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All recordings document life, arising from a specific time and place, and if that place is artificial, the results will be as well. Culled from a lifetime of learning through failure and designed to provoke thought and inspiration for artists in every medium, How Music Dies (or Lives) is a virtual how-to manual for those on a quest for authenticity in an age of airbrushed and Auto-Tuned so-called “artists.” Author and Grammy-winning producer Ian Brennan chronicles his own journeys to find new and ancient sounds, textured voices, and nonmalleable songs, and he presents readers with an intricate look at our technological society. His concise prose covers topics such as:•The damages of colonization in generalizing distinctive variations•The need for imperfection•The gaps between manufacturing and invention•The saturation of music in everyday lifeThis guide serves those who ask themselves, “What's wrong with our culture?” Along with possible answers are lessons in using the microphone as a telescope, hearing the earth as an echo, and appreciating the value of democratizing voices.Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.

Grammy-winning music producer, Ian Brennan's seventh book, Muse-Sick: a music manifesto in fifty-nine notes, acts as a primer on how mass production and commercialization have corrupted the arts. Broken down into a series of core points and actions plans, Muse-Sick is a concise and affordable pocket primer follow-up to Brennan's two previous music missives, How Music Dies (or Lives): Field Recording and the Battle for Democracy in the arts and Silenced by Sound: The Music Meritocracy Myth. Popular culture has woven itself into the social fabric of our lives, penetrating people's homes and haunting their psyche through images and earworm hooks. Justice, at most levels, is something that the average citizen might have little influence upon leaving us feeling helpless and complacent. But pop music is a neglected arena where some change can concretely occur—by exercising active and thoughtful choices to reject the low-hanging, omnipresent commercialized and pre-packaged fruit, we begin to re-balance the world, one engaged listener at a time. In fifty-nine concise and clear points, Brennan reveals how corporate media has constricted local culture and individual creativity, leading to a lack of diversity within “diversity.” Muse-Sick's narrative portions are driven and made corporeal via the author's ongoing field-recording chronicles with widely disparate groups, such as the Sheltered Workshop Singers. Marilena Umuhoza Delli's striking photographs accompany and bring to life each tale. As John Waters says: “I didn't think it was possible to write a shocking book about music anymore. But Brennan has.”

A study of contemporary music in light of transformations to work and social life.The emergence of the popular music industry in the early twentieth century not only drove a wedge between music production and consumption, it also underscored a wider separation of labor from leisure and of the workplace from the domestic sphere. These were changes characteristic of an industrial society where pleasure was to be sought outside of work, but these categories have grown increasingly porous today. As the working day extends into the home or becomes indistinguishable from leisure time, so the role and meaning of music in everyday life changes too. In arguing that the experience of popular music is partly conditioned by its segregation from work and its restriction to the time and space of leisure—the evening, the weekend, the dancehall—Take This Hammer shows how changes to work as it grows increasingly precarious, part-time, and temporary in recent decades, are related to transformations in popular music. Connecting contemporary changes in work and the economy to tendencies in popular music, Take This Hammer shows how song-form has both reflected developments in contemporary capitalism while also intimating a horizon beyond it. From online streaming and the extension of the working day to gentrification, unemployment and the emergence of trap rap, from ecological crisis and field recording to automation and trends in dance music, by exploring the intersections of work and song in the current era, not only do we gain a new understanding of contemporary musical culture, we also see how music might gesture towards a horizon beyond the alienating experience of work in capitalism itself.

Missing Music: Voices from Where the Dirt Roads End details Grammy-winning music producer and author Ian Brennan's ongoing quest to provide musical platforms for underrepresented nations and populations around the world.In a compact and quick-read format, Missing Music collects the latest narratives from Brennan's field-recording treks. This edition features a greater emphasis on storytelling and an even greater abundance of photos from his wife, Italian-Rwandan photographer/filmmaker Marilena Umuhoza Delli.Together, they meet the elderly shamans of the world's most musical language, Taa, a tongue that sadly is dying, with fewer than 2,500 speakers left. The duo traveled the most remote roads of Botswana to find the formally nomadic people now relegated to small desert towns.In Azerbaijan, Brennan and Delli ascended to the mountainous Iranian border to record centenarians in scattered villages of the Talysh minority, where the world's oldest man reportedly reached the age of 168. The result is the only record ever released to feature the voices of singers over one-hundred years of age.Among other tales, Brennan also updates the saga of the Sheltered Workshop Singers following COVID, including the tragic deterioration of his sister, Jane.Arising from the more than forty records that Brennan has produced over the past decade from underrepresented nations such as Comoros, Djibouti, Romania, South Sudan, Suriname, and Cambodia, Missing Music serves as the newest suite in the multiverse symphony of the world's most ignored corners—the places where countries expire and the “forgotten” live.

