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Organizational dynamics in community ensembles
No full textAbstract for 'Together in Music: Coordination, Expression, Participation': Recent years have seen a rise in interest, from a diversity of fields, in the musical ensemble as an exemplary form of creative group behavior. Musical ensembles can be understood and investigated as high functioning small group organizations that have coordinative structures in place to perform under pressure within strict temporal boundaries. Rehearsals and performances exemplify fruitful contexts for emergent creative behaviour, where novel musical interpretations are negotiated and discovered through improvisatory interaction. Furthermore, group music-making can be an emotionally and socially rewarding experience that enables positive outcomes for wellbeing and development.
This book brings together these different perspectives into one coherent volume, offering insight into the musical ensemble from different analytical levels. Part 1 starts from the meso-level, considering ensembles as creative teams and investigating how musical groups interact at a social and organizational level. Part 2 then zooms in to consider musical coordination and interaction at a micro-level, when considering group music-making as forms of joint action. Finally, a macro-level perspective is taken in Part 3, examining the health and wellbeing affordances associated with acoustical, expressive, and emotional joint behavior. Each part contains a balance of review chapters showcasing the most recent developments in each area of research, followed by demonstrative case studies featuring various ensemble practices and processes.
A rich and multidisciplinary reflection on ensemble music practice, this volume will be an insightful read for music students, teachers, academics, and professionals with an interest in the dynamics of group behavior within a musical context
Howells revisited
Get PDFThe chance discovery of a manuscript led Barnaby Robson to rediscover Herbert Howells’ Clarinet Sonata in an unknown, original version. He tells the fascinating story of bringing it to the recording studio
Seeing more clearly
No full textThe spate of sharply critical think-pieces published over the past few years might seem to suggest that the digital humanities are in crisis, but the discipline continues to thrive: public and private funding bodies remain robustly supportive of digital humanities initiatives, laying the groundwork for research that is orientated towards the capacity for communication beyond traditional readerships. The digital humanities glow with such promise that some of us – among whom I must include myself – have quietly set aside our misgivings, instead finding ways of incorporating digital technologies and methodologies into our work. But mute complicity is not the only alternative to vocal censure, as is made clear by the many accounts of experiments and other personal experiences posted on blogs and, increasingly, published in peer-reviewed journals. Grounded in self-reflective practices, this sort of autoethnography offers a productive means of coming to terms with our complex and sometimes contradictory motivations for engaging with the digital humanities. In this essay, I reflect on a digital network visualization and analysis project I have pursued over the past five years, the final iteration of which – entitled ‘Visualizing the French Voice’ – attempted to use algorithms to make sense of the relationships between professors and pupils active at the Paris Conservatoire around the turn of the nineteenth century. I try to understand my motives at each turn, which are clearly bound up with that seductive promise of a broader readership, but also, albeit much less clearly, of ‘impact’
Vanishing points: a personal approach to non-tempered tuning
Get PDFThe tuning of keyboard and zither instruments is tempered, that is, the system of tuning their intervals pragmatically approximates that of just (or pure) intervallic tuning. This has certain advantages, but results in a rigid, cyclic, closed system of tuning (and by extension, harmony). By comparison, non-tempered tuning is an open system requiring a flexible approach to tuning each interval in turn. The resulting harmonies are sonorous and
distinctive. Much music written using non-tempered tunings has an acute awareness of the phenomena arising from the interactions between the vibrations causing the sensation of
sound, the physiology of our ears and the psychology of our hearing faculty. Without diminishing this awareness, my work also investigates the evocative potential of this approach to harmony, in part through visual analogies and tactile processes of sketching.
