Exploring Political Action and Socialization through Group Improvisation within the Music of Frederic Rzewski and Cornelius Cardew

In the late 1960s, socialist composers, Cornelius Cardew and Frederic Rzewski, each established ensembles with the purpose of performing works consisting of experimental forms of improvisation. By employing group improvisation, and including untrained, non-musicians within their performances, they strove to use these ensembles as a model for society itself; this model includes a dissolution of the hierarchy among performers and the barrier between performer and audience. Improvisation helped music resist commodification by the culture industry or appropriation by authoritarian regimes for the purpose of propaganda. This dissertation aims to explore how Cardew and Rzewski constituted effective socialization and political action within two works: Cardew’s The Great Learning (Paragraph 1) and Rzewski’s Les Moutons de Panurge. This dissertation explores the complex relationship between politics and art, particularly, how art maintains its autonomy while also being political. The political and compositional backgrounds of these two composers is examined in order to gauge their intentions within these works and evaluate the political efficacy of the resulting compositions. This is accomplished by examining the scores as well as various studio recordings and live performances. This dissertation proposes that it is only within performance that the relationship between improvisational choices and political efficacy is revealed

Musical Instruments for Novices: Comparing NIME, HCI and Crowdfunding Approaches

Designing musical instruments to make performance accessible to novice musicians is a goal which long predates digital technology. However, just in the space of the past 6 years, dozens of instrument designs have been introduced in various academic venues and in commercial crowdfunding campaigns. In this paper, we draw comparisons in design, evaluation and marketing across four domains: crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter and Indiegogo; the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference; conferences in human-computer interaction (HCI); and researchers creating accessible instruments for children and adults with disabilities. We observe striking differences in approach between commercial and academic projects, with less pronounced differences between each of the academic communities. The paper concludes with general reflections on the identity and purpose of instruments for novice musicians, with suggestions for future exploration

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

Between two worlds : approaching Balkan oral music tradition through the use of technology as a compositional and performing medium

This text explores the problems of interpreting musical identity, meaning, and sociocultural value of a compositional work influenced by two traditions with different values: the modernist tradition based on Western European classical heritage, and the oral tradition of the Balkans. It also follows the process of transformation and recreation of the author's musical language: from classical, notation-oriented to a more intuitive, improvisational and live-performance based. Through detailing some of the experiences of the author as a composer and a performer, it also discusses some observations on the ways in which this discrepancy between two traditions and practices has affected and still influences those creative practices in Serbia and the former Yugoslavia that relate to traditional music and its derivations. By identifying musical performance within certain socio-cultural contexts this dichotomy can be highlighted. As a result, a substantial part of this text focuses on investigating the capacity of a technologically assisted composition and performance practice to overcome this issue. Technology is here perceived not only as an instrument for recording, improvising, composing and performing but also as a medium which communicates musical value. In this study, the oral tradition from the Balkans was approached not only as a purely acoustic phenomenon, but it also included a raised awareness of the nature of the continuous fusion of various cultures in the region, as well as existing cultural and religious antagonisms. This study investigates the problems of constructing musical identity as well as the meaning of an author’s creative practice in relation to the socio-cultural environment of its origin, whilst observing its reception by audiences outside the Balkan region. Socio-cultural environments are established through exploring the writings of the authors that depict the Balkans historical, cultural and musical spheres in relation to other cultural practices and influences

A Human-Computer Duet System for Music Performance

Virtual musicians have become a remarkable phenomenon in the contemporary multimedia arts. However, most of the virtual musicians nowadays have not been endowed with abilities to create their own behaviors, or to perform music with human musicians. In this paper, we firstly create a virtual violinist, who can collaborate with a human pianist to perform chamber music automatically without any intervention. The system incorporates the techniques from various fields, including real-time music tracking, pose estimation, and body movement generation. In our system, the virtual musician's behavior is generated based on the given music audio alone, and such a system results in a low-cost, efficient and scalable way to produce human and virtual musicians' co-performance. The proposed system has been validated in public concerts. Objective quality assessment approaches and possible ways to systematically improve the system are also discussed

Evolving the drum-kit : frameworks and methods for diachronic live electronic performance practice and bespoke instrument design

This thesis examines performance practice with the Augmented Drum-Kit, a personal evolution of the acoustic drum-kit with the use of digital technology. The practice is investigated from three perspectives: First, through possible spatial and contextual definitions of the instrument under development, taking into consideration the inherently open-ended nature of its building blocks: percussion and the computer. Second, by exploring the composer/performer/builder’s practice paradigm in terms of musical and performative goals with such an emerging performance environment. Finally, as a diachronic practice between performer and all constituent technological parts of the composite instrument, towards the practice’s ongoing development and evolution. Using these discussions as starting points, this practice-led research proposes three intertwined novel frameworks for diachronic live electronic performance practice and bespoke instrument design. Additionally, the developed instrument itself is detailed in the form of the devised design methods, schematics, diagrams and software, addressing questions such as intuitive control, gestural uniformity, consistent electro-acoustic vocabulary, distinct instrumental character, mobility, sound diffusion and transferability. Finally, music portfolio consisting of five solo and group album recordings with the Augmented Drum-Kit is presented, while audiovisual examples from various scenarios and development stages are used to further illustrate the discussion

College Theory Curriculum: Using the Philosophical Essence of Comprehensive Musicianship to Integrate Composition

While the National Standards for Arts Education emphasize the necessity for nurturing creativity in public schools, the current education system is biased toward performance, undervaluing the teaching of creativity through composing at all grade levels. The systemic avoidance of music composition curricular integration starts at the college-level, where future music educators fail to encounter practical composition assignments in their music theory courses. This qualitative research study examined six college theory professors’ perspectives on how well current theory curriculum prepares future students to teach composition and how it might be best implemented. Furthermore, this study assessed shortcomings in developing compositional skill within the available college music theory curriculum. It explored existing literature concerning benefits of creativity in music education. The researcher also demonstrated that the ideals of Comprehensive Musicianship (CM) are a superlative solution to this problem, not as a dogmatic teaching methodology, but by extracting the philosophy that underpins CM. In this light, attention was given to curricular integration by showing how compositional music theory assignments could be meaningfully incorporated in applied and ensemble courses. The efficacy of the proposed theory curriculum was demonstrated with examples from the author’s own community college classroom experience. This study was important because it paves the way for K-12 music educators comfortable and knowledgeable in training students to compose music effectively, thereby demonstrating more comprehensive mastery of music fundamentals. Correspondingly, this dissertation could spawn additional composition-focused curriculum development in applied and ensemble music courses