Explorations In Music The Arts And Ideas

Meyer makes a valuable statement on aesthetics, criteria for assessing great works of music, compositional practices and theories of the present day, and predictions of the future of Western culture. His postlude, written for the book's twenty-fifth anniversary, looks back at his thoughts on the direction of music in 1967.

In the humanities great scholars tend to be either epistemologists or metaphysicians, realists or idealists, codifiers or innovators. Leonard B. Meyer stands as an anomaly in this company, for within the realm of musicology his work is at once pragmatic and imaginative. An astonishing blend of intellectual depth and breadth, his five books and numerous essays have covered all the major fields of the discipline-not only theory, analysis, criticism, and aesthetics, but also twentieth-century culture, psychology, the nature of science versus the study of the humanities, and most recently, a refined historical theory explaining style change in the music of the nineteenth century. All of the essays in this celebratory volume reveal their affinity with and influence of Leonard Meyer's work; their widely variegated army bears witness to the catholicity of his thought and the ubiquity of its impact --From the Introduction by the editors

Table of contents

Moving Words provides a direct line into the most pressing issues in contemporary dance scholarship, as well as insights into ways in which dance contributes to and creates culture. Instead of representing a single viewpoint, the essays in this volume reflect a range of perspectives and represent the debates swirling within dance. The contributors confront basic questions of definition and interpretation within dance studies, while at the same time examining broader issues, such as the body, gender, class, race, nationalism and cross-cultural exchange. Specific essays address such topics as the black male body in dance, gender and subversions in the dances of Mark Morris, race and nationalism in Martha Graham's 'American Document', and the history of oriental dance.

Keeping Score is a diverse collection of essays that argues for and demonstrates the current effort to redefine the methods, goals, and scope of musical scholarship. This volume gives voice to new directions in music studies, including traditional and "new" musicology, music and psychoanalysis, music and film, popular music studies, and gay and lesbian studies. These essays speak to music study from within its own language and enter into important conversations already taking place across disciplinary boundaries throughout the academy.

In this work, Eugene Narmour extends the unique theories of musical perception presented in The Analysis and Cognition of Basic Melodic Structures. The two books together constitute the first comprehensive theory of melody founded on psychological research. Narmour's earlier study dealt with cognitive relations between melodic tones at their most basic level. After summarizing the formalized methodology of the theory described in that work, Narmour develops an elaborate and original symbology to show how sixteen archetypes can combine to form some 200 complex structures that, in turn, can chain together in a theoretically infinite number of ways. He then explains and speculates on the cognitive operations by which listeners assimilate and ultimately encode these complex melodic structures. More than 250 musical examples from different historical periods and non-Western cultures demonstrate the panstylistic scope of Narmour's model. Of particular importance to music theorists and music historians is Narmour's argument that melodic analysis and formal analysis, though often treated separately, are in fact indissolubly linked. The Analysis and Cognition of Melodic Complexity will also appeal to ethnomusicologists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists.