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Musical Cognition: A Science of Listening
by Henkjan HoningWhy do people attach importance to the wordless language we call music? Musical Cognition suggests that music is a game. In music, our cognitive functions such as perception, memory, attention, and expectation are challenged; yet, as listeners, we often do not realize that the listener plays an active role in reaching the awareness that makes music so exhilarating, soothing, and inspiring. In reality, the author contends, listening does not happen in the outer world of audible sound, but in the inner world of our minds and brains. Recent research in the areas of psychology and neuro-cognition allows Henkjan Honing to be explicit in a way that many of his predecessors could not. His lucid, evocative writing style guides the reader through what is known about listening to music while avoiding jargon and technical diagrams. With clear examples, the book concentrates on underappreciated musical skills-"sense of rhythm" and "relative pitch"-skills that make people musical creatures. Research on how living creatures respond to music supports the conviction that all humans have a unique, instinctive attraction to music. Everyone is musical. Musical Cognition includes a selection of intriguing examples from recent literature exploring the role that an implicit or explicit knowledge of music plays when one listens to it. The scope of the topics discussed ranges from the ability of newborns to perceive a beat, to the unexpected musical expertise of ordinary listeners. The evidence shows that music is second nature to most human beings-biologically and socially.
Ethnomusicology of the Flathead Indians
by Alan MerriamAll people, in no matter what culture, must be able to place their music firmly in the context of the totality of their beliefs, experiences, and activities, for without such ties, music cannot exist. This means that there must be a body of theory connected with any music system - not necessarily a theory of the structure of music sound, although that may be present as well, but rather a theory of what music is, what it does, and how it is coordinated with the total environment, both natural and cultural, in which human beings move.The Flathead Indians of Western Montana (just over 26,000 in number as of the 2000 census) inhabit a reservation consisting of 632,516 acres of land in the Jocko and Flathead Valleys and the Camas Prairie country, which lie roughly between Evaro and Kalispell, Montana. The reservation is bounded on the east by the Mission Range, on the west by the Cabinet National Forest, on the south by the Lolo National Forest, and on the north by an arbitrary line, approximately bisecting Flathead Lake about twenty-four miles south of Kalispell. The area is one of the richest agricultural regions in Montana, and fish and game are abundant. The Flathead are engaged in stocking, timbering, and various agricultural enterprises.For the Flathead, the most important single fact about music and its relationship to the total world is its origin in the supernatural sphere. All true and proper songs, particularly in the past, owe their origin to a variety of contacts experienced by humans with beings which, though a part of this world, are superhuman and the source of both individual and tribal powers and skills. Thus a sharp distinction is drawn by the Flathead between what they call "make-up" and all other songs. Merriam's pioneering work in the relationship of ethnography and musicology remains a primary source in this field in anthropology.
Tuning the Mind: Connecting Aesthetics to Cognitive Science
by Ruth HaCohenStarting from the late Renaissance, efforts to make vocal music more expressive heightened the power of words, which, in turn, gave birth to the modern semantics of musical expression. As the skepticism of seventeenth-century science divorced the acoustic properties from the metaphysical qualities of music, the door was opened to dicern the rich links between musical perception and varied mental faculties. In Tuning the Mind, Ruth Katz and Ruth HaCohen trace how eighteenth century theoreticians of music examined anew the role of the arts within a general theory of knowledge.As the authors note, the differences between the physical and emotional dimensions of music stimulated novel conceptions and empirical inquiries into the old aesthetic queries. Tracing this development, their opening chapter deals with seventeenth-century epistemological issues concerning the artistic qualities of music. Katz and HaCohen show that painting and literature displayed a comparable tendency toward "musicalization," whereby the dynamic of forms-the modalities specific to each artistic medium-rather than subject matter was believed to determine expression. Katz and HaCohen explore the ambiguities inherent in idealization of an art form whose mimetic function has always been problematic. They discuss the major outlines of this development, from Descartes to Vico through Condillac. Particular emphasis is placed on eighteenth-century British thinkers, from Shaftesbury to Adam Smith, who perceived these problems in their full complexity. They also explore how the French and the Germans dealt differently with questions that preoccupied the British, each nation in accordance with their own past tradition and tendencies. The concluding chapter summarizes the parallel development of abstract art and basic hypotheses concerning the mind and explores basic theoretical questions pertaining to the relationship between perception and cognition.In addressing some of the most complex problems in musical aesthetics, Katz and HaCohen provide a unique historical perspective on the ways their art creates and develops coherent worlds, and, in so doing, contribute to our understanding of the workings of the mind.
