Conditions Of Music

Music is performed, reproduced, and heard differently today as a result of twentieth-century technology. A new consideration of these changes is a practical and cultural necessity. In Conditions of Music, Alan Durant extends Deryck Cooke's Language of Music, placing the insights of Cooke into a much wider sociological and historical framework. Conditions of Music provides a basis for detailed commentary and criticism of music. Unlike literature and painting, around which illuminating critical techniques and theories have developed, little common ground exists for music criticism. The appraisal argument adopted here implies a major revision of accepted ways of thinking about contemporary directions of music.

“Musicians often pay a high price for sharing their art with us. Underneath the glow of success can often lie loneliness and exhaustion, not to mention the basic struggles of paying the rent or buying food. Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave raise important questions – and we need to listen to what the musicians have to tell us about their working conditions and their mental health.” Emma Warren (Music Journalist and Author). “Singing is crying for grown-ups. To create great songs or play them with meaning music's creators reach far into emotion and fragility seeking the communion we demand of it. However, music’s toll on musicians can leave deep scars. In this important book, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave investigate the relationship between the wellbeing music brings to society and the wellbeing of those who create. It’s a much needed reality check, deglamorising the romantic image of the tortured artist.” Crispin Hunt (Multi-Platinum Songwriter/Record Producer, Chair of the Ivors Academy). It is often assumed that creative people are prone to psychological instability, and that this explains apparent associations between cultural production and mental health problems. In their detailed study of recording and performing artists in the British music industry, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave turn this view on its head. By listening to how musicians understand and experience their working lives, this book proposes that whilst making music is therapeutic, making a career from music can be traumatic. The authors show how careers based on an all-consuming passion have become more insecure and devalued. Artistic merit and intimate, often painful, self-disclosures are the subject of unremitting scrutiny and data metrics. Personal relationships and social support networks are increasingly bound up with calculative transactions. Drawing on original empirical research and a wide-ranging survey of scholarship from across the social sciences, their findings will be provocative for future research on mental health, wellbeing and working conditions in the music industries and across the creative economy. Going beyond self-help strategies, they challenge the industry to make transformative structural change. Until then, the book provides an invaluable guide for anyone currently making their career in music, as well as those tasked with training and educating the next generation.

Did you ever ask whether music makes people smart, why a Parkinson patient's gait is improved with marching tunes, and whether Robert Schumann was suffering from schizophrenia or Alzheimer's disease? This broad but comprehensive book deals with history and new discoveries about music and the brain. It provides a multi-disciplinary overview on music processing, its effects on brain plasticity, and the healing power of music in neurological and psychiatric disorders. In this context, the disorders the plagued famous musicians and how they affected both performance and composition are critically discussed, and music as medicine, as well as music as a potential health hazard are examined. Among the other topics covered are: how music fit into early conceptions of localization of function in the brain, the cultural roots of music in evolution, and the important roles played by music in societies and educational systems. Topic: Music is interesting to almost everybody Orientation: This book looks at music and the brain both historically and in the light of the latest research findings Comprehensiveness: This is the largest and most comprehensive volume on "music and neurology" ever written! Quality of authors: This volume is written by a unique group of real world experts representing a variety of fields, ranging from history of science and medicine to neurology and musicology

This book examines the unique poetics of Shao Xunmei 邵洵美 (1906-1968), a Chinese poet who has long been marginalized by contemporary criticism. Shao aspires to reach the condition of music in poetry, which bears a resemblance to three Anglophone writers whom he applauds: Algernon Charles Swinburne, Edith Sitwell, and George Augustus Moore. The Condition of Music and Anglophone Influences in the Poetry of Shao Xunmei investigates how these three writers influenced Shao, and how this inspiration helped shape his idea of the condition of music in poetry. In the scope of world literature, this book aims to fill a small but important puzzle piece in the global network of literary influence. In a world where cultural exchanges have become increasingly frequent and convenient, and at a time when counter-globalization seems to burgeon into a hazardous trend, it is beneficial to look back to the 1920s-1930s, a time that is as equally tumultuous as today, to examine the global influence network that has taken us where we are, and to understand that in the dynamic of literary influence, no single piece of literature can have its significance alone. This groundbreaking book will benefit the scholarship of Shao and contribute to the relevant research in Chinese studies and word and music studies. Therefore, it will be of great use and interest to researchers of comparative literature, Chinese literature, and world literature, as well as scholars of word and music studies.

