Musical Version Research Articles

Babylon Revisited: Psalm 137 as American Protest Song

The 1973 release of The Harder They Come (dir. Perry Henzell) announced a new era in the transatlantic flow of African music of the Americas. The Jamaican film quickly became a campus cult classic, bringing its heady mix of reggae music, ganja, and gunslinging urban rudeboy style to an enthusiastic youth audience in North America and Europe. The film's soundtrack, featuring songs by Toots and the Maytals, Jimmy Cliff, and Desmond Dekker, became a phenomenon in its own right, helping pave the way for the global success of Bob Marley. For many outside Jamaica, it was an enticing introduction to reggae music. In addition to launching the international career of the film's star, Jimmy Cliff, the soundtrack was a boon to a Jamaican group called the Melodians. Heard twice in the film, their song Rivers of reworked Psalm 137 over a jaunty bass line. With its message of defiance amid social dislocation, the song offers a subtle commentary on an important relationship early in the film: the conflict between Ivan, a young man recently arrived in Kingston and the autocratic Christian preacher for whom Ivan briefly works and aggressively challenges before beginning his short career as a songwriter and ganja trader. No song text has exerted a more sustained pull on the political imagination of Americans than Psalm 137. Contained in the Hebrew Bible, the psalm figured in the worship of the English Puritans who settled New England. It appeared in the first English-language book published in North America. Almost a century and a half later, it served as the basis for a patriotic song of national independence by early America's first significant composer, William Billings. The psalm was the centerpiece of Frederick Douglass's great abolitionist oration, What to a Slave is the Fourth of July. More than a century later, it reappeared in a completely new musical guise, the protoreggae version first recorded in 1969 by the Melodians. Since then, Psalm 137 has been covered numerous times by groups representing a variety of musical styles: gospel, disco, country rock, alternative, hip hop. Why such longevity? Like many stories and passages from the Hebrew Bible, Psalm 137 is highly adaptable, open to a variety of interpretations. Its central question--How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?--has been central to the peopling of the Americas. The psalm deals with cultural dispossession and exile, pervasive experiences for large numbers of people over the course of American history. It offers a memorable image of uprooted people languishing beside a river, called to make music but unsure how to proceed. Its Babylon can stand for any oppressive power or force of injustice, whether political, cultural, or spiritual. While these meanings were resonant for early Anglo-Americans, who often perceived themselves as a persecuted people for religious or political reasons, Psalm 137's more recent history positions it in antiracist and anticolonial movements of African Americans in the circum-Caribbean region. Charting the evolution of the psalm from restrictive Puritan worship practices to a popular dance-hall hit underscores the challenges African Americans have spearheaded to boundaries erected by traditional European binaries: between sacred and secular, spiritual and political, mind and body, high and low culture. In the case of Psalm 137, this challenge to compartmentalization has come about through creative readings of the psalm's political meanings. Beginning with the American Revolution but accelerating in movements against slavery and white domination of black Americans in the circum-Caribbean, the struggle against colonial oppression has worked as a solvent to dissolve the conventional binaries of European Christianity. I The biblical psalm contains just nine verses, which fall into three sections of four, two, and three verses, respectively. The opening section is best known and most widely used in subsequent musical versions: 1 By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. …

Is life a cabaret? Cabaret and its sources in reality and the imagination

The article will explore the accuracy behind the creative conceit that cabaret life during the waning days of the Weimar Republic can serve as ‘metaphor for Germany’. The article will show how the peripheral presence of the cabaret in Christopher Isherwood’s stories and John Van Druten’s play adaptation I Am a Camera assumed primary importance in the musical Cabaret (directed by Hal Prince), Bob Fosse’s film based on the show and future stage productions, including the London and New York revival directed by Sam Mendes. The article will demonstrate that however effective as an artistic and social statement the guiding metaphor of Prince, largely retained by his successors, the powerful and persuasive artistic visions and social statements of the musical versions are historically misleading.

