Books about Musically from Amazon.com

Thinking Musically is the central volume in the Global Music Series. Designed for undergraduates and general readers with little or no background in music, it incorporates music from many diverse cultures--including the Americas, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Europe--and establishes the framework for exploring the practice of music around the world. It sets the stage for an array of case study volumes, each of which focuses on a single area of the world. Each case study uses the contemporary musical situation as a point of departure--covering historical information and traditions as they relate to the present--and comes with an audio CD of musical examples discussed in the text. The case studies can be used in any combination with Thinking Musically to provide a rich exploration of world musical cultures. Visit www.oup.com/us/globalmusic for a list of case studies in the series. The website also includes instructional materials to accompany each study.
Thinking Musically discusses the importance of musical instruments, describing their significance in a culture's folklore, religion, and history. It explores fundamental elements of music--including rhythm, pitch in melodic and harmonic relationships, and form--and examines how they vary in different musical traditions. The text considers the effects of cultural influences such as gender and ethnicity on the perception, interpretation, and performance of music. It also looks at how the forces of nationalism, acculturation, and westernization can affect musical traditions. Many of the musical examples are coordinated with material in the case studies. Thinking Musically includes activities designed to build critical listening and individual study skills and is packaged with an 80-minute CD that features selections from a wide variety of musical cultures.
Also available: Thinking Musically and Teaching Music Globally Package (2 books + CD; ISBN 0-19-517143-8)
Thinking Musically is also available in a package with Teaching Music Globally, by Patricia Shehan Campbell, a second framing volume in the Global Music Series. Essential for anyone teaching beginning students about the world's musical cultures, Teaching Music Globally describes pedagogical techniques for classes from K-12 to university level and offers a wealth of learning experiences..
Price: $15.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Developed in conjunction with Thinking Musically and the culture case studies in the Global Music Series, Teaching Music Globally provides teachers and students of music education with ideas and techniques for engaging their students in the study of the world's musical cultures. Offering a large selection of exercises and activities of varying difficulty, this text is a guide for teachers of elementary through university level students--in band, choir, general music, orchestra, and any other school music classes--who seek to establish a comprehensive musical understanding for students living in a global era.
Teaching Music Globally is packaged with Thinking Musically, which provides the conceptual foundation for exploring music around the world. Thinking Musically discusses the importance of musical instruments, describing their significance in a culture's folklore, religion, and history, and examines how fundamental elements of music--including rhythm, pitch, and form--vary in different musical traditions. The 80-minute audio CD packaged with Thinking Musically is also referenced in Teaching Music Globally. Teaching Music Globally and the CD give readers the opportunity to experience steel drum music from Trinidad, Irish jigs and reels, an ensemble piece for Peruvian panpipes, excerpts of Mexican mariachi music, gamelan music from Bali and Java, and choral pieces from Bulgaria, South Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the African-American experience. The book and CD also include Navajo social songs, an Egyptian maqam for string ensemble, a medieval European ronda, Carmen's Habanera, and percussion pieces from Brazil, China, Ghana, Japan, Liberia, and Puerto Rico. The CD selections provide the audio component for the numerous and varied experiences incorporated throughout the text. These "attentive," "engaged," and "enactive" listening, participatory, and performance activities are resources for shaping the musical education of students of all ages.
Visit www.oup.com/us/globalmusic for a list of case studies in the Global Music Series. Extensive culture-specific suggestions for participatory activities, class and take-home projects, worksheets, and many additional resources have been developed by music education specialists to accompany each culture case study and are available at this website..
Price: $30.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The world-renowned musicologist Richard Taruskin has devoted much of his career to helping listeners appreciate Russian and Soviet music in new and sometimes controversial ways. Defining Russia Musically represents one of his landmark achievements: here Taruskin uses music, together with history and politics, to illustrate the many ways in which Russian national identity has been constructed, both from within Russia and from the Western perspective. He contends that it is through music that the powerful myth of Russia's "national character" can best be understood. Russian art music, like Russia itself, Taruskin writes, has "always [been] tinged or tainted ... with an air of alterity--sensed, exploited, bemoaned, reveled in, traded on, and defended against both from within and from without." The author's goal is to explore this assumption of otherness in an all-encompassing work that re-creates the cultural contexts of the folksong anthologies of the 1700s, the operas, symphonies, and ballets of the 1800s, the modernist masterpieces of the 1900s, and the hugely fraught but ambiguous products of the Soviet period.

Taruskin begins by showing how enlightened aristocrats, reactionary romantics, and the theorists and victims of totalitarianism have variously fashioned their vision of Russian society in musical terms. He then examines how Russia as a whole shaped its identity in contrast to an "East" during the age of its imperialist expansion, and in contrast to two different musical "Wests," Germany and Italy, during the formative years of its national consciousness. The final section, expanded from a series of Christian Gauss seminars presented at Princeton in 1993, focuses on four individual composers, each characterized both as a self-consciously Russian creator and as a European, and each placed in perspective within a revealing hermeneutic scheme. In the culminating chapters--Chaikovsky and the Human, Scriabin and the Superhuman, Stravinsky and the Subhuman, and Shostakovich and the Inhuman--Taruskin offers especially thought-provoking insights, for example, on Chaikovsky's status as the "last great eighteenth-century composer" and on Stravinsky's espousal of formalism as a reactionary, literally counterrevolutionary move.

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Price: $39.04 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The expert guide to the identification and support of artistically and musically talented students!

Is artistic talent a matter of nature or nurture? What are the best methods for identifying potential in the arts? How can educators and parents encourage and support artistic development? From identification to the empowerment of teachers of talented arts students, the readings within Artistically and Musically Talented Students offer the best practices the leaders in the field have to offer.

Key features include:

• A practical look at the needs of artistically and musically talented students by field leader Enid Zimmerman, and her recommendations for future study
• Methods for recognizing potential talent in dance, art, and music
• Eight articles from the most influential researchers of giftedness and the arts

The ERGE Series:

The National Association for Gifted Children series Essential Readings in Gifted Education is a 12-volume collection of seminal articles from Gifted Child Quarterly. Put the knowledge and power of more than 25 years of research on giftedness and talent into your hands with the leading theories, studies, and findings the experts in the field have to offer.

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Price: $14.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Through practical examples, Keith Swanwick illustrates the essential layers of musical experience and outlines key principles for music educators and musical teaching. Chapters deal with musical value, culture, student assessment and the future of music education. There is also a broader appeal to anyone who invents or performs music and for those involved in music psychology, sociology or music promotion..
Price: $41.67 [Notify me when price goes down.]