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Artful Noise: Percussion Literature in the Twentieth Century

Thomas Siwe

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 ... More

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.Less

At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris

Rachel Anne Gillett

This book shows how and why music became part of the social changes Europe faced in the aftermath of World War I. It focuses on the story of Black music in Paris and the people who created it, ... More

This book shows how and why music became part of the social changes Europe faced in the aftermath of World War I. It focuses on the story of Black music in Paris and the people who created it, enjoyed it, criticized it, and felt at home when they heard it. African Americans, French Antilleans, and French West Africans wrote, danced, sang, and acted politically in response to the heightened visibility of racial difference in Paris during this era. They were consumed with questions that continue to resonate today. Could one be Black and French? Was Black solidarity more important than national and colonial identity? How could French culture include the experiences and contributions of Africans and Antilleans? From highly educated women, such as the Nardal sisters of Martinique, to the working Black musicians performing in crowded nightclubs at all hours, the book gives a fully rounded view of Black reactions to jazz in interwar Paris. It places that phenomenon in its historic and political context, and in doing so, it shows how music and music making formed a vital terrain of cultural politics. It shows how music making brought people together around pianos, on the dance floor, and through reading and gossip, but it did not erase the political, regional, and national differences among them. The book shows that many found a home in Paris but did not always feel at home. This book reveals these dimensions of music making, race, and cultural politics in interwar Paris.Less

Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media

Kyle Devine and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (eds)

Our day-to-day musical enjoyment seems so simple, so easy, so automatic. Songs instantly emanate instantaneously and almost magically from our computers and phones. The tools for playing and making ... More

Our day-to-day musical enjoyment seems so simple, so easy, so automatic. Songs instantly emanate instantaneously and almost magically from our computers and phones. The tools for playing and making music, such as records and guitars, wait for us in stores, ready for purchase and use. And when we’re done with all this stuff, we can kick it to the curb, where it disappears effortlessly and without a trace. These casual engagements often conceal the complex infrastructures that make our musical cultures possible.Less

Both from the Ears and Mind: Thinking about Music in Early Modern England

Linda Phyllis Austern

This interdisciplinary study shows the extent to which literate sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English people considered music beyond its heard and performed aspects. It explains the remarkable ... More

This interdisciplinary study shows the extent to which literate sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English people considered music beyond its heard and performed aspects. It explains the remarkable range of ways in which they wrote about music and understood it to inform other endeavors, and how musical ideas were connected to other trends during an era marked by intellectual change. Music was considered both art and science, had a long-established place in many human enterprises, and inhabited the fluid conceptual space between abstraction and concretion. Music and musical terminology thus enabled explanation of complex ideas and provided points of contact between otherwise discrete fields of human learning across audible, visual, literary, and performed media. Music and musical language also facilitated carefully coded approaches to some of the era’s most hotly contested topics such as religion and the rising domains of scientific inquiry. Such understanding, in turn, influenced ways in which sounding music was practiced, and its materials were created, marketed, and presented. Furthermore, reading, writing, and talking about music were valuable skills for a culture in which the subtleties of musical knowledge signified status, and in which gentlemen in particular fraternized through discourse as well as sociable practice. Yet no matter how esoteric reference to music became, there always remained something of its audibility and potential to affect the body, soul, and all five senses.Less

Brahms in the Priesthood of Art: Gender and Art Religion in the Nineteenth-Century German Musical Imagination

Laurie McManus

Brahms in the Priesthood of Art: Gender and Art Religion in the Nineteenth-Century German Musical Imagination explores the intersection of gender, art religion (Kunstreligion), and other aesthetic ... More

Brahms in the Priesthood of Art: Gender and Art Religion in the Nineteenth-Century German Musical Imagination explores the intersection of gender, art religion (Kunstreligion), and other aesthetic currents in Brahms reception of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, it focuses on the theme of the self-sacrificing musician devoted to his art, or “priest of music,” with its quasi-mystical and German Romantic implications of purity seemingly at odds with the lived reality of Brahms’s bourgeois existence. While such German Romantic notions of art religion informed the thinking on musical purity and performance, after the failed socio-political revolutions of 1848/49, and in the face of scientific developments, the very concept of musical priesthood was questioned as outmoded. Furthermore, its essential gender ambiguity, accommodating such performing mothers as Clara Schumann and Amalie Joachim, could explain why Brahms never married while leaving the composer open to speculation about his health and masculinity. Supportive critics combined elements of masculine and feminine values with a muddled rhetoric of prophets, messiahs, martyrs, and other art-religious stereotypes to account for the special status of Brahms and his circle. Detractors tended to locate these stereotypes in more modern, fin-de-siècle psychological frameworks that scrutinized the composer’s physical and mental well-being. In analyzing these receptions side by side, this book revises the accepted image of Brahms, recovering lost ambiguities in his reception. It resituates him not only in a romanticized priesthood of art but also within the cultural and gendered discourses overlooked by the absolute music paradigm.Less