Rank Awareness in Joint Sparse Recovery

This paper revisits the sparse multiple measurement vector (MMV) problem, where the aim is to recover a set of jointly sparse multichannel vectors from incomplete measurements. This problem is an extension of single channel sparse recovery, which lies at the heart of compressed sensing. Inspired by the links to array signal processing, a new family of MMV algorithms is considered that highlight the role of rank in determining the difficulty of the MMV recovery problem. The simplest such method is a discrete version of MUSIC which is guaranteed to recover the sparse vectors in the full rank MMV setting, under mild conditions. This idea is extended to a rank aware pursuit algorithm that naturally reduces to Order Recursive Matching Pursuit (ORMP) in the single measurement case while also providing guaranteed recovery in the full rank setting. In contrast, popular MMV methods such as Simultaneous Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (SOMP) and mixed norm minimization techniques are shown to be rank blind in terms of worst case analysis. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the rank aware techniques are significantly better than existing methods in dealing with multiple measurements.

Epistemic beliefs and self-regulated learning in music students

In the context of advanced instrumental learning, this study had two purposes: to investigate the relationships of epistemic beliefs to first-year music students’ self-reported learning strategies in practising a musical instrument, and to examine the adaption of a measure of academic personal epistemology to the musical domain. One hundred and thirty music students (71 women and 59 men) from six music academies/conservatoires filled out questionnaires detailing their epistemic beliefs and strategy use. To some degree, the factor analysis showed cross-subject generalizability in the dimensions of epistemic beliefs in the music version of the original measure. The four dimensions found were: certainty of knowledge (α = .64); control of knowledge acquisition (α = .66); ambiguity of knowledge (α = .56); and simplicity of knowledge (α = .50). Beliefs about the control of knowledge acquisition and the simplicity of knowledge were significantly related to strategies, but the correlations were low. Gender and degree programme were also significantly related to epistemic beliefs.

A Threshold Adaptation based Voice Query Transcription Scheme for Music Retrieval

This paper presents a threshold adaptation based voice query transcription scheme for music information retrieval. The proposed scheme analyzes monophonic voice signal and generates its transcription for diverse music retrieval applications. For accurate transcription, we propose several advanced features including (i) Energetic Feature eXtractor (EFX) for onset, peak, and transient area detection; (ii) Modified Windowed Average Energy (MWAE) for defining multiple small but coherent windows with local threshold values as offset detector; and finally (iii) Circular Average Magnitude Difference Function (CAMDF) for accurate acquisition of fundamental frequency (F0) of each frame. In order to evaluate the performance of our proposed scheme, we implemented a prototype music transcription system called AMT2 (Automatic Music Transcriber version 2) and carried out various experiments. In the experiment, we used QBSH corpus [1], adapted in MIREX 2006 contest data set. Experimental result shows that our proposed scheme can improve the transcription performance.

Hear Jane sing: narrative authority in two musical versions of Jane Eyre

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre focuses heavily on the development of the protagonist's voice, as the reader can trace the young Jane's transition from a vulnerable gothic heroine to an authoritative autobiographical narrator. Film adaptations of the novel often fail to convey this transition due to the inability of the film-maker to successfully incorporate Jane's narration into the piece. Two recent musical versions of Jane Eyre present interesting solutions to this problem; the ability to layer voices through song, along with the potential for musical commentary as opposed to voice-over, allows for innovative approaches to rectifying the problems regarding Jane's narration in other media. However, although the stage musical version by John Caird and Paul Gordon and the chamber opera adaptation by Michael Berkeley and David Malouf both attempt to preserve Jane's narrative authority, the writers are unable to fully capture the novelistic nuances of the heroine's development from abused orphan to omniscient storyteller.

