Nederlandse editie: 978 90 8964 570 8

For virtually all of our lives, we are surrounded by music. From lullabies to radio to the praises sung in houses of worship, we encounter music at home and in the street, during work and in our leisure time, and not infrequently at birth and death. But what is music, and what does it mean to humans? How do we process it, and how do we create it?

Musician Leo Samama discusses these and many other questions while shaping a vibrant picture of music's import...

Who is the “I” that performs? The arts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have pushed us relentlessly to reconsider our notions of the self, expression, and communication: to ask ourselves, again and again, who we think we are and how we can speak meaningfully to one another. Although in other performing arts studies, especially of theatre, the performance of selfhood and identity continues to be a matter of lively debate in both practice and theory, the question of how a sense o...

Exploring experimental attitudes in music.

Experimental Affinities in Music brings together diverse artistic, musicological, historical, and philosophical essays, enhancing a broad discourse on artistic experimentation, and exploring various experimental attitudes in music composed between the thirteenth and twentieth centuries.

The golden thread running through the different chapters is the quest for inherently experimental musical practices, a quest pursued from interrogating, descriptive, ...

Aberrant Nuptials explores the diversity and richness of the interactions between artistic research and Deleuze studies. “Aberrant nuptials” is the expression Gilles Deleuze uses to refer to productive encounters between systems characterised by fundamental difference. More than imitation, representation, or reproduction, these encounters foster creative flows of energy, generating new material configurations and intensive experiences. Within different understandings of artistic research,...

The elusive and ungraspable in Rihms's music.

Wolfgang Rihm ( b. Karlsruhe, 1952) is the most performed living German composer. With his personal, expressive, and versatile music, he became the most prominent representative of his generation. His individual approach to music was established in the 1980s and he continues to explore and enlarge his original concepts today. His 1980s work is at the core of this book, more specifically his instrumental music: the Chiffre cycle and the string quar...

'New Paths', the seventh volume in the Writings of the Orpheus Institute, is a result of the third International Orpheus Academy for Music Theory. Five renowned scholars discuss a variety of topics related to romanticism, focusing especially on the years 1800–1840. In a much-needed historical and critical overview of the concept of organicism, John Neubauer ranges from its origins in Enlightenment biology to its aftermath in postmodernism.

Janet Schmalfeldt shows that Beethoven’s op.47 not o...

Beyond resemblance: creative divergence in music performance.

What does it mean to produce resemblance in the performance of written music? Starting from how this question is commonly answered by the practice of interpretation in Western notated art music, this book proposes a move beyond commonly accepted codes, conventions and territories of music performance. Appropriating reflections from post-structural philosophy, visual arts and semiotics, and crucially based upon an artistic research ...

Two-Dimensional Sonata Form is the first book dedicated to the combination of the movements of a multimovement sonata cycle with an overarching single-movement form that is itself organized as a sonata form. Drawing on a variety of historical and recent approaches to musical form (e.g., Marxian and Schoenbergian Formenlehre, Caplin’s theory of formal functions, and Hepokoski and Darcy’s Sonata Theory), it begins by developing an original theoretical framework for the analysis of this type...

Questions concerning music and its inextricably intertwined and complex interface with time continue to fascinate musicians and scholars.

For performers, the primary perception of music is arguably the way in which it unfolds in ‘real time’; while for composers a work appears ‘whole and entire’, with the presence of the score having the potential to compress, and even eliminate, the perception of time as ‘passing’.

The paradoxical relationship between these two perspectives, and the sub...