Music, Meaning and Transformation: meaningful music making for life, examines the musical experiences that students find meaningful and the ways in which teachers, parents and community music leaders might provide access to meaningful music education. This is particularly relevant today because school music often fails to provide sustainable access to music making for life, health and wellbeing beyond school. This book seeks to reframe the focus of music education within a pragmatist philosophy and provide a framework that is culturally and chronologically inclusive. The approach involves an intensely personal music teachers’ journey that privilege the voices of students and teachers of a music making community and sets these against rigorous long termed qualitative methodologies. Music education is shifting focus away from music as an object and process towards the meaning experienced by the student personally, socially and culturally. This is an important and fundamental issue for the development of philosophy for pre-service and practicing music teachers and community music project leaders. The focus now needs to be upon the 98% who could have music as a significant expressive force in their lives as a means of facilitating social inclusion, for mental health and well being and to have access to the sense of belonging that community music making can bring as a lifelong activity. The book aims to provide a comprehensive guide to music education that leads to a music education for all for life. This book emphasises the maker in context examining: the student as maker, the teacher as builder and designer and the school as village. The relationship between music making, education and health and well being has been and is the subject of many research projects and national and international reviews. Seldom though in these studies has there been any attempt to identify the qualities of successful and sustainable interactions with music making, the qualities of good teaching and good teaching practice. The focus of this book is to provide simple but effective tools for evaluating and testing the meaning evident in a music-making context, identify the modes of engagement and establish the unique expressive music making needs of twenty first century communities. For further information see http://savetodisc.net

What is it that makes sound become music? "....sound, in and of itself, has no meaning; it is simply sound. It is descriptive or evocative of nothing more than what is present in the heart and mind of the listener." But for those who are open to it, able to respond to it, the power of music to influence us is extraordinary. And this mysterious quality of harmony reacts alike on the composer, the musician, and the listener. In this self-help book of theory and practical exercises, the author explains how we can put music to good use in our daily life; make it a part of our living experience; let it penetrate our soul so that we truly become One with the tones, rhythm, harmonics, the cadence of the music.

This dissertation presents a theory of the transformational analysis of music. It explores ways in which musical transformation, mathematics, and meaning can be integrated, through a critical reading of David Lewin's and several contemporary philosophers' works on language, system, and poetic experience.

Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations is by far the most significant contribution to the field of systematic music theory in the last half-century, generating the framework for the "transformational theory" movement.

This book takes the reader on a journey through music concepts in an organized approach that develops music essentials from the concepts of tone, pitch, and time, through notes, intervals, chords, and scores while at the same time interpreting these elements as software artifacts. Close attention is paid to the organization of and relationships amongst these concepts and their representation as Python classes and objects, to learn about music from a software design viewpoint. The first part of the book focuses on software representation of the main elements found in music theory. Its objective is to provide direction to students on how to build a music software model from basic concepts and grow towards more complex concepts. Chapter by chapter, music concepts are introduced, and each is broken apart into related data properties and methods with the goal that by the end of this section, the reader will have developed a relatively complete library of music elements in software. The second part takes on the task of applying that foundation to the subject of “music transformations”. The focus is on localized transformations, that is, transformations isolated to a few measures. After a general introduction, the discussion includes topics of pitch assignment, key change, melodic inversion, melodic shaping, harmonic transcription, retrograde, melodic search and dilation. This textbook is designed as a principal or supplemental source for computer science, software engineering, and programming courses. It can also be used as a main textbook for advanced computer music courses or electronic music courses. Computer music software professionals interested in learning how to model the complexities of music theory artifacts, or music students who want to learn advanced programming techniques in their domain will also find the book helpful.

Amplified offers a fresh, innovative way to relate to and experience music. The book shows the reader how to use the power of music in their everyday life-to awaken creativity, improve their wellbeing, deepen relationships, and amplify their true potential. Through a combination of personal stories, scientific research, inspiring anecdotes, and practical exercises, Frank Fitzpatrick provides us with a time-tested musical path to greater health and happiness. Amplified is a culmination of the author's key takeaways from more than forty years as a music entrepreneur working at the forefront of entertainment, creativity, health, and human performance. He wrote it for one purpose: to help you-the reader-better understand and apply the benefits of music in the key areas of your life and in the world in which you live.

