Intertextuality In Western Art Music

The first book-length consideration of questions relating to music and meaning.

The concept of intertextuality – namely, the meaning generated by interrelations between different texts – was coined in the 1960s among literary theorists and has been widely applied since then to many other disciplines, including music. Intertextuality in Music: Dialogic Composition provides a systematic investigation of musical intertextuality not only as a general principle of musical creativity but also as a diverse set of devices and techniques that have been consciously developed and applied by many composers in the pursuit of various artistic and aesthetic goals. Intertextual techniques, as this collection reveals, have borne a wide range of results, such as parody, paraphrase, collage and dialogues with and between the past and present. In the age of sampling and remix culture, the very notion of intertextuality seems to have gained increased momentum and visibility, even though the principle of creating new music on the basis of pre-existing music has a long history both inside and outside the Western tradition. The book provides a general survey of musical intertextuality, with a special focus on music from the second half of the twentieth century, but also including examples ranging from the nineteenth century to the second decade of the twenty-first century. The volume is intended to inspire and stimulate new work in intertextual studies in music.

In his third volume on musical expressive meaning, Robert S. Hatten examines virtual agency in music from the perspectives of movement, gesture, embodiment, topics, tropes, emotion, narrativity, and performance. Distinguished from the actual agency of composers and performers, whose intentional actions either create music as notated or manifest music as significant sound, virtual agency is inferred from the implied actions of those sounds, as they move and reveal tendencies within music-stylistic contexts. From our most basic attributions of sources for perceived energies in music, to the highest realm of our engagement with musical subjectivity, Hatten explains how virtual agents arose as distinct from actual ones, how unspecified actants can take on characteristics of (virtual) human agents, and how virtual agents assume various actorial roles. Along the way, Hatten demonstrates some of the musical means by which composers and performers from different historical eras have staged and projected various levels of virtual agency, engaging listeners imaginatively and interactively within the expressive realms of their virtual and fictional musical worlds.

Explores Liszt's compositional processes and methods of revision as the product of the composer's interactions with a large variety of social, cultural, personal and political forces. Franz Liszt (1811-86) is mostly known for his virtuosic piano works, but his compositional achievements in the genre of song have so far been neglected. Many of Liszt's Lieder exist in multiple versions, sometimes radically altered, and many with equal claims to 'authenticity'. This has sometimes been viewed as a barrier to performance and a hindrance to scholarly scrutiny. Nicolás Puyané now redresses this imbalance and draws attention to this rich and varied corpus of works. Liszt's songs contain a myriad of intertextual links, not just with the songs of other composers, but also with Liszt's own works in other genres and his own revisions. By focusing on the multi-version songs, the book uncovers how these intertextual relationships have evolved over time. Introducing the concept of "textual fluidity", the book explores Liszt's compositional processes and methods of revision, interpreting the work as being the product of the composer's interactions with a large variety of social, cultural, personal and political forces: for instance, the contemporaneous reception of Liszt's early Lieder, or the change in Liszt's performing and compositional environments from his virtuoso to his Weimar years. The book then offers close readings of selected songs, including the Goethe and Schiller Lieder, by applying the concept of textual fluidity. Its findings will impact the way in which we see Urtext editions, arguing instead for an online fluid-text edition as an ideal resource with which to study Liszt's multi-version compositions.

In recent years the music of minimalist composers such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass has, increasingly, become the subject of important musicological reflection, research and debate. Scholars have also been turning their attention to the work of lesser-known contemporaries such as Phill Niblock and Eliane Radigue, or to second and third generation minimalists such as John Adams, Louis Andriessen, Michael Nyman and William Duckworth, whose range of styles may undermine any sense of shared aesthetic approach but whose output is still to a large extent informed by the innovative work of their minimalist predecessors. Attempts have also been made by a number of academics to contextualise the work of composers who have moved in parallel with these developments while remaining resolutely outside its immediate environment, including such diverse figures as Karel Goeyvaerts, Robert Ashley, Arvo Pärt and Brian Eno. Theory has reflected practice in many respects, with the multimedia works of Reich and Glass encouraging interdisciplinary approaches, associations and interconnections. Minimalism’s role in culture and society has also become the subject of recent interest and debate, complementing existing scholarship, which addressed the subject from the perspective of historiography, analysis, aesthetics and philosophy. The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music provides an authoritative overview of established research in this area, while also offering new and innovative approaches to the subject.

