scholarly journals The Rules of Engagement: Richard Taruskin and the History of Western Music

2007 ◽  
pp. 21-49
Author(s):  
Harry White
Keyword(s):  
German Idealism ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Tonal Music ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
Musical Discourse ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American

The Oxford History of Western Music (2005) is a scrutiny of the ‘literate tradition’ of music in European and North American culture from the beginnings of notation to the end of the twentieth century. Richard Taruskin’s monumental and profoundly erudite engagement with a thousand years of western art music is animated from the outset by a radical critique of German idealism and the influence which this has exerted on the formation and transmission of European and American musical thought. Taruskin takes the view that as a result of this influence, the history of music has been seriously distorted, especially in regard to the contractual intelligibility of musical discourse in relation to society. The prestige of progressivism, as this is manifested in atonal and serial composition, in primitivism and neoclassicism, has enjoyed an excessive pre-eminence which eclipses in turn the narrative clarity of tonal music in the twentieth century.In this review essay, Taruskin’s indictment of historicism as a primary agent in the perpetuation of (German and Anglo-American) musicological orthodoxy is appraised in the context of his own obligations to narrative, musical analysis and the reception history of musical works. Taruskin’s identification of an historicist ‘master-narrative’ in earlier surveys of western music is considered in relation to a new master- narrative, of Taruskin’s own making, which condemns the hegemony of musical idealism at every turn. The tension which arises between this enduring preoccupation and the author’s sustained engagement with individual musical texts tends to confirm the autonomy of the musical work, not as an object immune (or indifferent) to history, but as a nexus of social, ideological and political expression which attains to a self-standing aesthetic integrity.

A History of Emotion in Western Music

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Spitzer
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Musical Structure ◽  
Basic Emotions ◽  
Western Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Musical Emotion

This book is the first history of musical emotion in any language. Combining intellectual history, music studies, philosophy, and cognitive psychology, it unfolds a history of musical emotion across a thousand years of Western art music, from chant to pop. It affords a new way of analyzing music, revealing the relationship between emotion and musical structure. The book also provides an introduction to the latest approaches to emotion research, as well as an original theory of how musical emotion works. The book is disposed in two parts. Part I (Chapters 1–4) comprises the theoretical foundation of the book. Part II (Chapters 5–9) provides an historical narrative from medieval to contemporary music. Chapter 1 summarizes contemporary theories of emotion in general, and of musical emotion in particular, bringing together seminal philosophers and psychologists. Chapter 2 contains the core of the book’s original thesis: that five basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, tenderness, and fear) constitute five categories of musical emotion throughout the common-practice period. Chapter 3 outlines a variety of complex musical emotions, such as wonder, nostalgia, envy, and disgust. Chapter 4 explores the historiography of emotion, including the seminal writings of Elias, Rosenwein, and Reddy. Part II of the book (Chapters 5–9) explores a millennium of Western music in terms of shifting categories of emotion: from affections and passions through sentiments, emotions proper, to modern affect.

Landmarks in the Study of Improvisation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno Nettl
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Research Study ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Jazz Improvisation ◽  
Single Model ◽  
Oral Transmission ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Music Making ◽  
History Of

Historically, research on improvisation has been related to the discovery of non-Western musics, folk music, and jazz, and has depended on the development of recording techniques for its principal kinds of data. The concept of improvisation is not unitary, but includes many vastly different kinds of un-notated music-making, which casts some doubt on the efficacy of the term itself. In the history of Western art music, improvisation was originally ignored or seen as craft rather than art, but since ca. 1980 it has occupied increased attention. The association of improvisation with oral transmission has sometimes been misunderstood. The most successful standard research study has been the comparison of performances based on a single model, for example, raga in India, maqam and dastgah in the Middle East, or a series of chord changes or a tune in jazz. Improvisation as a concept—for example, as a metaphor of freedom—has been important in recent research.

