Being Music

Being Music
Author: Mark Miller
Publisher: University Professors Press
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2020-09-21
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1939686687

Download Being Music Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Improvisation is a practice of musical exploration and discovery. What we explore is our lived experience and what we discover we share with our audience. As improvisers, our creative resources include sense perception, imagination, somatic presence, and the vitality of emotional expression. In collaboration we develop relationships that serve the music and balance the priorities of self and others in the ensemble. Being Music describes the craft of improvisation as “spontaneous composition” including an awareness of form, compositional focus, theme and development, stillness and creative flow. Miller and Lande address the problem of perfectionism and offer strategies for overcoming judgmental thinking and other obstacles to creative spontaneity. Abundant written musical examples and exercises offer the reader ample opportunity to practice the principles outlined in the text. With over forty-five years of experience performing together, Miller and Lande's dialogical reflections on creativity and community offer a clear and practical guide to the creative process of improvisation for musicians of any style or genre, and at all levels of experience.

The Music of Being

The Music of Being
Author: Alison Levinge
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2015-03-21
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1784500194

Download The Music of Being Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This book explores how the work of key child development theorists informs music therapy practice with children and families. Focusing primarily on the theoretical thinking and understanding of the paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, Alison Levinge highlights how his theories resonate with the central aspects of music therapy. Central to the book are Winnicott's ideas on play and an exploration of his understanding of the psychological processes of 'holding'. Winnicott's theories are given greater depth and understanding by referencing the writings of Adam Phillips and Christopher Bollas. Consideration of relevant aspects of Bowlby's theories will also be included. Knowledge of these theories of child development helps to support understanding of the music therapy process, making this book vital reading for both students and practitioners of music therapy.

African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe

African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe
Author: Mhoze Chikowero
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2015-11-24
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0253018099

Download African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

In this new history of music in Zimbabwe, Mhoze Chikowero deftly uses African sources to interrogate the copious colonial archive, reading it as a confessional voice along and against the grain to write a complex history of music, colonialism, and African self-liberation. Chikowero's book begins in the 1890s with missionary crusades against African performative cultures and African students being inducted into mission bands, which contextualize the music of segregated urban and mining company dance halls in the 1930s, and he builds genealogies of the Chimurenga music later popularized by guerrilla artists like Dorothy Masuku, Zexie Manatsa, Thomas Mapfumo, and others in the 1970s. Chikowero shows how Africans deployed their music and indigenous knowledge systems to fight for their freedom from British colonial domination and to assert their cultural sovereignty.

Madeline Kahn

Madeline Kahn
Author: William V. Madison
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2015-04-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1617037621

Download Madeline Kahn Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Best known for her Oscar-nominated roles in the smash hits Paper Moon and Blazing Saddles, Madeline Kahn (1942–1999) was one of the most popular comedians of her time—and one of the least understood. In private, she was as reserved and refined as her characters were bold and bawdy. Almost a Method actor in her approach, she took her work seriously. When crew members and audiences laughed, she asked why—as if they were laughing at her—and all her life she remained unsure of her gifts. William V. Madison examines Kahn's film career, including not only her triumphs with Mel Brooks and Peter Bogdanovich, but also her overlooked performances in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother and Judy Berlin, her final film. Her work in television—notably her sitcoms—also comes into focus. New York theater showered her with accolades, but also with remarkably bad luck, culminating in a disastrous outing in On the Twentieth Century that wrecked her reputation on Broadway. Only with her Tony-winning performance in The Sisters Rosensweig, fifteen years later, did Kahn regain her standing. Drawing on new interviews with family, friends, and such colleagues as Lily Tomlin, Carol Burnett, Gene Wilder, Harold Prince, and Eileen Brennan, as well as archival press and private writings, Madison uncovers Kahn's lonely childhood and her struggles as a single woman working to provide for her erratic mother. Above all, Madison reveals the paramount importance of music in Kahn's life. A talented singer, she entertained offers for operatic engagements long after she was an established Hollywood star, and she treated each script as a score. As Kahn told one friend, her ambition was “to be the music.”

