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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Theory of music & musicology
Babes in Toyland was one of the most influential and underrated
bands of the 1990s. They rode the wave of the Minneapolis grunge
scene crafting a unique sound composed of self-taught
instrumentation and unabashed banshee raging vocals. Their stage
presence was enigmatic, their lyrics vitriolic, and their
Kinderwhore fashion ironic and easy to emulate. But what made them
most inspiring was their ethos and a unique brand of sisterhood
that inspired fans to create Riot Grrl and form legendary bands
such as 7 year Bitch, Bikini Kill, and Hole. Despite the media's
politicization of them as an "all-female" band, the Babes insisted
their music wasn't a political statement but about personal
expression. They would dismiss labeling their act as feminist, but
their actions sent a positive message of what a female space within
music could look like. Now, almost 30 years after their most
seminal record, Fontanelle, was released, the legend of the band is
being resurrected and re-spun to reclaim their proper space and
context in the history of music and women in rock.
Identity and Diversity in New Music: The New Complexities aims to
enrich the discussion of how musicians and educators can best
engage with audiences, by addressing issues of diversity and
identity that have played a vital role in the reception of new
music, but have been little-considered to date. Marilyn Nonken
offers an innovative theoretical approach that considers how the
environments surrounding new music performances influence
listeners' experiences, drawing on work in ecological psychology.
Using four case studies of influential new music ensembles from
across the twentieth century, she considers how diversity arises in
the musical environment, its impact on artists and creativity, and
the events and engagement it makes possible. Ultimately, she
connects theory to practice with suggestions for how musicians and
educators can make innovative music environments inclusive.
In Maria Szymanowska (1789-1831): A Bio-Bibliography, Anna E. Kijas
examines the career of the highly-influential Polish pianist and
composer. Kijas focuses on Szymanowska's life from her days as a
young artist to her public concert tours between 1822 and 1828 to
the last three years of her life in St. Petersburg. Kijas examines
the daily aspects of touring, including organizing concerts,
securing transportation and lodging, and managing finances, and she
reviews Szymanowska's reception in the cities in which she
performed, paying attention to her repertoire, the critic's
remarks, ticket prices, and other artists on the program. Separated
into Works, Discography, and Literature, the bibliography lists
more than 100 compositions for piano, voice, and chamber ensemble.
The discography provides details for CD, LP, and cassette
recordings between 1960 and the present, and the literature section
examines more than 120 primary source documents such as
19th-century reviews and advertisements, personal correspondence,
journals, and scrapbooks. Secondary sources include articles,
books, and essays about Szymanowska as a composer and pianist.
Complete with a list of sources and an index, this comprehensive
reference provides insight into the struggles and accomplishments
related to concert life for a professional woman in early
19th-century Europe.
This book presents four extended essays that are rooted in the
growing interdisciplinary field of applied musicology, in which
music theory - in particular, the zygonic conjecture - is used to
inform thinking in the domains of music psychology, music education
and music therapy research. It is essential reading for academics
and postgraduate students working in these fields. The topics
covered include a new study on the emergence of musical abilities
in the early years, using the Sounds of Intent framework of musical
development; an exploration of how the Sounds of Intent model can
be extended to map how people with learning difficulties engage in
creative multisensory activities; an investigation of the
expectations generated on hearing a piece of music more than once
evolve in cognition, using evidence from a musical savant; and a
report on the effect on listeners of repeated exposure to a novel
melody. Data are drawn from the findings of postgraduate and
postdoctoral projects. It is hoped that this exciting new work will
act as a catalyst in the emerging field of applied musicological
research, and bring recognition to a group of new young academics.
From 1660 through approximately 1830, the alteration of
Shakespearean texts to comply with contemporary dramaturgy was a
normal occurrence, and the need to adapt Shakespeare to popular
tastes generated music quite different in style, function, and
influence from that envisioned by the Elizabethan playwright.
