Journal articles on the topic 'Purcell, Henry, Instrumental music'

Abstract During Purcell's lifetime the music-publishing business in England flourished, thanks mainly to John Playford. Since intellectual property rights did not yet exist, Playford and his successors were able to select music they were confident of selling, predominantly producing multicomposer anthologies of popular tunes. Composers may have benefited little from these publications so it is significant that some took the financial risk of printing their music without an established publisher's support. Analysis suggests that musical self-publication was undertaken for several quite specific purposes. Three self-published books stand out as the only operatic scores published in seventeenth-century England: Locke's The English Opera (1675), Grabu's Albion and Albanius (1687), and Purcell's The Vocal and Instrumental Musick of the Prophetess (1691). These substantial volumes had no obvious practical use and all sold poorly; put into political context, however, they reveal how printed music in England was developing from a purely practical performance tool into a medium through which statements could be made and musical works given monumental status. Yet Purcell's own management of the printing of The Vocal and Instrumental Musick of the Prophetess suggests that he was confused about the distinct and mutually exclusive functions of music printing in the period, which led him to misunderstand the nature of the market and how he might appropriate the medium for his own benefit.

Abstract Palestine, from the end of World War I to the foundation of the state of Israel, had a vibrant concert scene led partly by local musicians (and from 1933 onwards, by an elite of leading performers and composers who fled from Europe), and partly by the cultural institutions of the British Mandate, including the Palestine Broadcasting Service. While the collaborations between these two forces often yielded inspired musical results, each had its own agendas and priorities. The music of Henry Purcell was perceived as a cultural asset of the British and, as such, its performance became the platform for tacit negotiation of local musical identity, as well as a means to communicate with the British administration. The present study examines how Purcell’s music was treated in Palestine, which works by Purcell were performed, which scores and editions were available to local musicians, how the 250th anniversary of his death (1945) was commemorated, what motivated musicians to perform Purcell in concert, and what happened to the performance of Purcell’s music in Israel after Britain withdrew its forces from Palestine in 1948.

A manuscript of late seventeenth-century English harpsichord music was sold to an anonymous private collector at Sotheby's in London on 26 May 1994 for £276,500, a record price paid for any British music manuscript. The 85-page oblong quarto, in its original covers, includes 21 pieces in the hand of Henry Purcell (1659–95), five of which were previously unknown, and a further 17 works by Giovanni Battista Draghi (c.1640–1708), also probably autograph, four of which were previously unknown. The manuscript is important because of the rarity of Purcell autographs: this is the first to be sold at public auction since the great collection of fantazias and sonatas (now British Library, Add. MS 30,930) was offered in 1826, and the only major source to surface this century.

Restoration keyboard music has been well served in recent years by modern editions, source studies and thematic catalogues. Thus it is all the more surprising that Brussels Conservatoire MS XY 15139, a large manuscript from the early eighteenth century containing unique pieces by John Blow and William Croft as well as a number of early copies of music by Henry Purcell, has almost entirely escaped notice. It seems that the only references to it in the scholarly literature to date have been a brief description by Margaret Reimann in her article on the Kortkamp family in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, and my edition of two Croft suites in the 1982 revision of that composer's Complete Harpsichord Works.

As an introduction to ground-bass techniques, and as one of the great moments in operatic literature, Dido's Lament, from Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, has long been a favored topic in academic courses on both the history and the analysis of Western tonal music. This essay approaches an analysis of the Lament from literary and recent historical perspectives. It returns to Virgil's Aeneid in search of the Dido who served as the starting point for so many subsequent characterizations of her, including Purcell's and his librettist Nahum Tate's. The analysis considers specifically musical means through which Purcell and Tate restore to Dido the nobility and greatness of spirit she manifests when we first meet her in Virgil's tale.

ABSTRACT Enthusiasm, a state in which the soul is supposedly freed from the body and the human vessel is filled with the divine, troubled the religious mainstream in 17th-century England. During the English Civil War, radical Protestant sects used enthusiastic prophecy to justify rebellion against monarchical tyranny. Such practices drew fire from members of the Church of England who vilified the prophets' ““religious enthusiasm”” by associating it with madness and melancholy. This strategy pathologized enthusiasm, transforming it into a mental disorder. Anti-enthusiastic discourses shaped musical and dramatic practices on the Restoration stage, as witnessed in two songs for enthusiastic prophets, Cumana in Nathaniel Lee's Sophonisba (music by Henry Purcell for a 1690s revival) and the elderly Brahmin priest in Peter Motteux's revision of The Island Princess (music by Richard Leveridge, 1699). Purcell's song for Cumana, ““Beneath a Poplar's Shadow,”” incorporates the standard conventions of musical madness and is even called a ““mad song”” in Orpheus Britannicus, Book Two (1702). Similarly, the Brahmin priest channels the speech of the false pagan gods in Leveridge's ““Enthusiastick Song””——a piece that parallels contemporary political discourses about the ““madness”” of religious nonconformity and fanaticism. A close reading of the music, dramatic texts, and contemporary political, religious, and medical discourses demonstrates how musical representations of enthusiasm were affected by the critical rhetoric of religious orthodoxy.

AbstractControversial efforts to find political allegory in Dido and Aeneas (c.1689), the great chamber opera by Nahum Tate and Henry Purcell, have obscured the opera's broader concern with the politics of culture. As rival political factions claimed ownership of the nation's cultural heritage, Tate and other dramatists in Restoration England asked searching questions about the relationship between the artist and political authority. Grappling with Virgil's Aeneid, a central text of Stuart absolutism, Dido and Aeneas explores the workings and the costs of partisan myth-making. The opera joins many other Restoration voices in taking up an ancient ‘chaste Dido’ tradition, which accused Virgil of mangling Dido's historical reputation in the service of imperial propaganda. Yet Dido does not set forth a topical allegory or a coherent critique of Stuart misrule, but takes an unstable, irresolute attitude towards the cultural legacy of Virgil, the aesthetics of female suffering, and the politics of royal praise.

AbstractFrom the nineteenth century onwards the stereotype of Haydn as cheerful and jesting has dominated the reception of his music. This study contributes to the recent scholarship that broadens this view, with a new approach: I set works by Haydn in the context of eighteenth-century ideas about melancholy, those of Edmund Burke, Francisco Goya, Henry Home (Lord Kames), Immanuel Kant and Johann Georg Zimmermann. Their conceptions of melancholy were dialectical, involving the interplay of such elements as pleasure and pain, freedom and fettering, and self-reflection and absorption. I consider the relevance of these dialectics to Haydn’s English songs, his dramatic cantata Arianna a Naxos and two late chamber works. Musical melancholy arises, I argue, when the protagonist of a work – be it the vocal character in a song or the ‘composer’s voice’ in an instrumental work – exhibits an ironic distance from his or her own pain. The musical dialectics in these works prompt listeners, for their part, to take a step back to contemplate the borders and limits of emotional experience and communication.

