Polyphony and the Modern

Polyphony and the Modern PDF

Author: Jonathan Fruoco

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-05-10

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1000391086

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Polyphony and the Modern asks one fundamental question: what does it mean to be modern in one’s own time? To answer that question, this volume focuses on polyphony as an index of modernity. In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch showed that each moment in time is potentially fractured: people living in the same country can effectively live in different centuries – some making their alliances with the past and others betting on the future – but all of them, at least technically, enclosed in the temporal moment. But can a claim of modernity also mean something more ambitious? Can an artist, by accident or design, escape the limits of his or her own time, and somehow precociously embody the outlook of a subsequent age? This book sees polyphony as a bridge providing a terminology and a stylistic practice by which the period barrier between Medieval and Early Modern can be breached. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003129837

Chaucer’s Polyphony

Chaucer’s Polyphony PDF

Author: Jonathan Fruoco

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-10-12

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1501514369

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Geoffrey Chaucer has long been considered by the critics as the father of English poetry. However, this notion not only tends to forget a huge part of the history of Anglo-Saxon literature but also to ignore the specificities of Chaucer’s style. Indeed, Chaucer’s decision to write in Middle English, in a time when the hegemony of Latin and Old French was undisputed (especially at the court of Edward III and Richard II), was consistent with an intellectual movement that was trying to give back to European vernaculars the prestige necessary to a genuine cultural production, which eventually led to the emergence of romance and of the modern novel. As a result, if Chaucer cannot be thought of as the father of English poetry, he is, however, the father of English prose and one of the main artisans of what Mikhail Bakhtin called the polyphonic novel.

Renaissance Polyphony

Renaissance Polyphony PDF

Author: Fabrice Fitch

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-08-27

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1108882668

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This engaging study introduces Renaissance polyphony to a modern audience. It helps readers of all ages and levels of experience make sense of what they are hearing. How does Renaissance music work? How is a piece typical of its style and type; or, if it is exceptional, what makes it so? The makers of polyphony were keenly aware of the specialized nature of their craft. How is this reflected in the music they wrote, and how were they regarded by their patrons and audiences? Through a combination of detailed, nuanced appreciation of musical style and a lucid overview of current debates, this book offers a glimpse of meanings behind and beyond the notes, be they playful or profound. It will enhance the listening experience of students, performers and music lovers alike.

California Polyphony

California Polyphony PDF

Author: Mina Yang

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2010-10-01

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 025209297X

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What does it mean to be Californian? To find out, Mina Yang delves into multicultural nature of musics in the state that has launched musical and cultural trends for decades. In the early twentieth century, an orientalist fascination with Asian music and culture dominated the popular imagination of white Californians and influenced their interactions with the Asian Other. Several decades later, tensions between the Los Angeles Police Department and the African American community made the thriving jazz and blues nightclub scene of 1940s Central Avenue a target for the LAPD's anti-vice crusade. The musical scores for Hollywood's noir films confirmed reactionary notions of the threat to white female sexuality in the face of black culture and urban corruption while Mexican Americans faced a conflicted assimilation into the white American mainstream. Finally, Korean Americans in the twenty-first century turned to hip-hop to express their cultural and national identities. A compelling journey into the origins of musical identity, California Polyphony explores the intersection of musicology, cultural history, and politics to define Californian.

