During the Great Depression, Harry Partch rode the rails and followed the fruit harvest, finding ... more During the Great Depression, Harry Partch rode the rails and followed the fruit harvest, finding among hoboes what he called “a fountainhead of pure musical Americana.” Although he later wrote immense stage works for instruments of his own creation, he is still regularly called a hobo composer for the compositions that grew out of this period of his life. Yet few have questioned the label’s impact on his musical output, compositional life, and reception. By exploring Harry Partch and the cultural icon he represented side-by-side, this groundbreaking study examines the notion of Partch as a hobo composer from many sides – historical, cultural, political, and musical. It outlines the cultural history of the hobo from the mid-1800s through the 1960s as well as those figures associated with the hobo’s image. It explores how Partch’s music was received as it chronicled a subculture that was disappearing and how the composer ultimately engaged and frustrated popular conceptions of the hobo. And it follows the years after Partch lived as a hobo to question his response to the hobo label and the ways in which others used it to define and contain him for over thirty years.
In 1818, Scottish Presbyterian Robert Morrison, Protestantism's first missionary to China, is... more In 1818, Scottish Presbyterian Robert Morrison, Protestantism's first missionary to China, issued that country's first hymnal.1 Although it might seem strange that Morrison, who had only been in the country for eleven years, chose to focus his energies on translating the thirty hymns that made up that publication, it actually was a fairly common practice among Protestant missionaries. Congregational singing has long been a hallmark of Protestant worship, so in order for new converts to participate fully in the church's activities, missionaries had to translate hymnals. Neither was this focus on hymnody peculiar to China. Translation efforts in hymnody have so dominated Protestant mission work, that, around the world, the first exposure most non-Western societies have had to Western music has come through church music.2 What is unique about hymnody in China is that during the twentieth century, a strong tradition of indigenous hymnody quietly emerged, completely overtaking efforts at translating Western hymnody and in many ways uniting Christians persecuted there under the Communist regime. In fact, distinctly Chinese hymnody has affected the Western world in a powerful and reciprocal fashion not often seen when Western and non-Western musics come into contact. Not only do missionaries today often encourage the people with whom they work to compose their own worship music in their own musical style; Chinese hymns have entered American and European hymn books. Far from merely copying a Western tradition, composers of these hymns adapted literary and musical features from Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, altered Western features to match Chinese musical conventions, and created a hymnody that is now used by all denominations and languages across the nation, a feat of unification not seen anywhere in the Western world. These hymns were primarily composed for a small hymnal published in 1936, Hymns of Universal Praise. That one book and its compilers did more for the development of Chinese hymnody than any one or thing else, but it has rarely been studied for its cultural and musical impact. This article seeks to correct that fault. Beginning with a brief historical overview of the situation that prompted its publication, this study explores the difficulties Protestant missionaries encountered in translating Western hymns and the call for an indigenous hymnody that arose at the beginning of the twentieth century. It then proceeds to examine the hymnal's genesis as a collaborative effort among denominations and the ways in which the men and women of the Union Committee that compiled it overcame the obstacles earlier efforts had encountered. Finally, it looks at the hymnal itself both in the textual themes the hymns encapsulate and the musical traditions from which it borrows. By way of conclusion, this study ends by connecting the theme of unification woven throughout the discussion with the reason for Hymns of Universal Praise's remarkable success and its broad influence in the space where two cultures interacted. Lost in Translation-Early Attempts at Chinese Hymnody Although American missionaries carried a variety of hymn types with them as they went to China in the mid-nineteenth century, by and large they preferred gospel hymns to any other. This preference had musical and theological origins. The musical aspect lay in the hymns' singable melodies, repetitive and hearttugging lyrics, and slow harmonic movements with chord changes happening once per measure at the most. The theological aspect rested on the hymns' direct communication of their largely emotional message. Gospel hymns originated during the second Great Awakening in the 1850s, particularly in the MoodySankey revivals.3 Revivalists enjoyed using them because their lyrically direct and musically simple style generated an overwhelming emotional reaction in congregations. In fact, gospel hymns were partially responsible for the emotionally-charged atmosphere that characterized American revival meetings. …
Arnold Schoenberg. Moses und Aron. DVD. Daniele Gatti / Vienna State Opera and Slovak Philharmoni... more Arnold Schoenberg. Moses und Aron. DVD. Daniele Gatti / Vienna State Opera and Slovak Philharmonic Chorus. With Franz Grundheber and Thomas Moser. [Halle/Saale, Germany]: Arthaus Musik, 2006. 101 259. $32.98. Leos. Janacek. Jenufa. DVD. Peter Schneider / Orquestra Simfonica I Cor del Gran Teatre del Liceu. With Nina Stemme, Eva Marton, Jorma Silvasti, Par Lindskog. Ratingen, Germany: TDK, 2007, 2005. DVWW-OPJENU. $32.98. In the early twentieth century, opera underwent a sea change as the dissonant strands of musical modernism and the burgeoning ideas of psychology began to drift onto the stage. Audiences, caught in a rapidly industrializing world, sought to understand their situation through the theater. Composers, for their part, embraced the new freedoms granted by those shifting audience expectations and began telling stories unlike those that already existed. Many scaled back their scope, weaving tales of more modest proportions, while others delved into the inner world of thought and belief, both conscious and unconscious. These two admittedly broad responses, among the many from the period, are clearly borne out in the recent DVD releases of Leos Janacek's and Arnold Schoenberg's greatest operatic works, Jenufa and Moses und Aron. The nature of these DVDs speaks both to the place of these works in the modern repertoire and to the shifting current of modern audience expectation. Schoenberg's Moses und Aron is often acknowledged as one of the composer's masterpieces in the twelve-tone language, but its troubled compositional history, daunting stage directions, and undramatic subject matter have kept it out of the performing repertoire. Schoenberg first conceived the work in 1922 as a cantata, but by 1930, had refashioned it into an opera libretto. He began composing the work and finished its first