Tagged: Music

Kodály in the Second Grade Classroom : Developing the Creative Brain in the 21st Century

Since the mid-twentieth century, Zoltán Kodály’s child-developmental philosophy for teaching music has had significant positive impact on music education around the world, and is now at the core of music teaching in the United States and other English speaking countries. The Kodály Today handbook series is the first comprehensive system to update and apply the Kodály concepts to teaching music in elementary school classrooms. Kodály in the Second Grade Classroom provides teachers with a step-by-step road map for developing children’s performance, creative movement, and literacy skills in an organic and thoughtful manner.

Experiencing Jazz : A Listener’s Companion

In Experiencing Jazz: A Listener’s Companion, writer, teacher, and renowned jazz drummer Michael Stephans offers a much-needed survey in the art of listening to and enjoying this dynamic, ever-changing art form. More than mere entertainment, jazz provides a pleasurable and sometimes dizzying listening experience with an extensive range in structure and form, from the syncopated swing of big bands to the musical experimentalism of small combos.

Verdi in Victorian London

Now a byword for beauty, Verdi’s operas were far from universally acclaimed when they reached London in the second half of the nineteenth century. Why did some critics react so harshly? Who were they, and what biases and prejudices animated them? When did their antagonistic attitude change? And why did opera managers continue to produce Verdi’s works? Massimo Zicari’s Verdi in Victorian London reconstructs the reception of Verdi’s operas in London from 1844, when a first critical account was published in the pages of The Athenaeum, to 1901, when Verdi’s death received extensive tribute in The Musical Times.

Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo

How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, Keys to Play spans Greek myth and contemporary Japanese digital games to chart a genealogy of musical play and its animation via improvisation, performance, and recreation. As a paradigmatic digital interface, the keyboard forms a field of play on which the book’s diverse objects of inquiry-from clavichords to PCs and eighteenth-century musical dice games to the latest rhythm-action titles-enter into analogical relations. Remapping the keyboard’s topography by way of Mozart and Super Mario, who head an expansive cast of historical and virtual actors, Keys to Play invites readers to unlock ludic dimensions of music that are at once old and new.

Suite On Spiritus Silvestre: For Symphony

Carbon dioxide. This small book aims to open a door. It is an experiment in thinking about an object made extremely familiar to many people across the world in recent years through science, the news, governments, and public discourses. One of the first names given to carbon dioxide was spiritus silvestre or wild spirit, a moniker that has fallen out of favor. This experiment is a chance to hold what we think we know about this object in our hand and ponder our own knowledge for a while by looking at it in one particular historical context long after more modern names became familiar.

Radicalism and Music : An Introduction to the Music Cultures of Al-Qa’ida, Racist Skinheads, Christian-Affiliated Radicals, and Eco-Animal Rights Militants

Radicalism and Music offers a convincing argument for music’s transformational impact on the radicalization, reinforcement, and motivational techniques of violent political activists. It makes a case for the careful examination of music’s roles in radical cultures, roles that have serious impacts, as evidenced by the actions of the Frankfurt Airport shooter Arid Uka, Sikh Temple murderer Wade Page, white supremacist Matthew Hale, and animal-rights activist Walter Bond, among others. Such cases bring up difficult questions about how those involved in radical groups can be stirred to feel or act under the influence of music.