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Ambient Sufism is a study of the intertwined musical lives of several ritual communities in Tunisia that invoke the healing powers of long-deceased Muslim saints through music-driven trance ceremonies. It illuminates the virtually undocumented role of women and minorities in shaping the ritual musical landscape of the region, with chapters covering men’s Sufism (‘Isawiyya, Shadhuliyya, Tijaniyya), women’s Sufism (Mannubiyya, Tijaniyya al-Nisa’), the trance healing musics of black Tunisians (stambeli) and Tunisian Jews (rebaybiyya), the popular music genre associated with drinking parties of urban laborers (mizwid), and a growing industry of staged spectacles and concerts that continue to inject ritual sounds into the public sphere. The concept “ambient Sufism” captures how each of these adjacent ritual practices serves as a musical, social, and devotional-therapeutic niche while also contributing to a larger, shared ecology of practices surrounding and invoking the figures of saints. Based on extensive ethnographic research in the years preceding and following the Tunisian Revolution of 2011, Ambient Sufism also argues that ritual musical form—that is, the large-scale structuring of ritual through musical organization—has agency; that is, form is revealing and constitutive of experience and encourages particular subjectivities.

Studies of concert life in nineteenth-century America have generally been limited to large orchestras and the programs we are familiar with today, but audiences of that era enjoyed far more diverse musical experiences than this focus would suggest. To hear an orchestra, people were more likely to head to a beer garden, restaurant, or summer resort than to a concert hall, and what they heard were not just symphonic works—programs also included opera excerpts and arrangements, instrumental showpieces, comic numbers, and medleys of patriotic tunes. This book brings together musicologists and historians to investigate the many orchestras and programs that developed in nineteenth-century America. In addition to reflecting on the music that orchestras played and the socioeconomic aspects of building and maintaining orchestras, it considers a wide range of topics, including audiences, entrepreneurs, concert arrangements, tours, and musicians' unions. The authors also show that the period saw a massive influx of immigrant performers, the increasing ability of orchestras to travel across the nation, and the rising influence of women as listeners, patrons, and players.

This book explores the animating presence of the political in almost every aspect of Beethoven's life, work, and legacy. Beethoven was a civically engaged thinker confronted with severe challenges. Inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment at Bonn and of the French Revolution, Beethoven experienced the reactionary turn of politics in Austria after 1792, disappointment with Napoleon Bonaparte, recurrent war and the repression of the Metternich era. Many new sources are assessed in this reevaluation of Beethoven as a competitor to Napoleon in the cultural sphere, a "Generalissimo" in the world of tones who fashioned Schillerian "effigies of the ideal" in his compositions. Works such as the Pathétique and Appassionata, the Eroica, Fidelio and Ninth Symphony reflect Beethoven's response to the political turbulence of his time, embracing a moral force that strongly resonates in our own troubled political times. The Fifth Symphony helped galvanize resistance to fascism, the Sixth has energized the environmental movement. During the Congress of Vienna, on the other hand, Beethoven sought a different approach, as a pioneer of kitsch, writing for the occasion rather than seeking to promote an "empire of the mind or spirit." His "Flea Song" based on Goethe's Faust shows Beethoven as master of political satire, whose art has lost none of its bite in the 21st century. Assessment of the worldwide reception of the Ninth Symphony, with examples from Asia and Africa, South America and Europe, demonstrate how Beethoven's music today is more relevant than ever before, inspiring activists around the globe.

This interdisciplinary study shows the extent to which literate sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English people considered music beyond its heard and performed aspects. It explains the remarkable range of ways in which they wrote about music and understood it to inform other endeavors, and how musical ideas were connected to other trends during an era marked by intellectual change. Music was considered both art and science, had a long-established place in many human enterprises, and inhabited the fluid conceptual space between abstraction and concretion. Music and musical terminology thus enabled explanation of complex ideas and provided points of contact between otherwise discrete fields of human learning across audible, visual, literary, and performed media. Music and musical language also facilitated carefully coded approaches to some of the era’s most hotly contested topics such as religion and the rising domains of scientific inquiry. Such understanding, in turn, influenced ways in which sounding music was practiced, and its materials were created, marketed, and presented. Furthermore, reading, writing, and talking about music were valuable skills for a culture in which the subtleties of musical knowledge signified status, and in which gentlemen in particular fraternized through discourse as well as sociable practice. Yet no matter how esoteric reference to music became, there always remained something of its audibility and potential to affect the body, soul, and all five senses.

