Using landscape as its unifying concept, this engaging book explores orchestral music that represents real and imagined physical and cultural spaces, natural forces, and humans and wildlife. Spanning continents and centuries, David Knight links contrasting forms of music through unifying themes of time and space; waterscapes; imagined and mythic spaces; the search for meaning in extreme landscapes; and realms of death, survival, and remembrance. The author also underscores the importance of the physical spaces in which music is performed. Orchestral works are rarely perceived in geographical terms, but Knight, himself an accomplished geographer and musician, offers a deeply satisfying approach to interpreting and appreciating a wide range of music. Comparing classic masterworks from Europe and Russia alongside more recent compositions from the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and China, this innovative study offers a fresh understanding of the links between music and the worlds around us.

More perhaps than any other composer, Edward Elgar (1857-1934) has gained the status of an ‘icon of locality,' his music seemingly inextricably linked to the English landscape in which he worked. This, the first full-length study of Elgar’s complex interaction with his physical environment, explores how it is that such associations are formed and whether it is any sense true that Elgar alchemized landscape into music. It argues that Elgar stands at the apex of an English tradition, going back to Blake, in which creative artists in all media have identified and warned against the self-harm of environmental degradation and that, following a period in which these ideas were swept away by the swift but shallow tide of Modernism in the decades after the First World War, they have since resurfaced with a new relevance and urgency for twenty-first century society. Written with the non-specialist in mind, yet drawing on the rich resources of post-millennial scholarship on Elgar, as well as geographical studies of place, the book also includes many new insights relating to such aspects of Elgar’s output as his use of landscape typology in The Apostles, and his encounter with Modernism in the late chamber music. It also calls on the resources of contemporary social commentary, poetry and, especially, English landscape art to place Elgar and his thought in the broader cultural milieu of his time. A survey of recent recordings is included, in the hope that listeners, both familiar and unfamiliar with Elgar’s music, will feel inspired to embark on a voyage of (re)discovery of its endlessly rewarding treasures.

A sequel to the award-winning The Black Composer Speaks (Scarecrow Press, 1978), this exploration of the creative world of African American composers traces the lives and careers of 40 talented individuals and, in their own words, provides perspectives on a world that has been slow to recognize their remarkable contributions to classical music. The discussion places the music of these composers within the greater context of Western art music, but analyzes it through the lenses of sociology, Western concepts of art and taste, and vernacular musical forms, including spirituals, blues, jazz, and contemporary popular music. Each chapter is devoted to an individual composer, who discusses his or her musical training, compositional techniques and style, and the composer's personal philosophy as reflected in his or her music. A selected list of compositions for each composer is included, as well as a photo and sample of the composer's "hand." Banfield offers unprecedented insight into the history and influence of the African American composer with this documentary, which will appeal to everyone from the music scholar to the general reader.

In this masterful new study of the ancient poetry of the Song of Songs, Elaine T. James explores the Song's underlying interest in the natural world. Engaging with the fields of geography, landscape architecture, and literature, James critiques the tendency of scholars to reify a perceived dichotomy between "nature" and "culture" and instead argues that the poetic attention to landscape indicates an awareness of a viewer. Nature is here a poetic device that informs James's close-readings of agrarianism, gardens, cities, social control, and feminism and the gaze in the Song. With this two-fold emphasis on landscape and lyric, Landscape of the Song of Songs shows how the Song persistently envisions a world in which human lovers are embedded in the natural world, complexly enfolded in relationships of fragility and care.

Using landscape as its concept, this book explores orchestral music that represents imagined physical and cultural spaces, natural forces, and humans and wildlife. Comparing works from Europe and Russia alongside the compositions from the US, Canada, Japan, and China, it offers an understanding of the links between music and the worlds around us.

Electronic Landscapes: Music, Space and Resistance in Detroit (EL) celebrates Detroit's techno, house and hip-hop musicians who construct home studios, renovate buildings and sustain community despite increasing pressure from land development and speculation. It sheds a fresh light on the city's cultural significance and further contextualizes its current resurgence. Readers are invited to glimpse rarely seen aspects of Detroit's electronic music culture, and to reflect on historic and contemporary places in Detroit's landscape related to it. Featured musicians discuss their process and the significant link between race, space and cultural production, a theme expanded upon in critical texts by scholars Dora Apel and Carla Vecchiola, and internationally renowned DJ, John Collins.

