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Narrative in Music?
A. The existence of narrative in music. ‘Name a piece of music which is not narrative’. I was confronted by this deamnd in an interview. The interviewer clearly thought it self-evident that all music...
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How far can composers collaborate?
In a sense, all artistic creation is collaborative. There is the idea left over from the Romantic era that artists create alone, wrestling with their imagination in private so to speak. A more modern...
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How not to win an audience and influence people.
I’m writing this following a tweet-corespondence about composers who don’t seek to engage their audience. There has been a point of view among modernist artists, articulated by Theodor Adorno, that to...
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Hunting for the narrator in abstract western art music.
Abstract It is widely accepted that listeners to abstract music written during some historical periods at least commonly make narrative interpretations of the music. They do this in order to make sense...
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Cutting up “Collaboration”, or, Why is working together not always...
Views on ways of working together The term collaboration has been used to describe a wide variety of working relationships. Collaborations are sometimes described as being hierarchical, or...
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Hunting the narrator in Western abstract art music
Introduction The idea of narrative in music is contested. Views of musicologists range from those of Ball who dismisses the concept as ‘… simply not an essential, or even important, part of music …’...
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Music for an Imaginary Film – writing with other people’s material – writing...
About time I wrote up my experience earlier this autumn at the Tippett Music Centre. Two aspects of the project are particularly interesting: - composing using musical material provided by other...
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Chronicle of a collaboration
This is an account of working with Catarina Domenici, a Brazilian pianist and academic. It is based on looking at of how we worked together, and uses the terms for different types of working...
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The Peasants are Revolting
This may be the title of an opera I’m working on with writer Buffy Sharpe. So far we have a scenario, four characters, some text and a few musical sketches. We plan to have a chamber opera up to an...
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Guernica-Gaza, and the right of art to offend
A piece of mine has been withdrawn from performance. Some local people found the title of the piece offensive. The orchestra took the view that this, along with what they saw as a wider potential...
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