Music

Algorithmic music appears to be at a turning point in its history, with many new systems and communities of practice developing together, as vibrant musical culture. This handbook brings together dozens of leading researchers and practitioners in the field, blending technical, artistic, cultural and scientific viewpoints into a whole that considers the making of algorithmic music as a rich, and essentially human activity. The book is organised into four sections, the first grounding the topic in the history, philosophy and psychology of algorithmic music. The second section asks 'what can algorithms in music do?', finding answers in computer science, mathematics, machine learning, bio-inspired computation, manipulation of pattern, computational creativity, and live coding. The third section focuses on the music maker, and the role of algorithms in supporting network music, sonification, music interface design, music in computer games, and spatialisation. The final section opens out to culture at large, and considers algorithmic music in terms of its audience reception, sociology, education, politics and the potential for mass consumption. Perhaps just as importantly, these sections are interleaved with reflective pieces from leading practitioners in the field, allowing us to to grasp the pragmatics of making music with algorithms. Combined, these diverse standpoints provide an absorbing, authoritative survey of research and practice from across the algorithmic music field.

Twenty-four ethnomusicologists from eleven countries (Australia` Austria, Canada, China, Finland, Malaysia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and United States), balanced in age and gender, have contributed to our Handbook. The chapters, all newly written for this volume, theorize applied ethnomusicology, offer histories, and detail practical examples, with the goal of stimulating further development in the field. Some authors present contrasting case studies that encompass two or more mutually distant places. Some discuss circumstances within their own geopolitical (state) unit, while others base their arguments on their research in faraway countries. Themes and locations of their research projects in applied ethnomusicology encompass literally all world continents. The variety of views, approaches, and methodologies contributes to the strength of the volume. Most of the chapters consider marginalized peoples and communities, their low status being based on ethnicity, economy, or caste affiliation. The addressed themes encompass a considerable range, from indigenous peoples and immigrants to conflict, education, archives, health, and the music industry, as well as advocacy, decolonization, activism, peace and conflict studies, ecology, sustainability, public folklore, and participatory action research. This volume can be understood as an applied ethnomusicology project: as a medium of getting to know the thoughts and experiences of global ethnomusicologists, of enriching general knowledge and understanding about ethnomusicologies and applied ethnomusicologies in various parts of the world, and of inspiring readers as well as other ethnomusicologists, all in a shared attempt to put the accumulated knowledge, understanding, and skills into good use for the betterment of our world.

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.

This volume of the handbook addresses music education practice and technology in 37 chapters written by fifty three leading experts from across the world. The volume is divided into three sections and closes with an epilogue. Part 1, “Music Assessment in the United States,” presents a review of legislation and case law, national assessment trends, and state-level assessment programs in eight states. Part 2, “Assessment of Student Music Learning,” covers the practice of assessment in early childhood, special needs, primary, and secondary music classrooms and ensembles. Part 3, “Assessment and Music Technology,” covers policy and practice for technologically assisted music assessment, and details technical issues related to computerized assessment of music performance. The epilogue brings the handbook to a close with a review of the state of the art of music assessment, and introduces the International Principles of Assessment in Music Education.

The Oxford Handbook of Children's Musical Cultures is a compendium of perspectives on children and their musical engagements as singers, dancers, players, and avid listeners. Over the course of 35 chapters, contributors from around the world provide an interdisciplinary enquiry into the musical lives of children in a variety of cultures, and their role as both preservers and innovators of music. Drawing on a wide array of fields from ethnomusicology and folklore to education and developmental psychology, the chapters presented in this handbook provide windows into the musical enculturation, education, and training of children, and the ways in which they learn, express, invent, and preserve music. Offering an understanding of the nature, structures, and styles of music preferred and used by children from toddlerhood through childhood and into adolescence, The Oxford Handbook of Children's Musical Cultures is an important step forward in the study of children and music.

