Music

Hands, Wrists, Fingers invites musicians to explore a new way of thinking about good health. The physical dimensions of hands are certainly important and merit close study, encompassing coordination, relaxation, dexterity, speed, accuracy, and freedom from pain. While acknowledging these dimensions, Hands, Wrists, Fingers focuses on a broader perspective that includes cultural dimensions both conscious and unconscious, involving language, symbol, ritual, curiosity, playfulness, and mindfulness. Through a wealth of original insights, anecdotes, exercises, and games, musicians will be able to transform their hands into sensitive and intelligent agents of joyful creativity, in which the linguistic and symbolic dimensions of hands become inseparable from their physical and material existence.
Hands, Wrists, Fingers is organized in four parts: Culture, The Language of Hands, Sensitivity and Creativity, and Knowledge and Mystery. Behind the physical gestures and movements of your daily life and your music-making, there are the stories that you tell about your own hands—thoughts and feelings, memories, experiences, judgments, hopes, and fears. Hands, Wrists, Fingers argues that the way you use your hands is inseparable from these stories, in which you tell yourself “what you can and cannot do, what you should and should not do, what you’re allowed to do and what you’re prevented from doing.” If your inner stories aren’t healthy in themselves, it’s very difficult for your hands to behave in a healthy manner.
Hands, Wrists, Fingers is a practical book brimming with exercises and suggestions. Every chapter is supported by video clips illustrating and demonstrating its exercises. Among other things, you’ll explore the skills of rotation and of spiral movements, the mastery of textures and gradations, the playful manipulation of objects, and the use of your hands as agents of expressive language. Your hands will become creative, intelligent, and sensitive, and you’ll develop a new understanding of the true meaning of good health.

«El acto de escribir una canción es una experiencia única, diferente a todo lo que conozco. Tienes que estar de buen humor y empezar con la mente despejada. Debes confiar en tus sentimientos iniciales porque al principio no sabes realmente a dónde vas.» (Paul McCartney)

«Con más frecuencia de las que puedo contar, me han preguntado si escribiría una autobiografía, pero nunca ha sido el momento adecuado. Lo único con lo que siempre me las he arreglado para hacer, ya sea en casa o de viaje, es escribir canciones nuevas. Sé que a algunas personas, cuando llegan a cierta edad, les gusta ir en busca de su diario para recordar los acontecimientos del día a día del pasado, pero yo no tengo esos cuadernos. Lo que sí tengo son mis canciones, cientos de ellas, de las que he aprendido que tienen el mismo propósito. Y estas canciones abarcan toda mi vida.

Espero que lo que he escrito le muestre a la gente algo sobre mis canciones y mi vida que no hayan visto antes. He intentado decir algo sobre cómo ocurre la música y lo que significa para mí, y espero que pueda significar también algo para los demás.» (Paul McCartney)

 «A partir de las conversaciones que mantuve con Paul McCartney durante un período de cinco años, estos textos son lo más parecido a una autobiografía que jamás podríamos haber escrito. Sus conocimientos sobre su propio proceso artístico confirman una noción que ya habíamos adivinado: que Paul McCartney es una figura literaria importante que se basa y extiende en la larga tradición de la poesía inglesa.

Durante sesenta años ha encarnado la inquietud que asociamos con el artista de primer nivel. Y más allá de eso, Paul McCartney es notable porque es uno de los pocos que no solo está influenciado por su tiempo sino que su trabajo ha definido sustancialmente ese tiempo.» (Paul Muldoon)

‘Music Scenes and Migrations’ brings together new work from Brazilian and European scholars around the themes of musical place and transnationalism across the Atlantic triangle connecting Brazil, Africa and Europe. Moving beyond now-contested models for conceptualizing international musical relations and hierarchies of powers and influence, such as global/local or centre/periphery, the volume draws attention instead to the role of the city, in particular, in producing, signifying and mediating music-making in the colonial and post-colonial Portuguese-speaking world. In considering the roles played by cities as hubs of cultural intersection, socialization, exchange and transformation; as sites of political intervention and contestation; and as homes to large concentrations of consumers, technologies and media, Rio de Janeiro necessarily figures prominently, given its historical importance as an international port at the centre of the Lusophone Atlantic world. The volume also gives attention to other urban centres, within Brazil and abroad, towards which musicians and musical traditions have migrated and converged – such as São Paulo, Lisbon and Madrid – where they have reinvented themselves; where notions of Brazilian and Lusophone identity have been reconfigured; and where independent, peripheral and underground scenes have contested the hegemony of the musical ‘mainstream’.

