Pieces of the Musical World: Sounds and Cultures

Pieces of the Musical World: Sounds and Cultures
Author: Rachel Harris
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2015-05-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1317935039

Pieces of the Musical World: Sounds and Cultures is a fieldwork-based ethnomusicology textbook that introduces a series of musical worlds each through a single "piece." It focuses on a musical sound or object that provides a springboard from which to tell a story about a particular geographic region, introducing key aspects of the cultures in which it is embedded, contexts of performance, the musicians who create or perform it, the journeys it has travelled, and its changing meanings. A collaborative venture by staff and research ethnomusicologists associated with the Department of Music at SOAS, University of London, Pieces of the Musical World is organized thematically. Three broad themes: "Place", "Spirituality" and "Movement" help teachers to connect contemporary issues in ethnomusicology, including soundscape studies, music and the environment, the politics of identity, diaspora and globalization, and music and the body. Each of the book's fourteen chapters highlights a single musical "piece" broadly defined, spanning the range of "traditional," "popular", "classical" and "contemporary" musics, and even sounds which might be considered "not music." Primary sources and a web site hosting recordings with interactive listening guides, a glossary of musical terms and interviews all help to create a unique and dynamic learning experience of our musical world.

Pieces of the Musical World: Sounds and Cultures

Pieces of the Musical World: Sounds and Cultures
Author: Rachel Harris
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2015-05-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1317935020

Pieces of the Musical World: Sounds and Cultures is a fieldwork-based ethnomusicology textbook that introduces a series of musical worlds each through a single "piece." It focuses on a musical sound or object that provides a springboard from which to tell a story about a particular geographic region, introducing key aspects of the cultures in which it is embedded, contexts of performance, the musicians who create or perform it, the journeys it has travelled, and its changing meanings. A collaborative venture by staff and research ethnomusicologists associated with the Department of Music at SOAS, University of London, Pieces of the Musical World is organized thematically. Three broad themes: "Place", "Spirituality" and "Movement" help teachers to connect contemporary issues in ethnomusicology, including soundscape studies, music and the environment, the politics of identity, diaspora and globalization, and music and the body. Each of the book's fourteen chapters highlights a single musical "piece" broadly defined, spanning the range of "traditional," "popular", "classical" and "contemporary" musics, and even sounds which might be considered "not music." Primary sources and a web site hosting recordings with interactive listening guides, a glossary of musical terms and interviews all help to create a unique and dynamic learning experience of our musical world.

Pieces of the Musical World

Pieces of the Musical World
Author: Rachel A. Harris
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Ethnomusicology
ISBN: 9780415723107

In Pieces of the Musical World: Sounds and Cultures, each piece is a musical sound or object that provides a springboard from which to tell a story about a particular geographic region. A collaborative venture by staff and research associated with the Department of Music at SOAS, University of London, the text provides an in-depth yet personal treatment of these key musical pieces, which, when combined with an interactive companion website, mirroring the book's thematic framework, that features audio and video recordings, listening guides, a glossary of musical terms, interviews, and 3D models of instruments and maps, creates for students a complete and enhanced experience of the musical world.

Living in Worlds of Music

Living in Worlds of Music
Author: Minette Mans
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2009-09-22
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9048127068

Informed by her in-depth ethnomusical knowledge, the result of detailed fieldwork, Mans’s book is about musical worlds and how we as people inhabit them. The book asserts that an understanding of our musical worlds can be a transformative educational tool that could have a significant role to play in multicultural music and arts education. She explores the way in which musical expression, with its myriad cultural variations, reveals much about identity and cultural norms, and shows how particular musical sounds are aesthetically related to these norms. The author goes further to suggest that similar systems can be detected across cultures, while each world remains colored by a distinctive soundscape. Mans also looks at the way each cultural soundscape is a symbolic manifestation of a society’s collective cognition, sorting musical behavior and sounds into clusters and patterns that fulfill each society’s requirements. She probes the fact that in today’s globalized and mobile world, as people move from one society to another, cross-cultural acts and hybrids result in a number of new aesthetics. Finally, in addition to three personal narratives by musicians from different continents, the author has invited scholars from diverse specializations and locations to comment on different sections of the book, opening up a critical dialogue with voices from different parts of the globe. Musical categorization, identity, values, aesthetic evaluation, creativity, curriculum, assessment and teacher education are some of the issues tackled in this manner.

Musical Revolutions

Musical Revolutions
Author: Stuart Isacoff
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2022-06-07
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0525658645

From the critically acclaimed author of Temperament, a narrative account of the most defining moments in musical history—classical and jazz—all of which forever altered Western culture "A fascinating journey that begins with the origins of musical notation and travels through the centuries reaching all the way to our time.”—Semyon Bychkov, chief conductor and music director of the Czech Philharmonic The invention of music notation by a skittish Italian monk in the eleventh century. The introduction of multilayered hymns in the Middle Ages. The birth of opera in a Venice rebelling against the church’s pious restraints. Baroque, Romantic, and atonal music; bebop and cool jazz; Bach and Liszt; Miles Davis and John Coltrane. In telling the exciting story of Western music’s evolution, Stuart Isacoff explains how music became entangled in politics, culture, and economics, giving rise to new eruptions at every turn, from the early church’s attempts to bind its followers by teaching them to sing in unison to the global spread of American jazz through the Black platoons of the First World War. The author investigates questions like: When does noise become music? How do musical tones reflect the natural laws of the universe? Why did discord become the primary sound of modernity? Musical Revolutions is a book replete with the stories of our most renowned musical artists, including notable achievements of people of color and women, whose paths to success were the most difficult.

