Renaissance vocal music has an editorial problem. Performers and editors of pre-Baroque repertoire are unable simply to realise the music on the page but instead must decide whether the notation means what it says it means: manuscripts require interpretation. This obligation arises from the widely accepted idea that the surviving compositions were not chromatically precise and that certain types of inflection—what today we would call accidentals—were omitted in writing but applied in performance. There are several well-known ‘rules’ that govern the creation of these inflections,1 but this is where the consensus ends. Every scholar’s particular application of these rules is slightly different, and consequently, no two recordingsof a Josquin mass or a Mouton motet sound identical. As Peter Urquhart observes in his weighty contribution to the topic, even the term used to describe these problems, musica ficta, is ambiguous. […]
In the last decade or so there has been an increase in musicological studies on the liminal space between art music and popular styles. A foremost scholar in this field (if it can be called that) is Benjamin Piekut, who wrote his first book, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and its Limits (University of California Press, 2011) as a series of interrelated case studies. For his second book, Piekut focuses instead on a single band, Henry Cow, who sit neatly in the twilight zone between high and low art. Appropriately, this book is equally accessible to general readers and critically minded musicologists alike: its highly readable narrative avoids jargon and unnecessary citation. Divided into eight chapters (plus an introduction and afterword), Henry Cow traces the band’s story from its genesis in 1968 to its dissolution ten years later. […]
At least since the 1990s, the relationship between linguistic communication and jazz improvisation has been a topic of interest to both philosophers of language and theorists of jazz improvisation. Rarely, however, are the shared elements of language and jazz explored directly. This article interrogates these elements, with a particular focus on improvisation by drawing upon the work of Donald Davidson. While Davidson himself does not readily employ the term ‘improvisation’, I argue that key ideas from Davidson’s work—the principle of charity, triangulation, and his argument that there is no such thing as a language—align with the concept of improvisation. In this article I offer a reading of Davidson’s work—a reading that highlights an improvisational character of his philosophy typically not made explicit—and, on the basis of the ontology of improvisation that emerges from Davidson’s philosophy, I explore the implications of that understanding of language for the way in which we understand jazz.
This article interprets John Zorn's composition Interzone (2010) by comparing it to the eponymous place that is found throughout William S. Burroughs’ early novels. This is done through linking some of the ‘sound blocks’ that make up Zorn's composition to selected passages from Burroughs’ books as well as to specific events from the lives of Interzone's two dedicatees: Burroughs, and his associate, the writer and painter Brion Gysin. Zorn's disjointed, chaotic arrangement of sound blocks, and by extension their extra-musical associations, is then shown to emulate the dream-like structure of the phantasmatic place that is Interzone, which Burroughs created for his novels with the aid of Gysin's ‘cut-up’ method. Through these extra-musical connotations, it is demonstrated that Zorn's composition imitates Interzone's distortion of place; of internal and external space; and, most importantly, of time.
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