Having been off for the last two weeks since the end of the holidays with a fabulous phlegm chest infection this is me just getting back into the swing of things. Deadlines are again creeping up on us and the stress is piling on...
Dissertation.
I have had very little time to consider my dissertation over the past while. Something I shouldn’t really be admitting! However, I have been thinking about directions in which it could go. I recently saw a Horizon programme which talked about the phenomenon of synesthesia; a condition where a person can hear smells or taste sounds etc. I intend to do more research into this as the programme stated that it is thought that we all to some extent possess certain elements of this ability or some might call it a condition and that it may perhaps be a trait that most of us loose as we grow older but that children are more likely to possess. If this is the case it may have a bearing on musical perception, especially in young children, and I feel this idea is worth more exploration.
Whilst in London a friend told me about his friend, Kilford, who is known as ‘The Music Painter’. He produces paintings alongside live music and has worked with people such as Damon Albarn, Black Eyed Peas and The Charlatans to name but a few. The idea of music inspiring visual art is very relevant to the subject of musical perception and perhaps ties in with the idea of synesthesia. Anyway, I’ve been in touch through my friend, and when I’ve got more of a handle on the main thrust of the dissertation he’s happy to sit down and talk about how he interprets music in to visual art.
Therefore, the problem with this dissertation is not lack of source material but picking out what is relevant and what is not! I need to be quite focussed on what I am trying to say but, as I am currently finding, musical perception is a very hard thing to pin down. However, as far as conducting my own study goes, I have had the go ahead from the school to use their children. I have to submit a proposal to them but they don’t seem to think that it will be a problem. So I think that for now, I need to do a little more research into the methods that have been used to ascertain things such as synesthesia in children as these are certain to be geared specifically towards age and ability to communicate in order to develop my own study. Once I have conducted this, then I will be able to discuss the findings and pose some theories as to what these findings might mean and if they will allow us to move towards or dismiss the idea of accepting music as a universal language, which keeps within the remits of the original question and makes for a good structure. (I hope).
Ensemble
The bane of my life at the moment is ensemble. Although, this week has been more productive. Before the holidays I did an arrangement of Sing Sing Sing on Sibelius trying to share the horn parts out between the two guitars. This proved to be a bit of a nightmare in practice at first. However, this week I feel we’re finally starting to get a handle on it. This is going to be the big number of the set so it has to be as close to damned perfect as we can get it. Especially as, as much as anything, we’re out to prove our dissenters wrong. The downside to this realisation is that we are tending to focus so much on this track that other songs are falling by the wayside.
I think that there is definitely the issue of members of the band not being as familiar with the tracks as might be liked. So I’ve ripped all the audio from videos so everyone can have a copy of the tracks. Even if we are rearranging the songs knowing the tracks inside-out is going to be really beneficial and make rehearsals so much easier and productive. I also feel that if everyone immerses themselves in the style and gets a feeling for jazz chord progressions etc (which are so different in so many ways to pop) then we’ll be able to approach our interpretation of the tracks at the very least from the perspective people who know what they’re talking about to some extent. I’m also hoping that by providing everyone with the audio it might negate me having to provide the sheet music every week too. At the moment I feel that some are more involved in the ensemble than others and that the project would very much benefit from EVERYONE’S input, ideas and most of all preparation before we come to rehearse.
One of the tracks that we’re working on is “Why Don’t You Do Right” and I’ve become obsessed with the piano on the Amy Irving version. As far as authenticity is concerned I’m probably about 10 years out with the style but right now I don’t care (!). The piano is immense on this version and I’m sure that although this style of jazz is more 40’s it has been built upon conventions of the 20’s and 30’s and in that way I feel that it won’t be too out of kilter to incorporate elements of it into our interpretation. I’m having trouble with working out the voicings and some of the very complicated runs. Unfortunately and surprisingly, no one seems to have transcribed the piano part for this track. So it’s back to the keyboard for more bleeding fingers.
We have a meeting regarding out research for the Ensemble project with Marlisa on Monday morning so I’ve made sure that everyone has a copy of the proposal in order for them to find source materials. It’s easy to forget when you’re so focussed on the performance aspect that we’ve also got to write about it as well....
Individual Project.
Finally I feel like I’ve made steps towards getting my individual project moving. I’m going to have a meeting with Marlisa tomorrow and I actually have an acceptable plot outline and a firm idea of the songs that we’re going to include in the musical. I now need to arrange auditions for the cast. I’m hoping to have posters up on Monday for sign-up and after speaking to Marlisa tomorrow I’ll be able to go around the classes on Monday and tell everyone about the production to see who’s interested in taking part.
This is actually really scary for me. After months of talking about it this is the step that will actually make it start happening which means that I can’t get cold feet and back out now. I’m not sure if it’s normal to feel panicky about stuff like this but it does really feel like I’m putting my head on a platter. In retrospect I think that this is the one thing that I’ve not really done a lot of during my time at college. I’ve written songs for my group work and I’ve played as part of a band but perhaps I’ve not always been comfortable to put myself forward as a creative person. I think that this is down to fear of criticism. Well perhaps not criticism. I can accept criticism for my playing but to put something forward that you’ve created such as a song or the idea for this musical – it leaves you feeling exposed – like it’s not WHAT you are doing that’s being judged but WHO you really are. It’s like exposing your soul or something (which sounds a little dramatic) but I’m quite happy with my soul snuggled away happily safe and warm where no one can poke at it thank you very much.
Anyway, I’m not sure if this really is the forum for discussing things like this but I suppose the blog is meant to be for self-reflection and that was pretty self-reflective. I’m going to go and throw up now!
Promotion.
Finished my case-study for class this week. It wasn’t exactly what Helen had asked for but I fear that in my old age I’m struggling to devote 2000 words to an inspiring artist! Of course I could probably have written about Blur again but I fear that there might be a restraining order in the post. So, I came across a study conducted by PRS which talked about band branding. It provided lots of interesting issues to discuss in respect of promotion of oneself as a musician so I’ve discussed these instead of focussing on just one “inspiring” act.
Having been at deaths door for the last couple of weeks I’ve not had a chance to catch up with my designer so it was good to have a chat and see what she’s been working on. She’d come up with some interesting designs for logos drawing on some of the ideas we’d discussed previously. My favourite was the union jack umbrella logo; the umbrella being an idea that Robyn suggested when we were brainstorming and that I liked so much that I intend to use as a recurring motif in the actual performance. So I was really pleased that she seized upon this and used it as a logo. I feel if this appears on the promotional material it will really give the whole project a sense of unity.
