Im Zentrum des Buches steht die Betrachtung der Wiederholung in ihren vielfältigen, kulturübergreifenden Erscheinungsformen. Zahlreiche Analysen aus den Bereichen der abendländischen Kunstmusik, der europäischen Volksmusik, der afrikanischen, indonesischen und indischen Musik sowie der populären Musik untermauern die einzigartige Bedeutung der Wiederholung als musikalisches Gestaltungsmittel. Die europäische Theorie der musikalischen Form, mathematische Betrachtungen, Minimal Music (als Inbegriff repetitiver Musik) sowie ästhetische Überlegungen werden in einzelnen Kapiteln behandelt. Eine Systematisierung der Wiederholungsstrukturen steht am Ende des Buches. Entsprechend dieser Bedeutung wird (...) die Schrift eingeleitet mit einer streifzugartigen Darstellung der Wiederholung als einer universellen, kunstspartenübergreifenden Strategie. (shrink)

Music's status as an art form was distrusted in the context of German idealist philosophy which exerted an unparalleled influence on the entire nineteenth century. Hegel insisted that the content of a work of art should be grasped in concepts in order to establish its spiritual substantiality (Geistigkeit), and that no object, word or image could accurately represent the content and meaning of a musical work. In the mid-nineteenth century, Friedrich Theodor Vischer and other Hegelian aestheticians kept insisting on (...) art's conceptual clarity, but they adapted the aesthetic system on which this requirement had been based. Their adaptations turned out to be decisive for the development of music criticism, to such an extent that music critics used them to point out musical content and to confirm music's autonomy as an art form. This book unravels the network of music critics and philosophers, including not only Hegel but also Franz Liszt, Franz Brendel, and Eduard Hanslick, whose works shaped public opinions of music."--Publisher's description. (shrink)

More than a century after Guido Adler's appointment to the first chair in musicology at the University of Vienna, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History provides a first look at the discipline in this earliest period, and at the ideological dilemmas and methodological anxieties that characterized it upon its institutionalization. Author Kevin Karnes contends that some of the most vital questions surrounding musicology's disciplinary identities today-the relationship between musicology and criticism, the role of the subject in analysis (...) and the narration of history, and the responsibilities of the scholar to the listening public-originate in these conflicted and largely forgotten beginnings. Karnes lays bare the nature of music study in the late nineteenth century through insightful readings of long-overlooked contributions by three of musicology's foremost pioneers-Adler, Eduard Hanslick, and Heinrich Schenker. Shaped as much by the skeptical pronouncements of the likes of Nietzsche and Wagner as it was by progressivist ideologies of scientific positivism, the new discipline comprised an array of oft-contested and intensely personal visions of music study, its value, and its future. Karnes introduces readers to a Hanslick who rejected the call of positivist scholarship and dedicated himself to penning an avowedly subjective history of Viennese musical life. He argues that Schenker's analytical experiments had roots in a Wagner-inspired search for a critical alternative to Adler's style-obsessed scholarship. And he illuminates Adler's determined response to Nietzsche's warnings about the vitality of artistic and cultural life in an increasingly scientific age. Through sophisticated and meticulous presentation, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History demonstrates that the new discipline of musicology was inextricably tied in with the cultural discourse of its time. (shrink)

