Music is performed, reproduced, and heard differently today as a result of twentieth-century technology. A new consideration of these changes is a practical and cultural necessity. In Conditions of Music, Alan Durant extends Deryck Cooke's Language of Music, placing the insights of Cooke into a much wider sociological and historical framework. Conditions of Music provides a basis for detailed commentary and criticism of music. Unlike literature and painting, around which illuminating critical techniques and theories have developed, little common ground exists for music criticism. The appraisal argument adopted here implies a major revision of accepted ways of thinking about contemporary directions of music.
“Musicians often pay a high price for sharing their art with us. Underneath the glow of success can often lie loneliness and exhaustion, not to mention the basic struggles of paying the rent or buying food. Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave raise important questions – and we need to listen to what the musicians have to tell us about their working conditions and their mental health.” Emma Warren (Music Journalist and Author). “Singing is crying for grown-ups. To create great songs or play them with meaning music's creators reach far into emotion and fragility seeking the communion we demand of it. However, music’s toll on musicians can leave deep scars. In this important book, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave investigate the relationship between the wellbeing music brings to society and the wellbeing of those who create. It’s a much needed reality check, deglamorising the romantic image of the tortured artist.” Crispin Hunt (Multi-Platinum Songwriter/Record Producer, Chair of the Ivors Academy). It is often assumed that creative people are prone to psychological instability, and that this explains apparent associations between cultural production and mental health problems. In their detailed study of recording and performing artists in the British music industry, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave turn this view on its head. By listening to how musicians understand and experience their working lives, this book proposes that whilst making music is therapeutic, making a career from music can be traumatic. The authors show how careers based on an all-consuming passion have become more insecure and devalued. Artistic merit and intimate, often painful, self-disclosures are the subject of unremitting scrutiny and data metrics. Personal relationships and social support networks are increasingly bound up with calculative transactions. Drawing on original empirical research and a wide-ranging survey of scholarship from across the social sciences, their findings will be provocative for future research on mental health, wellbeing and working conditions in the music industries and across the creative economy. Going beyond self-help strategies, they challenge the industry to make transformative structural change. Until then, the book provides an invaluable guide for anyone currently making their career in music, as well as those tasked with training and educating the next generation.
Music has been used as a mood altering intervention for thousands of years. There are numerous examples of the healing powers of music in the historical records of different cultures. In the last few decades, investigators have developed a more scientific approach to exploring the mechanisms by which music exerts its effects on the brain and other organs. Music interventions are now being used in medicine and nursing throughout the world, and "music therapy" has become an accepted discipline alongside other paramedical professions. This book is a timely and comprehensive review of the use of music as a complementary therapy, and for management of some "otherwise difficult to treat" conditions. The authors, each experts in their chosen field of medicine, have come together to compile an excellent, clear and precise update regarding the use of music therapy in different illnesses and neuropsychiatric conditions. This book contains information useful to psychologists, psychiatrists and physicians involved in primary care in other branches of medicine, as well as health science students and other health professionals interested in music as a complementary and alternative therapy (CAM). This book adds music as a potent, enlightening, and life-enriching addition to our armamentarium for the management of complex medical conditions. The content of some chapters may foster more ideas for future research. Throughout the book, there is an emphasis on the greater need for large, blinded, controlled studies to better support music therapy.
Music is performed, reproduced, and heard differently today as a result of twentieth-century technology. A new consideration of these changes is a practical and cultural necessity. In Conditions of Music, Alan Durant extends Deryck Cooke's Language of Music, placing the insights of Cooke into a much wider sociological and historical framework. Conditions of Music provides a basis for detailed commentary and criticism of music. Unlike literature and painting, around which illuminating critical techniques and theories have developed, little common ground exists for music criticism. The appraisal argument adopted here implies a major revision of accepted ways of thinking about contemporary directions of music.
