Dogmas of Understanding in Western Art Music Performance

This paper presents an exploration of the ontological shift from musical materials (i.e. melody, harmony, rhythm, texture, timbre, register) to activities in music performance analysis. The “dogmas” extend Herbert H. Clark’s conceptual framework for the study of joint activity in language use to explore music performance in the WAM tradition. A systematic analysis of London Symphony Orchestra masterclasses examines the basic mechanisms of music making in four main areas: representation, audience, interaction and tacit knowledge. This exploration leads to a broader account of cognition and creativity in music performance, one that bridges inner and outer processes of awareness around domains of coordination in joint activities. In this view, material conceptualizations are viewed as targets of focal awareness rather than the basis for cognition in music making. This account, grounded in a rich third-person phenomenological analysis of instructional materials, paves the way for a “meaningful analytics” of musical practice

The Silent Space of the Vacuum

In this paper I argue that a reimagining of the notion of silence as more than a sonic phenomenon is needed to address the dominant structural apparati of Western discourse. Silence as an existential medium is where the Foucauldian apparatuses that power the status-quo of the world operate. They forge connections between things like ideology and social organization where one falls into the wake of the other and is shaped in a way that is nearly invisible to the passing glance. It is the indeterminacy within silence as explored by John Cage that that allows this to happen, but it also offers the potential to have an active role in the shaping of these apparatuses toward a more beneficial and culturally aware form of society. This new approach is crucial in helping one learn to embrace the indeterminacy of life and the hazy relational structures that drive our existence

Shostakovich, old believers and new minimalists

The chapter discusses ‘minimalist’ elements of Dmitri Shostakovich's style as embodiments/ expressions of traditional Russian expressive modes rooted in the idioms of old folk music and the music of the ‘old believers’ The collection volume comprises a selection of articles that, as a group, marks an important new stage in our understanding of Shostakovich and his working environment. The papers have in common a perspective that we believe offers the most fruitful route forward for Shostakovich studies today. All address aspects of the composer’s output in the context of his life and cultural milieu. They are thus illuminating from two directions: the uncovering of ‘outside’ stimuli allows us to perceive the motivations behind Shostakovich’s artistic choices, while at the same time the nature of those choices offers insights into the workings of the larger world—cultural, social, political—that he inhabited. Thus his often ostensibly quirky choices are revealed as responses—by turns sentimental, moving, sardonic and angry—to the particular conditions, with all their absurdities and contradictions, that he had to negotiate. The composer emerging from the role of tortured loner of older narratives into that of the gregarious and engaged member of his society that, for better and worse, characterized the everyday reality of his life

Decolonizing Higher Education: Rationales and Implementations from the Subject of Music History

In addition to ongoing territorial and material re-organization of power as a result of 19th-century European colonialism, there has been an increasing focus on decolonializing knowledge practices in higher education. Research communities are discussing what it could mean to decolonize thinking practices, conditions of knowledge creation, and access to higher education. Since the arts are a powerful tool for change, we want to contribute to the ongoing scholarly discussion by introducing examples of decolonial practices used in the Bachelor program in music performance. By presenting three cases from the subject of music history at two Norwegian universities, we provide insight into why and how we can teach differently, what kind of resistance we meet, and how we can make use of discomfort to decolonize knowledge practices. Our empirical material is composed of our own experiences, student course evaluations, conversations with students and teachers, as well as module descriptions. In the basis of our findings, we propose a strategic canonism to mediate in an increasingly polarized field

Free love and Bhakti : an inter-religious study on Martin Luther and Shri Krishna Caitanya

Martin Luther (1483 - 1546) and Vishvambhara Mishra (1486 - 1533), known as Shri Krishna Caitanya, have been the outstanding representatives of the great west-eastern religious revolution which shattered the hearts of their societies in the 16th century. They were the spiritual revolutionaries of the modern times. The question may very well be raised if and how these two religious reformers on the edge of modern age share theological commonness, even though they lived wide apart and certainly did not know of each other. We will see: Both Martin Luther and Shri Krishna Caitanya have taught the un-conditioned, Free Love viz. Bhakti. Even if they did it in the tradition of the theological context they were born in they produced a new common setting of religion: the destruction of meritoricly bound religion and its substitution by free religion. The worship of God or charity were no more a mean for but the final state of salvation. Their interpretation of this revolutionary religion has lost nothing of its existen-tial meaning, even though having been twisted often enough to indiscernibility or even to the complete opposite - up to the present day. ..

Boston University Messiaen Project, October 12 and 13, 2007

This is the concert program of the Boston University Messiaen Project international conference on Friday, October 12, and Saturday, October 13, 2007, at the College of Fine Arts, 855 Commonwealth Avenue. The conference featured lectures by Yves Balmer, Karin Heller, Stephen Butler Murray, Martin Lee, Andrew Shenton, Mark DeVoto, Wai Ling Cheong, Luke Berryman, Thomas Peattie, Peter Bannister, Vincent Benitez, Robert Sholl, Alexandre Abdoulvaev, Robert Fallon, Adam Gustafson, Douglas Shadle, Stephen Schloesser, Alexander Rehding, Sander van Maas, Ryan W. Dohoney, and David Cannata. Works performed on the concert on Saturday, October 13, 2007 in the Concert Hall were "Fantasie pour violon et piano by Olivier Messiaen, "Un reflet dans le vent" by O. Messiaen, "Ondine" by Claude Debussy, "Les fées sont d'exquises danseuses" by C. Debussy, "Brouillards" by C. Debussy, "Feuilles mortes" by C. Debussy, "La colombe" by O. Messiaen, "Deux romances de Paul Bourget" by C. Debussy, "Deux morceaux de soir" by C. Debussy, and "Poèmes pour Mi" by O. Messiaen. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Cultural Appropriation and the Limits of Identity: A Case for Multiple Humanity(es)

examine the dominant conversations on cultural appropriation. The first part of the essay will examine the ideological configuration of what constitutes cultural appropriation (hereafter as CA) first, as the politics of the diaspora and second, within a normative understanding of culture and its diachronic contradictions. This will be followed by a critical reevaluation of our subject theme as primarily a discourse of power with multiple implications. Framed as a discourse of power, CA is equally exposed to ideological distortions, and its critics becoming afflicted with the same virus they set out to cure in the first place. I am interested in the aspect of culture as a constant location of tensions and rupture, yet constitutive of core credential in the making of modern identity. I argue that the failure of dominant criticisms of cultural appropriation is precisely because they do not leave epistemic space for prior commitments: the internal variation of culture. If as critics have argued that CA enables cultural violence, we need to understand the epistemic space where cultural violence occurs in order to make a meaningful proposal for identity discourse and conversation. I will make a case for what may be termed multiple humanity (ies) as a way of transcending the homogenous claims imposed upon cultural memories