“Is It All Just Stuff? Genres, Tension and Language in Contemporary Australian Sound Arts,” (original) (raw)
Related papers
Towards a Universal Language: Grainger and Early Music; Grainger and World Music
2010
uring the 1930s Grainger entered a sustained period of activity that saw his musicological and educational work come to the fore as his compositional output declined. Driven by a passionate belief that the general public was both indifferent to-even intolerant of-music that lay outside the 1700-1900 western canon, he worked tirelessly to bring to the public's attention little-known music from the pre-classical period, as well as examples of music from india, indonesia, Polynesia, africa, and elsewhere. in 1932 he was invited to take up the post of head of music at New york University, and his class lectures A General Study of the Manifold Nature of Music provide a summary of his musical preoccupations at the time. Beginning with a series of twenty Statements, the lectures attempt to 'show the threads of unity, running through all kinds of music', by freely juxtaposing examples from the english polyphonic tradition with 'primitive music, folk-music, jazz, oriental and western art-music'. From 1931 to 1934 Grainger produced a constant stream of lectures, broadcasts, and articles exploring his developing world music view, including Democracy in Music in 1931, Arnold Dolmetsch : Musical Confucius and Can Music Become a Universal Language ? in 1933, and the australian Broadcasting commission series Music : A Commonsense View of All Types in 1934. Grainger's contribution to what he termed a 'universalist attitude toward music' 1 took many forms, but it is his often pioneering work in the transcription, arranging, and performing of early and non-european music that most directly addresses the task of bringing unfamiliar works-unfamiliar, at least, to western ears-into circulation. The establishment of the Grainger museum in melbourne in 1938 provided a further focus for his proselytising work, and among the many aims of the museum, Grainger included the creation of centres 'for the preservation and study of the early music of europe' and 'for the preservation and study of native music in, or adjacent to australia, such as aboriginal australian music, the art-musics of Java, Siam, Bali and the hybrid music of the South Sea'. 2 it is within this context that we now explore Grainger's legacy. 7 John Jenkins, Fantasy no. 8 for 3 viols ; Thomas Tomkins, Pavan no. 1 in F for 5 viols ; martin Pierson, Fantasy and 2 Almaines no. 6 for 6 viols ; richard Deering, Fantasy for 6 viols ; alfonso Ferrabosco ii, Dove House Pavan for 5 viols ; michael easte, 'Triumphavi' Fantasy for 5 viols ; coperario (i.e., John cooper), 'Chi pue mirarvi' Fantasy for 5 viols ; Thomas weelkes, Fantasy for 6 viols. 8 in a letter to Grainger dated 2 may 1949, Nathalie Dolmetsch informs Grainger that some of the consort pieces were under consideration for publication by the newly founded Viola da Gamba Society.
Through a glass darkly: a critique of the influence of linguistics on theories of music
Linguistics and the Human Sciences, 2007
If music is treated as a kind of 'language', then it makes sense for musicology to borrow from linguistics in order to define exactly what sort of a 'language' music is. However, not only does this avoid the challenge of defining music on its own terms, it also brings across a whole lot of unnecessary historical baggage. Through a close analysis of selected texts, the current article critiques some recent work in musicology, showing how it is based on a far too narrow understanding of what constitutes linguistics, i.e. basically formal linguistics. It points out some of the dangers of interdisciplinary work such as Brown's (2001) 'musilanguage' model, and shows how a less than careful borrowing of linguistic concepts can vitiate the usefulness of such system-building. It then traces the source of much of this borrowing in Lerdahl and Jackendoff 's (1983) highly influential work drawing on generative linguistics, and shows how a framework that privileges structure over meaning, system over text, and the cognitive over the social, is unable to provide a broader understanding of music beyond pattern recognition. It calls for a greater methodological scepticism among musicologists towards linguistics, and a greater self-consciousness about borrowings across disciplines.
A Theory for All Music: Problems and Solutions in the Analysis of Non-Western Forms
Professor Rahn takes the approach to the analysis of Western art music developed recently by theorists such as Benjamin Boretz and extends it to address non-Western forms. In the process, he rejects recent ethnomusicological formulations based on mentalism, cultural determinism, and the psychology of perception as potentially fruitful bases for analysing music in general. Instead he stresses the desirability of formulating a theory to deal with all music, rather than merely Western forms, and emphasizes the need to evaluate an analysis and compare it with other interpretations, and demonstrates how this may be done. The theoretical concepts which form the basis of Rahn's approach are discussed and applied: first to individual pieces of non-Western music which have enjoyed a fairly high profile in ethnomusicological literature, and second to repertoires or groups of pieces. The author also discusses the fields of anthropology and psychology, showing how his approach serves as a starting point for studies of perception and the concepts, norms, and values found in specific music cultures. In conclusion, he lists what he considers to be musical universals and takes up the more controversial issues implicit in his discussion.
