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Adrian Rollini (1904-1956)was as a child prodigy, playing piano when he was four. This book describes how job opportunities came to him easily at first and that his versatility helped him when they became rare.At the age of 16 he became a professional musician and, in New York, recorded piano rolls. In 1922, at the start of the jazz age, he joined the California Ramblers. He moved to the bass saxophone and gave it its definite place in early jazz. He had no serious competition and was highly appreciated by his colleagues. His style became the instrument's standard and his new sound was one reason why the band became a success. At the top of his fame Rollini became leader of his own band, with a.o. Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Trumbauer, Eddie Lang, and Joe Venuti. It was star-studded but short-lived. In late 1927, he moved to London to join Fred Eizalde's progressive dance band. A year later he became the band's practical leader. Back in the USA in 1930, Rollini joined Bert Lown's hotel band, but the bass saxophone was phasing out, so he moved to the vibraphone. Bands such as Lown's and, later, Richard Himber's did not satisfy him, and he decided to start a club, Adrian's Tap Room, as well as an instrument shop. He was one of the first to go for a jazz trio, consisting of himself,a guitarist, and a bass player. During the 40s, Rollini added another venture, a fishing lodge in Florida.

Haitian carnival offers a lens into popular power and politics. Political demonstrations in Haiti often manifest as musical performances. Studying carnival and political protest side by side brings insight to the musical engagement that ordinary citizens and celebrity musicians often cultivate and revere in contemporary Haiti. This book explores how the self-declared president of konpa Sweet Micky (Michel Martelly) rose to the nation’s highest office while methodically crafting a political product inherently entangled with his musical product. It provides deep historical perspective on the characteristics of carnivalesque verbal play—and the performative skill set of the artist (Sweet Micky) who dominated carnival for more than a decade—including vulgarities and polemics. It moreover demonstrates that the practice of leveraging the carnivalesque for expedient political function has precedence in Haiti’s history. Yet there has been profound resistance to this brand of politics led by many other high-profile artists, including Matyas and Jòj, Brothers Posse, Boukman Eksperyans, and RAM. These groups have each released popular carnival songs that have contributed to the public’s discussions of what civic participation and citizenship in Haiti can and should be. Author Rebecca Dirksen presents an in-depth consideration of politically and socially engaged music and what these expressions mean for the Haitian population in the face of challenging political and economic circumstances. After the Dance, the Drums Are Heavy centers the voices of Haitian musicians and regular citizens by extensively sharing interviews and detailed analyses of musical performance in the context of contemporary events well beyond the musical realm.

In recent decades, cognitive neuroscience research has increased our understanding of how the brain learns, retains, and recalls information. At the same time, social psychology researchers have developed insights into group dynamics, exploring what motivates individuals in a group to give their full effort, or conversely, what might instead inspire them to become freeloaders. This book explores the idea that choral conductors who better understand how the brain learns, and how individuals within groups function, can lead more efficient, productive, and enjoyable rehearsals. Armed with this knowledge, conductors can create rehearsal techniques which take advantage of certain fundamental brain and social psychology principles. Through such approaches, singers will become increasingly engaged physically and mentally in the rehearsal process. This book draws from a range of scientific studies to suggest and encourage effective, evidence-based techniques, and can help serve to reset and inspire new approaches toward teaching. Each chapter outlines exercises and creative ideas for conductors and music teachers, including the importance of embedding problem solving into rehearsal, the use of multiple entry points for newly acquired information, techniques to encourage an emotional connection to the music, and ways to incorporate writing exercises into rehearsal. Additional topics include brain-compatible teaching strategies to complement thorough score study, the science behind motivation, the role imagination plays in teaching, the psychology of rehearsal, and conducting tips and advice. All of these brain-friendly strategies serve to encourage singers’ active participation in rehearsals, with the goal of motivating beautiful, inspired, and memorable performances.

With a focus on music, this book outlines what improvisation is and why it is an important creative and social activity. Drawing on the emerging psychological literature in this area, as well as evidence from authors’ research with musicians, this text outlines innovative ideas on what defines improvisation and the psychological, creative, and social processes involved. It explores the role of specialist skills, the importance of musical identities and the nature of understanding in improvised interaction and between improvisers. It discusses how we develop as improvisers and the role of improvisation within therapeutic applications of music. Each chapter proceeds from discussion of an illustrative instance of musical improvisation. Providing fresh and provocative insights for anyone interested in playing, studying, teaching, or listening to improvised music, the authors offer suggestions for approaching this practice in new ways at any level, and identify potential developments in cross-disciplinary improvising. Asserting that everyone can and should improvise, the book provides a resource for courses teaching improvisation in contemporary practice, and has strong relevance for those applying musical improvisation in community and therapeutic contexts. The book deals with such questions as: What constitutes improvisation? Do all forms of improvisation represent the same thing? Faced with myriad possibilities, how do improvisers decide what to play? How does an improviser in a group know what the others will do? How might improvisation influence our well-being? In response to such questions, a definition of improvisation based on its unique behavioural features is set out as an exciting context for psychological investigation.