Music Criticism in Vienna records a culture in which musical criticism had achieved the status of a minor art form. The period covered - October 1896 to December 1897 - was an eventful time in Vienna. Bruckner died, then Brahms; Mahler arrived; premieres of works by Czech composers coincided with increasing tension in the Empire between Czechs and Germans; Puccini's La Boheme reached Vienna on its sensational progress around the world; and the great programme music debate continued. These (...) events and issues were recorded and debated by some two dozen critics ranging from Eduard Hanslick, widely credited with (and blamed for) raising music criticism to an art, to Heinrich Schenker. The focus of Sandra McColl's monograph is unashamedly on the critics themselves, and her reconstruction of the climate of debate about whatever music or musicians came to their notice. She illuminates the intellectual climate in which the music was created, performed and received, and provides a foundation for the study of musical criticism in the post-Hanslick generation. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Middlebrow takes a fresh look at the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Offering an alternative to the traditional focus on either "highbrow" modernism on the one hand or "lowbrow" popular music on the other, its novel view centers on the wealth of previously overlooked products and practices that bridged the space between these cultural extremes. While seminal attempts to recover middlebrow culture came from literary critics and historians, middlebrow (...) studies is now a burgeoning field within musicology. As the first essay collection on this topic, this handbook has two aims: first, it seeks to explore the middlebrow as a historical phenomenon, excavating the kinds of critical writings, marketing practices, and compositional styles with which it was associated. By reanimating a range of musical practices and products-from symphonic concerts to Broadway musicals, opera criticism to rock journalism, and modern jazz to pop-rock-the contributors investigate how artists, critics, and audiences breached the divide from both above and below. In the process, the handbook chapters push the boundaries of middlebrow studies and demonstrate the category's relevance outside of the mid-twentieth-century Anglophone world by delving into the nineteenth century, interrogating the present day, and looking to Germany, Russia, and beyond. The handbook's second aim is to complicate the disciplinary divisions that have flowed from the entrenched oppositions between high and low genres. Breaking new ground by bringing together scholars of classical and popular music, these chapters trace common middlebrow themes across traditional disciplinary boundaries. Across this broad vista, contributors account for the kinds of syntheses, overlaps, and juxtapositions that made the cultural middle such a richly textured and endlessly contested terrain. Keywords: middlebrow, music history, nineteenth century, twentieth century, popular music studies, modernism. (shrink)

Part one. Brahms and Bruckner : a radical historical, art-theoretical, and artistic contrast. Aspects and issues ; Art and personality ; The conflict ; Art-theoretical controversies ; On historical classification ; Parallelisms and antitheses ; The relation to historicism ; "Heirs" of Beethoven ; Parallelisms and antitheses once more ; Richard Wagner -- Part two. The unknown Brahms. Brahms : an autonomous composer? ; "Young Kreisler" ; Schumann's essay "Neue Bahnen" : a new interpretation ; Schumann and Brahms : Brahms' (...) Schumann variations (op. 9) and Schumann's Davidsbèundlertèanze ; The piano variations op. 23 : a monument to Robert Schumann ; "Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini" : on the "Mass quotation" in the Adagio of the Piano concerto op. 15 ; A special kind of father-son relationship -- Part three. The unknown Bruckner. Bruckner : "the most absolute of absolute musicians"? ; Bruckner and the program symphony ; On Bruckner exegesis : the "tone symbol of the cross" (Liszt) ; The program of the "Romantic" symphony ; The program of the Eighth symphony : musical semantics and historical contexts. (shrink)

I. History. Mainwaring's Handel : its relation to British aesthetics -- Herbert Spencer and a musical dispute -- II. Opera and film. Handel's operas : the form of feeling and the problem of appreciation -- Anti-semitism in Meistersinger? -- Speech, song, and the transparency of medium : on operatic metaphysics -- III. Performance. On the historically informed performance -- Ars perfecta : toward perfection in musical performance? -- IV. Interpretation. Another go at the meaning of music : Koopman, (...) Davies, and the meaning of "meaning" -- Another go at musical profundity : Stephen Davies and the game of chess -- From ideology to music : Leonard Meyer's theory of style change -- Sibley's last paper -- In defense of musical representation : music, representation, and the hybrid arts -- Music, language, and cognition : which doesn't belong? (shrink)

In this elegant book he develops a powerful statement of what music analysis and criticism in relation to historical understanding can be.

Homo aestheticus -- The Greeks -- The Age of Enlightenment -- A time of consolidation -- A period of expansion -- The present : the use of music : the transformation of aesthetics.

