Books in the AMS Studies in Music series

Details of Consequence examines a trait that is rarely questioned in fin-de-siecle French music: ornamental extravagance. In re-evaluating the status of ornament for French culture, this book investigates how musical and visual expressions of decorative detail shaped widespread discussions on identity, style, and aesthetics.

Between the first and last words of a black gospel song, musical sound acquires spiritual power. During this unfolding, a variety of techniques facilitate musical and physical transformation. The most important of these is a repetitive musical cycle known by names including the run, the drive, the special, and the vamp. Through its combination of reiteration and intensification, the vamp turns song lyrics into something more potent. While many musical traditions usevamps to fill space, or occupy time in preparation for another, more important event, in gospel, vamps are the main event. Why is the vamp so central to the black gospel tradition? What work-musical, cultural, and spiritual-does the gospel vamp do? And what does the vamp reveal about thetransformative power of black gospel more broadly? This book explores the vamp''s essential place in black gospel song, arguing that these climactic musical cycles turn worship services into transcendent events. A defining feature of contemporary gospel, the vamp links individual performances to their generic contexts. An exemplar of African American musical practice, the vamp connects gospel songs to a venerable lineage of black sacred expression. As it generates emotive and physical intensity, the vamp helps believers access an embodiedexperience of the invisible, moving between this world and another in their musical practice of faith. The vamp, then, is a musical, cultural, and religious interface, which gives vent to a system of belief, performance, and reception that author Braxton D. Shelley calls the Gospel Imagination. In theGospel Imagination, the vamp offers proof that musical sound can turn spiritual power into a physical reality-a divine presence in human bodies.

Through the telling of Alban Berg's Lulu, "Taken by the Devil" illuminates the forces of politically-driven censorship of theater, music, and the arts during the tumultuous early twentieth century.

Opera for the People is an in-depth examination of a forgotten chapter in American social and cultural history: the love affair that middle-class Americans had with continental opera (translated into English) in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s and the women who managed, sang in, and bankrolled these companies.

Through a detailed examination of the major musical treatises from the sixth through the twelfth centuries, this text establishes a central dichotomy between classical harmonic theory and the practices of the Christian church.

Brahms Among Friends identifies patterns of listening, performance, and composition among friends of Johannes Brahms and explores how those patterns informed the creation and reception of his music in intimate genres.

Sounding Authentic considers the influences of nationalism, modernism, and technological innovation on representations of ethnic and national identities in twentieth-century art music.

Rasa is the most thorough treatment to date of this all-important concept at the heart of Javanese aesthetics. Rasa encompasses not only mood and intuition, but also theories of musical perception and cognition, as well as meaning and expression in music.

This study is the first to explore the significance of aria insertion, the practice that allowed singers to introduce music of their own choice into productions of Italian opera during the nineteenth century. Each chapter investigates this practice from varying perspectives and through the experiences of some of the century's most famous prima donnas.

Marco Faustini was among the most successful professionals in seventeenth-century Venetian opera. Presenting an examination of Faustini's documents, this book provides a comprehensive view of opera production in mid-seventeenth century Venice. It places an emphasis on the "physical production," the scenery, costumes, and stage machinery.

The Critical Nexus confronts an important and vexing enigma of early writings on music: why chant, which was understood to be divinely inspired, needed to be altered in order to work within the then-operative modal system. To unravel this mystery, Charles Atkinson creates a broad framework that moves from Greek harmonic theory to the various stages in the transmission of Roman chant, citing numerous music treatises from the sixth to the twelfth century. Outof this examination emerges the central point behind the problem: the tone-system advocated by writers coming from the Greek harmonic tradition was not suited to the notation of chant and that this basic incompatibility led to the creation of new theoretical constructs. By tracing the path of subsequentadaptation at the nexus of tone-system, mode, and notation, Atkinson promises new and far-reaching insights into what mode meant to the medieval musician and how the system responded to its inherent limitations. Through a detailed examination of the major musical treatises from the sixth through the twelfth centuries, this text establishes a central dichotomy between classical harmonic theory and the practices of the Christian church. Atkinson builds the foundation for a broad and original reinterpretation of the modal system and how it relates to melody, grammar, and notation. This book will be of interest to all musicologists, music theorists working on mode, early music specialists, chant scholars,and medievalists interested in music.

Inventing the Business of Opera explores public opera in its infancy, bringing to life the men and women who successfully established the new genre on the stages of Venice during the seventeenth century. All of the components necessary to opera production are highlighted, from the financial backing, to the libretto and the score, to the singers, dancers, the scenery, and the costumes.

This text shows how work in cognitive science, especially that developed by cognitive linguists and cognitive psychologists, can be used to explain how we understand music. The book focuses on three cognitive processes - categorization, cross-domain mapping, and the use of the conceptual model.