The contributions to the volume are grouped according to three key thematic areas. ‘Colonial and Post-Colonial Transnationalisms, Migrations and Diasporas’ focuses on the musical movements and fluxes that have traversed the Atlantic world since the colonial period, including the diasporic extensions of African music-making; the role of early forms of mechanical music-recording in mediating between Portuguese and Brazilian popular songs in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro; the story of música caipira in articulating the ‘rooting’ and ‘uprooting’ migratory experience of the São Paulo peasantry in the twentieth century; and the contemporary phenomenon of Brazilian musicians living in the cities of Lisbon and Madrid, where they negotiate the needs and expectations of their expatriate communities, tourists and local audiences.

‘Relocating Rio de Janeiro’ considers how, in its identification with key musical traditions such as samba, pagode and choro, the city has been a contested space – geographically, symbolically and politically – whether in the memories and mythologies of key neighbourhoods and locations of music-making as expressed in the musical discourses themselves, through music’s involvement in the material forms of community life and popular culture, including religion, carnival and other festivals, or through the competing claims of official state institutions and policies, the recording industry and grassroots communitarian initiatives.

The essays in ‘Demetropolitanizing the Musical City: Other Scenes, Industries, Technologies’ explore how contemporary developments in the independent, underground and peripheral music scenes in Brazil and Portugal have challenged traditional narratives and hierarchies that dichotomized the field in terms of national tradition v. internationalism, mainstream v. margins, pop v. popular. Genres such as sertaneja universitária, funk, heavy metal, Brazilian jazz and instrumental music, post-Vanguarda Paulista MPB and rap are considered in the light of profound shifts in the economy and technology of the music industry, including fluctuations in the recording sector, the internationalization of audiences, and the rise of YouTube, among other video-based digital platforms, as a predominant medium for the consumption of music.

String Quartets in Beethoven’s Europe is the first detailed study of string quartets in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Europe. It brings together the work of nine scholars who explore little-studied aspects of this multi-faceted genre. Together, this book’s chapters deal with compositional responses to Beethoven’s string quartets and the prestige of the genre; varied compositional practices in string quartet writing, with a particular emphasis on texture and performance elements; and the reception of Beethoven’s string quartets ca. 1800. They include discussions of quartets composed for the amateur and connoisseur markets in Beethoven’s Europe; virtuosity, the French Violin School, and the quatuor brillant; the relationship between quartet composers and their audiences during Beethoven’s era; and the cross-pollination of quartet styles in Europe’s musical centers such as Vienna, Paris, and St. Petersburg.

Since the turn of the twentieth century the dramatic rise of mass media has profoundly transformed music practices in the Arab world. Music has adapted to successive forms of media dissemination—from phonograph cylinders to MP3s—each subjected to the political and economic forces of its particular era and region. Carried by mass media, the broader culture of Arab music has been thoroughly transformed as well. Simultaneously, mass mediated music has become a powerful social force. While parallel processes have unfolded worldwide, their implications in the Arabic-speaking world have thus far received little scholarly attention.

This provocative volume features sixteen new essays examining these issues, especially televised music and the controversial new genre of the music video. Perceptive voices—both emerging and established—represent a wide variety of academic disciplines. Incisive essays by Egyptian critics display the textures of public Arabic discourse to an English readership. Authors address the key issues of contemporary Arab society—gender and sexuality, Islam, class, economy, power, and nation—as refracted through the culture of mediated music.

Interconnected by a web of recurrent concepts, this collection transcends music to become an important resource for the study of contemporary Arab society and culture.



Contributors: Wael Abdel Fattah, Yasser Abdel-Latif, Moataz Abdel Aziz, Tamim Al-Barghouti, Mounir Al Wassimi, Walter Armbrust, Elisabeth Cestor, Hani Darwish, Walid El Khachab, Abdel-Wahab Elmessiri, James Grippo, Patricia Kubala, Katherine Meizel, Zein Nassar, Ibrahim Saleh, Laith Ulaby.