1857 research outputs found
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Pulsing touches
No full textFor string quartet, duration 5 minutes.
This piece was composed for Daryl Runswick’s 60th birthday and first performed by the Smith Quartet on 22 October 2006, at the Almeida Theatre, London
Pathophysiological differences between musician's dystonia and writer's cramp
No full textFocal hand dystonia (FHD) has been suggested to be a maladaptive response of the brain to repetitive performance of stereotyped and attentionally demanding hand movements. However, not all patients with FHD have a strict history of excessive hand use; for example, patients with musician's dystonia (MD) spend many hours per day with their attention focused on instrumental practice, whereas many patients with writer's cramp (WC) have a history of average hand use. The present experiments test whether seven MD and six WC patients have different pathophysiological deficits by examining the spatial pattern of sensorimotor organization in the motor cortex. Two control groups were used, eight healthy non-musicians and eight healthy musicians. The latter served to control for physiological adaptation of the brain to musical training. We used focal vibration of a single hand muscle to produce sensory input whilst the excitability of corticospinal outputs to the vibrated and other hand muscles was evaluated with transcranial magnetic stimulation. In healthy non-musicians, vibration increases the amplitude of motor-evoked potentials and decreases the short-latency intracortical inhibition (SICI) in the vibrated muscle, whilst having the opposite effect on the non-vibrated hand muscles. The pattern of sensorimotor interaction was abnormal in both patient groups. However, the nature of the deficit differed between them. While vibration had little effect on cortical excitability in WC, it strongly reduced SICI in all hand muscles irrespective of spatial organization in MD. In the healthy musicians we found an organization intermediate between that of healthy non-musicians and MD. The data are consistent with a model in which musical practice in healthy musicians leads to beneficial changes in organization of the motor cortex, but in MD these progress too far and begin to interfere with movement rather than assist it. The fact that sensory input had no effect on motor output in patients with WC suggests that sensory information from the hand may play a smaller role in provoking pathological changes in WC than in MD. ******* This article is available open access on the publisher's website at the Official URL given below. ******
Susato's colleagues: the trombonists of the Tudor court
No full textAbstract of book in which this chapter appears: Ambitious, versatile, and extraordinarily talented, Tielman Susato carved out a distinguished place for himself in the Renaissance cultural scene. He began his professional life as a trombonist in the Antwerp civic band. This was one of the outstanding ensembles of the day, but he soon expanded his range of activity as a musical scribe, preparing manuscript collections for an avid market that developed in the rapidly growing Flemish urban centers. He subsequently moved on and established one of the foremost publishing houses in Europe, providing an impeccably selected musical repertory that found a ready market then and which engenders respect even today among musicians and students of Renaissance music. In addition, he was a composer of exceptional talent, supplying superb pieces in all the genres that would have been desired in the elite urban and courtly circles of the time. In this volume a group of prominent scholars has contributed essays surveying a broad range of topics concerning Susato. These provide details of his biography (some only recently available), discuss aspects of his publications, investigate his compositional techniques, and lay out contexts for Susato's highly varied and remarkable career
J. S. Bach arr. Terence Charlston: Concerto in D minor for organ (harpsichord) and strings after BWV 35 and 156
No full textEdited and arranged by Terence Charlston and published by Peacock Press, Mytholmroyd, Hebden Bridge, UK
The London Sinfonietta 1968–2004: a perspective
No full textThe London Sinfonietta’s reputation as a contemporary music ensemble comes from the continuing commitment by its players and artistic directors to its quality of performance. The ensemble also developed a sense of its musical identity by generating a repertoire of commissioned works. This article looks at some of the ways that the Sinfonietta defined its musical ideology and has functioned as a performance-centred art world in which composers are invited to collaborate but are not there by right. It examines the Sinfonietta’s strategies for audience building, the ensemble’s contribution to the development of London’s concert life since its foundation in 1968, and looks at the ways that it has sought to renew itself in response to the different funding and aesthetic environments it has encountered in its history. The Sinfonietta’s venture into Broadway repertoire is discussed in terms of social identity. The article argues, after Jürgen Habermas and T. W. C. Blanning, that one of the most significant contributions of the Sinfonietta has been its continued commitment to the concert event as a forum for critical engagement and cultural debate
Music theatre since the 1960s
No full textOf all the performing arts, none has been more circumspect about its theatrical nature than classical concert music. A romantic ideology that located musical content in sounds rather than actions or locations, and that accordingly identified composer rather than performer as the primary origin of that content, came to ensure that the act of performance was, as far as possible, rendered invisible. The theatre of musical performance was largely limited to a carefully circumscribed ritual of dress and behaviour; the performer who sought to assert his or her individuality over and above this ritual risked accusations of charlatanism.
On the face of it, the postwar avant-garde in Europe and America, while enthusiastically dispensing with other aspects of musical tradition, represented the apotheosis of this downplaying of the business of performance. Here was a music that elevated the abstract sonic configuration to the status of a fetish, that finally eradicated the pleasure of the performer as a compositional consideration, and that seemed more at home in the lecture room or the computer lab than the concert hall. As Paul Griffiths has noted, ‘in the 1950s … few young composers wanted to work in the theatre. Indeed, to express that want was almost enough … to separate oneself from the avant-garde' (1995, 171). And yet this apparently arid terrain for theatrical endeavour was soon touched by developments that, conversely, prepared the ground for quite new sorts of musical theatre. During the second half of the 1950s, the music of the avant-garde became, albeit frequently unwittingly, suffused with the spirit of theatre
Recreation (2002, rev. 2005)
No full textOctet for any instrumentation, duration 10 minutes.
This piece was commissioned by CoMA (Contemporary Music for All) and first performed on 26 July 2002 by the CoMA Summer School Orchestra, conducted by Simon Foxley, at the New Theatre, Bretton Hall, Yorkshire.
For further details about this piece or to purchase the score and parts please see http://www.coma.org/catalogue/recreation/
The South Kensington music schools and the development of the British conservatoire in the late nineteenth century
No full textIn 1876, the National Training School for Music was established by the Society of Arts as a model of advanced music education after the pattern of leading European conservatoires. But, despite having Arthur Sullivan as Principal, the School failed amidst the rumblings of an academic scandal that dogged George Grove's attempt to establish the new Royal College of Music. The article sets this failure against the successful start of the Royal College and explains how conservatoires, after being in all practical senses virtually an irrelevance to professional concert life, managed to reinvent themselves as vital incubators of British musical talent