• Selling a dream? Information asymmetry and integrity within promotional literature for popular music courses

      Hall, Richard (Intellect Books, 2019-07-01)
      Providers of higher education have a legal responsibility to provide accurate information to students. In an increasingly marketized sector, however, promotional imperatives place pressure on providers to ‘sell’ degrees to students. Given the indeterminate nature of popular music careers, not to mention the ‘intangible product’ that is Higher Education, the implicit or explicit indication of an assurance of career success upon completion of the degree could be regarded as being overstated. This article brings to bear a qualitative linguistic analysis of the terms and constructed meanings implied within promotional literature across a range of performance-based popular music degrees. It suggests that language in this context functions in a performative sense and can perpetuate questionable conceptions of popular music careers and the efficacy of degree courses. The article concludes with suggestions of improvements that might be made across the sector in the promotion of popular music degree courses.
    • MAMIC goes live: a music programming system for non-specialist delivery

      Dalgleish, Mat; Payne, Christopher; Hepworth-Sawyer, Russ; Hodgson, Jay; Paterson, Justin; Toulson, Rob (CRC Press, 2019-06-21)
      The computing curriculum in England has shifted from “software training” to a model where children learn to code as a way of understanding underlying principles. This has created challenges for primary school teaching practitioners, many of whom require upskilling. The Music And Math In Collaboration (MAMIC) project addresses these issues via a custom library for the Pure Data (Pd) visual programming environment that interconnects key musical, mathematical and coding concepts within a unified environment that is able to be delivered by non-specialist teachers. Initial findings from deployment “in the wild” (i.e. in situ) are presented and future work is discussed.
    • To what extent do structured indeterminate procedures in musical composition share fundamental creative synergies with choreographic processes, and how do these influence the perception of time in performance?

      Foster, Christopher; Breslin, Jo (Athens Institute for Education and Research, 2019-06-10)
      Working together on a collaborative composition/choreographic project –Soundpoints Finding a Place to Be –choreographer Jo Breslin and composer Dr Chris Fosterexplore the potential of contingency as a creative procedure in music and dance. This paper will detail the process and some of the findings of this research and will suggest possible new avenues for exploring the relationship of the roles of makers and performers in the creation of work. Drawing on Derridia‘s concept of ̳hospitality‘, we arguethat the performer‘s contribution to work creation is crucial and that indeterminacy should be acknowledged as an inextricable and inevitable component of performance, and that makers of performance work should embrace and develop it both in theory and in practice as a valuable compositional/choreographic resource.
    • “I’m Gonna Shake and Shimmy” or may be not: choreographing Hairspray–a practice as research project

      Lidbury, C (Informa UK Limited, 2019-06-03)
      © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Using practice as research as my methodology I examine whether it is possible to choreograph Hairspray - the Musical while staying true to the movement principles developed by Kurt Jooss and Sigurd Leeder in the Jooss-Leeder Method. In discussing the process and the product I explore also the difficulties in choreographing for, and teaching the dances to, a cast of 15–18-year-olds in a school where there is no dance in the curriculum at this level. I conclude that selected Jooss-Leeder movement principles provide a useful framework for choreographing the musical numbers, that Leeder’s organic teaching process is effective for these novice dancers and that a lack of dance experience does not preclude a successful production.
    • Linguistic Landscape as an arena of conflict – language removal, exclusion, and ethnic identity construction in Lithuania (Vilnius)

      Moore, Irina; Evans, Matthew; Jeffries, Lesley; O'Driscoll, Jim (Routledge, 2019-05-23)
      This chapter explores historical and modern ethnic tensions in Lithuanian society. It analyses how written languages interact with the physical features of the cityscape to construct new landscapes and express ethnic conflicts, exclusion and inequality resulting from sociopolitical and ideological power changes. The chapter illustrates that language is key to managing and resolving such conflicts. It discusses a multimodal diachronic Linguistic Landscape (LL) analysis in combination with synchronic analysis. The chapter attempts to decipher the seeming disorder, however chaotic it appears to be, using the structuralist methodological principles developed in social science and cultural geography. In relation to LL, the structuralist principle “may transpire in the stronger social actors’ capacity to impose limitations on weaker actors’ use of linguistic resources”. However, cultural landscapes always represent social, economic, political and cultural trends that can lead to the re-evaluation of landscape elements.
    • The Making Affect: a co-created community methodology

