tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29929230204694152482024-03-15T18:10:10.403-07:00Jonathan PowlesRandom musings on life, music, education, and probably rugby.Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.comBlogger43125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-9140171207619726742015-07-25T13:37:00.000-07:002015-07-25T13:37:53.461-07:00Powles - Lee
<iframe border="0" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" width="574" height="519" src="http://www.chess.com/emboard?id=2628004"></iframe>Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-10538554728346750822014-04-20T03:38:00.001-07:002014-04-20T03:38:30.435-07:00WASP-43 bIt may not be much to look at, but I think this is the most mind-blowing thing I have been able to capture with my telescope.<br /><br />260 light years away, around a nondescript 12-magnitude orange star in the constellation of Sextans, orbits a "hot Jupiter". This planet, called WASP43 b, is the same size as Jupiter and twice its mass. But it orbits very very close to the star - about 2 million km, 1/25 the distance of Mercury. This close, it orbits about once every 22 hours. <br /><br />What this graph records is the brightness of the star in a series of 1 min exposures I took over three hours last night. The magnitude is listed on the left - you can see the variations are between about 11.83 to 11.88, only 5/100ths of a magnitude. A real test of equipment and technique.<br /><br />The big dip in the graph is a transit - the tiny reduction in starlight when the planet passed in front of the star. The whole transit lasted about 1.2 hours. <br /><br />I remember going to Sydney Observatory in 1979, for my twelfth birthday party. I asked the astronomer whether we would ever be able to see planets in other solar systems. "No way" he replied "not unless we build huge telescopes on the moon".<br /><br />Well, actually, just 10", on my balcony :-)<br />
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<br />Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-49054243807837268062013-12-09T03:21:00.001-08:002013-12-09T03:21:48.546-08:00Nova Centauri 2013: a crucial 24 hoursMy long-suffering wife is clearly bemused why I keep getting up at 3.00 am to "go and look at the nova". So I thought I'd try to explain some of the excitement.<br />
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I posted in some depth about the nova <a href="http://jonathanpowles.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/an-third-pointer-to-southern-cross.html" target="_blank">here</a>. So the short version is simply that a small, incredibly dense star -a white dwarf - has staged a gigantic runaway thermonuclear explosion, blasting clouds of hydrogen and other elements into space at incredible speed, while pumping enormous energies at visible wavelengths, X-ray and gamma ray wavelengths. This started last Tuesday, nearly a week ago. On Saturday it reached its peak brightness, and it's now fading fast.<br />
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This star is quite close to the top pointer to the Southern Cross - so invisible to most (Northern hemisphere) variable star enthusiasts. The upshot is, I and a handful of Australian, New Zealand, South African and South American observers have been hauling ourselves out of bed to measure and observe the thing. <br />
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A few of us have rudimentary spectroscopes - devices that can spread the white light of the star into its constituent spectrum. It's a simple filter which screws into the front of the camera. With this one can measure the intensity of each wavelength of light, from deep violet into the red and infra-red. You can see this at the bottom of the photo below:<br />
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The graphs simply plot the intensity of each wavelength of light.<br />
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So what does this tell us? The key to the whole process is to understand that, for some fascinating quantum-physical reasons, particular elements radiate and absorb light at particular wavelengths. For instance if hydrogen is heated or bombarded with ultraviolet or otherwise energised, it will radiate light at a very specific set of wavelengths - 4861 angstroms, (in the light blue part of the spectrum); 6562 angstroms (in the red zone); and others. Other elements emit light at different wavelengths. So, by analysing the spectra of glowing clouds of gas, we can work out their chemical compositon.<br />
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The same effect works in reverse. If a cloud of cool hydrogen is in between us and a bright light source (like an exploding white dwarf star), the gas will <i>absorb</i> light at the same wavelengths. This also applies to other elements and compounds. For instance, the big dip in the far right of the spectra above, labelled "Telluric", has nothing to do with the nova: these are the wavelengths absorbed by the water vapour and oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere.<br />
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The red line in the graph above shows the nova's spectrum when it was at its brightest, on 6 December. The red line is the spectrum a day later. An awful lot has changed; as you'd expect given that the star is in the process of exploding. <br />