As part her own side of the project Robyn has had to produce a portrait of me (!) I wasn’t sure that with the focus of my project being a musical rather than a gig showcasing me as a performer or my own material that a portrait would really be something I could use. However, Robyn has gone away and had the most fantastic idea of rendering a picture of me in the style of Julian Opie who provided the artwork for the Blur ‘Best Of’ album; a picture which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. I love it! It really keeps with the theme of Britpop and I suppose that as part of my pack that will be handed in to showcase the work I’ve done for my degree I’ll have to write a bit about me and what I do. As I really want this year to feel like a culmination of work towards an entire product this picture as an accompaniment to that biography will really tie everything together.
We’ve decided that once I’ve auditioned and cast the main characters for the show we will be able to start working on the photographic artwork for the promotional material, which again will include the umbrella motif. Onwards and upwards!
Production
Have been really stressing about production. Studio time, getting the band together, EVERYTHING.... is a hassle. However, I have a band together now kind of so we shall be rehearsing tomorrow. Had a meeting with Dave McFarlane in how we should approach this recording and he’s been very keen to record in the theatre which hooks up to the Eastlake 3 Studio. This required speaking with Andy Wardle who is in-charge of all things live and happening so off I trotted to the production base. This proved to be an excellent occurrence. Andy was really really helpful and has suggested that if I rehearse the band that it might be viable to do the songs as a lunchtime gig and have it recorded that way. I need to speak to Marlisa about this as it doesn’t give us a lot of time to rehearse but at the moment with the time restraints I see this as the best way forward. This lead on to a discussion about whether the project tied in with my individual project, which it does. Andy took the word musical a lot better than I expected. Phew. I had been hoping that I would be able to stage the performance in Perth Theatre but in reality I’m not so sure how viable this will be so it’s good to find that Andy felt it was a plausible project to be held at college and the fact that I had started planning for it now would make it easier than leaving to the last minute. (Goes without saying really but....)
In Other News ....
I eagerly await the grade 5 theory results of my first student to sit an exam. Much excitement!
Thursday, 4 November 2010
Saturday, 23 October 2010
Week 4
Dissertation
The deadline for our dissertation proposal was on Friday of this week – time to attempt to nail down exactly what I intend to research and write about. As I mentioned last week, the idea of music as a universal language is very subjective and in connecting this to musical perception seems to cover a myriad of specialities not limited to specific musical research, metaphysics, neuroscience, linguistics to name but a few. This said I have been down quite a few dreels (how colloquial!) in trying to locate material that deals with this area of discussion. I have also still to hit upon a reliable method of testing responses to musical stimuli in young children. This is going to require more research as well. Regardless, I have managed to write what I feel is an alright title for the dissertation: “The Age Of Innocence and Music As A Universal Language: An Study Of Musical Perception in Young Children.” Snappy isn’t it? The super-condensed version of the proposal goes a little like this...
Philip Tagg presents the argument that music cannot be considered a universal language as musical perception is formed through outside factors such as cultural conditioning. The 1999 paper delivered by Smith and Williams entitled “Children’s Artistic Responses To Music” presents their findings which seem to indicate that children display many similar perceptions to musical stimulus regardless of culture or background. If Tagg’s proposition holds true, then we could extrapolate that very young children, with relatively little exposure to cultural conditioning, would be less likely to display group responses to musical stimuli. However, if Smith and William’s results could be replicated in young children yet to become immersed in societal norms, then it may form the basis for the notion of music as a universal language.
Discuss ...
Literature review due in December - had best get reading.
Ensemble
Brain thoroughly wracked, I thought that perhaps if we could tie the majority of songs that we originally intended to do to either a record label or famous Jazz Club, then we may have the basis for a reasonable justification and avenue of research for our ensemble project. I looked into Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London but found that there is relatively little literature written about it, although many seminal jazz artists of the modern era such as Nina Simone and Johnny Dankworth recorded albums there. It didn’t really help me to justify the wide range of material we wanted to include. Still, it was a start. This led me to looking at other focal points for the Jazz scene which led to The Cotton Club in Harlem during the 20’s and 30’s. This period offers a wealth of things to write about. Musically this was a rich time in the development of Jazz, seeing, amongst other things, the form move from two-step and ragtime to swung rhythms. This period is now known as ‘The Harlem Renaissance’, and saw an explosion of culture across many artistic fields, literature, poetry, visual arts and music included. This time period also offers the opportunity to discuss sociological and historical issues such as racial inequality and the great depression and how these influenced the musical output of this time.
Although this route provides a rich source of material for research and discussion and allows us to look at the routes of Jazz it also means taking a U-turn on the material we wanted to included in our set. We can retain tunes by Ellington and the like but later tunes would have to be scrapped. However, at this point in time, this was the most plausible avenue to go down; any other credible suggestions were noticeably thin on the ground.
So I floated the idea on the Take Five Facebook page and was pleasantly surprised to find that mostly everyone was quite up for the idea. On Monday morning we got together to discuss whether it would be a viable idea and to talk to Marlisa about it. She was very encouraging and is going to arrange some dancers for the night of the show. We then went about writing the proposal. We had an idea of some of the songs but it was necessary to further research. Luckily there is quite a wide range of resources available on the internet. We started to work on tracks later that afternoon. However, our ensemble supervisor came in and spoke lengthily about the period and stylistic features of the genre. We were again slightly disheartened. We certainly haven’t chosen the easiest thing to cover. I feel though, this only stands to strengthen our resolve to prove ourselves and our ability to tackle more challenging material. It did make me realise that our quickly put together proposal didn’t really cut the mustard and therefore I went home tweaked it and added to some of the original points made. I feel now that it justifies our song choice and allows us to draw many different songs from a fertile and exciting period of modern musical development that not only changed the course of Jazz but greatly influenced popular music as a whole. I breathed a sigh of relief when it was handed in. It’s a great feeling to meet deadlines.
I’m going to include a copy of it here for anyone who’s interested.....
‘THE TAKE 5’PRESENT.....‘An Evening at The Cotton Club.’
Affectionately known as the “Aristocrat of Harlem”, The Cotton Club was the musical focal point of the Harlem Renaissance and “the most famous night club, not only in Harlem, but all of New York City” during the 1920’s (the golden era of Jazz) and well into the 1930’s, playing host to the most notable African-American musicians and performers of the time, including monumental legends such as, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. In fact, before the club’s relocation to Broadway and 48th in 1936, “virtually every major black musician and orchestra had already played at the club.”
