This book offers the first musical, cultural, and technological history of loudness, highlighting how loudness calls attention to musical, discursive, affective, and technological continuities that stretch across seemingly disparate traditions. Devine focuses especially on the years since 1915, when the forerunner of the modern loudspeaker was invented, and thus when loud sound became possible in new ways. The book corrects the fact that loudness remains surprisingly un-theorized and un-historicized, especially considering its longstanding importance as a source of pleasure, an object of criticism, and an engine of technological change. In exploring topics ranging from the role of dynamics in music theory to the problematic status of the decibel in the acoustic sciences, and from debates about orchestration technique to criticism in jazz, rock, and disco, the bookbreaks away from the generic and stylistic orthodoxies that circumscribe existing histories of twentieth-century music. Examining how loudness inflects central issues in music studies, including taste, race, gender, and youth, it argues that the crescendo model of the history of loudness stems from an impoverished understanding of music and sound as functions of their social settings. This volume charts an interdisciplinary path forward for music studies, highlighting the insights that can be gained when popular music is studied alongside various forms of art music and acoustic mediation, as overlapping phenomena in a shared history of sound and listening.
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Theorizing Sound Writing
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Maryland, My Maryland: Civil War Music and Patriotism
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In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea
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Lucinda Williams
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Staying Ahead of the Curve: The American Federation of Musicians Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
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When the World Stopped to Listen: Van Cliburn’s Cold War Triumph, and Its Aftermath
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Aaron Marks’ Complete Guide to Game Audio: For Composers, Sound Designers, Musicians and Game Developers
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Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain
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Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina: A Research Guide
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100 Best Albums of All Time
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Le Hainaut Et La Musique De La Renaissance
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Led Zeppelin
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Echoes of Other Worlds: Sound in Virtual Reality: Past, Present and Future
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Reel Music: Exploring 100 Years of Film Music
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The Music of the Future
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Made in France: Studies in Popular Music
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The Genesis and Development of an English Organ Sonata
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Sources of Identity: Makers, Owners and Users of Music Sources Before 1600
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Magic Realism in Music and Literature: The French-latin American Axis Since 1920
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Dreaming the Beatles: A Love Story of One Band and the Whole World, Includes Companion PDF, Library Edition
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