two acts by 1932, but he stalled there and never completed the work nor saw any of it performed. In fact, as the director of this particular production, Reto Nickler, notes in an interview included with the DVD, that Schoenberg did not think the work performable. With Moses und Aron, Schoenberg turned to operatic territory unexplored neither in his earlier Erwartung (1909) and Die gluckliche Hand (1910-13), nor in many other contemporaneous operas, namely the metaphysical. Moses and Aron represent for Schoenberg two different responses to spiritual revelation, and through them, he explored the nature of human faith and his ambiguity toward his own resurfacing Jewish identity. That search for a Jewish identity is given primacy over the question of faith in Nickler's production for the Vienna State Opera in 2006. Nickler created a tensely charged atmosphere absent in other productions by casting the characters and chorus as Holocaust survivors. The resulting severity of the staging, costume design, and lighting pulls the viewer's attention to the words and forces one to choose between Moses's direction of faith and singularity outside of culture and Aron's path toward assimilation, which ultimately, according to this production, leads to death. Unfortunately, the power of Nickler's production choice is broken by the over-the-top nature of his staging of the act 2 centerpiece, Der Tanz um das goldene Kalb. The chorus of Jews assimilates into an Ayran culture by donning blond wigs and gold costumes to fall prostrate before a giant, golden "ICH," while Aron instructs them to "worship yourself in this image." The use of pictures of the chorus's faces and a bank of giant television monitors is innovative and jarring, but undercuts the immediacy of Moses's challenge by reducing it to spectacle. By the time Moses returns to the stage with the Ten Commandments, and the original production design resurfaces, the flow of Schoenberg's argument is lost. Any production of Moses und Aron must contend with the lack of a final act; this production wisely chose to end with act 2. However, the DVD release includes the fascinating special feature of Franz Grundheber, who is mesmerizing as Moses, reading the final words of Schoenberg's libretto for act 3. …
Michael Nyman: Composer in Progress; Michael Nyman: In Concert. DVD. Written and directed by Silv... more Michael Nyman: Composer in Progress; Michael Nyman: In Concert. DVD. Written and directed by Silvia Beck. [Germany]: Arthaus Musik, 2010. 101 526. $39.99. In 1993, Michael Nyman was blindsided by the overwhelming success of his film score for Jane Campion's The Piano. In crafting the voice for Holly Hunter's mute character, Ada, Nyman believed he was writing for a film with the reach of his collaborations with Peter Greenaway-art house fare little seen by mainstream audiences. However, The Piano exploded into the cultural consciousness, and Nyman's score, drenched with Scottish melodies subjected to his trademark style of motoric repetition and layering, went on to sell over three million copies. Nyman became an overnight success twenty years in the making. Even with the name recognition that came from The Piano, Nyman did not receive the imprimatur of the British musical establishment until sixteen years later when he was invited to perform at the 2009 BBC Proms in Royal Albert Hall. Silvia Beck's portrait of Nyman, fittingly called Composer in Progress, takes these two moments when Nyman bathed in the popular limelight as touchstones from which to explore the composer's diverse interests and activities. With seemingly full access both to Nyman and his core musicians, Beck has created a frustratingly fascinating film that provides tantalizing glimpses of the composer, but not a full portrait. Instead of a straight-forward chronological approach, Beck has opted to engage Nyman episodically. Where many filmmakers would seek entry into a composer's aesthetic by beginning at the beginning with childhood and music studies, Beck opens with influences on Nyman's music by focusing on his 1977 In Re Don Giovanni, a work that recontextualizes and rearticulates the first 16 bars of Leporello's catalogue aria through the lens of Jerry Lee Lewis-style rock. She then jumps to Nyman's film scores, particularly Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract (which relies heavily on Purcell's music), Jane Campion's The Piano, and Volker Schlondorff's The Ogre, before digging into the makeup of The Michael Nyman Band and its performance at the BBC Proms. Interspersed among her three foci of recontextualization of older music, film music, and popular-music influenced performative style, Beck has peppered choice anecdotes to demonstrate Nyman's work outside of composition. We meet Steve Reich and hear how the famed minimalist convinced Nyman to return to composing after twelve years of music criticism, a time that resulted in the seminal book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. We observe Nyman taking photographs and video with small digital devices in Mexico City leading up to footage of his film Witness I. And we see him helping prepare and then perform at a festival of his music in Groningen in the Netherlands. However, throughout these episodes though we seek a common thread to help us categorize the thrust, impact, and import of Nyman's music, we never find it. That perspective, that thread, could have been delivered through interviews with his most important collaborators, particularly in film, but Beck only interviewed Volker Schlondorff, who in his two minutes on camera clearly articulates the subtexts Nyman's music brings to film and provides the most penetrating glimpse into Nyman's significance of the whole documentary. …
4. roy m. prendergast, Film Music: A Neglected Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). 5. Theo Van le... more 4. roy m. prendergast, Film Music: A Neglected Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). 5. Theo Van leeuwen, Speech, Music, Sound (basingstoke: macmillan, 1999); Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Towards a Semiotics of Music (princeton, N.J.: princeton university press, 1990). 6. Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia (oxford: oxford university press, 1998). 7. John Fiske, Television Culture (london: routledge, 1987); Reading the Popular (london: routledge, 1989); Jane Feuer, “genre study and Television” in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed. robert C. Allen (Chapel Hill: university of North Carolina press, 1992), 138–60; “melodrama, serial Form and Television Today,” in Television: The Critical View, ed. Horace Newcomb (oxford: oxford university press, 1994), 551–62; John Thornton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television (New brunswick, N.J.: rutgers university press, 1995); glen Creeber, Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen (basingstoke: macmillan, 2006); Creeber, Dennis Potter: Between Two Worlds (basingstoke: macmillan, 1998); and Creeber’s edited collections The Television Genres Book (london: bFi: 2001) and Tele-Visions (london: bFi, 2006); Todd gitlin, Inside Primetime (los Angeles: university of California press, 2000). 8. michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia gorbman (New York: Columbia university press, 1994), 178.
