It’s finally here! The New Music Database is a website designed to combine the information found on composer’s websites, YouTube recordings and program notes all in one place. Plus, it also emphasizes newer works, so that new composers gain more visibility. The site doesn’t have many pieces yet, so please contribute if you know of a piece to add to the database!
Visit the site here.
While I was searching for program notes for my solo recital this semester, I stumbled upon a good resource for horn players: HornRep.
The website was created by Dr. Sarah Schouten as part of her doctoral dissertation. Schouten’s goal was to create a resource for musicians to find good repertoire with skill level in mind. So far there are about 100 pieces in the database with intentions to add another 75 by next summer.
There are resources that exist already for searching for music, but HornRep caters its content to one instrument with a myriad of ways to find pieces you want. For example, already existing websites either only have the most popular/influential pieces (Wikipedia) or are more geared towards creating a public domain music library (International Music Score Library Project – IMSLP). Plus, none of these already existing websites allow for a variety of search terms within a certain instrument’s solo repertoire, most importantly skill level.
Each piece has a list of search terms and information about each piece (i.e. Composer, Duration, Horn Range, Level, Techniques, Accompaniment Available and others).
The blue buttons near the top of each piece’s page are very helpful. They differentiate some of the aspects of the piece that people will be most looking for to plan recital pieces.
There are many ways to structure a program for a recital. It can be organized by style, by country, or by special techniques. While Dr. Schouten covers a lot of these aspects, there are still some criteria missing. Another way to structure a program is through the history of the pieces. On HornRep, there is no section for program notes. Since often the intrigue of a piece comes from the history surrounding the piece or within the piece, it would be important to include at least a short blurb about each piece.
While on Dr. Schouten’s website it asks for suggestions and pieces to be added, I think a good addition to her website would be to include a form directly on HornRep.org for visitors to leave information. This would make the website more interactive. The audience would be more likely to revisit the website often if they are engaged in the process. Also, this form should have a button at the top of the page next to the home button.
Another addition may be adding a rating system. This would create an economy of sorts and it would more easily show popularity. A possibility is to add an option to share information of pieces on social media. This would publicize the website for free and it may encourage other people to add more information.
These additions would make the website a little bit more well-rounded and interactive. This resource is really helpful and it was a great idea on Dr. Sarah Schouten’s part. Well done!
In writing about music and technology, I have realized that there isn’t really a central hub for information on new music pieces. The information is largely scattered across the Internet on composers’ websites or on publishers’ websites.
To try to alleviate this issue a bit, I am planning on making a website for this very purpose. It will be a collaborative website, similar to Wikipedia or other wikis. However, while websites like Wikipedia only has pages on the most important topics, my website is intended to be all-inclusive.
I will create the website first, then create as many pages with information on new music pieces that I have played or know of. I will serve as an admin on the website, moderating and checking the material sent in to be posted.
I hope to include tags for instrumentation, genre, style, etc. so that people can easily go onto the website and find pieces to play.
I will post the link and more information when I have more to share!
Within the last 6 months or so, more orchestras going on strike against budget cuts and pay rate reductions have popped up more in the news. This is an ongoing issue, starting as early as 2011.
To show this issue and how far the issue has reached, I have created a Storify project to show the progression of recent and past events. Storify is a website that allows its users to curate Tweets, Facebook posts, blog posts and other forms of social media to illustrate a larger narrative.
Part of this is to show how fragments scattered throughout the Internet can be arranged and fused together to show a larger narrative.
I hope you will check out my Storify project on budget cuts and orchestra protests and leave your thoughts down below!
Wind ensemble and orchestra has always felt like a family. Part of that is probably due to all the time we spend together, like when we are waiting for our concerts to start or getting dinner together before a concert, etc.
In that downtime, we often played a variety of games together. One of the most popular of those games is called Mafia.
Little did we know that the game Mafia originally was invented in the USSR in 1989 by Dmitry Davidoff. The game is played all around the world with many, many variations on the rules.