This study explores the relationship between the poetic language of Donne, Herbert, Milton, and other British poets, and the choral music and part-songs of composers including Tallis, Byrd, Gibbons, Weelkes, and Tomkins. The seventeenth century was the time in English literary history when music was most consciously linked to words, and when the mingling of Renaissance and 'new' philosophy opened new discovery routes for the interpretation of art. McColley offers close readings of poems and the musical settings (...) of analogous texts, and discusses the philosophy, performance, and disputed political and ecclesiastical implications of polyphony. She also enters into current discourse about the nature of language, relating poets' use of language and composers' use of music to larger questions concerning the arts, politics and theology. (shrink)

A pioneering study that illuminates the connection of music, poetry, mystical praxis and social history underlying the ceremony of the Mevlevi Dervishes. Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, whose life and mystical poetry provided the inspiration for the Mevlevi Sufi order, is one of the world's best-known poets, yet the centuries-long musical tradition cultivated by the Mevleviye remains much less known. In this deeply researched book, renowned scholar Walter Feldman traces the historical development of Mevlevi music and brings to light (...) the remarkable musical and mystical aesthetics of the Mevlevi ayin - the instrumental and vocal accompaniment to the sublime ceremony of the 'Whirling' Dervishes. (shrink)

As the essays in this book attest, in a time of specialization John McCormick chose diversification, a choice determined by a life spent in many occupations and many countries. After his five years in the U. S. Navy in the Second World War, the academy beckoned by way of the G. I. Bill, graduate training, and a career in teaching. Prosperity in the American university at the time meant setting up as a "Wordsworth man," a "Keats man," or a "Dr. (...) Johnson man": all chilling to the author. He chose self-exile in which he disguised himself as an "Americanist" saleable in Europe, and lectured happily in comparative studies: literature, history, and philosophy. Thus the broad range of this volume, both in subject matter and in the span of time it covers. The essays are divided into three sections. First are general and personal essays on a variety of topics, followed by work on individual writers, and third, writings on criticism and theory. A section on Santayana reflects his eight years of research for Santayana's biography. The writings on Spain and toreo result from another long-held interest, together with the author's attempt to alter some of the romantic nonsense about the running of the bulls in Pamplona, too often the entire substance of what the general public knows about Spain. McCormick has long been convinced that without knowledge of bullfighting, the foreigner cannot comprehend arcane and wonderful aspects of the Spanish character. The coda, "Another Music," is an old man's attempt to solve the mysterious algebra of how the world turns now, and how the young appear to the aged. While the volume is diverse in its range of writers--from Whitman in America to Santayana in Europe, taken as a collectivity, these essays provide a sense of the grandeur as well as the decadent in twentieth century politics and aesthetics alike. Written with the literary taste and political non-conformity that still characterizes McCormick, the volume is a treat for the specialist and for the generalist. John McCormick was professor of American Studies in the Free University, Berlin, and is at present professor emeritus of comparative literature at Rutgers University. He is the author of Bullfighting, American and European Literary Imagination, Catastrophe and Imagination, Fiction as Knowledge, George Santayana and Seagoing. (shrink)

Discussions surrounding music and ethical responsibility bring to mind arguments about legal ownership and purchase. Yet the many ways in which we experience music with others are usually overlooked. Musical experience and practice always involve relationships with other people, which can place limitations on how we listen to and act upon music. In Music and Ethical Responsibility, Jeff Warren challenges current approaches to music and ethics, drawing upon philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's theory that ethics is the (...) responsibilities that arise from our encounters with other people. Warren examines ethical responsibilities in musical experiences including performing other people's music, noise, negotiating musical meaning, and improvisation. Revealing the diverse roles that music plays in the experience of encountering others, Warren argues that musicians, researchers, and listeners should place ethical responsibility at the heart of musical practices. (shrink)

