11,403 research outputs found
Music for classical guitar by South African composers : a historical survey, notes on selected works and a general catalogue
No full textIncludes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 296-309).This is the first comprehensive investigation of music for, or including, the classical guitar by South African composers. The focus of this research has been, firstly, to uncover as much of the repertoire as possible, and, secondly, to collate, study, catalogue and report on the information. A brief historical survey of the guitar in South Africa provides the context within which this study was conducted. The primary sources of quantitative data collection were through the archival catalogues of the South African Music Rights Organisation and through personal contact with guitarists, composers and guitar teachers. Other sources consulted were publishers, broadcasting corporations, recording companies, libraries and the internet. The body of the dissertation comprises biographical sketches, background notes, analyses and technical notes on 17 selected solo and chamber works dating from 1947 to 2007 by some of South Africa's most prominent composers and guitaristcomposers. The repertoire ranges in style from the traditional and ethnically inspired to the experimental and abstract. As this is an empirical survey, each selected entry includes details on instrumentation, duration, level of difficulty, number of pages, scordatura, commissions or requests, sources or publishers, premières and recordings. A biography of each composer is provided as well as background notes which offer an overview of the selected work. The notes discuss historical, cultural, musical and extra-musical influences, and frequently include references to interview material. The commentaries on the selected works, with musical examples, include an analytical component describing structure, form, stylistic and compositional elements, while the technical observations include performance suggestions and a grading for each work
'One equal music’: The royal college of music, its inception and the legacy of Sir George Grove 1883-1895
No full textThe establishment of the Royal College of Music (RCM) in 1883 represents the denouement of an eighteenth-century movement to found a conservatoire with a national remit in Britain. Whether motivated by the desire to rival Continental conservatoires to generate and develop an environment in which a worthy successor to Purcell could be nurtured or to create an indigenous musical workforce to obtain direct control of market forces, the RCM was seen as a panacea in the light of the demise of the experimental National Training School for Music (1876-1882) and the ineffectual Royal Academy of Music founded in 1822. The NTSM's financial concerns led Sir Henry Cole to approach the Royal Commission of 1851 for aid. In return for a meagre grant, the Commission insisted the NTSM remodel its management and constitution on pain of eviction from buildings on the Kensington Estate. Cole's approach to 1851 Commissionets precipitated the involvement of the Prince of Wales and other senior members of the Court that led directly to the establishment of the RCM in 1878.Attempts to institute the RCM as a quango to regulate the music profession alongside music education both at elementary school and university level were intended to provide ideal circumstances for inducing comprehensive treasury assistance where the NTSM failed. When this proved elusive, a contingency was provided by George Grove (first RCM Director from 1882) who, at the request of the Prince of Wales, imtiated a capital fund. The introduction of fee-paying students alongside scholars provided financial security that distanced the College & insolvency. Substantial growth in numbers during the first few years forced Grove and the Council to address the issue of a new building. Grove's appointment of an unrivalled professorial staff and the development of a rigorous curriculum, whose inspiration was to be found within the Continental traditions in France and Germany, had paid dividends. By 1894, the results of RCM's pedagogical methods were respected across Europe. The appointment of Grove's neighbour, Alexander Mackenzie, as Principal of the RAM heralded an environment for mutual co-operation between two rival institutions. The institution of local examinations under the Associated Board of the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music from 1889 marked the conclusion of further attempts to amalgamate the two institutions. The foundation of both the Associated Board was intended to provide a remedy to the shortage of suitably-qualified candidates entering for scholarships and to improve music tuition among school children as set out in the RCM's 1883 charter. The coalition created formidable opposition to Halle's proposal to establish a chartered Royal College of Music in Manchester (RMCM) in 1893 and Parliament's attempts to include music within the provision of the bill for the regulation and registration of teachers. The foundation of the Associated Board allowed Grove to begin implementing the RCM's remit to lead the music profession on both a national and imperial scale. The RCM's national and European reputation established by Grove was consolidated under the directorate of his successor, c. Hubert H. Parry, who confirmed the RCM's global reputation to which other, fledgling institutions, such as New York's Juilliard School of Music, came to aspke. Grove's initiatives, which began the process of emancipating composer and performer alike, went on to transform Britain's international musical reputation within a generation, the ramifications of which continue to affect us more than a century later
Metadata Representations for Queryable ML Model Zoos
No full textMachine learning (ML) practitioners and organizations are building model zoos of pre-trained models, containing metadata describing properties of the ML models and datasets that are useful for reporting, auditing, reproducibility, and interpretability purposes. The metatada is currently not standardised; its expressivity is limited; and there is no interoperable way to store and query it. Consequently, model search, reuse, comparison, and composition are hindered. In this paper, we advocate for standardized ML model metadata representation and management, proposing a toolkit supported to help practitioners manage and query that metadata.Web Information SystemsHuman-Centred Artificial Intelligenc
A Manifesto of Nodalism
No full textThis paper proposes the notion of Nodalism as a means describing contemporary culture and of understanding my own creative practice in electronic music composition. It draws on theories and ideas from Kirby, Bauman, Bourriaud, Deleuze, Guatarri, and Gochenour, to demonstrate how networks of ideas or connectionist neural models of cognitive behaviour can be used to contextualize, understand and become a creative tool for the creation of contemporary electronic music
