Becoming a national composer: critical reception to c.1925

The centrality of Vaughan Williams to British music in the first half of the twentieth century is now a commonplace in musicology, but this has not always been so. Prior to 1914 Vaughan Williams was regarded by a number of British critics as a figure of considerable potential, but of less interest than composers like Granville Bantock, Cyril Scott, and Joseph Holbrooke: a reflection, in part, of the many different strands that existed in musical modernism in pre-war Britain, as well as scepticism that Vaughan Williams's engagement with English folksong offered anything original. In this chapter, I consider this inauspicious early period of Vaughan Williams reception, when even works considered seminal today like the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis were received by some critics with bewilderment, and the changes that took place in the years after World War One after which Vaughan Williams became the leader of British musical modernism. I argue that Vaughan Williams's emergence reflects a change in attitude by British critics to modernism in general, to their approach to musical criticism, and to Vaughan Williams's musical language; in particular I note the distinction increasingly drawn by critics between folksong arrangements and a musical language derived from folksong.

An Enactive Approach to the Design of New Tangible Musical Instruments

In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework for the design of tangible interfaces for musical expression. The main insight for the proposed approach is the importance and utility of familiar sensorimotor experiences for the creation of engaging and playable new musical instruments. In particular, we suggest exploiting the commonalities between different natural interactions by varying the auditory response or tactile details of the instrument within certain limits. Using this principle, devices for classes of sounds such as coarse grain collision interactions or friction interactions can be designed. The designs we propose retain the familiar tactile aspect of the interaction so that the performer can take advantage of tacit knowledge gained through experiences with such phenomena in the real world.

‘Med Hondo’s Sarraounia: The musical articulation of cultural transformation’

This article examines music in Med Hondo’s Sarraounia, considering how it contributes to the dramatic form of the movie while concurrently articulating narratives regarding cultural transformation through both its extrinsic (cultural) and intrinsic (formal) dimensions. Examining how the use of traditional and contemporary African music politicises diegetic space by referring us to the relationships between indigenous musical forms and their global, culturally hybrid descendents, it then demonstrates the complex manner in which the film uses the formal specificities of African and Western musical idioms to articulate a narrative regarding the cultural transformations that occur when an oral culture (Africa) encounters a literate, modernised culture (the West).

Exploring Children's Stereotypes Through Drawings: The Case of Musical Performance

Drawings of 'a person' and of 'a person playing music' were collected from children aged seven to eight years and 10-11 years to discover whether children's musical representations would reflect gender differences evident in musical learning and performance, and the increased gender rigidity with age found in instrument preferences. As in previous drawing studies, same sex figures were overwhelmingly portrayed, although older girls drew more opposite sex figures than the other children. All except the older girls overwhelmingly drew same sex musicians irrespective of the gender stereotype of the instrument portrayed. The older girls drew similar numbers of male and female figures playing masculine instruments. Fewer feminine instruments were drawn by older than by younger boys. The increased gender rigidity with age accords with the results of the preference studies, but gender stereotyping was much weaker. This is discussed in relation to what the different methodologies measure.