A detailed and moving account of the life of Anneliese Landau, who, in Nazi Germany and later in émigré California, fought against prejudice to do notable work in music.
Prosody as a system of suprasegmental linguistic information such as rhythm and intonation is a prime candidate for looking at the relation between language and music in a principled way. This claim is based on several aspects: First, prosody is concerned with acoustic correlates of language and music that are directly comparable with each other by their physical properties such as duration and pitch. Second, prosodic accounts suggest a hierarchical organization of prosodic units that not only resembles a syntactic hierarchy, but is viewed as (part of) an interface to syntax. Third, prosody provides a very promising ground for evolutionary accounts of language and music. Fourth, bilateral transfer effects between language and music are best illustrated on the level of prosody. Highlighting the first two aspects, this book shows that it is a fruitful endeavor to use prosody for a principled comparison of language and music. In its broader sense, prosody as sound structure of communicative systems may be considered a »meta«-language that formalizes the way of "how music speaks to language and vice versa". Prosody is firmly established within linguistic theory, but is also applied in the musical domain. Therefore, prosody is not just a field of inquiry that shares elements or features between music and language, but can additionally provide a common conceptual ground.
There is a fundamental discrepancy between man as he is and man as he could be, if only he recognized his true being and purpose. Ethics is the discipline by which man can understand how he can pass from the first condition to the second. Udo Schaefer's Baha'i Ethics in Light of Scripture is an attempt to analyse the underlying structures and detect the interior architecture of the Baha'i moral system and is a step towards developing a Baha'i moral theology. Doctrinal Fundamentals, the first of two volumes, provides a historical overview of the Baha'i Faith, a systematic survey of it doctrines and an overview of the origin and derivation of moral values. It considers the metaphysical nature of human beings and human responsibilities, looks at reason and conscience, and explores liberty and its limits. Schaefer's second volume deals with concrete values - the virtues, divine commandments and principles of social ethics from a Baha'i perspective."
Music of the Baduy People of Western Java: Singing is a Medicine by Wim van Zanten is about music and dance of the indigenous group of the Baduy, consisting of about twelve-thousand people living in western Java. It covers music for rice rituals, for circumcisions and weddings, and music for entertainment. The book includes many photographs and several discussed audio-visual examples that can be found on DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5170520. Baduy are suppposed to live a simple, ascetic life. However, there is a shortage of agricultural land and there are many temptations from the changing world around them. Little has been published on Baduy music and dance. Wim van Zanten’s book seeks to fill this lacuna and is based on short periods of fieldwork from 1976 to 2016.
Popular music has long understood that human rights, if attainable at all, involve a struggle without end. The right to imagine an individual will, the right to some form of self-determination and the right to self-legislation have long been at the forefront of popular music's approach to human rights. At a time of such uncertainty and confusion, with human rights currently being violated all over the world, a new and sustained examination of cultural responses to such issues is warranted. In this respect music, which is always produced in a social context, is an extremely useful medium; in its immediacy music has a potency of expression whose reach is long and wide.
This book examines the interface between Polish popular music and screen media against the background of Polish history, cinema, and popular culture and situates that interface in a local as well as global context. It looks at Polish musicals, biographical films about musicians, documentary films and, finally, music videos. The author draws attention to the immense popularity of musical comedies in Polish interwar cinema, the enduring appeal of musical genres during the period of state socialism, despite their low status in film criticism, and the re-birth of musicals in the 2010s. Mazierska also discusses the most important stars, directors and authors of songs presented in Polish films, and points to the effect of technological changes on inception and transformation of music-centred genres of screen media, including the effect of YouTube on their growth and preservation. The book is informed by the question of how parochial and universal is Polish popular music and its screen representation.
A fascinating aspect of the study of music in medieval Islamic and Judaic writings is the broad and interdisciplinary nature of the works and treatises in which it is covered. In addition, such works verbalize an art that was transmitted orally and took shape spontaneously, typically with improvisation during performance. As a result of this outlook the musical concept (or science) is often intertwined with practice (or history). This second collection by Amnon Shiloah brings together twenty-two studies exemplifying such multi-faceted viewpoints on the world of sounds and its virtue. The first studies concern the origin and originators of music and to how its essential constituents came into being; included here is the art of dance along with the controversial attitudes towards it. Next comes the symbolic, philosophical and metaphorical interpretation of music; one of the major ideas epitomizing this approach claimed that the pursuit of knowledge is the path to human perfection and happiness. There follow studies on the transmission of knowledge, along with some annotated key works dealing with therapeutic effects. The last articles focus on cultural traditions elaborated on European soil developing a particular style and musical practice, centred on the Iberian Peninsula, which was the scene of one of the most fascinating examples of cultural interchange.
This first definitive reference resource to take a broad interdisciplinary approach to the nexus between music and the social and behavioral sciences 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.