Download or read book The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany 1891 1961 written by Anna Maria Busse Berger and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-10-30 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative book reassesses the history of musicology, unearthing the field’s twentieth-century German and global roots. In the process, Anna Maria Busse Berger exposes previously unseen historical relationships such as those between the modern rediscovery of medieval music, the rise of communal singing, and the ways in which African music intersected with missionary work in the German colonial period. Ultimately, Busse Berger offers a monumental new account of the early twentieth-century music culture in Germany and East Africa. ?The book unfolds in three parts. Busse Berger starts with the origins of comparative musicology circa 1900, when early proponents used ideas from comparative linguistics to test whether parallels could be drawn between nonwestern and medieval European music. She then turns to youth movements of the era—the Wandervogel, Jugendmusikbewegung, and Singbewegung—whose focus on joint music making influenced many musicologists. Finally, she considers case studies of Protestant and Catholic mission societies in what is now Tanzania, where missionaries—many of them musicologists and former youth-group members—extended the discipline via ethnographic research and a focus on local music and communities. In highlighting these long-overlooked transnational connections and the role of global music in early musicology, Busse Berger shapes a fresh conception of music scholarship during a pivotal part of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Listening to China written by Thomas Irvine and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-05-08 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From bell ringing to fireworks, gongs to cannon salutes, a dazzling variety of sounds and soundscapes marked the China encountered by the West around 1800. These sounds were gathered by diplomats, trade officials, missionaries, and other travelers and transmitted back to Europe, where they were reconstructed in the imaginations of writers, philosophers, and music historians such as Jean-Philippe Rameau, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, and Charles Burney. Thomas Irvine gathers these stories in Listening to China, exploring how the sonic encounter with China shaped perceptions of Europe’s own musical development. Through these stories, Irvine not only investigates how the Sino-Western encounter sounded, but also traces the West’s shifting response to China. As the trading relationships between China and the West broke down, travelers and music theorists abandoned the vision of shared musical approaches, focusing instead on China’s noisiness and sonic disorder and finding less to like in its music. At the same time, Irvine reconsiders the idea of a specifically Western music history, revealing that it was comparison with China, the great “other,” that helped this idea emerge. Ultimately, Irvine draws attention to the ways Western ears were implicated in the colonial and imperial project in China, as well as to China’s importance to the construction of musical knowledge during and after the European Enlightenment. Timely and original, Listening to China is a must-read for music scholars and historians of China alike.
Download or read book Music and Instruments of the Middle Ages written by Tess Knighton and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2020 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on important topics in early music.
Download or read book On African Music written by Kofi Agawu and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-19 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by one of the best-known academic writers on African music, On African Music is a collection of seven essays addressing various techniques, influences, and scholarly approaches to African music. After a concise introduction spelling out the rationale for the book, successive chapters develop answers to questions such as: How does a "minimalist impulse" animate creativity in Africa, and does "Western minimalism" differ from "African minimalism"? How do we explain the prevalence of iconic effects in African expressive forms? How has (European) tonality functioned as a "colonizing force" in African music? Why is the (written) art music of the continent talked about so little when it has been in existence since the middle of the nineteenth century? How might the discipline of music theory be rejuvenated by "aid" from Africa? What are the strengths and limitations of ethnotheory as a methodology? Who is who in theorizations of African rhythm, and how might we explain the shape of the existing archive? This book thus deals with analytical and interpretive issues, the politics of scholarship, and salient features of African music. Laced with provocative viewpoints on each page, On African Music should appeal not only to readers curious about the structural underpinnings of African music but also to those who wish to reflect critically and philosophically on how we study and write about the music of the continent, how we might approach its global status with a firm understanding from the inside, and what our priorities might be in promoting an empowering cosmopolitan discourse.
Download or read book Bitten by the Blues written by Bruce Iglauer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-10-19 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It started with the searing sound of a slide careening up the neck of an electric guitar. In 1970, twenty-three-year-old Bruce Iglauer walked into Florence’s Lounge, in the heart of Chicago’s South Side, and was overwhelmed by the joyous, raw Chicago blues of Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers. A year later, Iglauer produced Hound Dog’s debut album in eight hours and pressed a thousand copies, the most he could afford. From that one album grew Alligator Records, the largest independent blues record label in the world. Bitten by the Blues is Iglauer’s memoir of a life immersed in the blues—and the business of the blues. No one person was present at the creation of more great contemporary blues music than Iglauer: he produced albums by Koko Taylor, Albert Collins, Professor Longhair, Johnny Winter, Lonnie Mack, Son Seals, Roy Buchanan, Shemekia Copeland, and many other major figures. In this book, Iglauer takes us behind the scenes, offering unforgettable stories of those charismatic musicians and classic sessions, delivering an intimate and unvarnished look at what it’s like to work with the greats of the blues. It’s a vivid portrait of some of the extraordinary musicians and larger-than-life personalities who brought America’s music to life in the clubs of Chicago’s South and West Sides. Bitten by the Blues is also an expansive history of half a century of blues in Chicago and around the world, tracing the blues recording business through massive transitions, as a genre of music originally created by and for black southerners adapted to an influx of white fans and musicians and found a worldwide audience. Most of the smoky bars and packed clubs that fostered the Chicago blues scene have long since disappeared. But their soul lives on, and so does their sound. As real and audacious as the music that shaped it, Bitten by the Blues is a raucous journey through the world of Genuine Houserockin’ Music.
