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Books > Arts & Architecture > Music > Theory of music & musicology
On March 1, 1954, the US military detonated "Castle Bravo," its most powerful nuclear bomb, at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Two days later, the US military evacuated the Marshallese to a nearby atoll where they became part of a classified study, without their consent, on the effects of radiation on humans. In Radiation Sounds Jessica A. Schwartz examines the seventy-five years of Marshallese music developed in response to US nuclear militarism on their homeland. Schwartz shows how Marshallese singing draws on religious, cultural, and political practices to make heard the deleterious effects of US nuclear violence. Schwartz also points to the literal silencing of Marshallese voices and throats compromised by radiation as well as the United States' silencing of information about the human radiation study. By foregrounding the centrality of the aural and sensorial in understanding nuclear testing's long-term effects, Schwartz offers new modes of understanding the relationships between the voice, sound, militarism, indigeneity, and geopolitics.
This first full translation provides English-speaking theorists the opportunity to delve deeper into Ernst Kuth's ideas. Would be of interest to scholars who work at the intersections of music theory, psychology, linguistics, and related disciplines.
Well before she married Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann was already an internationally renowned pianist, and she concertized extensively for several decades after her husband's death. Despite being tied professionally to Robert, Clara forged her own career and played an important role in forming what we now recognize as the culture of classical music. Becoming Clara Schumann guides readers through her entire career, including performance, composition, edits to her husband's music, and teaching. Alexander Stefaniak brings together the full run of Schumann's concert programs, detailed accounts of her performances and reception, and other previously unexplored primary source material to illuminate how she positioned herself within larger currents in concert life and musical aesthetics. He reveals that she was an accomplished strategist, having played roughly 1,300 concerts across western and central Europe over the course of her six-decade career, and she shaped the canonization of her husband's music. Extraordinary for her time, Schumann earned success and prestige by crafting her own playing style, selecting and composing her own concerts, and acting as her own manager. By highlighting Schumann's navigation of her musical culture's gendered boundaries, Becoming Clara Schumann details how she cultivated her public image in order to win over audiences and embody some of her field's most ambitious aspirations for musical performance.
This book explores the interactions between science and music in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century. It examines and evaluates the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, Max Planck, Shohe Tanaka, and Adriaan Fokker, leading physicists and physiologists who were committed to understanding crucial aesthetic components of the art of music, including the standardization of pitch and the implementation of various types of intonations. With a mixture of physics, physiology, and aesthetics, author Erwin Hiebert addresses throughout the book how just intonation came to intersect with the history of keyboard instruments and exert an influence on the development of Western music. He begins with the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, a leading nineteenth-century physicist and physiologist who not only made important contributions in vision, optics, electrodynamics and thermodynamics, but also helped advanced the field of music theory as well. The author traces the Helmholtzian trends of thought that become inherently more complex by reaching beyond the sciences to perform a bridge with aesthetics and the diverse ways in which the human mind interprets or is taught, in different cultures, to interpret and understand music. Next, the author explores the works of other key physicists and physiologists who were influenced by Helmholtz and added to his legacy. He examines Japanese music theory student Shohe Tanaka, who sought to design a harmonium that was not based on equal temperament but rather on just intonation. Dutch physicist Adriaan Daniel Fokker, who arranged for organs to be built based on 31-tones per octave, orchestrated concerts for these new instruments and even attempted to compose microtonal music, or music whose tonality is based on intervals smaller than the typical twelve semitones of Western music."
