Forms Of Music-making Research Articles

Improvising Inside a House of Cards: New performance and music-making through a collective networked instrument

This article presents experiences and reflections related to performing improvised, live processed electroacoustic music within a context of networked music performance. The musical interaction is performed through a new collective networked instrument, and we report how the ensemble ‘Magnify the Sound’, consisting of two of the authors of this article, meets the instrument in different networked performance situations, and how this is related to the affordance of the instrument. In our performances the network is inherent to our artistic practice, and we experience a phenomenological and somatic transformation in our roles as musicians, from individual instrumentality to shared instrumentality. The instrument invites new forms of music-making and contributes in fundamental ways to the ensemble’s musical communication and artistic expression. In the present article we outline our methods of working artistically with the networked instrument, and we point at some artistic results. We then discuss how the collective instrument has facilitated new performance and musical practice within the network.

О специфике организации сольного скрипичного текста западноевропейского барокко (на примере Партиты № 1 h moll И. С. Баха для скрипки соло)

Different epochs develop different forms of music-making on the basis of transcription of “one’s own” and “somebody else’s” musical text. During the Baroque era transcripts were endowed with a universal meaning, since they reflected the genetic connection between the practices of composition and performance. By observing violin works and their arrangements in doubles, it is possible to follow the violin’s participation in the oral forms of ensemble and solo intonating, since the specific features of organization of solo thematicism carries on it the seal of a single practice of instrumental music-making. A comparative analysis of the dances and the doubles of J.S. Bach’s Partita No.1, unified by their musical material, accentuates attention on universal and specific principles of their notographic fixation, as well as on the processes of the migration and adaptation of intonational lexis. The mobile authorial musical text (the urtext) presents an authentic source. It is open for transformations and adaptations to any instrumental ensembles, genres and types of music-making. In this connection the semantic multilayer qualities of the solo violin musical text, revealing its genetic connection with baroque ensemble music, is seen as a legitimate phenomenon. Keywords: violin urtext of the Baroque period, baroque practice of music-making, thematicism, transcriptions, J. S. Bach, partitas for solo violin.

Music & Soundscapes of our everyday lives: Music & Sound-making, meaning-making, and self-making

The aim of this professional Doctor of Creative Industries (DCI) Research Project was to investigate music-making practice and self as a practitioner in the process of creating and producing a DIY music artefact, specifically to investigate why I as the practitioner felt an authentic connection with one form of music-making (acoustic instrument-based) and not a connection with another form of music-making (digital virtual-based). As a phenomenologist, I situated self into this auto-ethnographic study in the dual roles of researcher and practitioner, developing first-person narratives of my personal journey, critical reflection, and reflexive practice. The holistic and multidimensional nature of this research has provided rich and nuanced data, illuminating the co-constituted nature of self, interpreting meaning, and practice. In particular, the research study contextualizes contemporary DIY creative practice relative to three interdependent tenets: Music & Sound-making practice, meaning-making, and self-making, where these tenets are understood in terms of hybridity, agency, and subjectivity. The emergent cultural production artefact exemplifies a broader interpretation of Music & Sound-making practice: an authentic, subjective, auto-ethnographic Music & Soundscape.

YESTERDAY AND TODAY OF KAZAKH KUY


 
 
 The article discusses the history of the performance of the Kazakh kuy throughout the history of the separation of Kazakhs into a separate ethnic group to the present. Examples are provided to familiarize readers with the general context. Especially we focus on the Kazakh traditional forms of music-making.Since in the 20th century kuy appeared on the stage and was placed within the framework of a European-style concert, this could not but leave an imprint on how kuy was perceived, influenced the situation in the life of the once nomadic society, in the system of its spiritual values and the viability of kuy, especially in an urban environment.Now that the “Kazakh traditional art of dombra kuy” has been included in UNESCO's representative list, stakeholders need to take measures to safeguard the element of intangible cultural heritage.
 
 

Practical Music Making in the Context of the Educational Process of the Musical Classes of the Imperial Russian Musical Society in the South of Russia

The article examines the activities of the Musical Classes of the Rostov and Novocherkassk Sections of the Imperial Russian Musical Society (IRMS) from the perspective of the role of practical music-making in acquiring knowledge of the art of music. The statistics of the student concerts is brought in, the consistency in their organization is marked, on the basis of which the conclusion is arrived at that the main particular feature of the Musical Classes affiliated with the IRMS was the practical orientation of the instruction. Various forms of music-making are examined: solo performances, as well as those as part of ensembles and symphony orchestras. The repertoires of the student concerts were comprised predominantly of works by the composers of the Classical-Romantic period. The program of the student chamber ensemble morning and evening concerts were distinguished by the diversity of their programing, their cognitive constituent, as a rule, was connected with a panorama of names, genres and forms. The programs of the student orchestral concerts are perceived to have been more organic in their constituency. They were also frequently comprised according to the principle of contrast. Of great significance were the student opera productions. As the result of active work of the Opera Classes of the IRMS, the students mastered in a practical way large strata of Western European and Russian opera classics. In the general educational process a significant role was also played by the “adult” concerts, especially in such formats as monographic and historical concerts, as well as concert-lectures. Keywords: musical education, the musical life of Rostov, the musical life of Novocherkassk, student concerts.

