The beauty of choreographic genius – Oleg Danovski, proponent of the national ballet repertoire

A prominent figure in national ballet, Oleg Danovski is one of the personalities of 20th century ballet. He gave the world a vast repertoire consisting of classical, neoclassical, modern ballets, Romanian ballets, and divertimentos for operas. Despite his success with classical ballet staging that would make him famous abroad, the choreographer also turned his attention to folklore, by addressing specific local themes. Thus, through this desire to study and stylize the folk dance, he brought an important contribution to the Romanian cultivated dance, from which the image of the Romanian character dance would stem. He was devoted to the idea of Romanian ballet theater and he advocated for original music for ballet, a national repertoire and the development of the Romanian ballet school. His Romanian creations are precious pages of the history of Romanian ballet that should not be forgotten, and that have enormously contributed to the enrichment of the original choreographic repertoire.

The Emotional Landscape of Abelard ’s Planctus David super Saul et Ionatha

In Abelard’s Letter 16 addressed to ‘Héloise, sister to be revered in Christ and loved’, he refers to a set of six planctus or laments written in the voices of a number of Old Testament characters The last of these, Planctus 6, in which David laments for Saul and Jonathan, is probably the most famous and is the only one for which a reliable, original music setting survives. The laments are all in the first person and provide a deeply personal reflection on the tragic events which inspired them; they are virtuosic in language and almost shockingly intense in emotional range. This study examines Planctus 6 considering the link between Abelard’s language and the expression of specific emotions and, wherever possible, examines how music serves to intensify that expression.

Preservation Of Keroncong Music Through Music Learning At SMP Santa Angela Bandung

This study discusses the preservation of keroncong music through music learning at Santa Angela Junior High School in Bandung. Keroncong is a type of hybrid music, native to Indonesia, the result of acculturation between Portuguese music and Indonesian local music. Keroncong experiences a setback at the present time, especially among the younger generation. Through teaching and learning activities in schools one way keroncong music can be sustainable and developed. The focus of the problem that was studied included the keroncong music learning material, the learning methods used and the evaluation techniques used from the keroncong music extracurricular activities in Santa Angela Junior High School Bandung. This research uses a descriptive method with a qualitative approach. Based on research findings, learning keroncong music in extracurricular activities in Santa Angela Junior High School Bandung refers to three main materials namely the skill of playing the keroncong instrument, the skill of playing the keroncong rhythm, the keroncong songs. The benefit of this research is that it can provide innovation in learning keroncong music in schools as an effort to preserve and revitalize one of Indonesia's original music.

‘Modulation’ by Richard Powers: Digital sound, compression and the short story

This article presents a reading of ‘Modulation’ (2008) by Richard Powers. Firstly, I consider the short story’s representation of the MP3 music file, specifically its effects on how music is circulated and stored, as well as how it sounds. These changes are the result of different processes of compression. The MP3 format makes use of data compression to reduce the file size of a digital recording significantly. Such a loss of information devises new social and material relations between what remains of the original music, the recording industry from which MP3s emerged and the online markets into which they enter. I argue that ‘Modulation’ is a powerful evocation of a watershed moment in how we consume digital sound: what Jonathan Sterne has termed the rise of the MP3 as ‘cultural artifact’. I contend that the short story, like the MP3, is also a compressed manner of representation. I use narrative theory and short story criticism to substantiate this claim, before positioning ‘Modulation’ alongside Powers’s novels of information. I conclude by suggesting that ‘Modulation’ offers an alternative to representing information through an excess of data. This article reads Powers’s compressed prose as a formal iteration of the data compression the story narrates.

‘Recycling the past to meet immediate needs’: Bad Religion’s approach to history1

With the release of their seventeenth album of original music (Age of Unreason, May 2019), Bad Religion has reminded the public that their brand of punk rock is not, and has never been, simplistic, reductive or dismissible. While the language of variegated scientific fields provides co-lyricists Greg Graffin and Brett Gurewitz a consistent trove of terms, concepts and imagery, Bad Religion also scrutinizes the past and draws out historical implications for their socio-political-religious commentary. Through an analysis of Bad Religion’s lyrics, especially focusing on Age of Unreason, this article will argue that Bad Religion uses historical references as dire warnings, rhetorical devices and examples to instantiate their larger moral and philosophical principles. They seek to entangle the present and the past and reveal how narratives of ‘progress’ and American ‘exceptionalism’ are misleading. Bad Religion condenses revolutionary and reactionary historical events into sweeping generalizations of human (usually western) civilization, invoking idealized versions of historical periods (‘Dark Ages’ and ‘The Enlightenment’). While their use of the past is often overgeneralized, Bad Religion examines human history as a record of choices and behaviours that matter to the only existence we have: material and mundane, not transcendental or supernatural.

“Search and Destroy”

Punk rock, as a movement within popular music, sought to differentiate itself from prior forms of commercial rock in both sound and attitude. Anti-corporate and anti-consumerist in orientation, punk’s guiding maxim of “do it yourself” was about taking control of the means of production and shifting the musical form outside of the nexus of capitalism. This chapter examines the resultant effects and contradictions surrounding the use of punk music in television advertisements from the 1990s to the 2010s. The advertising industry initially kept their distance from punk until after the self-appointed architect of punk style, Malcolm McLaren, began writing original music for ads in 1990. From Iggy Pop seducing Royal Caribbean customers to The Clash hawking Jaguars, punk has proven to be a lucrative way for advertisers to connect to a demographic group who define themselves as anti-consumerist.

Handel’s Transformative Compositional Practices

In recent decades singers of Handel’s music have made great strides in recapturing the art of embellishing his music, thus breathing new life into forms such as the da capo aria. Yet Handel’s own “variations”—his development and transformation of musical material in his vocal music, important for understanding his compositional practice with borrowed as well as (presumably) original music—are not yet fully explored or appreciated. Admittedly, scholars have discussed musical procedures such as inserting, deleting, and reordering musical materials, as well as other Baroque combinatorial practices in Handel’s arias, but the musical transformations I discuss here are closer to a specifically Handelian brand of developing variation. To my knowledge, the concept of developing variation has never before been applied to early eighteenth-century music. I explore the relation of developing variation to drama (also rarely done) in two of Handel’s arias, providing a close examination of “Ombre, piante” from the opera Rodelinda and new thoughts about “Lament not thus,” originally intended for the oratorio Belshazzar. Although these arias belong to different genres and different stages of Handel’s career, they both exhibit material that undergoes a kind of progressive variation process that has tangible musical and dramatic ramifications, of interest to opera specialists and performers. Furthermore, both arias have a complicated compositional history; I offer fresh insights into the aesthetic qualities of each version, thereby throwing light on Handel’s possible compositional intentions. This article also discloses for the first time some recurring musical passages shared between “Lament not thus” and other pieces that could influence the listener’s interpretation of certain musico-dramatic gestures.