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Weimarer Klassik und tragédie classique – Die klassische Form und ihre staatsrechtliche Bedeutung Vor dem Hintergrund der epochalen Verunsicherungen des ausgehenden 18. Jahrhunderts stellen sich Goethe und Schiller in ihrer Dramatik den politischen Dimensionen und Abgründen der klassischen französischen Tragödie. Verkappte Staatsgründungen beherrschen ebenso das Geschehen wie der Staatsstreich, der Bürgerkrieg oder der failing state. Eine neue Aktualität gewann das Drama Corneilles und Racines jedoch erst wegen seiner Aufladung der klassischen Form mit staatspolitischen Fundamentalfragen. Das Ringen um eine Regelpoetik und ihre angemessene Umsetzung, vermeintliche Nebensächlichkeiten wie die Einheit der Zeit werden zum Schauplatz genuin politischer Reflexion. Goethe und Schiller verzichten auf eine Restauration der klassischen Form, sie entdecken aber ihre ursprüngliche Energie wieder und verhandeln diese neu. Besonders deutlich zeigt sich dies am dramaturgischen Konflikt zwischen König und Held, der einen bislang weithin übersehenen Grundpfeiler der klassischen Tragödie bildet.

Rethinking the significance of films including Pillow Talk, Rear Window, and The Seven Year Itch, Pamela Robertson Wojcik examines the popularity of the “apartment plot,” her term for stories in which the apartment functions as a central narrative device. From the baby boom years into the 1970s, the apartment plot was not only key to films; it also surfaced in TV shows, Broadway plays, literature, and comic strips, from The Honeymooners and The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Subways are for Sleeping and Apartment 3-G. By identifying the apartment plot as a film genre, Wojcik reveals affinities between movies generally viewed as belonging to such distinct genres as film noir, romantic comedy, and melodrama. She analyzes the apartment plot as part of a mid-twentieth-century urban discourse, showing how it offers a vision of home centered on values of community, visibility, contact, mobility, impermanence, and porousness that contrasts with views of home as private, stable, and family-based. Wojcik suggests that the apartment plot presents a philosophy of urbanism related to the theories of Jane Jacobs and Henri Lefebvre. Urban apartments were important spaces for negotiating gender, sexuality, race, and class in mid-twentieth-century America.

Although overlooked by most narratives of American cinema history, films made for purposes outside of theatrical entertainment dominated twentieth-century motion picture production. This volume adds to the growing study of nontheatrical films by focusing on the ways filmmakers developed and audiences encountered ideas about race, identity, politics, and community outside the borders of theatrical cinema. The contributors to Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film examine the place and role of race in educational films, home movies, industry and government films, anthropological films, and church films as well as other forms of nontheatrical filmmaking. From filmic depictions of Native Americans and films by 1920s African American religious leaders to a government educational film about the unequal treatment of Latin American immigrants, these films portrayed—for various purposes and intentions—the lives of those who were mostly excluded from the commercial films being produced in Hollywood. This volume is more than an examination of a broad swath of neglected twentieth-century filmmaking; it is a reevaluation of basic assumptions about American film culture and the place of race within it.Contributors. Crystal Mun-hye Baik, Jasmyn R. Castro, Nadine Chan, Mark Garrett Cooper, Dino Everett, Allyson Nadia Field, Walter Forsberg, Joshua Glick, Tanya Goldman, Marsha Gordon, Noelle Griffis, Colin Gunckel, Michelle Kelley, Todd Kushigemachi, Martin L. Johnson, Caitlin McGrath, Elena Rossi-Snook, Laura Isabel Serna, Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Dan Streible, Lauren Tilton, Noah Tsika, Travis L. Wagner, Colin Williamson

In a bold rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America, Joseph Litvak reveals a political regime that did not end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory sycophancy, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest, patriotic American. While many scholars have noted the anti-Semitism underlying the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC’s) anti-Communism, Litvak draws on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, and Max Horkheimer to show how the committee conflated Jewishness with what he calls “comic cosmopolitanism,” an intolerably seductive happiness, centered in Hollywood and New York, in show business and intellectual circles. He maintains that HUAC took the comic irreverence of the “uncooperative” witnesses as a crime against an American identity based on self-repudiation and the willingness to “name names.” Litvak proposes that sycophancy was (and continues to be) the price exacted for assimilation into mainstream American culture, not just for Jews, but also for homosexuals, immigrants, and other groups deemed threatening to American rectitude.Litvak traces the outlines of comic cosmopolitanism in a series of performances in film and theater and before HUAC, performances by Jewish artists and intellectuals such as Zero Mostel, Judy Holliday, and Abraham Polonsky. At the same time, through an uncompromising analysis of work by informers including Jerome Robbins, Elia Kazan, and Budd Schulberg, he explains the triumph of a stoolpigeon culture that still thrives in the America of the early twenty-first century.