... world during this time, Partch enjoyed a certain degree of recognition, due in no small part ... more ... world during this time, Partch enjoyed a certain degree of recognition, due in no small part to these Dust Bowl-themed compositions. Yet Partch's music and activities during this seminal phase of his career have received scant attention. This study casts the young Harry Partch ...
... "River-Trees Music" accompanies shots of a river gently flowing and situates the fi... more ... "River-Trees Music" accompanies shots of a river gently flowing and situates the film primarily from Apollo's viewpoint because it is scored only for percussion instrumentsthe Diamond Marimba, Bass Marimba, Spoils of War, and Boo. ... Video 5. "Boo (Bamboo Marimba)" 21 ...
Over the past decade, there has been a steady drumbeat of action in music history pedagogy, from ... more Over the past decade, there has been a steady drumbeat of action in music history pedagogy, from the founding of the AMS pedagogy study group in 2006 to the establishment of the Journal of Music History Pedagogy to the annual Teaching Music History Conference. Because of this action, pedagogues have become interested in the training afforded to graduate students in music history pedagogy, steadily establishing coursework in American universities. Yet there is precious little data about these courses, from where they are offered, to what is covered in those classes, to faculty’s impressions of their effectiveness. In the fall of 2015, Andrew Granade led a class in conducting a nationwide survey of graduate programs identified by the American Musicological Society as offering degrees in music history and musicology. The purposes of this survey were to establish quantitative data on the frequency of courses in music history pedagogy and the commonality of that coursework across institu...
During the Great Depression, Harry Partch rode the rails and followed the fruit harvest, finding ... more During the Great Depression, Harry Partch rode the rails and followed the fruit harvest, finding among hoboes what he called “a fountainhead of pure musical Americana.” Although he later wrote immense stage works for instruments of his own creation, he is still regularly called a hobo composer for the compositions that grew out of this period of his life. Yet few have questioned the label’s impact on his musical output, compositional life, and reception. By exploring Harry Partch and the cultural icon he represented side-by-side, this groundbreaking study examines the notion of Partch as a hobo composer from many sides – historical, cultural, political, and musical. It outlines the cultural history of the hobo from the mid-1800s through the 1960s as well as those figures associated with the hobo’s image. It explores how Partch’s music was received as it chronicled a subculture that was disappearing and how the composer ultimately engaged and frustrated popular conceptions of the hobo. And it follows the years after Partch lived as a hobo to question his response to the hobo label and the ways in which others used it to define and contain him for over thirty years.
In 1818, Scottish Presbyterian Robert Morrison, Protestantism's first missionary to China, is... more In 1818, Scottish Presbyterian Robert Morrison, Protestantism's first missionary to China, issued that country's first hymnal.1 Although it might seem strange that Morrison, who had only been in the country for eleven years, chose to focus his energies on translating the thirty hymns that made up that publication, it actually was a fairly common practice among Protestant missionaries. Congregational singing has long been a hallmark of Protestant worship, so in order for new converts to participate fully in the church's activities, missionaries had to translate hymnals. Neither was this focus on hymnody peculiar to China. Translation efforts in hymnody have so dominated Protestant mission work, that, around the world, the first exposure most non-Western societies have had to Western music has come through church music.2 What is unique about hymnody in China is that during the twentieth century, a strong tradition of indigenous hymnody quietly emerged, completely overtaking efforts at translating Western hymnody and in many ways uniting Christians persecuted there under the Communist regime. In fact, distinctly Chinese hymnody has affected the Western world in a powerful and reciprocal fashion not often seen when Western and non-Western musics come into contact. Not only do missionaries today often encourage the people with whom they work to compose their own worship music in their own musical style; Chinese hymns have entered American and European hymn books. Far from merely copying a Western tradition, composers of these hymns adapted literary and musical features from Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, altered Western features to match Chinese musical conventions, and created a hymnody that is now used by all denominations and languages across the nation, a feat of unification not seen anywhere in the Western world. These hymns were primarily composed for a small hymnal published in 1936, Hymns of Universal Praise. That one book and its compilers did more for the development of Chinese hymnody than any one or thing else, but it has rarely been studied for its cultural and musical impact. This article seeks to correct that fault. Beginning with a brief historical overview of the situation that prompted its publication, this study explores the difficulties Protestant missionaries encountered in translating Western hymns and the call for an indigenous hymnody that arose at the beginning of the twentieth century. It then proceeds to examine the hymnal's genesis as a collaborative effort among denominations and the ways in which the men and women of the Union Committee that compiled it overcame the obstacles earlier efforts had encountered. Finally, it looks at the hymnal itself both in the textual themes the hymns encapsulate and the musical traditions from which it borrows. By way of conclusion, this study ends by connecting the theme of unification woven throughout the discussion with the reason for Hymns of Universal Praise's remarkable success and its broad influence in the space where two cultures interacted. Lost in Translation-Early Attempts at Chinese Hymnody Although American missionaries carried a variety of hymn types with them as they went to China in the mid-nineteenth century, by and large they preferred gospel hymns to any other. This preference had musical and theological origins. The musical aspect lay in the hymns' singable melodies, repetitive and hearttugging lyrics, and slow harmonic movements with chord changes happening once per measure at the most. The theological aspect rested on the hymns' direct communication of their largely emotional message. Gospel hymns originated during the second Great Awakening in the 1850s, particularly in the MoodySankey revivals.3 Revivalists enjoyed using them because their lyrically direct and musically simple style generated an overwhelming emotional reaction in congregations. In fact, gospel hymns were partially responsible for the emotionally-charged atmosphere that characterized American revival meetings. …
