Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.
2010
Music is a powerful cultural medium. The volume explores the varied roles that music plays in human culture and society, and its unique symbolic and communicative properties. Contributors discuss Richard Wagner, Bob Dylan, John Cage, Eric Burdon, and Igor Stravinsky. From electronic and inner-city DIY to world music and rock concerts, the book looks at music’s part in creating the human sense of place, space, transcendence and identity. Philosophers, cultural thinkers, and sociologists collaborate to explain the exhilaration and fascination that human beings experience when they listen to music. Table of Contents Volume Foreword vii Chapter One Introduction: Philosophical and Cultural Theories of Music Eduardo De La Fuente and Peter Murphy Chapter Two Modern Hermeneutics and the Presentation of Opera Agnes Heller Chapter Three Algo-Rhythm and Mello-dy: A Consideration of the Relationship Between Technology and the Embodied Performance of Music Daniel Black Chapter Four Bob Dylan Ain’t Talking: One Man’s Vast Comic Adventure in American Music, Dramaturgy, and Mysticism Peter Murphy Chapter Five Music and Religion: Reflections on Cultural Secularization David Roberts Chapter Six Prophet and Priest, Ascetic and Mystic: Towards a Cultural Sociology of the Twentieth Century Composer Eduardo De La Fuente Chapter Seven Collective Effervescence, Numinous Experience or Proto-Religious Phenomena? Moshing with Durkheim, Schleiermacher and Otto Mark Jennings Chapter Eight Music as a Space of Possibilities 129 John Rundell Chapter Nine Some Suggestions for a Phenomenology of Rhythm Stuart Grant Chapter Ten The Paradox of “Do-it-Yourself” in Unpopular Music Joseph Borlagdan Chapter Eleven Musical Culturespeak and Cosmopolitan Identities in Australian Multiculturalism Graeme Smith Chapter Twelve The Piano and Cultural Modernity in East Asia Alison Tokita Chapter Thirteen Popular Music, Cultural Memory and Everyday Aesthetics Andy Bennett Chapter Fourteen Everything is Dirt: Reevaluating the Place of Cultural Status in Producing Aesthetic Attachment Claudio E. Benzecry Chapter Fifteen Musical Listening and Boundary-Work Michael Walsh
Journal of Material Culture, v. 16, n. 4, pp. 1-13
Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2023
The difficulty of capturing or deciphering music in words is largely why the same questions continue to be asked and the same tensions continue to be explored. Contributors to this special issue add fresh perspectives and new insights to these enduring themes and inquiries, looking at music in both the general sense and examining specific musical pieces, movements, and moments. Each article has its own focus, makes its own arguments, and occupies its own branch(es) of philosophy: ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, politics, and, of course, aesthetics. Beyond the centralizing subject of music, what ties them together and into the best of philosophical traditions is that they not only ask big questions but also, in seeking to answer them, add more questions to the ongoing discourse.
The Musical Quarterly, 74/3, 385–410., 1990
2012
ABSTRACT: This commentary discusses the anthropological implications of Richard Widess ’ paper by summarizing some anthropological approaches to music, especially focusing on the way musical participation inculcates and transmits an aesthetic orientation that guides action across cultural domains such as politics, economics and religion. The paper ends by suggesting that the heart of human culture is more likely to be an aesthetic orientation than a script or set of rules, and traces out some reasons why music does this so well.
Sounding Places: More-than-representational geographies of sound and music, 2019
This chapter is about musical interventions in public space and their role in the visceral politics of collective life. The ubiquitous presence of music across the spaces and situations of everyday life makes it a fruitful terrain for exploring the constitution, maintenance, and regulation of the nature of social situations. The chapter draws on the ongoing conceptualization of a ‘musical cosmopolitanism’ which has been debated considerably across the field of musicology, and puts it in relation with work in human geography which has engaged with music and sound from the perspective of non-representational theory. This results in a rethinking of cosmopolitanism in relation to sound and music, which understands the political potential of music as realized within the mundane goings-on of everyday spaces through the concept of visceral politics, as one way that music might matter in the transformation of social situations.