A culturally diverse historical record shows considerable evidence of a significant role for musical sound in healing processes. Very little of this information is used in contemporary medical practice. In part that is a function of paradoxical, inconclusive, and sometimes contradictory research results. Reviewed research literature is categorized as follows: physical healing, psychological healing, spiritual healing, and healing practices of indigenous peoples. The combination of ethnographic, descriptive and clinical data in the literature review demonstrates the complexity inherent to investigating this (...) topic. Most of the clinical research uses quantitative methodologies. Because of the diversity of musical sound, infinitely variable individual responsivity, and the variable significance of a variety of influences, quantitative studies about musical sound healing phenomena are only minimally revealing. It is suggested that whether or not a sound facilitates a healing response depends on how it is experienced. Further, how this happens as well as the distinction between sound and music is in large part a function of the meaning sound is given. This is the first study to examine in detail the meaning of such an experience. This study uses the phenomenological methodology developed by Giorgi to analyze four descriptive protocols detailing first-person responses to a question about musical sound-facilitated physical healing processes. The analysis results in a single general structure of the essential meaning of this experience revealing the relationships for each subject connecting an altered state of consciousness , spiritual awareness, cognitive understanding, history of related experiences and active, intentional choice. Despite their apparent individual differences all subjects used musical sound in ritualistic ways to facilitate an ASC which incorporated visual imagery and spiritual support. Half the subjects used music and sound for themselves, the other half participated in a sound-based ritual for the benefit of someone else. A phenomenological approach further provides a way to demonstrate the subtle interrelationships expressed by the ethnographic, descriptive and clinical data. Broad implications of the results of this study are discussed concluding with some directions for further research and a brief discussion on the value of a phenomenological approach to medical diagnosis and treatment. (shrink)

The Postlude, written for this edition, looks back at the predictions made more than twenty-five years ago and speculates about what the coming decades may hold ...

German jazz and the metronome of race -- The jazz paradox: race and totalitarian politics in German jazz reception -- The jazz machine: Brecht and the politics of jazz -- The monkey's trick: Herman Hesse and the music of decline -- The music of fascism: Adorno on jazz -- Jazz-Heinis: Klaus Mann and jazz ontology.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist NarrativeRandall Everett AllsupEric Prieto, Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative ( Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2002)Modernism. The Interpretation of Dreams, the assembly line, The Rite of Spring, the Panama Canal. The modernist sensibility is characterized above all by the "willful big idea"—history as text, a manifesto in conflict with itself and its past. Hopeful (...) and revolutionary like the writings of Karl Marx or progressive and corrupt like the Manhattan Project, such events-as-manifesto had a way of feeding off each other. Through collaboration, conflict, and competition, modernists from Robert Moses to Elliott Carter raced to explain and exemplify, often deliberately creating conflict as if crisis were its own rationale, its own sine qua non. One could hypothesize that this arms race of complexity collapsed—exhausted—about the same time that Communism did. Its failure to sustain its ideas (rather than outpace them one after another) may be one reason we live in an anti-dialectical world, an unmodern place of fundamentalisms and easy freedoms.Author Eric Prieto is at home in the modern world more so than the present; his heroes are French intellectuals after all, those lovers of complexity. In Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative, he investigates late modernist authors who looked to music as a way to exemplify the inward nature of mind [End Page 93] and the outward nature of place. To understand this book, we must revisit some formal aesthetic theories, namely that music's value resides in its ability to name without signifying, that musical properties like intervallic distance, dynamic contrast, and the space-time component that is rhythm put us in touch with the Kantian a priori—the-thing-in-itself, the Schopenhauerian will. Music as sound-in-itself (to riff on Kant and Schopenhauer) becomes a metaphor for the noumenal world or is mimetic at the very least of the abstract and non-linear nature of thought. Prieto argues that "wherever a music model is present [among his examples] it always serves to further this inwardly directed mode of mimesis I call 'listening in,' where the primary object of representation is not the outside world but the subtly modulating interactions between consciousness and world."1Prieto's book is highly consistent. He masterfully captures the spirit of cooperation from modernist writer to musician to thinker and back. Concentrating on three authors, Robert Pinget, Michel Leiris, and Samuel Beckett, Prieto cites the influences of composers like Bach and Beethoven, as well as philosophers like Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer on their literary works. He brings in thinking from Nelson Goodman and Ferdinand de Saussure. The result is literary criticism as manifesto. Reader beware, this is a book for an elevated audience, those rare folk who are comfortable with structural linguistics, nineteenth-century music aesthetics, specialized academic scholarship, and word puzzles. To explain for example why an author like Beckett is inspired by music to create abstract or associative narratives rather than traditional stories of cause and effect, Prieto writes:In music, this progression necessarily takes place on the level of audible resemblances, but in literature, by virtue of the properties of the two-tiered linguistic sign, analogical progression may take place either on the level of the signifier (via the principle of paronomasia), on the level of the signified (via metaphorical substitutions, as in the association of ideas), or between the two levels (punning, "imitative harmony").2This density of language and concept speak well of Prieto's intellect and one is likewise impressed by his broad understanding of music and letters, yet it is the musical scholar who gets the short end of the deal. Paronomasia? "Audible resemblance" is not a musical term I have heard used. In Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative, music serves as starting point, an inspiration, not as an equal partner. This holds true for Beckett and Pinget as well as for Prieto. The result can be disconcerting, even to readers like me for whom the cross-disciplinary study of music and literature is a fascinating endeavor.Difficulty, nonetheless, has its rewards and this is one lesson of... (shrink)