At least how I’ve played, the game has 4 roles:
The Narrator is the person who chooses all the roles of the group. Everyone closes their eyes and the narrator goes around and taps them a number of times for different roles (none for a townsperson, one for the doctor, twice for the sheriff and thrice for mafia).
Mafia is played with two phases: Night and Day. During the Night, the mafiosi choose their victim, the doctor chooses who he/she wants to save and the sheriff gets to ask the narrator if a certain person is in the mafia. During the Day, the townspeople wake up to find out if someone has been killed off or saved and they get to accuse and vote to kill off a member they think is in the mafia.
As mentioned in the video, the townspeople only know their own role and that is the force that drives the game. Townspeople are constantly questioning what side the other players are on. The mafiosi know who each other are and their role is to throw the townspeople off their trail and protect each other.
Ian Bogost, in The Rhetoric of Videogames, says, “video games make claims about the world, which players can understand, evaluate, and deliberate.” In such a simple game, Mafia models the idea that we don’t know who people really are and what their roles, goals and values are. We can’t know others’ motives for sure, only they truly know.
Mafia provides a chance to get better at figuring people out and how to deceive if that is your goal. As a mafia member, as you play more you learn how to keep your role a secret and protect your identity. As a townsperson, by trial and error you learn to identify suspicious behavior and patterns between mafia members.
Modeling these situations builds skepticism or cautiousness around other people. But, dealing with these situations in a game rather than reality allows us to learn from our successes and mistakes in protecting ourselves without reality’s consequences.
I recently created a Wikipedia account and had the experience of editing an article for the first time.
When I was in high school, there was a piece we played in orchestra called the Overture to Waverley by Hector Berlioz. I enjoyed the piece quite a bit (even though the French horn parts were not the most interesting from what I recall). I remembered that our orchestra conductor talked quite a bit about the history of the piece and even on our orchestra’s Facebook page, he posted a picture of himself in front of the Waverley Bridge in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Now that I’m in college, I have realized how obscure the pieces I played in my high school orchestra were. I was exposed to a lot of great music, but a lot of it is quite unknown by the masses.
So when I was choosing what article to edit, this Overture came to mind. The Overture to Waverley is combined in an article about the Overtures Berlioz composed. The article seems to be lacking a lot of information, but the part that I thought was most important to add first was the instrumentation for the Overtures. I often use Wikipedia as a preliminary source to find pieces to play or suggest to our orchestra conductor for the orchestra to play. The instrumentation is crucial to figuring out if it makes sense for our ensemble, so it seemed like a no-brainer. It seemed odd that it wasn’t added in, especially since it’s relatively easy to find that instrumentation.
I used IMSLP (International Music Score Lending Project) to look up the scores and figure out the instrumentation for most of the Overtures. In the future, I plan on adding a little more information about the history of the pieces and the rest of the Overtures’ instrumentation.
Though it was my first time editing a Wikipedia article, it wasn’t difficult to figure out how it worked. There are many help pages that explain what the procedure and protocol is. There’s even a specific page for the protocol/procedure for articles on classical music. If I were making more in-depth edits to the article, citations and finding evidence from what I know from music history classes, etc. might have been more challenging.
One aspect that is monitored closely is any kind of analysis. Wikipedia aims to have a very facts-based approach to their articles, so even if something may make sense from analysis in a music theory-type class may not fly with the other contributors. It’s a thin line to walk as well, but I look forward to exploring that further as I edit more articles.
When I was in high school, I found that with my extracurricular activities and schoolwork I had no time to read for pleasure. I missed my habit of voraciously reading books until the wee hours of the night as I did when I was young. I figured that if I had a way to track my reading, I would be more likely to read regularly. With a reading goal, I had more drive to finish books that I started.
In my junior year of high school, I decided to start blogging. I created a Goodreads account that linked to my blog, both for publicity, its functional use to track my reading progress, and to set my reading goal. It worked well as I could show my goal, progress and the books I was currently reading or had already read in a widget on WordPress.
