The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961

The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961 PDF Author: Anna Maria Busse Berger
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022674048X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 365

Get Book Here

Book Description
This innovative book reassesses the history of musicology, unearthing the field’s twentieth-century German and global roots. In the process, Anna Maria Busse Berger exposes previously unseen historical relationships such as those between the modern rediscovery of medieval music, the rise of communal singing, and the ways in which African music intersected with missionary work in the German colonial period. Ultimately, Busse Berger offers a monumental new account of the early twentieth-century music culture in Germany and East Africa. ?The book unfolds in three parts. Busse Berger starts with the origins of comparative musicology circa 1900, when early proponents used ideas from comparative linguistics to test whether parallels could be drawn between nonwestern and medieval European music. She then turns to youth movements of the era—the Wandervogel, Jugendmusikbewegung, and Singbewegung—whose focus on joint music making influenced many musicologists. Finally, she considers case studies of Protestant and Catholic mission societies in what is now Tanzania, where missionaries—many of them musicologists and former youth-group members—extended the discipline via ethnographic research and a focus on local music and communities. In highlighting these long-overlooked transnational connections and the role of global music in early musicology, Busse Berger shapes a fresh conception of music scholarship during a pivotal part of the twentieth century.

The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961

The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961 PDF Author: Anna Maria Busse Berger
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022674048X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 365

Get Book Here

Book Description
This innovative book reassesses the history of musicology, unearthing the field’s twentieth-century German and global roots. In the process, Anna Maria Busse Berger exposes previously unseen historical relationships such as those between the modern rediscovery of medieval music, the rise of communal singing, and the ways in which African music intersected with missionary work in the German colonial period. Ultimately, Busse Berger offers a monumental new account of the early twentieth-century music culture in Germany and East Africa. ?The book unfolds in three parts. Busse Berger starts with the origins of comparative musicology circa 1900, when early proponents used ideas from comparative linguistics to test whether parallels could be drawn between nonwestern and medieval European music. She then turns to youth movements of the era—the Wandervogel, Jugendmusikbewegung, and Singbewegung—whose focus on joint music making influenced many musicologists. Finally, she considers case studies of Protestant and Catholic mission societies in what is now Tanzania, where missionaries—many of them musicologists and former youth-group members—extended the discipline via ethnographic research and a focus on local music and communities. In highlighting these long-overlooked transnational connections and the role of global music in early musicology, Busse Berger shapes a fresh conception of music scholarship during a pivotal part of the twentieth century.

Listening to China

Listening to China PDF Author: Thomas Irvine
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022666712X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
From bell ringing to fireworks, gongs to cannon salutes, a dazzling variety of sounds and soundscapes marked the China encountered by the West around 1800. These sounds were gathered by diplomats, trade officials, missionaries, and other travelers and transmitted back to Europe, where they were reconstructed in the imaginations of writers, philosophers, and music historians such as Jean-Philippe Rameau, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, and Charles Burney. Thomas Irvine gathers these stories in Listening to China, exploring how the sonic encounter with China shaped perceptions of Europe’s own musical development. Through these stories, Irvine not only investigates how the Sino-Western encounter sounded, but also traces the West’s shifting response to China. As the trading relationships between China and the West broke down, travelers and music theorists abandoned the vision of shared musical approaches, focusing instead on China’s noisiness and sonic disorder and finding less to like in its music. At the same time, Irvine reconsiders the idea of a specifically Western music history, revealing that it was comparison with China, the great “other,” that helped this idea emerge. Ultimately, Irvine draws attention to the ways Western ears were implicated in the colonial and imperial project in China, as well as to China’s importance to the construction of musical knowledge during and after the European Enlightenment. Timely and original, Listening to China is a must-read for music scholars and historians of China alike.

Music and Instruments of the Middle Ages

Music and Instruments of the Middle Ages PDF Author: Tess Knighton
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783275561
Category : Conductus
Languages : en
Pages : 511

Get Book Here

Book Description
Essays on important topics in early music.

