Talking about classical music: radio as public musicology

In the spacious, public foyer of London’s Southbank Centre, Europe’s largest arts centre, a wall-sized advert trails the concerts of the venue’s four resident orchestras with the slogan ‘a classical music season exclusively for pretty much everyone.’ Orthodox marketing practice might well blanche at the use of ‘exclusively’ to describe classical music. Inclusivity and accessibility are the contemporary watchwords of a musical genre long dogged by cultural stereotypes, particularly surrounding (middle) class and (old) age. But the slogan’s deliberate oxymoron is surely self-aware and provocative, aiming to stop readers in their tracks, to play on classical music’s image problem, and ultimately, of course, to attract concertgoers. More broadly, then, the slogan underlines the importance of language to how classical music is perceived today, and the sensitivities that influence and regulate that association. As a marketing ploy, ‘exclusively’ here is both an invitation—the music these orchestras produce is for you, dear reader—and a qualified reminder of classical music’s elite credentials. Potential concertgoers are invited to imagine a special or premier event, not one that is cliquish or exclusory. How such language frames classical music is the central theme of this chapter. Language is used in myriad ways to contextualise and set expectations about classical music, but many such forms currently slip under musicology’s radar, despite being essential to how the genre is perceived: from programme notes, liner notes, and reviews that steer audiences’ experiences, to “bluffer’s” guides and the efforts of marketers to promote and demystify classical music. Consider also the rise of social media, society’s keen appropriation of classical music, and oral media such as podcasts and radio, and the work required to understand how perceptions of classical music are shaped in the broadest sense becomes clear. To appreciate this argument is also to begin to make the case for public musicology, a bidirectional process that recognises and attaches greater significance to public-musicological artefacts (such as liner notes and radio) and considers how musicology can make music relevant and useful in the public sphere. This nascent field is particularly pertinent to classical music, with its grand history and exclusive image. This chapter focusses on one of the most public forms of musicology to classify and critique how BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM speak about the music they broadcast. To survey the types and range of language they use is to reveal not only how the genre is portrayed on the radio today, but also the assumptions about what classical music is, and what it is supposed or presumed to do. In turn, the chapter will offer an account of how Radio 3 and Classic FM fulfil different but overlapping roles in today’s classical music industry. Figures show that these stations reach 1.89 and 5.36 million listeners per quarter respectively, making radio by far the most popular way in which people access classical music. Radio is therefore a meaningful way to critique the dilemmas—crises, as some commentators would have it—classical music faces. Indeed, radio itself, and particularly Classic FM, has been criticised heavily over the years, as we shall see. Such views are historically engrained, but how credible or true are they today? Might radio, in fact, be less a symptom of certain parts of classical music’s supposed malaise, and more a cure? Admittedly, examining radio as a conduit for musical understanding and enjoyment is challenging: the complete task would be as much philosophical and linguistic as cultural and musicological. This chapter is intended to be a midpoint that builds on recent musicology and sociology on both radio and the state of classical music, and which looks ahead to consider how public musicology might respond to the modern realities of classical music. A study of the vocabulary Radio 3 and Classic FM use to characterise classical music is therefore framed by two field-scoping sections: on public musicology itself and, first, on the intense debates that encircle the genre today

A Preliminary Report on Disordered Speech with Deep Brain Stimulation in Individuals with Parkinson's Disease

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) has proven effective in treating the major motor symptoms of advanced Parkinson's disease (PD). The aim of this study was to learn which laryngeal and articulatory acoustic features changed in patients who were reported to have worse speech with stimulation. Six volunteers with PD who had bilateral STN electrodes were recorded with DBS turned on or off. Perceptual ratings reflected poorer speech performance with DBS on. Acoustic measures of articulation (corner vowel formants, diphthong slopes, and a spirantization index) and phonation (perturbation, long-term average spectrum) as well as verbal fluency scores showed mixed results with DBS. Some speakers improved while others became worse on individual measures. The magnitude of DBS effects was not predictable based on the patients' demographic characteristics. Future research involving adjustments to stimulator settings or electrode placement may be beneficial in limiting the negative effects of DBS on speech

Stravinsky’s ear for instruments

Do you remember the first time you heard the music of Igor Stravinsky? Or modernist music? My own teenage introduction to both was Ragtime (1917–18), our music teacher helping us join the dots between its particular strand of twentieth-century classical music and Scott Joplin’s evergreen rag, ‘The Entertainer’ (1902), which the pianists among us would struggle to play.1 Looking back, the muffled giggling which Ragtime provoked was due as much to the jolting introduction of its faint and weird-sounding cimbalom as to the relentless discontinuities that shape its phrasing, melody and timbre. To hear Stravinsky repeatedly is to understand how these innovations relate to one another, but the shock of having to process his music for the first time was real and literally physical. Here were strange folk- and jazz-inspired sounds, far removed from the Classical and Romantic orchestras that had framed our expectations of so-called classical music until that point. Ragtime’s sound was, and remains, quite alie

Variability in Apraxia of Speech: A Perceptual, Acoustic, and Kinematic Analysis of Stop Consonants

This investigation was designed to examine articulatory variability over time in an individual with AOS and aphasia. Stimuli were randomly presented on three sampling occasions and stop consonant productions were examined via perceptual, acoustic and kinematic analyses. Findings revealed that predictability of errors across sampling time varied by sound. The same error frequently occurred for a sound within a sampling time, but infrequently on the same word. Acoustic and kinematic measurements also indicated different patterns of variability for sounds

New Horizons in Brazilian Contemporary Music: Grupo Novo Horizonte de São Paulo, 1988-99

Brazil's foremost ensemble of the late twentieth century, Grupo Novo Horizonte de São Paulo, transformed Brazilian contemporary music by cultivating a new mixed-chamber repertory and giving sustained support to a generation of emerging composers. That this cosmopolitan group took, then outgrew, the Pierrot ensemble as its cornerstone signals the medium it forged: a localized, evolving spectacle with a richly internationalist heritage. This article offers a panoramic view of the musical, intercultural and historical contexts that underpin Grupo Novo Horizonte's practices and legacy. Analysing landmark works by Sílvio Ferraz, Harry Crowl and others allows us to draw further connections between the group, the Brazilianness of late twentieth-century compositional aesthetic, and the realities of contemporary classical music-making in Brazil