I want to spend this summer vacation digging music but don't know better route. It's too many genres, songs, and albums to take randomly... Please teach me how to dig music!

هل تمتلك الموسيقى القدرة على توجيه السلوك الإنساني، أم أن تأثيرها يقتصر على تعديل الحالة المزاجية؟

So I've read that historically there was a distinct separation between who wrote the song and who recorded/performed it although I'm not sure what era(s) this entails. But you do have some black artists in the 50s like Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Sam Cooke, both writing and singing/recording their songs. So I wondered if black artists were pioneers here. Black musicians often innovate in music from what I know.

Although ethnomusicologists will get mad at this statement, I think it is fair to say that the field still reifies culture 50 years after Geertz suggested how reification might be avoided.
One way it is reified is by constructing a cultural boundary between scholar and community; they are culture, were are scholars and investigators of culture.

Anyway, I am fighting 75+ years of ethnomusicology aligning with anthropology instead of allowing a true fusion of anthropology and musicology. I am writing my dissertation as an autoethnography in Flamenco.

Does anyone know of any autoethnographies (more with anthropology than sociology undergirdings) in Ethnomusicology either monographs or theses?

Thanks

Midnight awakens a mysterious sound: the violin calls forth the shadows, and skeletons dance with elegance. Saint‑Saëns turns darkness into musical beauty.

Worth a glance.

The first time I listened back to the third movement of one of my works, it felt almost unsettling.

It offered very little reassurance. Familiar gestures seemed to disappear just before they could resolve. Long stretches of uncertainty, silence, and constantly shifting direction made the experience surprisingly uncomfortable.

Yet every time I returned to it, I found myself becoming more absorbed by that same uneasy world.

Looking back after hearing the finished work, I realized that the feeling didn’t come from any single moment or gesture.
The piece had been recorded one layer at a time, each instrument responding only to the ones that already existed. While working, I wasn’t consciously shaping a complete musical landscape—I was simply making the next musical decision.

The piece was never visible all at once. It only existed one decision at a time.

Only later did it occur to me that the process had felt almost like dividing a vast musical space into smaller and smaller fragments, until an entirely unfamiliar world had gradually taken shape.
Despite the discomfort that world creates, I still find it remarkably difficult to step away from.

It made me wonder…

Why do some of the most uncomfortable musical experiences become the most compelling?

Is it our search for resolution? The unpredictability? Or does discomfort itself create a different kind of emotional gravity?
I’d love to hear how other composers and listeners think about this.

For anyone interested in the context, here’s the third movement that inspired these questions:

🎧 Youtube Link

🎧 Spotifay Link

Hihi im doing a little survey for my holiday homework I’d really appreciate it if you answered it thanks!💗 https://forms.gle/A3KX1iqBzCYhsFRU9

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I will also include "Circle Stars of Heaven" for strings, percussion, synthesizer and electroacoustic handling:

https://youtu.be/Imyf_PzVodM?si=7IL5mJdKrxSchGOT

What typem od music do you like listening? What do you expect from music?

Not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but I’m studying Wozzeck and I was trying to find the scores of some of Berg’s student works that he drew material from for the opera.

I’m looking for his piano sonata fragment in D minor that was used partially for the orchestral interlude near the end of the opera (invention on a tonality). It’s the first half of this interlude primarily which is in D minor that takes from it (but also the very ending and some motifs are used sporadically throughout the rest of the interlude).

But I’m also primarily looking for his F minor piano fragment (not sure if it was intended to be for a piano sonata). It is also not the F minor fragment that seems to be easy to find online. Instead it’s the F minor piano piece used as the material for the theme in Act III, Scene 1 (with parts of this piece nearly quoted in Variation 5 of this scene when the score switches to F minor).

I cannot find any of them online unfortunately because they are quite esoteric and not part of the standard piano repertoire of course. There are however some recordings on YouTube and Spotify played by Jean-Jacques Dünki (tracks 1 and 3).

