Papers by David Clarke
Twentieth-century music, Sep 1, 2004
Difference is among the twentieth century's most volatile legacies to the twenty-first. Over this... more Difference is among the twentieth century's most volatile legacies to the twenty-first. Over this period it has increasingly lodged itself in our cultural consciousness, as both theoretical concept and lived experience. Its workings are refracted through culture (through phenomena such as music) and the way we contemplate and study it (through a journal such as this). A Brief History of Difference, at least the chapter relevant to the present story, might start in the early part of the last century with Ferdinand de Saussure's courses on linguistics. Not only language, but potentially all signifying phenomena, Saussure argued, articulate the world for us by cutting it into units (e.g. phonemes, concepts, words, signs) that carry meaning precisely through being differentiated from one another: reality is rendered as a system of mutually conditioning differences. By mid-century these ideas had become decisive for literary and cultural theory under the banner of structuralism and semiotics, in which even a cultural practice such as fashion could be seen to signify as a system of difference. With the rise of poststructuralism and deconstruction, difference (or différance) was again seminal in debates about the very nature of meaning, which in turn informed later twentieth-century cultural politics of class and society, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity. (As we know, all these movements would also in the end, and no less contentiously, make their mark on musicology.) Most recently -in terms far from academic -cultural difference has moved into the foreground of global consciousness with the literally shattering and explosive events of our new century. Is it going too far to invoke this politically conditioned history as a background to (or frame around) the contents of a scholarly music journal? The resonances are there. twentiethcentury music could have settled for comfortable retrospective musings on a high modernist or avant garde repertory, tidily demarcated by the calendar. Instead it has chosen not to 'exclude any style/genre/category/use of twentieth-century music' -as Christopher Mark and Allan Moore put it in their inaugural editorial. And so it is hoped that 'the contiguity of divergent topics in each issue . . . will stimulate the creation of new perspectives'. 1 Through a policy of non-exclusion and its openness to diversity, the journal can be seen, then, positively to embrace difference, and this is certainly in evidence in the following pages. Alongside investigations of composers and works from the modernist canon there are studies of the poetics of film music and the consumption of world music. (Plans to include an article on popular music, which would have made for still greater variegation, had to be shelved for this issue, owing to the vicissitudes of an already over-running production schedule; but the commitment to the vernacular as an essential part of twentieth-century music remains, and will, we hope, emerge as a conspicuous part of the journal's profile over future issues.) Also salient in the present issue is the range of modes and methodologies of enquiry, amounting to a snapshot (admittedly contingent and partial) of the heterogeneous world of present-day musicology. These include, or make reference to, music analysis, aesthetics, hermeneutics, interdisciplinary cultural theory, intradisciplinary critical musicology, ethnomusicology, 1 twentieth-century music 1/1 (March 2004), 3-4 (3).
Music Theory and Analysis, Oct 20, 2016
Analysis: The Case of Cage's Solo for Piano a na lyt i ca l v i g n ett es
'Consciousness', in McAuley, Tomás, Nanette Nielsen, Jerrold Levinson, and Ariana Phillips-Hutton, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, 652–76., 2020
Our understanding of the numerous and significant problems of consciousness is inseparable from t... more Our understanding of the numerous and significant problems of consciousness is inseparable from the often incommensurable disciplinary frameworks through which the topic has been approached. Music may offer a range of perspectives on consciousness, some issuing from interdisciplinary alliances (such as with cognitive psychology and neuroscience), others by tapping into what is distinctively musical about music and what music shares with comparable aesthetic formations. Philosophically speaking, music might afford valuable complementary perspectives to approaches within the empirical sciences that see consciousness as essentially a computational process (Pinker, Dennett),
Music and Concsciousness 2: Worlds, Practices, Modalities, ed. Ruth Herbert, David Clarke and Eric Clarke, 2019
This chapter explores the intersection of music and phenomenology as potentially fertile ground f... more This chapter explores the intersection of music and phenomenology as potentially fertile ground for the study of consciousness. Taking the philosophy of Edmund Husserl as a touchstone, and the Violin Concerto, Op. 47 of Jean Sibelius as a case study, the author considers how phenomenological concepts such as epoché, noesis, eidos, and the transcendental subject all find resonances within a formal analysis of this musical work. The chapter also juxtaposes Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and his critique of the ‘natural attitude’ against Daniel Dennett’s physicalist account of consciousness and Wilfrid Sellars’ concept of the ‘scientific image’. In negotiating a pathway between these positions, the author considers whether music—and its determination of an autonomous aesthetic sphere—may offer a productive alternative perspective to the often competing claims of philosophy and science in our understanding of consciousness.
