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1
Cacavas, Bonnie Becker. Musical feasts: Fabulous dining in the style of six of the world's great composers. Bryn Mawr, PA: Theodore Presser Co., 1985.
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3
Brown, Jeanell Wise. Amy Beach and her chamber music: Biography, documents, style. Metuchen, N.J: Scarecrow Press, 1994.
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5
Jezic, Diane Peacock. Women composers: The lost tradition found. 2nd ed. New York: Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1994.
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7
The French symphony at the fin de siècle: Style, culture, and the symphonic tradition. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press ; Woodbridge, Suffolk : Boydell & Brewer Limited, 2013.
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8
Il trittico, Turandot, and Puccini's late style. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
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9
M, Gillmor Alan, and Rochberg George, eds. Eagle minds: Selected correspondence of Istvan Anhalt and George Rochberg, 1961-2005. Waterloo, Ont: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007.
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11
Musiker, Reuben. Conductors and composers of popular orchestral music: A biographical and discographical sourcebook. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1997.
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13
Three Hundred Years of Composers' Instruments: The Cobbe Collection. Boydell & Brewer, Incorporated, 2014.
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14
Staff, Cobbe Collection Trust, Alec Cobbe, and Christopher Nobbs. Three Hundred Years of Composers' Instruments: The Cobbe Collection. Boydell & Brewer, Limited, 2014.
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Cobbe, Alec, and Christopher Nobbs. Three Hundred Years of Composers' Instruments: The Cobbe Collection. Boydell & Brewer, Incorporated, 2014.
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16
Listening to Jennifer Higdon: The Musical Style of the Pulitzer Prize Winning Composer. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2018.
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18
Lott, Marie Sumner. Redefining the “Progressive” Style in Responses to Beethoven’s Late Quartets. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252039225.003.0004.
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This chapter shows how composers who considered themselves progressive in different ways shared a single goal of fostering musical progress in the string quartet genre and how they communicated that goal to fellow composers and musicians in a musical dialogue that continued throughout nineteenth century. Their works often demonstrate a response to Beethoven and to more recent composers, representing a private conversation not just among the four members of the performing quartet but also among the composers of the past, present, and future. Whereas Liszt, Wagner, and their successors avoided addressing Beethoven head-on in genres associated with his achievements, composers in the Mendelssohn-Schumann circle responded directly to the innovations of Beethoven and his predecessors on their own terms and in the genres where those innovations were introduced.
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Foundations of a Musical Style, Great Composers and Music Masterpieces of Western Civilization from the Ancient World Through the Baroque. Pearson Custom Pulbishins, 2002.
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20
(Contributor), Daniel Glover, and Nancy Bachus (Editor), eds. The Baroque Piano: The Influence of Society, Style, and Musical Trends on the Great Piano Composers (Alfred Masterwork Edition: The Piano). Alfred Publishing Company, 2006.
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(Contributor), Daniel Glover, and Nancy Bachus (Editor), eds. The Romantic Piano: The Influence of Society, Style, and Musical Trends on the Great Piano Composers (Alfred Masterwork Edition: The Piano). Alfred Publishing Company, 2006.
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22
(Contributor), Daniel Glover, and Nancy Bachus (Editor), eds. The Classical Piano: The Infuluence of Society, Style, and Musical Trends on the Great Piano Composers (Alfred Masterwork Edition: The Piano). Alfred Publishing Company, 2006.
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23
(Contributor), Daniel Glover, and Nancy Bachus (Editor), eds. The Modern Piano: The Influence of Socity, Style, and Musical Trends on the Great Piano Composers (Alfred Masterwork Edition: The Piano). Alfred Publishing Company, 2006.
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24
Wilder, Alec. American Popular Song. Edited by Robert Rawlins. 3rd ed. Oxford University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190939946.001.0001.