For the Enlightenment mind, from Moses Mendelssohn's focus on the moment of surprise at the heart of the work of art to Herder's imagining of the seismic moment at which language was discovered, it is the flash of recognition that nails the essence of the work, the blink of an eye in which one's world changes. This book unmasks such prismatic moments in iconic music from the Enlightenment, from the “chromatic” moment—the single tone that disturbs the thrust of a diatonic musical discourse—and its deployment in seminal instrumental works by Emanuel Bach, Haydn, and Mozart; on to the poetic moment, taking the odes of Klopstock, in their finely wrought prosody, as a challenge to the problem of strophic song; and finally to the grand stage of opera, to the intense moment of recognition in Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride and the exquisitely introverted phrase that complicates Cherubino's daring moment of escape in Mozart's Figaro. Finally, the tears of the disconsolate Konstanze in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail provoke a reflection on the tragic aspect of Mozart's operatic women. Throughout, other players from literature and the arts—Diderot, Goethe, Lessing among them—enrich the landscape of this bold journey through the Enlightenment imagination.

This book weaves three inquiries into an argument about how individuals can preserve and improve civic life in democratic cultures. The term “civic life” refers here to the interaction of citizens rather than to practices of government. The primary inquiry explores what democracy requires of individuals, proceeding through two other inquiries: one into jazz music as a model for democratic interaction, and the other into Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical conception of art as experiential and potentially transformative. Jazz is often described as democratic. Kenneth Burke’s quite American rhetorical and aesthetic theory explains how that is so. For Burke, rhetoric prompts a sense of shared identity, a sense that follows from an experience that is like being taken through a story of a song. Among individuals who are jealous of their freedom, this way of change seems more appropriate, more fitting, than argument. Working with others to address immediate problems they share can align for a time individuals who are otherwise very different. That is what jazz does: it enables people who are different and even in conflict to combine in cooperation toward an end that matters to all of them just now. This is what civic life in democratic cultures demands. The chapters in this book cycle through these inquiries, elaborating and improvising on them on each pass.

Lyric theater in ancien régime France was an eminently political art, tied to the demands of court spectacle. Tragic opera (tragédie lyrique) was invented under the auspices of monarchy, and functioned from its start as an embodiment of Bourbon prestige. While historians have long privileged the popular origins of French dialogue opera (opéra comique), this genre, too, had close links to the Crown. In 1762 government authorities incorporated the fairground players that invented the form into a struggling royal troupe, the Comédie-Italienne, thereby consolidating a new venue where national music might be debated and defined. The Comedians of the King investigates the impact of Bourbon patronage on the development of opéra comique in the turbulent pre-revolutionary years. Drawing on extensive new musical and archival evidence, the book presents the history of this understudied lyric genre and unpacks the material structures that supported its rapid evolution at the Comédie-Italienne. This project also, critically, interrogates the political implications of such organizational and stylistic shifts. The comic theater alternately reinforced and undercut the monarchy’s carefully cultivated public image—a negotiation that became especially fraught after the accession of the music-loving queen, Marie Antoinette. In essence, The Comedians of the King examines the aesthetic, institutional, and political tensions that arose when a genre with popular roots was folded into the Bourbon propaganda machine, and when a collection of actors trained at the Parisian fairs became official representatives of the sovereign, or comédiens ordinaires du roi.

When, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Japanese leaders put into motion processes of modernization, Western music was adopted into the curriculum of a new educational system as a technology for producing shared cultural space for all Japanese people. As the infrastructures of modernity developed, a new role of composer apart from performer was created to meet the needs that emerged in education, industry and commerce (Part 1). The absorption of Western music in Japan did indeed create an environment of shared cultural space— shared internally by all Japanese people including those who have continued to cultivate traditional musical practices (albeit marginalized), and also shared internationally as Japanese composers have increasingly benefitted from, participated in, and contributed to global cosmopolitan culture (Part 2). The particular nature of the reception in Japan of European spheres of musical participation— orchestras, small ensembles for chamber and contemporary music, wind bands, and choruses--has afforded composers a variety of opportunities to create repertoire for musicians both professional and amateur (Part 3). Although the role of composer was new, based on primarily ethnographic research this book argues that most Japanese composers have maintained a socially relational role in their society as performer-composers previously did, as they respond with artistic flexibility to expectations of Japanese musical modernity.

Can music help us make sense of a form of (post)colonialism that is defined not by anticolonial rupture, but by an ongoing negotiation of the relationship between (former) colonies and their metropole? Along with Martinique, Guiana, and Rion, the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe chose to decolonize by fully integrating into the French state. In the late 1960s, as political integration failed to deliver on its social and economic promises, gwoka–a form of secular drum-based music and dance–became associated with a renewed and more radical form of anticolonial, separatist, activism. Today, while the music is still hailed as a tool and a symbol of resistance, its sounds mix with other musical genres to provide a platform for a cohort of younger musicians to express pan-Caribbean and diasporic solidarities. From colonialism to anticolonialism, from nationalism to postnationalism, the book explores how gwoka participates in five auralities, fields of sonic relations that make audible multiple–and often seemingly contradictory–cultural belongings and political longings. Drawing from Edouard Glissant's poetics of Relation and re-interpreting creolization as a double play of resistance and accommodation, Creolized Aurality moves away from narratives of anticolonial rupture and overcoming to elucidate (post)coloniality as an unstable relational matrix from which emerges a politics caught in the tension between a struggle for sovereignty and demands for full citizenship.

Italy in the early seventeenth century witnessed a revolution in the composition of instrumental music. Large, varied, and strikingly experimental in nature, this new repertoire constituted arguably the first significant body of independent, idiomatic instrumental music in the western tradition. In an age most widely known for its innovations in vocal music, Galileo Galilei explained that, in fact, it was instrumental music that was most effective as a means to “awaken the secret affetti of our soul.” In their new approach to instruments, musical composers were not alone. Instruments of all kinds stood at the center of changes in systems of knowledge in the early modern era. The telescope, the clock, the barometer, the pen—these were the tools of the natural philosopher, the collector, the patron, the early modern thinker. Scholars in the history of science have shown that in this period, the very notion of an instrument changed dramatically. No longer merely used to re-make an object, or to repeat a process already known, instruments were now increasingly seen as tools for open-ended inquiry that would lead to new knowledge. Although the instrumental music of this period has long been recognized as foundational to the Western tradition, the impulses that gave rise to it have never been adequately understood. This interdisciplinary study argues that the new instrumental music grew out of the early modern fascination with instruments of all kinds—scientific and artisanal tools that served as mediators between individuals and the world around them.

Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable draws together the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari in order to revisit the age-old question of music’s ineffability from a modern perspective. For these nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophers, music’s ineffability is a complex phenomenon that engenders an intellectually productive sense of perplexity. Through careful examination of their historical contexts and philosophical orientations, close attention to their use of language, and new interpretations of musical compositions that proved influential for their work, Deep Refrains forges the first panoptic view of their writings on music. Gallope concludes that music’s ineffability is neither a conservative phenomenon nor a pious call to silence. Instead, these philosophers ask us to think through the ways in which music’s stunning force might address, in an ethical fashion, intricate philosophical questions specific to the modern world.

This book is an account of how opera comes to the stage, filled with the author's personal experiences of triumphant—and even failed—performances, and suffused with his passion for music. Writing as a fan, a musician, and a scholar, the author brings to life the problems, and occasionally the scandals, that attend the production of some of our favorite operas. The book begins by tracing the social history of nineteenth-century Italian theaters in order to explain the nature of the musical scores from which performers have long worked. It then illuminates the often hidden but crucial negotiations between opera scholars, opera conductors, and performers: What does it mean to talk about performing from a critical edition? How does one determine what music to perform when multiple versions of an opera exist? What are the implications of omitting passages from an opera in a performance? In addition to vexing questions such as these, the author also tackles issues of ornamentation and transposition in vocal style, the matters of translation and adaptation, and even aspects of stage direction and set design. Throughout this work, the text enlivens a personal history with reports personal own experiences with major opera companies at venues ranging from the Metropolitan and Santa Fe operas to the Rossini Opera Festival at Pesaro.

