Guide to the Contemporary Etudes for Contrabass

1985 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-46
Author(s):  
Bertram Turetzky ◽  
Barney Childs ◽  
Donald Erb ◽  
Tom Johnson ◽  
Roger Ruggeri

“One purpose of any professional association is to keep its members informed of new developments and to give them an opportunity to master new skills, or at least to understand them.”—Margaret Farish It is appropriate to recall these words of educator Farish — then ASTA Publications Chairman —who pronounced them as she expedited the ASTA Contemporary Etudes Project. The first phase of the project was completed as ASTA prepared and published, in 1982, with violinist Eugene Gratovitch as project editor, 16 Contemporary Violin Etudes for Study and Performance. Robert Culver succeeded Margaret Farish as ASTA Publications Chairman, and continued with the project. With this issue of AST, we announce the publication of the second volume commissioned toward this goal — Contemporary Etudes for Contrabass. With performance notes by project editor Bertram Turetzky, with music written by bassist Turetzky and composers Barney Childs, Donald Erb and Tom Johnson, and with the acceptance you will see noted on these pages, we feel sure the volume will serve its purpose. Contemporary Etudes for Contrabass will become a creative doorway for bassists moving into the twenty-first century; it will become a standard part of the learning — and performing — repertoire. The etude book is handsomely designed, spiral-bound, generously laid out in a 9”xl2” format for ease of reading, with 78 pages of music and performance notes. The music is written at a level for bassists who already have the ability to perform much of the literature; however, the forms, the ideas and the music should be of interest to any educator and any student of the bass. Priced at $12.95, the book is available through Theodore Presser, Presser Place, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010. Look for a publications order blank elsewhere in this issue. [J.A.]

Modern Drama ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 350-372
Author(s):  
Jeff Casey

Tania El Khoury’s audience-of-one performance piece As Far as My Fingertips Take Me and Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s play The Jungle, produced and developed by Good Chance, are twenty-first-century productions that foreground the medial affordances of performance art and drama to foreground Western audiences’ relationships and responses to refugees. I propose a taxonomy of the strategies used in these two works as a model for analyzing theatre and performance about refugees. These strategies are classified in terms of the responses they seek to elicit from the audience, and my analysis explores some of the tactics used to achieve these goals. Remedial strategies counter harmful stereotypes about refugees; transformative strategies challenge and reshape basic conceptions of self, other, nation, and citizenship; and ethotic strategies reorient the audience to consider their relationship with refugees, particularly with respect to their disparate identity positions, mutual responsibility, and interdependence. Fingertips and The Jungle are substantially different artworks but are able to achieve similar results by utilizing the different affordances of their respective mediums. Thus, the taxonomy of strategies provides a more systematic and precise way of analyzing how refugee drama and performance achieve their goals. It avoids being overly prescriptive in how these goals should be achieved and instead recognizes how exploiting different tactics and medial affordances can advocate for refugees and other migrants.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Haiman Liu

<p>The images of maidens in Italian opera and German lieder from the period 1800-1850 are vivid. In the plots of the operas and the scenes and stories of the lieder almost invariably these characters focus enthusiastically on heartfelt love. This exegesis explores the relationship between the expression of love by unmarried women in selected lieder and opera of the first half of the nineteenth century and performance of these works by the young soprano in the twenty-first century. In the period when these songs and operas were written, performers of lieder would often have been of a similar age to the maiden characters portrayed in the songs, and in the case of Italian opera at the time, the singers who created such roles were usually in their twenties or early thirties. As a young soprano myself, in my study I consider some questions which are relevant for twenty-first century female singers who choose to perform these nineteenth-century portrayals of virgin characters. The figures in the works I have selected to study display a wide variety of personalities, moods and emotions, from the tenacious wild rose in Schubert’s ‘Heidenröslein’, to his passionate Gretchen and the melancholic Amina in Bellini’s La Sonnambula. I consider how the soprano may express the different emotions involved and approach performing young maiden characters such as these, whose experiences of life and status in society may be substantially removed from twenty-first century experiences.   In order to address these questions, I examine the selected song and aria texts in terms of the relationship between the content of the stories and the characters, as well as analyzing the vocal skills that can be used and vocal effects that may be applied when shaping these roles according to the music as written. In addition, I combine the background to the story and the plot with the musical markings in selected phrases to explore the emotional variety of the characters so as to interpret the deeper significance in the compositions. Through learning and performing these particular pieces I have explored the vocal techniques which are required in singing them from a practical perspective and this enables me to contribute insights I have gained to the general understanding of the skills required for this particular area of the repertoire. Having chosen repertoire for this study which combines Italian opera arias and lieder, and I also consider how the differences I have found in the vocal works may reflect their respective genres and distinguish the skills required for each. Through writing about my own research into the performance of these works, I provide new insights and ideas about these maiden characters which may be applicable to any young sopranos who sing repertoire from this period, and useful for their own vocal perfo</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 153-171
Author(s):  
Malcolm Gillies

Composer complete critical editions originated in the mid nineteenth-century and remain an important contribution to twenty-first-century scholarship and performance practice. This discussion article, commissioned by the Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, uses the Béla Bartók Complete Critical Edition, inaugurated in 2016, as the basis of reconsideration of the musicological, performance-related, publishing and business aspects of today's complete editions of composers’ works. Gillies looks at the characteristics of the first two Bartók edition volumes, For Children and Concerto for Orchestra, particularly their approach to the composer's use of notation, the representation of their geneses, and some interesting issues about variants, versions, alternatives, replacements, arrangements and deletions. He also considers what a dozen Henle Urtexts, issued on the basis of this complete critical edition's research, seek to present for performers, particularly in their use of Bartók's own recordings as exemplars as well as the presentation in his folk-music treatises of melodies on which these pieces are based. Gillies's consideration also reveals some of the bases of the Bartók complete edition in the post-war ‘Neue Ausgabe’ critical series, with some later influence from Schoenberg and Debussy editions. After looking at changes in format and related products, including thematic catalogues, and the business models that underpin many complete critical editions, Gillies evaluates the risks that may face the Bartók edition in the future, and suggests how they might best be mitigated.