Makis Solomos explores the ecologies of music and sound, inspired by Felix Guattari, for whom environmental destruction caused by capitalism goes hand in hand with deteriorating ways of living and feeling, and for whom an ecosophical stance, combining various ecological registers, offers a glimpse of emancipation, a position strengthened today by intersectional approaches. Solomos explores environmental, mental and social ecologies through the lens of the history of music and current artivisms – especially in the fields of acoustic ecology, contemporary music and sound art. Several theoretical and analytical debates are put forward, including a theory of sound milieus and the biopolitics of sound; the relationships between music and the living world; soundscape compositions, field recording, ecomusicology, and the creation of sound biotopes; the use of sound and music to violent ends as well as considering the social and political functions of music and the autonomy of art, sonic ecofeminism, degrowth in music, and much more.

From the mid-20th century to present, the Brazilian art, literature, and music scene have been witness to a wealth of creative approaches involving sound. This is the backdrop for Making It Heard: A History of Brazilian Sound Art, a volume that offers an overview of local artists working with performance, experimental vinyl production, sound installation, sculpture, mail art, field recording, and sound mapping. It criticizes universal approaches to art and music historiography that fail to recognize local idiosyncrasies, and creates a local rationale and discourse. Through this approach, Chaves and Iazzetta enable students, researchers, and artists to discover and acknowledge work produced outside of a standard Anglo-European framework.

Mamie Smith's 1920 recording of''Crazy Blues''is commonly thought to signify the beginning of commercial attention to blues music and culture, but by that year more than 450 other blues titles had already appeared in sheet music and on recordings. In this examination of early popular blues, Peter C. Muir traces the genre's early history and the highly creative interplay between folk and popular forms, focusing especially on the roles W. C. Handy played in both blues music and the music business. Long Lost Blues exposes for the first time the full scope and importance of early popular blues to mainstream American culture in the early twentieth century. Closely analyzing sheet music and other print sources that have previously gone unexamined, Muir revises our understanding of the evolution and sociology of blues at its inception.

If there is anything that can be said to define the music scene in the Nordic countries, it is that it is tremendously diverse, something that this engaging and informative guide to Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland's folk music will demonstrate. After reading this book, the readers will be able to dance on the violins of Hardanger fiddle or listen to the otherworldly lyrics of the Icelandic ballads. Learn the background and the role of the folk music of the Nordic countries, being introduced to the genuine musical and percussion instruments, singing techniques, and dances of the region. Discover how these traditions develop both in the colourful examples, leading personalities, and performances which proved the fact of the continents'spirit and creativity in folk music life. Regardless of whether one is a fan of music, a student of history, or just plain bored with popular music of the current trend, the compilation album'Nordic Folk'opens a window into the past and present of northern folk music. From the detailed information about every performer and his or her work to the conceptional analyses and outlooks on the further development of folk music this book is a gold mine for everyone interested in the songs and tales of North-Europa. Find out what people from the North are singing about and witness the eternal beauty of the folk vocals.

Music and sound studies have increasingly turned their attention to questions of empire and postcolonial thought in recent years, raising new questions about the forms and circulation of cultural, technological, political, and military power as manifest in and through sound. However, most of this scholarship has focused on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Conversely, sound and media studies have made nineteenth-century histories of science and technology a central part of their canonical repertoire, but largely overlooked the ways in which these technological developments emerged from contexts of empire. Acoustics of Empire provides a cultural history of global acoustics in the Age of Empire. Examining histories of sound, listening practices, and audiovisual technologies of the long nineteenth century through the lens of geopolitical power, the authors recover a sonic history that is irrefutably entangled with questions of imperial power and colonial rule. This volume brings together historians, musicologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars to consider topics ranging from Indian music treatises and vocal practices in Brazil to Egyptian traffic noises and stethoscopes-as-props in South Africa. Across its chapters more broadly, it also draws attention to a period when Euro-American academic disciplines like musicology and linguistics were created, shaped by the imperial contexts in which they emerged. These intertwined legacies of sound and power are not simply historical curiosities; rather, they stand as formative influences in cultural modernity and its discontents that continue to shape the ways we hear and experience the world today.

