Understanding Charles Seeger, Pioneer in Musicology (Music in American Life) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0252024931 ISBN 13: 9780252024931

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1999

Synopsis

A giant in the development of American musicology, Charles Seeger was a scholar- musician active in practically all areas of musical endeavor. This wide-ranging collection investigates Seeger's writings on music, musical research, and the responsibility of the musician and musicologist to society.   A social activist who played a leadership role in the Composers Collective in 1930s New York and in the founding of scholarly organizations including the American Musicological Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology, Seeger was a philosopher as well as a builder. His ideas about music and musicology, incorporating perspectives as wide-ranging as physics, philosophy, and anthropology, set the stage for the rise of modern ethnomusicology. Key to the establishment of formal musical scholarship in the United States, Seeger was also vitally interested in nurturing uniquely American musical forms and in bridging the gap between academia and the world outside the ivory tower.   By presenting new views of Seeger's thought, incorporating in particular often neglected early writings, Understanding Charles Seeger, Pioneer in American Musicology provides a unique perspective on intellectual history in twentieth- century America
 

About this title

Review

"Like Seeger himself, the essays are wonderfully various, addressing Seeger's thinking on dissonance; his social thought and its relation to music ... his ideas about the role(s) of music criticism in its broadest sense; his folk music research; his work with Ruth Crawford Seeger on folk songs; his Unitary Field Theory; the connections in his work between musicology and anthropology; and the connections between work and physics... Highly recommended." - Choice ADVANCE PRAISE "Seeger played a unique and central role in tying musicology to other disciplines and domains of culture. This collection shows him to be truly a musical 'man for all seasons,' for what comes across most is the many-sidedness of the man."-Bruno Nettl

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252024931
• ISBN 13: 9780252024931
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 216
• Editor: Yung Bell, Rees Helen