The so-called Henry VIII's Book (London, British Library Add. MS 31922) contains two textless pieces by Isaac—his three-part Benedictus and the four-part La my—together with a number of other Franco-Flemish “songs without words” typical of the contents of manuscripts copied for the North Italian courts where the earliest viol consorts were being developed in the 1490s and early 1500s. Alongside these pieces are works by native English composers, including William Cornyshe, whose extended three-part Fa la sol has a number of stylistic traits in common with some works by Isaac (for example, his three-part Der Hundt) and Alexander Agricola (his three-part Cecus non judicat de coloribus) that were also transmitted in textless format. The fact that these latter two pieces were published in Hieronymus Formschneider's Trium vocum carmina (Nuremberg, 1538) while Cornyshe's Fa la sol was published in XX Songes (London, 1530) shows that this type of repertoire was still prized several years after the composers' deaths. Analysis of musical connections between the work of Isaac and Cornyshe, as evident in pieces such as those from Henry VIII's Book—in particular, techniques employed by the composers to extend the structures of their “songs without words”—sheds fresh light on the reception in England of Isaac's music and that of his continental contemporary Agricola. Relevant considerations include the context in which these pieces were anthologized together and the introduction into England of viols similar to those Isaac may have known in Ferrara in 1502, when La my was composed. Such pieces are representative of a typical courtly repertoire that developed into the riches of the later Tudor instrumental consort music.

The library of University of Wales Lampeter, one of the oldest universities in Britain, collected many rare items, including music, during the first thirty years after its foundation in 1822. This music collection has never really been explored hitherto, and there are no printed references to it in the standard literature. The collection contains nearly 200 items, ranging from 1711 to the mid-nineteenth century but dating mainly from 1770–1820. Alongside the printed music are sixteen instrumental tutors and fifteen manuscripts. Judging by names written on some of the items, the collection was assembled piecemeal from various private collections. For nearly a third of the items, no exact match has yet been found elsewhere. These include previously unknown editions of music by Arne, Mozart and others; previously unknown works by composers such as William Burnett, Francis Linley and William Howgill; and even possibly unknown composers such as J. Gray and Henry Schroeder.

Abstract Adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays has been part of his legacy from the beginning, as works by artists such as Nahum Tate, Henry Purcell, and John Dryden can attest. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, too, have been put to many uses over the years. They have been set to music, they have been quoted by politicians, they have been used as wedding vows, and they have appeared on greeting cards. For many, they represent the ultimate statement on love. In the four hundred years since Shakespeare’s death, they have found their way into a variety of media, including music, drama, books, television, and film. Whereas the plays have long been acknowledged as a rich source of inspiration—both serious and parodic—by artists and auteurs, ranging in kind from novelist James Joyce to dramatist Tom Stoppard to comedian Ben Elton, the poems have received less scrutiny in this regard. However, they represent a gold mine of untold riches, especially in terms of biography, which has yet to be sufficiently tapped. In this paper I take a look at the various uses the sonnets have been put to, primarily in books, television, and film, and come to some conclusions regarding their success in remediation.

The article presents an analysis of one of the most interesting orchestral compositions intended to familiarize listeners of symphonic concerts with instruments – compositions by Benjamin Britten “Guide to the orchestra. Variations on Purcell’s theme” The composer created his opus in such a way that it could be played in educational programs. At the same time, the composition has a great artistic value. This allows us to consider it in purely musical and pedagogical aspects. The problems of the variation cycle as a dynamically developing flow of diverse images are determined by intonation segments emanating from the theme borrowed from Henry Purcell, in which the initial idea of the master of the XVII century is deeply rethought. The pedagogical task is connected with the demonstration of the timbres of all instruments in solo, ensemble, orchestral sounds, expressing different semantic facets of the original theme, transformed in the process of development into its own antipode. B. Britten found an organic solution to the problems. The article outlines the options for the use of this work in music lessons in secondary school and in the system of additional musical education in the study of instruments of the Symphony orchestra. For this purpose, the comparative characteristics of the performance of the “Guide” by major conductors of different generations are involved, including the interpretation of the composition by the author of the music, which can be assessed a reference. The characteristic of the film for which the music and contemporary videos of the performance of Britten’s opus are written is given.

In this profoundly dialogical exchange, Peter Sellars, theatre director, researcher, and teacher, and Maria Shevtsova open out a whole array of questions on the integral relation between politics and the theatre in its multiple manifestations. These questions not only concern the damages inflicted by the present Covid-19 pandemic but also those developed by the neoliberal economics and politics of the past forty years and more. In Sellars’s view, neoliberalism has been the hotbed of social injustices, inequities, market and other forms of current enslavement, migrations, refugee and related precarities, and the havoc of the world climate in which the plight of humanity and that of the planet are indelibly interconnected. His and Shevtsova’s discussion links such vital concerns with his theatre practice, which ranges from his engagement with local communities and indigenous peoples – he details some of his work with the collective, community organization of two Los Angeles Festivals of the early 1990s – to the various forms of his music theatre in which he collaborates, in institutional structures, with highly proficient musicians, singers and dancers. The focus chosen here from his music theatre is The Indian Queen (2013), which Sellars dramaturgically invents using pieces by Henry Purcell combined with prose fragments by Nicaraguan novelist Rosario Aguilar. Peter Sellars is an internationally renowned theatre director among whose more recent productions is Mozart’s Idomeneo, premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 2019. Maria Shevtsova, Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, is editor of New Theatre Quarterly. This conversation took place on 16 August 2020, was transcribed from the recording by Kunsang Kelden, and was edited by Maria Shevtsova.

If nineteenth-century aesthetics distinguish between distinct, colourful French instrumentation and doubled, equalised German orchestration, this distinction softens when the ‘New German’ orchestration of Wagner and Strauss exploits individual instrumental colours before dissolving them into massive orchestral sonorities. Similarly, if early French electroacoustic music counteracts the meta-serialism of early twentieth-century German electronic music, Pierre Schaeffer's Traité des objets musicaux combines his early anecdotal Noise Studies with a noise-reduction process into a new, rather German aesthetic of electroacoustics. In search of musical objects through a reductive, analytical listening (entendre), Schaeffer's neutralisation of anecdotal noises into musical objects is analogous to New German orchestration's neutralisation of individual orchestral colours in order to synthesise new orchestral combinations. Although this orchestral synthesis is different from the analytical probe for new valeurs involved in entendre, the separation of the noise from its residual signification are fundamental processes within both nineteenth-century orchestrational and twentieth-century electroacoustic musical aesthetics. If our current understanding of electronic music aligns Schaeffer and Pierre Henry wholly with modernity and its putatively radical and self-conscious break with Berlioz, Brahms and historical tradition, this article suggests that an essential underlying continuity in the French-instrumentation/German-orchestration binary persists even in the face of the decline of the musical and cultural traditions that created and sustained them.

