This collection about the early music movement will appeal to performers, teachers, academics, instrument makers, amateur musicians, and music lovers. With chapters about new ways to study, teach, perform, and listen to early music, there is something to appeal to everyone. The diverse group of authors--from young to established voices who live across the globe--offer positive, diverse, exciting, and challenging points of view about how the early music movement can go forward into the future.
Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the Twenty-21st Century is a multi-authored, collaboratively conceived book of essays that tackles key challenges facing scholars studying music of the United States in the early twenty-first century. This book encourages scholars in music circles and beyond to explore the intersections between social responsibility, community engagement, and academic practices through the simple act of working together. The book’s essays—written by a diverse and cross-generational group of scholars, performers, and practitioners—demonstrate how collaboration can harness complementary skills and nourish comparative boundary-crossing through interdisciplinary research. The chapters of the volume address issues of race, nationalism, mobility, cultural domination, and identity; as well as the crisis of the Trump era and the political power of music. Each contribution to the volume is written collaboratively by two scholars, bringing together contributors who represent a mix of career stages and positions. Through the practice of and reflection on collaboration, Sounding Together breaks out of long-established paradigms of solitude in humanities scholarship and works toward social justice in the study of music.
A great majority of European music written before 1750 is for voices but remains understudied and underperformed. It includes music for groups of voices and solo voices, with and without instruments, music for the church and the theater, for the court and the chamber, as well as music in different languages and with different national styles. In So You Want to Sing Early Music, Martha Elliott introduces this remarkably rich and varied repertoire within a historical context for the 21st century singer. Focusing on music from the 17th and early 18th centuries, this book offers guidance on style and ornamentation, working with vocal and instrumental colleagues, reading manuscripts and edited editions of scores. Elliot shares advice for how to handle the different kinds of early music performance situations in which singers might find themselves, as well as where to find workshops and performance opportunities. Equally helpful to the classically trained solo singer or amateur choral singer, So You Want to Sing Early Music will allow them to broaden their repertoire and build their stylistic toolbox. Additional chapters by Scott McCoy and Wendy LeBorgne address universal questions of voice science, pedagogy, and vocal health,. The So You Want to Sing seriesis produced in partnership with the National Association of Teachers of Singing. Like all books in the series, So You Want to Sing Early Music features online supplemental material on the NATS website. Please visit www.nats.org to access style-specific exercises, audio and video files, and additional resources.
From Music to Sound is an examination of the six musical histories whose convergence produces the emergence of sound, offering a plural, original history of new music and showing how music had begun a change of paradigm, moving from a culture centred on the note to a culture of sound. Each chapter follows a chronological progression and is illustrated with numerous musical examples. The chapters are composed of six parallel histories: timbre, which became a central category for musical composition; noise and the exploration of its musical potential; listening, the awareness of which opens to the generality of sound; deeper and deeper immersion in sound; the substitution of composing the sound for composing with sounds; and space, which is progressively viewed as composable. The book proposes a global overview, one of the first of its kind, since its ambition is to systematically delimit the emergence of sound. Both well-known and lesser-known works and composers are analysed in detail; from Debussy to contemporary music in the early twenty-first century; from rock to electronica; from the sound objects of the earliest musique concrète to current electroacoustic music; from the Poème électronique of Le Corbusier-Varèse-Xenakis to the most recent inter-arts attempts. Covering theory, analysis and aesthetics, From Music to Sound will be of great interest to scholars, professionals and students of Music, Musicology, Sound Studies and Sonic Arts. Supporting musical examples can be accessed via the online Routledge Music Research Portal.
