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Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction

Arved Ashby

Recordings are now the primary way we hear classical music, especially the more abstract styles of “absolute” instrumental music. This book argues that recording technology has transformed our ... More

Recordings are now the primary way we hear classical music, especially the more abstract styles of “absolute” instrumental music. This book argues that recording technology has transformed our understanding of art music. Contesting the laments of nostalgic critics, the author sees recordings as socially progressive and instruments of a musical vernacular, but also finds that recording and absolute music actually involve similar notions of removing sound from context. He takes stock of technology's impact on classical music, addressing the questions at the heart of the issue. This study reveals how mechanical reproduction has transformed classical musical culture and the very act of listening, breaking down aesthetic and generational barriers and mixing classical music into the soundtrack of everyday life.Less

American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots

Mark Slobin (ed.)

Klezmer, the Yiddish word for a folk instrumental musician, has come to mean a person, a style, and a scene. This musical subculture came to the United States with the late-nineteenth-century Jewish ... More

Klezmer, the Yiddish word for a folk instrumental musician, has come to mean a person, a style, and a scene. This musical subculture came to the United States with the late-nineteenth-century Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Although it had declined in popularity by the middle of the twentieth century, this lively music is now enjoying recognition among music fans of all stripes. Today, klezmer flourishes in the United States and abroad in world music and accompanies Jewish celebrations. The chapters this volume investigate American klezmer: its roots, its evolution, and its spirited revitalization. Contributors to the book include every kind of authority on the subject—from academics to leading musicians—and they offer a wide range of perspectives on the musical, social, and cultural history of klezmer in American life. The first half of this volume concentrates on the early history of klezmer, using folkloric sources, records of early musicians unions, and interviews with the last of the immigrant musicians. The second part of the book examines the klezmer “revival” that began in the 1970s. Several of these chapters were written by the leaders of this movement, or draw on interviews with them, and give firsthand accounts of how klezmer is transmitted and how its practitioners maintain a balance between preservation and innovation.Less

Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770-1830

Ellen Lockhart

This path-breaking study of Italian stage works reconsiders a crucial period of music history. Through an interdisciplinary examination of the statue animated by music, Ellen Lockhart deftly shows ... More

This path-breaking study of Italian stage works reconsiders a crucial period of music history. Through an interdisciplinary examination of the statue animated by music, Ellen Lockhart deftly shows how Enlightenment ideas influenced Italian theater and music, and vice versa. As Lockhart reveals, the animated statue became a fundamental figure within aesthetic theory and musical practice during the years from 1770 to 1830. Taking as its point of departure a repertoire of Italian ballets, melodramas, and operas from the period around 1800, Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy traces its core ideas between science, philosophy, theories of language, itinerant performance traditions, the epistemology of sensing, and music criticism.Less

Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe

Joy H. Calico

Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw seemed designed to irritate every exposed nerve in postwar Europe. A twelve-tone piece in three languages about the Holocaust, it was written for an ... More

Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw seemed designed to irritate every exposed nerve in postwar Europe. A twelve-tone piece in three languages about the Holocaust, it was written for an American audience by a Jewish composer whose oeuvre had been the Nazis’ prime exemplar of entartete (degenerate) music. Both admired and reviled as a pioneer of dodecaphony, Schoenberg had immigrated to the United States and become an American citizen. At approximately seven minutes, A Survivor is too short to occupy half of a concert, yet it is too fraught to easily share the bill with anything else. A cultural history of postwar Europe on both sides of the Cold War divide comes into focus when viewed through the lens of A Survivor. This book investigates the meanings attached to the work as it circulated through Europe between 1948 and 1968 in a kind of symbolic musical remigration, focusing on six case studies: West Germany, Austria, Norway, East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The details are specific to each, but common themes emerge in anxieties about musical modernism, Holocaust memory and culpability, the coexistence of Jews and former Nazis, anti-Semitism, dislocation, and the presence of occupying forces.Less