Appealing to the stated topic is relevant because of the desire to concretize the knowledge of little-known in Russian musicology instrumental consorts (musical groups), as well as to expand the existing understanding of the court culture of Renaissance England and its musical and sound appearance. The main center of English consorts development was the Royal court of the Tudors — Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth I. Their heyday was at the peak of the “Golden Age” of English culture. Based on the results of scienti­fic research by Western scientists and visual and verbal sources available for study, the article outlines the milestones in the history of the main types of instrumental consort in England — the whole consort, consisting of instruments of the same family, and the broken consort, today often identified with the mixed consort, which connects heterogeneous instruments. The article notes that the early history of the recorder consort in England was closely connected with creative activities of the family of Venetian musicians Bassano. Extremely popular in musical circles of England, the consort of viol was originally formed thanks to Flemish and, somewhat later, Italian musicians. As for the mixed consort, which united performers of the viols da gamba and da braccio, lute, bandore, cistre and recorder, it started to be called “English” because of the stable combination of certain musical instruments. Analysis of consort music anthologies of the 16th—17th centuries made it possible to identify individual genre and musical-style reference points in musical groups’ repertoire, in which musicians improved the principles of instrumental polyphony and the stile concertante, topical in the Modern Period.

In the winter of 1704–5 Henry Playford advertised ‘a Choice Collection of Vocal and Instrumental Musick in Italian, French, and English’ owned by Gottfried Finger and partly collected by him ‘in his Travels to Italy’. Finger had evidently sold the collection to Johann Gottfried Keller and John Banister junior prior to his abrupt departure from England in 1701 after coming last in the competition to set Congreve's masque The Judgement of Paris. The discovery of a copy of the printed catalogue throws light on Finger's collecting activities in Italy and on the reception of Italian music in England. It also includes a list of ‘Mr. Finger's Great Pieces for his Consort in York-Buildings’, providing us with valuable new information about his concert activities in London in the 1690s, and about the size and composition of groups performing at York Buildings, London's first purpose-built concert hall. The list includes many pieces richly scored with brass, woodwind and strings, evidently performed with sizeable forces: most of the sets of parts are said to have been ‘Prick’d 3 times over’. It adds a number of new pieces to the catalogue of Finger's known compositions, and enables us to attribute to him an anonymous sonata for four recorders and continuo that was published in the twentieth century as by James Paisible.

The paper is devoted to theproblematics of the late style in composer creativity. The typologies of the late style described in the musical science works of recent years (including the thesesby E. Nazaikinsky and N. Savitskaya) are systematized. The characteristic of B. Britten’s chamberheritage is given in the context of the achievements of the English composer’s school of аnew musical renaissance of the twentieth century. The purpose of the research is to reveal the specificity of the last opus phenomenon. Achieving the goal of the research involves using the following methods: genre approach, historical approach and stylistic approach. The specificity of the last opus phenomenon is revealed by the example of the Third String Quartet by B. Britten, which is recognized as the composer’s last opus. The late style of the composer is characterized in terms of orchestration, techniques, genre preferences and stylistic unity. Exposition of the main material of the study includes compositional and stylistic analysis of the Third String Quartet by B. Britten. In the paperheritage of B. Britten is considered as an example of a creative composer process which has an explicit division into several periods. The name of B. Britten is associated with the highest achievements of the English composer school of a new renaissance in the twentieth century. The researchers distinguish three periodsof B. Britten’s creativity. The first period is characterized by the interest in chamber music and various chamber compositions, the variation as a principle of development as well as the genre certainty. The individual style of the composer is formed in vocal musicearlier and more intensively. The second period is characterized by expressive orchestral writing, figurative concreteness and clarity of structures. The late period of B. Britten’s creativity is characterized by the desire to find the most flexible form of the modern performance. The stylistic synthesis reveals a reliance on ancient types and forms of playing music: Gregorian chant, heterophony, anemitonicpenta-tonic system and church modes. Most of his works are marked by the asceticism of expressive means. The scores are written in a stingy, honed manner, the composer uses instrumental compositions with vivid coloristic capabilities, but implements them with a subtle sense of proportion. The paper deals with the specifics of the B. Britten’s late style. According to the concept of N. Savitskaya the late style is the final evolutionary stage which includes stylistic elements of the early and mature stages of the composer’s creative formation in an in-depth and concentrated form. The researcher identifies the following types of late style: prognostic, consolidating and reduced. B. Britten’s late style can be classified as consolidating one. The paper isconcerned with the phenomenon of the last opus. B. Britten created three string quartets. The appearance of the first two was connected with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the death of H. Purcell. The Third Quartet was written thirty years later, in 1975, in Venice, and was first performed after the death of B. Britten in 1976. This work was the last instrumental composition the authorcompleted. The structure of the Third Quartetdeparts from the traditional form. It consists of five relatively short movements which form a kind of symmetrical arch. B. Britten originally used the term divertimento as a working description of the quartet. Each movement of the cycle has its own subtitle: Duets, Ostinato, Solo, Burlesque, Recitative and Passacalia (La Serenissima). All movements are written in three-part form (ABA). The slow lyrical movements of the quartet form a kind of arches inside the composition. The first movement, Duets, is in a sense the most abstract of all five parts. The beginning resembles a “double spiral” (two voices are closely intertwined and are an exact copy of each other). In the second movement, Ostinato, the idea of an ostinato, where a musical pattern is repeated over and over in the background, takes on a somewhat intrusive form. In the third movement, Solo, the lone violin line, moving through wide intervals, is accompanied mostly by only one other voice at a time. In the fourth movement, Burlesque, the world of parody entertainment, clowning, buffoonery is presented. The fifth movement is entitled La Serenissima, a reference to Venice. In this movement B. Britten quoted his own last opera, Death in Venice. The results of the research support the idea that B. Britten’s late style refers to consolidated type of late style. This conclusion is reached based ona specific analysis of the Third String Quartet by B. Britten. The Third Quartet accumulates as features of B. Britten’s late style as the asceticism of expressive means in writing, reliance on the frets of folk music and the rigor of writing. B. Britten’s enthusiasm for the traditions of folk music resulted in a desire for the texture of all the voices in his instrumental scores. The composer’s chamber music is characterized by detailed instrumentation. Despite all the possibilities of using modernist techniques in the creative process B. Britten can be traced to an academic style. It is worth noting the amazing unity of B. Britten’s style throughout his life. Individual composer style is constantly being refined, remaining homogeneous at the same time (there are not style shifts and differences). In addition, B. Britten had always been aimed at performers and often wrote instrumental works on order. Although B. Britten’s heritage is widely represented in Ukrainian and foreign musical science, the specifics of the composer’s late style is still a field for study and comprehension. The paper opens up prospects for the study of the last opus in the late period of the work of composers.

