Musica Practica: The Social Practice of Western Music from Gregorian Chant to Postmodernism

Abstract

This volume is a historical investigation into the social practice of Western music which advances an alternative approach to that of established musicology. Citing evidence from Barthes, Nietzsche, Bakhtin, Max Weber and Schoenberg, the author explores the communal roots of the musical tradition, and the effcts of notation on creative and performing practice. He appraises the psychological wellsprings of music using the insights of linguistics, semiotics and psychoanalysis. Tracing the growth of musical printing and the creation of a market for the printed score, he examines the transformation of patronage with the demise of the ancien regime, and draws on little-known texts by Marx to analyze the fomration of the musical economy in the 19th-century. book sketches out an unwritten history of musical instruments as technology, from Tutankhamen's trumpets to the piano, the Ancient Greek water organ to the digital synthesizer. It concludes with reflections on the rise of modernism and the dissolution of the European tradition in a sea of postmodernism and world music. This study assumes no specialist knowledge of music beyond an ordinary familiarity with common terms and average acquaintance with the musics of different styles and periods. It is a commentary on the soundtrace of daily life in the metropolis of the late-20th century. Michael Chanan is the author of The Dream that Kicks and The Cuban Image.

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