Modernity's Ear

Modernity's Ear PDF Author: Roshanak Kheshti
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479817864
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
Inside the global music industry and the racialized and gendered assumptions we make about what we hear Fearing the rapid disappearance of indigenous cultures, twentieth-century American ethnographers turned to the phonograph to salvage native languages and musical practices. Prominent among these early “songcatchers” were white women of comfortable class standing, similar to the female consumers targeted by the music industry as the gramophone became increasingly present in bourgeois homes. Through these simultaneous movements, listening became constructed as a feminized practice, one that craved exotic sounds and mythologized the ‘other’ that made them. In Modernity’s Ear, Roshanak Kheshti examines the ways in which racialized and gendered sounds became fetishized and, in turn, capitalized on by an emergent American world music industry through the promotion of an economy of desire. Taking a mixed-methods approach that draws on anthropology and sound studies, Kheshti locates sound as both representative and constitutive of culture and power. Through analyses of film, photography, recordings, and radio, as well as ethnographic fieldwork at a San Francisco-based world music company, Kheshti politicizes the feminine in the contemporary world music industry. Deploying critical theory to read the fantasy of the feminized listener and feminized organ of the ear, Modernity’s Ear ultimately explores the importance of pleasure in constituting the listening self.

Modernity's Ear

Modernity's Ear PDF Author: Roshanak Kheshti
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479817864
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Get Book

Book Description
Inside the global music industry and the racialized and gendered assumptions we make about what we hear Fearing the rapid disappearance of indigenous cultures, twentieth-century American ethnographers turned to the phonograph to salvage native languages and musical practices. Prominent among these early “songcatchers” were white women of comfortable class standing, similar to the female consumers targeted by the music industry as the gramophone became increasingly present in bourgeois homes. Through these simultaneous movements, listening became constructed as a feminized practice, one that craved exotic sounds and mythologized the ‘other’ that made them. In Modernity’s Ear, Roshanak Kheshti examines the ways in which racialized and gendered sounds became fetishized and, in turn, capitalized on by an emergent American world music industry through the promotion of an economy of desire. Taking a mixed-methods approach that draws on anthropology and sound studies, Kheshti locates sound as both representative and constitutive of culture and power. Through analyses of film, photography, recordings, and radio, as well as ethnographic fieldwork at a San Francisco-based world music company, Kheshti politicizes the feminine in the contemporary world music industry. Deploying critical theory to read the fantasy of the feminized listener and feminized organ of the ear, Modernity’s Ear ultimately explores the importance of pleasure in constituting the listening self.

Music, Modern Culture, and the Critical Ear

Music, Modern Culture, and the Critical Ear PDF Author: Nicholas Attfield
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317091655
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
In his 1985 book The Idea of Music: Schoenberg and Others, Peter Franklin set out a challenge for musicology: namely, how best to talk and write about the music of modern European culture that fell outside of the modernist mainstream typified by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern? Thirty years on, this collected volume of essays by Franklin’s students and colleagues returns to that challenge and the vibrant intellectual field that has since developed. Moving freely between insights into opera, Volksoper, film, festival, and choral movement, and from the very earliest years of the twentieth century up to the 1980s, its authors listen with a ‘critical ear’: they site these musical phenomena within a wider web of modern cultural practices - a perspective, in turn, that enables them to exercise a disciplinary self-awareness after Franklin’s manner.

Hearing Cultures

Hearing Cultures PDF Author: Veit Erlmann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000211045
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Vision is typically treated as the defining sense of the modern era and a powerful vehicle for colonial and postcolonial domination. This is in marked contrast to the almost total absence of accounts of hearing in larger cultural processes. Hearing Cultures is a timely examination of the elusive, often evocative, and sometimes cacophonous auditory sense - from the intersection of sound and modernity, through to the relationship between audio-technological advances and issues of personal and urban space. As cultures and communities grapple with the massive changes wrought by modernization and globalization, Hearing Cultures presents an important new approach to understanding our world. It answers such intriguing questions as: Did people in Shakespeare's time hear differently from us? In what way does technology affect our ears? Why do people in Egypt increasingly listen to taped religious sermons? Why did Enlightenment doctors believe that music was an essential cure? What happens acoustically in cross-cultural first encounters? Why do Runa Indians in the Amazon basin now consider onomatopoetic speech child's talk? The ear, as much as the eye, nose, mouth and hand, offers a way into experience. All five senses are instruments that record, interpret and engage with the world. This book shows how sound offers a refreshing new lens through which to examine culture and complex social issues.

Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas

Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas PDF Author: Jairo Moreno
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022682568X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
"Sounding Latin America studies popular music making by immigrants from Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean in the United States. It focuses on the points of contact and divergence in music making that result from competing values informed by how modernity is experienced across the Americas: the relation of language to letters; cosmopolitanism; racial categories and adjacent traditions and notions of the past; citizenship and migrancy; globalization and belonging. First study of the intra-hemispheric, linked but divergent relations of "Latin" music to the US and Latin America Proposes a comparative method for understanding the relations of immigrants to minority groups in the US with music making as the center Book places aurality ("intersensory, affective, cognitive, discursive, material, perceptual, and rhetorical network") as central operation in the constitution of "music.""--

