Listen Again: A New History of Music

About the Book

How do you tell the key of a piece—without looking at a score? How do you know when a musical work ended before an audience applauds or a radio announcer returns on air? Was there, in fact, a ‘breakdown of tonality’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? These questions and others are the focus of David Wulstan’s Listen Again: A New History of Music. He also shows where the nuove musiche of the early Baroque era came from and what the two critical but unlinked chords in the middle of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. III signify.

Previous literature in music does not properly address these questions and innumerable others. In Listen Again, Wulstan illustrates how music from Bach to Bartók was far less "revolutionary" than customarily imagined and that the "inversionist" doctrine of Rameau and kindred acoustical misconceptions, courtesy of Heinrich Schenker and other analysts, solve fewer problems than their purveyor claim. In Listen Again, Wulstan takes to task early theorists, who were mostly clerics who ignored non-ecclesiastical music, and their modern equivalents, who consider only the blinding white of the written or printed score, whilst ignoring music as heard and interpreted by the ear and brain. Instead, Wulstan enquires into the musical activities of the common folk to addressing key issues that early and modern theorists have regularly overlooked.

The book will appeal anyone who has dismissed "harmony," "theory" and the like as alien, in effect, to practical music. Readers will find in Listen Again that the true history of music has far more practical relevance for performers than the aridity of music theory coursework, demonstrating by example how this work a book about music, not, as in the case of so much theoretical work, a "book about books."

Table of Contents:

Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Permissions
Chapter 1: Some Matters of Terminology and Other Preliminaries
Chapter 2: The Recognition of Key
Chapter 3: Tonal Balance and Minor Tonality: The Use of Sequences; dissonance
Chapter 4: The Rule of the Octave: Harmony and Rhythm
Chapter 5: The Enhanced Tonic: Fugal Technique and Tonality
Chapter 6: Complex Key
Chapter 7: The Classical Style, Part I
Chapter 8: The Classical Style, Part II
Chapter 9: Classical to Romantic: Beethoven and Schubert
Chapter 10: The Romantic Era, Part I: Chopin, Brahms and Mendelssohn
Chapter 11: The Romantic Era, Part II: The Age of Wagner
Chapter 12: The Perception of Music
Chapter 13: The Twentieth Century, Part I: The Palette of Debussy
Chapter 14: The Twentieth Century, Part II: Themes and Theories in the Music of Stravinsky and Some Other Composers
Chapter 15:The Twentieth Century, Part III: Techniques and Treatises – Bartók, Hindemith, and Others
Chapter 16: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Chapter 17: Two Cultures
Chapter 18: Mediæval to Renaissance
Chapter 19: Renaissance to Baroque
Chapter 20: Back to the Future

About the Author :
David Wulstan is presently Honorary Fellowship at St Peter’s College, Oxford. Before then he served as Gregynog Professor of Music at University College of Wales. He is the author of various books and articles on medieval music and church history. He is widely known as the founder and director of The Clerkes of Oxenford, whose pioneering work, particularly in the restoration and interpretation of the works of John Sheppard and other Tudor composers, has since influenced the singing style of ensembles devoted to early Western music.

Review :
In his previous books, Wulstan focused on early music, but more recently, he has contributed to his oeuvre by demonstrating his knowledge of musical theory from the Middle Ages to the present. As he admits, Listen Again is not a ‘bedtime book’; it is a volume for those interested in pondering well-crafted analysis of music and its historical value. The author writes that he has sought to ‘cover most of the ground in regard to European music from the earliest times of which we have any real knowledge and to determine the mechanisms of tonality from a historical point of view.’ The book provides a number of opportunities to consider senescent ideas, such as modal versus tonal music, in a new light. Immediately following the introduction is a useful glossary of technical terminology the author uses—e.g., superdominant as opposed to submediant. . . .Listen Again is likely to inspire some interesting discussions among students with a foundation in music history and theory. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. Wustan presents a tantalizing and absolutely compelling argument.... Recommended.