Two crucial moments in the formation and disintegration of musical modernity and the musical canon occurred at the turn of the seventeenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Dr Ljubica Ilic provides a fresh and close look at these moments, exploring the ways musical compositions shift to and away from ideological structures identified with modernity. The focus is on European art music whose grand narrative, defined by tonality and teleological development, begins in the seventeenth century and ends with twentieth-century modernisms. This particular musical "language game" coincides with historical changes in the phenomenological understanding of space and selfhood. A key concept of the book concerns musical compositions that remain without proper conclusions: if the wholesome (musical) work is a manifestation of wholesome subjectivity, the pieces Ilic explores deny it, reflecting conflict of the individual with previous beliefs, with contexts, and even within the self as the basic modern condition. The musical work is, in this case, still bounded and well-defined, but fractured by the incapability or refusal to satisfactorily conclude: the implicit cut forced upon it changes the expected musical flow or - speaking in spatial terms - it influences the musical form. By using the metaphor of space, Ilic explores: how the existence of a separate self as a primary feature of Western modernity becomes negotiated through awareness of the subject's own independence and individuality; innerness as something entirely separate from its surroundings; and the collective space of social interaction. Seeing musical storytelling as a metaphoric representation of selfhood, and modernity as a historical continuum, Ilic examines the boundaries and relationships between the musical work, the subject, and modern European history.

This book was written in the belief that while music is a system of sounds, an assumption that provides the point of departure for most studies of music in culture, it is also a complex of behavior which resonates throughout the whole cultural organism--social organization, esthetic activity, economics, religion. This book is to be distinguished from other studies by its model of music as human action, making this work of interest not only to the ethnomusicologist and anthropologist, but also to those concerned with the nature of music, the nature of man, and the nature of music in human culture. Specifically, this model for the study of ethnomusicology is equally applicable to the study of visual arts, dance, folklore, and literature. --Adapted from dust jacket.

Music has been used as a mood altering intervention for thousands of years. There are numerous examples of the healing powers of music in the historical records of different cultures. In the last few decades, investigators have developed a more scientific approach to exploring the mechanisms by which music exerts its effects on the brain and other organs. Music interventions are now being used in medicine and nursing throughout the world, and "music therapy" has become an accepted discipline alongside other paramedical professions. This book is a timely and comprehensive review of the use of music as a complementary therapy, and for management of some "otherwise difficult to treat" conditions. The authors, each experts in their chosen field of medicine, have come together to compile an excellent, clear and precise update regarding the use of music therapy in different illnesses and neuropsychiatric conditions. This book contains information useful to psychologists, psychiatrists and physicians involved in primary care in other branches of medicine, as well as health science students and other health professionals interested in music as a complementary and alternative therapy (CAM). This book adds music as a potent, enlightening, and life-enriching addition to our armamentarium for the management of complex medical conditions. The content of some chapters may foster more ideas for future research. Throughout the book, there is an emphasis on the greater need for large, blinded, controlled studies to better support music therapy.

What goes on in human beings when they make or listen to music? What is it about music, what gives it such peculiar power over us, power delectable and beneficent for the most part, but also capable of uncontrollable and sometimes destructive force? Music has no concepts, it lacks images; it has no power of representation, it has no relation to the world. And yet it is evident in all of us–we tap our feet, we keep time, hum, sing, conduct music, mirror the melodic contours and feelings of what we hear in our movements and expressions. In this book, Oliver Sacks explores the power music wields over us–a power that sometimes we control and at other times don’t. He explores, in his inimitable fashion, how it can provide access to otherwise unreachable emotional states, how it can revivify neurological avenues that have been frozen, evoke memories of earlier, lost events or states or bring those with neurological disorders back to a time when the world was much richer. This is a book that explores, like no other, the myriad dimensions of our experience of and with music.