Catherine Littlefield: A Life in Dance

Sharon Skeel

Born in Philadelphia in 1905, Catherine Littlefield first learns dancing from her mother, Caroline (called Mommie), who was an expert pianist, and from a local dancing master, C. Ellwood Carpenter. ... More

Born in Philadelphia in 1905, Catherine Littlefield first learns dancing from her mother, Caroline (called Mommie), who was an expert pianist, and from a local dancing master, C. Ellwood Carpenter. As a teenager, Catherine becomes a Ziegfeld dancer and takes lessons from Luigi Albertieri in New York. She returns home in 1925 to help Mommie teach at the Littlefield School (among her students is Zelda Fitzgerald) and stage dances for women’s musical clubs and opera companies. William Goldman hires Catherine to produce routines in commercial theaters throughout Philadelphia and becomes her boyfriend. Catherine, Mommie, and Catherine’s sister, Dorothie, travel to Paris so the sisters can study ballet with Lubov Egorova. They become friendly with George Balanchine in Paris and help him establish his first American school and company when he comes to the United States in 1933. Catherine marries wealthy Philadelphia attorney Philip Leidy and founds her Philadelphia Ballet Company in 1935. She choreographs—and her company presents—the first full-length, full-scale production of Sleeping Beauty in the United States as well as popular ballet Americana works such as Barn Dance and Terminal. Her company’s European tour in 1937 is the first ever by an American classical ballet troupe. Catherine loses some of her protégées to the newly formed Ballet Theatre and disbands her company after the United States enters World War II; she then choreographs Broadway musicals, Sonja Henie’s Hollywood Ice Revues, and Jimmy Durante’s NBC television show before dying in 1951 at age forty-six.Less

Flexible Bodies: British South Asian Dancers in an Age of Neoliberalism

Anusha Kedhar

Flexible Bodies charts the emergence of British South Asian dance as a distinctive dance genre. Analyzing dance works, dance films, rehearsals, workshops, and touring alongside immigration policy, ... More

Flexible Bodies charts the emergence of British South Asian dance as a distinctive dance genre. Analyzing dance works, dance films, rehearsals, workshops, and touring alongside immigration policy, arts funding initiatives, citizenship discourse, and global economic conditions, author Anusha Kedhar traces shifts in British South Asian dance from 1990s Cool Britannia multiculturalism to fractious race relations in the wake of the July 7, 2005, terrorist attacks to economic fallout from the 2008 global financial crisis, and, finally, to anti-immigrant rhetoric leading up to the Brexit referendum in 2016. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with dancers, in-depth choreographic analysis of major dance works, and the author’s own lived experiences as a professional dancer in London, Flexible Bodies tells the story of British South Asian dancers and the creative ways in which they negotiate the demands of neoliberal, multicultural dance markets through an array of flexible bodily practices, including agility, versatility, mobility, speed, and risk-taking. Attending to pain, injury, and other restrictions on movement, it also reveals the bodily limits of flexibility. Theorizing flexibility as material and metaphor, the book argues that flexibility is both a tool of labor exploitation and a bodily tactic that British South Asian dancers exploit to navigate volatile economic and political conditions. With its unique focus on the everyday aspects of dancing and dance-making Flexible Bodies honors the lives and labor of dancers and their contributions to a distinct and dynamic sector of British dance.Less

Fugue in the Sixteenth Century

Paul Walker

This book explores the roots of the classic fugue and the early history of non-canonic fugal writing through the three principal fugal genres of the sixteenth century: motet, ricercar, and canzona. ... More

