Recent literature has thrown new light on the patronage, financing and social context of the music industry in nineteenth-century London. One area that has received less attention is the management and direction of musical performance – a branch of the profession which arguably changed more than any other. The thesis seeks to identify the radical changes in this area through the life and work of Michael Costa. His fifty-three year career in charge of the main London musical institutions saw the transition from divided control by the violin-leader, musical director and maestro al cembalo to unified control by a professional conductor-manager, of which he was the London prototype. Costa’s uniquely powerful position in the operatic, symphonic and choral world enabled him to embed reforms that laid the basis for much of modern musical practice: not only in baton-conducting but also in the conductor’s contractual powers, orchestral discipline, the lay-out of performers, rehearsal strategy, acoustics, and the system for managing the enlarged orchestras and choruses which emerged in the period. This infrastructure and the raised standards of performance that these reforms fostered were arguably the greatest achievement of English music in the otherwise rather barren mid-Victorian period. The thesis considers Costa’s crucial role in the battles between the two rival opera houses, between the Philharmonic and the New Philharmonic, and between the venerable Ancient Concerts and the mass festival events of the Sacred Harmonic Society. It tries also to place him in the context of the profound aesthetic changes of the period – in repertoire, performance and attitude to musical ‘works’. Finally it seeks to explain the remarkable rise and eclipse of Costa’s reputation and to reassess in its contemporary context Costa’s contribution to the emergence of the music industry in the form which we know today.

In many places in the Western world where music therapy occurs, improvisation is a significant and widespread practice in clinical work. The question of the nature of improvisation in music therapy is the topic of this enquiry, with particular reference to musical ontology and aesthetics. I examine how a consideration of ontology enables a distinction to be drawn between the music made within the clinical setting, known as clinical improvisation, and music that is made elsewhere. The context for this enquiry is the music therapy practice of the UK. Through an examination of the recent history of this practice, I establish two distinct approaches to clinical improvisation in the UK, music-centred and psychodynamic. I show how there are different ontologies of music ‘at work’ between these two approaches. I also demonstrate how these distinctions manifest in the question of the location of the therapeutic effect: is it in the music or the therapeutic relationship? Finally, I examine the nature of clinical improvisation in relation to performance. I explain how a consideration of distinct ontologies of music within clinical improvisation indicates a further distinction between the music of music therapy and art improvisation that is made elsewhere.

The music of Johannes Brahms currently enjoys popularity comparable with that of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven throughout England. However, unlike composers such as Handel and Mendelssohn who preceded him, Brahms never actually set foot on English soil, thereby making the introduction and eventual acceptance of his music in England long and difficult. This process was eventually engineered principally through the determination and perseverance of several prominent performers, conductors and critics, such as Clara Schumann and August Manns, during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Aside from a small number of relatively short articles and unpublished lectures, the reception and subsequent influence of the music of Brahms in England, and in particular on the composers Charles Hubert Hastings Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford, has not been the subject of any major or substantial study, yet is still a popular notion in many texts on nineteenth century British music. This thesis attempts to assemble and evaluate all the available information on the subject, from the principal people responsible for introducing the music of Brahms to England, to an assessment of the appearance of his supposed reception and influence in England in historical and biographical texts. Finally, a much needed analytical evaluation of key chamber and orchestral compositions across Parry and Stanford’s relative outputs concludes the thesis, attempting to bring clarity to the vexed, outdated, but still commonly accepted notion that their works were merely an inferior assimilation of those of Brahms.

