1857 research outputs found
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Debussy’s Impressionism interrogated
No full textThe arts were loosely defined by a plethora of ‘-isms’ in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. None is more often associated with Debussy than Impressionism. Even recent scholarship is still disposed to position him as an Impressionist composer. Whilst much work has been done to disentangle Debussy from the tag and align him in relation to, among others, Hellenistic paintings (around the time of the Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune [it.]), Symbolist painting, and the English Pre-Raphaelites, it is important to understand what has been intended by the term ‘musical Impressionism’, how it came to be associated with Debussy, and his usually hostile response to being thus categorised
Music literacy and the instrumental teacher
Full text linkIn a report commissioned by the Society for Music Analysis to address a gap in music literacy, McQueen (2020) identified instrumental teachers as an important part of music education both within schools and in the community. This article takes as a starting point McQueen’s (2020) proposal that ‘it is through instrumental tuition that music literacy in its many forms is likely to develop’ (p.65) to tease through some of the implications it might have for contemporary perspectives on music education. In doing so it assesses the relationship between music literacy and music analysis as a complex one involving professional partnerships which can lead to ‘a clash of allegiances’ (p.83) evident in versions of curriculum knowledge and the values underpinning them. My aim is to bring forward discussions surrounding instrumental teaching and school curricula, and to argue that greater collaboration between all those engaged in music education will address issues arising from and perpetuated by their separation
Musical ghosts: re-instating Elsie April in historical narratives of the British musical
No full textAt once a pianist, arranger, accompanist, and musical mastermind, Elsie April (1884–1950) has long been ignored by scholars. Despite her many collaborations with some of the most significant forces in the musical world of London's West End –– spanning several decades from the 1920s onward –– her contributions have been, at most, a footnote in historical accounts of musical theatre. She has been politely dismissed by Coward's biographers as ‘an important assistant to his success’, a statement clearly based on assumptions about the life of female musicians in British theatre. Even a cursory search for compositions written under the name of Elsie April in such major archival repositories as the British Library's catalogues reveals the numerous songs she composed and copyrighted, beyond the published Coward arrangements. Somehow, the full scope of her working practices has never made it into the historical record, despite the high regard in which her contemporaries held her. As theatrical impresario Charles B. Cochran (1872–1951) once noted:
'If you got near enough to inspect a pair of twinkling eyes, in a very expressive face, and delicate hands, it could be her. If you stopped the bike, and found the rider carrying a great quantity of manuscript music, and wearing an extraordinary hat, it must have been our Elsie . . . As a musician, she had few equals and her composers [i.e. those she worked with], orchestras, conductors, singers and arrangers bowed to her superiority . . . it was always a source of wonderment to observe this small person, so mistress of her art.'
Given the recognition by Cochran, one of Britain's most influential producers, her absence in the historical record is puzzling. However, it speaks to common industry practices and mechanisms of gendered erasure. In 1932, Peter Burnup asked in the theatrical newspaper The Era, ‘Why doesn't Elsie April get a credit on the programme? [She] contributes as much as any man to the success of Cochran shows . . . is someone afraid of ghosts?’ His use of the term ‘ghost’ is telling; the answer to this lies in a complex cultural web of market forces, gender parity, and lack of attention to female creators
Group music-making with families affected by Zika virus in Brazil
No full textChapter 12 explores how music-making can promote wellbeing for mothers of children affected by the Zika virus (ZIKV) in Brazil. An outbreak of ZIKV in 2015 had profound effects on children and families in the Northeast of Brazil, where hundreds of children exposed to the virus in utero were born with severe microcephaly, developmental delays, physical disabilities, and special educational needs, now classified under the term congenital Zika syndrome (CZS). This chapter introduces a six-week programme of group online music-making that was developed and run for mothers and their children with CZS, alongside interviews and video observations of music sessions. The learnings of the project are explored through two exploratory vignettes, highlighting the important role of music in everyday life and its potential to support some of the psychosocial needs of families affected by CZS
The global conservatoire: towards an integrated approach to developing twenty-first-century artists
No full textThis chapter looks beyond surface evaluations of online teaching during the pandemic and considers a new model for online teaching in the conservatoire. We start by recognising recent and significant changes in the external environment for all artists, notably the focus on generating a more sustainable future, the importance (and fragility) of global communities and the role of technology in the arts. While the significance of these aspects for the musician-in-training may not be immediately obvious, we argue that deep engagement with these issues is vital to develop global artistic citizens for the 21st Century. We propose that online teaching in the conservatoire has the potential to become an important vehicle for equipping students to respond to these changes in society. In recognising the possibilities for online teaching, we move from a position of online ‘replacing’ or ‘replicating’ traditional conservatoire teaching to ‘complementing’ practice-led experiences. We examine how core learning and teaching values can be embedded in the online environment to promote synergy between different learning experiences in the conservatoire. Furthermore, we propose that a transnational model of design and delivery could be most effective in developing culturally responsive artists. ***** This chapter is available open access at the Official URL given below. ****
Understanding the history of 1930s musical migrants to Britain through minimal computing-led digital humanities
Full text linkThis article explores how historical musicology can use computational methods within a minimal computing framework, recovering the performance histories of three migrant musicians, producing valuable new information about their careers. Líza Fuchsová, Maria Lidka, and Paul Hamburger all left Nazi-occupied Europe during the late 1930s and settled permanently in the UK. Fuchsová (1913-1977) was a Czech pianist who became an advocate for Czech musical culture as well as an important piano soloist; Hamburger (1920-2004) was an accompanist and teacher who left Vienna for London and became a senior figure in BBC radio and Guildhall professor; and Lidka (1914-2013) [Marianne Liedtke], was a violinist, orchestra leader and later Royal College of Music professor. Their careers have been underexplored, but machine-read digitised archives have opened new possibilities for finding and sorting what can seem like an overwhelming amount of performance data. This article uses a minimal computing led approach to demonstrate building a robust and accessible structure to interrogate performance data and establish performance histories. This article will demonstrate the value of this framework and will show how it can be applied to historical musicology work
What does it mean to sing with the Earth?
