Music

Dieser durchgehend zweisprachige Band versammelt Beiträge zu ästhetischen, künstlerischen und pädagogischen Fragestellungen der musikalischen Improvisation. Er beinhaltet Reflexionen und Modelle, die sich mit der Kunst der Improvisation und den in ihr handelnden Menschen befassen und darüber hinaus faszinierende Perspektiven auch für Kultur und Wissenschaft bieten.

This book, bilingual throughout, brings together essays providing aesthetic, artistic and pedagogical interrogations of the art of musical improvisation. It contains reflections and models which deal both with the art of improvisation and with the people who carry it out and offers fascinating perspectives for culture and for scholarship more generally.

Contributions by Alan Bern, Rogério Costa, Nina Polaschegg, Edwin Prévost, and others.

In the early years of the Cold War, Western nations increasingly adopted strategies of public diplomacy involving popular music. While the diplomatic use of popular music was initially limited to such genres as jazz, the second half of the 20th century saw a growing presence of various popular genres in diplomatic contexts, including rock, pop, bluegrass, flamenco, funk, disco, and hip-hop, among others.
This volume illuminates the interrelation of popular music and public diplomacy from a transnational and transdisciplinary angle. The contributions argue that, as popular music has been a crucial factor in international relations, its diplomatic use has substantially impacted the global musical landscape of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The integration of audible space is a central aspect of electroacoustic music. Ever since the earliest analogue days of electroacoustic music, pioneers of the genre – including Pierre Schaeffer, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luigi Nono – used special devices and methods for their compositions and refined the possibilities of integrating the sound of space into music.
In this anthology, analytical portraits of compositions and groups of compositions show the wide spectrum of spatial practices in early electroacoustic music. Additionally, retrospective views on the use of spatial composition in earlier epochs and in instrumental music of the 20th century portray the practice of spatial composition in different eras and genres, as well as the universality of spatial music as a topic. In this way the book contributes to a more differentiated understanding of the term »spatial music«.

Die Integration des hörbaren Raums ist ein zentraler Aspekt der elektroakustischen Musik. Schon auf Basis der Analogtechnik entstanden spezielle Geräte und Verfahren, die Pioniere des Genres wie Pierre Schaeffer, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen oder Luigi Nono für ihre Vorstellungen von Raummusik heranzogen und weiter entwickelten.
In diesem Band, der englisch- und deutschsprachige Beiträge gleichermaßen versammelt, zeigen analytische Portraits einzelner Kompositionen oder Kompositionsgruppen das breite Spektrum spatialer Praktiken in der frühen elektroakustischen Musik. Geschichtliche Rückblicke auf spatiale Kompositionsweisen früherer Epochen bis hin zur instrumentalen Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts stellen den epochen- und genrespezifischen Umgang mit Raum dar und belegen nicht nur die Universalität des Themas Raummusik, sondern leisten auch einen Beitrag zu deren begrifflicher Differenzierung.

Anonymity practices in electronic music culture have long been the object of journalistic and academic discourse. Yet anonymity itself is ephemeral and ontologically precarious. How can scholars research anonymous entities without impairing their anonymity, and what can they learn from their precarity?
This study describes two projects of anonymity performance as forms of critical practice (Judith Butler/Michel Foucault) involving performative play with anonymity through the use of fake identities or collaborative persona imaginations. Adopting a reflexive and performative writing style, this performance ethnography calls for a radical performative turn and an ontological reflexivity in the cultural studies of music.

We cannot simply listen to our urban past. Yet we encounter a rich cultural heritage of city sounds presented in text, radio and film. How can such »staged sounds« express the changing identities of cities?
This volume presents a collection of studies on the staging of Amsterdam, Berlin and London soundscapes in historical documents, radio plays and films, and offers insights into themes such as film sound theory and museum audio guides. In doing so, this book puts contemporary controversies on urban sound in historical perspective, and contextualises iconic presentations of cities. It addresses academics, students, and museum workers alike.
With contributions by Jasper Aalbers, Karin Bijsterveld, Carolyn Birdsall, Ross Brown, Andrew Crisell, Andreas Fickers, Annelies Jacobs, Evi Karathanasopoulou, Patricia Pisters, Holger Schulze, Mark M. Smith and Jonathan Sterne.

Connecting migration studies and the theory of valuation, this collection offers an interdisciplinary approach to the study of transnational music practices. Conceiving music as a practice not confined to audibility, the contributions reveal how music emerges in concrete situations through people, objects, techniques, meanings, and emotions in different parts of the world and during different historic periods. Values are thereby created and shared, and creative processes are evaluated in terms of diversity, space and exchange.
This book presents cases of contemporary, popular and traditional music, festivals and trade fairs, albums and band projects, shedding light on the tensions between the transfer, reconstruction and creation of music in different contexts.

Can sound be perceived independently of its social dimension? Or is it always embedded in a discursive network? »Postcolonial Repercussions« explores these questions in form of a collective conversation. The contributors have collected sound stories and sound knowledge from Brazil to Morocco, listened to resonances from the Underground and the Pacific Ocean, from Popular Music and speech recognition.
The anthology gathers heterogeneous approaches to emancipatory forms of ontological listening as well as pleas for critical fabulation and a practice of care. It tells us about opportunities, perspectives and the (im)possibility of decolonised listening.