Ancestral North: Spirituality and Cultural Imagination in Nordic Ritual Folk Music offers a detailed exploration of Nordic ritual folk music, a music scene focused on the revival of ancient folkways and archaic music that has found remarkable popularity around the globe. Once the domain of Viking reenactors and neopagan practitioners, the niche sonic and visual aesthetics of this music have found widespread visibility through a new generation of popular films, television series, and video games. The authors argue that many of these musical and media products connect with longstanding cultural attitudes about the Nordic region that conceive of it as wild, exotic, and dangerous, while also being a place of honor, community, and virtue. As such, the Nordic region and its music often becomes a vessel for reactionary escapes from all manner of modern discontentment. However, the authors also posit that spending time re-creating the music of an imaginary past offers participants the possibility for engagement and re-enchantment in the multicultural present.

From the legendary producer of Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, REM, and Taj Mahal and author of White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s comes a riveting, world-spanning tour of the artists, histories, controversies, and collaborations that shaped global music. When Paul Simon first heard the Zulu accordion flourish that would open his multi-platinum album Graceland, he told Joe Boyd that it seemed to proclaim, “You haven't heard this before!” Yet the “world music” boom of the 1980s that Simon's album helped to usher in had roots that extended back through the decades and across continents: tango on the eve of World War I, Latin dance across the'30s,'40s and'50s, reggae in the'70s, pre-War samba and pre-Beatles bossa nova, Eastern European ensembles filling capitalist concert halls during the Cold War, Indian ragas changing rock and roll in the 1960s, gypsy music inspiring classical composers of the 19th and 20th centuries. As far back as 1853, the music that had intrigued Simon had captivated London during a Zulu choir's extended run there. (Only Charles Dickens dissented.) Like that of other far-flung musical traditions sweeping the globe, the story of Zulu music and its relationship to neighbors, invaders, appropriators, and admirers—from brutal 19th century massacres to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”—is more controversial, colorful, and complex than many imagine. Joe Boyd was part of a small group of label heads and journalists who chose “world music” as their marketing slogan in the 1980s. Already the legendary producer of artists including Pink Floyd, The Incredible String Band, Soft Machine, Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, Toots and the Maytals, and many others, Boyd had little idea how fast and how wide those simple words would spread, or how far back the history went. He would soon learn, producing pathbreaking music in Cuba, Brazil, Bulgaria, Mali, Hungary, Spain, and India under his label Hannibal Records. Following the success of his book White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, a self-published smash hit, Boyd now sets out to explore the stories behind the world music he had helped to popularize. He has traveled across continents and interviewed dozens of musicians, producers, and academics, and spent years reading, listening, and writing. The one-of-a-kind result is And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: a riveting, symphonic, globetrotting tour of the music that shapes our world.

Dream Machines tracks the music's evolution from early avant-garde experiments after World War Two through psychedelia, art-rock and synth-pop to electronic dance music, sampling and the techno era. As well as profiling the sonic futurists who pioneered new styles, it documents the scenes and underground movements that built Britain's thrillingly diverse electronic music culture in its formative decades. Based on interviews with key players and a wealth of in-depth research, Dream Machines explores genres as diverse as space rock, electro-pop, ambient, dub, industrial music, prog, electro, hip-hop, hi-NRG and house, highlighting how developments in British electronic music were shaped by changes in society as well as technological advances.

At a time of transformation in the music history classroom and amid increasing calls to teach a global music history, Navigating Stylistic Boundaries in the Music History Classroom adds nuance to the teaching of varied musical traditions by examining the places where they intersect and the issues of musical exchange and appropriation that these intersections raise. Troubling traditional boundaries of genre and style, this collection of essays helps instructors to denaturalize the framework of Western art music and invite students to engage with other traditions—vernacular, popular, and non-Western—on their own terms.The book draws together contributions by a wide range of active scholars and educators to investigate the teaching of music history around cases of stylistic borders, exploring the places where different practices of music and values intersect. Each chapter in this collection considers a specific case in which an artist or community engages in what might be termed musical crossover, exchange, or appropriation and delves deeper into these concepts to explore questions of how musical meaning changes in moving across worlds of practice. Addressing works that are already widely taught but presenting new ways to understand and interpret them, this volume enables instructors to enrich the perspectives on music history that they present and to take on the challenge of teaching a more global music history without flattening the differences between traditions.

