- Table View
- List View
Musical Performance and the Changing City: Post-industrial Contexts in Europe and the United States (Routledge Research in Music)
by Fabian Holt Carsten WerginA contribution to the field of urban music studies, this book presents new interdisciplinary approaches to the study of music in urban social life. It takes musical performance as its key focus, exploring how and why different kinds of performance are evolving in contemporary cities in the interaction among social groups, commercial entrepreneurs, and institutions. From conventional concerts in rock clubs to new genres such as the flash mob, the forms and meanings of musical performance are deeply affected by urban social change and at the same time respond to the changing conditions. Music has taken on complex roles in the post-industrial city where culture and cultural consumption have an unprecedented power in defining publics, policies, and marketing strategies. Further, changes in real estate markets and the penetration of new media have challenged even fairly modern music cultures. At the same time, new music cultures have emerged, and music has become a driver for cultural events and festivals, channeling the dynamics of a society characterized by the social change, media intensity, and the neoliberal forces of post-industrial urban contexts. The volume brings together scholars from a broad range of disciplines to build a shared understanding of post-industrial contexts in Europe and the United States. Most directly grounded in contemporary developments in music studies and urban studies, its broad interdisciplinary range serves to strengthen the relevance of urban music studies to fields such as anthropology, sociology, urban geography, and beyond. Offering in-depth studies of changing music culture in concert venues, cultural events, and neighborhoods, contributors visit diverse locations such as Barcelona, Berlin, London, New York, and Austin.
Musical Performance in the Diaspora
by Tina K. RamnarineThis book illustrates how ethnographic investigation of musical performances might contribute to the analysis of diaspora. It embraces diverse examples such as 'mourning and cultures of survival' amongst Aboriginal and Jewish communities in Australia, remembering a Kazakh 'homeland' in Western Mongolia, celebrating Diwali in New Zealand and the circulation of musical performances in Mozambique, Portugal and the UK. Some of the topics discussed in Musical Performance in the Diaspora include: the expression and shaping of diasporic and postcolonial identities through performance musical memory in diasporic contexts the geographies of performance the politics of 'new' forms of diasporic music-making. This book presents a rich array of theoretical approaches and wide ranging ethnographic case studies to reconsider and challenge discourses that have favoured uncritical notions of diasporic 'hybridity' and to broaden current analyses of performance in the diaspora.
Musical Psychedelia: Research at the Intersection of Music and Psychedelic Experience (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)
by Gemma L. FarrellPsychedelic music is a fascinating yet under-researched field of study. This thought-provoking collection offers a broad introduction to the fi eld of psychedelic music studies, bringing together scholarly work on psychedelic music in genres like rock, folk, electronic dance music and pop. Through an expanded purview on psychedelic music, an emerging trend in research, the collection affords students and academics alike an introduction to a rich, multi-faceted field. The contributing authors explore a range of different facets of musical psychedelia: its transgressive and transcendent aspects, its foregrounding of timbre and texture, the way it changes our perception of time, its influence on “non-psychedelic” music, key composition and production techniques that composers and musicians use in its creation, how it is mediated by different places and spaces, and the interplay between psychedelic visual and sonic aesthetics. This interdisciplinary work reveals both commonalities in musical psychedelic experiences and the contestation inherent in a fi eld of study that juxtaposes music of different genres and eras with a variety of theoretical approaches and methodologies. In broadening the scope of psychedelic music research, the collection not only makes for varied and absorbing reading on the subject level but also stimulates reflexive thought about interdisciplinary research.
Musical Revolutions: How the Sounds of the Western World Changed
by Stuart IsacoffFrom the critically acclaimed author of Temperament, a narrative account of the most defining moments in musical history—classical and jazz—all of which forever altered Western culture "A fascinating journey that begins with the origins of musical notation and travels through the centuries reaching all the way to our time.&”—Semyon Bychkov, chief conductor and music director of the Czech PhilharmonicThe invention of music notation by a skittish Italian monk in the eleventh century. The introduction of multilayered hymns in the Middle Ages. The birth of opera in a Venice rebelling against the church&’s pious restraints. Baroque, Romantic, and atonal music; bebop and cool jazz; Bach and Liszt; Miles Davis and John Coltrane. In telling the exciting story of Western music&’s evolution, Stuart Isacoff explains how music became entangled in politics, culture, and economics, giving rise to new eruptions at every turn, from the early church&’s attempts to bind its followers by teaching them to sing in unison to the global spread of American jazz through the Black platoons of the First World War. The author investigates questions like: When does noise become music? How do musical tones reflect the natural laws of the universe? Why did discord become the primary sound of modernity? Musical Revolutions is a book replete with the stories of our most renowned musical artists, including notable achievements of people of color and women, whose paths to success were the most difficult.
