Twentieth Century Music

This paper takes a close look at the music of Kraftwerk, perhaps the best known of the ‘electronic’ groups of former West Germany’s so-called neue Welle, in order to raise some fundamental questions about the politics of elektronische Musik before the dawn of the digital age and, in particular, how constructions and performances of the voice in late analogue technology rehearse new and critical strategies of resistance in the aftermath of 1968.

It is a commonplace of recent cultural-theoretical considerations of digital technology to ascribe to it a fundamental re-positioning of imaginations of the subject, of authorship and of agency in the broadest sense. What has never really been fully worked through in this (usually utopian) figuration of digital technology is the extent to which technology can be conceived as ‘autonomous’ (as Rosie Braidotti would have it) or whether new technologies in themselves are a guarantor of new cultural formations. In particular, this paper seeks to test the extent to which Kraftwerk’s pre-digital imagination can be read as an expression of the politics of the so-called Tendenzwende (a ‘turning inwards’ from explicitly activist politics to a more diffuse politics of the personal) of the Schmidt- and early Kohlzeit. The article looks in particular at Kraftwerk’s use of what might be termed the ‘electronic sublime’ as a way of disengaging the music from the ego-centred practices of earlier German rock music and as a way of anticipating new German subject positions and political identities in the light of de-industrialization and globalization.

Circular breathing is the technique of maintaining a continuous, unbroken sound on a wind instrument by periodically expelling air stored in the mouth and simultaneously inhaling through the nose. While it has long been an essential part of many wind instrument traditions, such as that of the Australian Aboriginal didgeridu, it has only been since the latter decades of the twentieth century that composers and performers have begun exploring the possibilities of circular breathing in Western concert flute playing. Due partly to the difficulty of mastering circular breathing, its adoption among flautists has been slow compared with that of other extended techniques, such as multiphonics or percussive effects. As a result, the literature concerning circular breathing in the concert flute repertoire has so far been limited to technical guides outlining methods for learning the technique. To date, there has been a paucity of scholarly work undertaken on the role of circular breathing in ...

Morris's Arc (1988) for String Quartet flows; it flows with substance, and with purpose. By flowing, I don’t just mean in the trivial sense that all music flows because it is unfolding in time and time flows. Rather I mean that there is continuity to its various surges of eventfulness; these surges are not disjunct or sudden. And by substance I mean both that its sound is as a sensuous fluid material and that the unfolding of its constituent events presents a coherent organization, thus binding together into a statement that seems meaningful in retrospect. By purpose I mean not only that there is a local logic to the consequence of one note following another, but also that the flow of events enables the material to organize into processes that forge a trajectory toward a goal.
    The analysis first focuses on local details considered in terms of pitch and pitch-class formations as arising from twelve-tone rows; then it delves into aspects of form, process, and texture. These are considered in terms of emergent properties in flux. The modeling of these properties and their flux employs some mathematical formalisms, but the reader can rely on the fact that every mathematical definition and formula is described carefully in prose as well.
    In Arc, the twelve-tone pitch class details and the surging emergent qualities projecting form are not completely separate from each other. Rather, all these features interact. Thus not only does the article weave together connections between such facets as form, process, and texture, but it also connects these to the twelve-tone rows and pitch-class configurations that are more straightforwardly part of the compositional plan (and more usual in analyses) of Morris’s music.

[Download the pdf below, or contact the author [email protected], for a digital offprint. It can also accessed through JSTOR: www.jstor.org/stable/10.7757/persnewmusi.52.2.0249 ]

At the time of his death in 2007 David Osmond-Smith had begun work on his second book on Luciano Berio. Planned as a more substantial volume than the earlier one (Oxford University Press, 1991), it aimed to combine what he termed ‘creative biography’ with a multidimensional view of the composer’s output, seen through the lens of such categories as text and commentary, density and harmony, voice, and theatre. Published here is the only written-up chapter, covering the early part of the composer’s life (1925–53), followed by the outline of the projected book. Preceding these fragments is an introductory note by Talia Pecker Berio.