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Composer Alec Wilder’s American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950 is widely recognized as the definitive book on American popular song. In this volume, which achieved immediate praise and recognition upon its publication, Wilder discusses some eight hundred songs from the American Songbook, offering a composer’s insight, accessible music analysis, as well has his strong personal biases. Nearly fifty years later, this classic study has received a much-needed revision. While leaving Wilder’s colorful prose and brazen opinions intact, language, style, and musical nomenclature have been updated to reflect current usage. The musical examples mostly remain, but piano score notation has been replaced with lead-sheet notation: melody, chords, and lyrics. Rhythmic notation has also been adjusted to follow present-day norms. Additionally, a final chapter has been added, which includes more than fifty songs that were not in the original, seeking to achieve greater representation for women and African American composers, as well as including several of Wilder’s own songs.
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Parabosco, Girolamo. Madrigali a cinque voci (Venice, 1546). Edited by Timothy R. McKinney. A-R Editions, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.31022/r176.
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Girolamo Parabosco (ca. 1524–1557), a disciple of the renowned Venetian composer Adrian Willaert, held one of the most important musical posts in Italy as first organist at Venice's Basilica di San Marco from 1551 to 1557. He was lauded by his contemporaries for his talents as a poet, musician, and composer. Despite the fame he garnered during his lifetime and the enduring appeal of some of his literary works, much of his music has lain dormant since the sixteenth century. This volume represents the first complete critical edition of his sole extant music collection, the Madrigali a cinque voci, first published in 1546. Several of the twenty madrigals in this volume reveal the influence of Willaert's celebrated Musica nova, coupling weighty Petrarchan poetry with a grave musical style, while others are lighter in both poetic and musical style. Collectively, these madrigals reveal a composer whose music deserves rediscovery, study, and performance.
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Lott, Marie Sumner. Music for Men of Leisure. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252039225.003.0003.
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This chapter demonstrates some of the ways that the musical style of string quartets and quintets from the 1830s and 1840s reflects specific social uses of music in middle-class life by examining works of three composers clearly linked to this cultural milieu: Louis Spohr, George Onslow, and Friedrich Kuhlau. These composers belonged to the middle classes, and their music appealed to their neighbors and friends, as well as to a broad audience of sheet music purchasers throughout Europe who shared the composers' middle-class identity. In addition to their professional activities as composers, performers, conductors, and teachers, these three men also engaged in private, recreational music making during their “off-duty” hours that mirrored the activities of their patrons and other consumers of music. Their musical creations for this audience reflect the practice of their social peers—members of the Bildungsbürgertum, or the upper middle classes.
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Straus, Joseph N. The Art of Post-Tonal Analysis. Oxford University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197543979.001.0001.
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This book consists of analyses of thirty-three musical passages or entire short works in a variety of post-tonal styles. The works under study are taken from throughout the long twentieth century, from 1909 to the present. Within the atonal wing of modern classical music, the composers discussed here, some canonical and some not, represent a diversity of musical style, chronology, geography, gender, and race/ethnicity: Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Milton Babbitt, Luigi Dallapiccola, Elliott Carter, Louise Talma, Hale Smith, Elisabeth Lutyens, Ursula Mamlok, Tania León, Tan Dun, Shulamit Ran, Kaija Saariaho, Joan Tower, John Adams, Sofia Gubaidulina, Thomas Adès, Caroline Shaw, Chen Yi, and Suzanne Farrin. The approach is pedagogical, in the somewhat informal style of a classroom. Musical examples and analytical videos carry the burden of the analytical argument, with relatively little prose. For each piece, the book suggests ways of making sense of the music, using basic concepts of post-tonal theory to tease out rich networks of musical relationships and reveal something of the fascination and beauty of this challenging music.
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Platte, Nathan. Gone with the Wind, Part I. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199371112.003.0007.
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This chapter reconstructs the scoring of Selznick’s most famous film. The story interweaves several familiar anecdotes, such as Steiner’s furious discovery that another composer had been primed to replace him, into a more comprehensive, critical review of the full collaboration. Included are Steiner’s adaptation of musical ideas from Margaret Mitchell’s source novel, his divvying of the film’s music among multiple composers (Hugo Freidhofer, Adolph Deutsch, and Heinz Roemheld), Lou Forbes’s delicate negotiations with Selznick, the rejection and rewriting of critical passages of the score, the efforts of orchestrators, and the recording of the music with studio musicians. With archival materials ranging from Steiner’s doodled marginalia to Forbes’s legal files, a new impression of the score’s construction emerges: one in which a new level of involvement from Selznick prompts an unprecedented and vigorous style of musical collaboration—dubbed “Max Steiner and Co.”—that affected both process and product.
