Music, Society, Agency

by Nancy November (Editor)

Overview

Musicologists have increasingly taken a wide-angled lens on the study of music in society, to explore how it can be intertwined with issues of politics, gender, religion, race, psychology, memory, and space. Recent studies of music in connection with society take in a variety of musical phenomena from diverse periods and genres—medieval, classical, opera, rock, etc. This ten-chapter book not only asks how music and society are, and have been, intertwined and mutually influential, but it also examines the agents behind these connections: who determines musical cultures in society? Which social groups are represented in particular musical contexts? Which social groups are silenced or less well represented in music’s histories, and why?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798887193946
Publisher:	Academic Studies Press
Publication date:	12/26/2023
Series:	Studies in the History and Sociology of Music
Pages:	262
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Nancy November is Professor of Musicology at The University of Auckland. Combining interdisciplinarity and cultural history, her research centers on chamber music of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, probing questions of historiography, canonization, and genre. She is the recipient of a Humboldt Fellowship (2010-12); and three Marsden Grants from the New Zealand Royal Society. She recently published a book on Beethoven’s Symphonies Arranged for the Chamber (Cambridge UniversityPress, 2021).

Table of Contents

Introduction

Nancy November

Part One: Cultural and Cross-Cultural Agencies

The Year the Music Died: Agency in the Context of Demise on Takū, Papua New Guinea

Richard Moyle

“One of the finest and best-appointed theatres in the colonies”: His Majesty’s Theatre and the Evolution of Entertainment in Dunedin, New Zealand

Sandra Crawshaw

“In the Tiki Tiki Tiki Tiki Tiki Room”: Musicalizing the South Pacific in Disney’s Theme Parks

Gregory Camp

Part Two: Vocal Music’s Agencies

Figaro Transmuted through the Agency of Neapolitan Social and Political Creatives: Niccolò Piccinni’s La serva onorata

Lawrence Mays

Josephinism and Leopold Koželuh’s Masonic Cantata Joseph der Menschheit Segen 

Allan Badley

Agency, Politics, and Opera Arrangements in Fanny von Arnstein’s Salons

Nancy November

Part Three: Performance and Agency

Reflections on Aladdin’s Lamp: Developing a Framework for Creative Practice Research in-and-through Historically Informed Performance

Imogen Morris

When Your Heart Is Set on Both Broadway and the Met: An Exploration of Vocal Technique in Contemporary Musical Theatre

Christopher McRae

Part Four: Composition and Agency

“Brows betwixt and between”: The Agents of the Cultural Middlebrow and the Use of Topoi in Benjamin Britten’s First Suite for Cello 

Eliana Dunford

Provincializing Practice: Parsing Historical Influences on Contemporary Cross-Cultural Music in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Celeste Oram

Contributors

Index