1857 research outputs found
Sort by
Adolphe Sax, his saxhorns and their international influence
No full textExplores the cultural legacy of Adolph Sax as inventor
Musical culture and education (thematic issue of Music Education Research journal vol. 18 issue 4)
No full textEditorial: Throughout history and since time immemorial, there has been discussion and debate on music education. debate on music education. In the quest for greater understanding, the conception of music has taken various forms, and has been predicated on different notions of education and modes of transmission. In recent times, although there has been an emphasis on processes of musical learning informed by systematic historical musicology. Arguably, in its early iteration, it could be said that music education as a field of knowledge held a more modest status than theoretical musicological research. This may have arisen from methodological approaches to music education of the mid-twentieth century, with their focus on musical training in childhood and on a teaching–learning process with links to psycho-evolutionary development. Among the proponents of these approaches were pedagogues such as Edgar Willems (1890–1978), Zoltan Kodaly (1882–1967) and Justine Ward (1879–1975), whose interest was in good intonation and the place of singing in education, Carl Orff (1895–1982) and Shinichi Suzuki (1898–1998) who contributed to the foundation of principles of instrumental practice and Jacques Dalcroze (1865–1950) who emphasised the importance of movement. Whilst each worked from their own perspective, theirs was a common objective: to educate persons to express themselves in and through music, and to position this education in a global perspective within which music could become an integral part of a fulfilled life.
These pedagogies are now well established and continue to be appropriated by contemporary technologies, and to appear in ever increasing sites of online learning. Since the latter part of the twentieth century, however, critical voices have emerged which call some of the methodologies into question, labelling them classical and obsolete: they deal only with musical language and conventional notation of the western world, are directed towards children’s musical initiation, thereby neglecting a broad spectrum in the sound world, discarding migration, multicultural societies and failing to acknowledge a place for intercultural approaches in education
Sound art/street life: tracing the social and political effects of sound installations in London
No full textThis article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in London (2013-14) to address the social and political effects of installation and place-based sound-works. I begin by reviewing a number of theoretical approaches to the city, using my own and others’ ethnographic accounts of London to problematize some of the affirmative conceptualizations of the city being propagated by non-representational theories and cultural geographers. In so doing, I provide the theoretical and contextual substratum for my ensuing discussion of the sound-works, and offer an initial view on why physical urban public space remains crucial to progressive politics. I then examine the sonic re-arrangement of public space in three site-specific sound installations. Through ethnographic analysis of the social dynamics summoned into being by each sound-work, and the “multiple mediations” that animated such dynamics (Born 2005), I offer interpretations as to whether, and if so how, the sound installations might be enlisted as part of a process oriented towards mobilizing democratic designs. ******* PLEASE NOTE: This article is available open access at the 'Official URL' given below. ******
Making music for mental health: how group drumming mediates recovery
No full textBackground: While music-making interventions are increasingly recognised as enhancing mental health, little is known of why music may engender such benefit. The objective of this article is to elucidate the features of a programme of group drumming known to enable mental health recovery.
Methods: Qualitative research was conducted with 39 mental health patients and carers who had demonstrated recovery following engagement with a programme of group djembe drumming in the UK. Data were collected through semi-structured individual interviews and
focus group interviews designed to understand the connection between drumming and recovery and analysed using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA).
Results: Results revealed three overarching features of the drumming intervention: (i) the specific features of drumming, including drumming as a form of non-verbal communication, as a connection with life through rhythm, and as a grounding experience that both generates and liberates energy; (ii) the specific features of the group, including the group as a space of connection in and through the rhythmic features of the drumming, as well as facilitating feelings of belonging, acceptance, safety and care, and new social interactions; (iii) the specific features of the learning, including learning as an inclusive activity in which the
concept of mistakes is dissolved and in which there is musical freedom, supported by an embodied learning process expedited by the musical facilitator.