Rarely studied in their own right, writings about music are often viewed as merely supplemental to understanding music itself. Yet in the nineteenth century, scholarly interest in music flourished in fields as disparate as philosophy and natural science, dramatically shifting the relationship between music and the academy. An exciting and much-needed new volume, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century draws deserved attention to the people and institutions of this period who worked to produce these writings. Editors Paul Watt, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis, along with an international slate of contributors, discuss music's fascinating and unexpected interactions with debates about evolution, the scientific method, psychology, exoticism, gender, and the divide between high and low culture. Part I of the handbook establishes the historical context for the intellectual world of the period, including the significant genres and disciplines of its music literature, while Part II focuses on the century's institutions and networks - from journalists to monasteries - that circulated ideas about music throughout the world. Finally, Part III assesses how the music research of the period reverberates in the present, connecting studies in aestheticism, cosmopolitanism, and intertextuality to their nineteenth-century origins. The Handbook challenges Western music history's traditionally sole focus on musical work by treating writings about music as valuable cultural artifacts in themselves. Engaging and comprehensive, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century brings together a wealth of new interdisciplinary research into this critical area of study.

About the Book: This textbook is designed to inspire debate and discussion about the past, present, and future of the music industry--blending insights from legal, business, and policy perspectives. Students are introduced to the history of music as property in commerce; key technological and business milestones affecting all aspects of the creative process; legal protections for those who create music, those who own it, and those who want to use it; the competing (and recurring) policy debates from the past century that have influenced the way creative participants interact with one another; and the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital age. About the Authors: Julie Ross has been a full-time faculty member at Georgetown Law since 1998, where she has taught courses focusing on legal practice and music law. Her scholarship focuses on music copyright and writing pedagogy. She is a graduate of Hamilton College and Harvard Law School and clerked for the Honorable H. Lee Sarokin in New Jersey. Before moving to academia, she practiced as a litigator in Los Angeles. Michael Huppe is President & CEO of SoundExchange, an organization at the center of many legal, policy and technology issues confronting the modern music industry. With over 20 years in the industry, he has fought on behalf of artists, songwriters, labels, publishers, and studio producers. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he was originally a commercial litigator and now focuses on the business issues affecting creators, especially those relating to music and technology.

This volume offers chapters written by some of the most respected narrative and qualitative inquiry writers in the field of music education. The authorship and scope are international, and the chapters advance the philosophical, theoretical, and methodological bases of narrative inquiry in music education and the arts. The book contains two sections, each with a specific aim. The first is to continue and expand upon dialogue regarding narrative inquiry in music education, emphasizing how narrative involves the art of listening to and hearing others whose voices are often unheard. The chapters invite music teachers and scholars to experience and confront music education stories from multiple perspectives and worldviews, inviting an international readership to engage in critical dialogue with and about marginalized voices in music. The second section focuses on ways in which narrative might be represented beyond the printed page, such as with music, film, photography, and performative pieces. This section includes philosophical discussions about arts-based and aesthetic inquiry, as well as examples of such work.

Music is omnipresent in human society, but its language can no longer be regarded as transcendent or universal. Like other art forms, music is produced and consumed within complex economic, cultural, and political frameworks in different places and at different historical moments. Taking an explicitly spatial approach, this unique interdisciplinary text explores the role played by music in the formation and articulation of geographical imaginations--local, regional, national, and global. Contributors show how music's facility to be recorded, stored, and broadcast; to be performed and received in private and public; and to rouse intense emotional responses for individuals and groups make it a key force in the definition of a place. Covering rich and varied terrain--from Victorian England, to 1960s Los Angeles, to the offices of Sony and Time-Warner and the landscapes of the American Depression--the volume addresses such topics as the evolution of musical genres, the globalization of music production and marketing, alternative and hybridized music scenes as sites of localized resistance, the nature of soundscapes, and issues of migration and national identity.