"Composer, pianist, editor, writer, and pedagogue Mario Lavista (1943-2021) was a central figure of the cultural and artistic scene in Mexico and one of the leading Ibero-American composers of his generation. His music is often described as evocative and poetic, noted for his meticulous attention to timbre and motivic permutation, and his creative trajectory was characterized by its intersections with the other arts, particularly poetry and painting. Understanding analysis as an affective practice, this study explores the intertextual connections between the multiple texts-musical or otherwise-that are present in Lavista's music. It argues that, through adopting an interdisciplinary and transhistorical approach to music composition, Lavista forged a cosmopolitan imaginary to challenge imposed stereotypes of what Mexican music should sound like. This imaginary becomes a strategy of resistance against imperialist agendas placed upon postcolonial peripheries. Departing from traditional biographical and chronological frameworks that exalt masters and masterworks, this book offers a nuanced, personal narrative informed by conversations with composers, performers, artists, choreographers, poets, writers, and filmmakers. Implementing an innovative mosaic of methodologies, from archival work, to musical and intertextual analysis, oral history, and (auto)ethnography, this book is the first to offer a contextual framing of Lavista's career within a panoramic view of contemporary music practices in Mexico during the past fifty years"--

The conversations generated by the chapters in Music's Immanent Future grapple with some of music's paradoxes: that music of the Western art canon is viewed as timeless and universal while other kinds of music are seen as transitory and ephemeral; that in order to make sense of music we need descriptive language; that to open up the new in music we need to revisit the old; that to arrive at a figuration of music itself we need to posit its starting point in noise; that in order to justify our creative compositional works as research, we need to find critical languages and theoretical frameworks with which to discuss them; or that despite being an auditory system, we are compelled to resort to the visual metaphor as a way of thinking about musical sounds. Drawn to musical sound as a powerful form of non-verbal communication, the authors include musicologists, philosophers, music theorists, ethnomusicologists and composers. The chapters in this volume investigate and ask fundamental questions about how we think, converse, write about, compose, listen to and analyse music. The work is informed by the philosophy primarily of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and secondarily of Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva and Jean-Luc Nancy. The chapters cover a wide range of topics focused on twentieth and twenty-first century musics, covering popular musics, art music, acousmatic music and electro-acoustic musics, and including music analysis, music's ontology, the noise/music dichotomy, intertextuality and music, listening, ethnography and the current state of music studies. The authors discuss their philosophical perspectives and methodologies of practice-led research, including their own creative work as a form of research. Music's Immanent Future brings together empirical, cultural, philosophical and creative approaches that will be of interest to musicologists, composers, music analysts and music philosophers.

This book focuses on the cultural, political and religious representations of the Orient in Western music. Dr Nasser Al-Taee traces several threads in a vast repertoire of musical representations, concentrating primarily on the images of violence and sensuality. Al-Taee argues that these prevailing traits are not only the residual manifestation of the Ottoman threat to Western Europe, but also the continuation of a long and complex history of fear and fascination towards the Orient and its Islamic religion. In addition to analyses of musical works, Al-Taee draws on travel accounts, paintings, biographies, and political events to engage with important issues such as gender, race, and religious differences that may have contributed to the variously complex images of the Orient in Western music. The study extends the range of Orientalism to cover eighteenth-century Austria, nineteenth-century Russia, and twentieth-century America. The book challenges those scholars who do not see Orientalism as problematic and tend to ignore the role of musical representations in shaping the image of the Other within a wider interdisciplinary study of knowledge and power.