Download or read book Cybersonic Arts written by Gordon Mumma and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Composer, performer, instrument builder, teacher, and writer Gordon Mumma has left an indelible mark on the American contemporary music scene. A prolific composer and innovative French horn player, Mumma is recognized for integrating advanced electronic processes into musical structures, an approach he has termed ""Cybersonics."" Musicologist Michelle Fillion curates a collection of Mumma's writings, presenting revised versions of his classic pieces as well as many unpublished works from every stage of his storied career. Here, through words and astonishing photos, is Mumma's chronicle of seminal events in the musical world of the twentieth century: his cofounding the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music; his role in organizing the historic ONCE Festivals of Contemporary Music; performances with the Sonic Arts Union; and working alongside John Cage and David Tudor as a composer-musician with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In addition, Mumma describes his collaborations with composers, performers, dancers, and visual artists ranging from Robert Ashley and Pauline Oliveros to Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg. Candid and insightful, Cybersonic Arts is the eye-opening account of a broad artistic community by an active participant and observer.
Download or read book Open Access Musicology written by Louis Epstein and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2023-05-05 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Open Access Musicology (OAM) publishes peer-reviewed, scholarly essays primarily intended to serve students and teachers of music history, ethno/musicology, and music studies. The constantly evolving collection ensures that recent research and scholarship inspires classroom practice. OAM essays provide diverse and methodologically transparent models for student research, and they introduce different modes of inquiry to inspire classroom discussion and varied assignments. Addressing a range of histories, methods, voices, and sounds, OAM embraces changes and tensions in the field to help students understand music scholarship. In service of our student- and access-centered mission, Open Access Musicology is a free collection of essays, written in an engaging style and with a focus on modes of inquiry rather than coverage of content. Our authors draw from their experience as scholars but also as teachers. They not only make arguments, but also describe why they became musicologists in the first place and explain how their individual paths led to the topics they explore. Like most scholarly literature, the essays have all been reviewed by experts in the field. Unlike most scholarly literature, the essays have also been reviewed by students at a variety of institutions for clarity and relevance. These essays are intended for undergraduates, graduate students, and interested readers without any particular expertise. They can be incorporated into courses on a range of topics as standalone readings, used to supplement textbooks, or read with an eye to new scholarly insights. The topics introduce and explore a variety of subjects, practices, and methods but, above all, seek to stimulate classroom discussion on music history’s relevance to performers, listeners, and citizens. Open Access Musicology will never pretend to present complete histories, cover all elements of a subject, or satisfy the agenda of every reader. Rather, each essay provides an opening to further contemplation and study. We invite readers to follow the thematic links between essays, pursue notes or other online resources provided by authors, or simply repurpose the essay’s questions into new and exciting forms of research and creativity. Volume 2 of OAM expands the disciplinary, topical, and geographical ranges of our endeavor, with essays that rely on ethnographic and music theoretical methods as well as historical ones. The essays in this volume touch on music from Europe, South America, and Asia, spanning the 16th century to the present. Throughout, the contributing authors situate music in political, religious, racial, economic, and other cultural and disciplinary contexts. This volume therefore expands what scholars generally mean when they refer to “musicology” and “music,” always with an eye toward relevance and accessibility.
Download or read book Reminded by the Instruments written by You Nakai and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Tudor is remembered today in two guises: as an extraordinary pianist of post-war avant-garde music who worked closely with composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen and as a founding figure of live-electronic music. His early realization of indeterminate graphic scores and his later performances using homemade modular instruments both inspired a whole generation of musicians. But his reticence, his unorthodox approaches, and the diversity of his creative output which began with the organ and ended with visual art have kept Tudor a puzzle. Illustrated with more than 300 images of diagrams, schematics, and photographs of Tudor's instruments, Reminded by the Instruments sets out to solve the puzzle of David Tudor by applying Tudor's own methods for approaching the materials of others to the vast archive of materials that he himself left behind. You Nakai deftly patches together instruments, electronic circuits, sketches, diagrams, recordings, letters, receipts, customs declaration forms, and testimonies like modular pieces of a giant puzzle to reveal the long-hidden nature of Tudor's creative process. Rejecting the established narrative of Tudor as a performer-turned-composer, this book presents a lively portrait of an artist whose activity always merged both of these roles. In reading Tudor's electronic devices as musicological 'texts' and examining his idiosyncratic use of electronic circuits, Nakai undermines discourses on sound and illuminates our understanding of the instruments behind the sounds in post-war experimental music.
