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This chapter introduces the main concern of the book: the interaction of ‘rude’ (‘folk’), ‘vulgar’ (‘popular’), and ‘polite’ (‘art’) music, from about 1760 on. It deals, first, with the differentiation of these categories at this period, then with the neoclassical ethos and its ideal of the simple, natural, and (as we should now say) ‘accessible’, all of which entailed a new attitude to popular music. Whatever its ideals, in practice neoclassicism was highly eclectic. Its music made constant use of the popular, habitually setting it off against the learned.

This chapter presents reflections about an important and much discussed aspect of art-music composers' creative process, namely, the role — if any — that emotions, and specifically acute emotional states induced by life-events, play in that process. In contrast to the emotivist attitude, it argues for the paramount importance of contemplation, analytical and technical skills, problem-solving, and planning — in short, reason — as the key features of art-music composers' daily work, especially when developing large-scale pieces. It is also proposed that when emotions are experienced by composers in response to others' and their own music of very high quality, these are likely to be the states of being moved and aesthetic awe — which are very rare and have different phenomenological characteristics and evolutionary origin than the emotions with which psychologists and biologists are usually concerned.

In late 20th-century American religious experience, women gathered to use sacred music in transformative ways to change their condition in a society and in religious practices dominated by men. Women's ritual music draws upon many different traditions, from traditional hymns with new texts to secular art music (e.g., by Luciano Berio) to popular music with African American roots (e.g., performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock). This chapter examines different occasions, most of them non-liturgical and outside congregational religious practice, and the creation of new texts from existing hymns or songs as the convergence of women's ritual practice. The rituals and repertories examined in the chapter acquire political potential, and their performance serves to empower women to act together to bring about real change in their lives.

This chapter considers Schuman's various attempts to use his position and influence to extend his ideas of music education, musical diplomacy, and American contemporary music. It looks at the establishment of the BMI Student Composer Awards and Schuman's pressure upon the managers of the Metropolitan Opera Association and the New York Philharmonic to perform American music. Also striking is Schuman's role in brokering a number of mergers: 1) the National Institute of Arts and Letters with the American Academy of Arts and Letters; 2) the High School of Music and Art and the High School of Performing Arts; and 3) the International Society of Contemporary Music (U.S. Section) and the League of Composers. The chapter ends by looking at Schuman's Credendum, commissioned by the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO.

This chapter examines the aesthetic pleasure that became linked to serious art music. It focuses on charm and pleasure, which led to a revival of interest in feminine values and new debates over what was distinctive in French music. It discusses the relationship between music and its listeners that was based in aural pleasure and emotional and imaginative stimulation, along with an improved understanding of the contribution of music to the public interest.

In an essay entitled “Aladdin's Lamp” and published on the occasion of the edition of An-sky's The Jewish Artistic Heritage, Abram Markovich Efros, a leading Russian art critic, described a form of neonationalism. It was a creative combination of folk art and modernism in which the supposed authenticity of folk art lent stylistic credentials to modernist art. In the debates about the sources of Jewish art music, an opposition was similarly constructed between the near past and ancient times, between the Oriental-sounding Yiddish folk music and the less Orientally colored sacred music that, many believed, was historically traceable to Biblical times. In this new phase of Jewish art music, kuchkist preoccupation with folk music as an expression of national identity was replaced with a neonationalist orientation, in which national musical sources were abstracted.

This chapter describes four genres of music video — the pseudo-documentary music video, the ‘art’ music video, the narrative music video and the staged performance video — identifying their key generic codes and the differing legitimating functions they perform. Any particular music video's own generic properties are often subsumed under the genre of music that it is promoting. Although genre works as a framework of signs in relation to which difference and variation can be both produced on the one hand and read and understood on the other, music genres do not provide such a framework for the production or consumption of music videos. The four genres examined here describe the formal and aesthetic features of an important number of both historic and contemporary music videos. Genres of music video, and the edges between them, are every bit as contingent as those in film, literature and popular music itself.

This chapter explores an attempt at the creation of an Islamic “art music” for a relatively new community of Muslim intellectuals in Jakarta. It uses the compositions of Trisutji Kamal, a composition student of the Amsterdam Conservatory and professor at IKJ, the Jakarta Arts Academy. The chapter outlines the Suharto-era rise of the modernist Indonesian Association of Muslim Intellectuals (ICTM), and a pair of arts institutions: Taman Ismail Marzuki, a performing arts complex (the Jakarta Arts Center) that showcases modern arts from around the world, and IKJ, Institut Kesenian Jakarta, or the Jakarta Arts Institute, an institute for the education and patronage of the arts. The chapter focuses largely on Kamal's composition “Persembahan” (A Worship) as an example of an artistically successful hybrid emerging from this intellectual movement that combines Islamic elements and art music and blurs the lines between art and religion. Unique parts of the piece feature a religious text in Arabic, a mixed choir, and a set of rebana frame drums, which together give the impression of qasidahan, the activity of singing Arabic songs of praise, a rural pesantren tradition formerly denigrated by urban classes, now re-dressed for the proscenium stage. It is argued that the new middle class, while accepting the idea of newly composed art music and the Islamic elements therein, is not prepared to embrace Muslim art music with the associated, respectful etiquette of the concert setting.

Leonid Sabaneyev, like other historians of Jewish music, identified the origin of Jewish art music with the foundation of the Society for Jewish Folk Music—Obshchestvo Yevreyskoy Narodnoy Muzïki (OYNM) in St. Petersburg in 1908. The OYNM was an association of professional musicians and music lovers who sought to purvey Jewish music, both secular and sacred, to audiences both Jewish and non-Jewish. This chapter examines how the political vagaries within the Jewish national movement strongly affected the emergence and development of Jewish cultural organizations. The Russian nationalist model was crucial in turning the OYNM from an organization for the preservation and popularization of Jewish musical culture into a funnel for the creation of specifically Jewish art music. Ironically, the music written by composers whose ambition was to become the Mighty Band of Jewish music emulated their Russian models not only in technical details, but also in their willing embrace of stereotypes of Russian composers, exploited to depict the Oriental others, among them Jews.

