scholarly journals Normalizing the Abnormal: Disability in Music and Music Theory

2006 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOSEPH N. STRAUS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Cultural Construction ◽  
Significant Shift ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Theoretical Approaches

Abstract The emerging interdisciplinary field of disability studies takes as its subject matter the historical, social, and cultural construction of disability. After a brief introduction to disability studies, this article explores the interconnected histories of disability and music as they are manifested in three theoretical approaches to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Western art music (the musical Formenlehre and the tonal theories of Schoenberg and Schenker) and in three works by Beethoven and Schubert. Around the turn of the nineteenth century in Western Europe, disability began to be understood not as something natural and permanent but rather as a deviation from a normative standard, and thus subject to possible remediation. In the same time and place, art music also underwent a significant shift (reflected in the more recent theoretical traditions that have grown up around it), one that involved an increasing interest in rhetorically marked deviations from diatonic and formal normativity, and the possibility of their narrative recuperation. The article describes ways in which language about music and music itself may be understood both to represent and construct disability. More generally, it suggests that disability should take its place alongside nationality, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation as a significant category for cultural analysis, including the analysis of music.

THE DISCOURSE OF SOUND

Tempo ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 70 (277) ◽  
pp. 5-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Kaltenecker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Compositional Styles ◽  
Technical Features ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractThis article offers a short overview of the development of listening theories concerning Western art music since the end of the eighteenth century. Referring to Michel Foucault, I consider such theories as discourses which produce ‘power effects', such as the training of listening attitudes, or the construction of specific spaces, such as the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. During the eighteenth century, predominant discourses considered musical pieces as orations and, since the nineteenth century, as complex organisms or structures. In the last third of the twentieth century a focus on sound, evinced for instance by the field of ‘sound studies', has produced a new configuration that dissolves the prevailing model of structural listening. This perspective may shed light on some technical features of contemporary compositional styles, which I examine by considering the use of melodies, gestures and loops in two compositions by Fausto Romitelli and Simon Steen-Andersen.

Major Choral Organizations in Late Nineteenth-Century Melbourne

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-28
Author(s):  
Thérèse Radic
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Professional Musicians ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Difficult Situation ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Musical Skills ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Law

Australian musical life was founded and sustained for over 150 years by a particular class of displaced British and European professional musicians, mostly men, who brought with them what is now known as Western art music. At the time of Australia's foundation, a number of British musicians (many of them composers at the rudimentary level expected of musicians of the day), unable to find work where Italians and Germans were preferred, opted for migration to the colonies in the hope of trading their way out of a difficult situation. Some took ship to avoid the law (the debt-ridden composer Isaac Nathan for example), some came as farmers or joined the gold rushes, only to fail and have to turn to their musical skills again to earn a living (William Vincent Wallace, composer of one of the nineteenth century's most popular operas, Maritana, comes to mind).

scholarly journals Bio-political Perspectives on the Expression of People with Disabilities in Music Therapy: Case Examples

2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hiroko Miyake
Keyword(s):  
Music Therapy ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Medical Model ◽  
Cultural Construction ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
Case Examples ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Political Model ◽  
Therapy Field

The burgeoning interdisciplinary field of disability studies has understood disability not as medical pathology, but rather as a social and cultural construction. It involves political attempts to move the dividing line between dis/ability, ab/normal, as well as gender, race, or ethnicity, from the perspective of “claiming disability” (Linton, 1998) as a positive political and cultural identity. However, in the music therapy field, disability studies has been generally ignored because music therapy has traditionally been ensconced in a medical model rather than a socio-cultural or political model. In this article, I will discuss the issue of power relationships inherent in music therapy by referring to recent literature in disability studies.

Modernism and Film Music in Latin America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Avila
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Entertainment Education ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Push Forward ◽  
Mass Entertainment

Modernism in Latin America was, as in Europe, a movement that began as a reaction to late-nineteenth-century artistic currents, primarily in visual and plastic art, literature, and music. It broke down past conceptions of art and sought to find innovation and purpose in other areas utilizing nontraditional means. While waves of modernism flourished in Western Europe at the turn of the century—for example, Dadaism, Futurism, Expressionism—currents also hit the American continents. New advances in technology (particularly the development of telephones, cinema, and sound recordings), new modes of transportation, and industry helped push forward modernist ideologies through a reexamination and interpretation of reality that moved away from traditional forms. The burgeoning practice of cinema provided new juxtapositions of visual and musical art structures that served as a novel conduit for mass entertainment, education, and nationalist projects. Within Latin America, particularly in the larger film industries of Mexico and Argentina, cinema offered new opportunities for musical innovation that juxtaposed popular and folkloric music with practices from the Western art music tradition.

scholarly journals Theatrical Marginalia: Pierre Baillot and the Prototype of the Modern Performer

