Title: Symptoms of modernity: Jews and queers in late-twentieth-century Vienna
Author: Bunzl, Matti 1971-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Anthropology | Jewish Studies | European History | Sociology | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies
Publisher's Description: In the 1990s, Vienna's Jews and queers abandoned their clandestine existence and emerged into the city's public sphere in unprecedented numbers. Symptoms of Modernity traces this development in the context of Central European history. Jews and homosexuals are signposts of an exclusionary process of nation-building. Cast in their modern roles in the late nineteenth century, they functioned as Others, allowing a national community to imagine itself as a site of ethnic and sexual purity. In Matti Bunzl's incisive historical and cultural analysis, the Holocaust appears as the catastrophic culmination of this violent project, an attempt to eradicate modernity's abject by-products from the body politic. As Symptoms of Modernity shows, though World War II brought an end to the genocidal persecution, the nation's exclusionary logic persisted, accounting for the ongoing marginalization of Jews and homosexuals. Not until the 1970s did individual Jews and queers begin to challenge the hegemonic subordination - a resistance that, by the 1990s, was joined by the state's attempts to ensure and affirm the continued presence of Jews and queers. Symptoms of Modernity gives an account of this radical cultural reversal, linking it to geopolitical transformations and to the supersession of the European nation-state by a postmodern polity.   [brief]
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Title: Musical meaning: toward a critical history
Author: Kramer, Lawrence 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Music | Musicology
Publisher's Description: Lawrence Kramer has been a pivotal figure in the development of the controversial new musicology, integrating the study of music with social and cultural issues. This accessible and eloquently written book continues and deepens the trajectory of Kramer's thinking as it boldly argues that humanistic, not just technical, meaning is a basic force in music history and an indispensable factor in how, where, and when music is heard. Kramer draws on a broad range of music and theory to show that the problem of musical meaning is not just an intellectual puzzle, but a musical phenomenon in its own right. How have romantic narratives involving Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata affected how we hear this famous piece, and what do they reveal about its music? How does John Coltrane's African American identity affect the way we hear him perform a relatively "white" pop standard like "My Favorite Things"? Why does music requiring great virtuosity have different cultural meanings than music that is not particularly virtuosic? Focusing on the classical repertoire from Beethoven to Shostakovich and also discussing jazz, popular music, and film and television music, Musical Meaning uncovers the historical importance of asking about meaning in the lived experience of musical works, styles, and performances. Kramer's writing, clear and full of memorable formulations, demonstrates that thinking about music can become a vital means of thinking about general questions of meaning, subjectivity, and value. In addition to providing theoretical advances and insights on particular pieces and repertoires, Musical Meaning will be provocative reading for those interested in issues of identity, gender, and cultural theory. This book includes a CD of Kramer's own composition, Revenants: 32 Variations in C Minor, which he discusses in his final chapter.   [brief]
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Title: Writing about music: a style sheet from the editors of 19th-century music
Author: Holoman, D. Kern 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1988
Subjects: Music | Music
Publisher's Description: How do you spell Rachmaninov?Where do you place the hyphen in Hofmannsthal if it breaks across two lines? Is it premiere or première? The answers and much more can be found in a new, essential resource for authors, students, editors, concert producers - anyone who deals with music in print. An expanded version of the style sheet for the well-known journal 19th-Century Music , this small volume covers some of the thorniest issues of musical discourse: how to go about describing musical works and procedures in prose, the rules for citations in notes and bibliography, and proper preparation of such materials as musical examples, tables, and illustrations. One section discusses program notes, another explains the requirements of submitting manuscripts written on a word processor. An appendix lists common problem words.   [brief]
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Title: Reflections of an American composer 
Author: Berger, Arthur 1912-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Music | American Music | Classical Music | Contemporary Music | Composers | Musicology
