Studio Production in Contemporary Vietnam

2021 ◽  
pp. 133-155
Author(s):  
Lonán Ó Briain

Chapter 5 examines how and why the VOV music ensembles are keeping their red music relevant in contemporary Vietnam. In the reform era, the ensembles were separated into two groups: the national or ethnic music ensemble (nhóm nhạc dân tộc), comprised of traditional instrumentalists and folk singers, and the new music ensemble (nhóm nhạc mới), which performs Vietnamese songs and instrumental music composed for choir and chamber orchestra. Drawing on fieldwork at the radio studios in Hanoi, this research provides an ethnographic account of contemporary music production processes at the station. The first case study examines how recordings by the traditional music ensemble, a versatile group of instrumentalists and folk singers, represent and reify the three major cultural regions of Vietnam. The second explores how productions by the new music ensemble, which reference the musical styles of DRV revolutionary opera, memorialize government achievements, valorize heroes of the past, and are made relevant to the contemporary political context through references to current issues such as territorial claims in the South China Sea. Rather than dismiss these musicians as political puppets, the chapter investigates their creative, pragmatic approaches to the constraints and contradictions of life in a (post)socialist state. Meanwhile, culture brokers working at these national broadcasters are leading the politicization of this intangible cultural heritage, a process they justify with the language of cultural sustainability.

Tempo ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 58 (228) ◽  
pp. 61-62
Author(s):  
John Godfrey

Big Noise – heard in London on 21 November and repeated at the Dome (Corn Exchange) in Brighton on the 22nd – was a collaboration between the highly idiosyncratic New Music ensembles Orkest de Volharding (Holland) and Icebreaker (UK). The former was established by the amazingly influential Dutch composer Louis Andriessen: reacting against the elitist music of his youth, he saw the need for a new type of Art-music ensemble which could travel into the streets and play music with a broad appeal. Borrowing from the model of Dutch street bands (the equivalent, perhaps, of the UK's brass bands), jazz of the 1920s, Minimal music coming out of America and the European avant-garde, Andriessen created an ensemble and a language with an overt non-elitist agenda.


2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
KAILAN R. RUBINOFF

AbstractThe Notenkrakersactie of 17 November 1969 was a landmark event for Dutch musical life: a group of composers disrupted a concert of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, protesting against the orchestra's lack of contemporary music programming. Scholars have tended to interpret this protest as a watershed for the avant-garde, but historical performance – not just contemporary music – proved to be a significant beneficiary. Early Musicians, like New Musicians, had common political goals and appealed to the youth counterculture. Ensuing reforms to the federal arts subsidy system, state-funded music schools, and conservatories in the 1970s were also advantageous for the Dutch Early Music movement. During the welfare retrenchment of the 1980s and the subsidy restructuring of the 1990s, Early Music ensembles economized and had greater success with mainstream recording companies and audiences than new music groups. Nearly forty years after the Notenkrakersactie, traditional symphony orchestras have less influence on Dutch musical life, but recent cutbacks to arts subsidies threaten contemporary music and historical performance alike.


2018 ◽  
Vol 143 (1) ◽  
pp. 211-232
Author(s):  
Mareli Stolp

ABSTRACTThis article explores the content, scope and impact of an annual contemporary music festival in South Africa, the first of which was presented in 2000 by New Music South Africa (NMSA), the South African chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). It explores the New Music Indabas of 2000–02 against the background of the political and cultural transformations that characterized South Africa, especially in the aftermath of the end of apartheid. Research into the archive of NMSA provided an entry point into understanding South African cultural, social and political life in the early years of the country's democracy. The ‘separate development’ rhetoric of the totalitarian apartheid regime, in power from 1948 to 1994, prevented cultural exchange and connection between musics and musicians in South Africa for decades; this article explores the ways in which the New Music Indabas attempted to right these historical imbalances, and to forge new directions for South African art-music production and practice.


2021 ◽  
pp. 104837132110344
Author(s):  
Jason Fick ◽  
Chris Bulgren

Increased availability of tablets at home and in classrooms provides educators access to a powerful tool for music instruction. Music production lessons on tablets offer alternate approaches to developing music literacies while teaching valuable technology skills. These activities are ideal for general music education because they align with contemporary music practices and are adaptable to a variety of learning environments (in person, remote, and hybrid). This article will present a model for tablet-based music production instruction in the general music classroom that aligns with the National Core Arts Standards and accompanying process components grounded in five essential skills: sequencing, recording, editing, effects processing, and mixing.


