by | September 22, 2015 · 6:00 am

The Boydell composer compendium series

Rameau compendium

Boydell & Brewer launched The Boydell composer compendium series in 2014 with The Rameau compendium by Graham Sadler.

The series aims to present up-to-date reference works on major composers that can provide instant information and connect users with further reading. As leading authorities on the composers in question, the authors are encouraged both to present available information and, where appropriate, to introduce new facts and arguments and to illuminate the various discourses on the subject.

Each volume includes an exhaustive cross-referenced dictionary of relevant people, places, institutions, compositions, terminology, genres, and events. A comprehensive bibliography is also included, as are numerous musical examples and illustrations.

Below, John Eliot Gardiner conducts a concert of Rameau’s works.

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by | September 20, 2015 · 6:00 am

Jelly Roll Morton and Frog-i-More

jelly roll morton

Jelly Roll Morton probably wrote Frog-i-More rag in 1908 to accompany a fellow vaudevillian known as Frog-i-More, a contortionist who performed in a frog costume, but he did not deposit the music for copyright until 1918 for fear that any form of public record was an invitation to purloin his ideas.

Morton’s piano style and musical greatness are nowhere better demonstrated. All of the most typical features are abundantly evident: his wealth of melodic invention and skill in variation; the tremendous swing; his feeling for formal design and attention to detail; his effective use of pianistic resources; the contrasts of subtle elegance with hard hitting drive; and the variety of harmony yet freedom from complication and superficial display.

This according to “Jelly Roll Morton and the Frog-i-More rag” by William Russell, an essay included in The art of jazz: Essays on the nature and development of jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959, pp. 35–36).

Today is Morton’s 135th birthday! Below, a performance of the piece via mediated piano roll.

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by | September 18, 2015 · 6:00 am

The vocal tract organ

vocal tract organ

 

The vocal tract organ is a new musical instrument that consists of three-dimensional (3D)-printed vocal tracts (throat and mouth) for individual vowels sitting on loudspeakers to enable static vowel sounds to be produced.

The acoustic excitation from the loudspeakers is a synthesized version of the typical waveform produced by the vibrating human vocal folds during pitched sounds, which enables the instrument to be played from a keyboard.

The vocal tract organ will become an instrument in its own right, and it could be used as a direct replacement for the vox humana organ stop, given that its acoustic output is a much closer representation of the human vocal output than that from a vox humana organ pipe. The 3D-printed tracts may also be used  in vocal and choral workshops as well as degree-level music technology education.

This according to “The vocal tract organ and the vox humana organ stop” by David M. Howard (Journal of music, technology & education VII/3 [2014] pp. 265–277).

Above, an illustration from the article; below, a composition by Professor Howard.

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by | September 16, 2015 · 6:00 am

B.B. King’s evolving technique

 

 

B.B. King’s guitar technique drew from many sources, both direct and indirect.

At first he functioned primarily as a vocalist, making little idiomatic use of the instrument; in subsequent recordings the influence of T-Bone Walker became quite apparent.

He also adapted embellishments used by earlier blues guitarists (Lonnie Johnson) as well as those of jazz guitarists (Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, Bill Jennings). King’s distinctive finger tremolo was inspired by Bukka White’s bottleneck style.

This according to “B.B. King: Analysis of the artist’s evolving guitar technique” by Jerry Richardson (American Music Research Center journal VI [1996] pp. 89–107.

Today would have been King’s 90th birthday! Above, King in the late 1980s (photo licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license); below, live in 1974.

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by | September 13, 2015 · 6:00 am

Mel Tormé’s first gig

mel-torme

In a 1996 interview, Mel Tormé described his formative years.

“When I was a baby in Chicago my favorite toy was the radio, and I listened faithfully to the Coon-Sanders Orchestra.”

“My parents finally took me to see them at the Blackhawk Restaurant when I was four years old, and Carleton Coon and Joe Sanders saw me sitting there tapping my feet and singing along.”

“Finally Joe came over and asked ‘Who’s the little dwarf?’ My mother said ‘He listens to your program and knows everything you do’ so they took me onstage and had me sing a tune called You’re drivin’ me crazy. People seemed to like it, so for the next seven months they had me sit in every Monday night and sing that song.”

“I loved being onstage, and when that experience was over I knew what I wanted to do with my life.”

Quoted in Mel Tormé, an interview included in Kristine McKenna’s Book of changes: A collection of interviews (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2001, pp. 217–224).

Today would have been Tormé’s 90th birthday! Above, the singer early in his career; below, the seasoned pro in a memorable performance.

BONUS:  Tormé was also an accomplished drummer.

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by | September 11, 2015 · 6:00 am

Arvo Pärt and tintinnabuli

In an interview, Arvo Pärt discussed his tintinnabuli style:

“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.

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by | September 9, 2015 · 6:00 am

Halka in Haiti

Halka in Haiti

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).

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by | September 7, 2015 · 6:00 am

Reconfiguring popular screen dance

 

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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by | September 5, 2015 · 6:00 am

Perspektiven musikpädagogischer Forschung

Bedeutungszuweisungen

In 2014 Waxmann launched the peer-reviewed series Perspektiven musikpädagogischer Forschung with Bedeutungszuweisungen in der musikalischen Früherziehung: Integration der kindlichen Perspektive in musikalische Bildungsprozesse by Anne Weber-Krüger.

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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by | September 3, 2015 · 6:00 am

An early ethnomusicology symposium

group photo 1

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.

This according to “Patriarchs at work: Reflections on an ethnomusicological symposium in 1963” by Beverley Diamond (Sound matters 27 July 2015).

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