Full text linkA small group (n=11) of singers from the same community of musical practice in the UK participated in focus group workshops to reflect on their experiences of group singing in nature. The study found that group singing in nature was considered to be a (non-religious) spiritual practice which enhances participants’ experience of both communitas and their connection to the natural world.
Participants made an important distinction between singing with the earth - communing with the natural world in a more spiritual way - and singing for the earth, a more political activity in response to local and global environmental issues. From a Posthuman perspective, diffraction – as both the physical and metaphorical process of exploring ‘differences that matter’ (Barad 2007, 46) - is identified as an important concept for understanding how different routes to wellbeing can be mutually constitutive and intra-active. De-centring human experience by amplifying the co-constitutive role of other agencies like the natural world highlights the ontological and epistemological complexity of such
experience
A note on the future of music and parental mental wellbeing
No full textChapter 14 provides a short note on the future of music and parental mental wellbeing. It first acknowledges some of the threads that run through the book and then identifies four (of many) future directions that practice and research in music and parental mental wellbeing might take. These areas include implementation and scaling-up, emphasising the importance of strong and equal interdisciplinary partnerships, and looking beyond the early years to establish and research new practices designed with and for parents across the life course. Further areas for development include diversity and representation, prioritising work with parents and musicians in wide ranging contexts, as well as capacity building to support and nurture practitioners working in music and parental wellbeing settings. The chapter ends with a final reflection on the potential for music to help reimagine and communicate what parental wellbeing is and can be amongst all that the twenty-first century is bringing
Unsettling ‘necessities’: a poststructural analysis of curricular policy and its implementation in state secondary level music education in Malta
Full text linkThis research project has grown from my professional concern to grapple with the ‘necessities’ through which curricular policy and music education operate. As a Maltese citizen whose personal and professional identity is deeply intertwined with the institutional practice of music education, I take its curricular context as the site of analysis. Existing scholarship pertaining to the Maltese context takes policy as a taken-for-granted framework for speaking about and researching music education. As a result, there emerges a lack of analytic concern on two fronts: how the ‘necessary’ changes proposed regulate possibilities for the curricular practice of music education, and how taken-for-granted assumptions about music and music education shape acts of implementation. In an attempt to unsettle the assumptions that structure existing research practices and address resulting analytic lacunae, I first direct my focus to the concept of policy as a diverse and tension-laden landscape of practice. Drawing primarily on the work of Colebatch, Hoppe, and Noordegraaf (2010) and Michel Foucault, I evaluate policy through three different perspectives. I then propose the ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’ (Bacchi 2009) and ‘Poststructural Interview Analysis’ (Bacchi and Bonham 2016) frameworks as useful apparatus for the analysis of its proposals and effects, and I discuss how these have been adopted and applied within this research project.
The outcomes of my analysis are presented in four sections. In the first section, I put forward my analysis of the ‘Educators’ Guide to Pedagogy and Assessment: Music’ (2015), which constitutes the latest published curricular policy document relating to music education in Malta. This serves as a useful text for analysing the ‘necessary changes’ proposed by the current National Curriculum Framework and their ‘rationalised’ implications for music education. In the second section, the focus of my analysis shifts to the corresponding syllabus for the end-of-cycle assessment of music (Secondary Education Certificate) as a site of implementation at secondary level. In section three, I bring together the outcomes of each analysis and make use of interview transcripts to discuss the effects which these two sets of proposals carry on ‘educators’ and ‘learners’. The final section draws on marginalised perspectives to unsettle the ‘necessity’ of these proposals and emphasise their inadequacy in light of the discussed effects. I conclude with a set of reflections and recommendations for further research
Bach: the great Toccata [documentary by Daniel Moult]
No full textThis video DVD includes spoken contributions by Terence Charlston as a featured contributor and performances of excepts of BWV 565 and other keyboard works by J.S. Bach on harpsichord and pedal clavichord