutchinson outlines a novel concept of coherence within Western art music from the 1980s to the turn of the millennium as a means of understanding the work of a number of contemporary composers, including Thomas Ades, Kaija Saariaho, Toru Takemitsu and Gyoergy Kurtag, whose music cannot be fitted easily into a particular compositional school or analytical framework. Coherence is understood as a multi-layered phenomenon experienced, above all, in the act of listening, but reliant upon a variety of other aspects of musical experience, including compositional statements, analysis, and connections of aesthetic, as well as listeners' own, imaginative conceptualisations. Accordingly, the approach taken here is similarly multi-faceted: close analytical readings of a number of specific works are combined with insights drawn from philosophy and aesthetics, music perception, and critical theory, with a particular openness to novel metaphorical presentations of basic musical ideas about form, language and time.

In recent years, scholars and musicians have become increasingly interested in the revival of musical improvisation as it was known in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. This historically informed practice is now supplanting the late Romantic view of improvised music as a rhapsodic endeavour-a musical blossoming out of the capricious genius of the player-that dominated throughout the twentieth century. In the Renaissance and Baroque eras, composing in the mind (alla mente) had an important didactic function. For several categories of musicians, the teaching of counterpoint happened almost entirely through practice on their own instruments. This volume offers the first systematic exploration of the close relationship among improvisation, music theory, and practical musicianship from late Renaissance into the Baroque era. It is not a historical survey per se, but rather aims to re-establish the importance of such a combination as a pedagogical tool for a better understanding of the musical idioms of these periods. The authors are concerned with the transferral of historical practices to the modern classroom, discussing new ways of revitalising the study and appreciation of early music. The relevance and utility of such an improvisation-based approach also changes our understanding of the balance between theoretical and practical sources in the primary literature, as well as the concept of music theory itself. Alongside a word-centred theoretical tradition, in which rules are described in verbiage and enriched by musical examples, we are rediscovering the importance of a music-centred tradition, especially in Spain and Italy, where the music stands alone and the learner must distil the rules by learning and playing the music. Throughout its various sections, the volume explores the path of improvisation from theory to practice and back again.

In Heavy Metal Music in Latin America: Perspectives from the Distorted South, the editors bring together scholars engaged in the study of heavy metal music in Latin America to reflect on the heavy metal genre from a regional perspective. The contributors' southern voices diversify metal scholarship in the global north. An extreme musical genre for an extreme region, the contributors explore how issues like colonialism, dictatorships, violence, ethnic extermination and political persecution have shaped heavy metal music in Latin America, and how music has helped shape Latin American culture and politics.

Music Theory Essentials offers an antidote to music theory textbooks that are overly long and dense. Focusing on the essentials, this text provides a clear-cut guide to the key concepts of music theory. Beginning with no assumptions about music theory knowledge, the book covers the core elements of music fundamentals, diatonic and chromatic harmony, post-tonal theory, and popular music in a single concise volume. Emphasizing critical thinking skills, this book guides students through conceptualizing musical concepts and mastering analytic techniques. Each chapter concludes with a selection of applications designed to enhance engagement: Exercises allow students to apply and practice the skills and techniques addressed in the chapter. Brain Teasers challenge students to expand their musical understanding by thinking outside the box. Exploring Music offers strategies for students to apply learned concepts to the music they are currently learning or listening to. Thinking Critically encourages students to think more deeply about music by solving problems and identifying and challenging assumptions. A companion website provides answers to book exercises, additional downloadable exercises, and audio examples. Straightforward and streamlined, Music Theory Essentials is a truly concise yet comprehensive introduction to music theory that is accessible to students of all backgrounds.

This volume examines the use of Black popular culture to engage, reflect, and parse social justice, arguing that Black popular culture is more than merely entertainment. Moving beyond a focus on identifying and categorizing cultural forms, the authors examine Black popular culture to understand how it engages social justice, with attention to anti-Black racism. Black Popular Culture and Social Justice takes a systematic look at the role of music, comic books, literature, film, television, and public art in shaping attitudes and fighting oppression. Examining the ways in which artists, scholars, and activists have engaged, discussed, promoted, or supported social justice - on issues of criminal justice reform, racism, sexism, LGBTQIA rights, voting rights, and human rights - the book offers unique insights into the use of Black popular culture as an agent for change. This timely and insightful book will be of interest to students and scholars of race and media, popular culture, gender studies, sociology, political science, and social justice.