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

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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: Roger Moseley
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 10/28/2016
Pages: 468
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.37lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.95d
ISBN13: 9780520291249
ISBN10: 0520291247
BISAC Categories:
- Music | Musical Instruments | Piano & Keyboard
- Music | Ethnomusicology
- Music | Philosophy & Social Aspects

About the Author
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.