scholarly journals Art music, perfection and power: Critical dialogues with classical music culture in contemporary cinema

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Pontara
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Musical Work ◽  
Music Culture ◽  
Free Standing ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
High Standards ◽  
Relations Of Power

During the last three decades music scholars have provided a growing amount of critical accounts of what they contend is a fundamental conceptual support behind the performance of classical music, namely the belief in aesthetically autonomous and endurable musical works free-standing from any cultural and social context. According to this ontology, the primary obligation of the performer is to present and interpret the musical work, a performance ideal that has been claimed to foster a musical culture obsessed with perfectionism and permeated by problematic relations of power. Such critical assessments have of late migrated beyond the academic discourses of music scholars into the venues of popular culture, a phenomenon evidenced in particular by a variety of recently released feature films. This article argues that current screen media representations of classical musicians are involved in a complex critical dialogue with deep-rooted aesthetic ideologies clustering around classical music and its performance. Although such representations advance a view of classical music culture as being deeply permeated by structural inequalities, performance anxiety and unreasonably high standards of perfection, they don’t necessarily reject the notion of the musical work or devalue the high-art status and emancipatory potential traditionally ascribed to classical music.

scholarly journals Jacqueline du Pré as 'The Cellist' (2020)

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Whittaker
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Sexual Experience ◽  
Musical Instrument ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Musical Representations ◽  
Power Couple ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Few musicians of the twentieth century are as recognisable as Jacqueline du Pré. Her dazzling and distinctive talent, said to have enraptured audiences the world over, was overcome by a tragic diagnosis of MS. This sense of tragedy was all the more heightened by Du Pré’s famed physicality on the stage, leading critics to use all manner of analogies in describing her playing as a physical (and even sexual) experience. Her status as a musical celebrity, further intensified as she became one half of a classical music power couple, has led to numerous dramatic retellings and reimaginings of her biography, played out in film and TV, and now on stage. The most recent example of this fascination with Du Pré is the ballet The Cellist, Cathy Marston’s new work for the Royal Ballet, premiered in February 2020 to much critical acclaim. Its score, composed by Philip Feeney, features a cello soloist and interweaved repertoire extracts that have become so associated with Du Pré. Along with the characters of Barenboim, Du Pré, and her family, her 1673 Stradivarius cello is given a starring role in the form of Marcelino Sambé, a new take that makes this a distinctive contribution to media representations of Du Pré. This article examines the interactions across this complex web of musical representations of musical personae engrained in the cultural consciousness. It considers acts of musical performance, the musical instrument as living companion, and the representation of classical musical culture of the 1960s and 1970s, drawing attention to key features of Du Pré’s narrative re-presented in a new artistic form.

scholarly journals THE THREE KEYS TO A MUSICAL TREASURE

2021 ◽  
pp. 173-182
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Music Teachers ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Music Listening ◽  
Music Culture ◽  
Musical Activity ◽  
Musical Perception ◽  
Musical Taste ◽  
Musical Heritage

The role of music in the upbringing of a harmoniously developed generation is invaluable. Unlike other forms of art, music is a miraculous tool capable of activating a person’s most delicate feelings, emotions, and rich emotional reserves in a person. This article presents the pedagogical aspects of the formation of personality in the lessons of music culture, suggestions on the use of national melodies, the opportunities of our musical heritage, and suggestions on the use of Uzbek classical music in the development of artistic taste of future music teachers. The three aspects of musical activity, namely the ability to listen to music, musical taste, and musical sensitivity, are analyzed as factors that determine the extent to which a music listener or performer’s overall artistic taste has developed. Keywords: music, sound, aesthetic education, piece of music, listening to music, musical taste, musical perception, rhythm, timbre, artistic taste.

