A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Composers have used formalized procedures to create music throughout history. With the advent of the computer, algorithmic composition allows composers not only to create and experiment with different formalisms, but to hear and evaluate results quickly. Often in algorithmic composition, the composer has only a vague idea how the output will sound, but because the input is highly automated, the composer can make adjustments to take advantage of happy accidents, program bugs, and other creative sources of sound.
Algorithmic Composition: A Guide to Composing Music with Nyquistprovides an overview of procedural approaches to music generation. It introduces programming concepts through many examples written using the Nyquist system for music composition and sound synthesis. Nyquist is freely available software, and over 100 program examples from this book are available in electronic form. Readers will be well equipped to develop their own algorithms for composition.
Music students who are learning about computer music and electronic music will all be interested in this innovative book, as generative music becomes an important part of the future of the discipline. Students and scholars in computer science will also find much to interest them, in a straightforward and fun way.
The theoretical constants Narmour uses are context-free and, therefore, applicable to all styles of melody. He places considerable emphasis on the listener's cognitive performance (that is, fundamental melodic perception as opposed to acquired musical competence). He concentrates almost exclusively on low-level, note-to-note relations. The result is a highly generalized theory useful in researching all manner of psychological and music-theoretic problems concerned with the analysis and cognition of melody.
"In this innovative, landmark book, a distinguished music theorist draws extensively from a variety of disciplines, in particular from cognitive psychology and music theory, to develop an elegant and persuasive framework for the understanding of melody. This book should be read by all scholars with a serious interest in music."—Diana Deutsch, Editor, Music Perception
Faced with severe technological constraints on system memory, composers of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) sought ways to disguise repetition in music that repeats extensively. Their efforts gave rise to a set of compositional techniques for creating the illusion of variety.
This book distills these techniques into a theory of harmony and form for the analysis of NES music. It then uses this theory to analyze five landmark scores of the NES era: Super Mario Bros., Dragon Warrior, Metroid, Mega Man 2, and Silver Surfer. The book also includes a detailed description of the NES hardware and its attendant constraints, highlighting the ever-evolving dialogue between technology, commercial demand, and artistic sensibility that characterizes video game music of the 1980s and 1990s.
Applications of Research in Music Behavior stresses the practical applications and implications of investigating music behavior in a systematic, objective manner. Specifically, the book focuses on factors influencing the teaching of children; efficient methods for instructing future teachers; elements affecting musical perception, likes, and dislikes; and innovative efforts to investigate new areas of study. Recent studies by twenty-six nationally known educators that use objective strategies associated with experimental and behavioral research are presented to illustrate how people learn about music and how people are taught to make music.
The research studies are introduced by an article emphasizing the usefulness of research literature in devising a teaching strategy and are grouped into four sections: Teaching Music to Children, Teaching Future Teachers, Preference and Perception, and New Horizons. The concluding article is an allegorical proposal for balance and perspective in the consideration of music education.
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
What does a life with art offer that a life without art does not? Art and Freedom asserts that the fundamental point of the enterprise of art is the creation and delivery of values that are not singularly available in the nonart world.
E. E. Sleinis discusses visual art, literature, music, theater, and other art forms, arguing that as art both liberates and provides new points of focus and awareness, the art enterprise depends on a positive freeing from the nonart world, rather than on mere addition to it.
Art and Freedom introduces a novel classificatory system for representation, expression, and formalist theories of art. Sleinis argues that a characteristic defect of contemporary theories of art is their neglect of the issue of value. Challenging these reductive, formalist notions of art, he emphasizes the potential, and the need, for art to evolve and make progress in ways comparable to the sciences, albeit on a very different model.
A smart blend of incisive commentary and illuminating philosophy, Art and Freedom provides a useful context for transforming a sometimes baffling medium into a means of fostering personal growth and creating and sharing values.
The Art of Accompanying and Coaching was first published in 1965. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Kurt Adler, former conductor and chorus master of the Metropolitan Opera, provides a comprehensive guide to musical accompanying and coaching, based in his extensive experience, which will be helpful, if not indispensable, to music teachers, students, coaches, accompanists, orchestral and choral conductors, and performing vocal and instrumental artists.
The first part of the book gives the historical and technical background of the subject and explains in detail the mechanics of string instruments, piano, celeste, organ, harmonium, and voice. The next section offers a thorough guide to the singing diction of five languages— Italian, Latin, French, German, and English. The author continues with a discussion of the elements of musical style, describing, with the use of ample musical illustrations, tempo, rhythm, dynamics, phrasing and articulation, and ornamentation. This section closes with an analysis of the German lied style and the French art song style.
Mr. Adler goes on to synthesize the various elements of accompanying and coaching. He stresses the importance of psychological and spiritual rapport between accompanists and artist and shows ways of achieving this. He explains the differences and similarities among opera, oratorio, and song coaching. In a section on program arranging, he offers advice about planning concerts of various kinds, citing examples of programs given by outstanding artists. He writes about particular aspects of accompanying — self accompanying, the difference between piano accompanying and soloistic piano playing, and accompanying for singers, instrumentalists, and dancers. In conclusion, he describes the qualities of an ideal accompanist and the rewards derived from excellence in performance.
University and college music departments, schools of music, choral groups, voice teachers, singers, pianists, and other musicians will find the book of inestimable value, either as a text or as a reference work. It will be especially helpful to pianists who aspire to become accompanists.
Percussionist Thomas Siwe organizes and analyzes the groundbreaking musical literature that arose during the twentieth century. Focusing on innovations in style and the evolution of the percussion ensemble, Siwe offers a historical overview that connects the music to scoring techniques, new instrumentation and evolving technologies as well as world events. Discussions of representative pieces by seminal composers examines the resources a work requires, its construction, and how it relates to other styles that developed during the same period. In addition, Siwe details the form and purpose of many of the compositions while providing background information on noteworthy artists. Each chapter is supported with musical examples and concludes with a short list of related works specifically designed to steer musicians and instructors alike toward profitable explorations of composers, styles, and eras.
The essays are loosely connected through their bearing on one or more of three themes: the role of orality in the transmission of chant circa 700-1400; varying degrees of stability or instability in the transmission of chant; and the role of the formula in the construction of chant. Throughout, Karp uses 202 musical examples.
