Being well, being musical: Music composition as a resource and occupation for older people

Introduction: Participatory music making for older people has tended to focus on singing and performance. In a community music project undertaken by Manchester Camerata (a chamber orchestra), Blacon Community Trust and a small group of older adults, participants were given the opportunity to compose individual pieces of music interactively with professional musicians. This paper reports the findings of the research project. Method: An arts-based research method was adopted and incorporated action research and interpretive interactionism to articulate the experiences and perceptions of participants. Participants and Manchester Camerata musicians also worked together to represent the thematic findings of the research in a group composition. Findings: The findings demonstrate that individual and group music composition contributed to a sense of wellbeing through control over musical materials, opportunities for creativity and identity making, validation of life experience and social engagement with other participants and professional musicians. Conclusion: The results emphasised occupation as essential to health and wellbeing in the later stages of life. The findings also highlight the particularly innovative aspects of this research: (i) the use of music composition as a viable arts-in-health occupation for older people and (ii) the arts-based research method of group composition

Research Diary Visual Mapping : a reflective methodological tool for process and strategy-as-practice studies

Balogun, Huff and Johnson (2003) highlight the growing paradox for researchers who must focus on context and details while favouring general lines of research. These authors focus their reflection around the collection of qualitative data, particularly those of discussion groups, collaborative research and of research journal redaction techniques. We propose, in the context of collaborative research, a new utilisation of the personal diary, fuelled by our doctoral experiences in collaborative research. While the personal diary in its usual form increases the level of reflectivity on an intervening process, it is nevertheless difficult to exploit for the work of interpreting and legitimizing research. We therefore propose personal diary mapping. In addition to the advantages of personal diary mapping as a methodological tool for viewing the phenomenon, it allows a process to be described by highlighting specifics that are not obvious in reading a text. Moreover, the process of personal diary mapping provides a contribution to the epistemic work in a constructivist reference because it helps make the relationship between knowledge and empirical information explicit (Martinet 2007). After a summary bringing process studies closer to SaP and a review of the modalities of action research and their implications in terms of ethics and researcher responsibility, we present the origins, principles and benefits of visual mapping as regards the researcher's responsibility. In a second step, we illustrate the normative elements of this approach through a case study on strategic competence development based on personal diary mapping.Research Diary ; Visual Mapping ; methodological tool ; process ; strategy-as-practice

Linking Melodic Expectation to Expressive Performance Timing and Perceived Musical Tension

This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record

Suffolk University Academic Catalog, New England School of Art and Design (NESAD)--Course Descriptions and Class Schedules, 1987-1988

This catalog contains course descriptions and class schedules for the 1987-1988 academic yearhttps://dc.suffolk.edu/cassbs-catalogs/1113/thumbnail.jp

Life is a Story: Narrative and Identity in the War Poetry of Dan Pagis and Charles Simic

The use of the conceptual metaphor of “life is a story” can be conceived as reciprocally or bidirectionally transforming both life and story. Thus this metaphor structures life into a coherent narrative—with a linear, and causally-related, progression of events and relationships—while also realizing the varied interpretive potentials of “a story as life.” Such aspects of this metaphor are essential to understanding how the two poets, the Israeli Dan Pagis and the American Charles Simic, shape their identities not only as the poetic speaker or the “I” of poetry but also as that of a storyteller. The lives of both these poets demonstrate a similar trajectory of war, as well as a displacement that is geographical, cultural and linguistic: childhood and youth in a war-torn Europe; immigration at the age of sixteen to another, non-European country; and the adoption of a new language as the focus and instrument of poetic creation. Studying their poems in two sections—visual narrative and fictional narrative—provides the opportunity to see how narrative and poetic identity coalesce in the face of displacement and war. What is more, it provides the opportunity to develop the concept of narrativity within the poetic text, also discovering the ways in which these poets embed photographic, cinematographic and literary images within such a narrative. Finally, the use of the fable by these two poets illuminates a connection among various genres (poetry, interview, memoir, book review), as well as among various literary cultures (German, Hebrew, Graeco-Latin, English)