This book explores the roots of the classic fugue and the early history of non-canonic fugal writing through the three principal fugal genres of the sixteenth century: motet, ricercar, and canzona. The book begins with the pivot in Western composition from an emphasis on variety to one on repetition, first developed by such Franco-Flemish composers as Loyset Compère and Josquin des Prez toward the end of the fifteenth century. By around 1520 Jean Mouton and his contemporaries had established the classic Franco-Flemish motet with its well-known point-of-imitation structure. Nicolas Gombert proved to be the real pioneer in the further development of this idea in the 1530s when he explored the return of thematic material after its initial presentation, an approach that proved central not only to the motet writing of Thomas Crecquillon and Jacobus Clemens non Papa, but also to the earliest experiments in serious abstract instrumental composition (the ricercar) undertaken by a series of organists active in Venice, most notably Claudio Merulo and Andrea Gabrieli. The most important innovation of the last decades of the century was the creation at the hands of Brescian organists of the fugal canzona alla francese, an instrumental genre inspired not by the sophisticated compositional style of the motet, but by the contrapuntally looser approach of such imitative chansons as Passereau’s Il est bel et bon. By century’s end, composers such as Giovanni de Macque had given the canzona a contrapuntal integrity commensurate with that of the ricercar.Less

Gems of Exquisite Beauty: How Hymnody Carried Classical Music to America

Peter Mercer-Taylor

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, many Americans first encountered European classical music through excerpts captured in the form of psalm and hymn tunes. Psalmody was the United States’ ... More

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, many Americans first encountered European classical music through excerpts captured in the form of psalm and hymn tunes. Psalmody was the United States’ best-selling form of popular music through the early 19th century, sales of tune books reaching in some instances into the hundreds of thousands. Tunes lifted from Haydn, Mozart, and other major European composers first found a regular place in this market in the early 1820s, hundreds appearing by the early 1850s. This book explores the place of this repertoire in 19th-century American life, surveying its historical rise and fall. The tradition’s foremost pioneer was Arthur Clifton, an accomplished London musician who emigrated to Baltimore in 1817. Clifton’s 1819 Original Collection—which included 21 psalmodic adaptations of Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven’s work—was a commercial failure, but a pathbreaking harbinger of things to come. Lowell Mason’s 1822 Boston Handel and Haydn Society Collection—a runaway best-seller that launched Mason’s career as the era’s most influential American musician—also included 21 such adaptations, bringing the practice into broad public view. Only in the early 1840s, however, did the tradition catch fire, hundreds of such tunes appearing across a decade of feverish activity. This book’s final chapter steps back for a broad-ranging engagement with this repertoire in creative terms. Far beyond simple excerpts, the most ambitious of these adaptations represent inventive, resourcefully crafted conduits through which numerous dimensions of Europe’s musical practices were brought within reach of the American masses.Less

Granville Bantock (1868-1946): A Guide to Research

John Dressler

This volume is the first published study to bring together a variety of materials which represent the life and works of Sir Granville Bantock (1868-1946), British composer, arranger, editor, music ... More

This volume is the first published study to bring together a variety of materials which represent the life and works of Sir Granville Bantock (1868-1946), British composer, arranger, editor, music department administrator, competitive singing promoter and adjudicator, world traveler, lover of life, literature and philosophy, radio talk presenter, champion of works of other rising British composers over his own, husband and father. His works alone total over 600, yet many remain in manuscript housed for access at the Cadbury Special Collections Library on the campus of the University of Birmingham. The reader will find citations of reviews of his music, reviews of performances during his lifetime and beyond as well as reviews of recordings both then in now in contemporary and modern newspapers and journals. Commercial and archival recordings are noted and locations given. Manuscripts that remain extant are identified and located. Up to and including 10 representative national and international live performances are noted for each work with names and venues provided. Within the Works section of the book are subcategories by medium for which they were composed for easy identification with minimal information the reader has at hand prior to opening the volume. The sketchbooks are also detailed with what materials are contained in each. Within the Bibliography section are citations of obituaries, writings by GB, dissertations, and pertinent files at: the BBC, Worcestershire Archive, Liverpool Record Office and Trinity Laban Conservatoire to name a few.Less

Great Oboists on Music and Musicianship

Michele L. Fiala and Martin Schuring

This volume contains interviews with twenty-six of the most prominent oboists from around the world. The chapters are in prose format and highlight different aspects of each musician’s career, ... More