Download or read book Creatures of the Air written by J.Q. Davies and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-08-11 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of nineteenth-century music in Atlantic worlds told through the history of the art’s elemental medium, the air. Often experienced as universal and incorporeal, music seems an innocent art form. The air, the very medium by which music constitutes itself, shares with music a claim to invisibility. In Creatures of the Air, J. Q. Davies interrogates these claims, tracing the history of music’s elemental media system in nineteenth-century Atlantic worlds. He posits that air is a poetic domain, and music is an art of that domain. From West Central African ngombi harps to the European J. S. Bach revival, music expressed elemental truths in the nineteenth century. Creatures of the Air tells these truths through stories about suffocation and breathing, architecture and environmental design, climate strife, and racial turmoil. Contributing to elemental media studies, the energy humanities, and colonial histories, Davies shows how music, no longer just an innocent luxury, is implicated in the struggle for control over air as a precious natural resource. What emerges is a complex political ecology of the global nineteenth century and beyond.
Download or read book Deep Refrains written by Michael Gallope and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deep Refrains is a wide-ranging investigation of the philosophy of music. Michael Gallope asks what it means for music to "speak” when it is not saying anything in particular. To answer this question, he turns to the writings of some of the most revered thinkers of the twentieth century--Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Vladimir Jank�l�vitch, Gilles Deleuze, and F�lix Guattari. For these theorists, Gallope argues, the paradox that music is both ineffable and yet harbors deep philosophical wisdoms is fertile ground for thinking outside of conceptual boundaries. It provides the lens for a utopian potentiality that inspires hope (Bloch), an ethical critique of modernity (Adorno), an exemplification of the ephemeral movement of lived time (Jank�l�vitch), and a sonic extension of the syncopated, contrapuntal rhythms of sense and social life (Deleuze and Guattari). Gallope argues that a philosophical engagement with music’s ineffability rarely calls for silence or declarations of the unspeakable. Rather, it asks us to think through the ways in which the impact of music is made to address complex philosophical problems specific to the modern world.
Download or read book Circle of Winners written by Denise Von Glahn and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2023-08-01 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential high culture institution, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has both supported and molded American musical culture. Denise Von Glahn examines the Foundation and its immense influence from the organization’s prehistory and origins through the onset of World War II. Funded by the Guggenheim mining fortune, the Foundation took early shape from the efforts of Carroll Wilson, Frank Aydelotte, and Henry Allen Moe--three Rhodes Scholars who initially struggled to envision and implement the organization’s ambitious goals. Von Glahn also examines the career of the longtime musical advisor Thomas Whitney Surette while profiling early awardees Aaron Copland, Ruth Crawford Seeger, William Grant Still, Roger Sessions, George Antheil, and Carlos Chàvez. She examines the processes behind their selection, their values and aesthetics, and their relationships with the insiders and others who championed their work.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Ethics and Research in Ethnomusicology written by Jonathan P. J. Stock and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-11-30 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Ethics and Research in Ethnomusicology is an in-depth survey of the moral challenges and imperatives of conducting research on people making music. It focuses on fundamental and compelling ethical questions that have challenged and shaped both the history of this discipline and its current practices. In 26 representative cases from across a broad spectrum of geographical, societal, and musical environments, authors collectively reflect on the impacts of ethnomusicological research, exploring the ways our work may instantiate privilege or risk bringing harm, as well as the means that are available to provide recognition, benefit, and reciprocation to the musicians and others who contribute to our studies. In a world where differing ethical values are often in conflict, and where music itself is meanwhile a powerful tool in projecting moral claims, we aim to uncover the conditions and consequences of the ethical choices we face as ethnomusicologists, thereby contributing to building a more engaged, restructured discipline and a more globally responsible music studies. The volume comprises four parts: (1) sound practices and philosophies of ethics; (2) fieldwork encounters; (3) environment, trauma, collaboration; and (4) research in public domains.
Download or read book Music in the Flesh written by Bettina Varwig and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-07-20 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A corporeal history of music-making in early modern Europe. Music in the Flesh reimagines the lived experiences of music-making subjects—composers, performers, listeners—in the long seventeenth century. There are countless historical testimonies of the powerful effects of music upon the early modern body; it is described as moving, ravishing, painful, dangerous, curative, and miraculous while affecting “the circulation of the humors, the purification of the blood, the dilation of the vessels and pores.” How were these early modern European bodies constituted that music generated such potent bodily-spiritual effects? Bettina Varwig argues that early modern music-making practices challenge our modern understanding of human nature as a mind-body dichotomy. Instead, they persistently affirm a more integrated anthropology, in which body, soul, and spirit remain inextricably entangled. Moving with ease across repertories and regions, sacred and vernacular musics, and domestic and public settings, Varwig sketches a “musical physiology” that is as historically illuminating as it is relevant for present-day performance. This book makes a significant contribution not just to the history of music, but also to the history of the body, the senses, and the emotions, revealing music as a unique access point for reimagining early modern modes of being-in-the-world.
