Overview

Practical Musicology outlines a theoretical framework for studying a broad range of current musical practices and aims to provoke discussion about key issues in the rapidly expanding area of practical musicology: the study of how music is made. The book explores various forms of practice ranging from performance and composition to listening and dancing, from historically informed performances of Bach in the USA to Indonesian Dubstep or Australian musical theatre, and from Irish traditional music played by French musicians from Toulouse to Brazilian thrash metal or K-Pop. Drawing on neuroscience, cognitive psychology, ecological approaches in anthropology, and the social construction of technology and creativity, Zagorski-Thomas uses a series of case studies and examples to investigate how practice is already being studied and to suggest a principle for how it might continue to develop, based around the assertion that musicking cannot be treated as a culturally or ideologically neutral phenomenon.

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9781501357794

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What could musicology be in the 21st century? In his book, Simon Zagorski-Thomas outlines a practical musicology that wholeheartedly embraces all contemporary forms of sound and music production between streaming audio, game sounds, EDM and engineering a record production. The future of musicology, as Zagorski-Thomas envisions it, is a musicology that provides historical and technological knowledge and critique of how music and sound are actually produced, presented, experienced and consumed: a comprehensive musicology of aesthetic practices, which is indeed urgently needed. * Holger Schulze, Professor of Musicology at the University of Copenhagen and Principal Investigator at the Sound Studies Lab, Denmark, and editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound (2021) *

What could musicology be in the 21st century? In his book, Simon Zagorski-Thomas outlines a practical musicology that wholeheartedly embraces all contemporary forms of sound and music production between streaming audio, game sounds, EDM and engineering a record production. The future of musicology, as Zagorski-Thomas envisions it, is a musicology that provides historical and technological knowledge and critique of how music and sound are actually produced, presented, experienced and consumed: a comprehensive musicology of aesthetic practices, which is indeed urgently needed. * Holger Schulze, Professor of Musicology at the University of Copenhagen and Principal Investigator at the Sound Studies Lab, Denmark, and editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound (2021) * Practical Musicology is a brave and brilliant exploration of ways to explore and research 21st-century music practices anew. Drawing on his own exemplary research practice, Simon Zagorski-Thomas critically and eloquently advances and applies new ideas to Practical Musicology, ones which lay out a new theoretical framework, harnessing models of knowledge, capacity, power, identity, and technology anew, to illustrate, not only how 'to do' music, but also how 'to do music better'. A new and provocative Practical Musicology is put to work to explain how aesthetics emerge, develop and become embodied in practice. This is a must-read for all of us whose wanting a new 'way in' for thinking critically and differently about 21st-century music practices. * Pamela Burnard, Professor of Arts, Creativities and Educations, University of Cambridge, UK *

Author Information

Simon Zagorski-Thomas is Professor at the London College of Music, University of West London, UK, and is Co-Chairman of the Association for the Study of the Art of Record Production. He worked for 25 years as a composer, sound engineer, and producer and is, at present, conducting research into 21st Century Musical Practice. His books include The Art of Record Production (2012), co-edited with Simon Frith, and The Musicology of Record Production (2014), winner of the 2015 IASPM Book Prize.

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