“In its original run on HBO, The Sopranos mattered, and it matters still,” Dana Polan asserts early in this analysis of the hit show, in which he sets out to clarify the impact and importance of the series in both its cultural and media-industry contexts. A renowned film and TV scholar, Polan combines a close and extended reading of the show itself—and of select episodes and scenes—with broader attention to the social landscape with which it is in dialogue. For Polan, The Sopranos is a work of playful irony that complicates simplistic attempts to grasp its meanings and values. The show seductively beckons the viewer into an amoral universe, hinting at ways to make sense of its ethically complicated situations, only to challenge the viewer’s complacent grasp of things. It deftly exploits the interplay between art culture and popular culture by mixing elements of art cinema—meandering plots, narrative breaks, and an uncertain progression—with the allure of a soap opera, delving into its characters’ sex lives, mob rivalries, and parent–child conflicts.A show about corrupt figures who parasitically try to squeeze illicit profit from the system, The Sopranos itself seems a target of attempts to glom on to its fame as a successful TV series: attempts by media executives, marketers, critics and writers, and even presidential candidates. “Everyone wants a piece of Sopranos action,” says Polan, and he traces the marketing of the series across both official and unauthorized media platforms, including cookbooks, games, DVDs, and the kitschy Sopranos bus tour. Critiquing previous books on The Sopranos, Polan suggests that in their quest to find deep meaning, many of the authors missed the show’s ironic and comedic side.

Die »Gestaltung von Gesellschaft« wird zunehmend zum Anspruch unterschiedlicher Designausrichtungen wie zum Beispiel Social Design oder Public Interest Design. Damit verbunden ist die Vorstellung eines positiven Beitrags zu den gegenwärtigen Herausforderungen unserer Zeit. Hieraus ergeben sich vielfältige Überschneidungen mit anderen Disziplinen, zum Beispiel der Sozialen Arbeit, die sich ebenfalls im »Feld des Sozialen« verorten und darauf abzielen, soziales Miteinander zu beobachten, zu initiieren und zu begleiten. Mit der Überzeugung, voneinander lernen zu können, beleuchten die Beiträge des Bandes die Bedingungen, Formen und potenziellen Folgen einer kollaborativen Gesellschaftsgestaltung.

In the small world of Swiss graphic design, prizes such as the Swiss Design Awards (SDA) are followed closely. The winners' works are admired, envied and emulated. The generous prize money allows designers to launch their careers and focus on lesser paid but critically recognised work. Awards thus play the role of bellwethers of the scene. However, criticisms inevitably arise. Speaking in hushed tones, designers speculate as to why a colleague won over another. Rumours have it that jury members favour their inner circles and exclude competitors. Analysing this universe in detail, Jonas Berthod retraces the recent history of the SDA and the emergence of a new design culture in Switzerland.

Existing scholarly discussions of theatrical realism have been predominantly limited to 19th-century European and Russian theater, with little attention paid to wider explorations and alternative definitions of the practice. Examining theater forms and artists from China, Japan, and Korea, Realisms in East Asian Performance brings together a group of theater historians to reconsider realism through the performing arts of East Asia. The book’s contributors emphasize trans-regional conversations and activate inter-Asian dialogues on theatrical production. Tracing historical trajectories, starting from premodern periods through today, the book seeks to understand realisms’ multiple origins, forms, and cultural significances, and examines their continuities, disruptions, and divergences. In its diversity of topics, geographic locations, and time periods, Realisms in East Asian Performance aims to globalize and de-center the dominant narratives surrounding realism in theater, and revise assumptions about the spectacular and theatrical forms of Asian performance. Understanding realism as a powerful representational style, chapters collectively reevaluate acts of representation on stage not just for East Asia, but for theater and performance studies more broadly.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Melodrama films dominated the North and South Korean industries in the period between liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 and the hardening of dictatorship in the 1970s. The films of each industry are often read as direct reflections of Cold War and Korean War political ideologies and national historical experiences, and therefore as aesthetically and politically opposed to each other. However, Political Moods develops a comparative analysis across the Cold War divide, analyzing how films in both North and South Korea convey political and moral ideas through the sentimentality of the melodramatic mode. Travis Workman reveals that the melancholic moods of film melodrama express the somatic and social conflicts between political ideologies and excesses of affect, meaning, and historical references. These moods dramatize the tension between the language of Cold War politics and the negative affects that connect cinema to what it cannot fully represent. The result is a new way of historicizing the cinema of the two Koreas in relation to colonialism, postcolonialism, war, and nation building.

