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Music

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Welcome to the Music Research Guide! This guide is designed to assist you in your research.

New Books!

The Age of Musical Arrangements in Europe

This Element considers the art and culture of arranging music in Europe in the period 1780-1830, using Haydn's London symphonies and Mozart's operas as its principal examples. The degree to which musical arrangements shaped the social, musical, and ideological landscape in this era deserves further attention. This Element focuses on Vienna, and an important era in the culture of arrangements in which they were widely and variously cultivated, and in which canon formation and the conception of musical works underwent crucial development. Piano transcriptions (for two hands, four hands, and two pianos) became ever more prominent, completely taking over the field after 1850. For various reasons, principal composers of the era under consideration, including Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, participated directly in the practice of arrangement. Motivations to produce arrangements included learning the art of composition, getting one's name known more widely, financial gain, and pedagogical aims.

Portraits of Everyday Practice in Music Therapy

Portraits of Everyday Practice in Music Therapy is an edited volume of case studies providing music therapy students and new professionals critical reflections on everyday clinical practice across a variety of treatment settings, theories, approaches, and cultural contexts.

Music and Citizenship

Critical citizenship practices and the language of today's populism have never been more sharply opposed. Today's insistent efforts to anchor citizenship narratives in national belonging now confront a variety of 'flexible' or 'differentiated' citizenships - plural, performative, and decentered practices of rights claiming mutually defining 'the political', its subjects, and its others on a variety of scales. They confront, too, critiques of citizenship in totalitarian or neoliberal governmentality that derive from Foucault, Agamben, and Arendt and have become pressing today in proliferating states of emergency and exception and the growing ranks of non-citizens.How should these debates be configured now? And what place does music have in them? In Music and Citizenship, author Martin Stokes argues that music has for a long time been entangled with debates about citizenship and citizenly identities, though for various reasons this entanglement has been insufficiently recognized. Citizenship and citizenly identity debates, for their part, have important implications for the way we think about music in relation to politics, identity, and scholarly practice. Stokes's particular claim is that ethnomusicology has for too long configured relationships between music, society, and reflective and critical practice in terms of identity paradigms. The rejection of these identity paradigms in recent years has taken the form of a post- or anti-humanism that is equally problematic. This book challenges the conventional understanding of citizenship in terms of nationalism and national identity though the examination of case studies from across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. In this way, this volume departs from an earlier ethnomusicology preoccupied with belonging and cultural participation in the nation-state. Citizenship-the fantasy, according to some definitions, of political community without outsiders-suggests, in this book, a different space in which one might configure such relations, one more satisfactorily, and energetically, oriented to questions about musical ecology, sustainability, democracy, and inclusivity.

Prince on Prince

Prince on Prince gets behind the controversies to tell the Prince story in his own words.   Prince is among the most respected and influential entertainers of the twentieth century, breaking sexual, racial, and creative barriers throughout his almost forty years in the spotlight.  He was a multitalented studio artist, a master songwriter who produced and performed almost all of his own music on yearly LPs and countless singles and videos. He was one of the most dynamic live performers ever to hit the stage, a world-class dancer, and musician who's still remembered for the best Super Bowl halftime performance in history. He fought for artists' rights, changed his name to a glyph, and took a star turn in the Oscar-winner Purple Rain.  But for all this, he was a quiet and private individual, reluctant to talk about the work he felt should speak for itself. This volume offers a chronological look at some of Prince's most entertaining and revealing interviews, from 1978 and the release of his debut LP, For You, to a 2015 interview conducted only months before his untimely death at the age of fifty-seven.  Prince's memoir was left incomplete, but this volume offers a view of the man as he sought to portray himself in his own words to journalists of every status throughout his career.

This Is What It Sounds Like

This Is What It Sounds Like is a journey into the science and soul of music that reveals the secrets of why your favorite songs move you. But it's also a story of a musical trailblazer who began as a humble audio tech in Los Angeles, rose to become Prince's chief engineer for Purple Rain, and then created other No. 1 hits ,including Barenaked Ladies' "One Week," as one of the most successful female record producers of all time. Now an award-winning professor of cognitive neuroscience, Susan Rogers leads readers to musical self-awareness. She explains that we each possess a unique "listener profile" based on our brain's natural response to seven key dimensions of any song. Are you someone who prefers lyrics or melody? Do you like music "above the neck" (intellectually stimulating), or "below the neck" (instinctual and rhythmic)? Whether your taste is esoteric or mainstream, Rogers guides readers to recognize their musical personality, and offers language to describe one's own unique taste. Like most of us, Rogers is not a musician, but she shows that all of us can be musical--simply by being an active, passionate listener. While exploring the science of music and the brain, Rogers also takes us behind the scenes of record-making, using her insider's ear to illuminate the music of Prince, Frank Sinatra, Kanye West, Lana Del Rey, and many others. She shares records that changed her life, contrasts them with those that appeal to her coauthor and students, and encourages you to think about the records that define your own identity. Told in a lively and inclusive style, This Is What It Sounds Like will refresh your playlists, deepen your connection to your favorite artists, and change the way you listen to music.