Examples informing this investigation include Vija Celmins’ drawings, Dan Graham’s pavilion Double Exposure, the architectural concept terrain vague, the poetry of Gerard Manley
Hopkins, animated sound pioneers such as Arseni M. Avraamov, Percy Grainger’s “free music machine” and the works of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. My portfolio spans works for chamber orchestra to pieces for ensemble or soloist with pre-recorded sound and image. Through composing, I grappled with recurring questions concerning my evolving approach to non-tempered tuning—questions arising out of a meeting of theory, practice and imagination. These include the place of melody in my works, the place of traditional acoustic instruments (including those tuned in —or tuning to—equal temperament) and the relationship between perceptual phenomena and a personal evocative world. My study is indebted to—and extends—the work of composers like James Tenney, Ben Johnston and Marc Sabat. The title Vanishing Points poetically encapsulates different aspects of this exploration
‘Music, Migration and Mobility’: an ongoing research project at the Royal College of Music
No full textThis article presents new artistic research about the wider challenges faced by classical musicians when performing and presenting works by migrant composers. The research explores in performance music by composers from Nazi Europe who emigrated to Britain in the 1930s. Inspired by the new ‘mobilities paradigm’ in the humanities and diverging from established practices in relation to this repertoire, these performances aimed to foreground the composer’s migrations and mobilities rather than their national belongings and persecutions. This article identifies challenges faced by the author and fellow performers and relates them to cross-disciplinary theory from migration studies, philosophy, mobility studies and musicology. It also synthesises data from interviews with participating musicians, audience questionnaires and personal reflections by the author in order to explore how musicians can enhance their understanding and appreciation of music by migrants. *** The full text of this article, including embedded videos, is available open access at the 'Official URL' link given below. **
ARCO South Africa: research report
No full textThe study was commissioned by ARCO and Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (RBC) in 2018, and took place during the 2018–19 academic year. The objective of this project was to explore and uncover some of the key issues that arise within this cross-continental
string teaching programme between RBC and the Morris Isaacson Centre for Music (MICM). It explores the challenges faced, how they are navigated, and how they can help direct future practice. ***** This report is available open access at the Official URL given below. ****
Epistemologische Zyklen durchbrechen: Geschichte, Theorie und Aufführung in Schuberts Winterreise [Breaking epistemological cycles: history, theory, and performance in Schubert’s Winterreise]
Get PDFDieser Aufsatz nimmt die Aufführungsgeschichte von Schuberts Winterreise im 19. Jahrhundert zur Grundlage einer Kritik moderner theoretischer und praktischer Deutungen zyklischer Werke. Aufbauend auf einem theoretischen Rahmen, der sich aus Friedrich Schlegels Idee des Fragments und Walter Benjamins Idee des Sammlers bzw. Allegoristen ergibt, wird eine neue Konzeption musikalischer Zyklen präsentiert und argumentiert, dass sie Interpret*innen eine selektive Aufführung einzelner Stücke nahelegen und nicht eine vollständige und ununterbrochene Aufführung. Diese Idee wird anhand bestehender theoretischer Konzepte geprüft, und im Dialog mit dem Bariton Roderick Williams wird untersucht, wie flexibel die oft unartikulierten theoretischen Prinzipien von Interpret*innen in der Praxis sind.
*** This essay draws on the nineteenth-century performance history of Schubert’s Winterreise to critique modern-day theoretical and practical approaches to cyclical works. Building on a theoretical framework drawn from Friedrich Schlegel’s idea of the fragment and Walter Benjamin’s idea of the collector or allegorist, it proposes a new conception of musical cycles, arguing that performers were meant to make selections from them in performance, rather than present them in complete and uninterrupted sequences. This idea is tested against existing theoretical conceptions and in dialogue with the baritone Roderick Williams, to gain a sense of how flexible performers’ often unarticulated theoretical principles are in practice
English keyboard music c.1650-c.1700: a series of facsimiles of manuscript sources, vol. 2: London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 1040
No full textEdited by Andrew Woolley, Heather Windram and Terence Charlston with a foreword by Rachel Cosgrave.
London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 1040 is an example of a teaching manuscript that includes extensive contemporary fingerings and may predominantly be in the hand of the Westminster Abbey organist Albertus Bryne (c.1621–68). Copied in the 1660s, it contains 31 pieces, two of which are fragments. Its highlights include a fine four-movement suite in B
minor, probably by Bryne, and two suites by his Norwich-based contemporary Richard Ayleward (c.1626–69), the only pieces included with a composer attribution, which have been copied in a different, less accomplished hand. Some pieces it contains appear in versions that differ considerably from those in other sources, an indication of the varied
ways in which accomplished keyboard players performed this music (three of the variant versions from other sources have been transcribed in an appendix to illustrate). A group of A minor pieces is also suggestive of how suites were constructed from larger 'pools' of pieces. As a whole, the manuscript has been carefully copied, providing good versions of a small but varied cross-section of mid-seventeenth-century pieces intended
primarily for stringed-keyboard instruments, many of which it preserves uniquely.
Further information is available at http://www.ekm.org.uk/Volume%202.pdf
Group singing to support women experiencing symptoms of postnatal depression
Get PDFThe arts and music are increasingly being used in healthcare contexts, providing new ways of supporting women experiencing illnesses such as postnatal depression (PND). This article details the evidence for how group singing can support recovery from PND and outlines key characteristics of effective singing interventions for maternal mental wellbeing
Grove Music Online article: Schumann [née Wieck], Clara (Josephine)
No full textGrove Music Online article by Nancy B. Reich, revised by Natasha Loges