You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
How do musical analysis and performance relate? In a unique collaborative approach to this question, theorist-pianist Daphne Leong partners with internationally renowned performers to interpret twentieth-century repertoire. Imaginative explorations of music by Ravel, Schoenberg, Bartók, Schnittke, Milhaud, Messiaen, Babbitt, Carter, and Morris illuminate focal issues such as the role of embodiment, the affordances of a score, the cultural understanding of notation, the use of metaphor, and--to round out the viewpoints of theorist and performers with those of composer and listeners--the role of structure in audience reception. Each exploration engages deeply with musical structure, redefined...
Performing Knowledge explores the relationship between musical performance and analysis through a unique collaboration between a music theorist and a cast of internationally renowned performers, investigating major musical works of the twentieth century--Ravel, Schoenberg, Bartók, Schnittke, Milhaud, Messiaen, Babbitt, Carter, and Morris. The book is a brave crossing of disciplinary divides between scholarship and practice, a theory text enlivened by the voices of performers who create, interpret, and articulate structure.
Theorizing Music Evolution is a critical examination of ideas about musical origins, with emphasis on nineteenth-century music-evolutionary texts by Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. In a ground-breaking contribution to music theory and histories of science, author Miriam Piilonen argues for the significance of this Victorian music-evolutionism in lights of its ties to a recently revitalized subfield of evolutionary musicology.
Overturning the inherited belief that popular music is unrefined, Form as Harmony in Rock Music brings the process-based approach of classical theorists to popular music scholarship. Author Drew Nobile offers the first comprehensive theory of form for 1960s, 70s, and 80s classic rock repertoire, showing how songs in this genre are not simply a series of discrete elements, but rather exhibit cohesive formal-harmonic structures across their entire timespan. Though many elements contribute to the cohesion of a song, the rock music of these decades is built around a fundamentally harmonic backdrop, giving rise to distinct types of verses, choruses, and bridges. Nobile's rigorous but readable theoretical analysis demonstrates how artists from Bob Dylan to Stevie Wonder to Madonna consistently turn to the same compositional structures throughout rock's various genres and decades, unifying them under a single musical style. Using over 200 transcriptions, graphs, and form charts, Form as Harmony in Rock Music advocates a structural approach to rock analysis, revealing essential features of this style that would otherwise remain below our conscious awareness.
Why do most musical performers and musical researchers continue to inhabit divergent epistemic spaces? To what extent is the act of musical performance coextensive with the act of doing musical research, and vice versa? At what point in the research process can a performative act transform into a scholarly one, and a scholarly act into a performative one? These, and other related questions, form the central focus of this book, with each chapter offering a fresh perspective on a particular topic in music performance studies: improvisational traditions, historical performance practices, analysis and performance, sports psychology, cross-cultural musical interactions, and institutional challeng...
Exploring Musical Spaces is a comprehensive synthesis of mathematical techniques in music theory, written with the aim of making these techniques accessible to music scholars without extensive prior training in mathematics. The book adopts a visual orientation, introducing from the outset a number of simple geometric models--the first examples of the musical spaces of the book's title--depicting relationships among musical entities of various kinds such as notes, chords, scales, or rhythmic values. These spaces take many forms and become a unifying thread in initiating readers into several areas of active recent scholarship, including transformation theory, neo-Riemannian theory, geometric m...
At the centre of Bartók's œuvre are his string quartets, which are generally acknowledged as some of the most significant pieces of 20th century chamber music. This book examines these remarkable works from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives.
French composer Maurice Ravel was described by critics as a magician, conjurer, and illusionist. Scholars have been aware of this historical curiosity, but none so far have explained why Ravel attracted such critiques or what they might tell us about how to interpret his music. Magician of Sound examines Ravel's music through the lens of illusory experience, considering how timbre, orchestral effects, figure/ground relationships, and impressions of motion and stasis might be experienced as if they were conjuring tricks. Applying concepts from music theory, psychology, philosophy, and the history of magic, Jessie Fillerup develops an approach to musical illusion that newly illuminates Ravel's...
This book explores the intimate connection between body and instrument in popular music, explaining chords, melodies, riffs, and grooves in terms of embodied movement, which in turn informs the imagination in constructing meaning in songs. Tracing connections from foundational blues, gospel, and rock musicians to current rap artists, author Timothy Koozin demonstrates how a focus on body-instrument interaction can illuminate creative strategies while leveling implied hierarchies of cultural value, revealing how artists represent subjectivities of gender, race, and social class in shaping songs and whole albums.