The music of Tchaikovsky remains as much loved in the twenty-first century as it was a hundred years ago. But it has so much more to offer than luscious orchestration and tuneful melodies. In Experiencing Tchaikovsky: A Listener's Companion, historian and scholar David Schroeder looks beyond traditional views of Tchaikovsky to explore the dramatic impact of his music by walking readers through the remarkable range of works by this great Russian composer. Drawing on a select, but highly representative, group of compositions from Tchaikovsky's vast output, from his groundbreaking ballet Swan Lake to his great opera Eugene Onegin, Experiencing Tchaikovsky: A Listener's Companion offers in-depth explorations without technical jargon. In addition to looking at his ballets and some of his operas, Schroeder probes the many other genres in which Tchaikovsky worked, from his chamber music pieces and symphonies to his other orchestral works and concertos. Throughout, Schroeder draws connections among the works, painting a fuller, more coherent picture of Tchaikovsky through his thematic interests, musical techniques, sonic signatures, and literary and cultural focuses. For context, Schroeder describes the works of personal significance for the composer through such contemporary literature as Tchaikovsky's letters to Nadezhda von Meck, the wealthy patroness whom he never met. Experiencing Tchaikovsky: A Listener's Companion is for anyone who left a ballet performance whistling themes from Swan Lake or humming melodies from The Nutcracker. It is the ideal work for concertgoers, music students, opera buffs, ballet enthusiasts, and anyone who appreciates this musical master.
This monograph is an authoritative study of the oeuvre of one of the most important composers of our time. For the first time, Ligeti's key works are presented in the context of their drafts and sketches. His personal and artistic development is set forth and illuminated, and his principal compositions are analyzed and reinterpreted, based on detailed studies of the scores and drafts, as well as on personal conversations with the composer. In addition, numerous questions concerning today's composing are raised and discussed. Music does not have to be puristic: Ligeti's spheres of interest are close to universal, embracing history, natural science, and visual arts, as well as music of diverse eras and ethnicities. This expanded world of the musical comprises not just tones and sounds, speech and music, the vocal and the instrumental: Ligeti conceives music as a cosmos of acoustic form.
Kramer was one of the most visionary musical thinkers of the second half of the 20th century. In his The Time of Music, he approached the idea of the many different ways that time itself is articulated musically. This book has become influential among composers, theorists, and aestheticians. Now, in his almost completed text written before his untimely death in 2004, he examines the concept of postmodernism in music. Kramer created a series of markers by which we can identify postmodern works. He suggests that the postmodern project actually creates a radically different relationship between the composer and listener. Written with wit, precision, and at times playfully subverting traditional tropes to make a very serious point about this difference, Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening leads us to a strongly grounded intellectual basis for stylistic description and an intuitive sensibility of what postmodernism in music entails. Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening is an examination of how musical postmodernism is not just a style or movement, but a fundamental shift in the relationship between composer and listener. The result is a multifaceted and provocative look at a critical turning point in music history, one whose implications we are only just beginning to understand.
Music Downtown Eastside draws on two decades of research in one of North America's poorest urban areas to illustrate how human rights can be promoted through music. Harrison's examination of how gentrification, grant funding, and community organizations affect the success or failure of human rights-focused musical initiatives offers insights into the complex relationship between culture, poverty, and human rights that have global implications and applicability. The book takes the reader into popular music jams and music therapy sessions offered to the poor in churches, community centers and health organizations. Harrison analyzes the capabilities music-making develops, and musical moments where human rights are respected, promoted, threatened, or violated. The book offers insights on the relationship between music and poverty, a social deprivation that diminishes capabilities and rights. It contributes to the human rights literature by examining critically how human rights can be strengthened in cultural practices and policy.