The Art of Fugue: Bach Fugues for Keyboard, 1715-1750

Joseph Kerman

Fugue for J. S. Bach was a natural language; he wrote fugues in organ toccatas and voluntaries, in masses and motets, in orchestral and chamber music, and even in his sonatas for violin solo. The ... More

Fugue for J. S. Bach was a natural language; he wrote fugues in organ toccatas and voluntaries, in masses and motets, in orchestral and chamber music, and even in his sonatas for violin solo. The more intimate fugues he wrote for keyboard are among the greatest, most influential, and best-loved works in all of Western music. They have long been the foundation of the keyboard repertory, played by beginning students and world-famous virtuosi alike. This book discusses the author's favorite Bach keyboard fugues—some of them among the best-known fugues and others much less familiar—and reveals the inner workings of these pieces, linking the form of the fugues with their many different characters and expressive qualities, and illuminating what makes them particularly beautiful, powerful, and moving.Less

Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity

Karol Berger

This book examines works by Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to support two claims: first, that it was only in the later eighteenth century that music began to take the flow of time from the ... More

This book examines works by Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to support two claims: first, that it was only in the later eighteenth century that music began to take the flow of time from the past to the future seriously; second, that this change in the structure of musical time was an aspect of a larger transformation in the way educated Europeans began to imagine and think about time with the onset of modernity, a part of a shift from the premodern Christian outlook to the modern post-Christian worldview. Until this historical moment, as the author illustrates in his analysis of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, music was simply “in time.” Its successive events unfolded one after another, but the distinction between past and future, earlier and later, was not central to the way the music was experienced and understood. However, after the shift, as the author finds in looking at Mozart's Don Giovanni, the experience of linear time is transformed into music's essential subject matter; the cycle of time unbends and becomes an arrow. The book complements these musical case studies with a survey of the philosophical, theological, and literary trends influencing artists during this period.Less

Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality

David Schneider

It is well known that Béla Bartók had an extraordinary ability to synthesize Western art music with the folk music of Eastern Europe. What this study makes clear is that, contrary to much prevailing ... More

It is well known that Béla Bartók had an extraordinary ability to synthesize Western art music with the folk music of Eastern Europe. What this study makes clear is that, contrary to much prevailing thought about the great twentieth-century Hungarian composer, Bartók was also strongly influenced by the art-music traditions of his native country. Drawing from a wide array of material, including contemporary reviews and little known Hungarian documents, the author presents a new approach to Bartók that acknowledges the composer's debt to a variety of Hungarian music traditions as well as to influential contemporaries such as Igor Stravinsky. Putting representative works from each decade beginning with Bartók's graduation from the Music Academy in 1903 until his departure for the United States in 1940 under a critical lens, the author reads the composer's artistic output as both a continuation and a profound transformation of the very national tradition he repeatedly rejected in public. By clarifying why Bartók felt compelled to obscure his ties to the past and by illuminating what that past actually was, the book dispels myths about Bartók's relationship to nineteenth-century traditions and at the same time provides a new perspective on the relationship between nationalism and modernism in early-twentieth century music.Less

Beethoven after Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works

Stephen Rumph

This book is an analysis of Beethoven's late style, demonstrating how deeply political events shaped the composer's music, from his early enthusiasm for the French Revolution to his later ... More

This book is an analysis of Beethoven's late style, demonstrating how deeply political events shaped the composer's music, from his early enthusiasm for the French Revolution to his later entrenchment during the Napoleonic era. It challenges accepted views by illustrating the influence of German Romantic political thought in the formation of the artist's mature style. The author argues that Beethoven's political views were not quite as liberal as many have assumed. While scholars agree that the works of the Napoleonic era such as the Eroica Symphony or Fidelio embody enlightened, revolutionary ideals of progress, freedom, and humanism, Beethoven's later works have attracted less political commentary. The author contends that the later works show clear affinities with a native German ideology that exalted history, religion, and the organic totality of state and society. He claims that as the Napoleonic Wars plunged Europe into political and economic turmoil, Beethoven's growing antipathy to the French mirrored the experience of his Romantic contemporaries. The book maintains that Beethoven's turn inward is no pessimistic retreat but a positive affirmation of new conservative ideals.Less

