For the Culture: The Importance of a Critical Social Theory within the Music Education Classroom

This paper will analyze the history of music education in the United States and discuss how the music classroom can contribute to and dismantle social inequalities including social class, gender, and race. Class effects music education by creating barriers to necessary resources and opportunities as a result of economic positions.[1] Gender is the second focus because music has historically been a male-dominated profession. As a result, many textbooks and curriculum highlight the achievements of men while erasing the contributions of women which has taught women to devalue their own work.[2] The last focus is race. While the arts once served as a catalyst for community empowerment, it has become a way to control free thought and exploration of culture.[3] Thus, the purpose of this paper is to raise awareness of the social justice issues affecting our youth as a guide for creating better pedagogies for music education

The Self-Definition of Hellenic Identity through the Culture of Mousikē

Altgriechische Quellen sind voll von Verweisen auf die Musik von Völkern, die nicht griechisch sind und deshalb stereotyp als ,Barbaren‘ bezeichnet werden. Merkmale wie ,verweichlicht‘ und ,wollüstig‘ werden dabei oft dem musikalischen Paradigma des Ostens zu-geschrieben, vor allem während und nach den Perserkriegen des frühen 5. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. Ziel des Beitrags ist, die Konstruktion hellenischer Identität mit dem Begriff der mousikē zu untersuchen, wobei in der Hauptsache diejenigen literarischen und ikonographischen Quellen analysiert werden, in welchen ,griechische‘ und ,fremde‘ Elemente als Gegensätze dargestellt werden. Sie werden versuchsweise als Kennzeichen kultureller und politischer Veränderungen der Gesellschaft interpretiert

Male Belting: An Exploration of Technique and Style From 1967 to Current

Male belting is found in many different stylistic forms of musical theatre repertoire. Its evolution began in the late 1960s with the emergence of the rock musical phenomenon and the early musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Belting is a musical theatre singing technique that achieves specific vocal tone qualities derived from speechlike tones. These tone qualities can resonate through a performance space without the use of amplification. Belting technique has also evolved to support the singing of musical theatre repertoire that requires an extended male vocal tessitura and honest communication of text. The advance of belting as a legitimate vocal technique has been a continuous journey of discovery in the studio and performance realms. As of this writing, there is no published academic text on the subject of male belting. Male belting is thyroarytenoid dominant vocal production (TDP); in other words, it is chest register-dominant singing carried above the passaggio/break with speech-like production. When belting, the vocal tract assumes a shape that resembles normal speech, resulting in a brighter sound quality due to a lower soft palette. The first part of the document will offer a brief history of shows and people that were critical to the origin and development of musical theatre styles. The second part of the document will focus on sound expectations, emerging musical theatre vocal styles and pedagogical advances in musical theatre technique from the late 1960s through contemporary musical theatre repertoire. Specifically, it will discuss how musical theatre repertoire influenced the development of vocal technique and vocal styles of the male belt voice. In addition to published sources, this paper will include information from interviews and masterclasses with international colleagues who have proven critical to the understanding and evolution of male belting during the last thirty years. Musical examples will illustrate important musical pieces, vocal exercises, and information as appropriate

Maths, Computation and Flamenco: overview and challenges

Flamenco is a rich performance-oriented art music genre from Southern Spain which attracts a growing community of aficionados around the globe. Due to its improvisational and expressive nature, its unique musical characteristics, and the fact that the genre is largely undocumented, flamenco poses a number of interesting mathematical and computational challenges. Most existing approaches in Musical Information Retrieval (MIR) were developed in the context of popular or classical music and do often not generalize well to non-Western music traditions, in particular when the underlying music theoretical assumptions do not hold for these genres. Over the recent decade, a number of computational problems related to the automatic analysis of flamenco music have been defined and several methods addressing a variety of musical aspects have been proposed. This paper provides an overview of the challenges which arise in the context of computational analysis of flamenco music and outlines an overview of existing approaches

Beyond Markov Chains, Towards Adaptive Memristor Network-based Music Generation

We undertook a study of the use of a memristor network for music generation, making use of the memristor's memory to go beyond the Markov hypothesis. Seed transition matrices are created and populated using memristor equations, and which are shown to generate musical melodies and change in style over time as a result of feedback into the transition matrix. The spiking properties of simple memristor networks are demonstrated and discussed with reference to applications of music making. The limitations of simulating composing memristor networks in von Neumann hardware is discussed and a hardware solution based on physical memristor properties is presented.Comment: 22 pages, 13 pages, conference pape