A ground-breaking account of the scientists and architects who pioneered acoustics in twentieth-century Britain.On a winter's night in 1951, shortly after Evensong, the interior of St Paul's Cathedral echoed with gunfire. This was no act of violence but a scientific demonstration of new techniques in acoustic measurement. It aimed to address a surprising question: could a building be a musical instrument?Pistols in St Paul's tells the fascinating story of the scientists, architects and musicians who set out to answer this question. Beginning at the turn of the century, their innovative experiments, which took place at sites ranging from Herbert Baker's Assembly Chamber in Delhi to Abbey Road Studios and a disused munitions factory near Perivale, would come to define the field of ‘architectural acoustics'. They culminated in 1951 with the opening of the Royal Festival Hall – the first building to be designed for musical tone.Deeply researched and richly illustrated, Pistols in St Paul's brings to light a scientific quest spanning half a century, one that demonstrates the power of international cooperation in the darkest of times.

A devout Catholic, a visionary—and some say prophetic—writer, Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) has gained a growing presence in contemporary popular culture. While O'Connor professed that she did not have an ear for music, allusions to her writing appear in the lyrics and narrative form of some of the most celebrated musicians on the contemporary music scene. Flannery at the Grammys sounds the extensive influence of this southern author on the art and vision of a suite of American and British singer-songwriters and pop groups. Author Irwin H. Streight invites critical awareness of O'Connor's resonance in the products of popular music culture—in folk, blues, rock, gospel, punk, heavy metal, and indie pop songs by some of the most notable figures in the popular music business. Streight examines O'Connor's influence on the art and vision of multiple Grammy Award winners Bruce Springsteen, Lucinda Williams, R.E.M., and U2, along with celebrated songwriters Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Sufjan Stevens, Mary Gauthier, Tom Waits, and others. Despite her orthodox religious, and at times controversial, views and limited literary output, O'Connor has left a curiously indelible mark on the careers of the successful musicians discussed in this volume. Still, her acknowledged influence and remarkable presence in contemporary pop and rock songs has not been well noted by pop music critics and/or literary scholars. Many years in the making, Flannery at the Grammys achieves groundbreaking work in cultural studies and combines in-depth literary and pop music scholarship to engage the informed devotee and the casual reader alike.

California Gold offers a compelling cultural snapshot of a diverse California during the 1930s at the height of the New Deal, drawing on the career of folk music collector Sidney Robertson and the musical culture of often-unheard voices. Robertson—an intrepid young woman armed only with a map, her notebooks, and the recording equipment of the time—proposed and directed a New Deal initiative, the WPA California Folk Music Project, designed to survey musical traditions from a wide range of English-speaking and immigrant communities in Northern California. In California Gold, Catherine Hiebert Kerst explores Robertson's distinctive and modern approach to fieldwork and examines the numerous ethnographic documentary materials she generated with WPA project staff to capture a cross-section of the music that people were actively performing in their communities. Kerst highlights some of the most notable songs, images, and ephemera of the collection, capturing and contextualizing the diverse musical traditions that California immigrant communities performed during the New Deal era. Kerst also foregrounds the ethnographic insights and accomplishments of a significant woman folk music collector who has received less attention than she deserves.

Popular music and its listeners are strongly associated with newness and youth. Young people can stay up late dancing to the latest hits and use cutting-edge technology for listening to and sharing fresh music. Many young people incorporate their devotion to new artists and styles into their own developing personalities. However, if popular music is a genre meant for the youthful, what are listeners to make of the widespread sampling of music from decades-old R&B tracks, sold-out anniversary tours by aging musicians, retrospective box sets of vintage recordings, museum exhibits, and performances by current pop stars invoking music and images of the past? In Same Old Song: The Enduring Past in Popular Music, John Paul Meyers argues that these phenomena are part of what he calls “historical consciousness in popular music.” These deep relationships with the past are an important but underexamined aspect of how musicians and listeners engage with this key cultural form. In chapters ranging across the landscape of twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, Meyers finds indications of historical consciousness at work in multiple genres. Rock music canonizes its history in tribute performances and museums. Jazz and pop musicians cover tunes from the “Great American Songbook.” Hip-hop and contemporary R&B singers invoke Black popular music from the 1960s and 1970s. Examining the work of influential artists like Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Kanye West, Prince, D'Angelo, and Janelle Monáe, Meyers argues that contemporary artists'homage to the past is key for understanding how music-lovers make meaning of popular music in the present.