The Routledge Companion to Music, Mind, and Well-being

The Routledge Companion to Music, Mind, and Well-being
Author: Penelope Gouk
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 475
Release: 2018-12-07
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1351674986

Download The Routledge Companion to Music, Mind, and Well-being Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

In recent decades, the relationship between music, emotions, health and well-being has become a hot topic. Scientific research and new neuro-imaging technologies have provided extraordinary new insights into how music affects our brains and bodies, and researchers in fields ranging from psychology and music therapy to history and sociology have turned their attention to the question of how music relates to mind, body, feelings and health, generating a wealth of insights as well as new challenges. Yet this work is often divided by discipline and methodology, resulting in parallel, yet separate discourses. In this context, The Routledge Companion to Music, Mind and Well-being seeks to foster truly interdisciplinary approaches to key questions about the nature of musical experience and to demonstrate the importance of the conceptual and ideological frameworks underlying research in this field. Incorporating perspectives from musicology, history, psychology, neuroscience, music education, philosophy, sociology, linguistics and music therapy, this volume opens the way for a generative dialogue across both scientific and humanistic scholarship. The Companion is divided into two sections. The chapters in the first, historical section consider the varied ways in which music, the emotions, well-being and their interactions have been understood in the past, from Antiquity to the twentieth century, shedding light on the intellectual origins of debates that continue today. The chapters in the second, contemporary section offer a variety of current scientific perspectives on these topics and engage wider philosophical problems. The Companion ends with chapters that explore the practical application of music in healthcare, education and welfare, drawing on work on music as a social and ecological phenomenon. Contextualising contemporary scientific research on music within the history of ideas, this volume provides a unique overview of what it means to study music in relation to the mind and well-being.

The Sound of Being Human

The Sound of Being Human
Author: Jude Rogers
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2022-04-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 147462295X

Download The Sound of Being Human Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

'Too often we treat popular music as wallpaper surrounding us as we live our lives. Jude Rogers shows the emotional and cerebral heft such music can have. It's a personal journey which becomes universal. Fascinating' Ian Rankin 'Moving and absorbing, The Sound of Being Human mixes memoir, analysis, anecdote and personal chronicle into a mosaic that evokes what music means to the individual and the human tribe. A candid, beautiful read' Stuart Maconie The Sound of Being Human explores, in detail, why music plays such a deep-rooted role in so many lives, from before we are born to our last days. At its heart is Jude's own story: how songs helped her wrestle with the grief of losing her father at age five; concoct her own sense of self as a lonely adolescent; sky-rocket her relationships, both real and imagined, in the flushes of early womanhood, propel her own journey into working life, adulthood and parenthood, and look to the future. Shaped around twelve songs, ranging from ABBA's 'Super Trouper' to Neneh Cherry's 'Buffalo Stance', Kraftwerk's 'Radioactivity' to Martha Reeves and the Vandellas' 'Heat Wave', the book combines memoir and historical, scientific and cultural enquiry to show how music can shape different versions of ourselves; how we rely upon music for comfort, for epiphanies, and for sexual and physical connection; how we grow with songs, and songs grow inside us, helping us come to terms with grief, getting older and powerful memories. It is about music's power to help us tell our own stories, whatever they are, and make them sing.

Being Musically Attuned

Being Musically Attuned
Author: Erik Wallrup
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2016-04-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1317175395

Download Being Musically Attuned Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Listening according to mood is likely to be what most people do when they listen to music. We want to take part in, or even be part of, the emerging world of the musical work. Using the sources of musical history and philosophy, Erik Wallrup explores this extremely vague and elusive phenomenon, which is held to be fundamental to musical hearing. Wallrup unfolds the untold musical history of the German word for ’mood’, Stimmung, which in the 19th century was abundant in the musical aesthetics of the German-Austrian sphere. Martin Heidegger’s much-discussed philosophy of Stimmung is introduced into the field of music, allowing Wallrup to realise fully the potential of the concept. Mood in music, or, to be more precise, musical attunement, should not be seen as a peculiar kind of emotionality, but that which constitutes fundamentally the relationship between listener and music. Exploring mood, or attunement, is indispensable for a thorough understanding of the act of listening to music.