Beyond Reason: Wagner contra Nietzsche

Karol Berger

The book centers on the four music dramas (Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Parsifal) Wagner created in the second half of his career. Two aims are ... More

The book centers on the four music dramas (Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Parsifal) Wagner created in the second half of his career. Two aims are pursued here: first, to penetrate the “secret” of large-scale form in Wagner’s music dramas, the secret the very existence of which was called into question by the composer’s critics, including the most perceptive of those, Nietzsche; second, to see the ideological import of Wagner’s dramas against the background of the worldviews that were current in his lifetime and, in particular, to confront his works with Nietzsche’s critique. What connects the two aims is my conviction that a grasp of Wagner’s large forms affords insights into the dramatic and philosophical implications of his works. The music dramas of Wagner’s later years registered and reacted to every major component in the complex ideological landscape that emerged during his century. Like a number of artists of his time, in his later years Wagner understood himself to be something more than just an artist; rather, he saw himself as a cultural prophet announcing and preparing better, more desirable forms of life for humanity. The specific content of his message never ceased to evolve, but his self-understanding as someone with a message to deliver remained constant. The confrontation with Nietzsche, a rival cultural prophet, takes a particular urgency in this context, since what was at stake in the philosopher’s objections to the artist was precisely the ideological import of Wagner’s works.Less

Beyond Structural Listening?: Postmodern Modes of Hearing

Andrew Dell'Antonio (ed.)

In a highly influential essay, Rose Rosengard Subotnik critiques “structural listening” as an attempt to situate musical meaning solely within the unfolding of the musical structure itself. The ... More

In a highly influential essay, Rose Rosengard Subotnik critiques “structural listening” as an attempt to situate musical meaning solely within the unfolding of the musical structure itself. The authors of this volume, prominent young music historians and theorists writing on repertories ranging from Beethoven to MTV, take up Subotnik's challenge. The chapters here explore not only the implications of the “structural listening” model but also the alternative listening strategies that have developed in specific communities, often in response to twentieth-century Western music.Less

Blowin’ the Blues Away: Performance and Meaning on the New York Jazz Scene

Travis Jackson

New York City has always been a mecca in the history of jazz, and in many ways the city's jazz scene is more important now than ever before. This book examines how jazz has thrived in New York ... More

New York City has always been a mecca in the history of jazz, and in many ways the city's jazz scene is more important now than ever before. This book examines how jazz has thrived in New York following its popular resurgence in the 1980s. Using interviews, in-person observation, and analysis of live and recorded events, the author—an ethnomusicologist—explores both the ways in which various participants in the New York City jazz scene interpret and evaluate performance, and the criteria on which those interpretations and evaluations are based. Through the notes and words of its most accomplished performers and most ardent fans, jazz appears not simply as a musical style, but as a cultural form intimately influenced by and influential upon American concepts of race, place, and spirituality.Less

Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology

Elisabeth Le Guin

This study of the works of Luigi Boccherini uses knowledge gleaned from the author's own playing of the cello as the keystone of her approach to the relationship between music and embodiment. In ... More

This study of the works of Luigi Boccherini uses knowledge gleaned from the author's own playing of the cello as the keystone of her approach to the relationship between music and embodiment. In analyzing the striking qualities of Boccherini's music—its virtuosity, repetitiveness, obsessively nuanced dynamics, delicate sonorities, and rich palette of melancholy affects—the book develops an historicized critical method based on the embodied experience of the performer. In the process, it redefines the temperament of the musical Enlightenment as one characterized by urgent, volatile inquiries into the nature of the self.Less

Brecht at the Opera

Joy H. Calico

This book looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brecht later denounced the genre as decadent and irrelevant to modern society ... More

