![]() (He seems to think that musicology has never heard of Bakhtin, who will correct our "blinkered academicism". Adorno, Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Claude Levi-Strauss, and especially Max (not Carl) Weber and Karl (not A. The most important thinkers for Chanan (and the most cited) are Theodor W. ![]() The range of citations is enormous, but it is also weighted to dead musicologists and especially to the great cultural, philosophical, and literary minds of the last two centuries. The book contains virtually no music examples and no extended discussions of individual works. These, of course, are only general observations about styles or genres and one yearns for more specific analysis of the issues. Here too we find important clues to the history of style, especially the evolution of the Romantic symphony, for the result is a more attentive relationship to the music, which begins to develop a more and more complex idiom, culminating in vast Late Romantic symphonic canvases of Gustav Mahler, whom many regard as the greatest of the composer-conductors. ![]() ![]() Second came a new seating arrangement, with more of the audience now facing the orchestra directly this suppresses individual display in the auditorium, and displaces it to the corridors, bars and salons. First, the spatial-acoustic arrangement was intended to create a balanced sound. The opera house horseshoe has a triple function: to project the musical sound forwards to allow the members of the audience themselves to be on visual display and to minimize the diffusion of their chatter. The first purpose-built concert halls sometimes imitated the theatrical form of the opera house, which has, of course, its own architectural history. It is this encapsulation of centuries of interaction between music and society in pithy sentences that gives the book its power and also drives the reader to madness. Chanan is rarely content to make only the point that is explicit from his evidence, and he continues "notation erected a block in the Western ear against the inner complexities of non-Western musics" (p. His point is an important one, that "the development of notation has the effect of shaping musical materials to satisfy its own demands, thereby marginalizing and excluding from its syntax whatever it is unable to capture" (p. At the same time, their effect is to increase the tendency to think vertically. 69) to "gradually, the visual appearance of notation, increasingly designed to facilitate performance, becomes suggestive, and begins to take on an organizing role in the musical texture." Without leaving the paragraph he continues across further centuries: "When bar lines are introduced in the sixteenth century, and the unity of the measures is clearly marked, ensemble playing becomes easier and more precise. In one of his best chapters, "The Powers of Notation," he manages to sweep from "in the beginning the written page is not intended for use in performance but to serve as a reference copy" (p. Summarizing centuries of history in a paragraph is a tricky business, but Chanan usually manages to select carefully and bring out his theme while remaining true to the topic. It is a strength because Chanan is both an able distiller of complicated material and a keen observer of its consequences.
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