Royal College of Music

Abstract This text explores how electronic musical instruments and electronic music ensembles can relate to composition and music notation by discussing the instruments in terms of existing practice in traditional instrumentation and in relation to symbolic electroacoustic music analysis. Starting from orchestration theory, the text considers how electronic musical instruments behave and are used, both with support from the author’s own practice and from a case study with students within the framework of a live-electronic ensemble course. The case study reflected the participants’ practice as creative composers/musicians, and how their exploratory and experimental approaches to their instruments proved important, creating challenges for notation. Traditionally, music notation relies on continuous changes of simple parameters, while performances with complex electronic instruments may have just as important information to document regarding their initial connectivity and parameter settings.

One of the most precious treasures in the Royal College of Music Museum's collection, the ivory clarinet in D made by Georg Heinrich Scherer around 1740 has been copied through 3D printing. This article presents the observations of playing such copies, including reflections over the compass and pitch of clarinets from that time, and the revelation of a magnificent sound response. The piece to be performed and recorded is the Ouverture HWV424 for two clarinets and horn in five movements that Handel wrote around 1741 – the same period during which Scherer built the ivory clarinet in question. In this piece, Handel promotes the clarinet's cantabile qualities alongside the trumpet-like idioms characteristic of its earliest repertory. The composer makes considerable technical demands on the players, and the 3D-printed clarinets responded with a bright and crisp quality, even in their lower register, traditionally regarded as a weak feature of Baroque clarinets. Within the project, elements of historical accuracy are inevitably challenged by questions of practical expediency. Reed position and design, for instance, reflect the experience of musicians working in the 2020s, although the performance itself aims to demonstrate a historical awareness that is facilitated by the very success of the 3D prints.

In this video essay, I establish, discuss, and illustrate different types of Disney screencerts—events where the performance of music on stage is accompanied by the projection of the associated audiovisual on screen. Focusing on the audience experience, I use concepts from intermedial and multimodal studies to illustrate the experiential difference in each of the different forms of Disney screencerts—Film-with-Live-Orchestra Concert; Film-with-Live-Theatre-and-Orchestra Concert; Excerpt/Montage-with-Live-Orchestra Concert; and Shorts-with-Live-Orchestra concert. In the 100th anniversary of Disney, the event that truly celebrated the innovative spirit of Disney was not the one literary titled “Disney 100: The Concert” but the one titled “Encanto at the Hollywood Bowl”, which is a Film-with-Live-Theatre-and-Orchestra concert—a super-hybrid screencert form in which only Disney films have been presented so far.

This study investigates the phenomenon of “music fever” in the Chinese immigrant community in the UK, a relatively neglected research field in the English language literature. It explores the attitudes of Chinese immigrant parents towards their children’s music learning through three key concepts in Bourdieu’s cultural theory: capital, habitus, and field. Although the interviewees generally displayed a positive attitude towards their children’s music learning, it was conditional on it not interfering with their children’s academic studies. This study extends existing research on East Asian immigrants’ and parents’ perceptions of children’s music education, and contributes to the application of Bourdieu’s theoretical tool in research on East Asian cultural groups in both Western and non-Western contexts.

ABSTRACT Inspired by Sheldrake’s study of fungi [Sheldrake, M. 2020. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures. London: Penguin Random House] and Barad’s idea of entanglement [Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press], this paper explores music play with young children and artists, a practice that resists adult-centric approaches. As an embedded researcher within an early years arts organisation, I play with a diffractive methodology to read through ideas of Froebel with posthuman writings. Using slow-motion viewing of a video extract of musical play the vibrant agency of materials and sound emerges in micro-moments of playful music-making. Theorising with the mycelium produces ideas of extravagance, music and sound understood as lively intra-active and wild. It communicates through, and within, living and non-living matter. This view of music asks for artists to ‘do’ and say less, watch more and hold the space for the bursting forth of ripe and ready musical expressions. Through this pedagogical approach, children and adults can experience a sense of becoming with music, with the world.

ABSTRACT In this article I explore the construct of the ‘natural’ voice within the context of the natural voice movement, before invoking perspectives on voice from the posthumanities and D/deaf studies in discussion of The Walk, a performance between a puppet, a natural voice choir, a refugee choir and a large audience that occurred in London in October 2021. Methodologically, this paper is an attempt at ‘thinking with theory’ (Jackson, Alecia Youngblood, and Lisa A. Mazzei. 2017. “Thinking with Theory: A New Analytic for Qualitative Inquiry.” In The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by N. K. Denzin, and Y. Lincoln, 717–737. Sage) – specifically thinking voice alongside theoretical stimuli from the posthumanities through the doing of ethnography – in the hope of provoking useful flights of thought in relation to the practice and study of music education and community music. I conclude by considering my personal rationale for engaging with the posthumanities as a means of researching community singing within the natural voice movement. A protean version of this article was presented as a paper-presentation at the Grieg Research School in Bergen, Norway in 2022.

Journal Article The Modern Brass Ensemble in Twentieth-Century Britain. By John Miller Get access The Modern Brass Ensemble in Twentieth-Century Britain. By John Miller. Pp. 220. ( Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2022. ISBN 978-1-78327-734-6, £70.) Trevor Herbert Trevor Herbert The Royal College of Music, London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Music and Letters, Volume 105, Issue 1, February 2024, Pages 140–142, https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcad083 Published: 24 February 2024 Article history Editorial decision: 22 November 2023 Received: 22 November 2023 Accepted: 22 November 2023 Corrected and typeset: 24 February 2024 Published: 24 February 2024

In December 1971, the British rock band Deep Purple recorded Smoke on the Water, which became a global hit and significantly contributed to the band's popularity. This study aims to investigate the reasons behind the song's success, such as its inherent values, composition, lyrics, or music production design, as well as other potential explanations. We also study Smoke on the Water's impact on music education. We interviewed music teachers, producers, students, and musicians from different countries to accomplish this. The study also relies on insights from interviews with Deep Purple members, observations made during concerts and study visits, and external sources. The study finds its theoretical basis in cultural psychology, education, economics, sociology, and musicology theories. The findings highlight the significance of understanding the fundamental elements of a song, which aspiring artists, musicians, and music producers should consider if they want to reach a broader audience.