Revealing the connections between the veneration of national landscape and eighteenth- century English vocal music, this study restores English music’s relationship with the picturesque. In the eighteenth century, the emerging taste for the picturesque was central to British aesthetics, as poets and painters gained popularity by glorifying the local landscape in works concurrent with the emergence of native countryside tourism. Yet English music was seldom discussed as a medium for conveying national scenic beauty. Stephen Groves explores this gap, and shows how secular song, the glee, and national theatre music expressed a uniquely English engagement with landscape. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Groves addresses the apparent ‘silence’ of the English picturesque. The book draws on analysis of the visualisations present in the texts of English vocal music, and their musical treatment, to demonstrate how local composers incorporated celebrations of landscape into their works. The final chapter shows that the English picturesque was a crucial influence on Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons. Suitable for anyone with an interest in eighteenth- century music, aesthetics, and the natural environment, this book will appeal to a wide range of specialists and non- specialists alike.

Exploring how music is used to portray the past in a variety of media, this book probes the relationship between history and fantasy in the imagination of the musical past. The volume brings together essays from multidisciplinary perspectives, addressing the use of music to convey a sense of the past in a wide range of multimedia contexts, including television, documentaries, opera, musical theatre, contemporary and historical film, videogames, and virtual reality. With a focus on early music and medievalism, the contributors theorise the role of music and sound in constructing ideas of the past. In three interrelated sections, the chapters problematise notions of historical authenticity on the stage and screen; theorise the future of musical histories in immersive and virtual media; and explore sound’s role in more fantastical appropriations of history in television and videogames. Together, they pose provocative questions regarding our perceptions of ‘early’ music and the sensory experience of distant history. Offering new ways to understand the past at the crossroads of musical and visual culture, this collection is relevant to researchers across music, media, and historical and cultural studies.

This book brings a new perspective to secular music sources from the Middle Ages and early modernity by viewing them as media communication tools, whose particular features shape the meaning of their contents. Ranging from the eleventh to seventeenth centuries, and across countries and genres, the chapters offer innovative insights into the historical relationship between music and its presentation in a wide variety of media. The lens of media enables contributors to expand music history beyond notated music manuscripts and instruments to include images, furniture, luxury items, and other objects, and to address uniquely visual and material aspects of music sources in books and literature. Drawing together an international group of contributors, the volume pays close attention to the medial and material dimensions of musical sources, considering them as multifaceted objects that not only contain but also determine the nature of the music they transmit. Transforming our understanding of musical media, this volume will be of interest to scholars of musicology, art history, and medieval and early modern cultures.

Lutes and Marginality in Pre-Modern China traces the complex history of lutes as they moved from the far west into China, and how these instruments became linked to various forms of social, cultural, ethnic, and religious marginality within and at China’s borders. The book argues that the lute, a musical instrument that likely originated in the Near East or Central Asia, became a highly charged object replete with associations of ethnic and political identity, social status, and gender in China across the third to seventeenth centuries, and as such, offers a crucial vehicle for understanding interactions between the Chinese center and periphery. Using a richly interdisciplinary perspective that brings together music history, performance studies, archaeology, and art history, the author draws together the visual evidence for the history of Chinese lutes and analyzes the political and cultural dimensions of their depictions in art. In exploring the lute’s reception across time and space, this book illuminates the shifting relationships between China and cultures along its frontier, as well as the dynamics of gender and social status within China’s center. Comprehensive in scope, Lutes and Marginality in Pre-Modern China offers new insights for scholars of pre-modern China, art history, archaeology, music history, ethnomusicology, and Silk Road and frontier studies.

Longlisted for the PQ Best Publication Award in Performance Design & Scenography 2023 Sound Effect tells the story of the effect of theatrical aurality on modern culture. Beginning with the emergence of the modern scenic sound effect in the late 18th century, and ending with headphone theatre which brings theatre's auditorium into an intimate relationship with the audience's internal sonic space, the book relates contemporary questions of theatre sound design to a 250-year Western cultural history of hearing. It argues that while theatron was an instrument for seeing and theorizing, first a collective hearing, or audience is convened. Theatre begins with people entering an acoustemological apparatus that produces a way of hearing and of knowing. Once, this was a giant marble ear on a hillside, turned up to a cosmos whose inaudible music accounted for all. In modern times, theatre's auditorium, or instrument for hearing, has turned inwards on the people and their collective conversance in the sonic memes, tropes, clichés and picturesques that constitute a popular, fictional ontology. This is a study about drama, entertainment, modernity and the theatre of audibility. It addresses the cultural frames of resonance that inform our understanding of SOUND as the rubric of the world we experience through our ears. Ross Brown reveals how mythologies, pop-culture, art, commerce and audio, have shaped the audible world as a form of theatre. Garrick, De Loutherbourg, Brecht, Dracula, Jekyll, Hyde, Spike Milligan, John Lennon, James Bond, Scooby-Do and Edison make cameo appearances as Brown weaves together a history of modern hearing, with an argument that sound is a story, audibility has a dramaturgy, hearing is scenographic, and the auditoria of drama serve modern life as the organon, or definitive frame of reference, on the sonic world.

Discover Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl's epic bestselling Beautiful Creature series in this complete e-book collection that includes: Beautiful Creatures, Beautiful Darkness, Beautiful Chaos, Beautiful Redemption. There were no surprises in Gatlin County. At least, that's what I thought. Turns out, I couldn't have been more wrong. Ethan Wate used to think of Gatlin, the small Southern town he had always called home, as a place where nothing ever changed. Then he met mysterious newcomer Lena Duchannes, who revealed a secret world where a curse has marked Lena's family of powerful Supernaturals for generations. Mysterious, suspenseful, and romantic, Beautiful Creatures, Beautiful Darkness, Beautiful Chaos, and Beautiful Redemption introduce a secret world hidden in plain sight. A world where impossible, magical, life-altering events happen. Sometimes life-ending.