The Penn State Blue Band: A Century of Pride and Precision

The Penn State Blue Band: A Century of Pride and Precision

Author:

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published:

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9780271038827

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"Ten chapters follow, each devoted to a single decade covering the major events in the band's development over the next hundred years, such as the adoption of the name "Blue Band" in 1923."--BOOK JACKET.


Cultivated by Hand

Cultivated by Hand

Author: Glenda Goodman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-03-23

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0190884924

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Scattered in archives and historical societies across the United States are hundreds of volumes of manuscript music, copied by hand by eighteenth-century amateurs. Often overlooked, amateur music making played a key role in the construction of gender, class, race, and nation in the post-revolution years of the United States. These early Americans, seeking ways to present themselves as genteel, erudite, and pious, saw copying music by hand and performing it in intimate social groups as a way to make themselves--and their new nation-appear culturally sophisticated. Following a select group of amateur musicians, Cultivated by Hand makes the case that amateur music making was both consequential to American culture of the eighteenth century and aligned with other forms of self-fashioning. This interdisciplinary study explores the social and material practices of amateur music making, analyzing the materiality of manuscripts, tracing the lives of individual musicians, and uncovering their musical tastes and sensibilities. Author Glenda Goodman explores highly personal yet often denigrated experiences of musically "accomplished" female amateurs in particular, who grappled with finding a meaningful place in their lives for music. Revealing the presence of these unacknowledged subjects in music history, Cultivated by Hand reclaims the importance of such work and presents a class of musicians whose labors should be taken into account.


The Transformation of Black Music

The Transformation of Black Music

Author: Sam Floyd

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-02-28

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0190651296

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Powerful and embracive, The Transformation of Black Music explores the full spectrum of black musics over the past thousand years as Africans and their descendants have traveled around the globe making celebrated music both in their homelands and throughout the Diaspora. Authors Samuel A. Floyd, Melanie Zeck, and Guthrie Ramsey brilliantly discuss how the music has blossomed, permeated present traditions, and created new practices. As a companion to the ground-breaking The Power of Black Music, this text brilliantly situates emerging, morphing, and influential black musics in a broader framework of cultural, political, and social histories. Grappling with subjects frequently omitted from traditional musical texts, The Transformation of Black Music is guided by more than just the ideals of inclusivity and representation. This work covers overlooked topics that include classical musicians of African descent, and builds upon the contributions of esteemed predecessors in the field of black music study. Providing a sweeping list of figures rarely included in conventional music history and theory textbooks, the text elucidates the findings of ethnomusicologists, cultural historians, Americanists, Africanists, and anthropologists, and weaves these accounts into a powerful and informative narrative. Taking its readers on a journey - one that has never been attempted in a single volume alone - this book reflects the musical phenomena generated by forced African migration and collective memory, and considers the kinds of powerful stories that these musics were meant to tell. Filling in critical musical and historical gaps previously ignored, authors Floyd, Zeck, and Ramsey infuse an engaging musical dialogue with a deeper understanding of the interrelationships between black musical genres and mainstream music. The Transformation of Black Music will solidify not only the inestimable value of black musics, but also the importance and relevance of black music research to all musical endeavors.


Robert de Reims

Robert de Reims

Author: Robert de Reims

Publisher: Penn State University Press

Published: 2020-10

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 9780271087184

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Known as "La Chièvre de Reims," Robert de Reims was among the earliest trouvères--poet-composers who were contemporaries of the troubadours, but who wrote their works in the northern dialects of France. This critical edition provides new translations into English and Modern French of all the songs and motets attributed to him, along with the original texts, the extant melodies, and a substantive introduction. Active sometime between 1190 and 1220, Robert de Reims was an influential figure in the literary circles of Arras. There are thirteen compositions set to music attributed to him, including nine chansons (songs) and four polyphonic motets that show broad dissemination in the thirteenth century and beyond. Robert's work is exceptional on a number of fronts. His poetry is known for acoustic luxuriance and expertise in rhyming, grounded in the play of echoes and variations. He is the earliest trouvère known to have composed a sotte chanson contre Amours (silly song against Love), and his lyrics feature the first specimens of intensive echo rhyming. Located clearly at the nexus of monophonic song and polyphony, Robert's corpus also poses the intriguing question of trouvère participation in the development of the polyphonic repertory. The case of Robert de Reims jostles and tempers the standard history of the chanson and the motet. Accessible and instructive, this trilingual critical edition of his complete works makes the oeuvre of this innovative and consequential trouvère available in one volume for the first time.


