Rakenteiden törmäys. Taiteellinen toimintatutkimus Teatterikorkeakoulun ja Sibelius-Akatemian yleisökontaktikurssista

Colliding structures: Artistic action research on audience contact course at the Sibelius and Theatre Academies. This article focuses on a period between 2018–2019 when students from the Sibelius Academy were invited to take part in an audience contact course offered by the Theatre Academy. The experiment was carried out as an artistic activity analysis. During the course, theatre and music students formed working groups which encountered people from different habitation units and organized art workshops for them. Based on their experiences, the groups prepared performances which they performed in the health care and social security units as well as in prisons. We focus especially on what we term ‘structural collisions’ taking place between different practices: firstly, we examine the collision between Uniarts students and reception center workers in organizing art workshops. Another structural collision we discuss rose from the collaboration between different academies. We consider how representatives of different art genres discuss the work concept of a collaboration-based performance and how different work concepts define the agency of the artists within a work-group-based artistic process. The aim is to offer visions on how the Theatre Academy and the Sibelius Academy might develop collaborative communal art education at the Uniarts Helsinki.

To Be in Time: Repetition, Temporality, and the Musical Work

This chapter begins by examining recent scholarship in ‘music as performance’, especially that of Nicholas Cook, and its implications for the work concept. By exploring various formulations of the work concept from a temporal perspective, it becomes clear that contradictions occur whenever the work concept is tied too closely to the notion of a musical work’s identity. Instead, a Deleuzian understanding of the musical work is advanced, based on Deleuze’s idea of repetition: this is seen as allying closely with a deconstructive approach to musical material, which provides an additional opportunity to consider musical temporality, in the arena of history and the musical past. Finally, to recapture the spirit of Cook’s original theories, and drawing on Hannah Arendt, a parallel between musical and human ontology is drawn, based on their identical interaction with time, which reconstitutes but fundamentally changes the idea of (the) musical ‘work’.

CHALLENGING THE WORK CONCEPT: METAPHOR, EMBODIMENT AND STRUCTURE IN MUSIC ANALYSIS

<p>Metaphorical depictions, embodied experiences, and by extension structures within the music, are distinct between performances of both the same works and across works of different styles. Traditional forms of musical analysis focus on the score as a discrete, concrete “object”, replete with meaning and fully representative of the composer’s intentions. As a result, performance has been treated as inessential and not recognized for its significant role in the co-creation of music and its ability to generate meaning. This research examines performative differences through close listening in recent recordings of Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in G Minor BWV 1001, Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 7 in C Minor Op. 30 No. 2, and the Sibelius Violin Concerto Op. 47 in D Minor. With regard for the effects of metaphor, embodiment and structure, it shows how interpretive decisions within performance have profound implications on our emotional experience and perception of the music, well beyond what is notated in the score.</p>

CHALLENGING THE WORK CONCEPT: METAPHOR, EMBODIMENT AND STRUCTURE IN MUSIC ANALYSIS

<p>Metaphorical depictions, embodied experiences, and by extension structures within the music, are distinct between performances of both the same works and across works of different styles. Traditional forms of musical analysis focus on the score as a discrete, concrete “object”, replete with meaning and fully representative of the composer’s intentions. As a result, performance has been treated as inessential and not recognized for its significant role in the co-creation of music and its ability to generate meaning. This research examines performative differences through close listening in recent recordings of Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in G Minor BWV 1001, Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 7 in C Minor Op. 30 No. 2, and the Sibelius Violin Concerto Op. 47 in D Minor. With regard for the effects of metaphor, embodiment and structure, it shows how interpretive decisions within performance have profound implications on our emotional experience and perception of the music, well beyond what is notated in the score.</p>

Rethinking Bach

If Johann Sebastian Bach has loomed extra-large in the imagination of scholars, performers, and audiences since the late nineteenth century, this volume sets out to provocatively reshape that imagination from a multitude of present-day perspectives, both from within and outside of traditional Bach studies. The essays gathered here reconsider Bach’s musical practices from the vantage points of material culture, voice, embodiment, affect theory, and systematic theology; they challenge fundamental assumptions about the nineteenth-century Bach revival, about the rise of the modern work concept, about Bach’s music as a code, and about editions of his music as monuments; and they reimagine Bach as humorist, as post/colonial export, as pedagogue, as anti-modernist, and as uneasy postmodern icon. Collectively, these contributions thus take apart, scrutinize, dust off, and reassemble some of our most cherished narratives and deeply held beliefs about Bach and his music. In doing so, they open up multiple pathways toward exciting future modes of engagement with the composer and his legacy.

