A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, Keys to Play spans Greek myth and contemporary Japanese digital games to chart a genealogy of musical play and its animation via improvisation, performance, and recreation. As a paradigmatic digital interface, the keyboard forms a field of play on which the book’s diverse objects of inquiry—from clavichords to PCs and eighteenth-century musical dice games to the latest rhythm-action titles—enter into analogical relations. Remapping the keyboard’s topography by way of Mozart and Super Mario, who head an expansive cast of historical and virtual actors, Keys to Play invites readers to unlock ludic dimensions of music that are at once old and new.

Arriving in the United States at age twenty-seven, Hungarian-born Paul Henry Lang (1901-1991) went on to exert a powerful influence on musical life and scholarship in his adopted country for more than six decades. As professor of musicology at Columbia University, editor of the Musical Quarterly, a founder of the American Musicological Society, and chief music critic of the New York Herald Tribune, Lang became one of Americas foremost musical scholars and commentators. This anthology of his previously uncollected writings includes essays written throughout his career on a full array of musical subjects, as well as unpublished chapters of the book on performance practice that he was writing at the time of his death. Lang was concerned above all with safeguarding the purity of musical knowledge as reflected in both scholarship and performance. Whether addressing his fellow musicologists or the general public, he expressed a broadly humanistic conception of musicology in his erudite and entertaining writings on such diverse subjects as Bach and Handel, the historical veracity of the film Amadeus, Marxist theory and music, and the controversial issue of authenticity in performance.

A giant in the development of American musicology, Charles Seeger was a scholar- musician active in practically all areas of musical endeavor. This wide-ranging collection investigates Seeger's writings on music, musical research, and the responsibility of the musician and musicologist to society. A social activist who played a leadership role in the Composers Collective in 1930s New York and in the founding of scholarly organizations including the American Musicological Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology, Seeger was a philosopher as well as a builder. His ideas about music and musicology, incorporating perspectives as wide-ranging as physics, philosophy, and anthropology, set the stage for the rise of modern ethnomusicology. Key to the establishment of formal musical scholarship in the United States, Seeger was also vitally interested in nurturing uniquely American musical forms and in bridging the gap between academia and the world outside the ivory tower. By presenting new views of Seeger's thought, incorporating in particular often neglected early writings, Understanding Charles Seeger, Pioneer in American Musicology provides a unique perspective on intellectual history in twentieth- century America

American composer Charles Ives (1874–1954) has gone from being a virtual unknown to become one of the most respected and lauded composers in American music. In this sweeping survey of intellectual and musical history, David C. Paul tells the new story of how Ives's music was shaped by shifting conceptions of American identity within and outside of musical culture, charting the changes in the reception of Ives across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Paul focuses on the critics, composers, performers, and scholars whose contributions were most influential in shaping the critical discourse on Ives, many of them marquee names of American musical culture themselves, including Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, and Leonard Bernstein. Paul explores both how Ives positioned his music amid changing philosophical and aesthetic currents and how others interpreted his contributions to American music. Although Ives's initial efforts to find a public in the early twenties attracted a few devotees, the resurgence of interest in the American literary past during the thirties made a concert staple of his "Concord" Sonata, a work dedicated to nineteenth-century transcendentalist writers. Paul shows how Ives was subsequently deployed as an icon of American freedom during the early Cold War period and how he came to be instigated at the head of a line of "American maverick" composers. Paul also examines why a recent cadre of scholars has beset the composer with Gilded Age social anxieties. By embedding Ives' reception within the changing developments of a wide range of fields including intellectual history, American studies, literature, musicology, and American politics and society in general, Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer greatly advances our understanding of Ives and his influence on nearly a century of American culture.