Musical

Since the turn of the millennium, shows originating on Broadway, New York, have begun to be produced in many different cities around the world. During the 1980s and 1990s, American entrepreneurs developed strategies for selling theatrical works in cities of various nations (Machado, 2018). These producers elaborated a procedure for selling the rights to Broadway shows to other countries: they started to offer the rights to musicals for purchase by foreign companies via a rights licensing agency, Music Theatre International (MTI) (Gamerman, 2010). Brazil was one of the countries that invested in these productions. Particularly in the São Paulo theatre scene at the start of the new century, a series of indicators demonstrates the vigour of this enterprise: the number of shows, the size of audiences, the financial sums generated, and the construction of new buildings. For example, there were three versions of Broadway shows between 1950 and 1969, four between 1970 and 1979, rising to s...

Contents: Introduction Musical characterisation in HMS Pinafore and The Rocky Horror Show Encoding the voice: Show Boat, Guys and Dolls, and musical theatre post-1960 Integration and distance in musical theatre: the case of Sweeney Todd Layers of representation and the creation of irony: Aufsteig und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, Merrily We Roll Along and The Last 5 Years Alternatives to linearity: Cabaret, Kiss of the Spider Woman and Assassins Illusions of realism in West Side Story and actor-musician performances Experiencing live musical theatre performance: La Cage Aux Folles and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert I've heard that song before: the jukebox musical and entertainment in Jersey Boys, Rock of Ages, Mamma Mia and We Will Rock You Conclusion Bibliography Index.

The idea that a ‘musicianship of listening’ might exist alongside the more conventional notion of musicianship based on composition, improvisation, and performance forms the starting point of our analysis of the importance and function of musical preferences in adolescence. We consider adolescents’ musical preferences, a key part of their social identities, in the context of broader lifespan changes in musical preference, looking in particular at the explanatory power of the notion of ‘open-earedness’. We consider the main psychological theories of adolescent musical preference, distinguishing between those based on social identity theory and those which adopt different sociocultural approaches. There can be no doubt that musical preferences form a central part of the identities of many adolescents, and that the notion of a musicianship of listening can help explain why these preferences are integral to their social relationships and wellbeing.

Un viaggio in uno dei più affascinanti e popolari generi cinematografici, dai primi film sonori degli anni '30 (con le folgoranti apparizioni di Fred Astaire e Ginger Rogers), attraverso le scintillanti produzioni degli anni '40 e '50 (da Un americano a Parigi a Cantando sotto la pioggia), dalle nuove interpretazioni di questo genere negli anni '60 e '70 (da West Side Story a La febbre del sabato sera), fino  alle innovazioni più recenti (da Moulin Rouge! a La-La Land). Ma questo Dossier esplora anche lo sviluppo stilistico del musical attraverso il tempo, i significati che ha trasmesso e le funzioni sociali che ha svolto in contesti storici e culturali differenti.

Of course, music performance has a long “artisanal” history. After all, the training of musicians to perform has been the mainstay of academies and conservatoria for centuries. But the discipline of music performance as part of an academic musicology is a much more recent invention. We argue that it arises some time in the 1960s, when scholars could begin to write comparative histories of performance and think difference choices as to performance style. Against the now sterile authentic/non-authentic, modern/post-modern debates that characterise contemporary music studies, we propose that the various approaches might be classified according to the three Lacanian registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. We put forward a certain “Real” at stake in performance, although it could never be the basis of any practice, musical manifesto or even properly belong to a history of music performance.

In this article, I offer an autobiographical account of teaching musical ethnography in an ethnomusicology classroom. My reflections derive from a variety of modules that are offered as part of undergraduate music programmes and that combine an ethnomusicology fieldwork component with a theoretical introduction to the cultural study of music and, in many cases, with hands-on musical performance. I see the classroom as an ethnographic field and explore its pedagogical potential for affective encounters, for engendering new cultural understandings and an ‘openness to different ways of being, knowing and doing’ (Spencer and Mills 2011). Responding to Wong’s call for education as cultural work (Wong 1998), I am especially interested in a critical pedagogy of ethnography that affords opportunities for transformative learning (Mezirow 1997, McIlwairth 2016) for students and teachers alike.

