Since ascending onto the world stage in the 1990s as one of the premier bassists and composers of his generation, William Parker has perpetually toured around the world and released over forty albums as a leader. He is one of the most influential jazz artists alive today. In Universal Tonality historian and critic Cisco Bradley tells the story of Parker’s life and music. Drawing on interviews with Parker and his collaborators, Bradley traces Parker’s ancestral roots in West Africa via the Carolinas to his childhood in the South Bronx, and illustrates his rise from the 1970s jazz lofts and extended work with pianist Cecil Taylor to the present day. He outlines how Parker’s early influences—Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and writers of the Black Arts Movement—grounded Parker’s aesthetic and musical practice in a commitment to community and the struggle for justice and freedom. Throughout, Bradley foregrounds Parker’s understanding of music, the role of the artist, and the relationship between art, politics, and social transformation. Intimate and capacious, Universal Tonality is the definitive work on Parker’s life and music.

This book initiates "the first critical appraisal of the whole of Western tonal consciousness, from the discoveries of Pythagoras to the latest popular song." While tonality has been unwittingly championed as the product of the bourgeois age in Europe and America from 1600 to 1900, Norton states, key-centered music is understood here merely to exhibit components of an encompassing sonic expressivity as durable as any language. The author analyzes fundamental components of Western tonal phenomena that have persisted in music from ancient Jewish cantillation to the so-called atonal procedures of the Schoenberg school and beyond. Norton isolates the role of traditional music theory in the creation of models that attempted to explain tonality solely in terms of the concretized and limited objectivity of the musical score. The author evaluates and discards those features of logical positivism, scientific empiricism, idealism, and vitalism that in his view have encumbered virtually all speculation on tonality. With this negation, his aim is to restore the composer as a creator subject to his own sonic object. The book's approach is particularly indebted to the thought of Theodor Adorno, the member of the Frankfurt School of critical theorists that Norton finds most capable of suggesting an authentic dialectic of tonality. The author interprets the activities of both theorists and composers from various periods within the context of their mutual and conflicting historical interests. Ranging through the fields of physics, acoustics, psychology, sociology, economics, and historical musicology and criticism, Norton demonstrates that the cognitive abilities and disabilities of humans as tonal hearers form a necessary ground for understanding the remarkable vitality of tonality as historical process. Current theories of human tonal activity are hopelessly limited, the book concludes, however self-preserving they have become through the sanction of academic respectability. In short, tonal science, as it is commonly practiced, is not tonal truth. In its place the author urges a thoroughgoing critique of the language and methodology of contemporary tonal speculation, an abandonment of its confining sphere of interest, and a new and liberating approach to tonal consciousness that incorporates all relevant data of human sonic cognition. This approach assumes that tonality is not merely the result of the physical unfolding of natural appearance--the overtone series that so enchanted Rameau, Schenker, Hindemith, and others--and the submission of composers to its assumed authority. Tonality is, rather, Norton contends, a decision made against the chaos of pitch and for the human potential to create works of music that speak with integrity and beauty, that as aesthetic creations neither lag behind nor rush ahead of human enjoyment and understanding.

A defense of Schenkerian analysis of tonality in music.

A fascinating interdisciplinary approach to how everyday Western music works, and why the tones, melodies, and chords combine as they do. Despite the cultural diversity of our globalized world, most Western music is still structured around major and minor scales and chords. Countless thinkers and scientists of the past have struggled to explain the nature and origin of musical structures. In Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality, music psychologist Richard Parncutt offers a fresh take, combining music theory—Rameau’s fundamental bass, Riemann’s harmonic function, Schenker’s hierarchic analysis, Forte’s pitch-class set theory—with psychology—Bregman’s auditory scene, Terhardt’s virtual pitch, Krumhansl’s tonal hierarchy. Drawing on statistical analyses of notated music corpora, Parncutt charts a middle path between cultural relativism and scientific positivism to bring music theory into meaningful discourse with empirical research. Our musical subjectivity, Parncutt explains, depends on our past musical experience and hence on music history and its social contexts. It also depends on physical sound properties, as investigated in psychoacoustics with auditory experiments and mathematical models. Parncutt’s evidence-based theory of major-minor tonality draws on his interdisciplinary background to present a theory that is comprehensive, creative, and critical. Examining concepts of interval, consonance, chord root, leading tone, harmonic progression, and modulation, he asks: Why are some scale tones and chord progressions more common than others? What aspects of major-minor tonality are based on human biology or general perceptual principles? What aspects are culturally arbitrary? And what about colonial history? Original and provocative, Psychoacoustic Foundations of Major-Minor Tonality promises to become a foundational text in both music theory and music cognition.

