Paul explores both how Ives positioned his music amid changing philosophical and aesthetic currents and how others interpreted his contributions to American music. Although Ives's initial efforts to find a public in the early twenties attracted a few devotees, the resurgence of interest in the American literary past during the thirties made a concert staple of his "Concord" Sonata, a work dedicated to nineteenth-century transcendentalist writers. Paul shows how Ives was subsequently deployed as an icon of American freedom during the early Cold War period and how he came to be instigated at the head of a line of "American maverick" composers. Paul also examines why a recent cadre of scholars has beset the composer with Gilded Age social anxieties.
By embedding Ives' reception within the changing developments of a wide range of fields including intellectual history, American studies, literature, musicology, and American politics and society in general, Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer greatly advances our understanding of Ives and his influence on nearly a century of American culture.
With this book, Joseph Kerman establishes the place of music study firmly in the mainstream of modern intellectual history. He treats not only the study of the history of Western art music—with which musicology is traditionally equated—but also sometimes vexed relations between music history and other fields: music theory and analysis, ethnomusicology, and music criticism.
Kerman sees and applauds a change in the study of music toward a critical orientation. As examples, he presents fascinating vignettes of Bach research in the 1950s and Beethoven studies in the 1960s. He sketches the work of prominent scholars and theorists: Thurston Dart, Charles Rosen, Leonard B. Meyer, Heinrich Schenker, Milton Babbit, and many others. And he comments on such various subjects as the amazing absorption of Stephen Foster’s songs into the canons of “black” music, the new intensity of Verdi research, controversies about performance on historical instruments, and the merits and demerits of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Contemplating Music is filled with wisdom and trenchant commentary. It will spark controversy among musicologists of all stripes and will give many musicians and amateurs an entirely new perspective on the world of music.
Current Thought in Musicology covers a variety of topics, ranging from the Middle Ages to the present and touching on all the major disciplines of musicology: music history, theory and composition, music education, and performance. Taken together, the nine papers constitute a broad overview of the direction of music scholarship in the 1970s.
In “Tractatus Esthetico-Semioticus: Model of the Systems of Human Communication,” Charles Seeger presents a model of the situations in which the study of humanistic art may best be conducted. Charles Hamm writes in “The Ecstatic and the Didactic: A Pattern in American Music” of the pattern of conflicting points of view in music history and theory. American composer Elliott Carter, in his chapter titled “Music and the Time Screen,” presents a lucid explanation of his compositional process, including his concept of musical time. In “Instruments and Voices in the Fifteenth-Century Chanson,” Howard Mayer Brown suggests the nature of fifteenth-century performance, drawn from iconography and various musical sources. “Nottebohm Revisited,” by Lewis Lockwood, reexamines Beethoven’s sketchbooks, showing the extent to which performing editions of his work must be updated. Daniel Heartz’s article, “The Chanson in the Humanist Era,” is multidisciplinary and will interest a variety of scholars, including French historians and French literary historians. Gilbert Chase applies structuralism to musicological studies in his chapter, “Musicology, History, and Anthropology: Current Thoughts.” The concluding essays, “The Prospects for Research in Medieval Music in the 1970’s,” by Gilbert Reaney, and “The Library of the Mind: Observations on the Relationship between Musical Scholarship and Bibliography,” by Vincent Duckles, provide a unique view of the opportunities for further work in these areas.
The volume also includes an introduction by the editor, notes on the contributors, and an index. Current Thought in Musicology is the result of a symposium held at the University of Texas at Austin in 1971.
Modern academic criticism bursts with what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once termed paranoid readings—interpretative feats that aim to prove a point, persuade an audience, and subtly denigrate anyone who disagrees. Driven by strategies of negation and suspicion, such rhetoric tends to drown out softer-spoken reparative efforts, which forego forceful argument in favor of ruminations on pleasure, love, sentiment, reform, care, and accessibility.
Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good calls for a time-out in our serious games of critical exchange. Charting the divergent paths of paranoid and reparative affects through illness narratives, academic work, queer life, noise pollution, sonic torture, and other touchy subjects, William Cheng exposes a host of stubborn norms in our daily orientations toward scholarship, self, and sound. How we choose to think about the perpetration and tolerance of critical and acoustic offenses may ultimately lead us down avenues of ethical ruin—or, if we choose, repair. With recourse to experimental rhetoric, interdisciplinary discretion, and the playful wisdoms of childhood, Cheng contends that reparative attitudes toward music and musicology can serve as barometers of better worlds.
In the fall of 2015, a collection of faculty at liberal arts colleges began a conversation about the challenges we faced as instructors: Why were there so few course materials accessible to undergraduates and lay readers that reflected current scholarly debate? How can we convey the relevance of studying music history to current and future generations of students? And how might we represent and reflect the myriad, often conflicting perspectives, positions, and identities that make up both music’s history and the writers of history?
Here we offer one response to those questions. Open Access Musicology is a collection of essays, written in an accessible style and with a focus on modes of inquiry rather than content coverage. Our authors draw from their experience as scholars but also as teachers. They have been asked to describe why they became musicologists in the first place and how their individual paths led to the topics they explore and the questions they pose. Like most scholarly literature, the essays have all been reviewed by experts in the field. Unlike all scholarly literature, the essays have also been reviewed by students at a variety of institutions for clarity and relevance.
These essays are intended for undergraduates, graduate students, and interested readers without any particular expertise. They can be incorporated into courses on a range of topics as standalone readings or used to supplement textbooks. The topics introduce and explore a variety of subjects, practices, and methods but, above all, seek to stimulate classroom discussion on music history’s relevance to performers, listeners, and citizens.
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