'Talkin'Greenwich Village is impeccably researched, elegantly written and consistently fascinating.'--New York Times The definitive history of the rise and heyday of the revolutionary Greenwich Village music scene, based on new research and first-hand interviews with many of its legendary performers Although Greenwich Village encompasses less than a square mile in downtown New York, rarely has such a concise area nurtured so many innovative artists and genres. Over the course of decades, Billie Holiday, the Weavers, Sonny Rollins, Dave Van Ronk, Ornette Coleman, Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Phil Ochs, and Suzanne Vega are just a few who migrated to the Village, recognizing it as a sanctuary for visionaries, non-conformists, and those looking to reinvent themselves. Working in the Village's smokey coffeehouses and clubs, they chronicled the tumultuous Sixties, rewrote jazz history, and took folk and rock & roll into places they hadn't been before. Based on over 150 new interviews (Judy Collins, Sonny Rollins, Herbie Hancock, Eric Andersen, Suzzy and Terre Roche, Suzanne Vega, Steve Forbert, Arlo Guthrie, John Sebastian, Shawn Colvin, the members of the Blues Project, and more), previously unseen documents, and author David Browne's longtime immersion in the scene, Talkin'Greenwich Village lends the saga the epic, panoramic scope it's long deserved. It takes readers from the Fifties jamborees in Washington Square Park and into landmark venues like Gerde's Folk City, the Gaslight Café, and the Village Vanguard, onto Dylan's momentous arrival and returns, the no-holds-barred Seventies years (West Village discos, National Lampoon's Lemmings), and the folk revival of the Eighties (Vega's enduring “Tom's Diner”). In eye-opening fashion, Browne also details the often-overlooked people of color in the Sixties folk clubs, reveals how the FBI and city government consistently kept their eyes on the community, unearths the machinations behind the infamous “beatnik riot” in Washington Square Park, and tells the interconnected tales of Van Ronk, the seminal band the Blues Project, and the beloved sister trio, the Roches. In also recounting the racial tensions, crackdowns, and changes in New York and music that infiltrated the neighborhood, Talkin'Greenwich Village is more than just vivid cultural history. It also speaks to the rise and waning of bohemian culture itself, set to some of the most enduring lyrics, melodies, and jazz improvisations in American music.

Experimental film practice from an international and transdisciplinary perspective.Karel Doing is an experimental filmmaker and researcher who has worked across the globe with fellow artists and filmmakers, creating a body of work that is difficult to pinpoint with a simple catchphrase. In Ruins and Resilience he weaves autobiographical elements and critical reviews together with his wide ranging interdisciplinary approach, reflecting on his own practice by positioning key works within the context of a vibrant experimental film scene in Europe, North and South America, and Asia. Doing demonstrates how experimental filmmakers have continued to renew their practice despite the almost total demise of analog motion picture film and the constant neglect of this art form by institutions and critics. Written in a fluent and accessible style, the book looks into the connections between the work of groundbreaking artists within the field and subjects such as transgression, improvisation, collectivity, materiality, phenomenology, and perception. Specifically, intersections with music and sound are investigated, appealing to the idea of the cross-modal brain, the ability to perceive sounds and images in an integrated way. Instead of looking again at the'golden era'of experimental film, the book starts in the 1980s, showing how this art form has never ceased to surprise and inspire. The author's hands-on engagement with the medium is formational for his more theoretical approach and writing, making the book a highly original contribution in the field that is informative and inspiring for academic and practitioners alike.