This text explores varied perspectives on teaching, learning, and performing choral music. Authors are academic scholars and researchers as well as active choral conductors. Topics include music programming and the selection of repertoire; the exploration of singer and conductor identity; choral traditions in North America, Western Europe, South America, and Africa; and the challenges conductors meet as they work with varied populations of singers. Chapters consider children’s choirs, world music choirs, adult community choirs, gospel choirs, jazz choirs, professional choruses, collegiate glee clubs, and choirs that meet the needs of marginalized singers. Those who contributed chapters discuss a variety of theoretical frameworks including critical pedagogy, constructivism, singer and conductor agency and identity, and the influences of popular media on the choral art. The text is not a “how to” book. While it may be appropriate in various academic courses, the intention is not to explain how to conduct or to organize a choral program. While there is specific information about vocal development and vocal health, it is not a text on voice science. Instead, the editors and contributing authors intend that the collection serve as a resource to inform, provoke, and evoke discourse and dialogue concerning the complexity of pedagogy in the domain of the choral art.

It has long been suggested that films have changed the way we listen, but cinema’s contribution to broader listening cultures has only recently started to receive serious academic attention. Taking this issue as its central topic, The Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening explores—from philosophical, archival, empirical, and analytical perspectives—the genealogies of cinema’s audiovisual practices, the relationship between film aesthetics and listening protocols, and the extension of cinematic modes of listening into other media and everyday situations.

The Oxford Handbook of Community Music captures the vibrant, dynamic, and diverse approaches that characterize community music across the world. The chapters give a comprehensive review of achievements in the field to date, providing a ‘go-to’ volume that both deepens our understanding of what community music does and what it might become. The Handbook also looks to the future and charts new areas that are likely to define the field in the coming decades, such as social justice, political activism, peacemaking, health and well-being, and online engagement with music in community contexts, to mention a few. It features established and emerging practices of scholars and practitioners whose work crosses boundaries between theoretical development, practical engagement, and music-making. The volume features a diversity of topics and approaches, structured in five parts: Contexts; Transformations; Politics; Intersections; and Education. The wealth of insights and thought-provoking pieces will serve as a sounding board for the field now and well into the twenty-first century.

The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music offers a cross-section of field-defining topics and debates in computer music. It situates computer music in the broad context of its creation and performance across the range of issues—from music cognition to pedagogy to sociocultural topics—that shape discourse in the field. Fifty years after musical tones were produced on a computer for the first time, developments in laptop computing have brought computer music within reach of all listeners and composers. Production and distribution of computer music have grown tremendously as a result. An international array of music creators and academics discuss computer music's history, present, and future with a wide perspective, including composition, improvisation, interactive performance, spatialization, sound synthesis, sonification, and modeling. Throughout, they merge practice with theory to offer an insight into computer music's possibilities and enduring appeal.

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet is the first work of its kind to treat contemporary ballet as a genre within ballet history. In contrast to many, the anthology prioritizes connections between communities as it interweaves chapters authored by scholars, critics, choreographers, and working professional dancers. The work broadens the scope of ballet studies in the twenty-first century. In considering contemporary ballet as a noted moment in ballet’s historiography deserved of chronicling and further study, the Handbook provides new perspectives on ballet’s past, present, and future. In an effort to dismantle the linearity of academic canons, the seven parts, and fifty-three chapters within, provide multiple entry points for readers to engage in the balletic discourse through the lenses of dance criticism, choreography, and dance theory. With choices to rename pioneers as “game changers,” an emphasis on composition and process alongside dances created, and the postulation that contemporary ballet is a definitive era, the book carves out space for critical inquiry as it makes plain the inequalities, struggles, and lack of diversity in the form. The chapters can be read independently or collectively, as each contributes valuable, often experiential, knowledge while simultaneously adding to the larger project. Many of the chapters consider whether or not ballet can reconcile its past and actually become present, while others see ballet as flexible and willing to be remolded at the hands of those with tools to do so. The anthology is a resource for the general public as well as researchers; it positions twenty-first-century ballet from an international scope and brings forth contemporary issues and polemics, while pointing to possible directions for the future of the form.

Now in its sixth decade, country music studies is a thriving field of inquiry involving scholars working in the fields of American history, folklore, sociology, anthropology, musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, and geography, among many others. Covering issues of historiography and practice as well as the ways in which the genre interacts with media and social concerns such as class, gender, and sexuality, The Oxford Handbook of Country Music interrogates prevailing narratives, explores significant lacunae in the current literature, and provides guidance for future research. More than simply treating issues that have emerged within this subfield, The Oxford Handbook of Country Music works to connect to broader discourses within the various fields that inform country music studies in an effort to strengthen the area’s interdisciplinarity. Drawing on the expertise of leading and emerging scholars, this Handbook presents an introduction into the historiographical narratives and methodological issues that have emerged in country music studies’ first half-century.