Audio-Visual Biography: The Collaboration of Music and Image in Derek Jarman's Caravaggio*

Working beyond mainstream practice, Derek Jarman creates films that are unusually musical. Caravaggio, a biography of the artist, is a case in point. Jarman's collaboration with composer Simon Fischer Turner from the start of the filmmaking process enables music to assume a structural role, a procedure that turns common music-image interaction on its head in two ways. First, rather than strive for the audio-visual fusion common to many mainstream films, music and image are here juxtaposed. Second, as music becomes audible, the film's illusion of realism is destroyed. This article explores how Jarman's challenge to conventional filmmaking procedure can expose the fragility of reception history by comparing visual, literary, and musical versions of Caravaggio's biography.

Take Me Along, musical version of Ah, Wilderness!

Book Review| January 01 2008 Take Me Along, musical version of Ah, Wilderness! Take Me Along, musical version of Ah, Wilderness!O'Neill, Eugene; Merrill, Bob; Stein, Joseph; Russell, Robert; Moore, Charlotte Robert Simpson McLean Robert Simpson McLean Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Eugene O'Neill Review (2008) 30 (1): 178–180. https://doi.org/10.2307/29784862 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Robert Simpson McLean; Take Me Along, musical version of Ah, Wilderness!. The Eugene O'Neill Review 1 January 2008; 30 (1): 178–180. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/29784862 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThe Eugene O'Neill Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2008 Copyright © 2008 The Eugene O'Neill Review & Suffolk University2008Copyright © 2008 The Eugene O'Neill Review & Suffolk University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Remembering Bruce Merrifield

Remembering Bruce Merrifield

Mel Brooks' The Producers : Tracing American Jewish Culture Through Comedy, 1967–2007

In its first year on Broadway, Mel Brooks’ 2001 musical, The Producers, wowed critics, charmed audiences and shattered records with its 12 Tony awards, and its $100 tickets. Yet, Brooks’ original 1967 film, The Producers, received a far more mixed reception from both critics and audiences. The differences in the two works’ receptions resulted from the historical moments during which they were produced. Both works feature almost identical scripts that tell the story of two Jewish producers who attempt to make money by overselling shares in a Broadway musical that they believe is certain to be a flop: a paean to Nazi Germany entitled Springtime for Hitler. Mel Brooks’ original film version reflected the upheaval of the 1960s in the United States, and particularly in American Jewish life: generational and political divisions, as well as the changing social status and cultural preoccupations of Jews during this era reshaped the American Jewish community, and Brooks' wild film reflected this moment of very loud and visible change. The tamer Broadway musical version of The Producers in 2001, on the other hand, reflected a very different country, and a very different Jewish American experience in the 1990s. While issues like abortion and homosexuality moved to the center of public discourse in virulent culture wars during this decade, Jews moved more decisively, if quietly and unobtrusively, into the white middle class mainstream. The widely divergent responses to The Producers in 1967 and 2001 allow us to trace these changing dynamics in American and American Jewish life in the past forty years.

Trashing “America the Beautiful”: from She to Shining She

Trashing “America the Beautiful”: from She to Shining She

The best of all possible worlds: The Eldorado episode in Leonard Bernstein’s Candide

ABSTRACTIn January 1954 Leonard Bernstein began work with Lillian Hellman on a musical version of Voltaire’s Candide. A first draft of the show was complete by the end of the year but was subsequently revised with new lyricist Richard Wilbur, eventually opening for previews in October 1956 and on Broadway that December. From the beginning, Candide was intended as political satire. Both Bernstein and Hellman leaned to the left politically and were embroiled in McCarthyism during the early years of the Cold War; Candide was their indictment of ‘puritanical snobbery, phony moralism, inquisitorial attacks on the individual, brave-new-world optimism, [and] essential superiority’, as Bernstein himself explained. Voltaire’s critique of Enlightenment optimism is here deployed against the ideological certainties of Eisenhower’s America. Yet the letters, scripts and scores that document the genesis of Candide indicate that playwright and composer struggled with its meanings and, even more, with their own intent. Of particular interest as a site of that struggle is the Eldorado episode, a passage of central yet ambiguous significance in Voltaire’s conte. Although Hellman and Bernstein may have first been attracted to Candide for its political potential, changes to the Eldorado episode, involving a complete reworking of the second act, shifted the focus of Candide away from satirical critique and towards a romantic plot more typical of the Broadway musical.

