The first part of the book provides a detailed overview of the relevant work in cognitive science, framed around specific musical examples. The second part brings this perspective to bear on a number of issues with which music...

Psychology for Musicians provides the basis for answering this question. Examining the processes that underlie the acquisition of musical skills, Lehmann, Sloboda, and Woody provide a...

Meyer devotes the latter part of his book to a sketch-history of nineteenth-century music. He shows explicitly how the beliefs and attitudes of Romanticism influenced the choices of composers from Beethoven to Mahler and into our own time.

"A monumental work. . . . Most authors...

"A fascinating thesis and a timely synthesis.... Becker urges the reader to view certain arcane cultural rituals as being in the mainstream of spiritual development and argues that the resulting trance-like states may relate to the basic fabric of emotions and consciousness, which are our ancestral, animalian heritage. This is both a risky and courageous undertaking that challenges both cultural and neuroscientific studies."
Jaak Panksepp, author of Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

In Deep Listeners, Judith Becker brings together scientific...

This far-ranging book shows how human memory influences the organization of music. The book is divided into two parts. The first part presents basic ideas about memory and perception from cognitive psychology and, to some extent, cognitive linguistics. Topics include auditory processing, perception, and recognition. The second part describes in detail how the concepts from the first part are exemplified in music. The presentation is based on three levels of musical experience: event fusion (the formation of single musical events from acoustical vibrations in the air, on a time scale too...

Contributors to this volume are Philip Alperson, Francis Sparshott, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Edward T. Cone, Peter Kivy, Jenefer Robinson, Joseph Margolis, Arnold Berleant, Morris Grossman, Jerrold Levinson, Stephen Davies, Martin Donougho, Roger Scruton, and Rose Rosengard Subotnik.

Perris examines the past and present uses of music as a means for political and social change, overt or disguised. He presents evidence of music as propaganda ranging from Broadway to the official compositions of the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Communist China, as well as from concert halls to the protest movements of the 1960s. Familiar classics are analyzed, as well as operas of nineteenth-century nationalist composers. Shostakovich, Henze, and Penderecki, as well as Bob Dylan and many rock and roll bands are shown as composers who were adversaries of the...