- Table View
- List View
Rethinking J.S. Bach's The Art of Fugue
by Anatoly P. MilkaThe enigmatic character of The Art of Fugue became apparent as early as in its first edition, printed more than a year after the composer’s death. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who published both the first and the second editions, raised several unsolved questions regarding this opus. Anatoly P Milka presents a consistent and coherent solution to the unresolved questions about the history, structure and appearance of J.S. Bach’s The Art of Fugue, opening new perspectives for further exploration of this musical masterpiece. Milka challenges the present scholarly consensus that there exist two different versions of The Art of Fugue (the Autograph and the Original Edition) and argues that Bach had considered four versions, of which only two are apparent and have been discussed so far. Only Bach’s illness and death prevented him from fulfilling his plan and publishing a fourth, conclusive version of his opus.
Rethinking Mahler
by Jeremy BarhamAs one of the most popular classical composers in the performance repertoire of professional and amateur orchestras and choirs across the world, Gustav Mahler continues to generate significant interest, and the global appetite for his music, and for discussions of it, remains large. Editor Jeremy Barham brings together leading and emerging scholars in the field to explore Mahler's relationship with music, media, and ideas past and present, addressing issues in structural analysis, performance, genres of stage, screen and literature, cultural movements, aesthetics, history/historiography and temporal experience. Rethinking Mahler counterbalances prevailing scholarly assumptions and preferences that configure Mahler as proto-modernist, with hitherto neglected consideration of his debt to, and his re-imagining of, the legacies of his own historical past. Over the course of 17 chapters drawing from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the book pursues ideas of nostalgia, historicism and 'pastness' in relation to an emergent modernity and subsequent musical-cultural developments, yielding a wide-ranging exploration and re-evaluation of Mahler's works, their historical reception and understanding, and their resounding impact within diverse cultural contexts. Rethinking Mahler will be an essential resource for scholars and students of Mahler and late Romantic era music more generally, and will also find an audience among the many devotees of Mahler's music.
Rethinking Mahler
As one of the most popular classical composers in the performance repertoire of professional and amateur orchestras and choirs across the world, Gustav Mahler continues to generate significant interest, and the global appetite for his music, and for discussions of it, remains large. Editor Jeremy Barham brings together leading and emerging scholars in the field to explore Mahler's relationship with music, media, and ideas past and present, addressing issues in structural analysis, performance, genres of stage, screen and literature, cultural movements, aesthetics, history/historiography and temporal experience. Rethinking Mahler counterbalances prevailing scholarly assumptions and preferences that configure Mahler as proto-modernist, with hitherto neglected consideration of his debt to, and his re-imagining of, the legacies of his own historical past. Over the course of 17 chapters drawing from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the book pursues ideas of nostalgia, historicism and 'pastness' in relation to an emergent modernity and subsequent musical-cultural developments, yielding a wide-ranging exploration and re-evaluation of Mahler's works, their historical reception and understanding, and their resounding impact within diverse cultural contexts. Rethinking Mahler will be an essential resource for scholars and students of Mahler and late Romantic era music more generally, and will also find an audience among the many devotees of Mahler's music.
Rethinking Mendelssohn
by Benedict TaylorAs one of the foremost composers, conductors, and pianists of the nineteenth century, Felix Mendelssohn played a fundamental role in the shaping of modern musical tastes through his contributions to the early music revival and the formation of the Austro-German musical canon. His career allows for a remarkable meeting point for critical engagement with a host of crucial issues in the last two centuries of music history, including the relation between musical meaning and social function, programmatic and absolute music, notions of classicism and Romanticism, modernism and historicism. It also serves as a pertinent case-study of the roles political ideology, racism, and musical ignorance may play in creating and perpetuating a composer's posthumous reception. Fittingly, Rethinking Mendelssohn focuses on critical engagement with the composer's music and aesthetics, and on the interpretation of his works in relation to contemporaneous culture. Building on the renaissance in Mendelssohn scholarship of the last two decades, Rethinking Mendelssohn sets a fresh and exciting tone for research on the composer. Opening new ways of understanding Mendelssohn and setting the future direction of Mendelssohn studies, the contributing scholars pay particular attention to Mendelssohn's contested views on the relationship between art and religion, analysis of Mendelssohn's instrumental music in the wake of recent controversies in Formenlehre, and the burgeoning interest in his previously neglected contribution to the German song.
