György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre: Postmodernism, Musico-Dramatic Form and the Grotesque

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1315531283
Total Pages : 154 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (155 download)

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Book Synopsis György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre: Postmodernism, Musico-Dramatic Form and the Grotesque by : Peter Edwards

Download or read book György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre: Postmodernism, Musico-Dramatic Form and the Grotesque written by Peter Edwards and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-08-05 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre (1974–77, revised 1996) has consolidated its position as one of the major operatic works of the twentieth century. Few operas composed since the 1970s have received such numerous productions, bringing the eclectic score to a global audience. Famously dubbed by Ligeti as an ‘anti-anti-opera’, the piece is a highly ambiguous, apocalyptic fable about the human condition, fear of death and the final judgement. As the first book in English solely dedicated to discussion of this work, György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre: Postmodernism, Musico-Dramatic Form and the Grotesque offers new perspectives on the opera’s musico-dramatic identity in the context of musical postmodernism. Peter Edwards draws on a range of modernist and postmodernist theories to explore the collision of past styles and genre models in the opera, its expressive states and its engagement with the grotesque. This is ably supported by musical analysis and extensive study of Ligeti’s sketch materials held at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel. Edwards’s analyses culminate in a new approach to examining the opera’s rich multiplicities, the composition of the musical material and the nature of Ligeti’s relationship with the musical past. This is a key reference work in the fields of musical modernism and postmodernism, opera studies and the music of Ligeti.

György Ligeti's Cultural Identities

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317105109
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (171 download)

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Book Synopsis György Ligeti's Cultural Identities by : Amy Bauer

Download or read book György Ligeti's Cultural Identities written by Amy Bauer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since György Ligeti’s death in 2006, there has been a growing acknowledgement of how central he was to the late twentieth-century cultural landscape. This collection is the first book devoted to exploring the composer’s life and music within the context of his East European roots, revealing his dual identities as both Hungarian national and cosmopolitan modernist. Contributors explore the artistic and socio-cultural contexts of Ligeti’s early works, including composition and music theory, the influence of East European folk music, notions of home and identity, his ambivalent attitude to his Hungarian past and his references to his homeland in his later music. Many of the valuable insights offered profit from new research undertaken at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, while also drawing on the knowledge of long-time associates such as the composer’s assistant, Louise Duchesneau. The contributions as a whole reveal Ligeti’s thoroughly cosmopolitan milieu and values, and illuminate why his music continues to inspire new generations of performers, composers and listeners.

War and Death in the Music of George Crumb

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Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000644677
Total Pages : 156 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (6 download)

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Book Synopsis War and Death in the Music of George Crumb by : Abigail Shupe

Download or read book War and Death in the Music of George Crumb written by Abigail Shupe and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-09-02 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies George Crumb’s The Winds of Destiny (2004) and Black Angels (1970) as artifacts of collective memory and cultural trauma. It situates these two pieces in Crumb’s output and unpacks the complex methodologies needed to understand these pieces as contributions and challenges to traditional narratives of the Civil War and the Vietnam War. The Winds of Destiny is shown to be a critical commentary on the legacy of American wars and militarism, both concepts crucial to American identity. The Winds of Destiny also acts as an ironic war memorial as a means of critiquing such concepts. Black Angels has long been associated with the Vietnam War. This book shows how this association began and how it endures through connections to iconic Vietnam War media, including films and books. Together these analyses show the legacy of trauma in American collective memory, which is in a continuous crisis. Crumb’s musical critiques point to a need to resist conventional narratives and to begin to heal trauma on a collective level. This book will be of interest to students of contemporary American music, American studies, and memory studies. It benefits readers by newly situating Crumb’s music within these three fields of study.