Publisher's Description: In this engrossing collection of essays, distinguished composer, theorist, journalist, and educator Arthur Berger invites us into the vibrant and ever-changing American music scene that has been his home for most of the twentieth century. Witty, urbane, and always entertaining, Berger describes the music scene in New York and Boston since the 1930s, discussing the heady days when he was a member of a tight-knit circle of avant-garde young composers mentored by Aaron Copland as well as his participation in a group at Harvard University dedicated to Stravinsky. As Virgil Thomson's associate on the New York Herald Tribune and founding editor of the prestigious Perspectives of New Music, Berger became one of the preeminent observers and critics of American music. His reflections on the role of music in contemporary life, his journalism career, and how changes in academia influence the composition and teaching of music offer a unique perspective informed by Berger's abundant intelligence and experience.   [brief]
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Title: Western music and its others: difference, representation, and appropriation in music
Author: Born, Georgina
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Music | Ethnomusicology | Cultural Anthropology | Sociology | Postcolonial Studies | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: This innovative collection of articles offers a major comprehensive overview of new developments in cultural theory as applied to Western music. Addressing a broad range of primarily twentieth-century music, the authors examine two related phenomena: musical borrowings or appropriations, and how music has been used to construct, evoke, or represent difference of a musical or a sociocultural kind. The essays scrutinize a diverse body of music and discuss a range of significant examples, among them musical modernism's idealizing or ambivalent relations with popular, ethnic, and non-Western music; exoticism and orientalism in the experimental music tradition; the representation of others in Hollywood film music; music's role in the formation and contestation of collective identities, with reference to Jewish and Turkish popular music; and issues of representation and difference in jazz, world music, hip hop, and electronic dance music. Written by leading scholars from disciplines including historical musicology, sociology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, popular music studies, and film studies, the essays provide unprecedented insights into how cultural identities and differences are constructed in music.   [brief]
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Title: Paul Bowles on music
Author: Bowles, Paul 1910-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Music | American Music | Composers | Contemporary Music | American Literature | Film
Publisher's Description: "It's an easy enough job if one has something to say," Paul Bowles remarked in a letter to his mother about his first foray into music criticism. And Paul Bowles, indeed, had plenty to say about music. Though known chiefly as a writer of novels and stories, Paul Bowles (1910-99) thought of himself first and foremost as a composer. Drawing together the work he did at the intersection of his two passions and professions, writing and music, this volume collects the music criticism Bowles published between 1935 and 1946 as well as an interview conducted by Irene Herrmann shortly before his death. An intimate of Aaron Copland and protégé of Virgil Thomson, Bowles was a musical sophisticate acquainted with an enormous range of music. His criticism collected here brilliantly illuminates not only the whole range of modernist composition but also film music, jazz, Mexican and Moroccan music, and many other genres. As a reviewer he reports on established artists and young hopefuls, symphonic concerts indoors and out, and important premieres of works by Copland, Thomson, Cage, Shostakovich, and Stravinsky, among others. Written with the austere grace of his better-known literary works, Bowles's criticism enhances our picture of an important era in American music history as well as our sense of his accomplishments and extraordinary contribution to twentieth-century culture.   [brief]
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Title: Papal patronage and the music of St. Peter's, 1380-1513 
Author: Reynolds, Christopher A
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Music | Musicology | European History
Publisher's Description: A new picture of music at the basilica of St. Peter's in the fifteenth century emerges in Christopher A. Reynolds's fascinating chronicle of this rich period of Italian musical history. Reynolds examines archival documents, musical styles, and issues of artistic patronage and cultural context in a fertile consideration of the ways historical and musical currents affected each other.This work is both a historical account of performers and composers and an examination of how their music revealed their cultural values and educational backgrounds. Reynolds analyzes several anonymous masses copied at St. Peter's, proposing attributions that have biographical implications for the composers. Taken together, the archival records and the music sung at St. Peter's reveal a much clearer picture of musical life at the basilica than either source would alone. The contents of the St. Peter's choirbook help document musical life as surely as that musical life - insofar as it can be reconstructed from the archives - illumines the choirbook.   [brief]
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Title: Conventional wisdom: the content of musical form
Author: McClary, Susan
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Music | Musicology
