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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Theory of music & musicology
The German-Jewish emigre composer Stefan Wolpe was a vital figure in the history of modernism, with affiliations ranging from the Bauhaus, Berlin agitprop and the kibbutz movement to bebop, Abstract Expressionism and Black Mountain College. This is the first full-length study of this often overlooked composer, launched from the standpoint of the mass migrations that have defined recent times. Drawing on over 2000 pages of unpublished documents, Cohen explores how avant-garde communities across three continents adapted to situations of extreme cultural and physical dislocation. A conjurer of unexpected cultural connections, Wolpe serves as an entry-point to the utopian art worlds of Weimar-era Germany, pacifist movements in 1930s Palestine and vibrant art and music scenes in early Cold War America. The book takes advantage of Wolpe's role as a mediator, bringing together perspectives from music scholarship, art history, comparative literature, postcolonial studies and recent theories of cosmopolitanism and diaspora.
Race and Gender in the Western Music History Survey: A Teacher's Guide provides concrete information and approaches that will help instructors include women and people of color in the typical music history survey course and the foundational music theory classes. This book provides a reconceptualization of the principles that shape the decisions instructors should make when crafting the syllabus. It offers new perspectives on canonical composers and pieces that take into account musical, cultural, and social contexts where women and people of color are present. Secondly, it suggests new topics of study and pieces by composers whose work fits into a more inclusive narrative of music history. A thematic approach parallels the traditional chronological sequencing in Western music history classes. Three themes include people and communities that suffer from various kinds of exclusion: Locales & Locations; Forms & Factions; Responses & Reception. Each theme is designed to uncover a different cultural facet that is often minimized in traditional music history classrooms but which, if explored, lead to topics in which other perspectives and people can be included organically in the curriculum, while not excluding canonical composers.
There is a paucity of material regarding how choral music specifically was performed in the 1800s. The Historically Informed Performance (HIP) movement has made remarkable advancements in choral music of the Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical periods, with modest forays into the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and other early nineteenth-century composers; however, there are no sources with a comprehensive examination of how choral music was performed. Using more than one-hundred musical examples, illustrations, tables, and photographs and relying on influential, contemporaneous sources, David Friddle details the performance practices of the time, including expressive devices such as articulation, ornamentation, phrasing, tempo, and vibrato, along with an in-depth discussion of period pronunciation, instruments, and orchestral/choral placement. Sing Romantic Music Romantically: Nineteenth-Century Choral Performance Practices fills a gap in choral scholarship and moves forward our knowledge of how choral music sounded and was performed in the nineteenth century. The depth of research and abundance of source material makes this work a must-have for choral professionals everywhere.
An insightful biography of the great composer, revealing Schubert’s complex and fascinating private life alongside his musical genius  Brilliant, short-lived, incredibly prolific—Schubert is one of the most intriguing figures in music history. While his music attracts a wide audience, much of his private life remains shrouded in mystery, and significant portions of his work have been overlooked.  In this major new biography, Lorraine Byrne Bodley takes a detailed look into Schubert’s life, from his early years at the Stadtkonvikt to the harrowing battle with syphilis that led to his death at the age of thirty-one. Drawing on extensive archival research in Vienna and the Czech Republic, and reconsidering the meaning of some of his best-known works, Bodley provides a fuller account than ever before of Schubert’s extraordinary achievement and incredible courage. This is a compelling new portrait of one of the most beloved composers of the nineteenth century.
The book combines cutting edge insights from the fields of philosophy of mind, cognitive science, semiotics, linguistics, and music cognition, using a broad range of examples from traditional, classical and popular world musics, into a theoretical system that shows how the focus on the grounding problem may help researchers convincingly resolve the apparent ungraspability of musical semantics.
