he International Orpheus Academy for Music and Theory is the annual conference organised by the Orpheus Research Centre. For the Academy, a selected guest faculty with outstanding expertise in a specific topic is invited to attend a series of lectures and to write an individual essay. All researchers from the Orpheus Research Centre, as well as th…
In it’s broadest possible sense, music is defined as “organized sound.” This openended and safe definition is coherent regardless of era, style, culture, or the mechanics of musical organization. Each successive historical era produces musically artistic expressions of its own time, its own musical aura. The study of Music Theory is the means by which we investigate this. Among the commu…
Addressing a wide range of improvised art and music forms—from jazz and cinema to dance and literature—this volume's contributors locate improvisation as a key site of mediation between the social and the aesthetic. As a catalyst for social experiment and political practice, improvisation aids in the creation, contestation, and codification of social realities and identities. Among other to…
Look at the picture for a while, if you will, even if you cannot read theJavanese writing on it. It is a picture on a calendar for the months of Novemberand December 1978. I remember Judith and I were talking then about the like-ness between the structure of Javanese music, the way plots of shadow plays areput together, and the way cale…
Ethnomusicology today is an area of study caught up in a fascination with itself. Although its roots can be traced back some eighty years, and its origin perhaps even earlier, it is only within the past ten or fifteen years that, under the impetus of younger scholars who had brought to it new concepts of theory, method, and application, it has taken a sudden forward surge. The result has been a…
The speed of change in electronic media in the latter part of the 20thcentury revolutionised access to and the use of music in people’s lives. Music can be accessed in many ways, through radio, CDs, DVDs, TV, tablets, SMART technologies, computers and phones, and can be downloaded to enable the creation of personal playlists. This can be achieved …