Hugo Riemann and the birth of modern musical thought

Timbre has always been a central element of music and sound, but it is only now emerging as a central dimension in musical thought. Aided by the burgeoning fields of sound studies and critical organology, music studies are taking the “material turn” toward timbre. One of the most urgent tasks of a timbral musicology is to rethink its categories from the ground up and to make space for sound at the foundation of our thinking. This chapter offers an overview of the Handbook, presenting a variety of viewpoints on the multifaceted quality of timbre, covering its histories, philosophies, technologies, and modes of perception. It highlights explorations of timbre that have existed (but were marginalized by our collective timbral deafness) and proposes alternative paths not yet pursued.

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Landscape and Ecology

The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190616922.013.18 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 342-368

Author(s):

Daniel M. Grimley

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Economic Development ◽

Cultural Transformation ◽

Colonial Era ◽

Musical Thought ◽

The Social ◽

Representational Practice ◽

Raymond Williams ◽

The City ◽

Privileged Site

Images of landscape lie at the heart of nineteenth-century musical thought. From frozen winter fields, mountain echoes, distant horn calls, and the sound of the wind moving among the pines, landscape was a vivid representational practice, a creative resource, and a privileged site for immersion, gothic horror, and the Romantic sublime. As Raymond Williams observed, however, the nineteenth century also witnessed an unforeseen transformation of artistic responses to landscape, which paralleled the social and cultural transformation of the country and the city under processes of intense industrialization and economic development. This chapter attends to several musical landscapes, from the Beethovenian “Pastoral” to Delius’s colonial-era evocation of an exoticized American idyll, as a means of mapping nineteenth-century music’s obsession with the idea of landscape and place. Distance recurs repeatedly as a form of subjective presence and through paradoxical connections with proximity and intimacy.

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Music and Musical Thought in Early India

Notes ◽

10.2307/898536 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 50 (3) ◽

pp. 904 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Jonathan Katz ◽

Lewis Rowell ◽

Emmie te Nijenhuis

Keyword(s):

Musical Thought

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Representations of Music and Musicians in the Sanskrit Epics: The Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata

Indian Historical Review ◽

10.1177/0376983620968004 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 47 (2) ◽

pp. 247-262

Author(s):

Kaustubh Gaurh

Keyword(s):

Social Factors ◽

Musical Thought ◽

Art Form ◽

Time Period ◽

Literary Sources ◽

First Millennium ◽

The Relationship

The aim of this study is to understand the ‘idea’ of music that existed in early India in the first millennium bce. Observing the historiographical trends that have emerged in the historical studies of music, it can be seen that there is scarcity of sources to study the kind of music that was practised in this time period. But the approach presented here deals with the traces of music in the literary sources (the Sanskrit epics: the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata) which cover the representations of music and musicians. This would help us infer the nature of musical thought that evolved in early India. 1 The objective is to study the relationship between an art form and the society, by looking at ‘art in society’, not ‘society in art’ to see how music was conditioned by early Indian social factors. 2 After discussing the sources used for the study, a range of philosophical, material and societal aspects are addressed by looking at how the societies in early India engaged themselves with music.

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