Shakespeare's plots and poetry were updated, and the role of music
elevated. The musical repertoire created for this transfigured
Shakespeareana represents the staggering variety of music on the
English stage and shows the effect of Continental musical
influences, especially Italian opera and ballad opera. Proceeding
chronologically, this book discusses music used in Shakespeare
productions on the London stage during the 170-year period
following the Restoration. Included are settings of Shakespeare's
song lyrics, other original texts, and added non-Shakespearean
texts, as well as incidental music, masques, operas and afterpieces
based on the plays. Source materials documenting the arguments
include manuscript scores, the extant music printed in play texts,
and contemporary commentary from advertisements, criticism,
playbills, and memoirs and correspondence. An appendix summarizes
information about important productions and source materials in a
series of charts cross-referenced to the extensive bibliography.
Numerous musical examples illustrate the text, and scores of
Shakespearean music by Arne, Boyce, Leveridge, Vernon, Weldon, and
others are reprinted. Theater historians as well as music
historians working in this period will find this book a valuable
resource, as will theater practitioners interested in period
productions.
A new history of twentieth-century North Africa, that gives voice
to the musicians who defined an era and the vibrant recording
industry that carried their popular sounds from the colonial period
through decolonization. If twentieth-century stories of Jews and
Muslims in North Africa are usually told separately, Recording
History demonstrates that we have not been listening to what
brought these communities together: Arab music. For decades,
thousands of phonograph records flowed across North African
borders. The sounds embedded in their grooves were shaped in large
part by Jewish musicians, who gave voice to a changing world around
them. Their popular songs broadcast on radio, performed in concert,
and circulated on disc carried with them the power to delight
audiences, stir national sentiments, and frustrate French colonial
authorities. With this book, Christopher Silver provides the first
history of the music scene and recording industry across Morocco,
Algeria, and Tunisia, and offers striking insights into
Jewish-Muslim relations through the rhythms that animated them. He
traces the path of hit-makers and their hit records, illuminating
regional and transnational connections. In asking what North Africa
once sounded like, Silver recovers a world of many voices—of
pioneering impresarios, daring female stars, cantors turned
composers, witnesses and survivors of war, and national and
nationalist icons—whose music still resonates well into our
present.
Carl Stumpf (1848-1936) was a German philosopher and psychologist
and a visionary and important academic. During his lifetime, he
ranked among the most prominent scientists of his time. Stumpf's
intention, as evident in his book, Tone Psychology, was to
investigate the phenomenon of tone sensation in order to understand
the general psychic functions and processes underlying the
perception of sound and music. It could be argued that modern music
psychology has lost or perhaps ignored the epistemological basis
that Carl Stumpf developed in his Tone Psychology. To gain a
confident psychological basis, the relevance of Stumpf's
deliberations on music psychology cannot be overestimated. Analyses
of the essence of tones, complex tones and sounds are fundamental
topics for general psychology and epistemology. By the end of this
two-volume work, Stumpf had established an epistemology of hearing.
The subject of Volume I is the sensation of successive single
tones. Stumpf demonstrates that analysis leads to the realisation
of a plurality (is there only one tone or are there several
tones?), which is then followed by a comparison: an increase may be
observed (one tone is higher than the other) or a similarity may be
realised (both tones have the same pitch or the same loudness).
With almost mathematical stringency, Stumpf developed a topology of
tones. Volume II deals with the sensation of two simultaneous tones
(musical intervals). The books are stimulating, rewarding and
provocative and will appeal to music psychologists, music
theorists, general psychologists, philosophers, epistemologists and
neuroscientists.
Music, Sexuality and the Enlightenment explains how Mozart's music
for Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and CosA fan tutte 'sounds'
the intentions of Da Ponte's characters and their relationships
with one another. Mozart, by way of the infinitely generative and
beautiful logic of the sonata principle, did not merely interpret
Da Ponte's characterizations but lent them temporal, musical forms.
