Musical History As Seen Through Contemporary Eyes

"Musical History as Seen through Contemporary Eyes", edited by Benjamin Knysak and Zdravko Blažeković, is a Festschrift published in honor of the musicologist H. Robert Cohen. Born in Baltimore, educated in New York, and with a career spanning France, Canada, and the United States, Cohen is the founder of the Répertoire international de la presse musicale (RIPM), the international project focused on the historic musical press. With research interests spanning print culture, music iconography, Hector Berlioz, musical France, and Giuseppe Verdi, this volume presents a collection of essays written by many friends and collaborators exploring these themes and many others. "Musical History as Seen through Contemporary Eyes" is a tribute to Cohen's contributions to musicology, librarianship, and information science spanning more than fifty years.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.

From its earliest days as little more than a series of monophonic outbursts to its current-day scores that can rival major symphonic film scores, video game music has gone through its own particular set of stylistic and functional metamorphoses while both borrowing and recontextualizing the earlier models from which it borrows. With topics ranging from early classics like Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. to more recent hits like Plants vs. Zombies, the eleven essays in Music in Video Games draw on the scholarly fields of musicology and music theory, film theory, and game studies, to investigate the history, function, style, and conventions of video game music.

The History of Modern Japanese Education is the first account in English of the construction of a national school system in Japan, as outlined in the 1872 document, the Gakusei. Divided into three parts tracing decades of change, the book begins by exploring the feudal background for the Gakusei during the Tokugawa era which produced the initial leaders of modern Japan. Next, Benjamin Duke traces the Ministry of Education's investigations of the 1870s to determine the best western model for Japan, including the decision to adopt American teaching methods. He then goes on to cover the eventual "reverse course" sparked by the Imperial Household protest that the western model overshadowed cherished Japanese traditions. Ultimately, the 1890 Imperial Rescript on Education integrated Confucian teachings of loyalty and filial piety with Imperial ideology, laying the moral basis for a western-style academic curriculum in the nation's schools.

In 'Music Criticism and Music Critics in Early Francoist Spain', Eva Moreda Rodríguez presents a kaleidoscopic portrait of the diverse and often divergent writings of music critics in the early years of the Franco regime. Carefully selecting contemporary writings by well-known music critics, Moreda Rodríguez contextualizes music criticism written during the Franco regime within the broader intellectual history of Spain from the nineteenth century onwards.--Publisher description.

A.C. Crombie is one of the best known writers on the history of Science. Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought brings together a coherent body of essays that complement his books and are of independent value. A.C. Crombie traces general themes in the development of Science: the Aristotelian inheritance and the importance of the search for logical explanation in the middle ages; the ambitions and limitations of experiment and quantification; changing attitudes to scientific progress; the relations between Science and the Arts, and between Mathematics, Music and Medical Science; and the study of the senses. In particular he shows how the mechanistic hypothesis stimulated the experimental and philosophical study of vision.