In this collection of previously unpublished essays Jean-Jacques Nattiez applies his theoretical foundations of musical semiotics to theorists such as Levi-Strauss, Hanslick, and Brailoiu; novelists such as Proust; and poets such as Baudelaire. The author treats problems which musicologists and music lovers alike need to address: the artistic product in music of oral tradition, the nature of musical facts, and questions of fidelity and authenticity in performance practice. Nattiez tackles these perennial issues with an originality born out of (...) his focus on the status of time in the works considered. This approach allows him to take sides, sometimes in a provocative manner, in the ongoing debates which pit adherents of modernity against apologists of postmodernism. (shrink)

This book aims at drawing the reader’s attention to the sound of the urban environment. Using an interdisciplinary approach, it examines a heterogeneous selection of experimentations from the domains of music, art and architecture. Significant case studies of pieces of music, public art works and scientific research in the field of urban planning are analyzed, investigating the methods that have been adopted and the aural processes that have been generated. It then uses the findings to reconstruct the underlying (...) theories and practices and to show what might be drawn from these procedures applied to urban planning. (shrink)

Profound theoretical and philosophical approach to contemporary music Unsayable Music presents theoretical, critical and analytical reflections on key topics of contemporary music including acoustic, electroacoustic and digital music, and audiovisual and multimedia composition. Six essays by Paulo C. Chagas approaching music from different perspectives such as philosophy, sociology, cybernetics, musical semiotics, media, and critical studies. Chagas’s practical experience, both as a composer of contemporary music and sound director of the Electronic Music Studio of (...) Cologne, nourishes his observations on the specific creativity that emerges with the use of the technical apparatus, the development of the electronic music studio, the different aesthetics of electroacoustic music, and the forms of audiovisual and multimedia composition. The title Unsayable Music is a reference to Wittgenstein, who suggested that sound is only the surface of music and that the musical work conceals something more profound that can hardly be described by philosophical models or scientific theories. (shrink)

The studio/label as auteur -- Gender and degrees of popular music authorship -- The singular and collective : the writer as auteur -- The interpreter as auteur -- The producer/re-mixer as auteur -- The Zeitgeist as auteur : contexts, scenes & technologies -- Coda : the seeker and the sought.

Fixing the meaning of complex signs -- Pre-classical sentiment -- Contradictory sentiments -- The C minor style -- Beethoven's expansion -- Romantic intensity -- Obsessions.

Aesthetics, experiments and values -- Between cybernetics, aesthetics, and semiotics -- 'I/other' oppositions in music, aesthetics, and semiotics -- Interpersonal analysis in film music -- Janácek from an interpersonal viewpoint -- Postscript.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

A landmark work from the founder of the Frankfurt School. A key work in the study of Adorno, of interest to students and general readers alike.

A history of music aesthetics from Antiquity to the present day. Fubini considers musical thought in terms of its relationship to philosophy, medicine, astronomy, mathematics and teaching in the period up to the Enlightenment. The second half of the book concentrates on key issues in contemporary music aesthetics, placing them in the perspective of the Enlightenment and of 19th-century philosophers.".

