Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo

Roger Moseley

Open Access Published by University of California Press 2016

Keys to Play

Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo

Roger Moseley

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780520965096

Overview
Contents

About this book

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, Keys to Play spans Greek myth and contemporary Japanese digital games to chart a genealogy of musical play and its animation via improvisation, performance, and recreation. As a paradigmatic digital interface, the keyboard forms a field of play on which the book’s diverse objects of inquiry—from clavichords to PCs and eighteenth-century musical dice games to the latest rhythm-action titles—enter into analogical relations. Remapping the keyboard’s topography by way of Mozart and Super Mario, who head an expansive cast of historical and virtual actors, Keys to Play invites readers to unlock ludic dimensions of music that are at once old and new.

Author / Editor information

Moseley Roger :

Roger Moseley is Assistant Professor of Music at Cornell University. Active as a collaborative pianist on modern and historical instruments, he has published essays on the interface of the keyboard, the performativity of digital games, the practice of eighteenth-century improvisation, and the music of Brahms.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Prelude. Press Any Key to Start Open Access Download PDF	1
Part I. Fields and Interfaces of Musical Play
Key 1. Ludomusicality Open Access Download PDF	13
Key 2. Digital Analogies Open Access Download PDF	67
Part II. Play by Play: Improvisation, Performance, Recreation
Key 3. The Emergence of Musical Play Open Access Download PDF	119
Key 4. High Scores: WAM vs. LVB Open Access Download PDF	178
Key 5. Play Again? Open Access Download PDF	236
Notes Open Access Download PDF	275
Bibliography Open Access Download PDF	365
Ludography Open Access Download PDF	419
Index Open Access Download PDF	423

Language: English
Publisher: University of California Press
Pages
- Main content: 468

eBook

Published: October 28, 2016
ISBN: 9780520965096