Musical Revolutions in German Culture
by Mirko M. HallMusical Revolutions in German Culture explores the persistence of a critical-deconstructive philosophy toward musical production, consumption, and reception in Germany over the past two centuries. Drawing upon the cultural-revolutionary insights of Friedrich Schlegel, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and Blixa Bargeld, this book investigates how radical musical discourses and practices engage sound as a powerful site of cultural creativity, critique, and resistance. Intellectual historian Mirko M. Hall shows how music, when intentionally situated within certain counterhegemonic aesthetic practices, can decisively transform everyday consciousness in the service of human freedom.
Musical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)
by Anne DanielsenMusical Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction presents new insights into the study of musical rhythm through investigations of the micro-rhythmic design of groove-based music. The main purpose of the book is to investigate how technological mediation - in the age of digital music production tools - has influenced the design of rhythm at the micro level. Through close readings of technology-driven popular music genres, such as contemporary R&B, hip-hop, trip-hop, electro-pop, electronica, house and techno, as well as played folk music styles, the book sheds light on how investigations of the musical-temporal relationships of groove-based musics might be fruitfully pursued, in particular with regard to their micro-rhythmic features. This book is based on contributions to the project Rhythm in the Age of Digital Reproduction (RADR), a five-year research project running from 2004 to 2009 that was funded by the Norwegian Research Council.
Musical Ritual in Mexico City: From the Aztec to NAFTA
by Mark PedeltyOn the Zócalo, the main square of Mexico City, Mexico's entire musical history is performed every day. "Mexica" percussionists drum and dance to the music of Aztec rituals on the open plaza. Inside the Metropolitan Cathedral, choristers sing colonial villancicos. Outside the National Palace, the Mexican army marching band plays the "Himno Nacional," a vestige of the nineteenth century. And all around the square, people listen to the contemporary sounds of pop, rock, and música grupera. In all, some seven centuries of music maintain a living presence in the modern city. This book offers an up-to-date, comprehensive history and ethnography of musical rituals in the world's largest city. Mark Pedelty details the dominant musical rites of the Aztec, colonial, national, revolutionary, modern, and contemporary eras, analyzing the role that musical ritual played in governance, resistance, and social change. His approach is twofold. Historical chapters describe the rituals and their functions, while ethnographic chapters explore how these musical forms continue to resonate in contemporary Mexican society. As a whole, the book provides a living record of cultural continuity, change, and vitality.
Musical Scenes and Social Class: Debating Punk and Metal (Pop Music, Culture and Identity)
by Romain Garbaye Gérôme Guibert“In a fragmentation and large-scale social crisis context, this volume takes up the debate between punk and metal and class belonging, showing us the interrelations between practices and their determination by social belongings. A vital feature of the book is the demonstration of the self-renewal of punk and metal. The irreverence, resistance, and personification of subaltern and paradoxical identities portrayed here represent a step forward “ —Paula Guerra, KISMIF Co-Convenor, University of Porto, Portugal Early analysts of both punk and metal have shown their continuing popularity for segments of the public who were often considered in the 1970s and 1980s as “losers of globalization” despite the level of fragmentation of these scenes, the diversity of their audiences’ backgrounds, and their constant evolution and re-invention. This volume aims to stimulate and contribute to debates on social class and economic and cultural change, on one side, and punk and metal, on the other, through international, contemporary and historical approaches, mainly focused on Britain and France.
