tag:theconversation.com,2011:/fr/topics/classical-music-6875/articlesClassical music – The Conversation2024-03-05T18:21:36Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2244692024-03-05T18:21:36Z2024-03-05T18:21:36ZFrom concert halls to movie soundtracks, Arnold Schoenberg’s legacy as a classical composer still resounds<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579405/original/file-20240303-48934-502jcb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=164%2C329%2C3907%2C2540&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The composer's expressionism is often compared to paintings of his friend and fellow expressionist, Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky's 1925 painting 'Yellow-Red-Blue.' </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Wikipedia)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>2024 marks 150 years since the birth of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Arnold-Schoenberg">Arnold Schoenberg</a> (1874-1951), arguably the
<a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631497575">most influential classical composer of the 20th century</a>.</p>
<p>As a significant contributor to musical <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/Modernism-art/Modernism-in-the-visual-arts-and-architecture">modernism</a>, Schoenberg’s work reflected a radical shift away from past classical musical forms, signifying a sharp break with tradition.</p>
<p>Despite his popularity <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/arts/music/musical-dissonance-from-schumann-to-sondheim.html">and influence among</a> composers and scholars, Schoenberg remains <a href="http://www.scena.org/columns/lebrecht/010708-nl-schoenberg.html">largely misunderstood by the general public</a>, his music often among other modernist composition discredited as discordant noise. </p>
<p>Nonetheless, his compositions expressed important musical innovations that have shaped generations of subsequent composers, across music heard in concert halls and on film soundtracks.</p>
<h2>Late Romanticism</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="Line-type drawing of a man in a suit." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579232/original/file-20240301-30-6o811g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/579232/original/file-20240301-30-6o811g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=941&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579232/original/file-20240301-30-6o811g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=941&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579232/original/file-20240301-30-6o811g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=941&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579232/original/file-20240301-30-6o811g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1183&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579232/original/file-20240301-30-6o811g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1183&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/579232/original/file-20240301-30-6o811g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1183&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">1917 portrait of Schoenberg by Austrian expressionist artist Egon Schiele.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Wikipedia)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Born into 19th-century Vienna, Schoenberg began composing in the Romantic style. </p>
<p>Musical <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.23751">Romanticism connected with broader</a> socio-political ideas of the time, including the idea of the artist as “genius,” the value of expressing emotions and the importance of nature in a context of intensified industrialism and technological development.</p>
<p>Romanticism greatly developed the musical language of 18th-century classical music by adding a greater variety of sounds and forms and a greater range of notes, instruments and genres — while still being strongly connected to earlier music.</p>
<p>Around the turn of the 20th century, Schoenberg’s musical language evolved to be similar to the late <a href="https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/display/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000023751">Romanticism</a> of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Richard-Strauss">Richard Strauss</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gustav-Mahler">Gustav Mahler</a>, who were both inspired by the innovative harmonies of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Richard-Wagner-German-composer">Richard Wagner</a>.</p>
<p>Thus, Mahler, Strauss and Schoenberg formed the <a href="https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume4/actrade-9780195384840-chapter-001.xml">first wave of musical modernism</a>. </p>
<p>However, Mahler tragically died in 1911, and Strauss became a more conservative composer, leaving Schoenberg as the flag-bearer of musical modernism.</p>
<h2>‘Air from another planet’</h2>
<p>Around 1910, Schoenberg abandoned Romanticism, as he felt there was nothing left to express. </p>
<p>In the fourth movement of his <em>String Quartet No. 2</em> (1908), Schoenberg added poetry. This was an unusual addition to a genre normally without text.
The poetry, penned by <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stefan-George">Stefan George</a> and sung by a solo soprano, announced the departure from traditional music:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“<a href="https://oxfordsong.org/song/entr%C3%BCckung"><em>Ich fühle luft von anderem planeten</em> (I feel air from another planet).</a>” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Schoenberg continued to explore heightened emotions. </p>
<p>In his melodramatic song cycle, <a href="https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/page/1810"><em>Pierrot Lunaire</em> (1912)</a>, a “moonstruck” clown, Pierrot (a character from the Italian <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/commedia-dellarte">commedia dell’arte</a>, sings a number of angst-filled melancholic poems. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Schoenberg’s ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ (1913).</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This marked the beginning of Schoenberg’s “<a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/Expressionism">expressionism</a>,” where he sought to radically distort traditional musical elements to explore heightened emotions. </p>
<h2>Abstract expressionism in music</h2>
<p>Schoenberg’s musical expressionism is often compared to the paintings of his friend and fellow expressionist, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wassily-Kandinsky">Wassily Kandinsky</a>. </p>
<p>Schoenberg and Kandinsky had a <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Schonberg-and-Kandinsky-An-Historic-Encounter/Boehmer/p/book/9789057020476">sustained friendship</a> from their first meeting in 1911, and they <a href="https://www.schoenberg.at/index.php/en/schoenberg-kandinsky-blauer-reiter-und-die-russische-avantgarde-2">inspired each other’s artwork</a>. </p>
<p>Kandinsky moved towards abstract art, while Schoenberg moved towards the music parallel of “<a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/schoenbergs-atonal-music/schoenbergs-atonal-music/FF4393467C4538AAB31DCC201BADC3B3">atonality</a>,” meaning away from existing musical structures of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/key-music">keys</a> and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/triad-music#ref951825">traditional chords</a>. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">‘How did Schoenberg compose Pierrot Lunaire?’ video by composer Samuel Andreyev.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The result was the sound of more musical tension that Schoenberg called the <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520266070/style-and-idea">“emancipation of dissonance</a>.” </p>
<h2>Serialism</h2>
<p>However, Schoenberg still felt limited by expressionism. </p>
<p>In response, he began to use a novel compositional technique known as the “12-tone technique” or <a href="https://viva.pressbooks.pub/openmusictheory/chapter/basics-of-twelve-tone-theory/">“serialism.”</a> </p>
<p>In 12-tone compositions, all 12 tones of the western tuning system are repeated and varied in successions called “rows.”</p>
<p>By contrast, traditional composers typically employed only around seven or eight tones from a <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/scale-music/Common-scale-types">major or minor scale</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107110786">Schoenberg’s <em>Suite for Piano</em></a> (1923) that premiered in 1924 used this technique, making 2024 the centenary of serialism.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bQHR_Z8XVvI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Schoenberg’s <em>Suite for Piano</em> (1923)</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.cambridge.org/ca/universitypress/subjects/music/twentieth-century-and-contemporary-music/serialism?format=HB&isbn=9780521863414">Serialism went on to strongly influence many composers</a> who further developed the technique, such as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jan/30/milton-babbitt-obituary#">the avant-garde</a> <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Milton-Babbitt">Milton Babbitt</a>, recipient of a 1982 Pulitzer Prize in composition, and <a href="https://brahms.ircam.fr/en/pierre-boulez">Pierre Boulez</a>.</p>
<p>Film composers have taken up serialism <a href="https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.93.0.1/mto.93.0.1.neumeyer.php">as an important technique</a>, employing this to yield a high degree of dissonance and ethereal sounds. </p>
<p>This is heard in films such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bMqlj4ZSgw&list=PLNe0UezH0uKCW74x8AsLxU4I6rAD-sy7j"><em>Planet of the Apes</em> (1968)</a>, with what <a href="https://doi.org/10.5406/musimoviimag.6.2.0032">has been called a “landmark” score</a> composed by Jerry Goldsmith. </p>
<p>Schoenberg employed his own serialism in his <em>Accompaniment to a Film Scene</em>.
However, as music theorist Orit Hilewicz notes, the piece wasn’t composed specifically for film, <a href="https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.21.27.1/mto.21.27.1.hilewicz.html">but for concert performance</a>.</p>
<h2>‘Colours’ and the quality of sound</h2>
<p>Schoenberg was also instrumental in developing <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.27973">the quality of sound</a>
— known as <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-timbre-9780190637224">“timbre”</a> — as an important musical parameter. Timbre refers to how the same notes played at the same volumes — and by different instruments — can have very different qualities of sound, such as sounding pure, sharp, dull, <a href="https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.22.28.3/mto.22.28.3.mcadams.html">blended</a> or distorted.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=S2DIT1UHqF155cH3&t=450&v=I9-_tVSrCqs&feature=youtu.be"><em>Farben</em> (“Colours”), the third movement of Schoenberg’s</a> <em>Five Orchestral Pieces</em> (1909), the pitch stays largely constant, while a blend of instruments continuously changes to create a variety of different “colours” or timbres. This is one of the first works to experiment with timbre.</p>
<p>Today, timbre is a key musical parameter. Schoenberg’s pioneering of timbre has been influential across many genres of music, including in <a href="https://pittnews.com/article/177488/blogs/the-sound-of-the-cinema-constructing-atmosphere-with-timbre-and-instrumentation/">film scores seeking to establish atmosphere</a> and even arguably in <a href="https://timbreandorchestration.org/writings/project-reports/timbre-in-popular-song#">popular styles</a>. </p>
<h2>Memorializing the Holocaust</h2>
<p>Schoenberg’s use and innovation of musical elements to express dissonance was also used to sonically speak to the horrors of the Holocaust. </p>
<p>Being Jewish, Schoenberg was forced to migrate to the United States after the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933, eventually <a href="https://schoolofmusic.ucla.edu/facilities/schoenberg-hall/">settling in Los Angeles</a>. </p>
<p>In 1947, Schoenberg composed <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/737762"><em>A Survivor from Warsaw</em> as a memorial</a> to the victims. The work is scored for men’s chorus and orchestra. A narrator recites terrifying conditions of the Warsaw ghetto over the discordant and fragmented orchestral writing. </p>
<p>Despite being only seven minutes long, the work has had a powerful effect on audiences. Musicologist <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520281868/arnold-schoenbergs-a-survivor-from-warsaw-in-postwar-europe">Joy Calico</a> has examined varied reception of the work as it circulated through West Germany, Austria, Norway, East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War. </p>
<p>She also notes that <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520281868/arnold-schoenbergs-a-survivor-from-warsaw-in-postwar-europe">some found <em>A Survivor from Warsaw</em> to resemble a horror film soundtrack, and thus to be cliché</a>. Yet ironically these “clichés” were actually first developed by Schoenberg in the 1910s and 1920s before being borrowed by Hollywood composers, and then re-employed by Schoenberg.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">‘A Survivor from Warsaw’ (1947).</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This demonstrates the immense influence of Schoenberg’s music during his own lifetime.</p>
<h2>Innovations from tradition</h2>
<p>Despite Schoenberg’s radical innovations, he remained connected to the traditions of classical music and ensured his students <a href="https://www.google.ca/books/edition/Preliminary_Exercises_in_Counterpoint/BcEakgAACAAJ?hl=fr">mastered traditional methods of composition</a>. Schoenberg believed one needed to understand traditional forms of historical music in order to inform the music of the future. Schoenberg’s teaching methods are still widely employed, including through the work of music theorist <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/analyzing-classical-form-9780199987290?cc=ca&lang=en&">William Caplin</a>.</p>
<p>In the words of Kandinsky, Schoenberg’s “<a href="https://www.google.ca/books/edition/_/mG-VRWgfpuYC?hl=fr&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjMr63s2seEAxVGLFkFHcpNAzkQre8FegQIEhAH">music leads us into a realm where musical experience is a matter not of the ear but of the soul alone, and at this point the music of the future begins</a>.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/224469/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aidan McGartland receives funding from McGill University and the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation. </span></em></p>Though composers after Schoenberg used his technique to create atmospheric music in film, Schoenberg’s own ‘Accompaniment to a Film Scene’ was written for concert performance.Aidan McGartland, PhD student, Music Theory, McGill UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2226942024-03-04T13:38:26Z2024-03-04T13:38:26ZFrom ‘Jaws’ to ‘Schindler’s List,’ John Williams has infused movie scores with adventure and emotion<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/578158/original/file-20240227-30-vrbqen.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=22%2C4%2C2973%2C2061&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Composer John Williams conducts at the Walt Disney Concert Hall opening gala, Oct. 25, 2003, in Los Angeles, Calif.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/composer-john-williams-performs-on-stage-at-the-walt-disney-news-photo/2650695">Carlo Allegri/Getty Images for LAPA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When Harrison Ford <a href="https://www.essentiallysports.com/us-sports-news-olympics-news-equestrian-news-as-year-old-hollywood-superstar-takes-one-last-ride-in-indiana-jones-and-the-dial-of-destiny-his-persistent-fondness-for-horse-riding-is-clearly-evident/">saddles up once again</a> in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” he has an invisible partner along for the ride: composer John Williams, who received his <a href="https://www.classicfm.com/composers/williams/john-every-oscar-nomination/">54th Academy Award nomination</a> for scoring the movie.</p>
<p>Reviews are mixed, but as <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/indiana-jones-and-the-dial-of-destiny-movie-review-2023">one critic writes</a>, “When Indy and Helena (his goddaughter) get to actual treasure-hunting, and John Williams’ all-timer theme kicks in again, the movie clicks.” </p>
<p>At 92, Williams is the oldest Oscar nominee in Academy history – <a href="https://ew.com/john-williams-breaks-own-oscars-record-oldest-person-ever-nominated-8547953#:%7E:text=Of%20those%20nods%2C%20Williams%20has,and%20Schindler's%20List%20in%201994.">for the second time</a>. <a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/john-williams-hollywood-s-maestro-goes-for-more-oscars-history-/6995194.html">The first time</a> was in 2023, when his score to “The Fabelmans” was nominated. Altogether, Williams has been nominated for more Oscars than anyone in movie history except Walt Disney and has won five.</p>
<p>Williams began working in television and film in the 1950s, first as a studio pianist and then as a composer for television and feature films. But it wasn’t until his music for 1975’s “Jaws,” with its <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BePfzCOMRZQ">ominous two-note motif</a>, that he left his indelible stamp on Hollywood. </p>
<p>When Williams’ music for “Star Wars” poured out of cinema sound systems two years later, he single-handedly made the symphonic movie score respectable again, after a decade of <a href="https://archive.org/details/hollywoodrhapsod0000marm">rock ’n’ roll compilations and quirky uses</a> of regional material with limited instrumentation. If “Star Wars” hadn’t been a blockbuster, movies might never have returned to the use of big orchestras, which were standard from the advent of synchronized sound in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0018037/">1927’s “The Jazz Singer</a>” into the 1960s.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">John Williams conducts a Vienna Philharmonic performance of the main title from ‘Star Wars: A New Hope’ in 2021.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I am a <a href="https://www.arthurgottschalk.com/about/">music professor, composer of orchestral works</a> and lifelong student of film music. My admiration for John Williams has only deepened as he has continued to produce greatness.</p>
<p>Whether it’s disaster films like “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069113/">The Poseidon Adventure</a>,” blockbusters such as the <a href="https://www.classicfm.com/composers/williams/harry-potter-soundtrack-famous-themes-composers/">first three “Harry Potter” films</a> or stirring dramas like “<a href="https://example83813.wordpress.com/2017/04/22/schindlers-list-john-williams/">Schindler’s List</a>,” Williams continues to prove that he can do it all, regardless of genre. His film scores owe much to his deep background in every aspect of music, from a young age.</p>
<h2>The early years</h2>
<p>After a stint in the Air Force, during which he wrote his first film score, for a <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/star-wars-composer-john-williams-first-score-a-1952-newfoundland-film-1.3241603">travelogue about Newfoundland</a>, Williams studied at the Juilliard School and the Eastman School of Music. In 1956 he returned to Los Angeles, where he had once led dance bands as a high schooler under the name “<a href="https://www.metv.com/lists/listen-to-the-awesome-early-television-work-of-star-wars-composer-john-williams">Little Johnny Love</a>.”</p>
<p>He quickly found work as a film studio pianist and came to the attention of renowned Hollywood composer <a href="https://www.henrymancini.com/pages/biography">Henry Mancini</a>. Credited as Johnny Williams, he performed the iconic bass line ostinato – meaning “obstinate” in Italian – for Mancini’s <a href="https://variety.com/2022/artisans/news/peter-gunn-session-henry-mancini-centennial-celebration-john-williams-1235403949/">theme for the television detective classic</a> “Peter Gunn.” </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">John Williams played piano on the 1959 original recording of the theme song from ‘Peter Gunn.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Williams became a sought-after studio keyboardist, playing on the <a href="https://www.wtju.net/apprenticeship-john-williams/">film soundtracks</a> for hits such as “West Side Story.” He augmented this work by arranging and orchestrating odd bits of music here and there for television and movies. </p>
<p>His first scores were for television shows such as “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048893/">Playhouse 90</a>,” “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049996/">Bachelor Father</a>” and the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx7A4sxJi7c">pilot episode of “Gilligan’s Island</a>.” Williams worked with producer Irwin Allen on shows such as “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058824/">Lost in Space</a>” and “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062578/">Land of the Giants</a>.” His first feature film score was for <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052719/">1958’s “Daddy-O</a>.” </p>
<h2>The blockbusters</h2>
<p>For Williams’ score for “Star Wars” and many subsequent films, he conducted the London Symphony Orchestra. “Star Wars” reached the Billboard Top 10 in 1977 on both the Hot 100 and adult contemporary charts – an extraordinary crossover feat that has never been repeated.</p>
<p>His work on “Star Wars” showed that what amounted to an orchestral suite based on the score could sell extremely well as a soundtrack album. This made Williams <a href="https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/hearing-the-movies-9780199987719">an important source of revenue for a film</a>, and a highly valued collaborator. </p>
<p>But it was his score for <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/steven-spielberg-john-williams-50-year-collaboration-retirement-1235298681/">longtime associate</a> Steven Spielberg’s 1982 hit film “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083866/">E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial</a>” that was Williams’ first score to be embraced by concert orchestras. It introduced audiences to his other side, as a composer of serious concert music. </p>
<p>The suite from “E.T.” was frequently performed by orchestras across the country, <a href="https://online.berklee.edu/store/product?product%5Fid=11222&usca%5Fp=t">to great acclaim</a>. Orchestral demand for Williams’ music rose to such a level that his career as a classical musician became almost as fruitful as his work with film music. Williams’ scores not only moved audiences but also provided each member of the orchestra a meaningful and satisfactory playing experience, thus increasing his appeal to performers of his music.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The Danish National Symphony Orchestra performs the flying theme from ‘E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The “E.T.” music also soars, literally, on film. The scoring of the finale, in which protagonist Elliott and his friends help the alien escape captivity and return to his home planet, is so effective that Spielberg <a href="https://www.laphil.com/musicdb/pieces/4705/adventures-on-earth-from-et-the-extra-terrestrial">re-cut the end of the film</a> to match Williams’ music, inverting the normal relationship between director and composer.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">In the 1982 movie ‘E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,’ schoolboys help E.T. elude human pursuit and rendezvous with his spaceship.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Williams has written concertos for almost every instrument, including <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grSuicpzxR8">one for superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma</a>; <a href="https://www.songhall.org/profile/John_Williams">two symphonies</a> and a <a href="http://www.jw-collection.de/classical/sinfonietta.htm">sinfonietta for wind instruments</a>; and a chamber quartet incorporating the Shaker song “Simple Gifts” for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzSmS5JRYdw">President Barack Obama’s 2008 inauguration</a>. He is <a href="https://www.bso.org/exhibits/john-williams-and-the-boston-pops">emeritus conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra</a>, which he led from 1980 to 1993, succeeding the legendary Arthur Fiedler.</p>
<p>Williams’ classical education and abilities have played a huge role in the sound and success of his movie scores. George Lucas had reportedly entertained the idea of <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-force-is-still-strong-with-john-williams">using classic works for his “Star Wars” soundtrack</a>. Williams successfully argued in favor of an original score, but one that suggested old-Hollywood atmosphere. </p>
<p>His music for “Star Wars” draws equally from the romantic-style work of European film-score pioneers like <a href="http://filmmusiccritics.org/ifmca-legends/max-steiner/">Max Steiner</a> and <a href="http://orelfoundation.org/composers/article/erich_wolfgang_korngold">Erich Korngold</a>; the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/leitmotif">operatic and leitmotif technique</a> of <a href="https://www.biography.com/musicians/richard-wagner">Richard Wagner</a>; and the lush and entrancing orchestration of <a href="https://fondation-igor-stravinsky.org/en/composer/biography/">Igor Stravinsky</a>. All of the “Star Wars” film scores also are informed, as much of his music is, by Williams’ work in jazz and popular music. </p>
<h2>Works with staying power</h2>
<p>Many of Williams’ film scores have become icons of popular culture. The American Film Institute ranks the score to “Star Wars” as <a href="https://www.afi.com/news/star-wars-afi-movie-club/">the greatest film score of all time</a>, and the Library of Congress has entered its recording into the <a href="https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/Star%20Wars-AUDISSINO.pdf">National Recording Registry</a>, citing its cultural, historical and aesthetic significance. </p>
<p>Williams has been nominated for 76 Grammy Awards and won 26, most recently in 2024 for the “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” score. He has received numerous career honors, including the <a href="https://www.arts.gov/honors/medals/john-williams">National Medal of Arts in 2009</a>. But I believe a different honor most exemplifies his illustrious career.</p>
<p>In 2022, Williams received an <a href="https://deadline.com/2022/09/john-williams-knighthood-queen-elizabeth-ii-composer-steven-spielberg-1235126366/">honorary knighthood</a> from Queen Elizabeth II, one of <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6p51x0lexdo">the final awards the queen approved</a> before her death. Perhaps a fitting title, cinematic as it is, for a life lived so fully and so creatively: The Last Knight.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222694/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Arthur Gottschalk is a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.</span></em></p>Composer and conductor John Williams has shown for more than 60 years how music can take movies to new heights.Arthur Gottschalk, Professor of Music, Rice UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2231692024-02-19T13:42:42Z2024-02-19T13:42:42Z‘Maestro’ shows the enduring power of Gustav Mahler through Leonard Bernstein’s passion<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575086/original/file-20240212-20-xnfgow.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C30%2C984%2C679&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bradley Cooper as composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein in 'Maestro.' </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Netflix)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Bradley Cooper’s Oscar-nominated <em>Maestro</em> focuses on the man considered the “<a href="https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1222482533">first great American conductor</a>,” Leonard Bernstein, who composed such diverse works as <em><a href="https://leonardbernstein.com/works/view/9/west-side-story">West Side Story</a></em> and <em><a href="https://leonardbernstein.com/works/view/10/candide">Candide</a></em>.</p>
<p>Alongside <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-we-are-fascinated-by-the-oscar-nominated-tar-a-story-of-rare-female-power-in-classical-music-198500">Todd Field’s <em>Tár</em> (2022)</a>, this is another high-profile recent film centring on the life of a conductor, putting classical music in the spotlight.</p>
<p>Both films feature Bernstein prominently, as the protagonist of <em>Maestro</em> and the mentor of the fictional Lydia Tár. However, a third composer-conductor looms in the background <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2023/03/07/1161287197/tar-mahler-5th-symphony-conductor-rafael-payare">of both films</a>: <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gustav-Mahler">Gustav Mahler</a> (1860-1911). </p>
<p>This notable presence of Mahler poses the question: Why does the music of Mahler remain so popular and moving to this day? </p>
<p>Mahler’s significance includes his inventive modernism and highly expressive writing that communicated emotions shaped by his fascinating (albeit melancholic) life — and the turbulent history surrounding how his work was received. </p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Bradley Cooper conducts Mahler’s ‘Symphony No. 2’ in ‘Maestro.’ (Netflix)</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Power of Mahler</h2>
<p>In <em>Maestro</em>, Mahler is not explicitly discussed, but his music features prominently in the film, with a climactic reenactment of Bernstein conducting a triumphant finale of Mahler’s <em>Symphony No. 2</em> <a href="https://queensfilmtheatre.com/Whats-On/Mahler-Resurrection-Symphony-Concert">performed by the London Symphony Orchestra in Ely Cathedral (near Cambridge) in 1973</a>.</p>
<p><em>Maestro</em> frames Bernstein’s experience of Mahler’s finale as being so powerful it reignites Bernstein’s relationship with his wife, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein. Bernstein was instrumental in pioneering the revival of Mahler’s music.</p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Leonard Bernstein conducts Mahler’s ‘Symphony No. 2’ in 1973.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>From Vienna Court Opera to New York</h2>
<p>Mahler worked mainly as a conductor of operas, notably his 1897 appointment as director of the Vienna Court Opera (now the Vienna State Opera). From 1908-10, he held an appointment at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. </p>
<p>He spent his summer vacations composing in rural Austria, leading to many of his works being inspired by the Austrian countryside. </p>
<p>However, being Jewish, Mahler’s <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300170344/gustav-mahler/">career was tainted by antisemitism</a> and he was forced to resign from the Vienna Court Opera owing to the deteriorating treatment of Jews in Europe. </p>
<p>Upon his arrival in New York in 1908, the Metropolitan Opera also hired <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Arturo-Toscanini">Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini</a>, limiting Mahler’s actual appearances as conductor. In New York, Mahler faced xenophobia directed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1525/ncm.2021.44.3.169">at his Austro-Bohemian identity</a>, owing to the anti-German sentiment in America at the time. </p>
<p>After about a year of a serious heart infection, Mahler died in 1911 at the premature age of 50. Shortly before his death, Mahler had planned an early retirement, where he would had intended to dedicate himself to composition and completing his <em>Symphony No. 10</em>. </p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">An excerpt of Mahler’s incomplete ‘Symphony No. 10’ performed by Deryck Cooke with Berliner Philharmoniker.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Modernist pioneer</h2>
<p>Today, Mahler is in the canon <a href="https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/display/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000040696">of post-Beethovenian symphonists</a>, but this was certainly not the case during his lifetime. </p>
<p>Mahler was a pioneer of radical modernist developments in fin-de-siècle Vienna, alongside Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg. Together, these artists foreshadowed the musical expressionism of the 1910s. </p>
<p>Twentieth-century <a href="https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/display/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000040625">musical modernism</a> can be defined as a radical change from past forms, culminating in a marked <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/Modernism-art/Modernism-in-the-visual-arts-and-architecture">break with tradition</a>. </p>
<p>Mahler <a href="https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume4/actrade-9780195384840-div1-001004.xml?rskey=hE0eLl&result=1">did this partly by</a>: </p>