Download or read book White Musical Mythologies written by Edmund Mendelssohn and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-12 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a narrative that extends from fin de siècle Paris to the 1960s, Edmund Mendelssohn examines modernist thinkers and composers who engaged with non-European and pre-modern cultures as they developed new conceptions of "pure sound." Pairing Erik Satie with Bergson, Edgard Varèse with Bataille, Pierre Boulez with Artaud, and John Cage with Derrida, White Musical Mythologies offers an ambitious critical history of the ontology of sound, suggesting that the avant-garde ideal of "pure sound" was always an expression of western ethnocentrism. Each of the musicians studied in this book re-created or appropriated non-European forms of expression as they conceived music ontologically, often thinking music as something immediate and immersive: from Satie's dabblings with mysticism and exoticism in bohemian Montmartre of the 1890s to Varèse's experience of ethnographic exhibitions and surrealist poetry in 1930s Paris, and from Boulez's endeavor to theorize a kind of musical writing that would "absorb" the sounds of non-European musical traditions to Cage, who took inspiration from Eastern thought as he wrote about sound, silence, and chance. These modernist artists believed that the presence effects of sound in their moment were more real and powerful than the outmoded norms of the European musical past. By examining musicians who strove to produce sonic presence, specifically by re-thinking the concept of musical writing (écriture), the book demonstrates that we cannot fully understand French theory in its novelty and complexity without music and sound.
Download or read book Instruments of Embodiment written by Eric Mullis and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-16 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Instruments of Embodiment draws on fashion theory and the philosophy of embodiment to investigate costuming in contemporary dance. It weaves together philosophical theory and artistic practice by closely analyzing acclaimed works by contemporary choreographers, considering interviews with costume designers, and engaging in practice-as-research. Topics discussed include the historical evolution of contemporary dance costuming, Merce Cunningham’s innovative collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg, and costumes used in Ohad Naharin’s Virus (2001) and in a ground-breaking Butoh solo by Tatsumi Hijikata. The relationship between dance costuming and high fashion, wearable computing, and the role costume plays in dance reconstruction are also discussed and, along the way, an anarchist materialism is articulated which takes an egalitarian view of artistic collaboration and holds that experimental costume designs facilitate new forms of embodied experience and ways of seeing the body. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars working in performance philosophy, philosophy of embodiment, dance and performance studies, and fashion theory.
Download or read book Music Cultures in Sounds Words and Images written by Antonio Baldassarre and published by Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag. This book was released on 2018-03-19 with total page 813 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Music cultures in sounds, words and images", edited by Antonio Baldassarre and Tatjana Markovic, is dedicated to the 60th birthday of the Croatian-American musicologist Zdravko Blažekovic (b. 1956, Zagreb). After his studies of musicology and first working experiences in Zagreb, Blažekovic moved to New York City, where he is since 1996 the executive editor of the RILM - Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, and since 1998 director of the RCMI - Research Center for Music Iconography as well as editor of one of the leading journals for music iconography, "Music in Art", in the framework of the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Reserach and Documentation at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In view of Blažekovic's very broad multidisciplinary interests, including historical musicology, music iconography, organology, archeology, lexicography and databases, this book contains 38 studies in six languages (English, German, Italian, Serbian, Croatian, Chinese) organized in six chapters: Sounds of nations, Words on musics, Performance of musical cultures, Images on musics, Organology, and Classifying data on music.
