1857 research outputs found
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How Gilles Apap's new cadenza illuminates Mozart, via Bakhtin
No full textAccording to a recent article by Alex Ross in the New Yorker, the once defunct art of classical improvisation is in revival mode; his emphasis was not the expected ornamentation-savvy Baroque specialists but the more surprising field of cadenza-updates in the performance of Classical and Romantic works, a field led by Robert Levin (Mozart Piano Concertos), Will Crutchfield (Donizetti arias), and Joshua Bell (Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto). Here Ross could also have included original Mozart violin cadenzas by Leonidas Kavakos and Rachel Barton Pine. Curiously excluded from the immediate context of this revival is Gilles Apap’s Mozart, which Ross describes in parentheses as “full-on cadenza craziness.” He places it in a separate category along with Schnittke’s cadenza for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. What Apap’s and Schnittke’s cadenzas share that the others do not is explicit intertextual referencing: Schnittke quotes snippets of Violin Concertos by Brahms, Bartok, Berg, and Shostakovich, thereby stepping out of the bounds of Beethoven’s musical language, while Apap quotes Mendelssohn and ventures several steps further, out of the bounds of classical music altogether and into other musical styles. ******* This article is available open access at the 'Official URL' link below. ******
Lamenting at the piano: domestic music-making and well-being in eighteenth-century Britain
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Expressive revolutions: '1968' and music in the Netherlands
No full textDescription of book: Music was integral to the profound cultural, social and political changes that swept the globe in 1968. This collection of essays offers new perspectives on the role that music played in the events of that year, which included protests against the ongoing Vietnam War, the May riots in France and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. From underground folk music in Japan to antiauthoritarian music in Scandinavia and Germany, Music and Protest in 1968 explores music's key role as a means of socio-political dissent not just in the US and the UK but in Asia, North and South America, Europe and Africa. Contributors extend the understanding of musical protest far beyond a narrow view of the 'protest song' to explore how politics and social protest played out in many genres, including experimental and avant-garde music, free jazz, rock, popular song, and film and theatre music
Britten and Keller: letters and life
No full textCorrespondence between Benjamin Britten and Hans Keller with commentary by Alison Garnham
Book review: 'Musical understandings and other essays on the philosophy of music' by Stephen Davies
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Ars militaria
No full textIt would be an over-simplification to characterise Europe in the fifteenth, sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries as utterly dominated by conflict and warfare; nevertheless, there could have been few people in this epoch whose lives were not directly touched by the social consequences of organised aggression. War was considered to be largely inevitable, ultimately a natural result of the human condition of interior strife in which, in Erasmus’ words, ‘Reason wars with inclinations’. It is against the background of two realities, then, that this chapter examines the links between music and the Renaissance culture of war. These are, first, the common discourse of military values in the construction of the identity of the European nobility (who were the principal patrons and consumers of art music), and second, the constant noise of war, both literal and figurative, and its various representations and appropriations in music.
*** Please note this chapter is in German. **
Staff and parent views of the rationale for music in children's centres: a questionnaire study
No full textChildren’s Centres are widespread in England and comprise multi-professional staff teams seeking to work within a holistic framework with families with children aged 0-5 years. Centres are autonomous, and many favour evidence-based approaches to their work. Although group music sessions appear frequently on Children’s Centre activity programmes, the rationale for their inclusion remains unclear. This study seeks to explore staff and
parents’ attitudes towards and perceptions of parent-child group music-making activities. My doctoral research project has a mixed-methods design and comprises a qualitative interview study (including both parents and staff participants) which adopted a grounded-theory approach to the data analysis; a quantitative questionnaire survey employing two different instruments; and a quantitative comparative study using behavioural observational methods in which music groups were compared with other activities.
This paper presents findings from the questionnaire survey, which involved 49 staff and 91 parents. Seven thematic categories of the perceived benefits of music - Social, Emotion, Learning, Teaching, Links to home, Parenting, and Organisational – which had been identified in the interview study, were used as the basis of the design of the survey questionnaire. Initial statistical analyses revealed some significant differences between the expressed
views of parent and staff groups, as well as between parents in different broad age groups. Staff members expressed more positive views about the perceived benefits of music for
parents than were expressed by the parents themselves. Parents between the ages of 27-35 appear to express significantly more positive opinions on a variety of questionnaire items than did parents in both the younger and older age-groups. Some parents reported that music became more important in several ways in the home environment as a result of attending the music group.
The role of the music leader in early childhood group music provision in Children’s Centres will be discussed, and practical implications for practitioners will be considered. *** The full text of this paper is available open access as part of the conference proceedings at the Official URL given below. **
Brass and military bands in Britain - performance domains, the factors that construct them and their influence
No full textThis chapter focuses on military and brass bands as they have developed in Britain since the late eighteenth century. Despite the title, it is not entirely insular because several themes dealt with here lead necessarily to a discussion of music making in other European countries, the USA (which provides one of my case studies) and some other formerly colonized territories. The emphasis falls on history because it is my contention that historical processes have had several enduring influences: perhaps most importantly, they have shaped the fundamental idea of the ‘band’, as it is understood in the pages of this book, and ‘banding’ (a common enough term among brass band players), as a relatively distinct sphere of activity that stands apart from, but is also related to, other forms of instrumental music making. The most powerful manifestation of the historical legacy is to be found in the way that British bands sound, but it can also be detected in several cultural and value systems that have their origins in the same process. It is a process that has been nurtured by certain historical ‘events’ and by the mutually influential relationships that bands have had with their ‘audiences’ (a term to be understood in its broadest sense). The role of audiences has a special importance because the cultural assumptions and interactions created by this relationship and developed alongside banding have helped shape the way British bands sound. Those of us who regularly or occasionally listen to bands have our receptors tuned in a particular way to defined values and expectations, and bands respond obligingly if subconsciously. The sound world of bands is predictable to listeners and this can be taken as evidence of the maturity of its idiom