1857 research outputs found
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Searching fantasy: Froberger’s fantasias and ricercars four centuries on.
No full textThe fantasias and ricercars of Johann Jacob Froberger (1616–1667) provide fertile ground from which to study seventeenth-century counterpoint and its keyboard performance. They constitute just under a quarter of his entire keyboard music and almost one half of his contrapuntal keyboard music. Froberger’s historical significance, e.g. as ‘father’ of the keyboard suite, has often assumed greater importance than his contribution to the development of fugue generating a bias for a small core of more popular genres and pieces amongst performers: a trend reflected across the surviving sources and in current teaching and performance today.
Froberger’s autograph collections arrange and group the fantasias and ricercars into single-genre sets. These genre complexes display clear agendas of balance, contrast and self-referencing within and between pieces. This essay discusses the wide dissemination of sources and locates this with the context of the music’s reception history. It is proposed that the fantasias and ricercars form a distinctive grouping within Froberger’s contrapuntal keyboard music which complements the toccatas, suites and lamentations and, in comparison with them, represents a less overt, equally rhetorical, and more intellectually ‘virtuosic’ interpretation of the stylus fantasticus. Issues of performance practice, including ornamentation, tempo and meter, articulation and phrasing, instrumental designation, expression and affekt, and notational practices are considered. The composer’s compositional methods and contrapuntal skills are scrutinised and compared with contemporary theories of counterpoint. A new analytic approach is outlined to understand Froberger’s reliance on motivic construction better and which has practical applications to musical theory, historical inquiry and performance
El ocaso del socialismo mágico
No full textMusic for the documentary film 'El ocaso del socialismo mágico' directed by Michele Calabresi
Attitudes towards and perceptions of the rationale for parent–child group music making with young children
No full textThis paper presents the findings of an interview study (phase one of a three-phase doctoral research project) that attempted to establish practitioners’ and parents’ views of why parent–child group music making activities are offered in interdisciplinary Children's Centres in England for the 0–3 years age range. These settings are community hubs where a range of services is available for families with children under five. The responses of individual parents and practitioners (total 20) to a standardised interview schedule gave rise to eight main themes: social, emotional, learning, teaching, parenting, musical, links-to-home, and organisational. Practitioners emphasised the learning and development benefits, whereas parents were more concerned about the social and emotional reasons for attending music groups. Practitioners and parents both emphasised the emotional benefits that resulted from participating in musical activities. These findings suggest that socialisation may be multi-dimensional in the music group: between parent and child and amongst the wider group. Practitioners’ knowledge of the benefits of music may not necessarily lead to appropriate pedagogical musical approaches and there are questions raised about musical ‘culture’ and links to and from home
BBC Radio 3 record review: building a library: Mahler: Symphony No. 5
No full textWilliam Mival discusses recordings of Mahler's fifth symphony in this programme broadcast on 18 June 2016. This discussion is also available (UK only) on the Record Review Podcast, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03z154l
Achieving scientific excellence: an exploratory study of the role of emotional and motivational factors
No full textThis study investigates the perceived role of psychological factors
in achieving excellence in scientific research. Six outstanding
scientists aged 33–42 were interviewed. Data were analyzed
inductively resulting in three main dimensions: personality traits and
characteristics, psychological skills and processes, and task-specific
strategies. Researchers highlighted the importance of emotional
factors and motivational processes to achieve and sustain scientific
excellence. Flexible coping, emotion regulation, and goal setting were
emphasized and described as particularly important in dealing with
rejections, setbacks, and team management issues. Persistence and
adaptive perfectionism were key individual characteristics which
helped participants in nurturing and sustaining motivation. This study
suggests that the specific impact of emotional, motivational, and other
psychological skills at different stages of excellence development is
relevant; yet, further investigation is needed
Novello, John Stainer and commercial opportunities in the nineteenth-century British amateur music market
No full text‘Beyond the dance floor’? Gendered publics and creative practices in electronic dance music
No full textThis article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in London (2013–2014) to address the reasons why men dominate the crowds in certain spheres of electronic/dance music. Focusing on a group of London-based genres, notably dub, dubstep, grime and ‘bass music’, I analyse how gender gets attached to musical formations through the qualities and connotations not only of musical sound, but of its material, technological, social and spatial mediations. I show how such connotations ‘stick’ (Ahmed, S. [2004]. The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press) and get transmitted through time, leading to the persistent absence of women from certain musical lineages; and I demonstrate how this process serves to entrench and ‘naturalise’ associations between musical genres and ‘maleness’. I then take this analysis to creative practices. Through my dialogue with DJ/producer Jack Latham—aka Jam City (Night Slugs)—I illuminate how musicians caught up in gendered socio-musical formations can become reflexively engaged with the gendered implications of the sounds they produce, and can therefore experiment with making changes
Conference report: the Third Nordoff Robbins Plus conference ‘Exploring music in therapeutic and community settings’
Get PDFTrumpets, drums and the sources for their symbolic authority in Britain
No full textTrumpeters, drummers and to an extent pipers have been distinct in the military, and must be regarded as a separate species from those that make up what were known in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as bands of music. They had key operational functions in armies and navies, but they were also symbolic. They were marked out and categorized for their essential duties, and their status was unchallenged even by more senior soldiers. In Britain, trumpeters and drummers were the only categories of musician that could legally be the recipient of official funding. Their duties required bravery, but also high levels of discipline and remarkable feats of memory and precision. Images of them were repeatedly called up in representations of victory and defeat; less frequent are representations of their roles in the administration of military discipline. The position these players held in peace and in fields of conflict is more complex than the images suggest. By necessity, the players stood apart from other soldiers, mentoring and often controlling them