Polyphonic Minds

Polyphonic Minds PDF Author: Peter Pesic
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262543893
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
An exploration of polyphony and the perspective it offers on our own polyphonic brains. Polyphony—the interweaving of simultaneous sounds—is a crucial aspect of music that has deep implications for how we understand the mind. In Polyphonic Minds, Peter Pesic examines the history and significance of “polyphonicity”—of “many-voicedness”—in human experience. Pesic presents the emergence of Western polyphony, its flowering, its horizons, and the perspective it offers on our own polyphonic brains. When we listen to polyphonic music, how is it that we can hear several different things at once? How does a single mind experience those things as a unity (a motet, a fugue) rather than an incoherent jumble? Pesic argues that polyphony raises fundamental issues for philosophy, theology, literature, psychology, and neuroscience—all searching for the apparent unity of consciousness in the midst of multiple simultaneous experiences. After tracing the development of polyphony in Western music from ninth-century church music through the experimental compositions of Glenn Gould and John Cage, Pesic considers the analogous activity within the brain, the polyphonic “music of the hemispheres” that shapes brain states from sleep to awakening. He discusses how neuroscientists draw on concepts from polyphony to describe the “neural orchestra” of the brain. Pesic’s story begins with ancient conceptions of God’s mind and ends with the polyphonic personhood of the human brain and body. An enhanced e-book edition allows the sound examples to be played by a touch.

Polyphonic Minds

Polyphonic Minds PDF Author: Peter Pesic
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262543893
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Get Book Here

Book Description
An exploration of polyphony and the perspective it offers on our own polyphonic brains. Polyphony—the interweaving of simultaneous sounds—is a crucial aspect of music that has deep implications for how we understand the mind. In Polyphonic Minds, Peter Pesic examines the history and significance of “polyphonicity”—of “many-voicedness”—in human experience. Pesic presents the emergence of Western polyphony, its flowering, its horizons, and the perspective it offers on our own polyphonic brains. When we listen to polyphonic music, how is it that we can hear several different things at once? How does a single mind experience those things as a unity (a motet, a fugue) rather than an incoherent jumble? Pesic argues that polyphony raises fundamental issues for philosophy, theology, literature, psychology, and neuroscience—all searching for the apparent unity of consciousness in the midst of multiple simultaneous experiences. After tracing the development of polyphony in Western music from ninth-century church music through the experimental compositions of Glenn Gould and John Cage, Pesic considers the analogous activity within the brain, the polyphonic “music of the hemispheres” that shapes brain states from sleep to awakening. He discusses how neuroscientists draw on concepts from polyphony to describe the “neural orchestra” of the brain. Pesic’s story begins with ancient conceptions of God’s mind and ends with the polyphonic personhood of the human brain and body. An enhanced e-book edition allows the sound examples to be played by a touch.

Renaissance Polyphony

Renaissance Polyphony PDF Author: Fabrice Fitch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108882668
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
This engaging study introduces Renaissance polyphony to a modern audience. It helps readers of all ages and levels of experience make sense of what they are hearing. How does Renaissance music work? How is a piece typical of its style and type; or, if it is exceptional, what makes it so? The makers of polyphony were keenly aware of the specialized nature of their craft. How is this reflected in the music they wrote, and how were they regarded by their patrons and audiences? Through a combination of detailed, nuanced appreciation of musical style and a lucid overview of current debates, this book offers a glimpse of meanings behind and beyond the notes, be they playful or profound. It will enhance the listening experience of students, performers and music lovers alike.

African Polyphony and Polyrhythm

African Polyphony and Polyrhythm PDF Author: Simha Arom
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052124160X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 700

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Book Description
An original approach to the understanding of the complete and sophisticated patterns of polyphony and polyrhythm of African music.

The Spirit of Polyphony

The Spirit of Polyphony PDF Author: Joanna Tarassenko
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 056771358X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
This book re-examines how Bonhoeffer employs musical patterns of thought and language to a theological end. It outlines how the significance of Bonhoeffer's musico-theology has not been sufficiently recognised, and sets the stage for a rigorous re-examination. It becomes clear that through the lens of his musical metaphor of polyphony, Bonhoeffer demonstrates how his account of Christian formation contains a latent pneumatology. Tarassenko demonstrates that incorporation of this pneumatology is key in deepening one's understanding of Bonhoeffer. It allows the relationship between Christology and Christian formation in Bonhoeffer's thought to become fully realised. The appeal to polyphony articulates this pneumatology, as an indirect but nevertheless exceedingly successful means of contouring an account of the Spirit's work.