The name was a by-word for glamour and exclusivity and frequented by some of the biggest stars of the day such as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Bing Crosby. The Cotton Club’s connection with New York gangster and mafia operations, allowed patrons access to moonshine, brewed in illicit stills across the city during the years of prohibition. However, these same mafia connections insisted that the venue operate a strict “whites only” door policy and the glamour of the club was tainted by issues of race and segregation. Although this rule was somewhat relaxed in later years in deference to a request by Duke Ellington the club was eventually forced to temporarily close due to the Harlem race riots of 1936.
The Cotton Club’s original selling point was to give a white audience a taste of ‘jungle music’ and ‘the exotic’ during a time when segregation meant that there was little exposure to African-American culture. However, many of the venues reviews were directed or written by “white folks” such as Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh and Ted Koehler and Harold Arlen. Also, 1927 brought the advent of the first movie soundtrack with Warner Bros release of “The Jazz Singer”; the first motion picture in which spoken dialogue and music were used in synchronisation with action on the screen. Coupled with the huge popularity of composers (and club patrons) such as Gershwin and Berlin, this meeting of ‘black’ and ‘white’ culture, made The Cotton Club a melting pot of musical styles and a crucible for the development of jazz.
Performance
Popular songs of this period could be heard in any of the 100+ clubs, venues, speak-easys and supper clubs operating in Harlem during this time. However, much emphasis was put on skilful arranging of music which would set bands apart in levels of originality and style. As a band we are more than aware of the instrumental limitations of our line-up for this project: There will be no brass or reed sections and we will be playing electrified instruments. However, in the spirit of the era, we hope to be able to employ inventive arranging techniques whilst still displaying some of the defining musical features of the time, much as Steely Dan successfully attempted with their 1974 rendition of Ellington’s “East St Louis Toodle-oo”. These characteristics include, in the rhythm section, a heavy emphasis on the use of toms in drum parts representing the ‘jungle feel’ of The Cotton Club’s earlier days and later, the all important swing rhythms developed by Ellington. Walking bass lines will be an important feature as well as use of pizzicato and modified slap techniques in an attempt to emulate the double bass sound. The piano will incorporate elements of the Harlem-Stride style whilst taking responsibility for some of the lower brass parts. Guitars will take the place of trumpets, saxophones and clarinets.
We also hope to set the stage for the performance by re-creating some of the atmosphere and ambience of The Cotton Club. ‘Guests’ will be seated at tables and offered table service. We hope to arrange an alcohol licence for the event and patrons will be able to relax, drink and not only listen to the music but become truly involved with the whole experience. We shall be incorporating elements of ‘the musical revue’ side of the venue with dancers performing alongside the band, emulating the cabaret-style of The Cotton Club.
These endeavours to re- produce an authentic environment in which the audience can experience the performance together with a millennial-reimagining of the music and arrangements of the time will hopefully create a thought-provoking, yet entertaining juxtaposition and demonstrate that musicians of today should embrace the opportunity to perform and celebrate the popular music of bygone eras, regardless of the instruments they have available to them.
The deadline for our dissertation proposal was on Friday of this week – time to attempt to nail down exactly what I intend to research and write about. As I mentioned last week, the idea of music as a universal language is very subjective and in connecting this to musical perception seems to cover a myriad of specialities not limited to specific musical research, metaphysics, neuroscience, linguistics to name but a few. This said I have been down quite a few dreels (how colloquial!) in trying to locate material that deals with this area of discussion. I have also still to hit upon a reliable method of testing responses to musical stimuli in young children. This is going to require more research as well. Regardless, I have managed to write what I feel is an alright title for the dissertation: “The Age Of Innocence and Music As A Universal Language: An Study Of Musical Perception in Young Children.” Snappy isn’t it? The super-condensed version of the proposal goes a little like this...
Philip Tagg presents the argument that music cannot be considered a universal language as musical perception is formed through outside factors such as cultural conditioning. The 1999 paper delivered by Smith and Williams entitled “Children’s Artistic Responses To Music” presents their findings which seem to indicate that children display many similar perceptions to musical stimulus regardless of culture or background. If Tagg’s proposition holds true, then we could extrapolate that very young children, with relatively little exposure to cultural conditioning, would be less likely to display group responses to musical stimuli. However, if Smith and William’s results could be replicated in young children yet to become immersed in societal norms, then it may form the basis for the notion of music as a universal language.
Discuss ...
Literature review due in December - had best get reading.
Ensemble
Brain thoroughly wracked, I thought that perhaps if we could tie the majority of songs that we originally intended to do to either a record label or famous Jazz Club, then we may have the basis for a reasonable justification and avenue of research for our ensemble project. I looked into Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London but found that there is relatively little literature written about it, although many seminal jazz artists of the modern era such as Nina Simone and Johnny Dankworth recorded albums there. It didn’t really help me to justify the wide range of material we wanted to include. Still, it was a start. This led me to looking at other focal points for the Jazz scene which led to The Cotton Club in Harlem during the 20’s and 30’s. This period offers a wealth of things to write about. Musically this was a rich time in the development of Jazz, seeing, amongst other things, the form move from two-step and ragtime to swung rhythms. This period is now known as ‘The Harlem Renaissance’, and saw an explosion of culture across many artistic fields, literature, poetry, visual arts and music included. This time period also offers the opportunity to discuss sociological and historical issues such as racial inequality and the great depression and how these influenced the musical output of this time.
Although this route provides a rich source of material for research and discussion and allows us to look at the routes of Jazz it also means taking a U-turn on the material we wanted to included in our set. We can retain tunes by Ellington and the like but later tunes would have to be scrapped. However, at this point in time, this was the most plausible avenue to go down; any other credible suggestions were noticeably thin on the ground.
So I floated the idea on the Take Five Facebook page and was pleasantly surprised to find that mostly everyone was quite up for the idea. On Monday morning we got together to discuss whether it would be a viable idea and to talk to Marlisa about it. She was very encouraging and is going to arrange some dancers for the night of the show. We then went about writing the proposal. We had an idea of some of the songs but it was necessary to further research. Luckily there is quite a wide range of resources available on the internet. We started to work on tracks later that afternoon. However, our ensemble supervisor came in and spoke lengthily about the period and stylistic features of the genre. We were again slightly disheartened. We certainly haven’t chosen the easiest thing to cover. I feel though, this only stands to strengthen our resolve to prove ourselves and our ability to tackle more challenging material. It did make me realise that our quickly put together proposal didn’t really cut the mustard and therefore I went home tweaked it and added to some of the original points made. I feel now that it justifies our song choice and allows us to draw many different songs from a fertile and exciting period of modern musical development that not only changed the course of Jazz but greatly influenced popular music as a whole. I breathed a sigh of relief when it was handed in. It’s a great feeling to meet deadlines.
I’m going to include a copy of it here for anyone who’s interested.....
