This wide-ranging, ambitiously interdisciplinary study traces jazz's influence on African American poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary spoken word poetry. Examining established poets such as Langston Hughes, Ntozake Shange, and Nathaniel Mackey as well as a generation of up-and-coming contemporary writers and performers, Meta DuEwa Jones highlights the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality within the jazz tradition and its representation in poetry. Applying prosodic analysis to emphasize the musicality of African American poetic performance, she examines the gendered meanings evident in collaborative performances and in the criticism, images, and sounds circulating within jazz cultures. Jones also considers poets who participated in contemporary venues for black writing such as the Dark Room Collective and the Cave Canem Foundation, including Harryette Mullen, Elizabeth Alexander, and Carl Phillips. Incorporating a finely honed discussion of the Black Arts Movement, the poetry-jazz fusion of the late 1950s, and slam and spoken word performance milieus such as Def Poetry Jam, she focuses on jazz and hip hop-influenced performance artists including Tracie Morris, Saul Williams, and Jessica Care Moore. Through attention to cadence, rhythm, and structure, The Muse is Music fills a gap in literary scholarship by attending to issues of gender in jazz and poetry and by analyzing recordings of poets both with and without musical accompaniment. Applying the methodology of textual close reading to a critical "close listening" of American poetry's resonant soundscape, Jones's analyses include exploring the formal innovation and queer performance of Langston Hughes's recorded collaboration with jazz musicians, delineating the relationship between punctuation and performance in the post-soul John Coltrane poem, and closely examining jazz improvisation and hip-hop stylization. An elaborate articulation of the connections between jazz, poetry and spoken word, and gender, The Muse Is Music offers valuable criticism of specific texts and performances and a convincing argument about the shape of jazz and African-American poetic performance in the contemporary era.

Bundrick proposes that depictions of musical performance were linked to contemporary developments in music.

Cultivating the Muse looks beyond the secure and benign images traditionally associated with inspiration in classical literature and scholarship. In contrast to the shapeless collectivity of the Muses in ancient accounts, this collection aspires to redeem their shape in other more vitalforms, closer or more distant incarnations of the ever-elusive maiden. Protagonists -- or victims -- in a complex game of cultural exploration, the alternative Muses and muse-like figures of this book are manipulated, abused, or effaced, but at the same time they also advocate or resist their fatesand explore their own powers of persuasion. Inspiration is here not so much explored in its traditional cultic dimensions, but rather invoked for its capacity to trigger fervent debates about power, desire, knowledge, identity, and gender in the societies of ancient Greece and Rome.

Both Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald grew up in the Midwest and were strongly influenced by Romantic music, anchored by the aesthetic tastes of the German immigrants who settled across that region. Hemingway's ear for form and Fitzgerald's penchant for lyricism stem from early and frequent exposure to such masters as Johannes Brahms and Franz Schubert. Nostalgia is typically associated with romanticism, and the acoustic longing found in Hemingway and Fitzgerald's fiction resonates with it, characterized in the narrative voices in Hemingway's Winner Take Nothing, Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, and other of their fiction from the early thirties. Understanding that each writer has his own kind of musical biography charts new ways to read material we already think we know. Reading their work within a musico-historical context means acknowledging it as an extension of the 19th century; it means reading them as Romantic Modernists. This work reads each author's prose musically, considering how Romantic music inspired their craft and distinguished their work through the pivotal juncture of the early to mid-1930s, when each man faced an artistic crisis of conscience. Initial chapters provide background information in music history. Following chapters focus on how the life of each author was shaped by music and how they worked with specific influences that grew out of steady interactions with it, evidence of which is found in archival documents and collections.

This book is an English re-writing of the original Hebrew edition, published by Dvir Publishing House, in 2007, and written jointly with the late Herzl Shmueli. The book probes into the nature and quality of the beauty and meaning of music. According to the authors, these have to be found within the musical phenomena themselves and serve as the basis for the aesthetical criteria of all music. They maintain that similar to every linguistic phenomena, music is a message in sound that moves, within a certain time limit, from musician to listener. The musician on the one hand, and the listener on the other, are the two focal points between which the musical process takes place. Music is thus a covenant between the musician and the listener. One sends the musical message, the other takes it up and internalizes it; one is the initiator, the other proves the successful outcome of the artistic process. The book is intended for music connoisseurs and for all who are intersted in artistic thought, in general, and in musical thoughts in particular. Every professional concept that had to be included in the book is duly explained, so that any interested reader is able to broaden the scope of his/her outlook.

The presence of the phenomenological body is central to music in all of its varieties and contradictions. With the explosion of scholarly works on the body in virtually every field in the humanities, the social as well as the biomedical sciences, the question of how such a complex understanding of the body is related to music, with its own complexity, has been investigated within specific disciplinary perspectives. The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body brings together scholars from across these fields, providing a platform for the discussion of the multidimensional interfaces of music and the body. The book is organized into six sections, each discussing a topic that defines the field: the moving and performing body; the musical brain and psyche; embodied mind, embodied rhythm; the disabled and sexual body; music as medicine; and the multimodal body. Connecting a wide array of diverse perspectives and presenting a survey of research and practice, the Handbook provides an introduction into the rich world of music and the body.

The music for science fiction television programs, like music for science fiction films, is often highly distinctive, introducing cutting-edge electronic music and soundscapes. There is a highly particular role for sound and music in science fiction, because it regularly has to expand the vistas and imagination of the shows and plays a crucial role in setting up the time and place. Notable for its adoption of electronic instruments and integration of music and effects, science fiction programs explore sonic capabilities offered through the evolution of sound technology and design, which has allowed for the precise control and creation of unique and otherworldly sounds. This collection of essays analyzes the style and context of music and sound design in Science Fiction television. It provides a wide range of in-depth analyses of seminal live-action series such as Doctor Who, The Twilight Zone, and Lost, as well as animated series, such as The Jetsons. With thirteen essays from prominent contributors in the field of music and screen media, this anthology will appeal to students of Music and Media, as well as fans of science fiction television.

The Muse That Sings is a unique behind-the-scenes look at both twentieth-century music and the nuts and bolts of creative work. Here, twenty-five of America's leading composers--from Adams to Zorn, from Bolcom to Vierk--talk candidly about their craft, their motivations, their difficulties, and how they how proceed from musical idea to finished composition. While focusing on the process and the stories behind specific works, the composers also touch on topics that will interest anyone involved in creative work. They discuss teachers and mentors, the task of revision, relationships with performers, and the ongoing struggle for a balance between freedom and discipline. They reveal sources of inspiration, artistic goals, and the often unexpected ways their musical ideas develop. Some describe personal tonal systems; others discuss the impact of computers and other electronic tools on their work; still others reflect philosophically on the inner impulses and outer influences that continue to drive them. While serious music has a reputation for being difficult and inaccessible, The Muse That Sings provides a powerful antidote. The composers in this book speak clearly and thoughtfully in response to key questions of concern to all readers interested in contemporary music. Each interview has been edited to stand alone as a concise meditation on muse and technique, and the book includes selected discographies as well as brief biographical sketches. Anyone with an interest in twentieth-century music or in the creative process will find this lively collection a valuable source of inspiration and insight.