Musicians From A Different Shore

Musicians of Asian descent enjoy unprecedented prominence in concert halls, conservatories, and classical music performance competitions. In the first book on the subject, Mari Yoshihara looks into the reasons for this phenomenon, starting with her own experience of learning to play piano in Japan at the age of three. Yoshihara shows how a confluence of culture, politics and commerce after the war made classical music a staple in middle-class households, established Yamaha as the world's largest producer of pianos and gave the Suzuki method of music training an international clientele. Soon, talented musicians from Japan, China and South Korea were flocking to the United States to study and establish careers, and Asian American families were enrolling toddlers in music classes. Against this historical backdrop, Yoshihara interviews Asian and Asian American musicians, such as Cho-Liang Lin, Margaret Leng Tan, Kent Nagano, who have taken various routes into classical music careers. They offer their views about the connections of race and culture and discuss whether the music is really as universal as many claim it to be. Their personal histories and Yoshihara's observations present a snapshot of today's dynamic and revived classical music scene.

Like the works already published, these latest volumes of the Biographical Dictionary deal with theatre people of every ilk, ranging from dressers and one-performance actors to trumpeter John Shore (inventor of the tuning fork) and the incomparable Sarah Siddons. Also prominent is Susanna Rowson, a novelist, actress, and early female playwright. Although born into a British military family, Rowson often wrote plays that dealt with patriotic American themes and spent much of her career on the American stage. The theatrical jewel of these volumes is the "divine Sarah" Siddons: "She raised the tragedy to the skies," wrote William Hazlitt, and "embodied to our imagination the fables of mythology, of the heroic and dignified mortals of elder time." She endured much tragedy herself, including a crippling debilitating illness and the deaths of five of her seven children. Siddons played major roles in both comedy and tragedy, not the least of which was a performance as Hamlet.

Informed by theories pertaining to transnational mobility, ethnicity and race, gender, postcolonialism, as well as Japanese studies, Transnational Musicians explores the way Japanese musicians establish their transnational careers in the hierarchically structured classical music world. Drawing on rich material from multi-sited fieldwork and in-depth interviews with Japanese artists in Japan, France and Poland, this study portrays the structurally – and individually – conditioned opportunities and constraints of becoming a transnational classical musician. It shows how transnational artists strive to conciliate the irreconcilable: their professional identification with the dominant image of ‘rootless’ classical musicianship and their ethnocultural affiliation with Japan. As such this book critically engages with the neoliberal discourse on talent and meritocracy prevailing in the creative/cultural industry, which promotes the common image of cosmopolitan artists, whose high, universal skills allow them to carry out their occupational activity internationally, regardless of such prescriptive criteria as gender, ethnicity and race. Highly interdisciplinary, this book will appeal to students and researchers interested in such fields as migration, transnational mobility, ethnicity and race in the creative/cultural sector, gender studies, Japanese culture and other related social issues. It will also be instructive for professionals from the world of classical music, as well as ordinary readers passionate about Japanese society.

In Working Musicians Timothy D. Taylor offers a behind-the-scenes look at the labor of the mostly unknown composers, music editors, orchestrators, recording engineers, and other workers involved in producing music for films, television, and video games. Drawing on dozens of interviews with music workers in Los Angeles, Taylor explores the nature of their work and how they understand their roles in the entertainment business. Taylor traces how these cultural laborers have adapted to and cope with the conditions of neoliberalism as, over the last decade, their working conditions have become increasingly precarious. Digital technologies have accelerated production timelines and changed how content is delivered, while new pay schemes have emerged that have transformed composers from artists into managers and paymasters. Taylor demonstrates that as bureaucratization and commercialization affect every aspect of media, the composers, musicians, music editors, engineers, and others whose soundtracks excite, inspire, and touch millions face the same structural economic challenges that have transformed American society, concentrating wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands.

This well researched volume tells the story of music education in Japan and of the wind band contest organized by the All-Japan Band Association. Identified here for the first time as the world’s largest musical competition, it attracts 14,000 bands and well over 500,000 competitors. The book’s insightful contribution to our understanding of both music and education chronicles music learning in Japanese schools and communities. It examines the contest from a range of perspectives, including those of policy makers, adjudicators, conductors and young musicians. The book is an illuminating window on the world of Japanese wind bands, a unique hybrid tradition that comingles contemporary western idioms with traditional Japanese influences. In addition to its social history of Japanese school music programs, it shows how participation in Japanese school bands contributes to students’ sense of identity, and sheds new light on the process of learning to play European orchestral instruments.

Designed as a practical resource, this book examines transformational and inclusive approaches to the teaching of music at the postsecondary level based on first-person interviews with renowned musicians and their students. At the heart of the study are musical/artistic perspectives and pedagogical approaches from leading artists and the insights of their students on the impact of the teaching and mentoring process. Through case studies with renowned musicians and their protégés, the book identifies common themes in teaching and mentoring across classical and jazz performance. Each case study is a master class with the artist that offers insight into the evolution of the individual’s musical career, their approach to teaching, and specific strategies for navigating the complexities of the music business environment. With remarkable candor, artists and their protégés share how they navigated significant obstacles in their career journeys. Including overcoming performance anxiety, disability and injury, lack of financial support, difficulty obtaining an agent and recording contracts, country location and stereotypes based on gender and nationality. The book serves as an important resource for music educators by offering concrete approaches to mentoring talented students, while also sharing specific strategies for aspiring professional musicians seeking to forge a career in a highly competitive musical market.

Inge van Rij's book demonstrates how Berlioz used the sights and sounds of the orchestra to explore other worlds.

MASTERING MUSESCORE is the definitive guide to MuseScore 2, the free and open source music notation program for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. This book starts with the basics, walking you through the notation of a very simple song. Next it explores the process of note entry and editing in depth, covering everything from notes and rests to tuplets and grace notes to cross staff notation and feathered beaming. The book then explains how to create and edit each of the many different types of markings supported by MuseScore, including time signatures, repeats, tablature, chord symbols, slash notation, and much more. The book covers score and part organization and page layout, as well as the playback, graphics, import, and export features, and it explains the many customizations the program offers. Hundreds of examples and illustrations are included to make it easy to follow along. MASTERING MUSESCORE is all you need to become in an expert in using MuseScore, the most powerful free music notation software in the world.