Every night, somewhere in the world, three or four musicians will climb on stage together. Whether the gig is at a jazz club, a bar, or a bar mitzvah, the performance never begins with a note, but with a question. The trumpet player might turn to the bassist and ask, “Do you ‘Body and Soul?’”—and from there the subtle craft of playing the jazz repertoire is tested in front of a live audience. This book presents the view from the bandstand, revealing the array of skills necessary for working musicians to do their jobs. While learning songs from sheet music or by ear helps, the jobbing musician's lexicon is dauntingly massive: hundreds of thousands of tunes, from jazz classics and pop standards, to more exotic fare. Since it is impossible for anyone to memorize all of these songs, the book shows that musicians collectively negotiate and improvise their way to a successful performance. Players must explore each other's areas of expertise, develop an ability to fake their way through unfamiliar territory, and respond to the unpredictable demands of their audience. The book dishes out stories and insights drawn from the authors' own experiences and observations, as well as interviews with a range of musicians. The authors' detailed portrait of the musician at work holds lessons for anyone who has to think on the spot or under a spotlight.

In West Java, Indonesia, all it takes is a woman's voice and a drum beat to make a man get up and dance. Every day, men there—be they students, pedicab drivers, civil servants, or businessmen—breach ordinary standards of decorum and succumb to the rhythm at village ceremonies, weddings, political rallies, and nightclubs. The music the men dance to varies from traditional gong ensembles to the contemporary pop known as dangdut, but they consistently dance with great enthusiasm. This book draws on decades of ethnographic research to explore the reasons behind this phenomenon, arguing that Sundanese men use dance to explore and enact contradictions in their gender identities. Framing the three crucial elements of Sundanese dance—the female entertainer, the drumming, and men's sense of freedom—as a triangle, the book connects them to a range of other theoretical perspectives, drawing on thinkers from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lév–Strauss, and Freud to Euclid. By granting men permission to literally perform their masculinity, the book ultimately concludes, dance provides a crucial space for both reinforcing and resisting orthodox gender ideologies.

This book's author's imagination was captured the very first time that, as a girl visiting the Himalayas, she heard Kangra women join their voices together in song. Returning as an anthropologist, she became fascinated by how they spoke of singing as a form of enrichment, bringing feelings of accomplishment, companionship, happiness, and even good health—all benefits of the “everyday creativity” are explored in this book. Part ethnography, part musical discovery, part poetry, part memoir, and part unforgettable portraits of creative individuals, this work brings this remote region in North India alive in sight and sound while celebrating the incredible powers of music in our lives. The text portrays Kangra songs about difficulties on the lives of goddesses and female saints as a path to well-being. Like the intricate geometries of mandalu patterns drawn in courtyards or the subtle balance of flavors in a meal, well-crafted songs offer a variety of deeply meaningful benefits: as a way of making something of value, as a means of establishing a community of shared pleasure and skill, as a path through hardships and limitations, and as an arena of renewed possibility.

In the early twenty-first century, the economic growth in live music and especially music festivals caused a sensation in the music industries, in pop aesthetics, and in the media. This birth of a new mass consumer culture of live music has further ramifications in cultural policy, tourism, and urban planning and even generated a literature of its own in popular music studies. This book pioneers a critical approach to the field, arguing that live music is the result of the commercial institutionalization of musical performance, a process that has occurred several times since the birth of consumer society in the eighteenth century, but that the scale and form of the current process is unprecedented. The book begins by examining the lack of critical thinking about live music cultural research and the similar lack of comprehensive explorations of the conceptual foundations for the social study of musical performance in modernity. This leads to the main tasks of (1) developing a systematic and critical framework of the field with a grounding in music sociology and (2) investigating this history through case studies of significant developments in the United States and Europe. The empirical investigations focus on the origins and development of two central institutions of popular music—the club and the festival. The investigations provide insights into the history of these institutions and further use the institutional perspective to provide new insights into the history of music, urban life, and media culture, pointing to fundamental changes in the human condition.

