Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology

Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology
Author: American Musicological Society
Publisher: Philadelphia, PA (201 S. 34th St., Philadelphia 19104) : American Musicology Society ; [S.l.] : International Musicology Society
Total Pages: 570
Release: 1984
Genre: Dissertations, Academic
ISBN:

The Invention of Latin American Music

The Invention of Latin American Music
Author: Pablo Palomino
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2020-04-29
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190687436

The ethnically and geographically heterogeneous countries that comprise Latin America have each produced music in unique styles and genres - but how and why have these disparate musical streams come to fall under the single category of "Latin American music"? Reconstructing how this category came to be, author Pablo Palomino tells the dynamic history of the modernization of musical practices in Latin America. He focuses on the intellectual, commercial, musicological, and diplomatic actors that spurred these changes in the region between the 1920s and the 1960s, offering a transnational story based on primary sources from countries in and outside of Latin America. The Invention of Latin American Music portrays music as the field where, for the first time, the cultural idea of Latin America disseminated through and beyond the region, connecting the culture and music of the region to the wider, global culture, promoting the now-established notion of Latin America as a single musical market. Palomino explores multiple interconnected narratives throughout, pairing popular and specialist traveling musicians, commercial investments and repertoires, unionization and musicology, and music pedagogy and Pan American diplomacy. Uncovering remarkable transnational networks far from a Western cultural center, The Invention of Latin American Music firmly asserts that the democratic legitimacy and massive reach of Latin American identity and modernization explain the spread and success of Latin American music.

The Heart of a Woman

The Heart of a Woman
Author: Rae Linda Brown
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2020-06-22
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0252052110

Book Prize Winner of the International Alliance for Women in Music of the 2022 Pauline Alderman Awards for Outstanding Scholarship on Women in Music The Heart of a Woman offers the first-ever biography of Florence B. Price, a composer whose career spanned both the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, and the first African American woman to gain national recognition for her works. Price's twenty-five years in Chicago formed the core of a working life that saw her create three hundred works in diverse genres, including symphonies and orchestral suites, art songs, vocal and choral music, and arrangements of spirituals. Through interviews and a wealth of material from public and private archives, Rae Linda Brown illuminates Price's major works while exploring the considerable depth of her achievement. Brown also traces the life of the extremely private individual from her childhood in Little Rock through her time at the New England Conservatory, her extensive teaching, and her struggles with racism, poverty, and professional jealousies. In addition, Brown provides musicians and scholars with dozens of musical examples.

Opera for the People

Opera for the People
Author: Katherine K. Preston
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 649
Release: 2017
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0199371652

Opera for the People is an in-depth examination of a forgotten chapter in American social and cultural history: the love affair that middle-class Americans had with continental opera (translated into English) in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Author Katherine Preston reveals how-contrary to the existing historiography on the American musical culture of this period-English-language opera not only flourished in the United States during this time, but found its success significantly bolstered by the support of women impresarios, prima-donnas, managers, and philanthropists who provided financial backing to opera companies. This rich and compelling study details the lives and professional activities of several important players in American postbellum opera, including manager Effie Ober, philanthropist Jeannette Thurber, and performers/artistic directors Caroline Richings, Euphrosyne Parepa-Rosa, Clara Louise Kellogg, and "the people's prima donna" Emma Abbott. Drawing from an impressive range of primary sources, including contemporaneous music and theater periodicals, playbills, memoirs, librettos, scores, and reviews and commentary on the performances in digitized newspapers, Preston tells the story of how these and other women influenced the activities of some of the more than one hundred opera companies touring the United States during the second half of the 19th century, performing opera in English for a diverse range of audiences. Countering a pervasive and misguided historical understanding of opera reception in the United States-unduly influenced by modern attitudes about the genre as elite, exclusive, expensive, and of interest only to a niche market-Opera for the People demonstrates the important (and hitherto unsuspected) place of opera in the rich cornucopia of late-century American musical theatre, which would eventually lead to the emergence of American musical comedy.

Sex, Death, and Minuets

Sex, Death, and Minuets
Author: David Yearsley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2019-07-11
Genre: Music
ISBN: 022661784X

“Insightful commentary on the Bach family’s musical life and . . . the culture in which the Bachs lived. . . . Important and fascinating . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice At one time a star in her own right as a singer, Anna Magdalena (1701–60) would go on to become, through her marriage to the older Johann Sebastian Bach, history’s most famous musical wife and mother. The two musical notebooks belonging to her continue to live on, beloved by millions of pianists young and old. Yet the pedagogical utility of this music—long associated with the sound of children practicing and mothers listening—has encouraged a rosy and one-sided view of Anna Magdalena as a model of German feminine domesticity. Sex, Death, and Minuets offers the first in-depth study of these notebooks, reanimating Anna Magdalena as a historical subject—at once pious and bawdy, spirited and tragic. In these pages, we follow Magdalena from young and flamboyant performer to bereft and impoverished widow. David Yearsley explores the notebooks’ entries against the backdrop of the social practices and concerns that women shared in eighteenth-century Lutheran Germany. What emerges is a humane portrait of a musician who embraced the sensuality of song and the uplift of the keyboard, a sometimes ribald wife and oft-bereaved mother who used her cherished musical notebooks for piety and play, humor and devotion—for living and for dying. “Fascinating.” —Laurence Dreyfus, University of Oxford “Yearsley’s account . . . will doubtless stand as the definitive account of the ‘Bachin’ and her notebooks for years to come.” —Bettina Varwig, University of Cambridge “A warm, insightful, and compelling portrait.” —Matthew Dirst, University of Houston