Charles Ford's analytic interpretation of these musical forms
concerns processes and structures in detail and at medium- to
long-term levels. He addresses the music of a wide range of arias
and ensembles, and develops original ways to interpret the two
largely overlooked operatic genres of secco recitative and finales.
Moreover, Ford presents a new method by which to relate musical
details directly to philosophical concepts, and thereby, the music
of the operas to the inwardly contradictory thinking of the
European Enlightenment. This involves close readings of late
eighteenth-century understandings of 'man' and nature, self and
other, morality and transgression, and gendered identities and
sexuality, with particular reference to contemporary writers,
especially Goethe, Kant, Laclos, Rousseau, Sade, Schiller, Sterne
and Wollstonecraft. The concluding discussion of the implied
futures of the operas argues that their divided sexualities, which
are those of the Enlightenment as a whole, have come to form our
own unquestioned assumptions about gender differences and
sexuality. This, along with the elegant and eloquent precision of
Mozart's music, is why Figaro, Giovanni and CosA still maintain
their vital immediacy for audiences today.
New York City has long been a generative nexus for the
transnational Latin music scene. Currently, there is no other place
in the Americas where such large numbers of people from throughout
the Caribbean come together to make music. In this book, Benjamin
Lapidus seeks to recognize all of those musicians under one mighty
musical sound, especially those who have historically gone
unnoticed. Based on archival research, oral histories, interviews,
and musicological analysis, Lapidus examines how interethnic
collaboration among musicians, composers, dancers, instrument
builders, and music teachers in New York City set a standard for
the study, creation, performance, and innovation of Latin music.
Musicians specializing in Spanish Caribbean music in New York
cultivated a sound that was grounded in tradition, including
classical, jazz, and Spanish Caribbean folkloric music. For the
first time, Lapidus studies this sound in detail and in its
context. He offers a fresh understanding of how musicians made and
formally transmitted Spanish Caribbean popular music in New York
City from 1940 to 1990. Without diminishing the historical facts of
segregation and racism the musicians experienced, Lapidus treats
music as a unifying force. By giving recognition to those musicians
who helped bridge the gap between cultural and musical backgrounds,
he recognizes the impact of entire ethnic groups who helped change
music in New York. The study of these individual musicians through
interviews and musical transcriptions helps to characterize the
specific and identifiable New York City Latin music aesthetic that
has come to be emulated internationally.
The Choral-Orchestral Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams: Autographs,
Context, Discourse combines contextual knowledge, a musical
commentary, an inventory of the holograph manuscripts, and a
critical assessment of the opus to create substantial and
meticulous examinations of Ralph Vaughan Williams'
choral-orchestral works. The contents include an equitable choice
of pieces from the various stages in the life of the composer and
an analysis of pieces from the various stages of Williams' life.
The earliest are taken from the pre-World War I years, when Vaughan
Williams was constructing his identity as an academic and
musician-Vexilla Regis (1894), Mass (1899), and A Sea Symphony
(1910). The middle group are chosen from the interwar period-Sancta
Civitas (1925), Benedicite (1929), Magnificat (1932), Five Tudor
Portraits (1935), Dona nobis pacem (1936)-written after Vaughan
Williams had found his mature voice. The last cluster-Thanksgiving
for Victory (1944), Fantasia (Quasi Variazione) on the 'Old 104'
Psalm Tune (1949), Sons of Light (1950), Hodie (1954), The Bridal
Day/Epithalamion (1938/1957)-typify the works finished or revisited
during the final years of the composer's life, near the end of the
Second World War and immediately before or after his second
marriage (1953).
