Michael Chanan

New chapters express ongoing concerns about freedom of expression, the role of the Havana Film Festival in restoring Havana's central position in Latin American cinema, & the changing audience for Cuban films.

Cuban Cinema

Chilean Cinema

Musica Practica is a historical investigation into the social practice of Western music which advances an alternative approach to that of established musicology. Citing evidence from Barthes, Nietzsche, Bakhtin, Max Weber and Schoenberg, Michael Chanan explores the communal roots of the musical tradition and the effects of notation on creative and performing practice. He appraises the psychological wellsprings of music using the insights of linguistics, semiotics and psychoanalysis. Tracing the growth of musical printing and the creation of a market for the printed score, he examines the transformation of patronage with the demise of the ancien régime, and draws on little-known texts by Marx to analyze the formation of the musical economy in the nineteenth century. Chanan sketches out an unwritten history of musical instruments as technology, from Tutankhamen’s trumpets to the piano, the ancient Greek water organ to the digital synthesizer. The book concludes with reflections on the rise of modernism and the dissolution of the European tradition in a sea of postmodernism and “world music.” Musica Practica assumes no specialist knowledge of music beyond an ordinary familiarity with common terms and an average acquaintance with the music of different styles and periods. It is a fascinating commentary on the soundtrack of daily life in the metropolis of the late twentieth century.

The Social Practice of Western Music From Gregorian Chant to Postmodernism

Musica Practica

Edmundo Desnoes

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea

Includes the complete English continuity script of the film, Memorias del subdesarollo (Memories of underdevelopment) directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and the complete English translation (entitled 'Inconsolable memories') of Edmundo Desnoes' novel of the same name on which it was based.

Memories of Underdevelopment

The Dream the Kicks is a classic account of the prehistory and early years of cinema in Britain. In this new paperback edition, which has been thoroughly revised to take into account recent scholarship of early cinema, Michael Chanan provides a fasciniating account of the rich and hitherto hidden history of the origins of film. Chanan demonstrates that the theory of `the persistence of vision', which led to the invention of moving pictures, has been superceded by modern scientific findings. In its place, he puts forward a theory of invention as a type of bricolage, and shows that cinematography was a product of the forces of nineteenth century capitalism. He discusses the wealth of influences, both popular and bourgeois, on the culture of early cinema, including diorama, the magic lantern, itinerant entertainers and music hall. He looks at the relationship between film and photography, and considers the nascent film business, the ways in which early cinema was received by its audiences and the developing aesthetics of cinema in its first fifteen years.

The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain

The Dream That Kicks

The Dream that Kicks

In his new book, Michael Chanan examines the composer as a public figure in the light of Habermas's study of the transformation of the public sphere. Taking his cue from the German philosopher's remarks about the bourgeois concert audience, the emergence of criticism and the development of autonomous music, Chanan examines the fate of the composer through successive incarnations, from Handel, Bach and Rousseau in the eighteenth century to contrasting examples such as Kurt Weill and Duke Ellington, or John Cage and Pierre Boulez, in the twentieth. Calling on recent work in feminist and gay musicology, he investigates themes such as subjectivity and identity in Schubert and Chopin alongside questions of the political economy of music and the composer's progressive marginalization from the centre of musical life. The book continues Chanan's rethink of the relation between music and society pursued in two previous studies published by Verso, Musica Practica and Repeated Takes.

Michael Chanan

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