This book presents the first study of music in convent life in a single Hispanic city, Barcelona, during the early modern era. Exploring how convents were involved in the musical networks operating in sixteenth-century Barcelona, it challenges the invisibility of women in music history and reveals the intrinsic role played by nuns and lay women in the city’s urban musical culture. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, this innovative study offers a cross-disciplinary approach that not only reveals details of the rich musical life in Barcelona’s nunneries, but shows how they took part in wider national and transnational networks of musical distribution, including religious, commercial, and social dimensions of music. The connections of Barcelona convents to networks for the dissemination of music in and outside the city provide a rich example of the close relationship between musical networks, urban society, and popular culture. Addressing how music was understood as a marker of identity, prestige, and social status and, above all, as a conduit between earth and heaven, this book provides new insights into how women shaped musical traditions in the urban context. It is essential reading for scholars of early modern history, musicology, history of religion, and gender studies, as well as all those with an interest in urban history and the city of Barcelona. The book is supported by additional digital appendices, which include: Records of inquiries into the lineage of Santa Maria de Jonqueres nuns Development of the collections of choir books belonging to the convents of Santa Maria de Jonqueres and Sant Antoni i Santa Clara

Listening to Confraternities offers new perspectives on the contribution of guild and devotional confraternities to the urban phonosphere based on original research and an interdisciplinary approach. Historians of art, architecture, culture, sound, music and the senses consider the ways in which, through their devotional practices, confraternities acted as patrons of music, created their identity through sound and were involved in the everyday musical experience of major cities in early modern Europe. Confraternities have been studied from many different angles, but only rarely as acoustic communities that communicated through sound and whose musical activities delimited the urban spaces in which they were active. Contributors: Nicholas Terpstra, Emanuela Vai, Ana López Suero, Henry Drummond, Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita, Ferrán Escrivà-Llorca, Noel O’Regan, Magnus Williamson, Xavier Torres Sans, Erika Honisch, Alexander Fisher, Konrad Eisenbichler, Daniele Filippi, Dylan Reid, Elisa Lessa, Antonio Ruiz Caballero, Juan Ruiz Jiménez, Sergi González González, and Tess Knighton.

Music, Place, and Identity in Italian Urban Soundscapes circa 1550-1860 presents new perspectives on the role music played in the physical, cultural, and civic spaces of Italian cities from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Across thirteen chapters, contributors explore the complex connections between sound and space within these urban contexts, demonstrating how music and sound were intimately connected to changing social and political practices. The volume offers a critical redefinition of the core concept of soundscape, considering musical practices through the lenses of territory, space, representation, and identity, in five parts: Soundscape, Phonosphere, and Urban History Urban Soundscapes across Time Urban Soundscapes and Acoustic Communities Urban Soundscapes in Literary Sources Reconstructing Urban Soundscapes in the Digital Era Music, Place, and Identity in Italian Urban Soundscapes circa 1550-1860 reframes our understanding of Italian music history beyond models of patronage, investigating how sounds and musics have contributed to the construction of human identities and communities.

In both video games and animated films, worlds are constructed through a combination of animation, which defines what players see on the screen, and music and sound, which provide essential cues to action, emotion, and narrative. This book offers a rich exploration of the intersections between animation, video games, and music and sound, bringing together a range of multidisciplinary lenses. In fourteen chapters, the contributors consider similarities and differences in how music and sound structure video games and animation, as well as the animation within video games, and explore core topics of nostalgia, adaptation, gender and sexuality. Offering fresh insights into the aesthetic interplay of animation, video games, and sound, this volume provides a gateway into new areas of study that will be of interest to scholars and students across musicology, animation studies, game studies, and media studies more broadly.

Contemporary notions of musical virtuosity redevelop historic concepts and demonstrate that our present understanding of virtuosity in western art music has shifted from what seemed, for a time, to be a relatively clear and stable definition. In the field and the academy, lively debates around the definition and/or value of virtuosity have always elicited strong and varied ideas. In the twenty-first century, frictions have emerged between traditional definitions of virtuosity and contemporary practices that emphasise collaboration and blur roles between performers, composers, and improvisers. Contemporary Musical Virtuosities embraces the evolving processes, practitioners, and presentation models within twenty-first century art music. This edited collection explores recent insights into the experience and role of virtuosity in different contexts, via contributions from an intergenerational group of artists, academics, and artist-academics. Their writing highlights current themes in contemporary western art music and intersecting musical and performing arts genres such as dance, sound art, improvisation, jazz, trans-traditional collaborations, and Australian Indigenous music. It offers models for supporting and recognising a plurality of musical virtuosities typically excluded from traditional definitions and examines implications for musical practice today. Chapters take the form of academic essays, artist reflections, interviews, personal letters, and a manifesto, reflecting the range of approaches and contexts covered. The collection includes first writings on practices that have been present in the industry for some time not yet documented or examined in detail until now, and thus offers a vision for the future that prioritises inclusive and overlapping practices and processes in music.

Kevin Korsyn is a renowned music theorist, musicologist, and pedagogue who has taught at the University of Michigan since 1992. He has published widely and influentially in areas as diverse as Beethoven and Brahms studies, chromatic tonality, disciplinarity and metatheory, history of theory, musical meaning and hermeneutics, poststructuralism (deconstruction, intertextuality, etc.), and Schenkerian theory and analysis. Because of the scope and caliber of his published work, and also his legacy as a pedagogue, Korsyn has had a profound impact on the field of music theory, along with the related fields of historical musicology and aesthetics. This book, a festschrift for Korsyn, comprises essays that constellate around his numerous scholarly foci. Represented in the volume are not only familiar music-theoretical topics such as chromaticism, form, Schenker, and text-music relations, but also various interdisciplinary topics such as deconstruction, disability studies, German Idealism, posthumanism, and psychoanalysis. The book thus reflects the increasingly multifaceted intellectual landscape of contemporary music theory.

This volume brings together leading voices from the new wave of research on musical instruments to consider how we can connect the material aspects of instruments with their social function, approaches that have been otherwise too frequently separated in musical scholarship. Shaping Sound and Society: The Cultural Study of Musical Instruments locates the instruments at the centre of cultural interactions. With contributions from ten scholars spanning a variety of methodologies and a wide range of both contemporary and historic music cultures, the volume is divided into three sections. Contributors discuss the relationships between makers, performers, and their local communities; the different meanings that instruments accrue as they travel over time and place; and the manner in which instruments throw new light on historic music cultures. Alongside the scholarly chapters, the volume also includes a selection of shorter interludes based on interviews with makers of comparatively new instruments, offering further insights into the process of musical instrument innovation. An essential read for students and academics in the fields of music and ethnomusicology, this volume will also interest anyone looking to understand how the cultural interaction of musical instruments is deeply informed and influenced by social, technological, and cultural change.