Rethinking Mendelssohn
As one of the foremost composers, conductors, and pianists of the nineteenth century, Felix Mendelssohn played a fundamental role in the shaping of modern musical tastes through his contributions to the early music revival and the formation of the Austro-German musical canon. His career allows for a remarkable meeting point for critical engagement with a host of crucial issues in the last two centuries of music history, including the relation between musical meaning and social function, programmatic and absolute music, notions of classicism and Romanticism, modernism and historicism. It also serves as a pertinent case-study of the roles political ideology, racism, and musical ignorance may play in creating and perpetuating a composer's posthumous reception. Fittingly, Rethinking Mendelssohn focuses on critical engagement with the composer's music and aesthetics, and on the interpretation of his works in relation to contemporaneous culture. Building on the renaissance in Mendelssohn scholarship of the last two decades, Rethinking Mendelssohn sets a fresh and exciting tone for research on the composer. Opening new ways of understanding Mendelssohn and setting the future direction of Mendelssohn studies, the contributing scholars pay particular attention to Mendelssohn's contested views on the relationship between art and religion, analysis of Mendelssohn's instrumental music in the wake of recent controversies in Formenlehre, and the burgeoning interest in his previously neglected contribution to the German song.
Rethinking Music Education and Social Change
by Alexandra Kertz-WelzelThe arts, and particularly music, are well-known agents for social change. They can empower, transform, or question. They can be a mirror of society's current state and a means of transformation. They are often the last refuge when all attempts at social change have failed. But are the arts able to live up to these expectations? Can music education cause social change? Rethinking Music Education and Social Change offers timely answers to these questions. It presents an imaginative, yet critical approach. At once optimistic and realistic, the book asseses music education's relation to social change and offers a new vision for music education as utopian theory and practice. As an important topic in sociology and political science, utopia offers a new tradition of thinking and a scholarly foundation for music education's relation to social change.
Rethinking Music Education and Social Change
by Alexandra Kertz-WelzelThe arts, and particularly music, are well-known agents for social change. They can empower, transform, or question. They can be a mirror of society's current state and a means of transformation. They are often the last refuge when all attempts at social change have failed. But are the arts able to live up to these expectations? Can music education cause social change? Rethinking Music Education and Social Change offers timely answers to these questions. It presents an imaginative, yet critical approach. At once optimistic and realistic, the book asseses music education's relation to social change and offers a new vision for music education as utopian theory and practice. As an important topic in sociology and political science, utopia offers a new tradition of thinking and a scholarly foundation for music education's relation to social change.
Rethinking Music through Science and Technology Studies
by Antoine Hennion and Christophe LevauxThis volume seeks to offer a new approach to the study of music through the lens of recent works in science and technology studies (STS), which propose that facts are neither absolute truths, nor completely relative, but emerge from an intensely collective process of construction. Applied to the study of music, this approach enables us to reconcile the human, social, factual, and technological aspects of the musical world, and opens the prospect of new areas of inquiry in musicology and sound studies. Rethinking Music through Science and Technology Studies draws together a wide range of both leading and emerging scholars to offer a critical survey of STS applications to music studies, considering topics ranging from classical music instrument-making to the ethos of DIY in punk music. The book’s four sections focus on key areas of music study that are impacted by STS: organology, sound studies, music history, and epistemology. Raising crucial methodological and epistemological questions about the study of music, this book will be relevant to scholars studying the interactions between music, culture, and technology from many disciplinary perspectives.
Rethinking Music through Science and Technology Studies
by Christophe Levaux Antoine HennionThis volume seeks to offer a new approach to the study of music through the lens of recent works in science and technology studies (STS), which propose that facts are neither absolute truths, nor completely relative, but emerge from an intensely collective process of construction. Applied to the study of music, this approach enables us to reconcile the human, social, factual, and technological aspects of the musical world, and opens the prospect of new areas of inquiry in musicology and sound studies. Rethinking Music through Science and Technology Studies draws together a wide range of both leading and emerging scholars to offer a critical survey of STS applications to music studies, considering topics ranging from classical music instrument-making to the ethos of DIY in punk music. The book’s four sections focus on key areas of music study that are impacted by STS: organology, sound studies, music history, and epistemology. Raising crucial methodological and epistemological questions about the study of music, this book will be relevant to scholars studying the interactions between music, culture, and technology from many disciplinary perspectives.
