Michael Spitzer

Last updated

Michael Spitzer is a British musicologist and academic.

Contents

Early life

Michael Spitzer was born in 1966 in Nigeria. He was raised in Israel and, in 1973, emigrated to the UK. He was a refugee of the Yom Kippur War. [1]

He completed his undergraduate studies at Merton College, Oxford, and his doctorate at the University of Southampton (awarded in 1993).

Career

He taught at Durham University, where he was appointed to a readership in 2005; he then moved to the University of Liverpool after the 2009–10 academic year and remains a professor of music there as of 2018. He is a past president and chair of the Society for Music Analysis editorial board. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

According to his university profile, he is a specialist in Beethoven "with interests in aesthetics and critical theory, cognitive metaphor, and music and affect." [3]

He inaugurated the International Conferences on Music and Emotion series at Durham in 2009. [2] He co-organized the International Conference on the Analysis of Popular Music (Liverpool, 2013). [2] His publications explore the intersections between music theory, philosophy, and psychology. [2]

Works

Spitzer's book Metaphor and Musical Thought (2004) is among the first two book-length music theory publications on metaphor and music analysis. It distinguishes itself by synthesizing literary metaphor with cognitive-science approaches to metaphor.

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Music</span> Form of art using sound

The most general definition of music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise expressive content.However, definitions of music vary depending on culture, though it is an aspect of all human societies and a cultural universal. While scholars agree that music is defined by a few specific elements, there is no consensus on their precise definitions. The creation of music is commonly divided into musical composition, musical improvisation, and musical performance, though the topic itself extends into academic disciplines, criticism, philosophy, psychology, and therapeutic contexts. Music may be performed using a vast range of instruments, including the human voice to sing, and thus is often credited for its extreme versatility and opportunity for creativity.

Musicology is the scholarly study of music. Musicology research combines and intersects with many fields, including psychology, sociology, acoustics, neurology, natural sciences, formal sciences and computer science.

Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are considered as psychologically real, and research in cognitive linguistics aims to help understand cognition in general and is seen as a road into the human mind.

Susan Kaye McClary is an American musicologist associated with "new musicology". Noted for her work combining musicology with feminist music criticism, McClary is professor of musicology at Case Western Reserve University.

New musicology is a wide body of musicology since the 1980s with a focus upon the cultural study, aesthetics, criticism, and hermeneutics of music. It began in part a reaction against the traditional positivist musicology—focused on primary research—of the early 20th century and postwar era. Many of the procedures of new musicology are considered standard, although the name more often refers to the historical turn rather than to any single set of ideas or principles. Indeed, although it was notably influenced by feminism, gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and critical theory, new musicology has primarily been characterized by a wide-ranging eclecticism.

Evolutionary musicology is a subfield of biomusicology that grounds the cognitive mechanisms of music appreciation and music creation in evolutionary theory. It covers vocal communication in other animals, theories of the evolution of human music, and holocultural universals in musical ability and processing.

Music psychology, or the psychology of music, may be regarded as a branch of both psychology and musicology. It aims to explain and understand musical behaviour and experience, including the processes through which music is perceived, created, responded to, and incorporated into everyday life. Modern music psychology is primarily empirical; its knowledge tends to advance on the basis of interpretations of data collected by systematic observation of and interaction with human participants. Music psychology is a field of research with practical relevance for many areas, including music performance, composition, education, criticism, and therapy, as well as investigations of human attitude, skill, performance, intelligence, creativity, and social behavior.

Joseph Wilfred Kerman was an American musicologist and music critic. Among the leading musicologists of his generation, his 1985 book Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology was described by Philip Brett in The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as "a defining moment in the field". He was Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Nicholas Cook, is a British musicologist and writer born in Athens, Greece. From 2009 to 2017, he was the 1684 Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge, where he is a Fellow of Darwin College. Previously, he was professorial research fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he directed the Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM). He has also taught at the University of Hong Kong, University of Sydney, and University of Southampton, where he served as dean of arts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gabriel Pareyon</span> Musical artist

Gabriel Pareyon is a polymathic Mexican composer and musicologist, who has published literature on topics of philosophy and semiotics.

