Music, Analysis, Experience


Book Description

Transdisciplinary and intermedial analysis of the experience of music Nowadays musical semiotics no longer ignores the fundamental challenges raised by cognitive sciences, ethology, or linguistics. Creation, action and experience play an increasing role in how we understand music, a sounding structure impinging upon our body, our mind, and the world we live in. Not discarding music as a closed system, an integral experience of music demands a transdisciplinary dialogue with other domains as well. Music, Analysis, Experience brings together contributions by semioticians, performers, and scholars from cognitive sciences, philosophy, and cultural studies, and deals with these fundamental questionings. Transdisciplinary and intermedial approaches to music meet musicologically oriented contributions to classical music, pop music, South American song, opera, narratology, and philosophy. ContributorsPaulo Chagas (University of California, Riverside), Isaac and Zelia Chueke (Universidade Federal do Paraná, OMF/Paris-Sorbonne), Maurizio Corbella (Università degli Studi di Milano), Ian Cross (University of Cambridge), Paulo F. de Castro (CESEM/Departamento de Ciências Musicais; FCSH Universidade Nova de Lisboa), Robert S. Hatten (University of Texas at Austin), David Huron (School of Music, Ohio State University), Jamie Liddle (The Open University), Gabriele Marino (University of Turin), Dario Martinelli (Kaunas University of Technology; International Semiotics Institute), Nicolas Marty (Université Paris-Sorbonne), Maarten Nellestijn (Utrecht University), Małgorzata Pawłowska (Academy of Music in Krakow), Mônica Pedrosa de Pádua (Federal University of Minas Gerais, UFMG), Piotr Podlipniak (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan), Rebecca Thumpston (Keele University), Mieczysław Tomaszewski (Academy of Music in Krakow), Lea Maria Lucas Wierød (Aarhus University), Lawrence M. Zbikowski (University of Chicago)




Music, Analysis, Experience


Book Description

Transdisciplinary and intermedial analysis of the experience of music. Nowadays musical semiotics no longer ignores the fundamental challenges raised by cognitive sciences, ethology, or linguistics. Creation, action and experience play an increasing role in how we understand music, a sounding structure impinging upon our body, our mind, and the world we live in. Not discarding music as a closed system, an integral experience of music demands a transdisciplinary dialogue with other domains as well. Music, Analysis, Experience brings together contributions by semioticians, performers, and scholars from cognitive sciences, philosophy, and cultural studies, and deals with these fundamental questionings. Transdisciplinary and intermedial approaches to music meet musicologically oriented contributions to classical music, pop music, South American song, opera, narratology, and philosophy.




Peak Music Experiences


Book Description

Peak music experiences are a recurring feature of popular music journalism, biography and fan culture, where they are often credited as pivotal in people’s relationships with music and in their lives more generally. Ben Green investigates the phenomenon from a social and cultural perspective, including discussions of peak music experiences as sources of inspiration and influence; as a core motivation for ongoing musical and social activity; the significance of live music experiences; and the key role of peak music experiences in defining and perpetuating music scenes. The book draws from both global media analysis and situated ethnographic research in the dance, hip hop, indie and rock ‘n’ roll music scenes of Brisbane, Australia, including participant observation and in-depth interviews. These case studies demonstrate the methodological value of peak music experiences as a lens through which to understand individual and collective musical life. The theoretical analysis is interwoven with selected interview data, illuminating the profound and everyday ways that music informs people’s lives. The book will therefore be of interest to the interdisciplinary field of popular music studies as well as sociology and cultural studies beyond the study of music.




Reconceiving Structure in Contemporary Music


Book Description

This book studies recent music in the western classical tradition, offering a critique of current analytical/theoretical approaches and proposing alternatives. The critique addresses the present fringe status of recent music sometimes described as crossover, postmodern, post-classical, post-minimalist, etc. and demonstrates that existing descriptive languages and analytical approaches do not provide adequate tools to address this music in positive and productive terms. Existing tools and concepts were developed primarily in the mid-20th century in tandem with the high modernist compositional aesthetic, and they have changed little since then. The aesthetics of music composition, on the other hand, have been in constant transformation. Lochhead proposes new ways to conceive musical works, their structurings of musical experience and time, and the procedures and goals of analytic close reading. These tools define investigative procedures that engage the multiple perspectives of composers, performers, and listeners, and that generate conceptual modes unique to each work. In action, they rebuild a conceptual, methodological, and experiential place for recent music. These new approaches are demonstrated in analyses of four pieces: Kaija Saariaho’s Lonh (1996), Sofia Gubaidulina’s Second String Quartet (1987), Stacy Garrop’s String Quartet no.2, Demons and Angels (2004-05), and Anna Clyne’s "Choke" (2004). This book defies the prediction of classical music’s death, and will be of interest to scholars and musicians of classical music, and those interested in music theory, musicology, and aural culture.




A Theory of Music Analysis


Book Description

This book introduces a theory of music analysis that one can use to explore aspects of segmentation and associative organization in a wide range of repertoire including Western classical music from the Baroque to the present, with potential applications to jazz and popular music, and some non-Western musics. Rather than a methodology, the theory provides analysts with precise language and a broad, flexible conceptual framework through which they can formulate and investigate questions of interest and develop their own interpretations of individual pieces and passages. The theory begins with a basic distinction among three domains of musical experience and discourse about it: the sonic (psychoacoustic); the contextual (or associative, sparked by varying degrees of repetition); and the structural (guided by a specific theory of musical structure or syntax invoked by the analyst). A comprehensive presentation of the theory, with copious musical illustrations, is balanced with close analyses of works by Beethoven, Debussy, Nancarrow, Riley, Feldman, and Morris. Dora A. Hanninen is professor of music theory at the University of Maryland. She received the 2010 Outstanding Publication Award from the Society for Music Theory.




Music Data Analysis


Book Description

This book provides a comprehensive overview of music data analysis, from introductory material to advanced concepts. It covers various applications including transcription and segmentation as well as chord and harmony, instrument and tempo recognition. It also discusses the implementation aspects of music data analysis such as architecture, user interface and hardware. It is ideal for use in university classes with an interest in music data analysis. It also could be used in computer science and statistics as well as musicology.




Trends in World Music Analysis


Book Description

This volume brings together a group of analytical chapters exploring traditional genres and styles of world music, capturing a vibrant and expanding field of research. These contributors, drawn from the forefront of researchers in world music analysis, seek to break down barriers and build bridges between scholarly disciplines, musical repertoires, and cultural traditions. Covering a wide range of genres, styles, and performers, the chapters bring to bear a variety of methodologies, including indigenous theoretical perspectives, Western music theory, and interdisciplinary techniques rooted in the cognitive and computational sciences. With contributors addressing music traditions from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, this volume captures the many current directions in the analysis of world music, offering a state of the fi eld and demonstrating the expansion of possibilities created by this area of research.




Coherence in New Music: Experience, Aesthetics, Analysis


Book Description

What does it mean to talk about musical coherence at the end of a century characterised by fragmentation and discontinuity? How can the diverse influences which stand behind the works of many late twentieth-century composers be reconciled with the singular immediacy of the experiences that they can create? How might an awareness of the distinctive ways in which these experiences are generated and controlled affect the way we listen to, reflect upon and write about this music? Mark Hutchinson outlines a novel concept of coherence within Western art music from the 1980s to the turn of the millennium as a means of understanding the work of a number of contemporary composers, including Thomas Adès, Kaija Saariaho, Tōru Takemitsu and György Kurtág, whose music cannot be fitted easily into a particular compositional school or analytical framework. Coherence is understood as a multi-layered phenomenon experienced, above all, in the act of listening, but reliant upon a variety of other aspects of musical experience, including compositional statements, analysis, and connections of aesthetic, as well as listeners' own, imaginative conceptualisations. Accordingly, the approach taken here is similarly multi-faceted: close analytical readings of a number of specific works are combined with insights drawn from philosophy and aesthetics, music perception, and critical theory, with a particular openness to novel metaphorical presentations of basic musical ideas about form, language and time.




Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music


Book Description

There have been far-reaching changes in the way music theorists and analysts view the nature of their disciplines. Encounters with structuralist and post-structuralist critical theory, and with linguistics and cognitive sciences, have brought the theory and analysis of music into the orbit of important developments in intellectual history. This book presents the work of a group of scholars who, without seeking to impose an explicit redefinition of either theory or analysis, explore the limits of both in this context. Essays on the languages of analysis and theory, and on practical issues such as decidability, ambiguity and metaphor, combine with studies of works by Debussy, Schoenberg, Birtwistle and Boulez, together making a major contribution to an important debate in the growth of musicology.




Experience and Meaning in Music Performance


Book Description

This book explores how the immediate experience of musical sound relates to processes of meaning construction and discursive mediation. A unique multi-authored work that both draws on and contributes to current debates in ethnomusicology, musicology, psychology, and cognitive science, it presents a novel and productive view of how cultural practice relates to the experience and meaning of musical performance.