Film, Music, Memory

Film, Music, Memory
Author: Berthold Hoeckner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2019-11-27
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 022664975X

Film has shaped modern society in part by changing its cultures of memory. Film, Music, Memory reveals that this change has rested in no small measure on the mnemonic powers of music. As films were consumed by growing American and European audiences, their soundtracks became an integral part of individual and collective memory. Berthold Hoeckner analyzes three critical processes through which music influenced this new culture of memory: storage, retrieval, and affect. Films store memory through an archive of cinematic scores. In turn, a few bars from a soundtrack instantly recall the image that accompanied them, and along with it, the affective experience of the movie. Hoeckner examines films that reflect directly on memory, whether by featuring an amnesic character, a traumatic event, or a surge of nostalgia. As the history of cinema unfolded, movies even began to recall their own history through quotations, remakes, and stories about how cinema contributed to the soundtrack of people’s lives. Ultimately, Film, Music, Memory demonstrates that music has transformed not only what we remember about the cinematic experience, but also how we relate to memory itself.

Experimentalisms in Practice

Experimentalisms in Practice
Author: Ana R. Alonso-Minutti
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2018
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190842741

Experimentalisms in Practice explores the multiple sites in which experimentalism emerges and becomes meaningful beyond Eurocentric interpretative frameworks. Challenging the notion of experimentalism as defined in conventional narratives, contributors take a broad approach to a wide variety of Latin@ and Latin American music traditions conceived or perceived as experimental. The conversation takes as starting point the 1960s, a decade that marks a crucial political and epistemological moment for Latin America; militant and committed aesthetic practices resonated with this moment, resulting in a multiplicity of artistic and musical experimental expressions. Experimentalisms in Practice responds to recent efforts to reframe and reconceptualize the study of experimental music in terms of epistemological perspective and geographic scope, while also engaging traditional scholarship. This book contributes to the current conversations about music experimentalism while providing new points of entry to further reevaluate the field.

The Voice as Something More

The Voice as Something More
Author: Martha Feldman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2019-09-30
Genre: Music
ISBN: 022664717X

In the contemporary world, voices are caught up in fundamentally different realms of discourse, practice, and culture: between sounding and nonsounding, material and nonmaterial, literal and metaphorical. In The Voice as Something More, Martha Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin tackle these paradoxes with a bold and rigorous collection of essays that look at voice as both object of desire and material object. Using Mladen Dolar’s influential A Voice and Nothing More as a reference point, The Voice as Something More reorients Dolar’s psychoanalytic analysis around the material dimensions of voices—their physicality and timbre, the fleshiness of their mechanisms, the veils that hide them, and the devices that enhance and distort them. Throughout, the essays put the body back in voice. Ending with a new essay by Dolar that offers reflections on these vocal aesthetics and paradoxes, this authoritative, multidisciplinary collection, ranging from Europe and the Americas to East Asia, from classics and music to film and literature, will serve as an essential entry point for scholars and students who are thinking toward materiality.

The Fullness of Time

The Fullness of Time
Author: Matthew S. Champion
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2017-11-13
Genre: Art
ISBN: 022651479X

Over the course of the fifteenth century, the Low Countries transformed Europe's economic, political and cultural life. Innovative and influential cultural practices emerged across the region in flourishing courts, towns, religious houses, guilds and confraternities. Whether in visual culture, music, devotional practice, or communal rituals, the thriving cultures of the Low Countries wrestled with time, both through explicit measurement and reflection, and in the rhythms of social and religious life. This book offers a deeper understanding of how time was structured and experienced by different constituencies through a series of detailed readings of diverse cultural objects and practices, ranging from woodcuts and painted altarpieces, to early print books, and to the use of polyphony in the liturgy. Individual chapters are devoted to life in the university towns of Louvain and Ghent, the liturgical rituals at Cambrai Cathedral, and the rich pageantry that marked the courts of Philip the Good and the new Burgundian rulers. What emerges is a complex temporal landscape in which devotional and secular practices and experiences merged into a new "fullness of time."

The Melody of Time

The Melody of Time
Author: Benedict Taylor
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190206055

Music has been seen since the Romantic era as the quintessentially temporal art, possessing a unique capacity to invoke the human experience of time. The Melody of Time explores the multiple ways in which music may provide insight into the problematics of time, spanning the dynamic century between Beethoven and Elgar.