I started my blog with an anonymous name. The truth was: I was afraid of what people might say about my opinions. I was afraid they would attack me if they disagreed with me. I was afraid that my friends and family would find out about some of the books I read (some of which I knew my family wouldn’t approve).
To my surprise, most readers either agreed with me, or hadn’t read the book and found my view interesting. If they did disagree with me, they politely explained why and I often understood the reason for their opinion. I even made friends with some of the other bloggers. They would comment on my blog and I would reciprocate. Eventually they would tag me in Book Blogger awards and then their friends would tag me in Challenges, too.
However, I still remember nights where I would write, and rewrite, and rewrite, scrutinizing every detail and dissecting my review to see if they gave any hint about who I was. I was quite paranoid. I was worried about parts of my identity and my location. I didn’t want people to know where I lived or where I grew up. So, I started mixing in British colloquialisms and slang to throw them off my trail (“I was so chuffed that…”, “It sounded so posh!”). I didn’t even want them to know which gender I was, so sometimes I varied my opinions to confuse them and leave them guessing. Usually, I tried to read a variety of books, not romance or Harry Potter which some of my opinions might give away my gender, or my age.
Andreas Kitzmann, in “That Different Place: Documenting the Self Within Online Environments”, discusses identity between the personal journal and how it transfers to an online “journal”. Personal journals are just that: personal, only for you to see. A handwritten journal allows you to withdraw any kind of judgment or expectation, except from your future self. An online journal does not provide you with that protection. That’s exactly what happened when I started my blog. Had I continued to write my “reviews” in a journal for only myself, I wouldn’t have worried about the expectations of my audience based on my gender, etc.
Hyper reality also is seen today through YouTube “stars” and people who put their selves on the Internet. Some people create personas of themselves or conceal parts of their private life. One such example in music would be Sarah Willis, the fourth horn of the Berlin Philharmonic. She has a YouTube channel, a Facebook page for the Berlin Phil horn section and now has grown her “brand” to include a TV show, too. But though we see her on all these platforms, do we really know who she is? I would say not, personally. We only see the version of herself which entertains her audience.
Looking through my first blog, I even saw an old post where I discussed the fact that people would comment on YouTube videos and act as if they actually knew the person. I created a sort of persona for myself on my blog in that I was concealing the private parts of my life.
My blog and my persona went even further. I wanted to create a YouTube channel to join the “BookTube” community – a community of book vloggers on YouTube. But I still wanted to remain anonymous, so I gave the name I always wanted: Elizabeth. (I was somewhat obsessed with British culture, so it only seemed natural to want the name Elizabeth.)
It got complicated when my real life best friend and I decided to read a book together and then live chat about it on YouTube. The problem was that we both gave fake names. We slipped up many times in the video, trying to repair the damage and laughing it off. Though it probably wasn’t obvious, it still made us reveal part of our identities.
I went through so much trouble to hide everything about myself that it was difficult for my audience to relate to me. I gave hardly any personality, except for being nervous talking to a camera and concealing parts of myself from the world. I couldn’t fully create on a blog until I could let my paranoia go and show who I am and what I care about.
Eventually I did show more of myself, but only when I realized that anyone can find out anything about you on the Internet. Hackers can figure out just about anything from the location you posted from to posting for you and finding your hidden personal information. There came a point that I just gave up. I gave up on hiding everything because it was no longer fun anymore.
After the name slip-up, I decided to give out my real first name. I still withheld my last name because I didn’t want it out there on the Internet, but I was happier when I was creating things on my blog without concealing myself.
My “big” name reveal was not a big deal at all. I don’t think anyone ever noticed, but it was a relief to me. I no longer felt like I had to be so careful with my identity. At this point, I really gave up on hiding things about myself because it’s so easy to find out about people on the Internet. While location and university were still things I wanted to keep to myself, I didn’t have to worry as much about gender, age or education level. I was freer to discuss what I wanted. Though “Spectacles” was my digital persona, I always felt too cautious and it constricted my writing.
