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The Music of Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell is one of the foremost singer-songwriters of the late twentieth century. Yet despite her reputation, influence, and cultural importance, a detailed appraisal of her musical achievement is still lacking. Whitesell presents a through exploration of Mitchell's musical style, sound, and structure in order to evaluate her songs from a musicological perspective. His analyses are conceived within a holistic framework that takes account of poetic nuance, cultural reference, and stylistic evolution over a long, adventurous career. Mitchell's songs represent a complex, meticulously crafted body of work. The Music of Joni Mitchell offers a comprehensive survey of her output, with many dis...
The Pleasure of Modernist Music
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...
Queering the Popular Pitch
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.
Up Against the Real
"Up Against the Real is an exciting book about anti-art in the Sixties. It is the first comprehensive study of the group Black Mask and their acrimonious relationship to the New York art world in that decade. Now cited as originators of the protest aesthetics common today, Black Mask employed incendiary modes of direct action against racism, colonialism, and the museum system. They forced their way into the Pentagon during a political protest, threw rotten eggs and blood at Secretary of State Dean Rusk, dumped garbage into the fountain at Lincoln Center during a gala at the Metropolitan Opera, published a broadside, made films, tormented Andy Warhol, and much more, all covered in Nadja Milln...
Essays on Benjamin Britten from a Centenary Symposium
Coming to terms with Britten’s music is no easy task. The complex, often contradictory language associated with Britten’s style likely stems from his double interest in progressive composition and immediate connection with a broad, popular audience – an apparent paradox in the splintered musical culture of the 20th century – as well as from complicated truths in his own life, such as his love for a country that accepted neither his sexuality nor his politics. As a result, the attempt to describe his music can tell us as much about our own biases and the inadequacies of our analytic tools as it does about the music itself. Such audits of our scholarly language and strategies are vital...
Ernest John Moeran
This long-awaited study of the life and music of Anglo-Irish composer Ernest John Moeran (1894-1950) finally provides a full biography of the last senior figure in early twentieth-century British Music to have been without one. Although Moeran's work was widely performed during his lifetime, he suffered neglect in the years following his death. It was not until a re-awakening of appreciation for the music of the folksong-inspired English pastoralism in the latter part of the twentieth century that Moeran's tuneful, well-crafted and approachable music began to attract a new audience. However, widely accepted misconceptions about his life and character have obscured a clearunderstanding of both man and composer. Written with the benefit of access to previously unknown or unresearched archives, Ernest John Moeran: His Life and Music strips away a hitherto unchallenged mythological framework, and replaces it by a thorough-going examination and analysis of the life and work of a musician that may reasonably be asserted as having been unique in British music history.
The Songs of Joni Mitchell
An unorthodox musician from the start, singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell's style of composing, performing, and of playing (and tuning) the guitar is unique. In the framework of sexual difference and the gendered discourses of rock this immediately begs the questions: are Mitchell's songs specifically feminine and, if so, to what extent and why? Anne Karppinen addresses this question focusing on the kind of music and lyrics Mitchell writes, the representation of men and women in her lyrics, how her style changes and evolves over time, and how cultural context affects her writing. Linked to this are the concepts of subjectivity and authorship: when a singer-songwriter sings a song in the first p...
Rethinking Reich
Described by music critic Alex Ross as "the most original musical thinker of our time" and having received innumerable accolades in a career spanning over fifty years, composer Steve Reich is considered by many to be America's greatest contemporary composer. His music, however, remains largely underresearched. Rethinking Reich redresses this imbalance, providing a space for prominent and emerging scholars to reassess the composer's contribution to music in the twentieth century. Featuring fourteen tightly focused and multifarious essays on various aspects of Reich's work--ranging from analytical, aesthetic, and archival studies to sociocultural, philosophical, and ethnomusicological reflections--this edited volume reveals new insights, including those enabled by access to the growing Steve Reich Collection at the Paul Sacher Foundation archive, the premier institution for primary research on twentieth-century and contemporary classical music. This volume takes on the timely task of challenging the hegemony of Reich's own articulate and convincing discourses on his music, as found in his Writings on Music (OUP, 2002), and breaks new ground in the broader field of minimalism studies.
The Queer Composition of America's Sound
In this vibrant and pioneering book, Nadine Hubbs shows how a gifted group of Manhattan-based gay composers were pivotal in creating a distinctive "American sound" and in the process served as architects of modern American identity. Focusing on a talented circle that included Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Paul Bowles, David Diamond, and Ned Rorem, The Queer Composition of America's Sound homes in on the role of these artists' self-identification—especially with tonal music, French culture, and homosexuality—in the creation of a musical idiom that even today signifies "America" in commercials, movies, radio and television, and the concert hall.
Sound Commitments
The role of popular music is widely recognized in giving voice to radical political views, the plight of the oppressed, and the desire for social change. Avant-garde music, by contrast, is often thought to prioritize the pursuit of new technical or conceptual territory over issues of human and social concern. Yet throughout the activist 1960s, many avant-garde musicians were convinced that aesthetic experiment and social progressiveness made natural bedfellows. Intensely involved in the era's social and political upheavals, they often sought to reflect this engagement in their music. Yet how could avant-garde musicians make a meaningful contribution to social change if their music remained t...