Carrie (review)

Reviewed by: Carrie Jordan Schildcrout Carrie. By Erik Jackson , adapted from the novel by Stephen King . Directed by Josh Rosenzweig . Theatre Couture, Performance Space 122, New York City. 1312 2006. Stephen King's first novel, Carrie(1974), tells the story of a teenage misfit with telekinetic powers who avenges herself on cruel classmates by turning prom night into a deadly inferno. Sissy Spacek won acclaim playing the title role in Brian De Palma's popular 1976 film adaptation, while theatre aficionados remember the disastrous 1988 stage musical version as one of the most notorious flops in Broadway history. The persistent fascination with Carrie, in all her various incarnations, is perhaps rooted in America's interest in the tension between individuality and conformity, between queerness and normalcy. Therefore Theatre Couture's queer reinterpretation of Carrie, with drag performer Sherry Vine (a.k.a. Keith Levy) playing the title role, uses camp comedy not simply to send-up Carrie, but rather to highlight the themes of gender and sexual difference inherent in the original story. The result is a playful revenge fantasy for anyone who ever felt awkward, lonely, or queer in high school. Set in 1979, the play follows the Cinderella story of Carrie White, a painfully shy girl who is taunted and bullied by all of her classmates, never more so than when she has her first period in the gym shower. She finds little comfort at home from her Bible-thumping mother, who tells her that menstruation is the result of sinful desires and then locks her in a closet to force her to pray to Jesus for forgiveness. But Carrie begins to notice that, at times of great stress or anger, she can move things with her mind: teacups break and lightbulbs burst. One classmate with a conscience, Sue Snell, decides to help Carrie, so she persuades her own boyfriend Tommy to take Carrie to the prom. At first Carrie assumes that the invitation is a prank intended to humiliate her, but once convinced of Tommy's sincerity, she allows herself to believe that she has found her Prince Charming. Defying her mother, she goes to the prom and gets elected queen, only to have her moment of triumph ruined when a cabal of students dumps a bucket of pig's blood on her. Stunned and enraged, her mental powers unleash hell, trapping everyone in the school and burning them alive in a horrific blaze. She returns home and crucifies her mother with kitchen knives before burying herself under an imploding house. The actors present their archetypal characters in quotation marks, and the best performers (such as Danielle Skraastad as the butch gym teacher and Matthew Wilkas as the dopey though good-natured jock) find variety within the broad characterizations. As written by Erik Jackson and directed by Josh Rosenzweig, the play often imitates the cinematic techniques of De Palma's film, with puppet master Basil Twist (best known for his Symphonie Fantastique) crafting special effects that translate the tropes of the horror movie into a theatrical medium. Carrie's telekinesis moves objects with the aid of hooks and wires, flames are represented by fan-blown orange and red fabric, and a box window upstage shows us cars flipping and houses collapsing in miniature. Such low-budget effects have the ability to charm with their simple though well-crafted artistry but also to inspire laughter as deliberately facile imitations of recognizable movie moments. Perhaps the most striking effect is the realistically designed pig puppet (created by Emily DeCola), whose gruesome slaughter functions as the finale of act 1, foreshadowing the blood bath to come in the second act. [End Page 519] Following the tradition of Charles Ludlam's Camille, Theatre Couture's Carrietakes a female character—a social outsider and victim who finds a reservoir of strength but is ultimately doomed—and reinterprets her as a drag diva, adding material that underlines the character's queerness. When being bullied into the prayer closet by her mother, Sherry Vine's Carrie whines, "But Momma, I don't wanna go in the closet!" and then gives the audience a knowing look. Later, Carrie's mother begs her not...

