What does it mean to talk about musical coherence at the end of a century characterised by fragmentation and discontinuity? How can the diverse influences which stand behind the works of many late-twentieth-century composers be reconciled with the singular immediacy of the experiences that they can create? How might an awareness of the distinctive ways in which these experiences are generated and controlled affect the way we listen to, reflect upon and write about this music? Mark Hutchinson outlines a novel concept of coherence within Western art music from the 1980s to the turn of the millennium as a means of understanding the work of a number of contemporary composers, including Thomas Ades, Kaija Saariaho, T ru Takemitsu and Gyorgy Kurtag, whose music cannot be fitted easily into a particular compositional school or analytical framework. Coherence is understood as a multi-layered phenomenon experienced, above all, in the act of listening, but reliant upon a variety of other aspects of musical experience, including compositional statements, analysis, and connections of aesthetic, and listeners' own, imaginative conceptualisations. Accordingly, the approach taken here is similarly multi-faceted: close analytical readings of a number of specific works are combined with insights drawn from philosophy and aesthetics, music perception, and critical theory, with a particular openness to novel metaphorical presentations of basic musical ideas about form, language and time."

What does it mean to talk about musical coherence at the end of a century characterised by fragmentation and discontinuity? How can the diverse influences which stand behind the works of many late twentieth-century composers be reconciled with the singular immediacy of the experiences that they can create? How might an awareness of the distinctive ways in which these experiences are generated and controlled affect the way we listen to, reflect upon and write about this music? Mark Hutchinson outlines a novel concept of coherence within Western art music from the 1980s to the turn of the millennium as a means of understanding the work of a number of contemporary composers, including Thomas Adès, Kaija Saariaho, Tō ru Takemitsu and György Kurtág, whose music cannot be fitted easily into a particular compositional school or analytical framework. Coherence is understood as a multi-layered phenomenon experienced, above all, in the act of listening, but reliant upon a variety of other aspects of musical experience, including compositional statements, analysis, and connections of aesthetic, as well as listeners' own, imaginative conceptualisations. Accordingly, the approach taken here is similarly multi-faceted: close analytical readings of a number of specific works are combined with insights drawn from philosophy and aesthetics, music perception, and critical theory, with a particular openness to novel metaphorical presentations of basic musical ideas about form, language and time.

What does it mean to talk about musical coherence at the end of a century characterised by fragmentation and discontinuity? How can the diverse influences which stand behind the works of many late twentieth-century composers be reconciled with the singular immediacy of the experiences that they can create? How might an awareness of the distinctive ways in which these experiences are generated and controlled affect the way we listen to, reflect upon and write about this music? Mark Hutchinson outlines a novel concept of coherence within Western art music from the 1980s to the turn of the millennium as a means of understanding the work of a number of contemporary composers, including Thomas Adès, Kaija Saariaho, Tōru Takemitsu and György Kurtág, whose music cannot be fitted easily into a particular compositional school or analytical framework. Coherence is understood as a multi-layered phenomenon experienced, above all, in the act of listening, but reliant upon a variety of other aspects of musical experience, including compositional statements, analysis, and connections of aesthetic, as well as listeners' own, imaginative conceptualisations. Accordingly, the approach taken here is similarly multi-faceted: close analytical readings of a number of specific works are combined with insights drawn from philosophy and aesthetics, music perception, and critical theory, with a particular openness to novel metaphorical presentations of basic musical ideas about form, language and time.

This edited volume explores how selected researchers, students and academics name and frame creative teaching and learning as constructed through the rationalities, practices, relationships, events, objects and systems that are brought to educational sites and developed by learning communities. The concept of creative learning questions the starting-points and opens up the outcomes of curriculum, and this frames creative teaching not only as a process of learning but as an agent of change. Within the book, the various creativities that are valued by different stakeholders teaching and studying in the higher music sector are delineated, and processes and understandings of creative teaching are articulated, both generally in higher music education and specifically through their application within the design of individual modules. This focus makes the text relevant to scholars, researchers and practitioners across many fields of music, including those working in musicology, composition, performance, music education, and music psychology. The book contributes new perspectives on our understanding of the role of creative teaching and learning and processes in creative teaching across the domain of music learning in higher music education sectors.

In recent research, there has been growing emphasis on the collaborative, social, and collective nature of musical behaviour and practices. Among the emerging hypotheses in this connection are the idea that listening to music is always listening together and being with the other; that music making is a matter of intercorporeality, mutuality, and emphatic attunement; and that creative agency in musical practices is fundamentally a distributed phenomenon. Chamber music provides an ideal context for the testing and actualization of these notions. This Special Issue on chamber music and the chamber musician aims to explore the psychological, social, cultural, historical, and artistic issues in the practice of classical chamber music in the twenty-first century. Contributions are invited on any of these aspects and issues involved in being a contemporary classical chamber musician. Authors are encouraged to contextualise their research by reference to the recent literature on collaborative musicking, and among the topics they may choose to address are the cultural and musical demands chamber musicians face and the implications of these demands for their artistic practice, the ways the twenty-first-century chamber musicians engage with historical practices, the newly emerging musical identities and artistic roles available to them, and expressivity in current chamber music practices.

All music fans harbor in their memories vivid fragments of their favorite works. The starting guitar solo of "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones, the da-da-da-DUM gesture that opens Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the lush swelling chords of a beloved movie soundtrack: hearing the briefest snippet of any of these is enough to transport listeners into the piece's sonic and emotional world. But what makes musical motives so powerful? In Musical Motives, author Brent Auerbach looks at the ways that motives the small-scale pitch and rhythm shapes that are ever-present in music unify musical compositions and shape our experiences of them. Motives serve both to communicate basic musical meaning and to tie together sound space like the motifs in visual art. They present in all genres from classical and popular to jazz and world music, making them ideally suited for analysis. Musical Motives opens with a general introduction to these fundamental building blocks, then lays out a comprehensive theory and method to account for music's structure and drama in motivic terms. Aimed at both amateur and expert audiences, the book offers a tiered approach that progresses from Basic to Complex Motivic Analysis. The methods are illustrated by small- and large-scale analyses of pieces by Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, Chaminade, Verdi, Radiohead, and many more.