Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Ted Gioia
I first met Dave Brubeck when I was in my twenties, and writing my book on West Coast jazz. Dave deeply impressed me, and not just as a musician. How many celebrities have a marriage that lasts 70 years? I think Dave is the only one. He was a very caring family man, a good dad and husband – never a given in the entertainment industry. He was a pioneer on civil rights, threatening to cancel concerts when faced with complaints about his integrated band.
2012 has been a poignant year for avant-garde music. German composer Hans Werner Henze passed away in October at age 86; a little over a week later American composer Elliott Carter passed away at the age of 103. The late John Cage was, as Musical America put it, “feted beyond his own wildest dreams” this year in celebration of his birth centenary. All three of these composers wrote music that challenged listeners to reconsider the boundaries of what qualifies as music.
By Professor Jane Edwards
As a music therapy scholar, teacher, and practitioner for more than 20 years, I have been able to learn from many sources about the crucial role our early years play in our lives. The ability to reflect on challenges experienced in our adult lives by linking back to childhood experiences is an essential aspect of the way that many music therapists practice. Rather than using descriptions of family histories to apportion blame, the therapist tries to understand the current experience of the patient and their worldview through the lens of past experience, to see if there is some way to make sense of self-destructive behaviours, or difficulties experienced in creating meaningful and satisfying relationships with others.
By Terza S. Lima-Neves
For a relatively unknown small island nation in West Africa with a population of half a million people, Cape Verde enjoys a rich and lively music scene. This archipelago of ten islands and former Portuguese colony is a nation historically affected by drought and famine, leading to a very sizable global immigrant community. Many of Cape Verde’s musicians either live abroad or were born in countries such as Portugal or the United States, the host country of the largest community of Cape Verdeans outside of Cape Verde.
>By Liz Wollman
One of the largest — and, I admit, most disappointing — revelations I had while researching 1970s adult musicals for my book, Hard Times: The Adult Musical in 1970s New York City, was just how tame they all ended up being. Sure, there was frank talk about sex in most adult musicals. There were also a lot of naked bodies on display.
By Gordon Thompson
Fifty years ago, the Beatles recorded their arrangement of “Please Please Me,” a lilting lover’s complaint transformed into a burst of adolescent adrenaline. On 26 November 1962, after repeated attempts to capture just the right balance of frustration and anticipation, George Martin informed them over the studio intercom that they had just recorded their first number-one disc. But the path to the top of the charts would not be easy.
Thanksgiving is upon us in the US. Before the OUP Music team headed home for some turkey and stuffing, we compiled a list of what we are most thankful for, musically speaking. Read on for our thoughts, and leave your own in the comments. Happy Thanksgiving!
By Paul Griffiths
I must have seen Elliott Carter several times in London from deep back in the seventies; perhaps the earliest of my mental photographs has him standing at the kerbside at Oxford Circus, waiting to cross the road, his head slightly turned and raised to look at his publisher who was with him, Janis Susskind, his face (as it would always be) smiling, his white hair lifted by the wind.
Ask most TV viewers about what they think of political ads on TV, and they will say that they hate them. But political TV ads have been shown to be effective in validating voters’ leanings toward or against a particular candidate, or for sowing seeds of doubt about a particular candidate.
November is International Drum Month, so declared by the Percussion Marketing Council. Percussionists are often the most underrated performers in the world of music, perhaps because specialized instruments aren’t strictly necessary: anyone with an upturned bucket or even just two hands to clap can engage in percussion pretty much anywhere. But drumming is harder than it looks.
By R. Larry Todd
Tomorrow marks the 207th anniversary of composer Fanny Hensel’s birth. Here’s a a few interesting facts about this overlooked composer.
(1) Fanny Hensel (1805-1847) was a granddaughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, a devoted sister of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, and the wife of the Prussian painter Wilhelm Hensel.
By Simon Wright
One hundred years ago this month the bodies of Captain Scott and his companions were discovered, eight months after they had perished from starvation, frostbite, and exposure on their return journey from the South Pole. Ostensibly a scientific and research expedition, Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his party had raced against Roald Amundsen to be first at the South Pole, and lost.
I had the great thrill over the week to perform as part of the Paul Sanchez Rolling Road Show at the Voodoo Experience in New Orleans. The three day music extravaganza takes place under the live oaks in beautiful City Park. Sanchez asked me to read from New Atlantis: Musicians Battle for the Future of New Orleans at the beginning of his set on the Preservation Hall stage. I read about my return to New Orleans after hurricane Katrina as the band played the melodic swells of “At the Foot of Canal Street” behind me.
By Lucy Allen
The clocks have gone back, the days are colder, the evenings are darker, and poppies are starting to appear on everyone’s lapels. As November approaches our thoughts turn to Armistice Day (11th November) and to commemorating the fallen. Orders for the music of Requiem settings keeps the OUP Hire Library busy at this time of year, but with so many different Requiem versions, how does one select which to perform? We asked OUP staff and their families for their favourite; read on to find out which they chose.
By Jessica Barbour
An eerie image emerged from Europe’s 14th-century bubonic plague epidemics into popular imagination: Death, in skeleton form, leading living souls in a processional dance to the grave. This idea, the danse macabre, was evoked by artists and writers across the continent, a cultural reaction to daily lives spent surrounded by death. I was introduced to the genre in school when I first heard Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre, a boisterous seven-minute work for orchestra written in the 1870s.
Composer Howard Skempton is one of the mainstays of British contemporary classical music. He is an experimental composer who writes in a style completely his own, un-deflected by trends in composition or performance. Having developed, under the tutelage of Cornelius Cardew, a musical style characterised by its elegance and simplicity, Skempton’s catalogue of compositions is now extensive and diverse.