Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo

Roger Moseley

ISBN 10: 0520291247 / ISBN 13: 9780520291249

Published by University of California Press, 2016

About this Item

How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, this title deals with the genealogy of musical play and its animation via improvisation, performance, and recreation. Num Pages: 468 pages, 23 audio, 97 color, 13 video, 3 music ex, 1 table. BIC Classification: AVA. Category: (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly; (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 156 x 230 x 30. Weight in Grams: 638. . 2016. Paperback. . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9780520291249

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520291247
• ISBN 13: 9780520291249
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, Keys to Play spans Greek myth and contemporary Japanese digital games to chart a genealogy of musical play and its animation via improvisation, performance, and recreation. As a paradigmatic digital interface, the keyboard forms a field of play on which the book’s diverse objects of inquiry—from clavichords to PCs and eighteenth-century musical dice games to the latest rhythm-action titles—enter into analogical relations. Remapping the keyboard’s topography by way of Mozart and Super Mario, who head an expansive cast of historical and virtual actors, Keys to Play invites readers to unlock ludic dimensions of music that are at once old and new.
 

About the Author

Roger Moseley is Assistant Professor of Music at Cornell University. Active as a collaborative pianist on modern and historical instruments, he has published essays on the interface of the keyboard, the performativity of digital games, the practice of eighteenth-century improvisation, and the music of Brahms.