Joseph N. Straus

L. Poundie Burstein

Concise Introduction to Tonal Harmony

Preeminent music theorist and leader in the study of music and disability Joseph Straus presents a truly groundbreaking take on musical modernism--demonstrating in an expansive and vivid multimedia presentation that modernist music is inextricably entwined with attitudes toward disability. In Broken Beauty, Straus argues that the most characteristic features of musical modernism--fractured forms, immobilized harmonies, conflicting textural layers, radical simplification of means in some cases, and radical complexity and hermeticism in others--can be understood as musical depictions of disability conditions, including deformity/disfigurement, mobility impairment, madness, idiocy, and autism. Against the traditional medical model of disability, which sees it as a bodily defect requiring diagnosis and normalization or cure, this new sociocultural model of disability sees it as cultural artifact, something that is created by and creates culture. Straus places this revised model of disability against a wide range of canonical, high-art concert music from the first decades of the century through the 1950s. Broken Beauty illustrates how disability is right at the core of musical modernism; it is one of the things that musical modernism is fundamentally about.

Musical Modernism and the Representation of Disability

Broken Beauty

Approaching disability as a cultural construction rather than a medical pathology, this book studies the impact of disability and concepts of disability on composers, performers, and listeners with disabilities, as well as on discourse about music and works of music themselves. For composers with disabilities--like Beethoven, Delius, and Schumann--awareness of the disability sharply inflects critical reception. For performers with disabilities--such as Itzhak Perlman and Evelyn Glennie--the performance of disability and the performance of music are deeply intertwined. For listeners with disabilities, extraordinary bodies and minds may give rise to new ways of making sense of music. In the stories that people tell about music, and in the stories that music itself tells, disability has long played a central but unrecognized role. Some of these stories are narratives of overcoming-the triumph of the human spirit over adversity-but others are more nuanced tales of accommodation and acceptance of life with a non-normative body or mind. In all of these ways, music both reflects and constructs disability.

Disability in Music

Extraordinary Measures

This book is the first to study the music of Ruth Crawford Seeger, widely considered to be the most important American woman composer of this century. Indeed, it is the first full-length analytical study of the music of any woman composer. The book contains extensive technical descriptions of Ruth Crawford Seeger's music, and also considers her in relation to her contemporaries and to the history of women and music.

The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger

This is the eBook of the printed book and may not include any media, website access codes, or print supplements that may come packaged with the bound book. For undergraduate/graduate-level courses in Twentieth-Century Techniques, and Post-Tonal Theory and Analysis taken by music majors. A primer–rather than a survey–this text offers exceptionally clear, simple explanations of basic theoretical concepts for the post-tonal music of the twentieth century. Emphasizing hands-on contact with the music–through playing, singing, listening, and analyzing–it provides six chapters on theory, each illustrated with musical examples and fully worked-out analyses, all drawn largely from the “classical” pre-war repertoire by Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, Berg, and Webern. "Straus takes a paced, methodical, logical approach to each topic. He introduces it in context and — perhaps most significantly of all — uses language that's so transparent that merely to follow his descriptions, explanations and illustrations carefully is to understand each aspect of the theory under consideration." Mark Sealey, Classical.net

Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory

Written by master teachers Poundie Burstein and Joe Straus, the workbook that accompanies Concise Introduction to Tonal Harmony, Second Edition, provides your students the practice they need to master music theory. The workbook contains hundreds of exercises--more than could ever be assigned in any one class--offering you the flexibility to construct assignments that best meet the needs of your students. The Second Edition is enhanced with more analysis exercises at the end of every chapter.

Concise Introduction to Tonal Harmony Workbook

Most histories of American music have ignored the presence of twelve-tone music before and during the Second World War, and virtually all have ignored its presence after 1970, even though so many major composers continued (and continue) to compose serially. This book provides a comprehensive history of twelve-tone music in America, and compels a revised picture of American music since 1925 as a dynamic steady-state within which twelve-tone serialism has long been, and still remains, a persistent presence: a vigorous and unbroken tradition for more than eighty years. Straus outlines how, instead of a rigid orthodoxy, American twelve-tone music is actually a flexible, loosely-knit cultural practice. The book provides close readings of thirty-seven American twelve-tone works by composers including Copland, Babbitt, Stravinsky and Carter, among many others, who represent a typically American diversity of background and life circumstances, and strips away the many myths surrounding twelve-tone music in America.

Joseph N. Straus

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