Across Africa, artists increasingly turn to NGO sponsorship in pursuit of greater influence and funding, while simultaneously NGOs—both international and local—commission arts projects to buttress their interventions and achieve greater reach and marketability. As a result, the key values of artistic expression become “healing” and “sensitization” measured in turn by “impact” and “effectiveness.” Such rubrics obscure the aesthetic complexities of the artworks and the power dynamics that inform their production. Clashes arise as foreign NGOs import foreign aesthetic models and preconceptions about their efficacy, alongside foreign interpretations of politics, medicine, psychology, trauma, memorialization, and so on. Meanwhile, each community embraces its own aesthetic precedents, often at odds with the intentions of humanitarian agencies. The arts are a sphere in which different worldviews enter into conflict and conversation. To tackle the consequences of aid agency arts deployment, the volume assembles ten case studies from across the African continent employing multiple media including music, sculpture, photography, drama, storytelling, ritual, and protest marches. Organized under three widespread yet underanalyzed objectives for arts in emergency—demonstration, distribution, and remediation—each case offers a different disciplinary and methodological perspective on a common complication in NGO-sponsored creativity. The Art of Emergency shifts the discourse on arts activism away from fixations on message and toward diverse investigations of aesthetics and power negotiations. In doing so, this volume brings into focus the conscious and unconscious configurations of humanitarian activism, the social lives it attempts to engage, and the often fraught interactions between the two.

This book examines how four of the greatest composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner, and Edward Elgar—engaged with the legacy of the music of J. S. Bach. It investigates the various ways in which these individuals responded to Bach’s oeuvre, not as composers per se, but as performers, conductors, scholars, critics, and all-around ambassadors. In its detailed analyses of both musical and epistolary sources, the book sheds light on how Bach’s works were received within the musical circles of these composers. The book’s narrative also helps humanize these individuals as it reconstructs, with touching immediacy, and often by recounting colorful anecdotes, the intimate social circumstances in which Bach’s music was performed and discussed. Special emphasis is given to Mendelssohn’s and Schumann’s reception of Bach’s organ works, Schumann’s encounter with the St. Matthew and St. John Passions, Wagner’s musings on the Well-Tempered Clavier, and Elgar’s (resoundingly negative) thoughts on Bach’s vocal works.

Surveying American ballet in 1913, Willa Cather reported that few girls expressed any interest in taking ballet class and that those who did were hard-pressed to find anything other than dingy studios and imperious teachers. A century later, ballet is everywhere. There are ballet companies across the United States; ballet is commonly featured in film, television, literature, and social media; professional ballet dancers are spokespeople for all kinds of products; nail polish companies market colors like “Ballet Slippers”; and, most importantly, millions of American children have taken ballet class. Beginning with the arrival of Russian dancers like Anna Pavlova in the early 1900s, Ballet Class: An American History explores the growth of ballet from an ancillary part of nineteenth-century musical theater, opera, and vaudeville to the quintessential extracurricular activity it is today, pursued by countless children nationwide and an integral part of twentieth-century American childhood across borders of gender, class, race, and sexuality. A social history, Ballet Class takes a new approach to ballet and helps ground an art form often perceived to be elite in the experiences of everyday people who spent time in barre-lined studios. Drawing on materials including children’s books, memoirs by professional dancers and choreographers, pedagogy manuals, dance periodicals, archival collections, and oral histories, this pathbreaking study provides a national perspective on the history and significance of recreational ballet class in the United States and its influence on many facets of children’s lives, including gender norms, consumerism, body image, children’s literature, extracurricular activities, and popular culture.

