scholarly journals A Loose Affiliation of Alleluias

2021 ◽  
Vol 108 ◽  
pp. 115-136
Author(s):  
Celeste Oram ◽  
Keir GoGwilt
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
Violin Concerto ◽  
Creative Practice ◽  
Theoretical Frame ◽  
Musical Modernism ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Analytical Category ◽  
Current Practices

This article is written from our perspectives as a performer and a composer, focusing on our violin concerto, “a loose affiliation of alleluias”, which we created and premiered in 2019. Making this concerto was an exercise in excavating the material histories that guide our creative practice. Our purpose in doing so was to work towards a clear and necessarily complex appraisal of how our current practices are motivated by, and reproduce, historically-determined knowledge, authority, and cultural attitudes. We think through our own reproductions of historical knowledge via Ben Spatz’s exegesis of “technique”, and via Edward Said’s notion of “affiliations” as the networks which build up cultural associations and cultural authority. With this theoretical frame, we contextualize some of the musical techniques and tropes engaged in our concerto—for instance polyphony, ornamentation, and the concerto soloist as heroic subject.  We contextualize our reflections next to critical positions staked circumscribed by what Ben Piekut calls “elite avantgardism”—an analytical category which we see ourselves as operating within. We discuss, for instance, the critical gestures of musical modernism which (per Adorno’s analysis) conspicuously arrest and negate historical musical grammars and logics – and yet continue to reproduce its structuring values. In our concluding statements we gesture towards some of the pedagogical implications of this work, considering how creative practice can be leveraged to re-appraise the histories shaping our practices of composition, improvisation, and performance.

scholarly journals Macho Buddhism: Gender and Sexualities in the Diamond Way

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-103
Author(s):  
Burkhard Scherer
Keyword(s):  
Tibetan Buddhism ◽  
Gender Stereotyping ◽  
Sexual Ethics ◽  
Tibetan Buddhist ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Previous Scholarship

Western Tibetan Buddhist movements have been described as bourgeois and puritanical in previous scholarship. In contrast, Ole Nydahl’s convert lay Karma Kagyu Buddhist movement, the Diamond Way, has drawn attention for its apparently hedonistic style. This article addresses the wider issues of continuity and change during the transition of Tibetan Buddhism from Asia to the West. It analyses views on and performances of gender, sexual ethics and sexualities both diachronically through textual-historical source and discourse analysis and synchronically through qualitative ethnography. In this way the article demonstrates how the approaches of contemporary gender and sexualities studies can serve as a way to question the Diamond Way Buddhism’s location in the ‘tradition vs modernity’ debate. Nydahl’s pre-modern gender stereotyping, the hetero-machismo of the Diamond Way and the mildly homophobic tone and content of Nydahl’s teaching are interpreted in light of Indian and Tibetan Buddhist sexual ethics and traditional Tibetan cultural attitudes on sexualities. By excavating the emic genealogy of Nydahl’s teachings, the article suggests that Nydahl’s and the Diamond Way’s view on and performance of gender and sexualities are consistent with his propagation of convert Buddhist neo-orthodoxy.

scholarly journals Serbian music criticism in the first half of the twentieth century: Its canon, its method and its educational role

Muzikologija ◽  
2008 ◽  
pp. 185-202
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Vasic
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Negative Attitude ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
Educational Mission ◽  
Violin Concerto ◽  
The Public ◽  
Educational Role ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Professional Critics

Serbian music criticism became a subject of professional music critics at the beginning of the twentieth century, after being developed by music amateurs throughout the whole previous century. The Serbian Literary Magazine (1901- 1914, 1920-1941), the forum of the Serbian modernist writers in the early 1900s, had a crucial role in shaping the Serbian music criticism and essayistics of the modern era. The Serbian elite musicians wrote for the SLM and therefore it reflects the most important issues of the early twentieth century Serbian music. The SLM undertook the mission of educating its readers. The music culture of the Serbian public was only recently developed. The public needed an introduction into the most important features of the European music, as well as developing its own taste in music. This paper deals with two aspects of the music criticism in the SLM, in view of its educational role: the problem of virtuosity and the method used by music critics in this magazine. The aesthetic canon of the SLM was marked by decisively negative attitude towards the virtuosity. Mainly concerned by educating the Serbian music public in the spirit of the highest music achievements in Europe, the music writers of the SLM criticized both domestic and foreign performers who favoured virtuosity over the 'essence' of music. Therefore, Niccol? Paganini, Franz Liszt, and even Peter Tchaikowsky with his Violin concerto became the subject of the magazine's criticism. However their attitude towards the interpreters with both musicality and virtuoso technique was always positive. That was evident in the writings on Jan Kubel?k. This educational mission also had its effect on the structure of critique writings in the SLM. In their wish to inform the Serbian public on the European music (which they did very professionally), the critics gave much more information on biographies, bibliographies and style of the European composers, than they valued the interpretation itself. That was by far the weakest aspect of music criticism in the SLM. Although the music criticism in the SLM was professional and analytic one, it often used the literary style and sometimes even profane expressions in describing the artistic value and performance, more than it was necessary for the genre of music criticism. The music critics of the SLM set high aesthetic standards before the Serbian music public, and therefore the virtuosity was rejected by them. At the same time, these highly professional critics did not possess a certain level of introspection that would allow them to abstain from using sometimes empty and unconvincing phrases instead of exact formulations suitable for the professional music criticism. In that respect, music critics in the SLM did not match the standards they themselves set before both the performers and the public in Serbia.

