Music as Cultural Practice

Music as Cultural Practice PDF Author: Lawrence Kramer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description


Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900

Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900 PDF Author: Lawrence Kramer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520084438
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Book Description
In Music as Cultural Practice, Lawrence Kramer adapts the resources of contemporary literary theory to forge a genuinely new discourse about music. Rethinking fundamental questions of meaning and expression, he demonstrates how European music of the nineteenth century collaborates on equal terms with textual and sociocultural practices in the constitution of self and society. In Kramer's analysis, compositional processes usually understood in formal or emotive terms reappear as active forces in the work of cultural formation. Thus Beethoven's last piano sonata, Op. 111, forms both a realization and a critique of Romantic utopianism; Liszt's Faust Symphony takes bourgeois gender ideology into a troubled embrace; Wagner's Tristan und Isolde articulates a basic change in the cultural construction of sexuality. Through such readings, Kramer works toward the larger conclusion that nineteenth-century European music is concerned as much to challenge as to exemplify an ideology of organic unity and subjective wholeness. Anyone interested in music, literary criticism, or nineteenth-century culture will find this book pertinent and provocative.

Musical Meaning

Musical Meaning PDF Author: Lawrence Kramer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520382978
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Book Description
Ranging widely over classical music, jazz, popular music, and film and television music, Musical Meaning uncovers the historical importance of asking about meaning in the lived experience of musical works, styles, and performances. Lawrence Kramer has been a pivotal figure in the development of new resources for understanding music. In this accessible and eloquently written book, he argues boldly that humanistic, not just technical, meaning is a basic force in music history and an indispensable factor in how, where, and when music is heard. He demonstrates that thinking about music can become a vital means of thinking about general questions of meaning, subjectivity, and value. First published in 2001, Musical Meaning anticipates many of the musicological topics of today, including race, performance, embodiment, and media. In addition, Kramer explores music itself as a source of understanding via his composition Revenants for piano, revised for this edition and available on the UC Press website.

The Cultural Study of Music

The Cultural Study of Music PDF Author: Martin Clayton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136754326
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 371

Book Description
First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Ethnomusicology of Western Art Music

The Ethnomusicology of Western Art Music PDF Author: Laudan Nooshin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317325532
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
Since the late 1980s, the boundaries between the ‘musicologies’ have become increasingly blurred. Most notably, a growing number of musicologists have become interested in the ideas and methodologies of ethnomusicology, and in particular, in applying one of the central methodological tools of ethnomusicology – ethnography – to the study of Western ‘art’ music, a tradition which had previously been studied primarily through scores, recordings and other historical sources. Alongside this, since the 1970s a small number of ethnomusicologists have also written about Western art music, thus complicating the idea of ethnomusicology as the study of ‘other’ music. Indeed, there has been a growth in this area of scholarship in recent years. Approaching western art music through the perspectives of ethnomusicology can offer new and enriching insights to the study of this musical tradition, as shown in the writings presented in this book. The current volume is the first collection of essays on this topic and includes work by authors from a range of musicological and ethnomusicological backgrounds, exploring a variety of issues including music in orchestral outreach programmes, new audiences for classical music concerts, music and conflict transformation, ethnographic study of the rehearsal process, and the politics of a high-profile music festival. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnomusicology Forum.

Musical Composition in the Context of Globalization

Musical Composition in the Context of Globalization PDF Author: Christian Utz
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839450950
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 531

Book Description
Since the early transformation of European music practice and theory in the cultural centers of Asia, Latin America, and Africa around 1900, it has become necessary for music history to be conceived globally - a challenge that musicology has hardly faced yet. This book discusses the effects of cultural globalization on processes of composition and distribution of art music in the 20th and 21st century. Christian Utz provides the foundations of a global music historiography, building on new models such as transnationalism, entangled histories, and reflexive globalization. The relationship between music and broader changes in society forms the central focus and is treated as a pivotal music-historical dynamic.

The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction

The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction PDF Author: Nicky Losseff
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317028066
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
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.

Olivier Messiaen's System of Signs

Olivier Messiaen's System of Signs PDF Author: Andrew Shenton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135155588X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Book Description
Andrew Shenton's groundbreaking cross-disciplinary approach to Messiaen's music presents a systematic and detailed examination of the compositional techniques of one of the most significant musicians of the twentieth century as they relate to his desire to express profound truths about Catholicism. It is widely accepted that music can have mystical and transformative powers, but because 'pure' music has no programme, Messiaen sought to refine his compositions to speak more clearly about the truths of the Catholic faith by developing a sophisticated semiotic system in which aspects of music become direct signs for words and concepts. Using interdisciplinary methodologies drawing on linguistics, cognition studies, theological studies and semiotics, Shenton traces the development of Messiaen's sign system using examples from many of Messiaen's works and concentrating in particular on the M tations sur le myst de la Sainte Trinit or organ, a suite which contains the most sophisticated and developed use of a sign system and represents a profound exegesis of Messiaen's understanding of the Catholic triune God. By working on issues of interpretation, Shenton endeavours to bridge the traditional gap between scholars and performers and to help people listen to Messiaen's music with spirit and understanding.

Hermeneutics and Music Criticism

Hermeneutics and Music Criticism PDF Author: Roger W. H. Savage
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135839255
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Book Description
Hermeneutics and Music Criticism forges new perspectives on aesthetics, politics and contemporary interpretive strategies. By advancing new insights into the roles judgment and imagination play both in our experiences of music and its critical interpretation, this book reevaluates our current understandings of music’s transformative power. The engagement with critical musicologists and philosophers, including Adorno, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, provides a nuanced analysis of the crucial issues affecting the theory and practice of music criticism. By challenging musical hermeneutics’ deployment as a means of deciphering social values and meanings, Hermeneutics and Music Criticism offers an answer to the long-standing question of how music’s expression of moods and feelings affects us and our relation to the world.

Word and Music Studies: Defining the Field

Word and Music Studies: Defining the Field PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004649212
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
The nineteen interdisciplinary essays assembled in WORD AND MUSIC STUDIES I were first presented in 1997 at the founding conference of the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA) in Graz, Austria. Diverse in subject matter, theoretical orientation, critical approach, and interpretive strategy, they share a keen scholarly interest in contemporary word-music reflection. Registering the impact of cultural studies on word-music relations, as manifested in the 'new musicology' and other 'historicist' approaches, the volume aims to assess the entire field of word and music studies, to define its subject, objectives, and methodology and to describe the field's state of the art. Within the broader context of generic, structural, performative, and ideological considerations concerning the manifold interrelations between literature and music, contributors explore wide-ranging topics, such as the vexing question of terminology (e.g. 'word and music', 'melopoetics', 'interart', 'intermedial', 'transmedial'); inquiry into the meaning, narrative potential, and verbalization of music; analysis of texted music (the Lied and opera) and instrumental music; and discussion of individual issues (e.g. 'ekphrasis', 'musicalization of fiction', 'word music', and 'verbal music') and interart loanwords (e.g. 'narrativity', 'counterpoint', and 'leitmotif').