Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture, 1680–1880 PDF Download

Author: Sarah Hibberd
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108486592
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
The first English language collection on the musical sublime. Reveals music's place at the forefront of this interdisciplinary aesthetic category.

Author: Stacy J. Lettman
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469668092
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
In this interdisciplinary work, Stacy J. Lettman explores real and imagined violence as depicted in Caribbean and Jamaican text and music, how that violence repeats itself in both art and in the actions of the state, and what that means for Caribbean cultural identity. Jamaica is known for having one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world, a fact that Lettman links to remnants of the plantation era—namely the economic dispossession and structural violence that still haunt the island. Lettman contends that the impact of colonial violence is so embedded in the language of Jamaican literature and music that violence has become a separate language itself, one that paradoxically can offer cultural modes of resistance. Lettman codifies Paul Gilroy's concept of the "slave sublime" as a remix of Kantian philosophy through a Caribbean lens to take a broad view of Jamaica, the Caribbean, and their political and literary history that challenges Eurocentric ideas of slavery, Blackness, and resistance. Living at the intersection of philosophy, literary and musical analysis, and postcolonial theory, this book sheds new light on the lingering ghosts of the plantation and slavery in the Caribbean.

Author: Miranda Eva Stanyon
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812253086
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
What does the sublime sound like? Miranda Stanyon traces competing varieties of the sublime, a crucial modern aesthetic category, as shaped by the antagonistic intimacies between music and language. In resounding the history of the sublime over the course of the long eighteenth century, she finds a phenomenon always already resonant.

Author: Jeremy Begbie
Publisher: SCM Press
ISBN: 0334056942
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
How can the arts witness to the transcendence of the Christian God? It is widely believed that there is something transcendent about the arts, that they can awaken a profound sense of awe, wonder, and mystery, of something “beyond” this world. Many argue that this opens up fruitful opportunities for conversation with those who may have no use for conventional forms of Christianity. Jeremy Begbie—a leading voice on theology and the arts—in this book employs a biblical, trinitarian imagination to show how Christian involvement in the arts can (and should) be shaped by a vision of God’s transcendence revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. After critiquing some current writing on the subject, he goes on to offer rich resources to help readers engage constructively with the contemporary cultural moment even as they bear witness to the otherness and uncontainability of the triune God of love.

Author: Josh Epstein
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421415232
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
What is the significance of noise in modernist music and literature? When Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring premiered in Paris in 1913, the crowd rioted in response to the harsh dissonance and jarring rhythms of its score. This was noise, not music. In Sublime Noise, Josh Epstein examines the significance of noise in modernist music and literature. How—and why—did composers and writers incorporate the noises of modern industry, warfare, and big-city life into their work? Epstein argues that, as the creative class engaged with the racket of cityscapes and new media, they reconsidered not just the aesthetic of music but also its cultural effects. Noise, after all, is more than a sonic category: it is a cultural value judgment—a way of abating and categorizing the sounds of a social space or of new music. Pulled into dialogue with modern music’s innovative rhythms, noise signaled the breakdown of art’s autonomy from social life—even the “old favorites” of Beethoven and Wagner took on new cultural meanings when circulated in noisy modern contexts. The use of noise also opened up the closed space of art to the pressures of publicity and technological mediation. Building both on literary cultural studies and work in the “new musicology,” Sublime Noise examines the rich material relationship that exists between music and literature. Through close readings of modernist authors, including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, E. M. Forster, and Ezra Pound, and composers, including George Antheil, William Walton, Erik Satie, and Benjamin Britten, Epstein offers a radically contemporary account of musical-literary interactions that goes well beyond pure formalism. This book will be of interest to scholars of Anglophone literary modernism and to musicologists interested in how music was given new literary and cultural meaning during that complex interdisciplinary period.

Author: Sander van Maas
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823230597
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
On the basis of a careful analysis of Olivier Messiaen's work, this book argues for a renewal of our thinking about religious music. Addressing his notion of a "hyper-religious" music of sounds and colors, it aims to show that Messiaen has broken new ground. His reinvention of religious music makes us again aware of the fact that religious music, if taken in its proper radical sense, belongs to the foremost of musical adventures. The work of Olivier Messiaen is well known for its inclusion of religious themes and gestures. These alone, however, do not seem enough to account for the religious status of the work. Arguing for a "breakthrough toward the beyond" on the basis of the synaesthetic experience of music, Messiaen invites a confrontation with contemporary theologians and post-secular thinkers. How to account for a religious breakthrough that is produced by a work of art? Starting from an analysis of his 1960s oratorio La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ, this book arranges a moderated dialogue between Messiaen and the music theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, the phenomenology of revelation of Jean-Luc Marion, the rethinking of religion and technics in Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, and the Augustinian ruminations of Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-François Lyotard. Ultimately, this confrontation underscores the challenging yet deeply affirmative nature of Messiaen's music.

