Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony

Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony PDF Author: Melanie Lowe
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253000068
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Classical music permeates contemporary life. Encountered in waiting rooms, movies, and hotel lobbies as much as in the concert hall, perennial orchestral favorites mingle with commercial jingles, video-game soundtracks, and the booming bass from a passing car to form the musical soundscape of our daily lives. In this provocative and ground-breaking study, Melanie Lowe explores why the public instrumental music of late-eighteenth-century Europe has remained accessible, entertaining, and distinctly pleasurable to a wide variety of listeners for over 200 years. By placing listeners at the center of interpretive activity, Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony offers an alternative to more traditional composer- and score-oriented approaches to meaning in the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart. Drawing from the aesthetics of the Enlightenment, the politics of entertainment, and postmodern notions of pleasure, Lowe posits that the listener's pleasure stems from control over musical meaning. She then explores the widely varying meanings eighteenth-century listeners of different social classes may have constructed during their first and likely only hearing of a work. The methodologies she employs are as varied as her sources -- from musical analysis to the imaginings of three hypothetical listeners. Lowe also explores similarities between the position of the classical symphony in its own time and its position in contemporary American consumer culture. By considering the meanings the mainstream and largely middle-class American public may construct alongside those heard by today's more elite listeners, she reveals the great polysemic potential of this music within our current cultural marketplace. She suggests that we embrace "crosstalk" between performances of this music and its myriad uses in film, television, and other mediated contexts to recover the pleasure of listening to this repertory. In so doing, we surprisingly regain something of the classical symphony's historical ways of meaning.

Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony

Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony PDF Author: Melanie Lowe
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253000068
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
Classical music permeates contemporary life. Encountered in waiting rooms, movies, and hotel lobbies as much as in the concert hall, perennial orchestral favorites mingle with commercial jingles, video-game soundtracks, and the booming bass from a passing car to form the musical soundscape of our daily lives. In this provocative and ground-breaking study, Melanie Lowe explores why the public instrumental music of late-eighteenth-century Europe has remained accessible, entertaining, and distinctly pleasurable to a wide variety of listeners for over 200 years. By placing listeners at the center of interpretive activity, Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony offers an alternative to more traditional composer- and score-oriented approaches to meaning in the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart. Drawing from the aesthetics of the Enlightenment, the politics of entertainment, and postmodern notions of pleasure, Lowe posits that the listener's pleasure stems from control over musical meaning. She then explores the widely varying meanings eighteenth-century listeners of different social classes may have constructed during their first and likely only hearing of a work. The methodologies she employs are as varied as her sources -- from musical analysis to the imaginings of three hypothetical listeners. Lowe also explores similarities between the position of the classical symphony in its own time and its position in contemporary American consumer culture. By considering the meanings the mainstream and largely middle-class American public may construct alongside those heard by today's more elite listeners, she reveals the great polysemic potential of this music within our current cultural marketplace. She suggests that we embrace "crosstalk" between performances of this music and its myriad uses in film, television, and other mediated contexts to recover the pleasure of listening to this repertory. In so doing, we surprisingly regain something of the classical symphony's historical ways of meaning.

Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music

Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music PDF Author: Susan McClary
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520952065
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
In this book, Susan McClary examines the mechanisms through which seventeenth-century musicians simulated extreme affective states—desire, divine rapture, and ecstatic pleasure. She demonstrates how every major genre of the period, from opera to religious music to instrumental pieces based on dances, was part of this striving for heightened passions by performers and listeners. While she analyzes the social and historical reasons for the high value placed on expressive intensity in both secular and sacred music, and she also links desire and pleasure to the many technical innovations of the period. McClary shows how musicians—whether working within the contexts of the Reformation or Counter-Reformation, Absolutists courts or commercial enterprises in Venice—were able to manipulate known procedures to produce radically new ways of experiencing time and the Self.

The Pleasure of Modernist Music

The Pleasure of Modernist Music PDF Author: Arved Mark Ashby
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1580461433
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
The debate over modernist music has continued for almost a century: from Berg's Wozzeck and Webern's Symphony Op.21 to John Cage's renegotiation of musical control, the unusual musical practices of the Velvet Underground, and Stanley Kubrick's use of Ligeti's Lux Aeterna in the epic film 2001. The composers discussed in these pages -- including Bartók, Stockhausen, Bernard Herrmann, Steve Reich, and many others -- are modernists in that they are defined by their individualism, whether covert or overt, and share a basic urge toward redesigning musical discourse. The aim of this volume is to negotiate a varied and open middle ground between polemical extremes of reception. The contributors sketch out the possible significance of a repertory that in past discussions has been deemed either meaningless or beyond describable meaning. With an emphasis on recent aesthetics and contexts -- including film music, sexuality, metaphor, and ideas of a listening grammar -- they trace the meanings that such works and composers have held for listeners of different kinds. None of them takes up the usual mandate of "educated listening" to modernist works: the notion that a person can appreciate "difficult" music if given enough time and schooling. Instead the book defines novel but meaningful avenues of significance for modernist music, avenues beyond those deemed appropriate or acceptable by the academy. While some contributors offer new listening strategies, most interpret the listening premise more loosely: as a metaphor for any manner of personal and immediate connection with music. In addition to a previously untranslated article by Pierre Boulez, the volume contains articles (all but one previously unpublished) by twelve distinctive and prominent composers, music critics, and music theorists from America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa: Arved Ashby, Amy Bauer, William Bolcom, Jonathan Bernard, Judy Lochhead, Fred Maus, Andrew Mead, Greg Sandow, Martin Scherzinger, Jeremy Tambling, Richard Toop, and Lloyd Whitesell. Arved Ashby is Associate Professor of Music at the Ohio State University.