This book looks at the German playwright's lifelong ambivalent engagement with opera. An ardent opera lover in his youth, Brecht later denounced the genre as decadent and irrelevant to modern society even as he continued to work on opera projects throughout his career. He completed three operas and attempted two dozen more with composers such as Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Dessau. Brecht's simultaneous work on opera and Lehrstück in the 1920s generated the new concept of audience experience that would come to define epic theater, and his revisions to the theory of Gestus in the mid-1930s are reminiscent of nineteenth-century opera performance practices of mimesis.Less

The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds

Martha Feldman

The Castrato is the first book to explore in depth why innumerable boys were castrated for singing between the mid-sixteenth century and late nineteenth century. It shows that although the practice ... More

The Castrato is the first book to explore in depth why innumerable boys were castrated for singing between the mid-sixteenth century and late nineteenth century. It shows that although the practice formed the foundation of Western classical singing, it was birthed from an unlikely and historically unique set of desires—public and private, aesthetic, economic, and political. In Italy, castration for singing was understood through the lens of Catholic blood sacrifice, as expressed in idioms of offering and renunciation and, paradoxically, in satires, verbal abuse, and even the symbolism of the castrato’s comic cousin, Pulcinella. Sacrifice in Italy also encompassed a logics of reproduction, involving teachers, patrons, colleagues, and relatives. Yet what lured audiences and composers, from Cavalli and Pergolesi to Handel, Gluck, Mozart, and Rossini, were the extraordinary capacities of castrato voices. The phenomenon was ultimately unsettled by Enlightenment morality, which castrati failed to survive. But their musicality and vocality, central to this study, persisted long after their literal demise in traditions that extend to bel canto repertories and beyond.Less

Categorizing Sound: Genre and Twentieth-Century Popular Music

David Brackett

Categorizing Sound addresses the relationship between categories of music and categories of people: in other words, how do particular ways of organizing sound become integral parts of whom we ... More

Categorizing Sound addresses the relationship between categories of music and categories of people: in other words, how do particular ways of organizing sound become integral parts of whom we perceive ourselves to be and of how we feel connected to some people and disconnected from others? After an introduction that discusses the key theoretical concepts to be deployed, Categorizing Sound presents a series of case studies that range from foreign music, race music, and old-time music in the 1920s up through hillbilly and swing music in the 1940s, soul music in the 1960s, country and rhythm and blues in the 1980s. Each chapter focuses on the process of “gentrification” through which these categories are produced and how these are articulated to categories of identity (especially those of race and gender). This process is traced by an analysis of the discourses through which ideas about genres circulate, the institutions that either support and sustain genres or withhold their support, and the sounds that become identified with a particular genre and a particular demographic group. The conclusion discusses the pertinence of the approach to genre used in the book to the changes brought about by the internet and file sharing to the circulation of popular music genres.Less

Clark: The Autobiography of Clark Terry

Clark Terry

Gwen Terry (ed.)

This is the story of one of the most recorded jazz trumpeters of all time, Clark Terry, born in 1920. Thi sbook takes us from his impoverished childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, where jazz could be ... More

This is the story of one of the most recorded jazz trumpeters of all time, Clark Terry, born in 1920. Thi sbook takes us from his impoverished childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, where jazz could be heard everywhere, to the smoke-filled small clubs and carnivals across the Jim Crow South where he got his start, and on to worldwide acclaim. The book takes us behind the scenes of jazz history as it introduces scores of legendary greats—Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Dinah Washington, Doc Severinsen, Ray Charles, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Coleman Hawkins, Zoot Sims, and Dianne Reeves, among many others. The book also reveals much about Terry's own personal life, his experiences with racism, how he helped break the color barrier in 1960 when he joined the Tonight Show band on NBC, and why—at ninety years old—his students from around the world still call and visit him for lessons.Less

Classic Jazz: A Personal View of the Music and the Musicians

Floyd Levin

The author of this book, an award-winning jazz writer, has personally known many of the jazz greats who contributed to the music's colorful history. This book, which contains works published mostly ... More