British Journal of Music Education, 2008
Reviewed by Kelly Foreman Michael Tenzer has assembled a volume of eleven analyses of pieces from mainly non-Western musical traditions with a substantial CD recording of the examples analyzed. Analytical Studies in World Music (hereafter "ASWM") is not a comprehensive "world music" text; the geographic sampling of musical selections address broader questions of analysis, and are grouped under the three overarching themes of sectional periodicities, isoperiodicity, and linear composition in periodic contexts. Thus, the text differs significantly from either survey texts of world music or texts that attempt to generate a universal theory for all musics (such as Jay Rahn's A Theory for All Music). 1 The contributors are well-known ethnomusicologists and specialists with years of field research and performance experience in the areas about which they are writing. ASWM is an excellent text, unprecedented in its scope, depth, and in its efforts to be faithful to the traditions being analyzed while speaking to the Western musician. The individual chapters are of a high quality, each representing a thorough and detailed analysis. Its market is the Western-trained music theorist or composer who seeks a deeper understanding of musical structure (in a general sense) through case studies gleaned from the world's many traditions. I suspect, however, that these analyses may be most useful to those with background training and performance experience in each area or to those who already specialize in them. Indeed, ASWM would be a difficult text for most undergraduate courses in world music analysis, and is perhaps
Music practices, products and educational periphery, which are widely associated with Europe or its cultural derivates, seem to be well integrated into present-day Asian cultures. They are part of it and merge in many cases with contemporary local developments deriving from musical traditions. The appropriation of the "West" in musical terms is accompanied by fast changes within culturally inherited schemes of values and measurements. The paper aims to introduce some provocative thoughts that dominate current musicological discourses about the construction of the musical "West" in Asian cultures. Questions of shifting identities, ethnic disbandment and re-versa. Frederick Lau, criticises the conservative one-way approach of ethnomusicologists such as Nettl, Kartomi, and Shiloah. He writes "These scholars focus primarily on the impact of Western music on indigenous cultures rather than on how this interchange has affected music of the West. Their objective, different from that of music analysts, is to establish a typology that would account for all possible musical responses as local musicians begin to incorporate Western music and sound ideals into their creations" (Lau, 2004:23). His critic seems to be understandable from the viewpoint of an "analyst", who looks predominantly into the sounding appearance and its potential of structural synergy. But does it include an understanding of musical meanings, and if so, what kind of meanings, whose meanings, of which time, of which part of the world?
Music Theory Online, 2012
Michael Tenzer's companion collection, co-edited with John Roeder, proffers eleven new essays on the analysis of diverse musics. This volume, Analytical and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music (hereafter ACCSWM), provides additional case studies to supplement ASWM, thereby broadening the scope of materials available in this vein, as well as further pursuing what Roeder describes as "questions about the purview of musical analysis and about the possibility of cross-cultural comparison" (4). As in ASWM, the authors employ analytical tools of their choosing, some of which function comparatively while others tackle a single genre or narrow group of genres. [2] As in any edited volume, the chapters provide varied treatment of their chosen subjects. Some authors assume previous knowledge of the music they discuss, while others write for readers encountering the given repertory for the first time. The authors engage with a variety of sub-disciplines, and use a notable array of analytical tools. For example, Elizabeth Eva Leach addresses Machaut's balade De petit po through a depth/surface analogy, while Richard Widdess conducts a sort of phenomenological analysis of perceived raga in a recording by sitārist Budhaditya Mukherjee, and Lou Bunk uses what he calls "analytical fantasy" to grapple with the composition and performance processes of the BSC ensemble in Boston. The breadth of analytical approaches inspires optimism about the utility of widely contrasting methods for addressing salient aspects of music. [3] John Roeder notes, "Analysis. .. provides a basis for progressing from an appreciation of particular local patterns to a more general understanding of music in culture" (5), and this speaks to the volume's combination of anthropological and analytical concerns. Among several chapters that blend cultural and musical analysis, I particularly enjoyed Nathan Hesselink's discussion of village drumming practices (p'ungmul) in South Korea. Hesselink uses formal and metric analyses to demonstrate how the modular structure of village drumming is sufficiently accessible for introductory players while offering more complicated options for experienced participants, thus allowing people of all ability levels to participate and
'Musicality and Modernist Form'
Published in Modernist Cultures (May 2013)
Musico-literary questions have long informed modernist studies. 1 Issues of form have been at the heart of such scholarship, which continues to explore intermedial connections between music and literature by examining, in David Michael Hertz's words, 'the ubiquitous dialectic between form and content, structure and meaning.' 2 However, the cultural-historical 'turn' in modernist studies means that investigations of the problem of 'musicalised' literature, for instance, or of literary representations of musical themes and figures, now tend to be inflected by carefully historicised and theoretically informed accounts of modernism's musico-literary implications. Thus, recent work on musico-literary modernism represents an important development of mid-twentieth-century reassessments (undertaken by such philosophers as Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch) of music's place in modernity. Hence Ronald Schleifer's recourse to philosophical aesthetics in his recent book Modernism and Popular Music (2011), and his claim that studying modernism from a musico-literary viewpoint requires attention to the material and socio-cultural determinants of twentieth-century subjectivity as well as 'the continuities and discontinuities' by which modernity itself is underpinned. 3 This special issue of Modernist Cultures addresses all of these areas of debate by collecting essays which address the formal, contextual, and philosophical implications of musico-literary modernism. In doing so they expand our sense of modernism's intermedial complexity (and disputed constitution) in work by a diverse range of figures, from Modernist Cultures 8.1 (2013): 1-8