Rethinking Prokofiev
by Rita McAllister and Christina GuillaumierAmong major 20th-century composers whose music is poorly understood, Sergei Prokofiev stands out conspicuously. The turbulent times in which Prokofiev lived and the chronology of his travels-he left Russia in the wake of Revolution, and returned at the height of the Stalinist purges-have caused unusually polarized appraisals of his music. While individual, distinctive, and instantly recognizable, Prokofiev's music was also idiosyncratically tonal in an age when tonality was largely passé. Prokofiev's output therefore has been largely elusive and difficult to assess against contemporary trends. More than sixty years after the composer's death, editors Rita McAllister and Christina Guillaumier offer Rethinking Prokofiev as an assessment that redresses this enigmatic composer's legacy. Often more political than artistic, these appraisals have depended not only upon the date of publication but also the geographical location of the writer. Commissioned from some of the most distinguished and rising scholars in the field, this collection highlights the background and context of Prokofiev's work. Contributors delve into the composer's relationship to nineteenth-century Russian traditions, Silver-Age and Symbolist composers and poets, the culture of Paris in the 1920s and '30s, and to his later Soviet colleagues and younger contemporaries. They also investigate his reception in the West, his return to Russia, and the effect of his music on contemporary popular culture. Still, the main focus of the book is on the music itself: his early, experimental piano and vocal works, as well as his piano concertos, operas, film scores, early ballets, and late symphonies. Through an empirical examination of his characteristic harmonies, melodies, cadences, and musical gestures-and through an analysis of the newly uncovered contents of his sketch-books-contributors reveal much of what makes Prokofiev an idiosyncratic genius and his music intriguing, often dramatic, and almost always beguiling.
Rethinking Prokofiev
Among major 20th-century composers whose music is poorly understood, Sergei Prokofiev stands out conspicuously. The turbulent times in which Prokofiev lived and the chronology of his travels-he left Russia in the wake of Revolution, and returned at the height of the Stalinist purges-have caused unusually polarized appraisals of his music. While individual, distinctive, and instantly recognizable, Prokofiev's music was also idiosyncratically tonal in an age when tonality was largely passé. Prokofiev's output therefore has been largely elusive and difficult to assess against contemporary trends. More than sixty years after the composer's death, editors Rita McAllister and Christina Guillaumier offer Rethinking Prokofiev as an assessment that redresses this enigmatic composer's legacy. Often more political than artistic, these appraisals have depended not only upon the date of publication but also the geographical location of the writer. Commissioned from some of the most distinguished and rising scholars in the field, this collection highlights the background and context of Prokofiev's work. Contributors delve into the composer's relationship to nineteenth-century Russian traditions, Silver-Age and Symbolist composers and poets, the culture of Paris in the 1920s and '30s, and to his later Soviet colleagues and younger contemporaries. They also investigate his reception in the West, his return to Russia, and the effect of his music on contemporary popular culture. Still, the main focus of the book is on the music itself: his early, experimental piano and vocal works, as well as his piano concertos, operas, film scores, early ballets, and late symphonies. Through an empirical examination of his characteristic harmonies, melodies, cadences, and musical gestures-and through an analysis of the newly uncovered contents of his sketch-books-contributors reveal much of what makes Prokofiev an idiosyncratic genius and his music intriguing, often dramatic, and almost always beguiling.
Rethinking Reich
Described by music critic Alex Ross as "the most original musical thinker of our time" and having received innumerable accolades in a career spanning over fifty years, composer Steve Reich is considered by many to be America's greatest contemporary composer. His music, however, remains largely underresearched. Rethinking Reich redresses this imbalance, providing a space for prominent and emerging scholars to reassess the composer's contribution to music in the twentieth century. Featuring fourteen tightly focused and multifarious essays on various aspects of Reich's work--ranging from analytical, aesthetic, and archival studies to sociocultural, philosophical, and ethnomusicological reflections--this edited volume reveals new insights, including those enabled by access to the growing Steve Reich Collection at the Paul Sacher Foundation archive, the premier institution for primary research on twentieth-century and contemporary classical music. This volume takes on the timely task of challenging the hegemony of Reich's own articulate and convincing discourses on his music, as found in his Writings on Music (OUP, 2002), and breaks new ground in the broader field of minimalism studies.
