The Shaping Forces in Music

The Shaping Forces in Music PDF Author: Ernst Toch
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486233464
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
A masterful and original classical composer as well as a renowned composer of film scores, Ernst Toch (1887 1964) made a permanent contribution to music in this important and widely praised book. Based on a series of lectures given at Harvard in 1944 and first published in 1948, this book is a brilliant examination of the materials and concepts that are the basic building blocks of music harmony, melody, counterpoint, and form. An admirable reconciliation of traditional and modern (mainly 12-tone) trends in composition, this book shows all types of writing must respond to psychological wants of the listener and how similar goals may be achieved in seemingly opposed styles. Illustrating his discussion with 390 musical examples, Toch not only introduces new ideas and approaches, but examines many age-old problems with clarity and precision consonance and dissonance, form versus number, and more. His analysis of the expanding harmonic universe, the wave line of melody, and the formative influence of movement are particularly penetrating. New to this edition are a biological introduction by Toch's grandson, Lawrence Weschler; a previously unpublished letter from Thomas Mann to Toch about this book (in English translation); and a complete checklist of Toch's compositions. Intended for all those who have a minimum understanding of musical notation and theory, this book will appeal to music lovers, practical musicians and amateurs, and incipient composers."

The Shaping Forces in Music

The Shaping Forces in Music PDF Author: Ernst Toch
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486233464
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book

Book Description
A masterful and original classical composer as well as a renowned composer of film scores, Ernst Toch (1887 1964) made a permanent contribution to music in this important and widely praised book. Based on a series of lectures given at Harvard in 1944 and first published in 1948, this book is a brilliant examination of the materials and concepts that are the basic building blocks of music harmony, melody, counterpoint, and form. An admirable reconciliation of traditional and modern (mainly 12-tone) trends in composition, this book shows all types of writing must respond to psychological wants of the listener and how similar goals may be achieved in seemingly opposed styles. Illustrating his discussion with 390 musical examples, Toch not only introduces new ideas and approaches, but examines many age-old problems with clarity and precision consonance and dissonance, form versus number, and more. His analysis of the expanding harmonic universe, the wave line of melody, and the formative influence of movement are particularly penetrating. New to this edition are a biological introduction by Toch's grandson, Lawrence Weschler; a previously unpublished letter from Thomas Mann to Toch about this book (in English translation); and a complete checklist of Toch's compositions. Intended for all those who have a minimum understanding of musical notation and theory, this book will appeal to music lovers, practical musicians and amateurs, and incipient composers."

The shaping forces in music

The shaping forces in music PDF Author: Ernst Toch
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Musical Forces

Musical Forces PDF Author: Steve Larson
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253005493
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Steve Larson drew on his 20 years of research in music theory, cognitive linguistics, experimental psychology, and artificial intelligence—as well as his skill as a jazz pianist—to show how the experience of physical motion can shape one's musical experience. Clarifying the roles of analogy, metaphor, grouping, pattern, hierarchy, and emergence in the explanation of musical meaning, Larson explained how listeners hear tonal music through the analogues of physical gravity, magnetism, and inertia. His theory of melodic expectation goes beyond prior theories in predicting complete melodic patterns. Larson elegantly demonstrated how rhythm and meter arise from, and are given meaning by, these same musical forces.

Shaping Jazz

Shaping Jazz PDF Author: Damon J. Phillips
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140084648X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
There are over a million jazz recordings, but only a few hundred tunes have been recorded repeatedly. Why did a minority of songs become jazz standards? Why do some songs--and not others--get rerecorded by many musicians? Shaping Jazz answers this question and more, exploring the underappreciated yet crucial roles played by initial production and markets--in particular, organizations and geography--in the development of early twentieth-century jazz. Damon Phillips considers why places like New York played more important roles as engines of diffusion than as the sources of standards. He demonstrates why and when certain geographical references in tune and group titles were considered more desirable. He also explains why a place like Berlin, which produced jazz abundantly from the 1920s to early 1930s, is now on jazz's historical sidelines. Phillips shows the key influences of firms in the recording industry, including how record companies and their executives affected what music was recorded, and why major companies would rerelease recordings under artistic pseudonyms. He indicates how a recording's appeal was related to the narrative around its creation, and how the identities of its firm and musicians influenced the tune's long-run popularity. Applying fascinating ideas about market emergence to a music's commercialization, Shaping Jazz offers a unique look at the origins of a groundbreaking art form.

Musical Form and Analysis

Musical Form and Analysis PDF Author: Glenn Spring
Publisher: Waveland Press
ISBN: 1478611731
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Understanding the way music unfolds to the listener is a major key for unlocking the secrets of the composer’s art. Musical Form and Analysis, highly regarded and widely used for two decades, provides a balanced theoretical and philosophical approach that helps upper-level undergraduate music majors understand the structures and constructions of major musical forms. Spring and Hutcheson present all of the standard topics expected in such a text, but their approach offers a unique conceptual thrust that takes readers beyond mere analytical terminology and facts. Evocative rather than encyclopedic, the text is organized around three elements at work at all levels of music: time, pattern, and proportion. Well-chosen examples and direct, well-crafted assignments reinforce techniques. A 140-page anthology of music for in-depth analysis provides a wide range of carefully selected works.

