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It is at least interesting, and possibly rather more significant than that word suggests, that th... more It is at least interesting, and possibly rather more significant than that word suggests, that three of the groups on this batch of six recordings dedicate as much time to contemporary music as they do to early music: Tonus Peregrinus, under the direction of the composer Antony Pitts, Red Byrd and Cappella Romana. (I can speak with some authority of the activity of the latter two, in that they have commissioned and performed my own music.) The polymath René Clemencic is also a composer, though as far as I am aware he has kept these two worlds pretty much separate. While the influence of performers of early music on contemporary composers is usually fairly obvious, quite how performing contemporary music affects such groups when they return to earlier repertory has yet to be properly explored. I would suggest, however, that, essentially, there is a degree of risk-taking, of daring, that arises from a broader awareness than that of a narrowly specialized group. Red Byrd’s fluid, uninh...
Recensao: Owen Rees, Polyphony in Portugal c.1530-c.1620: Sources from the Monastery of Santa Cru... more Recensao: Owen Rees, Polyphony in Portugal c.1530-c.1620: Sources from the Monastery of Santa Cruz, Coimbra
Twentieth-Century Music, 2019
Russian Music Since 1917: Reappraisal and Rediscovery is a voluminous, 434-page collection of ess... more Russian Music Since 1917: Reappraisal and Rediscovery is a voluminous, 434-page collection of essays that deals squarely with what is arguably one of the most problematic concepts of our postmodern era: reflection. Originating from conference proceedings hosted by the Music Department of Durham University in July 2011, and published in late 2017 to coincide with the centenary of the October Revolution, it is ambitious in its undertaking and unapologetic in setting out its agenda. Taking the events of 1917 as a socio-political, cultural, and musical watershed, it seeks to identify and evaluate the trends, tensions, and developments that have occurred not in relation to Russian art music per se, but in relation to its surrounding scholarship. Subtitled ‘Reappraisal and Rediscovery’, it aims to fill a musicological void, asserting its claims as the first book-length study to critically examine and assess the current state of research connected to Russian art music dating from 1917 onwards. Anyone giving more than a cursory glance at the book’s cover will be in no doubt as to the scope and magnitude of the task at hand. Combining and foregrounding multiple signifiers – a white background, Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915), a manuscript page from Shostakovich’s ‘pre-Twelfth’ Symphony, and to the fore, an offset square in striking crimson – the sign system produced clearly conveys not only the concept of ‘Sovietness’ in all its manifestations, but also the extensive timeline that is under scrutiny: 100 years’ worth of music and related research and analysis, running from the birth of Futurism in the second decade of the twentieth century to the end of the Soviet avant-garde and beyond. Ironically, it is the black and white in the background that best signifies the extent of the problem. At the heart of this book’s attempt to both reappraise and rediscover is an acknowledgement that scholarly interpretations of Russian music, especially those written before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, have tended to be stylized, onedimensional, and fraught with inaccuracies: a condition attributed to Soviet censorship and political bias, as well as to the lack of critical perspective regarding Soviet life and culture that has prevailed in the West for decades. In the past twenty years or so, not only has Russian music scholarship become noticeably more abundant, with Russian music itself attracting more attention in the public domain, but the scholarship in question has become far more nuanced, with new, increasingly complex and multifaceted interpretations coming to light. This, quite rightly, has led academics to lambast past over-simplistic and ‘black-and-white’
UID/EAT/00693/2013In this paper I discuss the way in which composers of church music in Serbia an... more UID/EAT/00693/2013In this paper I discuss the way in which composers of church music in Serbia and Bulgaria during the earlier part of the XX century, such as Stevan Hristić, Kosta Manojlović, Milenko Živković, Petar Dinev and Dobri Hristov, endeavoured to reconcile the traditional demands of writing in this genre – the need for liturgical appropriateness and for a sense of connection with the past – and ideas of modernism. The work of influential cultural theorists such as Chavdar Mutafov in Bulgaria and Ljubomir Micić in Serbia, while not directly affecting church music, was nevertheless a significant part of this, and in parallel with a renewed interest in the history of both countries (symbolised in Serbia by Mokranjac’s vast historical survey concert in Belgrade in 1903), formed the basis for nationalist, pan-Slavic and ‘Byzantine modernist’ aesthetic positions. These ideas will be explored and their impact on these and other composers will be discussed, as well as their contin...