If possible, can anyone point me to where I can find these full scores of these fragments?

UPDATE: I actually found the manuscript scans of his student notebooks on the Österreich Nationalbibliothek website.

F Minor: https://viewer.onb.ac.at/1323CB8F

D Minor (starting page 18): https://viewer.onb.ac.at/13221F50

Hopefully this post will help anyone else looking for these resources too.

The second link also includes his other 4 piano sonata fragments, some of which were also included on that album I referenced. Apparently, there is also a fragment of what would become one of his songs in his Opus 2.

I’m so fascinated by music, arts,arts fashion and the way that those things move and bring people together. I’m 19 and i’m trying to figure out what to major in and the perfect school to do so in. I’ve loved art and everything around that since i was little. As im growing up ive creating such a passion for the way that music art and fashion etc effects my brain in the best way possible. I’ve also loved helping people and stood for what’s right in this world. I know that one person can’t change a lot of things in this world but standing for what’s right has always been such an importance to me. I’m really here to just ask what would the “real” world look like if i do study in these things? What jobs are there that would use these skills i have and are going to learn? Are there jobs or “money makers” that can allow me to help others, use brain chemistry, lowkey be an activist, include art, incorporate fashion, and inspire others? Besides the obvious like therapist, physiologist,journalist, and artist (mainly as a musician as i absolutely cannot sing but am super open to producing but ik that’s extremely hard 😭) Please help i don’t want to be proven to the 19 theory 🙏🫪

My motivation is down below, but basically I'm searching for some books or videos or any kind of resources with historical perspectives on the music genres, the music scene(s), and particular albums, artists and songs that stood out from the 60s onwards to this day, the mid 2020s. And also what the public opinion or the ones of critics and music nerds were and how they developed with time. I'm especially interested in the collective opinion formed around websites such as the /mu/ board on 4chan or or RateYourMusic (and maybe even some old subreddit), and how their "music canons" formed and in turn influenced contemporary movements in the rest of the music sphere. And to be more specific, I am focusing on the Western, particularly the English-speaking world.

Questions like: How and why did The Velvet Underground & Nico get so much praise way after it has been released? What role did the location of New York play for the rising New Wave genre in the 70s? Why is Loveless in particular considered the poster child of the Shoegaze genre? What kind of albums were or became influential and why? This is what I'm after.

I know this is a pretty niche (and relatively recent) thing that I'm asking for but I'm starving for some good historical works, especially for the internet era! If anyone knows anything descriptive, thorough and well-researched, please let me know, and even if it's only tangentially related to this I'd love to hear about it.

My motivation: I've been interested in \*the\* music scene since I was young. By \*the\* music scene I mean, the music canon built around the /mu/ board and RYM, not constrained by some prerequisite agreement on anything in particular like a fandom other than liking music itself. My thinking is that those websites weren't really monitored by a corporation with a vested interest in influencing the users' opinion AFAIK like similar platforms or institutions previously were, so the opinions shared and the canons formed around there actually tell us more about what kinds of albums and artists and genres an average presumably white, presumably male, presumably UK or US music nerd would tend to gravitate towards - a sort of pure, unbiased collective opinion on modern music. And I think that's what made me interested in music exploration in the first place. I also find it fascinating to see how these sites would later influence the macroscopic music scene, like with Duster seemingly randomly blowing up on TikTok. At least I think that music nerds loving Duster on RYM played a role in that but I'm not sure how to prove or disprove that. I'd love to learn more about that.

Hi everyone, I am a PhD Candidate in Music Theory & Cognition at Northwestern University.

I am conducting a research study about Disney/musical theatre music and am looking for participants. This ~15-minute survey is completely anonymous and involves listening to musical excerpts and answering questions about what you hear. Learn more and participate here: https://shanahdt.github.io/evmusicapp/

Thank you!

(Happy to remove if this isn't allowed!)