Search Results

The problem of establishing a musical text is encountered each time we wish to prepare a medieval piece for performance or study. This problem is raised by variation in the transmission of musical items from one source to another. Usually those problems have been discussed in peripheral compartments of publications: footnotes, prefaces, appendices, etc. This chapter moves the issues to the forefront and asks ‘What does it mean that the editorial problem exists?’. Considering this question means going behind methods of text criticism, to the conceptions on which the idea of text criticism in the domain of medieval music has been based: that the pieces with which we deal are the products of an act of composition (in the modern sense) or redaction; that it is the understanding of composers that they should normally remain fixed; and that variants arise either through revision or through error (corruption). These conceptions refer to a certain relation between musical production and transmission that has prevailed for a long time in the Western tradition.

This chapter looks at the idea of the intention of a musical text in the context of music videos and MTV. The ideal appraiser for such musical texts is the collective and not individual as the music videos on MTV appear to be meant to be consumed by a group and not an individual. Collective listening strategies may be as postmodern as non-modernist but their presence and premises certainly emphasize the idealization of structural listening as normative practice. The chapter explores some of the assumptions of the structural listening process and their effects on the study of vernacular music. It also demonstrates that music videos do not match Jameson's modernist model of autonomy, which necessitates a different conceptual framework for the interaction between texts and their appraisal. A brief discussion on the various commonalities in the collective listening process portrayed by MTV in its various programmes such as B&B, Yack Live, 12AV, and TRL is also presented.

The turn to cultural critique brought a new agenda to the academic study of music that sets out to contest the status quo, effect positive social change, and resist negative social change. This chapter shares a deep concern for the social and political issues raised by this critique and argues for the importance of aesthetic values and formal characteristics specific to musical texts. The chapter presents various examples through which it demonstrates how various formal music analyses can alleviate concrete political difficulties in different social contexts. The chapter elaborates various means of resisting the ideological closure and programmatic constraints of recent trends in musicology and discusses new kinds of closure and constraint produced by music analysis that may be politically beneficial in various quarters. It also questions Subotnik's text, and compares the practice of deconstruction with the work of specific music theorists, which can set the stage for various proposals for the politically strategic use of musical formalism.

This book presents chapters that explore the concept and history of opera. It discusses the identification of what generates the dramatic conflict, attempts at a taxonomic segmentation of dramatico-musical text, and identification of the function of a stylistic category such as exoticism or of a codified topos. The chapter also discusses Verdi and his contemporaries, and the history of Verdian criticism.