Paul Dukas: Legacies of a French Musician (Routledge Research in Music)
by Helen Julia Minors Laura WatsonThis book appraises the contribution of Paul Dukas (1865–1935) to a wide variety of French musical practices. As a composer, critic, artistic collaborator and teacher, Dukas was central to the fin de siècle and early twentieth-century Paris musical scene (and more broadly to the French scene). Significantly, his compositional style mediated tradition through the modern language of his present, while his critical writings pioneered a new mode of musical discourse in the French press. Of further interest are Dukas’s professional relationships with iconic figures such as Gabriel Fauré and Claude Debussy, and his role in fostering the next generation of French composers. In addition to mentoring famous names such as Olivier Messiaen and Tony Aubin, he staunchly supported his female students, notably Elsa Barraine, Claude Arrieu and Yvonne Desportes. This unique essay collection offers a panoramic perspective on a comparatively neglected French musician. Paul Dukas: Legacies of a French Musician traces two aspects of his work: Part I treats Dukas as a composer, thinker and artistic collaborator; Part II constructs his intellectual legacy as seen in his creative and pedagogic endeavours. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in fin de siècle and early twentieth-century French music, women in French music, music criticism and composition education in the Paris Conservatoire.
Musicians' Migratory Patterns: The Adriatic Coasts (CMS Cultural Expressions in Music)
by Franco SciannameoMusicians’ Migratory Patterns: The Adriatic Coasts contains essays dedicated to the movement of musicians along and across the coasts of the Adriatic Sea. In the course of this book, the musicians become narrators of their own stories seen through the lenses of wanderlust, opportunity, exile, and refuge. Essayists in this collection are scholars hailing from Croatia, Italy, and Greece. They are internationally known for their passionate advocacy of musicians’ migratory rights and faithfulness to the lesson imparted by the history of immigration in the broadest of terms. Spanning the Venetian Republic’s domination, the demise of the Ottoman Empire, the European nationalistic movements of mid-nineteenth century, the shocking outcomes of World War One, and the dramatic shifts of frontiers that continue to occur in our time, the chapters of this book guide the reader on a voyage through the Adriatic Sea—from the Gulf of Venice and the peninsula of Istria, to Albania, the Island of Corfu, and other Ionian outposts.
Teaching the Beatles
by Paul O. Jenkins and Hugh JenkinsTeaching the Beatles is designed to provide ideas for instructors who teach the music of the Beatles. Experienced contributors describe varied approaches to effectively convey the group’s characteristics and lasting importance. Some of these include: treating the Beatles’ lyrics as poetry; their influence on the world of art, film, fashion and spirituality; the group’s impact on post-war Britain; political aspects of the Fab Four; Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting and musical innovations; the band’s use of recording technology; business aspects of the Beatles’ career; and insights into teaching the Beatles in an online format.
Stories We Could Tell: Putting Words To American Popular Music (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)
by David SanjekHow has the history of rock ‘n’ roll been told? Has it become formulaic? Or remained, like the music itself, open to outside influences? Who have been the genre’s primary historians? What common frameworks or sets of assumptions have music history narratives shared? And, most importantly, what is the cost of failing to question such assumptions? "Stories We Could Tell:Putting Words to American Popular Music" identifies eight typical strategies used when critics and historians write about American popular music, and subjects each to forensic analysis. This posthumous book is a unique work of cultural historiography that analyses, catalogues, and contextualizes music writing in order to afford the reader new perspectives on the field of cultural production, and offer new ways of thinking about, and writing about, popular music.