The first essay evaluates forms of evidence that may shed light on the nature of orality that led to the surviving notational records of Gregorian chant and assembles evidence that supports the conclusion that fidelity of transmission represented an important goal of the Franks. The second essay treats formulas that cross the boundaries of individual liturgical genres and modes. The third essay defines the varying kinds of musical formulas in chant and proposes a chronological ordering of the genre of second-mode tracts.
The fourth essay treats the transmission of a stable melody and explores the ways in which one basic melody may be adapted to texts of widely differing structures and lengths. The fifth essay deals with a group of unstable melodies that furnished difficulties in modal classification. The sixth essay explores the problems faced by scribes seeking to represent in diastematic notation melodies employing tones not normally admitted into the medieval gamut. The seventh essay takes up the role of the formula in introits, a neumatic genre intended forchoral performance.
The two final essays look at second-mode tracts and at the interrelationship between Roman and Gregorian chant.
A continuation on the first edition, Basic Concepts in Music Education, II features revisions and updates by the living authors as well as contributions by new authors who delineate concepts of music education that are particularly important to the nineties and beyond. These topics include growth processes, learning theory, functional music, messages for teachers, the range of musical experience, technology, and evaluation.
Chapters from the most noted authorities in music education promise to provide definitive guidance in Basic Concepts, II that Basic Concepts, I has provided for the past quarter century. Among the contributors are Charles Fowler, Harry S. Broudy, Foster McMury, Wayne Bowman, Marilyn Zimmerman, Bennett Reimer, Clifton Burmeister, Richard Colwell, Robert Ehle, and Allen P. Britton. Like its predecessor, Basic Concepts, II offers rich and stimulating discussions on the most pertinent issues facing music education today - discussions that are vital to professionals and enlightening to the general reader.
Lewis Lockwood and Mark Kroll's volume The Beethoven Violin Sonatas is the first scholarly book in English devoted exclusively to the Beethoven sonatas, and deals with them in unprecedented depth. It presents seven critical and historical essays by some of the most important American and European Beethoven specialists of our time. The authors examine the sonatas within the history of the genre, the social and cultural context in which they were written, their significance within Beethoven's life and works, and the issues they raise regarding performance practices of the period.
This book is a collection of essays originally presented at Ann Arbor Symposium IV, Teaching and Learning Popular Music, at the University of Michigan. Organized into four sections of similar-themed writings, the essays trace numerous discourses, principles, methods, and prospects for popular music education in academia. Additionally, the book contains several features that are useful for modern-day scholars and their institutions. First, it acknowledges the gradual liquidation of traditional disciplinary boundaries, signaling the likely future dominance of interdisciplinary research and collaborations. Second, it values international perspectives of music teaching and learning. Third, the selected topics, methodologies, and predictions provide a working agenda for the future development and success of popular music teaching and learning.
Composing Music is the perfect introduction to writing music of all sorts for engaged beginners.
"Fortunately, in a blaze of good-humored . . . scholarship, [this] book helps brains unaccustomed to thinking about the future without jeopardizing the past imagine the wonder classical-music life might become if it embraced all people and all musics."—Laurence Vittes, Los Angeles Reader
"These essays will force us to rethink our position on many issues. . . [and] advance musicology into the twenty-first century."—Giulio Ongaro, American Music Teacher
With essays by Katherine Bergeron, Philip V. Bohlman, Richard Cohn and Douglas Dempster, Philip Gossett, Robert P. Morgan, Bruno Nettl, Don Michael Randel, Ruth A. Solie, and Gary Tomlinson.
Challenged in print for the unconventional aspects of his music, Monteverdi found himself at the center of a debate between defenders of Renaissance principles and the newest musical currents of the time. The principles of the seconda prattica, Ossi argues in this sophisticated analysis of Monteverdi's writings, music, and approaches to text-setting, were in fact much more significant to the course of Monteverdi's career than previously thought by modern scholars-not only did Monteverdi continue to pursue their aesthetic and theoretical implications for the rest of his life, but they also affected his dramatic compositions as well as his chamber vocal music and sacred works.
Ossi "divines the oracle" of Monteverdi's ambiguous theoretical concepts in a clear way and in terms of pure music; his book will enhance our understanding of Monteverdi as one of the most significant figures in western music history.
DJing in New York offers a rare, behind-the-scenes look at how underground Electronic Dance Music DJs in New York learn their craft, build careers, and navigate the ever-shifting world of nightlife.
Through immersive research, Eva J. Egolf reveals how DJing is more than a technical skill—it’s a deeply social process, rooted in friendships, enculturation, and access to professional networks. From honing beatmatching techniques to navigating the politics of club culture, these DJs rely on community as much as individual talent. Situating DJ learning within broader conversations on race, gender, and LGBTQ+ identities, this book expands our understanding of popular music education and the role of electronic music in shaping urban cultural history. It will be an illuminating resource for music educators, scholars of EDM and club culture, and those fascinated by the intersection of music, identity, and underground nightlife.
"It is not too much to say that his approach provides a basis for the meaningful discussion of emotion and meaning in all art."—David P. McAllester, American Anthropologist
"A book which should be read by all who want deeper insights into music listening, performing, and composing."—Marcus G. Raskin, Chicago Review
"If, in truth, Booth is an amateur player now in his fifth decade of amateuring, he is certainly not an amateur thinker about music and culture. . . . Would that all of us who think and teach and care about music could be so practical and profound at the same time."—Peter Kountz, New York Times Book Review
"[T]his book serves as a running commentary on the nature and depth of this love, and all the connections it has formed in his life. . . . The music, he concludes, has become part of him, and that is worth the price."—Clea Simon, Boston Globe
"The book will be read with delight by every well-meaning amateur who has ever struggled. . . . Even general readers will come away with a valuable lesson for living: Never mind the outcome of a possibly vain pursuit; in the passion that is expended lies the glory."—John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune
"Hooray for amateurs! And huzzahs to Wayne Booth for honoring them as they deserve. For the Love of It celebrates amateurism with genial philosophizing and pointed cultural criticism, as well as with personal reminiscences and self-effacing wit."—James Sloan Allen, USA Today
"Wayne Booth, the prominent American literary critic, has written the only sustained study of the interior experience of musical amateurism in recent years, For the Love of It. [It] succeeds as a meditation on the tension between the centrality of music in Booth's life, both inner and social, and its marginality. . . . It causes the reader to acknowledge the heterogeneity of the pleasures involved in making music; the satisfaction in playing well, the pride one takes in learning a difficult piece or passage or technique, the buzz in one's fingertips and the sense of completeness with the bow when the turn is done just right, the pleasure of playing with others, the comfort of a shared society, the joy of not just hearing, but making, the music, the wonder at the notes lingering in the air."—Times Literary Supplement
At first encounter, these partbooks yield no clues concerning their provenance, their composers' names, or the reasons for their dispatch to England. In his search for this information, Professor Slim used the musicologists' customary tools, namely, biobibliography, concordances, and textual and musical analysis. But he also used bibliographers' tools not always employed by musicologists: watermarks, bindings, script, orthography, and illuminations.
