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Is birdsong music? The most frequent answer to this question in the Middle Ages was resoundingly "no." In Sung Birds, Elizabeth Eva Leach traces postmedieval uses of birdsong within Western musical culture. She first explains why such melodious sound was not music for medieval thinkers and then goes on to consider the ontology of music, the significance of comparisons between singers and birds, and the relationship between art and nature as enacted by the musical performance of late-medieval poetry. If birdsong was not music, how should we interpret the musical depiction of birdsong in human music-making? What does it tell us about the singers, their listeners, and the moral status of secular polyphony? Why was it the fourteenth century that saw the beginnings of this practice, continued to this day in the music of Messiaen and others?Leach explores medieval arguments about song, language, and rationality whose basic terms survive undiminished into the present. She considers not only lyrics that have their singers voice the songs or speech of birds but also those that represent other natural, nonmusical, sounds such as human cries or the barks of dogs. The dangerous sweetness of birdsong was invoked in discussions of musical ethics, which, because of the potential slippage between irrational beast and less rational woman in comparisons with rational human masculinity, depict women's singing as less than fully human. Leach's argument comes full circle with the advent of sound recording. This technological revolution-like its medieval equivalent, the invention of the music book-once again made the relationship between music and nature an acute preoccupation of Western culture.

Poetry, Medieval --- Nature in music. --- Birds --- Music --- Aves --- Avian fauna --- Avifauna --- Wild birds --- Amniotes --- Vertebrates --- Ornithology --- History and criticism.

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Virginia Woolf famously claimed that, around December 1910, human character changed. Aesthetic Technologies addresses how music (especially opera), the phonograph, and film served as cultural agents facilitating the many extraordinary social, artistic, and cultural shifts that characterized the new century and much of what followed long thereafter, even to the present. Three tropes are central: the tensions and traumas-cultural, social, and personal-associated with modernity; changes in human subjectivity and its engagement and representation in music and film; and the more general societal impact of modern media, sound recording (the development of the phonograph in particular), and the critical role played by early-century opera recording. A principal focus of the book is the conflicted relationship in Western modernity to nature, particularly as nature is perceived in opposition to culture and articulated through music, film, and sound as agents of fundamental, sometimes shocking transformation. The book considers the sound/vision world of modernity filtered through the lens of aesthetic modernism and rapid technological change, and the impact of both, experienced with the prescient sense that there could be no turning back.

Nature in motion pictures. --- Nature in music. --- Sound recordings --- Motion pictures --- Opera --- Modernism (Music) --- Music --- Audio discs --- Audio recordings --- Audiorecordings --- Discs, Audio --- Discs, Sound --- Disks, Sound --- Phonodiscs --- Phonograph records --- Phonorecords --- Recordings, Audio --- Recordings, Sound --- Records, Phonograph --- Records, Sound --- Sound discs --- Audio-visual materials --- Comic opera --- Lyric drama --- Opera, Comic --- Operas --- Drama --- Dramatic music --- Singspiel --- Modernism in music --- Modernist music --- Musical modernism --- Style, Musical --- Hermeneutics (Music) --- Musical aesthetics --- Aesthetics --- Music theory --- Social aspects. --- History --- Philosophy and aesthetics. --- History and criticism --- Philosophy --- Puccini, Giacomo, --- Days of heaven (Motion picture) --- Fitzcarraldo (Motion picture) --- Nature in motion pictures --- Nature in music --- Social aspects --- Philosophy and aesthetics --- E-books --- Modernism (Music). --- Musik --- Modernism (musik). --- Film --- Musikinspelningar --- Naturen. --- Estetiska aspekter. --- Sociala aspekter. --- Fitzcarraldo (Motion picture). --- Days of heaven (Motion picture). --- Fanciulla del West (Puccini, Giacomo). --- 1900-1999. --- 1900-talet. --- Belasco, David, --- MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Opera --- 20th century --- aesthetic modernism. --- early 20th century culture. --- early 20th century fine arts. --- early 20th century music. --- early 20th century subjectivity. --- early century opera recording. --- film. --- modern media. --- musical aesthetics of the early 20th century. --- musical technology. --- nature in film. --- nature in western modernity. --- opera music. --- sound recording. --- sounds of modernity. --- tensions and traumas of modernity. --- visions of modernity. --- western modernity.