Download or read book Sounding Human written by Deirdre Loughridge and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-12-15 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An expansive analysis of the relationship between human and machine in music. From the mid-eighteenth century on, there was a logic at work in musical discourse and practice: human or machine. That discourse defined a boundary of absolute difference between human and machine, with a recurrent practice of parsing “human” musicality from its “merely mechanical” simulations. In Sounding Human, Deirdre Loughridge tests and traverses these boundaries, unmaking the “human or machine” logic and seeking out others, better characterized by conjunctions such as and or with. Sounding Human enters the debate on posthumanism and human-machine relationships in music, exploring how categories of human and machine have been continually renegotiated over the centuries. Loughridge expertly traces this debate from the 1737 invention of what became the first musical android to the creation of a “sound wave instrument” by a British electronic music composer in the 1960s, and the chopped and pitched vocals produced by sampling singers’ voices in modern pop music. From music-generating computer programs to older musical instruments and music notation, Sounding Human shows how machines have always actively shaped the act of music composition. In doing so, Loughridge reveals how musical artifacts have been—or can be—used to help explain and contest what it is to be human.
Download or read book Format Friction written by Gavin Williams and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With the rise of the gramophone circa 1900, the shellac disc mushroomed into the dominant sound format of the first half of the twentieth century. Format Friction brings together a set of local encounters with the shellac disc, beginning with its preconditions in South Asian knowledge and labor as well as early colonial expeditions to capture sounds, to offer a global portrait of this format. Spun at 78 revolutions per minute, the shellac disc had become an industrial standard, even while the gramophone itself remained a novelty. The very basis of this early sound reproduction technology was friction, an elemental materiality of sound shaped through cultural practice. Yet the recording of sounds was only one element in the making of this global format. Using friction as a lens, Gavin Williams reveals the environments plundered, the materials seized, the ears entangled. Bringing together material, political, and music history, Format Friction decenters the story of a beloved medium and so too explores new ways of understanding listening in technological culture more broadly"--
Download or read book Mensuration and Proportion Signs Origins and Evolution written by Anna Maria Busse Berger and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Medieval Music and the Art of Memory written by Anna Maria Busse Berger and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award and Society of Music Theory's Wallace Berry Award This bold challenge to conventional notions about medieval music disputes the assumption of pure literacy and replaces it with a more complex picture of a world in which literacy and orality interacted. Asking such fundamental questions as how singers managed to memorize such an enormous amount of music and how music composed in the mind rather than in writing affected musical style, Anna Maria Busse Berger explores the impact of the art of memory on the composition and transmission of medieval music. Her fresh, innovative study shows that although writing allowed composers to work out pieces in the mind, it did not make memorization redundant but allowed for new ways to commit material to memory. Since some of the polyphonic music from the twelfth century and later was written down, scholars have long assumed that it was all composed and transmitted in written form. Our understanding of medieval music has been profoundly shaped by German philologists from the beginning of the last century who approached medieval music as if it were no different from music of the nineteenth century. But Medieval Music and the Art of Memory deftly demonstrates that the fact that a piece was written down does not necessarily mean that it was conceived and transmitted in writing. Busse Berger's new model, one that emphasizes the interplay of literate and oral composition and transmission, deepens and enriches current understandings of medieval music and opens the field for fresh interpretations.
Download or read book Writing Sounds in Carolingian Europe written by Susan Rankin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-08 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Musical notation has not always existed: in the West, musical traditions have often depended on transmission from mouth to ear, and ear to mouth. Although the Ancient Greeks had a form of musical notation, it was not passed on to the medieval Latin West. This comprehensive study investigates the breadth of use of musical notation in Carolingian Europe, including many examples previously unknown in studies of notation, to deliver a crucial foundational model for the understanding of later Western notations. An overview of the study of neumatic notations from the French monastic scholar Dom Jean Mabillon (1632–1707) up to the present day precedes an examination of the function and potential of writing in support of a musical practice which continued to depend on trained memory. Later chapters examine passages of notation to reveal those ways in which scripts were shaped by contemporary rationalizations of musical sound. Finally, the new scripts are situated in the cultural and social contexts in which they emerged.
Download or read book Encounter Images in the Meetings Between Africa and Europe written by Mai Palmberg and published by Nordic Africa Institute. This book was released on 2001 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Positive images of Africa contrast with negative images of misery, war and catastrophes often conveyed by the mass media. This selection of papers debate the images and stereotypes of Africa.
Download or read book Ethnomusicology A Very Short Introduction written by Timothy Rice and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explaining that musicality is an essential touchstone of the human experience, a concise introduction to the study of the nature of music, its community and its cultural values explains the diverse work of today's ethnomusicologists and how researchers apply anthropological and other social disciplines to studies of human and cultural behaviors. Original.
