Serendipity, Poetry and Play in Toy Piano composition and Four Pieces for Toy Piano

In this paper I draw on literature by Xenia Pestova, Antonietta Loffredo and Maggie Williams/Margaret Leng Tan, and primary research in the form of an interview with Kate Ryder (transcribed as an Appendix) exploring aspects of toy piano performance/composition and focussing on my Four Pieces for Toy Piano (2018). These pieces were commissioned by Ryder and premiered by her in London in 2018, and subsequently published and recorded. I identify themes which emerge in, and out from, this and other professional repertoire for toy piano relating to composition and performance practice: material/materiality; sonic character, notation, collaboration and communication. I provide a poietic account of some of the processes involved in the pieces’ composition and realisation in performance

Classical music, copyright and collecting societies

This book chapter examines the relationships between classical music, copyright and collecting societies. The fixed, original, single-authored work concept is fundamental to modern copyright law. It is also strongly linked, musically and philosophically, with the eighteenth-/nineteenth-century Austro-German canon, which itself forms the core of standard classical repertoire. This concept, then, still underpins our legal understanding of musical copyright today, including in more widely disseminated popular music repertoire where it is both less relevant and more problematic, as explored in the critiques of Toynbee (2004) and Moy (2015). Classical music publishers featured prominently in the foundation of the UK's Performing Right Society in 1914, where the interests of ‘serious’ music were well represented up until the end of the twentieth century. Since then, the relationship between this Society and the classical music community has been more equivocal, and a key rupture in this regard was the removal in 1999 of the Classical Music Subsidy, which attracted considerable media attention. The chapter examines this case study with extensive recourse to contemporaneous documents produced by the Society and its composer and publisher members, as well as interviews with interested parties. It is contextualised with an overview of international collecting societies’ distribution policies in the twenty-first century. Finally, the cross-disciplinary academic near-consensus that has emerged since 2000—that radical steps are needed to reduce the strength and extent of legislative copyright protection—is scrutinised. While this stance is undoubtedly not shared by the music industry, viewing the debate through the lens of contemporary classical music offers a nuanced perspective on this frequently polarised discourse. This moves the agenda on from simplistic characterisations, e.g. creative remixers ‘heroically’ standing up to greedy, philistine corporations, or, conversely, struggling artists and entrepreneurs ‘robbed’ by piratical thieves and fickle legislators

‘Dumped modernism’? The interplay of musical construction and spiritual affect in John Tavener and his To A Child Dancing In The Wind

Since the 1990s, discourses around Tavener’s music – not least those promulgated by Sir John himself – have centred on its perceived spiritual qualities. These are linked explicitly with his conversion to Russian Orthodoxy in 1977, and relate the music wholeheartedly to traditional contexts, in contrast with the post-enlightenment Western view of musical expression (with which Tavener’s earlier compositions implicitly concur). As Geoffrey Haydon wrote in 1995, ‘Once he dumped modernism, his music came to inhabit a world made up largely of traditional models’. This view has become almost axiomatic. But did Tavener really ‘dump’ modernism? And was his pre-conversion music exclusively concerned with self-expressive innovation? This chapter explores how techniques associated with musical modernism form structural foundations in pieces which exhibit the contemplative idiom (sometimes labelled spiritual minimalism) for which the composer is renowned. With passing reference to Fall and Resurrection (1997) and The Lamb (1982), it centres on a close analytical reading of the Yeats chamber song-cycle To A Child Dancing In The Wind (1983). In some ways a transitional work, this piece facilitates a holistic understanding of Tavener’s achievement. While its potential for impacting spiritually on listeners is clearly present, it is shown to exemplify particularly well the composer’s distinctive postmodern intellectual craftsmanship. Spiritual affect is one mode of interpreting this and other Tavener pieces, which can be seen to possess a greater interpretive ambiguity and ‘inner life’ of musical construction than he – along with other composers of ‘spiritual minimalism’ – is sometimes given credit for (eg Fisk 1994). Through its ultimately enriching dichotomy of materials and technique, To a Child Dancing in the Wind could even be seen to reconcile two major strands of post-WWII compositional thought (often seen as antithetical): (post-)serialism and minimalism

Towards an analytical framework for graphic scores, and a proposed typology

Graphic scores pose significant challenges for analysis, which is perhaps why systematic attempts to analyse – as opposed to simply describe – such notations are vanishingly rare. The weakest of weak work concepts means that the problem of locating the piece's musical identity is exacerbated far beyond this issue's extent in other music. Graphic scores are visually fixed, so analysing them as solely visual artefacts is conceptually straightforward. Yet music is understood as sound, and the musical sounds arising from graphic notations can be highly unpredictable. Nevertheless, performances of graphic pieces tend to share a distinct sonic identity. Where is this essential identity is to be located? And how is its nature to be discovered? These are the primary questions faced by the graphic score analyst. In this paper I outline the challenges of, and rationale for, analysing graphic scores, addressing the question of ontology, and suggesting approaches to analysing the score itself, the sounding result, and the link between score and sound. In the last section of the paper I introduce a typology of graphic score compositions, developing the pioneering work of Erhard Karkoschka (1966). Examples by Cage, Cardew and others from the classic period of graphic score composition – from the 1950s to the 1970s – are used to illustrate the typology, which can also be applied, however (like my suggested analytical methodologies) to more recent graphic score compositions. While sometimes considered of purely historical interest, graphic score composition has continued to flourish since its 60s heyday through both the impetus of specific performing groups and their radically democratising use in secondary music education

Engaging with religious history and theological concepts through music composition: Ave generosa and The Song of Margery Kempe

This article explores the intersections among music composition, religious history and spiritual texts, with their attendant concepts. It focuses on two works with medieval sources—the concert piece Ave generosa (1996) and the chamber opera The Song of Margery Kempe (2008)—which were featured in the online Gallery of the conferences in 2021 and 2022, respectively, of the British and Irish Association for Practical Theology (BIAPT). Through the lenses of semiotics and intertextuality, it explores the ways by which theological concepts and spiritual contexts can be evoked and ‘translated’ into musical sound, both instrumental and vocal. A sampling of the literature on medieval monasticism and St Hildegard of Bingen, whose corpus forms the source of Ave generosa, supports a musical exegesis of its ‘spiritual programme’. In the case of The Song of Margery Kempe, recent scholarship on the text frames examples of the multiplication of meanings provided by dramatisation and musical setting. Art in general and music composition in particular are presented as a commentary, or gloss, on both religious history and enduring spiritual themes, and a different way of thinking about religion and spirituality

Alkan's Esquisses - past, present and future

Charles Valentin Alkan's Esquisses op.63 are amongst his most highly praised compositions, for their consistency, originality, variety and concisely-focussed expression. They effectively rebuff criticisms sometimes levelled against this composer (even in the context of advocacy) of inconsistent quality of inspiration and excessive length. The title 'Esquisse' is apparently sui generis, though the deployment in four books running through all the major and minor keys twice links them to other projects by Alkan himself and other 19th, 18th and 20th-century composers. This article provides a selective review of the literature on these pieces, a comparative contextualisation (particularly in terms of genre) and a topical typology. The diversity and deployment of topics and allusions leads to a connection being outlined with the polystylism and postmodernism of the later 20th century

From U-bounds to isoperimetry with applications to H-type groups

In this paper we study applications of U-bounds to coercive and isoperimetric problems for probability measures on finite and infinite products of H-type groups.Comment: 40 pages, with addition