This volume contains interviews with twenty-six of the most prominent oboists from around the world. The chapters are in prose format and highlight different aspects of each musician’s career, focusing on musicianship and pedagogy in ways that are applicable to all musicians. The interviews contain topics such as creating musical interpretations and shaping phrases, the relationship of vocal to instrumental music, taking orchestral auditions, and being a good ensemble player/colleague. The subjects describe their pedagogy and their thoughts on breathing and support on wind instruments, developing finger technique, and creating a useful warm-up routine. The oboists discuss their ideals in reed making, articulation, and vibrato. They also share stories from their lives and careers. The oboists and English hornists profiled from North America are Pedro Diaz, Elaine Douvas, and Nathan Hughes (Metropolitan Opera Orchestra); John Ferrillo (Boston Symphony Orchestra); Carolyn Hove (Los Angeles Philharmonic); Richard Killmer (Eastman School); Nancy Ambrose King (University of Michigan); Frank Rosenwein and Robert Walters (Cleveland Orchestra); Humbert Lucarelli (soloist); Grover Schiltz (formerly Chicago Symphony); Eugene Izotov (San Francisco Symphony, originally from Russia); Allan Vogel (Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra retired); David Weiss (formerly Los Angeles Philharmonic); Randall Wolfgang (New York City Ballet and formerly Orpheus Chamber Orchestra); Alex Klein (Brazil, formerly Chicago Symphony and currently Calgary, Canada); and Sarah Jeffrey, Toronto Symphony Orchestra. The performers based in Europe are Neil Black, Nicholas Daniel, and Gordon Hunt (England); Maurice Bourgue and David Walter (France); Thomas Indermühle (Switzerland); László Hadady (Hungary and France); and Omar Zoboli (Italy). From Australia is Diana Doherty of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.Less

Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace

William Robin

Amidst the heated fray of the Culture Wars emerged a scrappy festival in downtown New York City called Bang on a Can. Presenting eclectic, irreverent marathons of experimental music in crumbling ... More

Amidst the heated fray of the Culture Wars emerged a scrappy festival in downtown New York City called Bang on a Can. Presenting eclectic, irreverent marathons of experimental music in crumbling venues on the Lower East Side, Bang on a Can sold out concerts for a genre that had been long considered box office poison. Through the 1980s and 1990s, three young, visionary composers—David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe—nurtured Bang on a Can into a multifaceted organization with a major record deal, a virtuoso in-house ensemble, and a seat at the table at Lincoln Center, and in the process changed the landscape of avant-garde music in the United States. Bang on a Can captured a new public for new music. But they did not do so alone. As the twentieth century came to a close, the world of American composition pivoted away from the insular academy and toward the broader marketplace. In the wake of the unexpected popularity of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, classical presenters looked to contemporary music for relevance and record labels scrambled to reap its potential profits, all while government funding was imperilled by the evangelical right. Other institutions faltered amidst the vagaries of late capitalism, but the renegade Bang on a Can survived—and thrived—in a tumultuous and idealistic moment that made new music what it is today.Less

The Invention of Martial Arts: Popular Culture Between Asia and America

Paul Bowman

The Invention of Martial Arts examines the media history of what we now call ‘martial arts’ and argues that martial arts is a cultural construction that was born in film, TV, and other media. It ... More

The Invention of Martial Arts examines the media history of what we now call ‘martial arts’ and argues that martial arts is a cultural construction that was born in film, TV, and other media. It argues that ‘martial arts’ exploded into popular consciousness entirely thanks to the work of media. Of course, the book does not deny the existence of real, material histories and non-media dimensions in martial arts practices. But it thoroughly recasts the status of such histories, combining recent myth-busting findings in historical martial arts research with important insights into the discontinuous character of history, the widespread ‘invention of tradition’, the orientalism and imagined geographies that animate many ideas about history, and the frequent manipulation of history for reasons of status, cultural capital, private or public power, politics, and/or financial gain. In doing so, the book argues for the primacy of media representation as key player in the emergence and spread of martial arts, and overturns the dominant belief that ‘real practices’ are primary while representations are secondary. The book makes its case via historical analysis of the British media history of such Eastern and Western martial arts as Bartitsu, jujutsu, judo, karate, taiji, and mixed martial arts (MMA) across a range of media, from newspapers, comics, and books to cartoons, films, and TV series, as well as television adverts and music videos, focusing on often overlooked texts such as adverts for ‘Hai Karate’, the 1970s hit ‘Kung Fu Fighting’, and other mainstream and marginal media texts.Less

Listening to China: Sound and the Sino-Western Encounter, 1770-1839

Thomas Irvine

From bell ringing to fireworks, gongs to cannon salutes, a dazzling variety of sounds and soundscapes marked the China encountered by the West around 1800. These sounds were gathered by diplomats, ... More