As a result of his efforts, the author was able to identify nearly all the works' composers and the manuscripts' expert illuminator. He also presents a detailed description of the binding process and the probably background of the scribe, places the political and social references in the works, and determines the route the volumes may have taken after they left Henry's library.
By placing the date of the partbooks' arrival in England around 1528, Professor Slim suggests that the musical culture of the early Tudor court was less French than has hitherto been thought. Indeed, the presence of the partbooks in Henry's library makes them the earliest evidence of the Italian madrigal in England. The author also provides new and significant data on the artistic and historical position of Philippe Verdelot, the partbooks' most extensively represented composer.
Volume I of this set contains two parts. The first, dealing with the manuscript itself, contains the history of the partbooks, information on their origin, composers, texts, and their importance as a gift to Henry VIII. Part II, dealing with the music, discusses general musical traits, the motets, the madrigals, the results of collation, and the appearance of some of the Newberry motets and madrigals in other sources.
"Essential reading for anyone interested in the larger intellectual framework in which Romantic music found its place, a framework that to a remarkable degree has continued to shape our image of music."—Robert P. Morgan, Yale University
Carl Dahlhaus (1928-1989) is the author of a highly influential body of works on the foundations of music history and aesthetics.
If Colors Could Be Heard: Narratives About Racial Identity in Music Education is a groundbreaking collection of firsthand accounts by music educators, artists, activists, and students from the Global Majority. These deeply personal narratives explore how race and ethnicity shape experiences in music learning, making, and teaching.
From stories of childhood discovery to reflections on navigating racial identity in the classroom, these voices paint a complex and vivid portrait of music education in the United States. Going beyond a collection of research studies, this book embraces self-reflective storytelling as a legitimate and essential method of inquiry, offering a scholarly mosaic of lived experience.
By centering voices often marginalized in academia, If Colors Could Be Heard challenges dominant narratives and reimagines music education through a lens of equity, identity, and belonging. A must-read for students, educators, and researchers committed to fostering an inclusive and just musical future.
Demonstrating how improvisation can inform scenes of teaching and learning, this volume also outlines how improvisatory techniques offer powerful, if not vital, tools for producing connection, creativity, accompaniment, reciprocity, meaningful revelation, and lifelong curiosity.
The Improviser's Classroom champions activist pedagogies and the public work essential for creating communities bound together by reciprocal care and equity.
Contributors: Sibongile Bhebhe, Judit Csobod, Michael Dessen, jashen edwards, Kate Galloway, Tomie Hahn, Petro Janse van Vuuren, Lauren Michelle Levesque, George Lipsitz, Rich Marsella, Tracy McMullen, Hafez Modirzadeh, Ed Sarath, Joe Sorbara, Jesse Stewart, Ellen Waterman, Carey West, and the editors
Contributors are Stephen Blum, Sau Y. Chan, Jody Cormack, Valerie Woodring Goertzen, Lawrence Gushee, Eve Harwood, Tullia Magrini, Peter Manuel, Ingrid Monson, Bruno Nettl, Jeff Pressing, Ali Jihad Racy, Ronald Riddle, Stephen Slawek, Chris Smith, R. Anderson Sutton, and T. Viswanathan.
The Western musical tradition has produced not only music, but also countless writings about music that remain in continuous—and enormously influential—dialogue with their subject. With sweeping scope and philosophical depth, A Language of Its Own traces the past millennium of this ongoing exchange.
Ruth Katz argues that the indispensible relationship between intellectual production and musical creation gave rise to the Western conception of music. This evolving and sometimes conflicted process, in turn, shaped the art form itself. As ideas entered music from the contexts in which it existed, its internal language developed in tandem with shifts in intellectual and social history. Katz explores how this infrastructure allowed music to explain itself from within, creating a self-referential and rational foundation that has begun to erode in recent years.
A magisterial exploration of a frequently overlooked intersection of Western art and philosophy, A Language of Its Own restores music to its rightful place in the history of ideas.
“This is a major contribution to our understanding of Toscanini and of several entire eras of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century musical life, especially the almost improvisatory looseness of opera in Italy, the glamour of European festivals, and the concert life of the United States. It’s also a wonderful, sometimes downright salacious read.”—New York Times
“Toscanini’s large, cranky humanity comes alive throughout his letters, as it does in his best recordings.”—New York Review of Books
“Edited with scrupulous care and wide-ranging erudition.”—Wall Street Journal
“Sachs has served the conductor well . . . by editing this generously annotated and unprecedentedly revealing collection of letters that were written, usually in haste and often in fury, over the course of seventy years.”—Washington Post
Schwarz applies the ideas of post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theorists Slavoj Zizek, Julia Kristeva, and Kaja Silverman to an analysis of diverse works. In a discussion of John Adams’s opera Nixon in China, he presents music listening as a fantasy of being enclosed in a second skin of enveloping sound. He looks at the song cycles of Franz Schubert as an examination and expression of epistemological doubts at the advent of modernism, and traverses fantasy "space" in his exploration of the white noise at the end of the Beatles’ "I Want You (She’s So Heavy)." Schwarz also considers the psychosexual undercurrent in Peter Gabriel’s "Intruder" and the textual and ideological structures of German Oi Musik. Concluding with a reading of two compositions by Diamanda Galás, he reveals how some performances can simultaneously produce terror and awe, abjection and rage, pleasure and displeasure. This multilayered study transcends other interventions in the field of musicology, particularly in its groundbreaking application of literary theory to popular and classical music.
