You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In a visual culture, hearing is the second sense, and music is the art of hearing. Kandinsky believed that music transcended painting and visual representation because it had the power to act directly and invisibly on the human spirit. Because it is the only art to deal unequivocally with the real world of sound and its attendant perceptions of time, motion, and human mortality, music remains a powerful and often controversial influence on human behavior. Defining music in the broadest sense as 'any acoustic activity intended to influence the behavior of others', and written in a clear, conversational style for a non-specialist readership, The Second Sense draws on over 100 examples of recor...
None
Here is a catalogue raisonee of Stockhausen's complete output, involving no technical analyses, but rather an examination of the music's aesthetic, practical, and intellectual assumptions. The book contains plentiful citations from the history of radio, film, and sound recording, and from contemporary science and technology. Laid out in strict chronological order, it contains unusually ample commentary on the composer's sources of inspiration, including discussions of the composers Hermann Schroeder, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Schaeffer, Herbert Eimert, John Cage, the information scientist Werner Meyer-Eppler, and structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Each of Stockhausen's compositions is treated on its own terms, and also as a piece in a larger puzzle, embracing surrealist art and literature as well as music. Every piece of music is fully documented within the text with full information of the publisher, catalogue number, instrumentation, duration, and composer-authorized compact disc.
What is music for? How does it work? What can it teach us? Intuitively, we feel there must be answers to such questions, but they tend to be scattered throughout a wide range of different areas of study, from acoustics to music history, from psychology to composition. In this brilliant and thought-provoking book, Maconie seeks the answers to these and other fundamental questions about music, integrating music and appropriate scientific research in a new evaluation of his topic. In so doing, he argues passionately for a reappraisal of music, not as mere entertainment, but as something basic to our experience of listening and communicating in sound, and an art which has exerted a profound influence on society.
Music.
None
Here at last is a listener's guide to the hidden meanings of western classical music, expressed in accessible, jargon-free language and drawing on universal listening experiences and skills. The Way of Music is six booklets in one volume; it is a study guide in attention training, listening skills, and music appreciation for students, teachers, and the general reader. Each book is complete in itself, to be read and used as part of a multilayered database of musical meaning. Alternating aphorism and explanation, Books 1 and 2 inquire into hearing and communication processes using the example of a barking dog, while Books 3 and 4 extend the range of inquiry into the acoustics and performance o...
German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was arguably the most influential figure of the European postwar avant-garde and unquestionably the most elusive and enigmatic musical thinker of a generation that includes Pierre Boulez, John Cage, and Luciano Berio. His radically new electronic and instrumental music converted Igor Stravinsky to serialism in the 1950s and has continued to inspire young composers for more than fifty years. Other Planets: The Complete Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, 1950–2007 draws on more than fifty years of Maconie’s close study of Stockhausen and functions as a catalogue raisonee of Stockhausen’s complete output. With plentiful citations from the history of radi...