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Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction
"Arved Ashby writes with a keen sense of the historical processes, ironies, and reversals that seem to characterize the ways that musicologists think about, and contemporary listeners experience, works and performance. This book is a major contribution to the burgeoning body of critical musicological literature on recordings; anybody interested in that field, or in the question of the 'artwork' in the contemporary world, needs to read this book--which fortunately, is a great pleasure to do."--Adam Krims, author of Music and Urban Geography "The relationship between classical music and recording is strangely conflicted: on the one hand recorded music is the perfect realization of aesthetic au...
Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction
Recordings are now the primary way we hear classical music, especially the more abstract styles of "absolute" instrumental music. In this original, provocative book, Arved Ashby argues that recording technology has transformed our understanding of art music. Contesting the laments of nostalgic critics, Ashby sees recordings as socially progressive and instruments of a musical vernacular, but also finds that recording and absolute music actually involve similar notions of removing sound from context. He takes stock of technology's impact on classical music, addressing the questions at the heart of the issue. This erudite yet concise study reveals how mechanical reproduction has transformed classical musical culture and the very act of listening, breaking down aesthetic and generational barriers and mixing classical music into the soundtrack of everyday life.
The Pleasure of Modernist Music
The debate over modernist music has continued for almost a century: from Berg's Wozzeck and Webern's Symphony Op.21 to John Cage's renegotiation of musical control, the unusual musical practices of the Velvet Underground, and Stanley Kubrick's use of Ligeti's Lux Aeterna in the epic film 2001. The composers discussed in these pages -- including Bartók, Stockhausen, Bernard Herrmann, Steve Reich, and many others -- are modernists in that they are defined by their individualism, whether covert or overt, and share a basic urge toward redesigning musical discourse. The aim of this volume is to negotiate a varied and open middle ground between polemical extremes of reception. The contributors sk...
Experiencing Mahler
Experiencing Mahler surveys the symphonies and major song sets of Gustav Mahler, presenting them not just as artworks but as vivid and deeply felt journeys. Mahler took the symphony, perhaps the most tradition-bound genre in Western music, and opened it to the widest span of human experience. He introduced themes of love, nature, the chasmic depth of midnight, making peace with death, facing rebirth, seeking one’s creator, and being at one with God. Arved Ashby offers the non-specialist a general introduction into Mahler’s seemingly unbounded energy to investigate the elements that make each work an experiential adventure—one that has redefined the symphonic genre in new ways. In addition to the standard nine symphonies, Ashby discusses Das Lied von der Erde, the three most commonly heard song sets (the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Kindertotenlieder, and Rückert-Lieder), and the unfinished Tenth Symphony (in Cooke’s edition). Experiencing Mahler is a far-reaching and often provocative search for meaning in the music of one of the most beloved composers of all time.
The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Opera
This Companion celebrates the extraordinary riches of the twentieth-century operatic repertoire in a collection of specially commissioned essays written by a distinguished team of academics, critics and practitioners. Beginning with a discussion of the century's vital inheritance from late-romantic operatic traditions in Germany and Italy, the text embraces fresh investigations into various aspects of the genre in the modern age, with a comprehensive coverage of the work of individual composers from Debussy and Schoenberg to John Adams and Harrison Birtwistle. Traditional stylistic categorizations (including symbolism, expressionism, neo-classicism and minimalism) are reassessed from new critical perspectives, and the distinctive operatic traditions of Continental and Eastern Europe, Russia and the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and United States are subjected to fresh scrutiny. The volume includes essays devoted to avant-garde music theatre, operettas and musicals, filmed opera, and ends with a discussion of the position of the genre in today's cultural marketplace.
A Companion to Wong Kar-wai
With 25 essays that embrace a wide spectrum of topics and perspectives including intertextuality, transnationality, gender representation, repetition, the use of music, color, and sound, depiction of time and space in human affairs, and Wong’s highly original portrayal of violence, A Companion to Wong Kar-Wai is a singular examination of the prestigious filmmaker known around the world for the innovation, beauty, and passion he brings to filmmaking. Brings together the most cutting edge, in-depth, and interesting scholarship on arguably the greatest living Asian filmmaker, from a multinational group of established and rising film scholars and critics Covers a huge breadth of topics such as...
The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music
This collection of essays offers a historical reappraisal of what musical modernism was, and what its potential for the present and future could be. It thus moves away from the binary oppositions that have beset twentieth-century music studies in the past, such as those between modernism and postmodernism, between conceptions of musical autonomy and of cultural contingency and between formalist-analytical and cultural-historical approaches. Focussing particularly on music from the 1970s to the 1990s, the volume assembles approaches from different perspectives to new music with a particular emphasis on a critical reassessment of the meaning and function of the legacy of musical modernism. The authors include scholars, musicologists and composers who combine culturally, socially, historically and aesthetically oriented approaches with analytical methods in imaginative ways.
Twentieth Century Music and the Question of Modernity
This book analyzes the history of contemporary or 'new' music in the twentieth-century through the lens of the sociology of modern culture, linking the paradoxical aspects of twentieth-century music to the central processes in modern culture that are analyzed by sociology and social theory.
Early Sound Recordings
The use of historical recordings as primary sources is relatively well established in both musicology and performance studies and has demonstrated how early recording technologies transformed the ways in which musicians and audiences engaged with music. This edited volume offers a timely snapshot of a wide range of contemporary research in the area of performance practice and performance histories, inviting readers to consider the wide range of research methods that are used in this ever-expanding area of scholarship. The volume brings together a diverse team of researchers who all use early recordings as their primary source to research performance in its broadest sense in a wide range of r...
The Music Sound
A guide for music: compositions, events, forms, genres, groups, history, industry, instruments, language, live music, musicians, songs, musicology, techniques, terminology , theory, music video. Music is a human activity which involves structured and audible sounds, which is used for artistic or aesthetic, entertainment, or ceremonial purposes. The traditional or classical European aspects of music often listed are those elements given primacy in European-influenced classical music: melody, harmony, rhythm, tone color/timbre, and form. A more comprehensive list is given by stating the aspects of sound: pitch, timbre, loudness, and duration. Common terms used to discuss particular pieces include melody, which is a succession of notes heard as some sort of unit; chord, which is a simultaneity of notes heard as some sort of unit; chord progression, which is a succession of chords (simultaneity succession); harmony, which is the relationship between two or more pitches; counterpoint, which is the simultaneity and organization of different melodies; and rhythm, which is the organization of the durational aspects of music.
