Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations

Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations PDF Author: Greil Marcus
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067491533X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Greil Marcus has been one of the most distinctive voices in American music criticism for over forty years. His books, including Mystery Train and The Shape of Things to Come, traverse soundscapes of folk and blues, rock and punk, attuning readers to the surprising, often hidden affinities between the music and broader streams of American politics and culture. Drawn from Marcus’s 2013 Massey Lectures at Harvard, his new work delves into three episodes in the history of American commonplace song: Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s 1928 “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” Geeshie Wiley’s 1930 “Last Kind Words Blues,” and Bob Dylan’s 1964 “Ballad of Hollis Brown.” How each of these songs manages to convey the uncanny sense that it was written by no one illuminates different aspects of the commonplace song tradition. Some songs truly did come together over time without an identifiable author. Others draw melodies and motifs from obscure sources but, in the hands of a particular artist, take a final, indelible shape. And, as in the case of Dylan’s “Hollis Brown,” there are songs that were written by a single author but that communicate as anonymous productions, as if they were folk songs passed down over many generations. In three songs that seem to be written by no one, Marcus shows, we discover not only three different ways of talking about the United States but three different nations within its formal boundaries.

Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations

Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations PDF Author: Greil Marcus
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067491533X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Get Book Here

Book Description
Greil Marcus has been one of the most distinctive voices in American music criticism for over forty years. His books, including Mystery Train and The Shape of Things to Come, traverse soundscapes of folk and blues, rock and punk, attuning readers to the surprising, often hidden affinities between the music and broader streams of American politics and culture. Drawn from Marcus’s 2013 Massey Lectures at Harvard, his new work delves into three episodes in the history of American commonplace song: Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s 1928 “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” Geeshie Wiley’s 1930 “Last Kind Words Blues,” and Bob Dylan’s 1964 “Ballad of Hollis Brown.” How each of these songs manages to convey the uncanny sense that it was written by no one illuminates different aspects of the commonplace song tradition. Some songs truly did come together over time without an identifiable author. Others draw melodies and motifs from obscure sources but, in the hands of a particular artist, take a final, indelible shape. And, as in the case of Dylan’s “Hollis Brown,” there are songs that were written by a single author but that communicate as anonymous productions, as if they were folk songs passed down over many generations. In three songs that seem to be written by no one, Marcus shows, we discover not only three different ways of talking about the United States but three different nations within its formal boundaries.

Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations

Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations PDF Author: Greil Marcus
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674187083
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Greil Marcus delves into three distinct episodes in the history of American commonplace song and shows how each one manages to convey the uncanny sense that it was written by no one. In these seemingly anonymous productions, we discover three different ways of talking about the United States, and three separate nations within its borders.

Three songs, Three singers, Three nations

Three songs, Three singers, Three nations PDF Author: Greil Marcus
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : fr
Pages : 156

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Book Description
Quel touriste étranger n'associe pas La Vie en rose à la France, qui ne s'est pas imaginé à Rome en écoutant Ti amo ou en Espagne avec La Macarena ? Ces mélodies populaires sont tellement ancrées dans l'imaginaire collectif qu'elles ne sont plus les icônes du répertoire de leur interprète, celui-ci se dissolvant au profit d'une voix nationale, mais deviennent le symboles de la nation, son porte-parole. A travers trois chansons issues de la folk américaine, Greil Marcus lève le voile sur trois facettes d'une seule nation. Selon lui, elles permettent de définir la mentalité américaine. Par ces trois morceaux on découvre non seulement trois manières de parler des USA, mais aussi trois nations à l'intérieur de ceux-ci, chacune avec son histoire secrète, ses traditions et sa culture oubliées.

Three Songs, three Singers, three Nations

Three Songs, three Singers, three Nations PDF Author: Greil Marcus
Publisher: Verlag Wilhelm Fink
ISBN: 3846760838
Category : Music
Languages : de
Pages : 153

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Book Description
In seinem neuesten Buch entlarvt Marcus drei "gewöhnliche" amerikanische Songs als grundlegende Dokumente amerikanischer Identität: Bascom Lamar Lunsfords "I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground" (1928), Geeshie Wileys "Last Kind Words Blues" (1930) und Bob Dylans "Ballad of Hollis Brown" (1964). Die Art und Weise, auf die jeder dieser Songs den unheimlichen Eindruck erweckt, er sei von niemandem geschrieben worden, erhellt unterschiedliche Aspekte der Tradition des "gewöhnlichen" Songs. Manche sind im Laufe der Zeit ohne einen identifizierbaren Urheber entstanden. Andere beziehen ihre Melodien und Motive aus obskuren Quellen, nehmen aber in den Händen eines bestimmten Künstlers eine endgültige, unvergessliche Gestalt an. Und, wie im Fall von Bob Dylans "Hollis Brown", gibt es Songs, die von einem identifizierbaren Autor stammen, aber wirken wie Folksongs, die schon seit Generationen weitergereicht worden sind. So trägt jeder dieser Songs Amerikas Geschichte, seine Menschen in sich, auch in ihrer Rolle als Zuhörer.