On African Music

On African Music PDF Author: Kofi Agawu
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197664091
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
Written by one of the best-known academic writers on African music, On African Music is a collection of seven essays addressing various techniques, influences, and scholarly approaches to African music. After a concise introduction spelling out the rationale for the book, successive chapters develop answers to questions such as: How does a "minimalist impulse" animate creativity in Africa, and does "Western minimalism" differ from "African minimalism"? How do we explain the prevalence of iconic effects in African expressive forms? How has (European) tonality functioned as a "colonizing force" in African music? Why is the (written) art music of the continent talked about so little when it has been in existence since the middle of the nineteenth century? How might the discipline of music theory be rejuvenated by "aid" from Africa? What are the strengths and limitations of ethnotheory as a methodology? Who is who in theorizations of African rhythm, and how might we explain the shape of the existing archive? This book thus deals with analytical and interpretive issues, the politics of scholarship, and salient features of African music. Laced with provocative viewpoints on each page, On African Music should appeal not only to readers curious about the structural underpinnings of African music but also to those who wish to reflect critically and philosophically on how we study and write about the music of the continent, how we might approach its global status with a firm understanding from the inside, and what our priorities might be in promoting an empowering cosmopolitan discourse.

Bitten by the Blues

Bitten by the Blues PDF Author: Bruce Iglauer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022612990X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Get Book Here

Book Description
It started with the searing sound of a slide careening up the neck of an electric guitar. In 1970, twenty-three-year-old Bruce Iglauer walked into Florence’s Lounge, in the heart of Chicago’s South Side, and was overwhelmed by the joyous, raw Chicago blues of Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers. A year later, Iglauer produced Hound Dog’s debut album in eight hours and pressed a thousand copies, the most he could afford. From that one album grew Alligator Records, the largest independent blues record label in the world. Bitten by the Blues is Iglauer’s memoir of a life immersed in the blues—and the business of the blues. No one person was present at the creation of more great contemporary blues music than Iglauer: he produced albums by Koko Taylor, Albert Collins, Professor Longhair, Johnny Winter, Lonnie Mack, Son Seals, Roy Buchanan, Shemekia Copeland, and many other major figures. In this book, Iglauer takes us behind the scenes, offering unforgettable stories of those charismatic musicians and classic sessions, delivering an intimate and unvarnished look at what it’s like to work with the greats of the blues. It’s a vivid portrait of some of the extraordinary musicians and larger-than-life personalities who brought America’s music to life in the clubs of Chicago’s South and West Sides. Bitten by the Blues is also an expansive history of half a century of blues in Chicago and around the world, tracing the blues recording business through massive transitions, as a genre of music originally created by and for black southerners adapted to an influx of white fans and musicians and found a worldwide audience. Most of the smoky bars and packed clubs that fostered the Chicago blues scene have long since disappeared. But their soul lives on, and so does their sound. As real and audacious as the music that shaped it, Bitten by the Blues is a raucous journey through the world of Genuine Houserockin’ Music.

Creatures of the Air

Creatures of the Air PDF Author: J.Q. Davies
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226826147
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book Here

Book Description
An account of nineteenth-century music in Atlantic worlds told through the history of the art’s elemental medium, the air. Often experienced as universal and incorporeal, music seems an innocent art form. The air, the very medium by which music constitutes itself, shares with music a claim to invisibility. In Creatures of the Air, J. Q. Davies interrogates these claims, tracing the history of music’s elemental media system in nineteenth-century Atlantic worlds. He posits that air is a poetic domain, and music is an art of that domain. From West Central African ngombi harps to the European J. S. Bach revival, music expressed elemental truths in the nineteenth century. Creatures of the Air tells these truths through stories about suffocation and breathing, architecture and environmental design, climate strife, and racial turmoil. Contributing to elemental media studies, the energy humanities, and colonial histories, Davies shows how music, no longer just an innocent luxury, is implicated in the struggle for control over air as a precious natural resource. What emerges is a complex political ecology of the global nineteenth century and beyond.

