Cybermedia (New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media)
We're experiencing a time when digital technologies and advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and big data are redefining what it means to be human. How do these advancements affect contemporary media and music? This collection traces how media, with a focus on sound and image, engages with these new technologies. It bridges the gap between science and the humanities by pairing humanists' close readings of contemporary media with scientists' discussions of the science and math that info...
Focal Impulse Theory (Musical Meaning and Interpretation)
by John Paul Ito
Music is surrounded by movement, from the arching back of the guitarist to the violinist swaying with each bow stroke. To John Paul Ito, these actions are not just a visual display; rather, they reveal what it really means for musicians to move with the beat, organizing the flow of notes from beat to beat and shaping the sound produced. By developing "focal impulse theory," Ito shows how a performer's choices of how to move with the meter can transform the music's expressive contours. Change the...
This is a chapter taken from Alex Ross's groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest is Noise. Ross shows how the flowering of avant-garde music in early twentieth-century Russia was co-opted, corrupted and crushed by the dictatorial ideology of Stalin's Russia, with great composers including Shostakovich and Prokofiev forced to choose between collaboration, exile or ostracism. Now a major festival running throughout 2013 at London's Southbank, The R...
Moving back through Dewey, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Rousseau, the lineage of Western music education finds its origins in Plato and Pythagoras. Yet theories not rooted in the ancient Greek tradition are all but absent. A Way of Music Education provides a much-needed intervention, integrating ancient Chinese thought into the canon of music education in a structured, systematized, and philosophical way. The book's three central sources - the Yijing (The Book of Changes), Confucianism, and Daoism...
This is a chapter from Alex Ross's groundbreaking history of twentieth-century classical music, 'The Rest is Noise'. Further extracts are available as digital shorts, accompanying the London Southbank festival programme. How can composition in the twentieth century be summarised? Styles of every description - minimalism, post-minimalism, electronic music, laptop music, Internet music, appropriations of rock, pop and hip-hop, experimental folkloristic music in Latin America, the Far Eas...
In the context of a shifting domestic and international status quo that was evolving in the decades following World War II, French audiences used jazz as a means of negotiating a wide range of issues that were pressing to them and to their fellow citizens. Despite the fact that jazz was fundamentally linked to the multicultural through its origins in the hands of African-American musicians, happenings within the French jazz public reflected much about France's postwar society. In the minds of ma...
Reflections on the Music of Ennio Morricone: Fame and Legacy provides new contextualized perspectives on Ennio Morricone's position as a radical composer working at the cutting edge of music within the frame work of his cinematic compositions. The Italian composer has reached world fame as the creator of some 500 film scores and hundreds more arrangements for commercial recordings; however, Sciannameo argues that Morricone's legacy must include his concert works, a catalogued list of more than 1...
Sounds, Screens, Speakers provides a broadly comprehensive survey of the emerging field of music and media. Music has been present at the advent of nearly every new media form since the turn of the 20th century. Whether we look at the start of sound recording, film, television or the Internet, music has been a crucial participant in the social changes brought about by these new tools for making and listening to music. This book examines such changes starting in the late 19th century to the prese...
Nietzsche'S the Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner (Edinburgh Critical Guides to Nietzsche)
by Ryan Harvey and Aaron Ridley
Ryan Harvey and Aaron Ridley put Wagner centre-stage to show why he mattered so much to Nietzsche. Looking at both The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner, they identify and define the trajectory of a number of overarching themes modernity, decadence and Wagner as the sign of decline within Nietzsche's work as a whole and then demonstrate how they crystallise into Nietzsche's final and most substantial discussion of Wagner in The Case of Wagner.Assuming no prior knowledge of Nietzsch...
The music business is a multifaceted, transnational industry that operates within complex and rapidly changing political, economic, cultural and technological contexts. The mode and manner of how music is created, obtained, consumed and exploited is evolving rapidly. It is based on relationships that can be both complimentary and at times confrontational, and around roles that interact, overlap and sometimes merge, reflecting the competing and coinciding interests of creative artists and music i...
Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung is one of the greatest works of art created in modern times, and has fascinated both critics and devotees for over a century and a half. No recent study has examined the meaning of Wagner's masterpiece with the attention to detail and intellectual power that Roger Scruton brings to it in this inspiring account. The Ring of Truth is an exploration of the drama, music, symbolism and philosophy of the Ring from a writer whose knowledge and understanding of the...
Girls Aloud record the Pointer Sisters' 'Jump'; Atomic Kitten record Blondie's 'The Tide is High' and Kool and the Gang's 'Ladies Night'' Westlife record Billy Joel's 'Uptown Girl', Phil Collin's 'Against All Odds', Abba's 'I Have a Dream', and Barry Manilow's 'Mandy'-Thanks to the boom in TV-created pop stars, ancient pop classics have never had it so good, with 'Unchained Melody' massacred afresh by Gareth Gates and 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' eviscerated by Hear'Say. But back in pop's early...
As the brain child of Jack White, The Blue Series started in tandem with Third Man Records in 2009. The series of 7-inch singles were recorded in the same studio, with the same producer (White), and photos taken in the same locale (TMR s Blue Room). Whether Beck, Tom Jones, Stephen Colbert, the polarizing Insane Clown Posse, or the debut of previously unknown performers, The Blue Series epitomizes TMR/Jack White. With written contributions from David Fricke and every Blue Series recording artist...
The Charlatans' Tim Burgess invites you to the greatest listening party of all time. In 2020 when the world was forced to hit pause on live in-person gigs, Tim Burgess found an ingenious way to bring people together by inviting artists and bands, from Paul McCartney and New Order to Michael Kiwanuka and Kylie, to host real-time album playbacks via Twitter.Relive 100 of the most memorable listening parties here with stories from bands and fans, rarely seen backstage images, and unique insider inf...
Music in World War II
How can music withstand the death and destruction brought on by war? Global conflicts of the 20th century fundamentally transformed not only national boundaries, power relations, and global economies, but also the arts and culture of every nation involved. An important, unacknowledged aspect of these conflicts is that they have unique musical soundtracks. Music in World War II explores how music and sound took on radically different dimensions in the United States and Europe before, during, and...
As heard on Radcliffe and Maconie, Danny Baker and Simon Mayo‘Fascinating from start to finish’ Simon Mayo, Radio 2The age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has passed. Like the cowboy, the idea of the rock star lives on in our imaginations.What did we see in them? Swagger. Recklessness. Sexual charisma. Damn-the-torpedoes self-belief. A certain way of carrying themselves. Good hair. Interesting shoes. Talent we wished we had.What did we want of them? To be larger than life but also...