Effects of watermark and music on mobile message advertisements

The development of mobile telecommunication has made breakthrough advances in recent years. Compared to the Internet, mobile telecommunications has anywhere, anytime and always online characteristics. As growth in the Internet advertising market continues, mobile advertising has attracted attention. In this research, the effectiveness of two types of mobile message advertisements, watermarks and music are studied and compared. Two experiments were carried out to test four proposed hypotheses. The independent variable in experiment 1 was the watermark transparency (20%, 40% and 60%). The independent variable in experiment 2 was the music format with five levels: no music, vocal and instrumental version at high volume, vocal and instrumental version at low volume, instrumental version at high volume and instrumental version at low volume. The results showed that the watermarks transparency and format were effective in mobile advertising. The 60% watermark was found better than the 20% and 40% watermarks. The 40% watermark was found better than the 20% watermark for advertisement recall only. Music and vocal/instrumental music versions were effective in mobile advertisements. The vocal music version was found effective in mobile advertising. Music with both vocal and instrumental versions was more effective in advertisement recall than instrumental music for mobile device users.

MEG and EEG Source Localization in Beamspace

Beamspace methods are applied to EEG/MEG source localization problems in this paper. Beamspace processing involves passing the data through a linear transformation that reduces the data dimension prior to applying a desired statistical signal processing algorithm. This process generally reduces the data requirements of the subsequent algorithm. We present one approach for designing beamspace transformations that are optimized to preserve source activity located within a given region of interest and show that substantial reductions in dimension are obtained with negligible signal loss. Beamspace versions of maximum likelihood dipole fitting, MUSIC, and minimum variance beamforming source localization algorithms are presented. The performance improvement offered by the beamspace approach with limited data is demonstrated by bootstrapping somatosensory data to evaluate the variability of the source location estimates obtained with each algorithm. The quantitative benefits of beamspace processing depend on the algorithm, signal to noise ratio, and amount of data. Dramatic performance improvements are obtained in scenarios with low signal to noise ratio and a small number of independent data samples.

Pipe Dream Memories

In 1985, I appeared in a production of Arsenic and Old Lace at the Forestburgh Playhouse in New York that starred Jayne Heller as one of the kindly, murderous old ladies. When I encountered Jayne at a reunion of actors who'd worked at Forestburgh recently, we shared stories of what we'd been working on and what jobs were in the offing. I told her about "Steinbeck and the Land," a piece I had put together to help commemorate the centennial of Steinbeck's birth and that I hoped to develop into an educational piece that I could tour to schools. Jayne listened, smiled, and said, "Oh, I really liked John Steinbeck." "Did you know him?" She nodded. "How?" "Have you ever heard of a musical called Pipe Dream?" "Of course." "Well, I was in it." "Tell me about your experience," I asked. But it was impossible to talk in-depth at the party and we made arrangements to get together in the near future when we could speak without interruption. Meeting several months later at her Manhattan Plaza apartment in New York, we sat down with her husband, Les, who accompanied her to many of the rehearsals and performances, and talked about the show. With book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein, Jr. and music by Richard Rodgers, Pipe Dream is the musical version of John [End Page 117] Steinbeck's novel Sweet Thursday. It opened at the Shubert Theatre on 30 November 1955, ran for 246 performances, and had the shortest run of any Rodgers and Hammerstein show. Starring in the production was the Wagnerian soprano Helen Traubel as Fauna, William Johnson as Doc, Judy Tyler as Suzy, Mike Kellin as Hazel, and G.D. Wallace as Mac. Directed by Harold Clurman, the production had sets and lighting by Jo Mielziner and costumes by Alvin Colt. Click for larger view Figure 1 According to The Best Plays of 1955-1956, The Burns Mantle Yearbook, 1956 "was a very good season.... [D]uring such a season, the play reviewer could derive real enjoyment from his playgoing; could take a certain actual pride in his job" (3). It was a period of prosperity in the country and in the theater in general. And it seemed to Kronenberger that "besides those producers offering popular work at a respectable level and those concerned with box-office at all costs, there were others who cared about the quality of what they produced; and that there were those who—at least with other people's money—were really willing to take a chance" (3). (And when in one season people bring a Tiger at the Gates, a Chalk Garden, and Waiting for Godot to Broadway they can't help creating [End Page 118] an atmosphere that must infect other producers.) Click for larger view Figure 2 Jayne Heller. Some of the other shows that opened during the 1955-56 season were Bus Stop with Kim Stanley and Elaine Stritch; The Lark with Julie Harris; A Hatful of Rain with Shelley Winters; The Desk Set with Shirley Booth; No Time for Sergeants with Andy Griffith, Don Knotts, and Roddy McDowell; The Diary of Anne Frank with Susan Strasberg; A View from the Bridge with Leo Penn, Eileen Heckart, and Van Heflin; a revival of The Skin of Our Teeth with Mary Martin, George Abbot, and Helen Hayes; Inherit the Wind with Paul Muni and Ed Begley; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Barbara Bel Geddes, Ben Gazzara, Mildred Dunnock, and Burl Ives; Damn Yankees with Gwen Verdon and Ray Walston; and My Fair Lady with Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. The arrival of a new Rodgers and Hammerstein musical on Broadway was a significant event, and critics were waiting for it, waiting to compare it to their past works including Oklahoma!,Carousel, and South Pacific. When it opened, the reviews for Pipe Dream were respectful but far from glowing. With such great talent behind it, why wasn't Pipe Dream a success? According to Kronenberger, "Pipe Dream whitewashed what... collapse You are not currently authenticated. If you would like to authenticate using a different subscribed institution or have your own login and password to Project MUSE Authenticate