Heavy Metal at the Movies (Ashgate Screen Music Series)
by Gerd BayerThe chapters collected in this volume shed light on the areas of interaction between film studies and heavy metal research, exploring how the audio-visual medium of film relates to, builds on and shapes metal culture. At one end of the spectrum, metal music serves as a form of ambient background in horror films that creates an intense and somewhat threatening atmosphere; at the other end, the high level of performativity attached to the metal spectacle is emphasized. Alongside these tendencies, the recent and ongoing wave of metal documentaries has taken off, relying on either satire or hagiography.
Spinning the Child: Musical Constructions of Childhood through Records, Radio and Television
by Liam MaloySpinning the Child examines music for children on records, radio and television by assessing how ideals of entertainment, education, ‘the child’ and ‘the family’ have been communicated through folk music, the BBC’s children’s radio broadcasting, the children’s songs of Woody Guthrie, Sesame Street, The Muppet Show and Bagpuss, the contemporary children’s music industry and other case studies. The book provides the first sustained critical overview of recorded music for children, its production and dissemination. The music, lyrics and sonics of hundreds of recorded songs are analysed with reference to their specific social, historical and technological contexts. The chapters expose the attitudes, morals and desires that adults have communicated both to and about the child through the music that has been created and compiled for children. The musical representations of age, race, class and gender reveal how recordings have both reflected and shaped transformations in discourses of childhood. This book is recommended for scholars in the sociology of childhood, the sociology of music, ethnomusicology, music education, popular musicology, children’s media and related fields. Spinning the Child’s emphasis on the analysis of musical, lyrical and sonic texts in specific contexts suggests its value as both a teaching and research resource.
Re-Locating the Sounds of the Western (Ashgate Screen Music Series)
by Kendra Preston Leonard Mariana WhitmerRe-Locating the Sounds of the Western examines the use and function of musical tropes and gestures traditionally associated with the American Western in new and different contexts ranging from Elizabethan theater, contemporary drama, space opera and science fiction, Cold War era European filmmaking, and advertising. Each chapter focuses on a notable use of Western musical tropes, textures, instrumentation, form, and harmonic language, delving into the resonance of the music of the Western to cite bravura, machismo, colonisation, violence, gender roles and essentialism, exploration, and other concepts.
The Digital Musician (Third Edition)
by Andrew Hugill<p>The Digital Musician, Third Edition is an introductory textbook for creative music technology and electronic music courses. Written to be accessible to students from any musical background, this book examines cultural awareness, artistic identity and musical skills, offering a system-agnostic survey of digital music creation. Each chapter presents creative projects that reinforce concepts, as well as case studies of real musicians and discussion questions for further reflection. <p>This third edition has been updated to reflect developments in an ever-changing musical landscape―most notably the proliferation of mobile technologies―covering topics such as collaborative composition, virtual reality, data sonification and digital scores, while encouraging readers to adapt to continuous technological changes. With an emphasis on discovering one’s musical voice and identity, and tools and ideas that are relevant in any musical situation, The Digital Musician is sure to be an invaluable student resource for years to come.</p>
Revival: Modern Music and Musicians (Routledge Revivals)
by Richard Alexander StreatfieldA plethora of biographical accounts of some of the contemporary composers and musicians at the turn of the twentieth century.
Revival: Handel (Routledge Revivals)
by Richard Alexander StreatfieldIt is the inner meaning of Handel’s music, and its power of searching the profoundest recesses of the soul, that in the following pages I have endeavoured, so far as I am able, to elucidate. Its merely technical qualities have already been discussed enough and to spare. Books on Handel written by musicians already abound, but musicians as a rule take more interest in the means by which an end is attained than the end itself. They tell us a great deal about the methods by which a composer expresses himself, but very little about what he actually has to express. I have tried, how feebly and with what little success no one knows better than myself, to find the man Handel in his music, to trace his character, his view of life, his thoughts, feelings, and aspirations, as they are set forth in his works.
Revival: Art and Politics (Routledge Revivals)
by Carl Francis GlasenappFourth volume of Carl Francis Glasenapp's Life of Richard Wagner.