Music Theory operates with a host of technical terms for concepts that appear straightforward but that conceal layers of complexity. This collection uncovers some of the richness and intricacy of these terms. Using a range of methods, from philosophical and historical contextualizations to cognitive and systematic approaches, and across a range of repertories, these essays aim to convey a fuller understanding of the terms music theorists employ every day in teaching and research. In so doing, the collection provides a panoramic view of the contemporary music-theoretical landscape, offering new perspectives on established concepts, seeking to expanding their purview to new repertories, and adding new concepts to the theorist’s toolkit. Taken as a whole, the concepts collected in this volume spotlight some of the guiding questions of music theory as it is currently practiced in the English-speaking world; they seek to broaden its foundational conversations to underline the ways in which music theory itself is evolving.

Improvisation informs a vast array of human activities, from creative practices in art, dance, music, and literature to everyday conversation and the relationships to natural and built environments that surround and sustain us. These volumes gather scholarship on improvisation from a similarly wide range of perspectives, with contributions from more than 60 scholars working in architecture, anthropology, art history, computer science, cognitive science, cultural studies, dance, economics, education, ethnomusicology, film, gender studies, history, linguistics, literary theory, musicology, neuroscience, new media, organizational science, performance studies, philosophy, popular music studies, psychology, science and technology studies, sociology, and sound art, among others.

Improvisation informs a vast array of human activities, from creative practices in art, dance, music, and literature to everyday conversation and the relationships to natural and built environments that surround and sustain us. These volumes gather scholarship on improvisation from a similarly wide range of perspectives, with contributions from more than 60 scholars working in architecture, anthropology, art history, computer science, cognitive science, cultural studies, dance, economics, education, ethnomusicology, film, gender studies, history, linguistics, literary theory, musicology, neuroscience, new media, organizational science, performance studies, philosophy, popular music studies, psychology, science and technology studies, sociology, and sound art, among others.

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition examines the complex interactions between dance and competition, and addresses six areas of investigation: how dancers invest in competition to ensure economic survival and social standing; how dancing bodies and movement aesthetics are re-choreographed in response to a competition format; the strategies that dancers use to negotiate the dominant rhetoric of competition; the values and criteria that underpin frameworks of judgment and experiences of spectatorship in the competition realm; how failure, loss, and a resistance to structures of winning are engendered through danced attitudes toward competition; and the veiled ideas and strategic agendas that underpin dance competition. The Handbook acknowledges competition as a deeply embedded social and economic practice that creates marked indicators of inequality; yet it also shows how dance employs a tactics of resistance or critique through moving in ways that reveal and undermine the power structures of competition.

Dance intersects with ethnicity in a powerful variety of ways and in a broad set of venues. Dance practices and attitudes about ethnicity have sometimes been the source of outright discord, such as when African Americans were—and sometimes still are—told that their bodies are “not right” for ballet, when Anglo Americans painted their faces black to perform in minstrel shows, when nineteenth-century Christian missionaries banned the performance of particular native dance traditions throughout much of Polynesia, and when the Spanish conquistadors and church officials banned sacred Aztec dance rituals. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity brings together scholars from across the globe to investigate what it means to define oneself in an ethnic category and how this category is performed and represented by dance as an ethnicity. The chapters in the book place a reflective lens on dance and its context to examine the role of dance as performed embodiment of the historical moments and associated lived identities. In bringing modern dance and ballet into the conversation alongside forms more often considered ethnic, the chapters ask the reader to contemplate previous categories of folk, ethnic, classical, and modern. From this standpoint, the book considers how dance maintains, challenges, resists, or in some cases evolves new forms of identity based on prior categories. Ultimately, the goal of the book is to acknowledge the depth of research that has been undertaken and to promote continued research and conceptualization of dance and its role in the creation of ethnicity.