Saint Joan: From Renaissance Witch to New Woman

Saint Joan:From Renaissance Witch to New Woman Karma Waltonen (bio) Many have accused Bernard Shaw of sharing the sentiments of Henry Higgins (as expressed in lines written by Alan Jay Lerner): "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" This repeated refrain in the musical version of Pygmalion does indeed seem to fit Shaw's mind; several critics have noted that Shaw, a crusader for women's rights, wanted to enable women to become more like men. This article will explore the problematic picture of the masculine "New Woman" by tracing Shaw's recuperation of a woman who was burned for trying to "be more like a man." Saint Joan, vilified by her contemporaries and in Shakespeare's representation of her, is presented to Shaw's audience as a paragon of rational thought. Yet it would be simplistic to argue that Shaw was praising the maid merely for her masculine qualities. Rather, we shall see that Shaw's high estimation of Joan is due to his view that she shares many qualities with him. Perhaps Lerner hit upon the right line when he had Higgins end his song with the question: "Why can't a woman be like me?" Bernard Shaw apparently had William Shakespeare quite often on his mind. Not only does he praise Shakespeare—"He has outlasted thousands of abler thinkers, and will outlast a thousand more . . . people he has created become more real to us than our actual life" (quoted in Smith 127)—but he also expresses jealousy, or what Harold Bloom would call the anxiety of influence: "With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer . . . whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespear when I measure my mind against his" (quoted in Mason 47). Shaw has written several plays based on the events previously dramatized by Shakespeare. Are we to understand Shaw's "rewrites" of Shakespeare's plays as a modern man's attempts at improving the Bard's work, or as the highest compliment? After all, Shaw maintained: "the stage is still dominated by Garrick's conviction that the manager and actor must adapt Shakespear's [End Page 186] plays to the modern stage by a process which no doubt presents itself to the adapter's mind as one of masterly amelioration, but which must necessarily be mainly one of debasement and mutilation whenever, as occasionally happens, the adapter is inferior to the author" ("Mainly About Myself" 20). Shaw obviously felt that his adaptations were not debasements or mutilations. His treatment of Joan of Arc was perhaps even more justified in his mind, as he did not consider Shakespeare's Joan to be entirely authentic. Shaw believed that Shakespeare, "having begun by an attempt to make Joan a beautiful and romantic figure, was told by his scandalized company that English patriotism would never stand a sympathetic representation of a French conqueror of English troops, and that unless he at once introduced all the old charges against Joan of being a sorceress and a harlot, and assumed her to be guilty of all of them, his play could not be produced" (quoted in Hardin 25). While Shaw made excuses for Shakespeare's negative treatment of Joan, it is doubtful, however, that he fully considered his own reasons for rewriting her myth. That is not to say that Shaw was not prolific in his explanations or justifications—his Preface to Saint Joan is almost half as long as the text of the play. Among his other proclaimed goals, Shaw is eager to show us Joan as the embodiment of modern ideals: "she was in fact one of the first Protestant martyrs . . . one of the first apostles of Nationalism, and the first French practitioner of Napoleonic realism in warfare" ("Preface" 7).1 As she is a woman, she also becomes one of Shaw's "unwomanly women." Shaw's modernization of Joan is indicative of his desire to change the Victorian sex-gender system, which denigrated women to a lesser status because of their sex.2 Joan's historical contemporaries labeled her a witch, in part because she chose to break free of the sex-gender system of her time.3...