<ol>
<li><p>Augmenting compositions in length and sheer scale. His gargantuan <em>Symphony No. 8</em>, dubbed the “symphony of a thousand” due to the large numbers of musicians and diverse array of instruments required, including an enlarged percussion section, organ, harmonium and piano together with mass choir and vocal soloists. </p></li>
<li><p>Mahler employed a variety of extra-musical sounds from the world, including bird songs and horn calls. A notable example is Mahler’s use of cowbells that evoke the Austrian Alps in both his Sixth and Seventh symphonies. This foreshadows <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/sound-art">sound art</a> and <a href="https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/display/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-1002292545?rskey=HGkFuT&result=1">the liberation of noise as music that emerged later</a> in the 20th century.</p></li>
<li><p>Mahler was a pioneer of <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100348659">progressive tonality</a>, where the key changes from start to finish. This <a href="https://mahlerfoundation.org/mahler/listening-guide/listening-guide-symphony-no-9-intro/">technique challenges</a> traditional tonality, where there is a “home key.” These new techniques expanded Mahler’s musical language, allowing him to play with the listener’s expectations and create a greater range of musical expression.</p></li>
</ol>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Discussion of percussion in Mahler (including cowbells) from Singapore Symphony.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Expression and emotion</h2>
<p>Mahler believed that music could express emotions where words failed. He wrote in 1896 that: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“…as long as I can express an experience in words I should never try to put it into music. The need to express myself musically — in symphonic terms — <a href="https://www.google.ca/books/edition/Selected_Letters_of_Gustav_Mahler/v2_nQQAACAAJ?hl=fr">begins only on the plane of obscure feelings, at the gate that opens into the "other world”</a>, the world in which things no longer fall apart in time and space.“ </p>
</blockquote>
<p>His symphonic works are filled with a variety of music forms, with different characteristics, including operatic <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/854315">highpoints</a>, rustic country dances, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/scherzo">playful scherzos</a> and mournful marches. </p>
<p>To facilitate Mahler’s expanding expressive musical language, the composer wrote very long and precise instructions on his scores. </p>
<h2>Rediscovery</h2>
<p>From the 1960s onwards, Mahler’s music gradually regained more recognition for the first time since his death. </p>
<p>Firstly, in 1960, in a concert honouring Mahler broadcast on CBS, Bernstein introduced <a href="https://leonardbernstein.com/lectures/television-scripts/young-peoples-concerts/who-is-gustav-mahler">Mahler as not "one of those big popular names like Beethoven or Gershwin or Ravel</a>.” But Mahler soon achieved status alongside these composers, certainly eclipsing the popularity he experienced in his own lifetime due to a number of factors. </p>
<p>Bernstein claimed to have rediscovered Mahler, and subsequently pioneered Mahler’s symphonies. Bernstein said Mahler incorporated “<a href="https://leonardbernstein.com/lectures/television-scripts/young-peoples-concerts/who-is-gustav-mahler">the manners and customs and ways of thinking and feeling of both East and West</a> …. His music shows the influence of Mozart, and Schubert and Wagner — all the great German and Austrian composers.”</p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Who is Gustav Mahler?’, Young People’s Concerts, 1960.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Bernstein continued to demonstrate Mahler’s unique <a href="https://leonardbernstein.com/lectures/television-scripts/young-peoples-concerts/who-is-gustav-mahler">incorporation of musical ideas from Roma, Slavic, Jewish and Chinese musical cultures</a>. </p>
<p>This cross-cultural musical engagement and a <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/12/west-side-story-leonard-bernstein-politics-left-right-center.html">quest to express a unity that could encompass dissonance and difference</a> was one of the parallels Bernstein saw between himself and Mahler.</p>
<p>Bernstein, an American Jew, demonstrated his own passion for multicultural immersion and engagement in <em>West Side Story</em> (1957) and <a href="https://www.leonardbernstein.com/works/view/12/mass-a-theatre-piece-for-singers-players-and-dancers"><em>MASS</em> (1971)</a>.</p>
<p>Secondly, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3684792.html"><em>Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy</em></a> in 1960. Adorno considered <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/jul/29/mahler-where-to-start-with-his-music">Mahler’s Bohemian</a> childhood, personality and his sociopolitical context alongside Mahler’s music.</p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Opening of Visconti’s ‘Death in Venice.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Lastly, In 1971, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067445/">Luchino Visconti’s film, <em>Death in Venice</em></a> included a famous opening scene of Mahler’s Adagietto from <em>Symphony No. 5</em> accompanying a steamship arriving in Venice at sunrise, bringing Mahler’s music to a global audience. The film is adapted from a 1912 Thomas Mann story which contains many allusions to Mahler.</p>
<p>Decades later, Mahler’s musical power still endures.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/223169/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aidan McGartland receives funding from McGill University and the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation. </span></em></p>Mahler’s inventive modernism and highly expressive writing communicated emotions shaped by his fascinating late-19th century life.Aidan McGartland, PhD student and research assistant, Music Theory, McGill UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2130582024-02-07T13:13:23Z2024-02-07T13:13:23ZGeorge Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is a story of jazz, race and the fraught notion of America’s melting pot<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573120/original/file-20240202-27-30mlpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=7%2C0%2C2658%2C1966&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">It took George Gershwin just 10 days to pen the American classic.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/photo-of-us-composer-and-pianist-george-gershwin-news-photo/102488695?adppopup=true">GAB Archive/Redferns via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>February 12, 1924, was a frigid day in New York City. But that didn’t stop <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Continuum_Encyclopedia_of_Popular_Music/HZQemZyozqwC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=rachmaninov%20%22experiment%20in%20modern%20music%22&pg=PA479&printsec=frontcover">an intrepid group of concertgoers</a> from gathering in midtown Manhattan’s Aeolian Hall for “An Experiment in Modern Music.” The organizer, bandleader <a href="https://www.albany.edu/%7Esw7656/pathfind.htm">Paul Whiteman</a>, wanted to show how jazz and classical music could come together. So he commissioned a new work by a 25-year-old Jewish-American upstart named <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/arts/gershwin-obit.html">George Gershwin</a>. </p>
<p>Gershwin’s contribution to the program, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIr_WPcVDt8">Rhapsody in Blue</a>,” would go on to exceed anyone’s wildest expectations, becoming one of the best-known works of the 20th century. Beyond the concert hall, it would appear in iconic films such as Woody Allen’s “<a href="https://youtu.be/7mwZYGcbQCo?si=9cCvQHYdTvjcjDEF">Manhattan</a>” and Disney’s “<a href="https://youtu.be/ie-TS-BitnQ?si=m4PdBq-OM3Xit9dP">Fantasia 2000</a>.” It was performed during the opening ceremonies of the <a href="https://youtu.be/ylUF32pwvtI?si=74KSSpvdtXlC-KpB">1984 Los Angeles Olympics</a>, and if you ever fly on United Airlines, you’ll hear it playing during the <a href="https://blog.oup.com/2014/08/united-airlines-gershwin-rhapsody-blue/">preflight safety videos</a>. </p>
<p>I’ve spent nearly two decades <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-society-for-american-music/article/abs/each-man-kills-the-thing-he-loves-bernsteins-formative-relationship-with-rhapsody-in-blue/4D3271F9A4BD972DABD11C2ADB9DDF12">researching</a> <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/arranging-gershwin-9780199978380">and writing</a> <a href="https://www.schott-music.com/en/rhapsody-in-blue-no577145.html">about this piece</a>. To me, “Rhapsody” isn’t some static composition stuck in the past; rather, it’s a continuously evolving piece of music whose meaning has changed over time.</p>
<p>Programming “Rhapsody” for concerts today has become somewhat of a double-edged sword. A century after it premiered, it remains a crowd favorite – and almost always guarantees a sold-out show. But more and more scholars are starting to see the work as a whitewashed version of Harlem’s vibrant Black music scene. </p>
<h2>A cobbled-together hit</h2>
<p>Whiteman commissioned Gershwin to write “Rhapsody” sometime in late 1923. But as the story goes, the composer forgot about his assignment <a href="https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/RhapsodyInBlue.pdf">until he read about the upcoming concert in a newspaper</a> on Jan. 4, 1924. </p>
<p>Gershwin had to work quickly, writing as time allowed in his busy schedule. <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Arranging_Gershwin/3Yw_BAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA25&printsec=frontcover">Manuscript evidence suggests</a> that he only worked on the piece a total of 10 days over the span of several weeks.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573109/original/file-20240202-19-djol50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Handwritten sheet music." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573109/original/file-20240202-19-djol50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573109/original/file-20240202-19-djol50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=694&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573109/original/file-20240202-19-djol50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=694&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573109/original/file-20240202-19-djol50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=694&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573109/original/file-20240202-19-djol50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=872&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573109/original/file-20240202-19-djol50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=872&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573109/original/file-20240202-19-djol50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=872&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A copy of the first page of George Gershwin’s manuscript for ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/copy-of-the-first-page-of-the-autographed-manuscript-news-photo/500762335?adppopup=true">Gabriel Hackett/Archive Photos/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Accordingly, he relied on the familiar melodies, harmonies, rhythms and musical structures that had started to garner him acclaim as a popular composer for the Broadway stage. This music was increasingly influenced by early jazz, as the improvised, syncopated and blues-infused sound of Black musicians such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxBQ2kiQyi8">Louis Armstrong</a> made its way north from New Orleans. Gershwin also mingled with, and was influenced by, some of the great Harlem stride pianists of the day, including <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ajtCKLTOiM">James P. Johnson</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FDUNWm_W0Y">Willie “The Lion” Smith</a>.</p>
<p>Despite being quickly cobbled together, “Rhapsody in Blue” ultimately sold <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Arranging_Gershwin/3Yw_BAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA25&printsec=frontcover">hundreds of thousands of records and copies of sheet music</a>. Gershwin’s own performances of the work on tour also helped boost its popularity. </p>
<p>But success also opened up the piece to criticism – particularly that Gershwin had appropriated Black music.</p>
<h2>Black musicians feel snubbed</h2>
<p>This is not only a 21st-century critique by music historians. Even back then, some Black artists were miffed.</p>
<p>But rather than calling it out in print, they did so through their own art.</p>
<p>In 1929, blues artist Bessie Smith starred in a short film called “<a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/mbrs00063365/">St. Louis Blues</a>,” based on the song of the same name by composer <a href="https://www.alamhof.org/wc-handy">W.C. Handy</a>. It features an all-Black cast, including members of the <a href="https://syncopatedtimes.com/fletcher-henderson-orchestra/">Fletcher Henderson Orchestra</a> and the <a href="https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/hall-johnson-1888-1970/">Hall Johnson Choir</a>. Instrumental and vocal versions of Handy’s song provide the sonic backdrop for this 15-minute film – with one very pointed exception. </p>
<p>Smith plays the part of Bessie, an unrequited lover to a duplicitous gambler named Jimmy. In the final scene, after a previous falling out, Jimmy and Bessie reconcile in a club. They embrace on the dance floor to the strains of “St. Louis Blues.” </p>
<p>But unbeknownst to the love-struck Bessie, Jimmy carefully picks her pocket and unmercifully shoves her back to her bar stool. After Jimmy flashes his newly acquired bankroll, the opening clarinet glissando of “Rhapsody in Blue” begins. <a href="https://youtu.be/S1qqB9l7RQM?si=Y5Aoq1sutIipDuMv&t=848">During this brief, 20-second cue</a>, Jimmy boastfully backs out of the club, bowing and tipping his hat like a performer acknowledging his ovation. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/S1qqB9l7RQM?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The short film ‘St. Louis Blues’ takes a subtle dig at Gershwin 14 minutes in.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It’s hard not to see the subtext of introducing Gershwin’s famous piece at this moment: Just as Jimmy has robbed Bessie, the film suggests that Gershwin had pilfered jazz from the Black community.</p>
<p>Another musical response to “Rhapsody” emerged in 1927 from Gershwin’s stride pianist friend, James P. Johnson: “<a href="https://youtu.be/Bw2ynNYSvgo?si=AF_Mrk0CDJhipJK8">Yamekraw</a>.” Publisher Perry Bradford <a href="https://news.wosu.org/show/the-american-sound/2018-10-18/echoes-of-the-harlem-renaissance-james-p-johnson-wrote-a-rhapsody-in-black-and-white">billed the work</a> as “not a ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ but a Rhapsody in Black and White (Black notes on White paper).” </p>
<p>Of course, the “black notes” were more than just the score itself. Johnson demonstrates how a Black musician would approach <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rhapsody">the rhapsody genre</a>.</p>
<h2>Stuck in the middle with ‘Blue’</h2>
<p>Gershwin once described “Rhapsody” “<a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/George_Gershwin/RySwdc151ZoC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22musical%20kaleidoscope%20of%20America%22&pg=PA297&printsec=frontcover">as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America – of our vast melting pot</a>.” </p>
<p>The problem with the “melting pot” metaphor is that it asks immigrants to leave behind cultural practices and identities in order to assimilate into the majority population. </p>
<p>And that’s just what Whiteman’s musical experiment at Aeolian Hall a century ago was all about: He sought, as he put it, to “<a href="https://syncopatedtimes.com/paul-whiteman-profiles-in-jazz/">make a lady out of jazz</a>.”</p>
<p><a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Jazz_Cultures/8aUwDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22the%20tremendous%20strides%20which%20have%20been%20made%20in%20popular%20music%20from%20the%20day%20of%20the%20discordant%20Jazz%22&pg=PA162&printsec=frontcover">As the concert’s program read</a>, “Mr. Whiteman intends to point out, with the assistance of his orchestra and associates, the tremendous strides which have been made in popular music from the day of the discordant Jazz … to the really melodious music of today.” </p>
<p>In other words, he wanted to fold the era’s popular jazz music into classical music – and, in doing so, draw out the inherent beauty in the beast, making it more acceptable to white audiences. </p>
<p>“Rhapsody in Blue” and other classical-jazz hybrid works like it would soon <a href="https://theconversation.com/jane-austen-monet-and-phantom-of-the-opera-middlebrow-culture-today-145176">become known as “middlebrow” music</a>. </p>
<p>This fraught term emerges from the space between the so-called “lowbrow” and “highbrow,” descriptors that locate works of art on a scale from pedestrian to intellectual. These terms originally related to <a href="https://theconversation.com/neuroscientists-put-the-dubious-theory-of-phrenology-through-rigorous-testing-for-the-first-time-88291">the pseudoscience of phrenology</a>, which drew conclusions about intelligence based on skull shape and the location of the ridge of one’s brow line. </p>
<p>Highbrow music, made by and for white people, was considered the most sophisticated.</p>
<p>But highbrow music could also conveniently elevate lowbrow music by borrowing – or rather, appropriating – musical elements such as rhythm and harmony. Merging the two, the low gets to the middle. But it could never get to the top on its own terms.</p>
<p>If Gershwin’s “Rhapsody” is meant to be heard as a “musical kaleidoscope of America,” it is important to remember who’s holding the lens, what music gets added to the mix, and how it has changed once admitted. </p>
<p>But it’s also important to remember that 100 years is a long time. What the culture values, and why, inevitably changes. The same is true for “Rhapsody in Blue.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213058/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ryan Raul Bañagale does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The work remains a crowd favorite. But more and more scholars are starting to see ‘Rhapsody’ as a whitewashed version of Harlem’s vibrant Black music scene.Ryan Raul Bañagale, Associate Professor and Chair of Music, Colorado CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2210362024-01-19T13:03:17Z2024-01-19T13:03:17ZFive inspiring female composers from history you should listen to<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569094/original/file-20240112-17-vvtohu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=25%2C8%2C2849%2C1608&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> </figcaption></figure><p>I research female composers and contrary to what many people expect, women have successfully written music throughout history. It is important to learn about these musicians to undermine the idea of an exclusively white and male canon of western classical music. To start you on your journey of discovery, here are five female composers from history I recommend listening to. </p>
<h2>1. Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677)</h2>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569027/original/file-20240112-15-32g57e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The Viola da Gamba Player, a portrait of Barbara Strozzi by her husband, Bernardo Strozzi." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569027/original/file-20240112-15-32g57e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569027/original/file-20240112-15-32g57e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569027/original/file-20240112-15-32g57e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569027/original/file-20240112-15-32g57e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569027/original/file-20240112-15-32g57e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569027/original/file-20240112-15-32g57e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569027/original/file-20240112-15-32g57e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Viola da Gamba Player, a portrait of Barbara Strozzi by Bernardo Strozzi.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bernardo_Strozzi_001.jpg">Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister</a></span>
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<p>Born in Venice, the Italian baroque composer Barbara Strozzi is <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/742467">widely agreed</a> to have been the most productive and successful composer (of any gender) of non-religious vocal music in mid-17th century Venice.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/830997">Seven</a> of her eight published volumes contained secular, rather than sacral, vocal music, such as madrigals, arias and cantatas – the popular vocal genres of the time. </p>
<p>Most other composers, and certainly the other better-known female composers at the time, were generally associated with aristocratic courts or Christian religious institutions. For instance, Francesca Caccini was active at the Medici court and Isabella Leonarda composed for a convent in Novara, in northern Italy. Strozzi was <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/742467">one of the few</a> who was active as a composer independent of either.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Che Si Puo Fare by Barbara Strozzi.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>2. Marianna Martines (1744-1812)</h2>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569028/original/file-20240112-15-2eqxn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Portrait of Marianna Martines in a blue dress" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569028/original/file-20240112-15-2eqxn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569028/original/file-20240112-15-2eqxn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=787&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569028/original/file-20240112-15-2eqxn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=787&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569028/original/file-20240112-15-2eqxn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=787&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569028/original/file-20240112-15-2eqxn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=989&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569028/original/file-20240112-15-2eqxn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=989&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569028/original/file-20240112-15-2eqxn5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=989&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Portrait of Marianna Martines, attributed to Anton von Maron (c. 1780).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marianna_Martines,_Pupil_of_P._Metastasio;_born_in_Vienna,_4th_day_of_May_1744,_Member_Academia_Filarmonica.jpg">Haydn-Haus</a></span>
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<p>A multitalented woman, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt7zsvc0">Marianna Martines</a> was a highly regarded pianist, singer, composer and, later in life, teacher in 18th-century Vienna. </p>
<p>Her mentor and (after her biological father had passed away when she was around 20) substitute father was the imperial court poet and librettist Pietro Metastasio. </p>
<p>Her compositions range from sprightly virtuosic keyboard compositions and collections of arias to large choral and orchestral works, including several masses and two oratorios. Her abilities as a composer were such that she was <a href="https://www.sophie-drinker-institut.de/martines-marianna">the first woman ever</a> admitted to the Accademia Filarmonica di Bologna in 1773 – one of the highest honours that could be bestowed upon a composer at the time.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Sonata G Major by Marianna Martines.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>3. Josepha Barbara von Auernhammer (1758-1820)</h2>
<p>Josepha Barbara von Auernhammer was an Austrian composer and keyboardist. A student of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, her ambition was to pursue an international career as a performer. She ended up staying in Vienna, probably because of her marriage to an Austrian municipal councillor, though she continued to perform locally in the city’s most famous concert halls. </p>
<p>She published a lot of her music during her life. This was remarkable regardless of her gender, because in 18th-century Vienna very little music was printed. When the English composer Charles Burney visited Vienna, he commented on the steep prices of copyists, <a href="https://vmirror.imslp.org/files/imglnks/usimg/9/97/IMSLP279489-PMLP146757-Burney_The_present_state_of_music_in_Germany_etc_vol1.pdf">noting that</a>: “Everything is very dear at Vienna, and nothing more so than music, of which none is printed.” </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">6 Variations sur un Theme Hongrois by Josepha Barbara von Auernhammer.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Auernhammer’s compositions for piano – which she probably performed herself – give us an idea of the remarkable keyboard skills she must have possessed. They are very virtuosic while simultaneously requiring delicate subtlety and expertly controlled touch, so much so that even <a href="https://www.sophie-drinker-institut.de/auernhammer-josepha">her publisher noted</a> that they would not recommend her pieces for beginners.</p>
<h2>4. Florence Price (1887-1953)</h2>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Florence Price photographed by George Nelidoff (c. 1940).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://digitalcollections.uark.edu/digital/collection/p17212coll3/id/20/rec/31">University of Arkansas</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Florence Price, a biracial musician from Little Rock, Arkansas, grew up in relative comfort. After a stint at the New England Conservatory of Music, she returned home to the deep south where racial segregation in public facilities was still mandated by law.</p>
<p>Escalating racial tensions and lynchings in Little Rock eventually led her and her family to join the “great migration” north in 1927. They settled in Chicago, as part of the black southern diaspora, where contributed hugely to the <a href="https://www.chicago.gov/dam/city/depts/zlup/Historic_Preservation/Publications/Chicago_Black_Renaissance_Literary_Movement_Report.pdf">Chicago Black Renaissance</a> through her work as a composer and educator. </p>
<p>At age 46, she won the Wanamaker Music Contest, founded by <a href="https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/27318/1/Ege_203030808_Thesis.pdf">Rodman Wanamaker</a> to provide “African-American composers with opportunities for greater recognition”. Among her <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/43542379">approximately 300 works</a> are many instrumental solo-pieces, as well as expansive orchestral works, such as concertos and symphonies.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Fantasie Nègre No.2 in G Minor by Florence Price.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>5. Ilse Weber (1903-1944)</h2>
<p>Ilse Weber was a Jewish children’s book author and poet from Czechoslovakia who set several of her texts to music. At age 39 she was sent to Theresienstadt – a concentration camp. She was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569061/original/file-20240112-23-fz7wkl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="black and white photo of Ilse Weber." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569061/original/file-20240112-23-fz7wkl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569061/original/file-20240112-23-fz7wkl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=718&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569061/original/file-20240112-23-fz7wkl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=718&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569061/original/file-20240112-23-fz7wkl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=718&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569061/original/file-20240112-23-fz7wkl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569061/original/file-20240112-23-fz7wkl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569061/original/file-20240112-23-fz7wkl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ilse Weber photographed c. 1928.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ilse_Weber_(1903-1944).jpg">City Hall of Ostrava</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>During her time in Theresienstadt, Weber <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/nashim.36.1.05">volunteered in the paediatric infirmary</a>, taking care of sick children. Lacking adequate medicine, she strove to comfort her patients in any way she could. </p>
<p>It was here that she wrote many of her songs, which she then played for and with the other interned members of the camp. She accompanied herself on a guitar that she had, illegally, <a href="https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1072&context=senproj_s2022">managed to obtain</a>. Weber used “<a href="https://holocaustmusic.ort.org/places/theresienstadt/ilse-weber/">deceptively simple</a>” tunes and imagery to describe the horrors she and her fellow inmates witnessed, providing solace with music.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Three songs by Ilse Weber.</span></figcaption>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Judith Valerie Engel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It is important to learn about these musicians in order to undermine the idea of an exclusively white and male canon of western classical music.Judith Valerie Engel, PhD Candidate, Historical Musicology, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2197162023-12-18T01:06:56Z2023-12-18T01:06:56ZA long-dead soprano has taken to the stage with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Are holograms the future?<p>I was recently among a curious Melbourne audience who turned out to see a hologram of the long-dead soprano Maria Callas singing with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. </p>
<p>The stage was moodily lit, with 30 musicians in shadows. Loud reverberating footsteps foreshadowed Callas’ entrance and indicated potential humanness. When she eventually appeared centre stage, the audience gasped. Ripples of laughter followed when she and conductor Daniel Schlosberg played out a manufactured exchange of acknowledgement. </p>
<p>The Callas hits were performed, from Bellini’s <em>Casta Diva</em> from Norma to Bizet’s <em>L'amour est un oiseau rebelle</em> from Carmen. But there were limitations to the success. While the live orchestral sounds filled Hamer Hall, the vocals were clearly directed from the speakers, rather than the hologram at centre stage. </p>
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<p>I felt an uncomfortable silence lingering before and after each song. The Callas hologram delayed the momentum. She bowed, inviting the audience to clap again, and coyly berated the conductor when he started before she was ready. The audience waited, and it all seemed to drag on. </p>
<p>This is one of the limitations of combining live music and a pre-recorded voice: you can’t respond to the temperament of the audience. You can’t speed it up when required. </p>
<p>Those seated around me did not seem to share my concerns. A version of Callas – the woman known as <em>La Divina</em>, “the divine one” – had been digitally resurrected, and that was enough for now. </p>
<h2>Hologram performances across the world</h2>
<p>The audience was never fooled by the technology. Instead, they were awe-struck. A phrase I heard murmured over and over was: “how do they do it?”. </p>
<p>“They” are <a href="https://base-xperiential.com/">BASE Xperiential</a>, an American media company which also created Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly and Whitney Houston holograms. </p>
<p>But the “how” part of the question <a href="https://neoskosmos.com/en/2023/12/04/life/technology/the-technology-behind-the-holographic-concert-of-maria-callas/">can be complex</a>. In simple terms, holograms are created when laser lights project a 3D video of a person onto a transparent yet reflective surface, such as a screen. The projected figure lip-syncs to existing vocal recordings, and the live musicians play along.</p>
<p>This is not a unique phenomenon. </p>
<p>Callas in Concert has been performed across the world since 2018. Tupac performed beyond the grave <a href="https://andscape.com/features/the-strange-legacy-of-tupacs-hologram-after-coachella/">at Coachella in 2012</a>. Elvis Presley duetted posthumously with Celine Dion in front of a studio audience for American Idol in 2007. A hologram of the beloved Taiwanese superstar Teresa Teng <a href="https://www.thaiticketmajor.com/concert/teresa-teng-hologram-concert-thailand-bangkok.html">recently toured Asia</a>.</p>
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<p>Artists who are still living are also creating hologram concerts.
