Film Music in Concert

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emilio Audissino
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Historical Survey ◽  
Boston Symphony Orchestra ◽  
The Usa ◽  
John Williams ◽  
The Aesthetic

The Boston Pops Orchestra was the first orchestra of its kind in the USA: founded in 1885 from the ranks of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, its remit was to offer concerts of light symphonic music. Over the years, and in particular during the fifty-year tenure of its most famous conductor, Arthur Fiedler, the Pops established itself as the premier US orchestra specialising in bridging the fields of 'art music' and 'popular music'. When the Hollywood composer John Williams was assigned the conductorship of the orchestra in 1980, he energetically advocated for the inclusion of film-music repertoire, changing Fiedler's approach significantly. This Element offers a historical survey of the pioneering agency that the Boston Pops had under Williams's tenure in the legitimisation of film music as a viable repertoire for concert programmes. The case study is complemented with more general discussions on the aesthetic of film music in concert.

Hearing Film Music Topics outside the Movie Theatre

2021 ◽  
pp. 548-574
Author(s):  
Janet Bourne
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Extraction Method ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Film Scores ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Movie Theatre

This chapter describes a cognitively informed framework based on analogy for theorizing cinematic listening; in this case, it tests the hypothesis that contemporary listeners might use associations learned from film music topics to make sense of western art music (WAM). Using the pastoral topic as a case study, a corpus of film scores from 1980–2014 determines common associations for this topic based on imagery, emotion, and narrative contexts. Then, the chapter outlines potential narratives a modern moviegoer might make by listening “cinematically” to a Sibelius movement. The hypothesis is empirically tested through an experiment where participants record their imagined narratives and images while listening to WAM and film music. The meaning extraction method, a statistical analysis for identifying associational themes, is used to analyze people’s responses.

scholarly journals Vera Lynn on Screen: Popular Music and the ‘People's War’

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATE GUTHRIE
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
A Site ◽  
Second World

AbstractBy the outbreak of the Second World War in Britain, critics had spent several decades negotiating the supposed distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow culture, as recent scholarship has shown. What has received comparatively little attention is how the demands of wartime living changed the stakes of the debate. This article addresses this lacuna, exploring how war invited a reassessment of the relative merits of art and popular music. Perhaps the most iconic British singer of the period, Vera Lynn provides a case study. Focusing on her first film vehicle,We'll Meet Again(1942), I explore how Lynn's character mediated the highbrow/lowbrow conflict – for example, by presenting popular music as a site of community, while disparaging art music for its minority appeal. In so doing, I argue, the film not only promoted Lynn's star persona, but also intervened in a broader debate about the value of entertainment for a nation at war.

Symphony Orchestras and Artist-Prophets: Cultural Isomorphism and the Allocation of Power in Music

1999 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 69-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Osborne
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Power Allocation ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Interesting Case ◽  
Racial Minorities ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Western Art ◽  
The World

The Vienna Philharmonic is the paradigm of the symphony orchestra. No other orchestra in the world has been so intimately involved with the composers and cultural developments that have defined the genre. Despite recent protests against the orchestra, it still excludes women and visible members of racial minorities based on its belief that gender and ethnic uniformity give it aesthetic superiority. The Vienna Philharmonic thus provides an interesting case study for the allocation of power in Western art music. In this article, the author documents the orchestra's ideologies and relates them to a general theory that the allocation of power in artistic expression is often culturally isomorphic with the larger values of the society in which that expression occurs. He then discusses how cultural isomorphism affects concepts of power allocation in the modernist and postmodernist mind-sets.

Moral Masquerades

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-98
Author(s):  
William Cheng
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
The United States ◽  
Hiring Practices ◽  
Reality Show ◽  
Boston Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Hidden Cost ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Musical Excellence

Chapter 3 drops in on a variety of “blind” auditions, commonly upheld as a gold standard in appraisals of musical excellence. Using screens and anonymizing apparatus, judges evaluate auditionees on sound alone, thereby doing right by the music they love. But a hidden cost of such auditions, whether for the Boston Symphony Orchestra or the reality show The Voice, is the wholesale severing of musicianship from human identity at large. With auditionees out of sight, the conceits of impartiality and meritocracy enable all parties to avoid talking about issues of discrimination altogether—that is, why anonymity is desirable or necessary to begin with. A short case study ventures outside the United States to consider the illustrious, nearly all-white and all-male Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Tellingly, however, criticisms of this orchestra have come overwhelmingly from the United States, with music lovers exporting American brands of feminism and social justice to protest the ensemble’s discriminatory hiring practices.

