Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era

Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era PDF Author: Roger Mathew Grant
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199367299
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Beating Time & Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era chronicles the shifting relationships between ideas about time in music and science from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Centered on theories of musical meter, the book investigates the interdependence between theories of meter and conceptualizations of time from the age of Zarlino to the invention of the metronome. These formulations have evolved throughout the history of Western music, reflecting fundamental reevaluations not only of music but also of time itself. Drawing on paradigms from the history of science and technology and the history of philosophy, author Roger Mathew Grant illustrates ways in which theories of meter and time, informed by one another, have manifested themselves in the field of music. During the long eighteenth century, treatises on subjects such as aesthetics, music theory, mathematics, and natural philosophy began to reflect an understanding of time as an absolute quantity, independent of events. This gradual but conclusive change had a profound impact on the network of ideas connecting time, meter, character, and tempo. Investigating the impacts of this change, Grant explores the timekeeping techniques - musical and otherwise - that implemented this conceptual shift, both technologically and materially. Bringing together diverse strands of thought in a broader intellectual history of temporality, Grant's study fills an unexpected yet conspicuous gap in the history of music theory, and is essential reading for music theorists and composers as well as historical musicologists and practitioners of historically informed performance.

Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era

Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era PDF Author: Roger Mathew Grant
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199367299
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book Here

Book Description
Beating Time & Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era chronicles the shifting relationships between ideas about time in music and science from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Centered on theories of musical meter, the book investigates the interdependence between theories of meter and conceptualizations of time from the age of Zarlino to the invention of the metronome. These formulations have evolved throughout the history of Western music, reflecting fundamental reevaluations not only of music but also of time itself. Drawing on paradigms from the history of science and technology and the history of philosophy, author Roger Mathew Grant illustrates ways in which theories of meter and time, informed by one another, have manifested themselves in the field of music. During the long eighteenth century, treatises on subjects such as aesthetics, music theory, mathematics, and natural philosophy began to reflect an understanding of time as an absolute quantity, independent of events. This gradual but conclusive change had a profound impact on the network of ideas connecting time, meter, character, and tempo. Investigating the impacts of this change, Grant explores the timekeeping techniques - musical and otherwise - that implemented this conceptual shift, both technologically and materially. Bringing together diverse strands of thought in a broader intellectual history of temporality, Grant's study fills an unexpected yet conspicuous gap in the history of music theory, and is essential reading for music theorists and composers as well as historical musicologists and practitioners of historically informed performance.

Beating Time & Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era

Beating Time & Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era PDF Author: Roger Mathew Grant
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199367280
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book Here

Book Description
Beating Time & Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era chronicles the shifting relationships between ideas about time in music and science from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Centered on theories of musical meter, the book investigates the interdependence between theories of meter and conceptualizations of time from the age of Zarlino to the invention of the metronome. These formulations have evolved throughout the history of Western music, reflecting fundamental reevaluations not only of music but also of time itself. Drawing on paradigms from the history of science and technology and the history of philosophy, author Roger Mathew Grant illustrates ways in which theories of meter and time, informed by one another, have manifested themselves in the field of music. During the long eighteenth century, treatises on subjects such as aesthetics, music theory, mathematics, and natural philosophy began to reflect an understanding of time as an absolute quantity, independent of events. This gradual but conclusive change had a profound impact on the network of ideas connecting time, meter, character, and tempo. Investigating the impacts of this change, Grant explores the timekeeping techniques - musical and otherwise - that implemented this conceptual shift, both technologically and materially. Bringing together diverse strands of thought in a broader intellectual history of temporality, Grant's study fills an unexpected yet conspicuous gap in the history of music theory, and is essential reading for music theorists and composers as well as historical musicologists and practitioners of historically informed performance.