RETHINKING REICH C
by Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap SiônDescribed by music critic Alex Ross as "the most original musical thinker of our time" and having received innumerable accolades in a career spanning over fifty years, composer Steve Reich is considered by many to be America's greatest contemporary composer. His music, however, remains largely underresearched. Rethinking Reich redresses this imbalance, providing a space for prominent and emerging scholars to reassess the composer's contribution to music in the twentieth century. Featuring fourteen tightly focused and multifarious essays on various aspects of Reich's work--ranging from analytical, aesthetic, and archival studies to sociocultural, philosophical, and ethnomusicological reflections--this edited volume reveals new insights, including those enabled by access to the growing Steve Reich Collection at the Paul Sacher Foundation archive, the premier institution for primary research on twentieth-century and contemporary classical music. This volume takes on the timely task of challenging the hegemony of Reich's own articulate and convincing discourses on his music, as found in his Writings on Music (OUP, 2002), and breaks new ground in the broader field of minimalism studies.
Rethinking Schubert
by Lorraine Byrne Bodley Julian HortonIn Rethinking Schubert, today's leading Schubertians offer fresh perspectives on the composer's importance and our perennial fascination with him. Subjecting recurring issues in historical, biographical and analytical research to renewed scrutiny, the twenty-two chapters yield new insights into Schubert, his music, his influence and his legacy, and broaden the interpretative context for the music of his final years. With close attention to matters of style, harmonic and formal analysis, and text setting, the essays gathered here explore a significant portion of the composer's extensive output across a range of genres. The most readily explicable aspect of Schubert's appeal is undoubtedly our continuing engagement with the songs. Schubert will always be the first port of call for scholars interested in the relationship between music and the poetic text, and several essays in Rethinking Schubert offer welcome new inquiries into this subject. Yet perhaps the most striking feature of modern scholarship is the new depth of thought that attaches to the instrumental works. This music's highly protracted dissemination has combined with a habitual critical hostility to produce a reception history that is hardly congenial to musical analysis. Empowered by the new momentum behind theories of nineteenth-century harmony and form and recently-published source materials, the sophisticated approaches to the instrumental music in Rethinking Schubert show decisively that it is no longer acceptable to posit Schubert's instrumental forms as flawed lyric alternatives to Beethoven. What this volume provides, then, is not only a fresh portrait of one of the most loved composers of the nineteenth century but also a conspectus of current Schubertian research. Whether perusing unknown repertoire or refreshing canonical works, Rethinking Schubert reveals the extraordinary methodological variety that is now available to research, painting a contemporary portrait of Schubert that is vibrant, plural, trans-national and complex.
Rethinking Schubert
by Lorraine Byrne Bodley and Julian HortonIn Rethinking Schubert, today's leading Schubertians offer fresh perspectives on the composer's importance and our perennial fascination with him. Subjecting recurring issues in historical, biographical and analytical research to renewed scrutiny, the twenty-two chapters yield new insights into Schubert, his music, his influence and his legacy, and broaden the interpretative context for the music of his final years. With close attention to matters of style, harmonic and formal analysis, and text setting, the essays gathered here explore a significant portion of the composer's extensive output across a range of genres. The most readily explicable aspect of Schubert's appeal is undoubtedly our continuing engagement with the songs. Schubert will always be the first port of call for scholars interested in the relationship between music and the poetic text, and several essays in Rethinking Schubert offer welcome new inquiries into this subject. Yet perhaps the most striking feature of modern scholarship is the new depth of thought that attaches to the instrumental works. This music's highly protracted dissemination has combined with a habitual critical hostility to produce a reception history that is hardly congenial to musical analysis. Empowered by the new momentum behind theories of nineteenth-century harmony and form and recently-published source materials, the sophisticated approaches to the instrumental music in Rethinking Schubert show decisively that it is no longer acceptable to posit Schubert's instrumental forms as flawed lyric alternatives to Beethoven. What this volume provides, then, is not only a fresh portrait of one of the most loved composers of the nineteenth century but also a conspectus of current Schubertian research. Whether perusing unknown repertoire or refreshing canonical works, Rethinking Schubert reveals the extraordinary methodological variety that is now available to research, painting a contemporary portrait of Schubert that is vibrant, plural, trans-national and complex.
