Download or read book The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction written by Nicky Losseff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction seeks to address fundamental questions about the function, meaning and understanding of music in nineteenth-century culture and society, as mediated through works of fiction. The eleven essays here, written by musicologists and literary scholars, range over a wide selection of works by both canonical writers such as Austen, Benson, Carlyle, Collins, Gaskell, Gissing, Eliot, Hardy, du Maurier and Wilde, and less-well-known figures such as Gertrude Hudson and Elizabeth Sara Sheppard. Each essay explores different strategies for interpreting the idea of music in the Victorian novel. Some focus on the degree to which scenes involving music illuminate what music meant to the writer and contemporary performers and listeners, and signify musical tastes of the time and the reception of particular composers. Other essays in the volume examine aspects of gender, race, sexuality and class that are illuminated by the deployment of music by the novelist. Together with its companion volume, The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry edited by Phyllis Weliver (Ashgate, 2005), this collection suggests a new network of methodologies for the continuing cultural and social investigation of nineteenth-century music as reflected in that period's literary output.
Download or read book Absolute Music written by Mark Evan Bonds and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-09 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is music, and why does it move us? From Pythagoras to the present, writers have struggled to isolate the essence of "pure" or "absolute" music in ways that also account for its profound effect. In Absolute Music: The History of an Idea, Mark Evan Bonds traces the history of these efforts across more than two millennia, paying special attention to the relationship between music's essence and its qualities of form, expression, beauty, autonomy, as well as its perceived capacity to disclose philosophical truths. The core of this book focuses on the period between 1850 and 1945. Although the idea of pure music is as old as antiquity, the term "absolute music" is itself relatively recent. It was Richard Wagner who coined the term, in 1846, and he used it as a pejorative in his efforts to expose the limitations of purely instrumental music. For Wagner, music that was "absolute" was isolated, detached from the world, sterile. His contemporary, the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, embraced this quality of isolation as a guarantor of purity. Only pure, absolute music, he argued, could realize the highest potential of the art. Bonds reveals how and why perceptions of absolute music changed so radically between the 1850s and 1920s. When it first appeared, "absolute music" was a new term applied to old music, but by the early decades of the twentieth century, it had become-paradoxically--an old term associated with the new music of modernists like Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Bonds argues that the key developments in this shift lay not in discourse about music but rather the visual arts. The growing prestige of abstraction and form in painting at the turn of the twentieth century-line and color, as opposed to object-helped move the idea of purely abstract, absolute music to the cutting edge of musical modernism. By carefully tracing the evolution of absolute music from Ancient Greece through the Middle Ages to the twentieth-century, Bonds not only provides the first comprehensive history of this pivotal concept but also provokes new thoughts on the essence of music and how essence has been used to explain music's effect. A long awaited book from one of the most respected senior scholars in the field, Absolute Music will be essential reading for anyone interested in the history, theory, and aesthetics of music.
Download or read book The Idea of Absolute Music written by Carl Dahlhaus and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1991-08-13 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines a single music-aesthetical idea from various historical and philosophical backgrounds. In exploring the origins of the idea and its career over two centuries, it brings to light the variety of ways in which it has affected music.
Download or read book Music and the Child written by Natalie Sarrazin and published by . This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Children are inherently musical. They respond to music and learn through music. Music expresses children's identity and heritage, teaches them to belong to a culture, and develops their cognitive well-being and inner self worth. As professional instructors, childcare workers, or students looking forward to a career working with children, we should continuously search for ways to tap into children's natural reservoir of enthusiasm for singing, moving and experimenting with instruments. But how, you might ask? What music is appropriate for the children I'm working with? How can music help inspire a well-rounded child? How do I reach and teach children musically? Most importantly perhaps, how can I incorporate music into a curriculum that marginalizes the arts?This book explores a holistic, artistic, and integrated approach to understanding the developmental connections between music and children. This book guides professionals to work through music, harnessing the processes that underlie music learning, and outlining developmentally appropriate methods to understand the role of music in children's lives through play, games, creativity, and movement. Additionally, the book explores ways of applying music-making to benefit the whole child, i.e., socially, emotionally, physically, cognitively, and linguistically.
Download or read book Poe and the Idea of Music written by Charity McAdams and published by . This book was released on 2020-03-04 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The selling point of this book I think is that it's the only book that addresses Edgar Allan Poe's use of music from a purely literary standpoint.
Download or read book The Musical Idea and the Logic Technique and Art of Its Presentation New Paperback English Edition written by Arnold Schoenberg and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006-07-18 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents one of the most important documents in twentieth century musical thought.
Download or read book Music and Musical Thought in Early India written by Lewis Rowell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-12-25 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a broad perspective of the philosophy, theory, and aesthetics of early Indian music and musical ideology, this study makes a unique contribution to our knowledge of the ancient foundations of India's musical culture. Lewis Rowell reconstructs the tunings, scales, modes, rhythms, gestures, formal patterns, and genres of Indian music from Vedic times to the thirteenth century, presenting not so much a history as a thematic analysis and interpretation of India's magnificent musical heritage. In Indian culture, music forms an integral part of a broad framework of ideas that includes philosophy, cosmology, religion, literature, and science. Rowell works with the known theoretical treatises and the oral tradition in an effort to place the technical details of musical practice in their full cultural context. Many quotations from the original Sanskrit appear here in English translation for the first time, and the necessary technical information is presented in terms accessible to the nonspecialist. These features, combined with Rowell's glossary of Sanskrit terms and extensive bibliography, make Music and Musical Thought in Early India an excellent introduction for the general reader and an indispensable reference for ethnomusicologists, historical musicologists, music theorists, and Indologists.
Download or read book The Idea of Music written by P. Franklin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-30 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has modern music evolved as it has? Why is it that certain leading composers from the first half of this century are now considered insignificant, while the responsibility for the development of a musical language of modernism has been attributed to Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School? In this book the author seeks to re-examine Schoenberg's innovations through a reassessment of the nature of artistic expression and artistic truth. Starting from the premise that Austro-German music in the late nineteenth century was dominated by philosophical ideas, he has focused on writing by Schoenberg, Adorno and Thomas Mann, setting these alongside a discussion of the music of Pfitzner, Schreker, Mahler, Richard Strauss and Schoenberg himself, in a compelling argument for a review of the standard historical account of the period.
Download or read book The Rhythm of Thought written by Jessica Wiskus and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-03-05 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between present and past, visible and invisible, and sensation and idea, there is resonance—so philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued and so Jessica Wiskus explores in The Rhythm of Thought. Holding the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, the paintings of Paul Cézanne, the prose of Marcel Proust, and the music of Claude Debussy under Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological light, she offers innovative interpretations of some of these artists’ masterworks, in turn articulating a new perspective on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. More than merely recovering Merleau-Ponty’s thought, Wiskus thinks according to it. First examining these artists in relation to noncoincidence—as silence in poetry, depth in painting, memory in literature, and rhythm in music—she moves through an array of their artworks toward some of Merleau-Ponty’s most exciting themes: our bodily relationship to the world and the dynamic process of expression. She closes with an examination of synesthesia as an intertwining of internal and external realms and a call, finally, for philosophical inquiry as a mode of artistic expression. Structured like a piece of music itself, The Rhythm of Thought offers new contexts in which to approach art, philosophy, and the resonance between them.
Download or read book Rough Ideas written by Stephen Hough and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays on music and life by the famed classical pianist and composer Stephen Hough is one of the world’s leading pianists, winning global acclaim and numerous awards, both for his concerts and his recordings. He is also a writer, composer, and painter, and has been described by The Economist as one of “Twenty Living Polymaths.” Hough writes informally and engagingly about music and the life of a musician, from the broader aspects of what it is to walk out onto a stage or to make a recording, to specialist tips from deep inside the practice room: how to trill, how to pedal, how to practice. He also writes vividly about people he’s known, places he’s traveled to, books he’s read, paintings he’s seen; and he touches on more controversial subjects, such as assisted suicide and abortion. Even religion is there—the possibility of the existence of God, problems with some biblical texts, and the challenges involved in being a gay Catholic. Rough Ideas is an illuminating, constantly surprising introduction to the life and mind of one of our great cultural figures.
Download or read book Bad Vibrations written by James Kennaway and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music has been used as a cure for disease since as far back as King David's lyre, but the notion that it might be a serious cause of mental and physical illness was rare until the late eighteenth century. At that time, physicians started to argue that excessive music, or the wrong kind of music, could over-stimulate a vulnerable nervous system, leading to illness, immorality and even death. Since then there have been successive waves of moral panics about supposed epidemics of musical nervousness, caused by everything from Wagner to jazz and rock 'n' roll. It was this medical and critical debate that provided the psychiatric rhetoric of "degenerate music" that was the rationale for the persecution of musicians in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. By the 1950s, the focus of medical anxiety about music shifted to the idea that "musical brainwashing" and "subliminal messages" could strain the nerves and lead to mind control, mental illness and suicide. More recently, the prevalence of sonic weapons and the use of music in torture in the so-called War on Terror have both made the subject of music that is bad for the health worryingly topical. This book outlines and explains the development of this idea of pathological music from the Enlightenment until the present day, providing an original contribution to the history of medicine, music and the body.