Embodied music cognition is a direction within systematic musicology interested in studying the role of the human body in relation to all musical activities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shenington</span> Human settlement in England

Shenington is a village and former civil parish, now in the parish of Shenington with Alkerton, in the Cherwell district, in the county of Oxfordshire, England. It is about 5 miles (8 km) west of Banbury, it was an exclave of Gloucestershire until the Counties Act 1844 transferred it to Oxfordshire. Shenington is on Oxfordshire's boundary with Warwickshire. Shenington was an ancient parish of 1,628 acres (659 ha). In 1961 the parish had a population of 232. On 1 April 1970 the parish was abolished and merged with Alkerton to form "Shenington with Alkerton".

According to some music therapists, the use of Music in the therapeutic environment has an affinity with psychoanalysis in that it addresses obstructions in the mind that might be causing stress, psychic tension, and even physical illness. Music has been used, in conjunction with a psychoanalytic approach, to address symptoms of a variety of mental disorders, as well as forms of emotional distress, such as grief, loss, mourning, and trauma.

Cognitive musicology is a branch of cognitive science concerned with computationally modeling musical knowledge with the goal of understanding both music and cognition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph Jordania</span> Australian-Georgian musicologist

Joseph Jordania is an Australian–Georgian ethnomusicologist and evolutionary musicologist and professor. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music at the University of Melbourne and the Head of the Foreign Department of the International Research Centre for Traditional Polyphony at Tbilisi State Conservatory. Jordania is known for his model of the origins of human choral singing in the wide context of human evolution and was one of founders of the International Research Centre for Traditional Polyphony in Georgia.

Lawrence Kramer is an American musicologist and composer. His academic work is closely associated with the humanistic, culturally oriented New Musicology, now more often referred to as cultural or critical musicology. Writing in 2001, Alastair Williams described Kramer as a pioneering figure in the disciplinary change that brought musicology, formerly an outlier, into the broader fold of the humanities.

J. P. E. Harper-Scott is a British musicologist and formerly Professor of Music History and Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is a General Editor of the Cambridge University Press series 'Music in Context'.

Vincenzo Caporaletti is an Italian musicologist known for devising audiotactile formativity theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Timothy L. Jackson</span>

Timothy L. Jackson is an American professor of music theory who has spent most of his career at the University of North Texas and specializes in music of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, Schenkerian theory, politics and music. He is the co-founder of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies. In 2020, he became controversial for editing a special issue of that journal containing articles criticizing Philip Ewell's plenary talk "Music Theory's White Racial Frame".

Joshua Banks Mailman is an American music theorist, as well an analyst, composer, improvisor, philosopher, critic, and technologist of music.

References

  1. "Michael Spitzer". Shenington and Alkerton Music & Literature Festival. Shenington with Alkerton. Retrieved 15 January 2023.
  2. 1 2 3 4 "MichaelSpitzer-bio" (PDF). umass.edu. 2021. Retrieved 15 January 2023.
  3. 1 2 "Michael Spitzer", University of Liverpool. Retrieved 29 December 2018.
  4. For his promotion to a readership, compare Durham University Calendar, vol. 1 (2004–05), p. 204, and Durham University Calendar, vol. 1 (2005–06), p. 206. For his movement to Liverpool, compare Durham University Calendar, vol. 1 (2009–10), p. 208, with "Durham University Calendar 2010–11: Board of Studies in Music", Durham University. All retrieved 29 December 2018.
  5. "Professor Michael Spitzer", University of Liverpool, as archived on 3 February 2012.
  6. "Ambiguity and paradox in Beethoven's late style", EThOS (British Library). Retrieved 29 December 2018.
  7. "THE MUSICAL HUMAN". Kirkus Reviews . January 21, 2021. Retrieved 15 January 2023.
  8. Lyons, Mathew. "Symphony of a Thousand Millennia". Literary Review . Retrieved 15 January 2023.