America and the Musical Unconscious
America and the Musical Unconscious

Author: Julius Greve

Publisher:

Published: 2015-07-31

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 9781940813844

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Music occupies a peculiar role in the field of American Studies. It is undoubtedly recognized as an important form of cultural production, yet the field continues to privilege textual and visual forms of art as its objects of examination. The essays collected in this volume seek to adjust this imbalance by placing music center stage while still acknowledging its connections to the fields of literary and visual studies that engage with the specifically American cultural landscape. In doing so, they proffer the concept of the 'musical unconscious' as an analytical tool of understanding the complexities of the musical production of meanings in various social, political, and technological contexts, in reference to country, queer punk, jazz, pop, black metal, film music, blues, carnival music, Muzak, hip-hop, experimental electronic music, protest and campaign songs, minimal music, and of course the kazoo. Contributions by Hanjo Berressem, Christian Broecking, Martin Butler, Christof Decker, Mario Dunkel, Benedikt Feiten, Paola Ferrero, Jurgen Grandt, Julius Greve, Christian Hanggi, Jan Niklas Jansen, Thoren Opitz, Sascha Pohlmann, Arthur Sabatini, Christian Schmidt, Bjorn Sonnenberg-Schrank, Gunter Suss, and Katharina Wiedlack."

The Sound of the Unconscious
The Sound of the Unconscious

Author: Ludovica Grassi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-05-31

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 1000391612

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In this book, Ludovica Grassi explores the importance of music in psychoanalysis, arguing that music is a basic working tool for psyche, as words are composed of sound, rhythm and intonation more than lexical meaning. Starting from ethnomusicological, evolutionary, neurodevelopmental, psychological and psychoanalytical perspectives, the book explores music’s symbolic status, structure and way of operating compared to unconscious psychic functioning. Extraordinary similarities are revealed, especially in mechanisms such as repetition, imitation, variation (transformation), intimacy and the work of mourning, of the negative and of nostalgia. Moreover, silence and absence are essential components of music as well as of psychic and symbolic functioning. Time and temporality are specifically investigated in the book as key elements both in music and in symbolization and subjectivation processes. The role of the word’s phonic kernel and of the voice as fundamental links to emotions, the body, the sexual and the infantile has promising implications for psychoanalytic work. All these elements find an articulation in the natural as well as complex activity of listening, which conveys a tri-dimensional and polyphonic dimension of the world, so important both in music and in psychoanalysis. Illuminating the link between music and analysis in new and contemporary ways, The Sound of the Unconscious explores the resulting advances in theory and clinical practice and will be of great interest to practicing and training psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and African American Narratives
Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and African American Narratives

Author: W. Lawrence Hogue

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2013-11-12

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 1438448368

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This book explores how African American social and political movements, African American studies, independent scholars, and traditional cultural forms revisit and challenge the representation of the African American as deviant other. After surveying African American history and cultural politics, W. Lawrence Hogue provides original and insightful readings of six experimental/postmodern African American texts: John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire; Percival Everett's Erasure; Toni Morrison's Jazz; Bonnie Greer's Hanging by Her Teeth; Clarence Major's Reflex and Bone Structure; and Xam Wilson Cartiér's Muse-Echo Blues. Using traditional cultural and western forms, including the blues, jazz, voodoo, virtuality, radical democracy, Jungian/African American Collective Unconscious, Yoruba gods, black folk culture, and black working class culture, Hogue reveals that these authors uncover spaces with different definitions of life that still retain a wildness and have not been completely mapped out and trademarked by normative American culture. Redefining the African American novel and the African American outside the logic, rules, and values of western binary reason, these writers leave open the possibility of psychic liberation of African Americans in the West.

From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious
From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious

Author: Seth Brodsky

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2017-01-24

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 0520966503

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What happened to musical modernism? When did it end? Did it end? In this unorthodox Lacanian account of European New Music, Seth Brodsky focuses on the unlikely year 1989, when New Music hardly takes center stage. Instead one finds Rostropovich playing Bach at Checkpoint Charlie; or Bernstein changing “Joy” to “Freedom” in Beethoven’s Ninth; or David Hasselhoff lip-synching “Looking for Freedom” to thousands on New Year’s Eve. But if such spectacles claim to master their historical moment, New Music unconsciously takes the role of analyst. In so doing, it restages earlier scenes of modernism. As world politics witnesses a turning away from the possibility of revolution, musical modernism revolves in place, performing century-old tasks of losing, failing, and beginning again, in preparation for a revolution to come.

Americana
Americana

Author: Knut Holtsträter

Publisher: Waxmann Verlag

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 3830997566

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The essay collection Americana poses the basic question of how American music can be described and analyzed as such, as American music. Situated at the intersection between musicology and American Studies, the essays focus on the categories of aesthetics, authenticity, and performance in order to show how popular music is made American-from Alaskan hip hop to German Schlager, from Creedence Clearwater Revival to film scores, from popular opera to U2, from the Rolling Stones to country rap, and from Steve Earle to the Trans Chorus of Los Angeles.