Download or read book Poe and the Idea of Music written by Charity McAdams and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edgar Allan Poe often set the scenes of his stories and poems with music: angels have the heartstrings of lutes, spirits dance, and women speak with melodic voices. These musical ideas appear to mimic the ways other authors, particularly Romanticists, used music in their works to represent a spiritual ideal artistic realm. Music brought forth the otherworldly, and spoke to the possible transcendence of the human spirit. Yet, Poe's music differs from these Romantic notions in ways that, although not immediately perceptible in each individual instance, cohere to invert Romantic idealism. For Poe, artistic transcendence is impossible, the metaphysical realm is unreachable, and humans cannot perceive anything but their own failure of spirit. In this book, I show how we can look at Poe's poems and stories on the whole to discover this, and in doing so, unpack some of Poe's mysticism along the way.
Download or read book French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music written by Joseph Acquisto and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What role did music play in the creation of a new aesthetics of poetry in French from the 1860s to the 1930s? How did music serve as an unassimilable 'other' against which the French symbolist poets crafted a new poetics? And why did music gradually disappear from early twentieth-century poetic discourse? These are among the questions Joseph Acquisto poses in his lively study of the ways in which Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Ghil, and Royère question the nature and function of the lyric through an ever-shifting set of intertextual and cultural contexts. Rather than focusing on 'musicality' in verse, the author addresses the consequences of choosing music as a site of dialogue with poetry. Acquisto argues that memory plays an under acknowledged yet vital role in these poets' rewriting of symbolist poetics. His reading of their interactions, and his focus on both major and neglected poets, exposes the myth of a small handful of 'great authors' shaping symbolism while a host of disciples propagated the tradition. Rather, Acquisto proposes, the multiplicity of authors writing and rewriting symbolism invites a dialogic approach to the poetics of the period. Moreover, music, as theorized rather than performed or heard, serves as a privileged mobile space of poetic creation and dialogue for these poet-critics; it is through engagement with music, supposedly the purest or most abstract of the arts, that one can retrace the textual and cultural transformations accomplished by the symbolist tradition. By extension, these poets' rethinking of poetics is an occasion for present-day critics to re-examine assumptions, not only about the intersections of music and poetry and our understanding of symbolist poetics but also about the role that the aesthetic implicitly plays in the creation, preservation, or reshaping of cultural memory.
Download or read book Music and the Racial Imagination written by Ronald M. Radano and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2000-12 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A specter lurks in the house of music, and it goes by the name of race," write Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman in their introduction. Yet the intimate relationship between race and music has rarely been examined by contemporary scholars, most of whom have abandoned it for the more enlightened notions of ethnicity and culture. Here, a distinguished group of contributors confront the issue head on. Representing an unusually broad range of academic disciplines and geographic regions, they critically examine how the imagination of race has influenced musical production, reception, and scholarly analysis, even as they reject the objectivity of the concept itself. Each essay follows the lead of the substantial introduction, which reviews the history of race in European and American, non-Western and global musics, placing it within the contexts of the colonial experience and the more recent formation of "world music." Offering a bold, new revisionist agenda for musicology in a postmodern, postcolonial world, this book will appeal to students of culture and race across the humanities and social sciences.
Download or read book Listen to This written by Alex Ross and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-09-28 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011 Alex Ross's award-winning international bestseller, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has become a contemporary classic, establishing Ross as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians. Listen to This, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essay in which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at The New Yorker. These pieces, dedicated to classical and popular artists alike, are at once erudite and lively. In a previously unpublished essay, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music history—from Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelin—through a few iconic bass lines of celebration and lament. He vibrantly sketches canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi, and Brahms; gives us in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Björk and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark high school and indie-rock hipsters in Beijing. Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross shows how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. Witty, passionate, and brimming with insight, Listen to This teaches us how to listen more closely.
Download or read book Intimate Music written by John H. Baron and published by Pendragon Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first comprehensive overview of instrumental chamber music from the 16th century to the present. There are comparisons of different genres, composers, and periods. Situations for chamber music at different moments in history are brought into a continuum, and all aspects of chamber music are placed into perspective. A History of the Idea of Chamber Music is chronologically organized at the most general level. Beyond that, national schools figure prominently, as well as genres and personalities. Throughout this book the composition of chamber music, the performance of chamber music, and the social, economic, political, and aesthetic conditions for chamber music have been considered per se and as they interact. (From the Introduction)
Download or read book A Million Years of Music written by Gary Tomlinson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-02-27 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the origin of music? In the last few decades this centuries-old puzzle has been reinvigorated by new archaeological evidence and developments in the fields of cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary theory. Starting at a period of human prehistory long before Homo sapiens or music existed, Tomlinson describes the incremental attainments that, by changing the communication and society of prehuman species, laid the foundation for musical behaviors in more recent times. He traces in Neandertals and early sapiens the accumulation and development of these capacities, and he details their coalescence into modern musical behavior across the last hundred millennia
