Audible Signs

This is a vivid, expressive, and innovative study of how the great composers in classical and rock music deploy subtle musical signs in ingenious ways. Whether it's a song by Brahms or by the Boss, a serenade by Mozart or a ballet by John Harbison, music radiates a diverse spectrum of meaningful signs, hidden in plain hearing. To enjoy the interplay of musical signs, it helps to recognize them in the first place. The various iconographic strategies of Audible Signs - including commentary on graphic works, books, poems, and film - yield new appreciations and critiques of composers of vastly divergent styles and technical materials. Author and composer Michael Alec Rose helps readers decode the signs composers give us in their music - sounds that invoke very particular ideas, images, and cultural contexts - and reveals the extraordinary ingenuity with which certain pieces deploy recognizable figures in a musical landscape. None of this can be done systematically. Each artwork reinvents 'the code' and demands a unique set of approaches. But the chapters in this invigorating book spring from the same musical ground, where the only thing that matters is to pay attention to the wonders of great music.

ISBN 1441180508   Pages 192 ISBN13 9781441180506 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 263 Publisher Continuum Publishing Corporation   Published in New York Imprint Continuum Publishing Corporation   Height (mm) 216 Format Paperback   Width (mm) 138 Publication date 28 Oct 2010   Spine width (mm) 13 DEWEY 780.1   Academic level Postgraduate DEWEY edition DC22

		Preface and Hypothesis
		Acknowledgments
		A Note on Recordings
1		An Intimate Iconography of Music		1
2		The Redress of Music		19
3		Earning Your Song		37
4		The Rest of The Rest Is Noise		87
5		Daimones		131
6		Letting Go		139
7		A Letter to My Daughter		157
		Afterword		167
		Suggestions for Further Listening, Viewing, and Reading		173

"Brilliant, spiritual, funny - at times exasperating - this wonderful book is an irreverent and intimate conversational tour of the physical and spiritual reality of music. Ear-opening, mind-cracking, this is a paean to difficult love, and will remind you of every piece of music that you've really listened to." - Margaret Doody, John and Barbara Glynn Family Professor of Literature at the University of Notre Dame, and author of Aristotle Detective and other novels."

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