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This book provides a first look at the ideological dilemmas and methodological anxieties that pervaded the discipline of musicology (in German, Musikwissenschaft, encompassing music theory, analysis, and the study of music history) at the time and place of its academic institutionalization. Engaging in close readings of key contributions by Eduard Hanslick, Heinrich Schenker, and Guido Adler, all leading pioneers in the field, it argues against the widely held assumption that German musicology of the period was characterized, first and foremost, by a positivist endeavor to transform the discipline after the model of the natural sciences. Instead, it suggests that the work of its three central figures was shaped not only by progressivist ideologies of scientific positivism but also, and just as profoundly, by the skeptical pronouncements of Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and other critical observers of modern culture. It furthermore suggests that some of the most pressing questions regarding musicology's disciplinary identities in the present day—about the relationship between musicology and criticism, the role of the subject in analysis and the narration of history, and the responsibilities of the scholar to the listening public—have points of origin in the discipline's conflicted and largely forgotten beginnings.

This collection of essays analyzes diverse musical creations with reference to the contexts in which the music is created and performed. The authors explain the music as sound in process, through prose, diagrams, transcriptions, recordings, and (online) multimedia presentations, all intended to convey the richness, beauty, and ingenuity of their subjects. The music ranges across geography and cultures—court music of Japan and medieval Europe, pagode song from Brazil, solos by the jazz pianist Thelonius Monk and by the sitar master Budhaditya Mukherjee, form-and-timbre improvisations of a Boston sound collective, South Korean folk drumming, and the ceremonial music of indigenous cultures in North American and Australia. Thus the essays diversify and expand the scope of this book’s companion volume, Analytical Studies in World Music, to all inhabited continents and many of its greatest musical traditions. An introduction and an afterword point out common analytical approaches, and present a new way to classify music according to its temporal organization. Two special chapters consider the juxtaposition of music from different cultures: of world-music traditions and popular music genres, and of Balinese music and European Art music, raising questions about the musical encounters and fusions of today’s interconnected world.

This book is recognized as the seminal work paving the way for current studies in mathematical and systematic approaches to music analysis. The author, one of the 20th century’s most prominent figures in music theory, pushes the boundaries of the study of pitch-structure beyond its conception as a static system for classifying and inter-relating chords and sets. Known by most music theorists as “GMIT”, the book is by far the most significant contribution to the field of systematic music theory in the last half-century, generating the framework for the “transformational theory” movement. Appearing almost twenty years after GMIT’s initial publication, this Oxford University Press edition features a previously unpublished preface by the author, as well as a foreword by Edward Gollin contextualizing the work’s significance for the current field of music theory.

Although research in music psychology, education and therapy has expanded exponentially in the 21st century, there is something of a ‘black hole’ around which much of the discourse circles: music itself. While writers have largely been occupied with what people think about musical engagement, the little musical analysis that exists has tended to be at a low level compared to the sophisticated non-musical exploration that is present. This highlights the tenuous connection between musical enquiry in the context of the humanities and that occurring within the social sciences, the one exception being the partial intersection of music theory and psychology. Here, however, progress has largely been in one direction, with something of the objectivity that characterizes psychological research reading across to music analysis, and taking the form of what has been called ‘empirical musicology’. This book takes a further, reciprocal step, in which certain of the techniques of empirical musicology (in particular, the author’s ‘zygonic’ theory) are used to inform thinking in the domains of music-psychological, educational and therapeutic research. A new, interdisciplinary sphere of endeavour is sketched out, for which the term ‘applied musicology’ is coined. The book adopts a phenomenological, inductive approach, using the analysis of hundreds of real-life examples of musical engagement and interaction to build new theories of musical intentionality and influence, and to shed new light on our understanding of aspects of music perception and cognition. This book is intended to lay the foundations upon which a new category of interdisciplinary work will be built.

When Bitches Brew was released, it was not just another jazz album, but a major single event, with ramifications rippling over the next forty-plus years. Not only did Miles Davis change the face of jazz once again by launching the entire jazz-fusion movement, he changed all of modern music. Listen to This looks in detail at the making of Bitches Brew, exploring the inner workings of Davis at his creative peak, and provides resolution to many of the controversies that have plagued this record since its inception. It revisits the mysteries surrounding the album and places it into both a historical and musical context using new interviews, original analysis, recently found recordings, unearthed session data sheets, letters, musical transcriptions, scores, and other associated data. Listen to This is not just the story of Bitches Brew. It reveals the legend of Miles Davis, his attitude, his relationship to the masses, his business and personal etiquette, and his response to extraordinary social conditions determined to bring him down. Listen to This unveils this iconic figure’s complex psyche and his impact on both the fine arts and popular culture through one of the greatest recordings ever made.

This multi-author collection, the second to be published in an unprecedented four-volume series of analytical essays on music by women composers from the twelfth to the twenty-first centuries, presents detailed studies of compositions written up to 1900 by Hildegard of Bingen, Maddalena Casulana, Barbara Strozzi, Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre, Marianna Martines, Fanny Hensel, Josephine Lang, Clara Schumann, and Amy Beach. Each chapter opens with a brief biographical sketch of the composer, followed by an in-depth analysis of one representative composition or a small number of comparable compositions, linking analytical observations with broader considerations of music history, gender, culture, or hermeneutics. These essays, many by leading music theorists, are grouped thematically into three sections, the first focused on early music for voice, the second on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century keyboard music, and the third on lieder and piano music. The collection is designed to challenge and stimulate a wide range of readers. For academics, these thorough analytical studies can open new paths into unexplored research areas in music theory and musicology. Post-secondary instructors may be inspired by the insights offered here to include new works in graduate or upper-level undergraduate courses in early music, theory, history, or women and music. Finally, for performers, conductors, and music broadcasters, these thoughtful analyses can offer enriched understandings of this repertoire and suggest fresh, new programming possibilities to share with listeners—an endeavor of discovery for all those interested in music composed before 1900.

Identifying music as a vital site of cultural debate, this book captures the dynamic, contested nature of musical life in the United States. Using a blend of music analysis and cultural critique, the author examines an array of genres—including art music, jazz, popular song, ragtime, and Hawaiian music—and numerous well-known musicians, such as Charles Ives, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Irving Berlin. The book argues that rather than a single, unified vision, an exploration of the past century reveals a contested array of musical perspectives on the nation, each one advancing a different facet of American identity through sound.

Originating in dance parties in the South Bronx in the late 1970s, hip hop and rap music have become a dominant style of popular music in the United States and a force for activism all over the world. So, too, has scholarship on this music grown, yet much of this scholarship, employing methods drawn from sociology and literature, leaves unaddressed the expressive musical choices made by hip-hop artists. This book addresses flow, the rhythm of the rapping voice. Flow presents theoretical and analytical challenges not encountered elsewhere. It is rhythmic as other music is rhythmic. But it is also rhythmic as speech and poetry are rhythmic. Key concepts related to rhythm, such as meter, periodicity, patterning, and accent, are treated independently in scholarship of music, poetry, and speech. This book reconciles those approaches, theorizing flow by integrating the methods of computational music analysis and humanistic close reading. Through the analysis of large collections of verses, it addresses questions in the theories of rhythm, meter, and groove in the unique ecology of rap music. Specifically, the work of Eminem clarifies how flow relates to text, the work of Black Thought clarifies how flow relates to other instrumental streams, and the work of Talib Kweli clarifies how flow relates to rap’s persistent meter. Although the focus throughout is rap music, the methods introduced are appropriate for other genres mix voices and more rigid metric frameworks and further extends the valuable work on hip hop from other perspectives in recent years.