The illustrations used in the book range from the most elemental speech sounds to the poetry of Emerson, from a single saxophone note to the grandest passages of Beethoven; they include discussions of medieval polyphony and the music of Josquin, Palestrina, Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, Wagner, Debussy, Schoenberg, and American jazz, all within their historical contexts. Such scope shows how deep the analogy between music and language really is.
Whose Music? combines historical, musicological, and sociological materials and styles of analysis in ways that connect to the field of sociology. The analyses of social class systems presented here speak in translatable ways to analyses of musical forms. Not only that, both are connected to an understanding of the organizations through which works are distributed to their audiences. Perhaps most importantly for the contemporary reader, this book depicts the part of the process by which dominant class groups justify their domination--cultural and otherwise.
Paul Simon is commonly acknowledged to be one of the most successful singer-songwriters of the pop-rock era. His work has flourished in the context of Simon and Garfunkel as well as in his own solo career. Starting with the folk-rock style that marked his earliest significant success, he has drawn on a wide variety of influences, including many American traditions and, later, many international ones as well. He has won multiple Grammy awards in both the duo and the solo phases of his career. His songwriting has also provided the impetus for brief forays into film and musical theatre. After providing a brief biographical overview, this work examines Simon's songwriting work in depth, providing a critical discussion of each song as a fusion of text and music so as to help the reader to identify elements that enhance appreciation. A particularly valuable contribution in this context is the discussion of the wide variety of musical elements that contribute significantly to the value of Simon's work. These include such easily-understandable issues as verse-chorus structure, melodic variation, selection of particular instruments and even performers, variation of musical style within a song, general harmonic characteristics, relationships among keys, rhythm and pacing of text, etc. While the book proceeds chronologically through Simon's recorded output, specific threads are developed throughout, and the discussion of individual songs takes place in the context of these threads, both drawing on them and developing them further. The diversity of Paul Simon's work reflects his very American background, and no discussion of American music is complete without accounting for his influence.
In all of the books about rock music, relatively few focus on the purely musical dimensions of the style: dimensions of harmony and melody, tonality and scale, rhythm and meter, phrase structure and form, and emotional expression. The Musical Language of Rock puts forth a new, comprehensive theoretical framework for the study of rock music by addressing each of these aspects. Eastman music theorist and cognition researcher David Temperley brings together a conventional music-analytic approach with statistical corpus analysis to offer an innovative and insightful approach to the genre. With examples from across a broadly defined rock idiom encompassing everything from the Beatles to Deep Purple, Michael Jackson to Bonnie Raitt, The Musical Language of Rock shows how rock musicians exploit musical parameters to achieve aesthetic and expressive goals-for example, the manipulation of expectation and surprise, the communication of such oppositions as continuity/closure and tension/relaxation, and the expression of emotional states. A major innovation of the book is a three-dimensional model of musical expression-representing valence, energy, and tension-which proves to be a powerful tool for characterizing songs and also for tracing expressive shifts within them. The book includes many musical examples, with sound clips available on the book's website. The Musical Language of Rock presents new insights on the powerful musical mechanisms which have made rock a hallmark of our contemporary musical landscape.
What is the difference between a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the symphony itself? What does it mean for musicians to be faithful to the works they perform? To answer such questions, Lydia Goehr combines philosophical and historical methods of enquiry. Finding Anglo-American philosophy inadequate for the task, she shows that a historical perspective is indispensable to a full understanding of musical ontology. Goehr examines the concepts and assumptions behind the practice of classical music in the nineteenth century and demonstrates how different they were from those of previous centuries. She rejects the finding that the concept of a musical work emerged in the sixteenth century, placing its emergence instead around 1800. She describes how the concept of a work then came to define the norms, expectations, and behaviour that we now associate with classical music. Out of the historical thesis Goehr draws philosophical conclusions about the normative functions of concepts and ideals. She also addresses current debates among conductors, early music performers, and avant-gardists. - ;Introduction; I. The Analytic Approach: Status and identity: Analytical positions I; Analytical positions II; Critique and transition; II. The Historical Approach: Normativity and Practice: The central claim; Musical meaning I; Musical meaning II; Musical production I; Musical production II; Werktreue: Confirmation and challenge -
Since the inception of electroacoustic music in 1948, much has been written about technical developments. This book is one of the first to examine aesthetic issues central to this rapidly developing genre. It brings together composers from leading academic departments and studios in Britain, the United States, Canada and Paris with a wide range of approaches and opinions, resulting in a study which is likely to have a marked impact on current debates on the future of electroacoustic music. The book is divided into three sections. The first, Culture and Language, considers the relationship between music and the listener's perception and expectation. Materials and Lanugage looks at the types of materials available to composers and the way in which the internal structure of the sound can have implications for the overall structure of a piece. The final section, The Influence of New Technology, considers the relationship between computer systems and the music they are helping to create.
Word and music studies is a relatively young discipline that has nonetheless generated a substantial amount of work. Recent studies in the field have embraced music in literature (word music, formal parallels to music in literature, verbal music), music and literarature (vocal music) and literature in music (programme music). Other positions have been defined in which song exists as an analysable category distinct from words and music and requiring its own grammar. Much of the literature has tended to focus on readings of the literary text, pushing theoretical and analytical concerns in music to one side, a trend that is as apparent among musicologists as among literary historians. The essays presented here from the third Liverpool Music Symposium seek accordingly to redress this situation. Contributors tackle the study of words and music from a number of standpoints, examining artists as diverse as Eminem, Patti Smith and Arnold Schoenberg.
