Constructing Musicology
Constructing Musicology

Author: Alastair Williams

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-07-18

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 100015226X

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This title was first published in 2001: Unlike many other academic disciplines, musicology has been somewhat reluctant to explore the possibilities that critical theory might offer to our understanding of music and the ways in which we study it. In recent years, however, both the general impact of theory on humanities research and the wider repertoires now studied on music degree courses have urged a paradigm shift in musicology. Looking at both these trends, Alastair Williams examines and explains the theoretical issues raised by different musics, including the Western canon, popular music, folk music and music by women. A theoretically informed musicology, he argues, can reflect on its own procedures and create strategies for particular problems as they arise. In this sense the book offers a musicology under construction. To appreciate how theoretical discourses function and the interests they serve, it is important to understand their roots. Chapter One begins with a presentation of traditional musicology in the context of Joseph Kerman's call for a shift from fact-finding to critical interpretation. Discussion then moves to the scrutiny of the bourgeois tradition by Adorno and Dahlhaus. Chapter Two explores Kerman's critique of structural analysis, together with the impact of poststructuralism on musicology. Awareness of new repertoire and its consequences becomes evident as the book unfolds, with Chapter Three considering music by women and examining how gender is constructed in music. Chapter Four extends this discussion to the field of popular music and the ways in which this genre negotiates identity. Challenges to the dominant values are further explored as Chapter Five looks at how non-European cultures are presented in European music and reflects on perceptions of self and other in ethnomusicology. Chapter Six charts the emergence of modern subjectivity and its formations in music, arguing that musicology should not lose sight of modernity's critical resources.

Contemporary Music
Contemporary Music

Author: Irène Deliège

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-13

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 1317160681

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This collection of essays and interviews addresses important theoretical, philosophical and creative issues in Western art music at the end of the twentieth- and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Edited by Max Paddison and Irène Deliège, the book offers a wide range of international perspectives from prominent musicologists, philosophers and composers, including Célestin Deliège, Pascal Decroupet, Richard Toop, Rudolf Frisius, Alastair Williams, Herman Sabbe, François Nicolas, Marc Jimenez, Anne Boissière, Max Paddison, Hugues Dufourt, Jonathan Harvey, and new interviews with Pierre Boulez, Brian Ferneyhough, Helmut Lachenmann, and Wolfgang Rihm. Part I is mainly theoretical in emphasis. Issues addressed include the historical rationalization of music and technology, new approaches to the theorization of atonal harmony in the wake of Spectralism, debates on the 'new complexity', the heterogeneity, pluralism and stylistic omnivorousness that characterizes music in our time, and the characterization of twentieth-century and contemporary music as a 'search for lost harmony'. The orientation of Part II is mainly philosophical, examining concepts of totality and inclusivity in new music, raising questions as to what might be expected from an autonomous contemporary musical logic, and considering the problem of the survival of the avant-garde in the context of postmodernist relativism. As well as analytic philosophy and cognitive psychology, critical theory features prominently, with theories of social mediation in music, new perspectives on the concept of musical material in Adorno's late aesthetic theory, and a call for 'an aesthetics of risk' in contemporary art as a means 'to reassert the essential role of criticism, of judgment, and of evaluation as necessary conditions to bring about a real public debate on the art of today'. Part III offers creative perspectives, with new essays and interviews from important contemporary composers who have mad

Critical Music Historiography: Probing Canons, Ideologies and Institutions
Critical Music Historiography: Probing Canons, Ideologies and Institutions