Conflicting Aesthetic Ideals in a Musical Culture

1987 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 373-391 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. David Smith
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Performance Data ◽  
Aesthetic Response ◽  
Music Culture ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Space Allocation ◽  
Split Personality ◽  
Aesthetic Ideal

One can distinguish a culturally valued aesthetic response to music's intrinsic syntax from a culturally devalued aesthetic response to music's more extrinsic meaning. Experts probably hold a highly syntactic aesthetic ideal. By some accounts, novice listeners hold a less syntactic, more romantic ideal. If so, two aesthetic styles would coexist in musical culture, with experts broadcasting their syntactic ideal to the culture and listeners echoing it in their ideas of musical greatness. However, novices would have a musical split personality—with romantic preference at odds with the expert ideal, but a syntactic ideal of greatness congruent with it. An analysis of American classical music culture of the 1940s (using preference, eminence, space allocation, and musical performance data on Western composers collected by Farnsworth, Hevner-Mueller, etc.) confirmed these predictions. The results indicate the importance of nonsyntactic responses to listeners and suggest further research on these aesthetic dimensions which the culture's syntactic focus has orphaned. Such research might illuminate another cultural phenomenon—the rejection of contemporary music by audiences.

scholarly journals Investigating the canon in A-Level music: Musical prescription in A-level music syllabuses (for first examination in 2018)

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-27
Author(s):  
Adam Whittaker
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Regulatory Body ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
School Contexts ◽  
Close Study ◽  
Musical Traditions ◽  
And Function ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
School Curricula

AbstractThe canon forming the backbone of most conceptions of Western music has been a feature of musical culture for decades, exerting an influence upon musical study in educational settings. In English school contexts, the once perceived superiority of classical music in educational terms has been substantially revised and reconsidered, opening up school curricula to other musical traditions and styles on an increasingly equal basis. However, reforms to GCSE and A-levels (examinations taken aged 16 and 18 respectively), which have taken place from 2010 onwards, have refocused attention on canonic knowledge rather than skills-based learning. In musical terms, this has reinforced the value of ‘prescribed works’ in A-level music specifications.Thus far, little attention has been paid to the extent to which a kind of scholastic canon is maintained in the Western European Art Music section of the listening and appraising units in current A-level music specifications. Though directed in part by guidance from Ofqual (Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation, the regulatory body for qualifications in England), there is evidence of a broader cultural trend at work. The present article seeks to compare the historical evidence presented in Robert Legg's 2012 article with current A-level specifications. Such a comparison establishes points of change and similarity in the canon of composers selected for close study in current A-levels, raising questions about the purpose and function of such qualifications.

scholarly journals Roland Barthes' "Text" and aleatoric music: Is "The birth of the reader" the birth of the listener?

Muzikologija ◽  
2002 ◽  
pp. 263-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe Jeongwon ◽  
Hoo Song
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Music History ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Interesting Phenomenon ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Compositional Control

The history of Western classical music and the development of its notational system show that composers have tried to control more and more aspects of their compositions as precisely as possible. Total serialism represents the culmination of compositional control. Given this progressively increasing compositional control, the emergence of chance music, or aleatoric music, in the mid-twentieth century is a significantly interesting phenomenon. In aleatoric music, the composer deliberately incorporates elements of chance in the process of composition and/or in performance. Consequently, aleatoric works challenge the traditional notion of an art work as a closed entity fixed by its author. The philosophical root of aleatoric music can be traced to post structuralism, specifically its critique of the Enlightenment notion of the author as the creator of the meaning of his or her work. Roland Barthes' declaration of "the death of the author" epitomizes the Poststructuralists' position. Distinguishing "Text" from "Work," Barthes maintains that in a "Text," meanings are to be engendered not by the author but by the reader. Barthes conceives aleatoric music as an example of the "Text," which demands "the birth of the reader." This essay critically re-examines Barthes' notion of aleatoric music, focusing on the complicated status of the reader in music. The readers of a musical Text can be both performers and listeners. When Barthes' declaration of the birth of the reader is applied to the listener, it becomes problematic, since the listener, unlike the literary reader, does not have direct access to the "Text" but needs to be mediated by the performer. As Carl Dahlhaus has remarked, listeners cannot be exposed to other possible renditions that the performer could have chosen but did not choose, and in this respect, the supposed openness of an aleatoric piece is closed and fixed at the time of performance. In aleatoric music, it is not listeners but only performers who are promoted to the rank of co-author of the works. Finally, this essay explores the reason why Barthes turned to music for the purpose of illustrating his theory of text. What rhetorical role does music play in his articulation of "Work" and "Text"? Precisely because of music's "difference" as a performance art, music history provides the examples of the lowest and the highest moments in Barthes' theory of text, that is, those of Work and Text. If, for Barthes, the institutionalization of the professional performer in music history demonstrates the advent of Work better than literary examples, the performer's supposed dissolution in aleatoric music is more liberating than any literary moments of Text. This is because the figure of music - as performance art-provides Barthes with a reified and bodily "situated" model of the Subject.