Problem statement. Musical director’s activity of an opera performance is a complex phenomenon and largely unexplored, in particular, the theoretical aspects of the conductor’s interpretation of the opera have not received a sufficient development in domestic musicology yet. In the theoretical aspect not only the role of the conductor-director, but also co-directors of an opera performance – a director, a choirmaster and others who in cooperation create an artistic image of an opera spectacle is insufficiently investigated. The necessity of exploration of practical issues of the opera’s interpretation for further theoretical generalizations, awareness of specifics of the various performing interpretations determines the relevance of the topic of the offered article. The recent researches and publications by O. Menkov, P. Lando, G. Tkachenko and V. Makarenko emphasize the need of creation of the theory of collective performing, in particular, of the opera works, as well as the conductor’s role as a head of staging process. Admitting all the above, we insist also the necessity of developing a shared position by the all co-creators of the performance (a conductor, a stage director, a choirmaster, a ballet master, a painter and others). The purpose of the study – to reveal the specifics of the creation of the performing interpretation in student’s opera theater on the example of the work of opera studio of the Kharkiv National University of Arts named after I. P. Kotlyarevsky. The methodology of the research includes the interpretive analysis, chosen for understanding and explanation the specifics of the opera performance, as well as retrospective historical observations over the working process in Opera Studio of Kharkiv University of Art on the cusp of the 20th and 21st centuries with followed by generalization. Results. As the research material, the creative activity of the opera studio’s team under the leadership of the People’s Artist of Ukraine, professor of Solo Singing and Opera Training Department of Kharkiv National University of Arts was chosen. During the period since 1989 year to present time about 30 operas were staged in Opera Studio under the leadership of the Maestro. Co-organization persons of the opera studio’s performances were the stage directors I. Ryvina, O. Kolomiytsev, A. Kaloyan, the choirmasters – Honored Arts Workers of Ukraine professor N. Byelik-Zolotaryova (in performances 1989–2008, from 2013 and to present day) and associate professor I. Verbitska (during the period from 2009 to 2012), which also was executed the functions of the conductor of performances of student’s opera theater. The concertmasters headed by professor L. Kucher carried out studying the musical material of operas by students. According to our explorations, the principles of selection of operas for production in the Opera Studio became: art value of the chosen sample; presence of performance stuff among undergraduates of Department of the Solo Singing to create the main and secondary characters; vocal possibilities of young performers (because the opera studio is the student’s opera theater); the material base for creation of sceneries, tailoring the costumes etc.; demand of the chosen sample in opera theaters. For identification of the specifics of production process in student’s opera theater two representative samples were chosen: the production versions of the operas “The love for three oranges” by S. Prokofiev (18.12.1989, the stage director I. Ryvina, the choirmaster N. Byelik-Zolotaryova, the painter T. Medvid) and “Dido and Aeneas” by H. Purcell (19.11.2001, the stage director O. Kolomiytsev, the head of the opera’s staging I. Ryvina, the choirmaster N. Byelik-Zolotaryova, the painter K. Kolesnichenko), under maestro A. V. Kalabukhin’s conducting. The choice of these opera samples by Kharkiv University Opera Studio brightly demonstrates the essence of its repertoire policy, which is concluded in selection for staging the operas of different styles and directions. The performing conception of the opera “The love for three oranges” was built, on the one hand, on the understanding of this musically-scenic opus as the embodiment of the forms of “conditional theater”, on the other hand – as solution to the problem about essence of art, the theatricalized answer to the question, which it should be. The staging of the first English opera “Dido and Aeneas” by H. Purcell was directed on comprehension and acquisition by students of Baroque stylistics in an opera genre. Conclusions. As features of the staging process in the opera studio, it should be noted, at first, the synthesis of creative and pedagogical orientation in the activities of the producers of performances. So, in the student opera the conductor on rehearsals not only builds the structure of the opera whole, seeking an ensemble between performers-soloists, chorus and orchestra, but also is at work with students upon the technique of sound articulation (breathing, diction, phrasing), upon the emotional and meaning content of music. The rehearsals of young singers with stage directors also have a clear pedagogical orientation, presupposing detailed explanations of both the general line of development of the image and the specific situational details of the behavior of the character in different stages of the opera. An integral part of the artistic and pedagogical process, when creating the performance of the opera studio, the work of professional collectives is: choir and orchestra, which helps the student to enter the atmosphere of a real opera art. In the above successful performances of the Opera Studio of Kharkiv National University of Arts, the choir sound (choirmaster N. Byelik-Zolotaryova) featured a magnificent ensemble, a variety of dynamics, expressiveness of the word, intelligent emotionality, spirituality. Under the direction of A. Kalabukhin and I. Verbitska, the orchestra supported young performers by naturally way, and in solo instrumental episodes it showed the timbre saturation and completeness of expression of a musical thought. In the process of ground work on the performance, one should pay attention to certain organizational moments on which its success depends, namely, the drawing up of a clear schedule of rehearsals depending on the employment of students at lectures and the availability of the own premises for orchestral and stage rehearsals and performances. Given the sufficiently limited number of such rehearsals before the premiere, as well as the pedagogic orientation of student opera performance, it is extremely important to coordinate the actions of all the co-directors of the performances. A conductor, a director, a choirmaster, a painter, a costume designer and others have to adhere to the general artistic idea of the work, which clarified by the way of preliminary joint discussion.

