Through the looking glass: A researcher’s perspectives on a collaborative music composition project

Making Music: Composing with Young Musicians was a multi-year, multi-site research project partnered with the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board and the Canadian Music Centre to commission composers to collaborate with teachers and students to write educational music. On-site observations undertaken by the co-author and examined through a pragmatic lens employing Brief Focused Inquiry focused on the contributions of students, teachers and composers to the collaborative music compositions. Students contributed their creativity and knowledge of musical elements and concepts, and they provided feedback to the teachers and composers. Teachers contributed technical, instrumental feedback to the composers and their understanding of musical elements and concepts. Furthermore, they led band rehearsals and played musical instruments with the students. Composers contributed their musical creativity and feedback while undertaking a teacher-like role. The composers, teachers and students also used technology during this creative endeavor. The findings will be of potential interest to post-secondary music educators, composers, music teachers, and music publishers.

Kevin Volans: piano:string quartet:chopin, x:y:k. Melvyn Tan, Calefax, Signum Quartett. Wigmore Hall, 11 December 2019

Kevin Volans achieved remarkable fame in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the Kronos Quartet's recordings of White Man Sleeps and Hunting:Gathering. With record-breaking album sales, he was perhaps even one of the most accessible twentieth-century composers operating outside of the popular or film music spheres. Thirty years later, his position could not be more different. Volans's controversial 2016 keynote at the Contemporary Music Centre Ireland, entitled ‘If You Need an Audience, We Don't Need You’, announced most vehemently his current stance in its Babbittean (or, more accurately perhaps, Feldmanesque) denouncement of populism and the music industry. For him, the tactics of publicists and marketers engender a breakdown in respect between audience and composer, while short-form works required by festivals are the epitome of a composition culture in regression.

Making music in divided cities: Transforming the ethnoscape

In the phenomenon of the divided city – urban environments partitioned along ethno-religious lines as a result of war or conflict – projects seeking to bring segregated people together through community music activities face many operational and psychological obstacles. Divided cities are politically sustained, institutionally consolidated, and relentlessly territorialized by competing ethno-nationalist actors. They are highly resistant to peacebuilding efforts at the state level. This article uses an urban peacebuilding lens (peacebuilding reconceptualized at the urban scale that encompasses the spatial and social dimensions of ethno-nationalist division) to examine the work of community music projects in three divided cities. Through the examples of the Pavarotti Music Centre in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Mitrovica Rock School in Mitrovica, Kosovo, and Breaking Barriers (a pseudonym) in Belfast, Northern Ireland, we consider the context-specific practices and discourses that are deployed to navigate the local constraints on inter-communal cooperation, but that also contribute to the broader goal of building peace. We find that music-making is a promising strategy of peacebuilding at the urban scale, with both functional and symbolic contributions to make to the task of transforming an ethnoscape into a peacescape.

Encouraging Attention and Exploration in a Hybrid Recommender System for Libraries of Unfamiliar Music

There are few studies of user interaction with music libraries comprising solely of unfamiliar music, despite such music being represented in national music information centre collections. We aim to develop a system that encourages exploration of such a library. This study investigates the influence of 69 users’ pre-existing musical genre and feature preferences on their ongoing continuous real-time psychological affect responses during listening and the acoustic features of the music on their liking and familiarity ratings for unfamiliar art music (the collection of the Australian Music Centre) during a sequential hybrid recommender-guided interaction. We successfully mitigated the unfavorable starting conditions (no prior item ratings or participants’ item choices) by using each participant’s pre-listening music preferences, translated into acoustic features and linked to item view count from the Australian Music Centre database, to choose their seed item. We found that first item liking/familiarity ratings were on average higher than the subsequent 15 items and comparable with the maximal values at the end of listeners’ sequential responses, showing acoustic features to be useful predictors of responses. We required users to give a continuous response indication of their perception of the affect expressed as they listened to 30-second excerpts of music, with our system successfully providing either a “similar” or “dissimilar” next item, according to—and confirming—the utility of the items’ acoustic features, but chosen from the affective responses of the preceding item. We also developed predictive statistical time series analysis models of liking and familiarity, using music preferences and preceding ratings. Our analyses suggest our users were at the starting low end of the commonly observed inverted-U relationship between exposure and both liking and perceived familiarity, which were closely related. Overall, our hybrid recommender worked well under extreme conditions, with 53 unique items from 100 chosen as “seed” items, suggesting future enhancement of our approach can productively encourage exploration of libraries of unfamiliar music.

Papineau-Couture, Jean (1916–2000)

Grandson to Quebec’s art music scene pioneer Guillaume Couture (1851–1915), composer Jean Papineau-Couture (1916–2000) played a major role in the development of the province’s musical life throughout the century. A composer, pianist, pedagogue, and administrator, Papineau-Couture’s contributions range from his involvement with the foundation of the Canadian League of composers (Toronto, 1951) to the fulfilment of his academic function as Dean of the music faculty at Université de Montreal (1968–1973). He also participated in the creation of both the Society for Canadian Music (Montreal, 1954) and the Montreal bureau of the Canadian Music Centre (1973)—the former being a music society dedicated to the performance of Canadian music, the latter one of today’s most active institutions in the dissemination of Canadian art music—and acted as an administrator of the Société de musique contemporaine du Quebec, founded in 1966 and for which he served as president starting that very first year up to 1972. His teaching of music is stringed across these many accomplishments. The catalogue of Jean Papineau-Couture includes many stylistically diverse works. His music evolved throughout his life, moving from a form of neoclassicism most probably influenced by the composer’s many encounters with Igor Stravinsky—some by way of Nadia Boulanger, whom he studied with, along with Quincy Porter, at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts—to an atonal idiom. Papineau-Couture composed many concertante-style works, as demonstrated in his Clair-obscure (1986), a double concerto for contrabassoon, double bass, and orchestra. The composer also wrote many pieces of chamber music, most often for soloist and piano accompaniment (Caprices, 1962; Discussion animée, 1997), as well as a substantial number of orchestral works.

Adaskin, Murray (1906–2002)

Born in Toronto, Ontario and passing in Victoria, British Columbia, Murray Adaskin was a violinist, composer, and academic whose music was widely performed in Canada. Adaskin was violinist with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in 1926–36, and held senior academic and administrative positions at the University of Saskatchewan (1952–73) and the Canada Council for the Arts (1966–69). His compositional style largely avoids allegiance to modern and experimental currents of the twentieth century, balancing conservatism and lyricality with atonal and folk elements. An expedition to Canada’s arctic to record Inuit singing in 1965 proved influential to Adaskin, resulting in several works including Qala and Nilaula of the North (1969, for small orchestra), Rankin Inlet (1978, for piano duo), and Eskimo Melodies (1980, for piano). Adaskin wrote that he hoped his music would "someday be recognized for its Canadian flavor," and much of his programmatic oeuvre dedicates itself to regional and national topics (Canadian Music Centre, Musicanada, 9). His chamber opera based on a Metis fur trader, Grant, Warden of the Plains (1967), was commissioned for Canada’s centenary. The Adaskins, including Murray’s brothers John (1908–1964) and Harry (1901–1994), were significant influences on the cultivation of art music in Canada during the postwar period.