Saverio Mercadante and France (1823-1836)
No full textThis thesis explores the impact of Mercadante’s operas in France during the 1820s and 1830s. The study covers a period from the French premiere of Elisa e Claudio in Paris (1823) up to the period immediately preceding the worldpremiere of Il giuramento (Milan, La Scala, 11 March 1837), which is traditionally regarded as the first of Mercadante’s ‘reform’ operas and the watershed of his mature style. Modern music historians and early biographers have suggested that Mercadante’s encounter with French operatic conventions was the trigger for his ‘reform’ impulse, which the composer himself acknowledged in one of his most famous letters. As a contribution to discussion of Mercadante’s stylistic developments, I examine a number of case studies which probe the French reception of his early output. Chapter 1 provides a historical survey of French critical assessments of Mercadante in the nineteenth century, revealed in the ongoing discourse of the time regarding Italian opera in France. Chapter 2 explores the critical reception of Elisa e Claudio, staged at the Théâtre Italien in 1823. Chapter 3 studies the process of transfer that brought about the transformation of Elisa e Claudio into the pasticcio Les Noces de Gamache, produced for the Théâtre de l’Odéon by the composer Luc Guénée in 1825. Chapter 4 reconstructs Mercadante’s sojourn in Paris and the genesis of I briganti during the 1835-36 season at the Théâtre Italien. Chapter 5 frames the Italian performances of I briganti and the related revision process in the context of Mercadante’s French experience. In focusing on the intertwined responses of Franco-Italian music criticism, this study of Mercadante’s early operas shows the value of the study of pan-European criticism and of cultural transfer as a larger framework within which to locate studies of Mercadante’s developments in style and aesthetics
Optimizing ML Inference Queries Under Constraints
No full textThe proliferation of pre-trained ML models in public Web-based model zoos facilitates the engineering of ML pipelines to address complex inference queries over datasets and streams of unstructured content. Constructing optimal plan for a query is hard, especially when constraints (e.g. accuracy or execution time) must be taken into consideration, and the complexity of the inference query increases. To address this issue, we propose a method for optimizing ML inference queries that selects the most suitable ML models to use, as well as the order in which those models are executed. We formally define the constraint-based ML inference query optimization problem, formulate it as a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) problem, and develop an optimizer that maximizes accuracy given constraints. This optimizer is capable of navigating a large search space to identify optimal query plans on various model zoos.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Web Information SystemsHuman-Centred Artificial Intelligenc
A Century of Music Production in Durham City 1711-1811: A Documentary Study.
No full textIn the eighteenth century, Durham City was an important centre of political power, the nucleus of which was the cathedral whose own wealth and power was immense. The Bishop, as the King’s representative, governed County Durham, and Durham City, as the capital of the palatinate, was a vibrant socio-economic centre. Those with means spent much of their free time patronising the large number of concerts, balls, assemblies, or theatrical productions that were frequently held in the city. For a musician, these public events provided ample opportunities to make a living. There were also opportunities to teach the children of wealthy patrons and to publish compositions. In consequence a large number of musicians came to the city, either to live or to visit, with race and assize weeks (the busiest time of the year) as a major focus of their employment.
The centre of musical life in Durham was the cathedral which dominated the production of both sacred and secular music. In order to attract good quality singers to the north, the cathedral’s Chapter offered unusually high salaries to its lay-clerks. The clerks, as able singers, forged a high reputation as a musical force in the region at a time when the quality of sacred music and cathedral choirs was in serious decline. Some of the lay-clerks, most notably Edward Meredith and William Evance, would travel large distances to perform. Until 1763 the cathedral organist was James Hesletine who was succeeded by Thomas Ebdon. Both men were also involved in the local concert scene, although, under Hesletine, a significant dispute with the Newcastle musician Charles Avison took place which ultimately led to the establishment of a rival subscription series by Avison in partnership with John Garth.
Music permeated all levels of society at Durham. In addition to what was produced for concerts and at the cathedral, music was prevalent in many other arenas. Music formed part of worship in all of the city’s churches, although it was only at St. Mary le Bow that it reached an appreciable standard. As part of the broader matrix of performances of secular music, Durham possessed its own musical society, and, as part of its wider public role, music performed a key role in civic and other ceremonial
occasions as well as for local freemasonry, an organisation to which many of Durham’s musicians belonged. Other forms of music-making took place in the domestic environment, but it was also possible to find music performed in the city’s
taverns. Furthermore, the performance of folk music and the presence of the town waits and military bands meant that music was commonly heard on the city’s streets.
This thesis is based on a detailed study of several primary sources. The most important of these is the local newspapers, but ecclesiastical records, diaries, personal
letters, published books on music and local history, and the music itself (both printed and in manuscript), have also been closely examined. By means of this archival work
it has been possible to examine the whole spectrum of musical life across the city, a study which amply demonstrates that Durham was one of the most important
provincial musical centres outside London. In fact, notwithstanding its provincial location, Durham was by no means insular in its outlook, nor was it entirely backward-looking, as can be seen in the distinctly innovative and inventive work of Garth
The historical development of the clarinet with special reference to its musical repertoire
No full textIncludes bibliographical references (leaves 157-164.)The dissertation investigates the mechanical development of the clarinet from the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century
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