What goes on in human beings when they make or listen to music? What is it about music, what gives it such peculiar power over us, power delectable and beneficent for the most part, but also capable of uncontrollable and sometimes destructive force? Music has no concepts, it lacks images; it has no power of representation, it has no relation to the world. And yet it is evident in all of us–we tap our feet, we keep time, hum, sing, conduct music, mirror the melodic contours and feelings of what we hear in our movements and expressions. In this book, Oliver Sacks explores the power music wields over us–a power that sometimes we control and at other times don’t. He explores, in his inimitable fashion, how it can provide access to otherwise unreachable emotional states, how it can revivify neurological avenues that have been frozen, evoke memories of earlier, lost events or states or bring those with neurological disorders back to a time when the world was much richer. This is a book that explores, like no other, the myriad dimensions of our experience of and with music.
This Cambridge History of Modernism is the first comprehensive history of modernism in the distinguished Cambridge Histories series. It identifies a distinctive temperament of 'modernism' within the 'modern' period, establishing the circumstances of modernized life as the ground and warrant for an art that becomes 'modernist' by virtue of its demonstrably self-conscious involvement in this modern condition. Following this sensibility from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, tracking its manifestations across pan-European and transatlantic locations, the forty-three chapters offer a remarkable combination of breadth and focus. Prominent scholars of modernism provide analytical narratives of its literature, music, visual arts, architecture, philosophy, and science, offering circumstantial accounts of its diverse personnel in their many settings. These historically informed readings offer definitive accounts of the major work of twentieth-century cultural history and provide a new cornerstone for the study of modernism in the current century.
Music processing in severely brain-injured patients with disorders of consciousness has been an emergent field of interest for over 30 years, spanning the disciplines of neuroscience, medicine, the arts and humanities. Disorders of consciousness (DOC) is an umbrella term that encompasses patients who present with disorders across a continuum of consciousness including people who are in a coma, in vegetative state (VS)/have unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS), and in minimally conscious state (MCS). Technological developments in recent years, resulting in improvements in medical care and technologies, have increased DOC population numbers, the means for investigating DOC, and the range of clinical and therapeutic interventions under validation. In neuroimaging and behavioural studies, the auditory modality has been shown to be the most sensitive in diagnosing awareness in this complex population. As misdiagnosis remains a major problem in DOC, exploring auditory responsiveness and processing in DOC is, therefore, of central importance to improve therapeutic interventions and medical technologies in DOC. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the role of music as a potential treatment and medium for diagnosis with patients with DOC, from the perspectives of research, clinical practice and theory. As there are almost no treatment options, such a non-invasive method could constitute a promising strategy to stimulate brain plasticity and to improve consciousness recovery. It is therefore an ideal time to draw together specialists from diverse disciplines and interests to share the latest methods, opinions, and research on this topic in order to identify research priorities and progress inquiry in a coordinated way. This Research Topic aimed to bring together specialists from diverse disciplines involved in using and researching music with DOC populations or who have an interest in theoretical development on this topic. Specialists from the following disciplines participated in this special issue: neuroscience; medicine; music therapy; clinical psychology; neuromusicology; and cognitive neuroscience.
This definitive reference resource examines how music affects human beings and their interactions in and with the world. The interdisciplinary nature of the work provides a starting place for students to situate the status of music within the social sciences in fields such as anthropology, communications, psychology, linguistics, sociology, sports, political science and economics, as well as biology and the health sciences. Features: Approximately 450 articles, arranged in A-to-Z fashion and richly illustrated with photographs, provide the social and behavioral context for examining the importance of music in society. Entries are authored and signed by experts in the field and conclude with references and further readings, as well as cross references to related entries. A Reader′s Guide groups related entries by broad topic areas and themes, making it easy for readers to quickly identify related entries. A Chronology of Music places material into historical context; a Glossary defines key terms from the field; and a Resource Guide provides lists of books, academic journals, websites and cross-references. The multimedia digital edition is enhanced with video and audio clips and features strong search-and-browse capabilities through the electronic Reader’s Guide, detailed index, and cross references. Music in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, available in both multimedia digital and print formats, is a must-have reference for music and social science library collections. Key Themes: Aesthetics and Emotion Business and Technology Communities and Society Culture and Environment Elements of Musical Examination Evolutionary Psychology Media and Communication Musicianship and Expertise Neuroscience Perception, Memory, Cognition Politics, Economics, Law Therapy, Health, Wellbeing