This article characterizes development trends in jazz piano from its origins in the “third-layer” (Konen, V., 1984) of music (ragtime and other “pre-jazz” forms) to the present time (avant-garde and retro styles of the late 20th – early 21st centuries). Main attention was devoted to the stylistic sphere, which represents an entirety of techniques and methods of jazz piano improvisation and combines genre and style parameters. In this context, the currently available information about jazz pianism and its sources (Kinus,Y., 2008; Stoliar, R., 2017) was reviewed, and sociocultural determinants, which contributed to the advent and changes of jazz piano styles were highlighted. Standing out among them at the first (traditional) stage are the schools and individual creative techniques known under generic name “stride piano” and based on the ragtime technique. At the second (contemporary) stage beginning from bebop, jazz piano stylistics gradually diverge from standardized textural formulas of homophonicharmonic type and attain fundamental diversity depending on creative attitudes of leading jazz pianists. The question of jazz piano stylistics is one of the least studied in jazz theory. The existing works devoted to this subject address mostly the sequence of the advent and changes of jazz piano styles along with the general characteristics of their representatives. Beginning from approximately the 1920s, jazz piano styles appeared and changed so fast that they left no time for their comprehension and perception (Kinus, Y., 2008). Only in the newest stylistics of the period after bebop, which divided the art of jazz into traditional and contemporary stages, did these styles attain a certain shape in new modifications and become the components of a phenomenon defined by the generic notion “jazz pianism”. It was stated that the genesis of this phenomenon is usually seen in the art of ragtime, carried in the United States of the late 19th – early 20th centuries by itinerant pianists. This variety of “third-layer” piano music playing produced a significant impact on the art of jazz in general, which is proved by its reproduction in the Dixieland and New Orleans styles as some of the first examples of jazz improvisation. The stylistics of ragtime influenced the entire first stage of jazz piano, which traces its origins back to approximately the 1910s. It combined mental features and esthetics of two traditions: European and Afro-American, which in the entirety produced the following picture: 1) popular and concert area of music playing; 2) gravitation toward demonstration of virtuosic play; 3) domination of comic esthetics; 4) objectivity of expression; 5) tendency toward the completeness of form; 6) inclination toward stage representation. In technological (texturalpianistic) aspect, ragtime, reproduced in the jazz stylistics of stride piano, demonstrated the tendency toward universalization of piano, which combined in the person of one performer the functions of solo and accompaniment, derived from the practice of minstrel banjoists related to the percussion-accented rhythmics of dance accompaniment (Konen, V., 1984). It was stated that ragtime as the transitional bridge to jazz piano existed simultaneously with other forms of “third-layer” music playing found in the Afro-American environment (unlike ragtime itself, which was an art of white musicians). These were semi-folklore styles known as “barrel house” and “honky-tonk(y) piano” cultivated in Wild West saloons. The subsequent development of jazz piano stylistic went along the lines of more vocal and specific directions related mostly to peculiarities of playing technique. Among the more global origins equal in significance to ragtime and stride pianists derivative, blues piano stylistics is worth noting. It represents an instrumental adaptation of vocal blues, which had the decisive influence over the melodics and rhythmics of the right hand party of jazz pianists (ragtime and stride piano highlighted and consolidated the typical texture of accompaniment, i.e., the left hand party). Blues piano style is a multicomponent phenomenon that shaped up as a result of efforts taken by a whole number of jazz pianists. It was developed, and continues to exist until presently, in two variants: a) as a solo piano variant, b) as a duet variant (piano and vocal). Along with blues piano, a style known as “boogie-woogie” was cultivated in jazz piano stylistics of the period before bebop as the new reminiscence of the pre-jazz era (with rock-n-roll becoming a consequence of its actualization in the 1950–1960s). A stylistic genre known as “Harlem piano style” (its prominent representatives include Luckey Roberts, James P. Johnson, Willie “the Lion” Smith, and Thomas “Fats” Waller) became a sort of compendium that combined genetic components of traditional jazz piano. This school has finally defined jazz piano as a form of solo concert music playing, which also determined the subsequent stylistic varieties of this art, the most noteworthy of which are “trumpet piano style”, “swing piano style” and “locked hands style”. Their general feature was interpretation of the instrument as a “small orchestra”, which meant rebirth at the new volute of a historical-stylistic spiral of the “image” of universal piano capable of reproducing the “sounds” of other instruments, voices and their ensembles. Outstanding pianists of various generations have been, and are, the carriers (and often “inventors”) of jazz piano styles. It should suffice to mention the names of such “legends” of jazz as Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Bill Evans, and also Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett (older generation), Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Brad Mehldau, Vadim Neselovskyi, Robert Glasper (middle generation), Eldar Djangirov, Tigran Hamasyan, Cory Henry (younger generation). Conclusions. The description of the stages of development of jazz piano pianism made in this article proves that its polystylistic nature is preserved, and the main representative of certain stylistic inclinations were and remain the texture. Textured formulas serve as the main objects of stylistic interpretations for jazz pianists of different generations. These readings are represented by two vectors – retrospective (revival of jazz traditions) and exploratory, experimental (rapprochement with the academic avant-garde). Of great importance are the styles of personalities, in which polystylistic tendencies are combined with the individual playing manners and improvisation, which, in general, is the most characteristic feature of the current stage of development of jazz piano art.

AbstractThe article deals with the influence of rhetoric on musical thinking and musical practice in England from the end to fifteenth century until the eighteenth century. The humanistic rediscovery of sciences and arts led to the revival of the artes liberales and to an insight in the relationship of ars oratoria and ars musica and the affinity between poetry and music. The close connexion is based on the similarity of effects,which are produced by the eloquence of speech and the affective power of vocal and instrumental sounds: They convey a message and move the heart. The relation of the sister arts was primarily considered not in theoretical musical sources but in writings dealing with poetry or rhetoric by George Puttenham, Henry Peacham the Elder, Francis Bacon, Charles Butler and others. However, the treatises by Christopher Simpson,Thomas Mace,Charles Avison and William Jones attestagrowing importance of rhetorical principles on the creation of music. Ayres and wordless pieces by Campion, Dowland, Purcell and Händel give evidence, that the composers applied rhetorical procedures and figures to intensify the expressive and persuasive qualities of their art.

