Music's Meanings


Book Description

“In addressing a pedagogical problem ―how to talk about music as if it meant something other than itself – Philip Tagg raises fundamental questions about western epistemology as well as some of its strategically mystifying discourses. With an unsurpassed authority in the field, the author draws on a lifetime of critical reflection on the experience of music, and how to communicate it without resorting to exclusionary jargon. This is a must-read book for anyone interested in music, for whatever reason: students, teachers, researchers, performers, industry and policy stakeholders, or just to be able to talk intelligently about the musical experience.” (Prof. Bruce Johnson)




Approaches to Meaning in Music


Book Description

Approaches to Meaning in Music presents a survey of the problems and issues inherent in pursuing meaning and signification in music, and attempts to rectify the conundrums that have plagued philosophers, artists, and theorists since the time of Pythagoras. This collection brings together essays that reflect a variety of diverse perspectives on approaches to musical meaning. Established music theorists and musicologists cover topics including musical aspect and temporality, collage, borrowing and association, musical symbols and creative mythopoesis, the articulation of silence, the mutual interaction of cultural and music-artistic phenomena, and the analysis of gesture. Contributors are Byron Almén, J. Peter Burkholder, Nicholas Cook, Robert S. Hatten, Patrick McCreless, Jann Pasler, and Edward Pearsall.




Being True to Works of Music


Book Description

Being True to Works of Music explores the varieties of authenticity involved in our practice of performing works of Western classical music. Its key argument is that the familiar 'authenticity debate' about the performance of such works has tended to focus on a side issue. While much has been written about the desirability (or otherwise) of historical authenticity — roughly, performing works as they would have been performed, under ideal conditions, in the era in which they were composed — the most fundamental norm governing our practice of work performance is, in fact, another kind of kind of truthfulness to the work altogether. This is interpretive authenticity: being faithful to the performed work by virtue of evincing a profound, far-reaching, or sophisticated understanding of it. As such, performers are justified, on occasion, in sacrificing some score compliance for the sake of making their performance more interpretively authentic. Written in a clear, engaging style with discussion of musical examples throughout, this book will be of great interest to both philosophers of music and musicologists.




Music and Narrative Since 1900


Book Description

This comprehensive volume offers a wide-ranging perspective on the stories that art music has told since the start of the 20th century. Contributors challenge the broadly held opinion that the loss of tonality in some music after 1900 also meant the loss of narrative in that music. To the contrary, the editors and essayists in this book demonstrate how experiments in approaching narrative in other media, such as fiction and cinema, suggested fresh possibilities for musical narrative, which composers were quick to exploit. The new conceptions of time, narrative voice, plot, and character that accompanied these experiments also had a significant impact on contemporary music. The repertoire explored in the collection ranges across a wide variety of genres and includes composers from Charles Ives and the Pet Shop Boys to Thomas Adès and Dmitri Shostakovich.




Music and Meaning


Book Description

In order to promote new ways of thinking about musical meaning, this volume brings together scholars in music theory, musicology, and the philosophy of music, disciplines generally treated as separate and distinct. This interdisciplinary collaboration, while respecting differences in perspective, identifies and elaborates shared concerns. This volume focuses on the many and various kinds of meaning in music. Do musical meanings exist exclusively in internal, formal musical relations or might they also be found in the relationship between music and other areas of experience, such as action, emotion, ideas, and values? Also discussed is the vexed question why people listen to and apparently enjoy music which expresses unpleasant emotions, such as melancholy or despair. Among the particular pieces the writers discuss are Mahler's Ninth Symphony, Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, and Schubert's last sonata. More broadly, they consider the relation of musical meaning and interpretation to language, storytelling, drama, imagination, metaphor, and emotion.




The Music of Meaning


Book Description

This book is about meaning in music, poetry, and language; it is about signs: symbols, icons, diagrams, and more. It concerns art and how we communicate, how we make sense to each other—including the concept of nonsense. It is about metaphor and irony. It embraces a vast human universe of signification and some of its cognitive machines of meaning-making: a complex and diverse unfolding of the expressive human mind. These 24 essays study different aspects of the way we signify, present recent research and models of such processes, and discuss the—often intricate—problems of understanding the relations between expression and thought. In evolution, music may have preceded the language of words, and music remains indirectly present in every temporal unfolding of bodily, affective, playful, meaningful activity. We are immersed in meaning and have to ‘listen’ to it since it constitutes the semiotic reality structuring the world as we experience it.




