Interesting conference coming up in September 10th – 13th this year at Oxford University – Perspectives on Musical Improvisation. I’m half tempted to submit a proposal for a paper, since music improvisation in ballet classes is one of those mysterious and hidden-away things that rarely gets an airing. Just not cool enough, I suppose. Just a shame that this isn’t really my area of interest as a researcher, so I hope someone else will take up the challenge.
I’ve had several emails from people thanking me for passing on the link to the Ernesto Nazareth site, which includes a complete archive of Ernesto Nazareth’s compositions, the painstaking and exquisitely presented labour of love of Alexandre Dias (see previous post about this) who has edited and re-typeset every single one of them.
Alexandre and his team have now done the same at www.chiqunihagonzaga.com for the music of Chiquinha Gonzaga (1847-1935), the Brazilian composer, and I predict a communal round of applause from all us ballet pianists around the world who will find in this site a wonderful source of new, great music for class.
Alexandre, we salute you!
It’s well known that the Shrovetide Fair bit of Petrushka has many imitations of accordeon sounds and techniques in it, but this amazing performance on the accordeon by Boban Bjelić demonstrates just how much.
This is probably the most wonderful site I’ve ever come across in the very specialised world of music for dance: a page of links to the the content of Polish Dances, the complete written works of Raymond Cwieka. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of detailed research on the mazurka and polonaise. I can pretty much promise you that you will never, ever find another resource so large and comprehensive and informative on the topic.
The route by which I found it is interesting. I don’t know how long it’s been up there, but I’m shocked at myself for not having discovered it before, considering that I spend a lot of my life researching this subject. I found it because I was trying to find a the original German version of Paul Nettl’s The Story of Dance Music, given that the translation is poor in parts. I searched for <”the story of dance music” german title>, and one of the links that appeared was Cwieka’s book on the polonaise (all 410 pages of it) linked to by Jason Chuang. There’s a moral here: if you want to find good resources on the net, it helps if you put in another good source as your search term, because a well-researched page will have references. If you don’t know about a subject, then it stands to reason that you’re not going to know the kinds of terms that will bring up the best sources. References are a good place to start.
The generosity of Cwieka is overwhelming. It’s all up there for you and me to read and enjoy and learn from. I’m oscillating between joy and despair, though – it’s such a great resource, but it just shows that I don’t know shit about the polonaise really, and I know just how many hundreds of pages I am away from being well-informed.
I can’t usually watch more than two minutes of a televised debate without fast forwarding or switching off altogether, but I was completely hooked by all 100 minutes of the ‘Are We Making Monsters?’ debate at ENO with Will Self, Claire Fox, Norman Lebrecht and composer Nico Muhly.
The occasion was a build-up event for Muhly’s opera Two Boys which premieres at ENO this Friday (24th June). The opera is based around a true story of a teenage stabbing in which the internet, social media and multiple fictional online personalities played a central role.
I found it fascinating precisely because there is so much we can’t know here, and the issues are enormous, deep and wide-ranging. To hear the social, moral & psychological implications of Grindr discussed by such luminaries is deeply satisfying and funny. Time and again, I found myself switching sides as the speakers (particularly Claire Fox) disagreed with each other with compelling arguments.
There is one argument in all of it that I just don’t buy, however, and that is this conceptual division of individuals into what Will Self initially called the ‘pre-net’ and ‘post-net’ generation. An audience member finally pointed out that it’s more common to speak of ‘internet native’ and ‘internet immigrant’. I’m more accustomed to the terms ‘digital native’ and ‘digital immigrant’ to describe people who were born with or without the presence of the internet.
