The World's Earliest Music

The World's Earliest Music PDF Author: Hermann Smith
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Get Book Here

Book Description
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The World's Earliest Music" by Hermann Smith. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

The World's Earliest Music

The World's Earliest Music PDF Author: Hermann Smith
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Get Book Here

Book Description
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The World's Earliest Music" by Hermann Smith. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

The World's Earliest Music: Traced to Its Beginnings in Ancient Lands

The World's Earliest Music: Traced to Its Beginnings in Ancient Lands PDF Author: Hermann Smith
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
ISBN: 1465610634
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
THE human interest in the past never dies, its hold upon us increases with the growing years, and every gain that is made to the store of knowledge does but add to the zest with which we search for more; nation vies with nation for the glory of recovering relics of life that are strewn along the path of death. From the sands and from the tombs, from the paintings and the graven tablets, and from the faces of the rocks we rehabilitate the vision of the mighty dead; a recovered name is a page of a people’s history, and we seek with renewal of eagerness for the pages that should follow or precede. The long buried spoils of temples and palaces excite the imagination, the grandeur of gold and silver, the wealth of art and ornament, and the resplendent jewels, appeal to the love of power and of possession, active or dormant in every heart; yet not less do we treasure the fragile mementoes, the simplest things, rendered up from the past that were the surroundings of domestic life, that speak to us of the household ways, and of the personal pursuits of the men, and of the adornment of the women who for untold ages have ever sought “their pleasure in their power to charm.” The instruments of music that in the remoter ages of the past were in daily use are seldom found, for the nature of the materials of which they were constructed was adverse to their preservation; those that have been found are rarely in their original condition, perfect in all their parts, or suitable for being put to the test of playing, and the resource left to us is to obtain some approximate condition by means of models, and then adapt some modern method for eliciting sound, which method as near as we can judge shall be the counterpart of the original device.

The Archaeomusicology of the Ancient Near East

The Archaeomusicology of the Ancient Near East PDF Author: Richard J. Dumbrill
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
ISBN: 1412055385
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 532

Get Book Here

Book Description
'This volume is a massive leap forward over any previous synthesis of the subject and includes at the very minimum so much information that its academic and scientific value is self evident. The freshness and profundity of Dumbrill's approach to the subject exceeds anything attempted before. 'The mythology of ancient Mesopotamia proves readable as tonal allegory when its numerology is decoded as tuning theory. By the third millennium BC both pentatonic and heptatonic tunings were quantified throughout the entire 12-tone gamut. Richard Dumbrill has documented the massive empirical experience with strings and pipes that makes this early musicalization of the universe believable.' The volume consists in 4 parts with foreword by Prof. Ernest McClain. The first is about the decipherment, translation and interpretation of the few theoretical cuneiform texts dating from the Old Babylonian period, about 2000 BC, to Neo Assyrian up to the mid first millennium BC. Dumbrill undertakes comparative analyses and criticism of various interpretations having preceded his own and introduces new material. The second part is about the Hurrian hymns, the earliest music ever written, circa 1400 BC, and are produced in their integrality. Attempts to the interpretation of Hymn H.6 are compared and followed by Dumbrill's methodology and interpretation. Each fragment of the collection is analyzed separately. The part concludes with statistical analyses attempting at the reconstruction of some Hurrian rules of composition. The third part consists in the organology with relevant philology and is the largest collection of the Mesopotamian instrumentarium. The last part is a unique lexicon of all known Mesopotamian terminology, with quotation of texts in which the philology appears. The book had been previously published under the title of 'The Musicology and Organology of the Ancient Near East' and now appears under its new title.

Concise History of Western Music

Concise History of Western Music PDF Author: Barbara Russano Hanning
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393971682
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 585

Get Book Here

Book Description
Concise History of Western Music combines Grout and Palisca's uncompromising reliability, scope, and respect for the narrative, while offering many more pedagogical aids, such as chapter preludes and postludes; "Etudes," excursions that explore the material more deeply than the main text; and "Windows," boxed discussions of special topics.

The History of Musical Instruments

The History of Musical Instruments PDF Author: Curt Sachs
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486171515
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 562

Get Book Here

Book Description
Written by a distinguished musicologist, this comprehensive history of musical instruments traces their evolution from prehistoric times in a fusion of music, anthropology, and fine arts. Includes 24 plates and 167 illustrations.

The Music of the Bible Revealed

The Music of the Bible Revealed PDF Author: Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura
Publisher: Continuum
ISBN:
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 584

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is a translation by Dennis Weber, edited by John Wheeler and jointly published with King David's Harp, in which a noted French musicologist argues that the accentual system preserved in the Masoretic Text was originally a method of recording hand signals (chironomy) by which temple musicians were directed in the performance of music. She explains her reconstruction of these notations which has allowed her to perform haunting and beautiful music around the worlds using only the Hebrew text as a score.