Musical Sense-Making: Enaction, Experience, and Computation (SEMPRE Studies in The Psychology of Music)
by Mark ReybrouckMusical Sense-Making: Enaction, Experience, and Computation broadens the scope of musical sense-making from a disembodied cognitivist approach to an experiential approach. Revolving around the definition of music as a temporal and sounding art, it argues for an interactional and experiential approach that brings together the richness of sensory experience and principles of cognitive economy. Starting from the major distinction between in-time and outside-of-time processing of the sounds, this volume provides a conceptual and operational framework for dealing with sounds in a real-time listening situation, relying heavily on the theoretical groundings of ecology, cybernetics, and systems theory, and stressing the role of epistemic interactions with the sounds. These interactions are considered from different perspectives, bringing together insights from previous theoretical groundings and more recent empirical research. The author’s findings are framed within the context of the broader field of enactive and embodied cognition, recent action and perception studies, and the emerging field of neurophenomenology and dynamical systems theory. This volume will particularly appeal to scholars and researchers interested in the intersection between music, philosophy, and/or psychology.
Musical Signal Processing (Studies On New Music Research)
by Curtis Roads Stephen Travis Pope Aldo Piccialli Giovanni De PoliCompiled by an international array of musical and technical specialists, this book deals with some of the most important topics in modern musical signal processing. Beginning with basic concepts, and leading to advanced applications, it covers such essential areas as sound synthesis (including detailed studies of physical modelling and granular synthesis) ,control signal synthesis, sound transformation (including convolution), analysis/resynthesis (phase vocodor, wavelets, analysis by chaotic functions), object-oriented and artificial intelligence representations, musical interfaces and the integration of signal processing techniques in concert performance.
Musical Sincerity and Transcendence in Film: Reflexive Fictions (Ashgate Screen Music Series)
by Timothy B. CochranMusical Sincerity and Transcendence in Film focuses on the ways filmmakers treat music reflexively—that is, draw attention to what it is and what it can do. Examining a wide range of movies from recent decades including examples from Indiewood, teen film, and blockbuster cinema, the book explores two recurring ideas about music implied by foregrounded musical activity on screen: that music can be a potent means of sincere expression and genuine human connection and that music can enable transcendence of disenchantment and the mundane. As an historical musicologist, Timothy Cochran explores these assumptions through analysis of musical style, aesthetic implications, and narrative strategy while treating the ideas as historically-grounded and culturally-situated with conceptual origins often lying outside of film. The book covers eclectic critical terrain to highlight various layers of musical sincerity and transcendence in film, including the nineteenth-century aesthetics of E.T.A. Hoffmann, David Foster Wallace’s literary resistance to irony (sometimes called the New Sincerity), strategies of self-revelation in singer-songwriter repertoires, Lionel Trilling’s distinction between sincerity and authenticity, theories of play, David Nye’s notion of the American technological sublime, and Svetlana Boym’s writings on nostalgia. These lenses reveal that film is a way of perpetuating, revising, and critiquing ideas about music and that music in film is a potent means of exploring broader social, emotional, and spiritual desires.
The Musical Sounds of Medieval French Cities: Players, Patrons, and Politics
by Gretchen PetersDrawing upon hundreds of newly uncovered archival records, Gretchen Peters reconstructs the music of everyday life in over twenty cities in late medieval France. Through the comparative study of these cities' political and musical histories, the book establishes that the degree to which a city achieved civic authority and independence determined the nature and use of music within the urban setting. The world of urban minstrels beyond civic patronage is explored through the use of diverse records; their livelihood depended upon seeking out and securing a variety of engagements from confraternities to bathhouses. Minstrels engaged in complex professional relationships on a broad level, as with guilds and minstrel schools, and on an individual level, as with partnerships and apprenticeships. The study investigates how minstrels fared economically and socially, recognizing the diversity within this body of musicians in the Middle Ages from itinerant outcasts to wealthy and respected town musicians.
Musical Stages: An Autobiography
by Richard RodgersRichard Rodgers was one of the most successful, prolific composers of the last century. His songs are as well known today as when he created them more than 50 years ago, for musicals such as South Pacific, Pal Joey, Carousel, the King and I, The Sound of Music and Oklahoma! At 16 he began a long working relationship with the brilliant but tormented lyricist Lorenz hart and then went on to collaborate for another 20 years with the sturdier and equally inspired Oscar Hammerstein II. Late in his extraordinary life, Rodgers wrote what has sine become a celebrated autobiography and a classic of the theatre world, Musical Stages.