Performance-shy ABBA can now get back on stage via avatars of their 1979 selves for their lucrative show <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/jun/04/abba-voyage-review-a-dazzling-retro-futurist-extravaganza">Voyage</a>. Earlier this month, <a href="https://www.kissonline.com/newera-story?key=ZXJpY2FsYmFuYXNAZ21haWwuY29t">KISS wound up their final live tour</a> and announced they “have been immortalised and reborn as avatars to rock forever” in digital form. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/abba-and-tupac-in-the-metaverse-how-digital-avatars-could-be-the-bankable-future-of-band-touring-181222">Abba and Tupac in the metaverse: how digital avatars could be the bankable future of band touring</a>
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<h2>A living legacy</h2>
<p>Are hologram concerts a good thing? They are for performers. Possibly. </p>
<p>A hologram can continue to tour long after a singer’s physical body has expired. It keeps them in the public imagination – after all, a star’s image is contingent upon public awareness – and continues to be a lucrative source of income for the copyright holder. </p>
<p>Unlike people, holograms can be in many places at the one time, and aren’t restricted by travel. Artists can perform with their holographic peers such as Coldplay’s 2021 collaboration with BTW holograms for their single My Universe on The Voice finale. </p>
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<p>For audiences, the benefits are significant. </p>
<p>As <a href="https://www.thaiticketmajor.com/concert/teresa-teng-hologram-concert-thailand-bangkok.html">the brother of Teresa Teng noted</a>, hologram performances are also moments of nostalgia for those who want just one more gig. </p>
<p>A hologram performance might be the only way you can see a performer who died before you were born, or see a star who never toured Australia, or see a dream line-up of artists who never performed together.</p>
<p>But audience reactions are mixed.</p>
<p>I <a href="https://brill.com/edcollchap/book/9789004687172/BP000037.xml?rskey=QLqo1k&result=26">conducted a study</a> with a colleague from the Kyoto University of the Arts, asking Japanese audiences their responses to AI Hibari, an AI deep learning hologram of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibari_Misora">Misora Hibari</a>, who died in 1986.</p>
<p>This hologram replicated her fashion style, musical timing, unique vocal techniques and performance gestures, and performed several songs the real Hibari never did, including Let it Go from Frozen.</p>
<p>While some audience members at the Tokyo performances were visibly moved to tears, others said the hologram was “profaning the dead”, manipulating the memory of the real Hibari, and posing an existential threat to the live music industry. </p>
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<h2>Where to next?</h2>
<p>Audiences have high expectations for digital images. Poor-quality holograms fall into the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley">uncanny valley</a>” – that point when we feel revulsion because they are not quite human. </p>
<p>We’re sceptical about how the images of the dead are used. They have no say or recourse of action. What if Maria Callas never wanted to be performing as a hologram decades after her death? </p>
<p>We’re cynical about greedy copyright holders and gatekeepers in the music industry. Who is making the money from hologram performances? In death, control and power have shifted away from the singer. </p>
<p>And we’re worried about overreach. The enormous progress of AI and the growing public acceptance of virtual singers means more hologram performances will grace our concert halls. And they will be singing songs that they never performed when they were alive. </p>
<p>Holograms have been around for a long time, and I think they are here to stay in spite of these ethical dilemmas. Even though holograms are inherently gimmicky, inquisitive audiences will still flock to see the latest technological developments in music performance. And judging from the appreciative crowd at the Callas concert, the thrill of seeing <em>La Divina</em> again overrides any human concerns.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/holograms-and-ai-can-bring-performers-back-from-the-dead-but-will-the-fans-keep-buying-it-202431">Holograms and AI can bring performers back from the dead – but will the fans keep buying it?</a>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shelley Brunt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The audience was never fooled by the technology. Instead, they were awe-struck. A phrase I heard murmured over and over was: ‘how do they do it?’.Shelley Brunt, Associate professor, Music Industry, RMIT UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2193232023-12-11T19:02:17Z2023-12-11T19:02:17ZWho was Leonard Bernstein, the man at the centre of Bradley Cooper’s Maestro?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564693/original/file-20231210-25-fyd0ol.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=46%2C35%2C7779%2C5714&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jason McDonald/Netflix</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“Maestro” is a word that resonates across concert music. From the Italian word for master, it is applied most frequently to a respected and established conductor of operas and orchestras but can also be used to refer to virtuoso instrumentalists. </p>
<p>Despite its gendered form (male), the term has been regularly applied to female conductors, instrumentalists and others who have achieved significant artistic recognition. </p>
<p>Leonard Bernstein, the character at the centre of Maestro, a new film from director (and star) Bradley Cooper, was not just a great conductor. While the word maestro certainly sums up his career, ego and personality, early in the film Lenny (as he was affectionately known) lists all his achievements, then somewhat dryly sums himself up as “a musician”.</p>
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<h2>The life of ‘a musician’</h2>
<p>Bernstein is recognised as one of the most significant forces in 20th century American music. Starting as an accomplished concert pianist, Bernstein reached the pinnacle of success as a brilliant and effulgent conductor, the first American-born to direct the New York Philharmonic, and the first American-born to conduct the London Symphony, Royal Concertgebouw and Berlin Philharmonic orchestras. </p>
<p>Throughout his career, Bernstein championed the work of American composers, including those of his close friend and mentor Aaron Copland, as well as works by Marc Blitzstein, Lukas Foss, Samuel Barber and others. Encouraged by Copland, Bernstein revived interest in the music of Gustav Mahler and restored the Austrian composer as a regular feature on the international concert hall stage.</p>
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<p>Bernstein was a successful composer. His styles traversed popular and formal genres, often synthesising traditional Jewish melodic and modal elements with jazz and Latin American rhythms and melodies. He composed to great acclaim for concert, dance and theatre stages.</p>
<p>He was a notable educator. Throughout his life, Bernstein gave regular masterclasses in conducting at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer academy for elite musicians. </p>
<p>In 1954 Bernstein appeared for the first time on Omnibus, an educational entertainment television show on CBS, where he discussed and played diverse musical genres to millions of American homes.</p>
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<p>Bernstein’s educational work culminated with the televising of his Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic on CBS in 1964–5, eventually syndicated across 40 countries. </p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-exactly-do-musical-conductors-do-82889">Explainer: what exactly do musical conductors do?</a>
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<h2>A resolutely Jewish artist</h2>
<p>Born in Massachusetts in 1918 to Jewish immigrants from Berezdiv and Shepetivka in Western Ukraine, Bernstein entered the hallowed halls of Harvard in 1935. After graduating, he enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, to be supervised by another mentor (and refugee from quasi-fascist Hungary), Fritz Reiner. </p>
<p>Graduating from Curtis in 1941, Bernstein arrived on the American music scene at a time where persecution had caused many Jewish musicians and composers to flee the tentacles of Nazi Germany and its neighbours. </p>
<p>It was also a time of endemic antisemitism throughout American society. At one point in the movie, Serge Koussevitsky, the iconic Russian-born (and formerly Jewish) conductor and music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, suggests to the young Bernstein he change his name to Leonard S. Burns in order to achieve a successful conducting career.</p>
<p>Bernstein refused. Having conquered antisemitism at Harvard and elsewhere by being resolutely himself, Bernstein revealed not only a deep abiding commitment to Judaism, but a desire to forge a path of freedom for Jewish musical artists in the 20th century. </p>
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<p>Cooper chooses symbolic representations of Judaism throughout Maestro to reinforce this. What looks like a tallit (a prayer shawl) hangs in Bernstein’s flat in Carnegie Hall. Traditional rye bread is featured on the lunch table with Koussevitsky. When returning to his home in Connecticut after rehearsing a chorus from Candide, Lenny is seen wearing a Harvard sweatshirt, its letters emblazoned in the Hebrew spelling of his Ivy League alma mater. </p>
<p>The music playing over the credits at the end of the film highlight the Jewish aspects of his work. They begin with the Psalm 23 Hebrew words from the second movement of Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, and conclude with the second movement of his Symphony No. 3, Kaddish. This is a particularly interesting choice, as the narration of this movement invokes the Jewish tradition of a pious individual calling God to account for the suffering of the Jewish people, known as a din torah. </p>
<h2>A complicated relationship</h2>
<p>Maestro is particularly interested in the relationship between Bernstein and his wife, actor Felicia Montealegre Cohn (Carey Mulligan). She arrives as a young woman in a hauntingly beautiful cinematic moment to the party where she was to meet her future husband. We last see her in her final moments of life with Bernstein and their three children, dancing to the tune of Shirley Ellis’s 1965 hit, The Clapping Song. </p>
<p>Maestro depicts Lenny’s hedonistic whirlwind of a life. Bernstein’s mastery did not extend to human relationships. His bisexuality and its effects on his marriage are more a focus of the film than his Jewishness, but Cooper is at pains to acknowledge that Felicia enters the relationship with eyes wide open – as she says when he proposes to her in a hedge maze, “let’s give it a whirl”. </p>
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<p>Anger and frustration rise and fall as Lenny cavorts with impunity, bringing lovers home, lying (on instruction) to his daughter about the nature of his affairs, and generally doing what he wants.</p>
<p>Cooper has brought together many disparate elements to weave a fresh story of the life of Bernstein. Sometimes his use of symbolism is overly obvious, at other times beautifully subtle. Watch it for the cinematography, for the settings, for the music, and especially for the moment where Bernstein is conducting Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 at Ely Cathedral in the United Kingdom. It is an absolute highlight in the two hours.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/im-going-to-a-classical-music-concert-for-the-first-time-what-should-i-know-195290">I'm going to a classical music concert for the first time. What should I know?</a>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joseph Toltz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Leonard Bernstein was one of the most significant forces in 20th century American music – and led a complicated life behind the scenes.Joseph Toltz, Honorary Associate, Hebrew, Jewish and Biblical Studies, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1995382023-12-11T15:50:00Z2023-12-11T15:50:00ZGustav Mahler’s symphonies in cinema – and why Maestro’s Symphony No.2 and Tár’s Symphony No.5 sound so different<p>The works of the composer Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) are among the most often played in many orchestras’ repertoire. This was not the case during his lifetime, however, when he was much more popular as a conductor than a composer – <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/jan/10/gustav-mahler-150th-birth-anniversary">his critics</a> finding his compositions too different, too complex and, as one critic put it, “dangerous”.</p>
<p>One champion of Mahler after the second world war was the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990), who played an important part in the posthumous breakthrough of Mahler’s music. Bernstein’s love of Mahler has been dramatised in two films this year, Maestro and Tár. </p>
<p>In Maestro, a biopic of Berstein, the conductor is seen wildly conducting Mahler’s monumental Symphony No.2. In Tár, the fictional celebrated conductor at the heart of the film credits Bernstein as both her early inspiration and her mentor. The film follows Lydia Tár as she, like Bernstein before her, completes the cycle of Mahler’s symphonies with a live recorded performance of his Symphony No.5. </p>
<p>Both these films have brought Mahler to a new audience and, since the release of Tár, the 70-minute Fifth Symphony, in particular, has gained <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/08/style/tar-mahler-cate-blanchett.html">a new life and new fandom</a>. </p>
<p>Mahler’s symphonies are very of their time. Produced in the late 1800s and early 1900s, classical music was making the shift from the late-Romantic to early Modernist. They are, depending on which side you sit, either a sincere piece of late-romantic music or an ironic modernist jibe at late-romantic music.</p>
<p>If you are a lover of late-Romantic, his symphonies can be heard and understood as manifestations of romantic nostalgia and full of bombast. But if you are a modernist, you can hear in them premonitions of the tensions and fissures typical of that genre.</p>
<p>The two symphonies are quite different. The Fifth Symphony has a special position in his oeuvre because of a stylistic rift between it and its four predecessors that highlights these two ways of understanding Mahler. </p>
<h2>The Fifth: A symphonic transition</h2>
<p>The Fifth, Sixth and Seventh symphonies, composed between 1901 and 1905, form a group of works that differ from that heard in the first four symphonies in terms of structure and expression. What sets the latter works apart is their less linear development of ideas and structures. </p>
<p>In the later symphonies, Mahler often surprises his listeners with drastic and sudden shifts in texture and instrumentation. Mahler’s first four symphonies look back to their Romantic heritage in a tender manner; while the three middle symphonies, five, six and seven, are looking forward in time, anticipating the brokenness of modern man and art.</p>
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<p>The Fifth’s shortest movement, which is also the most prominent of this symphony, is the famous Adagietto. This movement is a dreamy and passionate piece that is the most coherent and easy to grasp of the entire work, even though its harmonic cadenzas often lead to nothing. </p>
<p>In it, the heavy brass section is kept silent and there is no bass register. The strings and harp play without interruption, creating a dense atmosphere. The movement is said to represent Mahler’s love song to his wife Alma, whom he married while working on the symphony.</p>
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<p>The Adagietto is what audience members hear throughout Tár. It also appeared in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film Death in Venice and a recording of Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic can be heard in Maestro. </p>
<p>The Fifth’s first movement with the instruction “Like a funeral march” is not, like in many famous symphonies, a piece of thematic conflict or dramatic development but almost the opposite of it. The march, which starts with a solo trumpet fanfare that alternates with the violent sound of the whole orchestra, is the beginning and the end of it. </p>
<h2>The breakthrough?</h2>
<p>Bleak sections in the middle of the movement enhance the brooding atmosphere of the piece rather than contrasting it. The second movement has the same gloomy tone. In it, Mahler employs what <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/746904">musicologist Bernd Sponheuer</a> has identified as a primary form category in his works: the breakthrough. </p>
<p>After a long rhythmically rather indistinct and, in terms of expression, swaying section, a solemn choral in the brass seems to lift the listener into another sonic environment, above the shadowy, amorphous world that they had been dwelling in until now. </p>
<p>A stable harmonic and melodic structure appears like the promise of having reached a safe haven after a long sailing in the dark. And yet, again, without any transition, this stability evaporates and the movement ends with a short, suffocated whimper. </p>
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<p>In this movement, Mahler impedes the breakthrough concept that he had developed in his former symphonies. The finale most often describes a victory after the struggles over the forces that were unleashed in the former movements, which is the case of famous symphonies from Beethoven and Bruckner. However, in the Fifth, the finale again structurally quite static like its opening. It ends not in triumph but just in loudness. Again, like in the introduction, there is not so much development but the initial idea is examined from different angles.</p>
<p>In the Fifth, Mahler quotes Wagner, Beethoven, Austrian military marches, trivial dance music and his own songs. Technically, it is much more complex than his former works, especially considering its polyphonic structures and so much more demanding for the instrumentalists.</p>
<p>Mahler, who was an experienced and industrious opera conductor, claimed to have pushed the technical boundaries of the individual instrument groups to the extreme in the Fifth. The disparity of ideas is enormous and culminates in moments when several different themes are played ruthlessly at the same time. </p>
<p>As Mahler told the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (1865–1957), for him his symphonies had <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2014/04/08/300616048/a-debut-symphony-that-embraced-the-world">to contain the whole world</a> and the Fifth is certainly a world on its own. In the piece the most contradicting ideas collide in a spectacular manner: nostalgia with irony, triumph with collapse, brutality with affection, the subtle with the banal, the innovative with the worn out and utopia with crude realism.</p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martin Knust does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The two symphonies show different sides to Mahler’s musical sensibilities as he shifted from from the late-Romantic to early Modernist,Martin Knust, Professor of Musicology, Linnaeus UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2119952023-11-14T13:26:24Z2023-11-14T13:26:24ZMusic painted on the wall of a Venetian orphanage will be heard again nearly 250 years later<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557160/original/file-20231101-23-zmwffr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C22%2C3024%2C2240&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The music room of the Ospedaletto is known for its remarkable acoustics.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Marica S. Tacconi</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Imagine Lady Gaga or Elton John teaching at an orphanage or homeless shelter, offering daily music lessons. </p>
<p>That’s what took place at Venice’s four <a href="https://imagesofvenice.com/ospedali-grandi/">Ospedali Grandi</a>, which were charitable institutions that took in the needy – including orphaned and foundling girls – from the 16th century to the turn of the 19th century. Remarkably, all four Ospedali hired some of the greatest musicians and composers of the time, such as <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Antonio-Vivaldi">Antonio Vivaldi</a> and <a href="https://guides.lib.fsu.edu/composerofthemonth">Nicola Porpora</a>, to provide the young women – known as the “putte” – with a superb music education.</p>
<p>In the summer of 2019, while in Venice on a research trip, I had the opportunity to visit the Ospedale di Santa Maria dei Derelitti, more commonly known as the Ospedaletto, or “Little Hospital,” because it was the smallest of the four Ospedali Grandi. </p>
<p>As a musicologist <a href="https://arts.psu.edu/faculty/marica-tacconi/">specializing in the music of early modern Venice</a>, I was especially excited to visit one of the hidden gems of the city: the <a href="https://www.gioiellinascostidivenezia.it/en/the-jewels/complesso-dell-ospedaletto/">Ospedaletto’s music room</a>, which was built in the mid-1770s.</p>
<p>I had heard about its beauty and perfect acoustics. So when a colleague and friend, classical singer <a href="https://venicemusicproject.it/en/liesl-odenweller/">Liesl Odenweller</a>, suggested we go together, I was delighted. I also secretly hoped Liesl would feel inclined to sing in the space, so I could experience the pure acoustics of the room. </p>
<p>Little did I know that I would encounter music that hasn’t been performed in nearly 250 years.</p>
<h2>Clues on the walls</h2>
<p>As we entered the stunning music room, I was immediately struck by its elegance and relatively small size. In my mind, I had envisioned a large concert hall; instead, the space is intimate, ellipse-shaped and richly decorated.</p>
<p>Overshadowed by <a href="https://www.exploreclassicalmusic.com/vivaldi-and-the-ospedale-della-piet">the more prominent Ospedale della Pietà</a>, not much is known about the music-making that took place for centuries behind the walls of the Ospedaletto. But one of the greatest clues to its venerable history as a music school is literally on one of its walls. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552861/original/file-20231009-15-1jj80a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Colorful painting of women performing." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552861/original/file-20231009-15-1jj80a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552861/original/file-20231009-15-1jj80a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552861/original/file-20231009-15-1jj80a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552861/original/file-20231009-15-1jj80a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552861/original/file-20231009-15-1jj80a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=569&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552861/original/file-20231009-15-1jj80a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=569&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552861/original/file-20231009-15-1jj80a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=569&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jacopo Guarana’s fresco ‘Concert of the Putte’ (1776-77).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Marica S.Tacconi</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A fresco on the far wall of the room, <a href="https://www.libreriauniversitaria.it/ospedaletto-sala-musica-favaro-tiziana/libro/9788885087071">painted in 1776-77 by Jacopo Guarana</a>, depicts a group of female musicians – likely portraits of some of the putte – at the feet of <a href="https://www.worldhistory.org/apollo/">Apollo</a>, the Greek god of music. Some of them play string instruments; one, gazing toward the viewer, holds a page of sheet music.</p>
<p>Call it a professional quirk, but when I see a music score depicted in a painting, I have to get up close and try to read it. In this case, I was lucky: The music notation was quite legible, and the composer’s name was inscribed in the upper-right corner: “Sig. Anfossi.” </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A close-up of a painting of a sheet of music." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552862/original/file-20231009-29-54ha7a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552862/original/file-20231009-29-54ha7a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552862/original/file-20231009-29-54ha7a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552862/original/file-20231009-29-54ha7a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552862/original/file-20231009-29-54ha7a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552862/original/file-20231009-29-54ha7a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552862/original/file-20231009-29-54ha7a.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The musical score depicted in Jacopo Guarana’s fresco.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Marica S. Tacconi</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I took several photos of the fresco. I wanted to learn as much as I could about that piece of music painted on the wall.</p>
<p>The sound of Liesl’s singing snapped me out of my music detective mode. As I had hoped, her beautiful soprano voice filled the space with a tone so pure that it sounded almost ethereal. I turned around, but my friend was no longer in the room. Where was her singing coming from? </p>
<p>Liesl, it turns out, was perched in the singing gallery. With the permission of a clerk, she had climbed up to this partially hidden loft and was singing through a grille. It was here that the putte of the Ospedaletto performed in public concerts, their features partially obscured from the prying glances of the male listeners below.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552864/original/file-20231009-15-25i1yo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Silhouette of woman singing from behind a cage above a grand room." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552864/original/file-20231009-15-25i1yo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552864/original/file-20231009-15-25i1yo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552864/original/file-20231009-15-25i1yo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552864/original/file-20231009-15-25i1yo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552864/original/file-20231009-15-25i1yo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552864/original/file-20231009-15-25i1yo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552864/original/file-20231009-15-25i1yo.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Liesl Odenweller sings from the gallery of the Ospedaletto’s music room.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Marica S. Tacconi</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Women rally behind their beloved institution</h2>
<p>Armed with those clues on the wall, I continued my research in the days following the visit to the Ospedaletto. I learned that the music by “Signor Anfossi” shown in the fresco was drawn from the opera “Antigono,” composed by <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095412866">Pasquale Anfossi</a> (1727-97) on a libretto by <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pietro-Metastasio">Pietro Metastasio</a>. The work premiered in Venice at the <a href="https://www.artnet.com/artists/francesco-guardi/the-interior-of-the-teatro-san-benedetto-venice-1UqjxTVRZT2LyYjJdQa0cg2">Teatro San Benedetto</a> in 1773.</p>
<p>The text of the solo song – known in opera <a href="https://www.operacolorado.org/blog/opera-explained-what-is-an-aria/">as an aria</a> – is legible in the excerpt on the wall. It reads, “Contro il destin che freme, combatteremo insieme” – “Against quivering destiny, we shall battle together.” </p>
<p>Like many works from the 17th and 18th centuries, the entire opera is lost. I was determined to find out, however, if that particular aria had survived. Sometimes, the “hit tunes” of an opera were copied or printed separately and performed as “arie staccate” – arias that were “detached” from the rest of the work. </p>
<p>Luck was on my side: To my delight, I found <a href="https://www.internetculturale.it/jmms/iccuviewer/iccu.jsp?id=oai%3Awww.internetculturale.sbn.it%2FTeca%3A20%3ANT0000%3AFR0084-01A07_04d&mode=all&teca=MagTeca+-+ICCU">a copy of the aria in a library in Montecassino</a>, a small town southeast of Rome. Why was that particular excerpt chosen to be displayed so prominently on the wall? </p>
<p>Like other institutions in Venice, the Ospedaletto faced financial hardship in the 1770s. Evidence suggests that <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Nel_regno_dei_poveri/ojgtAQAAIAAJ?hl=en">the putte of the Ospedaletto were likely involved in raising the funds</a> for the decoration of the music room. The new hall enabled them to give performances for special guests and benefactors, which brought in substantial donations. Together with Pasquale Anfossi, who was their music teacher from 1773 to 1777, they rallied behind their beloved institution, saving it – at least temporarily – from financial destitution. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557295/original/file-20231102-29-c3sj0z.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two girls, one holding music, the other depicted in a side profile, and a man holding sheets of music gazing down at them from behind." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557295/original/file-20231102-29-c3sj0z.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557295/original/file-20231102-29-c3sj0z.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=801&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557295/original/file-20231102-29-c3sj0z.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=801&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557295/original/file-20231102-29-c3sj0z.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=801&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557295/original/file-20231102-29-c3sj0z.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1007&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557295/original/file-20231102-29-c3sj0z.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1007&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557295/original/file-20231102-29-c3sj0z.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1007&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Italian composer Pasquale Anfossi, holding rolled up sheets of music, makes an appearance in the fresco.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Marica S. Tacconi</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>“Against quivering destiny, we shall battle together” may well have served as a rallying cry for the putte of the Ospedaletto, who literally “battled together” to preserve their splendid music conservatory.</p>
<p>Incidentally, the putte may also have wanted to honor their teacher, as Pasquale Anfossi, too, is portrayed in Guarana’s fresco, directly behind the young woman holding up his music. </p>
<h2>From wall to concert hall</h2>
<p>One of the aspects I find most rewarding about the study of older music is the process of discovering a work that has been neglected and unheard for hundreds of years and bringing it back to modern audiences.</p>
<p>Inspired by the Ospedaletto’s music room, Liesl Odenweller and I have embarked on a collaborative project that brings back not only the aria on the wall but also other music from the institution that has gone unheard for centuries. Thanks to a generous grant from the <a href="https://www.delmas.org/grantees-venetian-program">Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation</a>, the <a href="https://venicemusicproject.it/en/">Venice Music Project</a> – the ensemble Liesl co-founded in 2013 – will perform this music in a <a href="https://venicemusicproject.it/en/concert/hidden-treasures-of-the-ospedaletto/">concert in Venice on Dec. 2, 2023</a>.</p>
<p>Our program will include “Contro il destin” as well as other excerpts from “Antigono” – essentially, all that survives from that opera. In addition, we will include works by Tommaso Traetta (1727-79) and Antonio Sacchini (1730-86) who, like Anfossi, taught the young women, in some cases launching their international music careers.</p>
<p>Because the music of the past was <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/musical-notation/Evolution-of-Western-staff-notation">written in a notation</a> that’s different from that used today, it’s necessary to translate and input every mark of the original score – notes, dynamics and other expressive marks – into a music notation software to produce a modern score that can be easily read by today’s musicians.</p>
<p>By performing on period instruments and using a historically informed approach, the musicians of the Venice Music Project and I are excited to revive this remarkably beautiful and meaningful music. Its neglect is certainly not a reflection of its artistic quality but rather likely the result of other composers, such as Vivaldi and Mozart, taking over the spotlight and overshadowing the works of other masters. </p>
