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An insightful look at how avant-garde musicians of the postwar period in New York explored the philosophical dimensions of music’s ineffability. The Musician as Philosopher explores the philosophical thought of avant-garde musicians in postwar New York: David Tudor, Ornette Coleman, the Velvet Underground, Alice Coltrane, Patti Smith, and Richard Hell. It contends that these musicians—all of whom are understudied and none of whom are traditionally taken to be composers—not only challenged the rules by which music is written and practiced but also confounded and reconfigured gendered and racialized expectations for what critics took to be legitimate forms of musical sound. From a broad historical perspective, their arresting music electrified a widely recognized social tendency of the 1960s: a simultaneous affirmation and crisis of the modern self.
Timing the Future Metropolis—an intellectual history of planning, urbanism, design, and social science—explores the network of postwar institutions, formed amid specters of urban "crisis" and "renewal," that set out to envision the future of the American city. Peter Ekman focuses on one decisive node in the network: the Joint Center for Urban Studies, founded in 1959 by scholars at Harvard and MIT. Through its sprawling programs of "organized research," its manifold connections to universities, foundations, publishers, and policymakers, and its years of consultation on the planning of a new city in Venezuela—Ciudad Guayana—the Joint Center became preoccupied with the question of how to conceptualize the urban future as an object of knowledge. Timing the Future Metropolis ultimately compels a broader reflection on temporality in urban planning, rethinking how we might imagine cities yet to come—and the consequences of deciding not to.
Offers fresh perspectives on the life and pioneering musical activities of American composer and folk music activist Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-53). This book presents a collection of studies that reveals how innovation and tradition intertwined in surprising ways to shape the cultural landscape of twentieth-century America.
The first comprehensive study of musical Holocaust representations in the Western tradition to examine both musical language and cultural value.
Queering the Popular Pitch is a new collection of 19 essays that situate queering within the discourse of sex and sexuality in relation to popular music. This investigation addresses the changing debates within gay, lesbian and queer discourse in relation to the dissemination of musical texts -performance, cultural production and sexual meaning - situating music within the broader patterns of culture that it both mirrors and actively reproduces. The collection is divided into four parts: queering borders queer spaces hidden histories queer thoughts, mixed media. Queering the Popular Pitch will appeal to students of popular music, Gay and Lesbian studies. With case studies and essays by leading popular music scholars it provides insightful discourse in a growing field of musicological research.
Since the 1990s, migrant musicians have become increasingly prominent in New York City's jazz scene. Challenging norms about who can be a jazz musician and what immigrant music should sound like, these musicians create mobile and diverse notions of jazz while inadvertently contributing to processes of gentrification and cultural institutionalization. In Jazz Migrations, author Ofer Gazit discusses the impact of contemporary transnational migration on New York jazz, examining its effects on educational institutions, club scenes, and jam sessions. Drawing on four years of musical participation in the scene, as well as interviews with musicians, audience members, venue owners, industry professi...
Memory and Commemoration across Central Asia: Texts, Traditions and Practices, 10th-21st Centuries is a collection of fourteen studies by a group of scholars active in the field of Central Asian Studies, presenting new research into various aspects of the rich cultural heritage of Central Asia (including Afghanistan). By mapping and exploring the interaction between political, ideological, literary and artistic production in Central Asia, the contributors offer a wide range of perspectives on the practice and usage of historical and religious commemoration in different contexts and timeframes. Making use of different approaches – historical, literary, anthropological, or critical heritage studies, the contributors show how memory functions as a fundamental constituent of identity formation in both past and present, and how this has informed perceptions in and outside Central Asia today.
During the 1960s and 70s some ethnomusicologists formed relationships with music-makers and ritual specialists in an attempt to interpret how they understood their musical actions. Subsequently ethnomusicologists have studied the respects in which explicit and implicit theory is involved in communication of musical knowledge. They have observed the production of music theory in institutions of modern nation-states and have sought out groups and individuals whose theorizing is not constrained by existing institutions. They are assessing the extent to which musical terminologies of diverse languages can be interpreted in relation to general concepts without imposing the assumptions and biases of one body of existing theory. That exercise is increasingly recognized as a necessary effort of decolonization. A thorough yet concise introduction to this field, Music Theory in Ethnomusicology outlines a conception of music theory suited to cross-cultural research on musical practices.
Extreme Exoticism explores the role of music in shaping American perceptions of the Japanese, the influence of Japanese music on American composers, and the place of Japanese Americans in American musical life over the past 150 years.
At a time of both rising anti-Semitism and burgeoning Jewish nationalism, how and why did Russian music become the gateway to Jewish modernity in music? Loeffler offers a new perspective on the emergence of Russian Jewish culture and identity.