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The musical leitmotif, having reached a point of particular forcefulness in the music of Richard Wagner, has remained a popular compositional device up to the present day. In this book, Matthew Bribitzer-Stull explores the background and development of the leitmotif, from Wagner to the Hollywood adaptations of The Lord of The Rings and the Harry Potter series. Analyzing both concert music and film music, Bribitzer-Stull explains what the leitmotif is and establishes it as the union of two aspects: the thematic and the associative. He goes on to show that Wagner's Ring cycle provides a leitmotivic paradigm, a model from which we can learn to better understand the leitmotif across style periods. Arguing for a renewed interest in the artistic merit of the leitmotif, Bribitzer-Stull reveals how uniting meaning, memory, and emotion in music can lead to a richer listening experience and a better understanding of dramatic music's enduring appeal.

Leitmotif. --- Motion picture music --- Program music. --- Programmatic music --- Music --- Narrative in music --- Leading motif --- Leading motive --- Leitmotiv --- Opera --- History and criticism. --- History and criticism --- Wagner, Richard, --- Opera's --- Filmmuziek --- Leidmotieven --- Musical analysis --- Leitmotiv. --- Film, Musique de --- Musique à programme. --- Analyse musicale --- Motion picture music. --- Filmmusik --- Histoire et critique. --- Operas (Wagner, Richard) --- Bibel

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In this book, James Boon ranges through history and around the globe in a series of provocative reflections on the limitations, attractions, and ambiguities of cultural interpretation. The book reflects the unusual keyword of its title, extra-vagance, a term Thoreau used to refer to thought that skirts traditional boundaries. Boon follows Thoreau's lead by broaching subjects as diverse as Balinese ritual, Montaigne, Chaucer, Tarzan, Perry Mason, opera, and the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Ruth Benedict, Kenneth Burke, and Mary Douglas. He makes creative and often playful leaps among eclectic texts and rituals that do not hold single, fixed meanings, but numerous, changing, and exceedingly specific ones. Boon opens by exploring links between ritual and reading, focusing on commentaries about the seclusion of menstruating women in Native American culture, trance dances in Bali, and circumcision (or lack of it) in contrasting religions. He considers the ironies of "first-person ethnography" by telling stories from his own fieldwork, reflecting on ethnological museums, and making seriocomic connections between Mark Twain and Marcel Mauss. In expansive discussions that touch on Manhattan and Sri Lanka, the Louvre and the "World of Coca-Cola" museum, willfully obscure academic theory and shamelessly commercial show business, Boon underlines the inadequacies of simple ideologies and pat generalizations. The book is a profound and eloquent exploration of cultural comparison by one of America's most original and innovative anthropologists.

Culture --- Anthropology --- Philosophy. --- Philosophy. --- Apollonian and Dionysian values. --- Buginese. --- Calvin and Calvinism. --- Christian rites and contexts. --- Dolly as a leading motive. --- Dutch scholarship. --- France and the French. --- Grandville. --- Hollywood. --- Indic rites and contexts. --- Islamic rites and contexts. --- Japanese friends and culture. --- Jewish rites and contexts. --- alchemy. --- amusement industry. --- aphorism. --- births, actual and metaphorical. --- bricolage. --- carnivalization. --- circumcisions. --- comedy and theory. --- cyberspace. --- deconstruction. --- desire and theory. --- dialectics. --- elective affinities. --- ethnography as a genre. --- extra-Vagance. --- feminist topics. --- genitality as a category. --- hermeneutics. --- hybrids and hybridities. --- iconography and art history. --- journalistic accounts. --- lists and copiousness. --- margins and marginality. --- marriage institutions. --- melancholia. --- modernism and modernity. --- motives and leading motives. --- museums. --- mystic positions. --- neoplatonism. --- novels as a genre. --- palimpsests. --- polemical critique. --- postmodernist positions. --- race and racisms. --- renunciation. --- sacrifice. --- seriocomic interpretation.