The Musical Experience

This book proposes a new concept, musical experience, as the most effective framework for navigating the shifting terrain of educational policy as it is applied to music education. Other books that deal with music education reform often concentrate on non-musical topics at the expense of music listening, performance, and composition, or concentrate on only one of these at the expense of the others. This book works with musical experience as a comprehensive framework for all aspects of music education. This text defines musical experience as being characterized by the depth of affective and emotional responses that music engenders, and illustrate that its breadth is embodied in the infinite variety of meanings, both personal and communal, that music evokes. This book maps out the primary forms of musical engagement (performing, listening, improvising, composing, etc.) as activities which play a key role in classroom teaching. This book also addresses the cultural dimensions of musical experience, which call for consideration of time, place, beliefs, and values placed upon musical activities, works, and genres. The book discusses how music teachers can most effectively rely on means of musical communication to lead students toward the development and refinement of musical skills, understandings, and expression in educational settings. This book expands upon the dimensions of musical experience and provides, from the forefront of the field, an integrated yet panoramic view of the educational processes involved in music teaching and learning.

Peak music experiences are a recurring feature of popular music journalism, biography and fan culture, where they are often credited as pivotal in people’s relationships with music and in their lives more generally. Ben Green investigates the phenomenon from a social and cultural perspective, including discussions of peak music experiences as sources of inspiration and influence; as a core motivation for ongoing musical and social activity; the significance of live music experiences; and the key role of peak music experiences in defining and perpetuating music scenes. The book draws from both global media analysis and situated ethnographic research in the dance, hip hop, indie and rock ‘n’ roll music scenes of Brisbane, Australia, including participant observation and in-depth interviews. These case studies demonstrate the methodological value of peak music experiences as a lens through which to understand individual and collective musical life. The theoretical analysis is interwoven with selected interview data, illuminating the profound and everyday ways that music informs people’s lives. The book will therefore be of interest to the interdisciplinary field of popular music studies as well as sociology and cultural studies beyond the study of music.

On the Nature of Musical Experience discusses the shared beliefs of twenty prominent aestheticians, composers, theorists, and educators, and identifies fourteen features of musical experience as widespread phenomenon.

One of America's foremost contemporary composers, professor of music at the University of California, Roger Sessions here discusses the musical experience of the composer, the performer, the listener. He believes this experience to be shared, on in which all three participants play vital roles, and in this book he speaks especially to the listener. Mr. Sessions finds that the artist-public relationships has been shifted to that of producer and consumer in big business. But his reply to his own question about a threat to the future of music is both a challenge and an expression of hope. A fascinating little book that will be read with pleasure by people at all levels of musical education. Originally published in 1950. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Songprints, the first book-length exploration of the musical lives of Native American women, describes a century of cultural change and constancy among the Shoshone of Wyoming's Wind River Reservation. Through her conversations with Emily, Angelina, Alberta, Helene, and Lenore, Judith Vander captures the distinct personalities of five generations of Shoshone women as they tell their thoughts, feelings, and attitudes toward their music. These women, who range in age from seventy to twenty, provide a unique historical perspective on many aspects of twentieth-century Wind River Shoshone life. In addition to documenting these oral histories, Vander transcribes and analyzes seventy-five songs that the women sing--a microcosm of Northern Plains Indian music. She shows how each woman possesses her own songprint--a song repertoire distinctive to her culture, age, and personality, as unique in its configuration as a fingerprint or footprint. Vander places the five song repertoires in the context of Shoshone social and religious ceremonies to offer insights into the rise of the Native American Church, the emergence and popularity of the contemporary powwow, and the changing, enlarging role of women. Songprints also offers important new material on Ghost Dance songs and performances. Because the Ghost Dance was abandoned by the Wind River Shoshones in the 1930s, only Emily and Angelina saw it performed. Vander engages the two women--now in their sixties and seventies--in a discussion of the function and meaning of the Ghost Dance among the Wind River Shoshones. Thirteen Shoshone Ghost Dance song transcriptions accompany their accounts of past performances. The distinctive voices of these five women will captivate those interested in music, women's studies, ethnohistory, and ethnography, as well as ethnomusicologists, Native American scholars, anthropologists, and historians.

This book forms a basis and a starting point for a closer dialogue between musicologists, anthropologists and psychologists to achieve a better understanding of the cultural psychology of musical experience. This is done by arranging a meeting point or an arena in which different aspects of psychology and musicology touch and encounters each other due to how the two fields might be defined today. In line with this the book consists of a group of scholars that have their feet solidly grounded in psychology, social science or musicology, but at the same time have a certain interest in uniting them. On this basis it is divided into five parts, which investigates musical sensations, musical experiences, musical transformations, musical fundamentals and the notion of a cultural psychology of music. Thus another aim of this book is to prepare the basis for a further growth of a cultural psychology that is able to include the experiences of music as a basis for understanding the ordinary human life. Thus this book should be of interest for those who want to investigate the mysterious intersection between music and psychology. ENDORSEMENTS "Near a century ago, Alfred North Whitehead, a philosopher sensitive to the natural vitality of human intelligence, warned against the restriction of awareness by ‘products of logical discernment’. This book makes a bold and much needed effort to recover an appreciation of the creative agency in music of all kinds, which supports mastery of all domains of cultural intelligence, including language, and ‘artificial intelligence’. We need to replace a rational psychology of musical form with appreciation of impulses of ‘musicality’ in the life of every human society. From birth, and before, a human mind is eager to share the rhythms and tones of awareness-with-feeling in body movement, elaborated in song, instrumental performance or dance. The scholastic disciplines of psychology, anthropology, musicology and ethnomusicology, separated by artificial conventions, need to recover this common ground by 'a project that aims at assembling disciplines that have been separated and developed individually for almost hundred years ... to achieve a better understanding of the cultural psychology of musical experience.' This collection of papers boldly meets this challenge, with skillful respect for the complicated history of our understanding." Colwyn Trevarthen Professor (Emeritus) of Child Psychology and Psychobiology, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, The University of Edinburgh "This book is an important marker in the next wave of interdisciplinary socio-musical study. Culture, individual experience, and social forces converge here and are addressed, and sometimes redressed, through musical means. Bravo!" Tia DeNora Professor, Sociology, Philosophy & Anthropology (SPA) Exeter University EX4 4RJ, UK "Klempe has crafted a fascinating collection of discussions that is accessible and inspiring. Both students and experts will find this book invaluable." Fathali Moghaddam, Professor of Psychology Director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Cognitive Science, Georgetown University