Arnold Schoenberg. Moses und Aron. DVD. Daniele Gatti / Vienna State Opera and Slovak Philharmoni... more Arnold Schoenberg. Moses und Aron. DVD. Daniele Gatti / Vienna State Opera and Slovak Philharmonic Chorus. With Franz Grundheber and Thomas Moser. [Halle/Saale, Germany]: Arthaus Musik, 2006. 101 259. $32.98. Leos. Janacek. Jenufa. DVD. Peter Schneider / Orquestra Simfonica I Cor del Gran Teatre del Liceu. With Nina Stemme, Eva Marton, Jorma Silvasti, Par Lindskog. Ratingen, Germany: TDK, 2007, 2005. DVWW-OPJENU. $32.98. In the early twentieth century, opera underwent a sea change as the dissonant strands of musical modernism and the burgeoning ideas of psychology began to drift onto the stage. Audiences, caught in a rapidly industrializing world, sought to understand their situation through the theater. Composers, for their part, embraced the new freedoms granted by those shifting audience expectations and began telling stories unlike those that already existed. Many scaled back their scope, weaving tales of more modest proportions, while others delved into the inner world of thought and belief, both conscious and unconscious. These two admittedly broad responses, among the many from the period, are clearly borne out in the recent DVD releases of Leos Janacek's and Arnold Schoenberg's greatest operatic works, Jenufa and Moses und Aron. The nature of these DVDs speaks both to the place of these works in the modern repertoire and to the shifting current of modern audience expectation. Schoenberg's Moses und Aron is often acknowledged as one of the composer's masterpieces in the twelve-tone language, but its troubled compositional history, daunting stage directions, and undramatic subject matter have kept it out of the performing repertoire. Schoenberg first conceived the work in 1922 as a cantata, but by 1930, had refashioned it into an opera libretto. He began composing the work and finished its first two acts by 1932, but he stalled there and never completed the work nor saw any of it performed. In fact, as the director of this particular production, Reto Nickler, notes in an interview included with the DVD, that Schoenberg did not think the work performable. With Moses und Aron, Schoenberg turned to operatic territory unexplored neither in his earlier Erwartung (1909) and Die gluckliche Hand (1910-13), nor in many other contemporaneous operas, namely the metaphysical. Moses and Aron represent for Schoenberg two different responses to spiritual revelation, and through them, he explored the nature of human faith and his ambiguity toward his own resurfacing Jewish identity. That search for a Jewish identity is given primacy over the question of faith in Nickler's production for the Vienna State Opera in 2006. Nickler created a tensely charged atmosphere absent in other productions by casting the characters and chorus as Holocaust survivors. The resulting severity of the staging, costume design, and lighting pulls the viewer's attention to the words and forces one to choose between Moses's direction of faith and singularity outside of culture and Aron's path toward assimilation, which ultimately, according to this production, leads to death. Unfortunately, the power of Nickler's production choice is broken by the over-the-top nature of his staging of the act 2 centerpiece, Der Tanz um das goldene Kalb. The chorus of Jews assimilates into an Ayran culture by donning blond wigs and gold costumes to fall prostrate before a giant, golden "ICH," while Aron instructs them to "worship yourself in this image." The use of pictures of the chorus's faces and a bank of giant television monitors is innovative and jarring, but undercuts the immediacy of Moses's challenge by reducing it to spectacle. By the time Moses returns to the stage with the Ten Commandments, and the original production design resurfaces, the flow of Schoenberg's argument is lost. Any production of Moses und Aron must contend with the lack of a final act; this production wisely chose to end with act 2. However, the DVD release includes the fascinating special feature of Franz Grundheber, who is mesmerizing as Moses, reading the final words of Schoenberg's libretto for act 3. …
Michael Nyman: Composer in Progress; Michael Nyman: In Concert. DVD. Written and directed by Silv... more Michael Nyman: Composer in Progress; Michael Nyman: In Concert. DVD. Written and directed by Silvia Beck. [Germany]: Arthaus Musik, 2010. 101 526. $39.99. In 1993, Michael Nyman was blindsided by the overwhelming success of his film score for Jane Campion's The Piano. In crafting the voice for Holly Hunter's mute character, Ada, Nyman believed he was writing for a film with the reach of his collaborations with Peter Greenaway-art house fare little seen by mainstream audiences. However, The Piano exploded into the cultural consciousness, and Nyman's score, drenched with Scottish melodies subjected to his trademark style of motoric repetition and layering, went on to sell over three million copies. Nyman became an overnight success twenty years in the making. Even with the name recognition that came from The Piano, Nyman did not receive the imprimatur of the British musical establishment until sixteen years later when he was invited to perform at the 2009 BBC Proms in Royal Albert Hall. Silvia Beck's portrait of Nyman, fittingly called Composer in Progress, takes these two moments when Nyman bathed in the popular limelight as touchstones from which to explore the composer's diverse interests and activities. With seemingly full access both to Nyman and his core musicians, Beck has created a frustratingly fascinating film that provides tantalizing glimpses of the composer, but not a full portrait. Instead of a straight-forward chronological approach, Beck has opted to engage Nyman episodically. Where many filmmakers would seek entry into a composer's aesthetic by beginning at the beginning with childhood and music studies, Beck opens with influences on Nyman's music by focusing on his 1977 In Re Don Giovanni, a work that recontextualizes and rearticulates the first 16 bars of Leporello's catalogue aria through the lens of Jerry Lee Lewis-style rock. She then jumps to Nyman's film scores, particularly Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract (which relies heavily on Purcell's music), Jane Campion's The Piano, and Volker Schlondorff's The Ogre, before digging into the makeup of The Michael Nyman Band and its performance at the BBC