“It is a very simple, concentrated, and strict polyphonic harmonic system—although not in the classical sense. Tintinnabuli is merely a name; it is not intended to signify anything specific. And it sounds nice.”
“The most difficult thing is to find the right spirit. It all depends on that.”
This according to “A quick one while he’s away” by Ben Finane (Listen: Life with classical music IV/4 [winter 2012] p. 96).
Today is Pärt’s 80th birthday! Below, Spiegel im Spiegel, a much-celebrated example of his tintinnabuli style.
Inspired and provoked by the title character in Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo, two artists and a curator decided to revisit the mad plan to bring opera to the tropics.
With an eye to undercutting Fitzcarraldo’s colonialist Romanticism, they decided to confront a particular set of historical and socialpolitical realities by staging Stanisław Moniuszko’s opera Halka, which is considered Poland’s national opera, in the unlikely locale of Cazale, Haiti, a village inhabited by descendants of Polish soldiers who fought for the Haitian Revolution in the early 1800s.
On 7 February 2015 a one-time-only performance of Halka was presented to a rapt local audience on a winding dirt road in Cazale. A collaboration between Polish and Haitian performers, the event was filmed in one take to be presented as a large-scale projected panorama in the Polish Pavillion at the 2015 Venice Biennale.
This according to Halka/Haiti: 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W: C.T. Jasper & Joanna Malinowska (Warsaw: Zachęta: Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, 2015).
Above, a still from the film featuring a local extra (more stills are here); below, the Biennale installation (the music starts around 5:08).
The U.S. television series So you think you can dance is located within the broader aesthetics of popular screen dance rather than in the aesthetic realm of reality television, as dance has been featured in popular screen media—big and small—since the birth of the moving picture medium.
Taking into consideration the aesthetics, structure, and star personas from the backstage Hollywood musical of the studio era, So you think you can dance draws on and transforms this earlier contribution to popular screen dance, creating a haunted space as a result.
The start of the new millennium has seen another upsurge in the production of dance for popular moving picture media, and an increasing presence of dance in the mass mediascape. As So you think you can dance is simultaneously located at the beginning and in the middle of this new popular dance craze, it actively contributes to the reconfiguration of traditions from popular screen dance aesthetics.
This according to “‘We are not here to make avant-garde choreography!’: So you think you can dance and popular screen dance aesthetics” by Elena Natalie Benthaus, an essay included in Dance ACTions: Traditions and transformations (Society of Dance History Scholars 2013, pp. 55–62).
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The series aims to support the scientific examination of music education in all its substantive and methodological breadth with writings by young scientists and researchers as well as experienced scientists. The editorial team hopes that this series excites discussion in both the professional and interdisciplinary worlds.
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At a unique ethnomusicology symposium hosted by the University of Washington in 1963, presenters described their views of the discipline with particular attention to fieldwork. It was a heady moment in the discipline, one where there was a sense of a distinctive emerging disciplinary identity only a few years after the first conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
The event included debates about disciplinary identity, particularly the methodological division between those trained in music or anthropology.
In spite of traces of continuing interest in questions of universals, the terms of and reasons for their different positionings were presented as quite rigid and stark categorizations, binaries in most cases—simple/complex, fixed/improvised, tribal/urban, literate/non-literate, sonic structures/culture, musicologists/anthropologists, insiders/outsiders.
To our eyes over half a century later, various conflations of these binaries amount to highly problematic over-arching and totalizing constructs that are racist at worst and rigid at best. The entwined and porous processes of cultural production and reception that we more often focus on today would probably have been unthinkable for some of the 1963 participants.
A piano prodigy at an early age, Seiji Ozawa’s virtuoso career was cut short in his teens when he broke two fingers playing rugby. He switched to composition and conducting, and after graduating with honors he left Japan for Europe.
His rise was swift, and in 1973, at the age of 38, he became Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Sporting a Beatles haircut and Nehru jackets, he took Boston’s hyper-traditional classical music scene by storm; overnight, America’s most staid orchestra gained a hip new image.
