Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis

Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis
Author: Thomas Christensen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2019-05-27
Genre: Music
ISBN: 022662692X

Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis explores the concept of musical tonality through the writings of the Belgian musicologist François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1867), who was singularly responsible for theorizing and popularizing the term in the nineteenth century. Thomas Christensen weaves a rich story in which tonality emerges as a theoretical construct born of anxiety and alterity for Europeans during this time as they learned more about “other” musics and alternative tonal systems. Tonality became a central vortex in which French musicians thought—and argued—about a variety of musical repertoires, be they contemporary European musics of the stage, concert hall, or church, folk songs from the provinces, microtonal scale systems of Arabic and Indian music, or the medieval and Renaissance music whose notational traces were just beginning to be deciphered by scholars. Fétis’s influential writings offer insight into how tonality ingrained itself within nineteenth-century music discourse, and why it has continued to resonate with uncanny prescience throughout the musical upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis

Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis
Author: Thomas Christensen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2019-06-14
Genre: Music
ISBN: 022662708X

Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis explores the concept of musical tonality through the writings of the Belgian musicologist François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1867), who was singularly responsible for theorizing and popularizing the term in the nineteenth century. Thomas Christensen weaves a rich story in which tonality emerges as a theoretical construct born of anxiety and alterity for Europeans during this time as they learned more about “other” musics and alternative tonal systems. Tonality became a central vortex in which French musicians thought—and argued—about a variety of musical repertoires, be they contemporary European musics of the stage, concert hall, or church, folk songs from the provinces, microtonal scale systems of Arabic and Indian music, or the medieval and Renaissance music whose notational traces were just beginning to be deciphered by scholars. Fétis’s influential writings offer insight into how tonality ingrained itself within nineteenth-century music discourse, and why it has continued to resonate with uncanny prescience throughout the musical upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Hearing Homophony

Hearing Homophony
Author: Megan Kaes Long
Publisher:
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2020
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190851902

In Hearing Homophony, Megan Kaes Long presents a groundbreaking model for understanding tonality and its origins, examining it through the lens of popular songs of late-Renaissance Western Europe.

Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism

Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism
Author: Ian Bent
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1996-08-28
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780521551021

Twelve brilliant historians of theory probe the mind of the Romantic era in its thinking about music.

Sound Knowledge

Sound Knowledge
Author: J. Q. Davies
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 022640207X

What does it mean to hear scientifically? What does it mean to see musically? This volume uncovers a new side to the long nineteenth century in London, a hidden history in which virtuosic musical entertainment and scientific discovery intersected in remarkable ways. Sound Knowledge examines how scientific truth was accrued by means of visual and aural experience, and, in turn, how musical knowledge was located in relation to empirical scientific practice. James Q. Davies and Ellen Lockhart gather work by leading scholars to explore a crucial sixty-year period, beginning with Charles Burney’s ambitious General History of Music, a four-volume study of music around the globe, and extending to the Great Exhibition of 1851, where musical instruments were assembled alongside the technologies of science and industry in the immense glass-encased collections of the Crystal Palace. Importantly, as the contributions show, both the power of science and the power of music relied on performance, spectacle, and experiment. Ultimately, this volume sets the stage for a new picture of modern disciplinarity, shining light on an era before the division of aural and visual knowledge.

Sound and Affect

Sound and Affect
Author: Judith Lochhead
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2021-04-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 022675801X

"Studies of affect and emotions have blossomed in recent decades across the humanities, neurosciences, and social sciences. In music scholarship, they have often built on the discipline's attention to what music theorists since the Renaissance have described as music's unique ability to arouse passions in listeners. In this timely volume, the editors seek to combine this 'affective turn' with the 'sound turn' in the humanities, which has profitably shifted attention from the visual to the aural, as well as a more recent 'philosophical turn' in music studies. Accordingly, the volume maps out a new territory for research at the intersection of music, philosophy, and sound studies. The essays in Sound and Affect look at objects and experiences in which correlations of sound and affect reside, in music and beyond: the voice as it speaks, stutters, cries, or sings; music, whether vocal, instrumental, or electronic; our sonic environments, whether natural or man-made, and our responses to them. As argued here, far from being stable, correlations of sound and affect are influenced by factors as diverse as race, class, gender, and social and political experience. Examining these factors is key to the project, which gathers contributions from a cross-disciplinary roster of scholars including both established as well as a wealth of new voices. The essays are grouped thematically into sections that move from politics and ethics, to reflections on pre-and post-human "musicking," to the notions of affective listening and music temporalities, to are examination of historical understandings of music and affect. This agenda-setting collection will prove indispensable to anyone interested in innovative approaches to the study of sound and its many intersection with affect and emotions"--

Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz

Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz
Author: Francesca Brittan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2017-09-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107136326

An exploration of fantastic soundworlds in nineteenth-century France, providing a fresh aesthetic and compositional context for Berlioz and others.

Mozart's Music of Friends

Mozart's Music of Friends
Author: Edward Klorman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2016-04-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1107093651

This study analyzes chamber music from Mozart's time within its highly social salon-performance context.

The Modern Invention of Medieval Music

The Modern Invention of Medieval Music
Author: Daniel Leech-Wilkinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2002-10-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521818704

A challenging book which questions how much is really known about the way medieval music sounded.

The Arithmetic of Listening

The Arithmetic of Listening
Author: Kyle Gann
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2019-09-16
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0252051424

"Tuning is the secret lens through which the history of music falls into focus," says Kyle Gann. Yet in Western circles, no other musical issue is so ignored, so taken for granted, so shoved into the corners of musical discourse. A classroom essential and an invaluable reference, The Arithmetic of Listening offers beginners the grounding in music theory necessary to find their own way into microtonality and the places it may take them. Moving from ancient Greece to the present, Kyle Gann delves into the infinite tunings available to any musician who feels straitjacketed by obedience to standardized Western European tuning. He introduces the concept of the harmonic series and demonstrates its relationship to equal-tempered and well-tempered tuning. He also explores recent experimental tuning models that exploit smaller intervals between pitches to create new sounds and harmonies. Systematic and accessible, The Arithmetic of Listening provides a much-needed primer for the wide range of tuning systems that have informed Western music. Audio examples demonstrating the musical ideas in The Arithmetic of Listening can be found at: https://www.kylegann.com/Arithmetic.html