Conclusion: The findings provide support for the conceptual notion of ‘creative practice as mutual recovery’, demonstrating that group drumming provides a creative and mutual learning space in which mental health recovery can take place
The razor's edge: Australian rock music impairs men's performance when pretending to be a surgeon
No full textObjective: Over the past few decades there has been interest in the role of music in the operating theatre. However, despite many reported benefits, a number of potentially harmful effects of music have been identified. This study aimed to explore the effects of rock and classical music on surgical speed, accuracy and perceived distraction when performing multiorgan resection in the board game Operation.
Design: Single-blind, three-arm, randomised controlled trial.
Setting: Imperial Festival, London, May 2016.
Participants: Members of the public (n = 352) aged ≥ 16 years with no previous formal surgical training or hearing impairments.
Methods: Participants were randomised to listen through noise-cancelling headphones to either the sound of an operating theatre, rock music or classical music. Participants were then invited to remove three organs from the board game patient, Cavity Sam, using surgical tweezers.
Main outcome measures: Time taken (seconds) to remove three organs from Cavity Sam; the number of mistakes made in performing the surgery; and perceived distraction, rated on a five-point Likert-type scale from 1 (not at all distracting) to 5 (very distracting).
Results: Rock music impairs the performance of men but not women when undertaking complex surgical procedures in the board game Operation, increasing the time taken to operate and showing a trend towards more surgical mistakes. In addition, classical music was associated with lower perceived distraction during the game, but this effect was attenuated when
factoring in how much people liked the music, with suggestions that only people who particularly liked the music of Mozart found it beneficial.
Conclusions: Rock music (specifically Australian rock music) appears to have detrimental effects on surgical performance. Men are advised not to listen to rock music when either operating or playing board games
Listeners' and performers' shared understanding of jazz improvisations
Get PDFThis study explores the extent to which a large set of musically experienced listeners share understanding with a performing saxophone-piano duo, and with each other, of what happened in three improvisations on a jazz standard. In an online survey, 239 participants listened to audio recordings of three improvisations and rated their agreement with 24 specific statements that the performers and a jazz-expert commenting listener had made about them. Listeners endorsed statements that the performers had agreed upon significantly more than they endorsed statements that the performers had disagreed upon, even though the statements gave no indication of performers' levels of agreement. The findings show some support for a more-experienced-listeners-understand-more-like-performers hypothesis: Listeners with more jazz experience and with experience playing the performers' instruments endorsed the performers' statements more than did listeners with less jazz experience and experience on different instruments. The findings also strongly support a listeners-as-outsiders hypothesis: Listeners' ratings of the 24 statements were far more likely to cluster with the commenting listener's ratings than with either performer's. But the pattern was not universal; particular listeners even with similar musical backgrounds could interpret the same improvisations radically differently. The evidence demonstrates that it is possible for performers' interpretations to be shared with very few listeners, and that listeners' interpretations about what happened in a musical performance can be far more different from performers' interpretations than performers or other listeners might assume
Whose voices? The fate of Luigi Nono’s Voci destroying muros
No full textLuigi Nono's Voci destroying muros for female voices and small orchestra was performed for the first and only time at the Holland Festival in 1970. A setting of texts by female prisoners and factory workers, it marks a sharp stylistic departure from Nono's political music of the 1960s by virtue of its audible quotations of revolutionary songs, its readily intelligible text setting, and especially its retention of the diatonic structure of the song on which the piece is based, the communist “Internationale.” Nono's decision, following the premiere, to withdraw the work from his catalogue suggests that he came to regard it as transgressing an important boundary in his engagement with “current reality.” I examine the work and its withdrawal in the context of discourses within the Italian left in the 1960s that accused the intellectuals of the Partito Comunista Italiano of unhelpfully mediating the class struggle. Nono's contentious reading of Antonio Gramsci, offered as justification for his avant-garde compositional style, certainly provided fuel for this critique. But Voci destroying muros suggests receptivity on the part of the composer—albeit only momentary—to achieving a more direct representation of the voices of the dispossessed
Insight
No full textMusic for the short film 'Insight' directed by Lidia Ravviso, Alessandro Valori, and Slavina
