Understanding Charles Seeger, Pioneer in American Musicology

Understanding Charles Seeger, Pioneer in American Musicology PDF Author: Bell Yung
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252024931
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
A giant in the development of American musicology, Charles Seeger was a scholar- musician active in practically all areas of musical endeavor. This wide-ranging collection investigates Seeger's writings on music, musical research, and the responsibility of the musician and musicologist to society. A social activist who played a leadership role in the Composers Collective in 1930s New York and in the founding of scholarly organizations including the American Musicological Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology, Seeger was a philosopher as well as a builder. His ideas about music and musicology, incorporating perspectives as wide-ranging as physics, philosophy, and anthropology, set the stage for the rise of modern ethnomusicology. Key to the establishment of formal musical scholarship in the United States, Seeger was also vitally interested in nurturing uniquely American musical forms and in bridging the gap between academia and the world outside the ivory tower. By presenting new views of Seeger's thought, incorporating in particular often neglected early writings, Understanding Charles Seeger, Pioneer in American Musicology provides a unique perspective on intellectual history in twentieth- century America

Understanding Charles Seeger, Pioneer in American Musicology

Understanding Charles Seeger, Pioneer in American Musicology PDF Author: Bell Yung
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252024931
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
A giant in the development of American musicology, Charles Seeger was a scholar- musician active in practically all areas of musical endeavor. This wide-ranging collection investigates Seeger's writings on music, musical research, and the responsibility of the musician and musicologist to society. A social activist who played a leadership role in the Composers Collective in 1930s New York and in the founding of scholarly organizations including the American Musicological Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology, Seeger was a philosopher as well as a builder. His ideas about music and musicology, incorporating perspectives as wide-ranging as physics, philosophy, and anthropology, set the stage for the rise of modern ethnomusicology. Key to the establishment of formal musical scholarship in the United States, Seeger was also vitally interested in nurturing uniquely American musical forms and in bridging the gap between academia and the world outside the ivory tower. By presenting new views of Seeger's thought, incorporating in particular often neglected early writings, Understanding Charles Seeger, Pioneer in American Musicology provides a unique perspective on intellectual history in twentieth- century America

Music from the True Vine

Music from the True Vine PDF Author: Bill C. Malone
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807835102
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Music from the True Vine

Folklife Center News

Folklife Center News PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Folklore
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description


Gendering Musical Modernism

Gendering Musical Modernism PDF Author: Ellie M. Hisama
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521028434
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
This book explores the work of three significant American women composers of the twentieth century: Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer and Miriam Gideon. It offers information on both their lives and music and skillfully interweaves history and musical analysis in ways that both the specialist and the more general reader will find compelling. Ellie Hisama suggests that recognising the impact of a composer's identity on the music itself imparts valuable ways of hearing and understanding these works and breaks important new ground towards constructing a feminist music theory.

The Beautiful Music All Around Us

The Beautiful Music All Around Us PDF Author: Stephen Wade
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 025209400X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
The Beautiful Music All Around Us presents the extraordinarily rich backstories of thirteen performances captured on Library of Congress field recordings between 1934 and 1942 in locations reaching from Southern Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and the Great Plains. Including the children's play song "Shortenin' Bread," the fiddle tune "Bonaparte's Retreat," the blues "Another Man Done Gone," and the spiritual "Ain't No Grave Can Hold My Body Down," these performances were recorded in kitchens and churches, on porches and in prisons, in hotel rooms and school auditoriums. Documented during the golden age of the Library of Congress recordings, they capture not only the words and tunes of traditional songs but also the sounds of life in which the performances were embedded: children laugh, neighbors comment, trucks pass by. Musician and researcher Stephen Wade sought out the performers on these recordings, their families, fellow musicians, and others who remembered them. He reconstructs the sights and sounds of the recording sessions themselves and how the music worked in all their lives. Some of these performers developed musical reputations beyond these field recordings, but for many, these tracks represent their only appearances on record: prisoners at the Arkansas State Penitentiary jumping on "the Library's recording machine" in a rendering of "Rock Island Line"; Ora Dell Graham being called away from the schoolyard to sing the jump-rope rhyme "Pullin' the Skiff"; Luther Strong shaking off a hungover night in jail and borrowing a fiddle to rip into "Glory in the Meetinghouse." Alongside loving and expert profiles of these performers and their locales and communities, Wade also untangles the histories of these iconic songs and tunes, tracing them through slave songs and spirituals, British and homegrown ballads, fiddle contests, gospel quartets, and labor laments. By exploring how these singers and instrumentalists exerted their own creativity on inherited forms, "amplifying tradition's gifts," Wade shows how a single artist can make a difference within a democracy. Reflecting decades of research and detective work, the profiles and abundant photos in The Beautiful Music All Around Us bring to life largely unheralded individuals--domestics, farm laborers, state prisoners, schoolchildren, cowboys, housewives and mothers, loggers and miners--whose music has become part of the wider American musical soundscape. The hardcover edition also includes an accompanying CD that presents these thirteen performances, songs and sounds of America in the 1930s and '40s.