Slapstick: An Interdisciplinary Companion

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Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110571986
Total Pages : 423 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (15 download)

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Book Synopsis Slapstick: An Interdisciplinary Companion by : Ervin Malakaj

Download or read book Slapstick: An Interdisciplinary Companion written by Ervin Malakaj and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-10-25 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite its unabated popularity with audiences, slapstick has received rather little scholarly attention, mostly by scholars concentrating on the US theater and cinema traditions. Nonetheless, as a form of physical humor slapstick has a long history across various areas of cultural production. This volume approaches slapstick both as a genre of situational physical comedy and as a mode of communicating an affective situation captured in various cultural products. Contributors to the volume examine cinematic, literary, dramatic, musical, and photographic texts and performances. From medieval chivalric romance and nineteenth-century theater to contemporary photography, the contributors study treatments of slapstick across media, periods and geographic locations. The aim of a study of such wide scope is to demonstrate how slapstick emerged from a variety of complex interactions among different traditions and by extension, to illustrate that slapstick can be highly productive for interdisciplinary research.

The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 131704245X
Total Pages : 518 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music by : Björn Heile

Download or read book The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music written by Björn Heile and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-29 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernism in music still arouses passions and is riven by controversies. Taking root in the early decades of the twentieth century, it achieved ideological dominance for almost three decades following the Second World War, before becoming the object of widespread critique in the last two decades of the century, both from critics and composers of a postmodern persuasion and from prominent scholars associated with the ‘new musicology’. Yet these critiques have failed to dampen its ongoing resilience. The picture of modernism has considerably broadened and diversified, and has remained a pivotal focus of debate well into the twenty-first century. This Research Companion does not seek to limit what musical modernism might be. At the same time, it resists any dilution of the term that would see its indiscriminate application to practically any and all music of a certain period. In addition to addressing issues already well established in modernist studies such as aesthetics, history, institutions, place, diaspora, cosmopolitanism, production and performance, communication technologies and the interface with postmodernism, this volume also explores topics that are less established; among them: modernism and affect, modernism and comedy, modernism versus the ‘contemporary’, and the crucial distinction between modernism in popular culture and a ‘popular modernism’, a modernism of the people. In doing so, this text seeks to define modernism in music by probing its margins as much as by restating its supposed essence.

New Music Theatre in Europe

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429837372
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (298 download)

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Book Synopsis New Music Theatre in Europe by : Robert Adlington

Download or read book New Music Theatre in Europe written by Robert Adlington and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1955 and 1975 music theatre became a central preoccupation for European composers digesting the consequences of the revolutionary experiments in musical language that followed the end of the Second World War. The ‘new music theatre’ wrought multiple, significant transformations, serving as a crucible for the experimental rethinking of theatrical traditions, artistic genres, the conventions of performance, and the composer’s relation to society. This volume brings together leading specialists from across Europe to offer a new appraisal of the genre. It is structured according to six themes that investigate: the relation of new music theatre to earlier and contemporaneous theories of drama; the use of new technologies; the relation of new music theatre to progressive politics; the role of new venues and environments; the advancement of new conceptions of the performer; and the challenges that new music theatre lays down for music analysis. Contributing authors address canonical works by composers such as Berio, Birtwistle, Henze, Kagel, Ligeti, Nono, and Zimmermann, but also expand the field to figures and artistic developments not regularly represented in existing music histories. Particular attention is given to new music theatre as a site of intense exchange – between practitioners of different art forms, across national borders, and with diverse mediating institutions.

The Music of Pavel Haas

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429781733
Total Pages : 259 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (297 download)

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Book Synopsis The Music of Pavel Haas by : Martin Čurda

Download or read book The Music of Pavel Haas written by Martin Čurda and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-03 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Czech composer Pavel Haas (1899–1944) is commonly positioned in the history of twentieth-century music as a representative of Leoš Janáček’s compositional school and as one of the Jewish composers imprisoned by the Nazis in the concentration camp of Terezín (Theresienstadt). However, the nature of Janáček’s influence remains largely unexplained and the focus on the context of the Holocaust tends to yield a one-sided view of Haas’s oeuvre. The existing scholarship offers limited insight into Haas’s compositional idiom and does not sufficiently explain the composer’s position with respect to broader aesthetic trends and artistic networks in inter-war Czechoslovakia and beyond. This book is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive (albeit necessarily selective) discussion of Haas’s music since the publication of Lubomír Peduzzi’s ‘life and work’ monograph in 1993. It provides the reader with an enhanced understanding of Haas’s music through analytical and hermeneutical interpretation as well as cultural and aesthetic contextualisation, and thus reveal the rich nuances of Haas’s multi-faceted work which have not been sufficiently recognised so far.

