Artists: Carolyn Braus – alto, tenor, & baritone saxophone
Molly Orlando – piano
Featured Faculty Composer: Dorothy Chang, New Stories (2013)
Recording details:
Soundset Recordings
Tale Still Told
New Stories
Artists: Joseph Lullof, saxophone; Yu-Lien The, piano
Featured Faculty Composer: Dorothy Chang, New Stories (2013)
Recording details:
Blue Griffin Recordings
TRANSFORMATION
Artist: Megumi Masaki, piano
Composers: T. Patrick Carrabré, Keith Hamel, Bob Pritchard
Recording details:
Centrediscs, released March 3, 2023
TRANSFORMATION presents three interactive piano + multimedia works written in collaboration with Megumi Masaki that reimagine the piano and pianist’s artistic expression through new technologies, and transform the listener’s concert to an immersive, theatrical, and cinematic experience. These works explore new models of interaction between sound, image, text and movement to augment the piano and its surrounding space as a visual as well as musical instrument. This album also includes a documentary film about the inspiration and collaborative journey between Megumi Masaki, T. Patrick Carrabré, Keith Hamel and Bob Pritchard. TRANSFORMATION hopes to engage a wide audience in impactful and transformational experiences that motivate dialogue and action.
Munich
Author: Fisher, Alexander
Publication details: The Museum of Renaissance Music: A History in 100 Exhibits, edited by Vincenzo Borghetti and Tim Shephard, 351-6. Turnhout: Brepols, 2023.
Weblink: https://go.exlibris.link/HyjgkDX7
Hearing the Trumpets of the Church Militant: Weather Bells and Supernatural Audition in Post-Reformation Germany
Author: Fisher, Alexander
Publication details: Sixteenth Century Journal, Volume 53, Issue 4, Winter 2022, pp. 915-942
Weblink: https://doi.org/10.1086/SCJ5304002
Description: In the charged religious context of post-Reformation Germany, debate ensued about the power of weather bells to disperse the thunderstorms traditionally thought to be the work of demons and witches . Catholics and Protestants alike inherited medieval notions of demonic agency in the atmosphere, but they differed on the appropriate remedy . Protestant critics ridiculed the consecration of bells as a corruption of baptism and rejected their sonic agency as a violation of God’s providence, retaining weather bells as a compulsion to the collective prayer that alone could assuage God’s wrath . Defenders of Catholic practice, however, rehearsed medieval arguments for bell apotropaism and insisted on their efficacy against storms, appealing variously to their consecration or to the prayer they compelled . If published Catholic opinion shifted markedly against apotropaic sound in the Enlightenment, local populations continued to hear weather bells in traditional ways, and to posit bells as powerful deterrents against demonic listeners
Rhythmic and Melodic Techniques of Music in Sign Language
Author: Anabel Maler
Publication details: Circuit Musiques contemporaines, Volume 32
Weblink: www.erudit.org
Abstract: In this article, I argue that deafness is not a deficit for musical experience; rather, it is a source of musical ability. I do so by summarizing some of the different techniques used by Deaf musicians who create music in a signed language. I focus on how signing musicians use different types of movement to create rhythm, and use the movement of their bodies through space to create a sense of melody. Rhythm in signed music is created in a visual-tactile medium, rather than a sonic one. Specifically, it is created through movement of the hands, body, face, and head. Melody in signed music involves the directed, purposeful movement of the body through the signing space, which uses movements and holds to create dynamic, kinetic lines. I explore these concepts using examples from signed rap music by the artist Sean Forbes, and an asl cover of Carrie Underwood’s song Blown Away by Rosa Lee Timm.
Finding the Beat: Entrainment, Rhythmic Play, and Social Meaning in Rock Music
Author: Hesselink, Nathan
Publication details: Finding the Beat: Entrainment, Rhythmic Play, and Social Meaning in Rock Music
Weblink: https://www.bloomsbury.com
From publisher: Finding the Beat explores humankind’s ability, propensity, and enjoyment in finding the beat in live and recorded experiences of music-making through the lens of entrainment, the human capacity to perceive a beat and to synchronize to it. Anyone who has attended a concert, gone to a club, or watched a sporting event has witnessed and/or participated in tapping, clapping, or dancing along with a piece, song, or chant. It doesn’t matter who or where you are in the world-as humans we spend a lot of time taking pleasure in matching our bodily movements with a perceived beat.
Italian Opera in Vormärz Vienna: Bartolomeo Merelli, Gaetano Donizetti, and Habsburg Cultural Politics in the mid-1830s
Author: Vellutini, Claudio
Publication details: In Italian Opera in Vormärz Vienna: Bartolomeo Merelli, Gaetano Donizetti, and Habsburg Cultural Politics in the mid-1830s: Re-Imagining Italianità, ed. by Axel Körner and Paulo Kühl, 96–112. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Weblink: https://cambridge.org
Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers: Concert Music, 1900-1960
Authors: Laurel Parsons with Brenda Ravenscroft, eds.
Publication details: Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers. Vol. 1: Concert Music, 1900–1960, New York: Oxford University Press, 2022
Weblink: global.oup.com
Description: Through musical analysis of compositions written in the first half of the twentieth century, Analytic Essays on Music by Women Composers: Concert Music, 1900-1960 celebrates the achievements of eight composers: Alma Mahler-Werfel (1879-1964), Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979), Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), Ruth Crawford (1901-53), Florence B. Price (1887-1953), Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006), J. M. Beyer (1888-1944), and Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912-90). Written by outstanding music theorists and musicologists, the essays provide thought-provoking in-depth explorations of representative compositions, often linking analytical observations with questions of meaning and sociohistorical context. Each essay is introduced by a brief biographical sketch of the composer by editors Laurel Parsons and Brenda Ravenscroft.
This collection – Volume 2 in an unprecedented four-volume series of analytical studies on music by women composers – is designed to challenge and stimulate a wide range of readers. For academics, these thoughtful analytical essays can open new paths into unexplored research areas in the fields of music theory and musicology. Post-secondary instructors may be inspired by the insights offered in these essays to include new works in music theory and history courses at both graduate and upper-level undergraduate levels, or in courses on women and music. Finally, for soloists, ensembles, conductors, and music broadcasters, these detailed analyses can offer enriched understandings of this repertoire and suggest fresh, new programming possibilities to share with listeners.
Sound and the Conversion of Space in Early Modern Germany.
Author: Fisher, Alexander
Publication details: Theatres of Belief: Music and Conversion in the Early Modern City, Chapter 3 (2021): 87–104
Weblink: https://www.brepols.net/
Sumary (from www.brepols.net): These eleven essays, all centrally concerned with the intimate relationship between sound, religion, and society in the early modern world, present a sequence of test cases located in a wide variety of urban environments in Europe and the Americas. Written by an international cast of acclaimed historians and musicologists, they explore in depth the interrelated notions of conversion and confessionalisation in the shared belief that the early modern city was neither socially static nor religiously uniform. With its examples drawn from the Holy Roman Empire and the Southern Netherlands, the pluri-religious Mediterranean, and the colonial Americas both North and South, this book takes discussion of the urban soundscape, so often discussed in purely traditional terms of European institutional histories, to a new level of engagement with the concept of a totally immersive acoustic environment as conceptualised by R. Murray Schafer. From the Protestants of Douai, a bastion of the Catholic Reformation, to the bi-confessional city of Augsburg and seventeenth-century Farmington in Connecticut, where the indigenous Indian population fashioned a separate Christian entity, the intertwined religious, musical, and emotional lives of specifically grounded communities of early modern men and women are here vividly brought to life.