The publication comprises an introductory discussion complemented by scores and recordings of 22 songs, along with an exploration of the background of Renaissance musical settings of poems from Pierre de Ronsard’s Amours de Cassandre (1552).
Above, a portrait of Ronsard from ca. 1580; below, Guillaume Costeley’s setting of Mignonne allons voir si la rose, one of the most popular of Ronsard’s Amours among Renaissance composers.
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Launched in 2020 by Lever Press, Open access musicology is a book series that features peer-reviewed, scholarly essays primarily intended to serve students and teachers of music history, ethno/musicology, and music studies.
The constantly evolving collection ensures that recent research and scholarship inspires classroom practice, provides diverse and methodologically transparent models for student research, and introduces different modes of inquiry to inspire classroom discussion and varied assignments.
Addressing a range of histories, methods, voices, and sounds, OAM embraces changes and tensions in the field to help students understand music scholarship as the product of critical inquiry.
In 2019 Le Castor Astral launched A day in the life, a book series directed by Christophe Quillien. Each title evokes a key moment in the great rock saga; beyond the detailed narration of the facts, it traces the day’s consequences, sometimes unexpected, and its influence on rock in general.
The inaugural issue, De rock et de metal: 30 mai 1980, Trust dynamite–Le hard français by Pascal Paillardet (RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2019-17626), focuses on the evening in 1980 when the band Trust was recording “Antisocial” for its album Répression. This song became the anthem of the group and the spearhead of French hard rock. Through an account of this recording, the author illuminates the emergence of hard rock in France in the 1980s.
The volume collects papers from the conference L’Émergence en Musique: Dialogue des Sciences, which was held in Plaisir and Versailles in 2016. This conference explored musical examples of how in certain complex systems radically new properties appear unexpectedly and are characteristic of a higher level of organization; these emergent properties are not found in any individual parts of the system, but occur as an effect of the system as a whole.
Below, a work by Horacio Vaggione, one of the composers who contributed to the book and conference.
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The collection focuses on a wide range of questions about the causes of musical migrations and their role and importance for musical cultures. Particular emphasis is placed on migrations in central Europe that have also left a decisive mark on musical culture in Slovenia.
Below, a work by Roberto Gerhard, the subject of one of the articles in the book.
In 2017 the University of California Press launched Studies in the Grateful Dead to explore the achievement, impact, and significance of one of the most iconic American rock bands, the Grateful Dead. The series presents original monographs and edited anthologies by experts representing a range of disciplinary perspectives and fields that highlight the complexity, power, and enduring appeal of this protean, compelling musical and cultural phenomenon.
The inaugural volume, Listening for the secret: The Grateful Dead and the politics of improvisation by Ulf Olsson, is a critical assessment of the Grateful Dead and the distinct culture that grew out of the group’s music, politics, and performance. With roots in popular music traditions, improvisation, and the avant-garde, the group provides a unique lens through which we can better understand the meaning and creation of the counterculture community.
Below, a performance from 1974 that has been cited for its outstanding group improvisations (beginning just before the five-minute mark).
In 2017 Brill launched Brill’s companions to the musical culture of medieval and early modern Europe, a peer-reviewed series of volumes providing high-level and up-to-date surveys of research into all aspects of medieval and early modern musical culture in Europe—composers, schools, genres, instruments, education, dance, musical manuscripts and printing, and the musical cultures of given cities, chapels, religious orders, and courts.
Written by the foremost specialists, the books offer balanced accounts along with overviews of the state of scholarship and debates, pointing the way for future research. The books are normally multi-author volumes, thoroughly planned out at an editorial level to ensure comprehensiveness and cohesion and maximizing their value to the student and scholar.
The inaugural volume, Companion to music in the age of the Catholic monarchs, offers a major new study that deepens and enriches understanding of the forms and functions of music that flourished in late medieval Spanish society. The fifteen essays present a synthesis based on recently discovered material that throws new light on different aspects of musical life during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel (1474–1516): sacred and secular music-making in royal and aristocratic circles; the cathedral music environment; liturgy and power; musical connections with Rome, Portugal, and the New World; theoretical and unwritten musical practices; women as patrons and performers; and the legacy of Jewish musical traditions.
In 2017 the University of Oklahoma Press launched the series American popular music to explore the evolution of folk, blues, gospel, country, rock, jazz, and soul by looking at the ways music relates to the land and people. The primary focus is on music identified with Oklahoma, Texas, and surrounding regions, following regional influences to the farthest extent of their reach.
Of particular interest are individual artists and how they express their ties to land and people uniquely and collectively. This series therefore considers the role that music plays in the lives of artists and the communities that identify with them, and demonstrates how the business of music has shaped their careers and legacies.
The inaugural volume, Sing me back home: Southern roots and country music by Bill C. Malone, presents the story of the author’s working-class upbringing in rural East Texas, recounting how in 1939 his family’s first radio, a battery-powered Philco, introduced him to hillbilly music and how, years later, he went on to become a scholar on the subject before the field formally existed. The book draws on a hundred years of southern roots music history, exploring the intricate relationships between black and white music styles, gospel and secular traditions, and pop, folk, and country music.
Below, Joe Thompson, one of the musicians discussed in the book.
The Hren choirbooks comprise six large, well-preserved codices from the early seventeenth century; they are now held at the Narodna in Univerzitetna Knjižnica in Ljubljana (SI-Lnr MSS 339–44).
Both works are parody Masses: the model for Perini’s Mass is Ruggiero Giovannelli’s motet Benedicite omnia opera Domini, while that for Bianco’s Mass is the motet Percussit Saul mille by Giovanni Croce.
Above, the statue of Tomaž Hren at the Stolnica Svetega Nikolaja, where the books originated; below, Croce’s Percussit Saul mille, the basis of the Bianco work.
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The lead singer on Supercell’s eponymous first album is Hatsune Miku (初音ミク), a Vocaloid character created by Crypton Future Media with voice synthesizers. A virtual superstar, over 100,000 songs, uploaded mostly by fans, are attributed to her. By the time Supercell was released in March 2009, the group’s Vocaloid works were already well-known to fans.
This book explores the Vocaloid and DTM (desktop music) phenomena through the lenses of media and fan studies, looking closely at online social media platforms, the new technology for composing, avid fans of the Vocaloid character, and these fans’ performative practices. It provides a sense of how interactive new media and an empowered fan base combine to engage in the creation processes and enhance the circulation of DTM works.
From 4 to 8 October 2021, The Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation hosts the virtual conference Responses in Music to Climate Change. The event brings together scholars, performers, composers, and activists, with the goal of exchanging … Continue reading →
For it [the Walkman] permits the possibility…of imposing your soundscape on the surrounding aural environment and thereby domesticating the external world: for a moment, it can all be brought under the STOP/START, FAST FOWARD, PAUSE and REWIND buttons. –Iain Chambers, “The … Continue reading →
In 1947 Ella Fitzgerald, already an acclaimed singer of jazz standards, toured with Dizzy Gillespie, immersing herself in the new style known as bebop. Like Dizzy, Ella responded to bebop’s complex harmonies with an infallible ear, and easily translated its … Continue reading →
The American traditional song Go tell Aunt Rhody originated as a gavotte composed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau for his opera Le devin du village (1752). An English version of the opera was produced in London in 1766; subsequently the melody attracted … Continue reading →