Publisher's Description: With her usual combination of erudition, innovation, and spirited prose, Susan McClary reexamines the concept of musical convention in this fast-moving and refreshingly accessible book. Exploring the ways that shared musical practices transmit social knowledge, Conventional Wisdom offers an account of our own cultural moment in terms of two dominant traditions: tonality and blues.McClary looks at musical history from new and unexpected angles and moves easily across a broad range of repertoires--the blues, eighteenth-century tonal music, late Beethoven, and rap. As one of the most influential trailblazers in contemporary musical understanding, McClary once again moves beyond the borders of the "purely musical" into the larger world of history and society, and beyond the idea of a socially stratified core canon toward a musical pluralism. Those who know McClary only as a feminist writer will discover her many other sides, but not at the expense of gender issues, which are smoothly integrated into the general argument. In considering the need for a different way of telling the story of Western music, Conventional Wisdom bravely tackles big issues concerning classical, popular, and postmodern repertoires and their relations to the broader musical worlds that create and enjoy them.   [brief]
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Title: The listening composer
Author: Perle, George 1915-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Music | Contemporary Music | Composers
Publisher's Description: George Perle takes us into the composer's workshop as he reevaluates what we call "twentieth-century music" - a term used to refer to new or modern or contemporary music that represents a radical break from the tonal tradition, or "common practice," of the preceding three centuries. He proposes that this music, in the course of breaking with the tonal tradition, presents coherent and definable elements of a new tradition. In spite of the disparity in their styles, idioms, and compositional methods, he argues, what unites Scriabin, Stravinsky, Bartók, and the Viennese circle (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern) is more important than what separates them.If we are to understand the connections among these mainstream composers, we also have to understand their connections with the past. Through an extraordinarily comprehensive analysis of a single piece by Varèse, Density 21.5 for unaccompanied flute, Perle shows how these composers refer not only to their contemporaries but also to Wagner, Debussy, and Beethoven.Perle isolates the years 1909-10 as the moment of revolutionary transformation in the foundational premises of our musical language. He asks: What are the implications of this revolution, not only for the composer, but also for the listener? What are the consequences for the theory and teaching of music today? In his highly original answers, Perle relates the role of intuition in the listening experience to its role in the compositional process.Perle asserts that the post-Schoenbergian serialists have preoccupied themselves with secondary and superficial aspects of Schoenberg's twelve-tone method that have led it to a dead end but he also exposes the speciousness of current alternatives such as chance music, minimalism, and the so-called return to tonality. He offers a new and more comprehensive definition of "twelve-tone music" and firmly rejects the notion that accessibility to the new music is reserved for a special class of elite listeners.   [brief]
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Title: Musicology and difference: gender and sexuality in music scholarship
Author: Solie, Ruth A
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Music | Musicology | Women's Studies | Men and Masculinity | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Addressing Western and non-Western music, composers from Francesca Caccini to Charles Ives, and musical communities from twelfth-century monks to contemporary opera queens, these essays explore questions of gender and sexuality. Musicology and Difference brings together some of the freshest and most . . . [more]
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Title: The American musical landscape 
Author: Crawford, Richard 1935-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Music | Musicology | American Studies | United States History
Publisher's Description: In this refreshingly direct and engaging historical treatment of American music and musicology, Richard Crawford argues for the recognition of the distinct and vital character of American music. What is that character? How has musical life been supported in the United States and how have Americans understood their music? Exploring the conditions within which music has been made since the time of the American Revolution, Crawford suggests some answers to these questions.Surveying the history of several musical professions in the United States - composing, performing, teaching, and distributing music - Crawford highlights the importance of where the money for music comes from and where it goes. This economic context is one of his book's key features and gives a real-life view that is both fascinating and provocative. Crawford discusses interconnections between classical and popular music, using New England psalmody, nineteenth-century songs, Duke Ellington, and George Gershwin to illustrate his points.Because broad cultural forces are included in this unique study, anyone interested in American history and American Studies will find it as appealing as will students and scholars of American music.   [brief]
