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A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR's Hidden Music Unit Sought to Save America from the Great Depression—One Song at a Time
by Sheryl KaskowitzThe remarkable story of a hidden New Deal program that tried to change America and end the Great Depression using folk music, laying the groundwork for the folk revival and having a lasting impact on American culture.In 1934, the Great Depression had destroyed the US economy, leaving residents poverty-stricken. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt urged President Roosevelt to take radical action to help those hit hardest—Appalachian miners and mill workers stranded after factories closed, city dwellers with no hope of getting work, farmers whose land had failed. They set up government homesteads in rural areas across the country, an experiment in cooperative living where people could start over. To boost morale and encourage the homesteaders to find community in their own traditions, the administration brought in artists to lead group activities—including folk music. As part of a music unit led by Charles Seeger (father of Pete), staffer Sidney Robertson traveled the country to record hundreds of folk songs. Music leaders, most notably Margaret Valiant, were sent to homesteads to use the collected songs to foster community and cooperation. Working almost entirely (and purposely) under the radar, the music unit would collect more than 800 songs and operate for nearly two years, until they were shut down under fire from a conservative coalition in Congress that deemed the entire homestead enterprise dangerously &“socialistic." Despite its early demise, the music unit proved that music can provide hope and a sense of belonging even in the darkest times. It also laid the groundwork for the folk revival that followed, seeing the rise of artists like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Odetta, and Bob Dylan. Award-winning author and Harvard-trained American music scholar Sheryl Kaskowitz has had the unique opportunity to listen to the music unit&’s entire collection of recordings and examine a trove of archival materials, some of which have never been made available to the public. A Chance To Harmonize reveals this untold story and will delight readers with the revelation of a new and previously undiscovered chapter in American cultural history.
Choreomata: Performance and Performativity after AI
by Roberto Alonso TrilloIs artificial intelligence (AI) becoming more and more expressive, or is human thought adopting more and more structures from computation? What does it mean to perform oneself through AI, or to construct one’s subjectivity through AI? How does AI continue to complicate what it means to have a body? Has the golden age of AI, especially with regards to creative applications, already ended? Choreomata: Performance and Performativity after AI is a book about performance and performativity, but more specifically, it is a book about the performance of artificiality and the performance of intelligence. Both humans and human-designed computational forces are thoroughly engaged in an entangled, mutual performance of AI. Choreomata spins up a latticework of interdisciplinary thought, pairing theoretical inquiry from philosophy, information theory, and computer science with practical case studies from visual art, dance, music, and social theory. Through cross-disciplinary proportions and a diverse roster of contributors, this book contains insights for computer scientists, social scientists, industry professionals, artists, and beyond.
City Symphonies: Sound and the Composition of Urban Modernity, 1913–1931
by Daniel P. SchwartzCinema scholars categorize city symphony films of the 1920s and early 1930s as a subgenre of the silent film. Defined in visual terms, the city symphony organizes the visible elements of urban experience according to musical principles such as rhythm and counterpoint.In City Symphonies Daniel Schwartz explores the unheard sonic dimensions of these ostensibly silent films. The book turns its ear to the city symphony as an audible phenomenon, one that encompasses a multitude of works beyond the cinema, such as musical compositions, mass spectacles, radio experiments, and even paintings. What these works have in common is their treatment of the city as a medium for sound. The city is neither background nor content; rather, it is the material through which avant-garde works express themselves. In resonating through the city, these multimedia pieces perform experiments that undermine the borders between sight and sound.Applying an interdisciplinary approach, City Symphonies expands our understanding of the genre, breaking out of the confines of the cinema and onto the street.
