An autobiographical exploration of the role and meaning of music in our world by one of India's greatest living authors, himself a vocalist and performer. Amit Chaudhuri, novelist, critic, and essayist, is also a musician, trained in the Indian classical vocal tradition but equally fluent as a guitarist and singer in the American folk music style, who has recorded his experimental compositions extensively and performed around the world. A turning point in his life took place when, as a lonely t...
"From horror movie scores to national anthems to the crunchy sound of potato chips, sound and music greatly impact how we feel about our lives and the messages and products we encounter every day. With the right tools and understanding, anyone can cut through the meaningless noise competing for our attention and learn to use sound as a rich storytelling strategy"-- Provided by publisher.
The Oxford Handbook of Social Justice in Music Education (Oxford Handbooks)
Music education has historically had a tense relationship with social justice. One the one hand, educators concerned with music practices have long preoccupied themselves with ideas of open participation and the potentially transformative capacity that musical interaction fosters. On the other hand, they have often done so while promoting and privileging a particular set of musical practices, traditions, and forms of musical knowledge, which has in turn alienated and even excluded many children...
Classical music shows a close relationship to language, and both musicology and philosophy have tended to approach music from that angle, exploring it in terms of expression, representation, and discourse. This book turns that idea on its head. Focusing on the music of Debussy and its legacy in the century since his death, After Debussy offers a groundbreaking new perspective on twentieth-century music that foregrounds a sensory logic of sound over quasi-linguistic ideas of structure or meaning....
Already hugely successful in the States, this is the leading book on music's astonishing power to heal You know that music can affect your mood: it can make you feel happy, enchanted, excited, comforted. But music has an even greater power. Quite simply, music is good for you - physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Particular sounds, tones and rhythms, especially the music of Mozart, can improve your IQ, unlock the creative spirit, and, miraculously, even heal the body. The world's leading e...
The remarkable life of violinist and teacher Shinichi Suzuki, who pioneered an innovative but often-misunderstood philosophy of early childhood education—now known the world over as the Suzuki Method.The name Shinichi Suzuki is synonymous with early childhood musical education. By the time of his death in 1998, countless children around the world had been taught using his methods, with many more to follow. Yet Suzuki’s life and the evolution of his educational vision remain largely unexplored. A...
Why 33? Partly because that's the number of rotations performed by a vinyl album in one minute, and partly because it takes a lot of songs to tell a story which spans seven decades and five continents - to capture the colour and variety of this shape-shifting genre. This is not a list book, rather each of the 33 songs offers a way into a subject, an artist, an era or an idea. The book feels vital, in both senses of the word: necessary and alive. It captures some of the energy that is generated w...
In Hymns for the Fallen, Todd Decker listens closely to forty years of Hollywood combat films produced after Vietnam. Ever a noisy genre, post-Vietnam war films have deployed music and sound to place the audience in the midst of battle and to provoke reflection on the experience of combat. Considering landmark movies-such as Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, and American Sniper-as well as lesser-known films, Decker shows how the domain of s...
A legendary record producer-turned-brain scientist explains why you fall in love with music.This Is What It Sounds Like is a journey into the science and soul of music that reveals the secrets of why your favourite songs move you. But it's also a story of a musical trailblazer who began as a humble audio tech in Los Angeles to became Prince's chief engineer for Purple Rain, and then create other No. 1 hits as one of the most successful female record producers of all time.Now an award-winning pro...
Studies have proven that music has a powerful effect on the intellectual and creative development of children. Simply listening to sounds, tones and rhythms can stimulate brain development, improve language skills, enhance awareness, reduce stress and induce relaxation in children. Each chapter of this book is devoted to a particular age, from prenatal to school age, and parents and teachers alike can access musical guides, practical suggestions and games to play to stimulate children both intel...
Few music lovers realize that the arrangement of notes on today’s pianos was once regarded as a crime against God and nature, or that such legendary thinkers as Pythagoras, Plato, da Vinci, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton and Rousseau played a role in the controversy. Indeed, from the time of the Ancient Greeks through the eras of Renaissance scientists and Enlightenment philosophers, the relationship between the notes of the musical scale was seen as a key to the very nature of the universe...
Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration (Critical Conjunctures in Music and Sound)
by Naomi Waltham-Smith
In what ways is music implicated in the politics of belonging? How is the proper at stake in listening? What role does the ear play in forming a sense of community? Music and Belonging argues that music, at the level of style and form, produces certain modes of listening that in turn reveal the conditions of belonging. Specifically, listening shows the intimacy between two senses of belonging: belonging to a community is predicated on the possession of a particular property or capacity. Somewhat...
Listening to the sound practices of bands and musicians such as the Asian Dub Foundation or M.I.A., and spanning three decades of South Asian dance music production in the UK, Transcultural Sound Practices zooms in on the concrete sonic techniques and narrative strategies in South Asian dance music and investigates sound as part of a wider assemblage of cultural technologies, politics and practices. Carla J. Maier investigates how sounds from Hindi film music tunes or bhangra tracks have been sa...
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Policy (Bloomsbury Handbooks)
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Policy is the first thorough analysis of how policy frames the behavior of audiences, industries, and governments in the production and consumption of popular music. Covering a range of industrial and national contexts, this collection assesses how music policy has become an important arm of government, and a contentious arena of global debate across areas of cultural trade, intellectual property, and mediacultural content. It brings together a diverse ra...
Desire in Chromatic Harmony (Oxford Studies in Music Theory)
by Kenneth M. Smith
How does musical harmony engage listeners in relations of desire? Where does this desire come from? Author Kenneth Smith seeks to answer these questions by analyzing works from the turn of the twentieth- century that are both harmonically enriched and psychologically complex. Desire in Chromatic Harmony yields a new theory of how chromatic chord progressions direct the listener on intricate journeys through harmonic space, mirroring the tensions of the psyche found in Schopenhauer, Freud, Lacan,...
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 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...
'Shows the ways in which we are all, always, having to reimagine the story of our lives' Refinery29 'Subtle, astute' Observer 'A moving investigation of love, loss and parenthood' Esquire 'Mind-blowing . . . brilliant and fearless' Elif Batuman The perfect song. The biggest dream. The love of her life. It's the early days of the new millennium, and Laura has arrived in New York City's East Village in the hopes of recording her first album. A songwriter with a one-of-a-kind talent, she's just...
The Genesis and Structure of the Hungarian Jazz Diaspora (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music)
by Adam Havas
In Hungary, jazz was at the forefront of heated debates sparked by the racialised tensions between national music traditions and newly emerging forms of popular culture that challenged the prevailing status quo within the cultural hierarchies of different historical eras. Drawing on an extensive, four-year field research project, including ethnographic observations and 29 in-depth interviews, this book is the first to explore the hidden diasporic narrative(s) of Hungarian jazz through the system...
Is it possible we’ve all been missing something extraordinary in life? Can we really discover and understand the secret to everything? The answer is surprising, and what we’re about to learn will wake us up to a reality most of us never knew existed. The reason we’re so oblivious is because we’ve all been operating at human speed, relying on our own physical power and our five senses. But there is something extremely important we’ve all been missing. It holds the key to everything good—the k...
Traces the history of music programs in U.S. prisons and engages in dialogue with current programs to hypothesize how music functions in carceral settings. The authors recommend principles to support personal and social growth for people experiencing incarceration and build social awareness of the harmful aspects of the prison industrial complex.