Author: Vesa Kurkela

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-09

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 1317157206

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During the past two decades, there has emerged a growing need to reconsider the objects, axioms and perspectives of writing music history. A certain suspicion towards Francois Lyotard’s grand narratives, as a sign of what he diagnosed as our ’postmodern condition’, has become more or less an established and unquestioned point of departure among historians. This suspicion, at its most extreme, has led to a radical conclusion of the ’end of history’ in the work of postmodern scholars such as Jean Baudrillard and Francis Fukuyama. The contributors to Critical Music Historiography take a step back and argue that the radical view of the ’impossibility of history’, as well as the unavoidable ideology of any history, are counter-productive points of departure for historical scholarship. It is argued that metanarratives in history are still possible and welcome, even if their limitations are acknowledged. Foucault, Lyotard and others should be taken into account but systematized viewpoints and methods for a more critical and multi-faceted re-evaluation of the past through research are needed. As to the metanarratives of music history, they must avoid the pitfalls of evolutionism, hagiography, and teleology, all hallmarks of traditional historiography. In this volume the contributors put these methods and principles into practice. The chapters tackle under-researched and non-conventional domains of music history as well as rethinking older historiographical concepts such as orientalism and nationalism, and consequently introduce new concepts such as occidentalism and transnationalism. The volume is a challenging collection of work that stakes out a unique territory for itself among the growing body of work on critical music history.

Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History
Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History

Author: Kevin Karnes

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-08-22

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 0199709408

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More than a century after Guido Adler's appointment to the first chair in musicology at the University of Vienna, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History provides a first look at the discipline in this earliest period, and at the ideological dilemmas and methodological anxieties that characterized it upon its institutionalization. Author Kevin Karnes contends that some of the most vital questions surrounding musicology's disciplinary identities today-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-originate in these conflicted and largely forgotten beginnings. Karnes lays bare the nature of music study in the late nineteenth century through insightful readings of long-overlooked contributions by three of musicology's foremost pioneers-Adler, Eduard Hanslick, and Heinrich Schenker. Shaped as much by the skeptical pronouncements of the likes of Nietzsche and Wagner as it was by progressivist ideologies of scientific positivism, the new discipline comprised an array of oft-contested and intensely personal visions of music study, its value, and its future. Karnes introduces readers to a Hanslick who rejected the call of positivist scholarship and dedicated himself to penning an avowedly subjective history of Viennese musical life. He argues that Schenker's analytical experiments had roots in a Wagner-inspired search for a critical alternative to Adler's style-obsessed scholarship. And he illuminates Adler's determined response to Nietzsche's warnings about the vitality of artistic and cultural life in an increasingly scientific age. Through sophisticated and meticulous presentation, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History demonstrates that the new discipline of musicology was inextricably tied in with the cultural discourse of its time.

Music
Music

Author: Jane Edwards

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-03-26

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1443807427

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Playing live music with people who are ill to promote optimal states of health and well being is as at least as enduring as the written historical record. This book explores applications of music in healthcare with reference to the research and applied work in the disciplines of music therapy, music sociology and music psychology. Authors from six countries present aspects of healthful and health creating experiences in music participation, providing theoretical and philosophical reflections on music’s capacities for creating community, promoting health and delivering patient-centred care in a range of contexts.

Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music
Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music

Author: Delia da Sousa Correa

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2020-06-18

Total Pages: 720

ISBN-13: 0748693130

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Provides a pioneering interdisciplinary overview of the literature and music of nine centuriesOffers research essays by literary specialists and musicologists that provides access to the best current interdisciplinary scholarship on connections between literature and musicIncludes five historical sections from the Middle Ages to the present, with editorial introductions to enhance understanding of relationships between literature and music in each periodCharts and extends work in this expanding interdisciplinary field to provide an essential resource for researchers with an interest in literature and other mediaBringing together seventy-one newly commissioned original chapters by literary specialists and musicologists, this book presents the most recent interdisciplinary research into literature and music. In five parts, the chapters cover the Middle Ages to the present. The volume introduction and methodology chapters define key concepts for investigating the interdependence of these two art forms and a concluding chapter looks to the future of this interdisciplinary field. An editorial introduction to each historical part explains the main features of the relationships between literature and music in the period and outlines recent developments in scholarship. Contributions represent a multiplicity of approaches: theoretical, contextual and close reading. Case studies reach beyond literature and music to engage with related fields including philosophy, history of science, theatre, broadcast media and popular culture.This trailblazing companion charts and extends the work in this expanding interdisciplinary field and is an essential resource for researchers with an interest in literature and other media.

Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music
Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music

Author: Dr Sally Macarthur

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-01-28

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1409494160

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Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music opens up a new way of thinking about the absence of women's music. It does not aim to find 'a solution' in a liberal feminist sense, but to discover new potentialities, new possibilities for thought and action. Sally Macarthur encourages us, with the assistance of Deleuze, and feminist-Deleuzian work, to begin the important work of imagining what else might be possible, not in order to provide answers but to open up the as yet unknown. The power of thought - or what Deleuze calls the 'virtual' - opens up new possibilities. Macarthur suggests that the future for women's 'new' music is not tied to the predictable and known but to futures beyond the already-known. Previous research concludes that women's music is virtually absent from the concert hall, and yet fails to find a way of changing this situation. Macarthur finds that the flaw in the recommendations flowing from past research is that it envisages the future from the standpoint of the present, and it relies on a set of pre-determined goals. It thus replicates the present reality, so reinforcing rather than changing the status quo. Macarthur challenges this thinking, and argues that this repetitive way of thinking is stuck in the present, unable to move forward. Macarthur situates her argument in the context of current dominant neoliberal thought and practice. She argues that women have generally not thrived in the neoliberal model of the composer, which envisages the composer as an individual, autonomous creator and entrepreneur. Successful female composers must work with this dominant, modernist aesthetic and exploit the image of the neo-romantic, entrepreneurial creator. This book sets out in contrast to develop a new conception of subjectivity that sows the seeds of a twenty-first-century feminist politics of music.

Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music
Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music

Author: Sally Macarthur

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-24

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 131700910X

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Towards a Twenty-First-Century Feminist Politics of Music opens up a new way of thinking about the absence of women's music. It does not aim to find 'a solution' in a liberal feminist sense, but to discover new potentialities, new possibilities for thought and action. Sally Macarthur encourages us, with the assistance of Deleuze, and feminist-Deleuzian work, to begin the important work of imagining what else might be possible, not in order to provide answers but to open up the as yet unknown. The power of thought - or what Deleuze calls the 'virtual' - opens up new possibilities. Macarthur suggests that the future for women's 'new' music is not tied to the predictable and known but to futures beyond the already-known. Previous research concludes that women's music is virtually absent from the concert hall, and yet fails to find a way of changing this situation. Macarthur finds that the flaw in the recommendations flowing from past research is that it envisages the future from the standpoint of the present, and it relies on a set of pre-determined goals. It thus replicates the present reality, so reinforcing rather than changing the status quo. Macarthur challenges this thinking, and argues that this repetitive way of thinking is stuck in the present, unable to move forward. Macarthur situates her argument in the context of current dominant neoliberal thought and practice. She argues that women have generally not thrived in the neoliberal model of the composer, which envisages the composer as an individual, autonomous creator and entrepreneur. Successful female composers must work with this dominant, modernist aesthetic and exploit the image of the neo-romantic, entrepreneurial creator. This book sets out in contrast to develop a new conception of subjectivity that sows the seeds of a twenty-first-century feminist politics of music.

Reification and the Aesthetics of Music
Reification and the Aesthetics of Music

Author: Jonathan Lewis

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-11-19

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1317297962

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This innovative study re-evaluates the philosophical significance of aesthetics in the context of contemporary debates on the nature of philosophy. Lewis's main argument is that contemporary conceptions of meaning and truth have been reified, and that aesthetics is able to articulate why this is the case, with important consequences for understanding the horizons and nature of philosophical inquiry. Reification and the Aesthetics of Music challenges the most emphatic and problematic conceptions of meaning and truth in both analytic philosophy and postmodern thought by acknowledging the ontological and logical primacy of our concrete, practice-based experiences with aesthetic phenomena. By engaging with a variety of aesthetic practices, including Beethoven's symphonies and string quartets, Wagner's music dramas, Richard Strauss's Elektra, the twentieth-century avant-garde, Jamaican soundsystem culture, and punk and contemporary noise, this book demonstrates the aesthetic relevance of reification as well as the concept's applicability to contemporary debates within philosophy.