Books in the New Material Histories of Music series

Papers of the international conference "A Voice as Something More," held at the University of Chicago in November 2015.

At one time a star in her own right as a singer, Anna Magdalena (1701-60) would go on to become, through her marriage to the older Johann Sebastian Bach, history's most famous musical wife and mother. The two musical notebooks belonging to her continue to live on, beloved by millions of pianists young and old. Yet the pedagogical utility of this music--long associated with the sound of children practicing and mothers listening--has encouraged a rosy and one-sided view of Anna Magdalena as a model of German feminine domesticity.             Sex, Death, and Minuets offers the first in-depth study of these notebooks and their owner, reanimating Anna Magdalena as a multifaceted historical subject--at once pious and bawdy, spirited and tragic. In these pages, we follow Magdalena from young and flamboyant performer to bereft and impoverished widow--and visit along the way the coffee house, the raucous wedding feast, and the family home. David Yearsley explores the notebooks' more idiosyncratic entries--like its charming ditties on illicit love and searching ruminations on mortality--against the backdrop of the social practices and concerns that women shared in eighteenth-century Lutheran Germany, from status in marriage and widowhood, to fulfilling professional and domestic roles, money, fashion, intimacy and sex, and the ever-present sickness and death of children and spouses. What emerges is a humane portrait of a musician who embraced the sensuality of song and the uplift of the keyboard, a sometimes ribald wife and oft-bereaved mother who used her cherished musical notebooks for piety and play, humor and devotion--for living and for dying.

"Music in the Flesh reimagines the lived experiences of music-making subjects (composers, musicians, listeners) in the long European seventeenth century. There are countless historical testimonies of the powerful effects of music upon early-modern bodies, described as moving, ravishing, painful, dangerous, curative, miraculous, and encompassing "the circulation of the humors, purification of the blood, dilation of the vessels and pores. In asking what this all meant at the time, the author considers musical scores and their surrounding texts as "somatic scripts" that afford a range of somatic actions and reactions and can give us a glimpse into the historical embodied experience of organized sound. Starting from the Lutheran hymns and their accompanying intellectual traditions and ritual practices in German-speaking lands, the book moves with ease across repertories and regions, sacred and vernacular musics, domestic and public settings in order to sketch a "physiology of music" that is as historically illuminating as it is relevant for present-day performing practices and that sheds unprecedented light on how subjectivity was embodied through sound in early-modern Europe"--

"With this ambitious book, musicologist Nicholas Mathew uses the remarkable career of Joseph Haydn to consider a host of critical issues: how we tell the history of the Enlightenment and Romanticism; the relation of late-eighteenth-century culture to nascent capitalism and European colonialism; and how the modern market and modern aesthetic values were-and remain-inextricably entwined. The Haydn Economy weaves a vibrant material history of Haydn's late career, extending from the sphere of the ancient Esterhâazy court to his frenetic years as an entrepreneur plying between London and Vienna, to his final decade as a venerable musical celebrity, where he witnessed the transformation of his legacy by a new generation of students and acolytes, Beethoven foremost among them. Ultimately, Mathew claims, Haydn's historical trajectory compels us to ask what we might usefully retain from the cultural and political practices of European modernity--whether we can extract and preserve its moral promise from its moral failures. And it demands that we confront the deep economic histories that continue to shape our beliefs about music, sound, and material culture."--

"Through archival work and storytelling synthesis, Music Migration and Imperial New York revises, subverts, and supplements many inherited narratives about experimental music and arts in postwar New York into a sweeping new whole. From the urban street-level via music clubs and arts institutions to the world-making routes of global migration and exchange, this book seeks to redraw the geographies of experimental art and so to reveal the imperial dynamics, as well as profoundly racialized and gendered power relations, that shaped and continue to shape the discourses and practices of modern music in the United States. Beginning with the material conditions of power that structured the cityscape of New York in the early Cold War years (ca. 1957 to 1963), Brigid Cohen's book encompasses a considerably wider range of people and practices than is usual in studies of the music of this period. It looks at a range of artistic practices (concert music, electronic music, jazz, performance art) and actors (Varáese, Mingus, Yoko Ono, and Fluxus founder George Maciunas) as they experimented with new modes of creativity"--

"Listening to China is our first important foray in the field of global music history, which is rapidly establishing itself as the main area of growth in music studies. Compellingly and expertly written by a seasoned scholar, it tells the story of how Westerners experienced China with their ears at the time of the Sino-Western encounter of ca. 1800, and what this meant for their own construction of musical knowledge. It explores two kinds of Western practices of listening in and to China: ear-witness accounts by travelers to China, including diplomats, trade officials, and missionaries; and writings about Chinese music by European writers, philosophers, and music historians who constructed China's sound in their imaginations. The book's primary objective is a better understanding of how Westerners gained/gathered sonic knowledge of China and to investigate the aural dimensions of the Sino-Western encounter At the same time, the book reconsiders the idea of a specifically Western music history by showing how it was precisely the comparison with a great "other"--China--that helped the idea itself to emerge. Ultimately, the book draws attention to the importance of China for the construction of (musical) knowledge during and following the European Enlightenment."--

Papers of the international conference "A Voice as Something More," held at the University of Chicago in November 2015.

Does it make sense to refer to bird song - a complex vocalization, full of repetitive and transformative patterns that are carefully calculated to woo a mate - as art? What about a pack of wolves howling in unison or the cacophony made by an entire rain forest? Redefining music as "the art of possibly animate things," Musical Vitalities charts a new path for music studies that blends musicological methods with perspectives drawn from the life sciences. In opposition to humanist approaches that insist on a separation between culture and nature--approaches that appear increasingly untenable in an era defined by human-generated climate change--Musical Vitalities treats music as one example of the cultural practices and biotic arts of the animal kingdom rather than as a phenomenon categorically distinct from nonhuman forms of sonic expression. The book challenges the human exceptionalism that has allowed musicologists to overlook music's structural resemblances to the songs of nonhuman species, the intricacies of music's physiological impact on listeners, and the many analogues between music's formal processes and those of the dynamic natural world. Through close readings of Austro-German music and aesthetic writings that suggest wide-ranging analogies between music and nature, Musical Vitalities seeks to both rekindle the critical potential of nineteenth-century music and rejoin the humans at the center of the humanities with the nonhumans whose evolutionary endowments and planetary fates they share.