Circle of Winners

Circle of Winners PDF Author: Denise Von Glahn
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252054415
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Get Book Here

Book Description
An essential high culture institution, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has both supported and molded American musical culture. Denise Von Glahn examines the Foundation and its immense influence from the organization’s prehistory and origins through the onset of World War II. Funded by the Guggenheim mining fortune, the Foundation took early shape from the efforts of Carroll Wilson, Frank Aydelotte, and Henry Allen Moe--three Rhodes Scholars who initially struggled to envision and implement the organization’s ambitious goals. Von Glahn also examines the career of the longtime musical advisor Thomas Whitney Surette while profiling early awardees Aaron Copland, Ruth Crawford Seeger, William Grant Still, Roger Sessions, George Antheil, and Carlos Chàvez. She examines the processes behind their selection, their values and aesthetics, and their relationships with the insiders and others who championed their work.

Deep Refrains

Deep Refrains PDF Author: Michael Gallope
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022648369X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Get Book Here

Book Description
Deep Refrains is a wide-ranging investigation of the philosophy of music. Michael Gallope asks what it means for music to "speak” when it is not saying anything in particular. To answer this question, he turns to the writings of some of the most revered thinkers of the twentieth century--Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Vladimir Jank�l�vitch, Gilles Deleuze, and F�lix Guattari. For these theorists, Gallope argues, the paradox that music is both ineffable and yet harbors deep philosophical wisdoms is fertile ground for thinking outside of conceptual boundaries. It provides the lens for a utopian potentiality that inspires hope (Bloch), an ethical critique of modernity (Adorno), an exemplification of the ephemeral movement of lived time (Jank�l�vitch), and a sonic extension of the syncopated, contrapuntal rhythms of sense and social life (Deleuze and Guattari). Gallope argues that a philosophical engagement with music’s ineffability rarely calls for silence or declarations of the unspeakable. Rather, it asks us to think through the ways in which the impact of music is made to address complex philosophical problems specific to the modern world.

The Routledge Companion to Ethics and Research in Ethnomusicology

The Routledge Companion to Ethics and Research in Ethnomusicology PDF Author: Jonathan P. J. Stock
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000784649
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Ethics and Research in Ethnomusicology is an in-depth survey of the moral challenges and imperatives of conducting research on people making music. It focuses on fundamental and compelling ethical questions that have challenged and shaped both the history of this discipline and its current practices. In 26 representative cases from across a broad spectrum of geographical, societal, and musical environments, authors collectively reflect on the impacts of ethnomusicological research, exploring the ways our work may instantiate privilege or risk bringing harm, as well as the means that are available to provide recognition, benefit, and reciprocation to the musicians and others who contribute to our studies. In a world where differing ethical values are often in conflict, and where music itself is meanwhile a powerful tool in projecting moral claims, we aim to uncover the conditions and consequences of the ethical choices we face as ethnomusicologists, thereby contributing to building a more engaged, restructured discipline and a more globally responsible music studies. The volume comprises four parts: (1) sound practices and philosophies of ethics; (2) fieldwork encounters; (3) environment, trauma, collaboration; and (4) research in public domains.

Slave Emancipation, Christian Communities, and Dissent in Post-Abolition Tanzania, 1878-1978

Slave Emancipation, Christian Communities, and Dissent in Post-Abolition Tanzania, 1878-1978 PDF Author: Salvatory S Nyanto
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1847013589
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first historical account of the dramatic growth of Christianity in Western Tanzania during the twentieth century and of the role of former slaves in this process. Examining the intersection of post-slavery and evangelism, this book shows the ways that former slaves from a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds came together to create new communities in the Christian missions of western Tanzania. It shows how converts adapted to Christianity and, at the same time, shaped it through their translations of the Bible and other religious texts into the Kinyamwezi language, integrating concepts from their own cultures and experiences of slavery. Working as teachers, pastors, and catechists, former slaves and their descendants laid the basis for the growth of African Christianity in the region, and the book pays particular attention to women's agency in creating spaces for negotiating kinship ties and mutual relations with the wider communities. It also delves into the range of missionary sources to show the experience of lay Christians who opposed religious authority in Catholic and Moravian missions, examining the division caused by catechists' demands for equality of status, recognition, and appropriate pay in the context of ujamaa and the turmoil brought about by the revival movement. Through narratives of religious experience from multiple missions and village outstations, the book shows how former slaves created a Kinyamwezi-speaking Christian culture, taking inspiration both from European missionaries and neighbouring African villagers, and became part of evolving rural communities in the inter-war period, enabling their descendants to achieve a significant degree of social mobility.