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Books > Music > Western music, periods & styles
This handbook offers new ways to read the audiovisual. In the media
landscapes of today, conglomerates jockey for primacy and the
internet increasingly places media in the hands of
individuals-producing the range of phenomena from movie blockbuster
to YouTube aesthetics. Media forms and genres are proliferating and
interpenetrating, from movies, music and other entertainments
streaming on computers and iPods to video games and wireless
phones. The audiovisual environment of everyday life, too-from
street to stadium to classroom-would at times be hardly
recognizable to the mid-twentieth-century subject. The Oxford
Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics provides powerful ways to
understand these changes.
There can be little doubt that opera and emotion are inextricably linked. From dramatic plots driven by energetic producers and directors to the conflicts and triumphs experienced by all associated with opera's staging to the reactions and critiques of audience members, emotion is omnipresent in opera. Yet few contemplate the impact that the customary cultural practices of specific times and places have upon opera's ability to move emotions. Taking Australia as a case study, this two-volume collection of extended essays demonstrates that emotional experiences, discourses, displays and expressions do not share universal significance but are at least partly produced, defined, and regulated by culture. Spanning approximately 170 years of opera production in Australia, the authors show how the emotions associated with the specific cultural context of a nation steeped in egalitarian aspirations and marked by increasing levels of multiculturalism have adjusted to changing cultural and social contexts across time. Volume I adopts an historical, predominantly nineteenth-century perspective, while Volume II applies historical, musicological, and ethnological approaches to discuss subsequent Australian operas and opera productions through to the twenty-first century. With final chapters pulling threads from the two volumes together, Opera, Emotion, and the Antipodes establishes a model for constructing emotion history from multiple disciplinary perspectives.
Originally published in 1978, Medieval Music explores the fascinating development of medieval western music from its often obscure origins in the Jewish synagogue and early Church, to the mid-fifteenth century. The book is intended as a straightforward survey of medieval music and emphases the technical aspects such as form, style and notation. It is illustrated by nearly one hundred musical examples, the majority of which have been transcribed from original sources and many of which contains chapters on Latin chant and other forms of sacred monophony, secular song, early polyphony, the ars antiqua, French and Italian fourteenth-century music, English music, and fifteenth-century music. Each chapter is followed by a classified bibliography divided into musical sources, literary sources and modern studies; in addition to a comprehensive bibliography.
The manuscript Seville, Biblioteca Colombina y Capitular 5-2-25, a composite of dozens of theoretical treatises, is one of the primary witnesses to late medieval music theory. Its numerous copies of significant texts have been the focus of substantial scholarly attention to date, but the shorter, unattributed, or fragmentary works have not yet received the same scrutiny. In this monograph, Cook demonstrates that a small group of such works, linked to the otherwise unknown Magister Johannes Pipudi, is in fact much more noteworthy than previous scholarship has observed. The not one but two copies of De arte cantus are in fact one of the earliest known sources for the Libellus cantus mensurabilis, purportedly by Jean des Murs and the most widely copied music theory treatise of its day, while Regulae contrapunctus, Nota quod novem sunt species contrapunctus, and a concluding set of notes in Catalan are early witnesses to the popular Ars contrapuncti treatises also attributed to des Murs. Disclosing newly discovered biographical information, it is revealed that Pipudi is most likely one Johannes Pipardi, familiar to Cardinal Jean de Blauzac, Vicar-General of Avignon. Cook provides the first biographical assessment for him and shows that late fourteenth-century Avignon was a plausible chronological and geographical milieu for the Seville treatises, hinting provocatively at a possible route of transmission for the Libellus from Paris to Italy. The monograph concludes with new transcriptions and the first English translations of the treatises.