The second edition of The Baroque Clarinet (1992) is a history of the clarinet and chalumeau from antiquity to 1760 in six chapters: “Origins of the Chalumeau,” “Music for the Chalumeau,” “The Earliest Clarinets,” “Playing Techniques for the Baroque Clarinet,” “Music for the Baroque Clarinet,” and “Baroque Clarinet in Society.” There are five appendices: four checklists of extant chalumeaux, extant clarinets, chalumeau music and sources from 1694 to 1780, clarinet music and sources from about 1715 to 1760; and a fifth of chalumeau and clarinet concerts, rehearsals, and clarinets for purchase in newspaper advertisements from 1718 to 1760. The second edition has significant additions of makers, players, music, and iconography, that last in a chapter called “The Baroque Clarinet in Society.” Topics discussed include single-reed instruments in Egyptian antiquity and from the 10th through the 17th centuries; the mock trumpet; chalumeaux during the 17th and 18th centuries; Jacob Denner’s chalumeaux and clarinets; an organ pipe that sounds like a chalumeau; chalumeau players; chalumeau descriptions from the mid-18th century; later documented chalumeau makers; chalumeau reproductions; how and why Johann Christoph Denner improved the chalumeau and invented the clarinet, based on previous studies of mechanical inventions; chalumeau and clarinet music and composers; and the Baroque clarinet’s use by traveling musicians, in court and aristocratic music, church and civic music, and military music.

The “Beethoven syndrome” is the inclination of listeners to hear music as the projection of a composer’s inner self. Beethoven’s music was a catalyst for this change, but only in retrospect, for it was not until after his death that listeners began to hear composers in general—not just Beethoven—in their works, particularly in their instrumental music. The Beethoven Syndrome: Hearing Music as Autobiography traces the rise, fall, and persistence of this mode of listening from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. Prior to 1830, composers and audiences alike operated within a framework of rhetoric, in which the burden of intelligibility lay squarely on the composer, whose task it was to move listeners in a calculated way. Expression was thought of as an objective construct with a purpose. But through a confluence of musical, philosophical, social, and economic changes, the framework of rhetoric gave way to a framework of hermeneutics. Under the paradigm of expressive subjectivity, concert-goers no longer perceived composers as orators but as oracles to be deciphered. The aesthetics of “New Objectivity” around 1920 marked a return not only to certain stylistic features of eighteenth-century music but to the earlier concept of expression itself. Objectivity would go on to become the cornerstone of the high-modernist aesthetic that dominated the century’s middle decades. Perceptions of compositional subjectivity have nevertheless endured in surprising ways, and we find ourselves today in an era of dual and often conflicting paradigms.

A Blaze of Light in Every Word presents a conceptual model for analyzing vocal delivery in popular song recordings focused on three overlapping areas of inquiry: pitch, prosody, and quality. The domain of pitch, which refers to listeners’ perceptions of frequency, considers range, tessitura, intonation, and registration. Prosody, the pacing and flow of delivery, comprises phrasing, metric placement, motility, embellishment, and consonantal articulation. Qualitative elements include timbre, phonation, onset, resonance, clarity, paralinguistic effects, and loudness. Intersecting all three domains is the area of technological mediation, which considers how external technologies, such as layering, overdubbing, pitch modification, recording transmission, compression, reverb, spatial placement, delay, and other electronic effects, impact voice in recorded music. Though the book focuses primarily on the sonic and material aspects of vocal delivery, it situates these aspects among broader cultural, philosophical, and anthropological approaches to voice with the goal to better understand the relationship between sonic content and its signification. Drawing upon transcription and spectrographic analysis as the primary means of representation, as well as modes of analysis, this book features in-depth analyses of a wide array of popular song recordings spanning genres from indie rock to hip-hop to death metal, develops analytical tools for understanding how individual dimensions make singing voices both complex and unique, and synthesizes how multiple aspects interact to better understand the multidimensionality of singing voices.

Charlie Parker, Composer is the first assessment of a major jazz composer’s oeuvre in its entirety. Providing analytical discussion of each of Parker’s works, this study combines music-theoretical, historical, and philosophical perspectives. A variety of analytical techniques are brought to bear on Parker’s compositions, including application of a revised Schenkerian approach to the music that was developed through the author’s prior publications. After a review of Parker’s life emphasizing his musical training and involvement in composition, the book proceeds by considering the types of Parker pieces as categorized by overall form and harmony and the amount of preplanned music they contain. The historical circumstances of each piece are reviewed, and, in some cases, sources of the ideas of the most important tunes are explored. The introduction includes a discussion of the ontology of a jazz composition. The view is advanced that the Western concept of a music composition needs to be expanded to embrace practices typical of jazz composition and forming a significant part of Parker’s work. While focusing on Parker’s more conventional tunes, the book also considers his large-scale melodic formulas. Two formulas in particular are arguably compositional, since they are extensive and sometimes appear in subsequent improvisations. As part of the research for this book, all of Parker’s copyright submissions to the Library of Congress were examined and photographed. The book reproduces the four of them that were copied by Parker himself.

