The beautiful and the political

Competing and polarised positions related to the possible political nature of material in contemporary music are exemplified by the work of postmodern composers and of post-war modernist composers. Whilst the former argue for the political nature of their compositions by the inclusion of contemporary issues and imagery, the latter argue for the political nature of their manipulation of otherwise politically neutral musical material. This opposition can be understood as a dialectic between content and form, and is expressed by Adorno as the opposition between representational and ‘committed’ work. This paper examines one example of each type of work—Luigi Nono’s Il Canto Sospeso (1955-56) and Johannes Kreidler’s Audioguide—and their relationship to a conception of the ‘beautiful’ in music. These expressions of the ‘political’ offer a framework through which the musically beautiful can be interrogated in the opposition of committed and autonomous artworks, and understood as an experience of alienation. Eco's exploration of Entfremdung and Kristeva's concept of abjection can both be employed to argue that the ‘political’ dimension of autonomous works offers the potential for a radical experience of beauty as a transcendence derived from present conditions, whilst committed works negate beauty as a condition of re-presenting the present

Technology and Contemporary Classical Music: Methodologies in Practice-Based Research

This position paper provides a distillation of the NCRM Innovation Forum, ‘Technology and Contemporary Classical Music: Methodologies in Creative Practice Research’, hosted by Cyborg Soloists in June 2023. It features contributions from a variety of creative practitioner-researchers to debate the current state and future of technologically focused, practice-based research in contemporary classical music. The position paper is purposefully polyphonic and pluralistic. By collating a range of perspectives, experiences and expertise, the paper seeks to provoke and delineate a space for further questioning, inquiry, and response. The paper will be of interest to those working within creative practice research, particularly in relation to music, music technologists and those interested in research methodologies more broadly

The Rise and Fall, and the Rise (Again) of Feminist Research in Music: 'What Goes Around Comes Around'

This article reports from a two-phase study that involved an analysis of the extant literature followed by a three-part survey answered by seventy-one women composers. Through these theoretical and empirical data, the authors explore the relationship between gender and music’s symbolic and cultural capital. Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus is employed to understand the gendered experiences of the female composers who participated in the survey. The article suggests that these female composers have different investments in gender but that, overall, they reinforce the male habitus given that the female habitus occupies a subordinate position in relation to that of the male. The findings of the study also suggest a connection between contemporary feminism and the attitudes towards gender held by the participants. The article concludes that female composers classify themselves, and others, according to gendered norms and that these perpetuate the social order in music in which the male norm dominates

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Introduction: Musik und Sprache: Music/Language/Speech

The German phrase ‘Musik und Sprache’ has a dual meaning: both ‘music and speech’ and ‘music and language’. This is a commonly used phrase within the German speaking New Music community to refer to the field of music with spoken language, music that is derived from language and/or spoken utterances that are themselves music. This German phrase, in its potential to refer to any or all of these types of music, captures the ideas that are explored in this issue in relation to contemporary music practice, and its intersection with spoken performance, sound poetry, creative practices that involve music and text, and the consideration of the voice and its musical role. In English, the phrase ‘music and language’ might broadly refer to disciplinary positions across creative musical practice, music psychology, music aesthetics, music and literary criticism, and many more: taken together these disciplines offer a number of wide-ranging approaches to speech, language and the voice. While here, perspectives from some of these disciplines—in particular the philosophy of music and language (Sprachphilosophie), literary criticism, linguistics and the philosophy of the voice—inform the perspectives of a number of articles, the contemporary creative practice of music and language is the focus. Taken together, these articles explore this aspect of musical practice in specific examples of European, American and Australian art of the 20th and 21st centuries. In their variety, they broaden the available musicological discussion of examples of work situated between music, text, speech and language, with a focus on a wide variety of artists who do not yet frequently appear in such literature. They create a picture of an international and interdisciplinary body of work and its themes, interstices, and implications. As such, it is hoped that this issue will be of interest to those researching the individual composers whose work is explored, and to those with interests in sound poetry, Sprachmusik, and voice, speech and text within contemporary music more generally

Documenting Iterative Processes

Documenting Iterative Processes Dr Lauren Redhead, Goldsmiths A presentation given at the Jisc open access community event "Capturing practice research: improving visibility and searchability" on 15th March 2019 in London. https://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/capturing-practice-research-improving-visibility-and-searchability-15-mar-201