Since Sonicbond Publishing launched at the end of 2018, iwe have published books that span most genres in popular music, from easy listening to psychedelia and from pop to metal. However, it is in the world of progressive rock that we have found our most comfortable home. This book features eleven chapters from books on some of the greats of the genre, including from our On Track series Yes, Genesis, Caravan, ELP, Gentle Giant, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, Porcupine Tree and Steve Hackett solo. Our Decades series offers up chapters on Marillion in the 1980s and Van Der Graaf Generator in the 1970s and our Year In series has a chapter on Aphrodite's Child's seminal 666. This is just the tip of the iceberg, though, and for the up-to-date list, check out the complete stocklist at the back of this book. The book contains two exclusive pieces that you won't find in printed books anywhere else. Nick Holmes'detailed chapter on Porcupine Tree's Closure/Continuation can be found in the current E-book but not yet in the printed version. Stephen Lambe has rewritten his own chapter on Yes'‘lost album'Talk, released 30 years ago. Contents: Closure/Continuation (2022) from Porcupine Tree On Track (Revised Edition)by Nick Holmes (to be published in 2025) Talk (1994) from Yes On Track by Stephen Lambe. Revised version for futureEditions Aphrodite's Child – 666 (1972) from 1972: The Year Progressive Rock RuledThe World by Kevan Furbank If I Could Do It All Over Again It Again I'd Do It All Over You (1970) fromCaravan On Track by Andy Boot Tarkus (1971) from Emerson, Lake & Palmer On Track by Mike Goode Wind & Wuthering (1976) and the Spot The Pigeon EP from Genesis On Trackby Stuart Macfarlane Acquiring The Taste (1971) from Gentle Giant On Track by Gary Steel Songs From The Wood (1977) from Jethro Tull On Track by Jordan Blum 1985: The Heart That We Have Live from Marillion in the 1980s by NathanielWebb Meddle (1971) from Pink Floyd On Track by Richard Butterworth Defector (1980) from Steve Hackett On Track by Geoffrey Feakes 1975: The Undercover Men From Van der Graaf Generator In The 1970s bySteve Pilkington

Hounds Of Love invites you to not only listen, but to cross the boundaries of sensory experience into realms of imagination and possibility. Side A spawned four Top 40 hit singles in the UK,'Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)','Cloudbusting','Hounds of Love'and'The Big Sky', some of the best-loved and most enduring compositions in Bush's catalogue. On side B, a hallucinatory seven-part song cycle called The Ninth Wave broke away from the pop conventions of the era by using strange and vivid production techniques that plunge the listener into the psychological centre of a near-death experience. Poised and accessible, yet still experimental and complex, with Hounds Of Love Bush mastered the art of her studio-based songcraft, finally achieving full control of her creative process. When it came out in 1985, she was only 27 years old.This book charts the emergence of Kate Bush in the early-to-mid-1980s as a courageous experimentalist, a singularly expressive recording artist and a visionary music producer. Track-by-track commentaries focus on the experience of the album from the listener's point of view, drawing attention to the art and craft of Bush's songwriting, production and sound design. It considers the vast impact and influence that Hounds Of Love has had on music cultures and creative practices through the years, underlining the artist's importance as a barrier-smashing, template-defying, business-smart, record-breaking, never-compromising role model for artists everywhere.

A landmark history of early radio in Germany and the quest for broadcast fidelityWhen we turn on a radio or stream a playlist, we can usually recognize the instrument we hear, whether it's a cello, a guitar, or an operatic voice. Such fidelity was not always true of radio. Broadcasting Fidelity shows how the problem of broadcast fidelity pushed German scientists beyond the traditional bounds of their disciplines and led to the creation of one of the most important electronic instruments of the twentieth century.In the early days of radio, acoustical distortions made it hard for even the most discerning musical ears to differentiate instruments and voices. The physicists and engineers of interwar Germany, with the assistance of leading composers and musicians, tackled this daunting technical challenge. Research led to the invention in 1930 of the trautonium, an early electronic instrument capable of imitating the timbres of numerous acoustical instruments and generating novel sounds for many musical genres. Myles Jackson charts the broader political and artistic trajectories of this instrument, tracing how it was embraced by the Nazis and subsequently used to subvert Nazi aesthetics after the war and describing how Alfred Hitchcock commissioned a later version of the trautonium to provide the sounds of birds squawking and flapping their wings in his 1963 thriller The Birds.A splendid work of scholarship by an acclaimed historian of science, Broadcasting Fidelity reveals how the interplay of science, technology, politics, and culture gave rise to new aesthetic concepts, innovative musical genres, and the modern discipline of electroacoustics.

Was macht künstlerisches Forschen im Bereich Sound und Musik aus? Im Ausklang einer langen und produktiven technisch-künstlerischen sowie wissenschaftlichen Laufbahn stellt Hans-Ulrich Werner seine Ergebnisse zum Thema vor. Dazu orientiert er sich vor allem an den Ideen und Erkenntnissen der Menschen, denen er bei seinem Schaffen begegnete und die er als Akteure eines internationalen Netzes beschreibt. Somit ergibt sich nicht nur ein Einblick in die Protagonisten der vielfältigen Klanglandschaften dieser Welt, sondern auch die Etablierung des künstlerischen Forschens als eigenständige Disziplin jenseits von klassischer Wissenschaft.

