‘Can You Still Keep Your Balance?’: Keith Emerson's anxiety of influence, style change, and the road to prog superstardom

Popular Music ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
AKITSUGU KAWAMOTO
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
The Road ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Anxiety Of Influence ◽  
Progressive Rock ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Shed Light

Harold Bloom's theory of poetic influence has been applied to studies of Western art music, but rarely to studies of popular music. This article investigates the applicability of his theory to the music of British progressive rock keyboardist Keith Emerson. It will be argued that, while Emerson's overtly intertextual music for The Nice cannot be well illuminated with this theory, Bloom can help us explore and interpret some delicate aesthetic aspects of the important style change from The Nice to Emerson, Lake and Palmer (ELP). Emerson felt the anxiety of The Nice's influence upon ELP, changed his style because of it, and led the new group to prog rock superstardom. Bloom's six revisionary ratios can indeed shed light on those subtle qualities which were necessary for a progressive rock ideology to be ‘mainstreamed’ and sold as commodity – qualities that resulted from a process of ‘misreading’.

Lifeblood: Funding popular music education in Wales

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olivia Gable ◽  
James Hannam
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Service Provision ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Potential Impact ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Informal Settings

This study investigates the funding of popular music education (PME) in Wales at a time when the Welsh government is examining its current Music Service provision. Our research considers the potential impact of this move on PME in Wales, alongside analysis of the availability of state-funded PME across the four UK nations. Music curricula and funding have historically favoured western art music (WEAM), with PME often happening in more informal settings. However, this situation has changed in recent years, with both state and private funders now providing more support for PME in Wales. Our research includes interviews with both funders and grantees offering PME activities across the country, finding that the terminology used to describe PME varies widely between organizations. We also observe that Welsh organizations face challenges in both applying for and receiving funding.

THE NON-CANONIC STATUS OF MOZART’S CANONS

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
NEAL ZASLAW
Keyword(s):  
Art Music ◽  
Orchestral Music ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Circle Of Friends ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Peculiar Nature

Mozart's canons are rather inadequately represented in the Köchel catalogue and the Neue Mozart Ausgabe. The same may be said about other music for his immediate circle of friends, colleagues and patrons, as well as his dance music and his contributions to pasticcios. Neglect of these ‘minor’ genres perhaps arises at least in part from anachronistic paradigms, for instance ‘masterpieces for posterity’. And the canons suffer additionally from the peculiar nature of their sources and transmission, from uncertainty about the position of canons in the ‘canon’ of Western art music and probably also from embarrassment over some of Mozart’s texts. Mozart’s canons have been studied not only less often than his operatic, church, chamber and orchestral music, but also less well.

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 The Evolution of GIM Programming

2010 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Meadows
Keyword(s):  
Art Music ◽  
Music Programs ◽  
Western Art ◽  
The Core ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Music Programming ◽  
Bonny Method

This article traces the origins and evolution of the music programs central to the Bonny Method (also called GIM or BMGIM). These programmed, sequenced western art music selections shape the core experience of GIM, eliciting intra-, inter-, and trans-personal phenomena through a range of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic feelings, images, memories, and metaphoric fantasies. Bonny’s original programs will be described and discussed in relation to GIM, and developments in programming will demonstrate how the Bonny Method programs have been expanded, including adaptations to music programming and selection.

Playing for the Big Time: Musicians, Concerts, and Reputation-Building in Cincinnati, 1872–82

2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-165
Author(s):  
Karen Ahlquist
Keyword(s):  
National Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Institution Building ◽  
Civic Leaders ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Significant Achievement ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
High Level

Like many midwestern cities in the nineteenth century, Cincinnati, Ohio, was home to large numbers of German immigrant musicians, among them the founders of the Cincinnati Grand Orchestra in 1872. Their model of musician-based organization eventually ran counter to the prestige-building potential of Western art music, which made it attractive to local civic leaders determined to earn respect for their city at a national level. The successful Cincinnati May festivals beginning in 1873 under the artistic leadership of conductor Theodore Thomas brought the city the desired renown. But the musical monumentality needed for large festival performances could not be obtained locally, leaving Cincinnati's players with opportunities to perform at a high level but without a way to define their performance as a significant achievement in the world of high art. Although their orchestra was ultimately unsuccessful, however, these musicians demonstrated an agency that transcends their historical obscurity and helps incorporate aesthetic and practical aspects of institution-building into the social arguments common to discussions of Western art music in the United States.

‘The Timpani Beats Just Hit on My Heart!’ Music, Memory, and Diplomacy in the Philadelphia Orchestra's 1973 China Tour

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-418
Author(s):  
BESS XINTONG LIU
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Western Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Musical Diplomacy

AbstractThis article examines the underexplored history of the 1973 Philadelphia Orchestra China tour and retheorizes twentieth-century musical diplomacy as a process of ritualization. As a case study, I consult bilingual archives and incorporate interviews with participants in this event, which brings together individual narratives and public opinions. By contextualizing this musical diplomacy in the Cold War détente and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, I argue for the complex set of relations mobilized by Western art music in 1973. This tour first created a sense of co-dependency between musicians and politicians. It also engaged Chinese audiences by revitalizing pre-Cultural Revolution sonic memories. Second, I argue that the significance of the 1973 Orchestra tour lies in the ritualization of Western art music as diplomatic etiquette, based on further contextualization of this event in the historical trajectory of Sino-US relations and within the entrenched Chinese ideology of liyue (ritual and music).

Early Country Music

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-42
Author(s):  
Stephanie Vander Wel
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Musical Styles

Chapter 1 explores the theatrical context of 1930s country music on radio, specifically daily and weekly shows, including the National Barn Dance, on Chicago’s WLS. Similar to vaudeville, radio programmed the diverse strands of vernacular expression with music (including Western art music) that pointed to the high and popular aesthetics of the middle-class mainstream. With an emphasis on reception, this chapter demonstrates that listeners debated the merits of early country music as well as other musical styles and genres with a class-based understanding of aesthetics. The syncretic nature and theatrical characters of early country music (such as the singing mountaineer, the crooning cowboy, and the rustic buffoon) fit radio’s attempts to negotiate the crossing and blurring of the serious and the popular, the urban and the rural, and the sentimental and the parodic. Thus, through the technology of radio, early country music first secured a place in the American consciousness by rubbing against other styles and genres that transgressed cultural and musical divides.

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