      Hackney, Fiona; Chakrabarti, Amaresh; Chakrabarti, Debkumar (Springer, 2019-05-13)
    • Signifying Trauma in the Post-9/11 Combat Film: The Hurt Locker and In the Valley of Elah

      Pheasant-Kelly, Frances (Routledge, 2019-05-13)
      This article addresses two Iraq War films, The Hurt Locker (Bigelow 2008) and In the Valley of Elah (Haggis 2007), through the lens of trauma theory. Uniquely, it engages with Slavoj Žižek’s account of the Real in its analysis of how victim/perpetrator trauma is signified in their respective narrative structures and visual style. The primary argument is that the pattern of traumatic memory is reflected in their narrative modes. At the same time, it claims that the unfolding narrative of In the Valley of Elah mimics certain forms of trauma treatment, operating in a therapeutic mode for its characters (as well as offering narrative resolution for spectators). Such analysis of trauma differs from other scholarly approaches to these films that have variously considered them from perspectives of: embodiment in the war film (Burgoyne 2012); the ethics of viewing traumatic suffering (Straw 2011); the de-politicisation of torture by the inclusion of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Barker 2011); indifference to post-9/11 war films as an inability to respond to the trauma and loss that terrorism poses (Toffoletti and Grace 2010); trauma and the militarised body (Andreescu 2016); and the narration of trauma in Iraq War Films (Kopka 2018).
    • Immediacy and personalizing: celebrating Philip Taylor

      Prior, Ross W; Jones, Jonathan P (Jonathan P. Jones, 2019-05-10)
      Many students, over four decades, could write about how Dr Philip Taylor’s scholarship has influenced their thinking and intellectual interests, particularly in the area of drama in education. As one of those former students, I can offer some insights into that particular influence of his, spanning a number of different countries around the globe. Numerous students have travelled great distances for the opportunity to study with him, which also forms part of my own personal story. However no matter whom you are or how you have been introduced to Taylor’s work, you will quickly recognize that he is deeply and authentically affected by the classroom experience.
    • Sufrimiento en marcha: estrategias de movilidad de mexicanos deportados de los Estados Unidos

      Radziwinowiczówna, Agnieszka (Universidad del Pacífico, 2019-04-26)
      Desde inicios de este siglo hemos presenciado la realización de estudios que analizan críticamente la deportación y la deportabilidad. Poco sabemos, sin embargo, sobre las trayectorias de los deportados postdeportación. Este fenómeno puede entenderse mejor recurriendo a una tipología integral de estrategias de movilidad postdeportación. El presente artículo analiza el caso de mexicanos deportados de los Estados Unidos y se basa en estudios etnográficos realizados en Oaxaca entre personas que fueron deportadas. La movilidad postdeportación presupone o se deriva de las ausencias y el sufrimiento experimentados por las personas deportadas, movilidad que a menudo constituye un ejemplo de agencia y resistencia, especialmente en el contexto de un retorno no autorizado a los Estados Unidos.
    • An analysis of undergraduate motivations, perceptions of value and concerns in pursuing higher popular music performance education

      Hall, Rich (SAGE, 2019-04-11)
      The popular music performance undergraduate degree is a growing area within UK higher education. These courses carry a vocational emphasis and are popular with students looking to establish professional performing careers. As such, they are often marketed as an intermediary step towards this aspiration but, despite their popularity, there has been little critical review into their effectiveness. This article, based on doctoral research conducted by the author, draws on semi-structured interviews conducted with 12 second- and third-year undergraduates studying popular music performance-based courses. The article presents data and analysis concerning the motivations for study, perceptions of vocational value and the concerns around establishing professional careers. Concerns across four key areas are identified: (a) issues of negative public perception; (b) problematic conceptions of the popular music industries (PMI); (c) the value of practical experience over and above qualifications; and (d) negative narratives concerning developments in digital technologies and their effect on career opportunities. Implications from the article include the need for higher education providers (HEPs) to challenge students’ misconceptions concerning professional careers in the new popular music industries.
    • Evidence of blood and muscle redox status imbalance in experimentally induced renal insufficiency in a rabbit model