Bringing together well-known writers with composers and performers, this volume gives a complete overview of Holt's creative work up to 2015. British composer Simon Holt (b. 1958) has been a leading presence in contemporary music since the early 1980s and Kites. His output is diverse, comprising chamber music, concertos for diverse instruments, songs, piano musicand opera. Holt is a composer who demands unusual commitment from his interpreters - the intricate sound-worlds he creates often contain complex, rich textures, offset by 'still centres' - for the purpose of making music which speaks with extraordinary power. Bringing together well-known writers with composers and performers, this volume gives a complete overview of Holt's creative work up to 2015 and Fool is hurt. It uses a variety of approaches to help readers, listeners and players to find ways into the pieces and to understand the influence of visual art and poetry on Holt's work. Colour illustrations, music examples, tables and sketch facsimiles offer a rounded impression of Holt's inspiration and thought to date. Also included are a wide-ranging conversation between Simon Holt and the artist Julia Bardsley, and a text by the conductor Thierry Fischer. The volume also offers the first detailed catalogue of Holt's compositions, drawn up together with the composer. It reveals that the last twenty years have seen no slowing-up in his rate of creative production, notwithstanding that the nature of his writing has changed during this time. DAVID CHARLTON is Professor Emeritus of Music History, Royal Holloway, University of London. Contributors: JULIA BARDSLEY, DAVID BEARD, DAVID CHARLTON, THIERRY FISCHER, ANTHONY GILBERT, STEPHEN GUTMAN, MELINDA MAXWELL, RICHARD MCGREGOR, STEPH POWER, PHILIP RUPPRECHT, SIMON SPEARE, REBECCA THUMPSTON, EDWARD VENN
A prolific music theorist and critic as well as an established composer, Johannes Mattheson remains surprisingly understudied. In this important study, Margaret Seares places Mattheson's Pieces de clavecin (1714) in the context of his work as a public intellectual who encouraged German musicians and their musical public to eschew what he saw as the hidebound traditions of the past, and instead embrace a universalism of style and expression derived from contemporary currents in music of the leading European nations. Beginning with the early non-musical writings by Mattheson, Seares places them in the context of the cosmopolitan city-state of Hamburg, before moving to a detailed study of his first major musical treatise Das neu-erAffnete Orchestre of 1713, in which he espoused his views about the musics of the past and present and, in particular, the characteristics of the musics of Germany, Italy, France and England. This latter section of the treatise, Part III, is edited and translated into English in the book's appendix - the first such translation available. Seares then moves on to an evaluation of the Pieces de clavecin as a work in which Mattheson reflects in musical terms the themes of modernism (in the sense of A la mode) and universalism that are such a strong part of his writings of the period, and a work that represents an important precursor for the keyboard suites of Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Frideric Handel.
Tatjana Goldberg reveals the extent to which gender and socially constructed identity influenced female violinists' 'separate but unequal' status in a great male-dominated virtuoso lineage by focussing on the few that stood out: the American Maud Powell (1867-1920), Australian-born Alma Moodie (1898-1943), and the British Marie Hall (1884-1956). Despite breaking down traditional gender-based patriarchal social and cultural norms, becoming celebrated soloists, and greatly contributing towards violin works and the early recording industry (Powell and Hall), they received little historical recognition. Goldberg provides a more complete picture of their artistic achievements and the impact they had on audiences.
This book assesses the influence and reception of many different forms of guitar playing upon the classical guitar and more specifically through the prism of John Williams. Beginning with an examination of Andres Segovia and his influence upon Williams' life's work, a further three incisive chapters cover key areas such as performance, perception, education and construction, considering social and cultural contexts of the guitar over the past century. A final chapter on new directions in classical guitar examines the change in reception of the instrument from the mid-1970s to the present day, and Williams' impact upon what might be termed 'standard classical guitar repertoire'. With in-depth discussion of the cultural and perceptual impact of Williams' more daring crossover projects and numerous musical examples, this is an informative reference for all classical guitar practitioners, as well as scholars and researchers of guitar studies, reception studies, cultural musicology and performance studies. An online lecture by the author and a transcript of the author's interview with John Williams are also available as e-resources.
Between 1955 and 1975 music theatre became a central preoccupation for European composers digesting the consequences of the revolutionary experiments in musical language that followed the end of the Second World War. The 'new music theatre' wrought multiple, significant transformations, serving as a crucible for the experimental rethinking of theatrical traditions, artistic genres, the conventions of performance, and the composer's relation to society. This volume brings together leading specialists from across Europe to offer a new appraisal of the genre. It is structured according to six themes that investigate: the relation of new music theatre to earlier and contemporaneous theories of drama; the use of new technologies; the relation of new music theatre to progressive politics; the role of new venues and environments; the advancement of new conceptions of the performer; and the challenges that new music theatre lays down for music analysis. Contributing authors address canonical works by composers such as Berio, Birtwistle, Henze, Kagel, Ligeti, Nono, and Zimmermann, but also expand the field to figures and artistic developments not regularly represented in existing music histories. Particular attention is given to new music theatre as a site of intense exchange - between practitioners of different art forms, across national borders, and with diverse mediating institutions.