The Musical Thought and Spiritual Lives of Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 135197579X
Total Pages : 282 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (519 download)

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Book Synopsis The Musical Thought and Spiritual Lives of Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg by : Matthew Arndt

Download or read book The Musical Thought and Spiritual Lives of Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg written by Matthew Arndt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-11 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the origin, content, and development of the musical thought of Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg. One of the premises is that Schenker’s and Schoenberg’s inner musical lives are inseparable from their inner spiritual lives. Curiously, Schenker and Schoenberg start out in much the same musical-spiritual place, yet musically they split while spiritually they grow closer. The reception of Schenker’s and Schoenberg’s work has sidestepped this paradox of commonality and conflict, instead choosing to universalize and amplify their conflict. Bringing to light a trove of unpublished material, Arndt argues that Schenker’s and Schoenberg’s conflict is a reflection of tensions within their musical and spiritual ideas. They share a particular conception of the tone as an ideal sound realized in the spiritual eye of the genius. The tensions inherent in this largely psychological and material notion of the tone and this largely metaphysical notion of the genius shape both their musical divergence on the logical (technical) level in theory and composition, including their advocacy of the Ursatz versus twelvetone composition, and their spiritual convergence, including their embrace of Judaism. These findings shed new light on the musical and philosophical worlds of Schenker and Schoenberg and on the profound artistic and spiritual questions with which they grapple.

Compositional Process in Elliott Carter’s String Quartets

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429619510
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (296 download)

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Book Synopsis Compositional Process in Elliott Carter’s String Quartets by : Laura Emmery

Download or read book Compositional Process in Elliott Carter’s String Quartets written by Laura Emmery and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-20 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compositional Process in Elliott Carter’s String Quartets is an interdisciplinary study examining the evolution and compositional process in Elliott Carter’s five string quartets. Offering a systematic and logical way of unpacking concepts and processes in these quartets that would otherwise remain opaque, the book’s narrative reveals new aspects of understanding these works and draws novel conclusions on their collective meaning and Carter’s place as the leading American modernist. Each of Carter’s five string quartets is driven by a new idea that Carter was exploring during a particular period, which allows for each quartet to be examined under a unique lens and a deeper understanding of his oeuvre at large. Drawing on key ideas from a variety of subjects including performance studies, philosophy, music cognition, musical meaning and semantics, literary criticism, and critical theory, this is an informative volume for scholars and researchers in the areas of music theory and musicology. Analyses are supplemented with sketch study, correspondence, text manuscripts, and other archival sources from the Paul Sacher Stiftung, the Library of Congress, and the New York Public Library.

Cinema and Experience

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Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520265599
Total Pages : 406 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (22 download)

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Book Synopsis Cinema and Experience by : Miriam Hansen

Download or read book Cinema and Experience written by Miriam Hansen and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kracauer. Film, medium of a disintegrating world. -- Curious Americanism. -- Benjamin. Actuality, antinomies. -- Aura: the appropriation of a concept. -- Mistaking the moon for a ball. -- Micky-maus. -- Room-for-play. -- Adorno. The question of film aesthetics. -- Kracauer in exile. Theory of film.

Ligeti's Stylistic Crisis

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Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 0810872501
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (18 download)

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Book Synopsis Ligeti's Stylistic Crisis by : Michael D. Searby

Download or read book Ligeti's Stylistic Crisis written by Michael D. Searby and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2010 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923-2006) was one of the most innovative and influential composers of the last 50 years. Ligeti reached his creative maturity in the 1970s and 1980s. This book focuses on how Ligeti's compositional style completely transformed during and after the composition of his only opera Le Grand Macabre (1974-77).

Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000452395
Total Pages : 186 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (4 download)

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Book Synopsis Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras by : Norton Dudeque

Download or read book Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras written by Norton Dudeque and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras demonstrates how the composer achieved his own Brazilian neoclassical style in a group of works, nine suites in total, that is arguably one of the best examples of homage to J.S. Bach’s music in the twentieth century. In this book, the corpus of Bachianas Brasileiras is contextualized and critically examined according to its structure and intertextual aspects, as well as its relationship to Bach’s music, Brazilian popular music, and other works by contemporaries of Villa Lobos. A range of musical examples illustrate instances of the selected topics in the works, encompassing urban Brazilian popular music such as the choro, Brazilian northeast and afro rhythms, and citation of folkloric melodies. Dudeque’s comprehensive examination of the Bachianas Brasileiras will be invaluable for scholars and researchers of music theory and analysis.

Modern Music and After

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780199792283
Total Pages : 480 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (922 download)

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Book Synopsis Modern Music and After by : Paul Griffiths

Download or read book Modern Music and After written by Paul Griffiths and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-16 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over three decades, Paul Griffiths's survey has remained the definitive study of music since the Second World War; this fully revised and updated edition re-establishes Modern Music and After as the preeminent introduction to the music of our time. The disruptions of the war, and the struggles of the ensuing peace, were reflected in the music of the time: in Pierre Boulez's radical reformation of compositional technique and in John Cage's development of zen music; in Milton Babbitt's settling of the serial system and in Dmitry Shostakovich's unsettling symphonies; in Karlheinz Stockhausen's development of electronic music and in Luigi Nono's pursuit of the universally human, in Iannis Xenakis's view of music as sounding mathematics and in Luciano Berio's consideration of it as language. The initiatives of these composers and their contemporaries opened prospects that haven't yet stopped unfolding. This constant expansion of musical thinking since 1945 has left us with no singular history of music; Griffiths's study accordingly follows several different paths, showing how and why they converge and diverge. This new edition of Modern Music and After discusses not only the music of the fifteen years that have passed since the previous edition, but also the recent explosion of scholarly interest in the latter half of the twentieth century. In particular, the book has been expanded to incorporate the variety of responses to the modernist impasse experienced by composers of the 1980s and 1990s. Griffiths then moves the book into the twenty-first century as he examines such highly influential composers as Helmut Lachenmann and Salvatore Sciarrino. For its breadth, wealth of detail, and characteristic wit and clarity, the third edition of Modern Music and After is required reading for the student and the enquiring listener.

Becoming

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Publisher : Syracuse University Press
ISBN 13 : 0815654642
Total Pages : 339 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (156 download)

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Book Synopsis Becoming by : Kavita Mudan Finn

Download or read book Becoming written by Kavita Mudan Finn and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The NBC series Hannibal has garnered both critical and fan acclaim for its cinematic qualities, its complex characters, and its innovative reworking of Thomas Harris’s mythology so well-known from Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991) and its variants. The series concluded late in 2015 after three seasons, despite widespread fan support for its continuation. While there is a healthy body of scholarship on Harris’s novels and Demme’s film adaptation, little critical attention has been paid to this newest iteration of the character and narrative. Hannibal builds on the serial killer narratives of popular procedurals, while taking them in a drastically different direction. Like critically acclaimed series such as Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, it makes its viewers complicit in the actions of a deeply problematic individual and, in the case of Hannibal, forces them to confront that complicity through the character of Will Graham. The essays in Becoming explore these questions of authorship and audience response as well as the show’s themes of horror, gore, cannibalism, queerness, and transformation. Contributors also address Hannibal’s distinctive visual, auditory, and narrative style. Concluding with a compelling interview with series writer Nick Antosca, this volume will both entertain and educate scholars and fans of Hannibal and its many iterations.