Cognate Music Theories: The Past and the Other in Musicology (Essays in Honor of John Walter Hill) (Routledge Research in Music)
by Ignacio Prats-ArolasThis volume explores the possibilities of cognate music theory, a concept introduced by musicologist John Walter Hill to describe culturally and historically situated music theory.Cognate music theories offer a new way of thinking about music theory, music history, and the relationship between insider and outsider perspectives when researchers mediate between their own historical and cultural position, and that of the originators of the music they are studying. With contributions from noted scholars of musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology, this volume develops a variety of approaches using the cognate music theory framework and shows how this concept enables more nuanced and critical analyses of music in historical context.Addressing topics in music from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, this volume will be relevant to musicologists, music theorists, and all researchers interested in reflecting critically on what it means to construct a theory of music.
Commentaries on the Cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach: A Selective Guide
by Hans-Joachim SchulzeInternationally recognized Bach authority Hans-Joachim Schulze authored a 225-part series on the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach. In this collection, James A. Brokaw II translates a selection of the essays, illuminating a wide range of biographical and cultural features of Bach’s life and creative milieu. Schulze’s lively and engaging discussions provide a wealth of rewarding insights and perspectives focusing on individual cantatas, their texts, and the questions of chronology and context that attend them. The University of Illinois Press has paired the volume with a special web-based companion overseen by the translator and hosted by the Illinois Open Publishing Network. This online resource includes Brokaw’s translations of all 225 of Schulze’s essays alongside digital tools for searching, sorting, and bundling the commentaries according to date of composition, position within the liturgical church year sequence, and librettist.
Community-Engaged Performance Tours: A Guide for Music Ensemble Directors and Educators
by James SpinazzolaCommunity-Engaged Performance Tours addresses the role of performance touring as a form of classroom and community engagement. Performance tours have long been a part of the collegiate and high school music ensemble experience, bringing student bands, choirs, and orchestras into connection with a wide variety of audiences, venues, and cultural contexts. This book presents a new approach to the performance tour that integrates touring with community engagement and service-learning. Emphasizing reciprocity, cross-cultural exchange, and global awareness, the author addresses how visiting ensembles can work with host communities instead of performing for them. The book includes student and community perspectives and case studies from the author’s experience leading university wind symphony tours in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and provides a practical and hands-on model for ensemble leaders and educators.
The Composer, Herself: Contemporary Snapshots of the Creative Process
by Linda Kouvaras Natalie Williams Maria GrenfellThis edited volume presents 27 original essays by living composers from all around the globe, reflecting on the creation of their music. Coterminous to the recent worldwide resurgence in feminist focus, the distinctive feature of this collection is the “snapshots” of creative processes and conceptualizing on the part of women who write music, writing in the present day, from prominent early-career composers to major figures, from a range of ethnic backgrounds in the contemporary music field. The chapters step into the juncture point at which feminism finds itself: as binary conceptions of gender are being dissolved, with critiques of the attendant gender-based historical generalizations of composers, and with the growing awareness of the rightful place of First Nations' cultural voices, the contributors explore what, actually, is being composed by women, and what they think about their world. The needs that this book serves are acutely felt: despite recent social gains, and sector initiatives and programs encouraging and presenting the work of women who compose music, their works are yet to receive commensurate exposure with that of their male counterparts. In its multi-pronged, direct response to this dire situation, this vibrant volume highlights established as well as emerging women composers on the international stage; reveals myriad issues around feminism, as broadly conceived; and gives insights, from the composers' own voices, on the inner workings of their composition process.The volume thus presents a contemporary moment in time across the generations and within developments in musical composition. With its unique insights, this book is essential for academics and practitioners interested in the illuminations of the current working landscape for creative women.
Composers Who Changed History (DK History Changers)
by DKThis intricate visual celebration of the world's most celebrated composers tells the fascinating stories of their lives and works.Whether you have an interest in classical music and opera or you are a music student or musician, this book would be great for you. Composers Who Changed History places well-known composers in their historical and cultural context, allowing you to see how they came to influence music. In this edition, you can find: -An overview of the lives and works of around 80 of the world's most important composers - from the Middle Ages to the present-Eight pages of brand-new content with 12 new entries, including Joseph Bologne and Margaret Bonds-Lavishly illustrated with portraits of each composer, alongside photographs of their homes and studios, and original musical scores and personal correspondenceEach composer is Introduced with a realistic portrait and biographical entries which trace the friendships, loves, and rivalries that inspired and influenced them. Composers Who Changed History provides revealing insights into what drove each individual to create the musical masterpieces - symphonies, concertos and operatic scores - that changed the direction of classical music. Making the perfect gift for any classical music enthusiast or musician.
Composing for Silent Film
by Jack Curtis DubowskyComposing for Silent Film offers insight, information, and techniques for contemporary composition, arrangement, and live score performance for period silent film. A specialized music composition guide, this book complements existing film scoring and contemporary music composition texts. This book helps today’s composers better understand and correctly interpret period silent film, and to create and perform live scores that align with films’ original intentions, so that audiences notice and grasp fine points of the original film. Composing for Silent Film analyzes period silent film and its conventions – from Delsarte acting gestures to period fascinations and subtexts. As a practical composition text, it weighs varying approaches, including improvisation, through-scoring, "mickey-mousing," handling dialogue, and dividing roles amongst players. It steers composers towards informed understanding of silent film, and encourages them to deploy contemporary styles and techniques in exciting ways.For clarity and concision, examples are limited to nine canonical silents: Metropolis, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Mark of Zorro, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, The Black Pirate, Nosferatu, The Phantom Carriage, Daisy Doodad’s Dial, and The Golem.
Contemporary Musical Virtuosities (Routledge Research in Music)
by Louise DevenishContemporary notions of musical virtuosity redevelop historic concepts and demonstrate that our present understanding of virtuosity in western art music has shifted from what seemed, for a time, to be a relatively clear and stable definition. In the field and the academy, lively debates around the definition and/or value of virtuosity have always elicited strong and varied ideas. In the twenty-first century, frictions have emerged between traditional definitions of virtuosity and contemporary practices that emphasise collaboration and blur roles between performers, composers, and improvisers. Contemporary Musical Virtuosities embraces the evolving processes, practitioners, and presentation models within twenty-first century art music. This edited collection explores recent insights into the experience and role of virtuosity in different contexts, via contributions from an intergenerational group of artists, academics, and artist-academics. Their writing highlights current themes in contemporary western art music and intersecting musical and performing arts genres such as dance, sound art, improvisation, jazz, trans-traditional collaborations, and Australian Indigenous music. It offers models for supporting and recognising a plurality of musical virtuosities typically excluded from traditional definitions and examines implications for musical practice today. Chapters take the form of academic essays, artist reflections, interviews, personal letters, and a manifesto, reflecting the range of approaches and contexts covered. The collection includes first writings on practices that have been present in the industry for some time not yet documented or examined in detail until now, and thus offers a vision for the future that prioritises inclusive and overlapping practices and processes in music.
Creative Concert Production and Entrepreneurship: Concert Dramaturgy and Project Development for the Performing Arts
by Andreas SonningCreative Concert Production and Entrepreneurship: Concert Dramaturgy and Project Development for the Performing Arts offers a conceptual and applied introduction to the musical and dramaturgical challenges involved in developing and producing concerts. Drawing from over three decades of real-world experience and a range of international case studies, the author explores new models for cooperation between artists, cultural institutions, governments, and businesses, arguing for the importance of rooting the concert production process in artistic and ethical values. The book presents essential knowledge and techniques to meet the demand for music and stage performances across genres, arenas, formats, and distribution channels. Relevant to a wide range of students and professionals in music and the performing arts, Creative Concert Production and Entrepreneurship marries theory with practice, providing a framework for readers to develop the creative entrepreneurial practices essential for success in today’s music industry.