Konzertsituationen mit starken Musikerlebnissen faszinieren, ereignen sich jedoch nur selten. Wie können Musikvermittelnde dieses musikalische Involviertsein, das sich in einer besonderen Zugewandtheit oder Versunkenheit zeigt, begünstigen? Entlang dieser Frage entwickelt Irena Müller-Brozovic eine theoretische Fundierung von Musikvermittlung, die sich auf Hartmut Rosas Resonanztheorie bezieht und Aspekte von intensiven Momenten in Konzertsituationen beschreibt. Sowohl vielfältige Praxisbeispiele als auch ein dynamisches Modell sowie zugehörige Leitfragen dienen dabei als Werkzeug für das Konzipieren und Analysieren von Vermittlungssituationen.

In der öffentlichen Rede, in politisch-populistischen Debatten und in massenmedialen Berichten ist »Parallelgesellschaft« ein seit Jahren viel strapazierter Begriff. Mit seiner Geschichte politischer Instrumentalisierung geht die Gefahr von Affirmation gesellschaftlicher Ungleichheitsverhältnisse einher. Die Beiträge des Bandes setzen sich im Kontext populärer Musik mit parallel bestehenden, scheinbar unverbundenen Strukturen, Begriffen und Konzepten auseinander. Neben einem Blick auf die deutsch-deutsche Entwicklungsgeschichte der Popular Music Studies werden pop-kulturelle Differenzparadigmen u.a. aus musikwissenschaftlicher, musiksoziologischer, ethnomusikologischer und juristischer Sicht kritisch aufgearbeitet.

This collection of original essays brings together museum, theatre, and performance case studies with a focus on their distinctive and overlapping modes of producing memory for transnational audiences.Whether this is through narrative, object, embodied encounter or a combination of the three, this volume considers distinctions and interactions between memory and history specifically through the lenses of theatre and performance studies, visual culture, and museum and curator studies. This book is underpinned by three areas of research enquiry: How are contemporary theatre makers and museum curators staging historical narratives of difficult pasts? How might comparisons between theatre and museum practices offer new insights into the role objects play in generating and representing difficult pasts? What points of overlap, comparison, and contrast among these constructions of history and memory of authoritarianism, slavery, colonialism, genocide, armed conflict, fascism, and communism might offer an expanded understanding of difficult pasts in these transnational cultural contexts?This collection is designed for any scholar of its central disciplines, as well as for those interested in cultural geography, memory studies, and postcolonial theory.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives (CC-BY-ND) 4.0 license.

This edited collection examines the potential of dance training for developing socially engaged individuals capable of forging ethical human relations for an ever-changing world and in turn frames dance as a fundamental part of human experience.This volume draws together a range of critical voices to reflect the inclusive potential of dance. The contributions offer perspectives on contemporary dance training in Britain from dance educators, scholars, practitioners and artists. Through examining the politics, values and ethics of learning dance today, this book argues for the need of a re-assessment of the evolving practices in dance training and techniques. Key questions address how the concept of ‘technique’ and associated systems of training in dance could be redefined to enable the collaboration of skills and application of ideas necessary to twenty-first-century dance. The editors present these ideas in different modes of writing. This collection of essays, conversations and manifestos offers a way to explore, debate and grasp the shifting values of contemporary dance. Examining these values in the applied field of dance reveals a complex and contrasting range of ideas, encompassing broad themes including the relationships between individuality and collectivity, rigour and creativity, and virtuosity and inclusivity.This volume points to ethical techniques as providing a way of navigating these contrasting values in dance. It serves as an invaluable resource for academics as well as practitioners and students.