Genre-style priorities for the development of composer’s work for the balalaika in Slobozhanska Ukraine

Genre-style priorities for the development of composer’s work for the balalaika in Slobozhanska Ukraine

Southern Pennine Brass Bands and the Creation of Northern Identity, c. 1840–1914: Musical Constructions of Space, Place And Region

In spite of being a national form of music-making, the brass band movement is accepted — almost without question in the popular imagination — as working class and northern. Hence, in 1974, Peter Hennessy described a band contest at the Albert Hall: ‘A roll call of the bands is like an evocation of industrial history. From Wingates Temperance and Black Dyke Mills to more modern conglomerates .... Grown men, old bandsmen say, have been known to cry at the beauty of it all …. Of all the manifestations of working-class culture, nothing is more certain than a brass band to bring on an attack of the George Orwells. Even the most hardened bourgeois cannot resist romanticising the proletariat a little when faced with one.(The Times, 11 Oct. 1974) This stereotype, which emerged in the nineteenth century, generated the following questions about northern identity: what elements in the brass band movement created this reportage of northern bandsmen and how did bands, which thrived in large numbers in the Southern Pennines, emerge as a musical and cultural metonym of the industrial landscape? This article explores notions of music-making and the creation of a musical space, place and region through the reporting of brass bands c. 1840–1914.

Bodypercussion

Apart from singing, body percussion is the simplest and most immediate form of music-making. Without further devices, we make movement and touch audible. We organise clapping, fingersnapping, hand-slapping, hand-rubbing, stamping to create rhythmic and melodic sound patterns. Often we sing as we do so. Mostly, we do all this in a group, aware of our individual bodiliness and that of those around us. We synchronise, we help and correct each other, we have fun and sometimes feel stressed. Body percussion can be used in a variety of ways, and includes clapping and hand-slapping games with children, rhythmic movement games at family parties, short warm-ups and invigorating breaks in the school classroom, seminars and vocational training sessions as well as lengthy meditation sessions, intensive rhythm classes at music school or college or the rehearsing of almost artistic body percussion pieces for stage perfomance.

Musical Chameleons: Fluency and Flexibility in Online Remix Contests

Musical Chameleons: Fluency and Flexibility in Online Remix Contests

I Hear Music: Popular Music and its mediations.

Using as its platform Philip Tagg’s 2011 article ‘Caught on the back foot: Epistemic inertia and visible music’, this essay identifies gaps in the literature of popular music studies. In particular it discusses aspects and forms of music-making which do not fit the model of popular music based on modern mediations and commodification, but which are nonetheless crucial to an understanding of the history and present state of the relationship between music, affect and society. These are discussed under the headings ‘vernacular music’ and ‘corporeality’, both of which are largely occluded by theoretical models that deploy conceptual categories inappropriate in the analysis of sonic phenomenologies. The essay proposes a greater interdisciplinary and historical range, and a closer link between the study of music and the physiology and physics of sonicity and noise.

I Hear Music: Popular Music and its Mediations.

Abstract
 Using as its platform Philip Tagg’s 2011 article ‘Caught on the back foot: Epistemic inertia and visible music’, this essay identifies gaps in the literature of popular music studies. In particular it discusses aspects and forms of music-making which do not fit the model of popular music based on modern mediations and commodification, but which are nonetheless crucial to an understanding of the history and present state of the relationship between music, affect and society. These are discussed under the headings ‘vernacular music’ and ‘corporeality’, both of which are largely occluded by theoretical models that deploy conceptual categories inappropriate in the analysis of sonic phenomenologies. The essay proposes a greater interdisciplinary and historical range, and a closer link between the study of music and the physiology and physics of sonicity and noise.

From the Margins to the Mainstream: Jazz, Social Relations, and Discourses of Value

This paper examines the manner in which particular discourses have served to shape and influence broader social understandings of various forms of contemporary jazz and improvised music, exploring the somewhat conflicted relationship that these forms of music have had with both the mainstream and the margins, examining the value claims made on behalf of these forms from a cultural, social, and political perspective. In the post-World War II years, jazz occupied a curiously paradoxical discursive position within North American culture, combining its ‘outsider’ role with a significant degree of mainstream exposure – issues pursued in the first section of the paper. The second section of the paper addresses the manner in which, more recently, a populist conceptualization of the music, linked to a narrowly defined notion of the jazz canon, has functioned not only as a marketing category, but has also served to influence the increasingly mainstream positioning of a delimited, neo-traditionalist category of ‘jazz.’ 
 
