Transformational Analysis In Practice Music Analytical Studies On Composers And Musicians From Around The World

'Transformational analysis in practice' is a Must-Have for everyone working in the field or aspiring to develop their music-analytical and theoretical skills in transformational theory. This co-authored book puts together a plethora of analytical studies, diverse both in the repertoires covered and the methodologies employed. It is a much-needed anthology in this sub-field of music analysis, which has been developing and growing in recent years, reaching ever wider outlets in English-speaking countries and beyond, from dedicated conference panels to YouTube videos. The book is divided into four parts based on the repertoires under discussion. Part I encompasses four analytical studies on familiar composers from the European Romanticism of the nineteenth century. Part II analyzes the music of less familiar composers from Brazil and Turkey. Part III offers four contrasting ways to adapt the analytical capabilities of neo-Riemannian theory to the post-tonal music of the twentieth century. Catering to the interests of jazz performers and researchers, as well as those into popular music production, Part IV offers transformational analytical approaches to both notated and improvised jazz, emphasizing John Coltrane’s performance. Providing an invaluable synthesis of a wide range of analytical studies, this book will be an essential companion for many musicology students, as well as for performers and composers.

Musical Form and Transformation collects four of David Lewin's analytic essays to stimulate thought about the general methodology of musical analysis and issues of large-scale form as they relate to transformational analytic structuring.

This text assembles 11 distinguished writers on music to discuss the ingenuity with which sound is organized in musical traditions all over the world. It contains an introductory chapter which proposes ways to think about musical structures cross-culturally.

This volume brings together a group of analytical chapters exploring traditional genres and styles of world music, capturing a vibrant and expanding field of research. These contributors, drawn from the forefront of researchers in world music analysis, seek to break down barriers and build bridges between scholarly disciplines, musical repertoires, and cultural traditions. Covering a wide range of genres, styles, and performers, the chapters bring to bear a variety of methodologies, including indigenous theoretical perspectives, Western music theory, and interdisciplinary techniques rooted in the cognitive and computational sciences. With contributors addressing music traditions from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, this volume captures the many current directions in the analysis of world music, offering a state of the fi eld and demonstrating the expansion of possibilities created by this area of research.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the cross-pollenization of world musical materials and practices has accelerated precipitously, due in large part to advances in higher-speed communications and travel. We live now in a world of global musical practice that will only continue to blossom and develop through the twenty-first century and beyond. Yet music theory as an academic discipline is only just beginning to respond to such a milieu. Conferences, workshops and curricula are for the first time beginning to develop around the theme of 'world music theory', as students, teachers and researchers recognize the need for analytical concepts and methods applicable to a wider range of human musics, not least the hybrid musics that influence (and increasingly define) more and more of the world's musical practices. Towards a Global Music Theory proposes a number of such concepts and methods stemming from durational and acoustic relationships between 'twos' and 'threes' as manifested in various interrelated aspects of music, including rhythm, melody, harmony, process, texture, timbre and tuning, and offers suggestions for how such concepts and methods might be applied effectively to the understanding of music in a variety of contexts. While some of the bases for this foray into possible methods for a twenty-first century music theory lie along well established acoustical and psycho-acoustical lines, Dr Mark Hijleh presents a broad attempt to apply them conceptually and comprehensively to a variety of musics in a relevant way that can be readily apprehended and applied by students, scholars and teachers.

This book studies recent music in the western classical tradition, offering a critique of current analytical/theoretical approaches and proposing alternatives. The critique addresses the present fringe status of recent music sometimes described as crossover, postmodern, post-classical, post-minimalist, etc. and demonstrates that existing descriptive languages and analytical approaches do not provide adequate tools to address this music in positive and productive terms. Existing tools and concepts were developed primarily in the mid-20th century in tandem with the high modernist compositional aesthetic, and they have changed little since then. The aesthetics of music composition, on the other hand, have been in constant transformation. Lochhead proposes new ways to conceive musical works, their structurings of musical experience and time, and the procedures and goals of analytic close reading. These tools define investigative procedures that engage the multiple perspectives of composers, performers, and listeners, and that generate conceptual modes unique to each work. In action, they rebuild a conceptual, methodological, and experiential place for recent music. These new approaches are demonstrated in analyses of four pieces: Kaija Saariaho’s Lonh (1996), Sofia Gubaidulina’s Second String Quartet (1987), Stacy Garrop’s String Quartet no.2, Demons and Angels (2004-05), and Anna Clyne’s "Choke" (2004). This book defies the prediction of classical music’s death, and will be of interest to scholars and musicians of classical music, and those interested in music theory, musicology, and aural culture.

Internationally renowned scholars and practitioners come together in this volume to provide fresh insights into the cultural, institutional, theoretical, methodological, epistemological, ethical and practical aspects and implications of the rapidly evolving area of artistic research in music.

This book is a first sketch of what the overall field of performance could look like as a modern scientific field but not its stylistically differentiated practice, pedagogy, and history. Musical performance is the most complex field of music. It comprises the study of a composition’s expression in terms of analysis, emotion, and gesture, and then its transformation into embodied reality, turning formulaic facts into dramatic movements of human cognition. Combining these components in a creative way is a sophisticated mix of knowledge and mastery, which more resembles the cooking of a delicate recipe than a rational procedure. This book is the first one aiming at such comprehensive coverage of the topic, and it does so also as a university text book. We include musicological and philosophical aspects as well as empirical performance research. Presenting analytical tools and case studies turns this project into a demanding enterprise in construction and experimental setups of performances, especially those generated by the music software Rubato. We are happy that this book was written following a course for performance students at the School of Music of the University of Minnesota. Their education should not be restricted to the canonical practice. They must know the rationale for their performance. It is not sufficient to learn performance with the old-fashioned imitation model of the teacher's antetype, this cannot be an exclusive tool since it dramatically lacks the poetical precision asked for by Adorno's and Benjamin's micrologic. Without such alternatives to intuitive imitation, performance risks being disconnected from the audience.