Die Etablierung der Opera buffa veränderte die Opernlandschaft des 18. Jahrhunderts maßgeblich. Sie stellte einen inhaltlichen Kontrapunkt zur höfisch geprägten Opera seria dar und löste diese zunehmend in den Spielplänen ab. Wie aber ging die europaweite Verbreitung der komischen italienischen Oper vor sich? Wo konnte sie sich rascher als anderswo etablieren und wer waren die zentralen Akteurinnen und Akteure? Welche Rolle spielten mobile Operntruppen und wie verhielten sich die Höfe zu dem neuen Genre? Erstmals nehmen die Autorinnen in einer systematischen Analyse der Opera buffa in Europa Migration, Mobilität, Netzwerke und Transformationsprozesse zwischen 1740 und 1765 in den Blick. Mit einem Gastbeitrag von Tom Brökel und Heike Brökel.

Various modes of women's contemporary cultural, social and political leadership can be found in music. Informed by different histories and culturally bound social mores but also by a comparative perspective, the contributors of this volume ask what can be considered leadership in culture from women's point of view. They deconstruct the notion of leadership as corporative and career-related modes of success by showing how women's agency, power and negotiation in and through music can and should be considered as empowering, transformative and role-modeling. By interweaving several disciplinary perspectives - from ethnomusicology, musicology and cultural management to sociology and anthropology - this volume aims to substantially contribute to the study of women's leadership.

Was there more to comedy than Chaucer, the Second Shepherds’ Play, or Shakespeare? Of course! But, for a real taste of medieval and Renaissance humor and in-your-face slapstick, one must cross the Channel to France, where over two hundred extant farces regularly dazzled crowds with blistering satires. Dwarfing all other contemporaneous theatrical repertoires, the boisterous French corpus is populated by lawyers, lawyers everywhere. No surprise there. The lion’s share of mostly anonymous farces was written by barristers, law students, and legal apprentices. Famous for skewering unjust judges and irreligious ecclesiastics, they belonged to a 10,000-member legal society known as the Basoche, which flourished between 1450 and 1550. What is more, their dramatic send-ups of real and fictional court cases were still going strong on the eve of Molière, resilient against those who sought to censor and repress them. The suspenseful wait to see justice done has always made for high drama or, in this case, low drama. But, for centuries, the scripts for these outrageous shows were available only in French editions gathered from scattered print and manuscript sources. In Trial by Farce, prize-winning theater historian Jody Enders brings twelve of the funniest legal farces to English-speaking audiences in a refreshingly uncensored but philologically faithful vernacular. Newly conceived as much for scholars as for students and theater practitioners, this repertoire and its familiar stock characters come vividly to life as they struggle to negotiate the limits of power, politics, class, gender, and, above all, justice. Through the distinctive blend of wit, social critique, and breathless boisterousness that is farce, we gain a new understanding of comedy itself as form of political correction. In ways presciently modern and even postmodern, farce paints a different cultural picture of the notoriously authoritarian Middle Ages with its own vision of liberty and justice for all. Theater eternally offers ways for new generations to raise their voices and act.

This study traces the evolution of early film societies in Germany and Austria, from the emergence of mass movie theaters in the 1910s to the turbulent years of the late Weimar Republic. Examining a diverse array of groups, it approaches film societies as formations designed to assimilate and influence a new medium: a project emerging from the world of amateur science before taking new directions into industry, art and politics. Through an interdisciplinary approach—in dialogue with social history, print history and media archaeology—it also transforms our theoretical understanding of what a film society was and how it operated. Far from representing a mere collection of pre-formed cinephiles, film societies were, according to the book’s central argument, productive social formations, which taught people how to nurture their passion for the movies, how to engage with cinema, and how to interact with each other. Ultimately, the study argues that examining film societies can help to reveal the diffuse agency by which generative ideas of cinema take shape.

In der musikalischen Aufführungspraxis ist es normalerweise der Mensch, der das Tempo erzeugt. Innerlich ein Tempo zu etablieren und es an das der mitmusizierenden Personen anzugleichen, ist eine grundlegende musikalische Fähigkeit. Was bedeutet es also, wenn das Tempo von einem technischen System vorgegeben wird? Philippe Kocher unterzieht diese besondere Art der Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion einer musikgeschichtlichen, technikgeschichtlichen und medienarchäologischen Betrachtung. Darüber hinaus entwickelt er innerhalb seiner wissenschaftlich-künstlerischen Studie ein eigenes System zur technikgestützten Tempovermittlung und beschreibt dessen Einsatz in der Praxis.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Everyone speaks with an accent, but what is an accent? Thinking with an Accent introduces accent as a powerfully coded yet underexplored mode of perception that includes looking, listening, acting, reading, and thinking. This volume convenes scholars of media, literature, education, law, language, and sound to theorize accent as an object of inquiry, an interdisciplinary method, and an embodied practice. Accent does more than just denote identity: from algorithmic bias and corporate pedagogy to migratory poetics and the politics of comparison, accent mediates global economies of discrimination and desire. Accents happen between bodies and media. They negotiate power and invite attunement. These essays invite the reader to think with an accent—to practice a dialogical and multimodal inquiry that can yield transformative modalities of knowledge, action, and care.