Ever since the spread of cheap sampling technology in the 1980s, popular music has incorporated direct quotations from other songs. This trend reached its zenith in the “mash-up,” that genre of popular music which has emerged in the last 5 or 6 years. Most famously, DJ Dangermouse distributed his “Grey Album,” a concept that mashed together the a Capella vocals from Jay-Z’s Black Album with the music from the Beatles’ White Album. Distribution of the project was swiftly met with a Cease and Desist order from the Beatles’ label EMI, leading to the Grey Tuesday online protest in which many websites distributed the album for free in the name of free expression. As the name suggests, “mash-ups,” sometimes also called bootlegs, mash together two or more already released songs. This use of the term ‘bootlegs’ should not to be confused with bootleg recordings of albums or concerts, which are merely illegal copies sold for profit. Both mash-ups and bootlegs are new pieces of art, almost always unable to be bought from stores. In their most basic form, mash-ups take the vocal from one song and the instrumental from another—what bootleggers call an A+B. This has taken ever more elaborate forms, for instance, San Francisco’s DJ Earworm’s “Stairway to Bootleg Heaven” mashes together Dolly Parton, the Beatles, Art of Noise, Pat Benatar, the Eurythmics, and Laurie Anderson. By now, the history of mash-ups and illegal sampling in general has been well covered by many journalists (See, for instance, Sasha Frere Jones and Pete Rojas). The question, then, is not so much what mash-ups are so much as what they do. Many theories of consumer reception have often reductively posited a passive audience impelled by little more than the desire to consume. When it comes to popular culture in modernity, Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno, both in his own writing and with Horkheimer, made the hugely influential argument that the only cultural work it can do is in the service of hegemonic capitalism. Adorno argued, “the entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms” (232). Painting his argument in rather stark terms, Adorno said that “the categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in common with freedom. It proclaims: you shall … conform to that which exists anyway” (236). As philosopher Jane Bennett points out, Adorno and Horkheimer construct a passive audience consuming the derivative, repetitious pleasures of mass culture, under the thrall of the fetishised commodity “as if it was alive” (Bennett 123). Horkheimer and Adorno’s influential work denies the “possibility of an affective response to commodities able to challenge the socioeconomic system that generates it” (Bennett 121). Adorno damns the modern culture industries, but in an interesting way he also elevates their power, for his theory privileges the producer of the text, not its consumer. The question presents itself, therefore, what happens when subjects are both consumers and producers? The makers of mash-ups are clearly both. Arguably, mash-ups are a fannish re-appropriation in the manner that Henry Jenkins uses to describe slash fan-fiction in Textual Poachers (Jenkins). Like slash writers, mash-up artists take a common popular culture (music in this case) and appropriate it for their own desires and creative impulses. Rather than a purely passive audience, mash-ups show there exists at least a segment of an engaged audience, able to deconstruct and rework popular culture. Jenkins argues that “fandom celebrates not exceptional texts but exceptional readings” (284), a facet clearly exemplified in mash-ups use of not only the rock canon but “disposable” pop and chart R&B. What makes a mash-up interesting is not that it uses quality critically-approved materials, but that it re-works its materials into new contexts. Bootlegs as a whole can embody the “dissonant possibilities” of the commodity (Bennett 127)—as disruption of the normative reading of songs, as a critique of postmodern capitalism, as an affirmation of consumption, as a critique of the pop auteur cult that privileges certain acts as “art” and not others, as frivolous party music, and more. Most obviously, of course, mash-ups illuminate Fredric Jameson’s thesis that postmodern art is an art of pastiche (Jameson). Mash-ups often take disparate elements, songs from different genres, and make songs that shouldn’t belong together somehow work. Freelance Hellraiser’s classic “Stroke of Genius” bootleg took then band du jour The Strokes and overlayed pop muppet Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in A Bottle” vocals into a surprisingly soulful new song, showing in the process that the gap between “manufactured” pop artist and “authentic” rock artist may not be as far as some would imagine. Alternatively, artists can mash together songs that are basically the same, pointedly noting their lack of originality—for instance, the mash-up from which this article takes its name, San Francisco bootlegger Party Ben’s “Boulevard of Broken Songs,” which takes Green Day’s recent “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and shows its uncanny similarity to Oasis’s “Wonderwall,” as well as other songs by Travis, Coldplay and Aerosmith. Like any commodity, mash-ups are in some ways implicated in a hegemonic capitalist economy. They are an object to be consumed, and are reliant on the consumption of other texts. In a practical sense for its makers, making mash-ups requires the software to make music, often the Sony-owned ACID program, whose loop based lay-out lends itself to the use of sampled materials. Given their general immersion in technology, it is questionable whether bootleggers necessarily purchase these programs, given the availability of “cracked” software on peer-to-peer downloading programs and Bit-Torrent. Similarly, making mash-ups might require the purchase of CDs or mp3s, although again this is far from certain, given the easy accessibility of “illegal” mp3s downloadable on the internet (but of course that requires the money for an internet connection, as does the hosting of mp3s on individual mash-up sites). Compared to the money needed to “legitimately” release songs, though, mash-ups are a relatively inexpensive way to create “new” music. Most mash-up artists post their work with a disclaimer with words to the effect of “I don’t own these songs, I will take these songs down if asked by the copyright owners, don’t sue me.” Songs are usually available to download for free, and the selling of mash-up CDs on E-bay is highly frowned-upon. While this is partly an attempt to avoid being sued by copyright holders, it also suggests an opting-out of a capitalistic system—art for art’s sake. The most obvious critique of capitalism occurs in the form of the “cut-up,” which sees songs or speeches sampled and reassembled to form different meanings. This may be political, for example, the cut-up by RX that re-assembled George W Bush’s speeches into U2’s anti-war song “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” Australian readers may remember the satirical Pauline Pantsdown single “I Don’t Like It” which re-arranged right-wing One Nation politician Pauline Hanson’s voice into nonsensical sayings about shopping trolleys and discos. Like the slash that Jenkins applauds, this may also take the form of a rupture of the heteronormative surface of most pop music. One good example is Bristol mash-up artist Andrew Herring’s “Blue Cheese mix” which cut together Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8r Boi” into a homoerotic love song (“He was a boy/he was a boy/can I make it anymore obvious?”), over the top of such queer-friendly songs as Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real” and Placebo’s “Nancy Boy.” This is not to suggest that queer sexuality is outside of a capitalistic economy, but rather that queer re-readings take popular music culture into new contexts less frequently taken by the largely heteronormative music industry. But while some mash-up culture exhibits a decidedly anti-capitalist out-look, a few mash-up artists have made the leap from bootlegger to major-label sanctioned artist. The press coverage for the aforementioned Dangermouse got him a production gig with the Gorillaz and the leverage to release his much-hyped Gnarls Barkley project with Cee-Lo (of course, it rather helped that he already had a record deal with rapper Gemini). Richard X’s bootlegs landed him a number one UK single when the Sugababes re-recorded his “Freak Like Me” mash-up, and a number of mash-ups have been licensed by the labels of the original artists and released officially (French bootleggers Loo & Placido’s “Horny Like A Dandy,” English bootleggers Phil & Dog’s “Dr Pressure”). Particularly in the first flush of the mash-up hype in the UK in 2001, there has been the potential at least for a few bootleggers to break into the music industry. Thus, one should not consider mash-ups as an unambiguous refusal of late capitalism, for many bootleggers would like nothing better than to become part of the system from which they currently pilfer. However, given the nature of the medium, its commercial co-option is far from assured, since the clearance fees for many bootlegs render them un-releasable. In their re-appropriations of popular music culture, though, mash-ups embody the contradictions inherent in late capitalism—fun and serious, nihilist and political, anti-capitalist and marked by hyper-consumption. Immersed in pop culture, but not quite of it, the liminal place of mash-ups on the edge of the culture should continue to make them of interest to critics of media culture. References Adorno, Theodor W. “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” In The Adorno Reader. Ed. Brian O’Connor. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 230-239. Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Jones, Sasha Frere. “1 + 1 + 1 = 1: The New Math of Mash-Ups.” The New Yorker 10 Jan. 2005. 22 Sep. 2006 http://www.newyorker.com/critics/music/?050110crmu_music>. Rojas, Pete. “Bootleg Culture.” Salon 1 Aug. 2002. 22 Sep. 2006 http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/08/01/bootlegs/index.html?pn=1>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McAvan, Em. "“Boulevard of Broken Songs”: Mash-ups as Textual Re-appropriation of Popular Music Culture." M/C Journal 9.6 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/02-mcavan.php>. APA Style McAvan, E. (Dec. 2006) "“Boulevard of Broken Songs”: Mash-ups as Textual Re-appropriation of Popular Music Culture," M/C Journal, 9(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/02-mcavan.php>.

