Music Worlding in Palau

Music Worlding in Palau: Chanting, Atmospheres, and Meaningfulness is a detailed study of the performing arts in Palau, Micronesia as holistic techniques enabling the experiential corporeality of music’s meaningfulness—that distinctly musical way of making sense of the world with which the felt body immediately resonates but which, to a significant extent, escapes interpretive techniques. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research alongside Pacific Islander and neo-phenomenological conceptual frameworks, Music Worlding distinguishes between meaning(s) and meaningfulness in Palauan music-making. These are not binary phenomena, but deeply intertwined. However, unlike meaning, meaningfulness to a significant extent suspends language and is thus often prematurely considered ineffable. The book proposes a broader understanding of how the performing arts give rise to a sense of meaningfulness whose felt-bodily affectivity is pivotal to music-making and lived realities. Music Worlding thus seeks to draw the reader closer to the holistic complexity of music-making both in Palau and more generally.

Exploring musician-educators’ reflections on a collaborative cross-cultural music making encounter in Singapore

Professional musician-educators from a tertiary arts institution in Singapore collaborated on a cross-cultural performance in Beijing as part of their professional development. Through a case study, semi-structured interviews explored the music making experiences of four of the musician-educators involved: the composer, the singer, the pianist and the erhu performer. Their experiences address the concept of cross-cultural music making and its significance in professional development for musician-educators. The experiences shared by the four musician-educators illuminate challenges, tensions and some areas to further resolve and critically question regarding how cultures are engaged in the process of music-making. Through unpacking the narratives of musician-educators and how they experience interactions with culture in music making, there is the possibility to further understand diverse music making encounters in Singapore.

Glam “Heroines”. Gaps in Glam Historicisation from Black Self-Feminised Musicians to the Herstory of Glam Rock

The narration of glam music, especially glam rock, as queer is countered by a canonisation of male white icons in pop musicology, which is illuminated and expanded in this article. Early glam performances by self-feminised Black musicians (Ward 1998) as well as the music making of female agents of glam rock are at the center of this exploration. Firstly, an outline of the current gender and race specific remembrance of glam rock is given. Secondly, the “glamorous” origins of glam music are questioned with Ward; musical canon of glam is also re-arranged regarding the category of gender by adding the basic biographies of two further female heroines, Bobbie McGee and Cherrie Vangelder-Smith. They are present in digital (DIY) media within practices of affective archiving (Baker 2015), which enable lyrics interpretation in this paper.

The Positive Influence of the Popular Music Movement

The documentation of popular music curricula in K12 schools is used to suggest the secondary ensemble directors in schools can learn more about the role of popular music in the lives of students. Further, ensemble directors are encouraged to consider bridging music-making in school to young adulthood by way of providing encouragement and experience playing solo instruments and developing skills on secondary instruments that may lend themselves to inclusion of popular music styles. A list of suggestions is offered for developing confidence and proficiency in individual performance.

Life satisfaction and adolescent music making: A comparison of youth choirs and bands in Spain

Adolescents who are members of youth music groups learn music and develop other skills such as group work and conflict resolution. These skills and feelings may represent socioemotional factors underlying increased life satisfaction, leadership capacity, and academic motivation, together with the acquisition of emotional skills. The aim of the research was to determine the degree of life satisfaction reported by a sample of 660 Spanish adolescents who were members of a youth band or choir. It also aimed to examine correlations between life satisfaction, leadership capacity, academic motivation, and emotional development. Potential differences between these variables attributable to participants’ age, gender, type of youth music group, and musical instrument played were explored using a cross-sectional survey comprising four standardized questionnaires. The results show that the participants were highly satisfied with their lives. There were strong positive correlations between the variables studied but also some significant differences between the two groups (choirs and bands), and between players of different instrument families. These results are in line with those other studies, confirming the positive influence of group music making on adolescents’ social and emotional growth.

Musician and Poet

Music-making was a popular leisure activity in aristocratic households in the early seventeenth century and a growing number of courtier poets wrote and exchanged verse in aristocratic salons and literary coteries. Chapter 12 continues the exploration of Herbert’s intellectual achievements and reputation as a polymath. It traces his interest in playing the lute and singing, and the musical preferences and fashions demonstrated by the music books he owned and the preludes, fantasias, pavanes, galliards, courantes, voltes, sarabands, and airs assembled in his unique manuscript lute book. It probes his inclusion among the metaphysical poets, exploring the influence of John Donne and Giambattista Marino, but also that of Ben Jonson, Thomas Carew, and Sir Philip Sidney, and of Horace, Juvenal, and Ovid. It uses the themes of love, beauty, immortality, and death to examine examples of his sonnets, elegies, epitaphs, satires, and lyrical poems, some of which were published posthumously as The Occasional Verses of Lord Herbert of Cherbury in 1665, and looks briefly at his Latin philosophical poems and his rough draft for a masque. It explores his preference for deploying verbal ingenuity and erudition rather than feelings, his deployment of metaphysical conceits and concepts, his innovative experimentation with rhyme and the extent of his participation in the literary coterie culture of the times. It claims a place for him among the leading minor poets and suggests that this was an impressive achievement for a man heavily engaged in other intellectual fields as well as political and estate matters.

