Music Research Collection

Three Birmingham basketball players, three mobile percussionists, and an electronic musician run, jump, shuffle, bounce, and play across the 3X3 practice court of the Commonwealth Games creating an energetic and sonically rich performance that sits in the space between sport and music. This action is frequently interspersed by three singers quoting in close harmony the inspiring words of psychologist & Ex-NBA player, John Amaechi, the first basketball player to come-out as gay in the very straight world of sports. This queer-led performance is a celebration of sport, teamwork, collaboration, difference, and the human spirit, whilst also drawing attention to the difficulties faced by queer people in sport, and the status of queer people in 35 Commonwealth countries that criminalise homosexuality, 13 of which punish homosexuality with imprisonment or death.

John Williams has been associated with the sound of Classical Hollywood Cinema (1933–58) since his popular neoclassical scores of the 1970s seemed to revive the central European tradition represented by composers such as Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold (among others). Alongside this popular European romantic style, however, Williams’s scores often reference a diverse array of American musical idioms. When scoring American-centric narratives, or specific genres, Williams seems to rely on three distinct idioms, each with their own specific histories and associations both within and outside of their films. For westerns (The Cowboys), Coplandesque pastoralism serves to glorify landscape and maintain a myth of the West in ways reminiscent of Copland’s ballets of the 1940s. For political dramas (JFK) or war epics (The Patriot) the use of dignified brass fanfares, marches, and calls summon metatextual links to ceremony and the military to endow images with an earnestness and a patriotic air. In historical dramas (Lincoln) a hymn-inspired vocabulary generates a sense of the reverential or noble. Taken together, these idioms form a lingua franca of American-associated sounds, demonstrating how Williams cultivates the musical legacies and traditions of his homeland, while referencing European compositional practices. Three chapters investigate the histories of each of these idioms and their manifestations across a selection of Williams-scored films. By tracing the lineage of each idiom, exemplifying their associative rigidity, and revealing how Williams adapts them, this thesis not only showcases Williams’s own nationalistic mode, but additionally highlights issues arising from the pervasiveness of this style in a broader Hollywood context.

Jazz has occupied a defined space within Scotland’s cultural landscape since the 1930s, performed in dance halls, pubs and clubs, and later at urban and rural festivals, while providing the background for dinner dances, wedding celebrations and corporate entertainment. As elsewhere in the UK, jazz has over the years enjoyed peaks and endured troughs in popularity and in present times is facing considerable existential challenges. Chief amongst these challenges are musician wages that have not kept step with rising living costs, a fragile and precarious working environment that has little to no institutional safety net in place and an oversupply of (often academy trained) musicians for a shrinking marketplace (Medbøe et al., 2023). It is tragically ironic that musicianship and creativity have arguably never been of a higher standard, while the delicate ecology that supports jazz in the UK is under severe threat on most fronts.

Adam de la Halle has long been regarded as one of the most important musical and literary figures of thirteenth-century Europe. For music historians, Adam sits at an important historical juncture as the most prolific of the last generation of trouvères (northern French poet-composers) and the first known composer to write vernacular polyphonic songs of the kind that would remain popular well into the fifteenth century. Among literary scholars, Adam is known as the author of some of the earliest vernacular dramatic works and for his influence on other writers in the thirteenth century and beyond. As Jennifer Saltzstein points out, he was arguably ‘the most prolific and important artistic voice of thirteenth-century France’ (p. 1).

The history of medieval music has always rested on fragmentary sources, and polyphony in medieval England is no exception to this. Ernest H. Sanders and Peter M. Lefferts describe this as a ‘lamentable’ state of affairs: English polyphony is found plentifully in liturgical manuscripts and miscellanies, but is not the sole contents of any surviving codex between the Winchester Troper and Old Hall. 1 For evidence of the existence of large anthologies of polyphony in medieval England, we must instead look to fragments of these manuscripts that have been bound into or wrapped around other books. Sometimes these fragments are tiny, damaged or illegible: the reconstruction of a large source from such small fragments is often frustrated by the patchy survival of a manuscript that has been cut up, and the fact that fragments might be sewn or glued into a book, difficult to remove without damaging the host volume.

A woman, the protagonist of my own story, the lynchpin in my memories and the way that I remember this music and this time. It misses out key if mundane places, like the ladies’ toilet; a place to sort ourselves out, cool down, to salvage makeup or hair. It misses out the concerted level of care that women (and queer folks) develop for each other, particularly in a risky environment, making sure that it stays a messy but ‘good’ night. Have you had some water? Don’t drink too much. Do you need to cool down? Are you having a good night? Like so many other retrospective films that recreate the emotions and moments of a music movement, we discover the world of Beats (dir. Welsh, 2018) through the eyes and friendship of two male teenage boys. And it’s not that their experience doesn’t invoke any of my own. We are not that different, after all. But once the nostalgia has peaked and ebbed away a question remains: where are all the women? I mean, I can see them. They are the girlfriends (potential or actual), the cousins and friends of our two ravers, and they are part of the surging crowd in the rave scene that so grabbed me. But they are peripheral narratives. We are not supposed to care about them or ask questions about their lives or their futures. They are fleeting flashes of female ‘others’.

Despite having literally and figuratively ridden into the sunset in 1989, Hollywood’s favourite adventuring archaeologist returned in 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. John Williams’s score continued to revel in the established styles and codes befitting of the series’ nostalgic references: 40s and 50s B-movies. In addition to resurrecting beloved themes, the composer penned new themes for characters who, in part, progressed the franchise’s traditional gender roles. This article investigates how Williams’s neoclassical score lingers in the rigid gender codes of Hollywood’s past, at the expense of forming innovative thematic identities less reflective of traditional archetypes.

In their songs, trouvères referred to their own acts of composition in various ways, not least as ‘finding’ (trouver) or ‘dividing’ (partir). Both terms had a wide and varied usage in medieval French culture and carried meanings that shape the way that the melodic structure of trouvère songs might be analysed. Invention, and its sister art of memory, played a key role in rhetorical practices. The process of ‘finding’ a melody and adorning it with memorable musical figures is performed in the structure of some songs. Division was used for intellectual work, as found in the classificatory models of medieval encyclopaedic works, but it also signified socio-political animosity and strife. From close readings of text-music relationships in four jeux-partis, the cultural significance of the musical acts of invention and division in thirteenth-century Arras is discussed, in order to explore why trouvères performed acts of invention and division through their songs.

The composition of Where the Paths End occupied me for about a year between August 2022 and July 2023. As a result it encompasses many different concepts and processes. On the surface, the piece has four different manifestations. It exists as a work to be performed in concert by musicians, who are performing in tandem with, and responding to, location recordings from the three different cities of Edinburgh, Birmingham, and London. It also exists as three different soundwalks on the Echoes app in the three aforementioned cities. Each soundwalk should take about 40 - 50 minutes to experience, and they are located in areas of cultural importance within reasonable walking distance of the venues where this piece was first performed. Digging a little deeper, Where the Paths End, perhaps tries to exhibit three different but related things. Through the presentation of environmental sound in both the performance and on the soundwalks, it attempts to offer a record of the sound of three different cities in the early part of 2023. We often have visual records of cities through photographs, paintings etc, but we don’t have too many sonic records. What became apparent making these recordings is how loud our cities are, and how much of our audio space is given over to the combustion engine and other anthropophonic sounds. In the summer of 2023, we are firmly witnessing the devastating effects of the Anthropocene, and my hope is that in the years following this piece’s initial performances, we hear a gradual quietening of our cityscapes, until maybe one day people will not believe our habitat was so loud.