In 1956, John Cage predicted that “in the future, records will be made from records” (Duffel, 202). Certainly, musical creativity has always involved a certain amount of appropriation and adaptation of previous works. For example, Vivaldi appropriated and adapted the “Cum sancto spiritu” fugue of Ruggieri’s Gloria (Burnett, 4; Forbes, 261). If stuck for a guitar solo on stage, Keith Richards admits that he’ll adapt Buddy Holly for his own purposes (Street, 135). Similarly, Nirvana adapted the opening riff from Killing Jokes’ “Eighties” for their song “Come as You Are”. Musical “quotation” is actively encouraged in jazz, and contemporary hip-hop would not exist if the genre’s pioneers and progenitors had not plundered and adapted existing recorded music. Sampling technologies, however, have taken musical adaptation a step further and realised Cage’s prediction. Hardware and software samplers have developed to the stage where any piece of audio can be appropriated and adapted to suit the creative impulses of the sampling musician (or samplist). The practice of sampling challenges established notions of creativity, with whole albums created with no original musical input as most would understand it—literally “records made from records.” Sample-based music is premised on adapting audio plundered from the cultural environment. This paper explores the ways in which technology is used to adapt previous recordings into new ones, and how musicians themselves have adapted to the potentials of digital technology for exploring alternative approaches to musical creativity. Sampling is frequently defined as “the process of converting an analog signal to a digital format.” While this definition remains true, it does not acknowledge the prevalence of digital media. The “analogue to digital” method of sampling requires a microphone or instrument to be recorded directly into a sampler. Digital media, however, simplifies the process. For example, a samplist can download a video from YouTube and rip the audio track for editing, slicing, and manipulation, all using software within the noiseless digital environment of the computer. Perhaps it is more prudent to describe sampling simply as the process of capturing sound. Regardless of the process, once a sound is loaded into a sampler (hardware or software) it can be replayed using a MIDI keyboard, trigger pad or sequencer. Use of the sampled sound, however, need not be a faithful rendition or clone of the original. At the most basic level of manipulation, the duration and pitch of sounds can be altered. The digital processes that are implemented into the Roland VariOS Phrase Sampler allow samplists to eliminate the pitch or melodic quality of a sampled phrase. The phrase can then be melodically redefined as the samplist sees fit: adapted to a new tempo, key signature, and context or genre. Similarly, software such as Propellerhead’s ReCycle slices drum beats into individual hits for use with a loop sampler such as Reason’s Dr Rex module. Once loaded into Dr Rex, the individual original drum sounds can be used to program a new beat divorced from the syncopation of the original drum beat. Further, the individual slices can be subjected to pitch, envelope (a component that shapes the volume of the sound over time) and filter (a component that emphasises and suppresses certain frequencies) control, thus an existing drum beat can easily be adapted to play a new rhythm at any tempo. For example, this rhythm was created from slicing up and rearranging Clyde Stubblefield’s classic break from James Brown’s “Funky Drummer”. Sonic adaptation of digital information is not necessarily confined to the auditory realm. An audio editor such as Sony’s Sound Forge is able to open any file format as raw audio. For example, a Word document or a Flash file could be opened with the data interpreted as audio. Admittedly, the majority of results obtained are harsh white noise, but there is scope for serendipitous anomalies such as a glitchy beat that can be extracted and further manipulated by audio software. Audiopaint is an additive synthesis application created by Nicolas Fournel for converting digital images into audio. Each pixel position and colour is translated into information designating frequency (pitch), amplitude (volume) and pan position in the stereo image. The user can determine which one of the three RGB channels corresponds to either of the stereo channels. Further, the oscillator for the wave form can be either the default sine wave or an existing audio file such as a drum loop can be used. The oscillator shapes the end result, responding to the dynamics of the sine wave or the audio file. Although Audiopaint labours under the same caveat as with the use of raw audio, the software can produce some interesting results. Both approaches to sound generation present results that challenge distinctions between “musical sound” and “noise”. Sampling is also a cultural practice, a relatively recent form of adaptation extending out of a time honoured creative aesthetic that borrows, quotes and appropriates from existing works to create new ones. Different fields of production, as well as different commentators, variously use terms such as “co-creative media”, “cumulative authorship”, and “derivative works” with regard to creations that to one extent or another utilise existing works in the production of new ones (Coombe; Morris; Woodmansee). The extent of the sampling may range from subtle influence to dominating significance within the new work, but the constant principle remains: an existing work is appropriated and adapted to fit the needs of the secondary creator. Proponents of what may be broadly referred to as the “free culture” movement argue that creativity and innovation inherently relies on the appropriation and adaptation of existing works (for example, see Lessig, Future of Ideas; Lessig, Free Culture; McLeod, Freedom of Expression; Vaidhyanathan). For example, Gwen Stefani’s 2004 release “Rich Girl” is based on Louchie Lou and Michie One’s 1994 single of the same title. Lou and One’s “Rich Girl”, in turn, is a reggae dance hall adaptation of “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof. Stefani’s “na na na” vocal riff shares the same melody as the “Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum” riff from Fiddler on the Roof. Samantha Mumba adapted David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” for her second single “Body II Body”. Similarly, Richard X adapted Tubeway Army’s “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’ and Adina Howard’s “Freak Like Me” for a career saving single for Sugababes. Digital technologies enable and even promote the adaptation of existing works (Morris). The ease of appropriating and manipulating digital audio files has given rise to a form of music known variously as mash-up, bootleg, or bastard pop. Mash-ups are the most recent stage in a history of musical appropriation and they epitomise the sampling aesthetic. Typically produced in bedroom computer-based studios, mash-up artists use software such as Acid or Cool Edit Pro to cut up digital music files and reassemble the fragments to create new songs, arbitrarily adding self-composed parts if desired. Comprised almost exclusively from sections of captured music, mash-ups have been referred to as “fictional pop music” because they conjure up scenarios where, for example, Destiny’s Child jams in a Seattle garage with Nirvana or the Spice Girls perform with Nine Inch Nails (Petridis). Once the initial humour of the novelty has passed, the results can be deeply alluring. Mash-ups extract the distinctive characteristics of songs and place them in new, innovative contexts. As Dale Lawrence writes: “the vocals are often taken from largely reviled or ignored sources—cornball acts like Aguilera or Destiny’s Child—and recast in wildly unlikely contexts … where against all odds, they actually work”. Similarly, Crawford argues that “part of the art is to combine the greatest possible aesthetic dissonance with the maximum musical harmony. The pleasure for listeners is in discovering unlikely artistic complementarities and revisiting their musical memories in mutated forms” (36). Sometimes the adaptation works in the favour of the sampled artist: George Clinton claims that because of sampling he is more popular now than in 1976—“the sampling made us big again” (Green). The creative aspect of mash-ups is unlike that usually associated with musical composition and has more in common with DJing. In an effort to further clarify this aspect, we may regard DJ mixes as “mash-ups on the fly.” When Grandmaster Flash recorded his quilt-pop masterpiece, “Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel,” it was recorded while he performed live, demonstrating his precision and skill with turntables. Modern audio editing software facilitates the capture and storage of sound, allowing mash-up artists to manipulate sounds bytes outside of “real-time” and the live performance parameters within which Flash worked. Thus, the creative element is not the traditional arrangement of chords and parts, but rather “audio contexts”. If, as Riley pessimistically suggests, “there are no new chords to be played, there are no new song structures to be developed, there are no new stories to be told, and there are no new themes to explore,” then perhaps it is