The author of this book, an award-winning jazz writer, has personally known many of the jazz greats who contributed to the music's colorful history. This book, which contains works published mostly in jazz magazines over a fifty-year period, takes us into the nightclubs, the recording studios, the record companies, and, most compellingly, into the lives of the musicians who made the great moments of the traditional jazz and swing eras. Weaving anecdotal material, primary research, and music analysis into every chapter, the book is a mine of information on a rich segment of American popular music. This collection begins with the author's first published piece and includes several new chapters that contain material inspired by his work on this compilation. The chapters are organized thematically, beginning with a piece on Kid Ory's early recordings and ending with a newly written chapter about the campaign to put up a monument to Louis Armstrong in New Orleans. Along the way, the book gives in-depth profiles of many well-known jazz legends, such as Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong, and many lesser-known figures who contributed greatly to the development of jazz.Less

Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France

Jann Pasler

This book challenges modernist ideas about the value and role of music in Western society, demonstrating how music can help forge a nation. Exploring the history of Third Republic France, the book ... More

This book challenges modernist ideas about the value and role of music in Western society, demonstrating how music can help forge a nation. Exploring the history of Third Republic France, the book shows how French people from all classes and political persuasions looked to music to revitalize the country after the turbulent crises of 1871. Embraced not as a luxury but for its “public utility,” music became an object of public policy as integral to modern life as power and water, a way to teach critical judgment and inspire national pride. It helped people to forget the past, voice conflicting aspirations, and imagine a shared future. Based on a survey of archival material, this interdisciplinary work looks beyond elites and the histories their agendas have dominated to open windows onto the musical tastes and practices of amateurs as well as professionals. A history of the period emerges, one rooted in political realities and the productive tensions between the political and the aesthetic. The book ignites broad debates about music's role in democracy and its meaning in our lives.Less

Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form

Susan McClary

This book reexamines the concept of musical convention. Exploring the ways that shared musical practices transmit social knowledge, it offers an account of our own cultural moment in terms of two ... More

This book reexamines the concept of musical convention. Exploring the ways that shared musical practices transmit social knowledge, it offers an account of our own cultural moment in terms of two dominant traditions: tonality and the blues. The author looks at musical history from new and unexpected angles and moves across a broad range of repertoires: the blues, eighteenth-century tonal music, late Beethoven, and rap. The book moves beyond the borders of the “purely musical” into the larger world of history and society, and beyond the idea of a socially stratified core canon toward a musical pluralism. Gender issues are smoothly integrated into the general argument. In considering the need for a different way of telling the story of Western music, the author tackles issues concerning classical, popular, and postmodern repertoires and their relations to the broader musical worlds that create and enjoy them.Less

Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera

Gundula Kreuzer

Exploring opera from the perspectives of media studies and technology studies, this pioneering book examines how composers since the late eighteenth century have increasingly integrated specific ... More

Exploring opera from the perspectives of media studies and technology studies, this pioneering book examines how composers since the late eighteenth century have increasingly integrated specific audiovisual details into their creative visions, thereby furthering the development of stage machineries as well as the means of their codification. In particular, composers fostered what the author calls “Wagnerian technologies”: multisensory devices intended to veil both the artificiality of illusionist stage representation and their own mechanicity. Building on Richard Wagner’s theories of the total work of art and exposing its reliance on technology, the book looks in detail at the uses and effects of curtains, the gong (or tam-tam), and steam. Designed to appeal directly to the audience’s sensorium like media interfaces, these technologies not only mediated between the sound and sight of a production but also smoothed over its heterogeneous materialities. Drawing on scores, performance documents, treatises, reviews, and cultural discourses, the book traces the practical, hermeneutic, and artistic implications of each titular technology in a wealth of European operatic works—both well known and obscure—by Wagner and the generations of composers around him. Each technology was temporarily absorbed into common notions of the relevant operas but gradually transformed in later productions, in its own mechanical evolution, and its resurgence across performance genres of the last half century. With its interdisciplinary angle on the history and materiality of staging, Curtain, Gong, Steam thus expands the concept of the operatic work.Less