Best Music of 2008

Further Reading: Music

---

Music Video ... Music videos use a wide range of styles of film making techniques, including animation, live action filming, documentaries, and non-narrative approaches such as abstract film... Many music videos do not interpret images from the song's lyrics, making it less literal than expected... Other music videos may be without a set concept, being merely a filmed version of the song's live performance...

Ancient Music ... Ancient music refers to the various musical systems that were developed across various geographical regions such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, India, China, Greece and Rome... Mesopotamia Anne Draffkorn Kilmer from the University of California at Berkeley published in 1986 her decipherment of cuneiform tablet from Nippur dated to about 2000 BCE, demonstrating that it represents fragmentary instructions for performing music and that the music was composed in harmonies of thirds, and that it was also written using a diatonic scale (Kilmer 1986)... Hurrian music Among the Hurrian texts from Ugarit are some of the oldest known instances of written music, dating from c.1400 BC and including one substantially complete song...

Baroque Music ... Baroque music forms a major portion of the classical music canon, being widely studied, performed, and listened to... Baroque music expanded the size, range, and complexity of instrumental performance, and also established opera as a musical genre...

Music Theory ... At and below about 1,000 Hz, the perceived loudness of a tone gets lower as sound frequency decreases, but above approximately 2,000 Hz, the perceived loudness increases as the sound's frequency gets higher. This is due to the ear's natural sensitivity to higher pitched sound, as well as the ear's particular sensitivity to sound around the 2000-4000Hz area, the frequency range most of the human voice occupies...

Musical Notation ... Byzantine music uses the eight natural, non-tempered scales called Ēkhoi, "sounds", exclusively, and therefore the absolute pitch of each note may slightly vary each time, depending on the particular Ēkhos used... Early Europe Scholar and music theorist Isidore of Seville, writing in the early 7th century, remarked in this Etymologiae that it was impossible to notate music... The problem with this notation was that it only showed melodic contours and consequently the music could not be read by someone who did not know the music already...

The Arts ... Art is a global activity which encompasses a host of disciplines, as evidenced by the range of words and phrases which have been invented to describe its various forms. Examples of such phraseology include: Fine Arts, Liberal Arts, Visual Arts, Decorative Arts, Applied Arts, Design, Crafts, Performing Arts, and so on...

1980s In Jazz ... Acid jazz developed in the UK over the 1980s and 1990s and influenced by jazz-funk and electronic dance music...

Modernism ... Modernism explicitly rejects the ideology of realism, and makes use of the works of the past, through the application of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody in new forms. Modernism also rejects the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking, as well as the idea of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator...

Prehistoric Music ... Prehistoric music thus technically includes all of the world's music that has existed before the advent of any currently-extant historical sources concerning that music, for example, traditional Native American music of preliterate tribes and Australian Aboriginal music... However, it is more common to refer to the "prehistoric" music which still survives as folk, indigenous or traditional music... Origins Research on the evolutionary origins of music mostly started in the second half of the 19th century, and was much discussed within Music Archaeology in the 20th Century...

List Of Renaissance Composers ... Since the 14th century is not usually considered by music historians to be part of the musical Renaissance, but part of the Middle Ages, composers active during that time can be found in the List of Medieval composers... Composers on this list had some period of significant activity after 1400, before 1600, or in a few cases they wrote music in a Renaissance idiom in the several decades after 1600...

Record Producer ... Today, the recording industry has two kinds of producers: executive producer and music producer; they have different roles... While an executive producer oversees a project's finances, a music producer oversees the creation of the music... A music producer can, in some cases, be compared to a film director, with noted practitioner Phil Ek himself describing his role as "the person who creatively guides or directs the process of making a record, like a director would a movie...

Music Therapy ... Music therapy is also used in some medical hospitals, cancer centers, schools, alcohol and drug recovery programs, psychiatric hospitals, and correctional facilities... The Turco-Persian psychologist and music theorist al-Farabi (872–950), known as "Alpharabius" in Europe, dealt with music therapy in his treatise Meanings of the Intellect, where he discussed the therapeutic effects of music on the soul... Robert Burton wrote in the 17th century in his classic work, The Anatomy of Melancholy, that music and dance were critical in treating mental illness, especially melancholia...