This according to “Wild card” by Andrew Moravcsik (Opera news LXXIII/6 [December 2008] pp. 32–33).
Today is Ozawa’s 80th birthday! Below, a recording from 1974.
In 2014 Taarnborg inaugurated the series Hjerterne opad with Mod lyset: Rued Langgaard, musikken og symbolismen by Esben Tange.
The book discusses how The Danish composer Rued Langgaard was very much fascinated by light, which runs as an important theme in his life and production. It is especially expressed in his symphony no. 1 (Klippepastoraler). In the symphony no. 10 (Hin torden-bolig) and symphony no. 12 (Helsingeborg), light is linked to its contrast–darkness–and in his last symphony, no. 16 (Syndflod af Sol), Langgaard makes the divine light shine through the music.
Below, a performance of Langgaard’s 16th symphony.
Few rock musicians have been as politically and stylistically radical as The Fugs were in their first incarnation, which ran from about 1964 to mid-1969.
They were the first group to shatter taboos against profane and obscene language and explicit lyrics about sex and illicit substances in rock music, predating even The Velvet Underground. They were also among the forerunners of the hybrid known as folk-rock.
They claim to have played more benefits for left-wing political causes than any other band of the era did. They suffered draining battles against censorship and harassment from politicians, law enforcement, and right-wingers.
They drew upon the poetry of William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, and others for some of their more literary lyrics. They were among the first rock artists to smash the barrier against songs running more than five minutes and, along with The Mothers of Invention and The Bonzo Dog Band, they were one of the funniest bands of the time, couching their political and social satire in wit that could be both ferocious and gentle.
This according to “The Fugs” by Ritchie Unterberger, an essay included in Urban spacemen and wayfaring strangers: Overlooked innovators and eccentric visionaries of ’60s rock (San Francisco: Miller Freeman, 2000, pp. 94–108).
Below, The Fugs at the Fillmore East in 1968 (audio only).
The subsequent 1952 presidential race included an ad for Adlai Stevenson that featured a saucy Patti Page lookalike addressing the camera and singing, “I love the gov, the governor of Illinois…Adlai, I love you madly.” This was the first presidential race to feature widespread use of the new televisual medium, and Dwight D. Eisenhower won both the ad war and the presidency.
Ballet manga, in which the heroine withstands numerous trials to become a notable dancer, is very popular among Japanese girls and women, and has greatly contributed to the establishment of ballet in Japan.
The genre emerged during the 1950s; with an increase in its popularity, more children began attending private ballet classes, since Japan had no official ballet schools. After some decades now, many Japanese dancers have begun winning international dancing competitions.
While most ballet manga is fictional, some examples have been based on the lives of famous ballet dancers such as Vaclav Nižinskij and Maria Tallchief.
This according to “The relationship between ballet and manga in Japan” by Yukiyo Hoshino, an essay included in Writing dancing/Dancing writing (Birmingham: Society of Dance History Scholars, 2014, pp. 103–106).
Above, the first volume of Swan, a popular serialized ballet manga from the 1970s; below, the related genre of ballet anime.
The main entrance to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’s exhibition Lou Reed: Caught between the twisted stars opens up on Lincoln Plaza, directly adjacent to the The Metropolitan Opera house. On a sunny day, the Met’s … Continue reading →
Seven strings/Сім струн (dedicated to Uncle Michael)* For thee, O Ukraine, O our mother unfortunate, bound, The first string I touch is for thee. The string will vibrate with a quiet yet deep solemn sound, The song from my heart … Continue reading →
Introduction: Dr. Philip Ewell, Associate Professor of Music at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, posted a series of daily tweets during Black History Month (February 2021) providing information on some under-researched Black … Continue reading →
For it [the Walkman] permits the possibility…of imposing your soundscape on the surrounding aural environment and thereby domesticating the external world: for a moment, it can all be brought under the STOP/START, FAST FOWARD, PAUSE and REWIND buttons. –Iain Chambers, “The … Continue reading →