understandable that artists have searched for new forms of musical creativity. The notes and chords of mash-ups are segments of existing works sequenced together to produce inter-layered contexts rather than purely tonal patterns. The merit of mash-up culture lies in its function of deconstructing the boundaries of genre and providing new musical possibilities. The process of mashing-up genres functions to critique contemporary music culture by “pointing a finger at how stifled and obvious the current musical landscape has become. … Suddenly rap doesn’t have to be set to predictable funk beats, pop/R&B ballads don’t have to come wrapped in cheese, garage melodies don’t have to recycle the Ramones” (Lawrence). According to Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School critic, popular music (of his time) was irretrievably simplistic and constructed from easily interchangeable, modular components (McLeod, “Confessions”, 86). A standardised and repetitive approach to musical composition fosters a mode of consumption dubbed by Adorno “quotation listening” and characterised by passive acceptance of, and obsession with, a song’s riffs (44-5). As noted by Em McAvan, Adorno’s analysis elevates the producer over the consumer, portraying a culture industry controlling a passive audience through standardised products (McAvan). The characteristics that Adorno observed in the popular music of his time are classic traits of contemporary popular music. Mash-up artists, however, are not representative of Adorno’s producers for a passive audience, instead opting to wrest creative control from composers and the recording industry and adapt existing songs in pursuit of their own creative impulses. Although mash-up productions may consciously or unconsciously criticise the current state of popular music, they necessarily exist in creative symbiosis with the commercial genres: “if pop songs weren’t simple and formulaic, it would be much harder for mashup bedroom auteurs to do their job” (McLeod, “Confessions”, 86). Arguably, when creating mash-ups, some individuals are expressing their dissatisfaction with the stagnation of the pop industry and are instead working to create music that they as consumers wish to hear. Sample-based music—as an exercise in adaptation—encourages a Foucauldian questioning of the composer’s authority over their musical texts. Recorded music is typically a passive medium in which the consumer receives the music in its original, unaltered form. DJ Dangermouse (Brian Burton) breached this pact to create his Grey Album, which is a mash-up of an a cappella version of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ eponymous album (also known as the White Album). Dangermouse says that “every kick, snare, and chord is taken from the Beatles White Album and is in their original recording somewhere.” In deconstructing the Beatles’ songs, Dangermouse turned the recordings into a palette for creating his own new work, adapting audio fragments to suit his creative impulses. As Joanna Demers writes, “refashioning these sounds and reorganising them into new sonic phrases and sentences, he creates acoustic mosaics that in most instances are still traceable to the Beatles source, yet are unmistakeably distinct from it” (139-40). Dangermouse’s approach is symptomatic of what Schütze refers to as remix culture: an open challenge to a culture predicated on exclusive ownership, authorship, and controlled distribution … . Against ownership it upholds an ethic of creative borrowing and sharing. Against the original it holds out an open process of recombination and creative transformation. It equally calls into question the categories, rifts and borders between high and low cultures, pop and elitist art practices, as well as blurring lines between artistic disciplines. Using just a laptop, an audio editor and a calculator, Gregg Gillis, a.k.a. Girl Talk, created the Night Ripper album using samples from 167 artists (Dombale). Although all the songs on Night Ripper are blatantly sampled-based, Gillis sees his creations as “original things” (Dombale). The adaptation of sampled fragments culled from the Top 40 is part of Gillis’ creative process: “It’s not about who created this source originally, it’s about recontextualising—creating new music. … I’ve always tried to make my own songs” (Dombale). Gillis states that his music has no political message, but is a reflection of his enthusiasm for pop music: “It’s a celebration of everything Top 40, that’s the point” (Dombale). Gillis’ “celebratory” exercises in creativity echo those of various fan-fiction authors who celebrate the characters and worlds that constitute popular culture. Adaptation through sampling is not always centred solely on music. Sydney-based Tom Compagnoni, a.k.a. Wax Audio, adapted a variety of sound bytes from politicians and media personalities including George W. Bush, Alexander Downer, Alan Jones, Ray Hadley, and John Howard in the creation of his Mediacracy E.P.. In one particular instance, Compagnoni used a myriad of samples culled from various media appearances by George W. Bush to recreate the vocals for John Lennon’s Imagine. Created in early 2005, the track, which features speeded-up instrumental samples from a karaoke version of Lennon’s original, is an immediate irony fuelled comment on the invasion of Iraq. The rationale underpinning the song is further emphasised when “Imagine This” reprises into “Let’s Give Peace a Chance” interspersed with short vocal fragments of “Come Together”. Compagnoni justifies his adaptations by presenting appropriated media sound bytes that deliberately set out to demonstrate the way information is manipulated to present any particular point of view. Playing the media like an instrument, Wax Audio juxtaposes found sounds in a way that forces the listener to confront the bias, contradiction and sensationalism inherent in their daily intake of media information. … Oh yeah—and it’s bloody funny hearing George W Bush sing “Imagine”. Notwithstanding the humorous quality of the songs, Mediacracy represents a creative outlet for Compagnoni’s political opinions that is emphasised by the adaptation of Lennon’s song. Through his adaptation, Compagnoni revitalises Lennon’s sentiments about the Vietnam War and superimposes them onto the US policy on Iraq. An interesting aspect of sampled-based music is the re-occurrence of particular samples across various productions, which demonstrates that the same fragment can be adapted for a plethora of musical contexts. For example, Clyde Stubblefield’s “Funky Drummer” break is reputed to be the most sampled break in the world. The break from 1960s soul/funk band the Winstons’ “Amen Brother” (the B-side to their 1969 release “Color Him Father”), however, is another candidate for the title of “most sampled break”. The “Amen break” was revived with the advent of the sampler. Having featured heavily in early hip-hop records such as “Words of Wisdom” by Third Base and “Straight Out of Compton” by NWA, the break “appears quite adaptable to a range of music genres and tastes” (Harrison, 9m 46s). Beginning in the early 1990s, adaptations of this break became a constant of jungle music as sampling technology developed to facilitate more complex operations (Harrison, 5m 52s). The break features on Shy FX’s “Original Nutta”, L Double & Younghead’s “New Style”, Squarepusher’s “Big Acid”, and a cover version of Led Zepplin’s “Whole Lotta Love” by Jane’s Addiction front man Perry Farrell. This is to name but a few tracks that have adapted the break. Wikipedia offers a list of songs employing an adaptation of the “Amen break”. This list, however, falls short of the “hundreds of tracks” argued for by Nate Harrison, who notes that “an entire subculture based on this one drum loop … six seconds from 1969” has developed (8m 45s). The “Amen break” is so ubiquitous that, much like the twelve bar blues structure, it has become a foundational element of an entire genre and has been adapted to satisfy a plethora of creative impulses. The sheer prevalence of the “Amen break” simultaneously illustrates the creative nature of music adaptation as well as the potentials for adaptation stemming from digital technology such as the sampler. The cut-up and rearrangement aspect of creative sampling technology at once suggests the original but also something new and different. Sampling in general, and the phenomenon of the “Amen break” in particular, ensures the longevity of the original sources; sampled-based music exhibits characteristics acquired from the source materials, yet the illegitimate offspring are not their parents. Sampling as a technology for creatively adapting existing forms of audio has encouraged alternative approaches to musical composition. Further, it has given rise to a new breed of musician that has adapted to technologies of adaptation. Mash-up artists and samplists demonstrate that recorded music is not simply a fixed or read-only product but one that can be freed from the composer’s original arrangement to be adapted and reconfigured. Many mash-up artists such as Gregg Gillis are not trained musicians, but their ears are honed from enthusiastic consumption of music. 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(May 2007) "Amen to That: Sampling and Adapting the Past," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/09-collins.php>.