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Anderson, Virginia, ed. Interviews with American Composers. University of Illinois Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252043994.001.0001.
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This collection of interviews, published for the first time, advances our knowledge of musical thought, technique, education, life, and work in American composition in and around 1972. That year the composer Barney Childs began to conduct a series of interviews (or “conversations,” as he called them) with a diverse set of American new music composers who were then around thirty-forty years old. The composers determined the topics and content of the conversations, resulting in honest assessments of their concerns at the time of the interview, delivered with personal observations, humor, and passion. Childs was unable to interest publishers in his book, as the composers were young and just established, so he put them away. After intensive restoration, the surviving twenty-three conversations and fragments (Childs mentioned twenty-five completed interviews of a planned thirty-two) include many composers who have influenced the course of American concert music in the years since. Their styles are varied and include minimalism and imminent postminimalism, serialism, electronics, opera, pop and jazz crossovers, multimedia, and other areas of musical activity. Their conversations, enhanced and contextualized for present-day readers in essays by experts on the life and music of each composer, offer a unique glimpse into the state of being American in musical life in 1972, and a perspective on how American music became what it is today.
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Ansari, Emily Abrams. The Sound of a Superpower. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190649692.001.0001.
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Classical composers seeking to create an American sound enjoyed unprecedented success during the 1930s and 1940s. Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Howard Hanson, and others brought national and international attention to American composers for the first time in history. In the years after World War II, however, something changed. The prestige of musical Americanism waned rapidly as anti-Communists made accusations against leading Americanist composers. Meanwhile, a method of harmonic organization that some considered more Cold War–appropriate—serialism—began to rise in status. For many composers and historians, the Cold War had effectively “killed off” musical Americanism. In this book, the author offers a fuller, more nuanced picture of the effect of the Cold War on Americanist composers. She shows that the ideological conflict brought both challenges and opportunities. Some leftist Americanist composers struggled greatly in this new artistic and political environment, especially as American nationalism increasingly meant American exceptionalism. But composers of all political stripes would find in the federal government a new and unique channel through which to ensure the survival of musical Americanism, as the White House sought to use American music as a Cold War propaganda tool and American composers as cultural diplomats. The Americanists’ efforts to safeguard the reputation of their style would have significant consequences. Ultimately, they effected a rebranding of musical Americanism, with consequences that remain with us today.
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Sears, Ann. Political Currents and Black Culture in Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252036781.003.0006.
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This chapter examines politics and black culture in Scott Joplin's Treemonisha, a love story that also lays emphasis on the main character's education and its benefits to her and the plantation folk, as well as the novel idea of a woman as a community leader. Much of Treemonisha's music parallels the Euro-American musical style employed by other American opera composers of the early twentieth century, but also incorporates nineteenth-century African American musical styles. This chapter first considers Treemonisha's African American musical elements before discussing some important musical signifiers of black identity in the opera, along with Joplin's use of language to impart cultural and political messages. It also explores Treemonisha's take on progress and education as well as its political content. It argues that through Treemonisha, Joplin was making a statement about the political, social, and economic status of African Americans in the early twentieth century.
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Sandroni, Carlos. A Respectable Spell. Translated by Michael Iyanaga. University of Illinois Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252044021.001.0001.
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This book is primarily about the social history and musical changes of samba in Rio de Janeiro from 1917 to the early 1930s, looking chiefly at the era’s commercial recordings. The year 1917 marks the first time that a popular song designated as “samba” became a widespread Carnival success in the city. In the early 1930s, a new style of samba became dominant, such that it is still today the genre’s primary point of reference. The book proposes an analysis and interpretation of the differences in the musical styles, highlighting their rhythmic aspects. It also shows how these differences are linked to the way in which samba and sambistas are understood in Rio de Janeiro’s society and culture during this period. The first part of the book, “From Lundu to Samba,” deals with popular music genres created during the second half of the nineteenth century, such as lundu, Brazilian tango, and maxixe, whose musical characteristics came to be shared with old-style samba. The book’s second part, “From One Samba to Another,” deals with the emergence of samba in Rio de Janeiro as a commercial genre of popular music, and with the creation and success of the new style of samba, paying special attention to the trajectories of Ismael Silva and Noel Rosa, composers representative of this transition.