Focusing on Western theatre dance, Choreography Invisible explores the metaphysics of dances and choreographic works. It draws on a range of resources from analytic philosophy of art to develop the argument that dances are repeatable structures of action. The book also analyses the idea of the dance work in long-term historical perspective. Tracing different ways in which dances have been conceptualised across time, the book considers changing notions of authorship, fixity, persistence, and autonomy from the fifteenth century to the present day. The modern work-concept is interrogated, its relativity and contested status (particularly within contemporary dance practice) acknowledged. As the dance work disappears from contemporary discourse, what can be said about the kind of thing it is? Choreography Invisible considers the materials of dance making and the nature (and limits) of choreographic authorship. It explores issues of identity and persistence, including why distinct (and sometimes quite various) performances are still treated as performances of the same work. The book examines how dances survive through time and what it means for a dance work to be lost, considering the extent to which practices of dance reconstruction and reenactment can recuperate or reconstitute lost choreography. The focus here is dance, but the book addresses issues with wider implications for the metaphysics of art, including how the historical relativity of art practices should inflect analytic arguments about the nature of art works, and what place such works have within a broader ontology of human and natural worlds.

Hundreds of volumes filled with hand-copied music sit in archives and libraries across the United States. Created by amateur musicians who came of age in the years following the American Revolution. These manuscript books reveal the existence of a musical culture that was deeply intertwined in people’s everyday lives and at the same time in powerful historical forces that were shaping the new nation. Cultivated by Hand is a social and material history of musical amateurism. It uncovers the influences that directed amateurs’ experiences, delves into how those influences manifested in individuals’ lives, and reveals the hitherto unknown importance of music book creation and collection in early American musical life. This book argues that amateur music-making played an important and heretofore unacknowledged role in the making of gender, class, race, and nation in the early American republic. Moreover, much of the repertoire collected by relatively elite, white amateurs was imported from Britain, undermining concurrent efforts to foster a national musical style. Cultivated by Hand situates the making of manuscript books in the contexts of technology, handcrafts, and sociaability, exploring manuscript’s relationship to print as well as changes in music consumerism in the late eighteenth century. Creating manuscripts required hours of work, yet the labor of amateur musicians, particularly women, was discursively and economically devalued. The gendered attacks obscured the importance of copying and performing music for the self-fashioning of the first generation of amateurs in the new nation, who used their efforts to cultivate gentility, piety, and erudition, as well as sensible connection to others.

Of the many composers in the Western classical tradition who celebrated the marriage between psyche and sound, those explored in this book followed the lines diverging from Wagner in philosophizing the nature of desire in music. This book offers two new theories of tonal functionality in the music of the first half of the twentieth century that seek to explain its psychological complexities. First, the book further develops Riemann’s three diatonic chord functions, extending them to account for chromatic chord progression and substitution. The three functions (tonic, subdominant, and dominant) are compared to Jacques Lacan’s twin concepts of metaphor and metonymy, which drive the apparatus of human desire. Second, the book develops a technique for analyzing the drives that pull chromatic music in multiple directions simultaneously, creating a libidinal surface that mirrors the tensions of the psyche found in Schopenhauer, Freud, and the post-Freudians Lacan, Lyotard, and Deleuze. The harmonic models are tested in psychologically challenging pieces of music by post-Wagnerian composers. From the obsession with death and mourning in Suk’s Asrael Symphony to an exploration of “perversion” in Strauss’s Elektra, from the post-Kantian transcendentalism of Ives’s Concord Sonata to the “Accelerationism” of Skryabin’s late piano works, and from the Sufi mysticism of Szymanowski’s Song of the Night to the failed fantasy of the American dream in Copland’s The Tender Land, the book cuts a path through the dense forests of chromatic complexity and digs deep into the psychological makeup of post-Wagnerian psychodynamic music.

Film, Music, Memory demonstrates that cinema has shaped modern culture in part by changing its cultures of memory. Such change has rested in no small measure on the mnemonic powers of music. With the advent of film, music became involved in a new technology of audiovisual media, placing cultural knowledge in individual and collective memory. Through the capacity to reproduce temporal objects in sound recording and film, technology had advanced a novel mode of exteriorizing memory. This so-called “tertiary memory” (Bernard Stiegler) no longer tied acts of remembrance to the human body and made them subject to its limitations. Instead cinema could retain the past and re-project it in ways that contributed to new forms of cultural consciousness. Film music was central to “cinematic experience” (Miriam Hansen), best understood by extending Walter Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious to that of an optical-acoustic unconscious. Focusing on examples from American and European cinema, the book’s three parts show how music partook in cinematic representations of memory through storage, retrieval, and affect which shaped characters’ memory in film as well as viewers’ memory of film. Individual chapters establish how film music aligned with recording technology to cue visual recall and create new forms of intertextuality; how the habitual consumption of movies fostered their replay through music; how musicians and listeners became a site for traumatic and nostalgic memory; and how music affected economic and racial trust in society by shaping trust in film as a medium.