London : University of London, Goldsmiths Centre for Russian Music, 2020
International Record Review, 2014
Tempo, 2017
The impact of minimalism in Portugal has barely been studied; the establishment and subsequent in... more The impact of minimalism in Portugal has barely been studied; the establishment and subsequent institutionalisation of post-serial and other avant-garde thinking meant that approaches to other kinds of modernism – and whether or not ostensibly postmodernist approaches could be included in such categories – only gradually came to be employed, during the course of the 1990s. This article discusses the work of four composers, Luís Tinoco, Nuno Côrte-Real, Eugénio Rodrigues and Tiago Cutileiro, as part of this context. Their approaches are radically different from each other, but each of these four demonstrates an engagement with compositional approaches from outside what Paulo Ferreira de Castro calls the ‘sacralised avant-garde’ that is proof of the remarkable stylistic expansion evident in contemporary composition in Portugal during recent decades which is, in its turn, closely intertwined with a perceptible aesthetic and philosophical broadening in the teaching of the subject.
Muzikologija, 2018
The history of music in the countries of Southern Europe has, in general, been examined either fr... more The history of music in the countries of Southern Europe has, in general, been examined either from the West or from the East. This has had to do with traditional and univestigated assumptions of divisions on religious and linguistic grounds, amongst others, and a lack of familiarity with the relevant literatures which it self derives in large part from a lack of familarity with the relevant languages. Thus, there has been very little comparison of aesthetics in the context of emerging or newly-established nations, and the vital and simultaneous investigation of modernism in those countries, that takes into account both the countries of the Mediterranean and of the Balkans, rather than viewing them as peripheries and discussing them almost exclusively in relation to a theoretical centre. In a number of recent publications and papers, I have aimed to break down some of the seborders precisely by confronting the question of tradition and modernism and bycomparing and contrasting the m...
Musicological Annual, 2011
Sestavek se ukvarja z vprašanjem »zmernega« oziroma »ublaženega« modernizma v odnosu do srbske ce... more Sestavek se ukvarja z vprašanjem »zmernega« oziroma »ublaženega« modernizma v odnosu do srbske cekvene glasbe 20. stoletja, pri čemer prihaja do zaključka, da njegov vpliv – v dialogu s pravoslavno duhovnostjo in pomisleki, ki zadevajo liturgično umetnost – ni bil samo pozitiven, ampak je še daleč, da bi bil izčrpan.
Muzikologija, 2011
The venerable arguments concerning the validity of harmonized music in the Orthodox Church contin... more The venerable arguments concerning the validity of harmonized music in the Orthodox Church continue. Serbia is unique in that the codifiers of the monophonic repertoire (in particular Stankovis and Mokranjac) were also the initiators of the harmonic tradition. Comparison with Bulgaria and Romania prove that there are parallels elsewhere, but the systematic quality of the work of both Stankovis and Mokranjac is unique. The character of Mokranjac's work in particular is determined by the working out of the harmonic and melodic implications of the monophonic tradition.
It is at least interesting, and possibly rather more significant than that word suggests, that th... more It is at least interesting, and possibly rather more significant than that word suggests, that three of the groups on this batch of six recordings dedicate as much time to contemporary music as they do to early music: Tonus Peregrinus, under the direction of the composer Antony Pitts, Red Byrd and Cappella Romana. (I can speak with some authority of the activity of the latter two, in that they have commissioned and performed my own music.) The polymath René Clemencic is also a composer, though as far as I am aware he has kept these two worlds pretty much separate. While the influence of performers of early music on contemporary composers is usually fairly obvious, quite how performing contemporary music affects such groups when they return to earlier repertory has yet to be properly explored. I would suggest, however, that, essentially, there is a degree of risk-taking, of daring, that arises from a broader awareness than that of a narrowly specialized group. Red Byrd’s fluid, uninh...
