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An exploration of the meaning and reception of "modernist" music.
The debate over modernist music has continued for almost a century:
from Strauss's Elektra and Webern's Symphony Op.21 to John Cage's
renegotiation of musical control, the unusual musical practices of
the Velvet Underground, and Stanley Kubrick's use of Ligeti's Lux
Aeterna in the epic film 2001. The composers discussed in these
pages -- including Bartok, Stockhausen, Bernard Herrmann, Steve
Reich, and many others -- are modernists inthat they are defined by
their individualism, whether covert or overt, and share a basic
urge toward redesigning musical discourse. The aim of this volume
is to negotiate a varied and open middle ground between polemical
extremes of reception. The contributors sketch out the possible
significance of a repertory that in past discussions has been
deemed either meaningless or beyond describable meaning. With an
emphasis on recent aesthetics and contexts-- including film music,
sexuality, metaphor, and ideas of a listening grammar -- they trace
the meanings that such works and composers have held for listeners
of different kinds. None of them takes up the usual mandate of
"educated listening" to modernist works: the notion that a person
can appreciate "difficult" music if given enough time and
schooling. Instead the book defines novel but meaningful avenues of
significance for modernist music, avenues beyond those deemed
appropriate or acceptable by the academy. While some contributors
offer new listening strategies, most interpret the listening
premise more loosely: as a metaphor for any manner of personal and
immediate connection with music. In addition to a previously
untranslated article by Pierre Boulez, the volume contains articles
(all but one previously unpublished) by twelve distinctive and
prominent composers, music critics, and music theorists from
America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa: Arved Ashby, Amy
Bauer, William Bolcom, Jonathan Bernard, Judy Lochhead, Fred Maus,
Andrew Mead, Greg Sandow, Martin Scherzinger, Jeremy Tambling,
Richard Toop, and Lloyd Whitesell. Arved Ashby is Associate
Professor of Music at the Ohio State University.
Recordings are now the primary way we hear classical music,
especially the more abstract styles of "absolute" instrumental
music. In this original, provocative book, Arved Ashby argues that
recording technology has transformed our understanding of art
music. Contesting the laments of nostalgic critics, Ashby sees
recordings as socially progressive and instruments of a musical
vernacular, but also finds that recording and absolute music
actually involve similar notions of removing sound from context. He
takes stock of technology's impact on classical music, addressing
the questions at the heart of the issue. This erudite yet concise
study reveals how mechanical reproduction has transformed classical
musical culture and the very act of listening, breaking down
aesthetic and generational barriers and mixing classical music into
the soundtrack of everyday life.
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) took the symphony, one of the most
abstract and tradition-bound genres in Western music, and opened it
to the widest (and wildest) span of human experience. He opened it
to themes of love, nature, the world's chasmic depth at darkest
midnight, making peace with death, resurrection, seeking one's
creator, being at one with God—just to mention a few of his
themes. Mahler's music is experiential in the sense that it
contradicts textbook ideas of style, taste, structure,
orchestration, and musical language, abandoning musical politesse
for a more radical undertaking. Musicologist Arved Ashby takes
readers into the seeming chaos of Mahler's work to investigate the
elements which make each work an experiential adventure which
defines the symphonic genre in a new way. The book surveys Mahler's
symphonies and song cycles in detail —introducing them not as
artworks but as intensely vivid, truthful, and lived and felt
experiences. As a study of musical experience, this book is not a
Mahler biography, nor does it try to account for Mahler's pieces as
compositional structures. Ashby offers a critical perspective on
aspects that have been difficult to talk about in the past,
including Mahler's style anomalies, the intuitive nature of his
structures, Mahler's paradoxical relationship with the symphony
genre, the fact that famous musicians have found the music "wrong"
in ways that actually have some truth to them, and the re-creative
rather than simply interpretive role that has been played by Mahler
performance. All these things have deep implications for listening
to and experiencing Mahler's works.
Movies have never been the same since MTV. While the classic
symphonic film score promised direct insight into a character's
mind, the expanded role of popular music has made more ambiguous
the question of when, if ever, we are allowed to see or share a
character's emotions. As a result, the potential for irony and
ambiguity has multiplied exponentially, and characterization and
narrative capacities have fragmented. At the most basic level, this
new aesthetic has required filmgoers to renegotiate some of their
most basic instinctual connections with the human voice and with
any sense of a filmmaking self. Music videos widened the creative
vocabulary of filmmaking: they increased speeds of event in cinema
and deflecting filmmakers from narrative, characterization, and
storytelling toward a concentration on situation, feeling, mood,
and time. Popular Music and the New Auteur charts the impact of
music videos on seven visionary directors: Martin Scorsese, Sofia
Coppola, David Lynch, Wong Kar-Wai, the Coen brothers, Quentin
Tarantino, and Wes Anderson. Ashby and his contributors define
these filmmakers' relation to the soundtrack as their key authorial
gesture. These filmmakers demonstrate a fresh kind of cinematic
musicality by writing against music rather than against script, and
allowing pop songs a determining role in narrative and imagery.
Featuring important new theoretical work by some of the most
stimulating and provocative writers in the area today, Popular
Music and the New Auteur will be required reading for all who study
film music and sound. It will also be particularly relevant for
readers in popular music studies, and its intervention in the
ongoing debate on auteurism will make it necessary reading in film
studies.
Postnational Musical Identities gathers interdisciplinary essays
that explore how music audiences and markets are imagined in a
globalized scenario, how music reflects and reflects upon new
understandings of citizenship beyond the nation-state, and how
music works as a site of resistance against globalization.
'Hybridity, ' 'postnationalism, ' 'transnationalism, '
'globalization, ' 'diaspora, ' and similar buzzwords have not only
informed scholarly discourse and analysis of music but also shaped
the way musical productions have been marketed worldwide in recent
times. While the construction of identities occupies a central
position in this context, there are discrepancies between the
conceptualization of music as an extremely fluid phenomenon and the
traditionally monovalent notion of identity to which it has
historically been incorporated. As such, music has always been
linked to the construction of regional and national identities. The
essays in this collection seek to explore the role of music,
networks of music distribution, music markets, music consumption,
music production, and music scholarship in the articulation of
postnational sites of identifica
Postnational Musical Identities gathers interdisciplinary essays
that explore how music audiences and markets are imagined in a
globalized scenario, how music reflects and reflects upon new
understandings of citizenship beyond the nation-state, and how
music works as a site of resistance against globalization.
"Hybridity," "postnationalism," "transnationalism,"
"globalization," "diaspora," and similar buzzwords have not only
informed scholarly discourse and analysis of music but also shaped
the way musical productions have been marketed worldwide in recent
times. While the construction of identities occupies a central
position in this context, there are discrepancies between the
conceptualization of music as an extremely fluid phenomenon and the
traditionally monovalent notion of identity to which it has
historically been incorporated. As such, music has always been
linked to the construction of regional and national identities. The
essays in this collection seek to explore the role of music,
networks of music distribution, music markets, music consumption,
music production, and music scholarship in the articulation of
postnational sites of identification.
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