"An almost archetypal example of unpretentious and honest scholarship."—Alejandro Enrique Planchart, Journal of the American Musicological Society
In his extensive introduction, Mann considers in detail the biographical, cultural, and stylistic milieu in which the madrigals were written. The scholarly edition of the music, based on a thorough examination of all the known sources, includes a complete critical commentary.
Mann's work on Rossi's madrigals has already helped revive interest in them. In 1998 a CD recording of Book I appeared on the Virgin label, performed by Il Complesso Barocco under the direction of Alan Curtis, and based on this critical edition.
Andrea Antico was one of the earliest and most important music publishers. Starting in Rome in 1510 and continuing in Venice, Antico produced elegant books of polyphonic music, cut with incredible skill on wood blocks. The repertory he published is central to understanding sixteenth-century music. It includes, for example, many pieces sung regularly in the Sistine Chapel. Since the best-represented composer in Antico's volumes if Jean Mouton, chapel master to the French king, these motet books provide insights into the character of music both at the Vatican and at the French court at the height of the Renaissance.
Martin Picker provides an exemplary edition of the four volumes of motets published by Antico in the early 1520s. His edition includes, in modern notation, all of the contents of these volumes not previously published in the Medici Codex (Monuments of Renaissance Music, Volumes III-V). Picker prefaces his edition with a history of Antico's publishing career and a discussion of each piece and its sources. The list of concordant sources and the discussions of important variants will be of enormous value to Renaissance scholars.
Rouget rigorously examines a worldwide corpus of data from ethnographic literature, but he also draws on the Bible, his own fieldwork in West Africa, and the writings of Plato, Ghazzali, and Rousseau. To organize this immense store of information, he develops a typology of trance based on symbolism and external manifestations. He outlines the fundamental distinctions between trance and ecstasy, shamanism and spirit possession, and communal and emotional trance. Music is analyzed in terms of performers, practices, instruments, and associations with dance. Each kind of trance draws strength from music in different ways at different points in a ritual, Rouget concludes. In possession trance, music induces the adept to identify himself with his deity and allows him to express this identification through dance.
Forcefully rejecting pseudo-science and reductionism, Rouget demystifies the so-called theory of the neurophysiological effects of drumming on trance. He concludes that music's physiological and emotional effects are inseparable from patterns of collective representations and behavior, and that music and trance are linked in as many ways as there are cultural structures.
Music as Metaphor was first published in 1960. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
A professor of music for many years, Mr. Ferguson here sets forth his theories on how music conveys meaning to its listeners. He identifies and discusses the elements of musical expression - tonal stress and rhythm - and correlates them with the nervous tensions and motor impulses which characterize human emotion. Through this correlation, he shows how music portrays universally understood emotional states and ideas. He relates these principles to music criticism, proposing a new system for such criticism.
An edited volume that examines the data and statistics that are key to the music industry.
The music industries are fueled by statistics: sales targets, breakeven points, success ratios, royalty splits, website hits, ticket revenues, listener figures, piracy abuses, and big data. Statistics are of consequence. They influence the music that consumers get to hear, they determine the revenues of music makers, and they shape the policies of governments and legislators. Yet many of these statistics are generated by the music industries themselves, and their accuracy can be questioned. Music by Numbers sets out to explore this shadowy terrain.
This edited collection provides the first in-depth examination of the use and abuse of statistics in the music industry. Written by noted music business scholars and practitioners in the field, the book addresses five key areas in which numbers are employed: sales and awards; music industry policy; live music; music piracy; and digital solutions. The authors address these subjects from a range of perspectives: some of them test the veracity of this data and explore its tactical use by music businesses; others help to generate these numbers by developing surveys and online projects and offering candid observations.
The aim of this collection is to expose the culture and politics of data. Music industry statistics are pervasive, but despite this ubiquity they are underexplored. This book offers a corrective by providing new ways by which to learn music by numbers.
This solid collection of essays, written by outstanding American music educators, reflects the current issues in music education and the ongoing attempt to overcome obstacles to excellence in teaching music. It stands as the most important and far-ranging professional overview of the discipline since the publication of the landmark Basic Concepts in Music Education in 1958, and early reviews indicate that it will generate both critical discussion and acclaim.
Several themes recur:(1) that music and, therefore, music education exist in a variety of social and cultural contexts, even when examined in controlled situations; (2) that music teaching has not yet freed itself from its traditional over-reliance on technical training, in spite of attention to aesthetic education; and (3) that there is a remarkable undercurrent of agreement among this diverse group of authors concerning the profession’s basic obligation to expand and refine the musical sensitivity of all age group of Americans. This book reflects some advanced thinking about these themes, which establishes new foundations for next generation theorizing and research.
Music Lessons marks the first publication in English of Pierre Boulez’s Collège de France lectures, written while he held the chair of Invention, Technique and Language in Music at the Collège between 1976 and 1995. Representing Boulez’s most significant writings from the period, the lectures offer a sustained intellectual engagement with one of the dominant figures of twentieth-century music, a consummate composer-conductor who remained central to the conversation around contemporary music until his death in 2016. Boulez explores, among other topics, the process through which a musical idea is realized in a full-fledged composition, the complementary roles of craft and inspiration and the degree to which the memory of other musical works can influence and change the act of creation. Boulez also gives a penetrating account of problems in classical music that are still present today, such as the conservatism of a musical community fixated on the repertory of the past. Woven into the discussion are stories of his own compositions and those of fellow composers whose work he engaged with in his many roles as teacher, thinker, and conductor: from Stravinsky to Stockhausen and Varèse, from Bartók to Berg, Debussy to Mahler and Wagner, and all the way back to his beloved J. S. Bach.
Including a foreword by semiologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez, who was for years close to the composer, this edition is also enriched by an illuminating preface by Jonathan Goldman. With an authoritative translation retaining Boulez’s fierce convictions, cutting opinions and signature wit, Music Lessons is an essential and entertaining volume.
Robert Wannamaker's monumental two-volume study explores the influential music and ideas of American composer, theorist, writer, performer, and educator James Tenney. Delving into the whole of Tenney's far-ranging oeuvre, Wannamaker provides in-depth, aurally grounded analyses of works linked to the artist's revolutionary theories of musical form, timbre, and harmonic perception.