Flaming?: The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance examines the rituals and social interactions of African American men who use gospel music-making as a means of worshiping God and performing gendered identities. Prompted by the popular term “flaming” that is used to identify over-the-top or peculiar performance of identity, Flaming? argues that these men wield and interweave a variety of multivalent aural-visual cues, including vocal style, gesture, attire, and homiletics, to position themselves along a spectrum of gender identities. These multisensory enactments empower artists (i.e., “peculiar people”) to demonstrate modes of “competence” that affirm their fitness to minister through speech and song. Through a progression of transcongregational case studies, Flaming? observes the ways in which African American men traverse tightly knit social networks to negotiate their identities through and beyond the worship experience. Coded and “read” as either hypermasculine, queer, or sexually ambiguous, peculiar gospel performances are often a locus of nuanced protest, facilitating a critique of heteronormative theology while affording African American men opportunities for greater visibility and access to leadership. Same-sex relationships among men constitute an open secret that is carefully guarded by those who elect to remain silent in the face of traditional theology, but musically performed by those compelled to worship “in Spirit and in truth.” This book thus examines the performative mechanisms through which black men acquire an aura of sexual ambiguity, exhibit an ostensible absence of sexual preference, and thereby gain social and ritual prestige in gospel music circles.

Although Georges Auric (1899–1983) is best remembered today for his affiliation with the Groupe des Six, his musical career was long, productive, complex, and intimately attuned to the realities of modern life. His polyvalent career—as a composer of concert, theatrical, ballet, popular, film, and television music; music critic; opera director; and arts administrator—reveals a diversity of engagements that speak to a reconfiguration of the role of the composer in the modern world. Auric was a product of his time, with deep connections to France’s artistic, social, and political elites. At the same time, he drew on his prestige and privilege to improve the country’s musical life in tangible ways, whether with regard to musical education and accessibility or to the establishment of fair copyright laws. He took artistic collaboration, already a hallmark of the short-lived Groupe des Six, to a level that surpassed any of the other members of that group. Diverging from the romantic trope of individual creation, Auric’s legacy troubles conventional ideas of what it means to be a composer.

This book provides the first ethnographic examination into the life of and the community formed around Pandit Chitresh Das, one of India’s most dynamic, outspoken, and captivating dancers. Born in Calcutta in 1944, Pandit Das immigrated to the United States in 1970 and was instrumental in establishing kathak, an Indian classical dance form, in the States. This work examines issues that arose in teaching, learning, and performing kathak in the United States over forty-five years. As a teacher, how does one transmit cultural and dance knowledge to culturally diverse groups of students? Within an artistic diaspora, how does a culture bearer–teacher maintain, modify, and frame dance repertoire, cultural norms associated with being a dancer, and philosophies surrounding the dance? And how do dancers negotiate the challenges of cultural expression in multicultural contexts? This ethnographic study of one of the longest-running sites of kathak transmission in the United States examines such questions, concluding that even in this hierarchical pedagogical tradition, students and teacher mutually navigate issues of artistic style and cultural meaning to create and sustain a dance culture.

This book is a resource on projection systems for any music teacher’s treasure chest of tools. Educators, from brand new to seasoned veterans, can discover new lessons, activities, and resources involving the projection systems already in their classrooms. From conventional projectors to streaming media players, beginners to the digital world will find tips and tricks to start using new systems. More experienced users will discover new resources and activities, from learning how to create VR worlds to demonstrate knowledge of music venues from around the world, to going on an outside safari to find missing instruments of the orchestra. This book also includes a resource index with app and website recommendations for going further and appendices that make it easier to find the activities and resources to fit any type of instruction. This book is a toolbox for teachers to keep on their desks to use every day to incorporate their digital tools in a meaningful way.

This book reconstructs the transnational history of the category of Latin American music during the first half of the twentieth century, from a longer perspective that begins in the nineteenth century and extends the narrative until the present. It analyzes intellectual, commercial, state, musicological, and diplomatic actors that created and elaborated this category. It shows music as a key field for the dissemination of a cultural idea of Latin America in the 1930s. It studies multiple music-related actors such as intellectuals, musicologists, policymakers, popular artists, radio operators, and diplomats in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, the United States, and different parts of Europe. It proposes a regionalist approach to Latin American and global history, by showing individual nations as both agents and result of transnational forces—imperial, economic, and ideological. It argues that Latin America is the sedimentation of over two centuries of regionalist projects, and studies the place of music regionalism in that history.