Psalmodic Adaptation as Musical Translation

2020 ◽  
pp. 194-254
Author(s):  
Peter Mercer-Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Common Source ◽  
Low Level ◽  
The Third ◽  
One To One

The psalmodic adaptation of classical music constitutes a distinctive creative act in instances in which we find adapters not simply importing excerpts essentially unchanged (a chiefly curatorial service), but making substantive musical decisions to bridge the gap dividing art music from psalmody. This chapter explores such “translational actions,” unfolding in four phases. The first concerns low-level decisions, involving rhythm, ornamentation, and texture. The second centers on syntactic challenges that arise in drawing brief excerpts from larger works (negotiating European passages that begin and end in different keys, for instance). The third focuses on “purposeful substitution”: the replacement of musical effects inappropriate to psalmody with wholly different effects calculated to achieve comparable goals. The fourth explores adaptations that challenge the very notion of a one-to-one correspondence between “excerpt” and “psalm tune”: tunes that draw on more than one European movement, say, or adjacent pairs of tunes drawn from a common source.

The Closing and Lasting Impact of CLAEM

2020 ◽  
pp. 162-176
Author(s):  
Eduardo Herrera
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Social Bonds ◽  
American Art ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Latin American Art ◽  
American Composers ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Impact

This chapter evaluates the conditions leading to the closing of CLAEM and the impact the center as a whole had on the Latin American art music scene. Touching upon the three main themes of the book, the chapter discusses the lessons learned and the weaknesses revealed from the most significant philanthropic incursion into avant-garde art music in Latin America, and the lasting legacy of a generation of fellowship holders, both in terms of their embrace or rejection of the avant-garde, and their adoption of an identification as Latin American composers based on strong and intimate social bonds. It argues that the impact that the relatively short-lived center had during the following fifty years on the classical music of the region was the result of calculated philanthropic efforts, the embodied and multi-faceted embrace of avant-garde ideas, and the conscious and strategic construction and identification of Latin American composers.

Style in modern Nigerian Art music: the pioneering works of Fela Sowande

Africa ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-483 ◽  
Author(s):  
'Bode Omojola
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Compositional Style ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Christian Music ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Christian Missionary ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Elements Of Style ◽  
New Tradition

The Nigerian musical landscape changed significantly following the advent of Christian missionary activity and British colonial administration in the later nineteenth century. New idioms of musical practice which have evolved as a result of this historical process include a new tradition of religious, Christian, music, urban syncretic popular styles, new operatic forms and European-derived art/ classical music. This article focuses on one of these emerging styles, Nigerian art music, as reflected in the life and works of its most notable pioneer, Fela Sowande. After a brief historical background, the article discusses the circumstances of Sowande's life and the beliefs which shaped his composing career and his compositional style. In discussing elements of style in Sowande's works, it examines the nature of the interaction between African and European elements, a stylistic feature which constantly recurs in his works. The article ends by discussing the need to consolidate the growth of this new idiom by putting in place institutional structures within which it can develop.

Note on Tekman's Study of Preference Judgments for Excerpts of Music

1998 ◽  
Vol 83 (3) ◽  
pp. 937-938
Author(s):  
Albert LeBlanc
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Follow Up Study ◽  
Published Research

Tekman's study is a useful exploration and benefits from his consideration of published research on music; however, his interpretation of music tempo research by LeBlanc and associates cannot be supported. It would be worthwhile for Tekman to conduct a follow-up study with a larger number of participants and music excerpts from other styles of music in addition to art music (“classical” music).

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