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A Changing Role for the Composer in Society
Music is unique among the arts in its ability to bring large numbers of people together in a communal creative activity transcending social, cultural and linguistic boundaries. This book looks at many examples of composers working in schools, community centres, hospitals and other situations which are not traditional contexts for music. Examples are taken from the United Kingdom as well as from projects from other places in Europe which participated in the EU-funded 'Rainbow across Europe' programme. This study examines the development over the past hundred years of what has come to be known as creative music-making, and traces its spread in other parts of Europe and beyond. It also shows how the composer's role has developed from the nineteenth-century Romantic view of a heroic figure expressing his own inner emotional life in music, towards a more socially conscious inspirational catalyst whose role is to stimulate musical creativity in others.
First Instruments
Written for music educators from K - 5 onwards, First Instruments is a practical guide to teaching musical ideas through the first instruments we develop in early childhood, laying the foundation for how the collective creativity the book presents can sustain a lifelong commitment to music-making: voice and hand gestures. Founded on the belief that all children are musical, the book gives music teachers the necessary tools to develop students' confident understanding of pitch relationships through improvisation and composition. Author Nicholas Bannan, a veteran pedagogue and children's choir director, accomplishes this in a classroom-tested system that combines Kod ly hand signs with extende...
Composing Ambiguity: The Early Music of Morton Feldman
American composer Morton Feldman is increasingly seen to have been one of the key figures in late-twentieth-century music, with his work exerting a powerful influence into the twenty-first century. At the same time, much about his music remains enigmatic, largely due to long-standing myths about supposedly intuitive or aleatoric working practices. In Composing Ambiguity, Alistair Noble reveals key aspects of Feldman's musical language as it developed during a crucial period in the early 1950s. Drawing models from primary sources, including Feldman's musical sketches, he shows that Feldman worked deliberately within a two-dimensional frame, allowing a focus upon the fundamental materials of s...
The Graph Music of Morton Feldman
David Cline provides a detailed analysis of Morton Feldman's graph works and how they changed the course of post-war music.
Musical Models of Democracy
Music's role in animating democracy--whether through protests and demonstrations, as a vehicle for political identity, or as a means of overcoming social divides--is well understood. Yet musicians have also been drawn to the potential of embodying democracy itself through musical processes and relationships. In this book, author Robert Adlington uses modern democratic theory to explore what he terms the 'musical modelling of democracy' as manifested in modern and experimental music of the global North. Throughout the book, Adlington demonstrates how composers and musicians have taken strikingly different approaches to this kind of musical modelling. For some, democratic principles inform the...
The Hills of Rome
Rome is 'the city of seven hills'. This book examines the need for the 'seven hills' cliché, its origins, development, impact and borrowing. It explores how the cliché relates to Rome's real volcanic terrain and how it is fundamental to how we define this. Its chronological remit is capacious: Varro, Virgil and Claudian at one end, on, through the work of Renaissance antiquarians, to embrace frescoes and nineteenth-century engravings. These artists and authors celebrated the hills and the views from these hills, in an attempt to capture Rome holistically. By studying their efforts, this book confronts the problems of encapsulating Rome and 'cityness' more broadly and indeed the artificiality of any representation, whether a painting, poem or map. In this sense, it is not a history of the city at any one moment in time, but a history of how the city has been, and has to be, perceived.
Musical Semantics
Music offers a new insight into human cognition. The musical play with sounds in time, in which we share feelings, gestures and narratives, has fascinated people from all times and cultures. The author studies this semiotic behavior in the light of research from a number of sources. Being an analytical study, the volume combines evidence from neurobiology, developmental psychology and cognitive science. It aims to bridge the gap between music as an empirical object in the world and music as lived experience. This is the semantic aspect of music: how can something like an auditory stream of structured sound evoke such a strong reaction in the listener? The book is in two parts. In the first part, the biological foundations of music and their cognitive manifestations are considered in order to establish a groundwork for speaking of music in generic, cross-cultural terms. The second part develops the semantic aspect of music as an embodied, emotively grounded and cognitively structured expression of human experience.
Morton Feldman Says
Alongside John Cage and Edgar Varese, Morton Feldman is regarded by many as one of the foremost American composers of the 20th century. Evidence of his lifelong passion for music can be found in the numerous interviews and lectures he gave about his life and work. But despite his reputation and creative output, very little has been published on this charismatic figure. In Morton Feldman Says, editor Chris Villars has collected two decades of interviews, many available here for the first time, illustrating Feldman's creative process and his wide range of cultural interests and references, especially to visual art. Morton Feldman Says contains the first English translation of Sebastian Claren's biographical notes as well as conversations with Gavin Bryars, Kevin Volans and Walter Zimmermann. There are also transcriptions of two of Feldman's lectures, held in Toronto (1982) and Johannesburg (1983).
The Legacy of Cornelius Cardew
Cornelius Cardew is an enigma. Depending on which sources one consults he is either an influential and iconic figure of British musical culture or a marginal curiosity, a footnote to a misguided musical phenomenon. He is both praised for his uncompromising commitment to world-changing politics, and mocked for being blindly caught up in a maelstrom of naïve political folly. His works are both widely lauded as landmark achievements of the British avant-garde and ridiculed as an archaic and irrelevant footnote to the established musical culture. Even the events of his death are shrouded in mystery and lack a sense of closure. As long ago as 1967, Morton Feldman cited Cardew as an influential f...