"The scholarship of Michael Spitzer's new book is impressive and thorough. The writing is impeccable and the coverage extensive. The book treats the history of the use of metaphor in the field of classical music. It also covers a substantial part of the philosophical literature. The book treats the topic of metaphor in a new and extremely convincing manner."-Lydia Goehr, Columbia University The experience of music is an abstract and elusive one, enough so that we're often forced (...) to describe it using analogies to other forms and sensations: we say that music moves or rises like a physical form that it contains the imagery of paintings or the grammar of language. In these and countless other ways, our discussions of music take the form of metaphor, attempting to describe music's abstractions by referencing more concrete and familiar experiences. Michael Spitzer's Metaphor and Musical Thought uses this process to create a unique and insightful history of our relationship with music--the first ever book-length study of musical metaphor in any language. Treating issues of language, aesthetics, semiotics, and cognition, Spitzer offers an evaluation, a comprehensive history, and an original theory of the ways our cultural values have informed the metaphors we use to address music. And as he brings these discussions to bear on specific works of music and follows them through current debates on how music's meaning might be considered, what emerges is a clear and engaging guide to both the philosophy of musical thought and the history of musical analysis, from the seventeenth century to the present day. Spitzer writes engagingly for students of philosophy and aesthetics, as well as for music theorists and historians. (shrink)

The philosophically rich David Bowie is an artist of wide and continuing influence. The theatrical antics of Bowie ushered in a new rock aesthetic, but there is much more to Bowie than mere spectacle. The visual belies the increasing depths of his concerns, even at his lowest personal moments. We never know what lies in store in a Bowie song, for there is no point in his nearly 30 albums at which one can say, "That's typical Bowie!" Who else has (...) combined techno and hard rock, switched to R&B love songs (with accompanying gospel) to funk to jazz-rock fusion and back again? Among the topics explored inDavid Bowie and Philosophy are the nature of Bowie as an institution and a cult; Bowie's work in many platforms, including movies and TV; Bowie's spanning of low and high art; his relation to Andy Warhol; the influence of Buddhism and Kabuki theater; the recurring theme of Bowie as a space alien; the dystopian element in Bowie's thinking; the role of fashion in Bowie's creativity; the aesthetics of theatrical rock and glam rock; and Bowie's public identification with bisexuality and hisinfluence within the LGBTQ community. (shrink)

Postmodernity's Musical Pasts considers music after 1945 as a representation of concepts such as "historicity" and "temporality". The volume understands postmodernity as a period in which both modernism and postmodernism co-exist. It is attracted to a wider interpretation of "historicity" that focuses on the complex nexus of past-present-future. "Historicity" is understood as leaning closely on "temporality", generally thought of as the linear progression of past, present and future. The volume broadens the absolutist understanding of temporality to include processes which (...) can occur in circular, spiral, transcending and other formations. The book covers an extensive spectrum of topics from classical to popular and neo-traditional musics to concerns of the disciplines of musicology. Such a wide range of topics from both the centre and the periphery of the musicological canon mirrors the eclectic and diverse nature of the postwar era itself. The first section investigates how to understand manifestations of the past in musical composition with regard to time, on the one hand, and with regard to genre, style and idiom, on the other. A second section shows how time and history manifest themselves in art music. A third section takes the contrasts and transitional moments of post-1945 practices further by looking at the temporality of reception from different angles. A final part investigates questions of nostalgia and temporalities of belonging. TINA FR HAUF is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University, New York and serves on the faculty of The Graduate Center, CUNY. CONTRIBUTORS: Michael Arnold, Susana Asensio Llamas, Georg Burgstaller, Caitlin Carlos, Daniela Fugellie, Tina Fr hauf, John Koslovsky, Lawrence Kramer, Beate Kutschke, Laurenz L tteken, Max Noubel, Joshua S. Walden. (shrink)

Modern literature has always been obsessed by music. It cannot seem to think about itself without obsessing about music. And music has returned the favour. The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature addresses this relationship as a significant contribution to the burgeoning field of word and music studies. The 37 chapters within consider the partnership through four lenses-the universal, opera and literature, musical and literary forms, and popular music and literature-and touch upon diverse (...) and pertinent themes for our modern times, ranging from misogyny to queerness, racial inequality to the claimed universality of whiteness. This Companion therefore offers an essential resource for all who try to decode the musico-literary exchange. (shrink)

