The Oxford History of Western Music

This thesis locates historical discourses about music listening within the field of sound studies. Thus, the first three chapters illuminate the contiguities between sound studies and the so-called “sensory turn” introduced in the humanities and social sciences in the 1980s. An important theoretical premise of the research is the historicity of folk and expert notions that are normally employed in describing the structuring of the human psyche, like “sensation” and “perception”, which are related to the distinction between “to hear” and “to listen”. Chapters 1 and 2 addresses the historical development of the notion of “cultural construction of the senses”, which has been predominant among sensory scholars; they trace the emergence of the anthropology of the senses and the anthropology of the emotions, discussing also some critical approaches influenced by phenomenology and the anthropology of the body. The narration stresses the importance of authors, notions and theoretical elaborations associated with audition. Chapter 3 reviews the historical emergence of an awareness of the historicity of the senses and emotions in Europe, starting from the contributions of the French Annales School. It also deals with theoretical and methodological problems related to the historiography of the senses and emotions, in particular with the difficulties in establishing a periodization. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 form the historical core of the thesis, which zooms in on modern times, from the 15th century to the second half of the 19th century, that is until the publication of Helmholtz’s Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage fur die Theorie der Musik (1863). These chapters try to build a bridge between the history of aesthetics and the history of science by combining different thematic threads: the history of anatomical and physiological research into the ear and audition, the history of acoustics and the archaeology of audio technologies, and historical discourses on music listening. Chapter 4 presents the main disciplines that have historically dealt with hearing: physics music, rhetoric, medicine and physiology, psychology, and the convergence of electroacoustics, electrophysiology and psychoacoustics in 20th-century hearing science. It provides a short introduction to their history and the specificity of their approaches to hearing, stressing their connections to music and pointing at problems in the historicization of audition. While the chapter initially considers ancient and medieval notions of hearing and the senses in relation to music, it focuses mainly on early modern discourses on music and audition, including advances in anatomical and physiological knowledge, the relationship between rhetoric and music in Renaissance humanism, and the key role of music and the study of the senses in the establishment of the experimental programme of the so-called “Scientific Revolution”. The chapter offers a glimpse of aesthetic and scientific discourses on the senses, passions, sound, hearing and music until the end of the 17th century, when Sauveur proposed the foundation of acoustics. Chapter 5 deals with the 18th-century emergence of the concept of sensibility, with had roots both in Locke’s empiricism and in physiological research on muscle and nerve irritability, but ultimately stressed the connection between the senses and aesthetic and moral sentiments. It reviews important works of the French philosophes (Condillac, Diderot, Rousseau) on the differentiation and education of the senses, the sense of hearing and music aesthetics, as well as Rameau’s theory of harmony within the context of the mathematical development of acoustics in the 18th century. It also reviews some influential works on music aesthetics, and traces the transformation of musical taste and listening attitudes that took place in France and Germany towards the end of the 18th century, when hearing was increasingly defined as an “inner sense” and the notion of musical connoisseurs (Kenner) was formed. Chapter 6 briefly tackles on the acoustic research of Chladni and reports on the 19th-century development of new scientific instruments, including new musical instruments, which contributed to the refinement of scientific practices related to the measuring and evaluation of audition. This happened in parallel with the institutionalization of otology as a medical speciality, in the second half of the century, which is also narrated. The chapter then turns to sensory physiology and the pioneering work of Helmholtz, who developed physiological acoustics. His concern with delimiting the fields of aesthetics and science is presented here side by side with Hanslick’s efforts to define The Beautiful in Music, which would shape the notion of “absolute music”. The thesis closes with a narration of the reshaping of sensation by the new experimental psychology, pointing thus towards the beginnings of the psychology of music.

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Historical Models of Music Listening and Theories of Audition. Towards an Understanding of Music Listening Outside the Aesthetic Framework

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.

/pdf/viral-tunes-changes-in-musical-behaviours-and-interest-in-aflfv105mr.pdf

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

11.9 MB Free download An Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments with Truth book PDF, FB2, EPUB and MOBI. Read online An Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments with Truth which classified as Other that has 288 pages that contain constructive material with lovely reading experience. Reading online An Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments with Truth book will be provide using wonderful book reader and it's might gives you some access to identifying the book content before you download the book.

An Autobiography Or The Story Of My Experiments With Truth

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

Appendix: Fundamental Issues of Musical Listening (1925)

The terms ‘character’ and ‘characteristic’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have usually been thought of as having had rather limited significance, often being restricted in application to ‘picturesque’ or ‘realistic’ genres such as the romantic ‘character piece’ or ‘characteristic symphony’. Through a re-examination of Christian Gottfried Korner's 1795 essay ‘On the Representation of Character in Music’ and other contemporary texts, I argue that, on the contrary, these terms are conceptually fundamental to the classical German idealist project of defending music's dignity as a true and morally beneficial fine art. Although persistently misread during the twentieth century as a disguise for concerns with stylistic or thematic unity, the metaphor of ‘character’ was in fact a sophisticated hermeneutic tool and a means of equal discursive engagement for performers, composers and critics. It was only the rise of politically oriented criticism and Wagnerian polemics that undermined the legitimacy of the ‘characteristic’ – a concept that may have a better claim than ‘absolute music’ to be considered the leading idea of the classical and romantic eras in music aesthetics.