Revival: The Theatre (Routledge Revivals)
by Carl Francis GlasenappThird volume of Carl Francis Glasenapp's Life of Richard Wagner.
Revival: Opera and Drama (Routledge Revivals)
by Carl Friedrich GlasenappThe second volume of Carl Friedrich Glasenapp's Life of Richard Wagner.
Revival: Their History and Character (Routledge Revivals)
by Francis W. GalphinThe study of musical instruments now no longer with us is necessary, not only for the musician and composer, but for the man of letters, the artist, and the chronicler of our national life; for many allusions to customs of bygone times cannot otherwise be understood, and we should be spared such a trying ordeal as we were recently subjected to by one of our leading illustrated papers, which introduced into a thirteenth century scene a twentieth century mandoline with an up to date mechanism.
Revival: The Art Work of the Future (Routledge Revivals)
by Carl Friedrich GlasenappThis volume brings our story down to 1843, an important era in Richard Wagner’s Life, with his entry, as composer, of two successful operas, upon a so-called "practical" career at one of the principal German theatres.
Revival: Beethoven (1933) (Routledge Revivals)
by Harvey GraceThe original intention was that this book should be entirely biographical. If it be true, however, that out main interest is (or ought to be) in what a composer did rather than in what he was, the truth applies especially to Beethoven, and above all at the present time. The scheme of the book has therefore been modified so as to include a survey of his work. An attempt to make such survey cover the whole of Beethoven’s output would result in little more than a catalogue, with annotations to brief as to convey hardly anything of the essential quality of the music. It seemed, therefore, that the limited space would be best used, and the needs of the general reader more fully met, by a much less rigid and comprehensive method. My aim has been to indicate some, at least, of the more important characteristics of Beethoven’s works, and to show their influence on his successors.
Revival: Outspoken Essays on Music (Routledge Revivals)
by Camille Saint-SaensA series of essays on reactions and emotional responses to music.
Arnold Bake: A Life with South Asian Music (SOAS Musicology Series)
by Bob Van Der LindenArnold Bake (1899–1963) was a Dutch pioneer in South Asian ethnomusicology, whose research impressed not only the most renowned Indologists of his time but also the leading figures in the emerging field of ethnomusicology. This long overdue biography sheds light on his knowledge of the theory and practice of South Asian music, as well as his legacy on the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. Bake spent nearly seventeen years in the Indian subcontinent and made numerous, irreplaceable recordings, films and photographs of local musicians and dancers. As a gifted Western musician, he studied Indian singing with Bhimrao Shastri, Dinendranath Tagore and Nabadwip Brajabashi, and successfully performed Rabindranath Tagore’s compositions and South Asian folk songs during hundreds of lecture-recitals in India, Europe and the United States. For the last fifteen years of his life, Bake taught Indian music at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London; he was the first to do so at a Western university. Besides his numerous writings and radio presentations, he advanced his subject through his activities in British and international research associations. The history of ethnomusicology, especially as applied to South Asia, cannot be fully understood without regard to Bake, and yet his contribution has remained, until now, unclear and unknown.
Music, the Moving Image and Ireland, 1897–2017 (Ashgate Screen Music Series)
by John O'FlynnMusic, the Moving Image and Ireland, 1897–2017 constitutes the first comprehensive study of music for screen productions from or relating to the island. It identifies and interprets tendencies over the first 120 years of a field comprising the relatively distinct yet often overlapping areas of Irish-themed and Irish-produced film. Dividing into three parts, the book first explores accompaniments and scores for 20th-century Irish-themed narrative features that resulted in significant contributions by many Hollywood, British, continental European and, to a lesser extent, Irish composers, along with the input of many orchestras and other musicians. Its second part is framed by a consideration of various cultural, political and economic developments in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland from the 1920s (including the Troubles of 1968–1998). Focusing on scoring and other aspects of soundtrack production for domestic newsreel, documentary film and TV programming, it interprets the substantial output of many Irish composers within this milieu, particularly from the 1960s to the 1990s. Also referring to broader cultural and historical themes, the book’s third and final part charts approaches to and developments in music and sound design over various waves of Irish cinema, from its relatively late emergence in the 1970s to an exponential growth and increasingly transnational orientation in the early decades of the 21st century.