2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 1066-1068
Author(s):  
David Mutimer

Cyber-Diplomacy: Managing Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century, Evan H. Potter, ed., Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002, xii, 208.We are repeatedly told that we live in a revolutionary age, a time in which dramatic new developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs) will fundamentally transform the ways in which we live and work. Even the collapse of the dot.com bubble in 2000 has not much dampened the spirits of the techno-utopians. Given these often-exaggerated claims, I approached Cyber-Diplomacy with some trepidation, as the editor cites Marshall McLuhan's ‘global village’ in the first line of his introduction, and speaks of an information revolution in his second paragraph. However, as I pressed on in the text I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the editor and authors of this short volume are well aware of the dangers of overstatement in relation to ICTs, and work very hard throughout to avoid techno-utopianism. Instead, the authors attempt to take a fairly sober look at “how diplomacy is adapting to the new global information order” (7).


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Haiman Liu

<p>The images of maidens in Italian opera and German lieder from the period 1800-1850 are vivid. In the plots of the operas and the scenes and stories of the lieder almost invariably these characters focus enthusiastically on heartfelt love. This exegesis explores the relationship between the expression of love by unmarried women in selected lieder and opera of the first half of the nineteenth century and performance of these works by the young soprano in the twenty-first century. In the period when these songs and operas were written, performers of lieder would often have been of a similar age to the maiden characters portrayed in the songs, and in the case of Italian opera at the time, the singers who created such roles were usually in their twenties or early thirties. As a young soprano myself, in my study I consider some questions which are relevant for twenty-first century female singers who choose to perform these nineteenth-century portrayals of virgin characters. The figures in the works I have selected to study display a wide variety of personalities, moods and emotions, from the tenacious wild rose in Schubert’s ‘Heidenröslein’, to his passionate Gretchen and the melancholic Amina in Bellini’s La Sonnambula. I consider how the soprano may express the different emotions involved and approach performing young maiden characters such as these, whose experiences of life and status in society may be substantially removed from twenty-first century experiences.   In order to address these questions, I examine the selected song and aria texts in terms of the relationship between the content of the stories and the characters, as well as analyzing the vocal skills that can be used and vocal effects that may be applied when shaping these roles according to the music as written. In addition, I combine the background to the story and the plot with the musical markings in selected phrases to explore the emotional variety of the characters so as to interpret the deeper significance in the compositions. Through learning and performing these particular pieces I have explored the vocal techniques which are required in singing them from a practical perspective and this enables me to contribute insights I have gained to the general understanding of the skills required for this particular area of the repertoire. Having chosen repertoire for this study which combines Italian opera arias and lieder, and I also consider how the differences I have found in the vocal works may reflect their respective genres and distinguish the skills required for each. Through writing about my own research into the performance of these works, I provide new insights and ideas about these maiden characters which may be applicable to any young sopranos who sing repertoire from this period, and useful for their own vocal perfo</p>


Adaptation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernadette Luciano ◽  
Steele Burrow

Abstract This article explores Italian filmmaker Antonietta De Lillo’s cinematic adaptation of Franz Kafka’s short story ‘A Report to an Academy’ in which she incorporates elements from both literary and visual media to create a ‘re-performance’ of an earlier performance, that of Kafka’s Rotpeter. De Lillo through the extensive use of gesture, montage, shift of focus, and other cinematic devices, interrupts and disrupts the narrative ‘report’ thereby ‘shocking’ the viewer in Brechtian fashion into an awareness of the fragility of identity and of the ‘ape’ nature that remains in all of us. De Lillo’s addition of an interview to Kafka’s monologue represents an innovation in Kafka adaptation and within this framework her first person/ape narrator Signor Rotpeter is allowed to respond to what she terms our ‘loss of humanity’. He provides first person/ape evidence of this loss both verbally and through his gestural complex, addressing the disconnect between young and old, the cruelty toward animals, and the violence of everyday life, prompting the viewer to reflect on the lives of those who, like the narrator Rotpeter, are desperately seeking a ‘way out’.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-356
Author(s):  
Alison J. Miller

The paintings of Gajin Fujita (b. 1972) express the urban Asian diasporic experience in vivid images filled with historic and contemporary cultural references. Creating an amalgamation of contemporary sports figures, hip-hop culture, historic Japanese painting conventions, street art, and the visual language of Edo Japan (1600–1868), Fujita reflects his diverse experiences as a citizen of twenty-first century Los Angeles in his paintings. This article introduces the artist and provides a nuanced examination of his works vis-à-vis an understanding of the larger issues addressed in both Edo artistic practice and contemporary street art culture. By specifying the agents of power and performance in Fujita’s works, a greater understanding of the hybrid world of his colourful graphic paintings can be found.


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