Discussion on the construction of original music system platform in colleges or universities

2015 ◽  
pp. 171-175
Author(s):  
Yu Yang
Keyword(s):  
Original Music

SERGEY PROKOFIEV’s PETER AND THE WOLF THROUGH AN INTERMEDIAL LENS

Mousaion ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-154
Author(s):  
Elma De Kock
Keyword(s):  
Research Method ◽  
Theoretical Foundation ◽  
Original Music ◽  
Folk Tale ◽  
Sergey Prokofiev ◽  
Poetic Text ◽  
Practice Based Research ◽  
The Media ◽  
Artistic Product

Peter and the wolf is an intermedial work based on a folk tale originally written and composed by the Russian composer Sergey Prokofiev in 1936 (Hanson and Hanson 1964). Since few recent adaptations of the work in Afrikaans exist, a combined intermedial project was undertaken to recreate the work using practice-based research. The stages of this research method have brought forth a poetic text, the realisation of the original music, illustrations, and a voice artist to read the created text. To accomplish the final artistic product, it was important to obtain a theoretical foundation of practice-based research, intermediality, adaptation and the different media involved in the created word. The intermedial effects between the different media in the project provided the results of the study, stemming not only from the readers’ simultaneous experiences of the media as they read or listen to the work but, as it also became clear, from the mutually complementary effects between the different media of which their combination provided a richer final product.

Child Composers in the Old Conservatories

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert O. Gjerdingen
Keyword(s):  
Teaching Methods ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Mental Ability ◽  
Original Music ◽  
Innovative Teaching ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
History Of ◽  
Youtube Videos ◽  
Typical Day

The original music conservatories were orphanages. Through innovative teaching methods the masters of these old institutions were able to transform poor and often illiterate castoffs into elite musicians, many of whom became famous in the history of classical music. The book tells the story of how this was done. It shows what the lessons were like, what a typical day was like for an orphan, and how children progressed from simple lessons to ones more advanced than any seen today in colleges and universities. Recent rediscoveries of thousands of the old lessons have allowed us to understand how children’s minds were systematically developed to be able to “think” in music. That is, the lessons slowly built up the mental ability to imagine the interplay of two or more voices or instruments. Today we think of Mozart as having a miraculous ability to imagine musical works in his head, but in truth many of the conservatory graduates of that era had attained a similar level of controlled musical imagination. They could improvise for hours at the keyboard, and they could quickly compose whole works for ensembles. The book is accompanied by 100 YouTube videos so that readers can hear what the lessons sounded like.

“I Know Just What She’s Going Through”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Platte
Keyword(s):  
Original Music ◽  
Delicate Balance ◽  
Alternative Perspective ◽  
Franz Waxman ◽  
Studio Era ◽  
Musical Accompaniment

Rebecca’s music offers the strongest argument for the style of musical collaboration Selznick fostered. Although earlier scholarship has focused on Hitchcock and Waxman, this chapter provides an alternative perspective informed by production records: how ideas and decisions flowed from producer, music director Forbes, and composer Franz Waxman to intermingle in one of the most compelling scores of the studio era. This chapter shows the extent to which Selznick and Forbes shaped the score’s formation and the degree to which non-original music from the preview score works in dialogue with Waxman’s associative themes, Robert Russell Bennett’s arrangements, and Leonid Raab’s orchestrations. Rebecca’s musical accompaniment epitomizes a delicate balance of collaborative tensions: the fruit of a system developed under Selznick and Forbes in the late 1930s.

