- 1510 E Michigan Ave
Apt. 1
Lansing MI, 48912
Philip Rice
Michigan State University, Music, Alumnus
- Philip Rice (b. 1988) holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from Michigan State University and a Master of Music with distinction from Westminster College of the Arts in Princeton. In ... morePhilip Rice (b. 1988) holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from Michigan State University and a Master of Music with distinction from Westminster College of the Arts in Princeton. In 2015 he received an American Prize for orchestral composition and was an ASCAP Morton Gould Award finalist. His creative focus is on acoustic ecology and musical explorations of space and place. His academic research focus is in rhythmic and spatial constructions as well as postmodern theory. As a performer he sings tenor and has studied piano, organ, carillon, and handbells.edit
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a pseudoscientific neologism for a pleasurable tingling sensation reported by a growing number of people in response to soft sounds such as whispers, crinkles, and taps. ASMR is described... more
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a pseudoscientific neologism for a pleasurable tingling sensation reported by a growing number of people in response to soft sounds such as whispers, crinkles, and taps. ASMR is described as a “headgasm” where tingles start in the scalp or neck and radiate throughout the body. An active community of enthusiasts has emerged on YouTube in support of videos crafted by “ASMRtists.”
Characteristics of the videos include a strong sense of personal intimacy, long-duration unedited streams, and high fidelity recording made with “3Dio” binaural microphones shaped like human ears. These and other techniques invite the viewer into increasingly realistic online spaces defined by acoustic simulation. In recent months, the ASMR genre has pushed beyond the confines of two-dimensional screens with interactive videos that allow the viewer to freely explore three-dimensional space and sound. These new media formats explode the limits of mechanical reproduction as a microcosm of lived experience, instead functioning in and of themselves as ongoing macrocosmic events, placing them in dialogue with other recent musical trends including ambient music and acoustic ecology.
Using theoretical frameworks from Cusick, Kittler, Attali, and Scarry, I argue for an aesthetics of ASMR that challenges longstanding assumptions about the social politics of sound. Rather than being defined by structures of power, representation, and narrative, the ASMR community embodies a sound world defined by grace. Although virtually indistinguishable from music (and at times explicitly equated with it), ASMR completely lacks delimited roles of composer, performer, and audience. Additionally, ASMR counters popular concern about the mediating nature of digital interfaces in society and the art world. Rather than hedging individual subjectivities through the use of symbols, texts, and stylized or abbreviated forms, ASMR appears to foster personal intimacy, vulnerability, and authenticity through a heard, embodied, and shared practice.
Characteristics of the videos include a strong sense of personal intimacy, long-duration unedited streams, and high fidelity recording made with “3Dio” binaural microphones shaped like human ears. These and other techniques invite the viewer into increasingly realistic online spaces defined by acoustic simulation. In recent months, the ASMR genre has pushed beyond the confines of two-dimensional screens with interactive videos that allow the viewer to freely explore three-dimensional space and sound. These new media formats explode the limits of mechanical reproduction as a microcosm of lived experience, instead functioning in and of themselves as ongoing macrocosmic events, placing them in dialogue with other recent musical trends including ambient music and acoustic ecology.
Using theoretical frameworks from Cusick, Kittler, Attali, and Scarry, I argue for an aesthetics of ASMR that challenges longstanding assumptions about the social politics of sound. Rather than being defined by structures of power, representation, and narrative, the ASMR community embodies a sound world defined by grace. Although virtually indistinguishable from music (and at times explicitly equated with it), ASMR completely lacks delimited roles of composer, performer, and audience. Additionally, ASMR counters popular concern about the mediating nature of digital interfaces in society and the art world. Rather than hedging individual subjectivities through the use of symbols, texts, and stylized or abbreviated forms, ASMR appears to foster personal intimacy, vulnerability, and authenticity through a heard, embodied, and shared practice.
Research Interests:
A late nineteenth-century renaissance in French organ building partitioned organist, organ, and audience while expanding the instrument’s size and adding "swell" boxes shuttering pipes from public view. In theater, concert, and church... more
A late nineteenth-century renaissance in French organ building partitioned organist, organ, and audience while expanding the instrument’s size and adding "swell" boxes shuttering pipes from public view. In theater, concert, and church organs, the organist is hidden behind the console or is seated in an adjoining chamber, under the floor, or high in a loft. Cary Howie’s book, "Claustrophilia" (2007), examines how hermetic cloisters might be understood as erotic spaces in medieval literature and practice. In this paper, I argue that the enclosure of the organ, along with its promise of campy power, made it attractive to gay men in the 20th century, inscribing it as an extension of the closet. According to Cameron Carpenter, "most American organists are gay or at least […] questioning," while Virgil Fox complained that organists have historically been "hiding behind the woodwork." Popular French literary depictions of the organ, notably Leroux’s "Le Fantôme de l’Opéra" (1910) and Verne’s "Vingt mille lieues sous les mers" (1870), portray it as an expressive mode of repressed, reclusive villains. Rops’s etching, "L’Organiste du Diable" (1886), shows a nude woman playing an organ bedecked with penises propped against each other in a homoerotic configuration, while the film adaptation of Jean-Claude Forest’s "Barberella" (1964), introduces the "Excessive Machine," an organ-like musical orgasmatron that houses victims in its bellows, dousing them with lethal sexual energy. These texts and images indicate toward a French-influenced rendering of the organ in the 20th century that registered it as an enclosure for queer mechanisms and episodes.
