Read The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performance

The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performance

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

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Description:From the prefaceBecause music is made in our minds, the place to look if we want to understand how it works is in the human brain. Mind is what the brain does, and because we’re now making new progress in studying how brains respond to sound, including musical sound, we’re beginning to get some really plausible answers to the most fundamental questions about what music is and what it does for us.Nothing comes across more clearly from this work in musical science than that the performer is the source of all the most specific musical meaning. What the composer writes matters very much, but it’s what the performer does with that that shapes our responses, indeed that allows us to have responses at all. And so it’s time we looked much more closely at what performers do with scores. But how? The point of this book is to make some suggestions. I want to offer some ways of studying performances. For us to be able to examine them closely they need to be recorded performances. And therefore, so that we know what we’re dealing with, we have to spend a bit of time first of all looking at recording and where it can and cannot be trusted as evidence of performance. And before that we need to think a little about performance and its relation to compositions. So there are three preliminary chapters: one introducing the rather new field of the study of performances, one looking at the relationships between composition and performance and between performance and recording; and one outlining the way recording has changed so that we can better understand the worth of the sounds we hear as evidence for the practice of performers.One of the things that’s immediately apparent from studying recorded performance, and that turns out to be absolutely central to understanding music-making, is that performance changes: in other words, there is such a thing as performance style [...] It’s entirely thanks to recording, and to our having so many decades of it to hand, that we can now see for the first time, and think about, this gradual change in performance style. It’s one of the strangest things about music, for it suggests that much of what we assume is essential to musical performance could actually be quite different, was once, and will be in the future. Because the implications are so far-reaching we need to look at how style has changed really quite closely. And so the following three chapters are mainly about that. First (chapter 4) we look at twentieth-century singing, then at violin playing, and then at piano playing. Along the way, as we look at some performers and recorded performances in detail, I illustrate some of the more straightforward ways in which we can study the things performers do with musical sound in order to be expressive. At the end of this section (chapter 7) we take stock by looking at performance style from a more theoretical viewpoint, and try to understand why it changes and how. That takes us right to the heart of the question of how music moves us, because it requires us to think about what music is for, what it does to humans and how it relates to the way we experience the world. And that in turn puts us in a much stronger position to understand why performers change sounds from moment to moment, and why those changes move us. It’s that process that we examine in detail, using techniques involving computer visualisation of sound, in the last main chapter, chapter 8, which deals with expressivity and expressive gestures, first in singing and then in instrumental playing. The final chapter, chapter 9, looks briefly at where research might go next.All the case studies in this book concern western art music.Contents1. Introduction 2. Performances 3. Recordings 4. Singing 5. Violin playing 6. Piano playing 7. Style change 8. Expressivity 9. Conclusion Updates Bibliography Captions IndexesWe have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performance. To get started finding The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performance, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
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Pages: —

Format: PDF, EPUB & Kindle Edition

Publisher: Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM)

Release: 2009

ISBN: 1897791216

Description: From the prefaceBecause music is made in our minds, the place to look if we want to understand how it works is in the human brain. Mind is what the brain does, and because we’re now making new progress in studying how brains respond to sound, including musical sound, we’re beginning to get some really plausible answers to the most fundamental questions about what music is and what it does for us.Nothing comes across more clearly from this work in musical science than that the performer is the source of all the most specific musical meaning. What the composer writes matters very much, but it’s what the performer does with that that shapes our responses, indeed that allows us to have responses at all. And so it’s time we looked much more closely at what performers do with scores. But how? The point of this book is to make some suggestions. I want to offer some ways of studying performances. For us to be able to examine them closely they need to be recorded performances. And therefore, so that we know what we’re dealing with, we have to spend a bit of time first of all looking at recording and where it can and cannot be trusted as evidence of performance. And before that we need to think a little about performance and its relation to compositions. So there are three preliminary chapters: one introducing the rather new field of the study of performances, one looking at the relationships between composition and performance and between performance and recording; and one outlining the way recording has changed so that we can better understand the worth of the sounds we hear as evidence for the practice of performers.One of the things that’s immediately apparent from studying recorded performance, and that turns out to be absolutely central to understanding music-making, is that performance changes: in other words, there is such a thing as performance style [...] It’s entirely thanks to recording, and to our having so many decades of it to hand, that we can now see for the first time, and think about, this gradual change in performance style. It’s one of the strangest things about music, for it suggests that much of what we assume is essential to musical performance could actually be quite different, was once, and will be in the future. Because the implications are so far-reaching we need to look at how style has changed really quite closely. And so the following three chapters are mainly about that. First (chapter 4) we look at twentieth-century singing, then at violin playing, and then at piano playing. Along the way, as we look at some performers and recorded performances in detail, I illustrate some of the more straightforward ways in which we can study the things performers do with musical sound in order to be expressive. At the end of this section (chapter 7) we take stock by looking at performance style from a more theoretical viewpoint, and try to understand why it changes and how. That takes us right to the heart of the question of how music moves us, because it requires us to think about what music is for, what it does to humans and how it relates to the way we experience the world. And that in turn puts us in a much stronger position to understand why performers change sounds from moment to moment, and why those changes move us. It’s that process that we examine in detail, using techniques involving computer visualisation of sound, in the last main chapter, chapter 8, which deals with expressivity and expressive gestures, first in singing and then in instrumental playing. The final chapter, chapter 9, looks briefly at where research might go next.All the case studies in this book concern western art music.Contents1. Introduction 2. Performances 3. Recordings 4. Singing 5. Violin playing 6. Piano playing 7. Style change 8. Expressivity 9. Conclusion Updates Bibliography Captions IndexesWe have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performance. To get started finding The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performance, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

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The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performance

The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performance

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