‘THE TAKE 5’PRESENT.....‘An Evening at The Cotton Club.’
Affectionately known as the “Aristocrat of Harlem”, The Cotton Club was the musical focal point of the Harlem Renaissance and “the most famous night club, not only in Harlem, but all of New York City” during the 1920’s (the golden era of Jazz) and well into the 1930’s, playing host to the most notable African-American musicians and performers of the time, including monumental legends such as, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. In fact, before the club’s relocation to Broadway and 48th in 1936, “virtually every major black musician and orchestra had already played at the club.”
The name was a by-word for glamour and exclusivity and frequented by some of the biggest stars of the day such as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Bing Crosby. The Cotton Club’s connection with New York gangster and mafia operations, allowed patrons access to moonshine, brewed in illicit stills across the city during the years of prohibition. However, these same mafia connections insisted that the venue operate a strict “whites only” door policy and the glamour of the club was tainted by issues of race and segregation. Although this rule was somewhat relaxed in later years in deference to a request by Duke Ellington the club was eventually forced to temporarily close due to the Harlem race riots of 1936.
The Cotton Club’s original selling point was to give a white audience a taste of ‘jungle music’ and ‘the exotic’ during a time when segregation meant that there was little exposure to African-American culture. However, many of the venues reviews were directed or written by “white folks” such as Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh and Ted Koehler and Harold Arlen. Also, 1927 brought the advent of the first movie soundtrack with Warner Bros release of “The Jazz Singer”; the first motion picture in which spoken dialogue and music were used in synchronisation with action on the screen. Coupled with the huge popularity of composers (and club patrons) such as Gershwin and Berlin, this meeting of ‘black’ and ‘white’ culture, made The Cotton Club a melting pot of musical styles and a crucible for the development of jazz.
Performance
Popular songs of this period could be heard in any of the 100+ clubs, venues, speak-easys and supper clubs operating in Harlem during this time. However, much emphasis was put on skilful arranging of music which would set bands apart in levels of originality and style. As a band we are more than aware of the instrumental limitations of our line-up for this project: There will be no brass or reed sections and we will be playing electrified instruments. However, in the spirit of the era, we hope to be able to employ inventive arranging techniques whilst still displaying some of the defining musical features of the time, much as Steely Dan successfully attempted with their 1974 rendition of Ellington’s “East St Louis Toodle-oo”. These characteristics include, in the rhythm section, a heavy emphasis on the use of toms in drum parts representing the ‘jungle feel’ of The Cotton Club’s earlier days and later, the all important swing rhythms developed by Ellington. Walking bass lines will be an important feature as well as use of pizzicato and modified slap techniques in an attempt to emulate the double bass sound. The piano will incorporate elements of the Harlem-Stride style whilst taking responsibility for some of the lower brass parts. Guitars will take the place of trumpets, saxophones and clarinets.
We also hope to set the stage for the performance by re-creating some of the atmosphere and ambience of The Cotton Club. ‘Guests’ will be seated at tables and offered table service. We hope to arrange an alcohol licence for the event and patrons will be able to relax, drink and not only listen to the music but become truly involved with the whole experience. We shall be incorporating elements of ‘the musical revue’ side of the venue with dancers performing alongside the band, emulating the cabaret-style of The Cotton Club.
These endeavours to re- produce an authentic environment in which the audience can experience the performance together with a millennial-reimagining of the music and arrangements of the time will hopefully create a thought-provoking, yet entertaining juxtaposition and demonstrate that musicians of today should embrace the opportunity to perform and celebrate the popular music of bygone eras, regardless of the instruments they have available to them.
Thursday, 21 October 2010
Week 3
Dissertation
After consideration I have decided to continue with the theme of exploration of musical perception in young children as a topic for my dissertation and to discuss whether a collective response to music in young children might be used to argue towards the concept of music as a universal language. My worries in regard to this line of research stem mostly from the fact that there is an awful lot of reading to do. I’m not necessarily concerned about the sheer volume but more by the fact that much of the material deals with the topic from a neuroscience viewpoint; a subject of which I have relatively little (ehem... no) knowledge of. Another concern is that the notion of music as a universal language is largely a philosophical debate; can I, in this short space of time, fully understand the science enough to support or attempt to disprove a philosophical notion? Thirdly, this could potentially be a huge topic to cover! Will it be possible to thoroughly discuss the issues arising from my research and also present the findings of any study I conduct in only 5000 words? I shudder at the thought!
Ensemble
I have set up a group page on Facebook – “The Take 5” so that we can discuss ideas and post videos and try to sort out the mess that is our Jazz Ensemble! It is proving almost entirely impossible to justify including the entire broad sweep of tracks that we wanted to cover in this band. Our research paper is limited to around 3000 words and to attempt to cover the development of Jazz from 1920’s to present is a tall order within these boundaries. All of us have brought different songs and artists to the table that we really wanted to include in the set such as tracks from Dave Brubeck and Herbie Hancock, songs from the early swing era such as ‘It Don’t Mean A Thing’ by Duke Ellington, along with jazz standards popularised by the likes of Nat King Cole such as ‘Nature Boy’, right through to modern jazz artists.; Jamie Cullum and Diana Krall. I have been racking my brains to find a way that we can justify all this but to no avail! This has led to practice this week being more of a discussion of possible avenues to pursue. Regardless of which route we take it seems that we will have to cut many of the songs we had originally intended to include. Another issue that I am aware of is that I am probably more familiar with the genre than other members of the group (by their own admission). I include a lot of standards in my set outside of college and due to this I am quite comfortable in attempting to play in this style (but by no stretch of the imagination an expert in any way!) I feel like this familiarity is a plus point in so far as at least one of us has some working knowledge of the subject, however, I hope that this does not make it seem as though I am overly influencing the direction of the group as this, being an ensemble, is meant to be a group project. Also, although familiar with many of the songs concerned, as a solo pianist I am used to carrying both the melody and accompaniment along with including many prominent elements of the bass parts. This means I will have to greatly adjust my style of playing in order to accommodate and compliment other instruments as part of a band.
Music Production
This year our production unit luckily coincides and mirrors a unit in the BA Sound Production course. This has meant we have been able to meet with sound production degree students in an attempt to merge our projects in order to meet the specifications and outcomes of our respective units. There is actually little contact between the individual courses during degree year so this is not only a fantastic opportunity to work on this production project with the aid of an experienced sound engineer but also to network and meet other students. However, as fate would have it, I already knew one of the engineers from outside of college and after a discussion we elected to work on our projects together. Not, perhaps, the best attempt at networking but Dave is not only a fantastic engineer but also a brilliant musician and someone who I have wanted to work with for some time, so, what better opportunity to do so?! We went over the aims of the project and I now need to come up with a production time scale and also put an interim band together. Stress!