Polyphonic Minds

Polyphonic Minds PDF

Author: Peter Pesic

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2022-09-13

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 0262543893

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An exploration of polyphony and the perspective it offers on our own polyphonic brains. Polyphony—the interweaving of simultaneous sounds—is a crucial aspect of music that has deep implications for how we understand the mind. In Polyphonic Minds, Peter Pesic examines the history and significance of “polyphonicity”—of “many-voicedness”—in human experience. Pesic presents the emergence of Western polyphony, its flowering, its horizons, and the perspective it offers on our own polyphonic brains. When we listen to polyphonic music, how is it that we can hear several different things at once? How does a single mind experience those things as a unity (a motet, a fugue) rather than an incoherent jumble? Pesic argues that polyphony raises fundamental issues for philosophy, theology, literature, psychology, and neuroscience—all searching for the apparent unity of consciousness in the midst of multiple simultaneous experiences. After tracing the development of polyphony in Western music from ninth-century church music through the experimental compositions of Glenn Gould and John Cage, Pesic considers the analogous activity within the brain, the polyphonic “music of the hemispheres” that shapes brain states from sleep to awakening. He discusses how neuroscientists draw on concepts from polyphony to describe the “neural orchestra” of the brain. Pesic’s story begins with ancient conceptions of God’s mind and ends with the polyphonic personhood of the human brain and body. An enhanced e-book edition allows the sound examples to be played by a touch.

The Polyphony of Jewish Culture

The Polyphony of Jewish Culture PDF

Author: Benjamin Harshav

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 9780804755122

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This book is a collection of seminal essays on major aspects of Jewish culture: Yiddish and Hebrew literature, Europe, America and Israel, transformations of Jewish history, the Holocaust, and the formal traditions of Hebrew verse.

The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe, 1470-1530

The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe, 1470-1530 PDF

Author: Rob C. Wegman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005-09-12

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1135923248

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In the final decades of the fifteenth-century, the European musical world was shaken to its foundations by the onset of a veritable culture war on the art of polyphony. Now in paperback, The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe tells the story of this cultural upheaval, drawing on a wide range of little-known texts and documents, and weaving them together in a narrative that takes the reader on an eventful musical journey through early-modern Europe.

Valentinus’ Legacy and Polyphony of Voices

Valentinus’ Legacy and Polyphony of Voices PDF

Author: Piotr Ashwin-Siejkowski

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-23

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1000417735

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This book challenges the popular use of ‘Valentinian’ to describe a Christian school of thought in the second century CE by analysing documents ascribed to ‘Valentinians’ by early Christian Apologists, and more recently by modern scholars after the discovery of codices near Nag Hammadi in Egypt. To this end, Ashwin-Siejkowski highlights the great diversity of views among Christian theologians associated with the label ‘Valentinian’, demonstrating their attachment to the Scriptures and Apostolic traditions as well as their dialogue with Graeco-Roman philosophies of their time. Among the various themes explored are ‘myth’ and its role in early Christian theology, the familiarity of the Gospel of Truth with Alexandrian exegetical tradition, Ptolemy’s didactic in his letter to Flora, the image of the Saviour in the Interpretation of Knowledge, reception of the Johannine motifs in Heracleon’s commentary and the Tripartite Tractate, salvation in the Excerpts from Theodotus, Christian identity in the Gospel of Philip, and reception of selected Johannine motifs in ‘Valentinian’ documents. Valentinus’ Legacy and Polyphony of Voices will be an invaluable and accessible resource to students, researchers, and scholars of Early Christian theologies, as well as trajectories of exegesis in New Testament sources and the emerging of different Christian identities based on various Christologies.

Renaissance Polyphony

Renaissance Polyphony PDF

Author: Fabrice Fitch

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-08-27

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0521899338

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This engaging study introduces Renaissance polyphony to a modern audience, balancing the listening experience with what lies beyond the notes.

Medieval Polyphony and Song

Medieval Polyphony and Song PDF

Author: Helen Deeming

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-05-11

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1009340832

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What characterises medieval polyphony and song? Who composed this music, sang it, and wrote it down? Where and when did the different genres originate, and under what circumstances were they created and performed? This book gives a comprehensive introduction to the rich variety of polyphonic practices and song traditions during the Middle Ages. It explores song from across Europe, in Latin and vernacular languages (precursors to modern Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish); and polyphony from early improvised organum to rhythmically and harmonically complex late medieval motets. Each chapter focuses on a particular geographical location, setting out the specific local contexts of the music created there. Guiding the reader through the musical techniques of melody, harmony, rhythm, and notation that distinguish the different genres of polyphony and song, the authors also consider the factors that make modern performances of this music sound so different from one another.