Silence’s expressive potential came to the fore in twentieth-century arts and letters as never before. Its role in Christian theology and spirituality has a much longer history, but by the beginning of the twentieth century, its expressive potential had not been significantly recognized in liturgical choral music. This study examined the relationship between twentieth-century musical silence and the expression of silence as the ineffable in Anglican choral music (referred to as English cathedral music or ECM) of the middle of the twentieth century. The oeuvres of Benjamin Britten and Herbert Howells, two composers successful in both secular and liturgical repertoires and prominent in mid-twentieth-century ECM, were analyzed. This study examined perceptions and expressions of silence in areas of thought and creativity closely related to ECM: Anglican theology, twentieth-century music, and twentieth-century literature. It found that twentieth-century Anglicanism had an ethos of restraint about expressing silence, but the High Church wing (closer to Anglicanism’s Catholic roots) was more open to expressing silence as the ineffable than the Evangelical wing. Howells’s High Church background and Britten’s Evangelical background help account for Howells’s interest and Britten’s lack of interest in silence as the ineffable. This difference between Howells and Britten also became apparent by examining the silence-related literature they selected or avoided. Howells’s oeuvre thus became the focus of the remainder of the study. Howells’s perceptions of, and techniques for expressing, silence as the ineffable—some of which are unique to him—were identified and compared with the perceptions and techniques of important continental composers interested in silence: Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Anton Webern, and Olivier Messiaen. This study analyzed Howells’s more direct expressions of silence in several secular works before analyzing the more nuanced expression of silence in his ECM.

At the heart of this thesis is the analysis of the entrepreneurial context within which communities of university music students learn, and how this affects students’ abilities to embark on self-managed careers. Traditionally, the creative sector has high numbers of self-employed workers and significantly nearly three quarters of musicians are self-employed. Based on and contributing to this knowledge, previous studies have been carried out on the lives of working musicians and the destinations of music students from conservatories, but little is known about the specific case of university music students (a more diverse group), whilst they are still studying and anticipating entry into the world of work. Building on existing ethnomusicological studies of conservatories and university music departments, and recent studies on the working lives of musicians, this study illuminates processes at work in three different communities of university music students in the North East of England. The methodology, drawn from ethnography, seeks to illustrate the students’ identities, perspectives and attitudes through observing their entrepreneurial behaviour, individually and within their wider communities, and exploring how they envisage their future life-worlds as working musicians. The thesis outlines a new conceptual model ‘the music student as entrepreneur’ arguing that a pedagogical approach which draws directly upon theories of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial learning, rather than generic theories of student employability and career development, offers a more appropriate working framework in seeking to facilitate professional development for university music students. In doing so, the thesis also repositions some key theories of entrepreneurship by drawing them into a new interdisciplinary location.

This submission for PhD by Prior Output (comprising of six compositions and this dissertation) defines my personal approach to musical composition using music dramaturgy as its main source of inspiration and expression, contextualising the compositions within other pieces in the field and also within my own production. The pieces were selected following recommendations and regulations from the Graduate School at London Metropolitan University, which are fully explained in section II.L A further criterion for the selection of precisely these six pieces was, that in spite of their apparent diversity (showing a vast range of compositional techniques, including acousmatic music, ensemble and solo pieces with live-electronics) they nevertheless form a 'coherent whole', as it is explained in section ILi and ll.ii. A detailed analysis of the compositional techniques for each of the six works, a list of all works and publications of my authorship in the public domain, reviews about some of the works and diverse publications related to the compositions or main subjects are presented in the Appendices, as required. Papers which are relevant either to the pieces or to some of the concepts explained in this dissertation are presented in the appendices XV to XIX. List of the works included in the prior output: Geqenstitze (gegenseitig): alto flute, quadraphonic tape and live-electronics (ca. 33') Arte Poetice (I): quadrophonic tape (ca. 8') Overture (in memoriam T.A. T.): quadrophonic tape (ca. 11') Spectral colours: ensemble and tape (ca. 11') Color Code: quadrophonic tape and live-electronics, live viola, video (ca. 30') L.S. (waiting for changes): small orchestra (ca.12') Keywords Music dramaturgy, intrinsic and extrinsic music dramaturgy, communication process, musical discourse, musical semiotics, sound imprint, intention/reception, something-to-hold-on-to-factors.

No description available.