The Notenkrakersactie of 17 November 1969 was a landmark event for Dutch musical life: a group of composers disrupted a concert of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, protesting against the orchestra’s lack of contemporary music programming. Scholars have tended to interpret this protest as a watershed for the avant-garde, but historical performance – not just contemporary music – proved to be a significant beneficiary. Early Musicians, like New Musicians, had common political goals and appealed to the youth counterculture. Ensuing reforms to the federal arts subsidy system, state-funded music schools, and conservatories in the 1970s were also advantageous for the Dutch Early Music movement. During the welfare retrenchment of the 1980s and the subsidy restructuring of the 1990s, Early Music ensembles economized and had greater success with mainstream recording companies and audiences than new music groups. Nearly forty years after the Notenkrakersactie, traditional symphony orchestras have...

This article develops a theoretical analysis of music and mediation, building on the work of Theodor Adorno, Tia DeNora and Antoine Hennion. It begins by suggesting that Lydia Goehr's account of the work concept requires such a perspective. Drawing on Alfred Gell's ...

Can we any longer usefully speak of spectral music, beyond a very particular moment in Paris in the 1970s? Though the label still has a currency, the validity of the term has long been disputed even by its key practitioners. Gérard Grisey preferred to speak of liminal music, music on a threshold, and of spectralism as an attitude rather than a set of techniques. Yet a shared curiosity about the inner life of sounds, stimulated by an engagement with technology, certainly enabled a radical rethinking and renewal of how music could speak. Spectral thinking enabled composers to re-engage with time, with listening, with memory. Through this spectral node flowed all other kinds of music, which flowered in all sorts of new and varied directions. A heightened awareness of the properties of sound prompted new modes of musical thought and expression. Spectralism also represented a renewal of what might be understood more broadly as modernist thinking in the music of the later twentieth centur...

Music technology undergraduate degree programmes are a relatively new phenomenon in British higher education, situated at the intersection of music, digital technologies, and sound art. Such degrees have exploded in popularity over the past fifteen years. Yet the social and cultural ramifications of this development have not yet been analysed. In looking comparatively at the demographics of both traditional music and music technology degrees, we highlight a striking bifurcation: traditional music degrees draw students with higher social class profiles than the British national averages, while their gender profile matches the wider student population; music technology degrees, by contrast, are overwhelmingly male and lower in terms of social class profile. We set these findings into analytical dialogue with wider historical processes, offering divergent interpretations of our findings in relation to a series of musical, technological, educational, social, political, and cultural-inst...

This paper offers an analysis of EONTA based on Set Theory. Using Xenakis' score, we reconstruct the original pitch sets and their logical operations. A comparison with the sets actually employed in EONTA reveals significant incongruities. These could be attributed to material conditions in the production of the work (hand-processed cards for the IBM 7090 computer). A far more interesting possibility emerges, however, if we place them in the context of Parmenides' philosophy, to which the work pays homage. This approach may ...

Many early music theatre works, embraced topics similar to the neo-realist cinema, its audiovisual aesthetics were very different from the smooth textures and structural and immersive cohesion of narrative film. Mainstream film, including that in the neo-realist tradition operates through an audiovisual flow so tightly synchronised as to engender a filmic illusion of unity and realism through discrete editing that effaces its materiality, as can be seen in the paradoxical audiovisual flow of Bicycle Thieves. In attempting to embody and substantiate intolerance, then, the Boston Intolleranza privileged artistic collision by highlighting its media specificity; the edges of each discipline were left in full view, frayed and angular, enabling the ‘confrontation of selected realities’ desired by Josef Svoboda. While hyper-immersive gestures have become relatively normalised, when moving image technology first entered the musical stage during the 1960s, it operated as a radical interventi...

