Music Time And Its Other

Music, Time, and Its Other explores the relation between the enigmatic character of our temporal experiences and music’s affective power. By taking account of competing concepts of time, Savage explains how music refigures dimensions of our experiences through staking out the borderlines between time and eternity. He examines a range of musical expressions that reply to the deficiency born from the difference between time and an order that exceeds or surpasses it and reveals how affective tonalities of works by Bach, Carolan, Debussy, Schoenberg, Messiaen, and Glass augment our understanding of our temporal condition. Reflections on the moods and feelings to which music gives voice counterpoint philosophical investigations into the relation between music’s power to affect us and the force that the present has with respect to the initiatives we take. Music, Time, and Its Other thus sets out a new approach to music, aesthetics, politics, and the critical roles of judgment and imagination.

An unprecedented collection of polemical and autobiographical writings by America’s greatest composer-critic. Following on the critically acclaimed 2014 edition of Virgil Thomson's collected newspaper music criticism, The Library of America and Pulitzer Prize–winning music critic Tim Page now present Thomson’s other literary and critical works, a body of writing that constitutes America’s musical declaration of independence from the European past. This volume opens with The State of Music (1939), the book that made Thomson’s name as a critic and won him his 14-year stint at the New York Herald Tribune. This no-holds-barred polemic, here presented in its revised edition of 1962, discusses the commissions, jobs, and other opportunities available to the American composer, a worker in a world of performance and broadcast institutions that, today as much as in Thomson’s time, are dominated by tin-eared, non-musical patrons of the arts who are shocked by the new and suspicious of native talent. Thomson’s autobiography, Virgil Thomson (1966), is more than just the story of the struggle of one such American composer, it is an intellectual, aesthetic, and personal chronicle of the twentieth century, from World War I–era Kansas City to Harvard in the age of straw boaters, from Paris in the Twenties and Thirties to Manhattan in the Forties and after. A classic American memoir, it is marked by a buoyant wit, a true gift for verbal portrait-making, and a cast of characters including Aaron Copland, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Paul Bowles, John Houseman, and Orson Welles. American Music Since 1910 (1971) is a series of incisive essays on the lives and works of Ives, Ruggles, Varèse, Copland, Cage, and others who helped define a national musical idiom. Music with Words (1989), Thomson’s final book, is a distillation of a subject he knew better than perhaps any other American composer: how to set English—especially American English—to music, in opera and art song. The volume is rounded out by a judicious selection of Thomson’s magazine journalism from 1957 to 1984—thirty-seven pieces, most of them previously uncollected, including many long-form review-essays written for The New York Review of Books. From the Hardcover edition.

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.

Publisher Description

We are surrounded by new musical encounters today as never before, and the experience of musics from elsewhere is progressively affecting all arenas of the human conscience. Yet why is it that Western listeners expect a certain cultural and ethnic 'authenticity' or 'otherness' from visiting artists in world music, while contemporary musicians in Western music are no longer bound by such restraints? Should we feel uncomfortable when sacred rites from Asia or Africa are remade for Westerners as musical entertainment? As these thorny questions suggest, the great flood of world musics and of their agents into our most immediate cultural environment is not a simple matter of expanding global musical exchange. Instead, complex processes are at work involving the growth of intercontinental tourism, the development of new technologies of communication and our perceptions both of ourselves and of the new musical others now around us. Elegantly tracing the dimensions of these new musical encounters, Laurent Aubert considers the impact of world musics on our values, our habits and our cultural practices. His discussions of key questions about our contemporary music culture widen conventional ethnomusicological perspectives to consider not only the nature of Western society as a 'global village' but also the impact of current Western demands on the future of world musics and their practitioners.

A Travers Chants is the collection of writings selected from his thirty-odd years of musical journalism. These essays cover a wide spectrum of intellectual inquiry: Beethoven's nine symphonies and his opera, Fidelio; Wagner and the partisans of the "Music of the Future"; Berlioz's idols - Gluck, Weber, and Mozart. There is an eloquent plea to stop the constant rise in concert pitch (an issue still discussed today), a serious piece on the place of music in church, and a humorous and imaginative account of musical customs in China.

"There are many biographies and articles about the life of Frederick Delius (1862-1934), but there has never been a comprehensive book about his music until now. He was an extraordinarily versatiles composer, equally at home with orchestral, instrumental, and chamber works as with choral works and songs; and Delius and his Music covers his entire output. Everything he published, from his earliest compositions and 'trifiles' to the mighty, ninety-minute A Mass of Life, is analysed here in nontechnical language. The history and background of each work and its critical reception are also examined, set within a biography, and against a backdrop of the English musical scene and some of its personalities during the seventy years of Delius's life. There are numerous musical examples and many quotations from contemporary newspapers and journals, as well as a complete list of Delius's works, with catalogue numbers, and a select bibliography. This book will appeal not only to students and Delian scholars, but also to everyone who already has an interest in Delius's unique music, or who would like to discover it for the first time"--Jaquette.