The 12 Days of Christmas

In the whole body of Christmas carols sung in English, among the most famous and beloved is a song universally called "The Twelve Days of Christmas." Although its association with the holiday remains unquestioned, the tune was originally a raucous drinking song with wildly different connotations. This book documents the unfamiliar and distant history of one of the world's most well-known holiday songs, inextricably linked to the earliest celebrations of a festival suppressed by the Church itself. The rowdy and mischievous tone of traditional Christmas has vanished, as have the songs that accompanied the festival of drinking, gambling, fighting, feasting and sex. Modern participants of Christmas may be either embarrassed or pleased to discover the scandalous roots of a beloved holiday classic.

Medieval Polyphony and Song

What characterises medieval polyphony and song? Who composed this music, sang it, and wrote it down? Where and when did the different genres originate, and under what circumstances were they created and performed? This book gives a comprehensive introduction to the rich variety of polyphonic practices and song traditions during the Middle Ages. It explores song from across Europe, in Latin and vernacular languages (precursors to modern Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish); and polyphony from early improvised organum to rhythmically and harmonically complex late medieval motets. Each chapter focuses on a particular geographical location, setting out the specific local contexts of the music created there. Guiding the reader through the musical techniques of melody, harmony, rhythm, and notation that distinguish the different genres of polyphony and song, the authors also consider the factors that make modern performances of this music sound so different from one another.

Efficacy of Sound

The first book-length ethnographic study on music and Ifá divination in Cuba and Nigeria.   Hailing from Cuba, Nigeria, and various sites across Latin America and the Caribbean, Ifá missionary-practitioners are transforming the landscape of Ifá divination and deity (òrìşà/oricha) worship through transatlantic travel and reconnection. In Cuba, where Ifá and Santería emerged as an interrelated, Yorùbá-inspired ritual complex, worshippers are driven to "African Traditionalism" by its promise of efficacy: they find Yorùbá approaches more powerful, potent, and efficacious.   In the first book-length study on music and Ifá, Ruthie Meadows draws on extensive, multi-sited fieldwork in Cuba and Yorùbáland, Nigeria to examine the contentious "Nigerian-style" ritual movement in Cuban Ifá divination. Meadows uses feminist and queer of color theory along with critical studies of Africanity to excavate the relation between utility and affect within translocal ritual music circulations. Meadows traces how translocal Ifá priestesses (Ìyánífá), female batá drummers (bataleras), and priests (babaláwo) harness Yorùbá-centric approaches to ritual music and sound to heighten efficacy, achieve desired ritual outcomes, and reshape the conditions of their lives. Within a contentious religious landscape marked by the idiosyncrasies of Revolutionary state policy, Nigerian-style Ifá-Òrìşà is leveraged to reshape femininity and masculinity, state religious policy, and transatlantic ritual authority on the island.

Music Business Handbook and Career Guide

The Thirteenth Edition of this powerhouse best-selling text maintains its tradition as the most comprehensive, up-to-date guide to the music industry in all of its diversity. Readers new to the music business and seasoned professionals alike will find David Baskerville, Tim Baskerville, and Serona Elton′s handbook the go-to source, regardless of their specialty within the music field. Music Business Handbook and Career Guide is ideal for introductory courses such as Introduction to the Music Business, Music and Media, and other survey courses as well as more specialized courses such as the Record Industry, Music Careers, Artist Management, and more.  The fully updated Thirteenth Edition includes a comprehensive discussion of the streaming revolution, where this predominant form of music consumption stands today and is heading in the future. Rapid changes in music licensingare addressed and how they impact creators, musical work performance licensing, compulsory and negotiated mechanicals, and sound recording licenses. The new edition also analyzes the changing picture of music video and shows how music video has been upended by on-demand streaming.  Lastly, there is all-new coverage of COVID-19and how the concert industry has been impacted as well as digital advances that have been made.   

Library Services

  • Research assistance - help finding sources, evaluating sources

  • Online workshops for citing and plagiarism are held throughout the semester. To request a citing workshop, please email library@rcbc.edu

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