Epistrophies

Epistrophies
Author: Brent Hayes Edwards
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2017-06-05
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0674055438

Hearing across media is the source of innovation in a uniquely African American sphere of art-making and performance, Brent Hayes Edwards writes. He explores this fertile interface through case studies in jazz literature—both writings informed by music and the surprisingly large body of writing by jazz musicians themselves.

Epistrophies

Epistrophies
Author: Brent Hayes Edwards
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2017-06-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0674979028

In 1941 Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke copyrighted “Epistrophy,” one of the best-known compositions of the bebop era. The song’s title refers to a literary device—the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of successive clauses—that is echoed in the construction of the melody. Written two decades later, Amiri Baraka’s poem “Epistrophe” alludes slyly to Monk’s tune. Whether it is composers finding formal inspiration in verse or a poet invoking the sound of music, hearing across media is the source of innovation in black art. Epistrophies explores this fertile interface through case studies in jazz literature—both writings informed by music and the surprisingly large body of writing by jazz musicians themselves. From James Weldon Johnson’s vernacular transcriptions to Sun Ra’s liner note poems, from Henry Threadgill’s arresting song titles to Nathaniel Mackey’s “Song of the Andoumboulou,” there is an unending back-and-forth between music that hovers at the edge of language and writing that strives for the propulsive energy and melodic contours of music. At times this results in art that gravitates into multiple media. In Duke Ellington’s “social significance” suites, or in the striking parallels between Louis Armstrong’s inventiveness as a singer and trumpeter on the one hand and his idiosyncratic creativity as a letter writer and collagist on the other, one encounters an aesthetic that takes up both literature and music as components of a unique—and uniquely African American—sphere of art-making and performance.

The Practice of Diaspora

The Practice of Diaspora
Author: Brent Hayes EDWARDS
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0674034422

Edwards revisits black transnational culture in the 1920s and 1930s, paying particular attention to links between the intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance and their Francophone counterparts in Paris. He suggests that diaspora is less a historical condition than a set of practices through which black intellectuals pursue international alliances.

Anteaesthetics

Anteaesthetics
Author: Rizvana Bradley
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 500
Release: 2023-10-24
Genre: Art
ISBN: 150363714X

In Anteaesthetics, Rizvana Bradley begins from the proposition that blackness cannot be represented in modernity's aesthetic regime, but is nevertheless foundational to every representation. Troubling the idea that the aesthetic is sheltered from the antiblack terror that lies just beyond its sanctuary, Bradley insists that blackness cannot make a home within the aesthetic, yet is held as its threshold and aporia. The book problematizes the phenomenological and ontological conceits that underwrite the visual, sensual, and abstract logics of modernity. Moving across multiple histories and geographies, artistic mediums and forms, from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to the contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art of Glenn Ligon, Mickalene Thomas, and Sondra Perry, Bradley inaugurates a new method for interpretation—an ante-formalism which demonstrates how black art engages in the recursive deconstruction of the aesthetic forms that remain foundational to modernity. Foregrounding the negativity of black art, Bradley shows how each of these artists disclose the racialized contours of the body, form, and medium, even interrogating the form that is the world itself. Drawing from black critical theory, Continental philosophy, film and media studies, art history, and black feminist thought, Bradley explores artistic practices that inhabit the negative underside of form. Ultimately, Anteaesthetics asks us to think philosophically with black art, and with the philosophical invention black art necessarily undertakes.

The Jazz Standards

The Jazz Standards
Author: Ted Gioia
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 609
Release: 2021-08-18
Genre: Music
ISBN: 019008720X

An updated new edition of Ted Gioia's acclaimed compendium of jazz standards, featuring 15 additional selections, hundreds of additional recommended tracks, and enhancements and additions on almost every page. Since the first edition of The Jazz Standards was published in 2012, author Ted Gioia has received almost non-stop feedback and suggestions from the passionate global community of jazz enthusiasts and performers requesting crucial additions and corrections to the book. In this second edition, Gioia expands the scope of the book to include more songs, and features new recordings by rising contemporary artists. The Jazz Standards is an essential comprehensive guide to some of the most important jazz compositions, telling the story of more than 250 key jazz songs and providing a listening guide to more than 2,000 recordings. The fan who wants to know more about a tune heard at the club or on the radio will find this book indispensable. Musicians who play these songs night after night will find it to be a handy guide, as it outlines the standards' history and significance and tells how they have been performed by different generations of jazz artists. Students learning about jazz standards will find it to be a go-to reference work for these cornerstones of the repertoire. This book is a unique resource, a browser's companion, and an invaluable introduction to the art form.