Gender and Race Bias in the Judgement of Western Art Music Peiformance

A literature review demonstrates that women and Blacks are under-represented in the professional ranks of classical musicians worldwide. The current empirical study tested the notion that these groups were subject to biases that would affect their advancement in a classical music career. In the empirical work. eight pianists were filmed playing a short piece of music, two each from Black women, Black men, White women and White men. There were three observation conditions for each performer: sound only, full vision and point-light display (here race and gender information was not identifiable). The latter two conditions were repeated twice, once with the performer’s own interpretation and secondly at a set tempo, which enabled a pre-recorded soundtrack to be dubbed over the pictures. This latter measure ensured that half the trails consisted of a standard musical version for all performers. Then, 36 musicians aged between 16 and 26 years, matching the ethnic and gender groups of all the pianists, watched videos of the performances and were asked to judge them, using a seven-point scale, as if they were competition adjudicators or auditioners. The results indicated that there was no significant racial bias amongst judges, although some in-group racial trends could be detected. A significant, though unexpected, effect for gender was found-with female pianists scoring highestfor their performances. It was suggested that this result might be due to the age and background of the observer groups. The paper concludes with a discussion of the ways in which race and gender research might be further developed.

Gender and Race Bias in the Judgement of Western Art Music Performance

Abstract A literature review demonstrates that women and Blacks are under-represented in the professional ranks of classical musicians worldwide. The current empirical study tested the notion that these groups were subject to biases that would affect their advancement in a classical music career. In the empirical work. eight pianists were filmed playing a short piece of music, two each from Black women, Black men, White women and White men. There were three observation conditions for each performer: sound only, full vision and point-light display (here race and gender information was not identifiable). The latter two conditions were repeated twice, once with the performer’s own interpretation and secondly at a set tempo, which enabled a pre-recorded soundtrack to be dubbed over the pictures. This latter measure ensured that half the trails consisted of a standard musical version for all performers. Then, 36 musicians aged between 16 and 26 years, matching the ethnic and gender groups of all the pianists, watched videos of the performances and were asked to judge them, using a seven-point scale, as if they were competition adjudicators or auditioners. The results indicated that there was no significant racial bias amongst judges, although some in-group racial trends could be detected. A significant, though unexpected, effect for gender was found-with female pianists scoring highestfor their performances. It was suggested that this result might be due to the age and background of the observer groups. The paper concludes with a discussion of the ways in which race and gender research might be further developed.

Simulations of muon-induced neutron flux at large depths underground

The production of neutrons by cosmic-ray muons at large depths underground is discussed. The most recent versions of the muon propagation code MUSIC, and particle transport code FLUKA are used to evaluate muon and neutron fluxes. The results of simulations are compared with experimental data.