In the late 1960s, the prominent psychologist Abraham Maslow argued that music-making was an inherently bodily activity, which like sex, could induce what Maslow called “peak experiences”—moments of mystical transcendence and personal insight. Amass enough such peak experiences, Maslow suggested, and one could achieve “self-actualization”—the full realization of one's potential as a human being. This article argues that though many musicians would heed Maslow's words, few embodied Maslow's program more than composer John Coolidge Adams did in the late 1970s. The article shows how Maslowian ideas shaped some of Adams's formative musical experiences in the San Francisco Bay Area. The article further demonstrates how these same concepts inspired the development of Adams's idiosyncratic postminimalist idiom, with particular attention to Adams's 1978 string septet Shaker Loops. By considering the influence of Adams's countercultural milieu, the article reveals strains of primitivism, eroticism, and exoticism in Adams's work more closely associated with Adams's minimalist predecessors. It also presents an alternative view of postmodernism in music, arguing that for Adams, at least, to make music “after” modernism was to make music a medium of self-actualization.
Despite the advent of voice studies, opera scholars have yet to develop a thoroughgoing conversation about one of the most familiar elements of operatic vocal culture: voice type (categories such as soprano, tenor and the like). To address this, I suggest opera scholars analyse ideologies of voice type: the complex of ideas and practices that guide how individuals understand voice types and their relevance to the operatic experience. I devote the main part of this article to a historical case study of ideologies of voice type in action, focusing on Maurice Ravel, his 1911 opera L'heure espagnole, and the relatively obscure voice type Ravel assigned to Ramiro, the opera's male protagonist, the baryton-Martin. I argue that the characteristically modern ideology of voice type Ravel adopted in L'heure espagnole was unusual for its time and that this helps explains the work's reception.
This article examines the connections between experimental composer Pauline Oliveros, the US somatics movement, and the new musicology. While scholars tend to position Oliveros’s work within the familiar framework of women’s liberation and queer activism, we should instead understand Oliveros as a somatic feminist for whom somatic practice was synonymous with women’s liberation. Oliveros helped instigate an influential movement to integrate somatic discourse and practice into US musical culture—including music scholarship. Scholars of the so-called new musicology concerned with issues of embodiment also applied somatic concepts in their work. Oliveros and the new musicology share a history rooted in US popular culture of the 1970s. Across this period and beyond, US composers, performers, and scholars alike worked within and alongside the somatics movement to legitimize the performing body as a source of musical knowledge.
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