While the study and redefinition of the notion of authorship and its relationship to the idea of the literary work have played a central role in recent research on literature, semiotics, and related disciplines, its impact on contemporary musicology is still limited. Why? What implications would a reconsideration of the author- and work-concepts have on our understanding of the creative musical processes? Why would such a re-examination of these regulative concepts be necessary? Could it emerge from a post-structuralist revision of the notion of musical textuality? In this book, Trillo takes the ...Bach... project, a collection of new music based on Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No.1 for solo violin, BWV 1002, as a point of departure to sketch some critical answers to these fundamental questions, raise new ones, and explore their musicological implications.

This book offers the first detailed reception history of adaptations of Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations from 1800-2020. By focusing on ways the piece has been arranged, transcribed, and reworked, or quoted in in film, dance, literature, visual art, and digital media, it reveals changing views about the role of the composer and score that have impacted recent performance practices and notions of the work concept. Beyond this, it features the work of composers, many from underrepresented backgrounds, who have recently deconstructed Bach by reimagining the subjects, compositional procedures, and forms, using contemporary compositional approaches.

Social visionary Joseph Chilton Pearce’s indictment of cultural imprinting as the cause of humankind’s cruel and violent behavior • Refutes the Neo-Darwinist assumption that violence is inherent in humanity • Identifies religion as the sustaining force behind our negative cultural imprinting • Shows how infant-adult interactions unconsciously block the creative spirit We are all too aware of the endless variety of cruel and violent behavior reported to us in the media, reminded daily that in every corner of the world someone is suffering or dying at the hands of another. We have to ask: Is this violence and cruelty endemic to our nature? Are we, at our foundation, really so murderous? In The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of Spirit, Joseph Chilton Pearce, life-long advocate of human potential, sounds an emphatic and convincing no. Pearce explains that beneath our awareness, culture imprints a negative force-field that blocks the natural rise of the spirit toward its innate nature of love and altruism. Further, he identifies religion as the primary cultural force behind this negative imprinting. Drawing from recent neuroscience, neurocardiology, cultural anthropology, and brain development research, Pearce explains that the key to reversing this trend can be found in the interaction between infants and adults. The adult mind-set effectively compromises the infant’s neural and hormonal interactions between the heart and the higher evolutionary structures of the developing brain, thus keeping us centered primarily in our most primitive and defensive neural foundations, generation after generation. Pearce shows us that if we allow the intelligence of the heart to take hold and flourish, we can reverse this unconscious loss of our true nature.

Aimed at lay, student, and academic readers alike, this book concerns the imagination and, specifically, imagination in music. It opens with a discussion of the invalidity of the idea of the creative genius and the connected view that ideas originate just in the individual mind. An alternative view of the imaginative process is then presented, that ideas spring from a subconscious dialogue activated by engagement in the world around. Ideas are therefore never just of our own making. This view is supported by evidence from many studies and corresponds with descriptions by artists of their experience of imagining. The third subject is how imaginations can be shared when musicians work with other artists, and the way the constraints imposed by trying to share subconscious imagining result in clearly distinct forms of joint working. The final chapter covers the use of the musical imagination in making meanings from music. The evidence is that music does not communicate meanings directly, and so composers or performers cannot be looked to as authorities on its meaning. Instead, music is commonly heard as analogous to human experience, and listeners who perceive such analogies may then imagine their own meanings from the music.

Is artificial intelligence (AI) becoming more and more expressive, or is human thought adopting more and more structures from computation? What does it mean to perform oneself through AI, or to construct one’s subjectivity through AI? How does AI continue to complicate what it means to have a body? Has the golden age of AI, especially with regards to creative applications, already ended? Choreomata: Performance and Performativity after AI is a book about performance and performativity, but more specifically, it is a book about the performance of artificiality and the performance of intelligence. Both humans and human-designed computational forces are thoroughly engaged in an entangled, mutual performance of AI. Choreomata spins up a latticework of interdisciplinary thought, pairing theoretical inquiry from philosophy, information theory, and computer science with practical case studies from visual art, dance, music, and social theory. Through cross-disciplinary proportions and a diverse roster of contributors, this book contains insights for computer scientists, social scientists, industry professionals, artists, and beyond.

Publisher Description

C.P.E. Bach and the Rebirth of the Strophic Song brings to light the overlooked fact that C.P.E. Bach wrote a great many songs, most of which are as under appreciated as they are exemplary. All interested listeners, from amateurs to professional musicologists and singers, will benefit from the insight captured by this book.