I was able to talk about what I wanted, but now that people knew me more, I felt more self-conscious about what I wrote. At one point, I felt like my opinions were pretentious, that my reviews sounded pompous and self-important. So, I gave up writing for the most part. Sometimes if I have a really good idea I’ll talk about it on my blog, but otherwise I’ve stayed silent.
I have considered creating a blog about what I’ve learned as a musician since I don’t come from a musically active family. However, it is a question of whether it will be like a branding tool like for Sarah Willis or if I will keep it anonymous like the other blogs I have created. Do I want to create a split in my public and private life or do I want to take that leap to share freely? I haven’t decided.
Please let me know your thoughts on the subject in the comments section below.
In order to better understand the following post, I highly suggest you watch this video in its entirety:
4’33” is a famous piece by John Cage which explores the music we never really pay attention to. It was a philosophical stand-point that brought the argument of “what is music?” to fruition.
The piece is comprised of three movements labeled “tacet” (do not play).
The video above shows a connecting point between the representation and reality. Hyperreality is when we become unable to tell the difference between an imitation of reality and reality itself.
One of the easiest examples to understand is video games. Video games have become so advanced graphically. In my personal experience, if I play a video game long enough, I begin to see the gameplay behind my eyelids. In that way, the game became my own reality.
In 4’33”, the piece is comprised of what seems like silence. However, the point the composer is trying to make is that we don’t notice the sounds/”ambient noise” that naturally occur around us. The reality of our everyday ambient noise becomes a work of art.
Performances of 4’33” force the audience to listen to the coughs, cell phone texts, birds, traffic, etc. we never notice and consider it “music.” Whether or not you go along with the idea is up to your interpretation.
The controversial piece has spurred many iterations, often in parody. Here are some of my favorites:
If you would like to learn more about John Cage’s philosophy behind 4’33”:
Gavin Bryars based the piece The Sinking of the Titanic on a hymn that was played by a string quartet as the ship sank. He played around with the hymn created a kind of ambient atmosphere.
In the following performance, the Aventa Ensemble decided to perform the piece in an indoor pool (Vancouver Aquatic Centre) with the audience in the pool.
Delivery is a term that comes from J.E. Porter’s theory of delivery; it was a term from Ancient Greek rhetoric, but it still applies to today. It is comprised of five aspects of how new media is “delivered” today: accessibility, distribution, identity, interaction and economics. If you would like to read more about this theory, please see here.
In The Sinking of the Titanic, there are two main aspects to consider: accessibility and distribution.
Music isn’t necessarily the most accessible form of media online. Music is meant to be seen live. Music cannot be comprehensively experienced unless it’s live. Recordings and videos lose sound quality and actual vibration. Orchestras like the Berlin Philharmonic could not be heard unless you bought a plane ticket and were actually in Berlin.
With the Internet, it has made music more accessible. Music can be heard online while the live performance is going on or even shortly thereafter. The Berlin Philharmonic even offers an online service (Digital Concert Hall) that serves this purpose.
The Sinking of the Titanic achieves this, however one part to consider is that you are most definitely not getting the same experience as the audience (the primary audience) in that pool. Not only because of the lost vibrations, but also because of the acoustics of the room and the complete “surround sound” of the musicians playing all around you.
Distribution of music has a somewhat similar problem. There is so much music out there that it makes it difficult to know everything that is available. The Internet makes it much easier to make their music known through websites like SoundCloud or Spotify that allow users to listen to music for free.
The Sinking of the Titanic is not a very popular piece. It is typically performed by new music ensembles or other contemporary music ensembles. If this piece wasn’t available to listen to online, it may not be as well known. It’s not like a piece by Mozart or Bach that is being distributed and utilized in other forms of media.
Classical Modern Music 