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Stölzel, Gottfried Heinrich. Die leidende und am Creutz sterbende Liebe Jesu. Edited by Warwick Cole. A-R Editions, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.31022/b214.
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Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (1690–1749) was a highly respected musician and composer who contributed works in all major eighteenth-century musical genres. His first Passion, Die leidende und am Creutz sterbende Liebe Jesu, was performed widely during his lifetime, including by Bach in the same year he composed his Christmas Oratorio, which imitates various aspects of Stölzel's style. There are several characteristics of Stölzel's Passion that demonstrate the composer's unusual approach to the genre, including a lack of named protagonists, texts couched in the present tense to heighten the immediacy of the drama, a balance between recitatives and arias, and the employment of primarily seventeenth-century chorales with plain harmonizations that may have encouraged the participation of the listening congregation. Evidence of the Passion's popularity is evident from the existence of a truncated and adapted mid-eighteenth century score, several excerpts of which are included in the edition's appendix.
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Siwe, Thomas. Artful Noise. University of Illinois Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252043130.001.0001.
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A substantial body of musical literature for solo and ensemble percussion was created in the twentieth century. This book examines percussion literature’s evolution: how it came to be and the styles that composers embraced as they produced a large body of music for percussion instruments alone. The focus is on the music that was created, the various genres that arose, and the composers who contributed seminal works. The question is posed: What world and cultural events brought composers to reject the past and embrace modernism? The twentieth century is notable for its many technological advances as well as for the global conflicts that disrupted the lives of millions. Both had significant impact on the arts. Tape recorders, synthesizers, and computers became useful tools for the avant-garde composer. Artists, exiled from their homelands by the war’s devastation, arrived in the Americas with new ideas to share. On the West Coast of the United States, composers found that percussion music was an ideal accompaniment for a nascent modern dance movement. The end of World War II brought monumental change to higher education and to music education in the States. College-trained percussionists became an important resource for the modern composer, who contributed new solo and ensemble works to the percussion canon. The twentieth century witnessed the rise of the percussive arts to a status equal to that of other instrumental groups.
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Walden, Joshua S. Listening in on Composers’ Self-Portraits. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190653507.003.0004.
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Chapter 3 explores the methods by which composers have depicted themselves and their compositional styles in musical self-portraits. It views musical self-portraits in relation to self-portraiture in visual art to identify techniques shared by the two art forms. The chapter focuses in particular on two self-portraits, György Ligeti’s “Selbstportrait mit Reich und Riley (und Chopin ist auch dabei),” from Drei Stücke, and Peter Ablinger’s “Quadraturen IV: ‘Selbstportrait mit Berlin.’ ” In their self-portraits, Ligeti and Ablinger reflect on their professional and artistic identities in the context provided by the music and sounds that they hear around them. The study of these musical self-portraits reveals some of the ways recent and contemporary composers view the role of their art and of the sense of hearing in the construction of their own identities.
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Maul, Michael. Bach versus Scheibe. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252038136.003.0005.
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On May 14, 1737, Johann Adolph Scheibe (1708–76), a twenty-nine-year-old music theorist and composer in Hamburg, published a Sendschreiben (“letter”) describing the experience of a fictional musician with twelve living composers. Many readers were able to recognize one of the composers as Johann Sebastian Bach. Johann Abraham Birnbaum (1702–48), a professor of rhetoric at Leipzig University, took offense at Scheibe's rather critical remarks on Bach's style and published a vigorous defense. The resulting dispute, known as the Scheibe-Birnbaum affair, generated a number of publications over the next decade and has long been recognized as one of the most important documents regarding the reception of Bach's music before 1750. This chapter considers the Scheibe-Birnbaum affair and the hitherto unknown dimensions of the battle between Scheibe and Bach himself.