      Poulianiti, KP; Karioti, A; Kaltsatou, A; Mitrou, GI; Koutedakis, Y; Tepetes, K; Christodoulidis, G; Giakas, G; Maridaki, MD; Stefanidis, I; et al. (Hindawi, 2019-04-04)
      Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is accompanied by a disturbed redox homeostasis, especially in end-stage patients, which is associated with pathological complications such as anemia, atherosclerosis, and muscle atrophy. However, limited evidence exists about redox disturbances before the end stage of CKD. Moreover, the available redox literature has not yet provided clear associations between circulating and tissue-specific (muscle) oxidative stress levels. The aim of the study was to evaluate commonly used redox status indices in the blood and in two different types of skeletal muscle (psoas, soleus) in the predialysis stages of CKD, using an animal model of renal insufficiency, and to investigate whether blood redox status indices could be reflecting the skeletal muscle redox status. Indices evaluated included reduced glutathione (GSH), oxidized glutathione (GSSG), glutathione reductase (GR), catalase (CAT), total antioxidant capacity (TAC), protein carbonyls (PC), and thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS). Results showed that blood GSH was higher in the uremic group compared to the control (17.50 ± 1.73 vs. 12.43 ± 1.01, p = 0.033). In both muscle types, PC levels were higher in the uremic group compared to the control (psoas: 1.086 ± 0.294 vs. 0.596 ± 0.372, soleus: 2.52 ± 0.29 vs. 0.929 ± 0.41, p < 0.05). The soleus had higher levels of TBARS, PC, GSH, CAT, and GR and lower TAC compared to the psoas in both groups. No significant correlations in redox status indices between the blood and skeletal muscles were found. However, in the uremic group, significant correlations between the psoas and soleus muscles in PC, GSSG, and CAT levels emerged, not present in the control. Even in the early stages of CKD, a disturbance in redox homeostasis was observed, which seemed to be muscle type-specific, while blood levels of redox indices did not seem to reflect the intramuscular condition. The above results highlight the need for further research in order to identify the key mechanisms driving the onset and progression of oxidative stress and its detrimental effects on CKD patients.
    • Seeing with one's own ears: soundtrack as interface for theatre

      Dalgleish, Mat; Reading, Neil (University of Aveiro, 2019-03-30)
    • Warde (née Becker), Beatrice Lamberton Becker (1900–1969)

      Glaser, Jessica (Oxford University Press, 2019-03-30)
      Warde (née Becker), Beatrice Lamberton Becker (1900–1969), typographer, was born in New York, USA, on 20 September 1900, the only child of Gustav Becker (1861–1959), pianist and composer, and his wife, May, née Lamberton (1873–1958), the journalist and literary critic ...
    • Introduction: framing and reframing/existing ways of looking

      Whitfield, Sarah; Whitfield, Sarah; Whitfield, Sarah (Macmillan International, 2019-03-13)
      In an art gallery, a painting hangs on a wall. I stop, my eye called to the painting by the wooden rectangle that separates out the bit of the wall that is ‘the art’ from the rest. The frame does the work of telling me ‘look here, not there, look at this bit. This is the bit that is art’. Even the paintings without frames are framed by the blank wall around them, so that the wall becomes its own kind of frame: ‘here is art and there is not-art’. Frames make a transition between two spaces, and shape the way we look at the art in the middle. The musical, while plainly another kind of art to a painting, has been framed in various ways that shape how it is ‘seen’ and understood. These frames may be what we bring with us, our personal histories of encounters with musicals, perhaps what we might have performed in or listened to before. Popular histories may shape how we put musicals in order, or categorise them: glossy coffee table books and TV histories illustrated with beautiful pictures of the so-called Golden Age era of musical. We may share cultural references to the musicals ‘that were always on the telly when we were growing up’. But just as significantly, critical theories and academic approaches to the musical do this work too. They shape the way the musical is taught in colleges and universities, and ripple out of academia more broadly, impacting how the form is seen and understood in public discourse.
    • 'What About Love?': claiming and re-claiming LGBTQ+ spaces in 21st century musical theatre

      Lovelock, James; Whitfield, Sarah (Red Globe Press, 2019-03-08)
    • Digital realities & virtual ideals: Portraiture, idealism and the clash of subjectivities in the post-digital era