Download or read book Mario Lavista written by Ana R. Alonso-Minutti and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Composer, pianist, editor, writer, and pedagogue Mario Lavista (1943-2021) was a central figure of the cultural and artistic scene in Mexico and one of the leading Ibero-American composers of his generation. His music is often described as evocative and poetic, noted for his meticulous attention to timbre and motivic permutation, and his creative trajectory was characterized by its intersections with the other arts, particularly poetry and painting. Understanding analysis as an affective practice, this study explores the intertextual connections between the multiple texts-musical or otherwise-that are present in Lavista's music. It argues that, through adopting an interdisciplinary and transhistorical approach to music composition, Lavista forged a cosmopolitan imaginary to challenge imposed stereotypes of what Mexican music should sound like. This imaginary becomes a strategy of resistance against imperialist agendas placed upon postcolonial peripheries. Departing from traditional biographical and chronological frameworks that exalt masters and masterworks, this book offers a nuanced, personal narrative informed by conversations with composers, performers, artists, choreographers, poets, writers, and filmmakers. Implementing an innovative mosaic of methodologies, from archival work, to musical and intertextual analysis, oral history, and (auto)ethnography, this book is the first to offer a contextual framing of Lavista's career within a panoramic view of contemporary music practices in Mexico during the past fifty years"--
Download or read book Modular Synthesis written by Ezra J. Teboul and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2024-04-24 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modular Synthesis: Patching Machines and People brings together scholars, artists, composers, and musical instrument designers in an exploration of modular synthesis, an unusually multifaceted musical instrument that opens up many avenues for exploration and insight, particularly with respect to technological use, practice, and resistance. Through historical, technical, social, aesthetic, and other perspectives, this volume offers a collective reflection on the powerful connections between technology, creativity, culture, and personal agency. Ultimately, this collection is about creativity in a technoscientific world and speaks to issues fundamental to our everyday lives and experiences, by providing insights into the complex relationships between content creators, the technologies they use, and the individuals and communities who design and engage with them. With chapters covering VCV Rack, modular synthesis, instrument design, and the histories of synthesizer technology, as well as interviews with Dave Rossum, Corry Banks, Meng Qi, and Dani Dobkin, among others, Modular Synthesis is recommended reading for advanced undergraduates, researchers, and practitioners of electronic music and music technology. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Download or read book The Cashaway Psalmody written by Stephen A. Marini and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2020-02-14 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Singing master Durham Hills created The Cashaway Psalmody to give as a wedding present in 1770. A collection of tenor melody parts for 152 tunes and sixty-three texts, the Psalmody is the only surviving tunebook from the colonial-era South and one of the oldest sacred music manuscripts from the Carolinas. It is all the more remarkable for its sophistication: no similar document of the period matches Hills's level of musical expertise, reportorial reach, and calligraphic skill. Stephen A. Marini, discoverer of The Cashaway Psalmody, offers the fascinating story of the tunebook and its many meanings. From its musical, literary, and religious origins in England, he moves on to the life of Durham Hills; how Carolina communities used the book; and the Psalmody's significance in understanding how ritual song—transmitted via transatlantic music, lyrics, and sacred singing—shaped the era's development. Marini also uses close musical and textual analyses to provide a critical study that offers music historians and musicologists valuable insights on the Pslamody and its period. Meticulous in presentation and interdisciplinary in scope, The Cashaway Psalmody unlocks an important source for understanding life in the Lower South in the eighteenth century.
Download or read book Chinatown Opera Theater in North America written by Nancy Yunhwa Rao and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2017-01-11 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Awards: Irving Lowens Award, Society for American Music (SAM), 2019 Music in American Culture Award, American Musicological Society (AMS), 2018 Certificate of Merit for Best Historical Research in Recorded Country, Folk, Roots, or World Music, Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), 2018 Outstanding Achievement in Humanities and Cultural Studies: Media, Visual, and Performance Studies, Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS), 2019 The Chinatown opera house provided Chinese immigrants with an essential source of entertainment during the pre–World War II era. But its stories of loyalty, obligation, passion, and duty also attracted diverse patrons into Chinese American communities Drawing on a wealth of new Chinese- and English-language research, Nancy Yunhwa Rao tells the story of iconic theater companies and the networks and migrations that made Chinese opera a part of North American cultures. Rao unmasks a backstage world of performers, performance, and repertoire and sets readers in the spellbound audiences beyond the footlights. But she also braids a captivating and complex history from elements outside the opera house walls: the impact of government immigration policy; how a theater influenced a Chinatown's sense of cultural self; the dissemination of Chinese opera music via recording and print materials; and the role of Chinese American business in sustaining theatrical institutions. The result is a work that strips the veneer of exoticism from Chinese opera, placing it firmly within the bounds of American music and a profoundly American experience.
