The Shaping Forces In Music

A masterful and original classical composer as well as a renowned composer of film scores, Ernst Toch (1887 1964) made a permanent contribution to music in this important and widely praised book. Based on a series of lectures given at Harvard in 1944 and first published in 1948, this book is a brilliant examination of the materials and concepts that are the basic building blocks of music harmony, melody, counterpoint, and form. An admirable reconciliation of traditional and modern (mainly 12-tone) trends in composition, this book shows all types of writing must respond to psychological wants of the listener and how similar goals may be achieved in seemingly opposed styles. Illustrating his discussion with 390 musical examples, Toch not only introduces new ideas and approaches, but examines many age-old problems with clarity and precision consonance and dissonance, form versus number, and more. His analysis of the expanding harmonic universe, the wave line of melody, and the formative influence of movement are particularly penetrating. New to this edition are a biological introduction by Toch's grandson, Lawrence Weschler; a previously unpublished letter from Thomas Mann to Toch about this book (in English translation); and a complete checklist of Toch's compositions. Intended for all those who have a minimum understanding of musical notation and theory, this book will appeal to music lovers, practical musicians and amateurs, and incipient composers."

Steve Larson drew on his 20 years of research in music theory, cognitive linguistics, experimental psychology, and artificial intelligence—as well as his skill as a jazz pianist—to show how the experience of physical motion can shape one's musical experience. Clarifying the roles of analogy, metaphor, grouping, pattern, hierarchy, and emergence in the explanation of musical meaning, Larson explained how listeners hear tonal music through the analogues of physical gravity, magnetism, and inertia. His theory of melodic expectation goes beyond prior theories in predicting complete melodic patterns. Larson elegantly demonstrated how rhythm and meter arise from, and are given meaning by, these same musical forces.

What is required for a listener to understand a piece of music? Does aural understanding depend upon reflective awareness of musical architecture or large-scale musical structure? Jerrold Levinson thinks not. In contrast to what is commonly assumed, Levinson argues that basic understanding of music only requires properly grounded, present-focused attention, and that virtually everything in the comprehension of extended pieces of music that suggests explicit architectonic awareness can be explained without positing conscious grasp of relationships across broad spans. Levinson rejects the notion that keeping music's large-scale form before the mind is somehow essential to fundamental understanding of it. As evidence, he describes in detail the experience of listening to a wide range of music. He defends, with some qualifications, the views of nineteenth-century musician and psychologist Edmund Gurney, author of The Power of Sound, who argued that musical comprehension requires only attention to the evolution of music from moment to moment. Music theory standardly misapprehends the experience and mindset of most who know and love classical music, concludes Levinson. His book is a defense of the passionate and attentive, though architectonically unconcerned, music listener.

This volume showcases key theoretical ideas and practical considerations in the growing area of scholarship on musical gesture. The book constructs and explores the relations between music and gesture from a range of differing perspectives, identifying theoretical approaches and examining the nature of certain types of gesture in musical performance. The twelve chapters in this volume are organized into a heuristic progression from theory to practice, from essay to case study. Theoretical considerations about the interpretation of musical gestures are identified and phrased in terms of semiotics, the mimetic hypothesis, concepts of musical force, immanence, quotation and topic, and the work of musical gestures. The lives of musical gestures in performance are revealed through engaging with their rhythmic properties as well as inquiring into the breathing of pianists, the nature of clarinettists' bodily movements, and the physical acts and personae of individual artists, specifically Keith Jarrett and Robbie Williams. The reader is encouraged to listen to the various resonances and tensions between the chapters, including the importance given to bodies, processes, motions, expressions, and interpretations of musical gesture. The book will be of significance to musicologists, theorists, semioticians, analysts, composers and performers, as well as scholars working in different research communities with an interest in the study of gesture.

Understanding the way music unfolds to the listener is a major key for unlocking the secrets of the composer’s art. Musical Form and Analysis, highly regarded and widely used for two decades, provides a balanced theoretical and philosophical approach that helps upper-level undergraduate music majors understand the structures and constructions of major musical forms. Spring and Hutcheson present all of the standard topics expected in such a text, but their approach offers a unique conceptual thrust that takes readers beyond mere analytical terminology and facts. Evocative rather than encyclopedic, the text is organized around three elements at work at all levels of music: time, pattern, and proportion. Well-chosen examples and direct, well-crafted assignments reinforce techniques. A 140-page anthology of music for in-depth analysis provides a wide range of carefully selected works.

This extensive Handbook addresses a range of contemporary issues related to arts education across the world. It is divided into six sections; Contextualising Arts Education, Globally and Locally; Arts Education, Curriculum, Policy and Schooling; Arts Education Across the Life Span; Arts Education for Social Justice: Indigenous and Community Practice; Health, Wellbeing and Arts Education and Arts-Based and Research-Informed Arts Education. The Handbook explores global debates within education in the areas of dance, drama, music, media and visual arts. Presenting wide-ranging research from pedagogies of adaptation developed in Uganda to ethnomusicology in Malaysia and community participatory arts to wellbeing in Canada the Handbook highlights the universal need for arts education and in particular the importance of indigenous (including both traditional and contemporary practice) arts education. With contributions from internationally renowned scholars and practitioners and building on the World Alliance for Arts Education Global Summit in 2014, the Handbook creates an essential resource for arts education practices in and out of school alongside institutional, traditional and contemporary contexts. Students, teachers and practitioners across the arts disciplines will find the text invaluable for developing further opportunities to promote and study arts education.

Part three teaches the student to form clear and accurate concepts of music expression. It also teaches the guitarist how to perform in public with accuracy and confidence. the book is filled with carefully graded original exercises and pieces. Written in standard notation only. Companion CD included follows examples in the book.