Divided into two parts, this book shows how human memory influences the organization of music. The first part presents ideas about memory and perception from cognitive psychology and the second part of the book shows how these concepts are exemplified in music.

Phonographic Memories is the first book to perform a sustained analysis of the narrative and thematic influence of Caribbean popular music on the Caribbean novel. Tracing a region-wide attention to the deep connections between music and memory in the work of Lawrence Scott, Oscar Hijuelos, Colin Channer, Daniel Maximin, and Ramabai Espinet, Njelle Hamilton tunes in to each novel’s soundtrack while considering the broader listening cultures that sustain collective memory and situate Caribbean subjects in specific localities. These “musical fictions” depict Caribbean people turning to calypso, bolero, reggae, gwoka, and dub to record, retrieve, and replay personal and cultural memories. Offering a fresh perspective on musical nationalism and nostalgic memory in the era of globalization, Phonographic Memories affirms the continued importance of Caribbean music in providing contemporary novelists ethical narrative models for sounding marginalized memories and voices. Njelle W. Hamilton's Spotify playlist to accompany Phonographic Memories: https://spoti.fi/2tCQRm8

This book explores how photography and recorded music act as vehicles or catalysts in processes of remembering, and how they are regarded, treated, valued and drawn upon as resources connecting past and present in everyday life. It does so via two key concepts: vernacular memory and the mnemonic imagination.

Winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award and Society of Music Theory's Wallace Berry Award This bold challenge to conventional notions about medieval music disputes the assumption of pure literacy and replaces it with a more complex picture of a world in which literacy and orality interacted. Asking such fundamental questions as how singers managed to memorize such an enormous amount of music and how music composed in the mind rather than in writing affected musical style, Anna Maria Busse Berger explores the impact of the art of memory on the composition and transmission of medieval music. Her fresh, innovative study shows that although writing allowed composers to work out pieces in the mind, it did not make memorization redundant but allowed for new ways to commit material to memory. Since some of the polyphonic music from the twelfth century and later was written down, scholars have long assumed that it was all composed and transmitted in written form. Our understanding of medieval music has been profoundly shaped by German philologists from the beginning of the last century who approached medieval music as if it were no different from music of the nineteenth century. But Medieval Music and the Art of Memory deftly demonstrates that the fact that a piece was written down does not necessarily mean that it was conceived and transmitted in writing. Busse Berger's new model, one that emphasizes the interplay of literate and oral composition and transmission, deepens and enriches current understandings of medieval music and opens the field for fresh interpretations.

"Memories of a Musical Life" by William Mason. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

"This book is for pianists who wish to improvise. Many will be experienced performers - perhaps even veteran concert artists - who are nevertheless beginners at improvisation. This contradiction is a reflection of our educational system. Those who attend collegiate music schools spend nearly all time and effort on learning, perfecting, and reciting masterpieces from the standard repertoire. As far as I can remember, no one ever taught or advocated for improvisation during my decade as a student in music schools. Certainly no one ever improvised anything substantial in a concert (except for the jazz musicians, who were, I regret to say, a separate division and generally viewed with complete indifference by the classical community). Nor did any history professor mention that, long ago, improvisation was commonplace and indeed an indispensable skill for much of the daily activity of a working musician. I continue to dedicate a portion of my career to "perfecting and reciting" masterpieces of the repertoire, and teaching my students to do the same. That tradition is dear to me. Still, if I have one regret about my traditional education, it's that it wasn't traditional enough. We have forgotten that in the eighteenth century - those hundred years that form the bedrock of classical music - improvisation was a foundation of music training. Oddly, our discipline has discarded a practice that helped bring it into being. Perhaps it is time to retrieve it from the junk heap of history and give it a good dusting off. I love the legends of the improvisational powers of the masters: Bach creating elaborate fugues on the spot, or Beethoven humiliating Daniel Steibelt by riffing upon and thereby exposing the weakness of the latter's inferior tunes. The stories implied that these abilities were instances of inexplicable genius which we could admire in slack-jawed wonder but never emulate. But that isn't right. Bach could improvise fugues not because he was unique but because almost any properly-trained keyboard player in his day could. Even mediocre talents could improvise mediocre fugues. Bach was exceptionally good at something which pretty much everyone could do at a passable level. They could all do it because it was built into their musical thinking from the very beginning of their training"--