Volume 1, Contexts and Paradigms, chronologically surveys Tenney's creative development and output. Wannamaker begins each section with biographical, aesthetic, and technical context that illuminates a distinct period in Tenney's career. From there, he analyzes a small number of pieces that illuminate the concerns, characteristics, and techniques that emerged in Tenney's music during that time. Wannamaker supplements the text with musical examples, graphs, and diagrams while also drawing on unpublished material and newly available primary sources to flesh out each work and the ideas that shaped it.
A landmark in experimental music scholarship, The Music of James Tenney is a first-of-its-kind consideration of the experimental music titan and his work.
Robert Wannamaker's monumental two-volume study explores the influential music and ideas of American composer, theorist, writer, performer, and educator James Tenney. Delving into the whole of Tenney's far-ranging oeuvre, Wannamaker offers close, aurally grounded analyses of works linked to the artist's revolutionary theories of musical form, timbre, and harmonic perception.
Written as a reference work, Volume 2, A Handbook to the Pieces, presents detailed entries on Tenney's significant post-1959 experimental works (excepting pieces covered in volume 1). Wannamaker includes technical information, an analysis of intentions and goals, graphs and musical examples, historical and biographical context, and thoughts from Tenney and others on specific works. Throughout, he discusses the striking compositional ideas found in Tenney's music and, where appropriate, traces an idea's appearance from one piece to the next to reveal the evolution of the composer's art and thought.
A landmark in experimental music scholarship, The Music of James Tenney is a first-of-its-kind consideration of the experimental music titan and his work.
In nineteen essays dealing with musical theories from the twelfth to the twentieth century, two recurring themes emerge. One is the need to understand the historical circumstances of the writing and reception of theory, a humanistic approach that gives theory a place within social and intellectual history. The other is the advantages of applying contemporaneous theory to the music of a given period, thus linking theory to the history of musical styles and structures. The periods given principal attention in these essays are the Renaissance, the years around 1800, and the twentieth century.
Abundantly illustrated with musical examples, Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past offers models of new practical applications of theory to the analysis of music. At the same time, it raises the broader question of how historical knowledge can deepen the understanding of an art and of systematic writings about that art.
Improvisation is usually either lionized as an ecstatic experience of being in the moment or disparaged as the thoughtless recycling of clichés. Eschewing both of these orthodoxies, The Philosophy of Improvisation ranges across the arts—from music to theater, dance to comedy—and considers the improvised dimension of philosophy itself in order to elaborate an innovative concept of improvisation.
Gary Peters turns to many of the major thinkers within continental philosophy—including Heidegger, Nietzsche, Adorno, Kant, Benjamin, and Deleuze—offering readings of their reflections on improvisation and exploring improvisational elements within their thinking. Peters’s wry, humorous style offers an antidote to the frequently overheated celebration of freedom and community that characterizes most writing on the subject. Expanding the field of what counts as improvisation, The Philosophy of Improvisation will be welcomed by anyone striving to comprehend the creative process.
Phonetics and Diction in Singing was first published in 1967. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
This book provides rules and illustrative examples for the study of songs and operas in the leading foreign languages of musical literature. The author is conductor and chorus master of the Metropolitan Opera. He has drawn the material from his larger book, The Art of Accompanying and Coaching,to provide a handbook or textbook especially suitable for use by voice teachers, singers, students in high schools, colleges, and schools of music, and members of choruses, church choirs, and opera workshops and their directors. Following a general discussion of phonetics and diction in singing there are separate chapters on Italian, French, Spanish, and German phonetics and diction. The text is illustrated with drawings and diagrams of vocal techniques and musical examples.
All performers know that "tuning up the body" is necessary to maximize performance. A person's mannerisms, habitual patterns of movement, and posture can block the capacity for expression, often without the performer even noticing. Physical Expression and the Performing Artist offers an organized approach to movement for actors, conductors, dancers, singers, musicians---for performers of any kind.
Capturing the energy of the popular workshops presented by master movement teacher Jerald Schwiebert, the book draws from the wisdom of hatha yoga, tai chi, and Pilates as well as from the teachings of Stanislavski, Structural Integration (Rolfing), Alexander, Feldenkrais, and Laban to provide a fresh and accessible approach to movement. More than 300 anatomical drawings help readers pinpoint specific muscles, joints, and actions as they explore the capacity of the performer's physical instrument, the components of dynamic movement, and the anatomy of expression. The book's many detailed exercises bring awareness of habitual and inefficient movement and introduce the steps necessary for more efficient movement patterns in all parts of the body. This book will prove indispensable in movement courses and as a resource guide for professionals seeking to take their performances to the next level.
Catherine and Darius Brubeck’s 1983 move to South Africa launched them on a journey that helped transform jazz education. Blending biography with storytelling, the pair recount their time at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where they built a pioneering academic program in jazz music and managed and organized bands, concerts, and tours around the world.
The Brubecks and the musicians faced innumerable obstacles, from the intensification of apartheid and a lack of resources to the hardscrabble lives that forced even the most talented artists to the margins. Building a program grounded in multi-culturalism, Catherine and Darius encouraged black and white musicians to explore and expand the landscape of South African jazz together Their story details the sometimes wily, sometimes hilarious problem-solving necessary to move the institution forward while offering insightful portraits of South African jazz players at work, on stage, and providing a soundtrack to the freedom struggle and its aftermath.
Frank and richly detailed, Playing the Changes provides insiders’ accounts of how jazz intertwined with struggle and both expressed and resisted the bitter unfairness of apartheid-era South Africa.
A musician and a parent of a young violinist, sociologist Izabela Wagner offers an inside look at how her young subjects set out on the long road to becoming a soloist. The remarkable research she conducted—at rehearsals, lessons, and in other educational settings—enabled her to gain deep insight into what distinguishes these talented prodigies and their training. She notes, for instance, the importance of a family culture steeped in the values of the musical world. Indeed, more than half of these students come from a family of professional musicians and were raised in an atmosphere marked by the importance of instrumental practice, the vitality of music as a vocation, and especially the veneration of famous artists. Wagner also highlights the highly structured, rigorous training system of identifying, nurturing, and rewarding talent, even as she underscores the social, economic, and cultural factors that make success in this system possible.
Offering an intimate portrait of the students, their parents, and their instructors, Producing Excellence sheds new light on the development of exceptional musical talent, as well as draw much larger conclusions as to “producing prodigy” in other competition-prone areas, such as sports, sciences, the professions, and other arts. Wagner’s insights make this book valuable for academics interested in the study of occupations, and her clear, lively writing is perfect for general readers curious about the ins and outs of training to be a violin soloist.