After consideration I have decided to continue with the theme of exploration of musical perception in young children as a topic for my dissertation and to discuss whether a collective response to music in young children might be used to argue towards the concept of music as a universal language. My worries in regard to this line of research stem mostly from the fact that there is an awful lot of reading to do. I’m not necessarily concerned about the sheer volume but more by the fact that much of the material deals with the topic from a neuroscience viewpoint; a subject of which I have relatively little (ehem... no) knowledge of. Another concern is that the notion of music as a universal language is largely a philosophical debate; can I, in this short space of time, fully understand the science enough to support or attempt to disprove a philosophical notion? Thirdly, this could potentially be a huge topic to cover! Will it be possible to thoroughly discuss the issues arising from my research and also present the findings of any study I conduct in only 5000 words? I shudder at the thought!
Ensemble
I have set up a group page on Facebook – “The Take 5” so that we can discuss ideas and post videos and try to sort out the mess that is our Jazz Ensemble! It is proving almost entirely impossible to justify including the entire broad sweep of tracks that we wanted to cover in this band. Our research paper is limited to around 3000 words and to attempt to cover the development of Jazz from 1920’s to present is a tall order within these boundaries. All of us have brought different songs and artists to the table that we really wanted to include in the set such as tracks from Dave Brubeck and Herbie Hancock, songs from the early swing era such as ‘It Don’t Mean A Thing’ by Duke Ellington, along with jazz standards popularised by the likes of Nat King Cole such as ‘Nature Boy’, right through to modern jazz artists.; Jamie Cullum and Diana Krall. I have been racking my brains to find a way that we can justify all this but to no avail! This has led to practice this week being more of a discussion of possible avenues to pursue. Regardless of which route we take it seems that we will have to cut many of the songs we had originally intended to include. Another issue that I am aware of is that I am probably more familiar with the genre than other members of the group (by their own admission). I include a lot of standards in my set outside of college and due to this I am quite comfortable in attempting to play in this style (but by no stretch of the imagination an expert in any way!) I feel like this familiarity is a plus point in so far as at least one of us has some working knowledge of the subject, however, I hope that this does not make it seem as though I am overly influencing the direction of the group as this, being an ensemble, is meant to be a group project. Also, although familiar with many of the songs concerned, as a solo pianist I am used to carrying both the melody and accompaniment along with including many prominent elements of the bass parts. This means I will have to greatly adjust my style of playing in order to accommodate and compliment other instruments as part of a band.
Music Production
This year our production unit luckily coincides and mirrors a unit in the BA Sound Production course. This has meant we have been able to meet with sound production degree students in an attempt to merge our projects in order to meet the specifications and outcomes of our respective units. There is actually little contact between the individual courses during degree year so this is not only a fantastic opportunity to work on this production project with the aid of an experienced sound engineer but also to network and meet other students. However, as fate would have it, I already knew one of the engineers from outside of college and after a discussion we elected to work on our projects together. Not, perhaps, the best attempt at networking but Dave is not only a fantastic engineer but also a brilliant musician and someone who I have wanted to work with for some time, so, what better opportunity to do so?! We went over the aims of the project and I now need to come up with a production time scale and also put an interim band together. Stress!
Friday, 17 September 2010
Week 2
BA3 Dissertation
This week Rob and JT who completed their honours year before summer came in to talk us about their dissertation writing experiences. They too, stressed the importance of starting as soon as possible, writing about something in which you are interested in and of constantly referring work back to our lecturers for corrections and suggestions. We were asked, last week, to come up with 3 possible dissertation titles. I had focussed on the study I outlined in last week’s blog but have also thought about looking at musicians and composers who have suffered from illness or disability and how this has affected their work.
This idea is an extension of a recent Radio 4 series by Professor Robert Winston who discussed the life and works of composers such as Beethoven, Chopin and Rachmaninoff who all suffered medical illnesses during their lives, such as deafness in the case of Beethoven. Winston focuses mainly on composers of western art music and I felt that it might be interesting to consider what effect illness or disability may have on musicians and composers from the sphere of popular music. A list of possible subjects might read as follows:
Rick Allan – Drummer of Def Leppard and amputee.Michael Wolff – Jazz pianist, composer and tourette’s sufferer. Ian Dury – Musician, song-writer and polio-victim. Neil Young – Musician, song-writer, polio –victim, epileptic and diabetic. Joni Mitchel – Musician, songwriter and polio sufferer.
Hank Williams – Musician, songwriter - Suffered from Spina Bifida Occulta. John Cougar Mellencamp – Musician, song-writer -suffered from Spina Bifida. Billy Joel, Brian Wilson, John Denver, Billy Corgan and Kurt Kobain all suffered from mental illnesses such as depression and bi-polar disorder. Kurt Cobain also suffered from an undiagnosed stomach condition and scoliosis as a child. Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles were both blind from infancy. Syd Barrett and Peter Green both suffered from schizophrenia. It has even been speculated that Elvis suffered from autism. However, this is just a starting point and although it is an interesting subject for exploration I am struggling to find an angle from which to pose an answerable question.
Therefore, I have continued to look for literature on the previous topic of semiotic susceptibility in children. This has proved particularly frustrating also! I have found a paper in the JSTOR archives online titled “Children’s artistic responses to musical intervals” which is hugely interesting. It discusses a study which aimed to determine to what extent naive listeners from diverse cultural backgrounds perceived musical sounds to have the same meanings and seemed to suggest that music, on the most basic level, can be considered “universal”. To briefly describe the experiment, a group of 11/12 year old children were played four musical intervals (major 3rd, perfect 4th, perfect 5th and major 7th) and asked to draw a representation of these sounds. The pictures produced were then given to a group of psychology students who were then asked to describe these pictures by choosing adjectives from a pre-prepared list. There was, thematically, a high correspondence within the group to the interval heard and the subject of the drawing produced. For example, a high number of respondents drew images of death upon hearing an interval of a perfect 4th. A similar experiment was then conducted with children from diverse cultural backgrounds with South Africa, the results of which pointed to a correlation between certain intervals and themes regardless of cultural background.
This experiment was quite similar to the one I proposed to conduct. However, it uses the smallest musical phrase available, where as I had planned to use a longer piece of music. Philip Tagg suggests in his paper “ Universal music and the case of death” that from his own research he can conclude that music is not universal, it being subject to culturally biased interpretation by the listener. He demonstrated this theory by playing funeral/mourning music from non-western cultures to a group of ‘Western’ subjects and asked what they thought the function/theme of the music might be. The majority of the subjects did not identify the music with funerals, death or mourning, thus demonstrating the culturally-specific function of music. Therefore, any experiment I conduct which asks for responses to sounds more than an interval in length may be culturally-biased.