The composer of vocal music writes as poet and scholiast. His message is autonomous but not wholly his own. He sets to work with a preexistent artwork before him—a poem or passage of prose, often written without thought of musical setting—and fashions his song under its constraints. He welcomes to his work a second, distinct language, one which corresponds to his own at most only partially in syntax and significance.The composer's unique act of accommodation, structuring his setting after certain (...) requisites of his text, may have far-reaching implications for his musical style—implications too often ignored in today's musical analysis and criticism. Which particular textual characteristics the composer chooses to emphasize will depend on much beyond the text itself: on his view of the nature and capabilities of musical discourse, shaped internally by musical procedures developed from the canon of his predecessors, externally by general expectations and aspirations of his culture; and on his equally rich conception of the tradition behind his text. The text-music interface is therefore a provocative area of exploration for critic and historian alike. It points to the expressive aims of a composer in a given work, and it elucidates broader cultural assumptions concerning the nature of musical and poetic discourse.Gary Tomlinson, assistant professor of music history at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of articles on Monteverdi, early opera, and Verdi. He is currently writing a book on Monteverdi and late-Renaissance culture. (shrink)

With a characteristically broad and provocative treatment, Dahlhaus examines a single music-aesthetical idea from various historical and philosophical viewpoints. "Essential reading for anyone interested in the larger intellectual framework in which Romantic music found its place, a framework that to a remarkable degree has continued to shape our image of music."--Robert P. Morgan, Yale University Carl Dahlhaus (1928-1989) is the author of a highly influential body of works on the foundations of music history and aesthetics.

Music has been seen since the Romantic era as the quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time. The Melody of Time explores the multiple ways in which music may provide insight into the problematics of time, spanning the dynamic century between Beethoven and Elgar.

Prelude and address. I'm listening -- Author's rights, listener's rights (journal of our ancestors) -- Writing our listenings: arrangement, translation, criticism -- Our instruments for listening before the law (second journal entry) -- Listening (to listening): the making of the modern ear -- Plastic listening.

In this eloquent book, Daniel Barenboim draws on his profound and uniquely influential engagement with music to argue for its central importance in our everyday lives.

Musical values -- Back to Beethoven -- A state of crisis? -- An imaginary object -- A matter of representation -- Music and the academy -- Music and gender.

Given this bewildering abundance, how we can speak of a single thing called "music"? This book argues that we can.

In the past two decades digital technologies have fundamentally changed the way we think about, make and use popular music. From the production of multimillion selling pop records to the ubiquitous remix that has become a marker of Web 2.0, the emergence of new music production technologies have had a transformative effect upon 21st Century digital culture. Sonic Technologies examines these issues with a specific focus upon the impact of digitization upon creativity; that is, what musicians, cultural producers (...) and prosumers do. For many, music production has moved out of the professional recording studio and into the home. Using a broad range of examples ranging from experimental electronic music to more mainstream genres, the book examines how contemporary creative practice is shaped by the visual and sonic look and feel of recording technologies such as Digital Audio Workstations. (shrink)

Originally published in 1987, this book forms a conceptual account of the relationship between music and poetry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth ...

This book is the first to put forward a general theory of the manner in which different media--music, words, moving picture, and dance--work together to create multimedia. Beginning with a study of the way in which meaning is mediated in television commercials, the book concludes with in-depth readings of Disney's Fantasia, Madonna's video Material Girl, and Armide (Godard's sequence from the collaborative film Aria). Analysing Musical Multimedia not only shows how approaches deriving from music theory can contribute to (...) the understanding of multimedia, but also seeks to draw conclusions from the practice and further development of musical analysis. (shrink)

Why are some popular musical forms and performers universally reviled by critics and ignored by scholars-despite enjoying large-scale popularity? How has the notion of what makes "good" or "bad" music changed over the years-and what does this tell us about the writers who have assigned these tags to different musical genres? Many composers that are today part of the classical "canon" were greeted initially by bad reviews. Similarly, jazz, country, and pop musics were all once rejected as "bad" by (...) the academy that now has courses on these and many other types of music. This book addresses why this is so through a series of essays on different musical forms and performers. It looks at alternate ways of judging musical performance beyond the critical/academic nexus, and suggests new paths to follow in understanding what makes some music "popular" even if it is judged to be "bad." For anyone who has ever secretly enjoyed ABBA, Kenny G, or disco, Bad Music will be a guilty pleasure! (shrink)