Deep Refrains
Deep Refrains

Author: Michael Gallope

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-11-14

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 022648369X

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Deep Refrains is a wide-ranging investigation of the philosophy of music. Michael Gallope asks what it means for music to "speak” when it is not saying anything in particular. To answer this question, he turns to the writings of some of the most revered thinkers of the twentieth century--Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Vladimir Jank�l�vitch, Gilles Deleuze, and F�lix Guattari. For these theorists, Gallope argues, the paradox that music is both ineffable and yet harbors deep philosophical wisdoms is fertile ground for thinking outside of conceptual boundaries. It provides the lens for a utopian potentiality that inspires hope (Bloch), an ethical critique of modernity (Adorno), an exemplification of the ephemeral movement of lived time (Jank�l�vitch), and a sonic extension of the syncopated, contrapuntal rhythms of sense and social life (Deleuze and Guattari). Gallope argues that a philosophical engagement with music’s ineffability rarely calls for silence or declarations of the unspeakable. Rather, it asks us to think through the ways in which the impact of music is made to address complex philosophical problems specific to the modern world.

Deep Refrains
Deep Refrains

Author: Michael Gallope

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-11-16

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 022648372X

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We often say that music is ineffable, that it does not refer to anything outside of itself. But if music, in all its sensuous flux, does not mean anything in particular, might it still have a special kind of philosophical significance? In Deep Refrains, Michael Gallope draws together the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari in order to revisit the age-old question of music’s ineffability from a modern perspective. For these nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophers, music’s ineffability is a complex phenomenon that engenders an intellectually productive sense of perplexity. Through careful examination of their historical contexts and philosophical orientations, close attention to their use of language, and new interpretations of musical compositions that proved influential for their work, Deep Refrains forges the first panoptic view of their writings on music. Gallope concludes that music’s ineffability is neither a conservative phenomenon nor a pious call to silence. Instead, these philosophers ask us to think through the ways in which music’s stunning force might address, in an ethical fashion, intricate philosophical questions specific to the modern world.

Musicology of Religion
Musicology of Religion

Author: Guy L. Beck

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2023-05-01

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 1438493096

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For generations, religion and music have been regarded as "universals," yet despite the fact that they have been frequently linked throughout history and topography, and despite the importance of music in the early stages of religious studies, their combined presence has not until now been considered a separate area of study and research. While there are well-developed fields of anthropology of religion, psychology of religion, and philosophy of religion, the widely recognized connections between religion and sound, chant, and music warrant comparable study. Drawing upon theories and methods in the study of both religion and music, referencing examples from world religious traditions, and addressing challenges posed by critics, this book envisions a unified field for religion and music: musicology of religion. Grounded in the scope and methods of phenomenology and comparative analysis, musicology of religion represents an innovative direction in interdisciplinary study, enriched by the social sciences, ethnomusicology, philosophy, theology, liturgical studies, and cognitive studies. As conceived, musicology of religion will spearhead new and creative paths in the study of religion.

The Fact of Resonance
The Fact of Resonance

Author: Julie Beth Napolin

Publisher: Fordham University Press

Published: 2020-06-02

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0823288188

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Shortlisted, 2021 Memory Studies Association First Book Award The Fact of Resonance returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which theories of the novel developed, seeking in sound an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. Arguing that narrative theory has been founded on an exclusion of sound, the book poses a missing counterpart to modernism’s question “who speaks?” in the hidden acoustical questions “who hears?” and “who listens?” For Napolin, the experience of reading is undergirded by the sonic. The book captures and enhances literature’s ambient sounds, sounds that are clues to heterogeneous experiences secreted within the acoustical unconscious of texts. The book invents an oblique ear, a subtle and lyrical prose style attuned to picking up sounds no longer hearable. “Resonance” opens upon a new genealogy of modernism, tracking from Joseph Conrad to his interlocutors—Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, and Chantal Akerman—the racialized, gendered, and colonial implications of acoustical figures that “drift” through and are transformed by narrative worlds in writing, film, and music. A major synthesis of resources gleaned from across the theoretical humanities, the book argues for “resonance” as the traversal of acoustical figures across the spaces of colonial and technological modernity, figures registering and transmitting transformations of “voice” and “sound” across languages, culture, and modalities of hearing. We have not yet sufficiently attended to relays between sound, narrative, and the unconscious that are crucial to the ideological entailments and figural strategies of transnational, transatlantic, and transpacific modernism. The breadth of the book’s engagements will make it of interest not only to students and scholars of modernist fiction and sound studies, but to anyone interested in contemporary critical theory.