Music in the Moment

Music in the Moment PDF Author: Jerrold Levinson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501727664
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
What is required for a listener to understand a piece of music? Does aural understanding depend upon reflective awareness of musical architecture or large-scale musical structure? Jerrold Levinson thinks not. In contrast to what is commonly assumed, Levinson argues that basic understanding of music only requires properly grounded, present-focused attention, and that virtually everything in the comprehension of extended pieces of music that suggests explicit architectonic awareness can be explained without positing conscious grasp of relationships across broad spans. Levinson rejects the notion that keeping music's large-scale form before the mind is somehow essential to fundamental understanding of it. As evidence, he describes in detail the experience of listening to a wide range of music. He defends, with some qualifications, the views of nineteenth-century musician and psychologist Edmund Gurney, author of The Power of Sound, who argued that musical comprehension requires only attention to the evolution of music from moment to moment. Music theory standardly misapprehends the experience and mindset of most who know and love classical music, concludes Levinson. His book is a defense of the passionate and attentive, though architectonically unconcerned, music listener.

Music and Gesture

Music and Gesture PDF Author: Elaine King
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351557793
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
This volume showcases key theoretical ideas and practical considerations in the growing area of scholarship on musical gesture. The book constructs and explores the relations between music and gesture from a range of differing perspectives, identifying theoretical approaches and examining the nature of certain types of gesture in musical performance. The twelve chapters in this volume are organized into a heuristic progression from theory to practice, from essay to case study. Theoretical considerations about the interpretation of musical gestures are identified and phrased in terms of semiotics, the mimetic hypothesis, concepts of musical force, immanence, quotation and topic, and the work of musical gestures. The lives of musical gestures in performance are revealed through engaging with their rhythmic properties as well as inquiring into the breathing of pianists, the nature of clarinettists' bodily movements, and the physical acts and personae of individual artists, specifically Keith Jarrett and Robbie Williams. The reader is encouraged to listen to the various resonances and tensions between the chapters, including the importance given to bodies, processes, motions, expressions, and interpretations of musical gesture. The book will be of significance to musicologists, theorists, semioticians, analysts, composers and performers, as well as scholars working in different research communities with an interest in the study of gesture.

Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History

Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History PDF Author: Kevin Karnes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190451343
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
More than a century after Guido Adler's appointment to the first chair in musicology at the University of Vienna, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History provides a first look at the discipline in this earliest period, and at the ideological dilemmas and methodological anxieties that characterized it upon its institutionalization. Author Kevin Karnes contends that some of the most vital questions surrounding musicology's disciplinary identities today-the relationship between musicology and criticism, the role of the subject in analysis and the narration of history, and the responsibilities of the scholar to the listening public-originate in these conflicted and largely forgotten beginnings. Karnes lays bare the nature of music study in the late nineteenth century through insightful readings of long-overlooked contributions by three of musicology's foremost pioneers-Adler, Eduard Hanslick, and Heinrich Schenker. Shaped as much by the skeptical pronouncements of the likes of Nietzsche and Wagner as it was by progressivist ideologies of scientific positivism, the new discipline comprised an array of oft-contested and intensely personal visions of music study, its value, and its future. Karnes introduces readers to a Hanslick who rejected the call of positivist scholarship and dedicated himself to penning an avowedly subjective history of Viennese musical life. He argues that Schenker's analytical experiments had roots in a Wagner-inspired search for a critical alternative to Adler's style-obsessed scholarship. And he illuminates Adler's determined response to Nietzsche's warnings about the vitality of artistic and cultural life in an increasingly scientific age. Through sophisticated and meticulous presentation, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History demonstrates that the new discipline of musicology was inextricably tied in with the cultural discourse of its time.

A Windfall of Musicians

A Windfall of Musicians PDF Author: Dorothy L. Crawford
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300155484
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
This book is the first to examine the brilliant gathering of composers, conductors, and other musicians who fled Nazi Germany and arrived in the Los Angeles area. Musicologist Dorothy Lamb Crawford looks closely at the lives, creative work, and influence of sixteen performers, fourteen composers, and one opera stage director, who joined this immense migration beginning in the 1930s. Some in this group were famous when they fled Europe, others would gain recognition in the young musical culture of Los Angeles, and still others struggled to establish themselves in an environment often resistant to musical innovation. Emphasizing individual voices, Crawford presents short portraits of Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and the other musicians while also considering their influence as a group—in the film industry, in music institutions in and around Los Angeles, and as teachers who trained the next generation. The book reveals a uniquely vibrant era when Southern California became a hub of unprecedented musical talent.

Forbidden Music

Forbidden Music PDF Author: Michael Haas
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300154313
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
DIV With National Socialism's arrival in Germany in 1933, Jews dominated music more than virtually any other sector, making it the most important cultural front in the Nazi fight for German identity. This groundbreaking book looks at the Jewish composers and musicians banned by the Third Reich and the consequences for music throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Because Jewish musicians and composers were, by 1933, the principal conveyors of Germany’s historic traditions and the ideals of German culture, the isolation, exile and persecution of Jewish musicians by the Nazis became an act of musical self-mutilation. Michael Haas looks at the actual contribution of Jewish composers in Germany and Austria before 1933, at their increasingly precarious position in Nazi Europe, their forced emigration before and during the war, their ambivalent relationships with their countries of refuge, such as Britain and the United States and their contributions within the radically changed post-war music environment. /div