Proms. Interspersed among her three foci of recontextualization of older music, film music, and popular-music influenced performative style, Beck has peppered choice anecdotes to demonstrate Nyman's work outside of composition. We meet Steve Reich and hear how the famed minimalist convinced Nyman to return to composing after twelve years of music criticism, a time that resulted in the seminal book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. We observe Nyman taking photographs and video with small digital devices in Mexico City leading up to footage of his film Witness I. And we see him helping prepare and then perform at a festival of his music in Groningen in the Netherlands. However, throughout these episodes though we seek a common thread to help us categorize the thrust, impact, and import of Nyman's music, we never find it. That perspective, that thread, could have been delivered through interviews with his most important collaborators, particularly in film, but Beck only interviewed Volker Schlondorff, who in his two minutes on camera clearly articulates the subtexts Nyman's music brings to film and provides the most penetrating glimpse into Nyman's significance of the whole documentary. …
4. roy m. prendergast, Film Music: A Neglected Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). 5. Theo Van le... more 4. roy m. prendergast, Film Music: A Neglected Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). 5. Theo Van leeuwen, Speech, Music, Sound (basingstoke: macmillan, 1999); Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Towards a Semiotics of Music (princeton, N.J.: princeton university press, 1990). 6. Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia (oxford: oxford university press, 1998). 7. John Fiske, Television Culture (london: routledge, 1987); Reading the Popular (london: routledge, 1989); Jane Feuer, “genre study and Television” in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed. robert C. Allen (Chapel Hill: university of North Carolina press, 1992), 138–60; “melodrama, serial Form and Television Today,” in Television: The Critical View, ed. Horace Newcomb (oxford: oxford university press, 1994), 551–62; John Thornton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television (New brunswick, N.J.: rutgers university press, 1995); glen Creeber, Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen (basingstoke: macmillan, 2006); Creeber, Dennis Potter: Between Two Worlds (basingstoke: macmillan, 1998); and Creeber’s edited collections The Television Genres Book (london: bFi: 2001) and Tele-Visions (london: bFi, 2006); Todd gitlin, Inside Primetime (los Angeles: university of California press, 2000). 8. michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia gorbman (New York: Columbia university press, 1994), 178.
... world during this time, Partch enjoyed a certain degree of recognition, due in no small part ... more ... world during this time, Partch enjoyed a certain degree of recognition, due in no small part to these Dust Bowl-themed compositions. Yet Partch's music and activities during this seminal phase of his career have received scant attention. This study casts the young Harry Partch ...
... "River-Trees Music" accompanies shots of a river gently flowing and situates the fi... more ... "River-Trees Music" accompanies shots of a river gently flowing and situates the film primarily from Apollo's viewpoint because it is scored only for percussion instrumentsthe Diamond Marimba, Bass Marimba, Spoils of War, and Boo. ... Video 5. "Boo (Bamboo Marimba)" 21 ...
Over the past decade, there has been a steady drumbeat of action in music history pedagogy, from ... more Over the past decade, there has been a steady drumbeat of action in music history pedagogy, from the founding of the AMS pedagogy study group in 2006 to the establishment of the Journal of Music History Pedagogy to the annual Teaching Music History Conference. Because of this action, pedagogues have become interested in the training afforded to graduate students in music history pedagogy, steadily establishing coursework in American universities. Yet there is precious little data about these courses, from where they are offered, to what is covered in those classes, to faculty’s impressions of their effectiveness. In the fall of 2015, Andrew Granade led a class in conducting a nationwide survey of graduate programs identified by the American Musicological Society as offering degrees in music history and musicology. The purposes of this survey were to establish quantitative data on the frequency of courses in music history pedagogy and the commonality of that coursework across institu...
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 03007766 2010 537858, Nov 25, 2011
In his short-lived sci-fi/western television show Firefly, Joss Whedon created a future clearly r... more In his short-lived sci-fi/western television show Firefly, Joss Whedon created a future clearly rooted in the present through melded Asian and American influences. Since one of Whedon's overriding concerns in his art is identification of and with his characters, Firefly offers a rich tapestry to explore the ways music, particularly non-Western music drawing upon Chinese and Middle Eastern elements, is used in formulations of identity. The show's music is composed by Greg Edmonson and it serves as an important element of the show (Whedon himself composed a theme song demo, wrote detailed music pre-production notes, and provided Edmonson with a mix tape as a guide). Whedon clearly wants viewers of Firefly to break down common prejudices relating to people of Asian and Middle Eastern ancestry, but does the music he utilizes help or hinder that process? Is the soundtrack merely another instance of hegemonic Orientalism as theorized by Edward Said? Exploring the visual and audible representations of the exotic permeating Firefly, it is concluded that the show reverses standard musical depictions of non-Western elements and creates new patterns of identification that aid in viewer attachment.
There is a moment two thirds of the way through Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show where Chri... more There is a moment two thirds of the way through Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show where Christof, the titular show’s creator/director, appears on a talk show to discuss notions of ethics in relation to filming a man’s life without his knowledge. Returning to his studio after the interview, Christof watches Truman sleep on a giant screen while next to him, Philip Glass plays a circular, somnolent piano composition. In that single shot, barriers between what is real and what is fiction break down as a composer known for his documentary work appears on screen accompanying a fictional scene about a “reality” television show that is succumbing to real life.