Psychology of Music


Book Description

In Psychology of Music: From Sound to Significance (2nd edition), the authors consider music on a broad scale, from its beginning as an acoustical signal to its different manifestations across cultures. In their second edition, the authors apply the same richness of depth and scope that was a hallmark of the first edition of this text. In addition, having laid out the topography of the field in the original book, the second edition puts greater emphasis on linking academic learning to real-world contexts, and on including compelling topics that appeal to students’ natural curiosity. Chapters have been updated with approximately 500 new citations to reflect advances in the field. The organization of the book remains the same as the first edition, while chapters have been updated and often expanded with new topics. 'Part I: Foundations' explores the acoustics of sound, the auditory system, and responses to music in the brain. 'Part II: The Perception and Cognition of Music' focuses on how we process pitch, melody, meter, rhythm, and musical structure. 'Part III: Development, Learning, and Performance' describes how musical capacities and skills unfold, beginning before birth and extending to the advanced and expert musician. And finally, 'Part IV: The Meaning and Significance of Music' explores social, emotional, philosophical and cultural dimensions of music and meaning. This book will be invaluable to undergraduates and postgraduate students in psychology and music, and will appeal to anyone who is interested in the vital and expanding field of psychology of music.




Music Education as Critical Theory and Practice


Book Description

This collection of previously published articles, chapters and keynotes traces both the theoretical contribution of Lucy Green to the emergent field of the sociology of music education, and her radicalhands-on practical work in classrooms and instrumental studios. The selection contains a mixture of material, from essays that have appeared in major journals and books, to some harder-to-find publications. It spans issues from musical meaning, ideology, identity and gender in relation to music education, to changes and challenges in music curricula and pedagogy, and includes Green‘s highly influential work on bringing informal learning into formal music education settings. A newly-written introduction considers the relationship between theory and practice, and situates each essay in relation to some of the major influences, within and beyond the field of music education, which affected Green‘s own intellectual journey from the 1970s to the present day.




Island Musics


Book Description

What does the music of Madagascar or Trinidad tell us about the islands themselves and their inhabitants? Is there something unique about island musics? How does island music differ from its mainland counterparts? Drawing on a range of diverse examples from around the globe, this book examines the culture of island music and offers insight into local identities. Case studies look at how music, tradition, popular culture and islander life are linked in modern maritime societies. The islands covered include Crete, Ibiza, Zanzibar, Trinidad, Cuba, Madagascar and Papua New Guinea. In revealing the current practice behind modern island musics, the book considers the role of world music, exotica, global tourism, novels and travel writing in constructing fanciful images of islanders and island life. Island Musics throws into question some of our most basic notions and assumptions about island societies. There are a number of problems common to all island societies that vary in significance depending on an islands size, demographics and its proximity to the mainland. Problems include remoteness and insularity, peripherality to centralized sites of decision-making, a limited range of natural resources, specialization of economics, small markets, a narrow skills base, poor infrastructure and environmental fragility. These issues are discussed in relation to the creation of music in the construction of an islander identity. Of particular interest is the way in which islanders discuss their music and how it articulates the idea of the other and diaspora. Finally, Island Musics considers the musical industry, music education and the preservation of musical cultural heritage.




A Million Years of Music


Book Description

What is the origin of music? In the last few decades this centuries-old puzzle has been reinvigorated by new archaeological evidence and developments in the fields of cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary theory. In this path-breaking book, renowned musicologist Gary Tomlinson draws from these areas to construct a new narrative for the emergence of human music. Starting at a period of human pre_history long before Homo sapiens or music existed, Tomlinson describes the incremental attainments that, by changing the communication and society of prehuman species, laid the foundation for musical behaviors in more recent times. He traces in Neanderthals and early sapiens the accumulation and development of these capacities, and he details their coalescence into modern musical behavior across the last hundred millennia. But A Million Years of Music is not about music alone. Tomlinson builds a model of human evolution that revises our understanding of the interaction of biology and culture across evolutionary time-scales, challenging and enriching current models of our deep history. As he tells his story, he draws in other emerging human traits: language, symbolism, a metaphysical imagination and the ritual it gives rise to, complex social structure, and the use of advanced technologies. Tomlinson’s model of evolution allows him to account for much of what makes us a unique species in the world today and provides a new way of understanding the appearance of humanity in its modern form.