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In order to promote new ways of thinking about musical meaning, this volume brings together scholars in music theory, musicology, and the philosophy of music, disciplines generally treated as separate and distinct. This interdisciplinary collaboration, while respecting differences in perspective, identifies and elaborates shared concerns. This volume focuses on the many and various kinds of meaning in music. Do musical meanings exist exclusively in internal, formal musical relations or might they also be found in the relationship between music and other areas of experience, such as action, emotion, ideas, and values? Also discussed is the vexed question why people listen to and apparently enjoy music which expresses unpleasant emotions, such as melancholy or despair. Among the particular pieces the writers discuss are Mahler's Ninth Symphony, Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, and Schubert's last sonata. More broadly, they consider the relation of musical meaning and interpretation to language, storytelling, drama, imagination, metaphor, and emotion.
"Queer Ear brings together for the first time a collection of music theorists who issue queer challenges to both music theory and musicology. To queer musicology, which has often presumed that music theory has nothing valuable to contribute to queer music studies, we demonstrate how music theory can be appropriated for queer ends. We show that queerness is integral to our music-theoretical practice, and can change the field of music theory. Queers have always listened widely, repurposing straight sounds for the "queer ear," a concept which stands in contrast with queer soundings, by queer composers, who are also investigated in this volume. Privileging provisional, idiosyncratic, and nonnorm...
"In the 1990s, academic study of LGBTQ issues in relation to music centered on classical music, and the research topics and researchers were mostly white. The scope of the field has expanded greatly since then, with ongoing research on classical music, extensive work on white popular music, a growing literature on Black music, and recent initiatives in ethnomusicology. The term "queer" has risen as a welcome intention of inclusiveness, along with some complexity in its meanings. In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness, contributors choose their relationship to the term as it relates to their work within and without the academic community. Offering a decisive departure from a Western- a...
This book brings together a distinguished group of scholars from music, drama, poetry, performance art, religion, classics and philosophy to investigate the complex and developing interaction between performance and authenticity in the arts. The volume begins with a perspective on traditional understandings of that relation, examining the crucial role of performance in the Poetics, the marriage of art with religion, the experiences of religious and aesthetic authenticity, and modernist conceptions of authenticity. Several essays then consider music as a performative art. The final essays discuss the link of authenticity to sincerity and truth in poetry, explain how performance, as an authentic feature of poetry, embodies a collective effort, and culminate in a discussion of the dark side of performance - its constant susceptibility to inauthenticity. Together the essays suggest how issues of performance and authenticity enter into consideration of a wide range of the arts.
Rethinking Music reflects the ideas of 24 distinguished musicologists as they evaluate current thinking about music, its social and ethical dimensions and the relationship between academic study and direct musical experience.
Music, we are often told, is a language. But if music is a language, then who is speaking? The Composer's Voice tries to answer this obvious but infrequently raised question. In so doing, it puts forward a dramatistic theory of musical expression, based on the view that every composition is a symbolic utterance involving a fundamental act of impersonation. The voice we hear is not that of the composer himself, but of a persona--a musical projection of his consciousness that experiences and communicates the events of the composition. Developing his argument by reference to numerous examples ina wide variety of styles, Mr. Cone moves from song and opera through program music to absolute instru...
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...
Music/Ideology is a response to the question: Must the practice of music analysis and music theory always reinscribe the ideology of aesthetic autonomy? And, if not, under what circumstances does it reinscribe that ideology? The responses to these questions should appeal not only to music and cultural theorists, but also to a larger audience engaged in critical theory. These essays serve as an introduction to the broad array of issues arising from approaches that represent the full spectrum, from music-theoretical to marxist and feminist issues. Such questions are of vital importance, and not only to those who are engaged in establishing a connection among music theory, music analysis, and aesthetic ideology. Music/Ideology presents today's most interesting critical thinkers in postmodern theory and music theory, introducing an interdisciplinary approach and covering a wide range of subjects - both by implication and explication.
"Queer media is not one thing but an ensemble of at least four moving variables: history, gender and sexuality, geography, and medium. While many scholars would pinpoint the early 1990s as marking the emergence of a cinematic movement (dubbed by B. Ruby Rich, the "new queer cinema") in the United States, films and television programs that clearly spoke to LGBTQ themes and viewers existed at many different historical moments and in many different forms. Cross-dressing, same-sex attraction, comedic drag performance: at some points, for example in 1950s television, these were not undercurrents but very prominent aspects of mainstream cultural production. Addressing "history" not as dots on a pr...
Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off: Ambient Music's Psychedelic Past rethinks the history and socioaesthetics of ambient music as a popular genre with roots in the psychedelic countercultures of the late twentieth century. Victor Szabo reveals how anglophone audio producers and DJs between the mid-1960s and century's end commodified drone- and loop-based records as "ambient audio": slow, spare, spacious audio sold as artful personal media for creating atmosphere, fostering contemplation, transforming awareness, and stilling the body. The book takes a trip through landmark ambient audio productions and related discourses, including marketing rhetoric, artist manifestos and interviews, and music crit...