The Genre Formerly Known As Punk: A Queer Person of Color\u27s Perspective on the Scene

This video is a visual representation of the frustrations that I suffered from when I, a queer, gender non-conforming, person of color, went to “pasty normals” (a term defined by Jose Esteban Munoz to describe normative, non-exotic individuals) to get a definition of what Punk meant and where I fit into it. In this video, I personify the Punk music movement. Through my actions, I depart from the grainy, low-quality, amateur aesthetics of the Punk film and music genres and create a new world where the Queer Person of Color defines Punk. In the piece, Punk definitively says, “Don’t try to define me. Shut up and leave me to rest.

Improvisation in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Lessons from Rhetoric and Jazz

Saying that embellishment was a big deal for sixteenth-­century musicians is hardly a bold move; evidence abounds in treatises, music collections, and written accounts from the time. It has also been the subject of a fair amount of keen musicological scholarship over the years. But making sense out of what musicians of the time actually did in performance and trying to reproduce it today has proven to be more difficult, mainly because improvisers, by nature, do not tend to record what they do. The modern prevailing view seems to be that ornamentation was important, mainly because evidence suggests it was so widespread, but ultimately that it was a sort of varnish: something that could add color or texture to the surface of the music but that always left the original clearly discernable underneath. Certainly pieces back then, as today, were performed without embellishments, but perhaps there is more to the ornamentation than mere decorative sheen..

Volume 40, Number 06 (June 1922)

Radio Music for Everybody (interview with J. Andrew White) How Kullak Got Back Goldmark Avec Suite Musicale at Dickens\u27 Hepling the Careless Pupil Simple Facts About Harmony That Every Music Lover Should Know Character in Sound Legend of The Moonlight Sonata Capture the Child\u27s Magical Interest Early Reminiscences of a Famous Prima Donna Indicating Mistakes Silent Music Lesson Phrasing Made Simple for Earnest Piano Students Is This the Ideal Position at the Piano? Paganini Demanded Skill Why Popular Songs Don\u27t Last Symphonies in Color—Silent Music Practical Musical Note-Books Helping a Limping Pupil Know the Notes Something About the Pause Little Lessons from a Master\u27s Workshop What is Tempo? Notes with Two Stems Scales in Four Octaves Practical Preparation for the Pianoforte Recitalist (interview with Elly Ney) Simple Study in Triads Music Teachers\u27 Card in the Newspaperhttps://digitalcommons.gardner-webb.edu/etude/1690/thumbnail.jp

Color Me Joy

My culminating experience project, entitled “Color Me Joy” was a concept album and performance project of seven compositions in which each song addressed a different issue that young women, especially women of color have to struggle through and overcome. The purpose of this project was to look beyond the terms racism and sexism, and address the underlying issues within both subjects, such as identity, body image issues, sexual assault and harassment, the fetishization and objectification of women of color, and how all of these issues negatively affect mental health. I wanted to write music that was uplifting, empowering and joyful, but also reflective, cathartic, and healing. I wanted to discuss the intersectionality of being female and a person of color, and the silencing that so many women like myself feel and have been fighting against for hundreds of years. To enhance this goal further, I wrote spoken word poetry for each composition to be presented between songs along with free improvisation. I wrote this material from the perspective of a biracial woman living in America, because that is what I am, but I wanted all women, especially women of color to be able to relate to this project in some way.https://remix.berklee.edu/graduate-studies-global-jazz/1047/thumbnail.jp

Silence in the Valley of Songs: Work Songs from Sman shod Valley

The text and more than one hundred full-page color plates document Tibetan folk music (particularly work songs), and local life in the Sman shod Valley, Sde dge County, Dkar mdzes Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, China. Bo nyed, a local elder, describes the situation that motivated this timely documentation, "In the past we sang constantly, but now people don't sing no matter where they are or what they are doing. Now everyone is silent." The text includes richly contextualized and annotated transcriptions of the songs' Tibetan lyrics with English translations.

"A Light in Sound, a Sound-like Power in Light”: Light and/as Music in the History of the Color Organ

This dissertation examines the history of the relationship between light/color as an artistic medium and music. Looking at four artist-inventors from the eighteenth through to the mid-twentieth centuries, I consider how new arts of light and color arose from music, relied on music, and also distanced themselves from it. Drawing chiefly on published and unpublished primary sources, this dissertation compares artists’ and inventors’ conceptions of what this new art should be as it was continuously reimagined and reconstituted in their works, discourses, and technologies. I suggest a running tension throughout this history between the aspiration for a new and even autonomous art and its reliance on the music. In Chapter 1, I investigate the work of the eighteenth-century French Jesuit monk Louis Bertrand Castel, who in 1725 proposed the first ever instrument for color music, his clavecin oculaire or ocular harpsichord. I note conflicting tendencies in his thought as he suggested two different avenues for color music: as a form of multimedia, and as a separate, silent medium capable of giving pleasure on its own. The next chapter turns to the color organ and color music of the late nineteenth-century inventor and artist Alexander Wallace Rimington. Drawing on contemporaneous theories of color, reception of Rimington’s performances, and the inventor’s own writings, I locate Rimington’s organ at the intersection of a continuing tradition of analogizing music and color and late nineteenth-century attempts to theorize color independently and systematically. I then demonstrate how Rimington’s desire to use color music as means of improving color perception can be understood as part of a larger debates about sensing color and color education around the turn of the twentieth century. Chapters 3 considers Mary Hallock Greenewalt’s instrument, the sarabet, and her art form, nourathar¸ while the final chapter looks at Thomas Wilfred’s (usually silent) light art, lumia. I suggest that Greenewalt and Wilfred’s relationship to music is a source of tension in their work, as they attempted to extricate and purify light art into an autonomous art form but display various forms of musical influence

