Musicology and Sister Disciplines


Book Description

Drawing on the work of leading experts from around the globe, Musicology and Sister Disciplines provides the definitive, authoritative statement on the scope of musicology today and its relationship to other fields of academic endeavour, including philosophy and aesthetics, literary studies, art history, mathematics, computer science, historiography, and sociology. These groundbreaking papers represent the outcome of a major musicological conference in 1997, and include contributions from the philosopher Bernard Williams and world-famous mathematician Roger Penrose.




Songs in Their Heads


Book Description

Songs in Their Heads is a vivid and engaging book that bridges the disciplines of music education, ethnomusicology, and folklore. This revised and expanded edition includes additional case studies, updated illustrative material, and a new section exploring the relationship between children's musical practices and current technological advances. Designed as a text or supplemental text for a variety of music education methods courses, as well as a reference for music specialists and classroom teachers, this book can also help parents understand and enhance their own children's music making.




The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy


Book Description

Whether regarded as a perplexing object, a morally captivating force, an ineffable entity beyond language, or an inescapably embodied human practice, music has captured philosophically inclined minds since time immemorial. In turn, musicians of all stripes have called on philosophy as a source of inspiration and encouragement, and scholars of music through the ages have turned to philosophy for insight into music and into the worlds that sustain it. In this Handbook, contributors build on this legacy to conceptualize the rich interactions of Western music and philosophy as a series of meeting points between two vital spheres of human activity. They draw together key debates at the intersection of music studies and philosophy, offering a field-defining overview while also forging new paths. Chapters cover a wide range of musics and philosophies, including concert, popular, jazz, and electronic musics, and both analytic and continental philosophy.




Music, Medicine and Religion at the Ospedale Di Santo Spirito in Rome


Book Description

Explores the use of music as therapy and shows how it operated in the hospital''s institutional, social and historical contexts, undergoing change in response to broader cultural and religious movements.This book explores connections between the physical care of the sick based on the study of medicine, concepts of healing founded on religious thought, and the practice of music at the Ospedale di Santo Spirito (Hospital of the Holy Spirit) in Rome. The hospital was a unique institution that was regulated by the Roman Catholic Church but simultaneously reflected the significant shifts in scientific thought emerging during the period that coincided with post-Tridentine reforms in the church.The volume discusses the hospital''s foundation, architecture and links with the papacy. It also reflects on the then acceptable "ways of knowing" informed by religious concerns and medical traditions. The tripartite relationship between religion, medicine and music within the institution was complex. At times they existed side-by-side, at others they intersected. Drawing on extensive archival research such as financial records, decrees, records of apostolic visits and inventories as well as surviving musical sources (printed and manuscript), the book makes connections between intellectual beliefs about music and actual musical practices. It explores the early use of music as therapy and investigates the musical ideals and practices of the monastic regime which ran the hospital. In a wider sense, the book shows how music operated in the hospital''s institutional, social and historical contexts, and how it underwent change over time in response to broader cultural and religious movements.NAOMI J. Barker is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Open University. She is the author of various articles on late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century music. This is her first book.ide-by-side, at others they intersected. Drawing on extensive archival research such as financial records, decrees, records of apostolic visits and inventories as well as surviving musical sources (printed and manuscript), the book makes connections between intellectual beliefs about music and actual musical practices. It explores the early use of music as therapy and investigates the musical ideals and practices of the monastic regime which ran the hospital. In a wider sense, the book shows how music operated in the hospital''s institutional, social and historical contexts, and how it underwent change over time in response to broader cultural and religious movements.NAOMI J. Barker is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Open University. She is the author of various articles on late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century music. This is her first book.ide-by-side, at others they intersected. Drawing on extensive archival research such as financial records, decrees, records of apostolic visits and inventories as well as surviving musical sources (printed and manuscript), the book makes connections between intellectual beliefs about music and actual musical practices. It explores the early use of music as therapy and investigates the musical ideals and practices of the monastic regime which ran the hospital. In a wider sense, the book shows how music operated in the hospital''s institutional, social and historical contexts, and how it underwent change over time in response to broader cultural and religious movements.NAOMI J. Barker is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Open University. She is the author of various articles on late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century music. This is her first book.ide-by-side, at others they intersected. Drawing on extensive archival research such as financial records, decrees, records of apostolic visits and inventories as well as surviving musical sources (printed and manuscript), the book makes connections between intellectual beliefs about music and actual musical practices. It explores the early use of music as therapy and investigates the musical ideals and practices of the monastic regime which ran the hospital. In a wider sense, the book shows how music operated in the hospital''s institutional, social and historical contexts, and how it underwent change over time in response to broader cultural and religious movements.NAOMI J. Barker is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Open University. She is the author of various articles on late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century music. This is her first book.surviving musical sources (printed and manuscript), the book makes connections between intellectual beliefs about music and actual musical practices. It explores the early use of music as therapy and investigates the musical ideals and practices of the monastic regime which ran the hospital. In a wider sense, the book shows how music operated in the hospital''s institutional, social and historical contexts, and how it underwent change over time in response to broader cultural and religious movements.NAOMI J. Barker is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Open University. She is the author of various articles on late-sixteenth and seventeenth-century music. This is her first book.




Music as Medicine


Book Description

Music, whether performed or heard, has been seen as therapeutic in the history of many cultures. How have its therapeutic properties been conceptualized and explained? Which cultures have used music therapy? What were their aims and techniques, and how much continuity is there between ancient, medieval and modern practice? These are the questions addressed by the essays in this volume. They focus on the place of music therapy in European intellectual, medical and musical traditions, from their classical roots to the development of the music therapy profession since the Second World War. Chapters covering the Judaic, Islamic, Indian and South-East Asian traditions add global, comparative perspectives. Music as Medicine is the first book to establish the whole shape of the history of music therapy in a systematic and scholarly way. It addresses the problem of defining what music therapy has meant in different cultures and periods, and sets the agenda for future research in the subject. It will appeal to a diverse readership of historians, musicologists, anthropologists, and practitioners.




Musical Vitalities


Book Description

Does it make sense to refer to bird song—a complex vocalization, full of repetitive and transformative patterns that are carefully calculated to woo a mate—as art? What about a pack of wolves howling in unison or the cacophony made by an entire rain forest? Redefining music as “the art of possibly animate things,” Musical Vitalities charts a new path for music studies that blends musicological methods with perspectives drawn from the life sciences. In opposition to humanist approaches that insist on a separation between culture and nature—approaches that appear increasingly untenable in an era defined by human-generated climate change—Musical Vitalities treats music as one example of the cultural practices and biotic arts of the animal kingdom rather than as a phenomenon categorically distinct from nonhuman forms of sonic expression. The book challenges the human exceptionalism that has allowed musicologists to overlook music’s structural resemblances to the songs of nonhuman species, the intricacies of music’s physiological impact on listeners, and the many analogues between music’s formal processes and those of the dynamic natural world. Through close readings of Austro-German music and aesthetic writings that suggest wide-ranging analogies between music and nature, Musical Vitalities seeks to both rekindle the critical potential of nineteenth-century music and rejoin the humans at the center of the humanities with the nonhumans whose evolutionary endowments and planetary fates they share.




The Routledge Handbook of Music Signification


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Music Signification captures the richness and complexity of the field, presenting 30 essays by recognized international experts that reflect current interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches to the subject. Examinations of music signification have been an essential component in thinking about music for millennia, but it is only in the last few decades that music signification has been established as an independent area of study. During this time, the field has grown exponentially, incorporating a vast array of methodologies that seek to ground how music means and to explore what it may mean. Research in music signification typically embraces concepts and practices imported from semiotics, literary criticism, linguistics, the visual arts, philosophy, sociology, history, and psychology, among others. By bringing together such approaches in transparent groupings that reflect the various contexts in which music is created and experienced, and by encouraging critical dialogues, this volume provides an authoritative survey of the discipline and a significant advance in inquiries into music signification. This book addresses a wide array of readers, from scholars who specialize in this and related areas, to the general reader who is curious to learn more about the ways in which music makes sense.




Music and Moral Management in the Nineteenth-Century English Lunatic Asylum


Book Description

This book traces the role played by music within asylums, the participation of staff and patients in musical activity, and the links drawn between music, health, and wellbeing. In the first part of the book, the author draws on a wide range of sources to investigate the debates around moral management, entertainment, and music for patients, as well as the wider context of music and mental health. In the second part, a series of case studies bring to life the characters and contexts involved in asylum music, selected from a range of public and private institutions. From asylum bands to chapel choirs, smoking concerts to orchestras, the rich variety of musical activity presents new perspectives on music in everyday life. Aspects such as employment practices, musicians’ networks and the purchase and maintenance of musical instruments illuminate the ‘business’ of music as part of moral management. As a source of entertainment and occupation, a means of solace and self-control, and as a device for social gatherings and contact with the outside world, the place of music in the asylum offers valuable insight into its uses and meanings in nineteenth-century England.




Music in Evolution and Evolution in Music


Book Description

Music in Evolution and Evolution in Music by Steven Jan is a comprehensive account of the relationships between evolutionary theory and music. Examining the ‘evolutionary algorithm’ that drives biological and musical-cultural evolution, the book provides a distinctive commentary on how musicality and music can shed light on our understanding of Darwin’s famous theory, and vice-versa. Comprised of seven chapters, with several musical examples, figures and definitions of terms, this original and accessible book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the relationships between music and evolutionary thought. Jan guides the reader through key evolutionary ideas and the development of human musicality, before exploring cultural evolution, evolutionary ideas in musical scholarship, animal vocalisations, music generated through technology, and the nature of consciousness as an evolutionary phenomenon. A unique examination of how evolutionary thought intersects with music, Music in Evolution and Evolution in Music is essential to our understanding of how and why music arose in our species and why it is such a significant presence in our lives.




Intertextuality in Western Art Music


Book Description

The first book-length consideration of questions relating to music and meaning.