National Traditions in Nineteenth-Century Opera, Volume I

National Traditions in Nineteenth-Century Opera, Volume I
Author: Steven Huebner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1351915851

This volume covers opera in Italy, France, England and the Americas during the long nineteenth century (1789-1914). The book is divided into four sections that are thematically, rather than geographically, conceived: Places-essays centering on contexts for operatic culture; Genres and Styles-studies dealing with the question of how operas in this period were put together; Critical Studies of individual works, exemplifying particular critical trends; and Performance.

Oral and Written Transmission in Chant

Oral and Written Transmission in Chant
Author: Thomas Forrest Kelly
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2023-01-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351555642

The writing down of music is one of the triumphant technologies of the West. Without writing, the performance of music involves some combination of memory and improvisation. Isidore of Seville famously wrote that unless sounds are remembered by man, they perish, for they cannot be written down. This volume deals with the materials of chant from the point of view of transmission. The early history of chant is a history of orality, of transmission by mouth to ear, and yet we can study it only through the use of written documents. Scholars of medieval music have taken up the ideas and techniques of scholars of folklore, of oral transmission, of ethnomusicology; for the chant is, in fact, an ancient music transmitted for a time in oral culture; and we study a culture not our own, whose informants are not people but manuscripts. All depends, ironically, on deducing oral issues from written documents.

Secular Renaissance Music

Secular Renaissance Music
Author: Sean Gallagher
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 802
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1351549367

Secular music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries encompasses an extraordinarily wide range of works and practices: courtly love songs, music for civic festivities, instrumental music, entertainments provided by minstrels, the unwritten traditions of solo singing, and much else. This collection of essays addresses many of these practices, with a focus on polyphonic settings of vernacular texts, examining their historical and stylistic contexts, their transmission in written and printed sources, questions of performance, and composers? approaches to text setting. Essays have been selected to reflect the wide range of topics that have occupied scholars in recent decades, and taken together, they point to the more general significance of secular music within a broad complex of cultural practices and institutions.

Thomas Morley

Thomas Morley
Author: Tessa Murray
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2014
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1843839601

An essential book for scholars and students of renaissance music, as well as the history of music publishing and print. The Renaissance composer and organist Thomas Morley (c.1557-1602) is best known as a leading member of the English Madrigal School, but he also built a significant business as a music publisher. This book looks at Morley's pioneering contribution to music publishing in England, inspired by an established music printing culture in continental Europe. A student of William Byrd, Morley had a conventional education and early career as a cathedral musician both in Norwich and at St Paul's cathedral. Morley lived amongst the traders, artisans and gentry of England's major cities at a time when a market for recreational music was beginning to emerge. His entrepreneurial drive combinedwith an astute assessment of his market resulted in a successful and influential publishing business. The turning point came with a visit to the Low Countries in 1591, which gave him the opportunity to see a thriving music printpublication business at first hand. Contemporary records provide a detailed picture of the processes involved in early modern music publishing and enable the construction of a financial model of Morley's business. Morley died too young to reap the full rewards of his enterprise, but his success inspired the publication by his contemporaries of a significant corpus of readily available recreational music for the public. Critical to Morley's successwas his identification of the sort of music, notably the Italianate lighter style of madrigal, that would appeal to amateur musicians. Surviving copies of the original prints show that this music continued to be used for severalgenerations: new editions in modern notation started to appear from the mid eighteenth century onwards, suggesting that Morley truly had the measure of the market for recreational music. Thomas Morley: Elizabethan Music Publisher will be of particular interest to scholars and students of renaissance music, as well as the history of music publishing and print. Tessa Murray is an honorary research fellow at the University of Birmingham.

The Triumph of Music

The Triumph of Music
Author: Tim Blanning
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2013-03-07
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0141976454

Once musicians such as Mozart were little more than court servants; now they are multimillionaire superstars wielding more power than politicians. How did this extraordinary change come about? Tim Blanning's brilliantly enjoyable book examines how everything from the cult of the romantic to technology and travel all fed the inexorable rise of music in the West, making it the most dominant and ubiquitous of the art forms. Encompassing balladeers, the great composers, jazz legends and rock gods, this is an enthralling story of power, patronage, creativity and genius.

Music Theory in Ethnomusicology

Music Theory in Ethnomusicology
Author: Stephen Blum
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2023-04-28
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0197683746

During the 1960s and 70s some ethnomusicologists formed relationships with music-makers and ritual specialists in an attempt to interpret how they understood their musical actions. Subsequently ethnomusicologists have studied the respects in which explicit and implicit theory is involved in communication of musical knowledge. They have observed the production of music theory in institutions of modern nation-states and have sought out groups and individuals whose theorizing is not constrained by existing institutions. They are assessing the extent to which musical terminologies of diverse languages can be interpreted in relation to general concepts without imposing the assumptions and biases of one body of existing theory. That exercise is increasingly recognized as a necessary effort of decolonization. A thorough yet concise introduction to this field, Music Theory in Ethnomusicology outlines a conception of music theory suited to cross-cultural research on musical practices.

Music Traditions, Change and Creativity in Africa

Music Traditions, Change and Creativity in Africa
Author: Giorgio Adamo
Publisher: NeoClassica
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2019
Genre: Music
ISBN: 8893740281

In February 2014 an international seminar on musical dynamics and creativity in Africa was held at Tor Vergata University of Rome. The topic and the approach were strongly influenced by issues that Gerhard Kubik believed should have been addressed for a long time, such as the attention to cultural and social dynamics, with a specific emphasis on the creativity of individuals. Beside his keynote address, Music Traditions, Change and Creativity in Africa includes the contributions presented by scholars from different countries, particularly active in the East African area and in dialogue with Italian researchers who have field experience in the same region. Music Traditions, Change and Creativity in Africa is the first monograph of a series of volumes connected and inspired to the journal Etnografie Sonore / Sound Ethnographies (www.soundethnographies.it), which Giorgio Adamo and his colleagues recently founded. Along with the papers multimedia contents are also available online.