Assembling research from an international cohort of scholars dedicated to inquiry in the field, this volume investigates relationships between dance and politics, adding detail and dimension to existing research, illuminating epistemological and theoretical topographies, and forging new pathways for related inquiry. Opening up its critical terms in two directions, the project illuminates how dance achieves its politics and how notions of the political are themselves expanded when viewed from the perspective of dance. Conceiving the subject matter in mutually informing ways, through problematics that come from philosophy, social science, humanities, and history, the authors seek to participate in an ongoing conversation that is both interdisciplinary and international in scope. This Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics comes through a turn to dance from within a range of fields such as political philosophy, interests in social movements, and approaches to bodily difference such as disability, postcolonial, critical race, and queer studies. The editors have brought together writers with intimate engagement in these dialogues and close encounter with various dance practices. The result is a book that is at once essential reading for advanced teaching and research within various dance studies curricula and that intervenes in key discussions of political theory in the current climate.

Starting from differences between reenactment and the more established practice of historical reconstruction, leading practitioners and theorists ask how the notion of preservation and representation associated with reconstruction is transformed by reenactment into historical experience and affective relation to the past in the present. In other terms: How does dance convey historical meaning through sensuous form? Danced reenactment poses the problem of history and historicity in relation to the troubled temporality inherent to dance itself. Ephemerality as the central trope of dance is hence displaced in favor of dance as a reiterative practice that confounds categories of chronological time and opens up a theoretical space of history that is often invisibilized by ideologies of immediacy traditionally attributed to dancing. The preponderance of the re- in contemporary choreographic creativity points to the operational value of reenactment in dance as synonymous with cultural production itself inasmuch as culture is engaged with the re-appropriation of signs, citationality, and intertextuality. Collectively, these chapters theorize choreographic reenactments’ potential not only to re-arrange the relationship between past, present, and future, but also to destabilize singular authorship, to unleash choreographies’ multiple meanings, to challenge the linearity of dance history, to rewrite and re-inscribe dance canons, and to the highlight the dancing body’s agentive status as archive.

This anthology offers contemporary perspectives on dance in the context of the popular screen. It analyzes the role played by the dancing body in popular culture and its multi-layered meanings in film, television, music videos, video games, commercials, and Internet sites such as YouTube. It explores how dance and choreography function within the filmic apparatus, and how the narrative, dancing bodies, and/or dance style set in motion multiple choreographies of identity such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation. It also considers the types of bodies that are associated with specific dances and their relation to power, access, and agency, as well as the role(s) of a specific film in the genealogy of Hollywood dance films. The book is divided into five sections that examine dance in films such as Moulin Rouge!, Dance Girl Dance, Dirty Dancing, and Save the Last Dance; the different aspects of commercial dance films in the context of identity politics, technology, commercialism, and the politics of moving bodies; how dance and its practice are constructed in films as a form of self-discovery and individual expression; the impact of music videos on popular dance and its dissemination; and how dance video games such as Dance Central influence concepts of choreography, embodiment, and dance pedagogy.

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater collects a critical mass of border-crossing scholarship on the intersections of dance and theater. Taking corporeality as an idea that unites the work and embodiment as a negotiation of power dynamics, these chapters address the politics and poetics of the moving body in performance on and off stage. Contemporary stage performances have sparked global interest in new experiments between dance and theater and this volume situates this interest in its historical context by investigating other such moments from pagan mimes of late antiquity to early modern archives to Bolshevik Russia to post-Sandinista Nicaragua to Chinese opera on the international stage to contemporary flash mobs and television dance contests to name a few. Ideologically, the chapters investigate critical race theory, affect theory, cognitive science, historiography, dance dramaturgy, spatiality, gender, somatics, ritual, and biopolitics among other modes of inquiry. In terms of aesthetics, they examine musical theater, contemporary dance, improvisation, experimental theater, television, African total theater, modern dance, new Indian dance theater aesthetics, philanthroproductions, butoh, carnival, equestrian performance, tanztheater, Korean Talchum, Nazi movement choirs, lindy hop, bomba, court masques, political demonstrations, and hip-hop. Scholars of theater and of dance having long worked in isolation from each other, developing different theories and methodologies, have begun to identify and explore common ground and develop common methodologies. This work hopes to establish this research field, lay out its salient dialogues, widen horizons of scholarship in the performing arts, and move the fields of dance and theater closer together.