MUCP 183-983: Applied Music Composition--A Course Benchmark Portfolio

MUCP 183-983, Applied Music Composition, is the core of the music composition course curriculum for students at all levels, from freshman to doctoral candidate. Like all applied lesson environments, it is a one-on-one, individualized study that principally involves the instructor giving students feedback on their musical works-in-progress. This time-honored paradigm for teaching composition has produced brilliant artists, but is rife with pitfalls and traps that can tarnish a student’s growth: composition pedagogues can coerce students into writing music like their teachers, or can prescribe a curriculum that makes composition accessible only to students who have already played classical music for years. As the school of music diversifies, and students enroll whose musical experiences may be more varied than ever, how can composition lessons best serve them? How do we encourage student growth no matter what their musical aspirations, and how do we assess growth without letting our personal preferences color our judgments? Is there a way to “universalize” a composition curriculum so all students—from the doctoral student with an emerging compositional career to the brand new freshman whose only musical experiences have been making beats on their laptop—can grow within it? This portfolio sets out to answer these questions through examination of the Applied Composition curriculum. It introduces the structure and rationale for the course design, alongside current issues within the field of composition pedagogy. It examines strategies for maximizing and assessing student growth, and then applies those strategies to student work to demonstrate how they might be useful to both composition teachers and students

The racialization of Jimi Hendrix

The period of history immediately following World War Two was a time of intense social change. The end of colonialism, the internal struggles of newly emerging independent nations in Africa, social and political changes across Europe, armed conflict in Southeast Asia, and the civil rights movement in America were just a few. Although many of the above conflicts have been in the making for quite some time, they seemed to unite to form a socio-political cultural revolution known as the 60s, the effects of which continues to this day. The 1960s was a particularly intense time for race relations in the United States. Long before it officially became a republic, in matters of race, white America collectively had trouble reconciling what it practiced versus what it preached. Nowhere is this racial contradiction more apparent than in the case of Jimi Hendrix. Jimi Hendrix is emblematic of the racial ideal and the racial contradictions of the 1960s. Generally, black artists, such as those in jazz and R&B developed styles of playing that emphasized the distinctive timbre of the guitar set against the other instruments. White artists went further by perfecting the grandiose art of guitar soloing, and rock music was seen as their domain. Hendrix represents the virtually unheard of situation where a black man is virtually worshipped by young whites in general, and white males in particular, because of his mastery of what was previously their domain-the grandiose art of rock guitar soloing. (Heller) What may come as a surprise to many of his black detractors was that Jimi Hendrix not only knew that he was black, but what that blackness meant in the context of American history. What Jimi refused to do was allow the notion of blackness as defined by others to determine his music. Jimi was neither an activist nor a black separatist, and his central focus, as always, was music, which he saw as being without color. (Cross 98) Responding to a question during an interview about the difference in music and race in England versus America in U Jimi Hendrix-The Uncut Story, Jimi answers by stating, l could play louder over there [England]. could really get myself together over there. There wasn\u27t as many hang-ups as there was in America. You know mental hang-ups. Jimi Hendrix played the blues. From his days learning to play the guitar while growing up in Seattle, Washington, to playing a sideman on the chitlin\u27 circuit, before James Marshall Hendrix actually became the man known as Jimi Hendrix, he always played the blues. By refusing to be stereotyped for playing his music, Jimi Hendrix symbolizes the contradictions on race and ethnicity that continues to remain a burden to both blacks and whites alike. This paper examine why Jimi Hendrix became worshipped as a musical genius by the rock community, which by default was white, while balancing the social contradictions of the black community, particularly in regards to music, and which group got to claim him

The Mill: Analysis of the Original Score and Film

The Mill is an original film and music performance piece chronicling the history of the steel industry in the United States, with specific connections to Pittsburgh. In addition to scoring the project, I designed the sound and produced the film and music and also shot and edited the film. About eighty percent of the film material is historical footage (in black and white, as well as color), while I shot the remaining portions, on location, in various areas of the Mon Valley region of Pittsburgh. Separated into four distinct sections, the film portrays the rise, the zenith and the eventual collapse of the steel industry in the late 1970s and the early 1980s from its epicenter in Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania. The musical score is composed of two elements: a live performance ensemble consisting of a clarinet in B flat, a flute and piano; and an electronic soundtrack that mostly supports the live instrumentation but also, at times, creates ambiguity between what is heard live and what is pre-recorded. I also created the ambient sound design and Foley effects. The purpose of this document is to closely examine the various stages in the creative process of The Mill, to describe the inception of the idea, the implementation of technology and the overall aesthetics of a multimedia production. Although the project was intended to be solely a musical film piece, the final product resulted in an educational quasi-documentary The document is divided into seven chapters, each describing the techniques and tools utilized to achieve the final product

Sonic Pictures

Winning essay of the American Society for Aesthetics' inaugural Peter Kivy Prize. Extends Kivy's notion of sonic picturing through engagement with recent work in philosophy of perception. Argues that sonic pictures are more widespread and more aesthetically and artistically important than even Kivy envisioned. Topics discussed include: the nature of sonic pictures; the nature of sounds; what we can (and more importantly, cannot) conclude from musical listening; sonic pictures in film; beatboxing as an art of sonic picturing; and cover songs as sonic pictures. To be published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism