Sonic Object: A model for twentieth‐century music analysis

1997 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 346-375
Author(s):  
Didier Guigue
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Music Analysis ◽  
Object A ◽  
Twentieth Century Music

Hans Keller and the Media of Analysis

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
William O’Hara
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Functional Analysis ◽  
Music Analysis ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Dynamic Mode ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
Philosophy Of Music ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
The Media

Developed in the late 1950s, Hans Keller’s method of “functional analysis” (FA) sought to analyze music in audible form, without verbal argument or conceptual labels. Keller composed analytical interludes which repeated, recontextualized, and recomposed recognizable thematic and rhythmic elements from the compositions he studied, and placed them in between the movements of those works in live performances or radio broadcasts. Drawing on early twentieth-century music analysis, mid-century media theory, and recent studies of analysis for performance, this chapter reads Keller’s early analyses against a series of annual updates he published, chronicling FA’s development from a polemical philosophy of music criticism to a dynamic mode of wordless musical argument.

scholarly journals Editorial

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Mark ◽  
Allan Moore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Music Analysis ◽  
Traditional Music ◽  
New Music ◽  
Motivating Factors ◽  
Popular Film ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
The Uk

To start with the obvious: journals come into being for specific reasons. And if one regards the most influential titles born during the last thirty years or so, it seems that one of the principal motivating factors has been interventionist – an attempt to kick-start a particular subdiscipline, or to promote a hitherto neglected or insufficiently examined field. Thus Music Analysis (Basil Blackwell, 1982) sought to place on a fully professional footing a subdiscipline which, whilst recognized in North America (as Music Theory), was at that time underdeveloped in the UK, while 19th Century Music (University of California Press, 1977) sought ‘to stimulate and focus work on what has for too long been American musicology’s lost century’. There is, however, little need to stimulate the study of twentieth-century music(s): if one includes (as we believe one must) popular music, jazz, film music, and twentieth-century developments in traditional musics, as well as ‘art’ or ‘classical’ music, activity in the field is burgeoning at an impressive rate. What is needed, rather, is a dedicated forum. Earlier journals specializing in twentieth-century music (such as Contact and Perspectives of New Music) tended to act as voices for particular constructions of the field. Established generalist journals have frequently found a place for twentieth-century classical music, and more recently (following the trajectory of musicology in general) have begun to widen their scope to include the discussion of popular, film, and traditional music. But as the first three meetings of the Biennial International Conference on Twentieth-Century Music have shown (the third, held in Nottingham, UK, in June 2003, is reviewed in these pages), forums dedicated to the whole range of twentieth-century music promote a synergy and crossfertilization that will inevitably escape generalist journals or those confined to one corner of the field. twentieth-century music aims to provide such a forum; and not the least of our hopes is that, through the contiguity of divergent topics in each issue, the journal will stimulate the creation of new perspectives by encouraging contact with areas and approaches that we might not, as individual scholars, otherwise think to engage with.

The Doctor Faustus Dossier

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Daub
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Music And Literature ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Doctor Faustus ◽  
Public Lives ◽  
Nazi Era ◽  
The Impact

Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, two towering figures of twentieth-century music and literature, both found refuge in the German-exile community in Los Angeles during the Nazi era. This complete edition of their correspondence provides a glimpse inside their private and public lives and culminates in the famous dispute over Mann's novel Doctor Faustus. In the thick of the controversy was Theodor Adorno, then a budding philosopher, whose contribution to the Faustus affair would make him an enemy of both families. Gathered here for the first time in English, the letters are complemented by diary entries, related articles, and other primary source materials, as well as an introduction that contextualizes the impact that these two great artists had on twentieth-century thought and culture.

Queering Musical Biography in the Writings of Edward Prime-Stevenson and Rosa Newmarch

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-118
Author(s):  
Kristin M. Franseen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Benjamin Britten ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Symphonic Music ◽  
Biographical Knowledge

Beginning with the “open secret” of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears's relationship and continuing through debates over Handel's and Schubert's sexuality and analyses of Ethel Smyth's memoirs, biography has played a central role in the development of queer musicology. At the same time, life-writing's focus on extramusical details and engagement with difficult-to-substantiate anecdotes and rumors often seem suspect to scholars. In the case of early-twentieth-century music research, however, these very gaps and ambiguities paradoxically offered some authors and readers at the time rare spaces for approaching questions of sexuality in music. Issues of subjectivity in instrumental music aligned well with rumors about autobiographical confession within Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique) for those who knew how to listen and read between the lines. This article considers the different ways in which the framing of biographical anecdotes and gossip in scholarship by music critic-turned-amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson and Tchaikovsky scholar Rosa Newmarch allowed for queer readings of symphonic music. It evaluates Prime-Stevenson's discussions of musical biography and interpretation in The Intersexes (1908/9) and Newmarch's Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works (1900), translation of Modest Tchaikovsky's biography, and article on the composer in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians to explore how they addressed potentially taboo topics, engaged with formal and informal sources of biographical knowledge (including one another's work), and found their scholarly voices in the absence of academic frameworks for addressing gender and sexuality. While their overt goals were quite different—Newmarch sought to dismiss “sensationalist” rumors about Tchaikovsky's death for a broad readership, while Prime-Stevenson used queer musical gossip as a primary source in his self-published history of homosexuality—both grappled with questions of what can and cannot be read into a composer's life and works and how to relate to possible queer meanings in symphonic music. The very aspects of biography that place it in a precarious position as scholarship ultimately reveal a great deal about the history of musicology and those who write it.

Exploring Twentieth-Century Music

1971 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-123
Author(s):  
Henry Leland Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century Music

Regarding Electronic Music

Tempo ◽  
1966 ◽  
pp. 2-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurelio de la Vega
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Electronic Medium ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Long Time

For a long time now—long when we consider the quick, changing time-scale of our days—electronic music has been with us. The public at large usually remains cold, confused or merely dazed when faced with any new aesthetic experience. Critics, musicologists and the like still seem, as usual, to be unable to predict what will happen to this peculiar, mysterious and often anathematized way of handling musical composition, while many traditionally-minded composers consider it a degrading destruction of the art of music. On the other hand, the electronic medium seems to attract a long, motley caravan of young, inexperienced and often unprepared ‘beatnik type’ self-titled composers, who believe that the world began yesterday and that you only have to push buttons and prepare IBM cards to obtain magical results. Probably not since Schoenberg proclaimed the equal value of the twelve semitones of our sacred but by now obsolete tempered scale has twentieth-century music been faced with such a bewilderment.

‘A magic science’: rock music as a recording art

Popular Music ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 195-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rock Music ◽  
Sound Recording ◽  
Musical Practice ◽  
Order And Disorder ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
And Control ◽  
Jimi Hendrix ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Jimi Hendrix once claimed ‘I'm working on music to be completely, utterly a magic science’ (Henderson 1981, p. 337). It is a description that fits not just the best of Hendrix's own music, but the best of all that late twentieth-century music in which the ability to capture and control sounds (on tape or disc) has become a means of extending old musical forms and traditions, and establishing new possibilities for them. Throughout his career, Hendrix drew nourishment from his musical roots in black traditions, but it was not until the summer of 1967 that he plugged himself fully into the new possibilities opened up by the technology of sound recording. Hendrix had already proved himself something of a musical ‘magician’ in the ancient sense in that he attempted, through music, to mediate between order and disorder, using his guitar as an expressive extension of himself to flirt with the danger and power of musical disintegration (for the parallel with non-Western musical practice see Shepherd 1977, p. 72; Mellers 1973, pp. 24–6; Clarke 1982, pp. 227–9).

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