The Symphonic Repertoire, Volume I

The Symphonic Repertoire, Volume I PDF Author: Mary Sue Morrow
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025307214X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 946

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Book Description
Central to the repertoire of Western art music since the 18th century, the symphony has come to be regarded as one of the ultimate compositional challenges. In his five-volume series The Symphonic Repertoire, the late A. Peter Brown explores the symphony from its 18th-century beginnings to the end of the 20th century. In Volume 1, The Eighteenth-Century Symphony, 22 of Brown's former students and colleagues collaborate to complete the work that he began on this critical period of development in symphonic history. The work follows Brown's outline, is organized by country, and focuses on major composers. It includes a four-chapter overview and concludes with a reframing of the symphonic narrative. Contributors address issues of historiography, the status of research, and questions of attribution and stylistic traits, and provide background material on the musical context of composition and early performances. The volume features a CD of recordings from the Bloomington Early Music Festival Orchestra, highlighting the largely unavailable repertoire discussed in the book.

Stories of Symphonic Music

Stories of Symphonic Music PDF Author: Lawrence Gilman
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Stories of Symphonic Music is musicologic essay by Lawrence Gilman. It details the meaning of important Symphonies, Overtures, and Tone-Poems from Beethoven onwards.

The Vintage Guide to Classical Music

The Vintage Guide to Classical Music PDF Author: Jan Swafford
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679728058
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 626

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Book Description
The most readable and comprehensive guide to enjoying over five hundred years of classical music -- from Gregorian chants, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Johannes Brahms, Igor Stravinsky, John Cage, and beyond. The Vintage Guide to Classical Music is a lively -- and opinionated -- musical history and an insider's key to the personalities, epochs, and genres of the Western classical tradition. Among its features: -- chronologically arranged essays on nearly 100 composers, from Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377) to Aaron Copland (1900-1990), that combine biography with detailed analyses of the major works while assessing their role in the social, cultural, and political climate of their times; -- informative sidebars that clarify broader topics such as melody, polyphony, atonality, and the impact of the early-music movement; -- a glossary of musical terms, from a cappella to woodwinds; -- a step-by-step guide to building a great classical music library. Written with wit and a clarity that both musical experts and beginners can appreciate, The Vintage Guide to Classical Music is an invaluable source-book for music lovers everywhere.

When Bad Grammar Happens to Good People

When Bad Grammar Happens to Good People PDF Author: Ann Batko
Publisher: Red Wheel/Weiser
ISBN: 1601637896
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Discover an easy way to polish up your English with this guide to avoiding common mistakes people make when writing and speaking. Good news—you’re definitely not the only person who struggles to keep “who” and “whom,” “affect” and “effect,” or “lay” and “lie” straight. Bad news: Frequent grammatical errors can affect (not effect) your success at work and in other areas of life. This comprehensive, easy-to-use reference is a program designed to help you identify and correct the most common errors in written and spoken English. After a short, simple review of some basic principles, When Bad Grammar Happens to Good People is organized by error type, such as Mangled Modifiers or Mixing up Words that Sound the Same. You choose how to work your way through, either sequentially or in the order most relevant to you. Each unit contains tests at the end to help you reinforce what you’ve learned. Best of all, the information is presented in a clear, lively, and conversational style—unlike your eighth-grade grammar textbook!

Aquinas and the Nicomachean Ethics

Aquinas and the Nicomachean Ethics PDF Author: Tobias Hoffmann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107002672
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
This book discusses Aquinas's reception of Aristotle's work, exploring how Aquinas adopts, corrects or transforms key themes from Aristotle's ethics.

Poetic Knowledge

Poetic Knowledge PDF Author: James S. Taylor
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791435854
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Reveals the neglected mode of knowing and learning, from Socrates to the middle ages and beyond, that relies more on the integrated powers of sensory experience and intuition, rather than on modern narrow scientific models of education.

Mozart in Vienna

Mozart in Vienna PDF Author: Simon P. Keefe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107116716
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 719

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Book Description
Comprehensive and engaging exploration of Mozart's greatest works, focussing on his dual roles as performer and composer in Vienna.