‘The moral background of the work of art’: ‘character’ in German musical aesthetics, 1780–1850

In light of recent attempts to defend the role of the arts in education against the effects of policies based on utilitarian principles, this paper examines the arts educational writings and practical projects of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) at Santiniketan in West Bengal, showing how they were motivated by a Romantic and Upanishadic philosophy centred on the anti-utilitarian concept of ‘surplus’. While the development of Santiniketan’s present arts and music departments away from Tagore’s original ideals is acknowledged and traced, the paper argues that Tagore’s aesthetic and educational philosophy still contains much to challenge us. In many ways, his thought can be seen as more compatible with progressive and liberal arts education than the ideology of high modernism that developed at the same period in Europe.

A poem in a medium not of words: Music, dance and arts education in Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan:

By examining the ideas expressed by the German musicologist Heinrich Besseler in his 1925 essay ‘Grundfragen des musikalischen Horens’, this article attempts to find precedents in Weimar Germany for a contemporary social conception of music, and to trace the effects of this conception on music history between the wars. Although Besseler's position is seen to be complex and not wholly consistent, from his ideal of music as an expression of community (Gemeinschaft) arose two influential claims: that the concert was in crisis because it could no longer correspond to that ideal, and that the real source of communal vitality lay in Gebrauchsmusik, music for everyday use. The article explores the immediate political and musical consequences of these claims, both for the German youth music movement (Jugendmusikbewegung) and for Gebrauchsmusik as composed by Weill, Hindemith, and Eisler. It argues that the social aims of the Gebrauchsmusik movement were in fact best met when combined with an earlier understanding, rejected by Besseler himself, of the concert's own ‘community-forming power’ – a theoretical combination that was to lead outside Europe to the American musical and the Soviet symphony. By contrast, the sidelining of such ideas in post-war Germany was reflected in Adorno's outright rejection of musical community, a move which served to confirm only Besseler's first, negative claim – thereby establishing as normative an ‘autonomous’ conception of concert music and leaving musicology unable to give any positive account of the concert's social role.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S1478572211000272

Who Killed the Concert? Heinrich Besseler and the Inter-War Politics of Gebrauchsmusik

the publication of extracts with translations, prolonging the popularity of this 1884 prix de Rome cantata, among whose champions was Henry Wood. As one would expect from Herlin, variants are presented in detailed examples and the context lucidly evoked. A broader sweep follows in Corinne Schneider’s study of those who made it to the The¤ a“ tre Lyrique: a subject deserving of detailed attention. This opens with a hilarious quotation from the satirical novel Mise' res d’un prix de Rome by one Albe¤ ric Second, for a long time director of a revue entitled L’Entr’acte: ‘Like Jesus, we are flagellated, crowned with thorns, our hearts are pierced with a spear and when we ask for a drink, our gasping lips are offered a sponge soaked in vinegar’ (p. 641). The chapter goes on to detail the various attempts to overcome the obstacles facing young composers whose aspiration was success on the operatic stage, at first homing in on the efforts of Adolphe Adam to ease the way. Sections are divided between its changing directorates, notably the two periods under the control of Le¤ on Carvalho. In part based on a series of interviews with such figures as Dutilleux, Claude Pascal, and Edith Lejet, an essay based on twentiethcentury experience in the profession brings us up to date, less in a sociological way, more from the perspective of a modern-day career. Terms not met beforeç‘value for money’ and ‘professional competence’çjerk us towards present-day parlance. The final ‘entr’acte’ of illustrations is perhaps the richest. Its caricatures include Massenet on a mule and archive photos of both the Villa and its students.We then progress to the last collection of essays, ‘Le prix de Rome: mode' le respecte¤ ou cible des critiques?’çalthough the first, particularly fascinating, chapter doesn’t seem to have much to do with this title. Pierre Se¤ rie¤ begins with a short but very interesting piece reverting to the introduction of music into the prize in its earliest years but soon progresses to parallels between the visual arts and the cantata subjects, copiously illustrated. After a brief study of the cantata genre, by Emmanuel Reibel, Christophe Cordier puts Maurice Emmanuel’s evaluation of the prize as ‘odieuse et pue¤ rile cuisine’ to the test. Emmanuel never received a single accolade yet is a known name, if not a central composer in the canon. Correspondence with Delibes and Debussy fertilizes the chapter before Emmanuel’s own attempts at cantata composition are scrutinized. Michel Duchesneau examines the institution through a refracted lens, that of the Socie¤ te¤ musicale inde¤ pendente (SMI), and Malika Combes reflects on the institution in the 1960s and its final demise. A few testimonies finish off this magnificent volume: a lengthy defence by Henri Rabaud and a mixed view by Pierre Lalo. A table of prizes and awards concludes. It emerges not just as a brilliant study from more angles than one might have thought of, but also as an important tile in the mosaic of nineteenthand twentieth-century musical history in France. If there were a Prix de Rome for studies of the institution, I’d award it to this excellent volume. Bravo a' tous! RICHARD LANGHAM SMITH Royal College of Music

Matthew Pritchard

Papers

Appendix: Fundamental Issues of Musical Listening (1925)

‘The moral background of the work of art’: ‘character’ in German musical aesthetics, 1780–1850

A poem in a medium not of words: Music, dance and arts education in Rabindranath Tagore’s Santiniketan:

Who Killed the Concert? Heinrich Besseler and the Inter-War Politics of Gebrauchsmusik

Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism, and Expression. Ed. by Nicole Grimes, Siobhán Donovan, and Wolfgang Marx.