Research Interests: Music, Musicology, Queer Studies, Queer Theory, Organology, and 12 moreKeyboard Instruments, Gay And Lesbian Studies, French Romantic theatre, French Romantic organ music, French Romanticism, Jules Verne, Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux, Keyboard Music, Jane Fonda, Félicien Rops, and Jean-Claude Forest
Positive reception of Charles Ives as an ideal American composer appeared concurrently in the 1970s with the onset of New Musicology, revisionist biographies, and postmodern attitudes. While Ives’s essay, The Majority (1920) postured him... more
Positive reception of Charles Ives as an ideal American composer appeared concurrently in the 1970s with the onset of New Musicology, revisionist biographies, and postmodern attitudes. While Ives’s essay, The Majority (1920) postured him as a self-professed member of a privileged hegemony, more popular contemporaries Elliot Carter and Aaron Copland were critical of his music. Recent scholarship suggests that Ives’s later canonization was generated by anti-communist preference for fiercely individualistic “maverick” personalities, exemplified in his experimental eclecticism and disregard for popular taste. However, this interpretation is inconsistent with the prevailing vision of Ives as reclusive and sexually repressed. I argue that Ives’s music captured the attention of the American public in the early stages of the Civil Rights Movement as popular opinion found social merit in the art of outsiders. Leonard Bernstein (a minority in race and sexual orientation) identified in Ives’s Concord Sonata what he heard as “negro” syncopated rhythms, a characteristic he thought marked the music as American. Later promoters of Ives were also gay, such as Michael Tilson Thomas. Recent comparison with extreme outsider artists such as Henry Darger, who also focused on conservative religious/patriotic subjects and destructive effects of industrialization, indicates that post-industrial audiences appreciate Ives not for the “progressiveness” of his work, but for its “otherness.” I will show that a postmodern canonization of Ives does not frame him as representative of the cultural majority, rather as the ironic champion of the marginal, the outsider, indeed very “Minority” he sought to resist.
Research Interests:
Comparison of three choral settings of E. E. Cummings' "i thank You God for most this amazing" using a 1953 recording of the poet reading the poem as a control group for analysis of rhythmic features and affects within each work. Settings... more
Comparison of three choral settings of E. E. Cummings' "i thank You God for most this amazing" using a 1953 recording of the poet reading the poem as a control group for analysis of rhythmic features and affects within each work. Settings explored are by Jacob Avshalomov (1971), Gwyneth Walker (1998), and Eric Whitacre (2000).
Research Interests:
An investigation of the changes to rhythmic notation and rate of tactus from the Renaissance into the Baroque period, particularly how these changes reflect larger philosophical changes in the Baroque and Enlightenment.
Research Interests:
The music of Estonian minimalist, Arvo Pärt, is influenced by the style and form of medieval polyphony. This influence permeates both his compositional method, and the resulting musical affect. This paper focuses on rhythm as a point of... more
The music of Estonian minimalist, Arvo Pärt, is influenced by the style and form of medieval polyphony. This influence permeates both his compositional method, and the resulting musical affect. This paper focuses on rhythm as a point of comparison, most significantly the appearance of rhythmic modes in his vocal works, and the declamation of text. Also significant is his biography, which includes a period of monasticism which the author postulates may have led to the "tranquil" mood of much of his music.
Research Interests: Music Theory, Musicology, Digital Technology, Oral Traditions, Minimalism, and 12 moreMedieval Music, Renaissance music, Gregorian Chant, Polyphony, Performance Practice, Arvo Pärt, Art, Culture & Politics in Estonia, Vocal Polyphony, Chant research, Early Notations, Medieval musicology, and Hillier, Paul.