Perhaps therefore, any study conducted should seek, first and foremost, to determine if there is an across-the-board, semiotic response rather than attempt to determine what is signified.
Another difficulty highlighted by the study of children’s artistic responses to musical intervals was that posed by age of the children. The artistic responses of children below a certain age became much more difficult to interpret. The reason put forward for this was that children were limited by their ability to draw and subject matter in responses became far more uniform; many drawing cats, houses and familiar scenes of domesticity regardless of musical-interval. This confirms my own fear that it will be difficult to acquire accurate results from the very youngest children, who are, after all, for the purposes of my study, the age group I am most interested in. There is also a chance that, rather than showing limitations of ability, the uniform nature of responses from younger children does demonstrate a weaker cognitive awareness of semiotic correlation.
The study also references Husmann’s “Theory of Consonance”, in which he suggest that the anatomical structure of the human ear makes it easier for some intervals to be heard than others. To paraphrase, this is why some sounds are heard to be consonant and some to be dissonant, consonance being an easy or peaceful experience, dissonance being difficult and unsettling. If this is the case then it may not be a leap to suggest that cognitive inter-relation between certain sounds and certain emotions may be present from before birth.
This all poses the question: “How do I gather reliable empirical data that is not subject to limitations of age or ability?” So I thought of asking presenting children with a choice of colours and asking them to choose one that they feel best represents the sound/sounds they hear. This has opened up a whole can of worms and the subject of music/colour theory... my head hurts with thinking I may have to learn about frequencies et al. And who’s to say - young children might just not care enough about these things not to give completely arbitrary responses regardless of ease of expression? More on this later...
Ensemble
Much excitement was had at the prospect of ensemble. Having discussed the project since the start of HND Mark and I were quite certain that we wanted to play jazz, and now we had the opportunity to do it. Sounds easy doesn’t it? Apparently not. We need to justify EVERY song we choose to play! And write about it. Now we have been left attempting to link “It don’t mean a thing” with “Girl From Ipanema”. It therefore seems to me that we are going to have to do one of two things. We either focus on one particular period of jazz or try to demonstrate a jazz composition timeline. The first option could mean that we have to rethink songs in the set that we originally envisaged. The second will mean an awful lot of writing. The problem with the genre we’ve chosen is that there are so many sub-genres located within it. Personally, I’d be quite happy to play swing and 1930’s Jazz Standards from the great American songbook. However, it seems that whatever we do will be lacking authenticity as in addition to the standard Jazz trio we have two guitarists. Which, someone helpfully pointed out, is two guitarists too many! How do we justify this? I think we can get away with this as long as it’s we look at it from the right perspective. It’s just finding that perspective! So what do we have so far? Well, we have some brilliant ideas for the actual show itself. We can definitely demonstrate to some extent the key traits of Jazz: Improvisation, Swing and Harmony. I think it will be a case of taking seminal compositions from within each of the most important developments within the Jazz Timeline and demonstrating the main characteristics of a certain time (ie: the difference between Swing and Bebop)regardless of band structure. Argh! It’s too difficult!
Design
On Tuesday we met with our designers for the first time. We were paired up and then went off to discuss the initial design brief for our individual project. My designer, Robyn, took a lot of notes and I attempted to explain what I had imagined for the project. Items that will need to be designed are posters, CD cover, DVD Cover, Programme, and website. Also there will be a need for costume design as well as set design. My plan to use film-projection as a method of setting time and scene will also require a design element. I explained about the imagery and ethos of the time. Britpop bands drew heavily on the bands of the 60’s Brit-explosion. The use of Union Jacks and Mod-styles reminiscent of The Who’s Quadrophenia coupled with urban-sportswear was prevalent. This was in many ways juxtaposed with the “alternative” sights and sounds of Camden: a mish-mash of scenes, from Punk, Grunge, Goth right through to Media-Chic. Food records, Blurs label was based in the heart of Camden; Oasis’ label, Creation only a 10 minute walk-away in Primrose Hill as well as the MTV studios situated, again bang in the centre of Camden, at Hawley Crescent. The way I intend to indicate time is by setting the story in the run-up to the 1997 general-election, which saw Labour’s biggest landslide victory in history. Therefore I feel there should be an element of New Labour imagery incorporated within the design. I have begun collecting images to put together a mood-board that Robyn will hopefully be able to pull some ideas from, as well as writing my design-brief.
Sound Production
To tie in with the Britpop project I hope to be able to use this unit to produce an EP containing songs from the musical, that will be available in the weeks leading up to the performance. I hope that this will not only help to publicise the show but also raise awareness of Britpop bands and the merits of the era, encouraging people to perhaps go away and discover more about the music of the time. Just as the recent 80’s revival has re-popularised the music of bands such as OMD (whether this is a good or bad thing I’m not sure), I feel it is not unlikely that there may well be a 90’s revival in the future – this could be the start of something beautiful. Not that I’m dissatisfied with my life and wish I was 17 again or anything.
Media Production
I had hoped to use this class time to produce a short promo-video for the musical that will be able to go on You-Tube and link to a Facebook and also dedicated website to promote the show. I have a contact that works with hi-def video and I hope to be able to use his expertise in the development of this film. This should also tie in with the sound production as I will have original recordings of the sound track for backing music for the film. However, our lecturer feels that we should be using this class to demonstrate our own musical creativity. Therefore I plan to write an extra track in the style of Britpop for inclusion in the video. There will also be the need to record voice-over and sound effects for the piece. This class will also be an opportunity to produce a DVD/CD that acts as a compilation of all the work from the musical, such as studio-tracks, a film of the live performance as well as the promo-video.
This week Rob and JT who completed their honours year before summer came in to talk us about their dissertation writing experiences. They too, stressed the importance of starting as soon as possible, writing about something in which you are interested in and of constantly referring work back to our lecturers for corrections and suggestions. We were asked, last week, to come up with 3 possible dissertation titles. I had focussed on the study I outlined in last week’s blog but have also thought about looking at musicians and composers who have suffered from illness or disability and how this has affected their work.
This idea is an extension of a recent Radio 4 series by Professor Robert Winston who discussed the life and works of composers such as Beethoven, Chopin and Rachmaninoff who all suffered medical illnesses during their lives, such as deafness in the case of Beethoven. Winston focuses mainly on composers of western art music and I felt that it might be interesting to consider what effect illness or disability may have on musicians and composers from the sphere of popular music. A list of possible subjects might read as follows:
Rick Allan – Drummer of Def Leppard and amputee.Michael Wolff – Jazz pianist, composer and tourette’s sufferer. Ian Dury – Musician, song-writer and polio-victim. Neil Young – Musician, song-writer, polio –victim, epileptic and diabetic. Joni Mitchel – Musician, songwriter and polio sufferer.
