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The event of music history

This book presents a new theory of how to write music history, and offers an exemplar of this new theory in action, in a series of four chapter-length reflexions on Beethoven's heroic style. The first book-length theory of music history since Carl Dahlhaus's Foundations of Music History, it brings musicology to the cutting edge of debates in the postmodern philosophy of history. While the book engages with current thinking, it also goes further than the postmodern critique of history writing to find a new and positive basis for the writing of music history. In so doing the book revisits the philosophy of Alain Badiou: in place of a focus on the facts, the objects of history, whose problematic relation to history writing the theorists have demonstrated, the book proposes a focus instead on the subjects of history, the 'faithful', 'reactive, and 'obscure' responses to an 'Event' (a kind of rapture of ontology which brings the actors involved closer to a truth). It sees musical materials (the styles, techniques, and musical 'language' handed down to composers by history) in a dialectical relationship with the human beings who are music's manifold historical actors. Engagingly written, this new short theory of music history will be essential reading for scholars and students of the many area studies within music history. It will also attract those of neighbouring disciplines dealing with the philosophy of history or the history of historiography. J. P. E. Harper-Scott is Professor of Music History and Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London, and General Editor of the Cambridge University Press series, 'Music in Context'. His work focuses on an examination of music's cultural, personal, and interpersonal significance since around 1800. It draws extensively on philosophical, cultural, and social theory and the explanatory resources of music theory, and espouses an explicitly Leftist perspective. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Ideology in Britten's Operas (2018), The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism (2012), and Edward Elgar, Modernist (2006). He has edited essay collections with Julian Rushton (Elgar Studies, 2007) and Jim Samson (An Introduction to Music Studies, 2009), and a volume of Wagner Studies, edited with Steven Vande Moortele, is under contract to Cambridge University Press.

Earworm and event : music, daydreams, and other imaginary refrains

"Eldritch Priest questions the nature of sound, music, thought, and affect by analyzing the phenomenon of the earworm: those reveries that hijack our attention, the shivers that run down our spines, and the songs that stick in our heads."--In Earworm and Event Eldritch Priest questions the nature of the imagination in contemporary culture through the phenomenon of the earworm: those reveries that hijack our attention, the shivers that run down our spines, and the songs that stick in our heads. Through a series of meditations on music, animal mentality, abstraction, and metaphor, Priest uses the earworm and the states of daydreaming, mind-wandering, and delusion it can produce to outline how music is something that is felt as thought rather than listened to. Priest presents Earworm and Event as a tete-beche-two books bound together with each end meeting in the middle. Where Earworm theorizes the entanglement of thought and feeling, Event performs it. Throughout, Priest conceptualizes the earworm as an event that offers insight into not only the way human brains process musical experiences, but how abstractions and the imagination play key roles in the composition and expression of our contemporary social environments and more-than-human milieus. Unconventional and ambitious, Earworm and Event offers new ways to interrogate the convergence of thought, sound, and affect.

Online Duke University Press

Kellogg 50th anniversary, 1986 : Memoranda & correspondence; Briefs & scripts 1986

Description: Includes sheet music/music scores.

Online American Consumer Culture

Special collections: East Asia

The Stanford East Asia Library holds robust special collections of rare Chinese, Japanese, and Korean materials. Learn more about our collections and how to access them, including procedures for using the reading room.

Stanford Libraries receives major Black music collection, supporting new department and expanding possibilities for research

VOICES TO BE HEARD, STORIES TO BE TOLD: Exploring the Dijkstra Black Music Collection at Stanford’s Archive of Recorded Sound