Representations of the Orient in Western Music

Representations of the Orient in Western Music PDF Author: Nasser Al-Taee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351551418
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This book focuses on the cultural, political and religious representations of the Orient in Western music. Dr Nasser Al-Taee traces several threads in a vast repertoire of musical representations, concentrating primarily on the images of violence and sensuality. Al-Taee argues that these prevailing traits are not only the residual manifestation of the Ottoman threat to Western Europe, but also the continuation of a long and complex history of fear and fascination towards the Orient and its Islamic religion. In addition to analyses of musical works, Al-Taee draws on travel accounts, paintings, biographies, and political events to engage with important issues such as gender, race, and religious differences that may have contributed to the variously complex images of the Orient in Western music. The study extends the range of Orientalism to cover eighteenth-century Austria, nineteenth-century Russia, and twentieth-century America. The book challenges those scholars who do not see Orientalism as problematic and tend to ignore the role of musical representations in shaping the image of the Other within a wider interdisciplinary study of knowledge and power.

Representations of the Orient in Western Music

Representations of the Orient in Western Music PDF Author: Nasser Al-Taee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351551418
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book focuses on the cultural, political and religious representations of the Orient in Western music. Dr Nasser Al-Taee traces several threads in a vast repertoire of musical representations, concentrating primarily on the images of violence and sensuality. Al-Taee argues that these prevailing traits are not only the residual manifestation of the Ottoman threat to Western Europe, but also the continuation of a long and complex history of fear and fascination towards the Orient and its Islamic religion. In addition to analyses of musical works, Al-Taee draws on travel accounts, paintings, biographies, and political events to engage with important issues such as gender, race, and religious differences that may have contributed to the variously complex images of the Orient in Western music. The study extends the range of Orientalism to cover eighteenth-century Austria, nineteenth-century Russia, and twentieth-century America. The book challenges those scholars who do not see Orientalism as problematic and tend to ignore the role of musical representations in shaping the image of the Other within a wider interdisciplinary study of knowledge and power.

Music Semiotics: A Network of Significations

Music Semiotics: A Network of Significations PDF Author: Esti Sheinberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351557203
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
United in their indebtedness to the scholarship of Raymond Monelle, an international group of contributors, including leading authorities on music and culture, come together in this state of the art volume to investigate different ways in which music signifies. Music semiotics asks what music signifies as well as how the signification process takes place. Looking at the nature of musical texts and music's narrativity, a number of the essays in this collection delve into the relationship between music and philosophy, literature, poetry, folk traditions and the theatre, with opera a genre that particularly lends itself to this mode of investigation. Other contributions look at theories of musical markedness, metaphor and irony, using examples and specific musical texts to serve as case studies to validate their theoretical approaches. Musical works discussed include those by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, Stravinsky, Bart Xenakis, Kutavicius and John Adams, offering stimulating discussions of music that attest to its beauty as much as to its intellectual challenge. Taking Monelle's writing as a model, the contributions adhere to a method of logical argumentation presented in a civilized and respectful way, even - and particularly - when controversial issues are at stake, keeping in mind that contemplating the significance of music is a way to contemplate life itself.

Musicology and Difference

Musicology and Difference PDF Author: Ruth A. Solie
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520201460
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Collection of essays addressing Western and non-Western music, exploring questions of gender and sexuality

Experiencing Mozart

Experiencing Mozart PDF Author: David Schroeder
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810884291
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Titles in the Listener’s Companion Series provide readers with a deeper understanding of key musical genres and the work of major artists and composers. Aimed at nonspecialists, each volume clearly explains how to listen to works from particular artists, composers, and genres. Examining both the context in which the music appeared and its form, authors provide the environments in which key musical works were written and performed—from a 1950s bebop concert at the Village Vanguard to a performance of Handel’s Messiah in eighteenth-century Dublin. Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (1756–1791) remains as popular today as ever. His recordings fill iTunes playlists, and annual Mozart festivals are performed worldwide. His eminence as a musician has supported overseas guided tours, served as the subject of a cartoon series (Little Amadeus: twenty-nine episodes from 2006 to 2008), inspired movies and documentaries, and launched a French rock opera. In Experiencing Mozart: A Listener’s Companion, music historian David Schroeder illustrates how the issues Mozart cared about so deeply remain important to modern listeners. His views on politics, women, authority, and religion are provided, along with compelling analysis of selected great symphonies and sonatas, moving concertos and innovative keyboard works, and groundbreaking operas. Schroeder merges his vast knowledge of the great artist’s personal and professional life, late eighteenth-century European culture and society, and remarkable musicianship to guide listeners in the art of listening to Mozart. This work is an ideal introduction to readers and listeners at any level.