‘You can hear everything? You can hear my voice?’ The scratchy recording that opens REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape, and Testimony prefigures the questions of memory and performance that underlie Philip Miller's multimedia exploration of testimony from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In this article, I adapt Diana Taylor's concepts of the archive and the repertoire to questions of musical communication. I posit that…

The tapping paradigm has played an important role in formulating beat induction models. However, experimental studies that make use of actual music as source materials to investigate pulse finding mechanisms in complex rhythmic sequences are lacking. The present study proposes to use the concept of mensural determinacy, that is, the emergence of temporal expectations that may or may not be realized (Hasty, 1997), to explore the relative salience of an implied beat in two contrasting rhythmic sequences extracted from Elliott Carter's 90+ for piano (1994), and test the influence of style-specific expertise on…

Postcards played an important role throughout the first half of the twentieth century in French-ruled Algeria, offering a fast and affordable means of communication between North Africa and Europe for French citizens working and travelling in the Maghreb. Alongside depictions of beautiful scenery and highly exoticized subjects, a large body of postcards portrayed musicians, musical instruments, and musical performances. This article considers how these postcards shaped French understanding of Algerian music, and Algerian culture more broadly. Algerian musicians were unlikely to appear on public radio broadcasts in France during this period, and these small, inexpensive, mass-produced images thus provided the way in which much of the French public would encounter Algerian music. The article also examines the ways in which postcards of the time depicted the role of music and sound within Algerian public spaces, and how they shaped the place of public and private sonic realms within co...

The Recovery of Ezra Pound's Third Opera: Collis O Heliconii (poems by Catullus and Sappho) Ezra Pound and Margaret Fisher, edition of 200, 180 pp, pb, 2005, ISBN 978-0-9728859-3-5 list $47.00 Part I. Analysis of Pound's musical treatment of his favored poems of antiquity: Catullus carmen LXI ("Collis O Heliconii") and Sappho, fragment 1 ("Poikilothron' athanat' Aphrodita"). Part II. The engraved performance edition for violin and voice includes excerpts from the 2 principal arias, 3 incidental numbers, a transcription of Pound's unfinished translation of carmen LXI and Pound's scenario for his dramatic setting of the Catullan poem. Did you know? The Sappho aria has never been performed. It requires a mezzo soprano with expressive voice and minimum of vibrato. The lyrics are in Greek. Do you know a professional singer for this world premiere? Did you know? The Catullus aria has been sung publicly only once, by David Varnum. It was recorded...

This article focuses upon an arrangement of part of Stravinsky'sMavramade for the British dance-band leader Jack Hylton (1892–1965), which, on its presentation at the Paris Opéra in 1931, marked a notable, yet ultimately unsuccessful, attempt at ‘jazzing a classic’. For the French critic Pierre Leroi the failure was a direct consequence of combining different musics (‘La confusion de genres aboutit toujours à un résultat mauvais’). But while the ‘contest’ of style and genre undoubtedly played its part in the negative critical reception of the transcription, the reasons for its failure were not entirely straightforward.Drawing on Fauconnier and Turner's models of ‘conceptual blending’ and their recent applications in theories of musical ‘multimedia’, I compare Stravinsky's source and the Hylton band's jazz translation in terms of their intrinsic musical ‘attributes’, their relationship, and their potential emergent meanings. The exercise identifies commonalities and d...

There is nothing especially surprising or controversial in observing the significant influence that cybernetics exerted on music, especially in its heyday during the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. Indeed, it is hard to see how things might have been otherwise. Cybernetics was distinct from traditional sciences in aspiring to create a universal interdiscipline that patched together the probabilistic worldview of information theory and the flattened abstractions of systems theory. Its founding Macy conferences of 1946-53 assembled a cross-disciplinary network of intellectuals, the majority of whom worked in what would now be termed STEM disciplines, but some (and some of the most influential) were drawn from social science, linguistics, literary theory, and management theory. Many of the scientists were returning to universities having undertaken war research, and the specter of totalitarianism shaped the overarching ethos of collaboration and cooperation that both the conferences and cybernetics itself would embody. Some believed that the superdiscipline could contribute to a postwar "Unity of Science" movement based on the universal concepts of information, feedback, and homeostasis, and in this way we can see cybernetics as aligned with supranational efforts to restore and protect liberalism following the war. Yet scholarship of the past 30 years has suggested that it was via its extrascientific mediation that cybernetics secured such a foothold in the 20th-and 21st century imagination. As Geoffrey Bowker put it: "Where traditional sciences operated behind the walls of the laboratory, cybernetics was everywhere you went. Where traditional sciences repudiated all possible mention of society, cybernetics proclaimed that it could produce the best possible description thereof, and that its universal truth was immediately tied to this historical conjuncture." Bowker suggests that these factors worked together to position cybernetics as a "distributed obligatory passage point" capable of translating knowledge between incommensurate languages and facilitating exchanges of legitimacy in the process, and from one perspective the cybernetic traces in music are simply an affirmation of this. They show how successfully cyberneticians managed to consolidate their universal discipline across intellectual spheres, describing and to an extent creating the conditions of a new technological age-famously dubbed the "age of communication and control" by Norbert Wiener. It is precisely the aspiration to universalism that makes musical cybernetics difficult to analyze.