Handel’s Transformative Compositional Practices

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-502
Author(s):  
David Ross Hurley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
Original Music ◽  
Developing Variation ◽  
Compositional History ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Musical Transformations ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
First Time ◽  
Variation Process

In recent decades singers of Handel’s music have made great strides in recapturing the art of embellishing his music, thus breathing new life into forms such as the da capo aria. Yet Handel’s own “variations”—his development and transformation of musical material in his vocal music, important for understanding his compositional practice with borrowed as well as (presumably) original music—are not yet fully explored or appreciated. Admittedly, scholars have discussed musical procedures such as inserting, deleting, and reordering musical materials, as well as other Baroque combinatorial practices in Handel’s arias, but the musical transformations I discuss here are closer to a specifically Handelian brand of developing variation. To my knowledge, the concept of developing variation has never before been applied to early eighteenth-century music. I explore the relation of developing variation to drama (also rarely done) in two of Handel’s arias, providing a close examination of “Ombre, piante” from the opera Rodelinda and new thoughts about “Lament not thus,” originally intended for the oratorio Belshazzar. Although these arias belong to different genres and different stages of Handel’s career, they both exhibit material that undergoes a kind of progressive variation process that has tangible musical and dramatic ramifications, of interest to opera specialists and performers. Furthermore, both arias have a complicated compositional history; I offer fresh insights into the aesthetic qualities of each version, thereby throwing light on Handel’s possible compositional intentions. This article also discloses for the first time some recurring musical passages shared between “Lament not thus” and other pieces that could influence the listener’s interpretation of certain musico-dramatic gestures.

‘Modulation’ by Richard Powers: Digital sound, compression and the short story

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 161-176
Author(s):  
Michael Hedges
Keyword(s):  
Data Compression ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Original Music ◽  
Richard Powers ◽  
Recording Industry ◽  
File Size ◽  
Cultural Artifact ◽  
Use Of Data ◽  
Music File ◽  
Digital Sound

This article presents a reading of ‘Modulation’ (2008) by Richard Powers. Firstly, I consider the short story’s representation of the MP3 music file, specifically its effects on how music is circulated and stored, as well as how it sounds. These changes are the result of different processes of compression. The MP3 format makes use of data compression to reduce the file size of a digital recording significantly. Such a loss of information devises new social and material relations between what remains of the original music, the recording industry from which MP3s emerged and the online markets into which they enter. I argue that ‘Modulation’ is a powerful evocation of a watershed moment in how we consume digital sound: what Jonathan Sterne has termed the rise of the MP3 as ‘cultural artifact’. I contend that the short story, like the MP3, is also a compressed manner of representation. I use narrative theory and short story criticism to substantiate this claim, before positioning ‘Modulation’ alongside Powers’s novels of information. I conclude by suggesting that ‘Modulation’ offers an alternative to representing information through an excess of data. This article reads Powers’s compressed prose as a formal iteration of the data compression the story narrates.

Yakobson, Leonid (1904–1975)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janice Ross
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Full Length ◽  
Original Music ◽  
Religious Observance ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Classical Ballet

A Russian dancer and choreographer, Leonid Veniaminovich Yakobson choreographed for the Kirov and Bolshoi ballets from 1930 to the early 1970s, during which time he emerged as a powerful voice of Soviet ballet modernism. Based in St. Petersburg, his creative roots stretched back to the 1920s, a period of artistic experimentation when classical ballet developed exciting new movement vocabularies. He continued to explore and extend these influences until the 1970s, creating numerous short-format works—called ballet miniatures—that often used grotesque, athletic, or pantomimic movements to address social, dramatic, or erotic subjects with narrative clarity and concision. He favored original music, often in a contemporary style, believing that distinctive forms of music elicited an individual choreographic response. Among his most notable works were his full-length Spartacus (1956/1962)—which discarded the lifts and pointe work of traditional ballet language and featured characters who were fully developed psychologically—and Exercise XX (1972), a dance that verged on abstraction. In 1969, he founded Choreographic Miniatures, the first Soviet ballet company since the 1920s with a repertoire of original choreographic works by a single choreographer. Jewish by birth, Yakobson held onto his Jewish identity culturally as religious observance was effectively prohibited. During years of aggressive anti-Semitism, he created six ballets on Jewish themes; the first, Jewish Dance (1949), he created at a time when Jews were being actively persecuted.

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