The Music in World Cultures Collection of Instruments

The Music in World Cultures Collection of Instruments
Author: Drew Michael Kelly
Publisher:
Total Pages: 46
Release: 2007
Genre: Musical instruments
ISBN:

"This project is a presentation of the musical instruments in the collection of Music in World Cultures, Inc. ... In this paper, I present this collection with pictures, cultural details, sounds and stories so readers can connect with people in other cultures to some extent. The first part of this paper deals with what the classification of musical instruments is all about and what kinds of information should be included. This idea is expanded in the literature review section, where I have reviewed over thirty-five scholarly papers and books to shed light on different presentations of musical instruments. The three areas I cover are surveys and region studies, museum collections, and scholarly treatises on classification ... The remaining parts are the presentation of the instruments."--leaf x.

Music of the Peoples of the World

Music of the Peoples of the World
Author: William Alves
Publisher: Schirmer G Books
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2010
Genre: Education
ISBN:

World music cultures: an introduction -- Pitch and melody -- Rhythm and loudness -- Texture -- Timbre and musical instruments -- Sub-Saharan Africa -- The Middle East and North Africa -- Central Asia -- India -- China -- Japan -- Indonesia -- Eastern Europe -- Western Europe -- Latin America -- North America.

Focus

Focus
Author: Sydney Hutchinson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2019
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9781315106052

Focus: Music of the Caribbean presents the most important issues of Caribbean musical history and current practice, discussing thought-provoking questions in a student-friendly fashion. It uses current ethnomusicological research on Caribbean music to tell the stories of Caribbean history--those of colonialism and neocolonialism, race and nationalism, marginalization and globalization--and to explore that history's continuing impact on the lives, cultures, musics, and dance of modern-day people in the Caribbean and beyond. In three parts, the text presents an embodied understanding of the sounds, rhythms, and movements that exemplify the history, culture, and politics of Caribbean music: I. Caribbean Music and Caribbean History establishes a framework for thinking about Caribbean musical history and the roles race and migration play II. Music and Dance in Caribbean Societies considers how contrasting forms of dance music reconcile competing ideas about Caribbean identities past and present III. Focusing In: The Social Lives of Musical Instruments in Merengue Típico explores the music of the Dominican Cibao region through a focus of the genre's dominant musical instruments Accessible to all students regardless of musical background, Focus: Music of the Caribbean is bolstered by web resources, including more than sixty detailed listening guides and accompanying playlists, vocabulary lists, and student quizzes. Discussion questions and activities for each chapter are featured in the text.

The Evolution of Music through Culture and Science

The Evolution of Music through Culture and Science
Author: Peter Townsend
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2019-11-25
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0192587854

The Evolution of Music by Culture and Science aims to recognise the impact of science on music, why it occurs, how we respond, and even to tentatively see if we can predict future developments. Technology has played an immense role in the development of music as it has enabled the production of new sounds, introduced new instruments and continuously improved and modified existing ones. Printing, musical notation, and modern computer aids to composition, plus recordings and electronic transmission have equally enabled us to have access to music from across the world. Such changes, whether just more powerful pianos, or new sounds as from the saxophone, have inspired composers and audiences alike. Acoustics and architecture play similar roles as they changed the scale and performance of concert halls, and with the advent of electronics, they enabled vast pop music festivals. No aspect of modern music making has been untouched by the synergy with scientific innovation. This is not a one-way interaction as the early attempts to make recordings were a major motivating force to design the electronics for amplifiers and these in turn inspired and enabled the designs of semiconductor electronics and modern computer technology. To appreciate the impact of technology on music does not require any prior scientific background as the concepts are invariably extremely simple and are presented here without technical detail. Understanding music and why we like different genres is far more complex, as this involves our personal background and taste. Both aspects change with time, and there is no contradiction in enjoying items as diverse as baroque madrigals, symphonies, jazz or pop music, or music from totally different cultures.

Music in America

Music in America
Author: Adelaida Reyes
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2005
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

Music in America is one of several case-study volumes that can be used along with Thinking Musically, the core book in the Global Music Series. Thinking Musically incorporates music from many diverse cultures and establishes the framework for exploring the practice of music around the world. It sets the stage for an array of case-study volumes, each of which focuses on a single area of the world. Each case study uses the contemporary musical situation as a point of departure, covering historical information and traditions as they relate to the present. America's music is a perennial work in progress. Music in America looks at both the roots of American musical identity and its many manifestations, seeking to answer the complex question: "What does American music sound like?" Focusing on three themes--identity, diversity, and unity--it explores where America's music comes from, who makes it, and for what purpose. Rather than chronologically tracing America's musical history, author Adelaida Reyes considers how musical culture is shaped by space and time, by geography and history, by social, economic, and political factors, and by people who use music to express themselves within a community. Introducing the diversity that dominates the contemporary American musical landscape, Reyes draws on a dazzling range of musical styles--from ethnic and popular music idioms to contemporary art music--to highlight the ways in which sounds from various cultural origins come to share a national identity. Packaged with a 65-minute CD containing examples of the music discussed in the book, Music in America features guided listening and hands-on activities that allow readers to become active participants in the music.