Available in English for the first time, Prosdocimo's Tractatus plane musice (1412) and Tractatus musice speculative (1425) are exemplary texts for understanding the high sophistication of music theory in the early fifteenth century. Known for considering music as a science based on demonstrable mathematical principles, Prosdocimo praises Marchetto for his theory of plainchant but criticizes his influential Lucidarium for its heterodox mathematics. In dismissing Marchetto as a “mere performer,” Prosdocimo takes up matters as broad as the nature and definition of music and as precise as counterpoint, tuning, and ecclesiastical modes. The treatises also reveal much about Prosdocimo’s understanding of plainchant; his work with Euclid's Elementa; and his familiarity with the music theory of Boethius, Macrobius, and Johannes de Muris. A foremost authority on Italian music theory of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, Jan Herlinger consults manuscripts from Bologna, Cremona, and Lucca in preparing these valuable first critical editions.
Bringing together a wide range of scholars and critics from literature, communications, history, sociology, art, and music, this anthology looks at everything from the inner workings of the country music industry to the iconography of certain stars to the development of distinctive styles within the country music genre. Essays include a look at the shift from "hard-core" to "soft-shell" country music in recent years; Johnny Cash as lesbian icon; gender, class, and region in Dolly Parton’s star image; and bluegrass’s gothic tradition. Originally published as a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, this expanded book edition includes new articles on the spirituality of Willie Nelson, the legacy and tradition of stringed music, and the revival of Stephen Foster’s blackface musical, among others.
Contributors. Mary A. Bufwack, Don Cusic, Curtis W. Ellison, Mark Fenster, Vivien Green Fryd, Teresa Goddu, T. Walter Herbert, Christine Kreyling, Michael Kurek, Amy Schrager Lang, Charmaine Lanham, Bill Malone, Christopher Metress, Jocelyn Neal, Teresa Ortega, Richard A. Peterson, Ronnie Pugh, John W. Rumble, David Sanjek, Cecelia Tichi, Pamela Wilson, Charles K. Wolfe
"This is a path-breaking work, important alike to music students and teachers, but it will make profitable reading for performers, too."—New York Times Book Review
"When at some future time theories of rhythm . . . are . . . as well understood, and as much discussed as theories of harmony and counterpoint . . . they will rest in no small measure on the foundations laid by Cooper and Meyer in this provocative dissertation on the rhythmic structure of music."—Notes
". . . . a significant, courageous and, on the whole, successful attempt to deal with a very controversial and neglected subject. Certainly no one who takes the time to read it will emerge from the experience unchanged or unmoved."—Journal of Music Theory
The late GROSVENOR W. COOPER, author of Learning to Listen, was professor of music at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
There is no end to learning.
Originally published in1850, Advice to Young Musicians: Musical Rules for Home and in Life offered composer Robert Schumann’s (1810–56) combination of practical advice and poetic words of wisdom for young people beginning their musical education. Presented in aphorisms and short paragraphs, the book’s insights remain as valuable today as when it was written. Recognizing the continued resonance of Schumann’s words, world-renowned cellist Steven Isserlis, himself a writer of children’s books and many articles for young musicians, set out to rescue the work from history. Here, in this beautiful gift edition, he revisits Schumann’s work and contributes his own contemporary counsel for musicians and music lovers.
For this edition, Isserlis retranslated Schumann’s text and arranged it into four thematic sections: “On being a musician,” “Playing,” “Practicing,” and “Composing.” Each page is decoratively designed, and accompanying Schumann’s original quotation are Isserlis’s thoughtful and often humorous glosses. The book concludes with Isserlis’s own reflections on his life as a musician and performer: “My Own Bits of Advice (For What They’re Worth).” The result is a unique and thought-provoking book that will be treasured by aspiring musicians of any age.
Few art forms epitomize the anti-institutional image more than jazz, but it’s precisely at the academy where jazz is now flourishing. This shift has introduced numerous challenges and contradictions to the music’s practitioners. Solos are transcribed, technique is standardized, and the whole endeavor is plastered with the label “high art”—a far cry from its freewheeling days. Wilf shows how students, educators, and administrators have attempted to meet these challenges with an inventive spirit and a robust drive to preserve—and foster—what they consider to be jazz’s central attributes: its charisma and unexpectedness. He also highlights the unintended consequences of their efforts to do so. Ultimately, he argues, the gap between creative practice and institutionalized schooling, although real, is often the product of our efforts to close it.
The Silent Musician deepens our understanding of what conductors do and why they matter. Neither an instruction manual for conductors, nor a history of conducting, the book instead explores the role of the conductor in noiselessly shaping the music that we hear. Writing in a clever, insightful, and often evocative style, world-renowned conductor Mark Wigglesworth deftly explores the philosophical underpinnings of conducting—from the conductor’s relationship with musicians and the music, to the public and personal responsibilities conductors face—and examines the subtler components of their silent art, which include precision, charisma, diplomacy, and passion. Ultimately, Wigglesworth shows how conductors—by simultaneously keeping time and allowing time to expand—manage to shape ensemble music into an immersive, transformative experience, without ever making a sound.
One of the most highly acclaimed resources for the study of ear training in music education today
Solfège has become one of the most highly acclaimed resources for the study of ear training in music education today. This revised and expanded third edition includes a multitude of new musical examples and dictations covering the entire continuum of musical development from classical to modern. This edition is enhanced with a free online companion library of rich and definitive audio performances of each of the 51 musical dictations, keyed by track number to the musical notation in the text. As students progress from the simple to the complex by following these carefully interrelated lessons, the results are, according to Mel Powell, “akin to miracle-making.”
Contributors: Molly M. Breckling, William A. Everett, Kate Galloway, Sara Haefeli, Eric Hung, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Mark Katz, Nathan A. Langfitt, Matteo Magarotto, Mary Natvig, Frederick A. Peterbark, Laura Moore Pruett, Colleen Renihan, Amanda Christina Soto, John Spilker, Reba A. Wissner, and Trudi Wright
"A variety of approaches are brought to bear on fascinating repertoire, but with the underlying aim of better understanding some brilliant music. There’s nothing more exciting in music writing than something which entices you to listen to what’s familiar to you in a new way, and this collection brings such excitement in abundance."