Jazz and Death: Reception, Rituals, and Representations
by Walter van de LeurJazz and Death: Reception, Rituals, and Representations critically examines the myriad and complex interactions between jazz and death, from the New Orleans "jazz funeral" to jazz in heaven or hell, final recordings, jazz monuments, and the music’s own presumed death. It looks at how fans, critics, journalists, historians, writers, the media, and musicians have narrated, mythologized, and relayed those stories. What causes the fascination of the jazz world with its deaths? What does it say about how our culture views jazz and its practitioners? Is jazz somehow a fatal culture? The narratives surrounding jazz and death cast a light on how the music and its creators are perceived. Stories of jazz musicians typically bring up different tropes, ranging from the tragic, misunderstood genius to the notion that virtuosity somehow comes at a price. Many of these narratives tend to perpetuate the gendered and racialized stereotypes that have been part of jazz’s history. In the end, the ideas that encompass jazz and death help audiences find meaning in a complex musical practice and come to grips with the passing of their revered musical heroes -- and possibly with their own mortality.
Music in the Classical World: Genre, Culture, and History
by Bertil Van BoerMusic in the Classical World: Genre, Culture, and History provides a broad sociocultural and historical perspective of the music of the Classical Period as it relates to the world in which it was created. It establishes a background on the time span—1725 to 1815—offering a context for the music made during one of the more vibrant periods of achievement in history. Outlining how music interacted with society, politics, and the arts of that time, this kaleidescopic approach presents an overview of how the various genres expanded during the period, not just in the major musical centers but around the globe. Contemporaneous treatises and commentary documenting these changes are integrated into the narrative. Features include the following: A complete course with musical scores on the companion website, plus links to recordings—and no need to purchase a separate anthology The development of style and genres within a broader historical framework Extensive musical examples from a wide range of composers, considered in context of the genre A thorough collection of illustrations, iconography, and art relevant to the music of the age Source documents translated by the author Valuable student learning aids throughout, including a timeline, a register of people and dates, sidebars of political importance, and a selected reading list arranged by chapter and topic A companion website featuring scores of all music discussed in the text, recordings of most musical examples, and tips for listening Music in the Classical World: Genre, Culture, and History tells the story of classical music through eighteenth-century eyes, exposing readers to the wealth of music and musical styles of the time and providing a glimpse into that vibrant and active world of the Classical Period.
New Mansions For Music: Performance, Pedagogy and Criticism
by Lakshmi SubramanianThe essays in New Mansions for Music: Performance, Pedagogy and Criticism look at one of the most ancient and rigorous classical musical traditions of India, the Karnatik music system, and the kind of changes it underwent once it was relocated from traditional spaces of temples and salons to the public domain. Nineteenth-century Madras led the way in the transformation that Karnatik music underwent as it encountered the forces of modernization and standardization. This study also contributes to our understanding of the experience of modernity in India through the prism of music. The role of Madras city as patron and custodian of the performing arts, especially classical music offers an invaluable perspective on the larger processes of modernization in India. As the title suggests, the areas of classical music, which were most influenced by these developments were pedagogy or modes of musical transmission, performance conventions and criticism or music appreciation. Once the urban elite demanded the widening of the teaching of classical music, traditional modes of music instruction underwent a major change involving a breakdown of the gurushishya parampara or the tradition wherein the teacher imparted knowledge to a chosen few. Caste and kinship were important determining factors for the selection of these shishyas or students, but in modern institutions like the universities these boundaries had to be demolished. Simultaneously, the public staging of music brought the performer into a new relationship with his audience, especially as the art form became subject to validation and criticism by the newly emerging music critic. In an immensely readable book peppered with anecdotes and conversations with leading musicians and critics of the day, as well as humorous visual representations, part caricature, part satirical, the author describes a rapidly changing society and its new look in early twentieth century Madras.