2020 ◽  
Vol 101 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-299
Author(s):  
Fabio Morabito
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Instrumental Performance ◽  
Professional Identities ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Musical Notation ◽  
Western Art ◽  
The Core ◽  
Musical Event ◽  
Paris Conservatoire

Abstract In Western art music, the idea of the professional performer as a versatile interpreter of someone else’s music consolidated around the turn of the nineteenth century. The institutionalization of instrumental training in dedicated schools (such as the Paris Conservatoire, established in 1795) favoured an increasing specialization of composers and performers in their respective tasks. Scholars have often traced the development of these modern professional identities to fundamental innovations in the fabric and conceptions of musical notation. The newly detailed scores by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven specify articulation, phrasing, and even fingerings, suggesting a growing authority of the composer over the performer’s moves, and the score itself as an increasingly important focus of the musical event (scripting both what performers should do and what listeners, ideally, should discern). Rather than focusing on how music was notated by composers, this article proposes to explore the perspective of the performers handling it: how they understood their role in bringing the score to life, and the realms of commentary they inspired in Parisian debates about the progress of the art and the mechanization of performance in the early nineteenth century. At the core of the Paris Conservatoire’s universal pedagogical project, the violinist Pierre Baillot (1771–1842) devised a prototype professional figure for the future of instrumental performance across genres: not a puppet-musician controlled via invisible strings, but an architect of musical impersonations, able to stimulate images or stories in the listeners’ minds and leave them theatrically spellbound.

Music after the Fall

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War

By the start of the 21st century many of the foundations of postwar culture had disappeared: Europe had been rebuilt and, as the EU, had become one of the world’s largest economies; the United States’ claim to global dominance was threatened; and the postwar social democratic consensus was being replaced by market-led neoliberalism. Most importantly of all, the Cold War was over, and the World Wide Web had been born. Music After The Fall considers contemporary musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing on theories from the other arts, in particular art and architecture, it expands the definition of Western art music to include forms of composition, experimental music, sound art, and crossover work from across the spectrum, inside and beyond the concert hall. Each chapter considers a wide range of composers, performers, works, and institutions are considered critically to build up a broad and rich picture of the new music ecosystem, from North American string quartets to Lebanese improvisers, from South American electroacoustic studios to pianos in the Australian outback. A new approach to the study of contemporary music is developed that relies less on taxonomies of style and technique, and more on the comparison of different responses to common themes, among them permission, fluidity, excess, and loss.

Prerequisites for the reforms of the Russian Empire in the 1860s: a historical analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10-2) ◽  
pp. 176-184
Author(s):  
Dmitry Nechevin ◽  
Leonard Kolodkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Political Economic

The article is devoted to the prerequisites of the reforms of the Russian Empire of the sixties of the nineteenth century, their features, contradictions: the imperial status of foreign policy and the lagging behind the countries of Western Europe in special political, economic relations. The authors studied the activities of reformers and the nobility on the peasant question, as well as legitimate conservatism.

Tiki Taane’s With Strings Attached: Alive & Orchestrated and postcolonial identity politics in New Zealand

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oli Wilson
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Performance Practice ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Performance Group ◽  
Representational Practices ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
Television Documentary

This chapter explores how the New Zealand popular music artist Tiki Taane subverts dominant representational practices concerning New Zealand cultural identity by juxtaposing musical ensembles, one a ‘colonial’ orchestra, the other a distinctively Māori (indigenous New Zealand) kapa haka performance group, in his With Strings Attached: Alive & Orchestrated album and television documentary, released in 2014. Through this collaboration, Tiki reframes the colonial experience as an amalgam of reappropriated cultural signifiers that enraptures those that identify with colonization and colonizing experiences, and in doing so, expresses a form of authorial agency. The context of Tiki’s subversive approach is contextualized by examining postcolonial representational practices surrounding Māori culture and orchestral hybrids in the western art music tradition, and through a discussion about the ways the performance practice called kapa haka is represented through existing scholarly studies of Māori music.

Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Gold Standard ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Concert Programs

This chapter starts by revisiting a now-familiar text: James H. Johnson’s book Listening in Paris (1995). On the basis of concert and opera reviews, images, and the paratexts of concert programs, Ellis reframes Johnson’s question “When did audiences fall silent?” as “Where and why did audiences fail to fall silent?” Multilayered answers show how (1) many of the noisier phenomena of the eighteenth century resurfaced in new guises from the 1850s onward; (2) the democratization of art music took place in contexts that could not always impose “religious” listening; and (3) there was a resurgent demand, possibly concomitant, for music as pure entertainment in venues where silence was neither required nor expected. The chapter argues that although attentive listening was a gold standard during the latter two-thirds of the nineteenth century in Paris, practice rarely lived up to such expectations, and it was in effect a niche activity.

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