Publication details: Cultural Histories of Noise, Sound and Listening in Europe, 1300-1918, edited by Kirsten Gibson and Ian Biddle, 111-126. London: Routledge, 2017.
Abstract: For Robert Darnton this nursery rhyme bears witness to the fact that the early modern city was noisy. Dogs barked; peddlers shouted; beggars sang. But what interests him most about this nursery rhyme is that it is a written trace of an oral culture. Like other vernacular tales, nursery rhymes stand the test of time and echo the early modern soundworld. In an age before the invention of sound recording technology, this soundworld is often taken to be a lost world. But sometimes, bits and pieces of this lost world can be retrieved. Talking and writing criss-crossed at times and formed nodes of a complex circuit of communication.
Description: Concert by the experimental folk band Dálava, given as part of a workshop entitled “Encountering Life in Song: Affect, Vibration, and the Architecture of Sound” by Julia Úlehla. In the workshop recording, Úlehla answers questions from the audience and discusses her music in relation to her family history and cultural heritage.
Publication details: In From Folklore to World Music: In the Beginning There Was…, edited by Irena Přibylová and Lucie Uhlíková, 114-23. Náměšt nad Oslavou: Municipal Cultural Center, 2016.
Description: This presentation explores the sources, both real and imagined, of a diasporic performance
practice/auto-ethnographic research on Moravian folk song. The New York/Vancouver based Dálava project incorporates folk melodies from Slovácko that were transcribed by Vladimír Úlehla in the first half of the 20th century. Úlehla used his expertise in the biological sciences to perform an in-depth and novel study of folk songs from the town of Strážnice, and he considered the songs to be living organisms that were intimately related to their ecological environs. Inspired by his ideas of living song, but confronted with the reality of a deep cultural and familial heritage severed by diaspora, Vladimír’s great-granddaughter Julia Ulehla has taken the seeds of the folk songs and transplanted them into the ecological and cultural environs of her urban North American home. Along with musicians from avant-garde musical communities in these cities, she created musical microcosms around the song transcriptions, in an effort to re-animate, re-contextualize, and re-oral-ize the archival song materials into sound and body. Despite forces of dispersion, obstruction, and hybridization, what of the original source(s) can be made manifest? What is authentic in this case? What is borrowed, stolen, or rightfully owned?
Publication details: WONG, LUCAS. “Humour in Late Debussy: Multiple Perspectives on ‘Douze Études.’” The Musical Times 157, no. 1935 (2016): 77–98. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44862507.
Abstract: Music theorists have emphasized the intellectual, disembodied mind throughout music education’s history in Western culture extending back to the time of the ancient Greeks. Additionally, Regelski (2009) notes that the dominant and residual view of music curriculum involves the contemplation of music for its own sake (i.e., autonomous “works”) instead of experiencing it through action. Yet pioneering advocates for movement in music education, including Jaques-Dalcroze, Orff, Kodály, and Suzuki, all affirmed and emphasized the centrality of the body in music making and learning. Present-day instrumental music teachers’ proclivity toward teaching to the minds of their students (marginalizing physical action) seems incongruous with the views of these pioneers, especially when one considers the prevalence of movement and dance in contemporary popular music culture. When instrumental music teachers focus on teaching to the minds of their students, they ignore the importance of the students’ ancillary movements, those physical movements not directly involved in the production of sound (e.g., leaning forward, swaying side to side). Research on the importance of ancillary movements in the experiences of adolescent students studying instrumental music is sorely lacking. I thus undertook a two-month study utilizing a phenomenographic approach, which involves identifying and describing the varied conceptions of a phenomenon held by the members of a group collectively, not individual conceptions. I used interviews and student journals to map the different conceptions 24 adolescent instrumental music students have of ancillary movements. I found that ancillary movements reflect students’ degree of engagement with music-making and that these movements hold important meanings for them. Participants’ statements suggested that students become more engaged with music they are performing when they 1) are given freedom to make their own natural ancillary movements, 2) feel confident with their music skills (i.e., balance between challenge and skills), 3) do not feel self conscious about what others might think, and 4) discover that their teachers support ancillary movements. Moreover, students’ descriptions of their conceptions revealed increasingly complex understandings of ancillary movements, suggesting ways in which educators might develop more embodied approaches to teaching instrumental music.
Author: Kurth, Richard Publication details: Musicological Conference on the 90th Birthday of György Kurtág. Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest
Publication details: “‘This Imaginary Halfe-Nothing’: Temporality in Elisabeth Lutyens’s Essence of Our Happinesses.” In Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers. Vol. 3: Concert Music, 1960–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 196–220.
Description: In Essence of Our Happinesses (1968), a three-movement work for tenor, chorus, and orchestra, Elisabeth Lutyens explores the nature of time through settings of texts by Abū Yazīd, John Donne, and Arthur Rimbaud. This essay examines the second movement, Lutyens’s setting of a Donne meditation on the nature of time followed by an orchestral choros entitled “Chronikos.” First, an examination of the tenor’s recurring melody shows how, through orchestration and flexible treatment of the row, Lutyens creates a kind of serial plainchant. Metric analysis of the choros then demonstrates how Lutyens’s juxtaposition of a metrically unpredictable series of motives against a clocklike ostinato provides a wordless commentary on Donne’s text. Finally, the composition is discussed in the context of Lutyens’s many works exploring the paradoxes of human temporal experience.