Grounded in continental philosophy, The Conjectural Body: Gender, Race, and the Philosophy of Music uses feminist, critical race, and postcolonial theories to examine music, race, and gender as discourses that emerge and evolve with one another.. In the first section, author Robin James asks why philosophers commonly use music to explain embodied social identity and inequality. She looks at late twentieth-century postcolonial theory, Rousseau's early musical writings, and Kristeva's reading of Mozart and Schoenberg to develop a theory of the "conjectural body," arguing that this is the notion of embodiment that informs Western conceptions of raced, gendered, and resonating bodies. The second section addresses the ways in which norms about human bodily difference-such as gender and race-continue to ground serious and popular hierarchies well after twentieth and twenty-first century art and philosophy have deconstructed this binary. Reading Adorno's work on popular music through Irigaray's critique of commodification, James establishes and explains the feminization of popular music. She then locates this notion of the feminized popular in Nietzsche, and argues that he critiques Wagner by making an argument for the positive aesthetic (and epistemological) value of feminized popular music, such as Bizet and Italian opera. Following from Nietzsche, she argues that feminists ought and need to take "the popular" seriously, both as a domain of artistic and scholarly inquiry as well as a site of legitimate activism. The book concludes with an analysis of philosophy's continued hostility toward feminism, real-life women, and popular culture. While the study of gender, race, and popular culture has become a fixture in many areas of the academy, philosophy and musicology continue to resist attempts to take these objects as objects of serious academic study.
- First volume in almost 10 years to bring together a broad collection on world music analysis, capturing where the field is now - Wide-reaching scope makes this the perfect first stop for anyone interested in world music analysis, and could make it a good focus for seminars at graduate or advanced undergraduate level.
Introduction to Digital Music with Python Programming provides a foundation in music and code for the beginner. It shows how coding empowers new forms of creative expression while simplifying and automating many of the tedious aspects of production and composition. With the help of online, interactive examples, this book covers the fundamentals of rhythm, chord structure, and melodic composition alongside the basics of digital production. Each new concept is anchored in a real-world musical example that will have you making beats in a matter of minutes. Music is also a great way to learn core programming concepts such as loops, variables, lists, and functions, Introduction to Digital Music with Python Programming is designed for beginners of all backgrounds, including high school students, undergraduates, and aspiring professionals, and requires no previous experience with music or code.
The narrative of Tumult! The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner is an extended exploration of the magical transformation of shy country girl Anna Mae Bullock into the boisterous force of nature we know today as Tina Turner. This is creative alchemy in action: turning into Turner is actually also the captivating tale of someone who was already precociously there, a stellar talent just waiting to emerge and grab the global spotlight. Far from the early myths attached to her name by association with her talented but tormenting producer-husband, she was not a Svengali-like creation at all, but rather a fully formed, if vulnerable, young musical prodigy who was going to burst out of the creative shell imposed upon her one way or the other. Even though it took sixteen years to do so, her second career as a solo pop artist is the achievement for which she is rightly remembered. In Turner, we have a case study in triumph over adversity and sheer creative will power: singer, songwriter, dancer, actress, feminist icon. Often referred to as the Queen of Rock and Roll, she has sold over two hundred million records and sold more live concert tickets than any other solo performer in history. In 2019, she celebrated her eighieth birthday and was also lionized in the live Broadway version of her incredible life story, Tina: The Musical, starring Adrienne Warren. In Tumult!, we unearth and examine what uncanny skills enabled her to connect with so many people at such a deep heart-to-heart level. She is, in fact, a beating human heart in high heels.
Drawing on the analogy between musical meaning-making and human subjectivity, this book develops the concept of the acoustic self, exploring the ways in which musical characterization and structure are related to issues of subject-representation in the modernist English novel. The volume is framed around three musical topics-the fugue, absolute music, and Gesamtkunstwerk-arguing that these three modes of musicalization address modernist dilemmas around selfhood and identity. Varga reflects on the manifestations of the acoustic self in examples from the works of E.M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf, and such musicians as Bach, Beethoven, Handel, and Wagner. An additional chapter on jazz and electronic music supplements these inquiries, pursuing the acoustic self beyond modernism and thereby inciting further discussion and theorization of musical intermediality, as well as recent sonic practices. Probing the analogies in the complex interrelationship between music, representation, and language in fictional texts and the nature of human subjectivity, this book will appeal to students and scholars interested in the interface of language and music, in such areas as intermediality, multimodality, literary studies, critical theory, and modernist studies.