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First, and perhaps least interesting - we can see what sort of elements the star is flinging into space. This particular nova is a "Helium-Nitrogen" nova; slightly less common than the "Iron" novae. We can tell because we see particular wavelengths glowing that correspond to ions of these elements. Uninteresting - but it's pretty cool that I can measure the chemical composition of an exploding star 25,000 light years away from the comfort of my own balcony in Canberra. <br />
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Next, we can build a picture of exactly what's happening to the star through comparing successive spectra. First, let's visualize the explosion. A cloud of gas has been blasted away from the surface of the star, and this cloud is then being bombarded by high energy waves from the star, casing the gas to glow.<br />
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This is a photo the Hubble Space Telescope took of a nova that exploded in 1992. The ejected gas has expanded to the point where we can actually see it. In the current nova in Centaurus, the gas is far too close to the star for us to see it. But we can observe it with our spectrographs.<br />
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As you can see, the gas is moving away from the star, and glowing owing to the intense energies it is being bombarded with, This causes "emission lines"in the spectra. You can see in my spectra from 7 December (the blue line in the graph) that the hydrogen line at 6562 A has begun to glow much more than was the case even 24 hours before (the red line in the graph). This accounts for the peaks in the spectra - the energetic gas expanding outwards from the central star.<br />
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But remember that elements also absorb energy. Part of the expanding, glowing sphere of gas is coming straight towards us, and being "backlit" by the intense energy of the star itself. In this case, the high-intensity light from the star itself is actually absorbed by the expanding gas cloud.<br />
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Now here's the best bit. In the circled part of the red graph, you can see both the emission lines from the expanding cloud of hydrogen (the peak), and the absorption line that comes from the part of the cloud directly between us and the star, attenuating its energy (the trough). These are at exactly the same wavelength - 6562 Angstrom. But hang on - if both the emission and the absorption are at the same wavelength, why don't they just cancel each other out?<br />
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The answer is is the Doppler effect. The emission lines come from the gas that is moving out at a right angle to us - so is neither getting closer nor further away. But the absorption line comes from the gas coming directly towards us, so the emission line appears bluer than it is, because the energy of the velocity at which the gas is moving towards us is added to the energy of the light waves. It's the same principle that causes the engine tone of a car moving towards us sounds higher, while a car moving away sounds lower.<br />
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By measuring the shift between the emission lines and the absorption lines, we can calculate how fast the gas is moving towards us. The emission line is at 6562, while the absorption line is at about 6505. 6505/6562 = 0.99131. Thus, the gas is moving towards us at 1-0.99131 = 0.00868 times the speed of light. The speed of light is 299 792 458 m/s, so the velocity of the expanding gas cloud is 299 792 458 * 0.00868 = 2,604 km/s. Which is about right for this type of nova; but bloody fast if you think about it.<br />
Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-60197638478275518472013-12-04T00:01:00.002-08:002013-12-04T00:08:58.743-08:00A third pointer to the Southern CrossFor Australians and New Zealanders, the Southern Cross is an icon of identity. The stars of the cross adorn our flags, and the constellation, together with its two bright pointers, has hung always visible in our southern skies. It has been a constant and unchanging beacon to indigenous peoples, to European explorers, and to all modern Australasians.<br />
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Until this week.<br />
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For a few nights only, there is a third pointer to the Southern Cross. A new quite bright star has appeared very close to Beta Centauri, the topmost of the two pointers, effectively creating a third pointer to the Southern Cross. This star is what is known as a “nova” (from the Latin for “new”). In fact, an existing star – a very faint and hitherto undistinguished star invisible in any but powerful professional telescopes – has, over a period of mere hours, brightened spectacularly. Last night, it was 25,000 times brighter than it was on Monday, and it’s still getting brighter.<br />