English Dramatick Opera, 1661-1706 is the first comprehensive examination of the distinctively English form known as "dramatick opera", which appeared on the London stage in the mid-1670s and lasted until its displacement by Italian through-composed opera in the first decade of the eighteenth century. Andrew Walkling argues that, while the musical elements of this form are crucial to its definition and history, the origins of the genre lie principally in a tradition of spectacular stagecraft that first manifested itself in England in the mid-1660s as part of a hitherto unidentified dramatic sub-genre, to which Walkling gives the name "spectacle-tragedy". Armed with this new understanding, the book explores a number of historical and interpretive issues, including the physical and rhetorical configurations of performative spectacle, the administrative maneuverings of the two "patent" theatre companies, the construction and deployment of the technologically advanced Dorset Garden Theatre in 1670-71, the critical response to generic, technical, and ideological developments in Restoration drama, and the shifting balance between machine spectacle and song-and-dance entertainment throughout the later decades of the seventeenth century, including in the dramatick operas of Henry Purcell. This study combines the materials and methodologies of music history, theatre history, literary studies, and bibliography to fashion an entirely new approach to the history of spectacular and musical drama on the English Restoration stage. This book serves as a companion to the Routledge publication Masque and Opera in England, 1656-1688 (2017).
Victorian Vocalists is a masterful and entertaining collection of 100 biographies of mid- to late-19th-century singers and stars. Kurt Ganzl paints a vivid picture of the Victorian operatic and concert world, revealing the backgrounds, journeys, successes, failures and misdemeanours of these singers. This volume is not only an outstanding reference work for anyone interested in vocalists of the era, but also a compelling, meticulously researched picture of life in the vast shark tank that was Victorian music.
On 10 December 1910, Giacomo Puccini's seventh opera, La fanciulla del West, had its premiere before a sold-out audience at New York City's Metropolitan Opera House. The performance was the Metropolitan Opera Company's first world premiere by any composer. By all accounts, the premiere was an unambiguous success and the event itself recognized as a major moment in New York cultural history. The initial public opinion matched Puccini's own evaluation of his opera. He called it "the best he had ever written" and expected it to become as popular as La Boheme. Yet the music reviews tell a different story. Marked by ambivalence, the reviews expose the New York City critics' struggle to reconcile the opera they expected to see with the one they actually saw, and the opera itself became embroiled in controversy over the essence of musical Americanness and the nativist perception that a uniquely American national opera tradition continued to elude both American- and foreign-born opera composers. This book seeks to account for the differences between Puccini's own assessments of the opera and those of its first audience. Offering transcriptions of the central reviews and of letters unavailable elsewhere, the book provides a historically informed understanding of La fanciulla del West and the reception of this European work as it intersected with both opera production and consumption in the United States and with the process of American musical identity formation during the very period that Americans actively sought to eradicate European cultural influences. As such, it offers a window into the development of nativism and "cosmopolitan nationalism" in New York City's musical life during the first decade of the twentieth century.
The aftermath of World War II sent thousands of Estonian refugees into Europe. The years of Estonian independence (1917-1940) had given them a taste of freedom and so relocation to displaced person (DP) camps in post-war Germany was extremely painful. One way in which Estonians dealt with the chaos and trauma of WWII and its aftermath was through choral singing. Just as song festivals helped establish national identity in 1869, song festivals promoted cultural cohesiveness for Estonians in WWII displaced person camps. A key turning point in hope for the Estonian DPs was the 1947 Augsburg Song Festival, which is the center point of this book. As Estonian DPs dispersed to Australia, Canada, Europe, and the United States these choirs and song festivals gave Estonians the resilience to retain their identity and to thrive in their new homes. This history of Estonian WWII DP camp choirs and song festivals is gathered from the stories of many courageous individuals and filled with the tenacious spirit of the Estonian singing culture. This work contributes to an understanding of immigration, identity, and resilience and is particularly important within the field of music regarding music and healing, music and identity, historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and music and politics.
John Dowland: A Research and Information Guide offers the first comprehensive guide to the musical works and literature on one of the major composers of the English Renaissance. Including a catalog of works, discography of recordings, extensive annotated bibliography of secondary sources, and substantial indexes, this volume is a major reference tool for all those interested in Dowland's works and place in music history, and a valuable resource for researchers of Renaissance and English music.
