Material Cultures of Music Notation brings together a collection of essays that explore a fundamental question in the current landscape of musicology: how can writing and reading music be understood as concrete, material practices in a wider cultural context? Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from musicology, media studies, performance studies, and more, the chapters in this volume offer a wide array of new perspectives that foreground the materiality of music notation. From digital scores to the transmission of manuscripts in the Middle Ages, the volume deliberately disrupts boundaries of discipline, historical period, genre, and tradition, by approaching notation's materiality through four key interrelated themes: knowledge, the body, social relations, and technology. Together, the chapters capture vital new work in an essential emerging area of scholarship.

Verbal notation has emerged since the 1950s as a prominent medium in the field of experimental music, as well as in related areas of arts practice involving performance and object making. Works created with this type of notation are often referred to by their authors as event scores, prose scores, text scores or instruction scores. Word Events features over 170 scores, many printed here for the first time, representing the works of more than 50 practitioners including George Brecht, John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Michael Pisaro, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Jennifer Walshe and La Monte Young. The commentaries in the book explore the compositional strategies and performance practice of particular works, contextualised by key essays, including previously hard-to-find texts by Lawrence Halprin and Kenneth Maue, together with many new statements and interviews from composers, artists and performers. This unique and wide-ranging collection of scores and writings will be indispensable to musicians, artists, those involved with community arts, and anyone with an interest in exploring the rich potential of the written word.

Sound and Score brings together music expertise from prominent international researchers and performers to explore the intimate relations between sound and score and the artistic possibilities that this relationship yields for performers, composers and listeners. Considering "notation" as the totality of words, signs, and symbols encountered on the road to an accurate and effective performance of music, this book embraces different styles and periods in a comprehensive understanding of the complex relations between invisible sound and mute notation, between aural perception and visual representation, and between the concreteness of sound and the iconic essence of notation. Three main perspectives structure the analysis: a conceptual approach that offers contributions from different fields of enquiry (history, musicology, semiotics), a practical one that takes the skilled body as its point of departure (written by performers), and finally an experimental perspective that challenges state-of-the-art practices, including transdisciplinary approaches in the crossroads to visual arts and dance.

This classic reference work, the best one-volume music dictionary available, has been brought completely up to date in this new edition. Combining authoritative scholarship and lucid, lively prose, the Fourth Edition of The Harvard Dictionary of Music is the essential guide for musicians, students, and everyone who appreciates music. The Harvard Dictionary of Music has long been admired for its wide range as well as its reliability. This treasure trove includes entries on all the styles and forms in Western music; comprehensive articles on the music of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Near East; descriptions of instruments enriched by historical background; and articles that reflect today’s beat, including popular music, jazz, and rock. Throughout this Fourth Edition, existing articles have been fine-tuned and new entries added so that the dictionary fully reflects current music scholarship and recent developments in musical culture. Encyclopedia-length articles by notable experts alternate with short entries for quick reference, including definitions and identifications of works and instruments. More than 220 drawings and 250 musical examples enhance the text. This is an invaluable book that no music lover can afford to be without.

Performing Knowledge explores the relationship between musical performance and analysis through a unique collaboration between a music theorist and a cast of internationally renowned performers, investigating major musical works of the twentieth century--Ravel, Schoenberg, Bartók, Schnittke, Milhaud, Messiaen, Babbitt, Carter, and Morris. The book is a brave crossing of disciplinary divides between scholarship and practice, a theory text enlivened by the voices of performers who create, interpret, and articulate structure.

In the last few years, concerns about dancers’ health and the consequences of physical training have increased considerably. The physical requirements and type of training dancers need to achieve to reach their highest level of performance while decreasing the rate of severe injuries has awakened the necessity of more scientific knowledge concerning the area of dance, in part considering its several particularities. Scientific Perspectives and Emerging Developments in Dance and the Performing Arts is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research designed to reduce the gap between the scientific theory and the practice of dance. While highlighting topics such as burnout, mental health, and sport psychology, this publication explores areas such as nutrition, psychology, and education, as well as methods of maintaining the general wellbeing and quality of the health, training, and performance of dancers. This book is ideally designed for dance experts, instructors, sports psychologists, researchers, academicians, and students.

During the twentieth century, electronic technology enabled the explosive development of new tools for the production, performance, dissemination and conservation of music. The era of the mechanical reproduction of music has, rather ironically, opened up new perspectives, which have contributed to the revitalisation of the performer’s role and the concept of music as performance. This book examines questions related to music that cannot be set in conventional notation, reporting and reflecting on current research and creative practice primarily in live electronic music. It studies compositions for which the musical text is problematic, that is, non-existent, incomplete, insufficiently precise or transmitted in a nontraditional format. Thus, at the core of this project is an absence. The objects of study lack a reliably precise graphical representation of the work as the composer or the composer/performer conceived or imagined it. How do we compose, perform and study music that cannot be set in conventional notation? The authors of this book examine this problem from the complementary perspectives of the composer, the performer, the musical assistant, the audio engineer, the computer scientist and the musicologist.

Rethinking Music reflects the ideas of 24 distinguished musicologists as they evaluate current thinking about music, its social and ethical dimensions and the relationship between academic study and direct musical experience.