Music and Conciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives, ed. David Clarke & Eric Clarke, 2011
Teaching documents by David Clarke
Books by David Clarke
Rāgs Around the Clock: A Handbook for North Indian Classical Music, with Online Recordings in the Khayāl Style, 2024
Download for free at: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0313
Rāgs Around the Clock is a rich and vi... more Download for free at: https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0313
Rāgs Around the Clock is a rich and vibrant compendium for the discovery and study of North Indian classical music. The theory and practice of rāg are explored through two interlinked resources: a handbook of essays and analyses offering technical, historical, cultural and aesthetic perspectives; and two online albums – Rāg samay cakra and Twilight Rāgs from North India – featuring khayāl singer Vijay Rajput and accompanists.
Extracts from the albums are also embedded into the text to enhance learning and understanding. Each rāg is accompanied by a description of its chief characteristics and technical features, a notation of the song (bandiś) on which the performance is based, and a transliteration and translation of the song text. Distinctively, Rāg samay cakra also includes spoken renditions of each of the texts, helping non-Hindavi speakers to achieve the correct pronunciation.
Sharing insights from both theory and practice, this collection draws on recent scholarship while also showcasing the vocal idiom – the gāyakī – of Vijay Rajput, a disciple of the late Pandit Bhimsen Joshi. It offers invaluable reading for students and researchers of Indian classical music, world music and ethnomusicology, and a rich repository for teacher and student practitioners of the khayāl vocal style. The combination of an aural and written exploration of rāg will appeal to anyone drawn to this form of music – whether newcomer, student (śiṣyā) or aficionado (rasika).
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Papers by David Clarke
Teaching documents by David Clarke
Books by David Clarke
Rāgs Around the Clock is a rich and vibrant compendium for the discovery and study of North Indian classical music. The theory and practice of rāg are explored through two interlinked resources: a handbook of essays and analyses offering technical, historical, cultural and aesthetic perspectives; and two online albums – Rāg samay cakra and Twilight Rāgs from North India – featuring khayāl singer Vijay Rajput and accompanists.
Extracts from the albums are also embedded into the text to enhance learning and understanding. Each rāg is accompanied by a description of its chief characteristics and technical features, a notation of the song (bandiś) on which the performance is based, and a transliteration and translation of the song text. Distinctively, Rāg samay cakra also includes spoken renditions of each of the texts, helping non-Hindavi speakers to achieve the correct pronunciation.
Sharing insights from both theory and practice, this collection draws on recent scholarship while also showcasing the vocal idiom – the gāyakī – of Vijay Rajput, a disciple of the late Pandit Bhimsen Joshi. It offers invaluable reading for students and researchers of Indian classical music, world music and ethnomusicology, and a rich repository for teacher and student practitioners of the khayāl vocal style. The combination of an aural and written exploration of rāg will appeal to anyone drawn to this form of music – whether newcomer, student (śiṣyā) or aficionado (rasika).
Rāgs Around the Clock is a rich and vibrant compendium for the discovery and study of North Indian classical music. The theory and practice of rāg are explored through two interlinked resources: a handbook of essays and analyses offering technical, historical, cultural and aesthetic perspectives; and two online albums – Rāg samay cakra and Twilight Rāgs from North India – featuring khayāl singer Vijay Rajput and accompanists.
Extracts from the albums are also embedded into the text to enhance learning and understanding. Each rāg is accompanied by a description of its chief characteristics and technical features, a notation of the song (bandiś) on which the performance is based, and a transliteration and translation of the song text. Distinctively, Rāg samay cakra also includes spoken renditions of each of the texts, helping non-Hindavi speakers to achieve the correct pronunciation.
Sharing insights from both theory and practice, this collection draws on recent scholarship while also showcasing the vocal idiom – the gāyakī – of Vijay Rajput, a disciple of the late Pandit Bhimsen Joshi. It offers invaluable reading for students and researchers of Indian classical music, world music and ethnomusicology, and a rich repository for teacher and student practitioners of the khayāl vocal style. The combination of an aural and written exploration of rāg will appeal to anyone drawn to this form of music – whether newcomer, student (śiṣyā) or aficionado (rasika).