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Herrera, Eduardo. Elite Art Worlds. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190877538.001.0001.
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Between 1962 and 1971, the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) of the Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires became the central hub of Latin American avant-garde music. With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation and the wealthy Di Tella family, CLAEM offered two-year fellowships to some of the most recognized young composers of the region to undertake graduate studies in a unique privileged setting under the direction of Alberto Ginastera and with permanent and visiting faculty that included Gerardo Gandini, Francisco Kröpfl, Mario Davidovsky, Iannis Xenakis, Luigi Nono, Aaron Copland, Luigi Dallapiccola, Bruno Maderna, Riccardo Malipiero, Olivier Messiaen, Roger Sessions, and Earle Brown. This book combines oral histories, ethnographic research, and archival sources to reveal CLAEM as a meeting point of US and Argentine philanthropy, local experiences in transnational currents of artistic experimentation and innovation, and regional discourses of musical Latin Americanism. The story of CLAEM shows how musical avant-gardes were articulated, embodied, resignified, and institutionalized in Latin America; how composers during the 1960s engaged with discourses of Latin Americanism as professional strategy, identification marker, and musical style; and sheds light into the role of art in the legitimation and construction of elite status and identity. By looking at CLAEM as both an artistic and a philanthropic project, the book illuminates the relationships among foreign policy, corporate interests, and funding for the arts concerning Latin America and the United States in the mid-twentieth century.
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Chandler, David. Andrew Lloyd Webber. Edited by Robert Gordon and Olaf Jubin. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199988747.013.23.
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Andrew Lloyd Webber (b. 1948) and his Really Useful Group (founded 1977) have dominated British musical theatre since the 1970s, especially between 1981 and 2002. This critical survey of Lloyd Webber’s career discusses his self-understanding as a theatre composer; his development of an individual style in the late 1960s; his breakthrough success with Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) and the significance of what the lyricist Tim Rice calls its ‘operatic form’; the continued artistic and commercial development of the composer’s career through Evita (1976), Cats (1981), Starlight Express (1984), and The Phantom of the Opera (1986); and his subsequent failure to produce further musicals of comparable popularity. The Phantom of the Opera is identified as the most personal of Lloyd Webber’s major successes and his obsessive, revisionary investment in Gaston Leroux’s novel is analysed with reference to both the 1986 musical and its badly misjudged sequel, Love Never Dies (2010).
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Cook, Nicholas. Rethinking the garret. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199347803.003.0003.
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This second chapter of Music as Creative Practice develops an approach to musical imagination in opposition to the traditional creation myths according to which composers ‘hear’ music in their heads and simply write it down. Drawing an analogy with the creation of perfumes, it shows how imagining music involves representing it in terms of notational and other objects that enable it to be purposefully manipulated in such a way as to bring new sound conceptions into existence. Composition involves a rich ecology in which creators interact with sound images that talk back to them, resulting in an imaginative analogue to the social interaction of real-time musical creativity. The argument proceeds through case studies that range from popular songwriting to concert music, and from sixteenth-century polyphony through Beethoven to contemporary classical composition. The aim is to penetrate through analysis of style to the modes of creative thinking that underlie them.
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Batta, András, and Sigrid Neef. Opera: Composers, Works, Performers. Konemann, 2000.
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41
Merchant, Tanya. Like Tereshkova in the Cosmos. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252039539.003.0004.
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This chapter examines how women perform post-Soviet nationalism using the canon of European classical music by focusing on a project designed to produce Uzbek Western art music, one that retains prominence in independent Uzbekistan. The project has involved getting composers engaged in the creation of a sense of Uzbek style in composition. In Uzbekistan, from remarkably early in the Soviet period, women have been important figures in the performance and promulgation of Uzbek compositions. The chapter first provides a historical overview of Western art music in Soviet Uzbekistan and compares it with Western art music in independent Uzbekistan. It then considers how women's performances support a construction of national identity that began in the Soviet era and continues today. The chapter features interviews with Dilbara Abdurahmanova, the first female director of the Alisher Navoiy State Opera, and prominent pianist and former conservatory director Ofeliya Yusupova. By far the most pervasive musical style heard in Tashkent, popular music, known as estrada, provides audiences with a glamorous construction of Uzbek femininity.
