The Musical Representation

How human musical experience emerges from the audition of organized tones is a riddle of long standing. In The Musical Representation, Charles Nussbaum offers a philosophical naturalist's solution. Nussbaum founds his naturalistic theory of musical representation on the collusion between the physics of sound and the organization of the human mind-brain. He argues that important varieties of experience afforded by Western tonal art music since 1650 arise through the feeling of tone, the sense of movement in musical space, cognition, emotional arousal, and the engagement, by way of specific emotional responses, of deeply rooted human ideals. Construing the art music of the modern West as representational, as a symbolic system that carries extramusical content, Nussbaum attempts to make normative principles of musical representation explicit and bring them into reflective equilibrium with the intuitions of competent listeners. Nussbaum identifies three modes of musical representation, describes the basis of extramusical meaning, and analyzes musical works as created historical entities (performances of which are tokens or replicas). In addition, he explains how music gives rise to emotions and evokes states of mind that are religious in character. Nussbaum's argument proceeds from biology, psychology, and philosophy to music--and occasionally from music back to biology, psychology, and philosophy. The human mind-brain, writes Nussbaum, is a living record of its evolutionary history; relatively recent cognitive acquisitions derive from older representational functions of which we are hardly aware. Consideration of musical art can help bring to light the more ancient cognitive functions that underlie modern human cognition. The biology, psychology, and philosophy of musical representation, he argues, have something to tell us about what we are, based on what we have been.

This volume assembles leading scholars to provide a comprehensive study of representation in music from the nineteenth century to today.

Richard Leppert boldly examines the social meanings of music as these have been shaped not only by hearing but also by seeing music in performance. His purview is the northern European bourgeoisie, principally in England and the Low Countries, from 1600 to 1900. And his particular interest is the relation of music to the human body. He argues that musical practices, invariably linked to the body, are inseparable from the prevailing discourses of power, knowledge, identity, desire, and sexuality. With the support of 100 illustrations, Leppert addresses music and the production of racism, the hoarding of musical sound in a culture of scarcity, musical consumption and the policing of gender, the domestic piano and misogyny, music and male anxiety, and the social silencing of music. His unexpected yoking of musicology and art history, in particular his original insights into the relationships between music, visual representation, and the history of the body, make exciting reading for scholars, students, and all those interested in society and the arts.

A groundbreaking interdisciplinary volume exploring the phenomenon of the "Westernization" of contemporary Chinese music

This book takes the reader on a journey through music concepts in an organized approach that develops music essentials from the concepts of tone, pitch, and time, through notes, intervals, chords, and scores while at the same time interpreting these elements as software artifacts. Close attention is paid to the organization of and relationships amongst these concepts and their representation as Python classes and objects, to learn about music from a software design viewpoint. The first part of the book focuses on software representation of the main elements found in music theory. Its objective is to provide direction to students on how to build a music software model from basic concepts and grow towards more complex concepts. Chapter by chapter, music concepts are introduced, and each is broken apart into related data properties and methods with the goal that by the end of this section, the reader will have developed a relatively complete library of music elements in software. The second part takes on the task of applying that foundation to the subject of “music transformations”. The focus is on localized transformations, that is, transformations isolated to a few measures. After a general introduction, the discussion includes topics of pitch assignment, key change, melodic inversion, melodic shaping, harmonic transcription, retrograde, melodic search and dilation. This textbook is designed as a principal or supplemental source for computer science, software engineering, and programming courses. It can also be used as a main textbook for advanced computer music courses or electronic music courses. Computer music software professionals interested in learning how to model the complexities of music theory artifacts, or music students who want to learn advanced programming techniques in their domain will also find the book helpful.

How can we engage critically with music video and its role in popular culture? What do contemporary music videos have to tell us about patterns of cultural identity today? Based around an eclectic series of vivid case studies, this fresh and timely examination is an entertaining and enlightening analysis of the forms, pleasures, and politics that music videos offer. In rethinking some classic approaches from film studies and popular music studies and connecting them with new debates about the current 'state' of feminism and feminist theory, Railton and Watson show why and how we should be studying music videos in the twenty-first century. Through its thorough overview of the music video as a visual medium, this is an ideal textbook for Media Studies students and all those with an interest in popular music and cultural studies.

"[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