Material Cultures of Music Notation brings together a collection of essays that explore a fundamental question in the current landscape of musicology: how can writing and reading music be understood as concrete, material practices in a wider cultural context? Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from musicology, media studies, performance studies, and more, the chapters in this volume offer a wide array of new perspectives that foreground the materiality of music notation. From digital scores to the transmission of manuscripts in the Middle Ages, the volume deliberately disrupts boundaries of discipline, historical period, genre, and tradition, by approaching notation's materiality through four key interrelated themes: knowledge, the body, social relations, and technology. Together, the chapters capture vital new work in an essential emerging area of scholarship.

Material Cultures of Music Notation brings together a collection of essays that explore an essential question in the current landscape of musicology: how can writing and reading music be understood as concrete, material practices in a wider cultural context?

The chapters in this volume explore the relationship between music and art in Italy across the long sixteenth century, considering an era when music-making was both a subject of Italian painting and a central metaphor in treatises on the arts. Beginning in the fifteenth century, transformations emerge in the depiction of music within visual arts, the conceptualization of music in ethics and poetics, and in the practice of musical harmony. This book brings together contributors from across musicology and art history to consider the trajectories of these changes and the connections between them, both in theory and in the practices of everyday life. In sixteen chapters, the contributors blend iconographic analysis with a wider range of approaches, investigate the discourse surrounding the arts, and draw on both social art history and the material turn in Renaissance studies. They address not only paintings and sculpture, but also a wide range of visual media and domestic objects, from instruments to tableware, to reveal a rich, varied, and sometimes tumultuous exchange among musical and visual arts and ideas. Enriching our understanding of the subtle intersections between visual, material, and musical arts across the long Renaissance, this book offers new insights for scholars of music, art, and cultural history. Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

In The New Guitarscape, Kevin Dawe argues for a re-assessment of guitar studies in the light of more recent musical, social, cultural and technological developments that have taken place around the instrument. The author considers that a detailed study of the guitar in both contemporary and cross-cultural perspectives is now absolutely essential and that such a study must also include discussion of a wide range of theoretical issues, literature, musical cultures and technologies as they come to bear upon the instrument. Dawe presents a synthesis of previous work on the guitar, but also expands the terms by which the guitar might be studied. Moreover, in order to understand the properties and potential of the guitar as an agent of music, culture and society, the author draws from studies in science and technology, design theory, material culture, cognition, sensual culture, gender and sexuality, power and agency, ethnography (real and virtual) and globalization. Dawe presents the guitar as an instrument of scientific investigation and part of the technology of globalization, created and disseminated through corporate culture and cottage industry, held close to the body but taken away from the body in cyberspace, and involved in an enormous variety of cultural interactions and political exchanges in many different contexts around the world. In an effort to understand the significance and meaning of the guitar in the lives of those who may be seen to be closest to it, as well as providing a critically-informed discussion of various approaches to guitar performance, technologies and techniques, the book includes discussion of the work of a wide range of guitarists, including Robert Fripp, Kamala Shankar, Newton Faulkner, Lionel Loueke, Sharon Isbin, Steve Vai, Bob Brozman, Kaki King, Fred Frith, John 5, Jennifer Batten, Guthrie Govan, Dominic Frasca, I Wayan Balawan, Vicki Genfan and Hasan Cihatter.

Why Sámi Sing is an anthropological inquiry into a singing practice found among the Indigenous Sámi people, living in the northernmost part of Europe. It inquires how the performance of melodies, with or without lyrics, may be a way of altering perception, relating to human and non-human presences, or engaging with the past. According to its practitioners, the Sámi "yoik" is more than a musical repertoire made up by humans: it is a vocal power received from the environment, one that reveals its possibilities with parsimony through practice and experience. Following the propensity of Sámi singers to take melodies seriously and experiment with them, this book establishes a conversation between Indigenous and Western epistemologies and introduces the "yoik" as a way of knowing in its own right, with both convergences and divergences vis-à-vis academic ways of knowing. It will be of particular interest to scholars of anthropology, ethnomusicology, and Indigenous studies.

Igor Stravinsky left behind a complex heritage of music and ideas. There are many examples of discrepancies between his literate statements about music and musicians and his musical compositions and activity. Per Dahl presents a model of communication that unveils a clear and logical understanding of Stravinsky's heritage, based on the extant material available. From this, Dahl argues the case for Stravinsky’s music and his ideas as separate entities, representing different modes of communication. As well as describing a triangular model of communication, based on a tilted and extended version of Ogden's triangle, Dahl presents an empirical investigation of Stravinsky's vocabulary of signs and expressions in his published scores - his communicative mode towards musicians. In addition to simple statistics, Dahl compares the notation practice in the composer’s different stylistic epochs as well as his writing for different sizes of ensembles. Dahl also considers Stravinsky’s performances and recordings as modes of communication to investigate whether the multi-layered model can soften the discrepancies between Stravinsky the literary and Stravinsky the musician.

A detailed critical and historical investigation of the development of musical notation as a powerful system of symbolic communication.