A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music

A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music
Author: Robert S. Hatten
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2018-09-06
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0253038014

In his third volume on musical expressive meaning, Robert S. Hatten examines virtual agency in music from the perspectives of movement, gesture, embodiment, topics, tropes, emotion, narrativity, and performance. Distinguished from the actual agency of composers and performers, whose intentional actions either create music as notated or manifest music as significant sound, virtual agency is inferred from the implied actions of those sounds, as they move and reveal tendencies within music-stylistic contexts. From our most basic attributions of sources for perceived energies in music, to the highest realm of our engagement with musical subjectivity, Hatten explains how virtual agents arose as distinct from actual ones, how unspecified actants can take on characteristics of (virtual) human agents, and how virtual agents assume various actorial roles. Along the way, Hatten demonstrates some of the musical means by which composers and performers from different historical eras have staged and projected various levels of virtual agency, engaging listeners imaginatively and interactively within the expressive realms of their virtual and fictional musical worlds.

Healing for the Soul

Healing for the Soul
Author: Braxton D. Shelley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2021
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0197566464

Reimagining Gospel : An Introduction -- "A Balm In Gilead" : "Tuning Up" and the Gospel Imagination -- The Moment That Changed Everything : Gospel Music and the Incarnation of Time -- "The Evidence of Things Not Seen" : Gospel Vamps and the Incarnation of Text -- The Pursuit of Intensity : A Formal Theory of the Gospel Vamp.

A History of Emotion in Western Music

A History of Emotion in Western Music
Author: Michael Spitzer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2020-09-14
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190061766

When asked to describe what music means to them, most people talk about its power to express or elicit emotions. As a melody can produce a tear, tingle the spine, or energize athletes, music has a deep impact on how we experience and encounter the world. Because of the elusiveness of these musical emotions, however, little has been written about how music creates emotions and how musical emotion has changed its meaning for listeners across the last millennium. In this sweeping landmark study, author Michael Spitzer provides the first history of musical emotion in the Western world, from Gregorian chant to Beyoncé. Combining intellectual history, music studies, philosophy, and cognitive psychology, A History of Emotion in Western Music introduces current approaches to the study of emotion and formulates an original theory of how musical emotion works. Diverging from psychological approaches that center listeners' self-reports or artificial experiments, Spitzer argues that musical emotions can be uncovered in the techniques and materials of composers and performers. Together with its extensive chronicle of the historical evolution of musical style and emotion, this book offers a rich union of theory and history.

The Queerness of Video Game Music

The Queerness of Video Game Music
Author: Tim Summers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2023-08-03
Genre: Music
ISBN: 100937138X

Video game music is a significant site of queerness where normative demands are questioned, suspended or loosened. Games resist hegemonic musical logics, challenge musical value systems and use music to complicate essentialist notions of identity. This Element proposes three areas of queerness, each representing different relationships between 'queer design' and 'queer engagement', ranging fromunintentionally resistive to explicit engagement with identity. First, this Element examines musical structures that provide queer temporal alternatives to normative linear development, and interactive systems that reframe the power relationship between musical material and listener. Second, it considers 'retro' or 'chiptune' timbres that queer notions of technological progress to be improvements, rejecting chrononormativity. Finally, the Element discusses music that queers the self/other binary of identity. Games present ways of listening to, engaging with and understanding music that provide opportunities to challenge inherited assumptions and reductive or monolithic values, practices and identities.

Magician of Sound

Magician of Sound
Author: Jessie Fillerup
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2021-04-20
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0520379888

French composer Maurice Ravel was described by critics as a magician, conjurer, and illusionist. Scholars have been aware of this historical curiosity, but none so far have explained why Ravel attracted such critiques or what they might tell us about how to interpret his music. Magician of Sound examines Ravel's music through the lens of illusory experience, considering how timbre, orchestral effects, figure/ground relationships, and impressions of motion and stasis might be experienced as if they were conjuring tricks. Applying concepts from music theory, psychology, philosophy, and the history of magic, Jessie Fillerup develops an approach to musical illusion that newly illuminates Ravel's fascination with machines and creates compelling links between his music and other forms of aesthetic illusion, from painting and poetry to fiction and phantasmagoria. Fillerup analyzes scenes of enchantment and illusory effects in Ravel's most popular works, including Boléro, La Valse, Daphnis et Chloé, and Rapsodie espagnole, relating his methods and musical effects to the practice of theatrical conjurers. Drawing on a rich well of primary sources, Magician of Sound provides a new interdisciplinary framework for interpreting this enigmatic composer, linking magic and music.