"Fraser discusses the aesthetics and system of ideal musical styles employed by talempong players, the history of the talempong, and, most compellingly, the newer styles of practice, including repertoires that incorporate popular music genres from around the world. The author's discussion of institutionalization, professionalization, and monetization of Minangkau arts in general and talempong styles specifically gives this book broader relevance...SUMMING UP: Recommended." -CHOICE Scholarship on the musical traditions of Indonesia has long focused on practices from Java and Bali, including famed gamelan traditions, at the expense of the wide diversity of other musical forms within the archipelago. Jennifer A. Fraser counters this tendency by exploring a little-known gong tradition from Sumatra called talempong, long associated with people who identify themselves as Minangkabau. Grounded in rich ethnographic data and supplemented with online audiovisual materials, Gongs and Pop Songs is the first study to chronicle the history and variety of talempong styles. It reveals the continued vitality of older modes in rural communities in the twenty-first century, while tracing the emergence of newer ones with radically different aesthetic frames and values. Each talempong style discussed incorporates into its repertoire Minangkabau pop or indigenous songs, both of which have strong associations with the place and people. These contemporary developments in talempong have taken place against a shifting political, social, and economic backdrop: the institutionalization of indigenous arts, a failed regional rebellion, and the pressures of a free-market economy. Fraser adopts a cognitive approach to ethnicity, asking how people understand themselves as Minangkabau through talempong and how different styles of the genre help create and articulate ethnic sentiments - that is, how they help people sound Minangkabau.
Discovering Music Theory is a suite of workbooks and corresponding answer books that offers all-round preparation for the updated ABRSM Music Theory exams from 2020, including the new online papers. This full-colour workbook will equip students of all ages with the skills, knowledge and understanding required for the ABRSM Grade 2 Music Theory exam. Written to make theory engaging and relevant to developing musicians of all ages, it offers: - straightforward explanations of all new concepts - progressive exercises to build skills and understanding, step by step - challenge questions to extend learning and develop music-writing skills - helpful tips for how to approach specific exercises - ideas for linking theory to music listening, performing and instrumental/singing lessons - clear signposting and progress reviews throughout - a sample practice exam paper showing you what to expect in the new style of exams from 2020 As well as fully supporting the ABRSM theory syllabus, Discovering Music Theory provides an excellent resource for anyone wishing to develop their music literacy skills, including GCSE and A-Level candidates, and adult learners.
The Routledge Handbook of Music Signification captures the richness and complexity of the field, presenting 30 essays by recognized international experts that reflect current interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches to the subject. Examinations of music signification have been an essential component in thinking about music for millennia, but it is only in the last few decades that music signification has been established as an independent area of study. During this time, the field has grown exponentially, incorporating a vast array of methodologies that seek to ground how music means and to explore what it may mean. Research in music signification typically embraces concepts and practices imported from semiotics, literary criticism, linguistics, the visual arts, philosophy, sociology, history, and psychology, among others. By bringing together such approaches in transparent groupings that reflect the various contexts in which music is created and experienced, and by encouraging critical dialogues, this volume provides an authoritative survey of the discipline and a significant advance in inquiries into music signification. This book addresses a wide array of readers, from scholars who specialize in this and related areas, to the general reader who is curious to learn more about the ways in which music makes sense.