Peculiar Attunements

Peculiar Attunements PDF Author: Roger Mathew Grant
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823288072
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement in European music theory of the eighteenth century. During that time the affects—or passions, as they were also called—formed a vital component of a mimetic model of the arts. Eighteenth-century critics held that artworks imitated or copied the natural world in order to produce copies of the affects in their beholders. But music caused a problem for such theories, since it wasn’t apparent that musical tones could imitate anything with any dependability, beyond the rare thunderclap or birdcall. Struggling to articulate how it was that music managed to move its auditors without imitation, certain theorists developed a new affect theory crafted especially for music, postulating that music’s physical materiality as sound vibrated the nerves of listeners and attuned them to the affects through sympathetic resonance. This was a theory of affective attunement that bypassed the entire structure of representation, offering a non-discursive, corporeal alternative. It is a pendant to contemporary theories of affect, and one from which they have much to learn. Inflecting our current intellectual moment through eighteenth-century music theory and aesthetics, this book offers a reassessment of affect theory’s common systems and processes. It offers a new way of thinking through affect dialectically, drawing attention to patterns and problems in affect theory that we have been given to repeating. Finally, taking a cue from eighteenth-century theory, it gives renewed attention to the objects that generate affects in subjects.

Measure

Measure PDF Author: Marc D. Moskovitz
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783276614
Category : Metronome
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
While our modern concepts of musical time and tempo have been largely shaped by the metronome, musicians have long depended on a variety of methods, including the use of hands and feet, the incorporation of markings and pendulums. Measure: In Pursuit of Musical Time tells the fascinating story of musical timekeeping, beginning in an age before the existence of external measuring devices and continuing to the present-day use of the smartphone app. The book opens with a consideration of Renaissance images that inform our early understanding of the physical gestures associated with musical timekeeping. Early music treatises provide a first-hand glimpse into a musical world when timekeeping was bound up with motions of the body and the pulsing of the human heart. The adoption of the simple pendulum and the incorporation of tempo-related language profoundly altered the musical landscape. Such approaches allowed composers to communicate ideas about speed and slowness with increasing precision. Yet neither language nor the pendulum's natural swing proved sufficient to meet the needs of a changing musical world. Enter the metronome, a device that ultimately allowed musicians to consider musical time in real time. A triumph of innovation, the metronome was celebrated by many as the fulfillment of a centuries-long search. Yet not everyone was convinced of its benefits. From Beethoven to Ligeti, the book looks to a number of influential composers who have used or refused this revolutionary machine. Measure: In Pursuit of Musical Time follows a host of brilliant polymaths, trailblazing musicians and intrepid inventors in search of ever more accurate and practical ways to measure and master one of music's most critical and challenging aspects.

The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music

The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music PDF Author: Mark Doffman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190947276
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 617

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Book Description
"The work of this introductory chapter is twofold; first, to provide a brief historical overview of the changing nature and conception of musical time over the last two thousand years, and second, to set out the arc of the work through detailing the central points of each chapter. While the individual pieces of writing bring vital and varied perspectives from musicology, ethnomusicology, philosophy, psychology, and socio-cultural work, what unites them is their attention to music of the modern period, with a strong focus on the multiplicities of contemporary practice, while also pointing to their nineteenth-century antecedents. In introducing the main themes of the book, the introduction calls attention to the burgeoning scholarship on time in music ranging between the immediate feelings and socialities of being in time with others and the broader imaginings of the cultural politics of time in music"--

Where Sight Meets Sound

Where Sight Meets Sound PDF Author: Emily Zazulia
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197551939
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
The main function of western musical notation is incidental: it prescribes and records sound. But during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, notation began to take on an aesthetic life all its own. In the early fifteenth century, a musician might be asked to sing a line slower, faster, or starting on a different pitch than what is written. By the end of the century composers had begun tasking singers with solving elaborate puzzles to produce sounds whose relationship to the written notes is anything but obvious. These instructions, which appear by turns unnecessary and confounding, challenge traditional conceptions of music writing that understand notation as an incidental consequence of the desire to record sound. This book explores innovations in late-medieval music writing as well as how modern scholarship on notation has informedsometimes erroneouslyideas about the premodern era. Drawing on both musical and music-theoretical evidence, this book reframes our understanding of late-medieval musical notation as a system that was innovative, cutting-edge, and dynamicone that could be used to generate music, not just preserve it.