Musical Stimulacra: Literary Narrative and the Urge to Listen (Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature)
by Ivan DelazariThe title coinage of this book, stimulacra, refers to the fundamental capacity of literary narrative to stimulate our minds and senses by simulating things through words. Musical stimulacra are passages of fiction that readers are empowered to transpose into mental simulations of music. The book theorizes how fiction can generate musical experience, explains what constitutes that experience, and explores the musical dimensions of three American novels: William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central (2005), William H. Gass’s Middle C (2013), and Richard Powers’s Orfeo (2014). Musical Stimulacra approaches fiction’s music from a readerly perspective. Instead of looking at how novels forever fail to compensate for music’s physical, structural, and affective properties, the book concentrates on what literary narrative can do musically. Negotiating common grounds for cognitive audionarratology and intermediality studies, Musical Stimulacra builds its case on the assumption that, among other things, fiction urges us to listen—to musical words and worlds.
Musical Structure and Design
by Cedric T. DavieCedric Thorpe Davie is himself a noted composer, and musical forms are as familiar to him as armatures are to the sculptor. As a result, he is able not only to describe them clearly, but also to evaluate their qualities and to point out their truly characteristic fundamentals. It is his discussions of such core questions as: What is the true basis of sonata form? And What are the qualities of a successful form that make for convincing music? that cause his book to be the unusually interesting and lively study that it is.The text defines and describes the forms commonly used by Western composers in the period between 1550 and 1900. These are the binary and ternary forms, including the de capo aria, minuet-and-trio, and rondo; the sonata form; the forms in the concerto; variation forms -- including ground bass, passacaglia, and chaconne; and the contrapuntal forms, notably the fugue and canon. Each form is illustrated with a detailed analysis of a specific piece or movement, usually from the work of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven, but often from Purcell, Brahms, Dvorak, or other composers. The student is also referred to a list of compositions in the same form for further study.Experienced musicians, both professional and amateur, and students will find the author's thoughtful, well-written discussions of the controversial aspects of formal analysis extremely perceptive and stimulating. Beginning music lovers, even those with little or no training in music, will come away from a thorough reading of the book with a good knowledge of each important musical form, and with a greatly increased insight into the way music is organized.
Musical Style and Social Meaning: Selected Essays (Ashgate Contemporary Thinkers On Critical Musicology Ser.)
by DerekB. ScottWhy do we feel justified in using adjectives such as romantic, erotic, heroic, melancholic, and a hundred others when speaking about music? How do we locate these meanings within particular musical styles? These are questions that have occupied Derek Scott's thoughts and driven his critical musicological research for many years. In this selection of essays, dating from 1995-2010, he returns time and again to examining how conventions of representation arise and how they become established. Among the themes of the collection are social class, ideology, national identity, imperialism, Orientalism, race, the sacred and profane, modernity and postmodernity, and the vexed relationship of art and entertainment. A wide variety of musical styles is discussed, ranging from jazz and popular song to the symphonic repertoire and opera.
