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Music: naturally inclusive, potentially exclusive?
Get PDFThis chapter explores the way music lends itself to the IPAA framework, focusing on four key areas;
working outside of ability groups, using what learners can do as their starting point, engaging in
learning at their own level whilst contributing to a collaborative outcome, and developing the whole
creative child rather than just a skillset. After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
Consider different theoretical and philosophical understandings of musical knowledge and
how they manifest in musical learning.
Understand the way that teachers’ conceptualisations of musical ability steer pedagogical
decisions.
Describe what integrated activities are and understand how they enable learners to develop
reflective learning.
Identify areas of your music teaching that can be enhanced by the use of technology.
Consider how different pedagogies can be interwoven in the classroom to enable children
with different learning needs and experiences to engage in classroom music in a meaningful
way
Corporate Classicism and the Metaphysical Style: Affects, Effects, and Contexts of Two Recent Trends in Screen Scoring
Get PDFSituating the aesthetic practices of recent narrative film scoring within debates on ‘intensified’ or ‘post-continuity’ style, as well as accounts of reception in terms of post-cinematic affect or distributed subjectivity, this paper identifies two significant stylistic tendencies in film scoring: ‘corporate classicism’ and ‘the metaphysical style’. Examples are drawn from film and a wider range of musical media, with an analytical focus on representative cues from Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard’s score to The Dark Knight (2008) and Thomas Newman’s score to American Beauty (1999). The two styles of screen music scoring, orchestration, production, and post-production beg reminders not only of the problematic ‘utopian’ call of classical Hollywood film scoring (Flinn 1992), but also suggest that the powerful affective work performed by these scores raises the question of ‘unheard melodies’ (Gorbman 1987) anew
Corporate Classicism and the Metaphysical Style: Affects, Effects and Contexts of Two Recent Trends in Screen Scoring
Get PDFIn Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), the great detective goes to
the opera. Don Giovanni is playing – but not as we know it. Moriarty has
deceived Holmes into deducing that his nemesis has placed a bomb inside
the base of the Commendatore’s statue. When Holmes breaks into the prop
from beneath the stage, he discovers that he has been misdirected: the
explosion will happen elsewhere. To suggest that the scene lacks
detonations, however, would be to ignore Hans Zimmer’s contribution,
composed in collaboration with his Remote Control colleagues Lorne Balfe,
Matthew Margeson and Dominic Lewis. As Holmes experiences his moment
of recognition, Mozart is exploding all around him.
To say ‘explodes’ in this context might suggest a terrorist act, or a musical
murder, and lead one into a recitation of tired tropes concerning the co-option
of high art by mass culture. Of greater interest in the context of the present
essay are the affective intensities generated by this sequence. The
Commendatore scene in Don Giovanni already delivers one of the more
sublime shocks in opera, but to compete with the battery of audio-visual
effects and punch its weight in the context of the hyperbolic Holmes universe
created by director Guy Ritchie and co-workers for this Warner Brothers
franchise, merely dropping Mozart into the mix would have led to a
problematic dip in intensity. Mozart, as such, needs to gain some extra
musical muscle.
As Holmes, Watson and Sim race to the opera, a portentous minor mode horn
call, scored low for heavy brass, sounds against a string and drum ostinato.
Briefly – giddily, delightfully – the key shifts down a major third and into a
passage from Mozart’s scoring of the build-up to the Commendatore’s
manifestation, replete with shots from within the opera house of the onstage
action, before cutting back behind the scenes and to Remote Control’s cue.
This switchback is not the only way in which the fabric of the narrative
discourse intensifies or warps. Meta-diegetic imagery interrupts the action,
evoking Holmes’s problem-solving genius, with the cuts into and out of these
‘visions’ marked by non-diegetic accentuations from the sound designer.
Temporality becomes even more fluid when a sinister smoking character –
one of Moriarty’s gang – observes Holmes and team heading backstage. The
villain’s drag on his cigarette is sonically sweetened by a sizzling effect and
underscored with a dissonant cluster and glissando; the glissando’s stretching
of pitch exaggerates the impression of time drifting, while cueing unease.
When Holmes realizes that he has been deceived, the shot of his face
(glimpsed through the ‘O’ of ‘Imperatore’ on the statue base) actually flexes,
as if filmic representation itself is buckling in response to Moriarty’s
manipulations.
In this context, then, it comes as no surprise, as the Commendatore begins to
sing, to hear that Mozart has been manipulated too. Scoring and mixing retool
the original opera music, rendering it fitter for contemporary cinematic
purposes in both subtle and more obvious ways. These add undeniable
dramatic heft to the sequence – not least by inducing the contrast between
this ‘Mozart’ and the earlier snippet of opera. One can also note the following
features: the music’s bass end feels immense; voice and accompaniment are
close miked and punchy; reverberation unrelated to the opera house’s
architecture inflates one’s impression of the music’s acousmatic and symbolic
might; hammer blows of percussion help marshal the dramatic and musical
rhythms into an appropriately epic expressive register. Mozart’s music,
pumped up to deliver scene-specific jolts of affect, thus becomes an unlikely
contributor to one of the dominant modes of mainstream screen scoring in the
early twenty-first century: corporate classicism
Prisons and Primary Schools: using CHAT to analyse the relationship between developing identity, developing musicianship and transformative processes
Get PDFThis paper draws on three different research projects to demonstrate the use of an expanded model of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), developed as part of a doctoral research study. The first project is an evaluation of the impacts of a Music Partnership Project within Primary and Secondary schools. The second project is an evaluation of the Good Vibrations Javanese Gamelan project in male and female prisons. The third project is an exploration of the learning processes within a Good Vibrations Javanese Gamelan Project in a young offenders' institution. CHAT provides a lens for analysing activity, placing the interactions between the individual, individual cognition and the socio-cultural environment at the heart of the analytical framework. Although a useful way of looking at activity in order to understand the individual and social processes occurring in a learning activity, criticisms of CHAT include the rigidity of the unit of analysis, its inability to view progression and transformation and the focus on one individual without taking into account the labour power that a group offers
A conceptual model of spirituality in music education
Get PDFThis article aims to describe the phenomenon of spirituality in music education by means of a model derived from the academic literature on the topic. Given the centrality of lived experience within this literature, we adopted a hermeneutic phenomenological theoretical framework to describe the phenomenon. The NCT (noticing, collecting, and thinking) model was used for the qualitative document analysis. Atlas.ti 7, computer-aided qualitative data analysis software, was used to support and organize the inductive qualitative data analysis process. After data saturation, we used Van Manen’s lifeworld existentials (corporeality, relationality, spatiality, and temporality) as guides to reflection and to help organize the many quotes found in the literature. The model that results assigns quotes to codes and categories, which in turn appear within one of these four lifeworlds. This article not only offers a working conceptual model of spirituality in music education but may also help to foster an awareness of spiritual experience in pedagogical contexts and thus contribute to what Van Manen calls “pedagogic thoughtfulness and tact.
