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Holly Rogers is Senior Lecturer in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London. Book jacket.
Transmedia Directors focuses on artist-practitioners who work across media, platforms and disciplines, including film, television, music video, commercials and the internet. Working in the age of media convergence, today's em/impresarios project a distinctive style that points toward a new contemporary aesthetics. The media they engage with enrich their practices – through film and television (with its potential for world-building and sense of the past and future), music video (with its audiovisual aesthetics and rhythm), commercials (with their ability to project a message quickly) and the internet (with its refreshed concepts of audience and participation), to larger forms like restaurants and amusement parks (with their materiality alongside today's digital aesthetics). These directors encourage us to reassess concepts of authorship, assemblage, transmedia, audiovisual aesthetics and world-building. Providing a vital resource for scholars and practitioners, this collection weaves together insights about artist-practitioners' collaborative processes as well as strategies for composition, representation, subversion and resistance.
This book approaches opera fantasias – instrumental works that use themes from a single opera as the body of their virtuosic and flamboyant material – both historically and theoretically, concentrating on compositions for and by woodwind-instrument performers in Italy in the nineteenth century. Important overlapping strands include the concept of virtuosity and its gradual demonization, the strong gendered overtones of individual woodwind instruments and of virtuosity, the distinct Italian context of these fantasias, the presentation and alteration of opera narratives in opera fantasias, and the technical and social development of woodwind instruments. Like opera itself, the opera fantasia is a popular art form, stylistically predictable yet formally flexible, based heavily on past operatic tradition and prefabricated materials. Through archival research in Italy, theoretical analysis, and exploration of European cultural contexts, this book clarifies a genre that has been consciously stifled and societal resonances that still impact music reception and performance today.
Music videos play a critical role in our age of ubiquitous streaming digital media. They project the personas and visions of musical artists; they stand at the cutting edge of developments in popular culture; and they fuse and revise multiple frames of reference, from dance to high fashion to cult movies and television shows to Internet memes. Above all, music videos are laboratories for experimenting with new forms of audiovisual expression. The Rhythm Image explores all these dimensions. The book analyzes, in depth, recent music videos for artists ranging from pop superstar The Weeknd to independent women artists like FKA twigs and Dawn Richard. The music videos discussed in this book all treat the traditional themes of popular music: sex and romance, money and fame, and the lived experiences of race and gender. But they twist these themes in strange and unexpected ways, in order to reflect our entanglement with a digital world of social media, data gathering, and 24/7 demands upon our attention.
Remediating Sound studies the phenomena of remixing, mashup and recomposition: forms of reuse and sampling that have come to characterise much of YouTube's audiovisual content. Through collaborative composition, collage and cover songs to reaction videos and political activism , users from diverse backgrounds have embraced the democratised space of YouTube to open up new and innovative forms of sonic creativity and push the boundaries of audiovisual possibilities. Observing the reciprocal flow of influence that runs between various online platforms, 12 chapters position YouTube as a central hub for the exploration of digital sound, music and the moving image. With special focus on aspects of networked creativity that remain overlooked in contemporary scholarship, including library music, memetic media, artificial intelligence, the sonic arts and music fandom, this volume offers interdisciplinary insight into contemporary audiovisual culture.
This book examines how popular music is able to approach subjects of bio-politics, climate change, solastalgia, and anthropomorphisation, alongside its more common diet of songs about love, dancing, and break-ups – all while satisfying its primary remit of being entertaining and listenable. Nearly a thousand books have been published on bioethics since Van Rensselaer Potter’s Bioethics Bridge to the Future (1971), with a marked increase in the past 20 years. However, not one of these books has focused itself on popular music, something Christopher Partridge describes as ‘central to the construction of [our] identities, central to [our] sense of self, central to [our] well-being and, therefore, central to [our] social relations’. This edited collection examines popular music through a range of topics, from romance to climate change. Coastal Environments in Popular Song is perfect for students, scholars, and researchers alike interested in bioethics, social history, and the history of music.
The first collection dedicated to David Bowie's acting career shows that his film characterisations and performance styles shift and reform as decoratively as his musical personas. Though he was described as the most influential pop artis of the 20th century, whose work became synonymous with mask, mystery, sexual excess and ch-ch-ch-changing genres, Bowie also applied his genius to the craft of acting. Bowie's considerable filmography is systematically examined in 12 scholarly essays that include tributes to Bowie's performance craft in other media forms. Classic films such as The Prestige and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, cult hits Labyrinth and The Man Who Fell To Earth, as well as lesser-known roles in The Image, Christiane F. and Broadway hit The Elephant Man are viewed, not simply through the lens of Bowie's mega-stardom, but as the work of a serious actor with inimitable talent. This compelling analysis celebrates the risk-taking intelligence and bravura of David Bowie: actor, mime, mimic and icon.
In 2007, an unlikely troupe of 1500 Filipino prisoners became Internet celebrities after their YouTube video of Michael Jackson's ground-breaking hit 'Thriller' went viral. Taking this spectacular dance as a point of departure, Dangerous Mediations explores the disquieting development of prisoners performing punishment to a global, online audience. Combining analysis of this YouTube video with first-hand experiences from fieldwork in the Philippine prison, Áine Mangaoang investigates a wide range of interlocking contexts surrounding this user-generated text to reveal how places of punishment can be transformed into spaces of spectacular entertainment, leisure, and penal tourism. In the post-YouTube era, Dangerous Mediations sounds the call for close readings of music videos produced outside of the corporate culture industries. By connecting historical discussions on postcolonialism, surveillance and prison philosophy with contemporary scholarship on popular music, participatory culture and new media, Dangerous Mediations is the first book to ask critical questions about the politics of pop music and audiovisual mediation in early 21st-century detention centres.
Kahlil Joseph has collaborated with musicians FKA twigs, Flying Lotus, Sampha and Shabazz Palaces among many others. He has directed numerous films, music videos and advertisements across Africa, America and Europe. The award-winning filmmaker's disruptive style – which frequently merges visual representations of transcontinental experiences with the countercultural energies of Afrodiasporic music – challenges the Eurocentric biases underpinning Western media. At the same time, his works generate various contradictions and tensions because they are themselves products situated within an economic framework of neoliberal capitalism, at once offering alternative ways of being while, simulta...
Vincenzo Bellini on Stage and Screen, 1935–2020 offers nine case studies of the history of Vincenzo Bellini's operas on stage, on screen, and in sound, video and performance art. This investigation begins in 1935, the hundredth anniversary of the composer's death and the year when his first biopic was released, and ends in 2020, when performance artist Marina Abramovic's 'opera project' 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, whose final scene is accompanied by Bellini's famous aria 'Casta Diva,' was premiered. In Part One, several recent productions of La sonnambula, Norma and I Puritani are discussed from different perspectives, but the common focus is on the possible meanings of these works for conte...