Singing Utopia

Singing Utopia
Author: Ben Macpherson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2024-12-03
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0197557635

Singing Utopia is an original study of voice in musical theatre. Rather than focusing on how actors sing or analysing voices using established approaches found in opera studies, this book offers readers ways to understand musical theatre voices from a cultural perspective. It argues that musical theatre singing allows listeners and audiences to escape their everyday lives; and that voices can 'be' utopian. It then considers what this means and uncovers some paradoxes and difficulties in this idea. Introducing a new set of terms, it provides a way to listen to, think about, and even perform, voice in popular musical theatre.

Strains of Utopia

Strains of Utopia
Author: Caryl Flinn
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 206
Release: 1992-06-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1400820650

When Dmitri Tiomkin thanked Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, and Richard Wagner upon accepting the Academy Award for his score of The High and the Mighty in 1954, he was honoring a romantic style that had characterized Hollywood's golden age of film composition from the mid-1930s to the 1950s. Exploring elements of romanticism in film scores of composers ranging from Erich Korngold to Bernard Herrmann, Caryl Flinn argues that films tended to link music to the sense of an idealized, lost past. Just as the score of Gone with the Wind captured the grandeur of the antebellum South, others prompted flashbacks or suggested moments of emotional intensity and sensuality. Maintaining that many films treated this utopian impulse as a female trait, Flinn investigates the ways Hollywood genre films--particularly film noir and melodrama--sustained the connection between music and nostalgia, utopia, and femininity. The author situates Hollywood film scores within a romantic aesthetic ideology, noting compositional and theoretical affinities between the film composers and Wagner, with emphasis on authorship, creativity, and femininity. Pointing to the lasting impact of romanticism on film music, Flinn draws from poststructuralist, Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic criticism to offer fresh insights into the broad theme of music as an excessive utopian condition.

Chicanx Utopias

Chicanx Utopias
Author: Luis Alvarez
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2022-02-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 147732450X

2023 Honorable Mention Best History Book, International Latino Book Awards Broad and encompassing examination of Chicanx popular culture since World War II and the utopian visions it articulated Amid the rise of neoliberalism, globalization, and movements for civil rights and global justice in the post–World War II era, Chicanxs in film, music, television, and art weaponized culture to combat often oppressive economic and political conditions. They envisioned utopias that, even if never fully realized, reimagined the world and linked seemingly disparate people and places. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Chicanx popular culture forged a politics of the possible and gave rise to utopian dreams that sprang from everyday experiences. In Chicanx Utopias, Luis Alvarez offers a broad study of these utopian visions from the 1950s to the 2000s. Probing the film Salt of the Earth, brown-eyed soul music, sitcoms, poster art, and borderlands reggae music, he examines how Chicanx pop culture, capable of both liberation and exploitation, fostered interracial and transnational identities, engaged social movements, and produced varied utopian visions with divergent possibilities and limits. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall, and the Zapatista movement, this book reveals how Chicanxs articulated pop cultural utopias to make sense of, challenge, and improve the worlds they inhabited.

Utopia

Utopia
Author: David Ayers
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 505
Release: 2015-12-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110433001

Utopian hope and dystopian despair are characteristic features of modernism and the avant-garde. Readings of the avant-garde have frequently sought to identify utopian moments coded in its works and activities as optimistic signs of a possible future social life, or as the attempt to preserve hope against the closure of an emergent dystopian present. The fourth volume of the EAM series, European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, casts light on the history, theory and actuality of the utopian and dystopian strands which run through European modernism and the avant-garde from the late 19th to the 21st century. The book’s varied and carefully selected contributions, written by experts from around 20 countries, seek to answer such questions as: · how have modernism and the avant-garde responded to historical circumstance in mapping the form of possible futures for humanity? · how have avant-garde and modernist works presented ideals of living as alternatives to the present? · how have avant-gardists acted with or against the state to remodel human life or to resist the instrumental reduction of life by administration and industrialisation?

Listening for Utopia in Ernst Bloch's Musical Philosophy

Listening for Utopia in Ernst Bloch's Musical Philosophy
Author: Benjamin M. Korstvedt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2010-07
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0521896150

Korstvedt explains key concepts from Bloch's musical philosophy, making his complex ideas accessible for modern musical scholars.

American Utopia

American Utopia
Author: David Byrne
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2020-10-27
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1635576695

From former Talking Heads frontman and multimedia visionary David Byrne and revered bestselling author, illustrator, and artist Maira Kalman--an inspiring celebration in words and art of the connections between us all. Don't miss the Spike Lee film of the Broadway hit American Utopia--on HBO. A Beat Most Anticipated Graphic Novel of Fall 2020 A joyful collaboration between old friends David Byrne and Maira Kalman, American Utopia offers readers an antidote to cynicism, bursting with pathos, humanism, and hope--featuring his words and lyrics brought to life with more than 150 of her colorful paintings. The text is drawn from David Byrne's American Utopia, which has become a hit Broadway show and is now a film from Spike Lee on HBO. The four-color artwork, by Maira Kalman, which she created for the Broadway show's curtain, is composed of small moments, expressions, gestures, and interactions that together offer a portrait of daily life and coexistence. With their creative talents combined, American Utopia is a salvo for kindness and a call for jubilation, a reminder to sing, dance, and waste not a moment. Beautifully designed and edited by Alex Kalman, American Utopia is a balm for the soul from two of the world's most extraordinary artists.

Reading Utopia in Chronicles

Reading Utopia in Chronicles
Author: Steven Schweitzer
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2009-03-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567363171

This examination employs a literary approach in an attempt to address the coherence of Chronicles as a whole.

Utopia’s Pirates

Utopia’s Pirates
Author: Victor Sasson
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 61
Release: 2021-07-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1663222568

Utopia’s Pirates satirizes the founders and agents of Political Zionism and the deceptive and violent means they employed in establishing their militant Rat Utopia in the Holy Land. The process involved illegal immigration, smuggling of arms, bombings, kidnapping, sabotage, and massacres - all culminating in driving the British out of the land and forcing the indigenous inhabitants to flee for their lives. What was finally achieved has been falsely paraded as the only democracy in the Middle East, when in fact it is the only apartheid state in the region. Will this sham Utopia last for a thousand years? Utopia’s Pirates is a satire about Zionist terrorism, interspersed with propaganda slogans, humorous verses, and lines taken from recognisable songs.

Utopia as Method

Utopia as Method
Author: R. Levitas
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 443
Release: 2013-07-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137314257

Utopia should be understood as a method rather than a goal. This book rehabilitates utopia as a repressed dimension of the sociological and in the process produces the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society, a provisional, reflexive and dialogic method for exploring alternative possible futures.

Hope and Wish Image in Music Technology

Hope and Wish Image in Music Technology
Author: David P. Rando
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2016-11-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 3319340158

This book proposes that new music technologies attract unconscious desires for socialism and collectivity, enabling millions of people living under capitalism to dream of repressed social alternatives. Grounded in the philosophical writings of Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin, the book examines file sharing technologies, streaming services, and media players, as well as their historical antecedents, such as the player piano, cassette tape, radio and compact disc, alongside interpretations of fiction, memoir, and albums. Through the concept of wish images—the unconscious hopes and desires for social alternatives that gather around new technologies—the book identifies the repressed pre- and post-capitalist urges that attend our music technologies. While these desires typically remain unconscious and tend to pass away not only unmet but also unrecognized, Hope and Wish Image in Music Technology attempts to bring wishes for social alternatives to the surface at an auspicious moment of technological transition.