Why study music? How much practical use is it in the modern world? This introduction proves how studying music is of great value both in its own terms and also in the post-university careers marketplace. The book explains the basic concepts and issues involved in the academic study of music, draws attention to vital connections across the field and encourages critical thinking over a broad range of music-related issues. • Covers all main aspects of music studies, including topics such as composition, opera, popular music, and music theory • Provides a thorough overview of a hugely diverse subject, from the history of early music to careers in music technology, giving a head-start on the areas to be covered on a music degree • New to 'neume'? Need a reminder about 'ripping'? - glossaries give clear definitions of key musical terms • Chapters are carefully structured and organized enabling easy and quick location of the information needed
Reflecting the growth of international interest in Elgar's music, this collection of essays brings together leading scholars from the UK and the USA, and covers the broadest range of analytical approaches to his music. It is perhaps in textual analysis and criticism that Elgar studies are showing their most remarkable growth. In this volume, analysts and theorists place Elgar at the centre of research into late-tonal music theory - particularly Schenkerian and neo-Riemannian - and the continually burgeoning area of musical hermeneutics. Through study of published scores and recently discovered sketches, different contributions explore Elgar's musical language and treatment of symphonic form, and themes in his music such as empire, race, the pastoral and idyllic, mourning, and loss. The essays cover the entire range of current thinking on Elgar's music, and have wide ramifications for future approaches to music of the early twentieth century.
Why study music? How much practical use is it in the modern world? This introduction proves how studying music is of great value both in its own terms and also in the post-university careers marketplace. The book explains the basic concepts and issues involved in the academic study of music, draws attention to vital connections across the field and encourages critical thinking over a broad range of music-related issues. • Covers all main aspects of music studies, including topics such as composition, opera, popular music, and music theory • Provides a thorough overview of a hugely diverse subject, from the history of early music to careers in music technology, giving a head-start on the areas to be covered on a music degree • New to 'neume'? Need a reminder about 'ripping'? - glossaries give clear definitions of key musical terms • Chapters are carefully structured and organized enabling easy and quick location of the information needed
Modernism is both a contested aesthetic category and a powerful political statement. Modernist music was condemned as degenerate by the Nazis and forcibly replaced by socialist realism under the Soviets. Sympathetic philosophers and critics have interpreted it as a vital intellectual defence against totalitarianism, yet some American critics consider it elitist, undemocratic and even unnatural. Drawing extensively on the philosophy of Heidegger and Badiou, The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism proposes a new dialectical theory of faithful, reactive and obscure subjective responses to musical modernism, which embraces all the music of Western modernity. This systematic definition of musical modernism introduces readers to theory by Badiou, Žižek and Agamben. Basing his analyses on the music of William Walton, Harper-Scott explores connections between the revolutionary politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and responses to the event of modernism in order to challenge
The first full-length analytical study of Edward Elgar's music, this book argues that Elgar was a modernist composer, and that his music constitutes a pessimistic twentieth-century assessment of the nature of human being. Focusing on Elgar's music rather than his life, Harper-Scott blends the hermeneutic and existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger with music-analytical methods derived from Heinrich Schenker and James Hepokoski. In the course of engaging with debates centred on duotonality in musical structures, sonata deformations, meaning in music, the nature of tragedy, and the quest narrative, the book rejects poststructuralist and literary-theoretical interpretations of music, radically interprets Schenkerian theory, and tentatively outlines a new space - a Heideggerian 'clearing' - in which music of all periods can be understood to operate, be experienced and be understood. The book includes a detailed glossary which provides the reader with clear definitions of important and
The first full-length analytical study of Edward Elgar's music, this book argues that Elgar was a modernist composer, and that his music constitutes a pessimistic twentieth-century assessment of the n
This thematic examination of Britten's operas focuses on the way that ideology is presented on stage. To watch or listen is to engage with a vivid artistic testament to the ideological world of mid-twentieth-century Britain. But it is more than that, too, because in many ways Britten's operas continue to proffer a diagnosis of certain unresolved problems in our own time. Only rarely, as in Peter Grimes, which shows the violence inherent in all forms of social and psychological identification, does Britten unmistakably call into question fundamental precepts of his contemporary ideology. This has not, however, prevented some writers from romanticizing Britten as a quiet revolutionary. This book argues, in contrast, that his operas, and some interpretations of them, have obscured a greater social and philosophical complicity that it is timely - if at the same time uncomfortable - for his early twenty-first-century audiences to address.
This thematic examination of Britten's operas focuses on the way that ideology is presented on stage. To watch or listen is to engage with a vivid artistic testament to the ideological world of mid-twentieth-century Britain. But it is more than that, too, because in many ways Britten's operas continue to proffer a diagnosis of certain unresolved problems in our own time. Only rarely, as in Peter Grimes, which shows the violence inherent in all forms of social and psychological identification, does Britten unmistakably call into question fundamental precepts of his contemporary ideology. This has not, however, prevented some writers from romanticizing Britten as a quiet revolutionary. This book argues, in contrast, that his operas, and some interpretations of them, have obscured a greater social and philosophical complicity that it is timely - if at the same time uncomfortable - for his early twenty-first-century audiences to address.
Modernism is both a contested aesthetic category and a powerful political statement. Modernist music was condemned as degenerate by the Nazis and forcibly replaced by socialist realism under the Soviets. Sympathetic philosophers and critics have interpreted it as a vital intellectual defence against totalitarianism, yet some American critics consider it elitist, undemocratic and even unnatural. Drawing extensively on the philosophy of Heidegger and Badiou, The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism proposes a new dialectical theory of faithful, reactive and obscure subjective responses to musical modernism, which embraces all the music of Western modernity. This systematic definition of musical modernism introduces readers to theory by Badiou, Žižek and Agamben. Basing his analyses on the music of William Walton, Harper-Scott explores connections between the revolutionary politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and responses to the event of modernism in order to challenge