Musical Theater: An Appreciation (2nd Edition)
by Alyson McLamore<p>Musical Theater: An Appreciation, Second Edition offers a history of musical theater from its operating origins to the Broadway shows of today, combined with an in-depth study of the musical styles that paralleled changes on stage. Alyson McLamore teaches readers how to listen to both the words and the music of the stage musical, enabling them to understand how all the components of a show interact to create a compelling experience for audiences. <p>This second edition has been updated with new chapters covering recent developments in the twenty-first century, while insights from recent scholarship on musical theater have been incorporated throughout the text. The musical examples discussed in the text now include detailed listening guides, while a new companion website includes plot summaries and links to audio of the musical examples. <p>From Don Giovanni to Hamilton, Musical Theater: An Appreciation both explores the history of musical theater and develops a deep appreciation of the musical elements at the heart of this unique art form.</p>
Musical Theatre: A History
by John KenrickMusical Theatre: A History is a new revised edition of a proven core text for college and secondary school students – and an insightful and accessible celebration of twenty-five centuries of great theatrical entertainment. <p><p> As an educator with extensive experience in professional theatre production, author John Kenrick approaches the subject with a unique appreciation of musicals as both an art form and a business. Using anecdotes, biographical profiles, clear definitions, sample scenes and select illustrations, Kenrick focuses on landmark musicals, and on the extraordinary talents and business innovators who have helped musical theatre evolve from its roots in the dramas of ancient Athens all the way to the latest hits on Broadway and London's West End. <p> Key improvements to the second edition: <p> · A new foreword by Oscar Hammerstein III, a critically acclaimed historian and member of a family with deep ties to the musical theatre, is included <p> · The 28 chapters are reformatted for the typical 14 week, 28 session academic course, as well as for a two semester, once-weekly format, making it easy for educators to plan a syllabus and reading assignments. <p> · To make the book more interactive, each chapter includes suggested listening and reading lists, designed to help readers step beyond the printed page to experience great musicals and performers for themselves. <p> A comprehensive guide to musical theatre as an international phenomenon, Musical Theatre: A History is an ideal textbook for university and secondary school students.
Musical Theatre Education and Training in the 21st Century
by Scott D. Harrison Jessica O'BryanMusical Theatre Education and Training in the 21st Century presents a wide range of viewpoints on the musical theatre profession. It brings together research from the UK, US, Australia, and beyond, providing an essential resource for educators, students, and all those involved in training for musical theatre. The research draws on best practice from creatives, producers, practising artists, and the academy to reveal a multiplicity of approaches and educational pathways for consideration by performers, educators, institutions, and the profession.The book goes beyond the key elements of performance training in singing, dancing, and acting to explore adjacent creative and business skills, along with some of the more recent and challenging aspects of the profession such as diversity of representation both on and off stage, building safe working environments, and managing mental and physical health and wellbeing. The authors incorporate information from over 100 interviews with everyone from emerging performers to leading professionals, and explore the practicalities of pre-professional training, skills development, and curricular design, alongside the broader attributes required in preparation for the profession. This book offers vital insights into how musical theatre practitioners can best be prepared to make their way in the field now and in the future.
Musical Theatre For Dummies
by Seth RudetskyDiscover what goes on behind the curtains of your favorite musical Have you ever dreamed of being in a Broadway musical, or even just to be in the ensemble in your local community theatre? In Musical Theater For Dummies, Broadway insider and host of Sirus/XM Radio’s ON BROADWAY channel Seth Rudetsky takes you backstage and shows you what it takes to create a spectacular production. You’ll get the behind-the-curtain view of how your favorite on- and off-Broadway shows are made, plus get expert advice on how to launch your own career under the bright lights. If you’re new to musical theater, this book will initiate you into the world of musicals by sharing the stories and lingo that defines this fascinating world. This unique book shares insights into what makes musical theatre tick and how you can enjoy a show from your seat in the audience or from the stage itself. Learn the history of musical theater and discover the shows born on Broadway or the West End that became cultural phenomena Trace the development of productions, from the idea stage all the way through opening night and beyond Enjoy theater productions more, thanks to deep insights into how theater is made Get insider advice on the skills you need to perform in professional or amateur musical theater productions Real-life anecdotes and excellent show recommendations will entertain and delight you as you become a musical theater know-it-all, with Dummies.
Musical Theatre for the Female Voice: The Sensation, Sound, and Science, of Singing
by Shaun AquilinaFemale musical theatre singers produce some of the most exciting and expressive singing an audience can experience. They also face a unique and specific set of issues when approaching their craft, from negotiating the registers of their voice to enable them to belt, to vocal health challenges such as premenstrual voice syndrome. This is the only book that offers a full and detailed guide to tackling those issues and to singing with full expression and technical excellence. Musical Theatre for the Female Voice covers the origin of singing in musicals, from the bel canto style of 300 years ago through to the latest developments in high belting, in shows such as Wicked and Waitress. It offers the reader exercises and methods that have been used to train hundreds of singers at some of the UK’s leading musical theatre training institutions and are underpinned by the latest academic research in journals on singing, psychology, and health. Every element of a singer's toolkit is covered from a female perspective, from breath and posture to character work and vocal health. This is an essential guidebook for female singers in musical theatre productions, either training at university or conservatory level or forging a career as professional triple-threat performers.
Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment (Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera)
by Millie TaylorWhat is it about musical theatre that audiences find entertaining? What are the features that lead to its ability to stimulate emotional attachment, to move and to give pleasure? Beginning from the passion musical theatre performances arouse and their ubiquity in London's West End and on Broadway this book explores the ways in which musical theatre reaches out to and involves its audiences. It investigates how pleasure is stimulated by vocal, musical and spectacular performances. Early discussions centre on the construction of the composed text, but then attention is given to performance and audience response. Musical theatre contains disruptions and dissonances in its multiple texts, it allows gaps for audiences to read playfully. This combines with the voluptuous sensations of embodied emotion, contagiously and viscerally shared between audience and stage, and augmented through the presence of voice and music. A number of features are discovered in the construction of musical theatre performance texts that allow them to engage the intense emotional attachment of their audiences and so achieve enormous popularity. In doing this, the book challenges the conception of musical theatre as 'only entertainment'. Entertainment instead becomes a desirable, ephemeral and playful concept.
Musical Theory in the Renaissance
by Cristle Collins JuddThis volume of essays draws together recent work on historical music theory of the Renaissance. The collection spans the major themes addressed by Renaissance writers on music and highlights the differing approaches to this body of work by modern scholars, including: historical and theoretical perspectives; consideration of the broader cultural context for writing about music in the Renaissance; and the dissemination of such work. Selected from a variety of sources ranging from journals, monographs and specialist edited volumes, to critical editions, translations and facsimiles, these previously published articles reflect a broad chronological and geographical span, and consider Renaissance sources that range from the overtly pedagogical to the highly speculative. Taken together, this collection enables consideration of key essays side by side aided by the editor‘s introductory essay which highlights ongoing debates and offers a general framework for interpreting past and future directions in the study of historical music theory from the Renaissance.
The Musical Thought and Spiritual Lives of Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg (Ashgate Studies in Theory and Analysis of Music After 1900)
by Matthew ArndtThis book examines the origin, content, and development of the musical thought of Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg. One of the premises is that Schenker’s and Schoenberg’s inner musical lives are inseparable from their inner spiritual lives. Curiously, Schenker and Schoenberg start out in much the same musical-spiritual place, yet musically they split while spiritually they grow closer. The reception of Schenker’s and Schoenberg’s work has sidestepped this paradox of commonality and conflict, instead choosing to universalize and amplify their conflict. Bringing to light a trove of unpublished material, Arndt argues that Schenker’s and Schoenberg’s conflict is a reflection of tensions within their musical and spiritual ideas. They share a particular conception of the tone as an ideal sound realized in the spiritual eye of the genius. The tensions inherent in this largely psychological and material notion of the tone and this largely metaphysical notion of the genius shape both their musical divergence on the logical (technical) level in theory and composition, including their advocacy of the Ursatz versus twelvetone composition, and their spiritual convergence, including their embrace of Judaism. These findings shed new light on the musical and philosophical worlds of Schenker and Schoenberg and on the profound artistic and spiritual questions with which they grapple.
Musical Topics and Musical Performance (Routledge Research in Music)
by Julian HellabyThe principal purpose of topics in musicology has been to identify meaning-bearing units within a musical composition that would have been understood by contemporary audiences and therefore also by later receivers, albeit in a different context and with a need for historically aware listening. Since Leonard Ratner (1980) introduced the idea of topics, his relatively simple ideas have been expanded and developed by a number of distinguished authors. Topic theory has now become a well-established branch of musicology, often embracing semiotics, but its relationship to performance has received less attention. Musical Topics and Musical Performance thus focuses on the interface of theory and practice, and investigates how an appreciation of topical presence in a work may prompt interpretative thoughts for a potential performer as well as how performers have responded to such a presence in practice. The chapters focus on music from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries with case studies drawn from composers as diverse as Beethoven, Scriabin and Péter Eötvös. Using both scores and recordings, the book presents a variety of original and innovative perspectives on the subject from a range of distinguished authors, and addresses a neglected area of musicology and musical performance.