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The nova was discovered in the early hours of Tuesday morning by John Seach, an amateur astronomer from Chatsworth Island in NSW. John regularly scans the skies for novae and supernovae, using a nothing more elaborate than a DSLR camera with a wide-angle lens. He already has several discoveries to his name. On Tuesday morning, it was still only barely visible to the naked eye, but 24 hours later near dawn on Wednesday it had become as visible as in the image above.<br />
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The study of novae is extremely important to astronomers. A lot of the physics that underpins the formation, evolution and behaviour of star happens at such colossal temperatures and gravitational forces that they cannot possibly be duplicated in a laboratory. Therefore, a lot of stellar physics is theoretical. However, when a nova erupts, astronomers get a chance to watch the physics at work inside stars in real time. Therefore, they closely monitor the emissions from stars in nova – visible light at all wavelengths, X-rays, infra-red – to build up a picture of what is occurring within.<br />
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In fact, stars that “go nova” are part of a binary system – two stars in close orbit around each other. One of the pair is a normal star, much like our sun; or perhaps a bit larger and redder. The other is what is known as a “white dwarf” star. White dwarfs are extraordinarily small and dense – as much mass as our sun, packed into the size of a planet. At these densities, matter becomes “electron degenerate” – the electrons become stripped from their nuclei, which float together in an ultra-dense soup. One teaspoon of degenerate matter has a mass of several tonnes. These two stars whirl around each other in an orbit that takes mere hours.<br />
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In nova systems, the gravitational force of the white dwarf continually pulls matter (mostly hydrogen) away from the larger star. This matter gradually spirals down onto the surface of the white dwarf, where it accretes, and is compressed and heated. Pouring hydrogen onto the surface of a white dwarf star is a bit like pouring petrol on a barbecue - eventually a runaway nuclear fusion reaction starts in the accreted hydrogen, which explodes cataclysmically and blows the hydrogen and other accumulated gases out into space at thousands of kilometres per second. By examining the spectra of novae in outburst, we can determine the chemical composition of the gases hurtling into space; the temperatures of the reactions occurring; and much else of scientific interest. By measuring the Doppler shift of the spectrum, we can even determine how fast the gas is being blasted into space. So in a real sense, novae are astronomers’’ practical laboratories for observing stellar physics in action.<br />
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If it behaves as a typical nova, Nova Centauri 2013 might continue to brighten for another day or (if we are lucky) several days, before beginning a similarly rapid fade back into obscurity over the following weeks and months. At this time of year the Southern Cross and its pointers rise a decent distance above the horizon in the hours before dawn. So if you want to grab a look at the third pointer to the Southern Cross you’ll have to get up early over the next few days.<br />
<br />Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-87685111454244623542013-11-16T12:24:00.001-08:002013-11-16T12:24:07.753-08:00Staying powerRecently Alan Kerlin posted <a target="_blank" href="http://canberraastrosociety.blogspot.com.au/2013/11/m41-shiny-astro-bling-courtesy-of-peter.html">Peter Treyde's photo of M41 on the CAS blog</a> which instantly brought back memories of when I first started out with Astronomy. It was 1986, I was 19, and we all had Halley fever ... I had my first job, and my first scope soon followed: a Vixen 5" f/5 Newtonian on a very simple GEM mount. I used to run into M41 while looking at Sirius - the unexpected ones are always better I even tried some astrophotography with my dad's old SLR (no 'D') - somewhere I have some pink smudges that were my proud attempts at M42 and Eta Carina.<br /><br />I used the scope obsessively for a couple of years, then it gradually drifted into uncollimated disrepair. It came with me for ten years in the UK, and saw a lot of light pollution and not much else. But basically for the last 25 years has essentially been a spider breeding station and less of a light bucket and more of a rain bucket. It has been variously under the house, in the roof cavity, and outside on the verandah for the past 15 years. I just couldn't bring myself to throw it away. I always vowed that one day I'd return to astronomy.<br /><br />So, last year I finally got the opportunity to get set up with some functioning equipment - an SCT 10" on a decent mount, with a guiding setup and a Canon 60Da. At the same time, out of nostalgia, and while waiting for my new scope to arrive (it actually arrived the day Patrick Moore died, 9/12/2012 - that's another story) I decided to clean up my old Vixen. I pulled it out, cleaned up the structure, replaced all the rusted screws, cannibalized the old 0.95" fittings to build something that would accept my new 1.25" eyepieces and camera adapter, and sent the mirrors off for recoating.