Bøger i New Material Histories of Music serien

Papers of the international conference "A Voice as Something More," held at the University of Chicago in November 2015.

"The modern discipline of musicology has its roots in early-twentieth-century Germany and in three seemingly distinct but surprisingly connected areas of musical activity: the discovery of Medieval music and music theory through the all-consuming unearthing and decoding of documents; the tremendous growth of youth movements devoted to collective singing and music-making and the study of Medieval music; and the exportation of this music to Protestant and Catholic missions in German East Africa, where it was widely taught and performed. Underlying these activities was the belief that Medieval music, its structure and soundworld, had affinities with the music of "primitive" societies, such as those the missionaries encountered in East Africa. Rejected outright by African musicians and scholars at the time, the belief was kept alive in the European musicological community through the first half of the twentieth century. Anna Maria Busse Berger draws this all together for the first time, anchoring her writing in extensive archival research and her personal experience as the daughter of a German Lutheran missionary in East Africa. The result is a momentous re-thinking of the early history of music scholarship as well as a novel understanding of the imperial and colonial projects that shaped Germany's perception of itself at a crucial time in its history"--

"Through archival work and storytelling synthesis, Music Migration and Imperial New York revises, subverts, and supplements many inherited narratives about experimental music and arts in postwar New York into a sweeping new whole. From the urban street-level via music clubs and arts institutions to the world-making routes of global migration and exchange, this book seeks to redraw the geographies of experimental art and so to reveal the imperial dynamics, as well as profoundly racialized and gendered power relations, that shaped and continue to shape the discourses and practices of modern music in the United States. Beginning with the material conditions of power that structured the cityscape of New York in the early Cold War years (ca. 1957 to 1963), Brigid Cohen's book encompasses a considerably wider range of people and practices than is usual in studies of the music of this period. It looks at a range of artistic practices (concert music, electronic music, jazz, performance art) and actors (Varáese, Mingus, Yoko Ono, and Fluxus founder George Maciunas) as they experimented with new modes of creativity"--

"With this ambitious book, musicologist Nicholas Mathew uses the remarkable career of Joseph Haydn to consider a host of critical issues: how we tell the history of the Enlightenment and Romanticism; the relation of late-eighteenth-century culture to nascent capitalism and European colonialism; and how the modern market and modern aesthetic values were-and remain-inextricably entwined. The Haydn Economy weaves a vibrant material history of Haydn's late career, extending from the sphere of the ancient Esterhâazy court to his frenetic years as an entrepreneur plying between London and Vienna, to his final decade as a venerable musical celebrity, where he witnessed the transformation of his legacy by a new generation of students and acolytes, Beethoven foremost among them. Ultimately, Mathew claims, Haydn's historical trajectory compels us to ask what we might usefully retain from the cultural and political practices of European modernity--whether we can extract and preserve its moral promise from its moral failures. And it demands that we confront the deep economic histories that continue to shape our beliefs about music, sound, and material culture."--

"Music in the Flesh reimagines the lived experiences of music-making subjects (composers, musicians, listeners) in the long European seventeenth century. There are countless historical testimonies of the powerful effects of music upon early-modern bodies, described as moving, ravishing, painful, dangerous, curative, miraculous, and encompassing "the circulation of the humors, purification of the blood, dilation of the vessels and pores. In asking what this all meant at the time, the author considers musical scores and their surrounding texts as "somatic scripts" that afford a range of somatic actions and reactions and can give us a glimpse into the historical embodied experience of organized sound. Starting from the Lutheran hymns and their accompanying intellectual traditions and ritual practices in German-speaking lands, the book moves with ease across repertories and regions, sacred and vernacular musics, domestic and public settings in order to sketch a "physiology of music" that is as historically illuminating as it is relevant for present-day performing practices and that sheds unprecedented light on how subjectivity was embodied through sound in early-modern Europe"--