Il saggio descrive il radicarsi di una visione dell'armonia fondata sul concetto di simmetria come uno dei principali fattori che contribuirono al dissolversi della tonalità entro nuove modalità di organizzazione delle altezze. A dispetto di una consueta visione storiografica tendente a enfatizzare l'elemento di rottura (tonalità vs atonalità), una medesima visione simmetrica dei fenomeni armonici accomuna, infatti, molte composizioni ancora interpretabili nell'ottica dell'armonia tonale con altre che esulano più palesemente dalla tonalità. Il saggio mostra come il concetto di simmetria costituisca un aspetto centrale in numerosi scritti teorico-musicali prodotti tra la fine dell'Ottocento e i primi venti anni circa del Novecento. All'interno di tale produzione teorica è possibile distinguere una concezione simmetrico-assiale, tipica delle visioni fondate sugli intervalli naturali della serie degli armonici, e una concezione simmetrico-ciclica, che diverrà fondamentale per il pensiero post-tonale in genere. Il fatto che in questo periodo i teorici musicali avvertano sempre più pressantemente la necessità di una nuova riflessione sul significato e sulla legittimità teorica della suddivisione simmetrica dell'ottava nei dodici semitoni temperati è messo in relazione al progressivo affermarsi della visione simmetrico-ciclica, la cui premessa essenziale - l'equiparazione, sul piano teorico oltre che pratico, dei dodici semitoni dell'ottava musicale e la conseguente equivalenza delle grafie enarmoniche - si scontrava, all'epoca, con una consolidata tradizione teorica, di stampo fisicalistico e di orientamento positivista, secondo la quale l’armonia musicale si basa sulla serie degli armonici naturali. Prendendo in esame numerosi teorici dei primi decenni del Novecento coinvolti, più o meno dichiaratamente, con le nuove pratiche compositive post-tonali, il saggio sviluppa un discorso avviato soprattutto dagli studi di D. W. Bernstein, ampliandone il raggio d'azione, e considerando una casistica differente di scritti teorico-musicali, alcuni dei quali relativamente poco noti, ma non per questo mendo rivelatori e significativi. Dopo uno sguardo alle teorie di teorici di fine Ottecento, come François-Auguste Gevaert, Auguste Barbereau, Camille Durutte, Arthur von Oettingen, Ottokar Hostinsky e Hugo Riemann sono presi in esame numerosi scritti di teorici e/o compositori apparsi nei primi decenni del Novecento: René Lenormand, Antonio Alaleona, Hermann Erpf, Ernst Kirsch, Béla Bartók, Josef Matthias Hauer, Herbert Eimert, Bernhard Ziehn, George Capellen, Vincent d’Indy, Hermann Schröder, Boleslav Javorskij, Ernst Kurth, fino ad arrivare ad Arnold Schönberg, nei cui scritti si riannodano, in una sintesi originale, diversi fili di pensiero intravisti nei precedenti autori. Il progressivo radicarsi di una concezione dell’armonia basata sulla nozione di simmetria è messo in relazione ad Alcune delle principali correnti di pensiero – dal positivismo alla teoria della Gestalt – che influenzarono gli sviluppi nella pensiero scientifico tra la fine dell’Ottocento e primi anni del Novecento

... [their] music was a noxious fusion of Jethro Tull and Yes ... approaches the music from both sides, emphasizing the 'dialectical tensions' (30) between high and low elements that ... to the Edge' – the title track from their classic 1972 album – is quickly becoming the 'Tristan Prelude' of ...