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Title: Revealing masks: exotic influences and ritualized performance in modernist music theater
Author: Sheppard, William Anthony 1969-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Music | American Music | Contemporary Music | Ethnomusicology | Opera | Musicology | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: W. Anthony Sheppard considers a wide-ranging constellation of important musical works in this fascinating exploration of ritualized performance in twentieth-century music. Revealing Masks uncovers the range of political, didactic, and aesthetic intents that inspired the creators of modernist music theater. Sheppard is especially interested in the use of the "exotic" in techniques of masking and stylization, identifying Japanese Noh, medieval Christian drama, and ancient Greek theater as the most prominent exotic models for the creation of "total theater." Drawing on an extraordinarily diverse - and in some instances, little-known - range of music theater pieces, Sheppard cites the work of Igor Stravinsky, Benjamin Britten, Arthur Honegger, Peter Maxwell Davies, Harry Partch, and Leonard Bernstein, as well as Andrew Lloyd Webber and Madonna. Artists in literature, theater, and dance - such as William Butler Yeats, Paul Claudel, Bertolt Brecht, Isadora Duncan, Ida Rubenstein, and Edward Gordon Craig--also play a significant role in this study. Sheppard poses challenging questions that will interest readers beyond those in the field of music scholarship. For example, what is the effect on the audience and the performers of depersonalizing ritual elements? Does borrowing from foreign cultures inevitably amount to a kind of predatory appropriation? Revealing Masks shows that compositional concerns and cultural themes manifested in music theater are central to the history of twentieth-century Euro-American music, drama, and dance.   [brief]
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Title: In quest of spirit: thoughts on music
Author: Harvey, Jonathan 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Music | Composers | Contemporary Music | Religion
Publisher's Description: The interests of the British composer Jonathan Harvey are wide and varied, embracing Christianity, Buddhism, eastern and western philosophy, aesthetics, science, and mysticism. All affect his musical thinking and are a part of this unusual and personal book, which is accompanied by a compact disc featuring works discussed by the author.Harvey explores aspects of music that he connects with spirituality: self-identity, ambiguity, unity, stasis, and silence. In the course of his explorations he offers corroborating statements about music and spirituality from sources ranging from Nietzsche to Oliver Sacks. The book and CD include samples of his own music as well as compositions by Mozart, Scriabin, Stockhausen, and others that help to illustrate the profoundness of what Harvey deems "the good listening experience."For Harvey, composing is his way of trying to live a life "skillfully" in the Buddhist sense. In Quest of Spirit is a window into his creative world and provides a sense of what music can mean at the moment of its inception.   [brief]
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Title: Race music: black cultures from bebop to hip-hop
Author: Ramsey, Guthrie P
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Music | American Music | American Studies | Popular Music | United States History | Ethnomusicology | African American Studies
Publisher's Description: This powerful book covers the vast and various terrain of African American music, from bebop to hip-hop. Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., begins with an absorbing account of his own musical experiences with family and friends on the South Side of Chicago, evoking Sunday-morning worship services, family gatherings with food and dancing, and jam sessions at local nightclubs. This lays the foundation for a brilliant discussion of how musical meaning emerges in the private and communal realms of lived experience and how African American music has shaped and reflected identities in the black community. Deeply informed by Ramsey's experience as an accomplished musician, a sophisticated cultural theorist, and an enthusiast brought up in the community he discusses, Race Music explores the global influence and popularity of African American music, its social relevance, and key questions regarding its interpretation and criticism. Beginning with jazz, rhythm and blues, and gospel, this book demonstrates that while each genre of music is distinct - possessing its own conventions, performance practices, and formal qualities - each is also grounded in similar techniques and conceptual frameworks identified with African American musical traditions. Ramsey provides vivid glimpses of the careers of Dinah Washington, Louis Jordan, Dizzy Gillespie, Cootie Williams, and Mahalia Jackson, among others, to show how the social changes of the 1940s elicited an Afro-modernism that inspired much of the music and culture that followed. Race Music illustrates how, by transcending the boundaries between genres, black communities bridged generational divides and passed down knowledge of musical forms and styles. It also considers how the discourse of soul music contributed to the vibrant social climate of the Black Power Era. Multilayered and masterfully written, Race Music provides a dynamic framework for rethinking the many facets of African American music and the ethnocentric energy that infused its creation.   [brief]