Melodies of the Mind
Melodies of the Mind

Author: Julie Jaffee Nagel

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-11-27

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1136155988

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What can psychoanalysis learn from music? What can music learn from psychoanalysis? Can the analysis of music itself provide a primary source of psychological data? Drawing on Freud's concept of the oral road to the unconscious, Melodies of the Mind invites the reader to take a journey on an aural and oral road that explores both music and emotion, and their links to the unconscious. In this book, Julie Jaffee Nagel discusses how musical and psychoanalytic concepts inform each other, showing the ways that music itself provides an exceptional non-verbal pathway to emotion – a source of 'quasi' psychoanalytical clinical data. The interdisciplinary synthesis of music and psychoanalytic knowledge provides a schema for understanding the complexity of an individual's inner world as that world interacts with social 'reality'. There are three main areas explored: The Aural Road Moods and Melodies The Aural/Oral Road Less Travelled Melodies of the Mind is an exploration of the power of music to move us when words fall short. It suggests the value of using music and ideas of the mind to better understand and address psychological, social, and educational issues that are relevant in everyday life. It will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychologists, music therapists, musicians, music teachers, music students, social workers, educators, professionals in the humanities and social services as well as music lovers. Julie Jaffee Nagel is a graduate of The Juilliard School, The University of Michigan, and The Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. She is on the faculty of the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute and is in private practice in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

We Are All Astronauts
We Are All Astronauts

Author: Marc Blancher

Publisher: Neofelis Verlag

Published: 2019-06-21

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 3958082637

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"We are all astronauts", the American architect and thinker Richard Buckminster Fuller wrote in 1968 in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, where he compared Earth to a spaceship, provided only with exhaustible resources while flying through space. These words show the presence the phenomenon of the astronaut and the cosmonaut had in the public mind from the second half of the twentieth century on: Buckminster Fuller was able to drive his point home by asking his audience to identify with one of the most prominent figures in the public sphere then: the space traveler. At the same time, Buckminster Fuller's words themselves seem to have played a significant role in further shaping the space-exploring human as a symbol and an image of humankind in general. The twelve contributions in this book by authors from the fields of literature, music, politics, history, the visual arts, film, computer games, comics, social sciences, and media theory track the development, changes and dynamics of this symbol by analyzing the various images of the astronaut and the cosmonaut as constructed throughout the different decades of space exploration, from its beginning to the present day.

Gettin' Around
Gettin' Around

Author: Jürgen E. Grandt

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2018-12-15

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 082035435X

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Gettin' Around examines how the global jazz aesthetic strives, in various ways, toward an imaginative reconfiguration of a humanity that transcends entrenched borders of ethnicity and nationhood, while at the same time remaining keenly aware of the exigencies of history. Jürgen E. Grandt deliberately refrains from a narrow, empirical definition of jazz or of transnationalism and, true to the jazz aesthetic itself, opts for a broader, more inclusive scope, even as he listens carefully and closely to jazz's variegated soundtrack. Such an approach seeks not only to avoid the museal whiff of a "golden age, time past" but also to broaden the appeal and the applicability of the overall critical argument. For Grandt, "international" simply designates currents of people, ideas, and goods between distinct geopolitical entities or nation-states, whereas "transnational" refers to liminal dynamics that transcend preordained borderlines occurring above, below, beside, or along the outer contours of nation-states. Gettin' Around offers a long overdue consideration of the ways in which jazz music can inform critical practice in the field of transnational (American) studies and grounds these studies in specifically African American cultural contexts.

On not being Able to Play
On not being Able to Play

Author: Marla Morris

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-02-11

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 908790777X

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Scholars and musicians from many different backgrounds will find this book helpful as it deals with psychic problems in both professions. This book might help scholars and musicians to find a way out of their psychic dilemmas. From classical musicians to rock stars, from curriculum theorists to music teachers, from anthropologists to philosophers, this book takes the reader through a rocky intellectual terrain to explore what happens when one can no longer play or work. The driving question of the book is this: What do you do when you cannot do what you were called to do? This is what the author calls The Crisis of Psyche. The theoretical framework for this book combines curriculum theory, psychoanalysis and phenomenology. Here, the author looks at issues of emotion and the working through of crisis points in the lives of both scholars and musicians. Psychoanalytic theory helps to flesh out and untangle what it means to suffer from a damaged musical psyche and a damaged scholarly psyche. How to work through psychic inertia as a scholar? How to work through through psychic inertia as a musician? From Pink Floyd to Laurie Anderson, from Marion Milner to William F. Pinar, this book draws on the work of a wide range of musicians and scholars to find a way out of psychic blocks. From Philip Glass to Pablo Casals, from Michael Eigen to Mary Aswell Doll, this book draws on the work of composers, cellists, psychoanalysts and educationists to find a way out of psychic meltdowns.

The Power of Music
The Power of Music

Author: Roger Kennedy

Publisher: Phoenix Publishing House

Published: 2020-07-31

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1800130015

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Emotion is an integral aspect of musical experience; music has the power to take us on an emotional and intellectual journey, transforming the listener along the way. The aim of this book is to examine the nature of this journey, using a variety of perspectives. No one discipline can do justice to music's complexity if one is to have a sense of the whole musical experience, even if one has to break up the whole experience into various elements for the purposes of clarification. The issues raised have some relationship to psychoanalytic understanding and listening, as after all psychoanalysis is a listening discipline; its bedrock is listening to the patient's communications. While of course there are significant differences between understanding of, and listening to, a musical performance and a patient in a consulting room, the book explores common ground. Evidence from neuroscience indicates that music acts on a number of different brain sites, and that the brain is likely to be hard-wired for musical perception and appreciation, and this offers some kind of neurological substrate for musical experiences, or a parallel mode of explanation for music's multiple effects on individuals and groups. After various excursions into early mother/baby experiences, evolutionary speculations, and neuroscientific findings, the book's main emphasis is that it is the intensity of the artistic vision which is responsible for music's power. That intense vision invites the viewer or the listener into the orbit of the work, engaging us to respond to the particular vision in an essentially intersubjective relationship between the work and the observer or listener. This is the area of what we might call the human soul. Music can be described as having soul when it hits the emotional core of the listener. And, of course, there is 'soul music', whose basic rhythms reach deep into the body to create a powerful feeling of aliveness. One can truly say that music of all the arts is most able to give shape to the elusive human subject or soul.