Playa Song (story, Accessing the Future Anthology)

Performance Research, 2019

We are drawn to song, which seems to cut right across so many of the dualisms that structure modern Western thought and practice: between text and melody, rationality and emotion, individual and collective, form and content.... Seemingly narrower than related concepts like music, voice or sound, song opens onto specific territories and questions of its own: What is a song? Where do its borders lie? How do we handle its powers and forces? What is it that allows song to so vastly exceed the sum of its constituent parts? How is it that so many disparate elements – rhythm, vibration, melody, language, narrative, image, culture, affect – can bind together in those malleable yet seemingly indestructible beings we call songs? Is there an indissoluble link between song and the human, or between song and life? We are pleased to offer here a collection of essays and interventions that explore these questions and more. Rather than providing answers, they offer glimpses and insights into possible worlds of song. If nothing else, these collected voices rmly refute the persistent idea that song consists of melody plus words. While there is no lack of enngagement with the melodic and the textual, these pages are also filled with migration, translation, ecology, identity, place, ageing, politics, heritage, animality, materialisms, post-humanisms and many other key sites of contemporary contestation.

Aboriginal History Journal, 2011

In the broad enculturative process, children learn to sing and play the music of their particular cultural tradition, which is controlled by adults. In all cultures children are sung or taught songs by adults for children, including such songs as lullabies, nursery rhymes and songs of advice. Clearly distinguishable from this repertoire of songs for children, however, are songs by children. These are songs created by children at play for the purposes of the individual or group play situation. These songs are found in all cul tures and they share a common approach to rhythm, formal structure, textual form and content, and performance style. They share a quality which is perhaps most aptly described as a quality of childlikeness (Kartomi 1980: 172).

Doctoral Thesis, 2022

While Ariel's doctoral thesis begins by tracing a gradual realization of music production's fundamental exclusion from conventional composition/performance dualities, the phenomenological and existentialist approach that was adopted in this process ultimately led him to seek resolution through play. An eureka moment occurred when play's universality, flexibility, mercuriality, and autotelicity revealed itself to be an excellent way to frame musical activity. Turning back to the music producer's struggles towards playing live, it became clear that this conceptualization of music-making grounded in play could not only help reconcile persistent tensions between newer musical practices and the deeply-historied musical paradigms that they defy, but also facilitate the accommodation of any musical unorthodoxy that have yet to come.

The purpose of this article is to complete, and build on, the theories of a certain number of scholars, chiefly philosophers of previous generations, and a few eminent performers of classical music who all bring to the fore the essential link between music and play. Because of their impulse value and appealing character, tones and other elements of the performance could generate a playful attitude in the musicians. Play is understood as a reciprocal interaction with something that plays with the player: indeed, tones play with the musicians and, reciprocally, the musicians play with them. While engaging in a musical play, they draw on the remarkable creative abilities of their body, namely its spontaneity, sensibility, and “imaginative” anticipation. The satisfaction provided by the playful activity comes, in part, from the possibility of experiencing the body as a source of creative power and original performance.

Play-songs offer children at preschool and primary school age (especially those with hearing loss) a great creative potential which can be extremely beneficial to them. In a multi-sensory approach the play-song serves as an initiating as well as an encouraging factor for a diversity of activities involving music, movement, language and a selection of materials, which in turn lead to various experiences in learning.

2017

Video games are a challenging object of study for the musicologist because they are never played the same way twice. As interactive

“Frog Went A-Courting”: An Example of Folksong Transmission, from the Broadside to iTunes “The Frog Went A-Courting” is a British folksong dating back to 1548 and classified as a Scottish nursery rhyme. The pioneers took it to North America where it was passed down from generation to generation partly thanks to African-Americans. At the end of the nineteenth century it was registered and published both as a written document and a recorded song. It was included in various ethnographic collections and in several folk music compilations from 1919 to today. There are dozens of different versions that examplify a variety of ways traditional repertoire are passed on: through orality and literacy as well as through the record industry and the internet. It was originally connected to domestic contexts where it was known for its educational message, as well as its function as a traditional lullaby. Over the course of the twentieth century, it reached the record industry (cf. Chubby Parker, 1928; Bob Dylan, 1992; Burl Ives 1949, 1960; MacColl/Seeger 1957, etc.), and it recently reappeared within nursery rhyme compilations (sometimes in digital formats). Most of the these examples include instructive illustrations re-establishing the original educational purpose. My analysis focuses on this hundred-year-old path and, in particular, examines how the song spread through specialized record companies (such as race records and the folk music compilations) in order to reconstruct a possible evolutionary process of the lyric, the music, and the performance within the Anglo-American folk repertoire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Bloomsbury 331/3 Europe series, 2022

Bea Palya's I'll Be Your Plaything is a concept album comprising at times drastically re-imagined cover versions of Hungary's most popular hits from the socialist era. As such it is a testament to music as a medium's aptness to reflect on public and personal pasts. The album moreover exemplifies how rich and appealing synthesis of sounds and traditions can be concocted when folk, classically trained, rock, and jazz musical artists collaborate. Along with this freedom to blend and synthesize, the album opens up some long overdue space for women; playing with personas, voices, and singing styles, Palya reflects on issues of femininity, maternity, sexuality, and coupledom across generations.

CTR: Canadian Theatre Review, 2020

by Kelsie Acton, Caroline Howarth and Mieko Ouchi The aesthetics of accessibility, where considerations of access shape both the creation and presentation of a production, are a driving force in Canadian Deaf and disability theatre (Canada Council, 2012). In this article, we reflect on sound, music, access and audism in Songs My Mother Never Sung Me a bilingual American Sign Language (ASL) and sung English chamber opera written and composed by Dave Clarke and produced by Concrete Theatre at the SOUND OFF: A Deaf Theatre Festival in 2019. This fictionalized memoir is based on Clarke’s experience as a CODA (Child of Deaf Adult) and explores the complex relationship of a hearing boy and his Deaf mom. In this piece music and sound are not only aural elements, but are also tactile vibration, visual projection, and rhythmic ASL. This convergence of the senses expands conceptions of sound and music to comment on the inequality of Deaf and hearing access in the world beyond theatre production as audience position and ASL comprehension gave audiences differing access to the tactile vibration and ASL.