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.

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.