The Harmonicon

The Harmonicon PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 646

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Book Description


Tempesta

Tempesta PDF Author: Clive McClelland
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498568025
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Tempesta is a term coined in this book applying to music that exhibits agitated or violent characteristics in order to evoke terror and chaos, involving ideas like rapid scale passages, driving rhythmic figurations, strong accents, full textures, and robust instrumentation including prominent brass and timpani. Music of this type was used for storm scenes, which in operas of the 17th and 18th centuries are almost invariably of supernatural origin, and other frightening experiences such as pursuit, madness, and rage. This ‘stormy’ music formed the ingredients of a particular style in the later 18th century that scholars in recent decades have referred to as Sturm und Drang, implying a relationship to German literature which I believe is unhelpful and misleading. Haydn’s so-called Sturm und Drang symphonies exhibit characteristics that are no different to his depictions of storms in his operas and sacred music, and there is no evidence of Haydn suffering some kind of personal crisis, or even of him responding to the ‘spirit of the age’. He was simply exploring the expressive possibilities of the style for dramatic/rhetorical effect. Scholars have been dissatisfied with the term for some time, but no-one has previously suggested an alternative. The term tempesta therefore applies to all manifestations of this kind of music, a label that acknowledges the ‘stormy’ origins of the style, but which also recognizes that it functions as a counterpart to ombra. Tempesta contributed enormously to the continued popularity of operas on supernatural subjects, and quickly migrated towards sacred music and even instrumental music, where it became part of the topical discourse. The music does not merely represent the supernatural, it instills an emotional response in the listener. Awe and terror had already been identified as sources of the sublime, notably by Edmund Burke (predating the German literary Sturm und Drang), and the latter half of the century saw the rise of Gothic literature. The supernatural remained popular in theaters and opera houses, and special music that could produce an emotional response of such magnitude was a powerful tool in the composer’s expressive armory.

The Great Tradition and Its Legacy

The Great Tradition and Its Legacy PDF Author: Michael Cherlin
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571811738
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
This volume not only offers an overview of the theatrical history of the region, it is also a cross-disciplinary attempt to analyse the inner workings and dynamics of theater through a discussion of the interplay between society, the audience, and performing artists."--Book jacket.

Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart's Turkish Music

Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart's Turkish Music PDF Author: Matthew Head
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351555480
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Matthew Head explores the cultural meanings of Mozart's Turkish music in the composer's 18th-century context, in subsequent discourses of Mozart's significance for 'Western' culture, and in today's (not entirely) post-colonial world. Unpacking the ideological content of Mozart's numerous representations of Turkey and Turkish music, Head locates the composer's exoticisms in shifting power relations between the Austrian and Ottoman Empires, and in an emerging orientalist project. At the same time, Head complicates a presentist post-colonial critique by exploring commercial stimuli to Mozart's turquerie, and by embedding the composer's orientalism in practices of self-disguise epitomised by masquerade and carnival. In this context, Mozart's Turkish music offered fleeting liberation from official and proscribed identities of the bourgeois Enlightenment.

The Harmonicon

The Harmonicon PDF Author: William Ayrton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description


Critique of Pure Music

Critique of Pure Music PDF Author: James O. Young
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199682712
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
James O. Young seeks to explain why we value music so highly. He draws on the latest psychological research to argue that music is expressive of emotion by resembling human expressive behaviour. The representation of emotion in music gives it the capacity to provide psychological insight—and it is this which explains a good deal of its value.