The first monograph of the life and oeuvre of Marcin Mielczewski
(d. 1651) presents the best known Polish composer of
seventeenth-century Europe. During the 1990s, while exploring a
newly accessible collection of music manuscripts from Silesia (the
Sammlung Bohn) held in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, the author
found 37 compositions signed M.M., which she ascribed to
Mielczewski. This discovery, representing more than half the
composer's known legacy, fuelled a considerable rise in interest in
Mielczewski's output among musicologists and musicians. In this
book, the current state of knowledge about Marcin Mielczewski's
life and work is presented within the context of the musical
patronage of King Ladislaus IV Vasa of Poland and his brother,
Bishop Charles Ferdinand.
Music pervades Shakespeare's work. In addition to vocal songs and
numerous instrumental cues there are thousands of references to
music throughout the plays and many of the poems. This book
discusses Shakespeare's musical imagery according to categories
defined by occurrence in the plays and poems. In turn, these
categories depend on their early modern usage and significance.
Thus, instruments such as lute and viol deserve special attention
just as Renaissance ideas relating to musical philosophy and
pedagogical theory need contextual explanation. The objective is to
locate Shakespeare's musical imagery, reference and metaphor in its
immediate context in a play or poem and explain its meaning.
Discussion and explanation of the musical imagery suggests a range
of possible dramatic and poetic purposes these musical references
serve.
The University of Louisville's annual Grawemeyer Award for Music
Composition is the largest monetary award offered in its field. The
international prize is offered for outstanding achievement by a
living composer in a large musical genre, such as choral,
orchestral, chamber, electronic, song-cycle, dance, opera, musical
theater, or extended solo work. Since the award was first offered
in 1985, the Dwight Anderson Memorial Music Library-one of the
largest new music collections in North America-has housed the
competition submissions. In order to keep an accurate listing
detailing the holdings of this collection, this catalog was
developed. Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition: The First Twenty
Years catalogs every submission for this prestigious award,
offering complete information on all the competition submissions,
including title, composer, format, length, instrumentation, and
information on where to find or purchase the composition. The bulk
of the catalog is listed alphabetically by composer, so that users
can learn whose works were submitted over the 20 years covered by
the award. The additional appendixes provide the opposite
perspective: a year-by-year glance at the award and those who
submitted works each year. Concluding with an index, this catalog
increases awareness of this collection and acknowledges the work of
these important composers and their consequence to recent music
history.
Arriving in the United States at age twenty-seven, Hungarian-born
Paul Henry Lang (1901-1991) went on to exert a powerful influence
on musical life and scholarship in his adopted country for more
than six decades. As professor of musicology at Columbia
University, editor of the Musical Quarterly, a founder of the
American Musicological Society, and chief music critic of the New
York Herald Tribune, Lang became one of Americas foremost musical
scholars and commentators. This anthology of his previously
uncollected writings includes essays written throughout his career
on a full array of musical subjects, as well as unpublished
chapters of the book on performance practice that he was writing at
the time of his death. Lang was concerned above all with
safeguarding the purity of musical knowledge as reflected in both
scholarship and performance. Whether addressing his fellow
musicologists or the general public, he expressed a broadly
humanistic conception of musicology in his erudite and entertaining
writings on such diverse subjects as Bach and Handel, the
historical veracity of the film Amadeus, Marxist theory and music,
and the controversial issue of authenticity in performance.