From bell ringing to fireworks, gongs to cannon salutes, a dazzling variety of sounds and soundscapes marked the China encountered by the West around 1800. These sounds were gathered by diplomats, trade officials, missionaries, and other travelers and transmitted back to Europe, where they were reconstructed in the imaginations of writers, philosophers, and music historians such as Jean-Philippe Rameau, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, and Charles Burney. Thomas Irvine gathers these stories in Listening to China, exploring how the sonic encounter with China shaped perceptions of Europe’s own musical development. Through these stories, Irvine not only investigates how the Sino-Western encounter sounded, but also traces the West’s shifting response to China. As the trading relationships between China and the West broke down, travelers and music theorists abandoned the vision of shared musical approaches, focusing instead on China’s noisiness and sonic disorder and finding less to like in its music. At the same time, Irvine reconsiders the idea of a specifically Western music history, revealing that it was comparison with China, the great “other,” that helped this idea emerge. Ultimately, Irvine draws attention to the ways Western ears were implicated in the colonial and imperial project in China, as well as to China’s importance to the construction of musical knowledge during and after the European Enlightenment. Timely and original, Listening to China is a must-read for music scholars and historians of China alike.Less

Music and Social Justice: A Guide for Elementary Educators

Cathy Benedict

This book challenges and reframes traditional ways of addressing many of the topics we have come to think of as social justice. Offering practical suggestions for helping both teachers and students ... More

This book challenges and reframes traditional ways of addressing many of the topics we have come to think of as social justice. Offering practical suggestions for helping both teachers and students think philosophically (and thus critically) about the world around them, each chapter engages with important themes through music making and learning as it presents scenarios, examples of dialogue with students, unit ideas, and lesson plans geared toward elementary students (ages 6–14). Taken-for-granted subjects often considered sacrosanct or beyond the understanding of elementary students, such as friendship, racism, poverty, religion, and class, are addressed and interrogated in a way that honors the voice and critical thinking of the elementary student. Suggestions are given that help both teachers and students to pause, reflect, and redirect dialogue with questions that uncover bias, misinformation, and misunderstandings that too often stand in the way of coming to know and embracing difference. Guiding questions, which anchor many curricular mandates, are used throughout in order to scaffold critical and reflective thinking beginning in the earliest grades of elementary music education. Where does social justice reside? Whose voice is being heard, and whose is being silenced? How do we come to think of and construct poverty? How is it that musics become used the way they are used? What happens to songs initially intended for socially driven purposes when their significance is undermined? These questions and more are explored, encouraging music teachers to embrace a path toward socially just engagements at the elementary level.Less

Music Downtown Eastside: Human Rights and Capability Development through Music in Urban Poverty

Klisala Harrison

Music Downtown Eastside explores how human rights are at play in the popular music practices of homeless and street-involved people who feel that music is one of the rare things that cannot be taken ... More

Music Downtown Eastside explores how human rights are at play in the popular music practices of homeless and street-involved people who feel that music is one of the rare things that cannot be taken away of them. It draws on two decades of ethnographic research in one of Canada’s poorest urban neighborhoods, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Klisala Harrison takes the reader into popular music jams and therapy sessions offered to the poorest of the poor in churches, community centers and health organizations. There she analyzes the capabilities music-making develops, and how human rights are respected, promoted, threatened, or violated in those musical moments. When doing so, she also offers new and detailed insights on the relationships between music and poverty, a type of social deprivation that diminishes people’s human capabilities and rights. The book contributes to the human rights literature by examining critically how human rights can be strengthened in cultural practices. Harrison’s study demonstrates that capabilities and human rights are interrelated. Developing capabilities can be a way to strengthen human rights.Less

The Music Technology Cookbook: Ready-Made Recipes for the Classroom

adam patrick bell (ed.)