<p>This music deserves to be heard – as does the story of the young women of the Ospedaletto.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211995/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>This project received funding from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.</span></em></p>On the wall of an orphanage in Venice, a musicologist encountered a fresco featuring an aria written for an opera. She’s since embarked on a project to bring this forgotten music back.Marica S. Tacconi, Distinguished Professor of Musicology and Art History, Penn StateLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2166852023-11-02T09:43:34Z2023-11-02T09:43:34ZWhat does an orchestra conductor really do?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556641/original/file-20231020-23-2cg48x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=38%2C29%2C2788%2C1819&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Gustavo Dudamel dirigiendo a la Orquesta Juvenil Simón Bolívar en Oslo, en 2010.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/mostrauss/4692030444/">Miguel O. Strauss/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In recent years there have been many films about orchestra conductors. At the beginning of this year we had <em>Tar</em>, based on the conductor Marin Alsop. Also premiering soon are <em>Divertimento</em>, a film about the creation of an orchestra of the same name by conductor Zahia Ziouani, and <em>Maestro</em>, a biopic of the charismatic Leonard Bernstein.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555020/original/file-20231020-23-i0qpoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man in front of a lectern with a baton jumps up and down energetically." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555020/original/file-20231020-23-i0qpoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555020/original/file-20231020-23-i0qpoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=619&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555020/original/file-20231020-23-i0qpoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=619&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555020/original/file-20231020-23-i0qpoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=619&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555020/original/file-20231020-23-i0qpoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555020/original/file-20231020-23-i0qpoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555020/original/file-20231020-23-i0qpoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Portrait of Leonard Bernstein, Carnegie Hall, New York, between 1946 and 1948.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:(Portrait_of_Leonard_Bernstein,_Carnegie_Hall,_New_York,_N.Y.,_between_1946_and_1948)_(LOC)_(4888065253).jpg">Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In films such as these, you can sense the halo of mystery that surrounds the figure of the conductor, which composer and music critic Robert Schumann called “a necessary evil” as early as 1836. </p>
<p>To the untrained eye, the conductor stands on a podium and wildly gesticulates in front of a group of musicians who already have an intimate knowledge of the scores they are performing. The conductor is the only member of an orchestra who has no instrument, and makes no sound of their own throughout the performance. This begs the question: what contribution does a conductor make to the quality of an orchestra’s sound? </p>
<p>We will focus here on their two basic functions: technical and expressive leadership.</p>
<h2>Keeping time</h2>
<p>If we closely watch the conductor’s movements during a concert, we will soon notice one of these roles, which is keeping the piece in time. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/conductor-music">The earliest references to the need for musical timekeeping in western culture</a> can be found in treatises on music from the 16th century, when musicians were recommended to guide themselves by tapping their hands or feet. However, the first <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestra#symphony_orchestra">symphonic</a> orchestral ensembles during the 18th century – the era of musical classicism that we associate with composers such as Haydn or Mozart – still had three characteristics that made the existence of a conductor unnecessary.</p>
<p>Firstly, the number of musicians in ensembles was small, which made them easier to coordinate. Secondly, rhythm generally stayed the same across most compositions, making it easier to maintain without an external guide. Lastly, musicians played almost continuously from the beginning to the end of a piece. It was often the composers themselves, playing a harpsichord or violin, who guided the simple beginning and end of a piece.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555022/original/file-20231020-29-eug6qk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Drawing of the interior of a church where an orchestra plays at the orders of a conductor while the audience listens." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555022/original/file-20231020-29-eug6qk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555022/original/file-20231020-29-eug6qk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=833&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555022/original/file-20231020-29-eug6qk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=833&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555022/original/file-20231020-29-eug6qk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=833&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555022/original/file-20231020-29-eug6qk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555022/original/file-20231020-29-eug6qk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555022/original/file-20231020-29-eug6qk.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1047&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mass in commemoration of Saint Cecilia in the church of Saint-Eustache in Paris conducted by Charles Lamoureux (1834-1899).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84216764/#">Bibliothèque nationale de France</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The first third of the 19th century, when Beethoven (1770-1827) was making his mark on Western culture, was when the need for orchestral conductors emerged. His work represented a quantum leap in terms of the complexity of compositions. The size of orchestras increased substantially, and instruments began to vary their roles in more sophisticated <a href="https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestration">orchestrations</a>.</p>
<p>These developments meant that formal rehearsals had to be organised prior to performances, often led by composers themselves. Considering that a symphony orchestra has a minimum of eighty members, it is easy to understand the need for a leader to synchronise the musicians’ entrances, as well as the rhythm and <a href="https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempo"><em>tempo</em></a> of a piece. While the musicians have only their respective parts written in front of them, the conductor looks at the complete score, and is therefore the only person with an overall vision of the piece being played. </p>
<h2>Unique style</h2>
<p>The ability to perform a composer’s work without their presence, which came about as a result of an international market of music publishers, leads us to the second basic function of a conductor: expressive and artistic leadership. </p>
<p>The gradually developing field of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_notation">musical notation</a> allowed composers to communicate specific instructions about the character and performance of their pieces. However, notation does not even come close to comprehensively conveying a piece’s intended impact. This means that the same piece can have an infinite range of interpretations, and this where orchestral conducting becomes extremely important. </p>
<p>The score annotations of composer and conductor Gustav Mahler offer a good example of this openness. He noted in a passage of his Second Symphony that “trombones, violins and violas should play only if necessary to prevent the chorus from deflating”, leaving the final decision up to the conductor. Other indications of his, such as “with maximum power” or “imperceptible, a little more agitated” give an idea of the multiple potential readings of a piece’s character. </p>
<p>With such a margin of interpretative freedom, the conductor is free to create their own mental model of how a piece should be performed, resulting in personal versions that can be very different. These differences can be clearly seen if we compare the opening bars of <a href="https://youtu.be/t-gROZkUAMY?si=j5ajTN4NDf3aVWXU">Karajan’s</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/L7x8jwzA274?si=N-HRWevtlClmf0ih">Fürtwangler’s</a> or <a href="https://youtu.be/Ks2HfwqkedA?si=_p32KiAJfQdN1DyU">Savall’s</a> respective versions of Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture. </p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The Coriolanus Overture conducted by Karajan with the Berliner Philharmoniker in January 1975.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>The group leader</h2>
<p>The next step for the conductor is to persuade a group of tens, perhaps even hundreds, of musicians to coordinate their individual performances with the same expressive intent.</p>
<p>This task requires considerable leadership, as it involves making an ensemble follow the conductor’s interpretation and instruction. It not only encompasses <em>tempo</em>, but also the relative volume of each soloist or instrumental group, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_phrasing">phrasing</a>, and conveying the nuances that will colour the piece’s overall effect.</p>
<p>As in so many other fields of activity, such leadership has historically been exercised through hierarchical power structures and authoritarian attitudes. There are therefore many anecdotes of such conductors: the hot tempered Toscanini who <a href="https://scherzo.es/malditos-contrabajos/">frequently insulted the orchestra</a>; the capricious von Karajan who <a href="https://www.elmundo.es/larevista/num188/textos/29.html">conducted with his eyes closed</a> and hardly spoke to the musicians; and <a href="https://theweek.com/articles/452346/claudio-abbado-19332014">Claudio Abbado</a>, who was gentle and polite in his manner but was known for whispering the names of musicians he wanted out of his concerts to his artistic director at the end of rehearsals.</p>
<p>Nowadays, musicians have more of a voice in institutions. There is also greater diversity in orchestras, a fact which demands a closer, more open and more persuasive form of leadership.</p>
<p>Venezuelan conductor <a href="https://ve-es.gustavodudamel.com/">Gustavo Dudamel</a>, who will soon conduct the New York Philharmonic, <a href="https://www.berliner-philharmoniker.de/en/about-us/kirill-petrenko/">Kirill Petrenko</a>, who helms the Berlin Philharmonic, and the very young <a href="https://klausmakela.com">Klaus Makkela</a>, recently appointed chief conductor of the Dutch Royal Concertgebouw, are great examples of conductors who add value and make an impact. They are able to create an environment in which the orchestra’s musicians feel stimulated, can grow artistically, and are motivated to perform music at the highest possible standards.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/216685/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cristina Simón no recibe salario, ni ejerce labores de consultoría, ni posee acciones, ni recibe financiación de ninguna compañía u organización que pueda obtener beneficio de este artículo, y ha declarado carecer de vínculos relevantes más allá del cargo académico citado.</span></em></p>What does a conductor do when they stand up and move their hands and baton? What is their role? And how has their way of leading evolved?Cristina Simón, Master en Musicología por la Universidad de La Rioja y Profesora de Comportamiento Organizacional en IE University, IE UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2154452023-10-12T19:02:26Z2023-10-12T19:02:26ZArts organisations say they want to be ‘cultural leaders’ – but are they living up to their goals?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553382/original/file-20231011-19-drz9ru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=27%2C0%2C5979%2C4007&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/image-large-orchestra-2277995565">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When the date of the referendum was announced, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra (TSO) <a href="https://limelightmagazine.com.au/event/last-night-of-the-proms-2/">quietly cancelled</a> its Last Night of the Proms concert scheduled for the night before. </p>
<p>The reason, given by the orchestra to the media some weeks after the decision to cancel, <a href="https://www.themercury.com.au/news/tasmania/tasmanian-symphony-orchestra-scraps-last-night-of-the-proms-concert-due-to-voice-referendum/news-story/0cddf92cc236cfb5dcc0f9926365d8f8">was that</a>:</p>
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<p>to press ahead with a musical celebration of British pageantry on this night felt insensitive given its proximity to the Voice referendum the following day.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yet, at the time of the decision there was no public statement. The orchestra informed ticket buyers individually. The fact that the cancellation was effected quietly raises questions about why the orchestra did not make any meaningful statement with the cancellation.</p>
<p>The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra states it <a href="https://www.tso.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/TSO2030_StrategyDocument_WEB.pdf">aspires to</a> “serve our sector as cultural leaders”.</p>
<p>Indeed, many Australian arts organisations say they want to be “cultural leaders” – but they must be careful to match their words and actions.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-voice-to-parliament-explained-212100">The Voice to Parliament explained</a>
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<h2>A case of cultural leadership</h2>
<p>The expectation of cultural institutions to go beyond their primary function of creating art, and take an active role in important social conversations has become <a href="https://newapproach.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/ANA-Priorities-Paper_FA_Acc.pdf">widespread</a>. </p>
<p>The upcoming Voice referendum has prompted many arts organisations to <a href="https://www.artshub.com.au/news/features/arts-organisations-statements-on-the-voice-part-1-2667905/">publicly declare</a> their support for a “yes” vote. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/CxwZuOsSTvx/?hl=en\u0026img_index=3","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p>
<p>But engaging in social discourse and understanding and enacting a leadership role can be challenging.</p>
<p>The term “cultural leadership” has been <a href="https://culturehive.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Demos-Leadership-and-cultural-value1.pdf">used</a> frequently by arts organisations and their funding bodies since the 1990s, linked to an increased expectation that subsidised organisations should contribute to society by creating <a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Cultural-Leadership-Handbook-How-to-Run-a-Creative-Organization/Hewison-Holden/p/book/9780566091766">public value</a>. </p>
<p>When outlining goals and articulating purpose, arts organisations today regularly commit to contributing to their communities by providing cultural leadership. This commitment is usually <a href="https://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/Documents/Creating-Public-Value-Through-State-Arts-Agencies.pdf">linked</a> to activities such as outreach, education and collaboration. </p>
<p>The notion of cultural leadership has been subjected to scrutiny. In 2014 theatre maker and festival director Wesley Enoch <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/6538552">questioned</a> whether true cultural leadership existed in our major institutions. </p>
<p>He highlighted a lack of willingness for both individuals and their organisations to stand for something – to be bold and courageous, particularly when it came to challenging or divisive issues of social change. </p>
<p>Enoch called on cultural organisations to engage with burning social issues, embrace diversity of thought and contribute to the national conversation through their art-making and public engagement. </p>
<p>The TSO’s cancellation of a problematic program without including its stakeholders in discussion, context or explanation does not represent the vision of cultural leadership Enoch evokes.</p>
<h2>Post-colonial reckoning</h2>
<p>There is another important conversation in classical music around <a href="https://schoolofmusic.ucla.edu/george-e-lewis-on-the-decolonizing-of-classical-music/">decolonisation and the canon</a>. </p>
<p>The core <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/culture/music/dead-white-european-males-dominate-orchestra-music-survey-finds-20200623-p5559e.html">programs</a> of Australia’s orchestras are drawn from works by deceased European composers. These works can seem culturally remote and irrelevant in our relatively young country. </p>
<p>It is the role of orchestras to reinforce not just the transformational enrichment classical music can bring, but its relevance in our lives. </p>
<p>Today’s audiences are demanding examination of the origins and contemporary meaning of the works regularly performed in our concert halls. At the same time, questions of diversity, privilege and access are <a href="https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/Executive_Summary.pdf">reshaping</a> the organisations that make and present classical music.</p>
<p>In Australia, debates around cultural appropriation and representation have arisen around events like Opera Australia’s accusations of “<a href="https://www.smh.com.au/culture/opera/i-felt-sick-opera-australia-under-fire-for-using-yellowface-20220221-p59yet.html">yellowface</a>” in its production of Turandot, and a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/mar/23/we-made-a-mistake-dark-mofo-pulls-the-plug-on-deeply-harmful-indigenous-blood-work">cancelled event</a> at Dark Mofo where a British flag would have been soaked in Aboriginal blood.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/dark-mofo-doesnt-deserve-our-blood-australia-must-invest-in-first-nations-curators-and-artists-157677">Dark Mofo doesn't deserve our blood. Australia must invest in First Nations curators and artists</a>
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<p>How institutions engage with these discussions is at the heart of their cultural leadership role. </p>
<p>Orchestras are the custodians of the canon, responsible for pushing their art forms forward and vibrant hubs of collective talent, knowledge and experience. </p>
<p>They can choose to harness these resources, positioning themselves at the forefront of difficult conversations – rather than backing away from them without properly developing or communicating their rationales. </p>
<h2>Cultural paternalism</h2>
<p>The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra made a decision based on the moral judgement it would be insensitive to perform the Last Night of the Proms the night before the referendum, given the <a href="https://academic.oup.com/histres/article-abstract/81/212/315/5609831">overtly British patriotism</a> associated with the program.</p>
<p>This may be a worthy contention. But by just cancelling the concert, the orchestra took away the opportunity for important conversations. </p>
<p>This is reflected in the <a href="https://www.themercury.com.au/news/tasmania/tasmanian-symphony-orchestra-scraps-last-night-of-the-proms-concert-due-to-voice-referendum/news-story/0cddf92cc236cfb5dcc0f9926365d8f8">ambiguous statement</a> by the orchestra:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The TSO believes strongly that art and music should transcend political debate, but we also strive to be sensitive and mindful of community expectations.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As an alternative to the cancellation, the orchestra could have managed this series of events. They could have hosted a discussion about the history of the proms, exploring the tension between the themes of the concert and current conversations. </p>
<p>The program could have been reshaped, reflecting a dialogue with the orchestra’s community.</p>
<p>Instead, the cancellation raises questions. Will the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra ever perform the Last Night of the Proms program again? Were the themes considered when it was originally scheduled? What decision-making processes guided the call to cancel, and who was involved?</p>
<p>State orchestras were divested from the ABC in the late 1990s and left to redefine their purpose and place in society. The tension between artistic and non-artistic endeavours remains a source of <a href="https://repository.uantwerpen.be/docman/irua/932d44/173036.pdf">friction</a>. </p>
<p>In evolving a leadership role, orchestras and other cultural institutions could recognise that discourse brings us together as a society, and engage with difficult conversations – rather than backing away.</p>
<p>This could be the key to espousing a type of cultural leadership that adds real value to society, on and off stage.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/behind-the-scenes-of-the-voice-referendum-australias-museums-are-already-collecting-the-history-of-tomorrow-214265">Behind the scenes of the Voice referendum, Australia's museums are already collecting the history of tomorrow</a>
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</em>
</p>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/215445/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Samuel Cairnduff worked for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra from 2017 to 2022.</span></em></p>The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra quietly cancelled its Last Night of the Proms concert scheduled for the eve of the Voice. Do their words match their actions?Samuel Cairnduff, PhD candidate in cultural leadership, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2110162023-09-05T12:29:10Z2023-09-05T12:29:10ZHow video games like ‘Starfield’ are creating a new generation of classical music fans<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/546018/original/file-20230901-25-u3v8gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C4%2C3199%2C2122&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The London Symphony Orchestra has performed music from video games like 'Starfield' and 'The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.' </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/niklas-benjamin-hoffmann-winner-of-the-donatella-flick-lso-news-photo/623978072?adppopup=true">Tristan Fewings/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>“<a href="https://bethesda.net/en/game/starfield">Starfield</a>” is one of the most anticipated video games in recent history. </p>
<p>The game, which was released on Sept. 6, 2023, allows players to build their own character and spacecraft, travel to any one of a thousand or more planets and follow multiple story arcs.</p>
<p>The soundtrack is equally epic, with audio director Mark Lampert describing the game’s music as a “companion to the player,” with a “sense of scale” that “had to be totally readjusted,” in a <a href="https://youtu.be/fedc6ZzfU8I?si=Ui0UHlf-vnrKhXlX">recent interview</a> about Starfield’s sound design.</p>
<p>Soundtracks for outer space have appeared in many films – “Star Wars,” “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Interstellar,” to name a few.</p>
<p>But the interactive music of “Starfield” by composer Inon Zur does something different: Utilizing a palette of musical language that cultivates a contemplative soundscape, it launches the listener into the vastness of space while remaining curious, innocent and restrained. If you close your eyes, you can imagine it being performed in the concert hall.</p>
<p>That’s exactly what happened prior to the game’s release, when the London Symphony Orchestra <a href="https://youtu.be/IaskxKfeFno">performed the “Starfield Suite</a>” before a sold-out audience at the Alexandra Palace Theatre, one of the world’s most prestigious concert halls.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.jaaronhardwick.com/">As a conductor, musician and educator</a>, I’m excited about games like “Starfield” because they’re drawing people to symphonic music like never before.</p>
<h2>Classical music becomes exclusive</h2>
<p>Before recording technology, the only way to hear music was to experience it live. Throughout early history, music functioned as an integral part of cultural life: It was played at festivals, accompanied religious services and even served as a means of communication.</p>
<p>During the time of the <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/renm/hd_renm.htm">Renaissance</a>, around the middle 15th to 16th centuries, there was a shift from music as function to music as art and entertainment.</p>
<p>Soon, live vocal and instrumental music became a form of popular entertainment, and people clamored for bigger and better sounds. In the 16th century, the marriage of art, drama and music was consummated in <a href="https://www.sfopera.com/learn/about-opera/a-brief-history-of-opera/">opera</a>. During the 17th and 18th centuries, instruments continued to evolve, large concert halls and opera houses were built, and composers explored new ideas that pushed boundaries.</p>
<p>What’s now known as “symphonic music” was born: music that was performed by a symphony orchestra. <a href="https://coloradosymphony.org/symphony-vs-orchestra/">A symphony</a> is not only a large group of musicians, but it is also a piece of music written by a composer containing multiple movements.</p>
<p>To hear a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, you had to witness a symphony orchestra play it, and crowds clamored to gain entry to concert halls hear the newest and most acclaimed composers’ works.</p>
<p>During the 18th and early 19th centuries, however, a set of social rules calcified around this music: how to listen, what to wear, where to sit and when to applaud. As tastes and technologies began to <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/amcm/hd_amcm.htm">change in the late 19th century</a>, the masses were drawn to new forms of music like jazz. Concert halls, meanwhile, became the realm of high culture, high art and high society.</p>
<p>A clear divide between popular music and <a href="https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/music-theory/why-do-we-call-it-classical-music/">what became known as “classical” music</a> emerged. That divide still exists today.</p>
<p>Many argue that the <a href="https://www.economist.com/culture/2022/11/17/the-classical-music-world-is-grappling-with-accessibility">classical music world is no longer accessible</a> to most people – it’s seen as too intimidating and too stuffy, with works that are too long and tickets that are too expensive. Meanwhile, symphony orchestras around the world <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/16/arts/music/orchestra-diversity.html">are scrambling to diversify their music and ranks</a> within a tradition and culture that was long reserved for the highly educated, wealthy and white.</p>
<p>With symphonies working to be more inclusive in their music education and program offerings, I see video games as a key way to bridge this divide.</p>
<iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/69xgGwecfj6y1Jfz2e73PA?utm_source=generator&theme=0" width="100%" height="352" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy"></iframe>
<h2>From ‘bleeps and bloops’ to symphonic music</h2>
<p>Due to limitations in hardware, early video games utilized synthesized “bleeps and bloops.” However, these constraints spurred programmers to think about creative ways to make games more immersive through sound. </p>
<p>Today, video games do not have the same limitations. Composers have the agency to create soundscapes that utilize the most advanced hardware and software, and they can employ some of the best musicians in the world <a href="https://www.grammy.com/videos/assassins-creed-wins-best-score-soundtrack-video-games-interactive-media-2023-grammys-premiere-ceremony">to record award-winning soundtracks</a>. </p>
<p>In a 2021 interview, video game composer and conductor <a href="https://youtu.be/wInG9pSpmNQ?t=1505">Eimear Noone said</a>, “More young people listen to orchestral music through their game consoles today than have ever listened to orchestral music in the history of music.” </p>
<p>She’s probably right. <a href="https://financesonline.com/number-of-gamers-worldwide/">There are over 3 billion gamers</a> around the world, and people between the ages of 18 and 25 spend the most time playing video games. A <a href="https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/video-games-children-classical-music/">2018 poll conducted by the U.K.’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra</a> found that more young people are exposed to classical music through video games than through attending live performances.</p>
<p>The fusion of advanced technology and scholarship has forged worlds like those found in the “Assassin’s Creed” franchise, which can <a href="https://doi-org.wake.idm.oclc.org/10.1086/713365">act as time machines</a> that allow players to explore ancient Greece, with historically informed soundtracks accompanying them on their journeys.</p>
<p>In Activision’s “Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice,” composer Yuka Kitamura used traditional Japanese instruments to craft a sound informed by Japan’s <a href="https://doyouknowjapan.com/history/sengoku/">Sengoku period</a>; the music of “Civilization IV” contains tracks influenced by composers throughout history; and many of today’s most popular video game titles <a href="https://limelightmagazine.com.au/features/the-best-classical-music-in-videogames/">feature classical music</a>. </p>
<p>“Thanks to video games,” <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/04/28/arts/i-fell-love-with-classical-music-thanks-video-games/">Boston Globe music writer A.Z. Madonna wrote</a>, “I fell in love with classical music.”</p>
<h2>Getting the recognition it deserves</h2>
<p>Today’s video game music is more interactive and nonlinear than traditional concert hall and film music. This means that <a href="https://stringsmagazine.com/top-video-game-composers-talk-craft-and-breaking-into-the-business/">composers think differently when writing for games</a>. Tools, technologies and education for composers and musicians are changing.</p>
<p>The increasing complexity of video games means composers are once again pushing boundaries through expanded sound palettes. Like “Starfield,” many modern game titles incorporate symphonic music needed to provide the emotional and atmospheric underpinning of the game experience.</p>
<p>As the gaming industry continues to expand – it’s projected <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/748044/number-video-gamers-world/">to earn US$533 billion globally by 2027</a> – video game soundtracks have become more and more popular. When a game is released, <a href="https://blog.chartmetric.com/video-game-music-rise-popularity/">music streaming platforms</a> routinely release an accompanying soundtrack. </p>
<p>The classical music world and symphony orchestras may finally be catching on.</p>
<p>In 2022, the BBC Proms, a daily summer concert series that features classical music in London, included video game music <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/events/erjv9r">performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra</a> for the first time in history. In 2023, the Grammys recognized “<a href="https://www.grammy.com/news/2023-grammys-new-categories-songwriter-year-best-video-game-soundtrack-social-impact-special-merit-award-65th-grammy-awards">Best Video Game Soundtrack</a>” as an official category for the first time. Its inaugural winner was <a href="https://www.grammy.com/news/stephanie-economou-interview-2023-grammys-assassins-creed-valhalla-best-score-soundtrack-video-games-interactive-media">Stephanie Economou</a> for her work on “Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarök.”</p>
<p>Today, there are a number of symphonic concert series – <a href="http://gameonconcert.com/">GameOn!</a>, <a href="https://www.gameconcerts.com/en/concerts/final-symphony/">Game Concerts</a>, <a href="https://ffdistantworlds.com/">Distant Worlds</a> and <a href="https://www.videogameslive.com/">VGL</a> – that feature live video game music performed by top orchestras.</p>
<p>“Starfield” will be marked by beautiful graphics, interactive game play and a compelling story, but holding it together will be the gravity of its sonic landscape. Video game music has come a long way from its first “bleeps and bloops.” Symphonic music will continue to accompany players’ video game journeys, and like “Starfield,” the sky is no longer the limit.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211016/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>J. Aaron Hardwick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The genre has long been viewed as too exclusive, too expensive and too stuffy. Thanks to video games, that’s starting to change.J. Aaron Hardwick, Orchestra Director and Assistant Professor of Music, Wake Forest UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2083682023-07-26T20:05:43Z2023-07-26T20:05:43ZFusing traditional culture and the violin: how Aboriginal musicians enhanced and maintained community in 20th century Australia<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536462/original/file-20230710-17-vmrqa5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C4%2C2845%2C1855&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Aboriginal man playing violin to a group outside a tin shack, Moore River Native Settlement, Western Australia, ca. 1920.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://purl.slwa.wa.gov.au/slwa_b5600627_1">State Library of Western Australia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and images of deceased people.</em></p>
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<p>The European violin was initially an imposition on Indigenous culture. But Aboriginal engagement with the violin cannot be exclusively seen as a means of cultural loss. </p>