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Title: Music in other words: Victorian conversations Ruth A. Solie
Author: Solie, Ruth A
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Music | Classical Music | Musicology | Women's Studies | Victorian History
Publisher's Description: Just as the preoccupations of any given cultural moment make their way into the language of music, the experience of music makes its way into other arenas of life. To unearth these overlapping meanings and vocabularies from the Victorian era, Ruth A. Solie examines sources as disparate as journalism, novels, etiquette manuals, religious tracts, and teenagers' diaries for the muffled, even subterranean, conversations that reveal so much about what music meant to the Victorians. Her essays, giving voice to "what goes without saying" on the subject - that cultural information so present and pervasive as to go unsaid - fill in some of the most intriguing blanks in our understanding of music's history. This much-anticipated collection, bringing together new and hard-to-find pieces by an acclaimed musicologist, mines the abundant casual texts of the period to show how Victorian-era people - English and others - experienced music and what they understood to be its power and its purposes. Solie's essays start from topics as varied as Beethoven criticism, Macmillan's Magazine, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, opera tropes in literature, and the Victorian myth of the girl at the piano. They evoke common themes - including the moral force that was attached to music in the public mind and the strongly gendered nature of musical practice and sensibility - and in turn suggest the complex links between the history of music and the history of ideas.   [brief]
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Title: California soul: music of African Americans in the West
Author: DjeDje, Jacqueline Cogdell
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Music | African American Studies | American Studies | California and the West | Californian and Western History | United States History | Contemporary Music | Jazz
Publisher's Description: This new series, co-sponsored with The Center for Black Music Research of Columbia College, seeks to increase our understanding of black music genres and their importance to the cultures of the Atlantic world, including their influence on African musical styles. Books in the series will examine the wide-ranging music of the African diaspora - including the folk-derived musical styles of the Americas as well as European-influenced concert hall music of the entire black Atlantic world - by analyzing issues critical to our interpretation of the music itself and exploring the relationships between music and the other black expressive arts.Focusing on blues, jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, and soul music, California Soul is one of the first books to explore the rich musical heritage of African Americans in California. The contributors describe in detail the individual artists, locales, groups, musical styles, and regional qualities, and the result is an important book that lays the groundwork for a whole new field of study. The essays draw from oral histories, music recordings, newspaper articles and advertisements, as well as population statistics to provide insightful discussions of topics like the California urban milieu's influence on gospel music, the development of the West Coast blues style, and the significance of Los Angeles's Central Avenue in the early days of jazz. Other essays offer perspectives on how individual musicians have been shaped by their African American heritage, and on the role of the record industry and radio in the making of music. In addition to the diverse range of essays, the book includes the most comprehensive bibliography now available on African American music and culture in California.   [brief]
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Title: Driven into paradise: the musical migration from Nazi Germany to the United States
Author: Brinkmann, Reinhold 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Music | American Music | Composers | Musicology | European History | United States History
Publisher's Description: The forced migration of artists and scholars from Nazi Germany is a compelling and often wrenching story. The story is twofold, of impoverishment for the countries the musicians left behind and enrichment for the United States. The latter is the focus of this eminent collection, which approaches the subject from diverse perspectives, including documentary-style newspaper accounts and an exploration of Walt Whitman's poetry in the work of Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill.The flood of musical migration from Germany and Austria from 1933 to 1944 had a lasting impact. Hundreds of musicians and musicologists came to the United States and remained here, and the shaping power of their talents is incalculable. Several essays provide firsthand insights into aspects of American cultural history to which these émigrés made essential contributions as conductors, professors, and composers; other essays tell of the traumatic experience of being exiled and the difficulties of finding one's way in a foreign country. While the migration infused the U.S. with a distinctly European musical awareness, at the same time the status and authority of its participants tended to intervene in the development of a genuinely American cultural voice. The story of the unprecedented migration that resulted from Nazism has many dimensions, and Driven Into Paradise illuminates them in deeply human terms.   [brief]