Download or read book Industrial Strength Bluegrass written by Fred Bartenstein and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2021-01-25 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the twentieth century, Appalachian migrants seeking economic opportunities relocated to southwestern Ohio, bringing their music with them. Between 1947 and 1989, they created an internationally renowned capital for the thriving bluegrass music genre, centered on the industrial region of Cincinnati, Dayton, Hamilton, Middletown, and Springfield. Fred Bartenstein and Curtis W. Ellison edit a collection of eyewitness narratives and in-depth analyses that explore southwestern Ohio’s bluegrass musicians, radio broadcasters, recording studios, record labels, and performance venues, along with the music’s contributions to religious activities, community development, and public education. As the bluegrass scene grew, southwestern Ohio's distinctive sounds reached new fans and influenced those everywhere who continue to play, produce, and love roots music. Revelatory and multifaceted, Industrial Strength Bluegrass shares the inspiring story of a bluegrass hotbed and the people who created it. Contributors: Fred Bartenstein, Curtis W. Ellison, Jon Hartley Fox, Rick Good, Lily Isaacs, Ben Krakauer, Mac McDivitt, Nathan McGee, Daniel Mullins, Joe Mullins, Larry Nager, Phillip J. Obermiller, Bobby Osborne, and Neil V. Rosenberg.
Download or read book John Cage s Concert for Piano and Orchestra written by Martin Iddon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-14 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra is one of the seminal works of the second half of the twentieth century, and the centerpiece of the middle period of Cage's output. It is a culmination of Cage's work up to that point, incorporating notation techniques he had spent the past decade developing - techniques which remain radical to this day. But despite Cage's vitality to the musical development of the twentieth century, and the Concert's centrality to his career, the work is still rarely performed and even more rarely examined in detail. In this volume, Martin Iddon and Philip Thomas provide a rich and critical examination of this enormously significant piece, tracing its many contexts and influences - particularly Schoenberg, jazz, and Cage's own compositional practice - through a wide and previously untapped range of archival sources. Iddon and Thomas explain the Concert through a reading of its many histories, especially in performance - from the legendary performer disobedience and audience disorder of its 1958 New York premiere to a no less disastrous European premiere later the same year. They also highlight the importance of the piano soloist who premiered the piece, David Tudor, and its use alongside choreographer Merce Cunningham's Antic Meet. A careful examination of an apparently bewildering piece, the book explores the critical response to the Concert's performances, re-interrogates the mythology surrounding it, and finally turns to the music itself, in all its component parts, to see what it truly asks of performers and listeners.
Download or read book Samuel Barber written by Howard Pollack and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pivotal twentieth-century composer, Samuel Barber earned a long list of honors and accolades that included two Pulitzer Prizes for Music and the public support of conductors like Arturo Toscanini, Serge Koussevitzky, and Leonard Bernstein. Barber’s works have since become standard concert repertoire and continue to flourish across high art and popular culture. Acclaimed biographer Howard Pollack (Aaron Copland, George Gershwin) offers a multifaceted account of Barber’s life and music while placing the artist in his social and cultural milieu. Born into a musical family, Barber pursued his artistic ambitions from childhood. Pollack follows Barber’s path from his precocious youth through a career where, from the start, the composer consistently received prizes, fellowships, and other recognition. Stylistic analyses of works like the Adagio for Strings, the Violin Concerto, Knoxville: Summer of 1915 for voice and orchestra, the Piano Concerto, and the operas Vanessa and Antony and Cleopatra, stand alongside revealing accounts of the music’s commissioning, performance, reception, and legacy. Throughout, Pollack weaves in accounts of Barber’s encounters with colleagues like Aaron Copland and Francis Poulenc, performers from Eleanor Steber and Leontyne Price to Vladimir Horowitz and Van Cliburn, patrons, admirers, and a wide circle of eminent friends and acquaintances. He also provides an eloquent portrait of the composer’s decades-long relationship with the renowned opera composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Informed by new interviews and immense archival research, Samuel Barber is a long-awaited critical and personal biography of a monumental figure in twentieth-century American music.