Die drei knappen Wörter DENKEN, HÖREN, DA CAPO bezeichnen intentionale (Wahrnehmungs-) Prozesse, eine musikalische Spielanweisung und sind überdies konstitutives Element eines Werkes des Komponisten Peter Ablinger. Konkreter: DENKEN, HÖREN, DA CAPO ist konzeptuelle Musik. Der Begriff ist ebenso problematisch wie jeder Versuch seiner fasslichen Definition. Konzeptuelle Musik ist keine Gattung, sondern Reaktion auf musikalische Gattungskonventionen. So lässt sich dem Phänomen nur ex negativo begegnen. Monika Voithofer erarbeitet in ihrer Studie erstmals eine umfassende Darstellung der transatlantischen Geschichte und Ästhetik von konzeptueller Musik im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert. Sie leistet damit eine methodische, fachterminologische und institutionengeschichtliche Ergänzung der Erforschung von konzeptuellen Praktiken aus musikwissenschaftlicher Perspektive. Anhand eines repräsentativen Werkkorpus analysiert die Autorin detailliert theoretische wie künstlerische Positionen zur Genealogie, Materialität, Form und Semantik, um allzu dichotomisch bemühte Narrative – etwa Fluxus vs. Conceptual Art, experimentell vs. seriell oder ästhetisch vs. konzeptuell – zu revidieren.

Interpreting Music, Engaging Culture: An Introduction to Music Criticism offers a clear, hands-on guide for emerging music critics that brings together aesthetics, critical theory, and practical music criticism in an accessible format. Over the course of the book, readers develop a vocabulary and framework for criticizing music of all kinds and for various media while learning how to connect music to its cultural, social, and political contexts.Excerpts from primary sources throughout provide a wide range of writing examples, while Chapters address the distinct challenges of describing and interpreting music for various media and in diverse formats. Along the way, the book explores questions at the core of music and its criticism, such as what constitutes a musical work and what makes a piece of music “authentic”; it also introduces critical lenses, including feminist and queer criticism, postcolonialism and critical race theory, as well as the analysis of music in consumer culture. Addressing both classical and popular music criticism, Interpreting Music, Engaging Culture is a comprehensive and lively textbook that enables students to uncover, articulate, and analyze what makes music compelling and meaningful.

While David Bowie was alive, his songs and their strange commentaries on modern life had some kind of deep significance that made sense of it all for many people. His music evokes something futuristic and prophetic to his fans. This book shed light on Bowie's songwriting in the early, most-lauded part of his career, his much-vaunted sense of alienation and his desperate search to make music that was art. Everything he did was infused with a kind of indescribable oddness, like his two mismatched eyes. He had a lifelong interest in ideas about life on other worlds, and yet one of his many songs associated with this theme, ‘Life On Mars', is more concerned with the failings of this planet. When he sang ‘Starman'on Top Of The Pops in 1972, his arm draped around the shoulders of his talented lead guitarist Mick Ronson, he lit up a million teenage hearts. This is a complete examination of all the songs from Bowie's golden years, which extends from his days as a mod saxophonist through to his astonishing 1980 hit album, Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps). His songs run the gamut from extraordinary to esoteric but were always written from the heart. Carl Ewens, born in Burnley, Lancashire, in 1960, has previously published an absurdist science fiction novel, two books of poetry and a similar book about the songwriting of Marc Bolan. He also produces music under the pseudonym Psyfolk. His interests range from reading novels to football, art, photography, film and history, as well as UAPs and spirituality. He also has a degree in Social Anthropology and Comparative Religion. He is a lover of real ale but isn't keen on the currently trendy obsession with hazy IPAs as he thinks they all taste of grapefruit. He lives in West Sussex, UK.

Muddy Waters invented electric blues and created the template for the rock and roll band and its wild lifestyle. Gordon excavates Muddy's mysterious past and early career, taking us from Mississippi fields to postwar Chicago street corners.