City, Chant, and the Topography of Early Music

City, Chant, and the Topography of Early Music PDF Author: Michael Scott Cuthbert
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780964031746
Category : Gregorian chants
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
City, Chant, and the Topography of Early Music explores how space, urban life, landscape, and time transformed plainchant and other musical forms. Thirteen essays address a wide range of topics and regions--from Beneventan chant in Italy and Dalmatia, to music theory in medieval France, to later transformations of chant in Iceland and Spain.

This is Pop

This is Pop PDF Author: Eric Weisbard
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674013216
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This publication is an inquiry that crosses stylistic categories of pop music and writing pop music.

Lipstick Traces

Lipstick Traces PDF Author: Greil Marcus
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674535817
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
Greil Marcus, author of Mystery Train, widely acclaimed as the best book ever written about America as seen through its music, began work on this new book out of a fascination with the Sex Pistols: that scandalous antimusical group, invented in London in 1975 and dead within two years, which sparked the emergence of the culture called punk. âeoeI am an antichrist!âe shouted singer Johnny Rottenâe"where in the world of pop music did that come from? Looking for an answer, with a high sense of the drama of the journey, Marcus takes us down the dark paths of counterhistory, a route of blasphemy, adventure, and surprise.This is no mere search for cultural antecedents. Instead, what Marcus so brilliantly shows is that various kinds of angry, absolute demandsâe"demands on society, art, and all the governing structures of everyday lifeâe"seem to be coded in phrases, images, and actions passed on invisibly, but inevitably, by people quite unaware of each other. Marcus lets us hear strange yet familiar voices: of such heretics as the Brethren of the Free Spirit in medieval Europe and the Ranters in seventeenth-century England; the dadaists in Zurich in 1916 and Berlin in 1918, wearing death masks, chanting glossolalia; one Michel Mourre, who in 1950 took over Easter Mass at Notre-Dame to proclaim the death of God; the Lettrist International and the Situationist International, small groups of Parisâe"based artists and writers surrounding Guy Debord, who produced blank-screen films, prophetic graffiti, and perhaps the most provocative social criticism of the 1950s and âe(tm)60s; the rioting students and workers of May âe(tm)68, scrawling cryptic slogans on city walls and bringing France to a halt; the Sex Pistols in London, recording the savage âeoeAnarchy in the U.K.âe and âeoeGod Save the Queen.âe Although the Sex Pistols shape the beginning and the end of the story, Lipstick Traces is not a book about music; it is about a common voice, discovered and transmitted in many forms. Working from scores of previously unexamined and untranslated essays, manifestos, and filmscripts, from old photographs, dada sound poetry, punk songs, collages, and classic texts from Marx to Henri Lefebvre, Marcus takes us deep behind the acknowledged events of our era, into a hidden tradition of moments that would seem imaginary except for the fact that they are real: a tradition of shared utopias, solitary refusals, impossible demands, and unexplained disappearances. Written with grace and force, humor and an insistent sense of tragedy and danger, Lipstick Traces tells a story as disruptive and compelling as the century itself.

Music and the Historical Imagination

Music and the Historical Imagination PDF Author: Leo Treitler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674591295
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Leo Treitler is a central figure in American musicology, both for his writings on medieval and Renaissance music and for his influential work on historical analysis. In this elegant book he develops a powerful statement of what music analysis and criticism in relation to historical understanding can be. His aim is an understanding of the music of the past not only in its own historical context but also as we apprehend it now, and as we assimilate it to our current interests and concerns. He elucidates his views through unique new interpretations of major works from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries.

Dead Elvis

Dead Elvis PDF Author: Greil Marcus
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674194229
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Listening in on public conversation that recreates Elvis after death, Marcus tracks Presley's resurrection. He grafts together snatches of film, music, books, newspapers, photos, posters, and cartoons, and amazes us with what America has been saying as it raises its late king--and also what this obsession with dead Elvis says about America itself.

Freedom and the Arts

Freedom and the Arts PDF Author: Charles Rosen
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674065492
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
"Is there a moment in history when a work receives its ideal interpretation? Or is negotiation always required to preserve the past and accommodate the present? The freedom of interpretation, Charles Rosen suggests in these sparkling explorations of music and literature, exists in a delicate balance with fidelity to the identity of the original work. Rosen cautions us to avoid doctrinaire extremes when approaching art of the past. To understand Shakespeare only as an Elizabethan or Jacobean theatergoer would understand him, or to modernize his plays with no sense of what they bring from his age, deforms the work, making it less ambiguous and inherently less interesting. For a work to remain alive, it must change character over time while preserving a valid witness to its earliest state.