Thought And Play In Musical Rhythm

Thought and Play in Musical Rhythm offers new understandings of musical rhythm through the analysis and comparison of diverse repertoires, performance practices, and theories as formulated and transmitted in speech or writing. Editors Richard K. Wolf, Stephen Blum, and Christopher Hasty address a productive tension in musical studies between universalistic and culturally relevant approaches to the study of rhythm. Reacting to commonplace ideas in (Western) music pedagogy, the essays explore a range of perspectives on rhythm: its status as an "element" of music that can be usefully abstracted from timbre, tone, and harmony; its connotations of regularity (or, by contrast, that rhythm is what we hear against the grain of background regularity); and its special embodiment in percussion parts. Unique among studies of musical rhythm, the collection directs close attention to ways performers and listeners conceptualize aspects of rhythm and questions many received categories for describing rhythm. By drawing the ear and the mind to tensions, distinctions, and aesthetic principles that might otherwise be overlooked, this focus on local concepts enables the listener to dispel assumptions about how music works "in general." Readers may walk away with a few surprises, become more aware of their assumptions, and/or think of new ways to shock their students out of complacency.

Thought and Play in Musical Rhythm offers new understandings of musical rhythm through the analysis and comparison of diverse repertoires, performance practices, and theories as formulated and transmitted in speech or writing. Editors Richard K. Wolf, Stephen Blum, and Christopher Hasty address a productive tension in musical studies between universalistic and culturally relevant approaches to the study of rhythm. Reacting to commonplace ideas in (Western) music pedagogy, the essays explore a range of perspectives on rhythm: its status as an "element" of music that can be usefully abstracted from timbre, tone, and harmony; its connotations of regularity (or, by contrast, that rhythm is what we hear against the grain of background regularity); and its special embodiment in percussion parts. Unique among studies of musical rhythm, the collection directs close attention to ways performers and listeners conceptualize aspects of rhythm and questions many received categories for describing rhythm. By drawing the ear and the mind to tensions, distinctions, and aesthetic principles that might otherwise be overlooked, this focus on local concepts enables the listener to dispel assumptions about how music works "in general." Readers may walk away with a few surprises, become more aware of their assumptions, and/or think of new ways to shock their students out of complacency.

Rhythm is the fundamental pulse that animates poetry, music, and dance across all cultures. And yet the recent explosion of scholarly interest across disciplines in the aural dimensions of aesthetic experience--particularly in sociology, cultural and media theory, and literary studies--has yet to explore this fundamental category. This book furthers the discussion of rhythm beyond the discrete conceptual domains and technical vocabularies of musicology and prosody. With original essays by philosophers, psychologists, musicians, literary theorists, and ethno-musicologists, The Philosophy of Rhythm opens up wider-and plural-perspectives, examining formal affinities between the historically interconnected fields of music, dance, and poetry, while addressing key concepts such as embodiment, movement, pulse, and performance. Volume editors Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison bring together a range of key questions: What is the distinction between rhythm and pulse? What is the relationship between everyday embodied experience, and the specific experience of music, dance, and poetry? Can aesthetics offer an understanding of rhythm that helps inform our responses to visual and other arts, as well as music, dance, and poetry? And, what is the relation between psychological conceptions of entrainment, and the humane concept of rhythm and meter? Overall, The Philosophy of Rhythm appeals across disciplinary boundaries, providing a unique overview of a neglected aspect of aesthetic experience.

From Grammy-winning musical icon and legendary bassist Victor L. Wooten comes an inspiring parable of music, life, and the difference between playing all the right notes…and feeling them. The Music Lesson is the story of a struggling young musician who wanted music to be his life, and who wanted his life to be great. Then, from nowhere it seemed, a teacher arrived. Part musical genius, part philosopher, part eccentric wise man, the teacher would guide the young musician on a spiritual journey, and teach him that the gifts we get from music mirror those from life, and every movement, phrase, and chord has its own meaning...All you have to do is find the song inside. “The best book on music (and its connection to the mystic laws of life) that I've ever read. I learned so much on every level.”—Multiple Grammy Award–winning saxophonist Michael Brecker

Presents ideas for teaching students to think musically. Enrich the music curriculum through classroom interaction and instruction. Appropriate for elementary through high school levels.

This text presents intriguing explanations of extraordinary musical creations from diverse cultures across the world. It recounts the contexts in which the music is created and performed and then hones in on elucidating how the music works as sound in process.

An exploration of rhythm and the richness of musical time from the perspective of performers, composers, analysts, and listeners.

""In thinking about music it is difficult to avoid representing any concrete instance as if it were a stable and essentially pre-formed entity composed of fully determinate and ultimately static objects or relations. Certainly, in the actual performance of music there is no escaping the contingency and indeterminacy that inhere in every temporal act. When we attempt to analyze the musical event, however, it is most convenient to imagine that the intricate web of relationships that comes into play on such an occasion has already been woven in a prior compositional act or in a determinate and determining order of values and beliefs. We can, for example, point to the score as a fixed set of instructions for the recreation of an essentially self-same work or as a repository wherein the traces of a composer's thought lie encoded awaiting faithful decoding by a receptive performer/listener. Or, with even greater abstraction, we can point to the presence of an underlying tonal system, the governing rules of a style or "common practice," the reflection of a set of existing social relations, or the role of hardened ideologies in music's production and reception. It must be said that there is some truth in the variety of determinacies that intellectual analysis would ascribe to music (if little truth in the claims of any one perspective to speak for the whole). But it must also be said that, to the extent the abstractions of analysis deny or suppress the creativity, spontaneity, and novelty of actual musical experience, analysis will have misrepresented music's inescapably temporal nature. The challenge of taking this temporal nature into account lies in finding ways of speaking of music's very evanescence and thus of developing concepts that would capture both the determinacy and the indeterminacy of events in passage. Stated in this way, such an enterprise appears to be loaded with paradox. However, much of the paradox disappears if we can shift our attention from objects or products to process and from static being to dynamic becoming. Indeed, such a shift might provide a perspective from which the great variety of determinacies we ascribe to music could be seen as inseparable components of musical communication. ""--