Film, Music, Memory demonstrates that cinema has shaped modern culture in part by changing its cultures of memory. Such change has rested in no small measure on the mnemonic powers of music. With the advent of film, music became involved in a new technology of audiovisual media, placing cultural knowledge in individual and collective memory. Through the capacity to reproduce temporal objects in sound recording and film, technology had advanced a novel mode of exteriorizing memory. This so-called “tertiary memory” (Bernard Stiegler) no longer tied acts of remembrance to the human body and made them subject to its limitations. Instead cinema could retain the past and re-project it in ways that contributed to new forms of cultural consciousness. Film music was central to “cinematic experience” (Miriam Hansen), best understood by extending Walter Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious to that of an optical-acoustic unconscious. Focusing on examples from American and European cinema, the book’s three parts show how music partook in cinematic representations of memory through storage, retrieval, and affect which shaped characters’ memory in film as well as viewers’ memory of film. Individual chapters establish how film music aligned with recording technology to cue visual recall and create new forms of intertextuality; how the habitual consumption of movies fostered their replay through music; how musicians and listeners became a site for traumatic and nostalgic memory; and how music affected economic and racial trust in society by shaping trust in film as a medium.

Later life is a fraught topic in our commercialized, anti-aging, death-denying culture. Where does creativity fit in? The canonical composers whose stories are told here—Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), Richard Strauss (1864–1949), Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992), and Benjamin Britten (1913–1976)—offer radically individual responses to that question. In their late years, each of these national icons wrote an opera around which coalesced for them major issues about their creativity and aging. While these and other late works helped them explore creatively their own aging and mortality, the composers nonetheless had to face a variety of challenges that came with their own aging—ranging from health issues to the critical expectations that accompany success. They also had to deal with the social, political and aesthetic changes of their times, including World Wars and the rise of musical modernism. By investigating their own attitudes to their aging and their creativity, their late compositions, and the critical reception of them, this book tells the stories of their different but creative ways of dealing with those changes, Each composer began his career in an individual manner; each also ended it in a unique way. It is the complexity of the interrelationship of aging and creativity in all its individuality that this book investigates.

The popularity of the motion picture soundtrack O Brother, Where Art Thou? brought an extraordinary amount of attention to bluegrass, but it also drew its share of criticism from some aficionados who felt the album's inclusion of more modern tracks misrepresented the genre. This soundtrack, these purists argued, wasn't bluegrass, but “roots music,” a new and, indeed, more overarching category concocted by journalists and marketers. Why is it that popular music genres like these and others are so passionately contested? And how is it that these genres emerge, coalesce, change, and die out? This book provides new understanding as to why we debate music categories, and why those terms are unstable and always shifting. To tackle the full complexity of genres in popular music, the author embarks on a wide-ranging collection of case studies. Here he examines not only the different reactions to O Brother, but also the impact of rock and roll's explosion in the 1950s and 1960s on country music and jazz, and how the jazz and indie music scenes in Chicago have intermingled to expand the borders of their respective genres. Throughout, the author finds that genres are an integral part of musical culture—fundamental both to musical practice and experience, and to the social organization of musical life.

Exploring Peru’s lively music industry and the studio producers, radio DJs, and program directors that drive it, this book is an account of the deliberate development of artistic taste. Focusing on popular huayno music and the ways it has been promoted to Peru’s emerging middle class, the author tells a complex story of identity making and the marketing forces entangled with it, providing insights into the dynamics among art, class, and ethnicity that reach far beyond the Andes. He focuses on the music of Ayacucho, Peru, examining how media workers and intellectuals there transformed the city’s huayno music into the country’s most popular style. By marketing contemporary huayno against its traditional counterpart, these agents, the author argues, have paradoxically reinforced ethnic hierarchies at the same time that they have challenged them. Navigating between a burgeoning Andean bourgeoisie and a music industry eager to sell them symbols of newfound sophistication, the book is an account of the real people behind cultural change.