Rethinking Schumann
by Roe-Min Kok Laura TunbridgeA provocative re-examination of a major romantic composer, Rethinking Schumann provides fresh approaches to Schumann's oeuvre and its reception from the perspectives of literature, visual arts, cultural history, performance studies, dance, and film. Traditionally, research has focused on biographical links between the composer and his music, encouraging the assumption that Schumann was solitary, divorced from reality, and frequently associated with "untimeliness." These eighteen new essays argue from a multitude of perspectives that Schumann was in fact very much a man of his time, informed not only by music but also the culture and society around him. The book further reveals that the composer's reputation has been shaped significantly by, for example, changes in attitudes towards German romanticism and its history, and recent developments in musical scholarship and performance. Rethinking Schumann takes into account cultural and social-institutional frameworks, engages with ongoing and new issues of reception and historiography, and offers fresh music-analytical insights. As a whole, the essays assemble a portrait of the artist that reflects the different ways in which Schumann has been understood and misunderstood over the past two hundred years. The volume is, in short, a timely reassessment of this ultimately non-untimely figure's legacy. While the essays consider some of Schumann's most famous music (Dichterliebe, Kinderszenen and the Piano Quintet), they also provide crucial adjustment to judgments against the composer's later works by explaining their musical features not as the result of diminishing creative capacity but as reflections of the political and social situations of mid-nineteenth-century German culture and technological developments. Schumann is revealed to have been a musician engaged by and responsive to his surroundings, whose reputation was formed to a great extent by popular culture, both in his own lifetime as he responded to particular poets and painters, and later, as his life and works were responded to by subsequent generations.
Rethinking Social Action through Music: The Search for Coexistence and Citizenship in Medellín’s Music Schools
by Geoffrey BakerHow can we better understand the past, present and future of Social Action through Music (SATM)? This ground-breaking book examines the development of the Red de Escuelas de Música de Medellín (the Network of Music Schools of Medellín), a network of 27 schools founded in Colombia’s second city in 1996 as a response to its reputation as the most dangerous city on Earth. Inspired by El Sistema, the foundational Venezuelan music education program, the Red is nonetheless markedly different: its history is one of multiple reinventions and a continual search to improve its educational offering and better realise its social goals. Its internal reflections and attempts at transformation shed valuable light on the past, present, and future of SATM.
Rethinking the Music Business: Music Contexts, Rights, Data, and COVID-19 (Music Business Research)
by Guy Morrow Daniel Nordgård Peter TschmuckCOVID-19 had a global impact on health, communities, and the economy. As a result of COVID-19, music festivals, gigs, and events were canceled or postponed across the world. This directly affected the incomes and practices of many artists and the revenue for many entities in the music business. Despite this crisis, however, there are pre-existing trends in the music business – the rise of the streaming economy, technological change (virtual and augmented reality, blockchain, etc.), and new copyright legislation. Some of these trends were impacted by the COVID-19 crisis while others were not. This book addresses these challenges and trends by following a two-pronged approach: the first part focuses on the impact of COVID-19 on the music business, and the second features general perspectives. Throughout both parts, case studies bring various themes to life. The contributors address issues within the music business before and during COVID-19. Using various critical approaches for studying the music business, this research-based book addresses key questions concerning music contexts, rights, data, and COVID-19. Rethinking the music business is a valuable study aid for undergraduate and postgraduate students in subjects including the music business, cultural economics, cultural management, creative and cultural industries studies, business and management studies, and media and communications.
Retracing a Winter's Journey: Franz Schubert's "Winterreise"
by Susan Youens"I like these songs better than all the rest, and someday you will too," Franz Schubert told the friends who were the first to hear his song cycle Winterreise. These lieder have always found admiring audiences, but the poetry he chose to set them to has been widely regarded as weak and trivial. Susan Youens looks not only at Schubert's music but at the poetry, drawn from the works of Wilhelm Müller, who once wrote in his diary, "perhaps there is a kindred spirit somewhere who will hear the tunes behind the words and give them back to me!"Youens maintains that Müller, in depicting the wanderings of the alienated lover, produced poetry that was simple but not simple-minded, poetry that embraced simplicity as part of its meaning. In her view, Müller used the ruder folk forms to give his verse greater immediacy, to convey more powerfully the wanderer's complex inner state. Youens addresses many different aspects of Winterreise: the cultural milieu to which it belonged, the genesis of both the poetry and the music, Schubert's transformation of poetic cycle into music, the philosophical dimension of the work, and its musical structure.
Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past
by Simon ReynoldsWe live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups . . . But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of cultural-ecological catastrophe, where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted? Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have indeed reached a tipping point and that although earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity - the Renaissance with its admiration for Roman and Greek classicism, the Gothic movement's invocations of medievalism - never has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past. Retromania is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the question: Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own?
