Structure and Style, first published in 1962 and expanded in 1979, fills the need for new ways of analysis that put 20th-century music in perspective. It spans forms in use before 1600 through forms and techniques in use today. Anthology of Musical Forms provides musical examples of forms treated in Structure and Style. Some examples are analyzed throughout. Most are left for the student to analyze. These books reflect Leon Stein's impressive background as student, musician, and composer. Stein studied composition with Leo Sowerby, Frederick Stock (conductor of the Chicago Symphony) and orchestration with Eric DeLamarter, his assistant. He earned M. Mus and Ph.D degrees at DePaul University and was associated with its School of Music as director of the Graduate Division and chairman of the Department of Theory and Composition until his retirement in 1976. He has composed a wide variety of works, including compositions for orchestra, chamber combinations, two operas, and a violin concerto.
Understanding the way music unfolds to the listener is a major key for unlocking the secrets of the composer’s art. Musical Form and Analysis, highly regarded and widely used for two decades, provides a balanced theoretical and philosophical approach that helps upper-level undergraduate music majors understand the structures and constructions of major musical forms. Spring and Hutcheson present all of the standard topics expected in such a text, but their approach offers a unique conceptual thrust that takes readers beyond mere analytical terminology and facts. Evocative rather than encyclopedic, the text is organized around three elements at work at all levels of music: time, pattern, and proportion. Well-chosen examples and direct, well-crafted assignments reinforce techniques. A 140-page anthology of music for in-depth analysis provides a wide range of carefully selected works.
Like many texts on musical analysis, FORMS IN TONAL MUSIC equips students to critically examine a wide range of compositions and forms. However, Green's text takes students a step further by enabling them to approach musical works unencumbered by preconceived notions of what characteristics the text should or should not have. Providing specific help on every aspect of musical analysis, this text uses many of the compositions found in Charles Burkhart's ANTHOLOGY FOR MUSICAL ANALYSIS, but it allows students the freedom to explore works that they already own.
Music of the Middle Ages provides a comprehensive, chronological survey of musical style and compositional technique from early plainchant to the flourishing of fourteenth-century polyphony.--From publisher description.
Structure and Style, first published in 1962 and expanded in 1979, fills the need for new ways of analysis that put 20th-century music in perspective. It spans forms in use before 1600 through forms and techniques in use today. Anthology of Musical Forms provides musical examples of forms treated in Structure and Style. Some examples are analyzed throughout. Most are left for the student to analyze. These books reflect Leon Stein's impressive background as student, musician, and composer. Stein studied composition with Leo Sowerby, Frederick Stock (conductor of the Chicago Symphony) and orchestration with Eric DeLamarter, his assistant. He earned M. Mus and Ph.D degrees at DePaul University and was associated with its School of Music as director of the Graduate Division and chairman of the Department of Theory and Composition until his retirement in 1976. He has composed a wide variety of works, including compositions for orchestra, chamber combinations, two operas, and a violin concerto.
Joni Mitchell is one of the foremost singer-songwriters of the late twentieth century. Yet despite her reputation, influence, and cultural importance, a detailed appraisal of her musical achievement is still lacking. Whitesell presents a through exploration of Mitchell's musical style, sound, and structure in order to evaluate her songs from a musicological perspective. His analyses are conceived within a holistic framework that takes account of poetic nuance, cultural reference, and stylistic evolution over a long, adventurous career. Mitchell's songs represent a complex, meticulously crafted body of work. The Music of Joni Mitchell offers a comprehensive survey of her output, with many discussions of individual songs, organized by topic rather than chronology. Individual chapters each explore a different aspect of her craft, such as poetic voice, harmony, melody, and large-scale form. A separate chapter is devoted to the central theme of personal freedom, as expressed through diverse symbolic registers of the journey quest, bohemianism, creative license, and spiritual liberation. Previous accounts of Mitchell's songwriting have tended to favor her poetic vision, expansive verse structures, and riveting vocal delivery. Whitesell fills out this account with special attention to musical technique, showing how such traits as complex or conflicting sonorities, dualities of harmonic mode, dialectical tensions of texture and register, intricately layered instrumental figuration, and a variable vocal persona are all essential to her distinctive identity as a songwriter. The Music of Joni Mitchell develops a set of conceptual tools geared specifically to Mitchell's songs, in order to demonstrate the extent of her technical innovation in the pop song genre, to give an account of the formal sophistication and rhetorical power characterizing her work as a whole, and to provide grounds for the recognition of her intellectual stature as a composer within her chosen field.
Essential reading for anyone interested in artistic research applied to music This book is the first anthology of writings about the emerging subject of artistic experimentation in music. This subject, as part of the cross-disciplinary field of artistic research, cuts across boundaries of the conventional categories of performance practice, music analysis, aesthetics, and music pedagogy. The texts, most of them specially written for this volume, have a common genesis in the explorations of the Orpheus Research Centre in Music (ORCiM) in Ghent, Belgium. The book critically examines experimentation in music of different historical eras. It is essential reading for performers, composers, teachers, and others wanting to inform themselves of the issues and the current debates in the new field of artistic research as applied to music. The publication is accompanied by a CD of music discussed in the text, and by an online resource of video illustrations of specific issues. Contributors Paulo de Assis (ORCiM), Richard Barrett (Institute of Sonology, The Hague), Tom Beghin (McGill University), William Brooks (University of York, ORCiM), Nicholas G. Brown (University of East Anglia), Marcel Cobussen (University of Leiden), Kathleen Coessens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, ORCiM); Paul Craenen (Director Musica, Impulse Centre for Music), Darla Crispin (Norwegian Academy of Music), Stephen Emmerson (Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, Brisbane), Henrik Frisk (Malmö Academy of Music), Bob Gilmore (ORCiM), Valentin Gloor (ORCiM), Yolande Harris (Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media – DXARTS), University of Washington, Seattle), Mieko Kanno (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland), Andrew Lawrence-King (Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen, University of Western Australia), Catherine Laws (University of York, ORCiM), Stefan Östersjö (ORCiM), Juan Parra (ORCiM), Larry Polansky (University of California, Santa Cruz), Stephen Preston, Godfried-Willem Raes (Logos Foundation, Ghent), Hans Roels (ORCiM), Michael Schwab (ORCiM, Royal College of Art, London, Zurich University of the Arts), Anna Scott (ORCiM), Steve Tromans (Middlesex University), Luk Vaes (ORCiM), Bart Vanhecke (KU Leuven, ORCiM)
J. B. Kennedy argues that Plato's dialogues have an unsuspected musical structure and use symbols to encode Pythagorean doctrines. The followers of Pythagoras famously thought that the cosmos had a hidden musical structure and that wise philosophers would be able to hear this harmony of the spheres. Kennedy shows that Plato gave his dialogues a similar, hidden musical structure. He divided each dialogue into twelve parts and inserted symbols at each twelfth to mark a musical note. These passages are relatively harmonious or dissonant, and so traverse the ups and downs of a known musical scale. Many of Plato's ancient followers insisted that Plato used symbols to conceal his own views within the dialogues, but modern scholars have denied this. Kennedy, an expert in Pythagorean mathematics and music theory, now shows that Plato's dialogues do contain a system of symbols. Scholars in the humanities, without knowledge of obsolete Greek mathematics, would not have been able to detect these musical patterns. This book begins with a concise and accessible introduction to Plato's symbolic schemes and the role of allegory in ancient times. The following chapters then annotate the musical symbols in two of Plato's most popular dialogues, the Symposium and Euthyphro, and show that Plato used the musical scale as an outline for structuring his narratives.