Teledescante nº1: polyphony in time of plague

This report contemplates an instrumental composition as a project for audiovisual production in social isolation, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on the problematization of the impact of the pandemic in music making, solutions were sought that were not only viable as an artistic result but that could also be projected in a purposeful and prospective way in times of humanitarian crisis, of dismal symmetry between capitalist neoliberalism and programmed neglect in public health policies. After a description of the research on the use of art in past pandemics as a guiding principle in the choice of materials, the audiovisual production is detailed. The piece was written in April 2020 as a result of the analysis of a Renaissance motet, which, in turn, was conceived as a tribute to a composer who had perished from the plague and as a palliative against the disease.

The Oxford Handbook of Time in Music

As the art that calls most attention to temporality, music provides us with profound insight into the nature of time, and time equally offers us one of the richest lenses through which to interrogate musical practice and thought. In this volume, musical time, arrayed across a spectrum of genres and performance/compositional contexts is explored from a multiplicity of perspectives. The contributions to the volume all register the centrality of time to our understanding of music and music-making and offer perspectives on time in music, particularly though not exclusively attending to contemporary forms of musical work. In sharing insights drawn from philosophy, music theory, ethnomusicology, psychology of performance and cultural studies, the book articulates a range of understandings on the metrics, politics and socialities woven into musical time.

Owner Bound Music: A study of popular sheet music selling and music making in the New Zealand home 1840-1940

<p>From 1840, when New Zealand became part of the British Empire, until 1940 when the nation celebrated its Centennial, the piano was the most dominant instrument in domestic music making and the home pianist an important feature of New Zealand’s musical landscape. Many home pianists had their collection of individual sheets of music bound into composite volumes (“owner bound volumes”). This study’s sample of over 100 owner identified owner bound volumes (OBVs) examines the cultural and commercial significance of music sellers and music owners. Beyond the sample of OBVs, the study draws on personal and business archives, newspapers, directories and local and family histories in exploring music making over the course of a century. During the 100-year span of the study the music seller facilitated access to popular music by acting as a conduit between those composing and publishing sheet music, and the individual playing the piano in their home. As well as being a study in commerce and culture, the study is also located within the field of print culture. Sheet music was the staple sold by the music seller and the study explores the availability, sale and “consumption” of sheet music. The wide range of businesses selling sheet music in New Zealand between 1840 and 1940 affirms music’s significance to print culture commercially, socially and culturally. This study examines the music seller’s and music owner’s role in domestic music making, and in particular, the distribution, ownership and longevity of the popular sheet music later bound into OBVs. Booksellers, newspapers and businesses selling all types of goods and services sold sheet music, but the biggest music sellers were the specialist music dealers who also sold musical instruments. Two of these, Begg’s (1861-1970) and the Dresden (1883-1936) achieved nationwide coverage and longevity. Often based in substantial and impressive premises, specialist music dealers occupied prominent positions in the main commercial streets of towns and cities. The study also explores the societal, cultural and commercial links between women, the piano and sheet music. Gender is a theme throughout as the amateur female pianist was the primary customer for composers, publishers and music sellers, and women were also piano teachers, “play over girls” in music shops, pianists for the silent movies and mothers eager for their children to learn the piano. The study identifies the owners of the OBVs, exploring the differences in their backgrounds between 1840 and 1940. Initially the daughters of the wealthy, the landed or the educated, by 1900 the owners of the OBVs were from a broader socio-economic span with fathers who were labourers, barmen and railway workers. The study relates home music makers to the desire for, and purchase of, pianos in the context of gentility and democratisation. Musical taste is explored through an analysis of the individual sheets within the OBVs. The bulk of music changing hands was “popular”, music of the moment, rather than “classical” or “serious”. In this sense the study is one of popular culture. The small number of locally composed and published pieces highlights the importance of global influences on popular music for the home in New Zealand. The advent of the gramophone and the radio, although lessening the dominance of the piano, led to music heard on these new technologies to be sold, music that had been recorded by soloists and groups, the latest “hits” from musicals and “the talkies” and songs promoted by favourite singers or bands. This study confirms the music seller’s place at the heart of a bustling commercial and cultural enterprise, supplying up-to-the-minute music for the piano which created lively home music making within the global popular music scene.</p>