A Poetics of Handel's Operas

A Poetics of Handel's Operas
Author: Nathan Link
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2023-03-10
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0197651364

What should we consider when thinking about the relationship between an onstage performance and the story the performance tells? A Poetics of Handel's Operas explores this question by analyzing the narratives of Handel's operas in relation to the rich representational fabric of performance used to convey them. Nathan Link notes that in most storytelling genres, the audience can naturally discern between a story and the way that story is represented: with film, for example, the viewer would recognize that a character hears neither her own voiceover nor the ambient music that accompanies it, whereas in discussions of opera, some audiences may be distracted by the seemingly artificial nature of such conventions as characters singing their dialogue. Link proposes that when engaging with opera, distinguishing between the performance we see and hear on the stage and the story represented offers a meaningful approach to engaging with and interpreting the work. Handel's operas are today the most-performed works in the Baroque opera seria tradition. This genre, with its intricate dramaturgy and esoteric conventions, stands to gain much from an investigation into the relationships between the onstage performance and the story to which that performance directs us. In his analysis, Link offers theoretical studies on opera and narratological theories of literature, drama, and film, providing rich engagement with Handel's work and what it conveys about the relationship between text, story, and performance.

Musical Waves

Musical Waves
Author: Andrew Aziz
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2020-07-28
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1527557340

This volume draws together papers delivered at the 2018 meeting of the West Coast Conference of Music Theory and Analysis. It comprises a wide range of analytical approaches, including those inspired by Schoenberg, his theories and works; methods of applying transformational theory to analysis; and studies in narrative and form. Representing the diversifying discipline of music research, the book pointedly contains several approaches to popular music. It represents the cutting-edge nature of the repertoire under inspection, and the reader will find in this book a compendium of analytic techniques for numerous musical styles.

Queer Ear

Queer Ear
Author: Gavin S.K. Lee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2023-10-17
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0197536794

Through provisional, idiosyncratic, and non-normative listening practices, Queer Ear: Remaking Music Theory counters music theory's continuing tendencies towards rationality, unity, unilinearity, teleology, and logical certainty. In this volume, editor Gavin S.K. Lee brings together a diverse group of music theorists who issue queer challenges to both music theory and musicology and show that queerness is integral to music-theoretical practice. These investigations of the "queer ear" and queer soundings, while drawing upon a broad range of approaches, are united by the repurposing of "hard" music-theoretical apparatuses, as well as "soft" apparatuses like narratology and cultural theory, for queer ends. Such repurposings contribute to the search for general principles--or a theory--of queering that counters mainstream music theory's proclivities, instead encouraging everyone to experiment with queer ways of listening. Through the lenses of queer temporality, queer narratology, and queer music analysis, the essays examine a wide variety of artists and composers, including Sun Ra, Cowell, Czernowin, Henze, Schubert, and Schumann; theories ranging from Schenker to queer shame, disability studies, and posthumanism; and authors such as Edward Cone and Edward Prime-Stevenson. Together, they rethink the field's major tenets, examine hidden histories, and view listening practices from the perspective of non-normative subjectivities. Ultimately, Queer Ear works to queer the field of music theory while paying heed to the ways in which music theory intersects with diverse, embodied LGBTQ lives.

Together in Music

Together in Music
Author: Renee Timmers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2022
Genre: Ensemble playing
ISBN: 0198860765

Recent years have seen a rise in interest, from a diversity of fields, in the musical ensemble as an exemplary form of creative group behavior. Musical ensembles can be understood and investigated as high functioning small group organizations that have coordinative structures in place to perform under pressure within strict temporal boundaries. Rehearsals and performances exemplify fruitful contexts for emergent creative behaviour, where novel musical interpretations are negotiated and discovered through improvisatory interaction. Furthermore, group music-making can be an emotionally and socially rewarding experience that enables positive outcomes for wellbeing and development. This book brings together these different perspectives into one coherent volume, offering insight into the musical ensemble from different analytical levels. Part 1 starts from the meso-level, considering ensembles as creative teams and investigating how musical groups interact at a social and organizational level. Part 2 then zooms in to consider musical coordination and interaction at a micro-level, when considering group music-making as forms of joint action. Finally, a macro-level perspective is taken in Part 3, examining the health and wellbeing affordances associated with acoustical, expressive, and emotional joint behavior. Each part contains a balance of review chapters showcasing the most recent developments in each area of research, followed by demonstrative case studies featuring various ensemble practices and processes. A rich and multidisciplinary reflection on ensemble music practice, this volume will be an insightful read for music students, teachers, academics, and professionals with an interest in the dynamics of group behavior within a musical context.

Embodied Expression in Popular Music

Embodied Expression in Popular Music
Author: Timothy Koozin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2024
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0197692982

This book explores the intimate connection between body and instrument in popular music, explaining chords, melodies, riffs, and grooves in terms of embodied movement, which in turn informs the imagination in constructing meaning in songs. Tracing connections from foundational blues, gospel, and rock musicians to current rap artists, author Timothy Koozin demonstrates how a focus on body-instrument interaction can illuminate creative strategies while leveling implied hierarchies of cultural value, revealing how artists represent subjectivities of gender, race, and social class in shaping songs and whole albums.