<p>To only report the brutality and destruction of the British empire in Australia is to miss seeing how Indigenous people engaged, influenced, rejected and survived the forces of empire.</p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/08145857.2023.2170079">As my new research shows</a>, Indigenous violin playing throughout 20th century Australia saw Aboriginal people adapting the European violin to fit within ongoing cultural practices. </p>
<p>As an Aboriginal violinist, I have always been fascinated by the way Western instruments have been adapted to become an expression of culture and Indigenous identity.</p>
<p>By studying the ways Aboriginal people of this era played the violin, we can better understand how Aboriginal people have responded to interventions in their lives with varying degrees of accommodation and resistance. </p>
<h2>Cultural continuation</h2>
<p>As colonial governments made more concerted efforts to “civilise” Aboriginal people in 20th century Australia, many were segregated from society on missions or reserves. </p>
<p>Missionaries taught European activities and regularly forbade Aboriginal people from practising traditional customs. Western music was often taught to Aboriginal people as a means of demonstrating civility and as preparation for assimilation into white Australian society. </p>
<p>One of the first missions to explicitly use the violin in attempts to “civilise” Aboriginal people was on the <a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article166997170">New Norcia Mission</a>, north of Perth, in operation from 1848 until 1974.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536479/original/file-20230710-17-33v20y.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="8 young Aboriginal boys with violins, a bearded man with a cello." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536479/original/file-20230710-17-33v20y.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536479/original/file-20230710-17-33v20y.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536479/original/file-20230710-17-33v20y.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536479/original/file-20230710-17-33v20y.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=451&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536479/original/file-20230710-17-33v20y.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536479/original/file-20230710-17-33v20y.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536479/original/file-20230710-17-33v20y.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Spanish teacher and his Aboriginal pupils at the Mission at New Norcia, West Australia, 1896.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/71246042">Trove</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Aboriginal people continued to play the violin even when not prescribed. This does not mean the “civilising” mission was a success. Aboriginal people used music in the creation and preservation of individual, cultural and collective identities. </p>
<p>The violin was used on their own terms.</p>
<p>Peter Jetta was a Nyungar man born around 1872 who lived on the New Norcia Mission. Jetta used the violin as a hybrid expression of his own traditional culture. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536459/original/file-20230710-21-cw4d8i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="An Aboriginal man plays the violin. Text reads: A minstrel." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536459/original/file-20230710-21-cw4d8i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536459/original/file-20230710-21-cw4d8i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1234&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536459/original/file-20230710-21-cw4d8i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1234&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536459/original/file-20230710-21-cw4d8i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1234&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536459/original/file-20230710-21-cw4d8i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1551&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536459/original/file-20230710-21-cw4d8i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1551&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536459/original/file-20230710-21-cw4d8i.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1551&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Peter Jetta, photographed for the Western Mail, 1933.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/37694524">Trove</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As historian <a href="https://uwap.uwa.edu.au/products/dancing-in-shadows-histories-of-nyungar-performance">Anna Haebich writes</a>, Jetta played the violin for local dances, weddings and Nyungar-only campfire gatherings in the bush. </p>
<p>“Old and new songs and dances mingled together reviving flagging spirits with the healing joy of being together as they had for millennia,” she says.</p>
<p>With this fusion of music, Jetta used the violin to enhance and maintain a sense of community. </p>
<p>The need for community would have been particularly acute on missions where many aspects of traditional life had been removed. Community and connection is an intrinsic element of Indigenous culture and its continuity. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/an-ode-to-my-grandmother-remaking-the-past-using-oral-histories-theatre-and-music-180575">An Ode To My Grandmother: remaking the past using oral histories, theatre and music</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>An Aboriginal jazz band</h2>
<p>In 1933, the Singleton Argus <a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article81683811">published</a> a story on the wedding of Robert Silva and Mildred Bartholomew. The couple were living at Yellow Rock, a reserve at the base of the Blue Mountains near Sydney.</p>
<p>Music was provided by an Aboriginal jazz band playing locally made violins, banjos, steel guitars and gum leaves. </p>
<p>This couple walking down the aisle as these musicians played the Wedding March provides a rich evocation of the way western instruments were incorporated into Aboriginal music and events on their own terms. </p>
<h2>Violins at a corroboree</h2>
<p>An article <a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article162145633">from the Northern Champion</a> in 1934 recounts a concert and corroboree that occurred in Purfleet, New South Wales, for the local “townspeople”. We can assume many in the audience were white.</p>
<p>The first part of the program was devoted to songs and native dances, followed by a corroboree which illustrated elements of native lore. A <a href="https://midcoaststories.com/2022/01/purfleet-gum-leaf-band/">gumleaf band</a> and orchestra concluded the program. Each instrument was homemade and included single-string fiddles, violins and ukuleles made from tea chests.</p>
<p>These musicians combined their familiar traditions and cultures with European instruments. They were not only keeping cultural practices alive and carrying traditional knowledge forward, but also educating the broader population.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536745/original/file-20230711-28-514lz3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536745/original/file-20230711-28-514lz3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536745/original/file-20230711-28-514lz3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=794&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536745/original/file-20230711-28-514lz3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=794&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536745/original/file-20230711-28-514lz3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=794&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536745/original/file-20230711-28-514lz3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=998&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536745/original/file-20230711-28-514lz3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=998&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536745/original/file-20230711-28-514lz3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=998&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Band from Purfleet, NSW, about 1909. Bert Marr, violin; Fred Dumas , accordion; Bob Bungie, Banjo; Minnie and Hazel Dungie, vocals; Harry Dumas , auto-harp.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Australian Aboriginal Studies</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While some performances by Aboriginal people were organised to protest the repressive governmental policies of 20th century Australia, other performances were organised as a willingness to share cultural diversity to both educate and engage non-Indigenous audiences. </p>
<p>These performances acted as a channel for cultural continuation within changing social and political agendas.</p>
<h2>Indigenous players today</h2>
<p>These historical violinists are the predecessors of creative and innovative Indigenous string players who enrich our contemporary cultural life today. </p>
<p>Noongar violist, composer and conductor Aaron Wyatt made history in 2022 as the first Indigenous <a href="https://limelightmagazine.com.au/news/history-will-be-made-tonight-at-the-mso/">conductor of a state orchestra</a>. </p>
<p>Wyatt’s <a href="https://limelightmagazine.com.au/features/aaron-wyatt-the-coming-dawn/">compositions</a> draw on the tone colour of Western string instruments and Didgeridoo to reflect the beauty of Australian landscapes and convey an Indigenous connection to Country.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/w30IR3kCSKk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Ngiyampaa, Yuin, Bandjalang and Gumbangirr violinist <a href="https://ericavery.com.au/about/">Eric Avery</a> creates starkly original pieces for voice and violin that evoke a powerful connection to his ancestors, culture and identity.</p>
<p>Both Wyatt and Avery exceed and surpass the archetype of classical string playing to create immensely original and modern compositions. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-tasmanian-requiem-is-a-musical-reckoning-and-a-pathway-to-reconciliation-95435">A Tasmanian Requiem is a musical reckoning, and a pathway to reconciliation</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/208368/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Laura Case receives funding from the Henderson Postgraduate Scholarship.</span></em></p>Western music was often taught to Aboriginal people as preparation for assimilation into white Australian society – but Aboriginal people continued to play the violin even when not prescribed.Laura Case, PhD Candidate, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2077962023-06-28T12:35:03Z2023-06-28T12:35:03ZUS music education has a history of anti-Blackness that is finally being confronted<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534363/original/file-20230627-26812-uskrxe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=862%2C116%2C5128%2C3871&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">These multicolored notes reflect the diversity of music across the world.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/musical-note-shape-bokeh-backdrop-royalty-free-image/1147839051?phrase=music+theory+notes&adppopup=true">MirageC/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When it comes to achieving racial diversity, music education at the university level in the U.S. still has a long way to go. </p>
<p>One of the leading professional organizations, the Society for Music Theory, <a href="https://societymusictheory.org/announcement/executive-board-response-journal-schenkerian-studies-vol-12-2020-07">put it bluntly</a> in 2020: “We humbly acknowledge that we have much work to do to dismantle the whiteness and systemic racism that deeply shape our discipline,” the group wrote.</p>
<p>The focus on white, male Europeans in textbooks and music selected for study has been <a href="https://theconversation.com/music-education-has-a-race-problem-and-universities-must-address-it-143719">called into question</a> by countless scholars and practitioners because of <a href="https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/03/can-music-theory-education-overcome-its-whiteness-problem">music education’s deep roots</a> in anti-Blackness. </p>
<p>In recent years, the simplest solution for music professors has been to find nonwhite classical composers and use their work on a program or concert to demonstrate the school’s commitment to diversity. One person whose work some professors have used in such a way is <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/the-rediscovery-of-florence-price">Florence Price</a>. A composer and music teacher who died in 1953, Price is considered to be one of the first Black female musicians with mainstream appeal.</p>
<p>But <a href="http://philipewell.com/">in my view</a> as one of only a few Black scholars in the field of music theory, such diversity efforts often serve only to reinforce the whiteness and maleness of the system. </p>
<p>Ethnomusicologist Dylan Robinson <a href="https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/is/2019-v39-n1-is05836/1075347ar.pdf">calls these efforts</a> “additive inclusion” in that they give the impression of making positive change but serve only to maintain an overemphasis on the work of white male Europeans.</p>
<h2>Music theory textbooks</h2>
<p>In 2020, <a href="https://www.furman.edu/people/megan-lyons/#">music theorist Megan Lyons</a> and I did <a href="https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.20.26.2/mto.20.26.2.ewell.html">an analysis</a> of the seven most common undergraduate music theory textbooks in the U.S. </p>
<p>We wanted to establish a baseline of the racial and gender makeup of the composers represented in the books to see what teachers were offering to our students as the most important music to consider in the undergraduate music major.</p>
<p>Music theory courses, usually spread over four or five semesters, are often considered the most crucial aspect of the major, and theory textbooks are presented as authoritative sources that outline the essentials of the discipline. </p>
<p>Representative titles include “Harmony and Voice Leading,” “Harmony in Context,” “Harmonic Practice in Tonal Music” and “Concise Introduction to Tonal Harmony.” </p>
<p>Looming large in these textbooks is the word “<a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/harmony-music">harmony</a>,” the sound that is heard when two or more instruments or voices sound together, though in a global context the term has other meanings as well. What is considered harmony in the U.S. is based on European notions of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/tonality">tonality</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/pitch-music">pitch</a>, <a href="https://www.simplifyingtheory.com/music-scales/">scale</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/mode-music">mode</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/key-music">key</a> and <a href="https://online.berklee.edu/takenote/conjunct-disjunct-melody-basic-definitions/">melody</a>.</p>
<p>The three composers the books most commonly represented were Germans <a href="https://www.biography.com/musicians/johann-sebastian-bach">Johann Sebastian Bach</a> and <a href="https://www.bl.uk/people/ludwig-van-beethoven">Ludwig van Beethoven</a> and Austrian <a href="https://www.operaphila.org/whats-on/on-stage-2016-2017/figaro/composer/">Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A black and white portrait of a white man wearing a white powdered wig and holding a sheet of music." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534173/original/file-20230626-12748-u5iebb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534173/original/file-20230626-12748-u5iebb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=646&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534173/original/file-20230626-12748-u5iebb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=646&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534173/original/file-20230626-12748-u5iebb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=646&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534173/original/file-20230626-12748-u5iebb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=812&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534173/original/file-20230626-12748-u5iebb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=812&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534173/original/file-20230626-12748-u5iebb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=812&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A mid-19th-century engraving of Johann Sebastian Bach.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/illustration/bach-antique-engraved-portrait-royalty-free-illustration/164111851?phrase=Black+classical+musical+composer&adppopup=true">FierceAbin/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We found that of the nearly 3,000 musical examples cited in the textbooks, only 49 were written by composers who were not white and only 68 were written by composers who were not men. </p>
<p>On rare occasions those two subgroups overlapped, as with Florence Price. Only two examples were written by Asian composers.</p>
<p>All told, almost 98% of the musical examples were written by white men who mostly spoke German, and these seven textbooks represented about 96% of the market share.</p>
<p>Left out of textbooks are the many African American musicians who contributed significantly to American music, such as classical composers <a href="https://songofamerica.net/composer/dett-robert-nathaniel/">Nathaniel Dett</a>, <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200038842/">James Reese Europe</a>, <a href="https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/blogs/lapl/julia-perry-american-neoclassicist">Julia Perry</a> and <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200038858/">Clarence Cameron White</a>. </p>
<p>Also generally excluded were nonclassical genres like jazz, blues or bluegrass, or contemporary popular music such as hip-hop, soul or punk. </p>
<h2>Anti-Blackness in music conservatories</h2>
<p>American music academies generally reflect the social norms of the day. Anti-Blackness was commonly accepted in all music institutions until well into the 20th century through the <a href="https://www.press.umich.edu/11865737/destined_to_fail">eugenics of music pedagogue Carl Seashore</a>, the <a href="https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/am/article/38/4/395/261756">white supremacy of the composer-pianist John Powell</a> and the <a href="https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.20.26.2/mto.20.26.2.ewell.html">racism of music theorist Heinrich Schenker</a>.</p>
<p>In her 2019 master’s thesis “A Message of Inclusion, A History of Exclusion: Racial Injustice at the Peabody Institute,” violinist Sarah Thomas details a <a href="https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/62108">common American story of racial angst</a> in higher education. </p>
<p>Thomas focused on the Peabody Institute, founded in 1857 in Baltimore, Maryland and the oldest U.S. music institution, and its board members’ letters about the possible admission of Black pianist Paul Brent.</p>
<p>In July 1949, Peabody President William Marbury <a href="https://exhibits.library.jhu.edu/exhibits/show/a-message-of-inclusion/policy-change-at-peabody/acceptance-of-brent">wrote the school’s board of directors</a> and reminded board members of the school’s unofficial policy at the time:</p>
<p>“We are brought face to face with the issue whether to modify our long-standing rule against the admission of negro students,” Marbury wrote. </p>
<p>Once the issue was put to a vote, only one board member, Douglas Gordon, openly opposed admitting Brent and cast the one dissenting vote. </p>
<p>“It seems to me that it would be a great mistake to change the present policy,” <a href="https://exhibits.library.jhu.edu/exhibits/show/a-message-of-inclusion/policy-change-at-peabody/acceptance-of-brent">Gordon wrote</a>. “In our climate the presence of negroes can to some be extremely offensive.” </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="One black student stands with a group of white classmates." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/533001/original/file-20230620-12148-mzmx1q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/533001/original/file-20230620-12148-mzmx1q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533001/original/file-20230620-12148-mzmx1q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533001/original/file-20230620-12148-mzmx1q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=474&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533001/original/file-20230620-12148-mzmx1q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533001/original/file-20230620-12148-mzmx1q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/533001/original/file-20230620-12148-mzmx1q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Paul A. Brent, the first Black student to enroll at the Peabody Conservatory, is second from the right in the back row in this 1953 photograph.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://cdm16613.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p16613coll11/id/285">Peabody Institute</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Though Brent was admitted and became the first Black student to enroll at Peabody, the abhorrent views of Gordon still remain present today in more subtle forms. </p>
<p>The study of jazz is one such example of racial exclusion. </p>
<p>Generally considered a Black musical genre, jazz is now part of most music educational institutions, but is virtually always separate from the mainstream music major. </p>
<p>In a few cases, students are able to major in jazz. But in most cases, if students wants to major in jazz, they must major in classical music while playing jazz on the side.</p>
<h2>Change in music education is coming</h2>
<p>Citing declining enrollments for music majors across the country, the College Music Society in 2014 published a <a href="https://www.music.org/pdf/pubs/tfumm/TFUMM.pdf">manifesto for change</a> to the undergraduate music major.
It deemphasized music and methods of the Western canon while emphasizing the need for students to engage with music from different cultures and with new technologies. </p>
<p>This change has taken many forms. </p>
<p>Musicians are rethinking their curricula to treat all music of the world on equal footing as the European standards. </p>
<p>Piano proficiency and European language requirements are being reconsidered – in some cases cast aside – by music institutions. Other schools are creating new music majors for those working with digital sound and sound design, or for those studying popular genres such as blues, rock, metal and country. </p>
<p>Academic work in music is changing as well, and students can now at times get credit for work <a href="https://theconversation.com/hip-hop-professor-looks-to-open-doors-with-worlds-first-peer-reviewed-rap-album-153761">outside of traditional paper writing</a>.</p>
<p>It’s my belief that the sooner we musicians, irrespective of our own identities, can face up to our racial segregationist past, the sooner we can all reap the benefits of our nation’s unique musical diversity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207796/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Philip Ewell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The predominantly white European field of music education in the US is changing radically these days as schools confront anti-Black histories.Philip Ewell, Professor of music theory, Hunter CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2071062023-06-06T06:35:13Z2023-06-06T06:35:13ZIntimate and immense: remembering Kaija Saariaho, one of the greatest composers of our time<p>The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho passed away Friday at the age of 70. </p>
<p>There’s been an outpouring of grief, sadness and love on social media and in statements from orchestras, festivals and opera companies as the music community processes the loss of one of the greatest composers of our time.</p>
<p>When I was a young composer, the first work by Saariaho I heard live was Jardin Secret I (1985) at the 1988 Hong Kong ISCM Festival. </p>
<p>It was the first time the International Society of Contemporary Music had staged a festival in an Asian country, and many European composers were in attendance. </p>
<p>I was swept up by the work with its haunting bell tones transformed through electronics. The music sounded simultaneously familiar and alien, intimate and immense. I was awed by the imposing presence of a composer I knew only from <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/modern-music-and-after-9780199740505?cc=us&lang=en&">music history texts</a>.</p>
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<p>Later, we met when I served on some competition juries she chaired. </p>
<p>I briefly got to know someone of warm generosity, incisive knowledge and integrity who brought a hilariously dry wit and impeccable timing to telling stories.</p>
<h2>Operas of love and loss of innocence</h2>
<p>Saariaho will be remembered for her many illustrious achievements in forging a luminous musical language out of instrumental and electronic resources, the composition of five major operas, and through numerous orchestral works often showcasing close collaborators as soloists.</p>
<p>Her career reached its peak with two operas.</p>
<p><em>L’amour de loin</em> (Love from afar) created a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/17/arts/opera-review-a-prince-idealizes-his-love-from-afar.html">sensation</a> when it premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 2000 in a production by American director Peter Sellars. </p>
<p>In a lyrical retelling of an enigmatic story of love and spiritual yearning, with a libretto by Lebanese-French writer Amin Maalouf, it has become one of the most <a href="https://operawire.com/in-tribute-to-her-an-exploration-of-kaija-saariahos-operas/">successful</a> 21st century operas.</p>
<p>Hypnotic, suspended harmonies and modal melodies create an alternative, idealised world in which one has time to contemplate themes of obsession, devotion and the realities and illusions of love.</p>
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<p>In 2016, it was the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/arts/music/review-met-opera-amour-de-loin-kaija-saariaho.html">first opera by a female composer</a> to be staged at the Metropolitan Opera in New York since the production of Ethel Smyth’s <em>Der Wald</em> (The Forest) in 1903. </p>
<p>Two decades later, Saariaho’s last opera Innocence (2018) was described by the New Yorker as a “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-sublime-terror-of-kaija-saariahos-innocence">monumental cry against gun violence</a>”. Again, it was immediately hailed as a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/arts/music/innocence-saariaho-opera-aix.html">masterpiece</a> at its premiere at the 2021 Aix-en-Provence Festival in France.</p>
<p>Innocence is set in nine languages with a multitude of intersecting stories, but its genius lies in the way the luminously pulsing music is used to maintain dramatic momentum and a clear through line. </p>
<p>Following its premiere, Innocence has been taken up by major opera houses around the world.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/la-passion-de-simone-brings-simone-weils-sufferings-to-life-but-the-movements-feel-static-109794">La Passion de Simone brings Simone Weil's sufferings to life, but the movements feel static</a>
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<h2>A trailblazer for composers</h2>
<p>Since the mid-80s, a time when there were very few prominent women composers on the international stage, Saariaho has been a major role model.</p>
<p>She <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2016/12/03/503986298/half-of-humanity-has-something-to-say-composer-kaija-saariaho-on-her-met-debut">resented</a> the “woman composer” label and spoke infrequently about the prejudices and challenges she had encountered in the decidedly male-dominated world of classical music. </p>
<p>Yet on the occasions when Saariaho <a href="https://slippedisc.com/2013/11/the-composer-kaija-saariaho-on-sexism-in-classical-music/">did address this topic</a>, she conceded there was a role she could play in raising consciousness about the persistence of gender inequality in music. </p>
<p>In an <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2016/12/03/503986298/half-of-humanity-has-something-to-say-composer-kaija-saariaho-on-her-met-debut">interview for NPR</a> in 2016 she said:</p>
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<p>I’ve seen it with young women who are battling with the same things I was battling […] 35 years ago. […] Maybe we, then, should speak about it, even if it seems so unbelievable. You know, half of humanity has something to say.</p>
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<p>Saariaho opened pathways for many composers across different generations and practices. Her work alchemised several 20th century musical trends that had tended to inhabit separate “camps” into a unique and emotionally powerful style with broad appeal for both specialists and the general public. </p>
<p>Early on, she engaged with a modernist focus on a detailed chiselling of sounds working with techniques that extended the capacities of any virtuoso performer performing her work. </p>
<p>Working at IRCAM (the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music) in Paris in the 1980s, she created several genre-breaking works.</p>
<p>Lichtbogen (1985/86) for ensemble with live electronics used computer-aided analyses of sound to shape huge sweeping brushstrokes of sensuous sound. </p>
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<p>She worked within the musical field of “<a href="https://www.rem.routledge.com/articles/spectralism#:%7E:text=Spectralism%20is%20a%20tendency%20in,point%20of%20departure%20for%20composition">spectralism</a>”, where the analysis of the acoustic properties of sound is used as the basis of composition. This opened up new approaches to harmony in her music.</p>
<p>Orion (2002) for large orchestra is an example of how she could build up layer upon layer of sound where you hear individual colours in translucent detail within epic, billowing clouds of resonance.</p>
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<p>Her operatic works from 2000 on brought a narrative directness, a ravishing beauty and devastating emotional punch that saw her work embraced by audiences around the world.</p>
<h2>Soul listening</h2>
<p>At the heart of her work was a kind of soul-listening and deep connection to nature. </p>
<p>In 2015, I had the privilege of going for a walk with Saariaho in a snowy landscape outside Hämeenlinna, Finland (the birthplace of Sibelius). As we walked, I got to hear the sounds of cracking ice and the whisper of birch trees through the lens of her delicate observations.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/02/arts/music/kaija-saariaho-dead.html">quoted in The New York Times</a>, she remarked to her biographer Pirkko Moisala:</p>
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<p>The task of today’s artist is to nurture with spiritually rich art. […] To provide new spiritual dimensions. To express with greater richness, which does not always mean more complexity but with greater delicacy.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-sound-of-silence-why-arent-australias-female-composers-being-heard-59743">The sound of silence: why aren't Australia's female composers being heard?</a>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Liza Lim does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Finnish composer passed away Friday at the age of 70. She was someone of immense generosity, incisive knowledge and integrity.Liza Lim, Professor, Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2064792023-05-31T12:38:25Z2023-05-31T12:38:25ZHow the sounds of ‘Succession’ shred the grandeur and respect the characters so desperately try to project<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528918/original/file-20230529-25-6xjh0a.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=376%2C0%2C913%2C669&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">While the Roy siblings are shielded by their wealth, the show's music chips away at their armor.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/05/21/arts/21succession/21succession-superJumbo.jpg">Macall Polay/HBO</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>HBO’s “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7660850/">Succession</a>” delivered its grand finale on May 28, 2023 – the climax of four award-packed seasons of searing put-downs, nihilistic humor and desperate power plays. </p>
<p>The show tells the story of ailing media tycoon Logan Roy and his four horrid children who aim to inherit his empire. I loved it because it rendered despicable people in power as human – funny, pathetic, capable of deep feeling – without once trying to redeem them.</p>
<p><a href="https://music.berkeley.edu/people/delia-casadei/">But as a music historian</a>, I will miss the series’ use of music and sound the most. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/25/arts/television/succession-soundtrack-classical-music.html">As many critics have noticed</a>, one of the series’ best elements is its soundtrack, which is as complex and propulsive as the drama it accompanies.</p>
<p>To me, the show’s clever sound design, combined with composer <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1615109/">Nicholas Britell’s</a> gleefully dark score, reflects a level of emotional sophistication that is unrivaled on television. </p>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="93" data-image="" data-title="The theme song for 'Succession,' composed by Nicholas Britell" data-size="1488813" data-source="YouTube/HBO" data-source-url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77PsqaWzwG0" data-license="" data-license-url="">
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The theme song for ‘Succession,’ composed by Nicholas Britell.