Archive zahlreicher österreichischer und tschechischer Klöster beherbergen heute einige der wertvollsten Abschriften von Instrumentalwerken Wagenseils, J. Haydns, Vanhals und Ditters'. Dieses Vermächtnis ist größtenteils das Resultat eines in den 1750er Jahren aufkommenden Trends, dessen von Wien ausgehende Breitenwirkung bislang unterschätzt wurde. Christiane Maria Hornbachner macht auf die musikgeschichtliche Relevanz interregionaler Distributionsprozesse aufmerksam. Sie zeichnet in ihrer institutionenübergreifenden Analyse die weitverzweigten Netzwerke von Klostervorstehern, Mönchen, Komponisten und Kunsthändlern nach. Deren nachhaltiges Wirken als Musikvermittler lässt tief in die klösterliche Lebenswelt des 18. Jahrhunderts blicken - in eine Welt, die kulturell keineswegs so streng von ihrer Umgebung isoliert war, wie uns die mächtigen Gemäuer der großen Stifte glauben machen könnten.

Warum obligatorischer Musikunterricht? Musikunterricht wird oft als ›nice-to-have‹ betrachtet und im Rahmen knapper Ressourcen in Frage gestellt. Der Begründungsdruck führt dazu, dass der Musik Wirkungen zugesprochen werden, die wissenschaftlich nicht haltbar sind. Ist das Schulfach Musik tatsächlich zu begründen? Wie soll es ausgerichtet sein? Gelingender Unterricht ist nicht nur von Lehrplan und Qualifikation der Lehrpersonen abhängig. Vielmehr spielen Haltungen und Überzeugungen von Lehrenden und Lernenden eine entscheidende Rolle. Markus Cslovjecsek zeigt auf, wo die Beteiligten die Legitimation von Musikunterricht sehen und richtet sich damit an alle, die an schulischem (Musik-)Unterricht und seiner Begründung interessiert sind - ein ›must-have‹ für alle Bildungsverantwortlichen.

The early drama of Eugene O’Neill, with its emphasis on racial themes and conflicts, opened up extraordinary opportunities for Black performers to challenge racist structures in modern theater and cinema. By adapting O’Neill’s dramatic writing—changing scripts to omit offensive epithets, inserting African American music and dance, or including citations of Black internationalism--theater artists of color have used O’Neill’s texts to raze barriers in American and transatlantic theater. Challenging the widely accepted idea that Broadway was the white-hot creative engine of U.S. theater during the early 20th century, author Katie N. Johnson reveals a far more complex system of exchanges between the Broadway establishment and a vibrant Black theater scene in New York and beyond to chart a new history of American and transnational theater.  In spite of their dichotomous (and at times problematic) representation of Blackness, O’Neill’s plays such as The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun Got Wings make ideal case studies because of the way these works stimulated traffic between Broadway and Harlem—and between white and Black America. These investigations of O’Neill and Broadway productions are enriched by the vibrant transnational exchange found in early to mid-20th century artistic production. Anchored in archival research, Racing the Great White Way recovers not only vital lost performance histories, but also the layered contexts for performing bodies across the Black Atlantic and the Circum-Atlantic.

In der musikalischen Aufführungspraxis ist es normalerweise der Mensch, der das Tempo erzeugt. Innerlich ein Tempo zu etablieren und es an das der mitmusizierenden Personen anzugleichen, ist eine grundlegende musikalische Fähigkeit. Was bedeutet es also, wenn das Tempo von einem technischen System vorgegeben wird? Philippe Kocher unterzieht diese besondere Art der Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion einer musikgeschichtlichen, technikgeschichtlichen und medienarchäologischen Betrachtung. Darüber hinaus entwickelt er innerhalb seiner wissenschaftlich-künstlerischen Studie ein eigenes System zur technikgestützten Tempovermittlung und beschreibt dessen Einsatz in der Praxis.