What did rap music and hip hop culture inherit from the spirituals,
classic blues, ragtime, classic jazz, and bebop? What did rap music
and hip hop culture inherit from the Black Women's Club Movement,
New Negro Movement, Harlem Renaissance, Hipster Movement, and Black
Muslim Movement? How did black popular music and black popular
culture between 1900 and the 1950s influence white youth culture,
especially the Lost Generation and the Beat Generation, in ways
that mirror rap music and hip hop culture's influence on
contemporary white youth music, culture, and politics? In Hip Hop's
Amnesia award-winning author, spoken-word artist, and
multi-instrumentalist Reiland Rabaka answers these questions by
rescuing and reclaiming the often-overlooked early twentieth
century origins and evolution of rap music and hip hop culture. Hip
Hop's Amnesia is a study about aesthetics and politics, music and
social movements, as well as the ways in which African Americans'
unique history and culture has consistently led them to create
musics that have served as the soundtracks for their
socio-political aspirations and frustrations, their socio-political
organizations and nationally-networked movements. The musics of the
major African American social and political movements of the 1950s,
1960s, and 1970s were based and ultimately built on earlier forms
of "African American movement music." Therefore, in order to really
and truly understand rap music and hip hop culture we must
critically examine both classical African American musics and the
classical African American movements that these musics served as
soundtracks for. This book is primarily preoccupied with the ways
in which post-enslavement black popular music and black popular
culture frequently served as a soundtrack for and reflected the
grassroots politics of post-enslavement African American social and
political movements. Where many Hip Hop Studies scholars have made
clever allusions to the ways that rap music and hip hop culture are
connected to and seem to innovatively evolve earlier forms of black
popular music and black popular culture, Hip Hop's Amnesia moves
beyond anecdotes and witty allusions and earnestly endeavors a
full-fledged critical examination and archive-informed
re-evaluation of "hip hop's inheritance" from the major African
American musics and movements of the first half of the twentieth
century: classic blues, ragtime, classic jazz, swing, bebop, the
Black Women's Club Movement, the New Negro Movement, the Harlem
Renaissance, the Bebop Movement, the Hipster Movement, and the
Black Muslim Movement.
This anthology contains seven texts by Kurt Blaukopf (1914-1999)
that exemplify the sociological and epistemological position of
this pioneer of Austrian music sociology. Blaukopf's efforts were
aimed at a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach and analysis
of music as a cultural phenomenon and as social practice. The
primary aim of this anthology is to make Blaukopf's work better
known in the English-speaking world. It offers the interested
reader a fruitful analysis of the relation between music sociology
and its sister disciplines, e.g. musicology, a solid analysis in
terms of the philosophy of science on the possibilities and limits
of music sociology, and a highly topical discussion about the
significance of intrinsic artistic aspects in music sociology.
The Art of Digital Orchestration explores how to replicate
traditional orchestration techniques using computer technology,
with a focus on respecting the music and understanding when using
real performers is still the best choice. Using real-world examples
including industry-leading software and actual sounds and scores
from films, VR/AR, and games, this book takes readers through the
entire orchestration process, from composition to instruments,
performance tools, MIDI, mixing, and arranging. It sheds light on
the technology and musical instrument foundation required to create
realistic orchestrations, drawing on decades of experience working
with virtual instruments and MIDI. Bringing together the old and
new, The Art of Digital Orchestration is an excellent resource for
anyone using software to write or compose music. The book includes
access to online videos featuring orchestration techniques, MIDI
features, and instrument demonstrations.