Download or read book Rethinking American Music written by Tara Browner and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2019-03-16 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Rethinking American Music, Tara Browner and Thomas L. Riis curate essays that offer an eclectic survey of current music scholarship. Ranging from Tin Pan Alley to Thelonious Monk to hip hop, the contributors go beyond repertory and biography to explore four critical yet overlooked areas: the impact of performance; patronage's role in creating music and finding a place to play it; personal identity; and the ways cultural and ethnographic circumstances determine the music that emerges from the creative process. Many of the articles also look at how a piece of music becomes initially popular and then exerts a lasting influence in the larger global culture. The result is an insightful state-of-the-field examination that doubles as an engaging short course on our complex, multifaceted musical heritage. Contributors: Karen Ahlquist, Amy C. Beal, Mark Clagu,. Esther R. Crookshank, Todd Decker, Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett, Joshua S. Duchan, Mark Katz, Jeffrey Magee, Sterling E. Murray, Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., David Warren Steel, Jeffrey Taylor, and Mark Tucker
Download or read book Flaco s Legacy written by Erin E. Bauer and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2023-05-23 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A combination of button accordion and bajo sexto, conjunto originated in the Texas-Mexico borderlands as a popular dance music and became a powerful form of regional identity. Today, listeners and musicians around the world have embraced the genre and the work of conjunto masters like Flaco Jiménez and Mingo Saldívar. Erin E. Bauer follows conjunto from its local origins through three processes of globalization--migration via media, hybridization, and appropriation--that boosted the music’s reach. As Bauer shows, conjunto’s encounter with globalizing forces raises fundamental questions. What is conjunto stylistically and socioculturally? Does context change how we categorize it? Do we consider the music to be conjunto based on its musical characteristics or due to its performance by Jiménez and other regional players? How do similar local genres like Tejano and norteño relate to ideas of categorization? A rare look at a fascinating musical phenomenon, Flaco’s Legacy reveals how conjunto came to encompass new people, places, and styles.
Download or read book Queer Country written by Shana Goldin-Perschbacher and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2022-03-22 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Variety Best Music Book of 2022 A No Depression Most Memorable Music Book of 2022 A Library Journal Best Arts and Humanities Book of 2022 A Pitchfork Best Music Book of 2022 A Boot Best Music Book of 2022 A Ticketmaster Best Music Book of 2022 A Happy Magazine Best Music Book of 2022 Though frequently ignored by the music mainstream, queer and transgender country and Americana artists have made essential contributions as musicians, performers, songwriters, and producers. Queer Country blends ethnographic research with analysis and history to provide the first in-depth study of these artists and their work. Shana Goldin-Perschbacher delves into the careers of well-known lesbian artists like k.d. lang and Amy Ray and examines the unlikely success of singer-songwriter Patrick Haggerty, who found fame forty years after releasing the first out gay country album. She also focuses on later figures like nonbinary transgender musician Rae Spoon and renowned drag queen country artist Trixie Mattel; and on recent breakthrough artists like Orville Peck, Amythyst Kiah, and chart-topping Grammy-winning phenomenon Lil Nas X. Many of these musicians place gender and sexuality front and center even as it complicates their careers. But their ongoing efforts have widened the circle of country/Americana by cultivating new audiences eager to connect with the artists’ expansive music and personal identities. Detailed and one-of-a-kind, Queer Country reinterprets country and Americana music through the lives and work of artists forced to the margins of the genre's history.
Download or read book Music and Mystique in Muscle Shoals written by Christopher M. Reali and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A No Depression Most Memorable Music Book of 2022 The forceful music that rolled out of Muscle Shoals in the 1960s and 1970s shaped hits by everyone from Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin to the Rolling Stones and Paul Simon. Christopher M. Reali's in-depth look at the fabled musical hotbed examines the events and factors that gave the Muscle Shoals sound such a potent cultural power. Many artists trekked to FAME Studios and Muscle Shoals Sound in search of the sound of authentic southern Black music—and at times expressed shock at the mostly white studio musicians waiting to play it for them. Others hoped to draw on the hitmaking production process that defined the scene. Reali also chronicles the overlooked history of Muscle Shoals's impact on country music and describes the region's recent transformation into a tourism destination. Multifaceted and informed, Music and Mystique in Muscle Shoals reveals the people, place, and events behind one of the most legendary recording scenes in American history.
