Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject PDF Download

Author: Michael L. Klein
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025301722X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Departing from the traditional German school of music theorists, Michael Klein injects a unique French critical theory perspective into the framework of music and meaning. Using primarily Lacanian notions of the symptom, that unnamable jouissance located in the unconscious, and the registers of subjectivity (the Imaginary, the Symbolic Order, and the Real), Klein explores how we understand music as both an artistic form created by "the subject" and an artistic expression of a culture that imposes its history on this modern subject. By creatively navigating from critical theory to music, film, fiction, and back to music, Klein distills the kinds of meaning that we have been missing when we perform, listen to, think about, and write about music without the insights of Lacan and others into formulations of modern subjectivity.

Author: Timothy Koozin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197693008
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Theory in popular music has historically tended to approach musical processes of rhythm, harmony, counterpoint, and form as abstractions, without very directly engaging the intimate connection between the performer and instrument in popular music performance. Embodied Expression in Popular Music illuminates under-researched aspects of music theory in popular music studies by situating musical analysis in a context of embodied movement in vocal and instrumental performance. Author Timothy Koozin offers a performance-based analytical methodology that progresses from basic idiomatic gestures, to gestural combinations and interactions with large-scale design, to broader interpretive strategies that engage with theories of embodiment, the musical topic, and narrative. The book examines artistic practices in popular song that draw from a vast range of stylistic sources, including rock, blues, folk, soul, funk, fusion, and hip-hop, as well as European classical and African American gospel musical traditions. Exploring the interrelationships in how we create, hear, and understand music through the body, Koozin demonstrates how a focus on body-instrument interaction can illuminate musical structures while leveling implied hierarchies of cultural value. He provides detailed analysis of artists' creative strategies in singing and playing their instruments, probing how musicians represent subjectivities of gender, race, and social class in shaping songs and whole albums. Tracing connections from foundational blues, gospel, and rock musicians to current rap artists, he clarifies how inferences of musical topic and narrative are part of a larger creative process in strategically positioning musical gestures. By engaging with songs by female artists and artists of color, Koozin also challenges the methodological framing of traditional theory scholarship. As a contribution to work on embodiment and meaning in music, this study of popular song explores how the situated and engaged body is active in listening, performing, and the formation of musical cultures, as it provides a means by which we understand our own bodies in relation to the world.

Author: Esti Sheinberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351237527
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Music Signification captures the richness and complexity of the field, presenting 30 essays by recognized international experts that reflect current interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches to the subject. Examinations of music signification have been an essential component in thinking about music for millennia, but it is only in the last few decades that music signification has been established as an independent area of study. During this time, the field has grown exponentially, incorporating a vast array of methodologies that seek to ground how music means and to explore what it may mean. Research in music signification typically embraces concepts and practices imported from semiotics, literary criticism, linguistics, the visual arts, philosophy, sociology, history, and psychology, among others. By bringing together such approaches in transparent groupings that reflect the various contexts in which music is created and experienced, and by encouraging critical dialogues, this volume provides an authoritative survey of the discipline and a significant advance in inquiries into music signification. This book addresses a wide array of readers, from scholars who specialize in this and related areas, to the general reader who is curious to learn more about the ways in which music makes sense.

Author: Samuel Wilson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317092651
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
There is a growing interest in what psychoanalytic theory brings to studying and researching music. Bringing together established scholars within the field, as well as emerging voices, this collection outlines and advances psychoanalytic approaches to our understanding of a range of musics—from the romantic and the modernist to the contemporary popular. Drawing on the work of Freud, Lacan, Jung, Žižek, Barthes, and others, it demonstrates the efficacy of psychoanalytic theories in fields such as music analysis, music and culture, and musical improvisation. It engages debates about both the methods through which music is understood and the situations in which it is experienced, including those of performance and listening. This collection is an invaluable resource for students, lecturers, researchers, and anyone else interested in the intersections between music, psychoanalysis, and musicology.

Author: Robert S. Hatten
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253038014
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
In his third volume on musical expressive meaning, Robert S. Hatten examines virtual agency in music from the perspectives of movement, gesture, embodiment, topics, tropes, emotion, narrativity, and performance. Distinguished from the actual agency of composers and performers, whose intentional actions either create music as notated or manifest music as significant sound, virtual agency is inferred from the implied actions of those sounds, as they move and reveal tendencies within music-stylistic contexts. From our most basic attributions of sources for perceived energies in music, to the highest realm of our engagement with musical subjectivity, Hatten explains how virtual agents arose as distinct from actual ones, how unspecified actants can take on characteristics of (virtual) human agents, and how virtual agents assume various actorial roles. Along the way, Hatten demonstrates some of the musical means by which composers and performers from different historical eras have staged and projected various levels of virtual agency, engaging listeners imaginatively and interactively within the expressive realms of their virtual and fictional musical worlds.