California Polyphony

California Polyphony PDF Author: Mina Yang
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 025209297X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
What does it mean to be Californian? To find out, Mina Yang delves into multicultural nature of musics in the state that has launched musical and cultural trends for decades. In the early twentieth century, an orientalist fascination with Asian music and culture dominated the popular imagination of white Californians and influenced their interactions with the Asian Other. Several decades later, tensions between the Los Angeles Police Department and the African American community made the thriving jazz and blues nightclub scene of 1940s Central Avenue a target for the LAPD's anti-vice crusade. The musical scores for Hollywood's noir films confirmed reactionary notions of the threat to white female sexuality in the face of black culture and urban corruption while Mexican Americans faced a conflicted assimilation into the white American mainstream. Finally, Korean Americans in the twenty-first century turned to hip-hop to express their cultural and national identities. A compelling journey into the origins of musical identity, California Polyphony explores the intersection of musicology, cultural history, and politics to define Californian.

Spaces of Polyphony

Spaces of Polyphony PDF Author: Clara-Ubaldina Lorda
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027210322
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Spaces of Polyphony covers a lot of ground. It echoes the voices of researchers and their informants from many different places and backgrounds. Among the variety of languages under study and methodological approaches there is also a common ground and narrative thread underpinning the polyphonic chorus of the contributors. From a shared starting point of discourse analysis and inspiration from Bakhtin, the various authors span from East to West, from Moscow to Texas, from Romania and Czech Republic to Mexico. They look into all ages, starting from early childhood, and many walks of life, ranging from casual chatting among relatives to parliamentary speeches and TV shows, including formal education, literary inner monologue and translation. Irony, humour and self-awareness are recurrent themes. The array of voices and dialogism studied in this book is such that it even includes the silent (silenced) voices of people forced to express their heritage by weaving their discourse.

Polyphony and the Modern

Polyphony and the Modern PDF Author: Jonathan Fruoco
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000391086
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Polyphony and the Modern asks one fundamental question: what does it mean to be modern in one’s own time? To answer that question, this volume focuses on polyphony as an index of modernity. In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch showed that each moment in time is potentially fractured: people living in the same country can effectively live in different centuries – some making their alliances with the past and others betting on the future – but all of them, at least technically, enclosed in the temporal moment. But can a claim of modernity also mean something more ambitious? Can an artist, by accident or design, escape the limits of his or her own time, and somehow precociously embody the outlook of a subsequent age? This book sees polyphony as a bridge providing a terminology and a stylistic practice by which the period barrier between Medieval and Early Modern can be breached. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003129837

The Polyphony of Jewish Culture

The Polyphony of Jewish Culture PDF Author: Benjamin Harshav
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804755122
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
This book is a collection of seminal essays on major aspects of Jewish culture: Yiddish and Hebrew literature, Europe, America and Israel, transformations of Jewish history, the Holocaust, and the formal traditions of Hebrew verse.

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music PDF Author: Mark Everist
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107495121
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 982

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Book Description
From the emergence of plainsong to the end of the fourteenth century, this Companion covers all the key aspects of medieval music. Divided into three main sections, the book first of all discusses repertory, styles and techniques - the key areas of traditional music histories; next taking a topographical view of the subject - from Italy, German-speaking lands, and the Iberian Peninsula; and concludes with chapters on such issues as liturgy, vernacular poetry and reception. Rather than presenting merely a chronological view of the history of medieval music, the volume instead focuses on technical and cultural aspects of the subject. Over nineteen informative chapters, fifteen world-leading scholars give a perspective on the music of the Middle Ages that will serve as a point of orientation for the informed listener and reader, and is a must-have guide for anyone with an interest in listening to and understanding medieval music.

Polyphony in Medieval Paris

Polyphony in Medieval Paris PDF Author: Catherine A. Bradley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108311180
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Polyphony associated with the Parisian cathedral of Notre Dame marks a historical turning point in medieval music. Yet a lack of analytical or theoretical systems has discouraged close study of twelfth- and thirteenth-century musical objects, despite the fact that such creations represent the beginnings of musical composition as we know it. Is musical analysis possible for such medieval repertoires? Catherine A. Bradley demonstrates that it is, presenting new methodologies to illuminate processes of musical and poetic creation, from monophonic plainchant and vernacular French songs, to polyphonic organa, clausulae, and motets in both Latin and French. This book engages with questions of text-music relationships, liturgy, and the development of notational technologies, exploring concepts of authorship and originality as well as practices of quotation and musical reworking.