The first significant publication devoted entirely to Trevor Jones's work, The Screen Music of Trevor Jones: Technology, Process, Production, investigates the key phases of his career within the context of developments in the British and global screen-music industries. This book draws on the direct testimony of the composer and members of his team as well as making use of the full range of archival materials held in the University of Leeds's unique Trevor Jones Archive, which was digitized with support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Through a comprehensive series of chapters covering Jones's early career to his recent projects, this book demonstrates how Jones has been active in an industry that has experienced a prolonged period of major technological change, including the switchover from analogue to digital production and post-production techniques, and developments in computer software for score production and sound recording/editing. This is a valuable study for scholars, researchers and professionals in the areas of film music, film-score production and audio-visual media.
This collection of essays is the first book-length study of music history and cosmopolitanism, and is informed by arguments that culture and identity do not have to be viewed as primarily located in the context of nationalist narratives. Rather than trying to distinguish between a true cosmopolitanism and a false cosmopolitanism, the book presents studies that deepen understanding of the heritage of this concept - the various ways in which the term has been used to describe a wide range of activity and social outlooks. It ranges over a two hundred-year period, and more than a dozen countries, revealing how musicians and audiences have responded to a common humanity by embracing culture beyond regional or national boundaries. Among the various topics investigated are: musical cosmopolitanism among composers in Latin America, the Ottoman Empire, and Austro-Hungarian Empire; cosmopolitan popular music historiography; cosmopolitan musical entrepreneurs; and musical cosmopolitanism in the metropolises of New York and Shanghai.
Villa-Lobos and Modernism: The Apotheosis of Cannibal Music provides a new assessment of the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos in terms of his contributions to the Modernist Movement of the twentieth century. In this profound study, Ricardo Averbach elevates Cultural Cannibalism as a major manifestation of the Modernist aesthetics and Villa-Lobos as its top exponent in the music field. Villa-Lobos's anthropophagic appetite for multiple opposing aesthetics enlightens through the juxtaposition of contradictory elements, leaving a legacy of unmatched originality, a glittering kaleidoscope of sounds that draw from the radical power of Josephine Baker to the outrageous extravagance of Carmen Miranda, from Dada to Einstein's counterintuitive scientific findings, from folklorism to atonality. The constructed analyses use the works of Stravinsky as a familiar and popular touchstone for accessing Villa-Lobos as the leading exponent of an aesthetic movement that has been neglected due to a traditional Eurocentric view of Modernism. Averbach opens up new possibilities for the study of twentieth-century music, in general, while unveiling how much our present aesthetics owes to the Modernist ideas introduced by the Brazilian composer.
Georgia's music history is diverse in that it covers gospel singer Thomas Dorsey, soul singer James Brown, opera singer Jessye Norman, country singer Alan Jackson, folk singer Hedy West and symphony and choral conductors Robert Shaw and Yoel Levi. They Heard Georgia Singing provides brief musical biographies of the men and women who have made major contributions to Georgia musical history either as natives or as personalities within the context of Georgia music.
The first systematic assessment of the symphonic style of the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu [1890-1959], tracing the evolution of his musical language and including detailed analyses of all six symphonies. Over the past few decades the music of the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959) has enjoyed a slow but steady rise in popularity, and his six symphonies, written between 1942 and 1953, have now been recorded many times; concert performances are on the increase, too. But Martinu and the Symphony is not only the first book in English intended to help the music-lover to a deeper understanding of these glorious works - it is by far the most comprehensive work on the subject in any language. Each Symphony is examined in turn, the analyses revealing what makes each creation so individual yet also so clearly part of a close-knit family of works and identifying the elements of his melodic, harmonic and instrumental style which produce Martinu's very personal vibrant and organic symphonic manner. Martinu and the Symphony is illustrated with almost 200 musical examples, taken not only fromthe Symphonies but also from his other works for large orchestra. His path to symphonic mastery is examined in unprecedented detail: attention is at last paid to the early orchestral works which, although largely unperformed andunpublished even now, afford fascinating glimpses of the composer to come. A study of the late triptychs The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca and The Parables rounds out this appraisal of Martinus enthralling symphonic and orchestral legacy.
Double Lives: Film Composers in the Concert Hall is a collection of fifteen essays dealing with 'iconic' film composers who, perhaps to the surprise of many fans of film music, nevertheless maintained lifelong careers as composers for the concert hall. Featured composers include Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Waxman, Miklos Rozsa, Bernard Herrmann, Nino Rota, Leonard Rosenman, and Ennio Morricone. Progressing in chronological order, the chapters offer accounts of the various composers' concert-hall careers and descriptions of their concert-hall styles. Each chapter compares the composer's music for films with his or her music for the concert hall, and speculates as to how music in one arena might have affected music in the other. For each composer discussed in the book, complete filmographies and complete works lists are included as appendices. Double Lives: Film Composers in the Concert Hall is accessible for scholars, researchers, and general readers with an interest in film music and concert music.