Disney’s 2013 animated film Frozen attempts to subvert traditional fairy-tale gender roles with the use of two strong female protagonists entangled in a queer version of Disney’s popular tropes: a deadly curse is broken by sisterly love... more
Disney’s 2013 animated film Frozen attempts to subvert traditional fairy-tale gender roles with the use of two strong female protagonists entangled in a queer version of Disney’s popular tropes: a deadly curse is broken by sisterly love rather than the delivery of prince charming’s “true love’s kiss.” However, critical analysis of the film reveals that it fails to fulfill its own feminist agenda for both narratological and musical reasons as well as an uneven treatment of Elsa’s character, who emerges as morally ambiguous and ultimately a confirmation of the patriarchy’s prevailing power.
First we examine the film’s hypotext, Hans Christian Andersen’s Snedronningen (The Snow Queen). While Andersen’s story concentrates the locus of evil in the devil and posits the Snow Queen as a victim of his shattered mirror, Frozen fails to provide any explanation as to the nature and origin of Elsa’s powers. Consequently, these abilities are seen as a curse, and her failure to properly control them in early scenes of the film situate her as a “madwoman in the attic.” This subtly validates her father’s mantra, “conceal,don’t feel,” and suggests that Elsa cannot control her powers simply because she is too volatile. While the film’s hit song “Let It Go” ostensibly champions free expression, it arrives at a moment that is narratologically designed to vilify Elsa’s character. Anna’s characterization and musical treatment are no less troublesome. Initially her character corrodes fairy-tale conventions because her quest to save Elsa and restore the kingdom is motivated by sisterly love, while her romantic love story is relegated to subplot/non-redemptive status. Ultimately she is revealed as the heroine of the story, but she does not receive typical heroic treatment musically: none of her songs are true solos,while her duets are fraught with inequalities. Furthermore, all her musical numbers are predicated on disappointment or deception, inviting a comparison with pitifully self-sacrificing character types such as Éponine from Les Misérables.
Through Anna’s example, Elsa discovers her regulatory force is ironically in embracing a broader palette of emotions including love. This discovery is unsung,robbing the crucial moment of aesthetic currency within the narratological economy and leaving the film without a finale. By de-emphasizing this transferral of power to a feminine model, male oppressors are implicitly left in control—at best implying that Elsa’s transformation is accidental and thus she is still unstable, and at worst suggesting that her salvation was indeed rooted in emotional repression all along. Unlike more successfully feminist musicals like Stephen Schwartz’s Wicked, which dethrones the patriarchy with a fully subversive protagonist, Frozen concludes with Elsa’s return to the community, implying that her “happily ever after” still lies within an unapologetically oppressive society. Neither is Anna convincingly liberated; the final moments of the film focus on her heteronormative pursuits, thus reinscribing the film more firmly into the traditional fairy-tale model it initially seeks to resist.
First we examine the film’s hypotext, Hans Christian Andersen’s Snedronningen (The Snow Queen). While Andersen’s story concentrates the locus of evil in the devil and posits the Snow Queen as a victim of his shattered mirror, Frozen fails to provide any explanation as to the nature and origin of Elsa’s powers. Consequently, these abilities are seen as a curse, and her failure to properly control them in early scenes of the film situate her as a “madwoman in the attic.” This subtly validates her father’s mantra, “conceal,don’t feel,” and suggests that Elsa cannot control her powers simply because she is too volatile. While the film’s hit song “Let It Go” ostensibly champions free expression, it arrives at a moment that is narratologically designed to vilify Elsa’s character. Anna’s characterization and musical treatment are no less troublesome. Initially her character corrodes fairy-tale conventions because her quest to save Elsa and restore the kingdom is motivated by sisterly love, while her romantic love story is relegated to subplot/non-redemptive status. Ultimately she is revealed as the heroine of the story, but she does not receive typical heroic treatment musically: none of her songs are true solos,while her duets are fraught with inequalities. Furthermore, all her musical numbers are predicated on disappointment or deception, inviting a comparison with pitifully self-sacrificing character types such as Éponine from Les Misérables.
Through Anna’s example, Elsa discovers her regulatory force is ironically in embracing a broader palette of emotions including love. This discovery is unsung,robbing the crucial moment of aesthetic currency within the narratological economy and leaving the film without a finale. By de-emphasizing this transferral of power to a feminine model, male oppressors are implicitly left in control—at best implying that Elsa’s transformation is accidental and thus she is still unstable, and at worst suggesting that her salvation was indeed rooted in emotional repression all along. Unlike more successfully feminist musicals like Stephen Schwartz’s Wicked, which dethrones the patriarchy with a fully subversive protagonist, Frozen concludes with Elsa’s return to the community, implying that her “happily ever after” still lies within an unapologetically oppressive society. Neither is Anna convincingly liberated; the final moments of the film focus on her heteronormative pursuits, thus reinscribing the film more firmly into the traditional fairy-tale model it initially seeks to resist.