Creative Work Beyond Precarity: Learning to Work Together (Routledge Focus on the Global Creative Economy)
by Tim ButcherThis book offers an original critical evaluation of how freelance careers can be established and sustained in the increasingly uncertain global creative economy. Developing from the author’s theoretical and empirical research at the nexus of precarious work and entrepreneurial learning, it provides an in-depth understanding of why and how creatives can learn to become entrepreneurial and how this relates to creative entrepreneurship. This book traces how arts work became creative labour and explores the contemporary organisation of artistic and creative practices to understand practical alternatives to the individualised careers we currently feel responsible for maintaining. Inspired particularly by the work of Raymond Williams, creative work is reconceptualised as practice-based collaborative learning encounters through which we might put shared feelings of precarity to work towards the production and practice of alternative possibilities. Accessible and concise, breaking down complex concepts through practical examples and linking the creative process to entrepreneurial learning, this book will be of interest to students, educators and researchers studying and working in the creative economy.
Cry for Luck: Sacred Song and Speech Among the Yurok, Hupa, and Karok Indians of Northwestern California
by Richard KeelingThe "sobbing" vocal quality in many traditional songs of northwestern California Indian tribes inspired the title of Richard Keeling's comprehensive study. Little has been known about the music of aboriginal Californians, and Cry for Luck will be welcomed by those who see the interpretation of music as a key to understanding other aspects of Native American religion and culture. Among the Yurok, Hupa, and Karok peoples, medicine songs and spoken formulas were applied to a range of activities from hunting deer to curing an upset stomach or gaining power over an uninterested member of the opposite sex. Keeling inventories 216 specific forms of "medicine" and explains the cosmological beliefs on which they were founded. This music is a living tradition, and many of the public dances he describes are still performed today. Keeling's comparative, historical perspective shows how individual elements in the musical tradition can relate to the development of local cultures and the broader sphere of North American prehistory. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.
Cuban Fusion: The Transnational Cuban Alternative Music Scene
by Eva Silot BravoSurveying the impact of Cuba's economic crisis after the demise of the eastern socialist block, this book documents a relatively unexplored transnational network of collaborations among Cuban musicians that migrated to many different countries from the 1990s forward. The book’s main argument is that in light of the 1990s crisis in Cuba, new transnational and alternative narratives emerged, resulting in creative “in-between” spaces that reflect a post- socialist aesthetic condition. The manuscript also documents important developments in the Cuban jazz and fusion scenes outside the island in the last 20+ years..
Cultures of Work, the Neoliberal Environment and Music in Higher Education (Palgrave Critical University Studies)
by Sally Macarthur Julja Szuster Paul WattThis edited book considers the impact of neoliberalism on music teaching, research and scholarship in a higher education context. As a subject that bears little resemblance to other university practical disciplines, and fares poorly in a model driven by economics, the book considers whether musicology is a ‘public good’ or a threatened species. It contemplates what musicology can usefully contribute to a paradigm driven by economics, and questions whether it is ever possible to recover an ideal civil subject in neoliberal music academia. Contributions investigate what it means to build music research capacity in innovative ways, such as forging cross-cultural relationships, subverting conventional notions of quality and value, replacing them with knowledges and values that guide Indigenous intellectual traditions, and whether interventions into the legacy of colonialism are truly ever possible in neoliberal higher education institutions that celebrate difference and diversitywhile reinforcing social inequities. The book also explores the relationships between gender and music, music research training and scholarship, and whether the interdisciplinarity championed by the university is ever workable. Finally, it undertakes a cross-disciplinary, new materialist reading of a canonical musical work, offering a radically new perspective. The book will appeal to students and scholars of music education, musicology, higher education studies and the creative arts more broadly.