Video installation art is a collaboration of sound, image, and space, with a closer relationship to music and art than to cinema. Accordingly, those working in this genre are often both artist and musician, a double role that represents a radical departure from the artist/musician divide of many other audio-visual genres. Because it is single authored, video installation can invert many elements of the filmmaking process: while it is common procedure to add a soundtrack to film during post-production, for instance, many video artists use sound as their starting point, often basing whole works on a musical structure. While such an inversion invites reconsideration of musical audibility and film narrative, video work, when installed, also challenges the notions of screen space and realism. An audience is no longer offered the single-point perspective of film, but is instead enveloped within a three-dimensional space. And as image expands beyond the four sides of the cinema screen – a ...

ABSTRACT The early accounts of the keyboard contest that took place in Dresden in 1717 between J.S. Bach and Louis Marchand are widely divergent, despite Birnbaum (1739), C.P.E. Bach and Agricola (1754), Adlung (1758), Hawkins (1776), Marpurg (1786), and Forkel (1802) all claiming the authority of either Bach or his sons. These discrepancies enabled later biographers to craft their narratives selectively according to their own allegiances. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, Bach biography typically followed Bach/Agricola’s and Forkel’s retellings, in which Marchand fled Dresden on the day of the event before it could take place. However, in life-writing on Marchand, the story instead appeared in Marpurg’s more sympathetic version, which held that one concert took place—with Marchand implicitly judged to be Bach’s equal—prior to his taking flight. This rendering was apparently favored in France, where the episode’s potential for being appropriated to illustrate Austrogermanic musical superiority against French philistinism would have generated significant unease. Examination of variant narratives therefore reveals much about how national ideologies can steer a biographical episode in particular directions, as well as how an influential author’s endeavors to straighten the historical record can unwittingly send myth-making along fresh trajectories.

cially on Mahler’s self-critical approach to the symphony as a genre, his contribution to which, in the opinion of many scholars, marks an end to the symphonic tradition as we know it. Chapter 6, ‘Ways of Telling’, brings further insights into the ways in which this music communicates meanings, through narrative strategies such as those pointed out by Adorno, ‘collapse, breakthrough, suspension, and fulfillment ’ (216), or through ‘fragmentation’, ‘recollection’, or ‘reminiscence’. Johnson considers the ‘literary voices’ that influenced Mahler (such as Dostoyevsky, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Nietzsche, or Jean Paul) and, in the subsection ‘Idyll, Dream, and Fairy Tale’, the ‘capacity to shift from one poetic world to another’ (207) demonstrated in the many movements that juxtapose musical renditions of these literary categories. The last two chapters are purely historical: ‘Vienna, Modernism, and Modernity’ assesses the reception of Mahler’s music and personality in the political, cultural, and artistic climate of his time, while ‘Performing Authenticity’ discusses the performance history of the works. Informative and well written, like the rest of the book, they show that even if Mahler’s voices will never be exhausted, Johnson has certainly found his own.

This article explores the notion of artistic collaboration between performer and composer, a topic that has attracted some attention but whose methodology might be thought to preclude objective discussion by the participants themselves. Although our report can make no claims to objectivity either, it attempts a critical reflection on a specific collaboration between the two authors as composer and performer, respectively. Cast in a dialogical format, it traces the genesis of a composition by Fabrice Fitch for speaking cellist,Per Serafino Calbarsi II: Le Songe de Panurge, written in 2002–3 and premiered in London in October 2006. The collaboration first evolved as a constant exchange of ideas in which concept, technique, and realization were held in fine balance. The piece engages a variety of frames of reference. If its stance in relation to the instrument clearly draws on certain contemporary traditions, for example Lachenmann’smusiqueconcrète instrumentale, other aspects draw on ...