<br /><br />Earlier this year, while learning the ropes with the new state-of-the-art kit, I suddenly on a whim threw the old 5" Vixen on to my new mount and attached the camera. This image of the Horsehead was the result - 20 x 4 min subs. And you know, it's not half bad, especially for a dear old scope that cost $300 in 1986.<br /><br /><br /><center><a href='http://photo.blogpressapp.com/show_photo.php?p=13/11/16/957.jpg'><img src='http://photo.blogpressapp.com/photos/13/11/16/s_957.jpg' border='0' width='281' height='187' style='margin:5px'></a></center><br /><br />So now the old scope comes with me to Mt Stromlo public nights and is operated by my 15yo son while I run the 10" SCT. He had at least a hundred fascinated kids looking at lunar craters in September.<br /><br />Not a bad way to have spent my first ever paycheque, all things considered.<br /><br />Sorry for the rambling story. It just all came flooding back thinking about M41.<br />Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-16120662211597505532013-09-30T07:08:00.000-07:002013-09-30T07:08:58.219-07:00EV Ceti<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">I spent Saturday night watching an eclipse.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">The faint (11th magnitude) star EV Ceti is in fact two stars, very close together, that orbit each other in less than a day. We can't see this directly - they are far too close. But we can measure the consequences. Mostly, the light we see comes from both stars in the binary pair. But every ten hours or so one passes in front of the other and the total light drops.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">On Saturday I took one 50s image each minute for four hours, and captured and measured the brightness of the star. And of course duly submitted the observations to the venerable American Association of Variable Star Observers.</span></div>
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Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-36898792297754475482013-08-11T19:31:00.000-07:002013-08-11T19:32:24.234-07:00Music and Walking Pace<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<h3 class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> Marching to a
different tune: researchers unlock the motivational power of music</b></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> <i>This is the text of my article for </i>The Conversation <i><a href="http://theconversation.com/music-and-walking-speed-its-not-what-you-think-15999" target="_blank">published there </a>on 12 July 2013.</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i> </i>“Music has charms to
soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak”, wrote William
Congreve in 1697.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We take this for
granted, and therefore often tend to overlook how genuinely mysterious it is
that simple patterns of sound vibrations can have profound effects on our minds
and bodies. This power of music to on the one hand soothe, but equally to
energise, has long fascinated musicians and philosophers. Most recently, psychologists
and neurophysiologists have turned their attention to music, and have sought to
measure, and explain in empirical terms, how music can have so much influence
our moods and levels of energy.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A Belgian study published today has shed some further light
on how this might work. Marc Leman and colleagues at the Institute for
Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music and Ghent University analysed the effects
of listening to different pieces of music on the walking speed of 18 adults.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Researchers have long known that people will
synchronise their steps with the tempo of music – after all, this is why we
have marching bands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So for this study,
the researchers chose 52 pieces of instrumental music with contrasting moods
and styles, but exactly the same musical tempo – 130 beats per minute.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sure enough, almost all the participants stepped in time
with the music.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What was more
interesting was that certain pieces of music caused the participants to walk
more energetically – to take larger strides, and cover a larger total distance
– while other pieces caused the opposite effect.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For the record, the piece of music that created the most
vigorous walking in the study was:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://youtu.be/Ri7KzLwc5DU">Falik, Ballad of El
Efe</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
While the gentlest response was to:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://youtu.be/XXUzWZM1wMg">Monsieur
Saint-Colombe, Courante</a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
After the walking test, the participants were then asked to
rate the pieces they listened to in terms of opposed pairs of adjectives: was
the piece good or bad? Stuttering or flowing?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Tender or aggressive?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Soft or
loud?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unsurprisingly, the participants
