Music and Sound Culture – serie

The integration of audible space is a central aspect of electroacoustic music. Ever since the earliest analogue days of electroacoustic music, pioneers of the genre – including Pierre Schaeffer, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luigi Nono – used special devices and methods for their compositions and refined the possibilities of integrating the sound of space into music.In this anthology, analytical portraits of compositions and groups of compositions show the wide spectrum of spatial practices in early electroacoustic music. Additionally, retrospective views on the use of spatial composition in earlier epochs and in instrumental music of the 20th century portray the practice of spatial composition in different eras and genres, as well as the universality of spatial music as a topic. In this way the book contributes to a more differentiated understanding of the term »spatial music«.Die Integration des hörbaren Raums ist ein zentraler Aspekt der elektroakustischen Musik. Schon auf Basis der Analogtechnik entstanden spezielle Geräte und Verfahren, die Pioniere des Genres wie Pierre Schaeffer, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen oder Luigi Nono für ihre Vorstellungen von Raummusik heranzogen und weiter entwickelten.In diesem Band, der englisch- und deutschsprachige Beiträge gleichermaßen versammelt, zeigen analytische Portraits einzelner Kompositionen oder Kompositionsgruppen das breite Spektrum spatialer Praktiken in der frühen elektroakustischen Musik. Geschichtliche Rückblicke auf spatiale Kompositionsweisen früherer Epochen bis hin zur instrumentalen Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts stellen den epochen- und genrespezifischen Umgang mit Raum dar und belegen nicht nur die Universalität des Themas Raummusik, sondern leisten auch einen Beitrag zu deren begrifflicher Differenzierung.

Dieser durchgehend zweisprachige Band versammelt Beiträge zu ästhetischen, künstlerischen und pädagogischen Fragestellungen der musikalischen Improvisation. Er beinhaltet Reflexionen und Modelle, die sich mit der Kunst der Improvisation und den in ihr handelnden Menschen befassen und darüber hinaus faszinierende Perspektiven auch für Kultur und Wissenschaft bieten.This book, bilingual throughout, brings together essays providing aesthetic, artistic and pedagogical interrogations of the art of musical improvisation. It contains reflections and models which deal both with the art of improvisation and with the people who carry it out and offers fascinating perspectives for culture and for scholarship more generally.Contributions by Alan Bern, Rogério Costa, Nina Polaschegg, Edwin Prévost, and others.

How is musical practice connected with everyday life? Eva-Maria Houben shows that performing music as an activity – indeed, as playing – is a meaningful shift from an approach based on structural analysis. Musical practice, Eva-Maria Houben contends, can be understood as open and never finished. Such an emphasis on repetition offers freedom from perfection, productivity, and purpose, thus allowing meaning to unfold in specific situations, places, and relationships. Musical practice can become a form of life and a reality in its own right. The study includes musical examples from the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries as well as contemporary music.

This collection investigates the concept of modernity in music and its multiple interpretations in Europe and East Asia. Through contributions by both European and East Asian musicologists it discusses how a decentered understanding of musical modernity could be matched on multiple historiographical perspectives while being attentive to the specificities of local music and their narratives in East Asia and Europe. The essays connect local, global and transnational history with sociological theories of modernity and modernization, making the volume an important contribution to overcoming the Eurocentric dichotomy between western music and world music within the field of historical musicology.

Connecting migration studies and the theory of valuation, this collection offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of transnational music practices. Conceiving music as a practice not confined to audibility, the contributions reveal how music emerges in concrete situations through people, objects, techniques, meanings, and emotions in different parts of the world and during different historic periods. Values are thereby created and shared, and creative processes are evaluated in terms of diversity, space and exchange.This book presents cases of contemporary, popular and traditional music, festivals and trade fairs, albums and band projects, shedding light on the tensions between the transfer, reconstruction and creation of music in different contexts.

Since the early transformation of European music practice and theory in the cultural centers of Asia, Latin America, and Africa around 1900, it has become necessary for music history to be conceived globally – a challenge that musicology has hardly faced yet. This book discusses the effects of cultural globalization on processes of composition and distribution of art music in the 20th and 21st century. Christian Utz provides the foundations of a global music historiography, building on new models such as transnationalism, entangled histories, and reflexive globalization. The relationship between music and broader changes in society forms the central focus and is treated as a pivotal music-historical dynamic.

Music and sound shape the emotional content of audio-visual media and carry different meanings. This volume considers audio-visual material as a primary source for historiography. By analyzing how the same sounds are used in different media contexts at different times, the contributors intend to challenge the linear perspective of (music) history based on canonic authority. The book discusses AV-Documents (analysis in context), methodological questions (implications for research, education, and popularization of knowledge), archives of cultural memory (from the perspective of Cultural Studies) as well as digitalization and its consequences (organization of knowledge).

Contemporary music, like other arts, is dealing with the rise of »curators« laying claim to everything from festivals to playlists – but what are they and what do they do anyway? Drawing from backgrounds ranging from curatorial studies to festival studies and musicology, Brandon Farnsworth lays out a theory for understanding curatorial practices in contemporary music, and how they could be a solution to the field's diminishing social relevance. The volume focuses on two case studies, the Munich Biennale for New Music Theatre, and the Maerzmusik Festival at the Berliner Festspiele, putting them in a transdisciplinary history of curatorial practice, and showing what music curatorial practice can be.

Various modes of women's contemporary cultural, social and political leadership can be found in music. Informed by different histories and culturally bound social mores but also by a comparative perspective, the contributors of this volume ask what can be considered leadership in culture from women's point of view. They deconstruct the notion of leadership as corporative and career-related modes of success by showing how women's agency, power and negotiation in and through music can and should be considered as empowering, transformative and role-modeling. By interweaving several disciplinary perspectives – from ethnomusicology, musicology and cultural management to sociology and anthropology – this volume aims to substantially contribute to the study of women's leadership.