Η σταδιακή εγκατάλειψη της λειτουργικής τονικότητας ως το πρωταρχικό σύστημα μουσικής γραφής στη λόγια μουσική επέφερε σημαντικές αλλαγές σε όλα τα επίπεδα μουσικής δημιουργίας. Ειδικά δε, όσον αφορά στη μουσική γλώσσα, οι καινοτομίες είναι καταλυτικές. Παρατηρείται μια χωρίς προηγούμενο ροπή προς την εύρεση νέων μεθόδων οργάνωσης μουσικής σύνταξης η οποία επηρεάζει, και ταυτόχρονα επηρεάζεται από, την έλευση εναλλακτικών δεξαμενών δομικού υλικού.

In 2013, trucks and vans were driving across London, bearing the message ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.’ These mobile billboards declared the number of arrests that had taken place ‘in your area’ in the previous week and provided a number to which people could text the message ‘HOME’ to initiate voluntary repatriation. In 2016, Theresa May, who had organised this scheme as home secretary, became prime minister, following the upheaval caused by the country's plebiscite to leave the European Union. One of the main strands of argument of the successful ‘Brexit’ campaign centred on the ‘deep public anxiety . . . about uncontrolled immigration’ and promised to reduce numbers of immigrants to the country. This desire to control the nation's borders continued to dominate the official soundscape of Britain's government. At the 2016 annual Tory conference, May endeavoured to draw clear lines on issues of belonging, territory, citizenship, and the fuzzy notion of Br...

The fall of Communist rule in Eastern Europe (1989–91) had a profound impact on economic, socio-political, and cultural conditions in Cuba during the 1990s. It was the beginning of the so-called ‘Special Period in Times of Peace’. Increasing dire economic conditions on the island led to many changes that impoverished cultural life, including the relocation of composers in Europe, the United States, and other countries in the Americas. The situations encountered by composers who migrated to Europe varied, depending on generational differences and on the dynamics of the socio-political and cultural powers to which each of them were exposed in their new reception contexts. Whether adopting an uncontested identification with the new cultural milieu or resorting to discursive strategies of appropriation and de/re-territorialized negotiation, this text centres on the compositional journeys of four Cuban composers who settled in different European cities: Leo Brouwer (Córdoba, Spain); Edua...

This thesis discusses the interaction between composer and performer in the context of collaborative processes involving the creation of musical works for solo guitar. The aim is to categorise and characterise the relevant stages of a collaborative process, demonstrating and discussing the adaptation of the commissioned pieces, and analysing the creative results. Although the research field (composer-performer collaboration) has been the subject of recent attention, this research approaches a rarely explored perspective: the collaborative process between composers and performers in which composers do not play the instrument they are composing for. Therefore, the main focus lies in the problematic of composition for guitar by a non-guitarist composer interacting with a guitarist. The first section of this research consisted of an exploratory stage which analysed the collaborative processes of non-guitarist composers from Brazil – active composers with published guitar works – who were advised by one or more guitarists. All data obtained from the analysis of the interviews was used to guide the second part of this research, which addressed a case study based on a phenomenological approach: three new works for guitar were created in order to discuss the collaboration between the author of this thesis and the composer Samuel Peruzzolo-Vieira.