Recensao: Owen Rees, Polyphony in Portugal c.1530-c.1620: Sources from the Monastery of Santa Cru... more Recensao: Owen Rees, Polyphony in Portugal c.1530-c.1620: Sources from the Monastery of Santa Cruz, Coimbra
Twentieth-Century Music, 2019
Russian Music Since 1917: Reappraisal and Rediscovery is a voluminous, 434-page collection of ess... more Russian Music Since 1917: Reappraisal and Rediscovery is a voluminous, 434-page collection of essays that deals squarely with what is arguably one of the most problematic concepts of our postmodern era: reflection. Originating from conference proceedings hosted by the Music Department of Durham University in July 2011, and published in late 2017 to coincide with the centenary of the October Revolution, it is ambitious in its undertaking and unapologetic in setting out its agenda. Taking the events of 1917 as a socio-political, cultural, and musical watershed, it seeks to identify and evaluate the trends, tensions, and developments that have occurred not in relation to Russian art music per se, but in relation to its surrounding scholarship. Subtitled ‘Reappraisal and Rediscovery’, it aims to fill a musicological void, asserting its claims as the first book-length study to critically examine and assess the current state of research connected to Russian art music dating from 1917 onwards. Anyone giving more than a cursory glance at the book’s cover will be in no doubt as to the scope and magnitude of the task at hand. Combining and foregrounding multiple signifiers – a white background, Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915), a manuscript page from Shostakovich’s ‘pre-Twelfth’ Symphony, and to the fore, an offset square in striking crimson – the sign system produced clearly conveys not only the concept of ‘Sovietness’ in all its manifestations, but also the extensive timeline that is under scrutiny: 100 years’ worth of music and related research and analysis, running from the birth of Futurism in the second decade of the twentieth century to the end of the Soviet avant-garde and beyond. Ironically, it is the black and white in the background that best signifies the extent of the problem. At the heart of this book’s attempt to both reappraise and rediscover is an acknowledgement that scholarly interpretations of Russian music, especially those written before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, have tended to be stylized, onedimensional, and fraught with inaccuracies: a condition attributed to Soviet censorship and political bias, as well as to the lack of critical perspective regarding Soviet life and culture that has prevailed in the West for decades. In the past twenty years or so, not only has Russian music scholarship become noticeably more abundant, with Russian music itself attracting more attention in the public domain, but the scholarship in question has become far more nuanced, with new, increasingly complex and multifaceted interpretations coming to light. This, quite rightly, has led academics to lambast past over-simplistic and ‘black-and-white’
UID/EAT/00693/2013In this paper I discuss the way in which composers of church music in Serbia an... more UID/EAT/00693/2013In this paper I discuss the way in which composers of church music in Serbia and Bulgaria during the earlier part of the XX century, such as Stevan Hristić, Kosta Manojlović, Milenko Živković, Petar Dinev and Dobri Hristov, endeavoured to reconcile the traditional demands of writing in this genre – the need for liturgical appropriateness and for a sense of connection with the past – and ideas of modernism. The work of influential cultural theorists such as Chavdar Mutafov in Bulgaria and Ljubomir Micić in Serbia, while not directly affecting church music, was nevertheless a significant part of this, and in parallel with a renewed interest in the history of both countries (symbolised in Serbia by Mokranjac’s vast historical survey concert in Belgrade in 1903), formed the basis for nationalist, pan-Slavic and ‘Byzantine modernist’ aesthetic positions. These ideas will be explored and their impact on these and other composers will be discussed, as well as their contin...
London : University of London, Goldsmiths Centre for Russian Music, 2020
International Record Review, 2014
Tempo, 2017
The impact of minimalism in Portugal has barely been studied; the establishment and subsequent in... more The impact of minimalism in Portugal has barely been studied; the establishment and subsequent institutionalisation of post-serial and other avant-garde thinking meant that approaches to other kinds of modernism – and whether or not ostensibly postmodernist approaches could be included in such categories – only gradually came to be employed, during the course of the 1990s. This article discusses the work of four composers, Luís Tinoco, Nuno Côrte-Real, Eugénio Rodrigues and Tiago Cutileiro, as part of this context. Their approaches are radically different from each other, but each of these four demonstrates an engagement with compositional approaches from outside what Paulo Ferreira de Castro calls the ‘sacralised avant-garde’ that is proof of the remarkable stylistic expansion evident in contemporary composition in Portugal during recent decades which is, in its turn, closely intertwined with a perceptible aesthetic and philosophical broadening in the teaching of the subject.
