Emily MacGregor - Böcker

'As finely tuned as the very best of orchestras. I loved it' Alice Vincent, author of Why Women Grow'Beautifully written... a powerful testament that music is life' Michael Spitzer, author of The Musical Human: A History of Life on EarthWhen her father dies, music historian and trombonist Dr Emily MacGregor finds that music has become too much. Listening, let alone playing, music is suddenly too difficult. This is problematic given that she's a broadcaster, writer and academic working with classical music.It leads her on a journey of discovery: from the arrangement of an Isaac Albéniz piece she finds on her father's guitar stand, through encounters with psychologists, orchestras, summer schools and funeral celebrants, to the lives and works of individual composers who wrote music so often in the midst of loss. What is it about our experience of music that cuts so sharply to the heart of our emotions? And why is it more than any other artform painfully, exquisitely crucial in the evoking of memories?An erudite, lyrical, gently humorous and healing journey to rediscover the purpose of making and participating in music.

The symphony has long been entangled with ideas of self and value. Though standard historical accounts suggest that composers' interest in the symphony was almost extinguished in the early 1930s, this book makes plain the genre's continued cultural dominance, and argues that the symphony can illuminate issues around space/geography, race, and postcolonialism in Germany, France, Mexico, and the United States. Focusing on a number of symphonies composed or premiered in 1933, this book recreates some of the cultural and political landscapes of an uncertain historical moment-a year when Hitler took power in Germany, and the Great Depression reached its peak in the United States. Interwar Symphonies and the Imagination asks what North American and European symphonies from the early 1930s can tell us about how people imagined selfhood during a period of international insecurity and political upheaval, of expansionist and colonial fantasies, scientised racism, and emergent fascism.

The role music, sound, and voice played in modern knowledge production in the early twentieth centuryDerived from the Latin words circum (round) and ire (to go), a circuit can refer to any bounded area. For contemporary readers, it might evoke the course of an electric current, as well as the flow of global capital. Yet sound—an inherently temporal phenomenon—can only circulate in mediated forms. Tracing the pathways through and by which sound traveled in the early twentieth century, Sonic Circulations not only proposes a new account of the role of music, sound, and voice in modern knowledge production but also poses urgent questions about technology and empire, while also foregrounding the tensions and paradoxes involved in situating the sonic within any fixed regime or system.Exploring key moments in the development of disciplines including linguistics, sociology, and eugenics, as well as musicology itself, Sonic Circulations explores the many ways that sound has functioned as evidence and information, as both an object and an agent of scientific mastery. Contributors explore the processes by which sound has moved through a variety of conceptual, as well as physical domains, highlighting the richness of historical contingency. This volume shows that circulation happened in many spaces and through many technologies: through sound recording, but also through the trade magazine and in the classroom; through wireless broadcasting and international festivals, but also in the cozy spaces of the suburban home.Featuring scholars working at the borders of musicology, ethnomusicology, sound studies, and music theory, this volume's ten chapters and two epilogues illuminate an alternative genealogy of modernism, emphasizing the embeddedness of even the most abstract practices in the structures of imperial modernity.Contributors: Peter Asimov, Andrea F. Bohlman, Harriet Boyd-Bennett, Alexander W. Cowan, Emily I. Dolan, John Gabriel, Jonathan Hicks, Alexandra Kieffer, Gundula Kreuzer, Deirdre Loughridge, Emily MacGregor, Giles Masters, Arman Schwartz, Danielle Simon, John Tresch.