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Music Of Mesopotamia ... Sumerian music The discovery of numerous musical instruments in royal burial sites and illustrations of musicians in Sumerian art show how music seemed to play an important part of religious and civic life in Sumer... Music and dancing were a part of daily celebration and temple rites-music was played for marriages and births in the royal families... Singers probably expressed intense and withdrawn emotion, as if listening to themselves, as shown by the practice of cupping a hand to the ear (as is still current in modern Assyrian music and many Arab and folk musics) (van der Merwe 1989, p...

Letter Notation ... History The earliest known letter notation in the Western musical tradition appear in the textbook on music De institutione musica by the 6th-century philosopher Boethius... For example, after capo 3, most music sheets will write A to indicate a C chord, that is, they give the chord shape rather than its pitch, but some specify it as C, others give two lines, either the C on top and the A on the bottom or vice versa...

Music In Ancient India ... Prehistoric Music Archaeological discoveries Musical instruments, such as the seven-holed flute and various types of stringed instruments, have been recovered from Indus Valley Civilization archaeological sites... Surviving music The Samaveda, one of the ancient core Hindu scriptures known as the Vedas, consists of a collection (samhita) of hymns, portions of hymns and detached verses, all but 75 of which are taken from the Rigveda... Echoes in modern Indian music Contemporary South Asian and Indian music has its roots in the prehistoric era of Indian and South Asian culture...

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...

Futurism ... Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. "We want no part of it, the past", he wrote, "we the young and strong Futurists!" The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists...

Art ... Many definitions of art have been proposed by philosophers and others who have characterized art in terms of mimesis, expression, communication of emotion, or other values. During the Romantic period, art came to be seen as "a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science"...

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

Minimal Music ... Starting in the early 1960s as a scruffy underground scene in San Francisco alternative spaces and New York lofts, minimalism spread to become the most popular experimental music style of the late 20th century... The movement originally involved dozens of composers, although only five (Young, Riley, Reich, Glass, and later John Adams) emerged to become publicly associated with American minimal music... In Europe, the music of Louis Andriessen, Karel Goeyvaerts, Michael Nyman, Gavin Bryars, Steve Martland, Henryk Górecki, Arvo Pärt, and John Tavener exhibits minimalist traits...

Tablature ... Tablature was common during the Renaissance and Baroque eras, and is commonly used in notating rock, pop, folk, ragtime, bluegrass, and blues music...

Indian Classical Dance ... The term "classical" (Sanskr. "Shastriya") was introduced by Sangeet Natak Akademi to denote the Natya Shastra-based performing art styles...

Swing Era ... The many avenue's of black, white, latin, american, and european music influences merged together when Swing arrived... In 1932, early in the jazz, and the sweet music style's of the American music scene - worked on new, often unheard of musical arraingement's that were emphasized toward a more polished song with a bounce... Several factors led to the demise of the swing era: the recording ban from August 1942 to November 1944 (The union that most jazz musicians belong to told its members not to record until the record companies agreed to pay them each time their music was played on the radio), the earlier ban of ASCAP songs from radio stations, World War II which made it harder for bands to travel around as well as the "cabaret tax", which was as high as 20%, the change in music taste and the rise of bebop...

Neoclassicism (music) ... Sergei Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1 (1917) is sometimes cited as a precursor of neoclassicism (Whittall, 1980), but Prokofiev himself thought that his composition was a 'passing phase' whereas Stravinsky's neoclassicism was by the 1920s 'becoming the basic line of his music' (Prokofiev 1991, 273)...

Swara ... The basic mode of reference is that which is equivalent to the Western Ionian mode or major scale (called Bilawal thaat in Hindustani music, Dheerasankarabharanam in Carnatic). All relationships between pitches follow from this...

Plainsong ... Plainsong is monophonic, consisting of a single, unaccompanied melodic line. It generally has a more free rhythm than the metered rhythm of later Western music...

Theatre Of India ... The major source of evidence for Sanskrit theatre is A Treatise on Theatre (Nātyaśāstra), a compendium whose date of composition is uncertain (estimates range from 200 BCE to 200 CE) and whose authorship is attributed to Bharata Muni. The Treatise is the most complete work of dramaturgy in the ancient world...