The Musical Topic

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Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253112362
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (531 download)

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Book Synopsis The Musical Topic by : Raymond Monelle

Download or read book The Musical Topic written by Raymond Monelle and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2006-09-21 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Musical Topic discusses three tropes prominently featured in Western European music: the hunt, the military, and the pastoral. Raymond Monelle provides an in-depth cultural and historical study of musical topics -- short melodic figures, harmonic or rhythmic formulae carrying literal or lexical meaning -- through consideration of their origin, thematization, manifestation, and meaning. The Musical Topic shows the connections of musical meaning to literature, social history, and the fine arts.

The Music of Mauricio Kagel

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 135154229X
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (515 download)

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Book Synopsis The Music of Mauricio Kagel by : Bj Heile

Download or read book The Music of Mauricio Kagel written by Bj Heile and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mauricio Kagel was undoubtedly one of the major figures in the new music of the last fifty years. Growing up in the rich cultural atmosphere of Buenos Aires in the 1940s and '50s, where the writer Jorge Luis Borges was one of his teachers, he became a member of avant-garde circles as well as receiving a rigorous musical education. By 1957 Kagel had acted on the advice of Pierre Boulez to move to Europe to pursue a career as a composer. He quickly established himself at Cologne, the rallying point for young composers at the time, and became one of the leading, if controversial, figures at the famous Darmstadt summer courses. He embraced multiple serialism, aleatory technique and electronics, but he is best known for his pioneering explorations in music theatre, radio play, film and mixed media. Bj rn Heile charts Kagel's compositional development, considering the aesthetic and ideological issues the composer raises in his work. Focusing on Kagel's use of music as a means of intellectual inquiry, Heile shows Kagel to constantly question the nature of music and its role in society. Kagel's broadening of the concept of music to include theatre, film and other media, his disdain for purism as well as his subversive humour and sense of the absurd have challenged reified notions of music and art. Heile considers Kagel's background as Argentine immigrant to Europe (born to Russian-Jewish immigrants to Argentina) to situate the composer's aesthetic. What emerges is the breadth of Kagel's imagination and the multiplicity of contexts he drew from, which were both distinctive and, in the age of pluralist multiculturalism and globalization, exemplary. As Heile demonstrates, it was Kagel's enlarged notion of music as inherently multimedial that may be his most important contribution to new music, and on which his reputation ultimately rests.

Obiter Dicta

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Author :
Publisher : punctum books
ISBN 13 : 1685710026
Total Pages : 391 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (857 download)

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Book Synopsis Obiter Dicta by : Erick Verran

Download or read book Obiter Dicta written by Erick Verran and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2021-10-14 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stitched together over five years of journaling, Obiter Dicta is a commonplace book of freewheeling explorations representing the transcription of a dozen notebooks, since painstakingly reimagined for publication. Organized after Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia, this unschooled exercise in aesthetic thought--gleefully dilettantish, oftentimes dangerously close to the epigrammatic--interrogates an array of subject matter (although inescapably circling back to the curiously resemblant histories of Western visual art and instrumental music) through the lens of drive-by speculation. Erick Verran's approach to philosophical inquiry follows the brute-force literary technique of Jacques Derrida to exhaustively favor the material grammar of a signifier over hand-me-down meaning, juxtaposing outer semblances with their buried systems and our etched-in-stone intuitions about color and illusion, shape and value, with lessons stolen from seemingly unrelatable disciplines. Interlarded with extracts of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy as well as Roland Barthes, this cache of incidental remarks eschews what's granular for the biggest picture available, leaving below the hyper-specialized fields of academia for a bird's-eye view of their crop circles. Obiter Dicta is an unapologetic experiment in intellectual dot-connecting that challenges much long-standing wisdom about everything from illuminated manuscripts to Minecraft and the evolution of European music with lyrical brevity; that is, before jumping to the next topic.