Das Populäre als Kunst?: Fragen der Form, Werturteile, Begriffe und Begründungen
by Thomas HeckenPopulären Werken wird seit Jahrhunderten der Status des Kunstwerks aberkannt, unter Verweis auf deren vermeintliche Oberflächlichkeit, Eindimensionalität, Effekthascherei und Standardisierung werden sie streng von ‚echter‘ Kunst geschieden. Schiller, Nietzsche, Adorno, Greenberg, unzählige Kritiker und Feuilletonisten in Westeuropa und den USA – sie alle eint ein starker Vorbehalt gegenüber dem, was von den Vielen anerkannt, geschätzt und gekauft wird. Seit Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts und besonders seit den 1950er Jahren gibt es aber auch eine Reihe von Argumenten gegen die Auffassung, dass nichts Kunst sei, was auf große Zustimmung trifft. Die Fülle an unterschiedlichen Positionen, Aussagen und Argumentationsmöglichkeiten aufzuzeigen, zu bündeln, zu systematisieren und zu überprüfen, die dem Populären zu künstlerischer Anerkennung verhelfen wollen, ist Zweck dieses Buches. Das Resultat ist eine umfassende Darstellung von Gründen, auch populäre Werke aus Literatur, Musik, Film, Fotografie, bildender Kunst und Design als genuine Kunstwerke betrachten zu können.
David Lynch: Sonic Style (Filmmakers and Their Soundtracks)
by Reba WissnerDirector David Lynch is best known for films that channel the uncanny and the weird into a distinct "Lynchian" aesthetic, in which sound and music play a key role: Lynch not only writes his intended sounds into the script but also often takes on the role of creating the sounds himself. This concise study explores what makes Lynch’s sonic imprint distinct, breaking down three different sound styles that create Lynch’s sound aesthetic across his films. Showing how sound offers new insights into the aesthetic and narrative work of Lynch’s filmmaking, this book highlights new dimensions in the work of a key American auteur and deconstructs the process of building a unique sound world.
Deep and Shallow: Machine Learning in Music and Audio
by Shlomo Dubnov Ross GreerProviding an essential and unique bridge between the theories of signal processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) in music, this book provides a holistic overview of foundational ideas in music, from the physical and mathematical properties of sound to symbolic representations. Combining signals and language models in one place, this book explores how sound may be represented and manipulated by computer systems, and how our devices may come to recognize particular sonic patterns as musically meaningful or creative through the lens of information theory. Introducing popular fundamental ideas in AI at a comfortable pace, more complex discussions around implementations and implications in musical creativity are gradually incorporated as the book progresses. Each chapter is accompanied by guided programming activities designed to familiarize readers with practical implications of discussed theory, without the frustrations of free-form coding. Surveying state-of-the art methods in applications of deep neural networks to audio and sound computing, as well as offering a research perspective that suggests future challenges in music and AI research, this book appeals to both students of AI and music, as well as industry professionals in the fields of machine learning, music, and AI.
The Different Faces of Politics in Literature and Music
by Mario Thomas Vassallo André P. DeBattistaThis book highlights the links between politics and governance and the arts. The essays in the volume show how literature and music have challenged those in power risking political censure. In addition, they also try to delineate how patronage has been used for propaganda, or to stir up national fervour. They focus on the tension and symbiosis between the politician and the artist foregrounding how they have always tried to influence, challenge, and, in some cases, undermine one another. This volume will serve as an indispensable source for researchers and academics in political science, the humanities and performing arts.
Digital Transformation in The Recording Industry: Evolution of Power: From The Turntable To Blockchain (Routledge Research in the Creative and Cultural Industries)
by Anna Anetta JanowskaThe recording industry has famously been transformed by technology throughout its entire history.The book presents an analysis of these changes using Porter's five forces model. The author highlights the evolution of buyers' and suppliers' power, the emergence of new competitors, product innovation and rivalry between companies in the industry driven by economic, political, social and legal factors.As an early mover in the social diffusion of copyright-sensitive content, the recording industry reflected in this book serves as an important reference for the analysis of other cultural and creative sectors.
Digital Transformation in the Recording Industry: Evolution of Power: From The Turntable To Blockchain (Routledge Research in the Creative and Cultural Industries)
by Anna Anetta JanowskaThe recording industry has famously been transformed by technology throughout its entire history. The book presents an analysis of these changes using Porter's five forces model. The author highlights the evolution of buyers' and suppliers' power, the emergence of new competitors, product innovation and rivalry between companies in the industry driven by economic, political, social and legal factors. As an early mover in the social diffusion of copyright-sensitive content, the recording industry reflected in this book serves as an important reference for the analysis of other cultural and creative sectors.
Drones, Tones, and Timbres: Sounding Place among Nomads of the Inner Asian Mountain-Steppes
by Carole PeggAn indispensable study of the music of Altai-Sayan peoples Based on more than twenty years of collaborative research, Carole Pegg’s long-awaited participatory ethnography explores how Indigenous nomadic peoples of Russia’s southern Siberian republics (Altai, Khakassia, Tyva) sound multiphonies of place in a post-Soviet global world. Inspired by the mountain-steppe ecology and pathways of nomadism, soundscapes created in performative ritual events cross political and multiple-world boundaries in a shamanic-animist universe, enabling human and spirit actor interactions in a series of sensuous worlds. As with the “throat-singing” for which Indigenous Altai-Sayan peoples are famous, senses of place involve sonic relations, rootedness, movement, and plurality. Pegg echoes their drone-partials musical and ontological models in an innovative theoretical entwinement. Three strands form the book’s multivocal drone, the partials of which sound in each chapter: ontological sonicality and musicality that enables emplacement and movement; the importance of shamanism-animism--at the core of Indigenous spiritual practices--for personhood and community; and the agency of sonic performances. Sounding place, Pegg demonstrates, is essential to the identities, ways of life, and very senses of being of Indigenous Altai-Sayan peoples.
Ecologies of Creative Music Practice: Mattering Music
by Matthew LovettEcologies of Creative Music Practice: Mattering Music explores music as a dynamic practice embedded in contemporary ecological contexts, one that both responds to, and creates change within, the ecologies in which it is created and consumed. This highly interdisciplinary analysis includes theoretical and practical considerations – from blockchain technology and digital platform commerce to artificial intelligence and the future of work, to sustainability and political ecology – as well as contemporary philosophical paradigms, guiding its investigation through three main lenses: How can music work as a conceptual tool to interrogate and respond to our changing global environment? How have transformations in our digital environment affected how we produce, distribute and consume music? How does music relate to matters of political ecology and environmental change? Within this framework, music is positioned as a starting point from which to examine a range of contexts and environments, offering new perspectives on contemporary technological and ecological discourse. Ecologies of Creative Music Practice: Mattering Music is a valuable text for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers and practitioners concerned with producing, performing, sharing and listening to music.
The Economics of the Popular Music Industry: Modelling from Microeconomic Theory and Industrial Organization
by Christie ByunThis book uses economic theory to explain how consumers and producers have responded to major changes in the music industry. Byun examines the important role of technology in changing its structure, particularly as new methods of creating and accessing music prove to be a double-edged sword for creators and producers. This second edition includes new information about concert attendance and live performance in the COVID era and what followed, as well as the resultant economic impacts on the industry. Throughout the book, Byun questions how the business of music affects creativity and the extent to which this impacts the creative output of the individual artist. Chapters also address copyright enforcement and online piracy. This is an approachable resource for economists interested in the music industry as well as business and music majors studying the ways in which technology can impact a creative process.
Electronic Visual Music: The Elements of Audiovisual Creativity (Sound Design)
by Dave PaylingElectronic Visual Music is a comprehensive guide to the composition and performance of visual music, and an essential text for those wanting to explore the history, current practice, performance strategies, compositional methodologies and practical techniques for conceiving and creating electronic visual music. Beginning with historical perspectives to inspire the reader to work creatively and develop their own individual style, visual music theory is then discussed in an accessible form, providing a series of strategies for implementing ideas. Including interviews with current practitioners, Electronic Visual Music provides insight into contemporary working methods and gives a snapshot of the state of the art in this ever-evolving creative discipline. This book is a valuable resource for artists and practitioners, as well as students, educators and researchers working in disciplines such as music composition, music production, video arts, animation and related media arts, who are interested in informing their own work and learning new strategies and techniques for exploration and creative expression of electronic visual music.