Literary Music


Book Description

Music is commonly felt to offer a valued experience, yet to put that experience into words is no easy task. Rather than view verbal representations of music as somehow secondary to the music itself, Literary Music argues that it is in such representations that our understanding of music and its meanings is constituted and explored. Focusing on recent fictional and theoretical texts, Stephen Benson proposes literature, narrative fiction in particular, as a singular form of musical performance. Literary Music concentrates not only on song and opera, those forms in which words and music overtly confront one another, but also on a small number of recurring ideas around which the literary and the musical interact, including voice, narrative, performance, and silence. The book considers a wide range of literary and theoretical texts, including those of Blanchot and Bakhtin, Kazuo Ishiguro, Vikram Seth, David Malouf and J.M. Coetzee. The musical forms discussed range from opera to the string quartet, together with individual works by Elgar, Strauss and Michael Berkeley. As such, Literary Music offers an informed interdisciplinary approach to the study of literature and music that participates in the lively theoretical debate on the status of meaning in music.




Frog Music


Book Description

From the New York Times bestselling author of Room, a young French burlesque dancer living in San Francisco is ready to risk anything in order to solve her friend’s murder—but only if the killer doesn’t get her first. Summer of 1876: San Francisco is in the fierce grip of a record-breaking heat wave and a smallpox epidemic. Through the window of a railroad saloon, a young woman named Jenny Bonnet is shot dead. The survivor, her friend Blanche Beunon, is a French burlesque dancer. Over the next three days, she will risk everything to bring Jenny's murderer to justice—if he doesn't track her down first. The story Blanche struggles to piece together is one of free-love bohemians, desperate paupers, and arrogant millionaires; of jealous men, icy women, and damaged children. It's the secret life of Jenny herself, a notorious character who breaks the law every morning by getting dressed: a charmer as slippery as the frogs she hunts. In thrilling, cinematic style, Frog Music digs up a long-forgotten, never-solved crime. Full of songs that migrated across the world, Emma Donoghue's lyrical tale of love and bloodshed among lowlifes captures the pulse of a boomtown like no other. "Her greatest achievement yet . . . Emma Donoghue shows more than range with Frog Music—she shows genius." —Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life.




Gothic Music


Book Description

Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny traces sonic Gothic from the echoing footsteps in Gothic novels to the dark soundscapes of Goth club nights. This broad perspective importantly widens the scope of Gothic music from Goth subculture to literature, film, television and video games. This book also provides the musical and theoretical definition of Gothic music that lacks in current scholarship. Whether voicing the spectral beings of early cinema, announcing virtual terrors in video games, or intensifying the nocturnal rituals of Goth, Gothic music represents the sounds of the uncanny.




Pop Song


Book Description

"A warm and expansive portrait of a woman’s mind that feels at once singular and universal," this collection of essays interweaves commentary on modern life, feminism, art, and sex with the author's own experiences of obsession, heartbreak, and vulnerability (BuzzFeed). Like a song that feels written just for you, Larissa Pham's debut work of nonfiction captures the imagination and refuses to let go. Pop Song is a book about love and about falling in love—with a place, or a painting, or a person—and the joy and terror inherent in the experience of that love. Plumbing the well of culture for clues and patterns about love and loss—from Agnes Martin's abstract paintings to James Turrell's transcendent light works, and Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet to Frank Ocean's Blonde—Pham writes of her youthful attempts to find meaning in travel, sex, drugs, and art, before sensing that she might need to turn her gaze upon herself. Pop Song is also a book about distances, near and far. As she travels from Taos, New Mexico, to Shanghai, China and beyond, Pham meditates on the miles we are willing to cover to get away from ourselves, or those who hurt us, and the impossible gaps that can exist between two people sharing a bed. Pop Song is a book about all the routes by which we might escape our own needs before finally finding a way home. There is heartache in these pages, but Pham's electric ways of seeing create a perfectly fractured portrait of modern intimacy that is triumphant in both its vulnerability and restlessness. "Each of the essays in this debut collection reads like a mini-memoir . . . in which the author reflects on her experiences of young love, trauma, and transcendence through discussions of art and music . . . with an intimacy that is at once tender and expansive." —New York magazine




Interconnecting Music and the Literary Word


Book Description

Dealing with the interconnections between music and the written word, this volume brings into focus an updated range of analytical and interpretative approaches which transcend the domain of formalist paradigms and the purist assumption of music’s non-referentiality. Grouped into three thematic sections, these fifteen essays by Italian, British and American scholars shed light on a phenomenological network embracing different historical, socio-cultural and genre contexts and a variety of theoretical concepts, such as intermediality, the soundscape notion, and musicalisation. At one end of the spectrum, music emerges as a driving cultural force, an agent cooperating with signifying and communication processes and an element functionally woven into the discursive fabric of the literary work. The authors also provide case studies of the fruitful musico-literary dialogue by taking into account the seminal role of composers, singer-songwriters, and performers. From another standpoint, the music-in-literature and literature-in-music dynamics are explored through the syntax of hybridisations, transcoding experiments, and iconic analogies.




Milton, Music and Literary Interpretation


Book Description

Milton, Music and Literary Interpretation: Reading through the Spirit constructs a musical methodology for interpreting literary text drawn out of John Milton’s poetry and prose. Analyzing the linkage between music and the Holy Spirit in Milton’s work, it focuses on harmony and its relationship to Milton’s theology and interpretative practices. Linking both the Spirit and poetic music to Milton’s understanding of teleology, it argues that Milton uses musical metaphor to capture the inexpressible characteristics of the divine. The book then applies these musical tools of reading to examine the non-trinitarian union between Father, Son, and Spirit in Paradise Lost, argues that Adam and Eve’s argument does not break their concord, and puts forward a reading of Samson Agonistes based upon pity and grace.




Breaking the Sound Barrier


Book Description

Arguments about musical aesthetics often degenerate into "shouting matchesy that end in stalemate. In Breaking the Sound Barrier, John Winsor clears the air by presenting evidence that some works are, in fact, objectively better than others. This is a particularly timely issue because a great deal of bad music is being performed in American concert halls right now and a great deal of good music isn't. If you believe that qualitative judgment in the arts is purely subjective, this book should persuade you to rethink your position. If, on the other hand, you think there is a genuine qualitative difference between one musical work and another, this book will provide you with relevant ammunition. Winsor defines music, presents some empirical evidence from the field of music psychology, relates that evidence to events in Western music history, and explains what works and what doesn'tyand why. He demonstrates that from the advent of notation to the present, music has, in fact, progressed and not merely changed. He then exposes some major errors in modernist and postmodernist writing that have disrupted music's progress and recommends remedial action for restoring the mainstream literary tradition. "This is a challenging and thought-provoking book." yDiana Deutsch, Professor of Psychology, University of California, San Diego. "John Winsor tackles big questions about music and our perceptions, coming at them head-on. He anticipates our reactions and goes a long way toward resolving nagging issues of modern music. A clear, honest book." yKile Smith, Curator, Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music, Free Library of Philadelphia.




The Rhythm of Thought


Book Description

Between present and past, visible and invisible, and sensation and idea, there is resonance—so philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued and so Jessica Wiskus explores in The Rhythm of Thought. Holding the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, the paintings of Paul Cézanne, the prose of Marcel Proust, and the music of Claude Debussy under Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological light, she offers innovative interpretations of some of these artists’ masterworks, in turn articulating a new perspective on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. More than merely recovering Merleau-Ponty’s thought, Wiskus thinks according to it. First examining these artists in relation to noncoincidence—as silence in poetry, depth in painting, memory in literature, and rhythm in music—she moves through an array of their artworks toward some of Merleau-Ponty’s most exciting themes: our bodily relationship to the world and the dynamic process of expression. She closes with an examination of synesthesia as an intertwining of internal and external realms and a call, finally, for philosophical inquiry as a mode of artistic expression. Structured like a piece of music itself, The Rhythm of Thought offers new contexts in which to approach art, philosophy, and the resonance between them.




Literature and Music


Book Description

This collection of essays centers on musical elements that authors have employed in their work, thus joining heard sounds to a visual perception of their stories. The spectrum of authors represented is a wide one, from Pound to Durrell, from Steinbeck to Cather, from Beckett to Gaines, but even more unusual is the variety of musical type represented. Classical music (the quartet, the fugue, the symphony), Jazz (the jazz riff and jazz improv) and the spiritual all appear along with folk song and so-called random "noise." Such diversity suggests that there are few limits when readers consider how great writers utilize musical styles and techniques. Indeed, each author seems to realize that it is not the type of music that s/he chooses to employ that is important. Rather, it is the realization that such musical elements as harmony, dissonance, tonal repetition and beat are just as important in prose composition as they are in poetry and song. The essayists have selected some works that may be considered obscure and some that are modern classics. Each one, however, has captured one of the varied ways in which words and music complement and enhance each other.




Music, Memory, Resistance


Book Description

"Calypsonians have long been the 'voice of the people', delivering the complaints, criticisms and even the solutions to political leaders. In its earliest manifestations, calypso music emerged in response to a cultural climate that demanded creative modes of expression that could both resist and record political and historical changes taking place in Trinidad and Tobago. Since the 1920s and 1930s, calypsonians typically have composed songs that chronicle their observations and opinions on current events focusing on specific occurrences, from local scandals to current affairs while also examining broader trends. Not only has calypso served as an unofficial record of historical events, it emerged as a cultural weapon that yielded tremendous sway within the general audiences of the Caribbean region. This collection includes contributions from calypsonians, critics, novelists and poets alike, all engaged in representing Caribbean culture in its myriad forms. It represents an array of convergences across critical perspectives, political and social agendas, generations and national boundaries. The work of numerous calypsonians and other singers are explored, including Sparrow; Kitchener; Chalkdust; Denise Belfon; and writers such as Samuel Selvon, V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Errol John, Paul Marshall, Earl Lovelace and Lashkmi Persaud. The comparative analyses provide an interdisciplinary approach to Cultural Studies making the volume essential reading for students, scholars and calypso enthusiasts. "