Music Education ... At the university level, students in most arts and humanities programs may receive academic credit for taking music courses, which typically take the form of an overview course on the history of music, or a music appreciation course that focuses on listening to music and learning about different musical styles... In addition, most North American and European universities have some type of music ensemble in which students from various fields of study may participate such as a choir, concert band, marching band, or orchestra... Many universities also offer degree programs in the field of music education, allowing their students to become certified educators of primary and secondary school ensembles as well as beginner music classes...

Musical Instrument ... The date and origin of the first device considered to be a musical instrument is disputed. The oldest object that some scholars refer to as a musical instrument, a simple flute, dates back as far as 67,000 years...

Bebop ... In the 1940s, the younger generation of jazz musicians created a new style that came out of the 1930s' swing music... They partially strived to counter the popularization of swing with non-danceable music that demanded listening... These forerunners of the new music (which would later be termed "bebop," or "bop"-- although Parker himself never used that term, feeling it demeaned the music) began exploring advanced harmonies, complex syncopation, altered chords and chord substitutions...

Music Industry ... In the late 19th century and early 20th century, the music industry was dominated by the publishers of sheet music... By the middle of the century records had supplanted sheet music as the largest player in the music business: in the commercial world people began speaking of "the recording industry" as a loose synonym of "the music industry"... Since 2000, sales of recorded music have dropped off substantially, while live music has increased in importance...

Music ... The creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of music vary according to culture and social context... Music ranges from strictly organized compositions (and their recreation in performance), through improvisational music to aleatoric forms... Music can be divided into genres and subgenres, although the dividing lines and relationships between music genres are often subtle, sometimes open to individual interpretation, and occasionally controversial...

Ragtime ... Ragtime fell out of favor as jazz claimed the public's imagination after 1917, but there have been numerous revivals since the music has been re-discovered... The album won a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance of the year and was named Billboard's Top Classical Album of 1974... Historical context Ragtime originated in African American music in the late 19th century, descending from the jigs and march music played by black bands...

Ethnomusicology ... Coined by the musician Jaap Kunst from the Greek words ἔθνος ethnos (nation) and μουσική mousike (music), it is often considered the anthropology or ethnography of music... Jeff Todd Titon has called it the study of "people making music." Although it is often thought of as a study of non-Western musics, ethnomusicology also includes the study of Western music from an anthropological or sociological perspective... Bruno Nettl (1983) believes it is a product of Western thinking, proclaiming "ethnomusicology as western culture knows it is actually a western phenomenon." Nettl believes that there are limits to the extraction of meaning from a culture's music because of a Western observer's perceptual distance from the culture; however, the growing prevalence of scholars who study their own musical traditions, and an increasing range of different theoretical frameworks and research methodologies has done much to address criticisms such as Nettl's...

Classical Music ... European music is largely distinguished from many other non-European and popular musical forms by its system of staff notation, in use since about the 16th century... Western staff notation is used by composers to prescribe to the performer the pitch, speed, meter, individual rhythms and exact execution of a piece of music... This leaves less room for practices such as improvisation and ad libitum ornamentation, that are frequently heard in non-European art music and popular music...

History Of Classical Music Traditions ... A culture's music is influenced by all other aspects of that culture, including social and economic organization and experience, climate, and access to technology... The emotions and ideas that music expresses, the situations in which music is played and listened to, and the attitudes toward music players and composers all vary between regions and periods... "Music history" is the distinct subfield of musicology and history which studies music (particularly Western art music) from a chronological perspective...

Jazz ... From its early development until the present day jazz has also incorporated music from American popular music... As the music has developed and spread around the world it has drawn on many different national, regional and local musical cultures giving rise, since its early 20th century American beginnings, to many distinctive styles: New Orleans jazz dating from the early 1910s, big band swing, Kansas City jazz and Gypsy jazz from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s and on down through West Coast jazz, cool jazz, avant-garde jazz, modal jazz, free jazz, Latin jazz in various forms, soul jazz, jazz fusion and jazz rock, smooth jazz, jazz-funk, punk jazz, acid jazz, ethno jazz, jazz rap, cyber jazz, Indo jazz, M-Base, nu jazz, urban jazz and other ways of playing the music...

Performing Arts ... Artists who participate in performing arts in front of an audience are called performers, including actors, comedians, dancers, magicians, musicians, and singers. Performing arts are also supported by workers in related fields, such as songwriting and stagecraft...

20th-century Music ... Electronic music For centuries, instrumental music had either been created by singing, drawing a bow across or plucking taught gut or metal strings (string instruments), constricting vibrating air (woodwinds and brass) or hitting or stroking something (percussion)...