I, You, and the Word “God”

I, You, and the Word “God”

Author: Sarah Zhang

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2016-10-27

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1575064766

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I, You, and the Word “God” introduces the approach of lyrical ethics, inspired by Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical-phenomenological philosophy. Through the optics of lyrical ethics, the reader discovers how the ancient erotic poems of the Song of Songs bear ethical and theological significance for contemporary readers. Levinas’s intertwined concepts—oneself qua sensibility, otherness perceived through responsibility, and transcendence embodied in one’s love for the other—reveal themselves as lyrical colors woven into the fabric of Song 4:1–7, 5:2–8, and 8:6. More importantly, Levinas’s understanding that poetic language breaks the tautology of logocentric discourse and gestures to the outside of consciousness provides the theoretical ground for the listener to solicit meaningfulness from the Song. Through this lyrical reading of the selected poetic units, the book demonstrates that the traditional interpretive methods of representative description, narrative paraphrase, and thematic distillation fail to encounter the otherness of poetry. In contrast, lyrical ethics pays attention to that which transcends consciousness: the awakening of the reader’s subjectivity, the saying underlying the said, the sound of the sense, and the invisibility of the visible. The Song so caressed reveals in human love the purposelessly purposive encounter with God.


The Powers of Sound and Song in Early Modern Paris

The Powers of Sound and Song in Early Modern Paris

Author: Nicholas Hammond

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2020-01-16

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 0271085517

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The long and spectacular reign of Louis XIV of France is typically described in overwhelmingly visual terms. In this book, Nicholas Hammond takes a sonic approach to this remarkable age, opening our ears to the myriad ways in which sound revealed the complex acoustic dimensions of class, politics, and sexuality in seventeenth-century Paris. The discovery in the French archives of a four-line song from 1661 launched Hammond’s research into the lives of the two men referenced therein—Jacques Chausson and Guillaume de Guitaut. In retracing the lives of these two men (one sentenced to death by burning and the other appointed to the Ordre du Saint-Esprit), Hammond makes astonishing discoveries about each man and the ways in which their lives intersected, all in the context of the sounds and songs heard in the court of Louis XIV and on the streets and bridges of Paris. Hammond’s study shows how members of the elite and lower classes in Paris crossed paths in unexpected ways and, moreover, how noise in the ancien régime was central to questions of crime and punishment: street singing was considered a crime in itself, and yet street singers flourished, circulating information about crimes that others may have committed, while political and religious authorities wielded the powerful sounds of sermons and public executions to provide moral commentaries, to control crime, and to inflict punishment. This innovative study explores the theoretical, social, cultural, and historical contexts of the early modern Parisian soundscape. It will appeal to scholars interested in sound studies and the history of sexuality as well as those who study the culture, literature, and history of early modern France.


Songs of the Lisu Hills

Songs of the Lisu Hills

Author: Aminta Arrington

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2020-01-10

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 0271085843

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The story of how the Lisu of southwest China were evangelized one hundred years ago by the China Inland Mission is a familiar one in mission circles. The subsequent history of the Lisu church, however, is much less well known. Songs of the Lisu Hills brings this history up to date, recounting the unlikely story of how the Lisu maintained their faith through twenty-two years of government persecution and illuminating how Lisu Christians transformed the text-based religion brought by the missionaries into a faith centered around an embodied set of Christian practices. Based on ethnographic fieldwork as well as archival research, this volume documents the development of Lisu Christianity, both through larger social forces and through the stories of individual believers. It explores how the Lisu, most of whom remain subsistence farmers, have oriented their faith less around cognitive notions of belief and more around participation in a rhythm of shared Christian practices, such as line dancing, attending church and festivals, evangelizing, working in one another’s fields, and singing translated Western hymns. These embodied practices demonstrate how Christianity developed in the mountainous margins of the world’s largest atheist state. A much-needed expansion of the Lisu story into a complex study of the evolution of a world Christian community, this book will appeal to scholars working at the intersections of World Christianity, anthropology of religion, ethnography, Chinese Christianity, and mission studies.


The University of Pennsylvania Band

The University of Pennsylvania Band

Author: The University of Pennsylvania Band Arch

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13: 9780738545578

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The University of Pennsylvania Band, among the first collegiate marching bands in the country, was founded in 1897. Ever since, it has been a cornerstone of student life on campus, serving as a guardian of musical traditions and all things red and blue. The University of Pennsylvania Band is a distinctive photographic collection tracing the evolution of the student-led organization from its start as the prototype for the modern collegiate marching band, through the dramatic social changes during the middle of the 20th century, to the comedic Ivy Leaguestyle "scramble" band it became towards the end of its first 100 years. By following the evolution of the band, this pictorial collection traces the changes that occurred within the student body over the decades, including times of war and social inequality.