Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo
Roger Moseley
University of California Press
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.<BR><BR> How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, <I>Keys to Play</I> 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, <I>Keys to Play</I> invites readers to unlock ludic dimensions of music that are at once old and new.<BR>  