Hank Williams – Musician, songwriter - Suffered from Spina Bifida Occulta. John Cougar Mellencamp – Musician, song-writer -suffered from Spina Bifida. Billy Joel, Brian Wilson, John Denver, Billy Corgan and Kurt Kobain all suffered from mental illnesses such as depression and bi-polar disorder. Kurt Cobain also suffered from an undiagnosed stomach condition and scoliosis as a child. Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles were both blind from infancy. Syd Barrett and Peter Green both suffered from schizophrenia. It has even been speculated that Elvis suffered from autism. However, this is just a starting point and although it is an interesting subject for exploration I am struggling to find an angle from which to pose an answerable question.
Therefore, I have continued to look for literature on the previous topic of semiotic susceptibility in children. This has proved particularly frustrating also! I have found a paper in the JSTOR archives online titled “Children’s artistic responses to musical intervals” which is hugely interesting. It discusses a study which aimed to determine to what extent naive listeners from diverse cultural backgrounds perceived musical sounds to have the same meanings and seemed to suggest that music, on the most basic level, can be considered “universal”. To briefly describe the experiment, a group of 11/12 year old children were played four musical intervals (major 3rd, perfect 4th, perfect 5th and major 7th) and asked to draw a representation of these sounds. The pictures produced were then given to a group of psychology students who were then asked to describe these pictures by choosing adjectives from a pre-prepared list. There was, thematically, a high correspondence within the group to the interval heard and the subject of the drawing produced. For example, a high number of respondents drew images of death upon hearing an interval of a perfect 4th. A similar experiment was then conducted with children from diverse cultural backgrounds with South Africa, the results of which pointed to a correlation between certain intervals and themes regardless of cultural background.
This experiment was quite similar to the one I proposed to conduct. However, it uses the smallest musical phrase available, where as I had planned to use a longer piece of music. Philip Tagg suggests in his paper “ Universal music and the case of death” that from his own research he can conclude that music is not universal, it being subject to culturally biased interpretation by the listener. He demonstrated this theory by playing funeral/mourning music from non-western cultures to a group of ‘Western’ subjects and asked what they thought the function/theme of the music might be. The majority of the subjects did not identify the music with funerals, death or mourning, thus demonstrating the culturally-specific function of music. Therefore, any experiment I conduct which asks for responses to sounds more than an interval in length may be culturally-biased.
Perhaps therefore, any study conducted should seek, first and foremost, to determine if there is an across-the-board, semiotic response rather than attempt to determine what is signified.
Another difficulty highlighted by the study of children’s artistic responses to musical intervals was that posed by age of the children. The artistic responses of children below a certain age became much more difficult to interpret. The reason put forward for this was that children were limited by their ability to draw and subject matter in responses became far more uniform; many drawing cats, houses and familiar scenes of domesticity regardless of musical-interval. This confirms my own fear that it will be difficult to acquire accurate results from the very youngest children, who are, after all, for the purposes of my study, the age group I am most interested in. There is also a chance that, rather than showing limitations of ability, the uniform nature of responses from younger children does demonstrate a weaker cognitive awareness of semiotic correlation.
The study also references Husmann’s “Theory of Consonance”, in which he suggest that the anatomical structure of the human ear makes it easier for some intervals to be heard than others. To paraphrase, this is why some sounds are heard to be consonant and some to be dissonant, consonance being an easy or peaceful experience, dissonance being difficult and unsettling. If this is the case then it may not be a leap to suggest that cognitive inter-relation between certain sounds and certain emotions may be present from before birth.
This all poses the question: “How do I gather reliable empirical data that is not subject to limitations of age or ability?” So I thought of asking presenting children with a choice of colours and asking them to choose one that they feel best represents the sound/sounds they hear. This has opened up a whole can of worms and the subject of music/colour theory... my head hurts with thinking I may have to learn about frequencies et al. And who’s to say - young children might just not care enough about these things not to give completely arbitrary responses regardless of ease of expression? More on this later...
Ensemble
Much excitement was had at the prospect of ensemble. Having discussed the project since the start of HND Mark and I were quite certain that we wanted to play jazz, and now we had the opportunity to do it. Sounds easy doesn’t it? Apparently not. We need to justify EVERY song we choose to play! And write about it. Now we have been left attempting to link “It don’t mean a thing” with “Girl From Ipanema”. It therefore seems to me that we are going to have to do one of two things. We either focus on one particular period of jazz or try to demonstrate a jazz composition timeline. The first option could mean that we have to rethink songs in the set that we originally envisaged. The second will mean an awful lot of writing. The problem with the genre we’ve chosen is that there are so many sub-genres located within it. Personally, I’d be quite happy to play swing and 1930’s Jazz Standards from the great American songbook. However, it seems that whatever we do will be lacking authenticity as in addition to the standard Jazz trio we have two guitarists. Which, someone helpfully pointed out, is two guitarists too many! How do we justify this? I think we can get away with this as long as it’s we look at it from the right perspective. It’s just finding that perspective! So what do we have so far? Well, we have some brilliant ideas for the actual show itself. We can definitely demonstrate to some extent the key traits of Jazz: Improvisation, Swing and Harmony. I think it will be a case of taking seminal compositions from within each of the most important developments within the Jazz Timeline and demonstrating the main characteristics of a certain time (ie: the difference between Swing and Bebop)regardless of band structure. Argh! It’s too difficult!
Design
On Tuesday we met with our designers for the first time. We were paired up and then went off to discuss the initial design brief for our individual project. My designer, Robyn, took a lot of notes and I attempted to explain what I had imagined for the project. Items that will need to be designed are posters, CD cover, DVD Cover, Programme, and website. Also there will be a need for costume design as well as set design. My plan to use film-projection as a method of setting time and scene will also require a design element. I explained about the imagery and ethos of the time. Britpop bands drew heavily on the bands of the 60’s Brit-explosion. The use of Union Jacks and Mod-styles reminiscent of The Who’s Quadrophenia coupled with urban-sportswear was prevalent. This was in many ways juxtaposed with the “alternative” sights and sounds of Camden: a mish-mash of scenes, from Punk, Grunge, Goth right through to Media-Chic. Food records, Blurs label was based in the heart of Camden; Oasis’ label, Creation only a 10 minute walk-away in Primrose Hill as well as the MTV studios situated, again bang in the centre of Camden, at Hawley Crescent. The way I intend to indicate time is by setting the story in the run-up to the 1997 general-election, which saw Labour’s biggest landslide victory in history. Therefore I feel there should be an element of New Labour imagery incorporated within the design. I have begun collecting images to put together a mood-board that Robyn will hopefully be able to pull some ideas from, as well as writing my design-brief.