The History of the NME

The History of the NME PDF Author: Pat Long
Publisher: Portico
ISBN: 1907554777
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
'The NME mattered to all those generations who grew up with music at the centre of their universe. The NME never had a truer chronicler than Pat Long.' Tony Parsons Since it was founded in 1952, the New Musical Express has played a central part in the British love affair with pop music. Snotty, confrontational, enthusiastic, sarcastic: the NME landing on the doormat every Wednesday was the high point of any music fan’s week, whether they were listening to The Beatles, Bowie or Blur. The Sex Pistols sang about it, Nick Hornby claims he regrets not working for it and a whole host of household names – Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill, Nick Kent and Mick Farren, Steve Lamacq and Stuart Maconie – started their career writing for it. This authoritative history, written by former assistant editor, Pat Long, is an insider's account of the high times and low lives of the world's most famous, and most influential, music magazine. The fights, the bands, the brawls, the haircuts, the egos and much more. This is the definitive – and first – book about the infamous NME.

The World in Six Songs

The World in Six Songs PDF Author: Daniel J. Levitin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101043458
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Get Book Here

Book Description
The author of the New York Times bestseller This Is Your Brain on Music reveals music’s role in the evolution of human culture in this thought-provoking book that “will leave you awestruck” (The New York Times). Daniel J. Levitin's astounding debut bestseller, This Is Your Brain on Music, enthralled and delighted readers as it transformed our understanding of how music gets in our heads and stays there. Now in his second New York Times bestseller, his genius for combining science and art reveals how music shaped humanity across cultures and throughout history. Here he identifies six fundamental song functions or types—friendship, joy, comfort, religion, knowledge, and love—then shows how each in its own way has enabled the social bonding necessary for human culture and society to evolve. He shows, in effect, how these “six songs” work in our brains to preserve the emotional history of our lives and species. Dr. Levitin combines cutting-edge scientific research from his music cognition lab at McGill University and work in an array of related fields; his own sometimes hilarious experiences in the music business; and illuminating interviews with musicians such as Sting and David Byrne, as well as conductors, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists. The World in Six Songs is, ultimately, a revolution in our understanding of how human nature evolved—right up to the iPod.

The Great Animal Orchestra

The Great Animal Orchestra PDF Author: Bernie Krause
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316192392
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 186

Get Book Here

Book Description
A "passionate amalgam of science and autobiography" that will leave you hearing -- and seeing -- nature as never before (New York Times Book Review). Musician and naturalist Bernie Krause is one of the world's leading experts in natural sound, and he's spent his life discovering and recording nature's rich chorus. Searching far beyond our modern world's honking horns and buzzing machinery, he has sought out the truly wild places that remain, where natural soundscapes exist virtually unchanged from when the earliest humans first inhabited the earth. Krause shares fascinating insight into how deeply animals rely on their aural habitat to survive and the damaging effects of extraneous noise on the delicate balance between predator and prey. But natural soundscapes aren't vital only to the animal kingdom; Krause explores how the myriad voices and rhythms of the natural world formed a basis from which our own musical expression emerged. From snapping shrimp, popping viruses, and the songs of humpback whales -- whose voices, if unimpeded, could circle the earth in hours -- to cracking glaciers, bubbling streams, and the roar of intense storms; from melody-singing birds to the organlike drone of wind blowing over reeds, the sounds Krause has experienced and describes are like no others. And from recording jaguars at night in the Amazon rain forest to encountering mountain gorillas in Africa's Virunga Mountains, Krause offers an intense and intensely personal narrative of the planet's deep and connected natural sounds and rhythm. The Great Animal Orchestra is the story of one man's pursuit of natural music in its purest form, and an impassioned case for the conservation of one of our most overlooked natural resources-the music of the wild.

The Origins of Music

The Origins of Music PDF Author: Nils L. Wallin
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262731430
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 516

Get Book Here

Book Description
The book can be viewed as representing the birth of evolutionary biomusicology. What biological and cognitive forces have shaped humankind's musical behavior and the rich global repertoire of musical structures? What is music for, and why does every human culture have it? What are the universal features of music and musical behavior across cultures? In this groundbreaking book, musicologists, biologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, psychologists, neuroscientists, ethologists, and linguists come together for the first time to examine these and related issues. The book can be viewed as representing the birth of evolutionary biomusicology—the study of which will contribute greatly to our understanding of the evolutionary precursors of human music, the evolution of the hominid vocal tract, localization of brain function, the structure of acoustic-communication signals, symbolic gesture, emotional manipulation through sound, self-expression, creativity, the human affinity for the spiritual, and the human attachment to music itself. Contributors Simha Arom, Derek Bickerton, Steven Brown, Ellen Dissanayake, Dean Falk, David W. Frayer, Walter Freeman, Thomas Geissmann, Marc D. Hauser, Michel Imberty, Harry Jerison, Drago Kunej, François-Bernard Mâche, Peter Marler, Björn Merker, Geoffrey Miller, Jean Molino, Bruno Nettl, Chris Nicolay, Katharine Payne, Bruce Richman, Peter J.B. Slater, Peter Todd, Sandra Trehub, Ivan Turk, Maria Ujhelyi, Nils L. Wallin, Carol Whaling