2019
Theorists and musicologists have asked what particular musical works mean, what particular musical objects represent, what they narrate or disclose, and how those meanings got there. Recently, some thinkers have jettisoned music-language parallels in favor of investigating music’s ineffability, its sensuous effects, and the materialities of its performances. However, both routes of inquiry, whether sympathetic to the music-language analogy or not, rest on assumptions about the concept of meaning itself. Both typically ground the music-language analogy in the semantic aspects of language meaning—how language repressents, refers to, or discloses the world. If meaning and semantic representation are conflated, music’s efficacy—which exceeds its representational modalities—becomes, dissatisfyingly, the other of its meanings. This project challenges the status of representation in conceptions of the music-language analogy, developing an alternative foundation for understanding musical meaning from philosopher J. L. Austin’s concept of “performative utterances.” Austin and other thinkers in a tradition now called “ordinary language philosophy” rejected the view that language meaning is chiefly a matter of how it represents states of affairs or states of mind—its constative dimension. The performative dimension of language, however, names the ways words and sentences are used to accomplish semiotic actions and produce effects. This concept grounds language meaning in the efficacy of language use in social praxis. In Chapter 1, I develop an analogous theory of musical meaning, grounded in the semiotic actions and effects produced by music as utterance. Music is often said to be, if anything, expressive; but expression—strictly speaking, the mapping of inner content to outer signifying form—is a weak conceptual basis for what we think of when describe music as expressive. Instead, conceiving of music’s meaningfulness in terms of its efficacy as sonic utterance supplies the condition of possibility for musical expression, reference, and disclosure while also eliminating the false dichotomy between music’s meanings and its effects. In Chapters 2 through 4, drawing on fieldwork at European festivals of new music including the Darmstadt Summer Courses and Donaueschinger Musiktage, I explore works by four living composers and sound artists: Michael Beil, Peter Ablinger, Stefan Prins, and Ashley Fure. These works exemplify what I call an aesthetics of efficacy, and their meanings centrally involve the performance of communicative actions such as: the incitement of particular modes of listening, the construction of narrative identities, and the enactment of changed attitudes through musical sound and story. For instance, Ashley Fure’s The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects (2016) is a musical engagement with the problems of the Anthropocene. Through the lens of performative utterance, I characterize it as an ecocritical intervention. Fure’s work creates an abstract narrative that seeks to bring out a sense of the vibrancy and animacy of the non-human objects that star in the piece: vibrating speaker cones, percussion instruments, and elements of the mise-en-scène. Fure aims to incite listeners to leave the concert space with stronger senses of empathy and productive anxiety towards the vibrational events of the Anthropocene, including fracking-induced earthquakes or the calving of glaciers into warming oceans. The encouragement of empathies and incitement of anxieties towards the planetary ecosystem are highly salient aspects of the piece’s meaning, and these are, fundamentally, semiotic actions performed by musical sound. To fully probe performative utterance and understand its value for musical study, we must expand beyond the study of art music to investigate music in contemporary social life. Like scholars who have used Austin’s work to investigate the injurious efficacy of hate speech, I turn to examine the ethico-political stakes of the performative utterance concept, theorizing music’s potential to become injurious utterance. In Chapter 5, I critique tendencies to frame discussions concerning music as violence in materialist terms, and expose some shortcomings of this materialist, vibrational model. In Chapter 6, I conduct an observational cyber-ethnography of web forums for adult entertainers and their patrons, showing how both groups discuss strip club music’s capacity to elicit erotic dance and facilitate forms of sex work that take place in adult entertainment establishments. I argue that, for victims trafficked into strip clubs, music’s efficacy surpasses its prompting and facilitating functions, becoming the semiotic enactment of sexual violence. Music functions contextually to induce behaviors that promote precarity and rob victims of sexual agency, prompting striptease and lap dances as well as the forced solicitation of commercial sex within grossly uneven power differentials. The final chapters offer a corrective to the admittedly attractive view that music is inherently personally and socially therapeutic, arguing that such thinking is ideological and politically inefficacious.
Enseñanza a distancia, 2023
Danish Journal of Archaeology, 2022
Real Time Fraud Detection Using Machine Learning , 2024
Bleu Autour, 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt_2nKg2B4Q, 2020
La educación en campos disciplinares – Parte I. Educación Artística, 2024
Meridional. Revista de Estudios Latinoamericanos , 2022
Asian Journal of Economics, Business and Accounting
Revista de Museología "Kóot", 2019
περιοδικό "Διοικητική Ενημέρωση", τ.57, 2012
Journal of Pharmacy and Science, 2018
Trends in Immunology, 2014
International Journal of Computer Trends and Technology, 2014