Tonality in Western Culture

Download Tonality in Western Culture PDF Online Free

Author :
Release : 1984
Genre : Music
Kind :
Book Rating : /5 ( reviews)

Tonality in Western Culture - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Tonality in Western Culture write by Richard Norton. This book was released on 1984. Tonality in Western Culture available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.

Tonality in Western Culture

Download Tonality in Western Culture PDF Online Free

Author :
Release : 1984
Genre : Music
Kind :
Book Rating : /5 ( reviews)

Tonality in Western Culture - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Tonality in Western Culture write by Richard Norton. This book was released on 1984. Tonality in Western Culture available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.

Tonal Consciousness and the Medieval West

Download Tonal Consciousness and the Medieval West PDF Online Free

Author :
Release : 2008
Genre : History
Kind :
Book Rating : 068/5 ( reviews)

Tonal Consciousness and the Medieval West - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Tonal Consciousness and the Medieval West write by Fiona McAlpine. This book was released on 2008. Tonal Consciousness and the Medieval West available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Tonal consciousness, in the sense of a clear intuition about which note or chord a piece of music will finish on, is as much a part of our everyday experience of music as it is of contemporary music theory. This book asks to what extent such tonal consciousness might have operated in the minds of musicians of the Middle Ages, given the different tone world found in the modes of Gregorian chant, in troubadour and trouvère music, in Minnesang and in the early polyphony based upon chant. The author's approach is analytical, focusing on modality and balancing up-to-date concepts and methods of music analysis with those insights into their own compositional needs and processes that the people of the Middle Ages provided themselves through their writings about music. The book examines a range of both music sources and theoretical sources from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. This is a ground-breaking contribution both to the study of medieval music and to music analysis.

Beyond Exoticism

Download Beyond Exoticism PDF Online Free

Author :
Release : 2007-03-05
Genre : Music
Kind :
Book Rating : 687/5 ( reviews)

Beyond Exoticism - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Beyond Exoticism write by Timothy D. Taylor. This book was released on 2007-03-05. Beyond Exoticism available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. DIVStudy of how systems of power and domination have shaped representations of otherness in music./div

The Organ in Western Culture, 750-1250

Download The Organ in Western Culture, 750-1250 PDF Online Free

Author :
Release : 1993
Genre : Music
Kind :
Book Rating : 079/5 ( reviews)

The Organ in Western Culture, 750-1250 - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Organ in Western Culture, 750-1250 write by Peter Williams. This book was released on 1993. The Organ in Western Culture, 750-1250 available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. How did the organ become a church instrument? In this fascinating investigation Peter Williams speculates on this question and suggests some likely answers. Central to the story he uncovers is the liveliness of European monasticism around 1000 and the ability and imagination of the Benedictine reformers.