The significance of that scene continues to grow upon reflection. Over the past thirty years, Glass’s music has become the sound documentarians use when attempting to burnish their films with the sheen of verisimilitude whether or not Glass composed new music for the film. Consider that while Glass has composed twenty-one documentary scores, his music has appeared in over seventy documentaries. This presentation builds off that scene in The Truman Show by uncovering why Glass’s music has become so ubiquitous in documentary filmmaking. Exploring trends in musical scholarship, it shows that for many, minimalism has come to represent an objective sound. Using recent scholarship in documentary studies, it demonstrates that while earlier documentarians sought an “impression of authenticity,” modern filmmakers seek to represent the world rather than reproduce it. And looking closely at Glass’s music in The Art of the Steal (2009) and Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011), it confirms that the music’s use creates what Paul Arthur calls a “tangled reciprocity” between authenticity and persuasion, objectivity and narrative, ultimately adding unexpected resonances that will continue to draw documentarians to it for years to come.
In December of 2003, Ronald D. Moore’s reimagined version of the 1970s television show Battlestar... more In December of 2003, Ronald D. Moore’s reimagined version of the 1970s television show Battlestar Galactica premiered as a miniseries that soon led to a full series on the Sci-Fi channel. Composers Richard Gibbs for the miniseries and Bear McCreary for the series set out to create a soundscape directly opposed to the brassy orchestral sound of the original version by embracing what Ron Rodman has termed “multilingualism.” Instead of an orchestra, they employed seven to nine musicians playing a battery of percussion and instruments ranging from the duduk to the electric violin. However, on three occasions, McCreary replaced the newly composed music with pre-existing music that re-centered music in the show’s narrative. Each time, the pieces chosen (Stanley Myers’s “Cavatina,” Philip Glass’s “Metamorphosis One,” and Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower) acted both diegetically and intradiegetically and served as an anchor for the character’s memories of their home in the Twelve Colonies. For example, in the episode “Valley of Darkness” from Season Two, rogue pilot Starbuck finds a recording of her father playing the piano, supposedly a composition he wrote himself. That work, a diegetic rendering of Philip Glass’s “Metamorphosis One,” stirs her memories of home, contradictory feelings of wishing to leave her old life behind while simultaneously wanting to hold on to important memories, like those of her father. Throughout the rest of the series, Glass’s work and the notion of Starbuck’s father as a pianist became important markers of memory for the character as she journeyed metaphorically and physically into unknown territory. Similarly, “All Along the Watchtower,” the last- and most-used piece, appeared in various reimaginings throughout the final two seasons, stirring memories of the “Final Five” Cylons before ultimately becoming as a marker and representation for the entire show’s overarching narrative. Using close readings of each of these three pieces and recent frameworks in Memory studies that seek to understand the technologies of memory and the ways in which recorded sounds and musical cues can trigger memories and encode them personally and culturally, this paper will demonstrate the functions of pre-existing music in Battlestar Galactica and the ways in which television music can use its strength of connecting with a viewer’s cultural familiarity with the music presented to produce a multiplicity of resonant meanings.
During the Great Depression, artists from Dorothea Lange to Woody Guthrie to John Steinbeck detai... more During the Great Depression, artists from Dorothea Lange to Woody Guthrie to John Steinbeck detailed the lives of the destitute in California. Although little heralded at the time, Harry Partch also chronicled how California responded to its transient population in his music journal Bitter Music, creating a new style of documentary as well as a new literary/musical structure. This presentation uses Partch’s letters and notebooks as well as archival documents from the California State Emergency Relief Agency to trace the veracity of Partch’s account, its reception at a time artists were drawn to documentary, and it role in crafting the composer’s burgeoning aesthetic.
Many colleges and universities across the U.S. are in the process of implementing new general edu... more Many colleges and universities across the U.S. are in the process of implementing new general education curricula. These span the gamut as far as overall design is concerned, and most include some sort of arts requirement. This panel will offer ideas and practical examples of how music can be integrated into various courses within a new interdisciplinary general education curriculum.
Part of the new general education program at the presenters’
university includes three courses that must be team-taught by at least two faculty members from different disciplines. Each of these three courses focuses on a particular theme: 1) reasoning and values, 2) culture and diversity, and 3) civic/community
engagement. The courses are open to all students, regardless of major. Hence, students majoring in music, chemistry, history, and other fields may find themselves in the same class.
This panel will feature faculty from music and other disciplines who have been involved with the creation and implementation
of new courses in each of these three areas. All of the courses to be presented here include music as one of the focal disciplines. Topics to be addressed on the panel include discovering ways for faculty to collaborate across disciplines (both within music and outside of music), envisioning an interdisciplinary learning environment, creating viable student learning outcomes, formulating assignments and class activities
that work across disciplines and develop trans-disciplinary thinking, and determining workable assessment plans.
In the spring of 1961, following the successful production of Revelation in the Courthouse Park, ... more In the spring of 1961, following the successful production of Revelation in the Courthouse Park, the Illini Student Union of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign approached Harry Partch about writing a show for them. Each spring, the Union sponsored a student production of a musical, and they wanted the 1962 edition to stand out.
Stand out it did. Water! Water!, called “as close as he ever came to writing a Broadway musical” by Partch’s biographer Bob Gilmore, is a delightful melange of Partch's microtonal and percussive musical language, musical comedy-style acting and laughs, and mid-century jazz. Like all of Partch’s theatrical creations, it exists in the tension between his desire for total control and the necessity of collaboration with others skilled in areas about which he knew little. By exploring the tension between expectations and final product through interviews with the original actors, archival documents related to the Illinois production, and the full score, this presentation reveals the disdain for musical elitism that runs hidden through most of his oeuvre and the collaborative compromises that ultimately led Partch to suppress the work.