For nearly eight centuries - from the Muslim conquest of Spain in
711 to the final expulsion of the Jews in 1492 - Muslims, Jews and
Christians shared a common Andalusian culture under alternating
Muslim and Christian rule. Following their expulsion, the Spanish
and Arabic- speaking Jews joined pre-existing diasporic communities
and established new ones across the Mediterranean and beyond. In
the twentieth century, radical social and political upheavals in
the former Ottoman and European-occupied territories led to the
mass exodus of Jews from Turkey and the Arab Mediterranean, with
the majority settling in Israel. Following a trajectory from
medieval Al-Andalus to present-day Israel via North Africa, Italy,
Turkey and Syria, pausing for perspectives from Enlightenment
Europe, Musical Exodus: Al-Andalus and its Jewish Diasporas tells
of diverse song and instrumental traditions born of the multiple
musical encounters between Jews and their Muslim and Christian
neighbors in different Mediterranean diasporas, and the revival and
renewal of those traditions in present-day Israel. In this
collection of essays from Philip V. Bohlman, Daniel Jutte, Tony
Langlois, Piergabriele Mancuso, John O'Connell, Vanessa Paloma,
Carmel Raz, Dwight Reynolds, Edwin Seroussi, and Jonathan Shannon,
with opening and closing contributions by Ruth F. Davis and Stephen
Blum, distinguished ethnomusicologists, cultural historians,
linguists and performers explore from multidisciplinary
perspectives the complex and diverse processes and conditions of
intercultural and intracultural musical encounters. The authors
consider how musical traditions acquired new functions and meanings
in different social, political and diasporic contexts; explore the
historical role of Jewish musicians as cultural intermediaries
between the different faith communities; and examine how music is
implicated in projects of remembering and forgetting as societies
come to terms with mass exodus by reconstructing their narratives
of the past. The essays in Musical Exodus: Al-Andalus and its
Jewish Diasporas extend beyond the music of medieval Iberia and its
Mediterranean Jewish diasporas to wider aspects of Jewish-Christian
and Jewish-Muslim relations. The authors offer new perspectives on
theories of musical interaction, hybridization, and the cultural
meaning of musical expression in diasporic and minority
communities. The essays address how music is implicated in
constructions of ethnicity and nationhood and of myth and history,
while also examining the resurgence of Al-Andalus as a symbol in
musical projects that claim to promote cross-cultural understanding
and peace. The diverse scholarship in Musical Exodus makes a vital
contribution to scholars of music and European and Jewish history.
Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Song Cycles: Analytical
Pathways Toward Performance presents analyses of fourteen song
cycles composed after the turn of the twentieth century, with a
focus on offering ways into the musical and poetic structure of
each cycle to performers, scholars, and students alike. Ranging
from familiar works of twentieth-century music by composers such as
Schoenberg, Britten, Poulenc, and Shostakovich to lesser-known
works by Van Wyk, Sviridov, Wheeler, and Sanchez, this collection
of essays captures the diversity of the song cycle repertoire in
contemporary classical music. The contributors bring their own
analytical perspectives and methods, considering musical
structures, the composers' selection of texts, how poetic
narratives are expressed, and historical context. Informed by music
history, music theory, and performance, Twentieth- and
Twenty-First-Century Song Cycles offers an essential guide into the
contemporary art-music song cycle for performers, scholars,
students, and anyone seeking to understand this unique genre.
Sound positions individuals as social subjects. The presence of
human beings, animals, objects, or technologies reverberates into
the spaces we inhabit and produces distinct soundscapes that render
social practices, group associations, and socio-cultural tensions
audible. The Acoustics of the Social on Page and Screen unites
interdisciplinary perspectives on the social dimensions of sound in
audiovisual and literary environments. The essays in the collection
discuss soundtracks for shared values, group membership, and
collective agency, and engage with the subversive functions of
sound and sonic forms of resistance in American literature, film,
and TV.
A comprehensive survey of the latest neuroscientific research into
the effects of music on the brain * Covers a variety of topics
fundamental for music perception, including musical syntax, musical
semantics, music and action, music and emotion * Includes general
introductory chapters to engage a broad readership, as well as a
wealth of detailed research material for experts * Offers the most
empirical (and most systematic) work on the topics of neural
correlates of musical syntax and musical semantics * Integrates
research from different domains (such as music, language, action
and emotion both theoretically and empirically, to create a
comprehensive theory of music psychology
This book represents the volume of the International Musicological
Conference "Musical Romania and Neighbouring Cultures. Traditions,
Influences, Identities", which took place in Iasi (Romania) and was
organised by the George Enescu University of Arts Iasi in
collaboration with the International Musicological Society. The
volume includes 35 papers of 38 authors who represent academic
centres in Croatia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Romania. The
diverse topics include ancient Romanian, Balkan or East-European
music, music iconography, Byzantine and folkloristic traditions, as
well as modern and contemporary music. The articles propose
theoretical and methodological documentation on the interactions
between liturgical, folkloric and academic works within this
multicultural space.
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