The Oxford Handbook Of The New Cultural History Of Music

As the field of Cultural History grows in prominence in the academic world, an understanding of the history of culture has become vital to scholars across disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music cultivates a return to the fundamental premises of cultural history in the cutting-edge work of musicologists concerned with cultural history and historians who deal with music. In this volume, noted academics from both of these disciplines illustrate the continuing endeavor of cultural history to grasp the realms of human experience, understanding, and communication as they are manifest or expressed symbolically through various layers of culture and in many forms of art. The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music fosters and reflects a sustained dialogue about their shared goals and techniques, rejuvenating their work with new insights into the field itself.

As the field of Cultural History grows in prominence in the academic world, an understanding of the history of culture has become vital to scholars across disciplines. The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music cultivates a return to the fundamental premises of cultural history in the cutting-edge work of musicologists concerned with cultural history and historians who deal with music. In this volume, noted academics from both of these disciplines illustrate the continuing endeavor of cultural history to grasp the realms of human experience, understanding, and communication as they are manifest or expressed symbolically through various layers of culture and in many forms of art. The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music fosters and reflects a sustained dialogue about their shared goals and techniques, rejuvenating their work with new insights into the field itself.

This volume demonstrates a new approach to cultural history, as it now being practiced by both historians and musicologists, and the field's quest to grasp the realms of human experience, understanding, communication and meaning through the study of music and of musical practices. The contributors employ a resonant new methodological synthesis which combines the theoretical perspectives drawn from the "new cultural history" and "new musicology" of the 1980s with recent social, sociological, and anthropological theories.

Rarely studied in their own right, writings about music are often viewed as merely supplemental to understanding music itself. Yet in the nineteenth century, scholarly interest in music flourished in fields as disparate as philosophy and natural science, dramatically shifting the relationship between music and the academy. An exciting and much-needed new volume, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century draws deserved attention to the people and institutions of this period who worked to produce these writings. Editors Paul Watt, Sarah Collins, and Michael Allis, along with an international slate of contributors, discuss music's fascinating and unexpected interactions with debates about evolution, the scientific method, psychology, exoticism, gender, and the divide between high and low culture. Part I of the handbook establishes the historical context for the intellectual world of the period, including the significant genres and disciplines of its music literature, while Part II focuses on the century's institutions and networks - from journalists to monasteries - that circulated ideas about music throughout the world. Finally, Part III assesses how the music research of the period reverberates in the present, connecting studies in aestheticism, cosmopolitanism, and intertextuality to their nineteenth-century origins. The Handbook challenges Western music history's traditionally sole focus on musical work by treating writings about music as valuable cultural artifacts in themselves. Engaging and comprehensive, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century brings together a wealth of new interdisciplinary research into this critical area of study.

Most historians rely principally on written sources. Yet there are other traces of the past available to historians: the material things that people have chosen, made, and used. This book examines how material culture can enhance historians' understanding of the past, both worldwide and across time. The successful use of material culture in history depends on treating material things of many kinds not as illustrations, but as primary evidence. Each kind of material thing-and there are many-requires the application of interpretive skills appropriate to it. These skills overlap with those acquired by scholars in disciplines that may abut history but are often relatively unfamiliar to historians, including anthropology, archaeology, and art history. Creative historians can adapt and apply the same skills they honed while studying more traditional text-based documents even as they borrow methods from these fields. They can think through familiar historical problems in new ways. They can also deploy material culture to discover the pasts of constituencies who have left few or no traces in written records. The authors of this volume contribute case studies arranged thematically in six sections that respectively address the relationship of history and material culture to cognition, technology, the symbolic, social distinction, and memory. They range across time and space, from Paleolithic to Punk.

Revivals - movements that revitalize, resuscitate, or re-indigenize traditions perceived as threatened or moribund into new temporal, spatial, or cultural contexts - have been well-documented in Western Europe and Euro-North America. Less documented are the revival processes that have been occurring and recurring elsewhere in the world. And particularly under-analyzed are the aftermaths of revivals: the new infrastructures, musical styles, performance practices, subcultural communities, and value systems that have grown out of revival movements. The Oxford Handbook of Music Revival helps us achieve a deeper understanding of the role and development of traditional, folk, roots, world, classical, and early music in modern-day postindustrial, postcolonial, and postwar contexts. The book's thirty chapters present innovative theoretical perspectives illustrated through new ethnographic case studies on diverse music cultures around the world. Together these essays reveal the potency of acts of revival, resurgence, restoration, and renewal in shaping musical landscapes and transforming social experience. The contributors present research from Euro-America, Native America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, the former Soviet bloc, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific. They enrich the field by applying approaches and insights from across the disciplines of ethnomusicology, ethnochoreology, historical musicology, folklore studies, anthropology, ethnology, sociology, and cultural studies. The book makes a powerful argument for the untapped potential of revival as a productive analytical tool in contemporary, global contexts-one that is crucial for understanding manifestations of musical heritage in postmodern, cosmopolitan societies. With its detailed treatment of authenticity, recontextualization, transmission, institutionalization, globalization, and other key concerns, the collection makes a significant impact far beyond the field of revival studies and is crucial for understanding contemporary manifestations of folk, traditional, and heritage music in today's postmodern cosmopolitan societies.

Now in its sixth decade, country music studies is a thriving field of inquiry involving scholars working in the fields of American history, folklore, sociology, anthropology, musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, and geography, among many others. Covering issues of historiography and practice as well as the ways in which the genre interacts with media and social concerns such as class, gender, and sexuality, The Oxford Handbook of Country Music interrogates prevailing narratives, explores significant lacunae in the current literature, and provides guidance for future research. More than simply treating issues that have emerged within this subfield, The Oxford Handbook of Country Music works to connect to broader discourses within the various fields that inform country music studies in an effort to strengthen the area's interdisciplinarity. Drawing upon the expertise of leading and emerging scholars, this Handbook presents an introduction into the historiographical narratives and methodological issues that have emerged in country music studies' first half-century.

Written by an international team of experts, the Handbook makes accessible a full range of theoretical and applied approaches to the study of material culture, and the place of materiality in social theory, presenting current thinking about material culture from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, geography, and science and technology studies.

The Oxford Handbook of Children's Musical Cultures is a compendium of perspectives on children and their musical engagements as singers, dancers, players, and avid listeners. Over the course of 35 chapters, contributors from around the world provide an interdisciplinary enquiry into the musical lives of children in a variety of cultures, and their role as both preservers and innovators of music. Drawing on a wide array of fields from ethnomusicology and folklore to education and developmental psychology, the chapters presented in this handbook provide windows into the musical enculturation, education, and training of children, and the ways in which they learn, express, invent, and preserve music. Offering an understanding of the nature, structures, and styles of music preferred and used by children from toddlerhood through childhood and into adolescence, The Oxford Handbook of Children's Musical Cultures is an important step forward in the study of children and music.

The second edition of The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology updates the original landmark text and provides a comprehensive review of the latest developments in this fast-growing area of research. Covering both experimental and theoretical perspectives, each of the 11 sections is edited by an internationally recognised authority in the area. The first ten parts present chapters that focus on specific areas of music psychology: the origins and functions of music; music perception, responses to music; music and the brain; musical development; learning musical skills; musical performance; composition and improvisation; the role of music in everyday life; and music therapy. In each part authors critically review the literature, highlight current issues and explore possibilities for the future. The final part examines how, in recent years, the study of music psychology has broadened to include a range of other disciplines. It considers the way that research has developed in relation to technological advances, and points the direction for further development in the field. With contributions from internationally recognised experts across 55 chapters, it is an essential resource for students and researchers in psychology and musicology.