Author: Kenneth Smith
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501368478
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
What happens in our unconscious minds when we listen to, produce or perform popular music? The Unconscious – a much misunderstood concept from philosophy and psychology – works through human subjects as we produce music and can be traced through the music we engage with. Through a new collaboration between music theorist and philosopher, Smith and Overy present the long history of the unconscious and its related concepts, working systematically through philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, psychoanalysts such as Freud and Lacan, to theorists such as Deleuze and Kristeva. The theories offered are vital to follow the psychological complexity of popular music, demonstrated through close readings of individual songs, albums, artists, genres, and popular music practices. Among countless artists, Listening to the Unconscious draws from Prince to Sufjan Stevens, from Robyn to Xiu Xiu, from Joanna Newsom to Arcade Fire, from PJ Harvey to LCD Sound System, each of whom offer exciting inroads into the fascinating worlds of our unconscious musical minds. And in return, theories of the unconscious can perhaps takes us deeper into the heart of popular music.

Author: Delia da Sousa Correa
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748693130
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 720

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Book Description
Provides a pioneering interdisciplinary overview of the literature and music of nine centuriesOffers research essays by literary specialists and musicologists that provides access to the best current interdisciplinary scholarship on connections between literature and musicIncludes five historical sections from the Middle Ages to the present, with editorial introductions to enhance understanding of relationships between literature and music in each periodCharts and extends work in this expanding interdisciplinary field to provide an essential resource for researchers with an interest in literature and other mediaBringing together seventy-one newly commissioned original chapters by literary specialists and musicologists, this book presents the most recent interdisciplinary research into literature and music. In five parts, the chapters cover the Middle Ages to the present. The volume introduction and methodology chapters define key concepts for investigating the interdependence of these two art forms and a concluding chapter looks to the future of this interdisciplinary field. An editorial introduction to each historical part explains the main features of the relationships between literature and music in the period and outlines recent developments in scholarship. Contributions represent a multiplicity of approaches: theoretical, contextual and close reading. Case studies reach beyond literature and music to engage with related fields including philosophy, history of science, theatre, broadcast media and popular culture.This trailblazing companion charts and extends the work in this expanding interdisciplinary field and is an essential resource for researchers with an interest in literature and other media.

Author: Jacquelyn Sholes
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253033160
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Who inspired Johannes Brahms in his art of writing music? In this book, Jacquelyn E. C. Sholes provides a fresh look at the ways in which Brahms employed musical references to works of earlier composers in his own instrumental music. By analyzing newly identified allusions alongside previously known musical references in works such as the B-Major Piano Trio, the D-Major Serenade, the First Piano Concerto, and the Fourth Symphony, among others, Sholes demonstrates how a historical reference in one movement of a work seems to resonate meaningfully, musically, and dramatically with material in other movements in ways not previously recognized. She highlights Brahms's ability to weave such references into broad, movement-spanning narratives, arguing that these narratives served as expressive outlets for his complicated, sometimes conflicted, attitudes toward the material to which he alludes. Ultimately, Brahms's music reveals both the inspiration and the burden that established masters such as Domenico Scarlatti, J. S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, and especially Beethoven represented for him as he struggled to emerge with his own artistic voice and to define and secure his unique position in music history.

Author: Lawrence Kramer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520288807
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
"What, exactly, is knowledge of music? And what does it tell us about humanistic knowledge in general? The Thought of Music, completing a trilogy on musical understanding with Interpreting Music and Expression and Truth, grapples directly with these fundamental questions--questions especially compelling at a time when humanistic knowledge is enmeshed in debates about its character and future. Lawrence Kramer seeks answers in both thought about music and thought in music--thinking in tones. He skillfully assesses musical scholarship in the aftermath of critical musicology and musical hermeneutics and in view of more recent concerns with embodiment, affect, and performance. This authoritative and timely work challenges the prevailing conceptions of every topic it addresses: language, context, and culture; pleasure and performance; and, through music, the foundations of understanding in the humanities."--Provided by publisher.

Author: Julian Murphet
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192863126
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking and comprehensive study, Julian Murphet examines how dramatists and prose writers at the turn of the twentieth century experimented with new forms of modern character. Old truisms of character such as consistency, depth, and verisimilitude are eschewed in favour of inconsistency, bad faith, and fragmentation.