Seeing music performance: Visual influences on perception and experience

Drawing from ethnographic, empirical, and historical/cultural perspectives, we examine the extent to which visual aspects of music contribute to the communication that takes place between performers and their listeners. First, we introduce a framework for understanding how media and genres shape aural and visual experiences of music. Second, we present case studies of two performances, and describe the relation between visual and aural aspects of performance. Third, we report empirical evidence that visual aspects of performance reliably influence perceptions of musical structure (pitch related features) and affective interpretations of music. Finally, we trace new and old media trajectories of aural and visual dimensions of music, and highlight how our conceptions, perceptions and appreciation of music are intertwined with technological innovation and media deployment strategies.

Moving and dancing towards decolonisation in education: An example from an Indigenous Australian performance classroom

This paper explores the special type of thinking, moving and dancing place which is opened up for decolonisaton when students engage in an embodied pedagogical practice in Indigenous education. The author examines what decolonisation means in this context by describing the ways in which the curriculum, the students and teacher, and more generally the discipline of ethnomusicology itself, undergo a process to question, critique, and move aside the pedagogical script of colonialism in order to allow Indigenous ways of understanding music and dance to be presented, privileged and empowered. Key questions are: What is the relationship between embodiment and disembodiment and decolonisation and colonisation? In what ways is embodiment more than, or other than, the presence of moving bodies? In what ways is performativity an aspect of power/knowledge/subject formations? How can it be theorised? What could the pedagogical scripts of decolonisation look like?

The Populist Message of Australian Country Music

Australian country music is influenced by American country music and Australian bush ballads. This music idealises genuine true blue inhabitants of an idealised rural heartland and fuses nationalism with agrarian mythology. The lyrics of a number of country songs contain a populist political message, which is frequently nationalistic but is a form of nationalism.

Art after 9/11

This article examines ways in which art can help broaden understandings of contemporary security challenges, especially in view of the limits of conventional forms of strategic and policy analysis. The article focuses especially on responses to 9/11 in literature, the visual arts, architecture, and music, and considers some epistemological questions about the status of art as a way of knowing political events, like those of 9/11, that escape state-based forms of security analysis.

A retrospective lyrical analysis of songs written by adolescents with anorexia nervosa

Song-writing plays a central role in music therapy with adolescents. A retrospective lyrical analysis of songs written by adolescents with anorexia nervosa was undertaken in order to identify common themes solicited through song-writing interventions. Fifteen participants contributed 17 songs, from which 368 lyrical units were identified. A modified content analysis approach was used with each lyrical unit being categorised to one of six themes determined from the literature and clinical experience. The theme of 'identity' was used most frequently (28%), with the sub-theme of 'exploring new behaviours, positive self-talk' being addressed most often (12.5% of total). The dominance of the developmentally important theme of 'identity' may reflect the relationship between adolescents, music and identity or may be related to the way in which anorexia nervosa has been theorised to assist the adolescent in managing challenges to the emerging sense of self. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and Eating Disorders Association.