A century (and a bit) of Pierrot Ensembles: perspectives on Barcelona, London and São Paulo

Over the last 105 years, the mixed chamber ensemble of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire has become, in all its protean forms, a principal line-up for modern music. This paper offers a panoramic view of the musical, intercultural and historical contexts that underlie the Pierrot ensemble’s enduring appeal. In particular, it falls into three main parts to scrutinise how the medium has been adopted by musicians and composers in different parts of the world. Scholars have tended to focus on either Berlin, the site of Pierrot’s premiere, or on Anglo-American efforts to sustain and reinterpret the medium, especially in the late twentieth century. Instead, we begin in Barcelona to examine the Pierrot ensemble as a Spanish phenomenon, from its 1925 premiere, which also marked the premiere of Anton Webern’s Pierrot quintet arrangement of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony (1906/22–23), to Mercedes Zavala’s Senegal-inspired La apoteosis nocturna de Andoar (2001). Such histories are inevitably interwoven, so the paper next probes the legacy of the Pierrot Players (1967–70, later The Fires of London), one of the most galvanising ensembles in post-war British music. A comparison of this group’s wide-ranging achievements with those of Grupo Novo Horizonte de São Paulo (1988–99), Brazil’s leading ensemble of the late twentieth century, can cast new light on how musical media and genres evolve. The paper therefore concludes by scrutinising how Grupo Novo Horizonte, founded by the Briton Graham Griffiths, took then outgrew the Pierrot ensemble as its cornerstone, forging a localised spectacle with a richly internationalist heritage

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

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

A Snapshot of the Pierrot Ensemble Today

2012 was the centenary of the first performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, and over the last hundred years its mixed chamber ensemble has become, in all its protean forms, a principal line-up for modern music. As scholars have awoken to this phenomenon, so the term ‘Pierrot ensemble’ has gradually entered the lexicon of music criticism to describe such works, as well as the groups that perform them. At the same time, it is clear that music written for conventional chamber-music groupings has become increasingly rare since the early twentieth century, and that the preference of composers for more colourful and heterogeneous types of ensemble has grown. Because of these tendencies, the Pierrot ensemble’s line-up could be popular but never absolutely fixed: as we shall see, nearly all Pierrot ensembles deviate in some way from Schoenberg’s prototype. My paper scrutinises recent Pierrot ensembles against the backdrop of a century of composition and performance: a lineage of Pierrot ensembles instigated by Schoenberg, modernised by Peter Maxwell Davies, the Pierrot Players and The Fires of London during their twenty years of domestic and foreign tours (1967-87), and nourished by many others since. When Steve Reich scored his Pulitzer Prize-winning Double Sextet (2007) for Pierrot ensemble, it joined a repertory of hundreds. The last twenty years, indeed, have seen an outpouring of music for the line-up, in stark contrast to its first half-century. Analysing case studies composed by the likes of John Zorn (Chimeras), Tansy Davies (grind show: electric/unplugged) and Mercedes Zavala (La apoteosis nocturna de Andoar), I assess what the term ‘Pierrot ensemble’ means in the twenty-first century. Why, and for whom, do composers continue to write works for Pierrot ensemble? How useful are established subcategories – Pierrot quintet, Pierrot or ‘Fires’ sextet, Pierrot-with-percussion – to our musicological discourse today? While their prevalence is undoubted, with more Pierrot ensembles than ever sustaining their repertory through performance and commissions, no real attempt has yet been made to survey the long-term impact beyond Britain. What, then, can a modern, international perspective on the Pierrot ensemble teach us about music-making today and the Pierrot ensemble at large

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

So You Want to Write An Opera?

Short article on contemporary British opera commissioned by BASCA (British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors)

The Pierrot Ensembles: Chronicle and Catalogue, 1912-2012

2012 is the centenary of the first performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, and over the last hundred years its mixed chamber ensemble has become, in all its protean forms, a principal line-up for modern music. This book, the first of its kind, chronicles the ensemble’s evolution from Pierrot’s earliest performances, monitoring its influence on the Continent as well as upon Walton, Britten, Lutyens and Searle in Britain. In particular, it watches the growth of The Pierrot Players (later The Fires of London), one of the most galvanizing groups in post-war British music, and looks carefully at the social dynamics among its players and composers, notably Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle. The influence of Pierrot, however, has not been confined to Europe and Britain. In the final section the author catalogues over 400 principal works for ‘Pierrot Ensembles’ – with or without singer – drawn from both sides of the Atlantic. An appendix includes the first reprinting of Stephen Pruslin’s text for Birtwistle’s controversial Monodrama (1967). The book is richly illustrated with photographs, drawings, music examples and diagrams

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

Immunity to self co-generates regulatory T cells

Immune responses to self are kept in check by tolerance mechanisms, including suppression by regulatory T cells (Tregs). The defective generation of Tregs specific for self-antigens may lead to autoimmune disease. We identified a novel population of human CD4^+^ Tregs, characterized by high surface expression of CD52, which is co-generated in response to autoantigen. Blood CD4^+^CD52^hi^ T cells were generated preferentially in response to low-dose autoantigen and suppressed proliferation and interferon-[gamma] production by other T cells. Depletion of resting CD4^+^CD52^hi^ T cells enhanced the T-cell response to autoantigen. CD4^+^CD52^hi^ Tregs were neither derived from nor distinguished by markers of conventional resting CD4^+^CD25^+^ Tregs. In response to the pancreatic islet autoantigens glutamic acid decarboxylase, the generation of CD4^+^CD52^hi^ Tregs was impaired in individuals with and at-risk for type 1 diabetes, compared to healthy controls and individuals with type 2 diabetes. CD4^+^CD52^hi^ Tregs co-generated to self-antigen may therefore contribute to immune homeostasis and protect against autoimmune disease