‘The Timpani Beats Just Hit on My Heart!’ Music, Memory, and Diplomacy in the Philadelphia Orchestra's 1973 China Tour

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-418
Author(s):  
BESS XINTONG LIU
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Western Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Musical Diplomacy

AbstractThis article examines the underexplored history of the 1973 Philadelphia Orchestra China tour and retheorizes twentieth-century musical diplomacy as a process of ritualization. As a case study, I consult bilingual archives and incorporate interviews with participants in this event, which brings together individual narratives and public opinions. By contextualizing this musical diplomacy in the Cold War détente and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, I argue for the complex set of relations mobilized by Western art music in 1973. This tour first created a sense of co-dependency between musicians and politicians. It also engaged Chinese audiences by revitalizing pre-Cultural Revolution sonic memories. Second, I argue that the significance of the 1973 Orchestra tour lies in the ritualization of Western art music as diplomatic etiquette, based on further contextualization of this event in the historical trajectory of Sino-US relations and within the entrenched Chinese ideology of liyue (ritual and music).

The ‘Nautch’, the Veil and the Bayadère: The Indian Dance as Musical Nexus

2019 ◽  
pp. 213-235
Author(s):  
Margaret E. Walker
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
Indian Dance ◽  
The Veil

During the early period of mercantile contact with India, the exotic spectacle of the Bayadères or Nautch Girls seized the imagination of western sojourners and inspired an abundance of artistic production back in Europe. The ‘dancing girl’ is found everywhere in late 18th- and 19th-century orientalist paintings, poetry, novels, and of course, ballets, operas and other musical compositions. Although there are substantial studies exploring musical orientalisms in western art music, little attention has been paid to the role of real-life performances in such musical creation. This chapter explores the influence of the colonial interaction with Indian dance performances over the long 19th century. It argues not only for a nuanced and historicised approach to musical encounter but also, given the centrality of the Nautch in the Indian context, for the crucial inclusion of dance in the global history of music.

scholarly journals The Music Room: Betty Freeman's Musical Soirées

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-409
Author(s):  
JAKE JOHNSON
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Interaction Rituals ◽  
Salon Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Art Music

AbstractFor over ten years, Los Angeles arts patron Betty Freeman (1921–2009) welcomed composers, performers, scholars, patrons, and invited guests into her home for a series of monthly musicales that were known as ‘Salotto’. In this article, I analyse Freeman's musicales within a sociological framework of gender and what Randall Collins calls ‘interaction rituals’. I contextualize these events, which took place in a space in her Beverly Hills home known as the Music Room, within a broader history of salon culture in Los Angeles in the twentieth century – a history that shaped the city's relationship with the artistic avant-garde and made Los Angeles an important amplifier for many of the most important voices in contemporary Western art music of the last sixty years.

scholarly journals Onset asynchrony in Western art music

2021 ◽  
pp. 126-158
Author(s):  
Jonathan Dunsby ◽  
Yannis Rammos
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Physical Nature ◽  
Claude Debussy ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Piano Pedagogy ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Western Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Onset Asynchrony

Melodic onset asynchrony, whereby the upper or some component of a musical simultaneity may strike the ear ahead of other sounds, is a common feature in the performance of Western art music. It seems to be of high aesthetic value in the history of pianism, often harnessed to the seemingly contradictory “bass lead” that prevailed in the early 20th century, though in fact the two are far from exclusive. Departing from an application of Brent Yorgason’s taxonomy of “hand-breaking” (2009) to canonical, composed examples of onset asynchrony from Beethoven, Schumann, and Liszt, we examine timbral, organological, and aesthetic continuities that underly distinct practices of asynchrony. We consider the physical nature of such normally non-notated “microtiming”, ranging in performance from a few ms of melodic onset asynchrony to about 100ms, above which it is generally agreed that even the casual listener may perceive it. A piano-roll recording by Claude Debussy, of “The Little Shepherd”, illustrates the mix of melodic onset asynchrony, bass lead, and apparent simultaneity that may be applied in a single interpretation. We then discuss the concept of “audibility” and the question of to what extent, and in what ways, the combined transients of piano attacks may interact. We consider with reference to 20th century Russian piano pedagogy why onset asynchrony seems to have been a little documented, rather than an explicit playing technique, even though certain sources, such as a 1973 treatise by Nadezhda Golubovskaya, show it to be ubiquitous and well theorised. Finally, regarding the thinking that has predominated in musical performance studies in recent decades, with its emphasis on average practices and “ordinary” listeners, we suggest that a new emphasis will be fruitful, that is, research on what is particular about the embodied creativity of expert musicians.

