Mis-Guided Exploration of Cities: an ambulant investigation of participative politics of place

The politics of place and walking as an arts practice form the core concerns of my research. The research is being conducted with particular reference to the ongoing Mis-Guide projects, conceived and produced by the site-specific arts company, Wrights & Sites, of which I am a member. Our apparent rejection of performance-making for an audience has led to walking with spectators as collaborators in the work, and has made the physical journeys and verbal exchanges along the way an integral part of the practice. Through this work, which revolves around place, site-specific arts and urban walking, I am harnessing existing knowledge about cities as spectacle in the footsteps of the Flaneur, the Dadaist, and the Situationist and in recognition of contemporary works by artists who use journey and place as the text, reference points and resources that generate or support their research and practice. I am exploring a sense that urban spaces and places can offer passages to utopian, creative and optimistic relationships with the everyday. I am engaged in a research writing or re-writing of the city activated by wanderings and explorations that can lead, for example, to an active engagement in issues of ecology and environmental planning. In the spirit of a walk between places and ideas I have attempted to structure the writing as if the writer and the reader are passing though or over different thresholds. We pass through thresholds or doorways or across boundaries in our physical and mental development but we also employ such concepts practically and imaginatively in the devising of performance work. As theatre-makers we could make claim to be leaving the everyday and entering a dedicated space called a studio where by degrees we often engage in vocal, physical and mental practices that might appear very strange and out of place in any other context. The crossing of thresholds and boundaries is also part of the composition of performance with entrances and exits, appearance and disappearance, transformations and shape shifting as key aspects of such work. Some of these thresholds in this thesis might be regarded as doorways or obstacles whilst others might verge closer to the ambient hubs noted by poets and pychogeographers. I see this writing as a means of interrogating and exploring and developing my own practice towards particular social and environmental issues

Wavelength (March 1985)

https://scholarworks.uno.edu/wavelength/1069/thumbnail.jp

The Music of Mike Westbrook

ABSTRACT The Music of Mike Westbrook Gary Bayley (Durham, 2013) This dissertation – the first on the life and work of Mike Westbrook – proposes that his unique conception of English modern jazz was inspired by early 1900s New Orleans culture, where live music was contemporary, culturally relevant, and had a social function. Initially intended as art for a new post-World War socialist Britain, his drawing on cultural, social, economic, and political constraints became an artistic credo. The thesis argues (following Fischlin and Heble (2004), Horn (2002), Johnson (2002), and McKay (2005)) that jazz is primarily a cultural activity, not merely a style of music. While Westbrook has claimed that he was simply attempting to combine art and entertainment like Duke Ellington, this dissertation demonstrates how, as a trained painter, his jazz process is informed by Dada and Pop Art as well as by Bertolt Brecht’s Lehrstücke, lending his ensembles a social function as ‘mediating structures’ (Berger 1979). His central ‘brass band’ concept draws on English music-hall, circus and fairground, together with European cabaret, and his tendency towards theatrical performance was reinforced through his creative partnership with Kate Westbrook. The approach taken in this study is twofold: on the one hand field-work and extensive access to archival materials (much of it previously unavailable); and on the other hand cultural and historical interpretation. The thesis argues that Westbrook attempted a cultural revolution in broadening the terms of reference for jazz to construct a peculiarly English, polystylistic multi-media art. Accordingly, this dissertation locates Westbrook’s work in the larger cultural field of English contemporary artistic expression, rather than simply seeking to situate it stylistically within a narrower history of jazz

Conceptualising Musical Graphic Performance: An Investigative Journey of Self-Reflective Artistic Practice and Autoethnography

This thesis seeks to answer the question: how do performers engage with musical graphics? Musical graphics problematise the authorship hierarchies between performer and composer by challenging the documentative and communicative functions of musical notation. It is the central contention of this thesis that performing musical graphics involves a process of modal transfer, where the performer decodifies the visual elements of the score into referents, which are then consolidated into a conceptual analogue through processes of decodification, world building and musical ekphrasis. Then, once the conceptual analogue has been formed, the performer engages with a reflexive loop between it and the musical materials, through a process of hermeneutic playfulness. In addition, this thesis answers a range of secondary research questions: how do performers experience the creative processes of preparing and performing musical graphics? Are there identifiable differences in the experience of performing musical graphics between beginners and experienced performers? What is it that a performer learns as they become more experienced? How do performers recognise whether they are engaging with musical graphics effectively? What is the role of improvisation in the performance of musical graphics? The thesis is in three parts. Part I contextualises musical graphics and discusses the musical and extra-musical tools used to analyse how performers engage with musical graphics. Part II comprises two case studies. The first case study consists of a performances of two musical graphics by the English visual artist Janet Boulton, involving me on the bassoon and the composer and sound artist Samuel Rodgers on live electronics and bowed cymbals. The second case study consists of four workshops, led by the Danish composer and performer Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen, involving composition and jazz students from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Part II ends with analyses of the performances, which resulted from the two case studies. The creation of a musical graphic performance conceptualisation pipeline is the focus of Part III, which lays out the creative processes involved in preparing and performing musical graphics and the relationships between them. Each creative process is addressed in turn, to provide the insights required to answer all of the research questions within the conclusion of this thesis