In the fall of 2013, the author’s university began offering a new series of courses that combined... more In the fall of 2013, the author’s university began offering a new series of courses that combined traditional English and Communications Studies courses in order to teach literacy and orality side-by-side. These “Discourse” courses were designed to focus on the languages, images, styles, genres, behaviors and other forms of communication used by specific social and professional groups. By teaching the techniques of discourse analysis and language awareness, the desire was to enable students to position themselves socially and professionally, helping them understand the discourse conventions, reasoning, and “commonsense” assumptions that create and define academic, political, professional, and other discourse formations and communities.
As part of the redesign, the university invited faculty from multiple disciplines to participate in teaching Discourse in order to create a truly interdisciplinary approach to content traditionally taught in the English department. This talk details the creation of a music-centered Discourse section that engages a constellation of written, oral, and musical texts relating to what we now call “classical” music or the “Western Art Music” tradition. In taking music to be a form of discourse, the course encourages students to hear sound as communicating values and ideas that are not obviously or inherently sonic: for example, histories, beliefs, ideologies, politics, aspirations, and fears. Using examples of student work, this presentation will detail new techniques of teaching writing and speaking, inviting the audience to consider new pedagogical approaches in their own curriculum and ways to expand our teaching of writing and speaking in the music history classroom.
In December of 2003, Ronald D. Moore’s reimagined version of the 1970s television show Battlestar... more In December of 2003, Ronald D. Moore’s reimagined version of the 1970s television show Battlestar Galactica premiered as a miniseries that soon led to a full series on the Sci-Fi channel. Composers Richard Gibbs for the miniseries and Bear McCreary for the series set out to create a soundscape directly opposed to the brassy orchestral sound of the original version by embracing what Ron Rodman has termed “multilingualism.” Instead of an orchestra, they employed seven to nine musicians playing a battery of percussion and instruments ranging from the duduk to the electric violin. This multilingual ideal also impacted the diegetic music chosen for the show, as on three occasions, McCreary used pre-existing music that re-centered music in the show’s narrative. Each time, the pieces chosen acted both diegetically and intradiegetically and served as an anchor for the characters’ memories of their home in the Twelve Colonies, none more so than Philip Glass’s “Metamorphosis One.”
In the episode “Valley of Darkness” from Season Two, rogue pilot Starbuck finds a recording of her father playing the piano, supposedly a composition he wrote himself. That work, a diegetic rendering of Philip Glass’s “Metamorphosis One,” stirs her memories of home, contradictory feelings of wishing to leave her old life behind while simultaneously wanting to hold on to important memories, like those of her father. Throughout the rest of the series, Glass’s work and the notion of Starbuck’s father as a pianist became important markers of memory for the character as she journeyed metaphorically and physically into unknown territory. Several recent studies, most notably those by Rebecca Doran Eaton, have fruitfully mined minimalist film scores to discover how minimalist tropes have recently become what Claudia Gorbman termed “cinematic musical codes,” music fraught with enculturated meanings that can be exploited by film makers. However, although scholars have explored the use of minimalism to represent the Other, the mathematical, and dystopia, one trope that has not been explored but is evident in numerous film and television scores is the way composers and film makers use the repetitions inherent in minimalist music to signal memory on screen. Using recent frameworks in Memory studies that seek to understand the technologies of memory and the ways in which recorded sounds and musical cues can trigger memories and encode them personally and culturally, this presentation looks widely at other film uses of minimalist music to represent memory before detailing Battlestar Galactica’s use of Glass’s music to outline the characteristics of the “minimalism as memory” trope. Doing so adds to our understanding of cultural practices of minimalist music and the ways film and television music have exploited its musical features and cultural familiarity to produce a multiplicity of resonant meanings.
Harry Partch is routinely characterized in texts and the popular media as a musical hobo. Toward... more Harry Partch is routinely characterized in texts and the popular media as a musical hobo. Towards the end of his life, anxious for recognition of his long years of work, Partch even encouraged these accounts as they showcased a visionary artist willing to suffer for his art. Yet beyond his setting of hobo texts, few have questioned what impact that label had on his musical output, compositional life, and reception.
This presentation begins asking that question by exploring how Partch changed his use of the hobo throughout his final thirty years. Examining his letters and manuscripts, interviews with the composer and his associates, and other personal documents, this talk will uncover the volatile nature of Partch’s use of the hobo mystique and his reaction to it. It will show that following composition of The Wayward, Partch initially rejected the hobo, going so far as to destroy Bitter Music. However, as cultural accounts of the hobo shifted during the 1950s and 1960s, Partch began slowly embracing the hobo again, and the figure and its music began reappearing in his music and in the popular musical culture’s descriptions of him. By exploring the shifting forms of the hobo at work in his music and its reception, this presentation places the role the hobo image played in Partch’s later music and persona into its historical and cultural context.
Since the turn of the century, the “Maverick” label has been applied by numerous performing organ... more Since the turn of the century, the “Maverick” label has been applied by numerous performing organizations to tie together composers in a strand of influence understood as being so far removed from the Western canon that its only relationship to tradition was reaction against it. But is this popular categorization a useful one? What is exactly was the relationship between these composers and the established traditions of their day? This presentation probes these questions through Harry Partch, an archetypical “Maverick” composer often described as the most independent, nonconformist composer America has produced. Indeed, Partch even proclaimed that from the first moment of his musical life, “I was going to be completely free.” However, like the “Maverick” label, his claims blanket a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between his music and the Western musical tradition against which he rebelled. Using grant applications Partch made to the Guggenheim Foundation in 1933, 1934, and 1943, as well as recently released recommendation letters written by Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, Howard Hanson, and Douglas Moore, among others, this presentation produces a different view of the composer. Instead of the consummate outsider, Partch comes to be seen as desiring to take his place in Western music, as well as being willing to modulate his goals to match the musical politics of his day. Then, using Partch as a case study, the presentation reexamines the “Maverick” label, ultimately shattering the crystalline image associated with it to produce a richer, more resonant one.