Among music educators and particularly violinists, Otakar Ševčík and his violin method are accepted as important parts of the music education heritage. Starting from the initial stages of teaching and learning the violin, and reaching the most advanced thematic constructs, Ševčík’s educational work is the only one which covers in its content the widest – if not the whole – breadth of violin education, and debates in the most fervent way many variable approaches on musical and technical topics. However, even if its educational value is constantly acknowledged, nowadays it is not widely used in music teaching, as it is characterised by many instrumentalists as boring, complex, or difficult to understand. The surprising fact to all this is that during the end of the nineteenth and till the mid-­‐twentieth century, more than a thousand registered students were effectively taught directly by Ševčík through this method, while many others supported, used and were devoted to it, reaching through its path of knowledge their highest performing or teaching potential. My research, seeking to define a deeper understanding of the Ševčík ‘phenomenon’, offers a conceptual analysis to his entire educational approach, based on correlated to his life and work explicit and implicit links of information. Using three different but equally important sets of data – the context of the method’s existence, the content of the method’s 26 Opuses, and the method’s aspects of teaching and learning – my thesis finally justifies the hypothesis that Ševčík’s work, indeed, comprises a complete teaching and learning method, which provides the opportunity for a solid and holistic study on violin performance. *[N.B.: A DVD was was attached to this thesis at the time of its submission. Please refer to the author for further details: 'A Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) is attached to this thesis for further reference. Please consult it according to the core text. All material included in the DVD is either the author’s mental property, or – in case of other sources – [legally] released to the author by the legal authorities. Please email the author for more information (www.violinist.gr)']*

The blues, as a musical form, has been with us for around a century. How this novel form developed is still not known. The blues appeared in the repertoire of rural songsters, on the vaudeville stage and sheet music, and in the emerging jazz bands at much the same time. None of these genres has any clear primacy. W. C. Handy claimed that his commercial blues compositions were based upon rural folksong and the folklorist Alan Lomax developed this narrative of the development of the blues to argue that the Mississippi Delta was 'The Land Where the Blues Began.' Alan Lomax also extensively interviewed Jelly Roll Morton, the self styled 'inventor of jazz', who claimed that the blues was being performed in New Orleans in the early years of century and before there is any evidence of the blues being played by rural songsters. Morton explained how in 1910 as part of the Tri-State Vaudeville Circuit that he, and other vaudevillians performed the blues throughout Mississippi and elsewhere in the rural South. Using contemporaneous press reports, sheet music of the period, folklore collections, oral histories and the published literature, this thesis brings together what is known about the development of the blues within jazz, vaudeville, sheet music and also among rural songsters. I argue that the privileging by disengagement of the country blues from these other genres has limited our understanding of the development of the blues and that there is a need to reengage blues narratives.

The purpose of this study is to examine the links between postmodernism and music ‘fusing’ what are commonly described as popular and classical styles. Much postmodern theory has discussed the relationship between ‘high’ and ‘low' and recognised eclecticism within art, but how does fusion connect with this? An investigation of terminology and definitions together with a discussion of historical precedents for contemporary cross-influences provides a base from which to explore fusion and the postmodern. A framework oulining postmodernism’s background and its relevance to music is used in conjunction with an analysis of works by Talk Talk, Mike Oldfield and Graham Fitkin. Developing the concept of what might constitute the postmodern in music, theargument moves beyond the consideration of inherent traits which may or may not suggest postmodernism. A broader concept based on a sense of postmodern spirit is developed, recognising the importance of the roles of context and aesthetic as well as characteristics within the text. A detailed analysis of various works by the chosen artists allows exploration of both the concept of fused music and the application of postmodern theory. It will be suggested that, although these musicians produce music which displays a number of traits which are considered by many to reflect postmodernism, the music in question does not necessarily represent a postmodern aesthetic: the most postmodern of the works considered is also the least fused. It will be argued that the characteristics of music itself cause considerable problems in the application of postmodern theory, and that fusion, by its very definition and because of the connotative qualities that specific musical references often carry, does not correlate to concepts of the postmodern.