As a composer, Hector Berlioz embodied his century as the quintessential Romantic artist. Niccolo Paganini called him "Beethoven's only heir," and for a young Richard Wagner, he was dazzling as a composer, orchestra conductor, and critic. But Berlioz was known as much for his writings as for his music, and for decades Berlioz scholars have stressed the need for a good English-language anthology of his criticism. Featuring new translations and commentary by Katherine Kolb and Samuel N. Rosenberg, Berlioz on Music: Selected Criticism 1824-1837 is that volume. Berlioz's centrality as a critic results from his literary brilliance, his location in Paris - the music capital of the nineteenth century - and his 28-year tenure at the powerful Journal des debats. As one of its founding editors and principal writers, Berlioz contributed about 250 articles to the publication. Berlioz on Music comprises articles from the first 14 years of Berlioz's public writings, given in chronological order and, with few exceptions, in their entirety. Following chronology affords an overview of Berlioz's evolution as critic and of a key phase in the development of modern musical culture. The volume also presents explanatory data in engagingly composed introductions and footnotes, which elucidate Berlioz's references to persons, musical and literary works, historical events, and more. The reader is allowed to follow musical events during one of the richest periods in French cultural history, including the revolutionary decade surrounding 1830, a year marked by Victor Hugo's victory for the Romantics in the Classical bastion of the Theatre-Francais, by the premiere of Berlioz's Fantastic Symphony, and by the toppling of the Restoration monarchy. The result is an engaging collection of Berlioz's lively prose, presented with scholarly rigor and rendered in accessible English. Music historians, both professional and amateur, as well 19th century European history enthusiasts will find Berlioz on Music a compelling introduction to one of the richest periods of French culture.
(Music Pro Guide Books & DVDs). A great tool for all songwriters looking for creative resources. 1000 Songwriting Ideas is a handy book of creativity exercises that stop writer's block and spark the fire of your imagination. It offers concepts to ponder as starting places for lyric writing, along with some of the most provocative and inspirational examples you may encounter anywhere. Authored by a pro, these proven exercises are for moving the creative lyrical self, the soul, the real tool of songwriting and the real object of a song's intention.
1. This study gives book readers a broader understanding of what engagement with a literary text historically is, not just a private reading experience, but a living, every changing communal oral experience. 2. The book shifts the basic focus of epic studies from the codified texts of standard Western epics to the living tradition of generally unknown Mongol oral heroic epics and from isolated textual analysis to investigations of the creative interaction of singer and audience in a live performance. 3. It provides literature students with reference material about modern oral poetic research as focused on a work's content, narrative scale, social dimensions, cultural significance, performance strategies and modes of transmission. 4. It provides researchers of oral poetry and communication with theoretical approaches and practical guidelines for field and textual investigations based on relationships between inherited text and performance, performer and audience. 5. It provides seasoned epic scholars with first-hand information on Mongol oral epic, especially on lengthy epics' structures and incorporation of smaller poems, on singers' innovative use of traditional material, and on the strengths and weaknesses of Chinese oral epic research.
General music is informed by a variety of teaching approaches and methods. These pedagogical frameworks guide teachers in planning and implementing instruction. Established approaches to teaching general music must be understood, critically examined, and possibly re-imagined for their potential in school and community music education programs. Teaching General Music brings together the top scholars and practitioners in general music education to create a panoramic view of general music pedagogy and to provide critical lenses through which to view these frameworks. The collection includes an examination of the most prevalent approaches to teaching general music, including Dalcroze, Informal Learning, Interdisciplinary, Kodaly, Music Learning Theory, Orff Schulwerk, Social Constructivism, and World Music Pedagogy. In addition, it provides critical analyses of general music and teaching systems, in light of the ways children around the world experience music in their lives. Rather than promoting or advocating for any single approach to teaching music, this book presents the various approaches in conversation with one another. Highlighting the perceived and documented benefits, limits, challenges, and potentials of each, Teaching General Music offers myriad lenses through which to re-read, re-think, and re-practice these approaches.
This is a music theory text that presents a systematic approach to polyphonic composition in the ecclesiastical style of Palestrina. It is designed for use in beginning and intermediate level courses in modal counterpoint and helps students develop a systematic and reliable method to compare individual composers and stylistic trends of the Renaissance. It contains a comprehensive collection of Palestrina's works as well as selections from Lassus. Tear-out exercises can be used in conjunction with the text.
- Includes a number of interviews with diverse practitioners, offering extensive case studies - Supplemented by a website to be hosted and developed by the author, including videos, practice files and additional interviews - Acts as a supplementary text to the bestselling 'Dance Music Manual', which does not include a section on performance/performance tech |
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