Django Generations
Django Generations

Author: Siv B. Lie

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-10-22

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 022681100X

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"The distinctive sound of the swing-driven guitar style of Django Reinhardt has become almost synonymous with a carefree, bohemian Frenchness to fans all over the world. However, we in the US refer to his music using a telling designation: Django is known here as the father of gypsy jazz. In France, the cultural significance of the musical style--called jazz manouche in reference to his origins in the Manouche subgroup of Romanies (known pejoratively as "Gypsies")--is fraught both for the Manouche and for the white French men and women eager to claim Django as a native son. In Django Generations, ethnomusicologist Siv B. Lie explores the complicated ways in which Django's legacy and jazz manouche express competing notions of what it means to be French. Though jazz manouche is overwhelmingly popular in France, Manouche people are more often treated as outsiders. However, some Manouche people turn to their musical heritage to gain acceptance in mainstream French society. Considering all of the characteristics and roles attributed to Django--as a world-renowned jazz musician, as an artistic pioneer, as a representative of French heritage, and as a Manouche--jazz manouche becomes a potent means for performers and listeners to articulate their relationships with French society, actual or hoped-for. Weaving together a history of jazz manouche and ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in the bars, festivals, family events, and cultural organizations where jazz manouche is performed and celebrated, Lie offers insight into how a musical genre can channel arguments about national and ethnoracial belonging. She argues that an uncomfortable cohabitation of Manouche identity and French identity lies at the heart of jazz manouche, which is what makes it so successful and powerful"--

Debussy's Critics
Debussy's Critics

Author: Alexandra Kieffer

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-06-04

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0190847255

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Debussy's Critics: Sound, Affect, and the Experience of Modernism explores the music of Claude Debussy and its early reception in light of the rise of the empirical human sciences in Western Europe around the turn of the twentieth century. In the midst of a sea change in conceptions of the human person, the critics who wrote about Debussy's music in the Parisian press-continually returning to this music's nebulous relationship to sensation and sensibilité-attempted to articulate a music aesthetic appropriate to the fully embodied, material self of psychological modernism. While scholarship on French music in this period has often emphasized its affinities with other art forms, such as Impressionist painting and Symbolist poetry, Debussy's Critics demonstrates that a preoccupation with the specifically sonic materiality of Debussy's music, informed by late nineteenth-century scientific discourses on affect, perception, and cognition, was central to this music's historical intervention. Foregrounding the dynamic exchange between sounds and ideas, this book reveals the disorienting and bewildering experience of listening to Debussy's music, which compelled its early audiences to reimagine the most fundamental premises of the European art-music tradition.

Peculiar Attunements
Peculiar Attunements

Author: Roger Mathew Grant

Publisher: Fordham University Press

Published: 2020-03-03

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 0823288080

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Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement in European music theory of the eighteenth century. During that time the affects—or passions, as they were also called—formed a vital component of a mimetic model of the arts. Eighteenth-century critics held that artworks imitated or copied the natural world in order to produce copies of the affects in their beholders. But music caused a problem for such theories, since it wasn’t apparent that musical tones could imitate anything with any dependability, beyond the rare thunderclap or birdcall. Struggling to articulate how it was that music managed to move its auditors without imitation, certain theorists developed a new affect theory crafted especially for music, postulating that music’s physical materiality as sound vibrated the nerves of listeners and attuned them to the affects through sympathetic resonance. This was a theory of affective attunement that bypassed the entire structure of representation, offering a non-discursive, corporeal alternative. It is a pendant to contemporary theories of affect, and one from which they have much to learn. Inflecting our current intellectual moment through eighteenth-century music theory and aesthetics, this book offers a reassessment of affect theory’s common systems and processes. It offers a new way of thinking through affect dialectically, drawing attention to patterns and problems in affect theory that we have been given to repeating. Finally, taking a cue from eighteenth-century theory, it gives renewed attention to the objects that generate affects in subjects.

Navigating Urban Soundscapes
Navigating Urban Soundscapes

Author: Annika Eisenberg

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-01-01

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 3031167341

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Navigating Urban Soundscapes: Dublin and Los Angeles in Fiction offers an innovative analytical framework to explore sound in different media and across two distinct urban soundscapes. Studying a wide range of novels, films, and radio dramas, using Dublin and Los Angeles as case studies, Annika Eisenberg asks how sounds are aestheticised to signify urban space in fiction, and how sounds allow such fictional urban spaces to be navigated, both by auscultators, the characters listening within a work of fiction, and by auditeurs, the implied audience of a fictional work. Eisenberg argues that the concept of “urban sound” is a cultural and aesthetic construct, and in doing so, she shows why aesthetics needs to be front and center in sound studies.