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This essay addresses how Africanist choreography operates as a practice of cultural citizenship, focussing on the work of Thomas ‘Talawa’ Prestø as a leading figure in shaping the cultural sphere for choreography based on African and diaspora forms in Norway and internationally. Whereas cultural policy discourse tends to value Africanist choreography as a tool for social inclusion, this essay seeks to foreground the philosophical basis of Prestø’s work – with a focus on his piece I:Object (2018) and its enactment of ideas of Africana philosophy, heritage and polycentrism. However, rather than focussing exclusively on performance analysis, the essay also emphasises the political importance of the professional work that choreographers like Prestø undertake aside from choreographing – analysing the ways in which he has created a new discursive context for his own practice and the challenge to Eurocentric norms of reception this work enacts

Play it again, Duke: jazz performance, improvisation, and the construction of spontaneity

No abstract available

Measuring Expressive Music Performances: a Performance Science Model using Symbolic Approximation

Music Performance Science (MPS), sometimes termed systematic musicology in Northern Europe, is concerned with designing, testing and applying quantitative measurements to music performances. It has applications in art musics, jazz and other genres. It is least concerned with aesthetic judgements or with ontological considerations of artworks that stand alone from their instantiations in performances. Musicians deliver expressive performances by manipulating multiple, simultaneous variables including, but not limited to: tempo, acceleration and deceleration, dynamics, rates of change of dynamic levels, intonation and articulation. There are significant complexities when handling multivariate music datasets of significant scale. A critical issue in analyzing any types of large datasets is the likelihood of detecting meaningless relationships the more dimensions are included. One possible choice is to create algorithms that address both volume and complexity. Another, and the approach chosen here, is to apply techniques that reduce both the dimensionality and numerosity of the music datasets while assuring the statistical significance of results. This dissertation describes a flexible computational model, based on symbolic approximation of timeseries, that can extract time-related characteristics of music performances to generate performance fingerprints (dissimilarities from an ‘average performance’) to be used for comparative purposes. The model is applied to recordings of Arnold Schoenberg’s Phantasy for Violin with Piano Accompaniment, Opus 47 (1949), having initially been validated on Chopin Mazurkas.1 The results are subsequently used to test hypotheses about evolution in performance styles of the Phantasy since its composition. It is hoped that further research will examine other works and types of music in order to improve this model and make it useful to other music researchers. In addition to its benefits for performance analysis, it is suggested that the model has clear applications at least in music fraud detection, Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and in pedagogical applications for music education

Proceedings of the 25th International Seminar of the ISME Commission on Research. Federal University of Paraíba, João Pessoa, Brazil

This book includes twenty-three contributions developed form papers presented at the 2014 Research Commission Seminar of the International Society for Music Education (ISME). This was the 25th biennial ISME Research Commission Seminar, making it the most established research gathering of its type in the world. Over three hundred and seventy pages of peer-reviewed contributions are penned by scholars from the five continents working in the field’s state-of-the-art. Embracing diverse methodologies authors focus on topics including early childhood, inclusion, creativity, performance, perception, instrumental teaching, teacher education, primary, post-primary and informal education. Founded in 1954, affiliated to UNESCO and present in over eighty countries, ISME is the premiere international organisation for music education

Proceedings of the 25th International Seminar of the ISME Commission on Research. Federal University of Paraíba, João Pessoa, Brazil

This book includes twenty-three contributions developed form papers presented at the 2014 Research Commission Seminar of the International Society for Music Education (ISME). This was the 25th biennial ISME Research Commission Seminar, making it the most established research gathering of its type in the world. Over three hundred and seventy pages of peer-reviewed contributions are penned by scholars from the five continents working in the field’s state-of-the-art. Embracing diverse methodologies authors focus on topics including early childhood, inclusion, creativity, performance, perception, instrumental teaching, teacher education, primary, post-primary and informal education. Founded in 1954, affiliated to UNESCO and present in over eighty countries, ISME is the premiere international organisation for music education

Musical value in the jazz tradition of the 20th century

This thesis analyses the aesthetic principles of jazz, with the underlying motivation being the question of how different cultural perspectives regarding music and art, and their boundaries and definitions, are combined. It is fundamentally interdisciplinary – a synthesis of musicology and aesthetics that analyses the development of jazz’s aesthetic values, and their relationship with social and cultural influences. This approach serves as a corrective to the musicological exploration of creative socio-cultural phenomenon, which, while insightful, has lacked the inclusion of contemporary aesthetic analysis. In exploring questions of the philosophy of music, traditional aesthetic issues such as representation, authenticity, and expression in music are confronted. As this is developed, broader philosophical topics such as ontology, artistic virtue, and culture and appropriation are discussed, with jazz’s unique aesthetic values at the centre. In building an appropriate ethical and musicological framework, this thesis posits questions regarding the reliability of Western aesthetic theory when understanding diaspora culture, particularly the view of non-Western aesthetic principles as ancillary to the development of contemporary musical aesthetics. This informs an examination of the art vs entertainment dichotomy, and an assessment of the aesthetic legacy of modernism. This thesis emphasises the importance of the synthesis of philosophical aesthetics and musicology, and in understanding jazz’s aesthetic values we see the influence of the African American creative movements of the early 20th century, the role of factors such as social status, class, race, and economics, and how strict categories such as art and entertainment overlook unique creative values