42
Berr, Bruce. Imaginations in Style: Late-Elementary Level Composer Showcase. Hal Leonard Corporation, 1992.
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43
Ó Briain, Lonán. Hybridity and the Other in Modern National Music. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190626969.003.0003.
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The process of inventing a national musical tradition for newly independent Vietnam demanded the inclusion of appropriate features from the minority cultures. Scholars compiled studies of these groups and ascribed musical instruments and styles to particular people. Composers and performers were then encouraged, via the awards and honors that were bestowed upon them by the Communist Party, to incorporate these features into their musical palettes. Lương Kim Vĩnh, a state-employed musician from the Viet majority, successfully modified the Hmong reed pipe for use in modern national music, and he became internationally renowned for his innovative compositions and performances on this instrument. Chapter 2 examines the evolution of his “Hmong” sound, which has become a synecdoche for a wider pan-minority sound in contemporary Vietnam. His development of the modified reed pipe is used as a lens for studying the assimilation of the musical Other into Vietnamese modern national music.
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Burrows, George. The Recordings of Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199335589.001.0001.
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This is the first book-length study of the recordings of Andy Kirk and His Clouds of Joy. This all-black band found nationwide fame in the later 1930s and came to exemplify the Kansas City style of jazz through the records they made between 1929 and 1946. That body of work, however, serves to raise fundamental questions about the long-standing relationship between jazz music and the critical discourses about race that shaped it. This book considers how Kirk and his band appropriated musical styles in a way that was akin to the manipulation of masks in black forms of blackface performance: it signified race as much as it subverted racist conceptions of style. The band’s composer-pianist, Mary Lou Williams, and their singer Pha Terrell are reconceived within that context, and the band’s recordings are framed for their significance in understanding the way such black musicians influenced racial-musical negotiations over what and how they performed and recorded. The book brings together analytical tools from musicology with other perspectives that aim to show how intersecting discourses about race and musical styles are embedded in and expressed by the musical materials heard on the records. The difference between the band’s live and recorded performances establishes the place of audiences, especially dancing ones, in shaping jazz as a practice and conception, and it opens avenues for further investigation of the way practices of performance and recording have shaped understanding of what jazz music is and the racialized conceptions that underpin it.
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Mirchandani, Sharon. Epilogue. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252037313.003.0008.
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This epilogue reflects on Marga Richter's music, suggesting that her zest for living, coupled with her dedication to her art, makes her a role model for younger composers and performers. As she takes old age in stride, Richter has not thought of retiring and remains focused on composition. She continues to spend summers in Vermont and enjoys the beauty around her and visiting with professional colleagues, friends, and family. This epilogue describes Richter's musical style, which has remained fairly constant throughout her life, and argues that her works are characterized by dissonance, slowly unfolding free forms, ostinatos and layering, and a loose tonality. It also considers Richter's ties with feminism and her views on gender roles.
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Gilmour, Michael J., ed. Call Me the Seeker. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2005. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501383335.
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-One of very few books on religion and popular music -Covers a wide range of musical styles, from heavy metal and rap to country, jazz and Broadway musicals -The essays are written by academics and informed by their enthusiasm for the music Many books have explored the relationship between religion and film, but few have yet examined the significance of religion to popular music. Call Me The Seeker steps into that gap. Michael Gilmour’s introductory essay gives a state-of-the-discipline overview of research in the area. He argues that popular songs frequently draw from and “interpret” themes found in the conceptual and linguistic worlds of the major religions and reveal underlying attitudes in those who compose and consume them. He says these “texts” deserve more serious study. The essays in the book start an on-going conversation in this area, bringing a variety of methodologies to bear on selected artists and topics. Musical styles covered range from heavy metal and rap to country, jazz, and Broadway musicals.
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Ansari, Emily Abrams. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190649692.003.0001.