The Spaces of Dream: Lutosławski's Modernist Heterotopias
Get PDFThis article offers a revisionist perspective on the contested notion of Witold Lutosławski's authenticity as a modernist composer. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to musicology's increasingly nuanced narration of the story of musical modernism. The case is argued partly by relating Lutosławski's output to broader traditions in twentieth-century modernism, including musical representations of alienation, loss, violence, and nostalgia. Crucially, however, it is also argued by interpreting the more conventionally gratifying aspects of his pieces as something other than a hedonistic cop out. Adapting ideas from Michel Foucault, such passages are deemed heterotopian in function and interpreted in a wider-ranging sociohistorical context including Poland's responses to modernism and to Soviet Cold War oppression. The article's other main objective, therefore, is to interpret as heterotopian (and thus alternatively authentic) the expressive, structural and symbolic functions of passages in Lutosławski's works, thereby introducing Foucault's little-known idea to a wider audience of music scholars – given the concept's potential to contribute to critical explorations of a much wider diversity of musical texts and phenomena. Analysis of Lutosławski's Les espaces du sommeil for baritone and orchestra (1975) interconnects these strands
Gabriel Fauré: The Complete Verlaine Settings Vol 3
No full textNumbering more than 100 in total, and composed across a 60-year period, Gabriel Fauré’s songs form the single most influential contribution to the field of French art song. Despite their importance, the songs have long been riddled with misprints and inconsistencies. This first complete
critical edition is based on study of hundreds of manuscript and printed sources, along with evidence and
interpretative advice from artists who worked with Fauré. Above all, it is a practical edition, informed by
extensive work with musicians in performance, masterclasses and workshops
New Light on ‘Father’ Smith and the Organ of Christ Church, Dublin.
Get PDFAccording to received opinion, Bernard Smith never built the new organ that Christ Church, Dublin, commissioned from him in May 1694, and the contract was later awarded to his rival Renatus Harris; documents from the courts of Chancery and King’s Bench show that narrative to be only partially true. In 1697 William Moreton, Bishop of Kildare, instituted proceedings against Smith for breach of contract, from which it emerges that Smith actually built two organs for the cathedral. However, for various reasons, including Moreton’s dithering over stops, difficulties arranging delivery and transferring money, the cost and Harris’s meddling, both agreements ultimately foundered, leaving Smith with two unsold instruments. Great St Mary’s, Cambridge, took one of them, and St Michael’s, Barbados, probably the other. The documentation, comprising the lost contract and specification for Smith’s first Dublin organ, as well as depositions from Harris, Henry Aldrich and John Blow, illuminates a shadowy corner of Christ Church’s musical history
‘Through music and into music’ – through music and into wellbeing: Dalcroze Eurhythmics as Music Therapy.
Get PDFThere is a longstanding relationship between music therapy and Dalcroze Eurhythmics, an approach to music education that had its beginnings in the reform pedagogy movement of the European fin de siècle. Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950), the founder of the approach, initially focused on educational aims, but was soon to include therapeutic ones as well. During the early twentieth century, Dalcroze teachers applied the approach to their work with disabled children. Such applications have continued to develop to the present day and have expanded to include palliative treatment in HIV/AIDS and gerontology.
There are many theoretical and technical similarities between Dalcroze Eurhythmics and improvisational music therapy, including communication through musical improvisation and attunement in playing for movement. However, many of these similarities remain to be discussed in relation to the literatures on music therapy and communicative musicality. To address this gap, this article takes a transdisciplinary approach, making conceptual connections between the theory and practice of both Dalcroze Eurhythmics and music therapy. Implications for future training, practice and research in Dalcroze Eurhythmics are discussed
Musical References in the Jennens–Holdsworth Correspondence (1729–46)
Get PDFThese extracts on music from the correspondence between Charles Jennens (1700–73) and Edward Holdsworth (1684–1746) reflect the authors’ shared interests and (prohibited) political views. Though commonly known as the librettist of Messiah, Jennens was also a collector of music and art, and as such capitalized on Holdworth’s travels as a tutor of young gentlemen on the Grand Tour. Many of the letters detail musical commissions and their fulfilment by a willing Holdsworth. In return, Jennens acted as Holdsworth’s financial advisor, editorial consultant and publication adviser. Other discussions centre around the public and personal rating of singers and operas, in London and abroad, and include discussions of Handel’s fortunes, his borrowing of music from Jennens’s collection and his health. Mentions of personnel are not restricted to musicians but also
encompass members of Jennens’s family and of his and Holdsworth’s social circles, many of whom were supporters of Handel