Die Geschichte des türkisch-deutschen Migrant*innentheaters ist fast so alt wie die der türkischen Arbeitsmigration in die BRD. Von Beginn an befanden sich unter den Ankömmlingen nämlich auch Künstler*innen, die frühzeitig nach artistischen Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten suchten. Bald entstanden so erste Bühnenprojekte fernab der öffentlich subventionierten Theaterlandschaft, und über die Jahrzehnte entwickelte sich eine vitale Kultur, die weitgehend unbemerkt von der breiteren deutschen Öffentlichkeit stattfand. Erol M. Boran präsentiert die Vorgeschichte des zeitgenössischen postmigrantischen Theaters in Deutschland und liefert damit eine unentbehrliche Grundlage für dessen weitere Betrachtung.

Theater sind Maschinen des Erscheinens. Und Theatermaschinen, die erscheinen lassen, verbergen sich selbst und bezeugen sich in ihren Effekten. Das teilen sie mit den Machinationen, wie Intrigen bis ins 19. Jahrhundert hießen. Sie widerstreiten dem Primat der dramatischen Handlung und ermöglichen in Verbindung mit Musik und anderen Illuminationen Theater als Spektakel. Die Beiträger*innen des Bandes fragen nach dem Zusammenhang von Maschine, Machination, Schauspiel und Schauraum. Mit der Figur der Maschine denken sie das Theater von seinen Rändern her und arbeiten heraus, wie ein maschineninduziertes Spektakel auch in Theaterformen (weiter-)lebt, denen das Spektakuläre suspekt geworden ist.

From King Kong to Candyman, the boundary-pushing genre of horror film has always been a site for provocative explorations of race in American popular culture. This book offers a comprehensive chronological survey of Black horror from the 1890s to present day.In this second edition, Robin R. Means Coleman expands upon the history of notable characterizations of Blackness in horror cinema, with new chapters spanning the 1960s, 2000s, and 2010s to the present, and examines key levels of Black participation on screen and behind the camera. The book addresses a full range of Black horror films, including mainstream Hollywood fare, art-house films, Blaxploitation films, and U.S. hip-hop culture-inspired Nollywood films. This new edition also explores the resurgence of the Black horror genre in the last decade, examining the success of Jordan Peele’s films Get Out (2017) and Us (2019), smaller independent films such as The House Invictus (2018), and Nia DaCosta’s sequel to Candyman (2021). Means Coleman argues that horror offers a unique representational space for Black people to challenge negative or racist portrayals, and to portray greater diversity within the concept of Blackness itself.This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how fears and anxieties about race and race relations are made manifest, and often challenged, on the silver screen.

Music and noise seem to be mutually exclusive. Music is generally considered as an ordered arrangement of sounds pleasing to the ear and noise as its opposite: chaotic, ugly, aggressive, sometimes even deafening. When presented in a musical context, noise can thus act as a tool to express resistance to predominant cultural values, to society or to socioeconomic structures (including those of the music industry). The oppositional stance confirms current notions of noise as something which is destructive, a belief not only cherished by hard-core rock bands but also shared by engineers and companies developing devices to suppress or reduce noise in our daily environment.In contrast to the common opinions on noise just described, this volume seeks to explore the constructive potential of noise in contemporary musical practices. Rather than viewing noise as a ‘defect’, this volume aims at studying its aesthetic and cultural potential.Within the noise music study field, most recent publications focus on subgenres such as psychedelic post-rock, industrial, hard-core punk, trash or rave, as they developed from rock and popular music. This book includes work on avant-garde music developed in the domain of classical music as well. In addition to already well-established (social) historical and aesthetical perspectives on noise and noise music, this volume offers contributions by music analysts.

Contingent Encounters offers a sustained comparative study of improvisation as it appears between music and everyday life. Drawing on work in musicology, cultural studies, and critical improvisation studies, as well as his own performing experience, Dan DiPiero argues that comparing improvisation across domains calls into question how improvisation is typically recognized. By comparing the music of Eric Dolphy, Norwegian free improvisers, Mr. K, and the Ingrid Laubrock/Kris Davis duo with improvised activities in everyday life (such as walking, baking, working, and listening), DiPiero concludes that improvisation appears as a function of any encounter between subjects, objects, and environments. Bringing contingency into conversation with the utopian strain of critical improvisation studies, DiPiero shows how particular social investments cause improvisation to be associated with relative freedom, risk-taking, and unpredictability in both scholarship and public discourse. Taking seriously the claim that improvisation is the same thing as living, Contingent Encounters overturns long-standing assumptions about the aesthetic and political implications of this notoriously slippery term.