This chapter examines issues in relation to interdisciplinary study and aims to differentiate inter- from cross- and multidisciplinary research concerning the connection between art and music. It analyzes philosopher Jerrold Levinson's discussion of hybridity into different categories and argues that music operates as an exemplar of connection for art practices within the paradigm of postmodernism.

This book has traced the main stages of a complex process that changed the nature of music over several generations in the history of Ferrara in the fifteenth century. Perceived more broadly, it presents a detailed account of some of the operative factors in both music and in patronage that contribute to much larger patterns of change. It deals with the transformation of an established culture from a condition one can call “pre-musical” to one in which art-music had achieved the status of a major cultural resource. Formerly an occasional pastime, secular music had become a wide-ranging form of expression comprising a plurality of styles and means of performance. Sacred music had become under Ercole a true expression of his role as Christian prince, living in an ambience of intensified piety and enriching many of the major liturgical and devotional occasions of his life.

This chapter uses the specificities of analogue video to argue that the genre has a double lineage that runs through music and art histories. The theoretical work of Gene Youngblood, André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion and Yvonne Spielmann is used to situate early video art-music within the expansive multimedia culture of the 1960s. Contrasting the electromagnetic basis of the medium with the technologies of film and television, the issues of transmission, preservation and deliberation are used to demonstrate how the simultaneity of the video signal enabled image and sound to be produced, projected and manipulated at the same time. Nam June Paik, Steina Vasulka, Robert Cahen, Tony Conrad and Bill Viola provide examples of musically-trained artists who embraced video as an audiovisual agent for transformation. With the experimental nature of these musicians in mind, video art-music is discussed as a form of visual noise-composition able to produce a form of live intermedia.

Classical music helped the State Department reach a variety of audiences worldwide, not least because of the prestige associated with European traditions. The Department sponsored tours by orchestras and chamber music groups. Even though avant-garde art music lacked mass appeal, it attracted elite listeners. Yet classical music was also used more broadly: mixed programs and educational offerings helped wider audiences participate in U.S.-sponsored concerts. When musicians were unknown in the host country, officials used media strategies to convey their importance and ensure audience interest.

This article gives an overview on how magazines spread the musical ideas and information along with feelings and attitudes toward music that affected the culture in England. The professional writing of musicians in magazines lies alongside the same range of other discourses in which music is invoked for various purposes and to various effects. It produces the same kind of transforming reception and offers the opportunity for some insights into the percolation of musical ideas and beliefs through cultural discourse at large. Music is routinely deployed by novelists to depict character, health, and social status. A persistent distinction is made between folk or peasant music and the music of the cultivated tradition, but the relative valuations of those may vary with the fictional situation. The Victorians were clear about the aesthetic and ethical superiority of the “more highly developed” art music repertoire. Several beneficial medical effects are also expected from music, such as in Katherine S. Macquoid's account of “The Little Hospital by the River,” a fund-raising effort for a hospital for children with incurable conditions.

This chapter discusses the performance of art music as a phenomenon that changes when it becomes permanent, and studies the ontological role of recordings in relation to performance. It tries to determine whether the recorded performance replaces the musical work any more or less than the live performance, regardless of whether it is understood as a sounding entity or as a commercial or physical object. The chapter also studies how useful the conventional notion of recording as documentation is, and considers the possible function of recording as performing the performance.

This chapter appraises the origins, the styles, and the ideologies related to neoclassicism in music. Retrospectivism and stylistic allusion—in particular, pastiche or parody of eighteenth-century styles and forms—are indeed the features by which twentieth-century neoclassicism in music is generally identified. The origins of neoclassicism are usually located in the disruptions of World War I. Writers hostile to it have often attempted to write it off as a warbred hysteria, of which the chief outward manifestation, to quote its fiercest antagonist, was “retrogression into the traditional.” Some recent studies have attempted to reconstruct the historical contexts and circumstances out of which the neoclassicizing impulse emerged. The importance of this work lies not only in its contribution to the factual elucidation of the subject but also in its potential for dismantling many of the false premises on which the historiography of twentieth-century music has long been resting.

In the postwar era, the problem of identity in Hungarian music became even more complex. This chapter notes that the Communist regime in Hungary had to balance its desire for a specifically Hungarian art music, in which Bartók's legacy would certainly play a role against its desire to root out modernism. It shows how, as a result of conflicting aims, Bartók became central to the debates about musical style that accompanied Hungary's transition to Soviet-style socialism between 1945 and 1950.

The Eastern European effort to define folk song as essential to musical value seemed monolithic and unilateral from the Western perspective. However, this chapter shows that Eastern discussions about folk song's role in the creation of art music reveal that there, too, it was difficult to articulate a coherent artistic standard which would perfectly match the political ideal. In both of these cases, Bartók's music serves as a lens through which local judgments about music can be seen in sharper focus.

This chapter explores the interaction between music and consciousness in Buddhist thought. It argues that knowledge of Buddhist thinking on consciousness can illuminate the way that a new approach to sonic materials has radicalized Western art music since the 1950s, and suggest fresh insights into all kinds of music through observing our mental processes in response to it. Insight and awareness into a Buddhist view of sound, if developed to a high level, also has the potential to reveal profound truths about the nature of existence, and even to facilitate significant changes in the structure of consciousness. Such theories and practices that show us new ways to perceive the nature of sound, of consciousness, and of reality itself suggest how the elusiveness of music can be turned to good account.