I have never bought this idea as being particularly helpful or true. As a tutor, I spent a lot of my time struggling to teach ‘digital natives’ how to be one, not always with a great deal of success. I, and some others of my (pre-internet) generation, are at times more tuned in to the possibilities and affordances of the online world than people who grew up with it. No-one is compelled to use the internet all the time for all the things it can do, and the divisions, as far as I’m concerned, are not along age-lines, but between people who do and people who don’t do stuff with it. People who don’t make use of something like Zotero for academic work – to take one example – don’t do so not because of their age, but because they are lazy and/or they don’t need to do so in order to eat (lucky them). Or it’s simply that they can’t, because they don’t have the money, the broadband access, the hardware and the education. Try telling an impoverished child in an area where the council has closed the library that they’re part of the ‘net generation’.
I sometimes tend to the same kind of pessimism about the internet as Will Self, but in the end, that wouldn’t make any sense. The only reason that I know what he thinks about the subject is because I saw the debate on the web, using my iPhone not as some device to interact with others virtually, but as a small television. The only reason I knew about the debate is because I follow Dickon Edwards on Twitter, and he posted a link to the debate. The debate itself was occasioned by an art-form that I largely detest (opera). I got a flyer through the post, and promptly threw it away. Via the web, I got to hear a bit of Muhly’s music, see him in person, learn more about the opera, get engaged by the debate, and now I’ve bought tickets to see it.
The idea that there is an online world ‘out there’ that is separate, disengaged from the physical one is part of the problem of the debate. When Will Self heard the word ‘internet native’ he said something like ‘aha – so it’s a territory’. I don’t believe it is, even if people use the metaphor in casual speech. Because I don’t think it’s a territory, I also don’t think it’s capable of having ‘natives’ and ‘immigrants’. Perhaps it’s this metaphor that causes people to become internet xenophobes in the first place.
Postscript: As chance would have it – and thanks to Dickon Edwards again for the tip – the Guardian reports on Facebook Fatigue. Perhaps we’re over it already.
See also: 30 minute podcast/interview with Craig Lucas (librettist of Two Boys) and Nico Muhly from the Independent, with Edward Seckerson. Wonderful stuff, and more great insights on the world of the online.
I was intrigued by a reference to Mrs Bagot Stack’s Women’s League of Health & Beauty in a review of Michael Clark’s piece at the Tate Modern by Clement Crisp yesterday. As recondite as it sounds, the league, albeit after several changed names until the current Fitness League, is still going. The figures are extraordinary – in 1936, the league had 166,000 members in the UK alone. This is well over ten times the current worldwide membership of the organization I work for.
As I’m currently writing a PhD proposal, and my topic is broadly speaking the way that dance teachers and dance teacher educationalists use music in dance teaching, I was fascinated by a comment by Prunella Stack in an interview in 2005 on the 75th anniversary of the league:
She cites music’s role in appealing to the “higher senses”. “Aerobics is rather mechanical and is not influenced by music, unlike our system where it is terribly important,” she says. “This artistic element is what really releases people.” [In a league of their own, The Times, 2005]
As philosophical statements about music go, that’s pretty straight-down-the-line and clear. I’d love to read that in a brochure for a ballet school, but in so much dance training, music is used as a tool for attaining technique, or to distract from effort. It’s just another technology. The more I read about The Fitness League, the less I think that Michael Clark should be offended by the comparison.
Interesting blog by Eleanor Turney in the Guardian about dancing to words, and what makes it work or not work. It’s a topic that interests me a lot, ever since, about ten years ago, I saw a pas de deux in Christopher Hampson’s Canciones done to a reading of the poem instead of the sung version, due to a ghastly cock-up over rights.
It has stayed with me as one of the most beautiful, haunting, and musical moments of dance, one of my favourites, even. You have to understand that it’s all I can do to stay awake in a pas de deux. Too much blurred sentimental wrestling. But in this instance, the rise and fall of Rosario Serrano’s voice seemed to be more musically communicative and articulate than any music could have been.
Perhaps the reason it worked is precisely because the movement had originally been choreographed to de Falla’s music rather than the words, so what emerged from the conjunction of the music and text was the musicality of the poetry, not what it meant.