Remediating Sound studies the phenomena of remixing, mashup and recomposition: forms of reuse and sampling that have come to characterise much of YouTube's audiovisual content. Through collaborative composition, collage and cover songs to reaction videos and political activism, users from diverse backgrounds have embraced the democratised space of YouTube to open up new and innovative forms of sonic creativity and push the boundaries of audiovisual possibilities. Observing the reciprocal flow of influence that runs between various online platforms, 12 chapters position YouTube as a central hub for the exploration of digital sound, music and the moving image. With special focus on aspects of networked creativity that remain overlooked in contemporary scholarship, including library music, memetic media, artificial intelligence, the sonic arts and music fandom, this volume offers interdisciplinary insight into contemporary audiovisual culture.

Sound, music and storytelling are important tools of resistance, resilience and reconciliation in creative practice from protracted conflict to post-conflict contexts. When they are used in a socially engaged participatory capacity, they can create counter-narratives to conflict. Based on original research in three continents, this book advances an interdisciplinary, comparative approach to exploring the role of sonic and creative practices in addressing the effects of conflict. Each case study illustrates how participatory arts genres are variously employed by musicians, arts facilitators, theatre practitioners, community activists and other stakeholders as a means of'strategic creativity'to transform trauma and promote empowerment. This research further highlights the complex dynamics of delivering and managing creativity among those who have experienced violence, as they seek opportunities to generate alternative arenas for engagement, healing and transformation.

New Order have produced some of the most influential popular music of the last 40 years. A unique vision of alternative electronic rock, forged in Manchester and exported to the world, the band connected with the alternative-minded as well as the club-centric; the football fan and the artist; the boffin and the aesthete. The journey of New Order to the world has been nothing short of incredible: their punk-ignited founding as Warsaw; the eternally astonishing Joy Division and the rise and fall of Factory Records and The Haçienda. There were many remarkable associations including Martin Hannett, Peter Saville, Tony Wilson, Rob Gretton, Arthur Baker and Michael Shamberg. There were side hustles as BeMusic, Electronic, Revenge, The Other Two, Monaco, Bad Lieutenant, and The Light. Then there were their tragic losses, their unholy messes, their resilience, and, most importantly, the magnificent leftfield music written variously by Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris, Gillian Gilbert, Phil Cunningham, and Tom Chapman. This book reviews every song New Order has officially released to date across every album from Movement to Music Complete, plus the many singles, compilations, soundtracks, and other releases. This book is ‘remixed'(with updated and additional information) from the author's hugely popular and band-endorsed NewOrderTracks blog. Dennis Remmer lives in Brisbane, Queensland – the capital city of Australia's own ‘north'; a city renowned for its independent music scene. A lifelong devotee of New Order, Dennis has been applying their influence on a lifetime's exploration of indie, electronic, and alternative music. Dennis (and his partner Anna) formed the Brisbane record label Trans:Com in 1994, and in 2014 published BNE - The Definitive Archive, which documents the city's secret history of electronic music production.

This book undoes 50 years of mythmaking about Stravinsky's life in music. During his spectacular career, Igor Stravinsky underplayed his Russian past in favor of a European cosmopolitanism. Richard Taruskin has refused to take the composer at his word. In this long-awaited study, he defines Stravinsky's relationship to the musical and artistic traditions of his native land and gives us a dramatically new picture of one of the major figures in the history of music. Taruskin draws directly on newly accessible archives and on a wealth of Russian documents. In Volume One, he sets the historical scene: the St. Petersburg musical press, the arts journals, and the writings of anthropologists, folklorists, philosophers, and poets. Volume Two addresses the masterpieces of Stravinsky's early maturity—Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, and Les Noces. Taruskin investigates the composer's collaborations with Diaghilev to illuminate the relationship between folklore and modernity. He elucidates the Silver Age ideal of'neonationalism'—the professional appropriation of motifs and style characteristics from folk art—and how Stravinsky realized this ideal in his music. Taruskin demonstrates how Stravinsky achieved his modernist technique by combining what was most characteristically Russian in his musical training with stylistic elements abstracted from Russian folklore. The stylistic synthesis thus achieved formed Stravinsky as a composer for life, whatever the aesthetic allegiances he later professed. Written with Taruskin's characteristic mixture of in-depth research and stylistic verve, this book will be mandatory reading for all those seriously interested in the life and work of Stravinsky.This book undoes 50 years of mythmaking about Stravinsky's life in music. During his spectacular career, Igor Stravinsky underplayed his Russian past in favor of a European cosmopolitanism. Richard Taruskin has refused to take the composer at his word. In