---Allan Moore, author of Jethro Tull: Aqualung and Rock: The Primary Text
"These essays bring together a remarkable range of tools and perspectives to such diverse topics and contexts as the behind-the-scenes collaborations of composers, performers, arrangers, producers and engineers; pop culture; narratology; and race, politics and gender. The reader continuously benefits from a complementary lineup of sensitive ears that discover novelty in the familiar, exposing the heart of many rock and pop classics through imaginative and authoritative prose."
---Walter Everett, author of The Foundations of Rock and The Beatles as Musicians
The nine essays in Sounding Out Pop work together to map the myriad styles and genres of the pop-rock universe through detailed case studies that confront the music from a variety of engaging, thought-provoking perspectives---from historical to music-analytic, aesthetic to ethnographic, with several authors drawing liberally from ideas in other disciplines. The range of bands and artists covered is as vast and varied as the more than fifty-year history of pop and rock music, from the Coasters and Roy Orbison to Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, Radiohead, Beck, Genesis, Tori Amos, and the Police. Together these diverse essays cover a broad spectrum of studies ideally suited for classroom use and for other readers interested in gaining a deeper knowledge of the way popular music works.
Mark Spicer is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Music at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His writings have appeared in Contemporary Music Review, Gamut, Music Theory Online, twentieth-century music, and other scholarly journals and essay collections.
John Covach is Professor of Music at the University of Rochester and Professor of Theory at the Eastman School of Music. He is the author of the college textbook What's That Sound? An Introduction to Rock and Its History and the coeditor of Understanding Rock, American Rock and the Classical Music Tradition, and Traditions, Institutions, and American Popular Music.
Cover art credit: © iStockphoto.com/Aleksandar Dickov
Meyer devotes the latter part of his book to a sketch-history of nineteenth-century music. He shows explicitly how the beliefs and attitudes of Romanticism influenced the choices of composers from Beethoven to Mahler and into our own time.
"A monumental work. . . . Most authors concede the relation of music to its cultural milieu, but few have probed so deeply in demonstrating this interaction."—Choice
"Probes the foundations of musical research precisely at the joints where theory and history fold into one another."—Kevin Korsyn, Journal of American Musicological Society
"A remarkably rich and multifaceted, yet unified argument. . . . No one else could have brought off this immense project with anything like Meyer's command."—Robert P. Morgan, Music Perception
"Anyone who attempts to deal with Romanticism in scholarly depth must bring to the task not only musical and historical expertise but unquenchable optimism. Because Leonard B. Meyer has those qualities in abundance, he has been able to offer fresh insight into the Romantic concept."—Donal Henahan, New York Times
In Sync, James Tobias examines the development of musical sound and image in cinema and media art, indicating how these elements define the nature and experience of reception. Placing musicality at the center of understanding streaming media, Tobias presents six interwoven stories about synchronized audiovisual media—from filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky to today’s contemporary digital art and computer games—to show how these effects are never merely "musical" in the literal sense of organized sound.
Drawing on decades of teaching experience and the collective wisdom of dozens of the most creative theorists in the country, Michael R. Rogers’s diverse survey of music theory—one of the first to comprehensively survey and evaluate the teaching styles, techniques, and materials used in theory courses—is a unique reference and research tool for teachers, theorists, secondary and postsecondary students, and for private study. This revised edition of Teaching Approaches in Music Theory: An Overview of Pedagogical Philosophies features an extensive updated bibliography encompassing the years since the volume was first published in 1984.
In a new preface to this edition, Rogers references advancements in the field over the past two decades, from the appearance of the first scholarly journal devoted entirely to aspects of music theory education to the emergence of electronic advances and devices that will provide a supporting, if not central, role in the teaching of music theory in the foreseeable future. With the updated information, the text continues to provide an excellent starting point for the study of music theory pedagogy.
Rogers has organized the book very much like a sonata. Part one, “Background,” delineates principal ideas and themes, acquaints readers with the author’s views of contemporary musical theory, and includes an orientation to an eclectic range of philosophical thinking on the subject; part two, “Thinking and Listening,” develops these ideas in the specific areas of mindtraining and analysis, including a chapter on ear training; and part three, “Achieving Teaching Success,” recapitulates main points in alternate contexts and surroundings and discusses how they can be applied to teaching and the evaluation of design and curriculum.
Teaching Approaches in Music Theory emphasizes thoughtful examination and critique of the underlying and often tacit assumptions behind textbooks, materials, and technologies. Consistently combining general methods with specific examples and both philosophical and practical reasoning, Rogers compares and contrasts pairs of concepts and teaching approaches, some mutually exclusive and some overlapping. The volume is enhanced by extensive suggested reading lists for each chapter.
The teaching reflections in Teaching Difficult Topics examine difficult themes that fall into three primary categories: subjects that instructors sense to be controversial or emotionally challenging to discuss, those that derive from or intersect with real-world events that are difficult to process, and bigger-picture discussions of how music studies often focuses on dominant narratives while overlooking other perspectives. Some chapters offer practical guidance, lesson plans, and teaching materials to enable instructors to build discussions of race, gender, sexuality, and traumatic histories into their own classrooms; others take a more global view, reflecting on the importance and relevance of teaching these difficult topics and on how to respond in the music classroom when external events disrupt daily life.
Willie Nelson, Joe Ely, Marcia Ball, Tish Hinojosa, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Lyle Lovett...the list of popular songwriters from Texas just goes on and on. In this collection of thirty-four interviews with these and other songwriters, Kathleen Hudson pursues the stories behind the songs, letting the singers' own words describe where their songs come from and how the diverse, eclectic cultures, landscapes, and musical traditions of Texas inspire the creative process.
Conducted in dance halls, dressing rooms, parking lots, clubs-wherever the musicians could take time to tell their stories-the interviews are refreshingly spontaneous and vivid. Hudson draws out the songwriters on such topics as the sources of their songs, the influence of other musicians on their work, the progress of their careers, and the nature of Texas music. Many common threads emerge from these stories, while the uniqueness of each songwriter becomes equally apparent. To round out the collection, Hudson interviews Larry McMurtry and Darrell Royal for their perspectives as longtime friends and fans of Texas musicians. She also includes a brief biography and discography of each songwriter.