Gioachino Rossini's The Barber of Seville

Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville surveys the opera’s fascinating performance history, mapping out the myriad changes that have affected the work since its premiere, exploring many of the personalities responsible for those alterations, and taking into account the range of reactions that these changes have prompted in spectators and critics from the nineteenth century to the present. Opening with a wide-ranging overview of the types of alterations that have been imposed on Rossini’s score for the past two centuries, the first chapter addresses the mechanics behind these changes as well as the cultural forces that both fostered and encouraged them. The book next looks at some of the earliest revivals, drawing attention to alterations that were made to the score and to individual singers who were responsible for the changes, especially those who appeared in the roles of Almaviva and Bartolo. An entire chapter is devoted to Rosina, examining the wide array of creative liberties that prima donnas have unremittingly and unrepentantly taken with their interpretations of this character. The final sections turn to the opera’s recent history, observing how the Rossini Renaissance brought with it a new dedication to the “work concept” and to shedding the types of alterations that had long characterized performances of this work. The book closes with a consideration of operatic consumerism from the nineteenth century to the present, exploring the myriad ways that one can now experience The Barber of Seville in all its recorded, digitized, and commodified glory.

A Return to Rossini

This chapter situates The Barber of Seville in the context of the twentieth century, a time when the Rossini Renaissance and a growing sense of fidelity to the “work concept” led to a desire to adhere closely to Rossini’s intent. Following a brief overview of sporadic attempts to access the “original” opera during the nineteenth century, the focus falls on the development of the critical edition project, exploring the various singers, directors, and musicologists who played a role in accessing an authentic version of The Barber of Seville. The chapter concludes with a comparison of the two modern critical editions of the opera.

Assessing vulnerability of informal floating workers in Bangladesh before and during COVID-19 pandemic: a multi-method analysis

PurposeGlobally, a myriad of floating workers is in grave jeopardy due to the ceasing of employment opportunities that resulted from the mobility restriction during the Covid-19. Despite the global concern, developing countries have been suffering disproportionately due to the dominance of informal workers in their labour market, posing the necessity to campaign for the immediate protection of this vulnerable population. This paper analyses various dimensions of the vulnerability of urban floating workers in the context of Covid-19 in Bangladesh. In reference to International Labour Organization's (ILO) “Decent Work” concept, this paper endeavours to examine floating workers' vulnerability using the insider-outsider framework in context to Covid-19 pandemic.Design/methodology/approachThe study was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, data were collected before the pandemic to assess the vulnerability of the informal floating workers. Later, we extended the study to the second phase during the Covid-19 pandemic to understand how pandemic affects the lives and livelihood of floating workers. In phase one, data were collected from a sample of 342 floating workers and analysed based on job security, wages, working environment, psychological wellbeing and education to understand the vulnerability of floating workers. In phase two, 20 in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted, followed by thematic analysis to explore how the pandemic affects the existing vulnerability of floating workers.FindingsVarious social protection schemes were analysed to evaluate their effectiveness in reducing the vulnerability of floating workers facing socio-economic crises. The study has found that the pandemic has multiplied the existing vulnerability of the floating workers on many fronts that include job losses, food crisis, shelter insecurity, education, social, physical and mental wellbeing. In response to the pandemic, the Government stimulus packages and Non-government Covid-19 initiatives lack the appropriate system, magnitude, and focus on protecting the floating workers in Bangladesh.Practical implicationsThis paper outlines various short-term interventions and long-term policy prescriptions to safeguard floating workers' lives and livelihood from the ongoing Corona pandemic and unforeseen uncertainties.Originality/valueThis paper is the first of its kind that aims at understanding the vulnerability of this significant workforce in Bangladesh, taking the whole picture of Government and Non-government initiatives during Covid-19.

Labour remuneration in the healthcare sector of Ukraine in terms of decent work concept

PurposeHigh European standards of life quality are declared in a set of legislative documents in Ukraine, but the rewarding policy for the healthcare employees because of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) disease remains not fully implemented. The purpose of the study is to develop indicators, standards and methods of assessing rewarding policies for healthcare employees in terms of providing decent labour remuneration that are useful for all stakeholders of the healthcare sector in Ukraine.Design/methodology/approachThe study proposes the methodical foundations of developing evaluation tools of rewarding policies for implementing the decent work concept at the sectoral level.FindingsThe findings identify the complex indicator of decent labour remuneration in the healthcare sector in Ukraine, which is 0.185. It proves that the level of the decent labour remuneration of the healthcare employees in Ukraine is at the low level.Practical implicationsThe study provides the important recommendations for all policymakers in the healthcare sector in different countries in the context of diagnosing the problems in the rewarding policies and determining the directions for improvement in terms of implementation of the decent work principles.Originality/valueBy proposing and calculating the main methodical foundations of evaluation tools development of rewarding policies in the context of realisation of the decent work concept at the sectoral level, the study fills a void in the decent labour remuneration and the labour economics theory literature.

The Work and the Listener

Paul Eggert’s The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies offers an important perspective on the value of the work-concept in textual scholarship. This response to his book, written for a seminar at the 2021 Society for Textual Scholarship conference, takes up threads leading outward from his argument, and in three sections considers the potential of bibliography beyond books, textual scholarship beyond editing, and archives beyond metaphor.