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Details of Consequence examines a trait that is rarely questioned in fin-de-siècle French music: ornamental extravagance. In re-evaluating the status of ornament for French culture, this book investigates how musical and visual expressions of decorative detail shaped widespread discussions on identity, style, and aesthetics.
Debussy himself had little regard for Clair de Lune, and scholars have thus far followed suit--until now. Claude Debussy's Clair de Lune is the first book wholly dedicated to an historical, cultural, and analytical investigation of the French composer's famous composition for piano. Author Gurminder Kaur Bhogal explores why, over any other piece in Debussy's repertoire for piano, Clair de Lune achieved stardom in the decades following the composer's death, and how, as the third movement of the Suite Bergamasque, it managed to almost fully eclipse the other movements. Drawing on a broad range of excerpts from classical and popular music, commercials, film, and video games, Bhogal examines the various ways in which listeners have engaged with the piece. She also places it in its proper artistic context, through analysis alongside the poetry of Paul Verlaine and the paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau. A wide range of aural, visual, and video examples energize the narrative, and demonstrate how Clair de Lune has come to achieve an iconic status within and beyond Debussy's oeuvre.
Featuring multidisciplinary research by an international team of leading scholars, this volume addresses the contested aspects of arabesque while exploring its penchant for crossing artistic and cultural boundaries to create new forms. Enthusiastically imported from its Near Eastern sources by European artists, the freely flowing line known as arabesque is a recognizable motif across the arts of painting, music, dance, and literature. From the German Romantics to the Art Nouveau artists, and from Debussy's compositions to the serpentine choreographies of Loïe Fuller, the chapters in this volume bring together cross-disciplinary perspectives to understand the arabesque across both art historical and musicological discourses.
A fresh perspective on the Ballets Russes, focusing on relations between music, dance and the cultural politics of belle-époque Paris.
As a coherent field of research, the field of music and visual culture has seen rapid growth in recent years. The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture serves as the first comprehensive reference on the intersection between these two areas of study, an ideal introduction for those coming to the field for the first time as well as a useful source of information for seasoned researchers. This collection of over forty entries, from musicologists and art historians from the US and UK, delineate the key concepts in the field in five parts: Starting Points Methodologies Reciprocation – the musical in visual culture and the visual in musical culture Convergence –in metaphor, in concep...
Female characters assumed increasing prominence in the narrative of 19th and early 20th century opera. This book shines a light on the singers who created and inhabited these roles, the flesh-and-blood women who embodied these fabled doomed women onstage before an audience.
Brian Eno's seminal album Ambient 1: Music for Airports continues to fascinate and charm audiences, not only as a masterpiece of ambient music, but as a powerful and transformative work of art. Author John T. Lysaker situates this album in the context of twentieth-century art music, where its ambitions and contributions to avant garde music practice become even more apparent. To appreciate the album's multifaceted character, Lysaker advocates for "prismatic listening," an attentiveness that continually shifts registers in the knowledge that no single approach can grasp the work as a whole. Exploring each of the album's four tracks and their unique sonic arrangements, Brian Eno's Ambient 1: M...
Opera for the People is an in-depth examination of a forgotten chapter in American social and cultural history: the love affair that middle-class Americans had with continental opera (translated into English) in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Author Katherine Preston reveals how-contrary to the existing historiography on the American musical culture of this period-English-language opera not only flourished in the United States during this time, but found its success significantly bolstered by the support of women impresarios, prima-donnas, managers, and philanthropists who provided financial backing to opera companies. This rich and compelling study details the lives and professional activitie...
Censorship had an extraordinary impact on Alban Berg's opera Lulu, composed by the Austrian during the politically tumultuous years spanning 1929 to 1935. Based on two plays by Frank Wedekind that were repeatedly banned from publishing and performing up until the end of World War I, thelibretto was in turn censored by Berg himself when he submitted it to authorities in Nazi Germany in 1934. When Berg died before the opera was debuted the next season, the third act was censored by his widow, Helene, and his former teacher, Arnold Schoenberg.In "Taken By the Devil", author Margaret Notley uncovers the unusual and uniquely generative role of censorship throughout the lifecycle of Berg's great o...
This book shows how recent work in cognitive science, especially that developed by cognitive linguists and cognitive psychologists, can be used to explain how we understand music. The book focuses on three cognitive processes--categorization, cross-domain mapping, and the use of conceptual models--and explores the part these play in theories of musical organization. The first part of the book provides a detailed overview of the relevant work in cognitive science, framed around specific musical examples. The second part brings this perspective to bear on a number of issues with which music scholarship has often been occupied, including the emergence of musical syntax and its relationship to musical semiosis, the problem of musical ontology, the relationship between words and music in songs, and conceptions of musical form and musical hierarchy. The book will be of interest to music theorists, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists, as well as those with a professional or avocational interest in the application of work in cognitive science to humanistic principles.