Author(s):  
Chong Lee Suan

Objective - This paper examines Dusun Tindal's instrumental music practice within the context of modernity of the society in Tenghilan, a town that is located on northwest Sabah. The study looks into the driving modish musical styles and forms in the root of the ancient traditions especially in the aspects of musical natures, music compositions, musical functions, and philosophies. Methodology/Technique - The contemporary musical ensemble is a newly developed tradition combining a mixture of traditional and western musical instruments and styles. Due to the new mindsets and tastes of their young people, as well as to open up opportunities to venture into the exotic blooms of globalized musical festivals and tourism, their music is manifold and endeavoring in captive of the hearts of the global audience. Findings - The contemporary musical ensemble is a newly developed tradition combining a mixture of traditional and western musical instruments and styles. Due to the new mindsets and tastes of their young people, as well as to open up opportunities to venture into the exotic blooms of globalized musical festivals and tourism, their music is manifold and endeavoring in captive of the hearts of the global audience. Novelty - This study attempts to disclose the grounds and rationales behind the persistence of the Dusun Tindals in upholding their ancient musical essence until today Type of Paper - Empirical Keywords: Bamboo Orchestra; Dusun Tindal Contemporary Music; Dusun Tindal Music


Tempo ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 57 (224) ◽  
pp. 22-38
Author(s):  
John Warnaby

There is a school of thought in Britain which suggests that the rigours of modernist composition resulted in sterility and uniformity. Yet in the German-speaking world, composers have explored a wide range of expressive possibilities within a modernist sensibility. They have proved that the discipline of modernism is capable of stimulating genuine individuality, and over the past 30 years, Nicolaus A. Huber has emerged as one of the most distinctively radical, yet equally recognizable personalities on the German contemporary music scene. In contrast to Lachenmann, Rihm, or Höller, Huber has not attempted anything on the largest scale, but in the spheres of orchestral, chamber and instrumental music, he has produced a substantial body of work of considerable originality and dramatic power, frequently involving theatrical elements.


2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 749-793 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Robin

Between 2013 and 2015, the ensemble yMusic collaborated with graduate student composers in a residency at Duke University. This article positions the residency as a result of the transformation of the university and the new-music ensemble from a technocratic Cold War paradigm to their contemporary status under the market- and branding-oriented logics of neoliberalism. The works written for yMusic by the Duke composers were deeply informed by the ensemble's musical brand, including its idiosyncratic instrumentation, preexisting repertory, collaborative ethos, and relationship to popular music. In accounting for the impact of these institutional developments on the production of musical works, this article argues that the economic and ideological practices of neoliberalism have discernible aesthetic consequences for American new music. Given the key role of the ensemble and the university in the contemporary music landscape, the issues raised by my ethnographic and historical analysis have significant implications for new music in the twenty-first century, and for the way composers work in the United States and beyond.


TURBA ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-84

This article examines the practice of concert organization from an ethical perspective. By examining the field in relation to the notion of value, it explores the processes by which curators produce live acts, and the issues they face when they do so. The central argument traces a trajectory from the material to the immaterial aspects. The first part (Context and Value) shows how financial and cultural matters are embedded into live music production, and frames curatorship as the articulation of their co-dependent relations. The second part (Praxis) explores how music curators breathe value creation in their work context, by comparing interviews with the directors of Venice Biennale Musica, London Contemporary Music Festival, and No-Nation. The third part (Risk and Ethics) introduces risk-taking as a unit of value measurement, and points out the force of the curatorial in its power to confer value.


Industry ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 190-220
Author(s):  
William Robin

In the 1990s, Bang on a Can jumped from releasing albums on the academic label Composers Recordings, Inc. to signing a contract with the major label Sony Classical. Their path emblematized an unusual moment in recording contemporary music: after Nonesuch’s 1992 recording of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 became extraordinarily popular, major labels looked to contemporary music as a means to reach new listeners. Whereas new music had previously been the provenance of noncommercial labels like CRI, major labels began investing in new composers and new institutions like Bang on a Can in the hopes of turning new profits. From Sony, Bang on a Can jumped to Philips’s Point Music and released their rendition of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, an album designed to reach new rock audience; and from there, amidst the industry tumult of the late 1990s, they struck out on their own with the independent label Cantaloupe Music.


2021 ◽  
pp. 134-170
Author(s):  
Katharine Ellis

Bands, chamber ensembles, and (especially) orchestral societies acted as indicators of the musical maturity of urban centers. Together with conservatoires and opera houses, orchestras formed centers of gravity often overseen by town councils as an interconnected unit or as a set of overlapping units. A relative lack of state regulation resulted in less focus on centralization and more on internal organization (including dealing with the progressive unionization of musicians), rivalries between concert societies, and distinctive patterns in repertory selection and programming. Nevertheless, a strong touring circuit for composer-conductors, the soft power of Parisian institutions (notably the Concerts Populaires of Jules Pasdeloup), and town council demands for standard repertory rather than new music, meant that regionalist particularism had little part to play. Angers, Bordeaux, Montpellier, Nancy, and Toulouse provide case-studies of the intersections of local politics, concert administration and orchestral professionalization; Lyon, Lille, and Strasbourg emerge as centers with an especially distinctive mix of chamber and orchestral music, especially during the Third Republic.


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