The Music Technology Cookbook is a practitioner-oriented collection of lesson plans outlining step-by-step music-making activities with music technology. Featuring fifty-six lessons by forty-nine ... More

The Music Technology Cookbook is a practitioner-oriented collection of lesson plans outlining step-by-step music-making activities with music technology. Featuring fifty-six lessons by forty-nine authors from around the world, The Music Technology Cookbook covers a broad range of music technology topics including: composition (with digital audio workstations such as Ableton, Soundtrap, GarageBand); production skills such as recording, editing, and equalization; creating multimedia (ringtones, soundscapes, audiobooks, sonic brands, jingles); beatmaking; DJing; programming (Minecraft, Scratch, Sonic Pi, P5.js); and, designing instruments (Makey Makey). The contributing authors of the lessons work in diverse educational contexts including universities and colleges, schools, community organizations, and online platforms. Each lesson is comprehensive, including a short description of the activity, keywords, materials needed, teaching context of the contributing author, time required, detailed instructions, modifications for learners, learning outcomes, assessment considerations, and recommendations for further reading. Divided into five sections (Beatmaking and Performance; Composition; Multimedia and Interdisciplinary; Production; Programming and Design), each section is scaffolded using the levels “beginner,” “intermediate,” and “advanced” to help educators gauge the appropriate level of difficulty for their students.Less

The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training

Doran George

Susan Leigh Foster (ed.)

The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training examines the development of Somatics as it has been adopted by successive generations of practitioners since its early beginnings in the 1950s. The book ... More

The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training examines the development of Somatics as it has been adopted by successive generations of practitioners since its early beginnings in the 1950s. The book elucidates the ways in which Somatics has engaged globally with some of the various locales in which it was developed and practiced, in terms of its relationships both to other dance training programs in that region and to larger aesthetic and political values. The book thereby offers a cogent analysis of how training regimens can inculcate an embodied politics as they guide and shape the experience of bodily sensation, construct forms of reflexive evaluation of bodily action, and summon bodies into relationship with one another. Throughout, it focuses on how the notion of a natural body was implemented and developed in Somatics pedagogy.Less

Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical

Roger Mathew Grant

Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement that took place in European music theory of the eighteenth century. During that time the affects—or ... More

Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement that took place in European music theory of the eighteenth century. During that time the affects—or the passions, as they were also called—formed a vital component of a mimetic model of the arts. Eighteenth-century critics held that artworks imitated or copied the natural world in order to produce copies of the affects in their beholders. But music caused a problem for these thinkers, since it wasn’t apparent that musical tones could imitate anything with any dependability (except, perhaps, for the rare thunderclap or birdcall). Struggling to articulate how it was that music managed to move its auditors without imitation, certain theorists developed a new affect theory crafted especially for music. These theorists postulated that it was music’s physical materiality as sound that vibrated the nerves of listeners and attuned them to the affects through sympathetic resonance. This was a theory of affective attunement that bypassed the entire structure of representation, offering a non-discursive, corporeal alternative. Inflecting our current intellectual moment through eighteenth-century music theory and aesthetics, this book offers a reassessment of affect theory’s common systems and processes. It offers a new way of thinking through affect dialectically, drawing attention to patterns and problems in affect theory that we have been given to repeating. Finally, taking a cue from eighteenth-century theory, it argues for renewed attention to the objects that generate affects in subjects.Less

Performing Knowledge: Twentieth-Century Music in Analysis and Performance

Daphne Leong

This book brings a theorist and performers together to examine the interface of analysis and performance in music of the twentieth century. Nine case studies, of music by Ravel, Schoenberg, Bartók, ... More

This book brings a theorist and performers together to examine the interface of analysis and performance in music of the twentieth century. Nine case studies, of music by Ravel, Schoenberg, Bartók, Schnittke, Milhaud, Messiaen, Babbitt, Carter, and Morris, are co-authored with performers (or composers) of those works. The case studies revolve around musical structure, broadly defined to comprise relations among parts and whole created in the process of making music, whether by composers, performers, listeners, or analysts. Knowledge that is produced in the course of relating analysis and performance is conceived in three dimensions: wissen, können, and kennen. The collaborative process itself is viewed through three constructs that facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration: shared items, shared objectives (activity objects and epistemic objects), and shared agents. The book’s collaborations “thicken” the description of analysis and performance by illuminating key issues around (a) the implicit identity of a work: the role of embodiment, the affordances of a score, the cultural understanding of notation; (b) the use of metaphor in interpretation: here metaphors of memory, of poetry, and of ritual and drama; and (c) the relation of analysis and performance itself: its antagonisms, its fusion, and—rounding out the perspectives of theorist and performer with those of composer and listener—the role of structure in audience response. Along with these broader insights, each collaboration exemplifies processes of analysis and of performance, in grappling with and interpreting particular pieces. Video performances, demonstrations, and interviews; audio recordings; and photographs partner with the book’s written text.Less