Music In The Western World

Contains primary source material.

Contains primary source material.

This classic anthology assembles over 200 source readings, bringing to life the history of music through letters, reviews, biographical sketches, memoirs, and other documents. Writings by composers, critics, and educators touch on virtually every aspect of Western music from ancient Greece to the present day. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version.

Emphasizing stylistic analysis and historical development, this unique book is the first to examine all major non-Western music styles, from reggae and salsa to the popular musics of non-Western Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

'The Oxford History of Western Music', by Richard Taruskin, illuminates those themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to each musical age. Each of the five volumes of main text have musical examples, black-and-white pictures and eight-page colour inserts.

Music in the Western: Notes from the Frontier presents essays from both film studies scholars and musicologists on core issues in western film scores: their history, their generic conventions, their operation as part of a narrative system, their functioning within individual filmic texts and their ideological import, especially in terms of the western’s construction of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity. The Hollywood western is marked as uniquely American by its geographic setting, prototypical male protagonist and core American values. Music in the Western examines these conventions and the scores that have shaped them. But the western also had a resounding international impact, from Europe to Asia, and this volume distinguishes itself by its careful consideration of music in non-Hollywood westerns, such as Ravenous and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and in the “easterns” which influenced them, such as Yojimbo. Other films discussed include Wagon Master, High Noon, Calamity Jane, The Big Country, The Unforgiven, Dead Man, Wild Bill, There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men. Contributors Ross Care Corey K. Creekmur Yuna de Lannoy K. J. Donnelly Caryl Flinn Claudia Gorbman Kathryn Kalinak Charles Leinberger Matthew McDonald Peter Stanfield Mariana Whitmer Ben Winters The Routledge Music and Screen Media Series offers edited collections of original essays on music in particular genres of cinema, television, video games and new media. These edited essay collections are written for an interdisciplinary audience of students and scholars of music and film and media studies.

DIVStudy of how systems of power and domination have shaped representations of otherness in music./div

"[Western Music and Its Others] will be taken as an important book signalling a new turn within the field. It takes the best features of traditional, rigorous scholarship and brings these to bear upon contemporary, more speculative questions. The level of theoretical sophistication is high. The studies within it are polemical and timely and of lasting scholarly value."--Will Straw, co-editor of Theory Rules: Art as Theory/ Theory and Art "The great value of this collection lies in the wealth of questions that it raises--questions that together crystallize the recent concerns of musicology with force and clarity. But it also lies in the authors' resistance to the easy 'postmodernist' answers that threaten to turn new musicology prematurely grey. The editors' comprehensive, intellectually adventurous introduction exemplifies the sort of eager yet properly skeptical receptivity to scholarly innovation that fosters lasting disciplinary reform. It alone is worth the price of the book." --Richard Taruskin, author of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through " Mavra" "When cultural-studies methods first appeared in musicology 15 years ago, they triggered a storm of polemics that sometimes overshadowed the important issues being raised. As the canon wars recede, however, scholars are finding it possible to focus on the concerns that led them to cultural criticism in the first place: the study of music and its political meanings. Western Music and Its Others brings together leading musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and specialists in film and popular music to explore the ways European and North American musicians have drawn on or identified themselves in tension with the musical practices of Others. In a series of essays ranging from examination of the Orientalist tropes of early 20th-century Modernists to the tangled claims for ownership in today's World Music, the authors in this collection greatly advance both our knowledge of specific case studies and our intellectual awareness of the complexity and urgency of these problems. A timely intervention that should help push music studies to the next level." --Susan McClary, author of Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (2000) "This collection provides a sophisticated model for using theory to interrogate music and music to interrogate theory. The essays both take up and challenge the dominance of notions of representation in cultural theory as they explore the relevance of the concepts of hybridity and otherness for contemporary art music. Sophisticated theory, erudite scholarship and a very real appreciation for the specificities of music make this a powerful and important addition to our understanding of both culture and music." --Lawrence Grossberg, author of Dancing in Spite of Myself