Borah Bergman: The Long Look

Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre Dissertations 4, 2009

The principal aim of this dissertation is to examine the use of Arvo Pärt's pre-existing tintinnabuli compositions in contemporary film soundtracks in order to determine the aesthetic reception of this music in film art. This will be achieved primarily through film analyses that explore functions of tintinnabuli music in film, and expressive meaning this music is considered suitable to communicate (with). Two questions underlie this dissertation: 1) what kind of expressive meaning could be communicated through tintinnabuli music in film; 2) what musical attributes make tintinnabuli music suitable for expressing those particular meanings? I have focused on two representative examples of early instrumental tintinnabuli style, namely on the use of Für Alina (1976) and Spiegel im Spiegel (1978) in film soundtracks.

Musicians produce virtual performance videos of themselves and others on websites like YouTube. In a society with ubiquitous Internet and prominent social media interactions, music education can benefit by exploring the practices of musicians who produce music online, such as the creators of virtual vocal ensembles. A virtual vocal ensemble is a video containing multiple audio-visual tracks layered together through a technique called multitracking. In this performance practice, a virtual vocal ensemble creator records and combines multiple tracks to make a choir of clones or works with others in collaborative or collective ways. The purpose of this study was to explore the implications of virtual vocal ensembles and the medium that emerged from the development and distribution of those videos. This study situates the creators of virtual vocal ensembles within a sound recording medium, based on a theoretical framework developed by Sterne (2003) that defines a medium as a contingent network of relations made up of people, practices, institutions, and technologies. Guiding questions focus on the musical and social implications of creating virtual vocal ensembles, the entities listed above, and the relations between them. Traditional research methods and Internet inquiry were combined to create a multiple case study that examined three YouTube channels, each produced by a video creator. Data included the observation of the videos on the YouTube channels, text comments, and website analytics as well as interviews with video creators and others pertinent to the cases. A cross-case analysis was conducted to produce assertions that attended to the guiding questions. Creators of virtual vocal ensembles developed methods to construct and publish their videos, which were limited by their musical and technological abilities and the resources available. As musicians produced virtual vocal ensembles, online communities containing iii elements of fandoms, learning communities of practice, and music making spaces developed. Implications of the performance practice have effected the way the medium is situated within society as well as the way creators perform choral music and sing. For example, when performers create virtual vocal ensembles, they develop identities as virtual performers and express themselves musically and theatrically. Musical arrangement, voice range expansion, and autonomous exploration of musical concepts were also results of creators’ performance practices. Creating virtual vocal ensembles require not only musical skills, but also technological and production abilities that can be applied to music education practices and expand conceptions of ensemble, performance, and medium. As producers of virtual vocal ensembles, video creators use social media to expand their reach and develop a community that has aspects of a fandom as well as learning and music making communities. Music educators can incorporate the practices of virtual vocal ensemble creators into their instruction and help students learn skills that may allow them to make music outside of the choral ensemble classroom in virtual contexts.

Chapter Ten, some of the younger generation of players on the FMP roster (ca. 1997)—Axel Dörner, Willi Kellers, Thomas Borgmann, Wolfgang Fuchs, and Johannes Bauer, along with one elder who plays with Dörner, Sven-Åke Johansson—for the directions in which they are extending the musical initiatives begun by the "first-hour" principals. Woven in with their interviews is the strand of research begun with "Interlude: A Walk On the Wild Side."

Chapter Seven, the Wuppertal scene (primarily Peter Brötzmann and Peter Kowald).

Chapter Five will overview and introduce five "elder statesman" of the music (Albert Mangelsdorff, Gunter Hampel, Joachim Kühn, Vinko Globokar, and Ernst-Ludwig Petrovsky) with peripheral/transitory links to FMP, who span geopolitical as well as generational and stylistic spectra, including the spectrum between improvisation and composition.

2017

Through the multiplicity of the fast, ever-growing digital communication and information sharing during the first years of 2000 to the present date, millions of online users produce, transform, criticize and circulate between them an endless amount of materials and contents. Videogame music itself has its own networked culture with its cybercommunities that discuss, share and create, thus allowing an open space of creativity and artistic activities in a digital and constant flow. One of these activities is music composition and production for this medium, available on music sharing platforms such as Spotify or Soundcloud, on Youtube and specifically in the format of modification files2. This type of content is developed in a voluntary and free way through tools and softwares now available from video game companies and also on the internet with its due functions. While the areas of sociology, new media, game design, among others, already develop research on mods as a digital phenomenon of fan culture and its relationship with industries, concerning aspects of co-creative work and its surrounding cybercommunities, the field of musicology (both in the international and national academic worlds) is marked by the scarce research that contributes to the understanding and formulation of knowledge about musical mods that are created (or, in this case, composed) for videogames on which the creators of mods have bent over. This dissertation focuses on the musical mods present in the Nexus Mods website in two of the video games that are hosted and managed by it: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Bethesda Softworks 2006) and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda Softworks 2011). Through research, sources and interviews conducted to the mods composers, I intend to demonstrate the existence of a new model of online musical production and circulation, reflective of participatory culture age in which it is inserted. It will be discussed the whole process of access, composition, availability, sharing and visibility of their compositions, their motivations, and personal discourses about the composition of music for video games. On the other hand, the perspectives on the concept of musical immersion, considered indispensable by composers and players, are particularly relevant: music in this medium and its compositional style is related to the idea of verisimilitude with a certain reality as a primary aspect in the player's involvement in the virtual universe with which he is interacting. The intersections between these components thus construct a new paradigm of musical composition and renegotiation, placing this dimension at a higher level of importance and meaning amid videogames and its cybercommunities.

Watching forty years of my work over the span of one year [for the accomplishment of this book] turned out to be unexpectedly upsetting, at times unbearable. I suddenly realized that my movies had mostly been conceived in the depths of my soul, in my heart, my brain, my nerves, my sex, and not to the least, in my guts.

This contains much detail and info about the musical recordings discussed throughout the dissertation.

Our first thanks go to Leslie Mitchner of Rutgers University Press for commissioning this volume and believing in it from the outset. We also give our deepest thanks to Dana Miller for a superb typing job; to Jerry Ohlinger for the many stills that grace this volume; to Michael Andersen for his assistance with the bibliography; to Dennis Coleman for help in research; to Virginia Clark for tirelessly checking facts and copyediting the first draft; to Eric Schramm for an excellent job of copyediting subsequent drafts; and to David Sterritt for a thorough and meticulous reading of the final text.