This volume offers an unprecedented English translation of the second volume of Elementi teorico-practici di musica, with annotations and commentary. The translation is introduced with a study of Galeazzi's life and milieu, the genesis and sources for the Elementi, and its reception through the present day.
Every day, musicians and teachers use terms like “pitch,” “scale,” and “meter” to describe what music is made of and how it works. But what are the stories behind our musical terminology? Theorizing Music for Antiracist Futures contends that seemingly neutral musical terms are entangled with human histories of oppression and resistance. Bringing together scholars from music theory, ethnomusicology, music history, and popular music studies, the book reads music history alongside critical philosophies of race and ethnic studies to illuminate the power structures that inform musical description and analysis across disciplines. With each chapter focusing on a single musical term, topics covered include: how ancient Greek philosophers used “harmony” to promote peaceful relationships between the ruling class and their subordinates; how sixteenth-century European colonizers perceived Indigenous groups as “dissonant;” and how nineteenth-century scholars measured “pitch” to form now-discredited scientific proof of Europe’s cognitive and musical superiority over its colonized populations. Other chapters take a global perspective, examining theorizations of meter, scale, and musical texture in Japan, Iraq, Malawi, Georgia, and Central Africa. Theorizing Music for Antiracist Futures brings these histories to light and is a crucial volume in creating antiracist futures for music studies.
The product of more than fifteen years of immersion in the jazz world, Thinking in Jazz combines participant observation with detailed musicological analysis, the author's experience as a jazz trumpeter, interpretations of published material by scholars and performers, and, above all, original data from interviews with more than fifty professional musicians: bassists George Duvivier and Rufus Reid; drummers Max Roach, Ronald Shannon Jackson, and Akira Tana; guitarist Emily Remler; pianists Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris; saxophonists Lou Donaldson, Lee Konitz, and James Moody; trombonist Curtis Fuller; trumpeters Doc Cheatham, Art Farmer, Wynton Marsalis, and Red Rodney; vocalists Carmen Lundy and Vea Williams; and others. Together, the interviews provide insight into the production of jazz by great artists like Betty Carter, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, and Charlie Parker.
Thinking in Jazz overflows with musical examples from the 1920s to the present, including original transcriptions (keyed to commercial recordings) of collective improvisations by Miles Davis's and John Coltrane's groups. These transcriptions provide additional insight into the structure and creativity of jazz improvisation and represent a remarkable resource for jazz musicians as well as students and educators.
Berliner explores the alternative ways—aural, visual, kinetic, verbal, emotional, theoretical, associative—in which these performers conceptualize their music and describes the delicate interplay of soloist and ensemble in collective improvisation. Berliner's skillful integration of data concerning musical development, the rigorous practice and thought artists devote to jazz outside of performance, and the complexities of composing in the moment leads to a new understanding of jazz improvisation as a language, an aesthetic, and a tradition. This unprecedented journey to the heart of the jazz tradition will fascinate and enlighten musicians, musicologists, and jazz fans alike.
Named one of PopMatters’ Best Books of 2025! Discover a new side of the songs of Bob Dylan by exploring the virtues of rough sounds, peculiar intonation, and a raspy voice.
Folk troubadour, rock star, country crooner—for a musician who adopted so many personas, Bob Dylan always sounds like himself. While he’s written many of the most iconic and impactful lyrics of the past sixty years, Dylan’s music has also reshaped our sonic imagination with his ragged voice, wailing harmonica, and rough-hewn guitar.
Music theorist Steven Rings argues that such sonic imperfections are central to understanding Dylan’s songs and their appeal. These blemishes can invoke authenticity or persona, signal his social commitments, and betray his political shortcomings. Rings begins—where else?—with Dylan’s voice, exploring its changeability, its unmistakable features, and its ability to inhabit characters, including the female narrator of “House of the Rising Sun.” Rings then turns to Dylan as an instrumentalist, examining his infamous adoption of the electric guitar in 1965, as well as his stylistically varied acoustic playing, which borrows sounds and techniques from Black blues musicians, among other influences. Rings charts the histories audible in Dylan’s harmonica as well as piano, which has been central to his music making since his earliest days of imitating Little Richard in his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota. Finally, Rings guides readers through one of Dylan’s most famous songs, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” analyzing its musical sources as well as variations in live performances. A companion website of audio and video examples helps readers notice the nuances and idiosyncrasies inherent in Dylan’s work and, even more importantly, their effects.
A close look at an underdiscussed but essential aspect of Dylan’s oeuvre, What Did You Hear? offers a fresh understanding of a singular performer, his musical choices, and the meanings that we can hear in his imperfect sounds.
Throughout the book, readers encounter scenes from over two thousand years of history, mathematics, and music: Pythagoras using pebbles to articulate didactic number games to his disciples; Galileo fretting a hill and listening with a musician’s ear to calculate the rate of acceleration under gravity; Rameau trapping Western music in a five-limit tuning system, and what could have been if he were more adept with numbers. Even when drawing on classical sources to explore canonical figures like Saint Augustine, What Music Did offers idiosyncratic critical insights that highlight our ongoing cultural reverence when answers result in simple whole number ratios like 3:2, 4:3, or 5:4. What Music Did is Tony Conrad’s extended indictment of music’s role, from the Pythagoreans to the twentieth century, in upholding the use of number as a clandestine and circumscribed armature of power.
The Why of Music was first published in 1969. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
In his many tears of teaching and writing about music Professor Ferguson has given much thought to the question of the why of music — why does music affect us as it does, why are we deeply moved by some music by not by other music, what is it about music that "sends" us, and where does it send us? In this book he explores such questions in depth and provides intriguing answers. The discussions are presented in the form of dialogues between the author and several friends.
As Professor Ferguson explains, the book is intended to take the reader on a guided tour, a tour which follows, in part, the familiar roads of formal music appreciation but which leads more often into byways where, almost hidden by the brilliant Hows that line the more familiar roads, lurks the essential Why of music. He describes this Why as the fertilizing commerce between music and human experience—a portrayal, not of the tangible facts of experience, but of the concern aroused by our encounter with those facts. He explains that while avant-garde abstractionism is concerned only with music as art—a concern too specialized for the general music lover to grasp and too narrow to sustain interest—the Why of enduring music lies in its endeavor to portray experience as it lives in Everyman's mind.
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