Music is surrounded by movement, from the arching back of the guitarist to the violinist swaying with each bow stroke. To John Paul Ito, these actions are not just a visual display; rather, they reveal what it really means for musicians to move with the beat, organizing the flow of notes from beat to beat and shaping the sound produced. By developing "focal impulse theory," Ito shows how a performer's choices of how to move with the meter can transform the music's expressive contours. Change the dance of the performer's body, and you change the dance of the notes. As Focal Impulse Theory deftly illustrates, bodily movements carry musical meaning and, in a very real sense, are meaning.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval, CMMR 2012, held in London, UK, in June 2012. The 28 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this volume. The papers have been organized in the following topical sections: music emotion analysis; 3D audio and sound synthesis; computer models of music perception and cognition; music emotion recognition; music information retrieval; film soundtrack and music recommendation; and computational musicology and music education. The volume also includes selected papers from the Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Expressive Performance Workshop held within the framework of CMMR 2012.

"It is 1969 and Joni Mitchell is on television, standing empty-handed in the middle of a circular stage that is adorned with psychedelic colors. She is wearing a long, hunter-green dress, surrounded by an audience sitting cross-legged on the floor. She waits for television host Dick Cavett to introduce her next performance. The show is filming on the day after the 1969 Woodstock music festival, an event that Mitchell was initially scheduled to attend but from which she was held back by her management to ensure she could perform on The Dick Cavett Show the next day. The host introduces Mitchell and jokes with her about singing a capella, wondering aloud if someone stole her guitar. The singer laughs politely in response, denies any theft, and then proceeds to her performance, explaining to the audience that she will be singing a "song for America" that she wrote "as a Canadian living in this country." With her hands clasped behind her back, she performs "The Fiddle and the Drum" with no accompaniment, channeling the folk performance tradition on which the song is based. This song about military participation is a rare political statement from Mitchell who, unlike her peers Bob Dylan and Buffy Sainte-Marie, had only released this one "protest song" by 1969. But the song's message was not a particularly risky proclamation. Her anti-war narrative echoed the opinions of the young Cavett Show audience that night, aligning with an established trend of resistance against the war in Vietnam. Similar to the way that Mitchell's song "Woodstock" would eventually capture the spirit of an event she did not attend, "The Fiddle and the Drum" characterizes a popular anti-war sentiment in the public consciousness of the late 1960s"--

Global Popular Music: A Research and Information Guide offers an essential annotated bibliography of scholarship on popular music around the world in a two-volume set. Featuring a broad range of subjects, people, cultures, and geographic areas, and spanning musical genres such as traditional, folk, jazz, rock, reggae, samba, rai, punk, hip-hop, and many more, this guide highlights different approaches and discussions within global popular music research. This research guide is comprehensive in scope, providing a vital resource for scholars and students approaching the vast amount of publications on popular music studies and popular music traditions around the world. Thorough cross-referencing and robust indexes of genres, places, names, and subjects make the guide easy to use. Volume 1, Global Perspectives in Popular Music Studies, situates popular music studies within global perspectives and geocultural settings at large. It offers over nine hundred in-depth annotated bibliographic entries of interdisciplinary research and several topical categories that include analytical, critical, and historical studies; theory, methodology, and musicianship studies; annotations of in-depth special issues published in scholarly journals on different topics, issues, trends, and music genres in popular music studies that relate to the contributions of numerous musicians, artists, bands, and music groups; and annotations of selected reference works.

The Routledge Handbook of Music Signification captures the richness and complexity of the field, presenting 30 essays by recognized international experts that reflect current interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches to the subject. Examinations of music signification have been an essential component in thinking about music for millennia, but it is only in the last few decades that music signification has been established as an independent area of study. During this time, the field has grown exponentially, incorporating a vast array of methodologies that seek to ground how music means and to explore what it may mean. Research in music signification typically embraces concepts and practices imported from semiotics, literary criticism, linguistics, the visual arts, philosophy, sociology, history, and psychology, among others. By bringing together such approaches in transparent groupings that reflect the various contexts in which music is created and experienced, and by encouraging critical dialogues, this volume provides an authoritative survey of the discipline and a significant advance in inquiries into music signification. This book addresses a wide array of readers, from scholars who specialize in this and related areas, to the general reader who is curious to learn more about the ways in which music makes sense.

Over the last two centuries, Beethoven's music has been synonymous with the idea of freedom, in particular a freedom embodied in the heroic figure of Prometheus. This image arises from a relatively small circle of heroic works from the composer's middle period, most notably the Eroica Symphony. However, the freedom associated with the Promethean hero has also come under considerably critique by philosophers, theologians and political theorists; its promise of autonomy easily inverts into various forms of authoritarianism, and the sovereign will it champions is not merely a liberating force but a discriminatory one. Beethoven's freedom, then, appears to be increasingly problematic; yet his music is still employed today to mark political events from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the attacks of 9/11. Even more problematic, perhaps, is the fact that this freedom has shaped the reception of Beethoven music to such an extent that we forget that there is another kind of music in his oeuvre that is not heroic, a music that opens the possibility of a freedom yet to be articulated or defined. By exploring the musical philosophy of Theodor W. Adorno through a wide range of the composer's music, Beethoven and Freedom arrives at a markedly different vision of freedom. Author Daniel KL Chua suggests that a more human and fragile concept of freedom can be found in the music that has less to do with the autonomy of the will and its stoical corollary than with questions of human relation, donation, and a yielding to radical alterity. Chua's work makes a major and controversial statement by challenging the current image of Beethoven, and by suggesting an alterior freedom that can speak ethically to the twenty-first century.

"This book reflects the increasing significance of musical performance studies in recent decades. Originally published as separate essays over thirty years, the twelve chapters have been refashioned as a monograph which is both scholarly in nature and intensely personal, building on the author's extensive musical experience, most notably as a pianist. Hence the primary focus on piano music by Chopin, Schubert, Liszt, Brahms and Rachmaninoff. The book's cross-cutting themes nevertheless apply to diverse performance idioms and domains. By exploring themes in complementary ways, the book offers broad insights into musical ontology, epistemology and semantics while demonstrating various methodologies now used to study performance. Among other things, it highlights the powerful effects that experiencing music in performance can have on those who take part in it, in any capacity. There are many practical insights too. The volume has four sections, focusing on 'performance and performance studies', historical performance, analysis and performance, and artistic research. Case studies of romantic masterpieces for the piano feature throughout"--