Times A-Changin'

Times A-Changin' PDF Author: Nancy Murphy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197635210
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
"It is 1969 and Joni Mitchell is on television, standing empty-handed in the middle of a circular stage that is adorned with psychedelic colors. She is wearing a long, hunter-green dress, surrounded by an audience sitting cross-legged on the floor. She waits for television host Dick Cavett to introduce her next performance. The show is filming on the day after the 1969 Woodstock music festival, an event that Mitchell was initially scheduled to attend but from which she was held back by her management to ensure she could perform on The Dick Cavett Show the next day. The host introduces Mitchell and jokes with her about singing a capella, wondering aloud if someone stole her guitar. The singer laughs politely in response, denies any theft, and then proceeds to her performance, explaining to the audience that she will be singing a "song for America" that she wrote "as a Canadian living in this country." With her hands clasped behind her back, she performs "The Fiddle and the Drum" with no accompaniment, channeling the folk performance tradition on which the song is based. This song about military participation is a rare political statement from Mitchell who, unlike her peers Bob Dylan and Buffy Sainte-Marie, had only released this one "protest song" by 1969. But the song's message was not a particularly risky proclamation. Her anti-war narrative echoed the opinions of the young Cavett Show audience that night, aligning with an established trend of resistance against the war in Vietnam. Similar to the way that Mitchell's song "Woodstock" would eventually capture the spirit of an event she did not attend, "The Fiddle and the Drum" characterizes a popular anti-war sentiment in the public consciousness of the late 1960s"--

Sonic Bodies

Sonic Bodies PDF Author: Tekla Bude
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812298322
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Tekla Bude starts from a simple premise--that music requires a body to perform it--to rethink the relationship between music, matter, and the body in the late medieval period. Sonic Bodies argues that writers thought of "music" and "the body" as mutually dependent and historically determined processes that called each other into being.

Hearing Homophony

Hearing Homophony PDF Author: Megan Kaes Long
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190851910
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
The question of tonality's origins in music's pitch content has long vexed many scholars of music theory. However, tonality is not ultimately defined by pitch alone, but rather by pitch's interaction with elements like rhythm, meter, phrase structure, and form. Hearing Homophony investigates the elusive early history of tonality by examining a constellation of late-Renaissance popular songs which flourished throughout Western Europe at the turn of the seventeenth century. Megan Kaes Long argues that it is in these songs, rather than in more ambitious secular and sacred works, that the foundations of eighteenth century style are found. Arguing that tonality emerges from features of modal counterpoint - in particular, the rhythmic, phrase structural, and formal processes that govern it - and drawing on the arguments of theorists such as Dahlhaus, Powers, and Barnett, she asserts that modality and tonality are different in kind and not mutually exclusive. Using several hundred homophonic partsongs from Italy, Germany, England, and France, Long addresses a historical question of critical importance to music theory, musicology, and music performance. Hearing Homophony presents not only a new model of tonality's origins, but also a more comprehensive understanding of what tonality is, providing novel insight into the challenging world of seventeenth-century music.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Music PDF Author: Christopher R. Wilson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190945141
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 1289

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Book Description
"This compendium reflects the latest international research into the many and various uses of music in relation to Shakespeare's plays and poems, the contributors' lines of enquiry extending from the Bard's own time to the present day. The coverage is global in its scope, and includes studies of Shakespeare-related music in countries as diverse as China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, and the Soviet Union, as well as the more familiar Anglophone musical and theatrical traditions of the UK and USA. The range of genres surveyed by the book's team of distinguished authors embraces music for theatre, opera, ballet, musicals, the concert hall, and film, in addition to Shakespeare's ongoing afterlives in folk music, jazz, and popular music. The authors take a range of diverse approaches: some investigate the evidence for performative practices in the Early Modern and later eras, while others offer detailed analyses of representative case studies, situating these firmly in their cultural contexts, or reflecting on the political and sociological ramifications of the music. As a whole, the volume provides a wide-ranging compendium of cutting-edge scholarship engaging with an extraordinarily rich body of music without parallel in the history of the global arts"--