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The introduction provides an overview of the history of musical Americanism, from the 1920s to the 1970s, in tandem with an assessment of changing attitudes toward American identity in the United States. It introduces scholarly debates surrounding the Cold War politicization of serialism and tonality and describes the various opportunities for work with government exploited by American composers during the 1950s and 1960s. These opportunities included serving as advisers to the State Department, the US Information Agency, and organizations funded by the CIA, as well as touring overseas as government-funded cultural ambassadors. These contexts establish the basis for the book’s argument that the Cold War presented both challenges and opportunities for Americanist composers that would ultimately result in a rebranding of their style.
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Mirka, Danuta, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199841578.001.0001.
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The concept of topics was introduced into the vocabulary of music scholars by Leonard Ratner to account for cross-references between eighteenth-century styles and genres. The emergence of this phenomenon followed the rapid proliferation and consolidation of stylistic and generic categories. While music theorists and critics classified styles and genres, defining their affects and proper contexts for their usage, composers crossed the boundaries between them, using stylistic conventions as means of communication with the audience. Such topical use of styles and genres out of their proper contexts and their mixtures with other styles and genres became the hallmark of South-German instrumental music, which engulfed the so-called Viennese Classicism. Since this music did not develop its own aesthetics and, in its days, received no adequate critical appraisal, topic theory developed from Ratner’s seminal insight by Wye J. Allanbrook, Kofi Agawu, Robert Hatten, Raymond Monelle, and others can be considered a theory of this music, andThe Oxford Handbook of Topic Theorygoes some way toward reconstructing its aesthetic underpinnings. The volume grounds the concept of topics in eighteenth-century music theory, aesthetics, and criticism; documents historical reality of individual topics on the basis of eighteenth-century sources, traces the origins of topical mixtures to transformations of eighteenth-century musical life, and relates topical analysis to other kinds of music analysis conducted from the perspectives of composers, performers, and listeners. It lays the foundation under further investigation of musical topics in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.
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Ashley, Richard. Musical improvisation. Edited by Susan Hallam, Ian Cross, and Michael Thaut. Oxford University Press, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199298457.013.0038.
Full textAbstract:
Musical improvisation is, to many in the Western world, an activity shrouded in mystery. Most listeners are familiar with some genres of music in which improvisation is a commonplace, such as rock and other popular styles, jazz, or perhaps ‘ethnic’ musics – that is to say, composed or improvised ‘traditional’ musics falling outside the typical Western canons. Therefore listeners are aware that many musicians can, and routinely do, produce novel musical utterances in real time. The question for most them is ‘How is improvisation carried out?’ With this formulation of the question, musical improvisation becomes a suitable topic for psychological investigation, focusing on cognitive, physical, and interpersonal processes, and on the musical structures on which these processes operate. This article seeks to bring together the literature on musical improvisation that will be of interest and benefit to those wishing to know more about it from a cognitive perspective.
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Bick, Sally. Unsettled Scores. University of Illinois Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252042812.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Unsettled Scores treats the Hollywood activities of Aaron Copland and Hanns Eisler, who were among the earliest modernist composers to negotiate the collision of the high/low dichotomy within these two cultural realms. The social and political crises provoked by capitalism and war profoundly affected these ideals and, in turn, the men’s cultural and aesthetic thinking. Confronting and living through social crisis (Eisler during the instability of Weimar Germany and Copland through America’s Depression years), both composers experimented with new artistic forms and values, shaping their musical perspectives. Eventually, they turned to Hollywood, where they found possibilities to negotiate their distinct modernist aesthetics and political beliefs. The book approaches Copland’s and Eisler’s Hollywood activities through a dual study, pairing interpretations of their writings on the subject with close examination of their first film scores: Copland’s music for Lewis Milestone’s 1939 film Of Mice and Men and Eisler’s 1943 score for Hangmen Also Die!, directed by Fritz Lang. This study examines how the highly politicized and topical nature of these films appealed to each composer’s political ideologies concerning society and the human condition. Their scores became agents for political expression as they transformed their individual styles into the commercial sphere.