The Oxford History of Western Music

Music and Imagination

Beyond immediate health risks, the COVID-19 pandemic poses a variety of stressors, which may require expensive or unavailable strategies during a pandemic (e.g., therapy, socialising). Here, we asked whether musical engagement is an effective strategy for socio-emotional coping. During the first lockdown period (April–May 2020), we surveyed changes in music listening and making behaviours of over 5000 people, with representative samples from three continents. More than half of respondents reported engaging with music to cope. People experiencing increased negative emotions used music for solitary emotional regulation, whereas people experiencing increased positive emotions used music as a proxy for social interaction. Light gradient-boosted regressor models were used to identify the most important predictors of an individual’s use of music to cope, the foremost of which was, intriguingly, their interest in “coronamusic.” Overall, our results emphasise the importance of real-time musical responses to societal crises, as well as individually tailored adaptations in musical behaviours to meet socio-emotional needs.

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Viral tunes: changes in musical behaviours and interest in coronamusic predict socio-emotional coping during COVID-19 lockdown

Arbeit und rhythmus.

This work contains almost 30,000 articles containing over 25 million words on musicians, composers, musicologists, instruments, places, genres, terms, performance practice, concepts, acoustics and more. All the articles are written by experts in their subject. There are over 500 biographies of composers, performers and writers on music and over 1,500 articles on styles, terms, and genres. It also includes: over 500 articles on ancient music and church music over 700 articles on regions, countries and cities over 2,000 articles on instruments and their makers and performance practice over 650 articles on printing and publishing over 1,200 articles on world music over 1,000 articles on popular music, light music and jazz over 250 articles on concepts 85 articles on acoustics 126 articles on sources and a one volume index.

The new grove dictionary of music and musicians, vol. 2

When Hugo Riemann wrote his 1873 doctoral dissertation, ‘On Musical Listening’, he felt himself part of the innocent atmosphere of a self-contained musical tradition. Back then, a topic that was so general could lead without further ado into fundamental questions of Classical and Romantic harmony. Today we can no longer view issues such as the opposition of major and minor or relationships of consonance and dissonance as genuine matters of principle, and physiology and mathematical acoustics seem to us to be even less suitable bases for explaining musical phenomena. If we take up Riemann’s theme again today, this must necessarily mean taking other approaches, both to our subject matter and to methodology. The musical situation has changed too much in the meantime. A tradition that is in any way self-contained no longer exists. In musical creativity, as in theoretical contemplation, things once taken for granted have now been put in question to a degree hardly ever recorded in music history. The naı̈ve feeling of living in the heyday of a unified tradition is past, Viennese Classicism has been stripped of its absolute dominance, and the figure of Richard Wagner is on the point of slipping from immediate potency into historical distance. In their place – alongside the new rhythms and colours of the nigger jazz band [sic] – early

Heinrich Besseler

Papers

Appendix: Fundamental Issues of Musical Listening (1925)