Author: Glenn Fosbraey
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100081467X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
This book examines how popular music is able to approach subjects of bio-politics, climate change, solastalgia, and anthropomorphisation, alongside its more common diet of songs about love, dancing, and break-ups – all while satisfying its primary remit of being entertaining and listenable. Nearly a thousand books have been published on bioethics since Van Rensselaer Potter’s Bioethics Bridge to the Future (1971), with a marked increase in the past 20 years. However, not one of these books has focused itself on popular music, something Christopher Partridge describes as ‘central to the construction of [our] identities, central to [our] sense of self, central to [our] well-being and, therefore, central to [our] social relations’. This edited collection examines popular music through a range of topics, from romance to climate change. Coastal Environments in Popular Song is perfect for students, scholars, and researchers alike interested in bioethics, social history, and the history of music.

Author: Lisa Shapiro
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190882492
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
For many, the word 'pleasure' conjures associations with hedonism, indulgence, and escape from the life of the mind. However little we talk about it, though, pleasure also plays an integral role in cognitive life, in both our sensory perception of the world and our intellectual understanding. This previously important but now neglected philosophical understanding of pleasure is the focus of the essays in this volume, which challenges received views that pleasure is principally motivating of action, unanalyzable, and caused, rather than responsive to reason. Like other books in the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series, it traces the development of the focal idea from ancient times through the 20th century. The essays highlight points of departure for new lines of inquiry rather than attempting to provide a full picture of how the idea of pleasure has been explored in philosophy. The volume begins by showing how Plato, Aristotle, early Islamic philosophers, and philosophers in the Medieval Latin tradition, such as Aquinas, honed in on the challenge of unifying the variety of pleasures so that they fall under one concept. In the early modern period, philosophers shifted from understanding the logic of pleasure to treating pleasure as a mental state. As the studies of Malebranche, Berkeley and Kant show, the central problem becomes understanding the relation of pleasure to other sensory experiences, and the role of pleasure in human cognition and knowledge. Short interdisciplinary reflections interspersed between essays focus on art of 16th and 17th century textbooks and the difficult music of composers like Bach, which demonstrate translation of these concerns to cultural production in the period. As the essay on Mill shows, the 19th century development of scientific psychology narrowed the definition of pleasure, and so its philosophical focus. Contemporary accounts of pleasure, however, in both philosophy and psychology, are now recognizing the limitations of this narrow focus, and are once again recognizing the complexity of pleasure and its role in human life.

Author: Sarah Hibberd
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108788343
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
The sublime - that elusive encounter with overwhelming height, power or limits - has been associated with music from the early-modern rise of interest in the Longinian sublime to its saturation of European culture in the later nineteenth century and beyond. This volume offers a historically situated study of the relationship between music, sound and the sublime. Together, the authors distinguish between the different aesthetics of production, representation and effect, while understanding these as often mutually reinforcing approaches. They demonstrate music's strength in playing out the sublime as transfer, transport and transmission of power, allied to the persistent theme of destruction, deaths and endings. The volume opens up two avenues for further research suggested by the adjective 'sonorous': a wider spectrum of sounds heard as sublime, and (especially for those outside musicology) a more multifaceted idea of music as a cultural practice that shares boundaries with other sounding phenomena.

Author: Michael E. Veal
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819576549
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
This ground-breaking case study examines record production as ethnographic work. Since its founding in 2003, Seattle-based record label Sublime Frequencies has produced world music recordings that have been received as radical, sometimes problematic critiques of the practices of sound ethnography. Founded by punk rocker brothers Alan and Richard Bishop, along with filmmaker Hisham Mayet, the label's releases encompass collagist sound travelogues; individual artist compilations; national, regional and genre surveys; and DVDs—all designed in a distinctive graphic style recalling the DIY aesthetic of punk and indie rock. Sublime Frequencies' producers position themselves as heirs to canonical ethnographic labels such as Folkways, Nonesuch, and Musique du Monde, but their aesthetic and philosophical roots in punk, indie rock, and experimental music effectively distinguish their work from more conventional ethnographic norms. Situated at the intersection of ethnomusicology, sound studies, cultural anthropology, and popular music studies, the essays in this volume explore the issues surrounding the label—including appropriation and intellectual property—while providing critical commentary and charting the impact of the label through listener interviews.