Sacred and Secular Intersections in Music of the Long Nineteenth Century: Church, Stage, and Concert Hall explores interconnections of the sacred and the secular in music and aesthetic debates of the long nineteenth century. The essays in this volume view the category of the sacred not as a monolithic attribute that applies only to music written for and performed in a religious ritual. Rather, the "sacred" is viewed as a functional as well as a topical category that enhances the discourse of cross-pollination of musical vocabularies between sacred and secular compositions, church and concert music. Using a variety of methodological approaches, the contributors articulate how sacred and religious identities coalesce, reconcile, fuse, or intersect in works from the long nineteenth century that traverse an array of genres and compositional styles.
Software mediates a great deal of human musical activity. The writing, running, and maintenance of code lies at the heart of such software. Code Musicology: From Hardwired to Software argues why it is time for a "code musicology," then outlines what that should entail. A code musicology opens a conduit between musicology and software studies, providing insights into both of these now interlinked fields along the way. It extends an ethnomusicology of technoculture from the world of hardware and the hardwired to software, code, and algorithms. For popular music studies, it helps direct attention to a newly relevant industrial focus-IT and software-centered transnational commerce-as a result of sectorial transformation. Denis Crowdy demonstrates how analysis from software studies, critical code studies, and the digital humanities offers insights into power relations, diversity, and commerce in music. Crowdy weaves readings of code and application programming interfaces (APIs) into the discussion, as well as ethnomusicological fieldwork exploring music and mobile phones from the Global South. Analysis of the author's own music apps and associated distribution infrastructure provides unique insights into the machinations of music "appification."
Van den Toorn and McGinness take a fresh look at the dynamics of Stravinsky's musical style from a variety of analytical, critical and aesthetic angles. Starting with processes of juxtaposition and stratification, the book offers an in-depth analysis of works such as The Rite of Spring, Les Noces and Renard. Characteristic features of style, melody and harmony are traced to rhythmic forces, including those of metrical displacement. Along with Stravinsky's formalist aesthetics, the strict performing style he favoured is also traced to rhythmic factors, thus reversing the direction of the traditional causal relationship. Here, aesthetic belief and performance practice are seen as flowing directly from the musical invention. The book provides a counter-argument to the criticism and aesthetics of T. W. Adorno and Richard Taruskin, and will appeal to composers, critics and performers as well as scholars of Stravinsky's music.
For a century and more, the idea of democracy has fuelled musicians' imaginations. Seeking to go beyond music's proven capacity to contribute to specific political causes, musicians have explored how aspects of their practice embody democratic principles. This may involve adopting particular approaches to compositional material, performance practice, relationships to audiences, or modes of dissemination and distribution. Finding Democracy in Music is the first study to offer a wide-ranging investigation of ways in which democracy may thus be found in music. A guiding theme of the volume is that this takes place in a plurality of ways, depending upon the perspective taken to music's manifold relationships, and the idea of democracy being entertained. Contributing authors explore various genres including orchestral composition, jazz, the post-war avant-garde, online performance, and contemporary popular music, as well as employing a wide array of theoretical, archival, and ethnographic methodologies. Particular attention is given to the contested nature of democracy as a category, and the gaps that frequently arise between utopian aspiration and reality. In so doing, the volume interrogates a key way in which music helps to articulate and shape our social lives and our politics.
Over 400,000 people moved their families in search of a better life in the American West during the Westward Expansion. The pioneers made room for musical instruments with their guns, food, and tools while taking only the minimal necessities that would fit into modest wagons. During what seemed like an interminable dusty journey, music was often the sole source of light and happiness for these exhausted travelers. This book examines the roles of music in the Westward Expansion and the diverse cultural landscape of the Old West, including Northern Cheyenne courtship flute makers, fiddle-playing explorers, dancing fur trappers, hymn-singing missionaries, frontier flutists, girls with guitars, wagon-driving balladeers, poetic cowboys, singing farmers, musical miners, and preaching songsters.
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.