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The significance of that scene continues to grow upon reflection. Over the past thirty years, Glass’s music has become the sound documentarians use when attempting to burnish their films with the sheen of verisimilitude whether or not Glass composed new music for the film. Consider that while Glass has composed twenty-one documentary scores, his music has appeared in over seventy documentaries. This presentation builds off that scene in The Truman Show by uncovering why Glass’s music has become so ubiquitous in documentary filmmaking. Exploring trends in musical scholarship, it shows that for many, minimalism has come to represent an objective sound. Using recent scholarship in documentary studies, it demonstrates that while earlier documentarians sought an “impression of authenticity,” modern filmmakers seek to represent the world rather than reproduce it. And looking closely at Glass’s music in The Art of the Steal (2009) and Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011), it confirms that the music’s use creates what Paul Arthur calls a “tangled reciprocity” between authenticity and persuasion, objectivity and narrative, ultimately adding unexpected resonances that will continue to draw documentarians to it for years to come.
Part of the new general education program at the presenters’
university includes three courses that must be team-taught by at least two faculty members from different disciplines. Each of these three courses focuses on a particular theme: 1) reasoning and values, 2) culture and diversity, and 3) civic/community
engagement. The courses are open to all students, regardless of major. Hence, students majoring in music, chemistry, history, and other fields may find themselves in the same class.
This panel will feature faculty from music and other disciplines who have been involved with the creation and implementation
of new courses in each of these three areas. All of the courses to be presented here include music as one of the focal disciplines. Topics to be addressed on the panel include discovering ways for faculty to collaborate across disciplines (both within music and outside of music), envisioning an interdisciplinary learning environment, creating viable student learning outcomes, formulating assignments and class activities
that work across disciplines and develop trans-disciplinary thinking, and determining workable assessment plans.
Stand out it did. Water! Water!, called “as close as he ever came to writing a Broadway musical” by Partch’s biographer Bob Gilmore, is a delightful melange of Partch's microtonal and percussive musical language, musical comedy-style acting and laughs, and mid-century jazz. Like all of Partch’s theatrical creations, it exists in the tension between his desire for total control and the necessity of collaboration with others skilled in areas about which he knew little. By exploring the tension between expectations and final product through interviews with the original actors, archival documents related to the Illinois production, and the full score, this presentation reveals the disdain for musical elitism that runs hidden through most of his oeuvre and the collaborative compromises that ultimately led Partch to suppress the work.
As part of the redesign, the university invited faculty from multiple disciplines to participate in teaching Discourse in order to create a truly interdisciplinary approach to content traditionally taught in the English department. This talk details the creation of a music-centered Discourse section that engages a constellation of written, oral, and musical texts relating to what we now call “classical” music or the “Western Art Music” tradition. In taking music to be a form of discourse, the course encourages students to hear sound as communicating values and ideas that are not obviously or inherently sonic: for example, histories, beliefs, ideologies, politics, aspirations, and fears. Using examples of student work, this presentation will detail new techniques of teaching writing and speaking, inviting the audience to consider new pedagogical approaches in their own curriculum and ways to expand our teaching of writing and speaking in the music history classroom.
In the episode “Valley of Darkness” from Season Two, rogue pilot Starbuck finds a recording of her father playing the piano, supposedly a composition he wrote himself. That work, a diegetic rendering of Philip Glass’s “Metamorphosis One,” stirs her memories of home, contradictory feelings of wishing to leave her old life behind while simultaneously wanting to hold on to important memories, like those of her father. Throughout the rest of the series, Glass’s work and the notion of Starbuck’s father as a pianist became important markers of memory for the character as she journeyed metaphorically and physically into unknown territory. Several recent studies, most notably those by Rebecca Doran Eaton, have fruitfully mined minimalist film scores to discover how minimalist tropes have recently become what Claudia Gorbman termed “cinematic musical codes,” music fraught with enculturated meanings that can be exploited by film makers. However, although scholars have explored the use of minimalism to represent the Other, the mathematical, and dystopia, one trope that has not been explored but is evident in numerous film and television scores is the way composers and film makers use the repetitions inherent in minimalist music to signal memory on screen. Using recent frameworks in Memory studies that seek to understand the technologies of memory and the ways in which recorded sounds and musical cues can trigger memories and encode them personally and culturally, this presentation looks widely at other film uses of minimalist music to represent memory before detailing Battlestar Galactica’s use of Glass’s music to outline the characteristics of the “minimalism as memory” trope. Doing so adds to our understanding of cultural practices of minimalist music and the ways film and television music have exploited its musical features and cultural familiarity to produce a multiplicity of resonant meanings.
This presentation begins asking that question by exploring how Partch changed his use of the hobo throughout his final thirty years. Examining his letters and manuscripts, interviews with the composer and his associates, and other personal documents, this talk will uncover the volatile nature of Partch’s use of the hobo mystique and his reaction to it. It will show that following composition of The Wayward, Partch initially rejected the hobo, going so far as to destroy Bitter Music. However, as cultural accounts of the hobo shifted during the 1950s and 1960s, Partch began slowly embracing the hobo again, and the figure and its music began reappearing in his music and in the popular musical culture’s descriptions of him. By exploring the shifting forms of the hobo at work in his music and its reception, this presentation places the role the hobo image played in Partch’s later music and persona into its historical and cultural context.