Helen M. Prior

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

Shape is a concept widely used in talk about music. Musicians in classical, popular, jazz and world musics use it to help them rehearse, teach and think about what they do. Yet why is a word that seems to require something to see or to touch so useful to describe something that sounds? Music and Shape examines numerous aspects of this surprisingly close relationship, with contributions from scholars and musicians, artists, dancers, filmmakers, and synaesthetes. The main chapters are provided by leading scholars from music psychology, music analysis, music therapy, dance, classical, jazz and popular music who examine how shape makes sense in music from their varied points of view. Here we see shape providing a key notion for the teaching and practice of performance nuance or prosody; as a way of making relationships between sound and body movement; as a link between improvisational as well as compositional design and listener response, and between notation, sound and cognition; and as a unimodal quality linked to vitality affects. Reflections from practitioners, between the chapters, offer complementary insights, embracing musical form, performance and composition styles, body movement, rhythm, harmony, timbre, narrative, emotions and feelings, and beginnings and endings. Music and Shape opens up new perspectives on musical performance, music psychology and music analysis, making explicit and open to investigation a vital factor in musical thinking and experience previously viewed merely as a metaphor.

Music and Shape

Elaine King

Familiarity underpins our engagement with music. This book highlights theoretical and empirical considerations about familiarity from three perspectives: listening, musicology and performance. Part I, ’Listening’, addresses familiarity as it relates to listeners’ behaviour and responses to music, specifically in regulating our choice and exposure to music on a daily basis; how we get to know music through regular listening; how comfortable we feel in a Western concert environment; and music’s efficacy as a pain-reliever. Part II, ’Musicology’ exposes the notion of familiarity from varied stances, including appreciation of music in our own and other cultures through ethnomusicology; exploration of the perception of sounds via music analysis; philosophical reflection on the efficiency of communication in musicology; evaluation of the impact of researchers’ musical experiences on their work; and the influence of familiarity in music education. Part III, ’Performance’, focuses on the effects of familiarity in relation to different aspects of Western art and popular performance, including learning and memorizing music; examination of ’groove’ in popular performance; exploration of the role of familiarity in shaping socio-emotional behaviour between members of an ensemble; and consideration about the effects of the unique type of familiarity gained by musicians through the act of performance itself.

Helen M. Prior

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