The Case of Inter-Expert Creative Collaboration in Science Gallery Dublin: A Discourse Analytical Approach

The phenomenon of creativity has been a focus of enquiry by psychologists for many years. Compared with individual creativity, much less is known about creativity in collaborative contexts (Glăveanu, 2010; Sawyer, 2010). Taking a sociocultural view of creativity, this study contributes to an emerging strand of research that focusses centrally on how creativity unfolds in the performance of creative collaboration. The research design followed an inductive path conducive to theory building and employed a single case study method (Yin, 2009). Science Gallery Dublin, part of Trinity College Dublin (TCD), is presented as a special place for creative collaboration. In response to calls for further detail about how ideas emerge in group contexts (Glăveanu, 2017; Hargadon and Beckhy, 2006; Harvey and Chia-Yu, 2013; Harvey, 2014; Kurtzberg and Amabile, 2010), this study contributes to the literature in a number of ways. It describes a kind of talk - Idea Talk - that is presented as characteristic of and instrumental in the collaborative development of ideas and solutions. It presents a ‘Creative Convergence framework’ as a model that seeks to explain how ideas emerge through interdisciplinary dialogue. Findings of the study also challenge an established doctrine of creative collaboration and brainstorming which holds that equality of participation is desirable. The implications for practice include an enhanced understanding of the organisational and contextual features that can positively contribute to creative collaborations. The Idea Talk and Creative Convergence contributions, combined with further observations relating to the hosting and facilitation of groups, provide leaders and participants with new insights into how creativity emerges in groups

Doing It to Death: An investigation into a session musician’s migration

This doctorate dissertation is about the guitar and technology in a creative perspective – about a change and transformation in musical direction. Dreyer's quest is to clarify how technology can help break new ground for a former session musician with ambitions to deepen and create a more distinctive personal expression. Through different angles and with an exploratory approach, Dreyer is searching for his own personal sound, using improvisation, composition and sound manipulating tools. Dreyer is an experienced session guitarist now exploring creating his own music using technology. He has participated in more than 160 released albums, and toured with numerous Norwegian and international artists. He also has released four albums with three different self-initiated music projects, two of which combine music and sound art. This text is an autoethnographic depiction of the quest for a personal change in musical direction and a need for a strengthened profile as a performer and composer. The reader can acquire an insight into Dreyer’s search for, and aim at a clearer idiom and sound, using technology.publishedVersio

Casco Bay Weekly : 6 October 1988

https://digitalcommons.portlandlibrary.com/cbw_1988/1022/thumbnail.jp

Kalymnian music and dance in Tarpon Springs, Florida

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston UniversityGreek immigrants from the Dodecanese island of Kalyrnnos have dominated the social, political, and economic life of Tarpon Springs, Florida since their arrival in the first decades of the twentieth century. Remarkably unlike the typical urban immigrant experience, this dynamic has allowed the Kalyrnnian-American community of Tarpon Springs to negotiate its relationship with American society from a position of relative power, without the immediate need to compromise linguistic, social, or occupational identity for the sake of survival. The cultural and artistic traditions of Kalymnos-foremost among them music and dancing-have played a central role in the construction of Kalyrnnian-American identity in Tarpon Springs, and have enabled a creative negotiation on the community's own terms ofthe states of"hyphenated being" that characterize immigrant communities. In this thesis, I examine the ways in which Kalymnian Tarponites use embodied musical movement as a resonant bridge between competing cultural allegiances, a means of imaginative travel in search of emotional fulfillment, and a venue to perform notions of distinction and belonging. For Kalymnian residents of Tarpon Springs, the embodied music and dance traditions of Kalyrnnos function as mobile sites of tension and transcendence, are imbued with a new set of self-sufficient meanings, and serve as a passport to cross the blurry borders of transnational being

Open Access Musicology

"In the fall of 2015, a collection of faculty at liberal arts colleges began a conversation about the challenges we faced as instructors: Why were there so few course materials accessible to undergraduates and lay readers that reflected current scholarly debate? How can we convey the relevance of studying music history to current and future generations of students? And how might we represent and reflect the myriad, often conflicting perspectives, positions, and identities that make up both music’s history and the writers of history? Here we offer one response to those questions. Open Access Musicology is a collection of essays, written in an accessible style and with a focus on modes of inquiry rather than content coverage. Our authors draw from their experience as scholars but also as teachers. They have been asked to describe why they became musicologists in the first place and how their individual paths led to the topics they explore and the questions they pose. Like most scholarly literature, the essays have all been reviewed by experts in the field. Unlike all scholarly literature, the essays have also been reviewed by students at a variety of institutions for clarity and relevance. These essays are intended for undergraduates, graduate students, and interested readers without any particular expertise. They can be incorporated into courses on a range of topics as standalone readings or used to supplement textbooks. The topics introduce and explore a variety of subjects, practices, and methods but, above all, seek to stimulate classroom discussion on music history’s relevance to performers, listeners, and citizens.