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"Theorizing Music Evolution is a critical examination of ideas about musical origins, emphasizing both nineteenth-century theories of music in the evolutionist writings of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. What did historical evolutionists such as Darwin and Spencer have to say about music? What role did music play in their evolutionary theories? What were the values and limits of these evolutionist turns of thought, and in what ways have they endured in present-day music research? Author Miriam Piilonen argues for the significance of Victorian music-evolutionism in lights of its ties to a recently revitalized subfield of evolutionary musicology. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to music theorizing, Piilonen explores how historical thinkers constructed music in evolutionist terms and argues for an updated understanding of music as an especially fraught area of evolutionary thought"--
Theorizing Music Evolution is a critical examination of ideas about musical origins, with emphasis on nineteenth-century music-evolutionary texts by Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. In a ground-breaking contribution to music theory and histories of science, author Miriam Piilonen argues for the significance of this Victorian music-evolutionism in lights of its ties to a recently revitalized subfield of evolutionary musicology.
“A perceptive, engaging, and clever set of meditations on . . . how sound produces human, technical, and nonhuman intimacies.” —Richard Grusin,University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Sonic Intimacy asks us who—or what—deserves to have a voice, beyond the human. Arguing that our ears are far too narrowly attuned to our own species, the book explores four different types of voices: the cybernetic, the gendered, the creaturely, and the ecological. Through both a conceptual framework and a series of case studies, Dominic Pettman tracks some of the ways in which these voices intersect and interact. He demonstrates how intimacy is forged through the ear, perhaps even more than through any oth...
Theory in popular music has historically tended to approach musical processes of rhythm, harmony, counterpoint, and form as abstractions, without very directly engaging the intimate connection between the performer and instrument in popular music performance. Embodied Expression in Popular Music illuminates under-researched aspects of music theory in popular music studies by situating musical analysis in a context of embodied movement in vocal and instrumental performance. Author Timothy Koozin offers a performance-based analytical methodology that progresses from basic idiomatic gestures, to gestural combinations and interactions with large-scale design, to broader interpretive strategies t...
In this book, author Ryan Dohoney tells the story of the 1972 premier of Morton Feldman's music for the Rothko Chapel in Houston, reconstructing the network of artists and patrons who contributed to the premier, and documenting the ways that they questioned the emotional translation of art into religious stimulation.
Seeing Voices explores the phenomenon of music created in a signed language and argues that music can exist beyond sound and the sense of hearing, instead involving all of our senses, including vision and touch. Using a blend of tools from music theory, cognitive science, musicology, and ethnography, author Anabel Maler presents the history of music in Deaf culture from the early nineteenth century, contextualizes contemporary Deaf music through ethnographic interviews with Deaf musicians, and provides detailed analyses of a wide variety of genres of sign language music.
For music theory teachers, some common questions might arise: why assess students with exams like AP Music Theory? Why teach them melodic dictation, formal structures, and key signatures? Why design curriculums this way? In recent years, educators around the country have developed new and innovative teaching approaches to address these questions, reintroducing a sense of purpose into their classrooms. In this new volume, Jennifer Snodgrass visits several of these teachers, observing them in their music theory classrooms and providing lesson plans that build upon their approaches. Based on three years of field study spanning seventeen states, coupled with reflections from the author on her ow...
Arguing that existing modernisation theories have been unnecessarily one-sided, Hedwig Fraunhofer offers a rewriting of modernity that cuts across binary methodologies - nature and culture, mind and matter, epistemology and ontology, critique and affirmative writing, dramatic and postdramatic theatre. She specifically reworks the biopolitical exclusions that mark modern western epistemology, leading up to modernity's totalitarian crisis point.Fraunhofer reveals the performativity of theatre in its double sense - as theatrical production and as the intra-activity of a dynamic system of multiple relations between human and more-than-human actors, energies and affects. In modern theatre, public and private, human and more-than-human, materiality and meaning collapse in a common life.
Nonlinear Temporality in Joyce and Walcott is the first dedicated comparative study of James Joyce and Derek Walcott. The book examines the ways in which both Joyce’s fiction and Walcott’s poetry articulate a nonlinear conception of time with radical cultural and political implications. For Joyce and Walcott equally, the book argues, it is only by reconceiving time in this way that it becomes possible to envisage a means of escape from what Joyce calls “force, hatred, history” and what Walcott calls the “madness of history seen as sequential time”. A starting point for the comparisons drawn between Joyce and Walcott is their relationship to Homer. Joyce’s Ulysses is in one resp...