Marc Blitzstein

Marc Blitzstein PDF Author: Howard Pollack
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199977089
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 649

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Book Description
A composer and lyricist of enormous innovation and influence, Marc Blitzstein remains one of the most versatile and fascinating figures in the history of American music, his creative output running the gamut from films scores and Broadway operas to art songs and chamber pieces. A prominent leftist and social maverick, Blitzstein constantly pushed the boundaries of convention in mid-century America in both his work and his life. Award-winning music historian Howard Pollack's new biography covers Blitzstein's life in full, from his childhood in Philadelphia to his violent death in Martinique at age 58. The author describes how this student of contemporary luminaries Nadia Boulanger and Arnold Schoenberg became swept up in the stormy political atmosphere of the 1920s and 1930s and throughout his career walked the fine line between his formal training and his populist principles. Indeed, Blitzstein developed a unique sound that drew on everything contemporary, from the high modernism of Stravinsky and Hindemith to jazz and Broadway show tunes. Pollack captures the astonishing breadth of Blitzstein's work--from provocative operas like The Cradle Will Rock, No for an Answer, and Regina, to the wartime Airborne Symphony composed during his years in service, to lesser known ballets, film scores, and stage works. A courageous artist, Blitzstein translated Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera during the heyday of McCarthyism and the red scare, and turned it into an off-Broadway sensation, its "Mack the Knife" becoming one of the era's biggest hits. Beautifully written, drawing on new interviews with friends and family of the composer, and making extensive use of new archival and secondary sources, Marc Blitzstein presents the most complete biography of this important American artist.

Charles Ives in the Mirror

Charles Ives in the Mirror PDF Author: David C Paul
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252094697
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
American composer Charles Ives (1874–1954) has gone from being a virtual unknown to become one of the most respected and lauded composers in American music. In this sweeping survey of intellectual and musical history, David C. Paul tells the new story of how Ives's music was shaped by shifting conceptions of American identity within and outside of musical culture, charting the changes in the reception of Ives across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Paul focuses on the critics, composers, performers, and scholars whose contributions were most influential in shaping the critical discourse on Ives, many of them marquee names of American musical culture themselves, including Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, and Leonard Bernstein. Paul explores both how Ives positioned his music amid changing philosophical and aesthetic currents and how others interpreted his contributions to American music. Although Ives's initial efforts to find a public in the early twenties attracted a few devotees, the resurgence of interest in the American literary past during the thirties made a concert staple of his "Concord" Sonata, a work dedicated to nineteenth-century transcendentalist writers. Paul shows how Ives was subsequently deployed as an icon of American freedom during the early Cold War period and how he came to be instigated at the head of a line of "American maverick" composers. Paul also examines why a recent cadre of scholars has beset the composer with Gilded Age social anxieties. By embedding Ives' reception within the changing developments of a wide range of fields including intellectual history, American studies, literature, musicology, and American politics and society in general, Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer greatly advances our understanding of Ives and his influence on nearly a century of American culture.

Making Art Panamerican

Making Art Panamerican PDF Author: Claire F. Fox
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145293942X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Among the buildings on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., only the Pan American Union (PAU) houses an international organization. The first of many anticipated “peace palaces”constructed in the early twentieth century, the PAU began with a mission of cultural diplomacy, and after World War II its Visual Arts Section became a leader in the burgeoning hemispheric arts scene, proclaiming Latin America’s entrée into the international community as it forged connections between a growing base of middle-class art consumers on one hand and concepts of supranational citizenship and political and economic liberalism on the other. Making Art Panamerican situates the ambitious visual arts programs of the PAU within the broader context of hemispheric cultural relations during the cold war. Focusing on the institutional interactions among aesthetic movements, cultural policy, and viewing publics, Claire F. Fox contends that in the postwar years, the PAU Visual Arts Section emerged as a major transfer point of hemispheric American modernist movements and played an important role in the consolidation of Latin American art as a continental object of study. As it traces the careers of individual cultural policymakers and artists who intersected with the PAU in the two postwar decades—such as Concha Romero James, Charles Seeger, José Gómez Sicre, José Luis Cuevas, and Rafael Squirru—the book also charts the trajectories and displacements of sectors of the U.S. and Latin American intellectual left during a tumultuous interval that spans the Mexican Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the New Deal, and the early cold war. Challenging the U.S. bias of conventional narratives about Panamericanism and the postwar shift in critical values from realism to abstraction, Making Art Panamerican illuminates the institutional dynamics that helped shape aesthetic movements in the critical decades following World War II.

Speech about Music

Speech about Music PDF Author: Malik Sharif
Publisher: Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag
ISBN: 3990125605
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
The US American musicologist, composer, philosopher, inventor, and political activist Charles Seeger (1886–1979) is a key figure in the development of twentieth-century musicology. "Speech about Music" is an in-depth study of his philosophical theory of musicology – his meta-musicology. Seeger developed this body of theory in numerous publications over the course of more than sixty years, yet he never realized his dream of creating a comprehensive "Principia Musicologica". Detailed historical reconstruction and comparative analysis of Seeger's meta-musicology makes "Speech about Music" an important contribution to the study of the history of musicology. By approaching Seeger's theory as an arsenal of ideas in the discussion of twenty-first century meta-musicological issues, the book is also a critical examination of the pertinence of Seeger's ideas.

Women in Music

Women in Music PDF Author: Karin Pendle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135848130
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 870

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Book Description
Women in Music: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography emerging from more than twenty-five years of feminist scholarship on music. This book testifies to the great variety of subjects and approaches represented in over two decades of published writings on women, their work, and the important roles that feminist outlooks have played in formerly male-oriented academic scholarship or journalistic musings on women and music.