To feel the emotional force of music, we experience it aurally. But how can we convey musical understanding visually?Visualizing Music explores the art of communicating about music through images. Drawing on principles from the fields of vision science and information visualization, Eric Isaacson describes how graphical images can help us understand music. By explaining the history of music visualizations through the lens of human perception and cognition,...

A self-training manual as well as a classroom text, this book is a complete step-by-step course to develop the musician's ability to hear and notate any style of music. Personal training, thoery and exercises produce techniques which are combined in an integrated craft which may be applied to composition, orchestration, arranging, improvisation and performance. A kind of finishing school for those who wish to pursue a career in composing, orchestrating, arranging or performing. -- The Scor...

Electronic music evokes new sensations, feelings, and thoughts in both composers and listeners. Opening the door to an unlimited universe of sound, it engages spatialization as an integral aspect of composition and focuses on sound transformation as a core structural strategy. In this new domain, pitch occurs as a flowing and ephemeral substance that can be bent, modulated, or dissolved into noise. Similarly, time occurs not merely as a fixed duration subdivided by ratios, but as a plastic...

Film music often tells us how to feel, but it also guides us how to hear. Filmgoing is an intensely musical experience, one in which the soundtrack structures our interpretations and steers our emotions. Hollywood Harmony explores the inner workings of film music, bringing together tools from music theory, musicology, and music psychology in this first ever book-length analytical study of this culturally central repertoire. Harmony, and especially chromaticism, is emblematic of th...

Twentieth-Century Music Theory and Practice introduces a number of tools for analyzing a wide range of twentieth-century musical styles and genres. It includes discussions of harmony, scales, rhythm, contour, post-tonal music, set theory, the twelve-tone method, and modernism. Recent developments involving atonal voice leading, K-nets, nonlinearity, and neo-Reimannian transformations are also engaged. While many of the theoretical tools for analyzing twentieth century music have b...

Music Outside the Lines is an informative and practical resource for all who are invested in making music composition an integral part of curriculum. Author Maud Hickey offers both a well-grounded justification for teaching music composition and also a compendium of useful instructional ideas and classroom activities. Hickey begins with a rationale for teachers to begin composition activities in their own classrooms, with a thoughtful argument that demonstrates that all music teac...

First Published in 2007. This volume is a collection of a series of six illustrated lectures that demonstrate a picture of the author’s evolved thinking about the composing of music: both from a more general, overall perspective and from that of the particular moment-to-moment decision making that, gradually accumulating, brings a whole into being.

Composing with Constraints: 100 Practical Exercises in Music Composition provides an innovative approach to the instruction of the craft of music composition based on tailored exercises to help students develop their creativity. When composition is condensed to a series of logical steps, it can then be taught and learned more efficiently. With this approach in mind, Jorge Variego offers a variety of practical exercises to help student composers and instructors to create tangible w...

Jazz Theory: From Basic to Advanced Study, Second Edition, is a comprehensive textbook for those with no previous study in jazz, as well as those in advanced theory courses. Written with the goal to bridge theory and practice, it provides a strong theoretical foundation from music fundamentals to post-tonal theory, while integrating ear training, keyboard skills, and improvisation. It hosts "play-along" audio tracks on a Companion Website, including a workbook, ear-traini...

One of contemporary music’s most significant and controversial figures, Brian Ferneyhough's complex and challenging music draws inspiration from painting, literature and philosophy, as well as music from the recent and distant past. His dense, multi-layered compositions intrigue musicians while pushing performer and instrument to the limits of their abilities. A wide-ranging survey of his life and work to date, Brian Ferneyhough examines the critical issues fundamental to understanding the...

What is experimental music today? This book offers an up to date survey of this field for anyone with an interest, from seasoned practitioners to curious readers. This book takes the stance that experimental music is not a limited historical event, but is a proliferation of approaches to sound that reveals much about present-day experience. An experimental work is not identifiable by its sound alone, but by the nature of the questions it poses and its openness to the sounding event.

"Robert Hatten's new book is a worthy successor to his Musical Meaning in Beethoven, which established him as a front-rank scholar . . . in questions of musical meaning. . . . [B]oth how he approaches musical works and what he says about them are timely and to the point. Musical scholars in both musicology and theory will find much of value here, and will find their notions of musical meaning challenged and expanded." —Patrick McCrelessThis book continues to develop the semiotic th...