Growing with art in Shikshamitra

As Shikshamitra happened in 2005, art started happening around it. Shikshamitra was an alternative school/learning center for 8-16-year-old boys and girls from a slum community. Experiments in learning processes, class durations, contents, forms, and modes of evaluations highlighted its span of existence from April 2005 to January 2011

Reading the Score: Music Novels and the Alternative World of Words

The aim of this thesis is to write a ‘music novel’ for children and by doing so examine some of the many ways words and music play a role in storytelling. A music novel can be studied critically and to write one is ultimately a creative act. Academic scholarship on literary representations of music has so far been primarily focused on attending to the presence and representation of Western classical music in adult literary texts. Eminent leaders in the field include Delia da Sousa Correa, Emily Petermann, and Werner Wolf. Research into music in children’s fiction has not been undertaken to such an extent. This thesis takes a first step towards readdressing this gap in knowledge, taking as examples children’s novels by Aimee Lucido (In the Key of Code, 2019), Philip Reeve (Railhead, 2015), and Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865); and a more recent, contemporary adult novel by Matthew Herbert (The Music – A novel through sound, 2018). My detailed analysis centres on how music contributes to the construction and development of these works, as well as music that has made use of fiction as a compositional device in György Ligeti’s Nonsense Madrigals (1988-93). The theoretical framing of my study draws on work by Roland Barthes, John Cage, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, and Patricia Waugh. Underdog, my music novel aimed at readers aged eight years and over, is my creative response to the questions this thesis raises. The two soundscapes that accompany the novel are musical paratexts born from Underdog that help unite the words with the music beyond the printed page. I provide a critical reflection on the inspirations behind Underdog which serves as a bridge into critical case studies that investigate what happens when one art form (music) has infiltrated the other (fiction) as part of what Jean-Jacques Nattiez calls the poietic process. My study demonstrates that the literary techniques used in fiction to imitate music, regardless of genre, are shared. These traits include references to pop and classical music embedded in the text, imitation of motifs and numerical musical patterns associated with a particular piece of music, and individual pieces of music that underpin the construction of a literary work

Loose fit? The impact of the Manchester music scene on youth fashion 1986 to 1996

This thesis questions the stereotype of the loose fitting silhouette of the Mancunian music scene from 1986 to 1996, exploring the links between the city’s music scene and local youth fashion. It establishes the important contribution of fashion to culture in the music scene and the distinct local “looks” that resulted. The thesis explores the literature of subculture and identity, enriched by the concepts of bricolage and local fashion. The contributory influence of the Manchester music scene is investigated in its public and private sites of creation and consumption. Combining cultural studies, dress history and fashion theory, the research is based on oral evidence in the form of active interviews, supported by analysis of contemporary images. Interviewees were pre-identified for their role in Mancunian fashion and music. These revealed previously unidentified aspects of Mancunian dress, which inform a discussion of the nature and context of local fashion in the period. Salient findings included the eloquence with which men can talk about clothes, and the sources and methods of the quest for authenticity through “looks”. The thesis repositions subculture, in the light of the shift toward more mutable groupings, and affiliations that can change with site. These formed a multi-faceted movement that was able to embrace both mainstream culture and its subversions. The contribution to knowledge centres on: (1) the importance of authenticity in subcultural movements; (2) identification of the several looks co-existing under the banner of Madchester; (3) establishing that these looks were understood differently from inside the movement because experiences shared by participants depended on tacit understandings rather than purely visual judgements; and, (4) the concept of fashion in motion to describe the interrelationship of garment and wearer in movement and its connection with identity. This led to (5) the addition of “attitude” to Brake’s practical aspects of subcultural style. Attitude is the outward expression of the inward state produced by dress upon the body, sometimes visually sensed (as swagger on the Madchester scene) but also encompassing less tangible projections

A modal measure of art critical development.

The study addressed the problem of the provision of objective measures for the arts, in order to provide information for national testing in art education. This involved the revision and testing of a developmental matrix and measure of art critical abilities, that had been devised in previous studies (Hickey, 1975; Stuart, 1989). The matrix was revised to project three operational levels of development for critical abilities, that were derived from projecting key concepts through four phases of a critical or cognitive strategy. Key concepts were projected for three art functions and contextual enquiry. The modal measure was revised to provide criteria for projecting and assessing three operational levels of development for each ability. A descriptive multi-disciplinary research strategy was used to test the objectivity of the projected matrix and measure. The testing was undertaken with thirty-one case studies derived fromjunior, middle and upper schools. The data was collected from children aged seven to eighteen years of age with three operational measuring instruments to test operational levels, reasoning and vocabulary. The objectivity of the matrix was indicated by a correspondence between Piagetian operational levels and modal reasoning for three levels of development. The objectivity of 2 the modal measure was indicated by a triangulation of operational, modal and vocabulary scores. The findings confirmed the previous testing in that the modal measure of the operational level of explanations provided an objective measure of art critical development. However, differences in the level of vocabulary and reasoning could account for a partial correspondence with concrete operational levels of development. The findings contribute to knowledge about the development of inter-disciplinary measures of the cognitive style of strategy evaluation. The information would be relevant for co-ordinating national testing in different subject areas, and for art education in particular

Celtic constructs : heritage media, archaeological knowledge and the politics of consumption in 1990s Britain.

Over the past ten years, the academic archaeological community has begun to come to terms with some of the implications of the archaeological're-thinking the Celts'. Yet, what can we say about the ways in which images of an archaeo-historic Celtic cultural package are circulated in heritage media, and invested with meaning by the consumers (i.e. us all) of those media? Despite the academic critique of the potentially dangerous conflation of race and politics which characterizes Celticentric heritage media, very little work has been done on the forms that these media take, and on the actual mobilization of Celtic images in the everyday. This dissertation represents an attempt to chart the landscapes of Celticentric heritage media in English-speaking Europe of the 1990s, and the ways in which those landscapes are mobilized in our lives. From in-depth interviews with visitors to two Welsh spaces of Celtic representation - Castell Henllys Iron Age Hillfort and Celtica - I go on to suggest that while it is a mistake to reduce such consumption to a value-free leisure activity, neither should we uncritically assume that representations of the Celtic automatically reproduce racist and nationalist discourses via an unproblematic relationship between 'text' and 'reader'. Rather, we need to look at the specific circumstances of active visitor engagement in order to begin to understand the ways in which these physical representations of Celtic culture are' good to think' the politics of identity in late- 1990s Britain. From this work I am able to suggest creative ways forward for those presenting media narratives of pastness. The key is to rethink our own professional attitudes towards monolithic notions of 'the public' and the meanings which are invested in the communal consumption of images of a Celtic past

The Music Sound

A guide for music: compositions, events, forms, genres, groups, history, industry, instruments, language, live music, musicians, songs, musicology, techniques, terminology , theory, music video. Music is a human activity which involves structured and audible sounds, which is used for artistic or aesthetic, entertainment, or ceremonial purposes. The traditional or classical European aspects of music often listed are those elements given primacy in European-influenced classical music: melody, harmony, rhythm, tone color/timbre, and form. A more comprehensive list is given by stating the aspects of sound: pitch, timbre, loudness, and duration. Common terms used to discuss particular pieces include melody, which is a succession of notes heard as some sort of unit; chord, which is a simultaneity of notes heard as some sort of unit; chord progression, which is a succession of chords (simultaneity succession); harmony, which is the relationship between two or more pitches; counterpoint, which is the simultaneity and organization of different melodies; and rhythm, which is the organization of the durational aspects of music