The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles represents a recent contribution to an extensive list of texts dedicated to the band that has arguably had more cultural and musical impact than any other within popular music. Edited by Kenneth Womack, its contributions are from American and British authors, thus reflecting the main territories of the Beatles’ success. It is divided into three distinct sections – ‘History and Influence’, ‘Background’, and ‘Works’ – and ranges chronologically from the period preceding the band’s formation, through its official releases, to the solo projects of individual band members and the more recent adaptation albums, such as Love. After the usual chronology and introductions, Dave Laing’s account of the Beatles’ formative years examines the impact of factors such as religion, class, and the Second World War on all six of the group’s one-time members (including Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best, who left the band in 1961 and 1962 respectively). Laing starts from Gramsci’s notion of the self as an accumulation of traces deposited by history and experience, dealing skilfully with such subjects as the members’ schooling and their initial formation as a skiffle band, the Quarrymen, before discussing the social and cultural environment from which the Beatles as a band emerged. The historical approach is continued in Jerry Zolten’s chapter, which examines the group’s use of recording technology throughout its lifespan, from the 1961 Hamburg recordings to the break-up in 1970. The chapter charts the emergence of recording, from Edison’s invention of the phonograph through to its assimilation as an art form in the work of artists such as Phil Spector, the Beach Boys, and, of course, the Beatles themselves. Although much of its content has been covered elsewhere, Zolten’s essay notes how the Beatles evolved from using the studio as a means of simply documenting what they would play live (with no overdubs) to incorporating technology as a compositional tool. Ironically, this process created dilemmas for those artists who also wanted to perform the recorded versions live, dilemmas that affected the Beatles’ own decision to stop giving concerts and focus exclusively on the recording studio from 1966. Towards the end of the essay the author provides accounts of the emergence of specific tracks in the studio, providing valuable insight into the Beatles’ creative idiolect. In the first of eight chapters in the section entitled ‘Works’, Howard Kramer’s initial comments reinforce Zolten’s argument by reminding the reader that the Beatles are known principally for their recordings, not for their live performances. The essay documents the first two years of the Beatles’ careers, covering the days of the Quarrymen, their meeting with Brian Epstein, the early releases, and ultimately the first three albums, which provide

""The Sounds of the Silents in Britain explores the sonic dimension of film exhibition in Britain, from the emergence of cinema through to the introduction of synchronized sound. Edited by Julie Brown and Annette Davison, the volume includes original scholarship from many highly-regarded experts on British silent film from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, such as film history, theatre studies, economic history, and musicology. The essays provide an introduction to diverse aspects of early film sound: vocal performance, from lecturing and reciting, to voicing the drama; music, from the forerunners of music for visual spectacle to the impact of legislation and the development of film music practice; and performance in cinemas more generally, from dancing and singalong films, to live stage prologues, and even musical performances captured in British Pathé's early sound shorts. Other topics include the sonic eclecticism of performances at the Film Society, British International Pictures' first synchronized sound films, and the role of institutions such as the Musicians' Union and the Performing Right Society in relation to cinema music and musicians. In addition to tackling these familiar topics from surprising new angles, The Sounds of the Silents in Britain also debunks some of the myths about the sonic dimension of film exhibition. For example, the book reveals that local venue licensing decisions had a profound effect on whether music could even be performed with film in some British performances spaces and cities, and that the same was true of live acts alongside film - even into the late 1920s. The books also bring to light the fact that, in terms of special film presentation and orchestral accompaniment, practices in London were arguably more sophisticated than those in New York before the onset of World War I; that lecturing to film in Aberdeen, Scotland had almost as long a life as Japanese benshi; and that the London Film Society was as eclectic in its approach to sound as it was in programming the films themselves. Filled with both archival research and sound musicological analysis, The Sounds of the Silents in Britain represents an important addition to early film and film music scholarship. ""

Music technology undergraduate degree programmes are a relatively new phenomenon in British higher education, situated at the intersection of music, digital technologies, and sound art. Such degrees have exploded in popularity over the past fifteen years. Yet the social and cultural ramifications of this development have not yet been analysed. In looking comparatively at the demographics of both traditional music and music technology degrees, we highlight a striking bifurcation: traditional music degrees draw students with higher social class profiles than the British national averages, while their gender profile matches the wider student population; music technology degrees, by contrast, are overwhelmingly male and lower in terms of social class profile. We set these findings into analytical dialogue with wider historical processes, offering divergent interpretations of our findings in relation to a series of musical, technological, educational, social, political, and cultural-inst...

Whenever Alban Berg entered a room with a piano he would invariably head straight for the keyboard to play the "Tristan" chord.' Such behavior bears witness to a lifelong passion for the music of Richard Wagner. According to Hermann Watznauer's biographical notes, which ...

The inspiration for this interdisciplinary collection of nine essays appears to have come from an idea for a festival of 'late style' mooted by Ernest Fleischmann, who retired in 1998 as Managing Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. With unwitting irony (and questionable taste), ...