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<h2>Corrupting classical music</h2>
<p>Most contemporary political dramas are about corruption, and music is great at progressively turning something seemingly wholesome into something sour. </p>
<p>Traditionally, this is done by adding <a href="https://sites.tufts.edu/markdevoto/files/2015/10/Chromaticism.pdf">chromaticism</a> – the black keys of the piano keyboard – into the chords and melody, which produces a sense of darkening and dissonance. But these days, anything sounding weird – an off-beat rhythm, an unexpected sound – can do the trick. It is the composer’s skill in layering the strangeness into the music that makes the difference. </p>
<p>Britell <a href="https://youtu.be/X0WzqanwlG0?t=216">has described</a> being inspired by European late-18th century music. And the theme of “Succession” does draw from a couple of unmemorable bars from Beethoven’s “<a href="https://youtu.be/SrcOcKYQX3c?t=139">Pathétique Sonata</a>,” slowed down and with a few changed notes. </p>
<p>However, I’d say the theme song’s soundworld is closer to the opening dance of Sergei Prokofiev’s 1935 ballet “<a href="https://youtu.be/u3r5I9RolCA?t=101">Romeo and Juliet</a>” or Sergei Rachmaninov’s <a href="https://youtu.be/L1D-EQNTZWI?t=15">famous 1892 piano prelude in C Sharp minor</a>: big romantic pieces that swing between bass notes and thick block chords like the batter of a church bell.</p>
<p>But Britell then adds details that work in outlandish tension with the romantic musical language he’s adopted.</p>
<p>For example, the piano that plays the theme song is audibly out of tune. That’s no accident. Meanwhile, the melody, which is in a high register, awkwardly tries, but ultimately fails, to squirm its way to a brighter key. Throughout the show, there are a lot of reality-show-style pans to the faces of characters saying things like “I am excited.” This is their music.</p>
<p>The rhythm is littered by small dissonant accents in the upper register of the piano that sound like a fun-house version of the “low battery” sound on a cellphone. The effect is alarming – and oddly befitting of the topic of a corrupt media conglomerate.</p>
<p>Lastly, Britell is a hip-hop beat maker and layers the theme song with a cheesy 1990s synthesizer beat. This adds bounce, and a smirk, to the romantic broodiness of the chords and melody. </p>
<p>In his very 21st-century way, Britell festoons earnest Romantic music with details that gleefully desecrate it, bringing viewers right into the psychological dynamics of the show’s protagonists: a hunger for power, accompanied by levels of self-loathing that vacillate between comedy and tragedy.</p>
<h2>Brood too much and the effect is lost</h2>
<p>For comparison, “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1856010/">House of Cards</a>,” which follows a crooked politician’s quest for the U.S. presidency, and “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4236770/">Yellowstone</a>,” which tells the story of a Montana landowning family’s mission to ward off developers, Indigenous leaders and environmental activists, also attempt to convey a grim mood and crookedness in their music. </p>
<p>Both shows have rightly garnered attention and praise. Yet they, unlike “Succession,” have, in my view, underwhelming scores.</p>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="96" data-image="" data-title="The title theme for 'House of Cards,' composed by Jeff Beal." data-size="1537197" data-source="YouTube/Simon" data-source-url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9w-O60x1bYk" data-license="" data-license-url="">
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The title theme for ‘House of Cards,’ composed by Jeff Beal.
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<p>Their theme songs are symphonic, which befits the grandeur of the topic and obscene privilege of the characters; tunes are carried in the deeper, lower range, rather than the more customary bright, high register. Both theme songs make heavy use of the lower strings of violas, cellos and double basses, which further darken the sonic palette. </p>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="62" data-image="" data-title="The title theme for 'Yellowstone,' composed by Brian Tyler." data-size="996970" data-source="YouTube/EndtheProject" data-source-url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WOgBtFnZmY" data-license="" data-license-url="">
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The title theme for ‘Yellowstone,’ composed by Brian Tyler.
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<p>The composers also make an effort to signal corruption through momentarily dissonant chords or notes. At the end of the opening credits of “House of Cards,” you can hear it <a href="https://youtu.be/9w-O60x1bYk?t=70">in the twang of the electric guitar</a>. And in “Yellowstone,” Tyler uses <a href="https://sites.tufts.edu/markdevoto/files/2015/10/Chromaticism.pdf">chromaticism</a> to <a href="https://youtu.be/1WOgBtFnZmY?t=23">decorate the melody</a>. </p>
<p>These tricks, however, don’t quite land. </p>
<p>In order for the stain of corruption to stand out, musically and otherwise, it has to operate against a relatively clean background. The scores for both “House of Cards” and “Yellowstone” are already dark and twisty to begin with, which makes the “staining” effect harder to pull off. </p>
<p>This is where Britell’s astute ways of combining brightness and darkness in “Succession’s” music make all the difference.</p>
<h2>Hearing what the characters hear</h2>
<p>The unusual sound design in “Succession” also unveiled the series’ psychological complexity.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.nfi.edu/sound-design/">Sound design</a> indicates the ways in which all sounds, from noises to dialogue and music, are mixed into the soundtrack.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.vulture.com/article/succession-recap-series-premiere-season-1-episode-1-celebration.html">In the pilot episode</a>, viewers meet Kendall Roy, an eminently slappable finance bro and heir apparent to his father’s company. He’s being chauffeured to a business meeting, and he’s bouncing in the back seat to the Beastie Boys’ “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ny6hwUOFvlw">An Open Letter to New York</a>.” </p>
<p>It’s utterly cringeworthy: a wealthy white dude using hip-hop as emotional fluffing. </p>
<p>The Beastie Boys, as Britell and the showrunners must know, <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/popular-music/article/abs/beastie-boys-jews-in-whiteface/ECA1F2EFFF95A757B7F70A9A2B183921">have been criticized</a> for being white Jewish musicians parading as white working-class boys aping, in turn, Black hip-hop artists. At first the Beastie Boys blare out on the soundtrack; seconds later, their music disappears into Kendall’s headphones, and viewers hear his whiny voice rapping the lyrics. </p>
<p>Suddenly, we suspect he might hate himself more than we already do. </p>
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<p>Film scholar <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/15053054">Claudia Gorbman</a> first theorized the effect toyed with here by “Succession’s” award-winning sound designers, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0003635/">Nicholas Renbeck</a> and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0471397/">Andy Kris</a>.</p>
<p>Gorbman highlights the distinction between “diegetic music” – music playing in the background, say, at a party, or ambient sounds, like cutlery and crockery – that can be heard by the characters in the film, and “<a href="https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/diegetic-vs-non-diegetic-sound-guide-75566/">non-diegetic music</a>,” which is music heard only by the film’s audience and not by the characters. </p>
<p>The balance between these two kinds of music and sounds creates the psychological setup for the story: Diegetic implies that the characters’ world is not quite the audience’s own. Non-diegetic, on the other hand, implies that the filmmakers are conveying the characters’ emotions to the audience, like when the music comes in as two romantic leads share a kiss. </p>
<p>The switch from non-diegetic to diegetic in Kendall’s entrance gives viewers a sense that they are spying on his fragile self-delusion. He is slippery, tweaky, unknown – even to himself.</p>
<h2>Haunted by water</h2>
<p>Britell’s music, and the show’s use of diegetic and non-diegetic sound, may be one of the reasons why, even four seasons in, that none of the show’s fans could confidently anticipate who would succeed the family’s patriarch.</p>
<p>The series that begins with Kendall fittingly ends with him, too, as he walks, in a daze, along the Hudson River. The non-diegetic theme song plays in the background one last time. Then, for a brief moment – before a hard cut to a black screen – the sound goes diegetic: Viewers hear, with Kendall, the sound of the river flowing.</p>
<p>It’s a shocking moment. The show’s sound designers <a href="https://www.asoundeffect.com/succession-sound/">deliberately avoided ambient noises</a> so as to show how the Roy siblings are too privileged and too busy scheming to notice their surroundings. </p>
<p>The moment Kendall hears the Hudson, everyone understands – first by ear, then by sight – that this story is over.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/206479/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Delia Casadei does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Composer Nicholas Britell festoons earnest Romantic music with sounds that gleefully desecrate it, underscoring the show’s emotional core: a lust for power joined by immense self-loathing.Delia Casadei, Assistant Professor of Music, University of California, BerkeleyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2023302023-04-11T16:12:17Z2023-04-11T16:12:17ZQuartet review: did four women really change the world of classical music?<p>The subtitle of <a href="https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571366101-quartet/">Quartet</a>, historian Leah Broad’s book about four UK women composers, reads boldly: How Four Women Changed the Musical World.</p>
<p>But I am unsure that the musical world – for Broad, classical music – was changed in any meaningful way by composers <a href="https://www.bl.uk/people/ethel-smyth">Ethel Smyth (b.1858)</a> <a href="https://www.rebeccaclarke.org/">Rebecca Clarke (b.1886)</a>, <a href="https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/info/50137/music_and_performance/1464/dorothy_howell">Dorothy Howell (b.1898)</a> and <a href="https://www.classical-music.com/composers/carwithen-doreen/">Doreen Carwithen (b.1922)</a>, however fascinating their lives and careers, and however much their music deserves to be more widely heard.</p>
<p>Although Broad is a passionate advocate for these women’s music, convincingly arguing that it should be heard far more, she never really explains how her chosen women might have changed their or our musical worlds – or even what changing the musical world might mean. Given the book’s title, this is a fundamental flaw.</p>
<p>Broad paints vivid, at times over-imagined, pictures of all four women and the worlds in which they lived and worked. She deftly interweaves their stories in a chronological tapestry, although she opens the book in 1930 with Ethel Smyth, then in her seventies, conducting the Metropolitan Police Band in musical works including a piece by the then 32-year-old Dorothy Howell.</p>
<p>The other two women are not involved in this particular musical event, although Broad tells us that 43-year-old Rebecca Clarke was giving a concert with the English Ensemble a few miles away, and seven-year-old Doreen Carwithen was practising the piano. In fact, the four women’s paths rarely crossed – hardly surprising given their different generations, circles and career paths.</p>
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<p>When the eldest of the women, Smyth, died in 1944, the youngest, Carwithen, was 21. It was Smyth who was the most radical of the four, loudly challenging assumptions about women’s musical capabilities and refusing to be the meek woman she was expected to be.</p>
<p>Carwithen was in many ways the most conventional, giving up her own composing career to promote and nurture composer <a href="https://www.williamalwyn.co.uk/">William Alwyn</a>, her demanding and often unpleasant married lover and later her husband. </p>
<p>None of these women are part of the musical canon, despite the valiant efforts of performers and scholars, in the way their British male contemporaries were. <a href="https://www.boosey.com/pages/cr/composer/composer_main?composerid=2741&ttype=BIOGRAPHY">Elgar</a> is heard rather than Smyth, and <a href="https://www.boosey.com/pages/cr/composer/composer_main?composerid=2772&ttype=BIOGRAPHY">Delius</a> rather than Clarke. <a href="https://www.bl.uk/people/benjamin-britten">Britten</a> is given many more performances than either Howell or Carwithen.</p>
<p>Both Elgar and Britten were recognised by the British establishment with acclaim and honours that were rarely given to women, although Smyth was made a dame of the British empire in 1922. Throughout their lives, these four women were confronted with the belief that “serious” musical composition was simply beyond the capabilities of their sex.</p>
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<h2>Selective stories</h2>
<p>These are certainly stories that need to be told; stories of women who created bodies of often remarkable, beautiful and powerful music. Broad creates compelling, readable narratives underpinned, as one would expect from an Oxford University musicologist, with considerable research. </p>
<p>However, this is not an academic book. There is no assumption of technical musical knowledge, and lives are carefully placed in wider political and social contexts. Broad perhaps tells us more about these women’s relationships than their music, from Smyth’s long procession of female lovers, through Clarke’s prolonged affair with a married man and Howell’s resolute singledom, to Carwithen’s bewildering devotion to Alwyn.</p>
<p>There are drawbacks to this approach. I find it hard to take that these women are referred to by their first names. So often creative women have been <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/feb/13/whats-in-a-surname-the-female-artists-lost-to-history-because-they-got-married">kept firmly in their place this way</a>, not being granted the respect paid to their male contemporaries who are inevitably referred to by just their <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/10/27/professor-argues-referring-to-famous-composers-by-their-last-names-is-white-supremacy/">surnames</a>. </p>
<p>More troubling are some of Broad’s assumptions and omissions, such as her sidelining of the generation of UK women composers who were slightly younger than Howell but older than Carwithen. This generation, many of whom were friends, includes <a href="https://britishmusiccollection.org.uk/composer/elisabeth-lutyens">Elisabeth Lutyens</a>, <a href="https://britishmusiccollection.org.uk/article/composer-profile-elizabeth-maconchy">Elizabeth Maconchy</a>, <a href="https://britishmusiccollection.org.uk/composer/phyllis-tate">Phyllis Tate</a>, <a href="https://www.schott-music.com/en/person/index/index/urlkey/priaulx-rainier">Priaulx Rainier</a> and <a href="https://britishmusiccollection.org.uk/composer/grace-williams">Grace Williams</a>.</p>
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<p>Some are given a brief mention – Maconchy, Lutyens and Williams are described as “a new, young group of modernist women composers”. But “modernist” seems to have negative connotations for Broad who contrasts Howell’s 1947 violin sonata with “the brutal modernist music being written by so many of her contemporaries”.</p>
<p>In focusing on Carwithen’s achievements as a film composer, Broad plays down Lutyens’s pioneering work in the film industry. She also claims, as do <a href="https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/when-did-women-join-orchestras/#:%7E:text=In%201913%2C%20the%20first%20women,around%20the%20instruments%20they%20played;%20https://leannelangley.com/projects/women-in-the-band-1913/">many others</a>, that when Clarke and five other string players joined the Queen’s Hall Orchestra in 1913, they were “the first women in England to be employed in a professional orchestra”. In fact, women had been <a href="https://etudemagazine.com/etude/1901/10/english-women-in-the-orchestra.html">playing in professional orchestras</a> for many years.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-music/articles/the-society-of-women-musicians">Aeolian Ladies’ Orchestra</a>, for example, was founded and conducted by double bass player Rosabel Watson in the early 1890s. This was not an amateur ensemble and often played canonical repertoire by composers such as Mendelssohn and Grieg, although it also played lighter music at seaside resorts.</p>
<h2>Surprising absence</h2>
<p>With no easy-to-follow footnotes, it is often hard to know how much of Quartet is Broad’s own research. And perhaps the most surprising absence in the book is the lack of overt acknowledgement that Broad gives to those who have gone before her in fighting for these, and other, women and their music.</p>
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<p>The leading Smyth scholar, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/27751853">Elizabeth Wood</a>, for example, is mentioned in Broad’s acknowledgements as one of a list of general writers “whose work has profoundly shaped this book”, but she fails to make clear that Wood’s life’s work was specifically thinking, researching and writing about Smyth. </p>
<p>I remain unconvinced that these four women changed the musical world. Programming and recording more of their music will certainly broaden and enrich the musical world. And this is what Broad seems to be suggesting.</p>
<p>She says that “the tides might be changing”, and that in recent years more of these women’s music is being heard. Certainly, if Quartet’s readers take their lives and music to their hearts as Broad so clearly has, then the way the musical world is both seen and heard may well change.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202330/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sophie Fuller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A new book about female composers in the 19th and 20th centuries misses an opportunity to cast its net wider in the pool of female musical talent and fails to prove the claims of its title.Sophie Fuller, Professor in Gender Studies in Music, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and DanceLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2020292023-03-17T03:12:39Z2023-03-17T03:12:39ZBjörk was the big-ticket name – but Perth Festival’s heart was found in Bikutsi 3000’s afrofuturist musing on African resistance<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515965/original/file-20230316-18-20pk39.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=6%2C0%2C2038%2C1361&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jess Wyld/Perth Festival</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>For the culturally curious, February and March in Perth can be a rich maelstrom, with Perth Fringe and Perth Festival. We have apparently the world’s “<a href="https://fringeworld.com.au/news/7-facts-about-fringe-world-that-ll-make-you-go-hmmmm/">third largest</a>” fringe festival (after Edinburgh and Adelaide), but I’m not sure why this is good. </p>
<p>Whatever the case, audiences must plan and be focused in navigating such a cornucopia of competing works in two simultaneous festivals. </p>
<p>My Perth Festival was complicated by a jaunt to Adelaide (in the middle of that city’s festival and fringe) but I was delighted to be able to follow links between works, including <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/afrofuturism">afrofuturism</a>, <a href="https://www.classical-music.com/features/articles/what-post-classical-music/">post-classical music</a> and arts offering haunting examples of <a href="https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-post-humanism/">post-humanism</a>: that which exceeds, replaces or accompanies the human. </p>
<h2>Deep listening</h2>
<p>Artistic director Iain Grandage’s previous Perth Festivals tended towards light musical programming, both in quantity and emphasis on accessibility – consider the festival obtaining the world record for <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-02/acdc-tribute-highway-to-hell-rocks-perth/12015120">biggest air guitar ensemble</a> in 2020.</p>
<p>This year, however, had many post-classical music highlights which demanded <a href="https://artreview.com/whats-the-point-of-deep-listening-pauline-oliveros/">deep listening</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515956/original/file-20230316-28-7ttkfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Musicians on a deep blue stage." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515956/original/file-20230316-28-7ttkfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515956/original/file-20230316-28-7ttkfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515956/original/file-20230316-28-7ttkfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515956/original/file-20230316-28-7ttkfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515956/original/file-20230316-28-7ttkfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515956/original/file-20230316-28-7ttkfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515956/original/file-20230316-28-7ttkfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Dread Of Voids was an uncompromising night of rich sonic assaults.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Cam Campbell/Perth Festival</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Anthony Pateras’ compositions piano, amplified vocals, clarinet, contrabass and flute with <a href="https://www.anthonypateras.com/bandsprojects/adreadofvoids-2021">A Dread of Voids</a> was an uncompromising night of rich sonic assaults and drone, often with cyclic developmental structures. </p>
<p>Pateras offered a masterful performance, framing the piano with electronics and off kilter pianistic effects such that, for me, it recalled to some degree his other works on prepared piano (where bolts, screws, paper and other materials render strings percussive). </p>
<p>This was followed by Cédric Tiberghien’s performance of <a href="https://matildamarseillaise.com/the-cage-project-en/">John Cage’s suite for prepared piano</a>. Matthias Schack-Arnott crafted a sounding mobile that rotated over Tiberghien. Spun by fans and motors, it gave the performance an air of the inhuman. Tambours and slates were struck above Tiberghien, adding density and counterpoint.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515958/original/file-20230316-28-bwsw9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man at a piano." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515958/original/file-20230316-28-bwsw9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515958/original/file-20230316-28-bwsw9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515958/original/file-20230316-28-bwsw9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515958/original/file-20230316-28-bwsw9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515958/original/file-20230316-28-bwsw9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515958/original/file-20230316-28-bwsw9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515958/original/file-20230316-28-bwsw9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cédric Tiberghien’s performance had an air of the inhuman.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tony McDonough/Perth Festival</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Schack-Arnott also performed in his <a href="http://matthiasschackarnott.com/everywhen/">Everywhen</a>, intimately offered in the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. </p>
<p>Schack-Arnott circled within a lighter, jewel-like mobile, sometimes dragging along the ground ringing metal tubes, bells, seed-pods and more. </p>
<p>Schack-Arnott animated or removed items, before crouching ritualistically to play stones and other items, again accompanied by mechanically driven devices above.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515959/original/file-20230316-28-n6qzuy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515959/original/file-20230316-28-n6qzuy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515959/original/file-20230316-28-n6qzuy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515959/original/file-20230316-28-n6qzuy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515959/original/file-20230316-28-n6qzuy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515959/original/file-20230316-28-n6qzuy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515959/original/file-20230316-28-n6qzuy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515959/original/file-20230316-28-n6qzuy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Everywhen was intimately offered in the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Perth Festival</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The music program closed with Gradient from composer/photographer Olivia Davies, performed by Callum G’Froerer on double-bell trumpet. They offered a sort of aggressive chillout room, where G’Froerer’s looped, breathy, clattery and sometimes rhythmic sounds were accompanied by abstract distortions of images taken at the dilapidated Liberty Theatre.</p>
<h2>Deconstructing cinema and theatre</h2>
<p>Grandage has put First Nations art at the heart of his festivals, together with dance and theatre. </p>
<p>Stephanie Lake’s dance and drumming <a href="https://theconversation.com/innovative-and-thrilling-stephanie-lakes-manifesto-is-a-joy-175332">Manifesto</a> toured from the east. Sadly, it was too wide for Heath Ledger Theatre, with some spectators unable to see the drummers in the wings. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/innovative-and-thrilling-stephanie-lakes-manifesto-is-a-joy-175332">'Innovative and thrilling': Stephanie Lake's Manifesto is a joy</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>I missed Australian Dance Theatre’s <a href="https://limelightmagazine.com.au/reviews/tracker-australian-dance-theatre-and-ilbijerri-theatre-company/">The Tracker</a> and Maatakitj (Clint Bracknell) performing with Kronos Quartet. </p>
<p>Local versions of what Bracknell calls “Noongar-futurism” – inspired by afrofuturism and drawing on electronic dance culture – featured in 2023, with the outdoor opening event of Djoondal offering a <a href="https://www.artshub.com.au/news/reviews/review-djoondal-and-perth-moves-perth-festival-2614249/">fleet of synchronised drones</a> evoking celestial Dreamings.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515960/original/file-20230316-28-trxhws.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Drones light up the sky" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515960/original/file-20230316-28-trxhws.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515960/original/file-20230316-28-trxhws.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515960/original/file-20230316-28-trxhws.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515960/original/file-20230316-28-trxhws.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515960/original/file-20230316-28-trxhws.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515960/original/file-20230316-28-trxhws.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515960/original/file-20230316-28-trxhws.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Djoondal evoked celestial Dreamings.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jarrad Russell/Perth Festival</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Choreographer/director Laura Boynes’ <a href="https://limelightmagazine.com.au/reviews/equations-of-a-falling-body-perth-festival/">Equations of a Falling Body</a> offered a beautiful disorder of objects, bodies and things piled and moved about stage in what has become something of a WA tradition, following Emma Fiswick’s 2021 Festival production of <a href="https://www.seesawmag.com.au/2021/03/dance-to-savour/">Slow Burn, Together</a>.</p>
<p>Aside from Equations of a Falling Body, this year’s theatre and dance highlights were tours of works from the eastern states. </p>
<p>Cyrano, from the Melbourne Theatre Company in association with Black Swan, was an enormously fun vehicle for writer/performer Virginia Gay. The other characters were thespians, so the performance was a cross between Pirandello’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Characters_in_Search_of_an_Author#">Six Characters in Search of an Author</a> and romantic melodrama, a celebratory post-COVID work, if perhaps ultimately forgettable.</p>
<p>The mobile screens above the stage for <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-production-to-satisfy-sydneys-darkest-imaginings-sydney-theatre-companys-strange-case-of-dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-185596">The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde</a>, from Sydney Theatre Company, produced not so much director Kip Williams’ professed “cine-theatre”, as a deconstructing of the inhuman cinematic machine itself. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515961/original/file-20230316-1658-i50sjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515961/original/file-20230316-1658-i50sjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515961/original/file-20230316-1658-i50sjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515961/original/file-20230316-1658-i50sjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515961/original/file-20230316-1658-i50sjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515961/original/file-20230316-1658-i50sjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515961/original/file-20230316-1658-i50sjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515961/original/file-20230316-1658-i50sjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was a deconstructing the inhuman cinematic machine itself.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Daniel Boud/Perth Festival</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This suited Williams’ exploration of distorting mirrors and mediated character doubles, which was so polished as to be all but seamless. In this production, however, Williams lacks any improvisatory fun and sense of exploration in his use of screens. I preferred the take on screen-enhanced theatre from local company The Last Great Hunt, whose exceptional <a href="https://www.outinperth.com/review-the-last-great-hunt-bottle-brilliance-with-le-nor-the-rain/">Lé Nør [the rain]</a> in the 2019 festival pointed to the inconsistency between screen image and ludicrous on-stage setups, celebrating cine-theatrical playfulness.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-production-to-satisfy-sydneys-darkest-imaginings-sydney-theatre-companys-strange-case-of-dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-185596">A production to satisfy Sydney's darkest imaginings: Sydney Theatre Company's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A transcultural museological performance</h2>
<p>Black Futurist music was another feature of the 2023 festival. </p>
<p>Franco-Cameroonian <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gncpiNV5sIQ">Bikutsi 3000</a> presented an afrofuturist musing on African resistance to Western culture through dance-as-peaceful-combat. </p>
<p>With an African-European cast led by Blick Bassy, Bikutsi 3000 featured selections from the <a href="https://www.quaibranly.fr/en/">musée du quai Branly</a>’s film archives, framed as a faux lecture combined with projected displays of fantastist African couture. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515962/original/file-20230316-2270-vqytnx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Women dancing." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515962/original/file-20230316-2270-vqytnx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515962/original/file-20230316-2270-vqytnx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515962/original/file-20230316-2270-vqytnx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515962/original/file-20230316-2270-vqytnx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515962/original/file-20230316-2270-vqytnx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515962/original/file-20230316-2270-vqytnx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515962/original/file-20230316-2270-vqytnx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Bikutsi 3000 presented an afrofuturist musing on African resistance to Western culture.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jess Wyld/Perth Festival</span></span>