Muzikologija, 2018
The history of music in the countries of Southern Europe has, in general, been examined either fr... more The history of music in the countries of Southern Europe has, in general, been examined either from the West or from the East. This has had to do with traditional and univestigated assumptions of divisions on religious and linguistic grounds, amongst others, and a lack of familiarity with the relevant literatures which it self derives in large part from a lack of familarity with the relevant languages. Thus, there has been very little comparison of aesthetics in the context of emerging or newly-established nations, and the vital and simultaneous investigation of modernism in those countries, that takes into account both the countries of the Mediterranean and of the Balkans, rather than viewing them as peripheries and discussing them almost exclusively in relation to a theoretical centre. In a number of recent publications and papers, I have aimed to break down some of the seborders precisely by confronting the question of tradition and modernism and bycomparing and contrasting the m...
Musicological Annual, 2011
Sestavek se ukvarja z vprašanjem »zmernega« oziroma »ublaženega« modernizma v odnosu do srbske ce... more Sestavek se ukvarja z vprašanjem »zmernega« oziroma »ublaženega« modernizma v odnosu do srbske cekvene glasbe 20. stoletja, pri čemer prihaja do zaključka, da njegov vpliv – v dialogu s pravoslavno duhovnostjo in pomisleki, ki zadevajo liturgično umetnost – ni bil samo pozitiven, ampak je še daleč, da bi bil izčrpan.
Muzikologija, 2011
The venerable arguments concerning the validity of harmonized music in the Orthodox Church contin... more The venerable arguments concerning the validity of harmonized music in the Orthodox Church continue. Serbia is unique in that the codifiers of the monophonic repertoire (in particular Stankovis and Mokranjac) were also the initiators of the harmonic tradition. Comparison with Bulgaria and Romania prove that there are parallels elsewhere, but the systematic quality of the work of both Stankovis and Mokranjac is unique. The character of Mokranjac's work in particular is determined by the working out of the harmonic and melodic implications of the monophonic tradition.
Reflections on the idea of composition as research, for the round table discussion at the "Old is... more Reflections on the idea of composition as research, for the round table discussion at the "Old is New" conference, Lisbon 2016.
Orthodoxy, Music, Politics and Art in Russia and Eastern Europe (Orthodoxy, Music, Politics and Art in Russia and Eastern Europe, London/Belgrade: Centre for Russian Music, Goldsmiths, University of London/Institute of Musicology, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts), 2020
Stravinsky in Context (Graham Griffiths, ed., Cambridge: CUP 2021, 42-49 ISBN 978-1-108-42219-2, 2021
Orthodoxy, Music, Politics and Art in Russia and Eastern Europe, 2021
Scholars working on primary sources of medieval liturgical chant are kindly invited to contribute... more Scholars working on primary sources of medieval liturgical chant are kindly invited to contribute to the new book Scriptor, Cantor, & Notator: The Materiality of Sound in Chant Manuscripts, to be published by Brepols in the series Musicalia Antiquitatis & Medii Aevi (MUSAM), begun in 2018-2019. This book aims to showcase the most recent advances and trends in studies of music paleography and techniques of preparing modern editions of early music, with a primary focus on liturgical chant. This collection of essays proposes to explore the close relationship—and mutual influences—between learning, writing, and performing chant from the Middle Ages onwards, as understood from the manuscript and printed record.
The object of this paleographical and musical investigation is the tradition of Christian “plainchant” in western Europe and the Byzantine world through the Middle Ages. By presenting several examples of paleographical research applied to different kinds of medieval chant manuscripts, this collection aims to define some methodological parameters and broad research questions that encompass the peculiarity of the sources being studied, and to define more broadly the foundations of music-paleographic research as applied to medieval chant notations.
Timeline:
Scholars interested in submitting a chapter should send a preliminary abstract and title to the editors. The final submissions are due by 1 November 2020. Each chapter can include up to 15000 words. Languages accepted are English, French, German, and Italian. The peer review process is single-blind, and it will be undertaken by a specialist member of MUSAM Editorial Board or an external specialist. The projected date of publication is 2021. For further information and preliminary discussion on submissions please contact Elsa De Luca.
The editors of Scriptor, Cantor, & Notator: The Materiality of Sound in Chant Manuscripts, are Elsa DE LUCA (CESEM - NOVA University of Lisbon elsadeluca@fcsh.unl.pt), Jean-François GOUDESENNE (Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes - CNRS jean-francois.goudesenne@cnrs-orleans.fr) and Ivan MOODY (CESEM - NOVA University of Lisbon ivanmoody@fcsh.unl.pt).
