The song "John Henry," perhaps America's greatest folk ballad, is about an African-American steel driver who raced and beat a steam drill, dying "with his hammer in his hand" from the effort. Most ...singers and historians believe John Henry was a real person, not a fictitious one, and that his story took place in West Virginia--though other places have been proposed. John Garst argues convincingly that it took place near Dunnavant, Alabama, in 1887. The author's reconstruction, based on contemporaneous evidence and subsequent research, uncovers a fascinating story that supports the Dunnavant location and provides new insights. Beyond John Henry, readers will discover the lives and work of his people: Black and white singers; his "captain," contractor Frederick Dabney; C. C. Spencer, the most credible eyewitness; John Henry's wife; the blind singer W. T. Blankenship, who printed the first broadside of the ballad; and later scholars who studied John Henry. The book includes analyses of the song's numerous iterations, several previously unpublished illustrations and a foreword by folklorist Art Rosenbaum.
English comedy from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century abounds in song lyrics, but most of the original tunes were thought to have been lost--until now. By deducing that playwrights ...borrowed melodies from songs they already knew, Ross W. Duffin has used the existing English repertory of songs, both popular and composed, to reconstruct hundreds of songs from more than a hundred plays and other stage entertainments, rendering them performable with period music for the first time in five hundred years.
What makes a classical song a song? In a wide-ranging 2004 discussion, covering such contrasting composers as Brahms and Berberian, Schubert and Kurtág, Jonathan Dunsby considers the nature of ...vocality in songs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essence and scope of poetic and literary meaning in the Lied tradition is subjected to close scrutiny against the backdrop of 'new musicological' thinking and music-theoretical orthodoxies. The reader is thus offered the best insights available within an evidence-based approach to musical discourse. Schoenberg figures conspicuously as both songsmith and theorist, and some easily comprehensible Schenkerian approaches are used to convey ideas of musical time and expressive focus. In this work of scholarship and theoretical depth, Professor Dunsby's highly original approach and engaging style will ensure its appeal to all practising musicians and students of Romantic and modern music.
The Conductus repertory is the body of monophonic and polyphonic non-liturgical Latin song that dominated European culture from the middle of the twelfth century to the beginning of the fourteenth. ...In this book, Mark Everist demonstrates how the poetry and music interact, explores how musical structures are created, and discusses the geographical and temporal reach of the genre, including its significance for performance today. The volume studies what medieval society thought of the Conductus, its function in medieval society - whether paraliturgical or in other contexts - and how it fitted into patristic and secular Latin cultures. The Conductus emerges as a genre of great poetic and musical sophistication that brought the skills of poets and musicians into alignment. This book provides an all-encompassing view of an important but unexplored repertory of medieval music, engaging with both poetry and music even-handedly to present new and up-to-date perspectives on the genre.
In Scots Folk Singers and their Sources, Caroline Macafee offers a detailed analysis of song transmission in two major Scottish folk song collections, the Greig-Duncan Collection, and the Scots folk ...song material of the School of Scottish Studies Archives.
Lauri Suurpää brings together two rigorous methodologies, Greimassian semiotics and Schenkerian analysis, to provide a unique perspective on the expressive power of Franz Schubert's song cycle. ...Focusing on the final songs, Suurpää deftly combines textual and tonal analysis to reveal death as a symbolic presence if not actual character in the musical narrative. Suurpää demonstrates the incongruities between semantic content and musical representation as it surfaces throughout the final songs. This close reading of the winter songs, coupled with creative applications of theory and a thorough history of the poetic and musical genesis of this work, brings new insights to the study of text-music relationships and the song cycle.
One of the earliest documented Scottish song collectors actually to go 'into the field' to gather his specimens, was the Highlander Joseph Macdonald. Macdonald emigrated in 1760 - contemporaneously ...with the start of James Macpherson's famous but much disputed Ossian project - and it fell to the Revd. Patrick Macdonald to finish and subsequently publish his younger brother's collection. Karen McAulay traces the complex history of Scottish song collecting, and the publication of major Highland and Lowland collections, over the ensuing 130 years. Looking at sources, authenticity, collecting methodology and format, McAulay places these collections in their cultural context and traces links with contemporary attitudes towards such wide-ranging topics as the embryonic tourism and travel industry; cultural nationalism; fakery and forgery; literary and musical creativity; and the move from antiquarianism and dilettantism towards an increasingly scholarly and didactic tone in the mid-to-late Victorian collections. Attention is given to some of the performance issues raised, either in correspondence or in the paratexts of published collections; and the narrative is interlaced with references to contemporary literary, social and even political history as it affected the collectors themselves. Most significantly, this study demonstrates a resurgence of cultural nationalism in the late nineteenth century.
"Popayán en las canciones de Sergio Rojas Fajardo" es un libro que pretende acercar al lector al conocimiento de la vida y la obra de este compositor payanés (Popayán 1920 - Bogotá 1993), y mostrar ...como plasmó en doce de sus creaciones su admiración por cada rincón de la ciudad que lo vio nacer gracias al dominio del lenguaje descriptivo con el que bosquejó sus ideas. Sergio Rojas fue ingeniero civil, intérprete de la guitarra, la bandola, el tiple e intérprete vocal. En su obra le cantó al Valle de Pubén, La Ermita, al Puente del Humilladero, en fin, puede decirse que sus canciones son un viaje musical por los diversos lugares históricos de la ciudad de Popayán. Este libro es un estudio que aborda el campo de la recuperación de la memoria histórica y visibiliza las músicas que son testimonio del patrimonio inmaterial, histórico y cultural de la ciudad. Presenta un esbozo biográfico del compositor, un catálogo de sus composiciones, complementado con el análisis musical de las doce obras seleccionadas para este estudio. Ofrece algunos referentes históricos de los lugares que fueron motivo de inspiración y quedaron plasmados en la prosa de sus creaciones. Incluye una amplia galería de fotos y un cancionero que contiene la transcripción de las melodías, cifrados y la letra de las canciones El libro se acompaña de un CD con las composiciones en versiones orquestadas para diversos formatos musicales, realizados por docentes del departamento de Música de la Universidad del Cauca. Este trabajo ha sido realizado por el Grupo de Investigación Soncolombia en el año del centenario del nacimiento de este ilustre compositor payanés.