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Title: Cultivating music in America: women patrons and activists since 1860 
Author: Locke, Ralph P
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Music | Women's Studies | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: This wide-ranging collection brings together leading authorities on the social history of American art music to reveal the indispensable contribution that women have made to American musical life. Some chapters discuss collective endeavors, such as music clubs, Wagnerites, supporters of "modern music" in the 1920s, and activists in African American communities, while others focus on the work of a single, strikingly individual patron such as Isabella Stewart Gardner or Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. Primary sources such as private letters and autobiographies are utilized, and documentary vignettes scattered throughout the book bring to life important events and reminiscences. Among these are an interview with Betty Freeman, noted patron of avant-garde music, and advice from Mildred Bliss to Nadia Boulanger. Extensive opening and closing chapters provide conceptual and factual background on music in America and draw out the larger implications of women's patronage in the past, present, and future.   [brief]
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Title: Classical music and postmodern knowledge
Author: Kramer, Lawrence 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Music | Musicology
Publisher's Description: A leading cultural theorist and musicologist opens up new possibilities for understanding mainstream Western art music - the "classical" music composed between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries that is, for many, losing both its prestige and its appeal. When this music is regarded esoterically, removed from real-world interests, it increasingly sounds more evasive than transcendent. Now Lawrence Kramer shows how classical music can take on new meaning and new life when approached from postmodernist standpoints.Kramer draws out the musical implications of contemporary efforts to understand reason, language, and subjectivity in relation to concrete human activities rather than to universal principles. Extending the rethinking of musical expression begun in his earlier Music as Cultural Practice , he regards music not only as an object that invites aesthetic reception but also as an activity that vitally shapes the personal, social, and cultural identities of its listeners.In language accessible to nonspecialists but informative to specialists, Kramer provides an original account of the postmodernist ethos, explains its relationship to music, and explores that relationship in a series of case studies ranging from Haydn and Mendelssohn to Ives and Ravel.   [brief]
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Title: A heart at fire's center: the life and music of Bernard Herrmann
Author: Smith, Steven C
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | Film | Contemporary Music | Composers
Publisher's Description: No composer contributed more to film than Bernard Herrmann, who in over 40 scores enriched the work of such directors as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, and Martin Scorsese. In this first major biography of the composer, Steven C. Smith explores the interrelationships between Herrmann's music and his turbulent personal life, using much previously unpublished information to illustrate Herrmann's often outrageous behavior, his working methods, and why his music has had such lasting impact.From his first film ( Citizen Kane ) to his last ( Taxi Driver ), Herrmann was a master of evoking psychological nuance and dramatic tension through music, often using unheard-of instrumental combinations to suit the dramatic needs of a film. His scores are among the most distinguished ever written, ranging from the fantastic ( Fahrenheit 451 , The Day the Earth Stood Still ) to the romantic ( Obsession , The Ghost and Mrs. Muir ) to the terrifying ( Psycho ).Film was not the only medium in which Herrmann made a powerful mark. His radio broadcasts included Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre of the Air and The War of the Worlds . His concert music was commissioned and performed by the New York Philharmonic, and he was chief conductor of the CBS Symphony.Almost as celebrated as these achievements are the enduring legends of Herrmann's combativeness and volatility. Smith separates myth from fact and draws upon heretofore unpublished material to illuminate Herrmann's life and influence. Herrmann remains as complex as any character in the films he scored - a creative genius, an indefatigable musicologist, an explosive bully, a generous and compassionate man who desperately sought friendship and love.   [brief]
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