Sound Pedagogy: Teaching listening since Cage

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Tinkle
Keyword(s):  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Experimental Music ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Lived Space ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Western Art Music

This article proposes that teaching people how to listen is a central and underappreciated facet of post-Cagean experimental music and sound art. Under a new analytical framework that I call ‘sound pedagogy’, I trace a history of linguistic discourses about listening, from John Cage’s talking pieces to Fluxus text scores, Max Neuhaus’s soundwalks, R. Murray Schafer’s ear cleaning exercises and Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Meditations. I show how all these artists attempt to transform auditory perception in the everyday life of the subject. A central debate here is whether this more ‘open’ listening should be viewed as a new, cultivated practice, or, more problematically, as a primordial condition to which we must return. Framed as a polemical antidote to our harmful auditory enculturation (which privileges Western art music and alienates us from potential auditory aesthesis in the lived space of daily life), these sound pedagogies are, as I will show, ripe for deconstruction and critique. Yet, more hopefully, they may also open up broader and more immediate forms of participation than Western art music has typically allowed.

The Tonic as Triad: Key Profiles as Pitch Salience Profiles of Tonic Triads

2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 333-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Parncutt
Keyword(s):  
Music Theory ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Tonal Music ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Music Psychology ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Composition ◽  
And Inversion ◽  
Tonic Triad

Major and minor triads emerged in western music in the 13th to 15th centuries. From the 15th to the 17th centuries, they increasingly appeared as final sonorities. In the 17th century, music-theoretical concepts of sonority, root, and inversion emerged. I propose that since then, the primary perceptual reference in tonal music has been the tonic triad sonority (not the tonic tone or chroma) in an experiential (not physical or notational) representation. This thesis is consistent with the correlation between the key profiles of Krumhansl and Kessler (1982; here called chroma stability profiles) and the chroma salience profiles of tonic triads (after Parncutt, 1988). Chroma stability profiles also correlate with chroma prevalence profiles (of notes in the score), suggesting an implication-realization relationship between the chroma prevalence profile of a passage and the chroma salience profile of its tonic triad. Convergent evidence from psychoacoustics, music psychology, the history of composition, and the history of music theory suggests that the chroma salience profile of the tonic triad guided the historical emergence of major-minor tonality and continues to influence its perception today.

Lupus tonalis

2020 ◽  
Vol 150 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-141
Author(s):  
Ellen Lockhart
Keyword(s):  
Art Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Relationship ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Western Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Art Music

There are two kinds of thing called the wolf: one is acoustic and music adjacent; the other is biomaterial. Together, they are an instance of what Donna Haraway called “figures”: that is, “material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings co-shape one another.” This essay begins by observing these wolves in London, ca. 1806, where both conjured anxious musings on the human relationship to nature. From there, the perspective widens geographically and historically, to situate the figure of the wolf within a wider history of repressed animalia in Western art music.

The Closest Thing to Crazy: The Shocking Scarcity of Septuple Time in Western Music

2012 ◽  
Vol 137 (2) ◽  
pp. 351-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew James Gustar
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Factors ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Subsequent Evolution ◽  
Western Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Time Signature

AbstractThis article considers why septuple metres are so rare in Western music, despite being common in many other cultures. The scene is set by tracing the history of the septuple-time ‘meme’ (an idea that replicates by imitation) from ancient Greece through to Western art and popular music. The following sections consider the psychological, musical and environmental factors in more detail. The scarcity of septuple time in Western music is largely attributable to the development of the time signature, as a vertical conception of music evolved during the Renaissance. Subsequent evolution of the ‘Western music memeplex’ maintained septuple time on its periphery. Analysis of this interaction permits the construction of a meme-centred narrative of aspects of the development of Western music.

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