Publication date:
29 October 2015Length of book:
480 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781442237490
How do you tell the key of a piece—without looking at a score? How do you know when a musical work ended before an audience applauds or a radio announcer returns on air? Was there, in fact, a ‘breakdown of tonality’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? These questions and others are the focus of David Wulstan’s Listen Again: A New History of Music. He also shows where the nuove musiche of the early Baroque era came from and what the two critical but unlinked chords in the middle of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. III signify.
Previous literature in music does not properly address these questions and innumerable others. In Listen Again, Wulstan illustrates how music from Bach to Bartók was far less "revolutionary" than customarily imagined and that the "inversionist" doctrine of Rameau and kindred acoustical misconceptions, courtesy of Heinrich Schenker and other analysts, solve fewer problems than their purveyor claim. In Listen Again, Wulstan takes to task early theorists, who were mostly clerics who ignored non-ecclesiastical music, and their modern equivalents, who consider only the blinding white of the written or printed score, whilst ignoring music as heard and interpreted by the ear and brain. Instead, Wulstan enquires into the musical activities of the common folk to addressing key issues that early and modern theorists have regularly overlooked.
The book will appeal anyone who has dismissed "harmony," "theory" and the like as alien, in effect, to practical music. Readers will find in Listen Again that the true history of music has far more practical relevance for performers than the aridity of music theory coursework, demonstrating by example how this work a book about music, not, as in the case of so much theoretical work, a "book about books."
Previous literature in music does not properly address these questions and innumerable others. In Listen Again, Wulstan illustrates how music from Bach to Bartók was far less "revolutionary" than customarily imagined and that the "inversionist" doctrine of Rameau and kindred acoustical misconceptions, courtesy of Heinrich Schenker and other analysts, solve fewer problems than their purveyor claim. In Listen Again, Wulstan takes to task early theorists, who were mostly clerics who ignored non-ecclesiastical music, and their modern equivalents, who consider only the blinding white of the written or printed score, whilst ignoring music as heard and interpreted by the ear and brain. Instead, Wulstan enquires into the musical activities of the common folk to addressing key issues that early and modern theorists have regularly overlooked.
The book will appeal anyone who has dismissed "harmony," "theory" and the like as alien, in effect, to practical music. Readers will find in Listen Again that the true history of music has far more practical relevance for performers than the aridity of music theory coursework, demonstrating by example how this work a book about music, not, as in the case of so much theoretical work, a "book about books."
In his previous books, Wulstan focused on early music, but more recently, he has contributed to his oeuvre by demonstrating his knowledge of musical theory from the Middle Ages to the present. As he admits, Listen Again is not a ‘bedtime book’; it is a volume for those interested in pondering well-crafted analysis of music and its historical value. The author writes that he has sought to ‘cover most of the ground in regard to European music from the earliest times of which we have any real knowledge and to determine the mechanisms of tonality from a historical point of view.’ The book provides a number of opportunities to consider senescent ideas, such as modal versus tonal music, in a new light. Immediately following the introduction is a useful glossary of technical terminology the author uses—e.g., superdominant as opposed to submediant. . . .Listen Again is likely to inspire some interesting discussions among students with a foundation in music history and theory. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.