Martin Iddon

Melanie L. Marshall

Who runs the world? The Beyhive knows. From the Destiny's Child 2001 hit single "Survivor" to her 2019 jam "7/11," Beyoncé Knowles-Carter has confronted dominant issues around the world. Because her image is linked with debates on race, sexuality, and female empowerment, she has become a central figure in pop music and pop culture. Beyoncé: At Work, On Screen, and Online explores her work as a singer, activist, and artist by taking a deep dive into her songs, videos, and performances, as well as responses from her fans. Contributors look at Beyoncé's entire body of work to examine her status as a canonical figure in modern music and do not shy away from questioning scandals or weighing her social contributions against the evolution of feminism, critical race theory, authenticity, and more. Full of examples from throughout Beyoncé's career, this volume presents listening as a political undertaking that generates meaning and creates community. Beyoncé: At Work, On Screen, and Online contends that because of her willingness to address societal issues within her career, Beyoncé has become an important touchstone for an entire generation—all in a day's work for Queen Bey.

At Work, On Screen, and Online

Beyoncé

The last - and largest - of Cage's most important formative exchanges of letters, discussing music criticism and questions of aesthetics.

Correspondence on Music Criticism and Aesthetics

John Cage and Peter Yates

John Cage

David Tudor

Martin Iddon discusses one of the twentieth century's most provocative musical collaborations: between composer John Cage and pianist David Tudor.

Correspondence on Interpretation and Performance

John Cage and David Tudor

Philip Thomas

John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra is one of the seminal works of the second half of the twentieth century, and the centerpiece of the middle period of Cage's output. It is a culmination of Cage's work up to that point, incorporating notation techniques he had spent the past decade developing - techniques which remain radical to this day. But despite Cage's vitality to the musical development of the twentieth century, and the Concert's centrality to his career, the work is still rarely performed and even more rarely examined in detail. In this volume, Martin Iddon and Philip Thomas provide a rich and critical examination of this enormously significant piece, tracing its many contexts and influences - particularly Schoenberg, jazz, and Cage's own compositional practice - through a wide and previously untapped range of archival sources. Iddon and Thomas explain the Concert through a reading of its many histories, especially in performance - from the legendary performer disobedience and audience disorder of its 1958 New York premiere to a no less disastrous European premiere later the same year. They also highlight the importance of the piano soloist who premiered the piece, David Tudor, and its use alongside choreographer Merce Cunningham's Antic Meet. A careful examination of an apparently bewildering piece, the book explores the critical response to the Concert's performances, re-interrogates the mythology surrounding it, and finally turns to the music itself, in all its component parts, to see what it truly asks of performers and listeners.

John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra

John Cage is best known for his indeterminate music, which leaves a significant level of creative decision-making in the hands of the performer. But how much licence did Cage allow? Martin Iddon's book is the first volume to collect the complete extant correspondence between the composer and pianist David Tudor, one of Cage's most provocative and significant musical collaborators. The book presents their partnership from working together in New York in the early 1950s, through periods on tour in Europe, until the late stages of their work from the 1960s onwards, carried out almost exclusively within the frame of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Tackling the question of how much creative flexibility Tudor was granted, Iddon includes detailed examples of the ways in which Tudor realised Cage's work, especially focusing on Music of Changes to Variations II, to show how composer and pianist influenced one another's methods and styles.

A collection of writings examining the multitalented star’s significance to music, culture, and society. Who runs the world? The Beyhive knows. From the Destiny’s Child 2001 hit single “Survivor”to her 2019 jam “7/11,” Beyoncé Knowles-Carter has confronted dominant issues around the world. Because her image is linked with debates on race, sexuality, and female empowerment, she has become a central figure in pop music and pop culture. Beyoncé: At Work, On Screen, and Online explores her work as a singer, activist, and artist by taking a deep dive into her songs, videos, and performances, as well as responses from her fans. Contributors look at Beyoncé’s entire body of work to examine her status as a canonical figure in modern music and do not shy away from questioning scandals or weighing her social contributions against the evolution of feminism, critical race theory, authenticity, and more. Full of examples from throughout Beyoncé’s career, this volume presents listening as a political undertaking that generates meaning and creates community. Beyoncé contends that because of her willingness to address societal issues within her career, Beyoncé has become an important touchstone for an entire generation?all in a day’s work for Queen Bey. “Iddon and Marshall’s Beyoncé is poised to expand critical conversations about the biggest and most influential pop star of the 21st century.” —Daphne Brooks, author of Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910

The first full-length English-language discussion of the Darmstadt New Music Courses, showing the rise and fall of the 'Darmstadt School'.

Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez

New Music at Darmstadt

"The book is a comprehensive examination of John Cage's seminal Concert for Piano and Orchestra. It places the piece into its many contexts, examining its relationship with Cage's compositional practice of indeterminacy more generally, the importance of Cage's teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, on the development of his structural thought, and the impact of Cage's (mis)understanding of jazz. It discusses, on the basis of Cage's sketches and manuscripts, the compositional process at play in the piece. It details the circumstances of the piece's early performances-often described as catastrophes-its recording and promotion, and the part it played in Cage's (successful) hunt for a publisher. It examines in detail the various ways in which Cage's pianist of choice, David Tudor, approached the piece, differing according to whether it was to be performed with an orchestra, alongside Cage delivering the lecture, 'Indeterminacy', or as a piano solo to accompany Merce Cunningham's choreography Antic Meet. It demonstrates the ways in which, despite indeterminacy, the instrumental parts of the piece are amenable to analytical interpretation, especially through a method which exposes the way in which those parts form a sort of network of statistical commonality and difference, analysing, too, the pianist's part, the Solo for Piano, on a similar basis, discussing throughout the practical consequences of Cage's notations for a performer. It shows the way in which the piece played a central role, first, in the construction of who Cage was and what sort of composer he was within the new musical world but, second, how it came to be an important example for professional philosophers in discussing what the limits of the musical work are"--

This book is a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary examination of the music and figure of Lady Gaga, combining approaches from scholars in cultural studies, art, fashion, and music. It represents one of the first scholarly volumes devoted to Lady Gaga, who has become, over a few short years, central to both popular (and, indeed, populist) as well as more scholarly thought in these areas and who, the contributors argue, is helping to shape—directly and indirectly—thought and culture both in the fields of the "scholarly" and the "everyday." Lady Gaga's output is firmly embedded in a self-consciously intellectual pop culture tradition, and her music videos are intertextually linked to icons of pop culture intelligentsia like Alfred Hitchcock and open to multiple interpretations. In examining her music and figure, this volume contributes both to debates on the status of intertextuality, held in tension with originality, and to debates on the figuring of the sexualized female body, and representations of disability. There is interest in these issues from a wide range of disciplines: popular musicology, film studies, queer studies, women’s studies, gender studies, disability studies, popular culture studies, and the burgeoning sub-discipline of aesthetics and philosophy of fashion.

Martin Iddon

Books

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