 Concurrent with these developments, and in sharp contrast to the discursive role of jazz as a marketing category or a historical style, some more contemporary and challenging forms of jazz and improvised music have exhibited a rather more conflicted relationship with the cultural mainstream, claiming – or having claimed on their behalf – an oppositional politics, linked to often romanticized notions of marginality. In some circles, these musical forms have been employed as the locus for discussions of the role that such forms might play as models for social change. In this case, significant rhetorical claims, linked to a wide range of socio-political benefits, are made on behalf of contemporary jazz and improvised music. The final sections of the paper engage critically with these discourses, situating them within broader debates regarding the social benefits and impacts of the arts. The paper concludes by arguing for a somewhat more realistic view of the socio-political potential of a wide range of contemporary forms of music-making.

In Buxtehude's footsteps

This article investigates the seminal position of Dieterich Buxtehude in the history of organ pedalling, one of the crucial aspects of the north German organ art and one which set it apart not only from other forms of music-making but from the organ traditions of all other European nations. Although the chronology of Buxtehude ' s organ works cannot be established with any real specifi city, his solos seem to be the first fully formed examples to have survived. The most famous of these opens his Praeludium in C major, BuxWV 137. Pedalling like this is equally improbable as a form of physical movement as it is a mode of musical discourse, yet this epoch-making solo succeeds by the force of a bravura that uses massive organ sound to convey to distant listeners the motion of the body. So convincing was Buxtehude ' s essay in pedal rhetoric that it continues to captivate because of its freshness and its monumentality.

Exploring children's singing development: do experiences in early schooling help or hinder?

This paper outlines a novel approach to studying children's singing that enables a more accurate and global picture to be drawn of children's actual level of singing achievement across a range of tasks. It enables predictions to be made about their potential singing development in a formal school setting. It draws on a two-year longitudinal field study of children aged 4 to 8 years. The results highlight considerable diversity in actual singing achievement in different tasks and different test contexts. Children's singing development is both varied and multifaceted, and this has considerable implications for teaching and assessing singing as well as other forms of music-making that depend on singing in the first few years of school.

The Art of Interpolation in theRoman de Fauvel

The music of Paris, BN fonds fr. 146 has long held a special place in medieval musicology as one of the most abundant records of musical taste and style in the early decades of the 14th century, particularly so in its famous version of the Old French satire of the Roman de Fauvel, interpolated with no less than 169 musical items. In the last decade, however, perspective on the manuscript has radically altered in a new climate of interdisciplinary research. If there was once a tendency for scholars to extrapolate information from the manuscript, to allow its abundant visual, musical, literary and political texts to speak of cultures exterior to the book's bindings, recent collaborative approaches have focused attention on how those different media work together within the boundaries of the parchment. One consequence of such an approach is to raise new questions about music's role in the book, most particularly about its relationship to the narrative into which it is cast. This study explores perhaps the most startling and perplexing aspect of music's position in Fauvel: the numerous occasions where music is uncued and unprepared in the narrative. I focus on the most famous moment of narrative disjunction brought about by the presence of song: the interpolated bifolio, 28 bis and ter, containing the lai Pour recouvrer alegiance. Long viewed by musicologists as an ill-conceived afterthought, it is suggested that the song's intrusion (narrative and bibliographic) may be interpreted poetically, as a moment of lyric suspension engineered by its singer, Fauvel, in der to defer his lady's final, deadly refusal of his marriage suit. That deferral occurs not just in an abstract moment of lyrical time, but in the real, unfurling space of the parchment: As time passes (the reader turning the folios), Fortuna's impatience finally becomes palpable as she dramatically enters the landscape of the song in its closing moments. Song may thus be understood to occupy not only time but also space; the manuscript, it is argued, is witness to a new form of music-making in France at the turn of the 14th century, music-making that is material as well as sonic.

Imaging Music: Abstract Expressionism and Free Improvisation

The author defines free improvisation, a form of music-making that first emerged in the 1960s with U.K. composers and groups such as Cardew, Bailey, AMM and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble. The approach here considers free improvisation as creative activity, encompassing its artistic agenda on the one hand and the process-based dynamic of its production on the other. After considering the historical location of free improvisation within Western music history, the article explores free improvisation as analogous with Abstract Expressionist art. This comparison enables a fuller understanding of the activity's conceptual basis and the creative process it engenders.