Music in the Galant Style is an authoritative and readily understandable study of the core compositional style of the eighteenth century. Gjerdingen adopts a unique approach, based on a massive but little-known corpus of pedagogical workbooks used by the most influential teachers of the century, the Italian partimenti. He has brought this vital repository of compositional methods into confrontation with a set of schemata distilled from an enormous body of eighteenth-century music,...

What's so special about music? We experience it internally, yet at the same time it is highly social. Music engages our cognitive/affective and sensory systems. We use music to communicate with one another--and even with other species--the things that we cannot express through language. Music is both ancient and ever evolving. Without music, our world is missing something essential.In Reflections on the Musical Mind, Jay Schulkin offers a social and behavioral neuroscienti...

Now in trade paperback: “The definitive guide to musical enjoyment” (Forum).In this fascinating analysis of how to listen to both contemporary and classical music analytically, eminent American composer Aaron Copland offers provocative suggestions that will bring readers a deeper appreciation of the most viscerally rewarding of all art forms.

A renowned cognitive neuroscientist?s fascinating and highly informative account of how the brain acquires readingHow can a few black marks on a white page evoke an entire universe of sounds and meanings? In this riveting investigation, Stanislas Dehaene provides an accessible account of the brain circuitry of reading and explores what he calls the ?reading paradox?: Our cortex is the product of millions of years of evolution in a world without writing, so how did ...

The perfect music gift from one of the most trusted names in continuing education. Learn how to better appreciate music in this guide that will unlock the knowledge you need to understand “the most abstract and sublime of all the arts.”Whether you're listening in a concert hall or on your iPod, concert music has the power to move you. The right knowledge can deepen the ability of this music to edify, enlighten, and stir the soul. In How to Listen to Great Music...

The brain sciences are influencing our understanding of human behavior as never before, from neuropsychiatry and neuroeconomics to neurotheology and neuroaesthetics. Many now believe that the brain is what makes us human, and it seems that neuroscientists are poised to become the new experts in the management of human conduct. Neuro describes the key developments--theoretical, technological, economic, and biopolitical--that have enabled the neurosciences to gain such traction outs...

Combining musical insight with the most recent research, William Kinderman's Beethoven is both a richly drawn portrait of the man and a guide to his music. Kinderman traces the composer's intellectual and musical development from the early works written in Bonn to the Ninth Symphony and the late quartets, looking at compositions from different and original perspectives that show Beethoven's art as a union of sensuous and rational, of expression and structure. In analyses of individual piec...

"A fascinating and genuinely accessible guide....Educating, enjoyable, and delightfully unscary."—Classical MusicWhat if Bach and Mozart heard richer, more dramatic chords than we hear in music today? What sonorities and moods have we lost in playing music in "equal temperament"—the equal division of the octave into twelve notes that has become our standard tuning method? Thanks to How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony, "we may soon be able to hear...

Experts describe current perspectives and experimental approaches to understanding the neural bases of creativity.This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the latest neuroscientific approaches to the scientific study of creativity. In chapters that progress logically from neurobiological fundamentals to systems neuroscience and neuroimaging, leading scholars describe the latest theoretical, genetic, structural, clinical, functional, and applied research on th...

Music's ability to express and arouse emotions is a mystery that has fascinated both experts and laymen at least since ancient Greece. The predecessor to this book 'Music and Emotion' (OUP, 2001) was critically and commercially successful and stimulated much further work in this area. In the years since publication of that book, empirical research in this area has blossomed, and the successor to 'Music and Emotion' reflects the considerable activity in this area. The Handbook of Music and ...

This new text consists of parts of Bornstein and Lamb’s Developmental Science, 6th edition along with new introductory material that as a whole provides a cutting edge and comprehensive overview of cognitive development. Each of the world-renowned contributors masterfully introduces the history and systems, methodologies, and measurement and analytic techniques used to understand human cognitive development. The relevance of cognition is illustrated through engaging applications. ...

A fresh guide to classical music from the acclaimed creator of NPR's "What Makes It Great"™Rob Kapilow has been helping audiences hear more in great music for two decades with his What Makes It Great? series on NPR's Performance Today, at Lincoln Center, and in concert halls throughout the US and Canada. In this book, he focuses on short masterpieces by major composers to help you understand the essence of each composer's genius and how each piece...