Overview and response to reviewers of The Singing Neanderthals

Why are humans musical? Why do people in all cultures sing or play instruments? Why do we appear to have specialized neurological apparatus for hearing and interpreting music as distinct from other sounds? And how does our musicality relate to language and to our evolutionary history? Anthropologists and archaeologists have paid little attention to the origin of music and musicality — far less than for either language or ‘art’. While art has been seen as an index of cognitive complexity and language as an essential tool of communication, music has suffered from our perception that it is an epiphenomenal ‘leisure activity’, and archaeologically inaccessible to boot. Nothing could be further from the truth, according to Steven Mithen; music is integral to human social life, he argues, and we can investigate its ancestry with the same rich range of analyses — neurological, physiological, ethnographic, linguistic, ethological and even archaeological — which have been deployed to study language. In The Singing Neanderthals Steven Mithen poses these questions and proposes a bold hypothesis to answer them. Mithen argues that musicality is a fundamental part of being human, that this capacity is of great antiquity, and that a holistic protolanguage of musical emotive expression predates language and was an essential precursor to it. This is an argument with implications which extend far beyond the mere origins of music itself into the very motives of human origins. Any argument of such range is bound to attract discussion and critique; we here present commentaries by archaeologists Clive Gamble and Iain Morley and linguists Alison Wray and Maggie Tallerman, along with Mithen's response to them. Whether right or wrong, Mithen has raised fascinating and important issues. And it adds a great deal of charm to the time-honoured, perhaps shopworn image of the Neanderthals shambling ineffectively through the pages of Pleistocene prehistory to imagine them humming, crooning or belting out a cappella harmonies as they went.

Pagan epic in contemporary British poetry: Hughes and Logue, Ovid and Homer

In 'Tales from Ovid' and 'War Music' respectively, Ted Hughes and Christopher Logue turned to classical epic as source material and a model for contemporary poetry. In this essay I consider the different ways in which they work with the original epic poems and how they rework them both textually and generically. In the process, I suggest, Hughes gives his readers an Ovid modeled on his own, vatic conception of Homer, while Logue reworks Homer in a manner that is essentially Ovidian.

Beyond a constructivist curriculum : a critique of competing paradigms in music education

The distinction between learning to perform on an instrument or voice and learning music in a wider sense is one that is made in many countries, and is especially pertinent in England in the context of recent policy developments. This article argues that, whilst this distinction has come to represent curricula based on the opposing paradigms of behaviourist and constructivist approaches to learning, this opposition does not necessarily extend to the pedagogy through which the curricula are taught. A case study of the National Curriculum in England highlights the characteristics of a curriculum based on constructivist principles, along with the impact this has when taught in a behaviourist way. It is argued that conceiving the curriculum in terms of musical competencies and pedagogy in terms of musical understanding would provide a basis for greater continuity and higher quality in the music education experienced by young people.

Punk, Politics and British (fan)zines, 1974-84:'While the world was dying, did you wonder why?

This article recovers and contextualizes the politics of British punk fanzines produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It argues that fanzines – and youth cultures more generally – provide a contested cultural space for young people to express their ideas, opinions and anxieties. Simultaneously, it maintains that punk fanzines offer the historian a portal into a period of significant socio-economic, political and cultural change. As well as presenting alternative cultural narratives to the formulaic accounts of punk and popular music now common in the mainstream media, fanzines allow us a glimpse of the often radical ideas held by a youthful milieu rarely given expression in the political arena.

Interview with Louise "Lou" Trucks

In her December 2014 interview with Michelle Dubert-Bellrichard, Louise “Lou” Trucks detailed her thoughts and memories of her time at Winthrop. Trucks spoke of the time period from 1960-1964 as a music and music education double major. Trucks shared the benefits of being a music major, her involvement in campus traditions and organizations, and the rigor of her studies. Trucks concludes her interview detailing her life after Winthrop in Bloomington, IN and Rochester, NY. This interview was conducted for inclusion into the Louise Pettus Archives and Special Collections Oral History Program.

A poesia, a música e a performance da canção: alma minha gentil - um estudo de caso na obra de Glauco Velásquez

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

As peculiaridades na escrita pianística de Ronaldo Miranda: sugestões interpretativas e técnico-musicais

Pós-graduação em Música - IA

Dedilhado pianístico e suas relações com princípios técnicos e musicais

Pós-graduação em Música - IA

Pianeiros: dialogismo e polifonia no final do século XIX e início do século XX

Pós-graduação em Música - IA

Técnicas estendidas na performance e no ensino do contrabaixo acústico no Brasil

Pós-graduação em Música - IA

As canções de Camargo Guarnieri e Suzanna de Campos: um estudo para a interpretação

Pós-graduação em Música - IA

Lendas para cantar: Uma análise dialógica do discurso das canções amazônicas de Waldemar Henrique

Pós-graduação em Linguística e Língua Portuguesa - FCLAR

Dixie Music Score - Accession 1398 - M690 (746)

This collection consists of an autographed copy of Herman F. Arnold’s “Dixie”. The music scale is inscribed with “At the request of Miss Minnie Parker the copy of Dixie is presented to Winthrop College [in 1923] by Prof. Herman F. Arnold + the score in 159 of + who wrote Dixie and was made the war tune of the south at the inauguration of Jefferson Davis Feb. 18th 1861 at Montgomery, Ala.” There is also a note stating that this score is “One of the Four Autograph Copies of the Score of Dixie.” Minnie Barker was curator of the Winthrop museum and the music score was displayed there until Tillman Science Building was razed in 1962 which housed the museum.