Black Fiction

Black Fiction
Author: Roger Rosenblatt
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 1974
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780674076228

In this illuminating book Roger Rosenblatt offers both sensitive analyses of individual works and a provocative and compelling thesis. He argues that black fiction has a unity deriving not from any chronological sequence, or simply from its black authorship, but from a particular cyclical conception of history on which practically every significant black American novel and short story is based. Marked for oppression by an external physical characteristic, black characters struggle constantly against and within a hostile world. Rosenblatt's analysis of the way black protagonists try to break historical patterns provides an integrated and sustained interpretation of motives and methods in black fiction. The black hero, after starting on a circular track, may try to change direction by means of his youth, love, education, or humor; or he may try to escape into his own elusive and vague history. But, as Rosenblatt demonstrates, these attempts all fail. And the black hero discovers in the failure of his attempts that the society which caused all this failure is not only unattainable but undesirable. Neither a sociological study nor a routine survey, this is distinctly a work of literary criticism which concentrates on black fiction as literature.

The Funk Era and Beyond

The Funk Era and Beyond
Author: T. Bolden
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2016-04-30
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0230614531

The Funk Era and Beyond is the first scholarly collection to discuss the significance of funk music in America. Contributors employ a multitude of methodologies to examine this unique musical genre's relationship to African American culture and to music, literature, and visual art as a whole.

Photophysiology

Photophysiology
Author: Arthur C. Giese
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2013-09-24
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1483262278

Photophysiology, Volume I: General Principles: Action of Light on Plants focuses on the fundamental mechanisms by which non-ionizing radiations affect the living cell at the molecular level when such analysis is possible. The selection first offers information on the development of photochemistry, including photosynthesis, photoaxis, vision, phototropism, diurnal rhythms and visible light, and medical uses of ultraviolet light. The text then takes a look at the principles of photochemistry and photochemical methods and electron spin resonance and its application to photophysiology. The publication examines the photochemical action of light on macromolecules, absorption spectra, spectrophotometry, and action spectra, and photochemical reactions of photosynthesis. Discussions focus on photosynthetic phosphorylation, measurement and interpretation of action spectra, instrumentation for absorption spectra, and inactivation of viruses by visible and ultraviolet light. The selection is a valuable source of information for readers interested in photophysiology.

Brilliant Corners

Brilliant Corners
Author: Chris Sheridan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 556
Release: 2001-04-30
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0313016402

In this masterful compilation, world-recognized discographer Chris Sheridan draws together the most comprehensive reconstruction of Thelonious Monk's performances and recordings. Woven through the chronological listing of Monk's work is the story of his rise to acceptance as one of the key pianists and composers of jazz and his decline in health and popularity to his death in 1982. Following a Prologue which attempts to summarize the career and man, the narrative discography covers Monk's entire performance career. This is followed by appendixes listing all microgroove and post-microgroove issues of Monk's performances, all known commercially produced films and videos in which Monk took part, a listing of all of his engagements from 1944 until his career petered out in the mid-1970s, and a bibliography. The work concludes with an index of the people, places, producers, and radio and television programs referred to or quoted in the main taxt, a listing of all musicians, vocalists, and broadcast presenters who took part in the recordings or who played in Monk's bands, an index of all the titles used for Monk's tunes by other musicians and vocalists, and a listing of all tunes played, together with their composers and, where relevant, lyricists. A comprehensive reference work for all scholars and other researchers involved with jazz from the 1940s onward.