Book review: Tia DeNora’s “Music Asylums”
A book review (of Tia DeNora’s Music Asylums: Wellbeing Through Music in Everyday Life) I did ages ago has now been published online in Current Musicology. It might not look like much,…
“They would have…” — Coppélia, Scotch snaps and class (the social kind)
The Scotch Snap goes to Poland My recent discovery that one of the interpolations in Coppélia for Franz’s variation is from a “Scottish” ballet (Gretna Green, by Guiraud) encouraged me to re-watch Philip…
The mysterious case of the Lyrical Waltz
I’ve just had an email from a teacher, asking me what I understand by the term “Lyrical Waltz.” Short answer, I don’t understand anything by it, but the long answer is that…
Music theory for (ballet) dancers, the last word for now? Grant’s “Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era”
I’ve just added Roger Grant’s Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era as my top choice for books on music theory for those interested in music-dance relationships (see…
Inventing Tradition: The Chestnut Tree Dance
Dancing your country back The Chestnut Tree Dance is a bizarre bit of British dance history. It seems worth remembering for a moment in the current atmosphere where some English have…
Musicology, ballet teaching and time signature
A proud day for me, my first proper article published in Empirical Musicology Review. “How Down is a Downbeat? Feeling Meter and Gravity in Music and Dance?” came out of a single…