Joensuu/Belgrade: ISOCM/SANU, 2017 ISBN 978-86-80639-29-1/978-952-99883-7-2 (Editor with Vesna Sa... more Joensuu/Belgrade: ISOCM/SANU, 2017 ISBN 978-86-80639-29-1/978-952-99883-7-2 (Editor with Vesna Sara Peno)
https://soundcloud.com/ivanmoody
Journal of the International Society for Orthodox Church Music, 2020
There is a popular perception amongst the Orthodox that emotion has no place in liturgy, though t... more There is a popular perception amongst the Orthodox that emotion has no place in liturgy, though this is something that is, in turn, almost completely undermined by instinctively emotional reactions to liturgical music of various kinds, to hymnography, to homiletic discourse and, indeed, to aspects of liturgical ritual itself (I am thinking, for example, of the burial procession of Christ on Holy Friday). This remarkable book seeks to understand compunction as a "liturgical emotion", enacted through embodiment precisely through chanted hymnology as mystagogy. In order to do this, Andrew Mellas, who is Senior Lecturer in Byzantine Studies at St Andrew's Theological College, Sydney, concentrates on hymns for Great Lent and Holy Week by Romanos the Melodist, Andrew of Crete and Kassia the nun. It is divided into five chapters and a conclusion, three of the chapters dealing with each of these hymnographers systematically and prefaced by a substantial introduction and a discussion of "The Liturgical World of Compunction". The Introduction is neatly sparked by a quotation from St Basil the Great concerning the way in which compunction is given or withheld, and there follows a clearly-written and often revelatory appraisal of the way in which the theme has been dealt with by other scholars. Particularly important, it seems to me, is Mellas's acknowledgement that "(…) I eschew Hinterberger's methodology, which approaches emotions in Byzantium as 'ideational' constructs rather than embodied phenomena" (p. 15), since this is a foundational aspect of the book's aims and scope. There is a very pungent section on the limitations of much scholarship on hymnography which ought to be read by anyone venturing
Journal of the International Society for Orthodox Church Music, 2016
Journal of the International Society for Orthodox Church Music, 2016
Journal of the International Society of Orthodox Church Music, 2014
Kristina Yapova has written what she describes as a set of "variations" on Boethius's ideas, work... more Kristina Yapova has written what she describes as a set of "variations" on Boethius's ideas, working through, firstly, the relationship between music and philosophy, then the question of allegory, "Sound and Ethos", and finally, music and theology. Lest "variations" suggest a lack of seriousness in approach, the first thing to say about this publication is that it clearly demonstrates a very deep knowledge of Boethius's work in general, the way in which it fits into the philosophical and educational context of the time, and it possible applications today. The author states that, "This book does not strive to choose a polar position of its own, even less so to strike a middle way between extremes. It wants to bring up again the point as to how we can speak about music without losing it in the process of speaking." Thus, using Boethius's "tres esse musicas" as a foundation, she ranges over a very wide spectrum of philosophy, various writings about art, and theology. In situating her understanding of Boethius's theme, she has fascinating observations to make, for example, on Joseph Dyer's discussion of Musica as part of the mediaeval system of knowledge, taking the context further back to Plato's Timaeus, and in a short space taking it forward again to the baroque. A thought-provoking chapter on Boethius and Leibniz (a "double variation") hints at the later chapter on theology, but first there is the discussion on "Sound and Ethos" (Ἤχος and ἤθος), which brings the discussion in a more concrete fashion to touch on the idea of the Octoechos. The final chapter, "Musical Theology: The Ellipsis that is Needed" is a very personal journey through theology as music-"Musical is the theology that understands music as a way of putting on Christ". Though the sources on which Yapova draws are predominantly western (Balthasar, Kierkegaard, Leibniz…), Lossky does make an appearance. Her last chapter in particular contains many phrases that might serve as a motto for anyone teaching the theology of church music: "If music is the sonic revealing of the Logos, and if this revealing is achieved in hearing, then musical knowledge will be musical only when it is theological." Yapova's text certainly assists in understanding that revelation. The full text is published in Bulgarian, and there is an extended summary in English.
Book review in Muzikološki Zbornik LIII-1, 254-6 ISSN 0580/373X
Book review in Muzikologija 23 (II/2017), 322-4 ISSN 1450-9814
Books review in Gramophone March 2018, 98
