This book offers the first musical, cultural, and technological history of loudness, highlighting how loudness calls attention to musical, discursive, affective, and technological continuities that stretch across seemingly disparate traditions. Devine focuses especially on the years since 1915, when the forerunner of the modern loudspeaker was invented, and thus when loud sound became possible in new ways. The book corrects the fact that loudness remains surprisingly un-theorized and un-historicized, especially considering its longstanding importance as a source of pleasure, an object of criticism, and an engine of technological change. In exploring topics ranging from the role of dynamics in music theory to the problematic status of the decibel in the acoustic sciences, and from debates about orchestration technique to criticism in jazz, rock, and disco, the bookbreaks away from the generic and stylistic orthodoxies that circumscribe existing histories of twentieth-century music. Examining how loudness inflects central issues in music studies, including taste, race, gender, and youth, it argues that the crescendo model of the history of loudness stems from an impoverished understanding of music and sound as functions of their social settings. This volume charts an interdisciplinary path forward for music studies, highlighting the insights that can be gained when popular music is studied alongside various forms of art music and acoustic mediation, as overlapping phenomena in a shared history of sound and listening.
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100 Best Albums of All Time
$1,643 -
Pop Up: Popular Music Since 1945
$1,283 -
A Cathedral of Music: The Archivio Storico Ricordi
$2,098 -
Maryland, My Maryland: Civil War Music and Patriotism
$628 -
The Blue Series: The Story Behind the Color
$2,100 -
Truth and Music: The Complete Writings from Music and Musicians, 1957-85
$3,600 -
Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World
$875 -
When the World Stopped to Listen: Van Cliburn’s Cold War Triumph and Its Aftermath, Library Edition
$2,415 -
Echoes of Other Worlds: Sound in Virtual Reality: Past, Present and Future
$4,500 -
Amy: A Life Through the Lens
$1,225 -
Les Saintes-chapelles En Musique: De Saint Louis a La Revolution
$7,200 -
Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011
$945 -
Dreaming the Beatles: A Love Story of One Band and the Whole World, Includes Companion PDF, Library Edition
$2,100 -
Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache: How Music Came Out
$1,050 -
Le Hainaut Et La Musique De La Renaissance
$7,200 -
In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea
$558 -
It’s Just the Normal Noises: Marcus, Guralnick, No Depression, and the Mystery of Americana Music
$735 -
Made in France: Studies in Popular Music
$6,525 -
Nino Rota: La Dolce Vita: Sources of the Creative Process
$8,460 -
Lucinda Williams
$523