There have been far-reaching changes in the way music theorists and analysts view the nature of their disciplines. Encounters with structuralist and post-structuralist critical theory, and with linguistics and cognitive sciences, have brought the theory and analysis of music into the orbit of important developments in intellectual history. This book presents the work of a group of scholars who, without seeking to impose an explicit redefinition of either theory or analysis, explore the limits of both in this context. Essays on the languages of analysis and theory, and on practical issues such as decidability, ambiguity and metaphor, combine with studies of works by Debussy, Schoenberg, Birtwistle and Boulez, together making a major contribution to an important debate in the growth of musicology.

Music Moves. While the volume s main title suggests a rather unambiguous stand towards the manifold possible relations between music and movement, its various chapters each nuance this seemingly univocal articulation. Rather than providing the reader with an all-inclusive theory on movement that is simply mapped onto the manifold complex musical dynamics the volume attends to, each chapter explores these composite dynamics in and on their own terms. Besides a clear but diverse focus on questions of music and movement, the individual chapters have common conceptual, methodological, and theoretical ground. Issues of central concern for musicology (here understood in its most inclusive sense), such as questions of power, musical meaning, and identity construction underlie most of its chapters. Three uniting concepts, which are of crucial importance for debates within musicology and cultural studies, emerge most prominently from, frame, and connect the individual papers: relation, knowledge, and transformation. Due to its comprehensive geographical, musical, and theoretical range, the approximations of music and movement offered within the volume explore issues of relevance to musicology, anthropology, critical theory, philosophy, post-colonial theory, and cultural studies."

Tonality and Transformation is a groundbreaking study in the analysis of tonal music. Focusing on the listener's experience, author Steven Rings employs transformational music theory to illuminate diverse aspects of tonal hearing - from the infusion of sounding pitches with familiar tonal qualities to sensations of directedness and attraction. In the process, Rings introduces a host of new analytical techniques for the study of the tonal repertory, demonstrating their application in vivid interpretive set pieces on music from Bach to Mahler. The analyses place the book's novel techniques in dialogue with existing tonal methodologies, such as Schenkerian theory, avoiding partisan debate in favor of a methodologically careful, pluralistic approach. Rings also engages neo-Riemannian theory-a popular branch of transformational thought focused on chromatic harmony-reanimating its basic operations with tonal dynamism and bringing them into closer rapprochement with traditional tonal concepts. Written in a direct and engaging style, with lively prose and plain-English descriptions of all technical ideas, Tonality and Transformation balances theoretical substance with accessibility: it will appeal to both specialists and non-specialists. It is a particularly attractive volume for those new to transformational theory: in addition to its original theoretical content, the book offers an excellent introduction to transformational thought, including a chapter that outlines the theory's conceptual foundations and formal apparatus, as well as a glossary of common technical terms. A contribution to our understanding of tonal phenomenology and a landmark in the analytical application of transformational techniques, Tonality and Transformation is an indispensible work of music theory.

In 1999 the Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim and the Palestinian writer Edward Said organised a concert in Weimar in which half the performers were Palestinians and the other half Israelis.The performance itself and the rehearsals which preceded it had a lasting effect on all the participants. How far can the relationship between music and politics be used to promote a more peaceful world? That is the central question which motivates this challenging new work by some of the leading musicians and music scholars of our time. Combining theory from experienced academics such as Johan Galtung, Cindy Cohen and Karen Abi-Ezzi with compelling stories from musicians like Yair Dalal, the book also includes an exclusive interview with folk legend Pete Seeger. In each instance, practical and theoretical perspectives have been combined in order to explore music's role in conflict transformation. The book is divided into five sections. The first, 'Frameworks', reflects in-depth on the connections between music and peace, while the second, 'Music and Politics', discusses the impact of music on society. The third section, 'Healing and Education', offers examples of the transformative power of music in prisons and settings of conflict-resolution, while the fourth, 'Stories from the Field', tells true stories about music's impact in the Middle East and elsewhere. Finally, 'Reflections' encourages the reader to consider a personal evaluation of the work with a view to further explorations of the power of music to promote peace.