You're History

You're History
Author: Lesley Chow
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2021-03-09
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1913462358

Download You're History Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Raucous, sensual and sublime: how twelve pioneering female artists rewrote the rules of pop. From Kate Bush to Nicki Minaj, from Janet Jackson to TLC and Taylor Swift, pop's greatest female pioneers are simply strange: smashing notions of taste and decorum, and replacing them with new ideals of pleasure. Instead of rehashing biographies, Lesley Chow dives deep into the music of these groundbreaking performers, identifying the ecstatic moments in their songs and finding out what makes them unique. You're History is a love letter to pop's most singular achievements, celebrating the innovations of women who are still critically underrated. It's a ride that includes tributes to Chaka Khan, Rihanna, Neneh Cherry, Sade, Shakespears Sister, Azealia Banks, and many more... “The slim, sharp book considers a range of female artists from Janet Jackson and Taylor Swift to TLC and Nicki Minaj, a group that the Australian cultural critic Chow views as ‘outliers, marking moments where the culture might have swerved to incorporate their influence, but somehow contrived not to.’” — New York Times summer reads

Being True to Works of Music

Being True to Works of Music
Author: Julian Dodd
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2020-05-22
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0198859481

Download Being True to Works of Music Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Being True to Works of Music explores the varieties of authenticity involved in our practice of performing works of Western classical music. Its key argument is that the familiar 'authenticity debate' about the performance of such works has tended to focus on a side issue. While much has been written about the desirability (or otherwise) of historical authenticity -- roughly, performing works as they would have been performed, under ideal conditions, in the era in which they were composed -- the most fundamental norm governing our practice of work performance is, in fact, another kind of kind of truthfulness to the work altogether. This is interpretive authenticity: being faithful to the performed work by virtue of evincing a profound, far-reaching, or sophisticated understanding of it. As such, performers are justified, on occasion, in sacrificing some score compliance for the sake of making their performance more interpretively authentic. Written in a clear, engaging style with discussion of musical examples throughout, this book will be of great interest to both philosophers of music and musicologists.

To Feel the Music

To Feel the Music
Author: Neil Young
Publisher: BenBella Books
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2019-09-10
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1948836637

Download To Feel the Music Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Neil Young took on the music industry so that fans could hear his music—all music—the way it was meant to be heard. Today, most of the music we hear is com-pressed to a fraction of its original sound,while analog masterpieces are turning to dustin record company vaults. As these record-ings disappear, music fans aren't just losing acollection of notes. We're losing spaciousness,breadth of the sound field, and the ability tohear and feel a ping of a triangle or a pluckof a guitar string, each with its own reso-nance and harmonics that slowly trail off intosilence. The result is music that is robbed of its original quality—muddy and flat in sound compared to the rich, warm sound artists hear in the studio. It doesn't have to be this way, but the record and technology companies have incorrectly assumed that most listeners are satisfied with these low-quality tracks. Neil Young is challenging the assault on audio quality—and working to free music lovers from the flat and lifeless status quo. To Feel the Music is the true story of his questto bring high-quality audio back to musiclovers—the most important undertaking ofhis career. It's an unprecedented look insidethe successes and setbacks of creating thePono player, the fights and negotiationswith record companies to preserve master-pieces for the future, and Neil's unrelentingdetermination to make musical art availableto everyone. It's a story that shows how muchmore there is to music than meets the ear. Neil's efforts to bring quality audio to his fans garnered media attention when his Kickstarter campaign for his Pono player—a revolutionary music player that would combine the highest quality possible with the portability, simplicity and affordability modern listeners crave—became the third-most successful Kickstarter campaign in the website's history. It had raised more than $6M in pledges in 40 days. Encouraged by the enthusiastic response, Neil still had a long road ahead, and his Pono music player would not have the commercial success he'd imagined. But he remained committed to his mission, and faced with the rise of streaming services that used even lower quality audio, he was determined to rise to the challenge. An eye-opening read for all fans of Neil Young and all fans of great music, as well as readers interesting in going behind the scenes of product creation, To Feel the Music has an inspiring story at its heart: One determined artist with a groundbreaking vision and the absolute refusal to give up, despite setbacks, naysayers, and skeptics.