- Offers a diverse snapshot of current studies of music notation as material culture, encompassing a wide range of methodological approaches - Broad historical and regional/stylistic scope, covering material from the middle ages to the present
From the classical violinist to the hip hop producer, creating music pays homage to principles of harmony. It is not just the sum of the musical parts that makes a song come alive, but how every part interacts with others to create more harmonies, enriched melodies, dynamic rhythms, and more interaction. Composers, engineers, producers and performing musicians constantly use the harmonic principles derived from basic acoustics every time they work through a piece. This book offers a deep analytical dive into the theories of harmonics. It explores many nontraditional approaches such as extended and hyperextended chords and it includes an explanation for the consonance of the elusive minor triad. The book also covers voicing and arranging from a vertical or harmonic perspective, a system of classifying the sonority of each chord, how extended chords impact the listener, and how the composer applies these principles.
Music has long played a prominent role in cultural diplomacy, but until now no resource has comparatively examined policies that shape how non-western countries use music for international relations. Ethnomusicology and Cultural Diplomacy, edited by scholars David G. Hebert and Jonathan McCollum, demonstrates music's role in international relations worldwide. Specifically, this book offers "insider" views from expert contributors writing about music as a part of cultural diplomacy initiatives in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, Syria, Japan, China, India, Vietnam, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Nigeria. Unique features include the book's emphasis on diverse legal frameworks, decolonial perspectives, and cultural policies that serve as a basis for how nations outside "the west" use music in their relationships with Europe and North America.
Reflections on the Music of Ennio Morricone: Fame and Legacy provides new contextualized perspectives on Ennio Morricone's position as a radical composer working at the cutting edge of music within the frame work of his cinematic compositions. The Italian composer has reached world fame as the creator of some 500 film scores and hundreds more arrangements for commercial recordings; however, Sciannameo argues that Morricone's legacy must include his concert works, a catalogued list of more than 100 titles. By analyzing the composer's formative years as a music practitioner and his transition into the world of composing for the screen, Franco Sciannameo reconsiders the best of Morricone's popular compositions and reveals the challenging concert works which have been an intimate expression of Morricone's lifelong creative season. Reflections on the Music of Ennio Morricone explores Morricone's legacy, its nature, and its eventual impact on posterity.
A major new study piecing together the intriguing but fragmentary evidence surrounding the lives of minstrels to highlight how these seemingly peripheral figures were keenly involved with all aspects of late medieval communities. Minstrels were a common sight and sound in the late Middle Ages. Aristocrats, knights and ladies heard them on great occasions (such as Edward I's wedding feast for his daughter Elizabeth in 1296) and in quieter moments in their chambers; town-dwellers heard and saw them in civic processions (when their sound drew attention to the spectacle); and even in the countryside people heard them at weddings, church-ales and other parish celebrations. But who were the minstrels, and what did they do? How did they live, and how easily did they make a living? How did they perform, and in what conditions? The evidence is intriguing but fragmentary, including literary and iconographic sources and, most importantly, the financial records of royal and aristocratic households and of towns. These offer many insights, although they are often hard to fit into any coherent picture of the minstrels' lives and their place in society. It is easy to see the minstrels as peripheral figures, entertainers who had no central place in the medieval world. Yet they were full members of it, interacting with the ordinary people around them, as well as with the ruling classes: carrying letters and important verbal messages, some lending huge sums of money to the king (to finance Henry V's Agincourt campaign in 1415, for instance), some regular and necessary civic servants, some committing crimes or suffering the crimes of others. In this book Rastall and Taylor bring to bear the available evidence to enlarge and enrich our view of the minstrel in late medieval society.
The minstrelsy play, song, and dance "Jump, Jim Crow" did more than enable blackface performers to spread racist stereotypes about Black Americans. This widespread antebellum-era cultural phenomenon was instrumental in normalizing the N-word across several aspects of American life. Material culture, sporting culture, consumer products, house-pets, carnival games and even geographic landmarks obtained the racial slur as a formal and informal appellation. Music, it is argued, was the catalyst for normalizing and disseminating those two ugly syllables throughout society, well beyond the environs of plantation and urban slavery. This weighty and engaging look at the English language's most explosive slur, described by scholars as the "atomic bomb" of bigoted words, traces the N-word's journey through various music genres and across generations. The author uses private letters, newspaper accounts, exclusive interviews and, most importantly, music lyrics from artists in the fields of minstrelsy, folk, country, ragtime, blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll and hip hop. The result is a reflective account of how the music industry has channeled linguistic and cultural movements across eras, resulting in changes to the slur's meaning and spelling.