This article argues that deaf musical knowledge became epistemically excluded from systems of musical thought in the United States as the result of a battle between two competing philosophies of deaf education in the nineteenth century: manualism and oralism. It reveals how oralist educators explicitly framed music as exclusively involving “normal hearing”—and thus as outside of deaf knowledge except through technological intervention—by drawing on ideas about eugenics, race, and authenticity. Ideas about morality and technology also colored views of deaf musicality in the United States, shaping the reception of deaf music-making throughout the twentieth century until today. This article tells the story of how deaf music-making came to be forgotten and discovered, again and again, in the U.S. consciousness. By way of conclusion, I suggest that in order to address the epistemic exclusion of deaf musical knowers, we must carefully attend to what deaf epistemologies bring to music stud...

HAYDN’S CREATION AS A MUSICAL RESPONSE TO THE ENLIGHTENMENT Shawn T. Eaton, D.M.A. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2012 Chair: Thomas W. Bolton Important tenets of Enlightenment thought, specifically natural theology and philosophical naturalism, mark both the libretto and certain aspects of the music of Haydn’s Creation. The opening chapters of the dissertation establish the philosophical, historical, literary, and musical milieu as shaped by leading thinkers of the period. Influences of important precursors are discussed, including Milton’s Paradise Lost and earlier “creation” oratorios. The libretto of Creation, through its revisionist treatment of the biblical account of creation, reflects a shift from the orthodox Christian, apologetic perspective of Handelian oratorio toward a deistic representation of biblical truth. Paralleling this shift away from theological orthodoxy is The Creation’s departure from the contrapuntal textures of Baroque oratorio—associated by Ja...

The third part in this journey through one of the most fascinating and popular film genres, from the early  talkies  of the '30s (with the stunning performances of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) through the glamorous productions of the '40s and '50s (from An American in Paris  to Singin' in the rain ), from the new interpretations of this genre in the '60s and '70s (from West Side Story  to Saturday night fever ), to the most recent innovations (from Moulin Rouge!  to La-La Land ). A rich anthology of the movie sequences that have made the musical an unforgettable audience experience ...

This article delineates a metaphysical concept, musical community, and considers its implications for material practices in the art world. It describes ways in which two theoretically distant categories of art music, namely, electroacoustic music and the concert-hall tradition, may converge given the emergent societal and technological shifts in the information age. The concepts of ‘networks’ and ‘reciprocity’, as developed by sociologists Manuel Castells and Marcel Mauss, respectively, constitute the theoretical lens for this analysis, which sees a number of musicological notions, including ‘musical society’ and ‘acousmatics’ reconsidered philosophically. Emphasis is placed, in lieu of the insular methodologies associated with the akousmatikoi, on broader Pythagorean society, its mythical links with present-day musical society, which are explored in relation to practical as well as structural proclivities permeating contemporary art music. These philosophical considerations are the...

Resumo O artigo tem por objetivo revisitar a noção de gênero musical, buscando mapear seu percurso nos estudos de comunicação no Brasil nas duas últimas décadas, identificando alguns dos principais debates em torno da questão e apontando as reconfigurações que garantiram sua produtividade em tempos de cultura digital.

espanolLa escasez de representaciones artisticas conservadas en Filipinas dificulta el estudio de la iconografia musical y, con ello, de las practicas interpretativas y constructivas de los instrumentos. El analisis de este conjunto pictorico permite ofrecer nuevos datos sobre la produccion pictorica y la representacion musical en los territorios asiaticos del mundo hispanico. EnglishThe shortage of artistic images preserved in the Philippines renders difficult the study of musical iconography and thus the practices of interpretation and construction of the instruments. The analysis of this pictorial set allows to offer new insights into the pictorial and musical production in the Asian territories of the Hispanic world.

THE IMPROVISER AND THE IMPROVISED: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN NEURAL AND MUSICAL STRUCTURES, AND THE ROLE OF IMPROVISATION Tyreek Antoine Jackson This paper investigates the intersection of well-formed structures in music with neurocognitive structures and responses in expert musicians. As musicology has explored musical structures to great length, and neuroscience has begun exploring the neural structures that underscore musical experiences, little research has been done to investigate how functional differences in music structure relate to neural structure. As the overwhelming majority of professional performing musicians have regular contact with music structures in applied and theoretical contexts, it is of interest to understand how the functions of these music structures correlate with neurocognitive structures when listening to or performing music. Furthermore, this work aims to explore how experience with improvisation drives the relationship between the function of musical st...

A journey through one of the most fascinating and popular film genres, from the early talkies of the '30s (with the stunning performances of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) through the glamorous productions of the '40s and '50s (from An American in Paris to Singin' in the rain), from the new interpretations of this genre in the '60s and '70s (from West Side Story to Saturday night fever), to the most recent innovations (from Moulin Rouge! to La-La Land). However, this Dossier also explores the stylistic development of the musical through time, the meanings it has conveyed and the social functions it has fulfilled in different historical and cultural contexts.

Various studies have been conducted to understand the role of mental representation when musicians practice or perform music (Lehman and Ericsson, 1997; Sloboda, 2005) and the work steps required for a musician to prepare a concert (Chaffin et al., 2003). More recent studies examine creativity in the shaping of a musical interpretation (Lisboa et al., 2011; Payne, 2016; Barros et al., 2017; Wise et al., 2017). However, none of these studies answers the following questions: Why do expert musicians working from the same score create different musical interpretations? During individual practice sessions, what happens that allows each musician to produce significantly different interpretive results? To answer these questions, we instructed nine expert musicians to record their individual practice sessions, verbalize their actions and thoughts, and answer a self-reflection questionnaire. A third-party observer also described what happened during the practice sessions. We conducted interv...

Musical phrasing is an important element in generating expression, demonstrating the direction of music structure, giving a sense of melodic contour and so forth. Like other musical elements such as articulation, dynamics, harmony, meter, rhythm and tempo, musical phrasing also features greatly in the choreography of dance and of sports that involve a routine. As phrasing indicates the start and the end of a unit or sub-unit in a melodic structure, this indirectly correlates to a movement or series of movements in a routine or dance. This study looks into the perception of musical phrasing in movements in a Tai Chi routine from a musical perspective. A competition routine in which choreography and music were evaluated to have the most congruence was chosen. From the video recording, the initiation of musical phrases was recorded and compared with the phrasing of movements in the routine. While many musical elements are congruent with the movements, the result indicates that the Tai ...

Is there such a thing in music as meaning? This question has been made several times in the history of western music, but, anyways, what is the consequence of its answer for musical performance? This short reflection aims to bring some references for guiding the research on ways of making music that embody values as meaning and affections. For the whole history of human thought Ethics has been the discipline where values and beliefs are put into practice. The assumption of existence or not of something in reality necessarily led to a consequent action. Thus, Ethics deals not that much with the righteousness of an action but with the responsibility of doing the action. This is how can be suggested such a thing as a musical performance Ethics; not in the sense of a right or wrong performance, but as a responsible and adequate performance in relation of a set of values (and finally to reality). This matter will be considered mostly after two branches of Aristotelian works: Rhetoric and...

espanolA partir de una investigacion colectiva discernimos una configuracion emergente en la que gestionar, mezclary habitarson verbos constitutivos de la experiencia musical entre jovenes que participan de espacios de produccion y uso de musica independiente en las ciudades de Buenos Aires y La Plata desde el ano 2008 hasta la actualidad. En este articulo nos interesa conectar aspectos relevantes de esa configuracion con proposiciones teoricas mas abstractas sosteniendo un doble papel: ampliar la capacidad heuristica a nuestros analisis empiricos iniciales y darle fundamentos a una consideracion reflexiva de la nocion de “campo de estudios sociales de la musica”. Este esfuerzo se orienta a desarrollar los siguientes puntos: 1) la relacion entre arte y mercado, 2) la relacion entre critica y pragmatica, 3) la relacion entre musica y movimientos sociales y 4) la relacion entre estas problematizaciones y las caracteristicas del campo de analisis de los fenomenos musicales. EnglishBase...

This paper looks at the design process of the WamBam; a self-contained electronic hand-drum meant for music therapy sessions with severely intellectually disabled clients. Using co-reflection with four musical therapists and literature research, design guidelines related to this specific user-group and context are formed. This leads to a concept of which the most relevant aspects are discussed, before describing the user studies. Finally, the plan for the redesign is discussed. The WamBam has unique possibilities to deal with the low motor skills and cognitive abilities of severely intellectually disabled users while music therapists benefit from the greater versatility and portability of this design compared to other musical instruments. A prototype was tested with twenty users. Participants proved to be triggered positively by the WamBam, but three limiting usability issues were found. These issues were used as the fundamentals for a second prototype. Music therapists confirm the ...

This dissertation examines the place of traditional songs in the Tibetan Buddhist culture of the former Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh. I look at how Buddhism and pre-Buddhist religion informed the texts and performance contexts of traditional songs, and how Ladakhi songs represent cultural self-images through associated musical, textual, and visual tropes. Many songs of the past, both from the old royal house and the rural Buddhist populations, reflect the socio-political structure of Ladakhi society. Some songs reflect a pan-Tibetan identity, connecting the former Namgyal dynasty to both the legendary King Gesar and Nyatri Tsangpo, the historical founder of the Tibetan Yarlung dynasty. Nevertheless, a distinct Ladakhi identity is consistently asserted. A number of songs contain texts that evoke a mandala or symbolic representation of the world according to Vajrayana Buddhist iconography, ritual and meditative visualization practices. These mandala descriptions depict the social order...

The repertoire and social role of the klezmer musician in Eastern Europe can be best appreciated within the context of the broader “traditional” musical life of East European Jews. From the early seventeenth century onward the emphasis on the “Jewishness” and halakhic validity of all aspects of life now became fixed and part of local custom (minhag). This merging of the sacred and the secular came to affect music and dance just as it did costume, through the internal action of the Jewish community, not pressure from external sources. The instrumental klezmer music and the accompanying profession of badkhones (wedding orator) displayed both the fusion of the religious and secular in Jewish life, and a continuing tension between secular and religious allusions, moods, and techniques. The “Jewishness” in musical style – especially in instrumental klezmer music but also in Hasidic niggunim and to some extent in Yiddish song – grew by a process of cultural differentiation.This process in...

In terms of the specific case investigated in this chapter, mystery cults provide a field of study that is extraordinarily rich in details relevant to the sensory experiences of participants. The textual, epigraphic, archaeological, and iconographic sources are replete with sensory references. Despite this rich evidential base, this category has not been a historiographical priority in the past. Our intention in the present study is to carry out a first approach to the way in which it is possible to identify the base of this sensory, or rather multi-sensory, experience. In pursuing this goal, we focus on the cult of the goddess Cybele, the mystery cult that was most popular not only throughout the Roman Empire but also in the capital city of Rome itself. The epigraphic and iconographic expressions of the cult of Cybele, as well as ancient testimonies describing both its ritual and liturgical manifestations, allow us to reconstruct a context in which we can identify the specific purpose at work in the sensory stimulation of the devotees: making the experience of encountering the deity possible through corporal transcendence.

When jazz musicians perform an improvisational piece of music their behaviors are not fully prescribed in advance. Nonetheless their actions become so tightly coordinated and their decisions so seamlessly intertwined that the musicians behave as a single synergistic unit rather than a collection of individuals. A fundamental aspect of such musical improvisation is the bodily movement coordination that occurs among the performing musicians, with the embodied interaction of musicians both supporting and constraining musical creativity. Here we consider the ability of pairs of piano players to improvise, to spontaneously coordinate their actions with co-performers. We demonstrate the ability of the time-evolving patterns of inter-musician movement coordination as revealed by the mathematical tools of nonlinear time series analyses to provide a new understanding of what potentiates the novelty of spontaneous musical action. Cross wavelet spectral analysis is applied to the musical movem...

Eshofuni@TheAbyssis a multidisciplinary project and performance, proposing real-time representations of brain phenomena using a braincomputer interface. It implements novel representational approaches to action/perception/reaction processes, specifically, to the contextual balance ratio between reason and emotion. It is an ecological approach based on a theoretical framework that implies that behavior and evolution depend on environmental synergies and are a consequence of enactive dynamics, be they physically or symbolically based. This paper discusses the project within the context of live interfaces while also introducing a transdisciplinary approach to brain phenomena, addressing a multiplicity of aspects that are fundamental to its understanding and, consequently, to the project. We discuss the definition of interface, then introduce the brain complex neuro-physical electrical system with preand experience-independent, built-in possibilities, but which is also moldable by inter...