Performance practice and philology in Bartók’s Violin Concerto (1938)

2012 ◽  
Vol 53 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 153-160
Author(s):  
Péter Laki
Keyword(s):  
Chamber Music ◽  
Performance Practice ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Violin Concerto ◽  
Final Version ◽  
The World ◽  
And Performance ◽  
World Premiere ◽  
Conservatory Students ◽  
Comparative Examination

The world premiere recording of Bartók’s Violin Concerto, played by Zoltán Székely has been a classic for seventy-two years now. Since that time, dozens of artists have committed the work to disc and hundreds more—from concert artists to conservatory students—have played the Concerto. Székely’s extremely subtle, almost chamber-music-like interpretation has been widely admired but many violinists in past decades have favored, by and large, a more robust approach, one that stresses the work’s connections to the Romantic concerto tradition. The question is: can a careful reading of the musical text—the final version as well as the various manuscript sources—help a player make practical stylistic decisions? A comparative examination of the performance of the first 16 measures from a number of older and more recent recordings will be set against what textual analysis can tell us, as a test case for a productive dialog between scholarship and performance.

scholarly journals Profile of the Interactive Media and Performance (IMP) Labs: An Interview with Dr. Charity Marsh

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Caines
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Interactive Media ◽  
Cutting Edge ◽  
Creative Practice ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University

This interview profiles Dr. Charity Marsh's work with the Interactive Media and Performance Labs at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. The interview discusses the work with young people, adults, artists, faculty, students and communities in this cutting-edge research and creative practice facility.

scholarly journals Samoan identity through music composition: The agony of asking

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Opeloge Ah Sam
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Music Composition ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Creative Practice ◽  
Professional Musician ◽  
And Performance

<p>In this thesis, Samoan music and identity are woven together and expressed simultaneously through new composition, critical reflection, and performance. This thesis explores creative practice in both Samoa and New Zealand, and it engages with critical insights in order to produce a body of new creative work in music. Through these efforts, this thesis contributes a new original understanding for how to articulate Samoan identity in current musical composition.  In Samoa, cultural practices exist alongside global influences. These are found in song, language, contemporary music and dance in a variety of social contexts, and it is in this space of crossing boundaries where I explore my own identity as a Samoan-born, New Zealand composer, and a broader Samoan communal identity. The two contexts of my journey in Samoa and New Zealand offer sustained influences on my compositions both as a professional musician and educator. They provide very different expectations and cultures that I have negotiated, and have formed the basis of my creative work in this thesis. Adapting the Pasifika-centred framework of Epeli Hau’ofa in “Our Sea of Islands” (1993), in this thesis I provide a personal blueprint for a Samoan interpretation of creative practice in music, based on close readings and interpretations of concepts in new music composition.  Through this work I deconstruct my own colonial past to rise above cultural stereotypes, and instead move towards finding connections with local-based styles and values of music. In doing so, my creative output offers an original voice as a composer that is firmly based in Samoan realities, just as it extends to experiences and with a diversity of musical practices. Through my creative work I offer unique musical spaces and mediums that expresses my Samoan identity, in both music and culture. In this way, new composition is a means of navigating and negotiating musical creativity.  As I have discovered, I am not the only one moving in and out of these contexts as a Samoan musician and composer. I have worked together, alongside other Samoan composers such as Natalia Mann (based in Queensland, Australia), Metitilani Alo (based in Dunedin, New Zealand), Igelese Ete (based in Fiji) and Maori artists such as Riqi Harawira (based in Kaitaia, New Zealand) and artist BJ Natanahira (based in Kaitaia) sharing ideas and engaging in discussions around process of creativity and identity.  In creating our own musical voices, we also take control of the forms and shapes used to express our identities musically and culturally. As Thomas Turino points out in Music as Social Life (2008) this is about navigating and negotiating our identity according to the spaces we move within, and the music we associate with through composition and performance.  This is that journey.</p>

Health care outputs, outcomes and performance: a review of the debate

2010 ◽  
pp. 145-166
Author(s):  
Angela Genova
Keyword(s):  
Health Systems ◽  
Health Needs ◽  
Health Policies ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Services Sector ◽  
The Family ◽  
Welfare Systems ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Analytical Category

Comparative studies on health systems in Europe show growing convergence in terms of general characteristics, while insufficient attention is paid to the overall range of varying welfare policies within which the health systems operate. By developing the theoretical model of health systems, this work puts forward the construction of an analytical approach able to contextualise health policies within the relative welfare systems. It proposes health regimes as an analytical category, defined on the basis of the different roles played by the actors called on to respond to health needs: the state, the market, the services sector and the family. Through a comparative study of a number of indicators, it outlines the four main ideal types of health regime in Europe. The attention on the contexts in which health systems operate makes it possible to recognise and valorise the contribution that the various actors make in responding to health needs, thus promoting a more complete vision for the analysis of health policies in Europe.

scholarly journals Improvisation, Analysis, and Listening Otherwise

2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
August Sheehy
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Analytic Work ◽  
Improvised Music ◽  
Theoretical Frame ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Relationship

This essay asks what it would mean to conceive of music analysts as improvisers. Drawing on Derek Bailey’s observations on improvised music and performance, Lydia Goehr’s distinction between improvisation impromptu and improvisation extempore, and elements of David Lewin’s analytic work, I argue that such a conception returns continually to the relationship between the analyst and the analyzed work as it unfolds in real time, i.e., in listening. Rather than placing moments of heard music within an a priori theoretical frame, which I call “idiomatic listening,” analysis-as-improvisation resists the idea of stability suggested by theories of music. I suggest that analysis-as-improvisation thereby reflects part of what analysis has historically accomplished as well as the goals analysts implicitly pursue.

scholarly journals Abstrakcji przestrzeń wieloraka. Kategoria przestrzenności w twórczości Wojciecha Fangora, Jerzego Grabowskiego i Ryszarda Winiarskiego - studium porównawcze

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 401-436
Author(s):  
Łukasz Rozmarynowski
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Abstract Painting ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Methodological Perspective ◽  
Surrounding Space ◽  
Probabilistic Space ◽  
Negative Space ◽  
Mathematical Sciences ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Analytical Category

If one were to indicate some tendencies characteristic of the art of the 20th century, the pursuit of making artwork more spatial would certainly be one of them. This tendency manifests itself in the myriad of symptoms: an avant-garde redefinition of sculpture with its negative space; a proliferation of kinetic works enabling spectators to (re)shape artwork’s matter more actively; a dissemination of ephemeral forms, especially happening and performance; beginnings of installation art, to mention but a few. The present paper sets out to examine an artistic phenomenon  which is not as spectacular as the aforementioned examples, but it could be somehow placed at the intersection of them. One can consider the particular type of abstract painting, embedded in a pictorial plane and slightly opening for surrounding space, but simultaneously reconceptualising the relation between the imagined and the physically present. The first part of the article deals with methodology. As far as research is concerned, the author assumes moderate scientism as the methodological perspective. It is based on the belief that mathematical sciences throughout history have developed notions and analytical methods allowing the observable and communicable features of things, including artworks and artistic phenomena, to be explained in an effective way, i.e. more faithfully and usefully. Because of the fact that mathematical truths are not absolute, the methodological perspective is called ‘moderate’. Taking into account these assumptions, the second part of the article defines the analytical category of spatiality, which expresses painting’s ability to evoke variously conceptualised spaces. The three subsequent sections of the article are devoted to some paintings by three Polish artists active in the second half of the 20th century, i.e. Wojciech Fangor, Jerzy Grabowski, Ryszard Winiarski. Each of them combined two differently understood spatial orders in their works: physical (related to phenomenological and sensual experience) and conceptual (related to notions and theories proposed by exact sciences). Having analysed a number of paintings by Fangor, Grabowski and Winiarski, one can define notions of cosmogonic, transcendence and probabilistic space, respectively. In summary, the specificity of works analysed in the context of ideas drawn from exact sciences is examined.

Regional and Transnational Traditions of Violin Playing

2020 ◽  
pp. 69-88
Author(s):  
Tina K. Ramnarine
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Teaching Practice ◽  
Performance Style ◽  
Violin Concerto ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Violin Playing ◽  
Transnational Traditions

This chapter argues that an appreciation of both regional and transnational violin-playing styles is needed for a profound understanding of the Sibelius violin concerto. Sibelius’s musical ideas and performers’ interpretations of the violin concerto are shaped by different violin-playing traditions. This argument also offers perspectives on how pedagogy shapes musical transmission and performance style by focusing on Leopold Auer’s influence on the violin playing of the twentieth century. Leading into the main concerns of the fifth chapter, the argument concludes by noting that Auer’s teaching practice coincided with women’s emerging political voices. He accepted many women violinists into his class in the St. Petersburg Conservatory, women who went on to forge careers as virtuoso violinists and to champion Sibelius’s violin concerto internationally.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document