Jaco Pastorius, the Electric Bass, and the Struggle for Jazz Credibility

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 121-138
Author(s):  
Brian F. Wright
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Electric Bass ◽  
Public Persona

This article explores Jaco Pastorius’s efforts to legitimize himself as a jazz electric bassist. Even though the instrument had existed at the margins of jazz for decades, by the 1970s it was overwhelmingly associated with rock and funk music and therefore carried with it the stigmatized connotations of outsider status. Building on the work of Bill Milkowski, Kevin Fellezs, Lawrence Wayte, and Peter Dowdall, I situate Pastorius’s career within the broader context of 1970s jazz fusion. I then analyze how he deliberately used his public persona, his virtuosic technical abilities, the atypical timbre of his fretless electric bass, and his work as a composer and bandleader to vie for acceptance within the jazz tradition. As I argue, Pastorius specifically attempted to establish his jazz credibility through his first two solo albums, initially by disassociating himself from his own instrument, and then by eventually abandoning the musical style that had made him famous. Ultimately, Pastorius’s story serves as a useful case study of the tangible ramifications of authenticity disputes and the complicated ways in which musicians have attempted to navigate contested musical spaces within popular music.

Preparation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Douglas Bomberger
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Copyright Protection ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Sheet Music ◽  
Racial Harassment ◽  
Boston Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Jazz Band ◽  
Philadelphia Orchestra ◽  
The Right

The Fifteenth Regiment’s disciplined response to racial harassment during a two-week stay at Camp Wadsworth, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, earned it the right to be among the first units ordered to France. Nick LaRocca represented the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in a Chicago lawsuit to stop the unauthorized publication of the sheet music to “Livery Stable Blues” by former bandmate “Yellow” Nunez, but the judge ruled that all blues were the same and therefore not subject to copyright protection. The Victor Talking Machine Company, using the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra, made the first recordings employing the full symphony orchestra. The concert seasons of orchestras across the country opened amid intense scrutiny of their repertoire choices and patriotism.

Candy and Drugs for Dinner

2019 ◽  
pp. 572-588
Author(s):  
Sean Guynes
Keyword(s):  
Comic Book ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
Media Production ◽  
Comics Studies ◽  
Contemporary Media ◽  
The Aesthetic

This chapter links the seemingly disparate but deeply interconnected discourses and practices of contemporary media production, genre, aesthetics, and comics. It offers these arguments through a case study of the popular fantasy comic book Rat Queens and in the process demonstrates the critical utility to comics studies of reading genre, aesthetics, and industry together. The chapter reads Rat Queens through Sianne Ngai’s conception of the zany, cute, and interesting, showing how each of these categories is part of the aesthetic logic of the series, while also showing how each performs or critiques the series’ (superficial) investment in gender politics and the fantasy genre.

scholarly journals The reasons women choose and stay in a geology major: a qualitative multi-case analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ron E. Gray ◽  
Alexis T. Riche ◽  
Isabel J. Shinnick-Gordon ◽  
James C. Sample
Keyword(s):  
Role Models ◽  
Critical Incident ◽  
Earth Science ◽  
Time Period ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Data Source ◽  
Introductory Classes ◽  
Iterative Coding ◽  
As Relationship

AbstractDespite earning half of all science and engineering undergraduate degrees between 2007 and 2016 in the USA, women were awarded only 39% of earth science degrees in the same time period. In order to better understand why women are both choosing and staying in geology programs, we conducted a multi-case study of nine current female undergraduate geology majors at a large public university in the USA within a department that is at gender parity among its undergraduate majors. The main data source was audio-recorded critical incident interviews of each participant. Data from the interviews were analyzed through an iterative coding process using codes adapted from previous studies that focused on factors both internal and external to the department. The students said that personal interests, influence by others outside of the department, and introductory classes attracted them to the geology program, but once declared, departmental factors such as relationship with faculty caused them to stay. We also found an emphasis on female role models, especially those teaching introductory courses. We believe this study offers important insights into the ways in which factors leading to recruitment and retention play out in the lived experiences of female geology majors.

An Ethicolegal Analysis of Involuntary Treatment for Opioid Use Disorders

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 735-740
Author(s):  
Farhad R. Udwadia ◽  
Judy Illes
Keyword(s):  
Police Officers ◽  
Standard Of Care ◽  
Opioid Use ◽  
Ethical Concerns ◽  
Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Law ◽  
Court Mandated ◽  
Ethical Critique

Supply-side interventions such as prescription drug monitoring programs, “pill mill” laws, and dispensing limits have done little to quell the burgeoning opioid crisis. An increasingly popular demand-side alternative to these measures – now adopted by 38 jurisdictions in the USA and 7 provinces in Canada — is court-mandated involuntary commitment and treatment. In Massachusetts, for example, Part I, Chapter 123, Section 35 of the state's General Laws allows physicians, spouses, relatives, and police officers to petition a court to involuntarily commit and treat a person whose alcohol or drug abuse poses a likelihood of serious harm. This paper explores the ethical underpinnings of this law as a case study for others. First, we highlight the procedural and substantive standards of Section 35 and evaluate the application of the law in practice, including the frequency with which it has been invoked and outcomes. We then use this background to inform an ethical critique of the law. Specifically, we argue that the infringement of autonomy and privacy associated with involuntary intervention under Section 35 is not currently justified on the grounds of a lack of evidenced benefits and a risk of significant of harm. Further ethical concerns also arise from a lack of standard of care provided under the Section 35 pathway. Based on this analysis, we advance four recommendations for change to mitigate these ethical shortcomings.

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