How black electronic dance music makes it possible to reorganize life within the contemporary city. Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski argues that Black electronic dance music produces sonic ecologies of Blackness that expose and reorder the contemporary racialization of the urban--ecologies that can never simply be reduced to their geographical and racial context. Dhanveer Singh Brar makes the case for Black electronic dance music as the cutting-edge aesthetic project of the diaspora, which due to the music's class character makes it possible to reorganize life within the contemporary city. Closely analysing the Footwork scene in South and West Chicago, the Grime scene in East London, and the output of the South London producer Actress, Brar pays attention to the way each of these critically acclaimed musical projects experiment with aesthetic form through an experimentation of the social. Through explicitly theoretical means, Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski foregrounds the sonic specificity of 12" records, EPs, albums, radio broadcasts, and recorded performances to make the case that Footwork, Grime, and Actress dissolve racialized spatial constraints that are thought to surround Black social life. Pushing the critical debates concerning the phonic materiality of blackness, undercommons, and aesthetic sociality in new directions, Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski rethinks these concepts through concrete examples of contemporary black electronic dance music production that allows for a theorization of the way Footwork, Grime, and Actress have--through their experiments in blackness--generated genuine alternatives to the functioning of the city under financialized racial capitalism.
The music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in its cultural, social, and intellectual contexts. Joseph Auner's Music in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries explores the sense of possibility unleashed by the era's destabilizing military conflicts, social upheavals, and technological advances. Auner shows how the multiplicity of musical styles has called into question traditional assumptions about compositional practice, the boundaries of music and noise, and the relationship among composer, performer, and listener. He also shows how composers and their works have played important roles in defining ideas of nation, race, and gender, and thus in shaping the modern world for better and worse. Western Music in Context: A Norton History comprises six volumes of moderate length, each written in an engaging style by a recognized expert. Authoritative and current, the series examines music in the broadest sense—as sounds notated, performed, and heard—focusing not only on composers and works, but also on broader social and intellectual currents.
In recent research, there has been growing emphasis on the collaborative, social, and collective nature of musical behaviour and practices. Among the emerging hypotheses in this connection are the idea that listening to music is always listening together and being with the other; that music making is a matter of intercorporeality, mutuality, and emphatic attunement; and that creative agency in musical practices is fundamentally a distributed phenomenon. Chamber music provides an ideal context for the testing and actualization of these notions. This Special Issue on chamber music and the chamber musician aims to explore the psychological, social, cultural, historical, and artistic issues in the practice of classical chamber music in the twenty-first century. Contributions are invited on any of these aspects and issues involved in being a contemporary classical chamber musician. Authors are encouraged to contextualise their research by reference to the recent literature on collaborative musicking, and among the topics they may choose to address are the cultural and musical demands chamber musicians face and the implications of these demands for their artistic practice, the ways the twenty-first-century chamber musicians engage with historical practices, the newly emerging musical identities and artistic roles available to them, and expressivity in current chamber music practices.
"...the best extant map of our sonic shadowlands, and it has changed how I listen."—Alex Ross, The New Yorker "...an essential survey of contemporary music."—New York Times "…sharp, provacative and always on the money. The listening list alone promises months of fresh discovery, the main text a fresh new way of navigating the world of sound."—The Wire 2017 Music Book of the Year—Alex Ross, The New Yorker Music after the Fall is the first book to survey contemporary Western art music within the transformed political, cultural, and technological environment of the post–Cold War era. In this book, Tim Rutherford-Johnson considers musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing connections with the other arts, in particular visual art and architecture, he expands the definition of Western art music to include forms of composition, experimental music, sound art, and crossover work from across the spectrum, inside and beyond the concert hall. Each chapter is a critical consideration of a wide range of composers, performers, works, and institutions, and develops a broad and rich picture of the new music ecosystem, from North American string quartets to Lebanese improvisers, from electroacoustic music studios in South America to ruined pianos in the Australian outback. Rutherford-Johnson puts forth a new approach to the study of contemporary music that relies less on taxonomies of style and technique than on the comparison of different responses to common themes of permission, fluidity, excess, and loss.
Music moves through time; it is not static. In order to appreciate music wemust remember what sounds happened, and anticipate what sounds might comenext. This book takes you on a journey of music from past to present, from the Middle Ages to the Baroque Period to the 20th century and beyond!