In the Dogon funeral proceedings, a major song cycle called baja ni is performed in a session of at least seven hours. The texts of the chants are attributed to a legendary figure called Abire, who as a blind singer in the nineteenth century roamed the heartland of the Dogon. The baja ni songs have escaped scholarly attention thus far. Singing with the Dogon Prophet by Walter E.A. van Beek, Oumarou S. Ongoiba, and Atim D. Saye provides their first publication in English as well as an analysis of these songs. These texts deal with the relations between man and woman, man's ambivalent dependency on the otherworld, and with life and death; the whole night performance is one of the high points of the funeral. Additionally, Abire is a prophet, and during his life has uttered a great number of prophecies on a wide range of topics, from local issues to the relation of the Dogon with the Fulbe herdsmen, and from the arrival of the colonials to ecological transformation. This book examines how these prophecies with these songs offer an inside view of the way the Dogon construct the present in a continuous dialogue with their past and their projected future.
Alan Lomax (1915-2002) is arguably the most popular and influential American folk song collector of the 20th century. Pursuing a mission of both preserving and popularizing folk music, Lomax moved between political activism, the scholarly world, and the world of popular culture. Based largely on primary material, the book shows how Lomax's diverse activities made him an authority in the field of folk music and how he used this power to advocate the cultures of perceived marginalized Americans - whom he located primarily in the American South. In this approach, however, folk music became an abstract idea onto which notions oscillating between hope and disillusionment, fear and perspective were projected. The author argues that Lomax's role as a cultural mediator, with a politically motivated approach, helped him to decisively shape the perception and reception of what came to be known as American folk music, from the mid 1930s to the late 1960s.
When Genres Collide is a provocative history that rethinks the relationship between jazz and rock through the lens of the two oldest surviving and most influential American popular music periodicals: Down Beat and Rolling Stone. Writing in 1955, Duke Ellington argued that the new music called rock 'n' roll "is the most raucous form of jazz, beyond a doubt." So why did jazz and rock subsequently become treated as separate genres? The rift between jazz and rock (and jazz and rock scholarship) is based on a set of received assumptions about their fundamental differences, but there are other ways popular music history could have been written. By offering a fresh examination of key historical moments when the trajectories and meanings of jazz and rock intersected, overlapped, or collided, it reveals how music critics constructed an ideological divide between jazz and rock that would be replicated in American musical discourse for decades to follow. Recipient of and Honorable Mention in the PROSE Award, Music & the Performing Arts 2018.
Blues Hall of Fame Inductee, 2019 - A "Classic of Blues Literature" In 1941 and '42 African American scholars from Fisk University-among them the noted composer and musicologist John W. Work III, sociologist Lewis Wade Jones, and graduate student Samuel C. Adams Jr.-joined folklorist Alan Lomax of the Library of Congress on research trips to Coahoma County, Mississippi. Their mission was "to document adequately the cultural and social backgrounds for music in the community." Among the fruits of the project were the earliest recordings by the legendary blues singer and guitarist Muddy Waters. The hallmark of the study was to have been a joint publication of its findings by Fisk and the Library of Congress. While this publication was never completed, Lost Delta Found is composed of the writings, interviews, notes, and musical transcriptions produced by Work, Jones, and Adams in the Coahoma County study. Their work captures, with compelling immediacy, a place, a people, a way of life, and a set of rich musical traditions as they existed in the 1940s.
- Comprehensive overview offering a careful balance of the practical and theoretical - No competing titles - Diverse set of contributors from a range of geographical regions and professional/academic backgrounds
- Comprehensive overview offering a careful balance of the practical and theoretical - No competing titles - Diverse set of contributors from a range of geographical regions and professional/academic backgrounds |
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