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<p>Voiceover text was paired with monumental living portraits of fictional matriarchs representing Cameroon, Namibia, Togo, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi. </p>
<p>Accompanied by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOKEwtggKvw">throbbing house and hip hop</a>, it was punctuated by forceful Afro-fusion dance, mostly performed singly or in pairs, which combined regional forms of voguing, shade, hip hop, krumping and dancehall, alongside <a href="http://www.chinafrica.cn/Homepage/202108/t20210830_800256928.html">Indigenous African dance</a>. </p>
<p>Forceful energies rolled across the dancers’ chests while their limbs dropped and weaved. Legs and arms pumped or flew and circled. Bodies close to the ground flowed like liquid or shook vigorously. </p>
<p>Choreographer/dancers Nadeeya Gabrieli Kalati, Audrey Carlita, Martine Mbock and Mwendwa Marchand were exceptional, while Bassy’s inventive combination of blaring digital tones and bullhorns with African drumming and vocals recalled the best of South Africa’s electronic dance music scene.</p>
<p>As a transcultural museological performance, Bikutsi 3000 was nearly unique. Presented at the Studio Underground in the State Theatre Centre, it is unfortunate it wasn’t hosted at a museum. Presenting Bikutsi 3000 in the quai Branly was an implicit rebuke to the Anglo-European institutions still in charge of colonial heritage.</p>
<h2>The Romantic sublime</h2>
<p>The festival showstopper was Björk’s Cornucopia. Björk’s recordings are complex, multi-tracked works, and, like Bikutsi 3000, her stadium performance supplemented prerecorded material.</p>
<p>This produced hiccups, as when the on-stage use of bailers in a water tank to make music was inaudible and out of synchronisation. </p>
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<span class="caption">When Björk’s production gelled, it was magic.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Santiago Felipe/Perth Festival</span></span>
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<p>On the night I saw the performance, Björk was dressed in an unglamorous blue satin blob, which suited her <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/mar/04/bjork-cornucopia-review-an-electrifying-pop-concert-art-installation-and-opening-ceremony-rolled-into-one">retiring performance persona</a>.</p>
<p>Without a charismatic megastar around which to anchor, Cornucopia became an agglutinated, operatic audiovisual spectacle. It was Björk’s flute septet Viibra who bopped away, not Björk. </p>
<p>But when it gelled, it was magic, as when Björk sat inside a giant “circle flute” played by four women, the singer’s angst-ridden vocals soaring.</p>
<p>Björk describes the show as representing a futuristic human/nature utopia, but it’s a utopia that has little space for humans. Projections for Body Memory <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaQfixl2Ss4">showed</a> twisting headless bodies with spines and ridges deforming them, while <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu">Cthulhu</a>-like figures ascended as flayed skins. </p>
<p>In Björk’s fantasy, something descended from us will survive, but it won’t be any more human than Schack-Arnott’s mobiles.</p>
<p>Unlike the Black Futurist music theatre of the festival which offers an exuberant critical socio-cultural alternative way of viewing the past and the present, Björk’s alt-classicism and Jekyll echo older European models of the <a href="https://scalar.usc.edu/works/the-bengal-annual/sublime">Romantic sublime</a>: something appealing or beautiful because it will soon destroy us.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/sexual-exhibitionism-riot-grrrl-and-climate-change-activism-30-years-of-raging-by-peaches-bikini-kill-and-bjork-still-going-strong-201388">Sexual exhibitionism, Riot Grrrl and climate change activism: 30 years of raging by Peaches, Bikini Kill and Björk, still going strong</a>
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</p>
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<p><em>Correction: Anthony Pateras’ compositions were not for a prepared piano. This has been corrected.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202029/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jonathan W. Marshall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Iain Grandage’s fourth Perth Festival continued his focus on First Nations performance, together with an exhilarating dose of Black Futurism as well as demanding post-classical music.Jonathan W. Marshall, Associate Professor & Postgraduate Research Coordinator, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1985002023-02-07T21:42:15Z2023-02-07T21:42:15ZWhy we are fascinated by the Oscar-nominated ‘Tár,’ a story of rare female power in classical music<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/508482/original/file-20230206-29-jqlr39.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=174%2C404%2C5868%2C2005&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Cate Blanchett plays Lydia Tár in the Oscar-nominated film 'Tár,' that explores power, gender and sexuality.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Focus Features)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Musicians and music scholars are excited to see <em>Tár</em> earn Oscar nominations in 2023. The psychological thriller is set in the rarefied world of classical music, starring Cate Blanchett as a brilliant, ruthless conductor of the real and renowned <a href="https://www.berliner-philharmoniker.de/en/">Berlin Philharmonic</a>. </p>
<p>Music, ephemeral in its power over our emotions, is a notoriously demanding discipline, so this film presents exciting possibilities for an exploration of the dark sides of the “<a href="https://evidencenetwork.ca/jordan-peterson-and-the-cult-of-genius/">cult of genius</a>.” The film also shines a spotlight on the challenges of working in the ultraconservative world of classical music. It gives musicologists a chance to discuss not only the portrayal of music, but also some of the complex social issues present in classical music spheres, such as misogyny, racism and homophobia.</p>
<h2>Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5</h2>
<p><em>Tár</em>‘s story revolves around <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/0cqcRqZgkNHanWQ8slYA0v">Gustav Mahler’s <em>Symphony 5</em> (1904)</a>. As Blanchett conducts the opening measures of the dramatic score, she swings her arms wide and punches the air aggressively. Mahler’s Fifth is a heart wrenchingly beautiful rumination on death, so the brooding music complements Tár’s darkness and helps to foreshadow her downfall. Director Todd Field <a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2022-10-07/cate-blanchett-tar-classical-music">described <em>Symphony No. 5</em></a> as his own “gateway drug into a lot of classical music.” In this film, he says, the symphony is “haunting her, coming for her.” </p>
<p>Indeed, the ways that <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2022/12/tar-cate-blanchett-movie-ending-explained-analyzed.html">sounds unsettle Tár</a> — waking her in the night, alarming her when out for a run — contribute significantly to the spooky, gothic story. And how else would a musician be haunted, if not through her ears?</p>
<h2>Women breaking barriers in classical music</h2>
<p>Although the fictional Lydia Tár leads the Berlin Philharmonic, in reality, that orchestra has only ever had male conductors — though they were ahead of the <a href="https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/when-did-women-join-orchestras/">Vienna Philharmonic</a>, which did not admit women even as orchestra members until 1997. Indeed, orchestral conductors are disproportionately male and straight, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/arts/music/female-conductors-search-for-equality-at-highest-level.html?">very few women lead any professional orchestras</a>. </p>
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<img alt="a woman sits and looks to be playing the cello" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/508477/original/file-20230206-17-iwf95h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/508477/original/file-20230206-17-iwf95h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=251&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508477/original/file-20230206-17-iwf95h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=251&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508477/original/file-20230206-17-iwf95h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=251&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508477/original/file-20230206-17-iwf95h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508477/original/file-20230206-17-iwf95h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/508477/original/file-20230206-17-iwf95h.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=316&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Olga, played by Sophie Kauer, is a young Russian cellist who catches Lydia’s eye.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Focus Features)</span></span>
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<p>A superb conductor like <a href="https://www.marinalsop.com">Marin Alsop</a> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/arts/music/marin-alsop-baltimore-symphony-orchestra.html">has alluded to</a> navigating misogyny and homophobia while rising through <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/sep/06/marin-alsop-proms-classical-sexist">the conservative classical music</a> world.</p>
<p>Alsop, who is mentioned in the film, and <a href="https://ew.com/movies/female-conductor-referenced-in-tar-reacts-to-movie/">who has also criticized its depictions of women</a>, leads through innovative <a href="https://peabody.jhu.edu/faculty/marin-alsop/">and collaborative</a> approaches. Alsop is currently chief conductor of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and regular guest conductor with major orchestras.</p>
<p>Other female and queer musicians are passed up for positions, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/02/21/696574690/top-flutist-settles-gender-pay-gap-suit-with-boston-symphony-orchestra">paid inequitably</a> and otherwise abused in the orchestral world. Orchestras implemented <a href="http://doi.org/10.1257/aer.90.4.715">screened auditions</a> specifically to combat sexist bias in assessing talent. Similarly,
<a href="https://oc.ca/en/resource/re-sounding-the-orchestra/">Orchestras Canada, the national association for Canadian Orchestras</a>, has developed strategies to dismantle systemic barriers for Black, Indigenous and other racialized musicians.</p>
<h2>Female conductors urged to project power</h2>
<p>Orchestras and audiences tend to construct an ideal of a conductor as someone with a powerful aura, so female conductors are often urged to project a strong, imperious persona. <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/class-control-and-classical-music-9780190844356?cc=ca&lang=en&">Musicologist Anna Bull</a> reports that young female conductors who choose a gentler physicality risk criticism for their “weak” presence and lack of power to command a full, rich sound. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.cutcommonmag.com/7-female-conductors-you-should-know-about/">Posters, promo material and even headshots</a> depict female conductors in contorted poses. We see their hair flying as if blown by the sounds they create, and bodies struggling to contain the power they exude. Depictions of Lydia Tár are no different, as we see in <em>Tár</em>’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14444726/">promotional material</a>.</p>
<p>“<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/arts/music/female-conductors-search-for-equality-at-highest-level.html?">When men make forceful gestures, they come off as being masculine and virile</a>,” Alsop told the <em>New York Times</em>. But, she noted, when women do that, they’re interpreted as being pushy.</p>
<h2>A missed opportunity to depict nuance</h2>
<p>The filmmaker’s presentation of Lydia Tár, a white lesbian, is as a white masculine-style authority. It makes her out to be a mere copy of her straight male colleagues. But the reality for the few queer conductors working in the field is thankfully much more interesting.</p>
<p>For example, cellist and composer <a href="https://www.crisderksen.com/">Cris Derksen</a> explores the reality of working with orchestras as an Indigenous and queer Canadian in their 2015 work, <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/classical-powwow-music-cris-derksen-1.4518747"><em>Orchestral Powwow</em> (Tribal Spirit Music)</a>. By dispensing with a conductor and elevating a drum circle and cello soloist to lead performance of this work, Derksen asks musicians and orchestras to let go of conventional notions of authority. Derksen’s music re-centres that authority toward a queer and Indigenous perspective. </p>
<h2>Coda: the epilogue</h2>
<p><em>Editor’s Note: This section contains spoilers which reveal plot details of the movie, 'Tár’</em> </p>
<p>The final segment of <em>Tár</em> works like a coda — an additional musical section that comes after the musical resolution, like an epilogue — to this cautionary tale. The story began with Tár telling a hushed, respectful audience that music consists of time, controlled by the conductor. Its conclusion sees her alone in her dreary childhood home, watching her mentor <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTath-grbvo">Leonard Bernstein explain that music is about movement, change and growth.</a> </p>
<p>This is the lesson that Tár has failed to learn. </p>
<p>The coda ends with Tár banished from the elite western orchestra circuit. Instead, she is working in an unnamed country in the Global South. Here, she is depicted as the bearer of the European classical musical tradition. Her players and audience are depicted as obedient, but indifferent. </p>
<p>As the scene closes, it is revealed that she is actually conducting video game music; this is a dreadful fate for an elite musician. This scene ruefully acknowledges that <a href="https://willxcheng.com/sound-play">video games</a> are nowadays where western orchestral music resides, for audiences and working musicians alike.</p>
<p>Tár’s whiteness, within a neocolonial context, allows her to cling to the authority she has been stripped of elsewhere. It is not clear, though, that she is capable of truly grappling with the <a href="https://www.anothergaze.com/lesbian-allure-colonial-unconscious-todd-fields-tar/">“patriarchal-colonial power” she exerts, “its violence laid bare,” as literary scholar Luna Beller-Tadiar put it,</a> or whether her arrogance will blind her even to this final lesson. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">A trailer for the movie, ‘Tar.’ (Focus Features)</span></figcaption>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jacqueline Warwick is affiliated with Prismatic Arts Festival, as chair of their board.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jacob Caines is affiliated with Choirs for Change and ClassicalQueer.com, as chair of both boards. </span></em></p>‘Tár’ shines a spotlight on the challenges of working in the ultraconservative world of classical music, including complex social issues such as misogyny, racism and homophobia.Jacqueline Warwick, Professor of Musicology, Dalhousie UniversityJacob Caines, Instructor of Music, Dalhousie UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1982952023-01-29T19:08:55Z2023-01-29T19:08:55ZTár isn’t just about gender, sexuality and power – it is also a story of class in the elite world of classical music<p><em>This article contains spoilers.</em></p>
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<p>Todd Field’s new, <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/oscar-nominations-2023-nominees-list-1235307974/">multi-Academy Award nominated</a> feature film Tár is generating considerable commentary – and not a little controversy. </p>
<p>For some, its storyline allows for a timely exploration of <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/01/19/the-instrumentalist-tar-todd-field-zadie-smith/">intergenerational conflict</a> concerning the value of Western art and artistic ethics. Others see it as a critique of <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/tar-review-cate-blanchett-b2260012.html">cancel culture</a>. </p>
<p>Still others think it epitomises the <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/im-offended-by-tar-as-a-woman-as-a-conductor-as-a-lesbian-t22vg7p70">problematic representation</a> of women and LGBTQI+ people in a traditionally male-dominated industry.</p>
<p>But I think it also shines a light on some of the social and political dynamics of the world in which it is set: the elite end of the classical music industry.</p>
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<h2>Power before the fall</h2>
<p>Portraying the professional and psychological downfall of orchestral conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), the film depicts her as prone to abusive and grooming behaviours. Those behaviours, the film suggests, may have led to the suicide of a young former student (and possible love interest). </p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2022/10/cate-blanchett-todd-field-interview-tar-1234769464/">interviews</a>, Field has stated he created her character not to explore gender or sexuality, but rather power. The film could have equally been set, he suggests, in “a multinational corporation or an architectural firm. Pick your poison.” </p>
<p>But Field’s choice of setting supports his dramatic aim beyond merely providing it with an interesting backdrop. </p>
<p>The globetrotting level of the classical music industry at which Tár works has faced its own <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/assaults-in-dressing-rooms-groping-during-lessons-classical-musicians-reveal-a-profession-rife-with-harassment/2018/07/25/f47617d0-36c8-11e8-acd5-35eac230e514_story.html">#metoo stories</a>.</p>
<p>It is also characterised by especially <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/160469/insidious-classism-classical-music">high numbers</a> of people drawn from private wealth and educational privilege – a situation some argue is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/dec/10/huge-decline-working-class-people-arts-reflects-society">only becoming worse</a>. </p>
<p>Late in the film, we discover Tár is from much humbler stock. This informs her character more than we might first realise.</p>
<p>From the outset, the film gives us several clues about her true class identity. Her charitable foundation is named “Accordion”, after the decidedly non-elite instrument she happens to play. Despite living in a supremely stylish Berlin apartment, she feels more comfortable retreating to the bedsit she has refused to relinquish. She has <a href="https://www.refinery29.com/en-au/imposter-syndrome-working-class-women">impostor syndrome</a> about whether all she creates is merely pastiche, if all her creative work is derivative. </p>
<p>Ultimately, we discover she was not born Lydia Tár, rather Linda Tarr. When she briefly encounters her brother, he tellingly remarks “you don’t seem to know where the hell you came from, or where you’re going”. </p>
<p>Tár is therefore not a “true” member of the elite level of artists she has fought so hard to join. </p>
<p>Although we initially see her being supported by colleagues who enable aspects of her toxic behaviour or choose to stay silent when they witness it, when things go public, she is unceremoniously dumped. </p>
<p>Ultimately she is not protected by the industry that promoted her, nor does she really know how to protect herself when it turns on her. </p>
<p>This is not the norm. The film names two real-life conductors (<a href="https://variety.com/2021/music/news/james-levine-dead-conductor-met-opera-scandal-1234932701/">James Levine</a> and <a href="https://apnews.com/article/885288285af146009ceca402940c4628">Charles Dutoit</a>) who also fell from favour owing to similar accusations of predatory sexual behaviour, but their downfalls occurred at the end of their careers, not, as here, at its apex.</p>
<p>Field’s film suggests Tár’s particularly swift and brutal downfall may be in part because she cannot fully access networks of patronage and privilege in the classical music industry.</p>
<p>In this world, personal and institutional power is still intimately tied up with class. Both can be made to serve the interests of wrongdoers and silence their victims.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/classical-music-training-and-abuse-cultures-we-need-to-act-now-38851">Classical music training and abuse cultures – we need to act now</a>
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<h2>From Mahler to Monster</h2>
<p>There is one other dominating presence complicating the film’s narrative: the music. It is not for nothing Field chose a composition by Gustav Mahler, in particular his Symphony No. 5, for Tár to conduct. </p>
<p>At first glance, here is another artist who might be vulnerable to cancel culture. Mahler had his own history of manipulative behaviour, such as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/dec/02/alma-schindler-problem-gustav-mahler">insisting</a> his wife sublimate her own musical career to support his.</p>
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<p>Much like Tár herself, the symphony can be characterised as self-aggrandising. As with all his symphonies, it is conceived on a colossal scale and is replete with self-quotations from earlier works. </p>
<p>And yet exposing the personal faults of the conductor and the composer is neither sufficient nor necessary to appreciate the resulting art. As German philosopher Theodor Adorno noted in <a href="http://journal.telospress.com/content/1978/35/128.abstract">an essay from 1932</a>, we tend to avoid considering the measure of a conductor’s life off the podium when we watch them on it. </p>
<p>The film reminds us this tendency can come at a significant human cost, and we apply it unequally: depending on not just the identity but also the class background of the conductor themselves. </p>
<p>The film ends with Tár conducting a concert in an unnamed Southeast Asian country. No Mahler is to be found here. Rather, she conducts a program of music from the 2018 action role-playing computer game <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Hunter:_World">Monster Hunter: World</a>. </p>
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<p>This is not, I think, meant to be some kind of cruel joke (apart from the possible allusion to Tár herself in the title of the game) or a tasteless (and culturally patronising) dig at the expense of non-Western, commercially oriented, orchestral music. But computer game music carries little of the establishment prestige Western classical music does. </p>
<p>The film ultimately leaves it as an open question, but there is a hint that, away from the political machinations of the elite classical music industry, Tár might be able to reconnect with a more authentic – and less destructive – artistic and ethical persona.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/tar-an-exploration-of-the-flawed-musicians-behind-decadent-music-197714">Tár – an exploration of the flawed musicians behind decadent music</a>
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<p><em>Tár is in Australian cinemas now.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198295/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Tregear does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The classical music industry has especially high numbers of people drawn from private wealth and educational privilegePeter Tregear, Principal Fellow and Professor of Music, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1980372023-01-27T06:18:36Z2023-01-27T06:18:36ZTár: busting the myths the film perpetuates of the all-powerful maestro<p>Tár follows a fictional all-powerful female orchestra conductor and her fall from the height of her career. Lydia Tár is portrayed as one of the top conductors in the world and the first female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. </p>
<p>The film aims to ask if gender matters when it comes to power. How does our judgment change when an abuser is female? What is the place of identity politics in art? Can art be separated from the artist?</p>
<p>To draw the audience into these questions, director Todd Field works hard to convince the audience that Tár and the classical music industry portrayed in the film is real. He does this by blurring the lines between the film and real-life people in the industry while also relying on most audience members’ lack of understanding of the day-to-day work of an orchestra. </p>
<p>The film slides between reality, mythology and fantasy in depicting an orchestra and a conductor’s powers. </p>
<h2>Muddling fact and fiction</h2>
<p>The film opens with Tár being interviewed by Adam Gopnik, a New Yorker writer, who plays himself. In this interview, a substantial number of her biographical details share striking parallels with those of the world’s actual leading female conductor, Marin Alsop. This muddle of fact and fiction left audience members <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2022/10/lydia-tar-is-not-real.html">believing that Tár was a real person</a>.</p>
<p>Marin Alsop was understandably <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/im-offended-by-tar-as-a-woman-as-a-conductor-as-a-lesbian-t22vg7p70">unhappy</a> with the similarities. She also pointed out that Tár plays into a sort of “maestro mythology” where “real” conductors are untouchable geniuses with unparalleled musical skills. </p>
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<p>A <a href="https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Why-They-%E2%80%99-re-Not-Smiling-%3A-Stress-and-Discontent-Levine/475387bc2f2885176c655d5710ef556f30e24450">study</a> conducted by neurology academic Seymour Levine and his son <a href="https://www.mso.org/backstage/robert-levine-principal-violist/">Robert Levine</a>, a violist in the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, observed that underlying the behaviour of conductors and musicians in orchestras is: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the myth of the conductor as omniscient father (“maestro,” “<em>maître</em>”) and the musicians as children (“players”) who know nothing and require uninterrupted teaching and supervision. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>They concluded that the “disparity between myth and reality in professional orchestras is extreme and serves as the most powerful source of musician stress and counterproductive institutional dynamics”. </p>
<p>This myth plays out in Tár where musicians respond with affable compliance to all her musical decisions, even those they’re unhappy or uncomfortable with. We’re led to believe that Lydia Tár is fully responsible for the final artistic product. The musicians are simply following her every gesture as a united body. </p>
<p>In reality, while what audiences see appears to be a carefully choreographed performance of shared intentions and performance goals, beneath the surface lies a web of competing influences and interactions in which the conductor may only play a small part. </p>
<h2>Musical authority in performance</h2>
<p><a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/together-in-music-9780198860761?cc=us&lang=en">Analysing more than 1,500 comments</a> from orchestral musicians describing who and what they were responding to in real-life rehearsals and performances, I have studied the process of artistic “authorship” in orchestras. </p>
<p>What I found is that opinions about how things should go differ dramatically throughout orchestras and that there is only one overarching shared goal in performance: to play together and to achieve ensemble cohesion. </p>
<p>To be clear, what constitutes ensemble cohesion at the highest level is complex and nuanced. To play together precisely in time, musicians must have a developed sense of every aspect of the sound, colour, volume and phrasing of their part. They must play with not after their colleagues. </p>
<p>To do this, they must make split-second decisions about what’s best for every note, drawing on their extensive musical experience while navigating the decisions of the musicians around them. They’re also often battling acoustic situations as they can only hear part of what the orchestra is doing from their seat. The conductor’s usefulness in this is extremely variable and partial. </p>
<p>One professional brass player explained to me that there was a visual knack that players have by watching each other. For example, the euphonium part in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXOanvv4plU&ab_channel=BBC">Holst’s Mars from The Planets</a> the strings will play down bows. The brass player noted that some conductors will try to push the piece on there. If they were to follow the conductor there, they would be early. It was more helpful seeing a bank of strings all doing down bows, which let them know exactly where to place a note.</p>
<p>While in rehearsal a conductor can stop play and ask for a change, in a performance they can’t. This changes the power dynamics in ways some conductors might be uncomfortable admitting. </p>
<h2>Systemic abuse</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/742362">Research has shown</a> that musicians in self-governing orchestras, such as the Berlin Philharmonic, have generally higher job satisfaction than colleagues in other orchestras and “that players in these orchestras are the real masters of their ensembles”. </p>
<p>However, the international classical music industry is steeped with systemic power imbalances and abuses.</p>
<p>It’s not just high-profile #MeToo cases in the upper echelons of the profession, like those of real conductors <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/28/arts/music/daniele-gatti-charles-dutoit-metoo-orchestra-opera.html">James Levine and Charles DuToit</a> (both named in the film), on which Tár’s sadistic power trips are modelled. The body of evidence of abuse within musical institutions, from <a href="https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20220301223055/https:/www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/28486/view/iicsa-residential-schools-investigation-report-march-2022.pdf">schools</a> to professional orchestras in the UK, continues to grow. </p>
<p>A recent <a href="https://www.ism.org/images/files/ISM-Dignity-2-report.pdf">survey by the Independent Society for Musicians</a> reported that 77% of respondents (rising to 88% of self-employed) did not report offences. The main reasons given were: “it’s just the culture” in the music sector (55%), followed by “no one to report to” (48%) and “fear of losing work” (45%). </p>
<p>While 72% of incidents were committed by people with seniority or influence over their career, 45% were committed by colleagues or co-workers and 27% by a third party (such as an audience member, client or customer). The report noted that 58% of the discriminatory experiences reported by respondents would be classed as sexual harassment.</p>
<p>By so masterfully interweaving reality and fantasy Field both affirms the harmful “maestro myth” and detracts from the actual, complex and deeply embedded webs of power abuse within the music industry today.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198037/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Tár muddles fact in with its fiction, creating a skewed impression of a conductor’s power.Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, University of SheffieldLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1977142023-01-12T15:33:10Z2023-01-12T15:33:10ZTár – an exploration of the flawed musicians behind decadent music<p>Tár (2022) follows superstar conductor Lydia Tár, played by Cate Blanchett, as she conducts the Berlin Philharmonic (represented in the film by the Dresden Philharmonic) in a much-anticipated performance of Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. </p>
<p>Conductors have only received relatively sporadic exposure on film. Among the more notable examples are the understated performance by Stellan Skarsgård as Wilhelm Furtwängler facing denazification in István Szábo’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfURytVFKB0&ab_channel=Guerillafilmsltd">Taking Sides</a> (2001) and the sadistic jazz conductor Terence Fletcher in Damian Chazelle’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/whiplash-is-a-horror-film-so-jazz-critics-should-stop-worrying-36156">Whiplash </a>(2014).</p>
<p>Similarly, Michael Haneke’s disturbing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjROGqRTMzQ">La pianiste</a>(2001) features a troubled piano teacher who realises repressed sadomasochistic desires through casual sexual encounters with students and acts of cruelty towards them. </p>
<p>These films, and others, focus on exalted music, seemingly inhabiting a privileged realm and the murky realities of life and musicians as flawed human beings. </p>
<p>In the last decade numerous stories have exposed musicians <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11425241/Philip-Pickett-Does-elite-music-teaching-leave-pupils-open-to-abuse.html">abusing pupils</a> (often underage), <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2020/01/conservatories-sexual-harassment-abuse/604351/">grooming students</a> and using their <a href="https://ianpace.wordpress.com/2013/12/30/reported-cases-of-abuse-in-musical-education-1990-2012-and-issues-for-a-public-inquiry/">power to exploit others</a>. Names like <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/mar/26/chelthams-teacher-michael-brewer-jailed">Michael Brewer</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/mar/18/james-levine-obituary">James Levine</a> or <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spain-domingo-idUSKCN20J113">Placido Domingo</a> will never be viewed in the same way and more victims of such predators have felt able to speak out.</p>
<p>A striking film about power, identity and passion and their role in classical music, Tár is concerned with this recent history of abuse. </p>
<h2>A generational divide</h2>
<p>Lydia Tár has worked her way through principal conductorships of several major US orchestras towards the prize position at the Berlin Philharmonic. </p>
<p>The film follows her preparations for a live recording of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with which she will complete a cycle of the symphonies (something of a rite of passage for big name conductors since Leonard Bernstein did so in the 1960s). She conducts the Adagietto, notorious since <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvBbe8Nkgz8&ab_channel=ILoveChScBr">Bernstein conducted it at Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral</a>, before being used in Luchino Visconti’s film <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJT5BUZr_9Y&ab_channel=bilitis131313">Death in Venice </a>(1971).</p>
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<p>Despite being the first female to occupy the position at the Berlin Philharmonic (in reality no woman has yet done so) and openly lesbian, Tár is quite dismissive of identity politics. </p>
<p>This is made clear in a memorable scene with a student who himself dismisses “white male cis composers” such as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/sep/21/secret-bach-teenage-thug">Bach</a> based on their treatment of women.</p>
<p>A clash of generations is played out. Tár, born in 1972, is around 50 and has a curt attitude towards younger musicians who use social media and discover recordings through YouTube rather than LPs or CDs. She also wonders why some are more obsessed with musicians’ identities and biographies than with their music. Tár often asks whether a musician’s personal history is important to our love of or the importance of their work. </p>
<p>We gradually discover that this is a loaded question for her as it becomes clear she has acted, like her male counterparts, in a sexually predatory manner towards young women and can otherwise be selfish and manipulative.</p>
<p>The film has prompted a negative response from conductor Marin Alsop who has <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/im-offended-by-tar-as-a-woman-as-a-conductor-as-a-lesbian-t22vg7p70">expressed offence at the film stating</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To have an opportunity to portray a woman in that role and to make her an abuser — for me that was heartbreaking … it’s not really about women conductors, is it? It’s about women as leaders in our society.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Alsop also noted that Lydia Tár’s biography shares various aspects with her own. Alsop is arguably the most famous female conductor in the world and the first female chief conductor of a big American orchestra. But Alsop’s biography might not make the type of compelling drama that this film undoubtedly is.</p>
<p>I have played orchestral piano with Alsop conducting and can confirm she’s not at all like Tár, both in terms of manner and indeed conducting technique. </p>
<h2>Ambiguous sympathies</h2>
<p>Alsop’s critique also falls short in other ways. It would be rash to assume that such a figure could never act in a predatory and exploitative manner. This is not just an issue of identity, but <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-power-corrupts-37165345/">power</a> and the opportunities it provides for the reckless. </p>
<p>Yet Blanchett’s remarkable performance manages to elicit some sympathy, despite the indefensibility of her actions (especially when she threatens another girl at her daughter’s primary school). Therein lies the fundamental ambiguity that makes this much more than a simple didactic piece. Her vulnerable body language and visible attempts to suppress feelings and tics in front of others are contrasted with hyper-stress in private.</p>
<p>The film is directed in a subtle and unostentatious manner by Todd Field. It opens with several extended tableaux (an interview, a scene where Tár meets fans in the lobby, a rehearsal) into which gradually short scene shifts are inserted to mirror Tár’s progressive mental collapse. </p>
<p>Field also makes judicious use of shots from the stalls or back of the concert hall to communicate a sense of the dislocation and isolation of Tár and those close to her. He understands well the power of sound for musicians. Tár is driven by sound but also maddened by it. Audiences are brought into this with a series of scenes where stray noises from a metronome or fridge provoke Tár’s ultra-sensitivity.</p>
<p>Tár is a highly strung conductor specialising in emotionally intense performances of her beloved Mahler, replete with string vibratos and abrupt shifts of mood, typical of a certain late-20th-century performance aesthetic. She employs wild, extravagant gestures, seemingly representing a charged passion for the music. </p>
<p>However, Blanchett’s conducting is one of the film’s only weak spots.</p>
<p>Her exaggerated motions lack the long-learned clarity of beat, coordination of arm and hand and security of posture that is clear when watching Tár’s idol <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvBbe8Nkgz8&ab_channel=ILoveChScBr">Bernstein</a>. Her violent two-handed sideways swipes with the baton would be more appropriate if she was playing a swordsman carrying out a decapitation.</p>
<p>This overwrought style of music-making is part of Tár’s wider temperament. The film asks whether such an approach to music and conducting leads her to act callously and contemptuously towards others as it infects her wider attitude on life. Should we ignore that when the music is so good? Possibly not.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/197714/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ian Pace does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A complicated look at power and abuse in classical music.Ian Pace, Professor of Music, City, University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1959882023-01-03T06:57:59Z2023-01-03T06:57:59ZWhat does a conductor actually do? A surprising amount<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/500383/original/file-20221212-99176-xfyk4b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=38%2C0%2C5054%2C3405&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/hands-music-conductor-1899459124">Angelo Giampiccolo/shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>At the age of three, I remember jumping on my parent’s sofa, waving my arms in the air conducting a record of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Pirates-of-Penzance">Gilbert and Sullivans Pirates of Penzance</a>. Last week, my four-year-old son was doing the same thing, only to the soundtrack of Disney’s Frozen. </p>
<p>“What are you doing?” I said. “I am being you, Daddy,” he replied as he continued directing his imaginary orchestra. I felt a heartstring pluck and I remembered as a child getting excited at the music and just letting my arms wave and wiggle. Fifty years later I do it for real. But what conductors actually do can be a bit of a mystery.</p>
<p>It’s a misconception that the sole purpose of a conductor is to wave their arms around <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_yIn8V3UcU">while the musicians follow</a>. Yes, the animation signifies the speed and placement of a beat of music, but have you seen any two conductors wave their arms around in the same way? </p>
<p>In most cases, their work takes place well before an audience sees them on the concert platform. </p>
<h2>Physical communication</h2>
<p>A conductor is a translator visualising their interpretation of little black dots on a page into an audible delight. Yes, they hold their musicians together on the day, but their primary importance is to feed an interpretation to the musicians, encouraging them to communicate a melodic and rhythmic message to the best of their capabilities.</p>
<p>A conductor works at different levels ranging from educational, amateur and professional situations with different genres such as choral, orchestral, opera and musical. In all categories standards, styles and techniques vary, so the job is challenging, often requiring a unique and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diwV2HGKerE">eccentric approach</a>. </p>
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<p>A good conductor has a bag of tricks (developed through experience) to call upon for any musical situation. For example, the proximity between my hands influences volume. The closer my hands are together, the softer I want the choir to be, the larger the distance, the louder the sound.</p>
<p>Primarily we are communicators, both verbal and physical. Conductors need to form a relationship with their musicians: trust, skill and leadership are essential. The physical becomes important when verbal is not possible (when the audience is present and in earshot). This is when the arm waving comes into play. The movement in the left hand signifies dynamics, emotion and expression while the right hand is mainly used to signify speed and beat. </p>
<p>Conductors have unique styles and skills. Watch <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qo45uRKIA8w">Igor Stravinsky</a> conduct and you will see how he keeps an exact beat, very rigid and solid with no emotion. He allows the musicians emotional control but leads the very difficult rhythmic timing, speeds and beat. He is a human metronome. </p>
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<h2>Unique styles</h2>
<p>A conductor is also an educator. It is our job to coach musicians in the accuracy of music.</p>
<p>You would think it’s an easier job when working with professionals than youngsters, but interpretation can lead to disagreements. Sometimes the music is incredibly difficult, sometimes musicians might not be prepared, so a degree of diplomacy is required to get the effect the conductor is after. Or, if you are Bernstein – arguably one of the greatest composers and conductors of the 20th century – nothing less than excellence is good enough and no diplomatic communication is possible. </p>
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<p>There is a famous excerpt that demonstrates the tension between Bernstein and the young tenor soloist Jose Carreras through rehearsals for the recording of Westside Story. It’s awkward and at times cringe worthy. They are both trying to create perfection. You can see communication and passion expressed through Bernstein’s face and then Carreras’ frustration at not being able to deliver the level of precision required.</p>
<p>Conductors can seem to be the most <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkMEK7u0fAI">stubborn of breeds</a>. The late Romanian conductor <a href="https://theviolinchannel.com/sergiu-celibidache-played-by-actor-in-upcoming-film/">Sergiu Celibidache</a> is well known for his refusal to have his music recorded, believing it should only be heard in the concert hall. His determined attitude towards the orchestras he worked with was infamous, displaying strong views on and off the concert platform. However, his techniques worked and he is now seen as one of the greatest conductors of the 20th century.</p>
<p>Conductors’ interpretations are different, every performance is unique. Each has developed a unique style to get the desired effect. </p>
<p>The American conductor <a href="https://www.proscenium.at/kuenstler/joseph_olefirowicz_en.php">Joseph R. Olefirowicz</a> is known for his genius abilities and methods to deliver his interpretations. </p>
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<p>There’s an awful lot more going on than just arm waving, as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJU0lC3iHaY">demonstrated in the beautiful clip above</a> of him conducting Candide. His unique and comic personality combined with his facial expressions convey his interpretation of the music to the orchestra who can’t help being infected by his charisma. You can see he keeps time with his body, not just his arms. Unfortunately, the audience rarely sees what he is doing as his back is to the auditorium. </p>
<p>In comparison, British-German conductor <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbPmED_Xwn0">Simon Rattle</a> takes a much more relaxed body style to Candide, but the emotion he wants to convey is translated through facial expression and flowing arm movements. </p>
<p>So, if you’re thinking about taking up the baton and waving those arms around, reflect on the weeks of rehearsals that get to the point of performance. Consider the months of planning to organise such a mass of people to perform and fill an auditorium. Finally, contemplate the years of practice undertaken by singers, musicians and the figure at the front, flapping their arms around, and that’s what a conductor does.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/195988/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephen Langston does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It’s about much more than arm waving.Stephen Langston, Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for Performance, University of the West of ScotlandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1952902022-12-06T23:53:51Z2022-12-06T23:53:51ZI’m going to a classical music concert for the first time. What should I know?<p>Classical music is surprisingly controversial. </p>
<p>For some, it’s a pinnacle of cultural achievement. For others it perpetuates class inequality and <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/class-control-and-classical-music-9780190844356?cc=au&lang=en&">upholds</a> “white middle class social domination”. </p>
<p>To controversy, we can add contradiction! We love to hear the instruments and idioms of classical music in film and television (think of the theme from The Crown or the music from the Harry Potter films), but experience has shown classical music is most effective at <a href="https://www.wqxr.org/story/classical-music-actually-effective-fighting-crime/">repelling loiterers</a> from public spaces. </p>
<p>Engaging with the controversy and contradiction of this music requires more than streaming a minute or two of Mozart. <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23959902/%5D">Research shows</a> we make better judgements about music when hearing and seeing it, and classical music was designed to be experienced live. </p>
<p>So are you considering giving classical music a go? Here are some tips for first-time concert goers.</p>
<h2>Where should I start?</h2>
<p>Concerts range from intimate performances by solo players to major works for choir and orchestra featuring hundreds of musicians. </p>
<p>Terms like “chamber” (small ensembles like string quartets), “choral” (choirs large and small), “orchestral” (ranging from larger string ensembles to giant collections of strings, winds, brass and percussion) and “opera” (companies of musicians that include orchestral players, solo singers and sometimes a chorus) describe different groups of musicians.</p>
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<p>Each has its own repertoire and a dizzying array of terms (such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aria">aria</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerto">concerto</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinfonia">sinfonia</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oratorio">oratorio</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantata">cantata</a>) help describe the pieces these ensembles perform.</p>
<p>The more you get to know classical music, the more you’ll understand and appreciate the terminology. </p>
<p>One of the most common types of classical music you’ll come across is a symphony. A symphony is a substantial orchestral work with different sections or “movements”, each with a different character and tempo. Though the term “symphony” became popular in the 18th century, composers are still writing symphonies today. Symphonies differ in purpose and duration. They can be as short as ten minutes and as long as two hours. </p>
<p>Sammartini’s Symphony in F from 1740, for example, has three movements and lasts about ten minutes. Its movements have simple, direct structures that aren’t too far removed from pop songs in terms of complexity and scope. </p>
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<p>Mahler’s third symphony from 1896, on the other hand, has six movements and lasts for 90 minutes. Its breadth and complexity are astounding.</p>
<p>I would suggest a first timer selects an orchestral concert with multiple pieces on the program. You will get to enjoy the spectacle of many musicians and many different instruments. You’re also likely to be exposed to the work of composers from different times and places. </p>
<p>If money is a concern, many orchestras put on <a href="https://concreteplayground.com/melbourne/event/the-msos-2023-sidney-myer-free-concerts">free concerts</a>. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-exactly-do-musical-conductors-do-82889">Explainer: what exactly do musical conductors do?</a>
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<h2>What should I expect?</h2>
<p>Classical music is pretty diverse. Just as rock ’n’ roll traverses anything from Buddy Holly to Thundermother, what we colloquially know as “classical music” spans many cultures and many centuries. </p>
<p>Terms like “Baroque” (composed between 1600 and 1750), “Classical” (this time with a capital C, composed between 1730 and 1820), “Romantic” (around 1820 to 1900) and “Modern” (1890 to 1950) help us keep track of when the music was written.</p>
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<p>These eras also operate with regional descriptors such as French, German, Italian or Russian. </p>
<p>Overlay this with subtleties of style and the distinct personalities of individual composers and you get a sense of the vast breadth of classical music. </p>
<p>But it is also important to know classical music isn’t only a celebration of dead Europeans. It is a living tradition whose boundaries aren’t fixed. </p>
<p>Classical music readily interacts with other types of music and crosses cultural boundaries to generate new styles and new sounds. Consider the Australian work <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/classic/read-and-watch/classic-australia/barton-hindson-kalkadungu-2007/11268328">Kalkadungu</a> by William Barton and Matthew Hindson, a work “designed to explore the transition of traditional song-lines between the past, present and future”.</p>
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<p>Though sometimes far removed from contemporary culture, every piece of classical music has something to say about the human experience. So, what to expect in the program? Expect to be surprised. </p>
<h2>What should I wear?</h2>
<p>Wear what makes you comfortable. While it’s not unusual for people to dress up for a concert, it isn’t compulsory, and ordinary casual clothes are fine. In the same way people dress up for the Melbourne Cup, some people wear black tie to the opera. Don’t let it faze you.</p>
<h2>When should I clap?</h2>
<p>While you might be moved to clap right after hearing an incredible feat of musicianship, modern audiences generally don’t clap whenever there is a pause in the music, such as between movements of a symphony. </p>
<p>This reflects the idea that a symphony is a “complete” musical statement – including the pauses between sections. </p>
<p>If you’re uncertain when to clap, wait until others do. </p>
<h2>What else should I keep in mind?</h2>
<p>Going to classical music should be about enjoying the concert! Here are some final tips on how to enjoy yourself.</p>
<p>Enjoy the spectacle. There’s much to see at classical concerts. The interactions between the conductor and the orchestra can be particularly interesting. Watch as the conductor, with a flick of the baton, unleashes awesome sonic power.</p>
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<p>Appreciate the skill of the musicians. Classical performers are the elite in their field. It takes decades of training to do what they do.</p>
<p>Learn something about the composer and the work. Some classical composers are saints (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hildegard_of_Bingen">Hildegard of Bingen</a>) and some may have been psychopaths (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2010/mar/18/carlo-gesualdo-composer-psychopath">Gesualdo</a>). Knowing who the composer is and what they were trying to achieve in their music will add to your appreciation.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that your musical taste expands as you expose yourself to new and unfamiliar sounds. The more you listen, the more you are likely to enjoy. </p>
<p>Oh, and sometimes, if the audience is adequately enthusiastic, there’ll be a short additional piece at the end. Encore! </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-you-should-consider-adding-classical-music-to-your-exercise-playlist-147316">Why you should consider adding classical music to your exercise playlist</a>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Timothy McKenry does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Research shows we make better judgements about music when hearing and seeing it, and classical music was designed to be experienced live.Timothy McKenry, Professor of Music, Australian Catholic UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1762452022-02-07T19:09:07Z2022-02-07T19:09:07ZFrom Jaws to Star Wars to Harry Potter: John Williams, 90 today, is our greatest living composer<p>John Williams, the man who changed the way we hear the movies, turns 90 today.</p>
<p>As the key Hollywood composer during the blockbuster era of the 1970s and 1980s, Williams had an astronomical career alongside the likes of filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. </p>
<p>With his music for their movies, Williams revived the romantic orchestral sound of Hollywood’s Golden Age – the sound pioneered by composers <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT6dLPfSCL8">Erich Wolfgang Korngold</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EESHIpo4Lgk">Max Steiner</a> at the dawn of the talkies – and reinvented it for a new era. </p>
<p>“John Williams has been the single most significant contributor to my success as a filmmaker,” <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2012/11/10/164615420/john-williams-inevitable-themes">said Spielberg in 2012</a>.</p>
<p>On the numbers alone, Williams has had a career like no other. If you were going to the movies between 1970 and 1990, every second year would have had a number one box office hit with music by Williams. </p>
<p>This prolific era saw Williams write music for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0In9gXH7Yg">Jaws</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9lapdvLSGw">Star Wars</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgncJgSbbck">Indiana Jones</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbUGsbZWitw">Close Encounters of the Third Kind</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoFmHjdyre4">Superman</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olHOAnPY1GI">E.T. The Extra Terrestrial</a> – an abundant run by any standard.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/45-years-on-the-jaws-theme-manipulates-our-emotions-to-inspire-terror-136462">45 years on, the 'Jaws' theme manipulates our emotions to inspire terror</a>
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<p>Williams today holds 52 Academy Award nominations (and five wins), the most nominations of any living human and second in history only to Walt Disney. Williams can add to that 72 Grammy Award nominations (and 25 wins), 16 BAFTA nominations (seven wins) and six Emmy nominations (three wins). </p>
<p>He has written music for the Olympics (in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWdOFgDQIn0">1984</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QLee9g-fzk">1988</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3kNRyh_rj8">1996</a> and the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaWyOylQnI4">2002</a> Winter Olympics), for a Presidential inauguration (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GoRIQ9cwG8">for Barack Obama in 2009</a>) and for the nightly news (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAzc-P9uMpI">NBC – also used by Channel Seven in Australia</a>).</p>
<p>When adjusted for inflation, one-fifth of <a href="https://www.boxofficemojo.com/chart/top_lifetime_gross_adjusted/?adjust_gross_to=2019">the top 100 films at the North American box office</a> have music by Williams.</p>
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<h2>The sound of the silver screen</h2>
<p>By re-energising the sound of the Hollywood orchestra in the 1970s, Williams linked history with the present. The films he is most associated with from this era – things like Star Wars and Indiana Jones – are deliberate throwbacks to an older form of storytelling. </p>
<p>Outside the multiplex in the 1970s, the public worried about Watergate, Vietnam and the threat of Cold War nuclear war. Inside cinemas however, with the music of Williams, was a moment of escape and excitement.</p>
<p>Then there are those melodies. By now, reading this article, it’s likely you’ve already hummed some John Williams to yourself or are suffering an earworm. Between his major hits of the blockbuster era and his later work like the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbUeK1PP7-s">Home Alone</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtHra9tFISY">Harry Potter</a> franchises, Williams has written some of the most widely-recognisable melodies on earth. </p>
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<p>This is no coincidence: despite the orchestral complexity of his music, <a href="https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/indiana-jones-john-williams/">Williams admits</a> he often spends the most time devising his melodies and perfecting them, lifting a note here, lowering another there.</p>
<p>For the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZj7gUIO-2k">five note alien “hello”</a> in Close Encounters Williams <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=fH9XAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA208&lpg=PA208&dq=john+williams+five+note+variations&source=bl&ots=UMsbIu-DAL&sig=ACfU3U2tRfrvK3RxBizzxScP9EZhnyD_pA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjyxsnHtOz1AhUu6XMBHUSWDs0Q6AF6BAgnEAM#v=onepage&q=john%20williams%20five%20note%20variations&f=false">formulated hundreds of variations</a> before settling on the one heard in the final film.</p>
<p>For several of his themes – <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7HF4JG1pOg">The Imperial March</a> from The Empire Strikes Back, or Superman’s theme, for example – it feels less like Williams composed them as he simply reached into our collective consciousness and redeployed what was already there.</p>
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<h2>The art of homage</h2>
<p>For much of the period of his success, Williams has been looked down upon by some in the classical establishment as writing simple popular ditties, or worse, as a rampant plagiarist of the classical canon. </p>
<p>It is no secret Williams’ music takes influence from the greats, like Stravinsky, Holst and Dvořák. Sometimes, the influence becomes direct allusion, as with Howard Hanson’s <a href="https://youtu.be/nN4li1lVReQ">Romantic Symphony</a> and <a href="https://youtu.be/P7CyzH6R7f4?t=264">the conclusion of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial</a>.</p>
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<p>But these “gotcha” comparisons are superficial, dull, and miss the point. </p>
<p>“Any fool can see that,” <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/934785">Brahms is meant to have said</a> when asked about the similarities between his second symphony and Beethoven. </p>
<p>Williams was writing music for films that were also deliberate throwbacks. One might as well complain about how Star Wars borrows Flash Gordon’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnOL8Fx3Tvc">opening crawl</a>, or the plot of Kurosawa’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_Fortress">Hidden Fortress</a> or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7x-rzLoeUA">that scene</a> from John Ford’s The Searchers with the burning homestead. </p>
<p>This is how the most popular culture of the 20th century gained its meaning: through evocation, reworking and memory. </p>
<p>In looking to the music of the past, Williams was not having a lend of us. He was asking us to think more deeply about what we were seeing and hearing.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-one-man-changed-the-landscape-of-film-music-29191">How one man changed the landscape of film music</a>
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<h2>The celebrity composer</h2>
<p>Today, these complaints have little momentum. Go to any symphony orchestra and you will find at least a few players who picked up their instruments for the first time in order to puzzle out a tune from Star Wars or Indiana Jones. </p>
<p>When Williams made his conducting debut with the famed Vienna Philharmonic in 2019, the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-force-is-still-strong-with-john-williams">musicians asked him for autographs</a> like a celebrity at a sports game.</p>
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<p>The classical establishment can now count cellist Yo-Yo Ma, conductor Gustavo Dudamel and violinists Anne-Sophie Mutter and Itzhak Perlman as among the biggest of Williams’ admirers – a who’s who of the elite.</p>
<p>At 90, John Williams is not just one of our most acclaimed living composers. With the power of the movies, and their unparalleled reach, it’s likely Williams is also now one of the most-heard composers to have ever lived.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/176245/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dan Golding does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>John Williams’ compositions have an unparalleled reach. He defined the sound of the 20th century.Dan Golding, Associate professor, Swinburne University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.