Sound Production
To tie in with the Britpop project I hope to be able to use this unit to produce an EP containing songs from the musical, that will be available in the weeks leading up to the performance. I hope that this will not only help to publicise the show but also raise awareness of Britpop bands and the merits of the era, encouraging people to perhaps go away and discover more about the music of the time. Just as the recent 80’s revival has re-popularised the music of bands such as OMD (whether this is a good or bad thing I’m not sure), I feel it is not unlikely that there may well be a 90’s revival in the future – this could be the start of something beautiful. Not that I’m dissatisfied with my life and wish I was 17 again or anything.
Media Production
I had hoped to use this class time to produce a short promo-video for the musical that will be able to go on You-Tube and link to a Facebook and also dedicated website to promote the show. I have a contact that works with hi-def video and I hope to be able to use his expertise in the development of this film. This should also tie in with the sound production as I will have original recordings of the sound track for backing music for the film. However, our lecturer feels that we should be using this class to demonstrate our own musical creativity. Therefore I plan to write an extra track in the style of Britpop for inclusion in the video. There will also be the need to record voice-over and sound effects for the piece. This class will also be an opportunity to produce a DVD/CD that acts as a compilation of all the work from the musical, such as studio-tracks, a film of the live performance as well as the promo-video.
Week 1
BA3 Dissertation
Having spent some time over the summer thinking about dissertation and possible topics it felt somewhat of a relief to finally be sitting in class discussing the ins and outs of dissertation writing and also to be given the deadlines we are to meet for this class. We were asked to think firstly about choosing our topic and were made aware of how important it is to choose a subject with which we are interested in and with which we can truly engage. Originality, along with the ability to be objective when writing your dissertation seem to also be key. We were asked to consider the merits of previous dissertation titles and how the wording of this question and how well it is addressed within the text of the dissertation will influence the success of the final submission of work.
When studying for HND I became interested in semiotics and enjoyed the discussion of this in the Music History units of the course. The subject of semiotic responses to music raises many questions and I hope to be able to find a unique viewpoint from which to discuss and analyse aspects of this in my dissertation. When writing the Fabbri and Adorno essays for Music History last year I came across a paper by Philip Tagg entitled “Towards a Sign Typology of Music”, in which he discusses the need for further research in to this area and within this puts forward an outline of how connotative signification might be systemised. This paper was delivered in 1991 and is now almost 20 years out of date and much has advanced in this field since. Google scholar lists 22 articles that reference this work and I am currently reading through them in order to find an original angle from which to approach this subject. If a system of connotative signification (however culturally-biased) can be defined I feel it would be interesting to examine if it is possible to determine at what age, if any, we become more aware of or more susceptible to these signifiers, and also, from the point of view of one who is interested in education, if the responses of children who receive extra-curricular musical tuition are more likely to conform with this system, or whether they are able present a more individualistic response to musical stimuli.
Anecdotal evidence that there may be a point of realisation within a child’s formative years to desired semiotic responses to music came recently; Tennessee watched the film “Arachnaphobia” recently. Mid-way through the film she said “Oh now I see! When that music comes on you know the spiders are coming!”
Tagg’s paper, “Music, moving image, semiotics and the democratic right to know.” Also has relevance to this topic and I hope to find a wealth more research to build upon that will allow me to conduct my own original research.
Now all I need to do is find a snappy title, get the go-ahead for my proposal and find an un-biased way in which to collect and analyse empirical data. Easy! In reference to this last point; should the proposal be given the green light, I feel the most difficult thing to achieve in collecting evidence for this research will be finding a way in which a wide age-range of children could respond to a piece of music without biasing their responses (i.e from adult-help, peer-suggestion, range of ability.) Therefore, I intend to liaise with a variety of teachers and educators prior to conducting this research in order to best establish a method to collect data without falling prey to limiting factors that might make the study worthless.
Having spent some time over the summer thinking about dissertation and possible topics it felt somewhat of a relief to finally be sitting in class discussing the ins and outs of dissertation writing and also to be given the deadlines we are to meet for this class. We were asked to think firstly about choosing our topic and were made aware of how important it is to choose a subject with which we are interested in and with which we can truly engage. Originality, along with the ability to be objective when writing your dissertation seem to also be key. We were asked to consider the merits of previous dissertation titles and how the wording of this question and how well it is addressed within the text of the dissertation will influence the success of the final submission of work.
When studying for HND I became interested in semiotics and enjoyed the discussion of this in the Music History units of the course. The subject of semiotic responses to music raises many questions and I hope to be able to find a unique viewpoint from which to discuss and analyse aspects of this in my dissertation. When writing the Fabbri and Adorno essays for Music History last year I came across a paper by Philip Tagg entitled “Towards a Sign Typology of Music”, in which he discusses the need for further research in to this area and within this puts forward an outline of how connotative signification might be systemised. This paper was delivered in 1991 and is now almost 20 years out of date and much has advanced in this field since. Google scholar lists 22 articles that reference this work and I am currently reading through them in order to find an original angle from which to approach this subject. If a system of connotative signification (however culturally-biased) can be defined I feel it would be interesting to examine if it is possible to determine at what age, if any, we become more aware of or more susceptible to these signifiers, and also, from the point of view of one who is interested in education, if the responses of children who receive extra-curricular musical tuition are more likely to conform with this system, or whether they are able present a more individualistic response to musical stimuli.
Anecdotal evidence that there may be a point of realisation within a child’s formative years to desired semiotic responses to music came recently; Tennessee watched the film “Arachnaphobia” recently. Mid-way through the film she said “Oh now I see! When that music comes on you know the spiders are coming!”
Tagg’s paper, “Music, moving image, semiotics and the democratic right to know.” Also has relevance to this topic and I hope to find a wealth more research to build upon that will allow me to conduct my own original research.
Now all I need to do is find a snappy title, get the go-ahead for my proposal and find an un-biased way in which to collect and analyse empirical data. Easy! In reference to this last point; should the proposal be given the green light, I feel the most difficult thing to achieve in collecting evidence for this research will be finding a way in which a wide age-range of children could respond to a piece of music without biasing their responses (i.e from adult-help, peer-suggestion, range of ability.) Therefore, I intend to liaise with a variety of teachers and educators prior to conducting this research in order to best establish a method to collect data without falling prey to limiting factors that might make the study worthless.
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