Listening with a Feminist Ear

Listening with a Feminist Ear PDF Author: Pavitra Sundar
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472903667
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Listening with a Feminist Ear is a study of the cultural politics and possibilities of sound in cinema. Eschewing ocularcentric and siloed disciplinary formations, the book takes seriously the radical theoretical and methodological potential of listening. It models a feminist interpretive practice that is not just attuned to how power and privilege are materialized in sound, but that engenders new, counter-hegemonic imaginaries. Focusing on mainstream Bombay cinema, Sundar identifies singing, listening, and speaking as key sites in which gendered notions of identity and difference take form. Charting new paths through seven decades of film, media, and cultural history, Sundar identifies key shifts in women’s playback voices and the Islamicate genre of the qawwali. She also conceptualizes spoken language as sound, and turns up the volume on a capacious, multilingual politics of belonging that scholarly and popular accounts of nation typically render silent. All in all, Listening with a Feminist Ear offers a critical sonic sensibility that reinvigorates debates about the gendering of voice and body in cinema, and the role of sound and media in conjuring community.

Eardrums

Eardrums PDF Author: Tyler Whitney
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810140233
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
In this innovative study, Tyler Whitney demonstrates how a transformation and militarization of the civilian soundscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries left indelible traces on the literature that defined the period. Both formally and thematically, the modernist aesthetics of Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Detlev von Liliencron, and Peter Altenberg drew on this blurring of martial and civilian soundscapes in traumatic and performative repetitions of war. At the same time, Richard Huelsenbeck assaulted audiences in Zurich with his “sound poems,” which combined references to World War I, colonialism, and violent encounters in urban spaces with nonsensical utterances and linguistic detritus—all accompanied by the relentless beating of a drum on the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire. Eardrums is the first book-length study to explore the relationship between acoustical modernity and German modernism, charting a literary and cultural history written in and around the eardrum. The result is not only a new way of understanding the sonic impulses behind key literary texts from the period. It also outlines an entirely new approach to the study of literature as as the interaction of text and sonic practice, voice and noise, which will be of interest to scholars across literary studies, media theory, sound studies, and the history of science.

The Audible Past

The Audible Past PDF Author: Jonathan Sterne
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822330134
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Book Description
Table of contents

Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity

Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity PDF Author: Kimberly Elman Zarecor
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 082297780X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Eastern European prefabricated housing blocks are often vilified as the visible manifestations of everything that was wrong with state socialism. For many inside and outside the region, the uniformity of these buildings became symbols of the dullness and drudgery of everyday life. Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity complicates this common perception. Analyzing the cultural, intellectual, and professional debates surrounding the construction of mass housing in early postwar Czechoslovakia, Zarecor shows that these housing blocks served an essential function in the planned economy and reflected an interwar aesthetic, derived from constructivism and functionalism, that carried forward into the 1950s. With a focus on prefabricated and standardized housing built from 1945 to 1960, Zarecor offers broad and innovative insights into the country’s transition from capitalism to state socialism. She demonstrates that during this shift, architects and engineers consistently strove to meet the needs of Czechs and Slovaks despite challenging economic conditions, a lack of material resources, and manufacturing and technological limitations. In the process, architects were asked to put aside their individual creative aspirations and transform themselves into technicians and industrial producers. Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity is the first comprehensive history of architectural practice and the emergence of prefabricated housing in the Eastern Bloc. Through discussions of individual architects and projects, as well as building typologies, professional associations, and institutional organization, it opens a rare window into the cultural and economic life of Eastern Europe during the early postwar period.

Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain

Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain PDF Author: Heather Fielding
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108629296
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Modernism reshaped novel theory, shifting criticism away from readers' experiences and toward the work as an object autonomous from any reader. Novel Theory and Technology in Modernist Britain excavates technology's crucial role in this evolution and offers a new history of modernism's vision of the novel. To many modernists, both novel and machine increasingly seemed to merge into the experiences of readers or users. But modernists also saw potential for a different understanding of technology - in pre-modern machines, or the technical functioning of technologies stripped of their current social roles. With chapters on Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and Rebecca West, Novel Theory argues that in these alternative visions of technology, modernists found models for how the novel might become an autonomous, intellectual object rather than a familiar experience, and articulated a future for the novel by imagining it as a new kind of machine.

Modernist Soundscapes

Modernist Soundscapes PDF Author: Angela Frattarola
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813052432
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
At the turn of the twentieth century, new technologies such as the phonograph, telephone, and radio changed how sound was transmitted and perceived. In Modernist Soundscapes, Angela Frattarola analyzes the influence of “the age of noise” on writers of the time, showing how modernist novelists used sound to bridge the distance between characters and to connect with the reader on a more intimate level. Frattarola tunes in to representations of voices, noise, and music in works by Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Jean Rhys, and Samuel Beckett. She argues that the common use of headphones, which piped sounds from afar into a listener’s headspace, inspired modernists to record the interior monologues of their characters in a stream-of-consciousness style. Woolf’s onomatopoeia stemmed from a desire to render the sounds of the world without mediation, similar to how some contemporaries hoped that recording technology would eliminate the need for musicians. Frattarola also explains how Beckett’s linguistic repetition mirrors the mechanical reproduction of the tape recorder. These writers challenged ocularcentrism, the traditional emphasis on vision in art and philosophy, and instead characterized the eye as distancing and analytical and the act of listening as immediate and unifying. Contending that the experimentation typically associated with modernist writing is partly due to this new attentiveness to sound, this book introduces a fresh perspective on texts that set the course of contemporary literature.