"A book of landmark importance. It is unprecedented in its design: a brilliantly selected group of essays on music coupled with lucid, deeply incisive, and in every way masterly analysis of Adorno's thinking about music. No one who studies Adorno and music will be able to dispense with it; and if they can afford only one book on Adorno and music, this will be the one. For in miniature, it contains everything one needs: a collection of exceptionally important writings on all the principal aspects of music and musical life with which Adorno dealt; totally reliable scholarship; and powerfully illuminating commentary that will help readers at all levels read and re-read the essays in question."—Rose Rosengard Subotnik, author of Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society "An invaluable contribution to Adorno scholarship, with well chosen essays on composers, works, the culture industry, popular music, kitsch, and technology. Leppert's introduction and commentaries are consistently useful; his attention to secondary literature remarkable; his interpretation responsible. The new translations by Susan Gillespie (and others) are outstanding not only for their care and readability, but also for their sensitivity to Adorno's forms and styles."—Lydia Goehr, author of The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics and the Limits of Philosophy "With its careful, full edition of Adorno's important musical texts and its exhaustive yet eminently readable commentaries, Richard Leppert's magisterial book represents a brilliant solution to the age-old dilemma of bringing together primary text and interpretation in one volume."—James Deaville, Director, School of the Arts, McMaster University "The developing variations of Adorno's life-long involvement with musical themes are fully audible in this remarkable collection. What might be called his 'literature on notes' brilliantly complements the 'notes to literature' he devoted to the written word. Richard Leppert's superb commentaries constitute a book-length contribution in their own right, which will enlighten and challenge even the most learned of Adorno scholars."—Martin Jay, author of The Dialectical Imagination: A History of The Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research "There is afoot in Anglo-American musicology today the first wholesale reconsideration of Adorno's thought since the pioneering work of Rose Rosengard Subotnik around 1980. Essays on Music will play a central role in this effort. It will do so because Richard Leppert has culled Adorno's writings so as to make clear to musicologists the place of music in the broad critique of modernity that was Adorno's overarching project; and it will do so because Leppert has explained these writings, in commentaries that amount to a book-length study, so as to reveal to non-musicologists the essentially musical foundation of this project. No one interested in Adorno from any perspective—or, for that matter, in modernity and music all told—can afford to ignore Essays on Music."—Gary Tomlinson, author of Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera "This book is both a major achievement by its author-editor and a remarkable act of scholarly generosity for the rest of us. Until now, English translations of Adorno's major essays on music have been scattered and often unreliable. Until now, there has been no comprehensive scholarly treatment of Adorno's musical thinking. This volume remedies both problems at a single stroke. It will be read equally—and eagerly—for Adorno's texts and for Richard Leppert's commentary on them, both of which will continue to be essential resources as musical scholarship seeks increasingly to come to grips with the social contexts and effects of music. No one knows Adorno better than Leppert, and no one is better equipped to clarify the complex interweaving of sociology, philosophy, and musical aesthetics that is central to Adorno's work. From now on, everyone who reads Adorno on music, whether a beginner or an expert, is in Richard Leppert's debt for devoting his exceptional gifts of learning and lucidity to this project."—Lawrence Kramer, author of Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History

The 1889 Exposition universelle in Paris is famous as a turning point in the history of French music, and modern music generally. This book explores the ways in which music was used, exhibited, listened to, and written about during the Exposition universelle. It also reveals the sociopolitical uses of music in France during the 19th century.

A guide for music: compositions, events, forms, genres, groups, history, industry, instruments, language, live music, musicians, songs, musicology, techniques, terminology , theory, music video. Music is a human activity which involves structured and audible sounds, which is used for artistic or aesthetic, entertainment, or ceremonial purposes. The traditional or classical European aspects of music often listed are those elements given primacy in European-influenced classical music: melody, harmony, rhythm, tone color/timbre, and form. A more comprehensive list is given by stating the aspects of sound: pitch, timbre, loudness, and duration. Common terms used to discuss particular pieces include melody, which is a succession of notes heard as some sort of unit; chord, which is a simultaneity of notes heard as some sort of unit; chord progression, which is a succession of chords (simultaneity succession); harmony, which is the relationship between two or more pitches; counterpoint, which is the simultaneity and organization of different melodies; and rhythm, which is the organization of the durational aspects of music.

Haynes (U. of Montreal) traces the history of musical pitch standards over the last four centuries, linking frequency values to pitch names and telling where, when, and why various pitch levels have been used. With a focus on Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the Hapsburg lands, he covers the pitches of about 1,400 historical instruments and how the design and function influenced and were influenced by changes in pitch. In addition, he studies the effect of pitch differences on musical notation and choice of key. The author has also written a book on the oboe, the instrument that plays the "A" to which a symphony orchestra tunes. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR