{"title":"Teresa Balough and Kay Dreyfus, eds. Distant Dreams: The Correspondence of Percy Grainger and Burnett Cross 1946–60 (review)","authors":"Erinn Knyt","doi":"10.46580/cx34958","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46580/cx34958","url":null,"abstract":"Percy Grainger (1882–1961) is frequently remembered as a virtuoso pianist, a collector of folk songs, and an idiosyncratic composer. Yet in addition to his other activities, he also designed and built numerous sound-producing machines. These experimental machines enabled Grainger to begin realising the experimental music he envisioned, that is, sounds freed from traditional rhythms and pitches. Grainger initially tried to create the new sounds he imagined with known instruments such as the theremin, but eventually began modifying instruments to create his own sound machines, such as the microtonal ‘butterfly’ piano. Grainger’s main collaborator, Burnett Cross (1914–1996), a high school science teacher with a background in both physics and music, helped to make those dreams a reality. Cross contributed technical expertise as the two worked together to bring Grainger’s ideas to life. Cross began working with Grainger in 1944 and became gradually more involved throughout the 1950s. By the late 1950s, Cross took the lead, especially with the electronic machine models. […]","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":"124 3-4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72477952","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Peter Urquhart. Sound and Sense in Franco-Flemish Music of the Renaissance: Sharps, Flats and the Problem of Musica Ficta (review)","authors":"T. Daly","doi":"10.46580/cx57008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46580/cx57008","url":null,"abstract":"Renaissance vocal music has an editorial problem. Performers and editors of pre-Baroque repertoire are unable simply to realise the music on the page but instead must decide whether the notation means what it says it means: manuscripts require interpretation. This obligation arises from the widely accepted idea that the surviving compositions were not chromatically precise and that certain types of inflection—what today we would call accidentals—were omitted in writing but applied in performance. There are several well-known ‘rules’ that govern the creation of these inflections,1 but this is where the consensus ends. Every scholar’s particular application of these rules is slightly different, and consequently, no two recordingsof a Josquin mass or a Mouton motet sound identical. As Peter Urquhart observes in his weighty contribution to the topic, even the term used to describe these problems, musica ficta, is ambiguous. […]","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90798202","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sarah Kirby. Exhibitions, Music and the British Empire (review)","authors":"Paul Watt","doi":"10.46580/cx49792","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46580/cx49792","url":null,"abstract":"The 2022 World Fair (aka ‘Expo’) held in Dubai has recently drawn to a close. The next Expo will be hosted by Buenos Aires in 2023; the one after that will be staged in Osaka in 2025. These Expos are all linked to the first Expo of them all: the Great Exhibition staged in London in 1851. To be sure, the term ‘great’ is an understatement. The 1851 event, and those that followed it, were—and remain—colossal undertakings. They take years of planning, attract millions of visitors, and serve a variety of cultural and political purposes. These Expos are built and designed to ‘dazzle’—a word that Sarah Kirby uses in her book to describe the at times overwhelming effect of Expos on the senses (p. 52). […]","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":"115 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79509257","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Benjamin Piekut. Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem and George Henderson. Blind Joe Death’s America: John Fahey, the Blues, and Writing White Discontent (review)","authors":"Maurice Windleburn","doi":"10.46580/cx47064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46580/cx47064","url":null,"abstract":"In the last decade or so there has been an increase in musicological studies on the liminal space between art music and popular styles. A foremost scholar in this field (if it can be called that) is Benjamin Piekut, who wrote his first book, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and its Limits (University of California Press, 2011) as a series of interrelated case studies. For his second book, Piekut focuses instead on a single band, Henry Cow, who sit neatly in the twilight zone between high and low art. Appropriately, this book is equally accessible to general readers and critically minded musicologists alike: its highly readable narrative avoids jargon and unnecessary citation. Divided into eight chapters (plus an introduction and afterword), Henry Cow traces the band’s story from its genesis in 1968 to its dissolution ten years later. […]","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89396289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Civil Rights to the Post-racial Lie: The Representation of Racial Politics in the American Horror Film Score","authors":"Calum White","doi":"10.46580/cx78995","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46580/cx78995","url":null,"abstract":"Socio-political messages have been discernible in film since the advent of the moving image. With this study, I respond to a gap in academic research by establishing how these messages have been manifested through a film’s score, focusing specifically on racial politics within American horror films. Drawing upon discussions of film scores, both generally and specific to the horror genre, as well as writings on cultural identity in music, I question how, using these theoretical frameworks, music can be seen as representative of a film’s racial politics and subtext. I will focus on three films released over a fifty-year period that each provide commentary on race in the contemporary United States: Night of the Living Dead (dir. George A. Romero, 1968); Candyman (dir. Bernard Rose, 1992); and Get Out (dir. Jordan Peele, 2017). The study showcases numerous ways in which film scores can represent subtext through instrumentation, timbre, pre-existing music, silence, and the cultural associations that these elements evoke.","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90147417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Co-creating a Brass Band Dance Number for a Large-scale Community Opera Project with the Aid of Improvisatory Techniques: Co-creativity within an Operatic Context","authors":"Oliver Rudland","doi":"10.46580/cx34966","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46580/cx34966","url":null,"abstract":"Community opera projects have often integrated bands of varying types to involve participants in ways other than singing and acting. Although many community opera projects incorporate co-creative elements and improvisation techniques in their composition, there is little coverage of how bands, in practice, can be involved as participants in the co-creative process of shaping a new community opera. This paper documents a practice research project that took place with Waterbeach Brass Band based in Cambridgeshire, UK. It records in detail the process whereby aspects of a brass band dance number were devised during co-creative improvisation workshops, and provides both audio-visual recordings and notated examples that capture the emergent creative process, alongside a commentary explaining the processes and methodological approaches employed. The paper discusses the different ways in which members of the brass band responded to improvisational workshops, and how this fed into the co-creative process. It subsequently examines how such co-creative elements can form part of a larger musical-dramatic presentation, demonstrating how they can be developed during an extended operatic scene.","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":"155 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86635090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘The Vibrant, Passionate Human Soul He Was’: Robert Haven Schauffler’s The Unknown Brahms (1933) and the American Middlebrow","authors":"Adam Weitzer","doi":"10.46580/cx83220","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46580/cx83220","url":null,"abstract":"Written to mark the centenary of Brahms’s birth in 1933, Robert Haven Schauffler’s The Unknown Brahms (1933) was received rapturously by many American critics as a work which had humanised Brahms to a public that had perceived the composer as mysterious, contradictory, and unrelatable. Today, however, Schauffler’s book is regarded as a readable but unreliable work of popular psychology based not on serious research, but hearsay and rumour. Given its faults, why was The Unknown Brahms met with such acclaim by American critics? This article analyses the book’s early reception to explain its public success. Interpreting a range of reviews published in large-circulation newspapers, I situate The Unknown Brahms’s reception within the discursive context of the middlebrow, to which musicologists have devoted increasing attention in recent years. I also point to the prominence of popular psychology in interwar American society and its importance to a new paradigm of humanistic biography. I argue principally that The Unknown Brahms engrossed middlebrow readers and critics because it was an effective work of music appreciation which allowed lay listeners to engage empathetically with Brahms’s music. By contributing a new case study of Brahms’s American reception, the article broadens understandings of Brahms’s cultural status in the twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":"137 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75106331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Helen J. English. Music and World-Building in the Colonial City: Newcastle, NSW, and its Townships, 1860–1880 (review)","authors":"S. Owens","doi":"10.46580/cx89103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46580/cx89103","url":null,"abstract":"As Helen English rightly acknowledges early on in her wonderfully detailed study of music making in nineteenth-century Newcastle and its surrounds, while the area’s European settlers engaged enthusiastically in ‘building individual and collective worlds,’ their ‘world-building’ simultaneously (and violently) destroyed the country and lifestyle of the local Awabakal people (pp. 2, 29). In stark contrast, the locations covered in this book—the coalmining city of Newcastle, the pastoral settlement of Maitland, and a number of small towns nearby (among them Lambton, Wallsend, and Waratah, now all suburbs of Newcastle)—were all thriving by the 1860s. While there was a certain degree of demographic diversity between these settlements— Newcastle, for example, was chiefly home to miners, tradesmen, and itinerant port workers, compared to Maitland’s landowners and small-scale farmers—one feature they all shared was the significant amount of music-making that occurred within their communities. […]","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":"41 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89885292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Improvisation, Ontology, and Davidson: Exploring the Improvisational Character of Language and Jazz","authors":"Sam McAuliffe","doi":"10.46580/cx87493","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46580/cx87493","url":null,"abstract":"At least since the 1990s, the relationship between linguistic communication and jazz improvisation has been a topic of interest to both philosophers of language and theorists of jazz improvisation. Rarely, however, are the shared elements of language and jazz explored directly. This article interrogates these elements, with a particular focus on improvisation by drawing upon the work of Donald Davidson. While Davidson himself does not readily employ the term ‘improvisation’, I argue that key ideas from Davidson’s work—the principle of charity, triangulation, and his argument that there is no such thing as a language—align with the concept of improvisation. In this article I offer a reading of Davidson’s work—a reading that highlights an improvisational character of his philosophy typically not made explicit—and, on the basis of the ontology of improvisation that emerges from Davidson’s philosophy, I explore the implications of that understanding of language for the way in which we understand jazz.","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90532605","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Exploring Tasmania’s History and Landscape in Music for Children’s Performance: Don Kay’s There Is an Island (1977)","authors":"Holly Caldwell, C. Philpott, Maria Grenfell","doi":"10.46580/cx46584","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46580/cx46584","url":null,"abstract":"Tasmanian composer Don Kay (b. 1933) has made a significant contribution to music in his island state and in Australia more broadly in a career spanning over six decades. Many of his works explore aspects of Tasmania’s landscape and history, especially its Indigenous past, and of his 300 works, approximately ten percent are designed specifically for children to perform. Through these latter works, Kay has made a substantial contribution to educating children about locally relevant topics, a practice often overlooked within the context of art music and education. Kay’s works are regularly performed and held in high regard, particularly in Tasmania; however, his music has rarely been discussed in detail in the literature before now. In this article, we begin to address this gap by examining one of Kay’s most successful works for children to perform, There is an Island (1977), within the context of his work as a composer and educator. Drawing on primary data collected from the composer via interviews and surveys, relevant existing literature and our analyses of the score and recording of There is an Island,the article aims to illuminate the processes Kay has employed to write music for children that connects them with Tasmania’s landscape and history; and to demonstrate the ongoing relevance and significance of such work within Australian music.","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":"92 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83793605","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}