      Altintzoglou, Evripidis (Taylor and Francis, 2019-02-26)
      All portraits play host to a number of antithetical tensions, such as ‘private’ and ‘public’, ‘real’ and ‘ideal’, without which they would be reduced to a type of unassuming identification of subjects. Whereas in premodern times the artist was subject to the demands of the commissioner, after modernism the representational desires of the sitter began to clash with the creative intentions of the artist. Prior to the introduction of digital formats, this clash of subjectivities manifests itself in photography during the production of the work, the shooting of a portrait. Digital photography and post-production editing have expanded the methods for idealising external appearance; a desire stimulated by the recent technological acceleration of production and circulation of more ‘manipulated’ portraits than ever. In what ways, therefore, does the introduction of digital post-production editing and composite images affect this double-clash in portraiture, between the real and ideal, and the desires of the sitter against the intentions of the artist? Moreover, how does the evolution of self-portraiture in the ‘selfie’ affect the epistemological character of the genre? As such, is conceptual and aesthetic subservience a matter of technological possibility or creative determination?
    • From Domus to Polis: hybrid identities in Southey’s letters from England (1807) and Blanco White’s letters from Spain (1822)

      Colbert, Benjamin (Taylor and Francis, 2019-02-18)
      Robert Southey’s fictive travelogue, Letters from England, by Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807), inspired several imitators, most importantly José María Blanco White’s Letters from Spain (1822). These works rejuvenate a fictional device popularised by Montesquieu’s Persian Letters – the “familiar stranger” – at a crucial juncture when British involvement in the affairs of Europe provoked a reassessment of pre-Revolutionary cosmopolitanism. The stranger as “home-interpreter” calls attention to an emerging emphasis in European Romantic thought on the contingency of freedom with hybrid, mobile identities, prefiguring the psycho-social-historical terrain in which Jean-François Lyotard and Dean MacCannell link modernity with travel and tourism. This essay argues that the Romantic figure of the foreign traveller expresses a condition of travel, reflecting Lyotard’s critique of human contingency in his essay, “Domus and Megalopolis.” Southey’s sympathetic stranger modulates a conversation with Wordsworth about the nature of modern subjectivity, historically contingent yet paradoxically liberated from historical particulars. Blanco White’s Letters from Spain demonstrates how displacement, emigration, and expatriation become refigured as conditions of the modern psyche, especially visible in moments of political crisis, when the cosmopolitan polis is immobilised by the myth of the domus.
    • The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians. Annebella Pollen, Donlon Books, 2016. 228 pp., 68 b&w and 40 col. illus., cloth, £35.00. ISBN: 9780957609518.

      Hackney, Fiona (Oxford University Press, 2019-02-18)
      This is a beautiful and intriguing book that tells a fascinating story about a little-known form of alternative modernist design and craft practice. Published by the independent Donlon Books and written by Annebella Pollen as part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Fellowship, it draws on numerous archival sources from public and private collections, and includes over a hundred largely unseen images in black and white, and colour.
    • Repetition as the performative syndrome of dying

      Chukhrov, Keti (Performance Philosophy, 2019-02-01)
      In his Difference and Repetition Deleuze reveals an aporia: repetition is singular, solitary, it is torn away from any original or source; nevertheless it preserves a genetic tie with certain event to which it is a repetition. This solitariness of the repetition is not, however, confined to mere difference between the act of repetition and the repeated source that cancels the original just to differentiate two performative procedures. An act of repetition is solitary only when it evolves in specific time-regime, which even ontically diverges from the regular ontology of time. Deleuze calls such temporality “empty”, Nietzsche defines it as amor fati, Heidegger sees in it convergence of eternity and an instant. The stake in this case is a specific kind of repetitive regime which unfolds as the performative syndrome of ‘dying’ – a “repetition into death” (Deleuze) which paradoxically executes itself as performative plenitude. But who is the Subject undergoing such a syndrome and what should have happened to her/him so as to impose the regime of dying on any act of repetition?
    • Althusser and contingency

      Pippa, Stefano; Pippa, Stefano (Mimesis International, 2019-01-31)
      The concept of contingency plays a central role in Althusser's attempt to recast Marxist philosophy and to free the Marxist conception of history from notions such as teleology, necessity and origin. Drawing on a wealth of published and unpublished material, Stefano Pippa discusses how Althusser's unfaltering commitment to contingency should encourage us to revisit our understanding of his conceptions of structural change, ideology, politics and materialism. As grounded on contingency, Althusser's so-called 'Structural Marxism' originates in fact a 'logic of interruption' and a notion of structurally under-determined becoming; just like his theory of ideology is radically reinterpreted on the basis of his notion of 'overinterpellation'. Though constant, Althusser's relationship with contingency has not been monolithic throughout his career. As observed by Pippa, it is possible to distinguish a 'political' and a 'philosophical' moment in Althusser's late materialism of contingency. Perhaps, as this volume suggests, the problematic coexistence of these two aspects might account for the unstable character of Althusser's late philosophical project.