Through the systematic analysis of data from music rehearsals, lessons, and performances, this book develops a new conceptual framework for studying cognitive processes in musical activity. Grounding the Analysis of Cognitive Processes in Music Performance draws uniquely on dominant paradigms from the fields of cognitive science, ethnography, anthropology, psychology, and psycholinguistics to develop an ecologically valid framework for the analysis of cognitive processes during musical activity. By presenting a close analysis of activities including instrumental performance on the bassoon, lessons on the guitar, and a group rehearsal, chapters provide new insights into the person/instrument system, the musician's use of informational resources, and the organization of perceptual experience during musical performance. Engaging in musical activity is shown to be a highly dynamic and collaborative process invoking tacit knowledge and coordination as musicians identify targets of focal awareness for themselves, their colleagues, and their students. Written by a cognitive scientist and classically trained bassoonist, this specialist text builds on two decades of music performance research; and will be of interest to researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of cognitive psychology and music psychology, as well as musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, and performance science. Linda T. Kaastra has taught courses in cognitive science, music, and discourse studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and Simon Fraser University. She earned a PhD from UBC's Individual Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies Program.
The mention of the term "melodrama" is likely to evoke a response from laymen and musicians alike that betrays an acquaintance only with the popular form of the genre and its greatly heightened drama, exaggerated often to the point of the ridiculous. Few are aware that there exists a type of melodrama that contains in its smaller forms the beauty of the sung ballad and, in the larger-scale works, the appeal of the spoken play. This category of melodrama is one that surfaced in many cultures but was perhaps never so enthusiastically cultivated as in the Czech lands. The melodrama varied greatly at the hands of its Czech advocates. While the works of Zdenek Fibich and his contemporary Josef Bohuslav Foerster, a composer best known for his songs, remained closely bound to the text, those of conductor/composer Otakar Ostrcil reveal a stance that privileged the music and, given their creator's orchestral experience, are more reminiscent of the symphonic poem. Fibich in his staged works and Josef Suk (composer/violinist and Dvorak's son-in-law), in his incidental music reflect variously late nineteenth-century Romanticism, the influence of Wagner, and early manifestations of Impressionism. In its more recent guise, the principles of the staged melodrama reside quite comfortably in the film score. Judith A. Mabary's important volume will be of interest not only to musicologists, but those working in Central and East European studies, voice studies, European theatre, and those studying music and nationalism.
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.
Offers an overview of Italian music of the modern era dealing with the composers and the music they wrote. This book includes full bibliographical references and an index.
The Ashgate Research Companion to Johann Sebastian Bach provides an indispensable introduction to the Bach research of the past thirty-fifty years. It is not a lexicon providing information on all the major aspects of Bach's life and work, such as the Oxford Composer Companion: J. S. Bach. Nor is it an entry-level research tool aimed at those making a beginning of such studies. The valuable essays presented here are designed for the next level of Bach research and are aimed at masters and doctoral students, as well as others interested in coming to terms with the current state of Bach research. Each author covers three aspects within their specific subject area; firstly, to describe the results of research over the past thirty-fifty years, concentrating on the most significant and controversial, such as: the debate over Smend's NBA edition of the B minor Mass; Blume's conclusions with regard to Bach's religion in the wake of the 'new' chronology; Rifkin's one-to-a-vocal-part interpretation; the rediscovery of the Berlin Singakademie manuscripts in Kiev; the discovery of hitherto unknown manuscripts and documents and the re-evaluation of previously known sources. Secondly, each author provides a critical analysis of current research being undertaken that is exploring new aspects, reinterpreting earlier assumptions, and/or opening-up new methodologies. For example, Martin W. B. Jarvis has suggested that Anna Magdalena Bach composed the cello suites and contributed to other works of her husband - another controversial hypothesis, whose newly proposed forensic methodology requires investigation. On the other hand, research into Bach's knowledge of the Lutheran chorale tradition is currently underway, which is likely to shed more light on the composer's choices and usage of this tradition. Thirdly, each author identifies areas that are still in need of investigation and research. |
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