The Return Of Jazz: Joachim-ernst Berendt And West German Cultural Change (PDF)
by Andrew Wright HurleyJazz has had a peculiar and fascinating history in Germany. The influential but controversial German writer, broadcaster, and record producer, Joachim-Ernst Berendt (1922–2000), author of the world’s best-selling jazz book, labored to legitimize jazz in West Germany after its ideological renunciation during the Nazi era. German musicians began, in a highly productive way, to question their all-too-eager adoption of American culture and how they sought to make valid artistic statements reflecting their identity as Europeans. This book explores the significance of some of Berendt’s most important writings and record productions. Particular attention is given to the “Jazz Meets the World” encounters that he engineered with musicians from Japan, Tunisia, Brazil, Indonesia, and India. This proto-“world music” demonstrates how some West Germans went about creating a post-nationalist identity after the Third Reich. Berendt’s powerful role as the West German “Jazz Pope” is explored, as is the groundswell of criticism directed at him in the wake of 1968.
The Return of Jazz: Joachim-Ernst Berendt and West German Cultural Change
by Andrew Wright HurleyJazz has had a peculiar and fascinating history in Germany. The influential but controversial German writer, broadcaster, and record producer, Joachim-Ernst Berendt (1922–2000), author of the world’s best-selling jazz book, labored to legitimize jazz in West Germany after its ideological renunciation during the Nazi era. German musicians began, in a highly productive way, to question their all-too-eager adoption of American culture and how they sought to make valid artistic statements reflecting their identity as Europeans. This book explores the significance of some of Berendt’s most important writings and record productions. Particular attention is given to the “Jazz Meets the World” encounters that he engineered with musicians from Japan, Tunisia, Brazil, Indonesia, and India. This proto-“world music” demonstrates how some West Germans went about creating a post-nationalist identity after the Third Reich. Berendt’s powerful role as the West German “Jazz Pope” is explored, as is the groundswell of criticism directed at him in the wake of 1968.
Return to Riemann: Tonal Function and Chromatic Music (ISSN)
by J. P. Harper-Scott Oliver ChandlerThis book is a music-theoretical and critical-theoretical study of late tonal music, and, in particular, of the music of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.First, in terms of music theory, it proposes a new theory of tonal function that returns to the theories of Hugo Riemann to rediscover a development of his thought that has been covered over by the recent project of neo-Riemannian theory. Second, in terms of its philosophical approach, it reawakens the critical-theoretical examination of the relation between music and the late capitalist society that is sedimented in the musical materials themselves, and which the music, in turn, subjects to aesthetically embodied critique. The music, the theory, and the listeners and critics who respond to them are all radically reimagined.This book will be of interest to professional music theorists, undergraduates, and technically inclined musicians and listeners, that is, anyone who is fascinated by the chromatic magic of late-nineteenth-century music.
Return to Riemann: Tonal Function and Chromatic Music (ISSN)
by J. P. Harper-Scott Oliver ChandlerThis book is a music-theoretical and critical-theoretical study of late tonal music, and, in particular, of the music of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.First, in terms of music theory, it proposes a new theory of tonal function that returns to the theories of Hugo Riemann to rediscover a development of his thought that has been covered over by the recent project of neo-Riemannian theory. Second, in terms of its philosophical approach, it reawakens the critical-theoretical examination of the relation between music and the late capitalist society that is sedimented in the musical materials themselves, and which the music, in turn, subjects to aesthetically embodied critique. The music, the theory, and the listeners and critics who respond to them are all radically reimagined.This book will be of interest to professional music theorists, undergraduates, and technically inclined musicians and listeners, that is, anyone who is fascinated by the chromatic magic of late-nineteenth-century music.
Reverberations: The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise
by Michael Goddard Benjamin Halligan Paul HegartyNoise permeates our highly mediated and globalised cultures. Noise as art, music, cultural or digital practice is a way of intervening so that it can be harnessed for an aesthetic expression not caught within mainstream styles or distribution.This wide-ranging book examines the concept and practices of noise, treating noise not merely as a sonic phenomenon but as an essential component of all communication and information systems. The book opens with ideas of what noise is, and then works through ideas of how noise works in contemporary media, to conclude by showing potentials within noise for a continuing cultural renovation through experimentation. Considered in this way, noise is seen as an essential yet excluded element of contemporary culture that demands a rigorous engagement. Reverberations brings together a range of perspectives, case studies, critiques and suggestions as to how noise can mobilize thought and cultural activity through a heightening of critical creativity.Written by a strong, international line-up of scholars and artists, Reverberations looks to energize this field of study and initiate debates for years to come.