Key Components of Musical Discourse Analysis

Musical discourse analysis is an interdisciplinary study which is incomplete without consideration of relevant social, linguistic, psychological, visual, gestural, ritual, technical, historical and musicological aspects. In the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, musical discourse can be interpreted as social practice: it refers to specific means of representing specific aspects of the social (musical) sphere. The article introduces a general view of contemporary musical discourse, and analyses genres from the point of ‘semiosis’, ‘social agents’, ‘social relations’, ‘social context’, and ‘text’. These components of musical discourse analysis, in their various aspects and combinations, should help thoroughly examine the context of contemporary musical art, and determine linguistic features specific to different genres of musical discourse

Nests, arcs and cycles in the lifespan of a studio project

Middlewood Sessions produced a kind of popular music that infuses the timbral aesthetics of jazz and orchestral music with the driving rhythms of dance music. This studio project, lasting for almost eight years, provided a rich resource for gaining insight into the increasingly prevalent context of the domestic project studio via a longitudinal case study approach. At the heart of this research is the desire to understand how people collaborate as part of a studio project, how people use technologies to make music and how all of this unfolds over time. To tackle the question of how to understand the shattered, scattered nature of creative practices, and in extending existing creativity research, I propose three ways of thinking about time: nests, arcs and cycles. While explicating this theoretical framework, something of the specific and idiographic nature of the case study, as an example of contemporary music production, is recounted

Homebound: producing music during a pandemic

Commercial Music Design is a new course within the Music Media Production degree path, jointly taught by Dr. Christoph Thompson, area coordinator of the Music Media Production program at Ball State University, and Prof. Michael Rafter, assistant professor of Music Theatre. The curriculum is designed to exposed students to the multiple facets of music production, combining elements of songwriting, composition, beat production, and recording within a fast-paced learning environment. Two projects within this curriculum called for full production from songwriting, to mastering, with requirements for inclusion of acoustic elements in the recording. The two songs from these projects are the central focus of this thesis. Following a brief overview of the concepts and themes explored in the creation of the songs, I provide a comprehensive walkthrough of the production process from start to finish in three stages: pre-production, production, and post-production.Thesis (B.?)Honors Colleg

An investigation of the impact of ensemble interrelationship on performances of improvised music through practice research

In this thesis I present my investigation into the ways in which the creative and social relationships I have developed with long-term collaborators alter or affect the musical decisions I make in my performances of Improvised Music. The aim of the investigation has been to deepen the understanding of my musical and relational processes as a trombonist through the examination of my artistic practice, which is formed by experiences in range of genres such as Jazz and contemporary music, with a current specialty in Improvised Music performance. By creating an interpretative framework from the theoretical and analytical processes used in music therapy practice, I have introduced a tangible set of concepts that can interpret my Improvised Music performance processes and establish objective perspectives of subjective musical experiences. Chapter one is concerned with recent debates in Improvised Music and music therapy. Particular reference is made to literature that considers interplay between performers. Chapter two focuses on my individual artistic practice and examines the influence of five trombone players from Jazz and Improvised Music performance on my praxis. A recording of one of my solo trombone performances accompanies this section. It concludes with a discussion on my process of making tacit knowledge of Improvised Music performance tangible and explicit and the abstruse nature of subjective feeling states when performing improvisation. This concludes part one of the thesis. The second part of the thesis is concerned with the development and application of concepts and their outcomes. In chapter three, I present frameworks drawn from concepts in music therapy practice. Musical material from my work with long standing collaborators Steve Beresford, John Edwards and Mark Sanders form the basis of three case studies presented in chapter four. Recordings of trio and quartet pieces accompany case study one and two. A recording of a duo with myself and Mark Sanders accompanies case three. In the conclusion, I provide a summary of the research processes, frameworks for analysis and their outcomes. My quartet record All Will Be Said, All To Do Again, which was recorded in the period of this research, forms part three of the study and is the basis for two of three pieces in the aforementioned case studies in chapter four. Part three also includes a live performance of the quartet featuring myself and the musicians featured in thesis which has been documented and included. I further considered how to share my analytical framework in the form of a software programme, a prototype of which can be found in the appendix

2022-2023 Cali Immersive Residency Program

https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/cali-immersive-residency-2022-2023/1000/thumbnail.jp

Machito and His Afro-Cubans: Selected Transcriptions

Machito (Francisco Raúl Grillo, 1909–1984) was born into a musical family in Havana, Cuba, and was already an experienced vocalist when he arrived in New York City in 1937. In 1940 he teamed up with his brother-in-law, the Cuban trumpeter Mario Bauzá (1911–1993), who had already made a name for himself with top African American swing bands such as those of Chick Webb and Cab Calloway. Together, Machito and Bauzá formed Machito and his Afro-Cubans. With Bauzá as musical director, the band forged vital pan-African connections by fusing Afro-Cuban rhythms with modern jazz and by collaborating with major figures in the bebop movement. Highly successful with Latino as well as black and white audiences, Machito and his Afro-Cubans recorded extensively and performed in dance halls, nightclubs, and on the concert stage. In this volume, ethnomusicologist Paul Austerlitz and bandleader and professor Jere Laukkanen (both experienced Latin jazz performers) present transcriptions from Machito’s recordings which meticulously illustrate the improvised as well as scored vocal, reed, brass, and percussion parts of the music. Austerlitz’s introductory essay traces the history of Afro-Cuban jazz in New York, a style that exerted a profound impact on leaders of the bebop movement, including Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, who appears as a guest soloist with Machito on some of the music transcribed here. This is MUSA’s first volume to represent the significant Latino heritage in North American music.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1106/thumbnail.jp

An analysis towards the construction and the role of collaborative circles in jazz musicians of Barcelona

This article aims to study the impact that networks of contacts and circles of musicians have in generating work opportunities within the musical field of jazz. The research has been framed within the perspective of Pierre Bourdieu's artistic field (1984, 1987) and the main characteristics of conformation of collaborative circles studied by Michael P. Farrell (2003). The methodology used is qualitative and is based on semi-structured interviews and participant observation conducted between 2015 and 2016 with musicians from the jazz scene of the city of Barcelona. From this fieldwork, we have analyzed the main contributions that contact networks and collaborative circles of jazz musicians offer to generate work opportunities within the musical artistic field. We have also studied how the collective work and the conformation of musical groups become a crucial artistic and creative platform both for the development of the individual careers of musicians and in the field of joint exploration of the musical language itself

An Analysis of the Compositional Practices of Ornette Coleman as Demonstrated in His Small Group Recordings During the 1970s

This study is an examination of the musical output of Ornette Coleman’s small ensembles during the 1970s. The primary goal of the paper is to define the specific changes that took place in the early part of the decade that distinguish the artist’s later musical conception from that which he employed during the previous years. In order to create such a discussion, the study explores several areas of both Ornette’s life and music, and asserts that throughout this decade Ornette’s creative processes frequently exceeded the boundaries that existed in his music of the previous period. The paper is divided into three sections: historical background; Ornette’s “Renaissance”; and an analysis of compositional techniques and improvisatory style between 1971 and 1979, the years that comprise his most extreme departure from the practices in his earlier and more commonly accepted recordings. The overall trend shows an apparent shift in Ornette’s musical thinking represented by several experimentations with ensemble, tone color, and compositional practice. The result of these undertakings eventually gave rise to a new vision for his art represented by the electric group, Prime Time