walked with more of a spring in their step to music rated as stuttering, loud,
or aggressive, while gentler, softer, flowing or more complex music had a
relaxing effect.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This effect appeared to be independent of musical genre: the
list of the most arousing music included classical, techno, world music and
house, while the top ten most relaxing pieces ranged from Baroque solo viol
music to contemporary Korean dance tracks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The effect also seemed to be independent of the participants own musical
preferences – the music had the observed affect whether or not the participants
liked that particular style or genre.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Leman and colleagues speculate that this musical effect on the vigour of
physical response might happen at an autonomous or subliminal level.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This suggests several possible practical
applications of the research, for instance in sports performance or physical
rehabilitation.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What makes this study relatively unusual is that the
researchers then analysed these objective cognitive results in terms of a
sophisticated music theoretical model.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They were attempted to discover exactly what the musical features were
that were associated with the arousing or relaxing effects.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nearly 200 sonic features of each piece were
analysed – the loudness of various parts music, the sharpness of the attack,
the structure of the beats, the distribution of pitches and so on – and this
musical analysis was then correlated with the results of the walking
experiment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Surprisingly, only a handful
of features were shown to cause arousal and relaxation, and these all had to do
with the regular structure of the rhythm, which musicians call “metre”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Put simplistically, music with a march-like
rhythm (“binary metre”) causes more arousal, while music with a waltz-like
rhythm (“ternary metre”) causes greater relaxation.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So when you next see a batsman stride to the crease or a
boxer enter the ring to the blare of aggressive, pounding motivational music,
it’s more than just theatre.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s a
genuine physiological effect at work. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it might be that the Blues’ best chance in
next week’s State of Origin decider will be to make sure the Queensland team
runs out to the sound of the Blue Danube Waltz.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-87404462243433968382013-03-14T19:09:00.002-07:002013-08-11T19:33:04.619-07:00Four curiositiesHere are four slightly random images that I'm posting simply because they are slightly quirky, and I am rather fond of them. The first is the Eskimo Nebula, an example of a rather particular type of nebula called a "planetary nebula". The name is a misnomer: these objects have nothing to do with planets. They are the remains of stars much like our sun, that die not with a bang but a whimper. Instead of the fate of larger stars, which end as novae or supernovae, massive explosions and/or collapse into neutron stars or black holes, smaller stars like the sun simply puff their mass out into space as a series of cosmological death-rattles. These puffs form a sphere of gas that expands outwards from the star over thousands of years. They appear as small coloured discs - easily mistaken for planets. Hence the name. This particular nebula, the "Eskimo", NGC2392, is a rich blue colour not unlike Neptune. It's the first example of its type I have photographed.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihm1HAcsmtyKpiKgZNtZRvCh0j9fx0WFZ88rt78HxtLv8MmdIgQIRSwer_c4Bw0EHjL0vRLK6dGQ79gxpCl46X6-7KaRChABN5MQBksX4aBqmmd9AU5KBVOJIU35A-lUMaQRxfizbyHX1l/s1600/0eskimo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihm1HAcsmtyKpiKgZNtZRvCh0j9fx0WFZ88rt78HxtLv8MmdIgQIRSwer_c4Bw0EHjL0vRLK6dGQ79gxpCl46X6-7KaRChABN5MQBksX4aBqmmd9AU5KBVOJIU35A-lUMaQRxfizbyHX1l/s320/0eskimo.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
The next photo is f the Tarantula Nebula. This is not strikingly exceptional as an emission and diffusion nebula - the (slightly colour enhanced) red elements are glowing hydrogen, while the blue/white sections are gas reflecting the bright light of internal stars. The one really unusual aspect of this object is that it is outside our own galaxy, in the Large Magellanic Cloud. It's actually a massive object, and if it were in our own galaxy - say, at the same distance as the Orion Nebula - it would take up half the sky and glow as bright as the moon.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifrcrLfe0GaVSRX36tgr_xv9zzZQ5sPTdwRUcJtgtcQkZ0BrS3KXcDvfxpVsBiH1o_CrG6BKdepr8tY5NiF4CjASXgt75bbvfcWVQS7DuRorfnc_AurJHmSYHCCvLY41urAuKCdbGbux6a/s1600/0IMG_00014.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifrcrLfe0GaVSRX36tgr_xv9zzZQ5sPTdwRUcJtgtcQkZ0BrS3KXcDvfxpVsBiH1o_CrG6BKdepr8tY5NiF4CjASXgt75bbvfcWVQS7DuRorfnc_AurJHmSYHCCvLY41urAuKCdbGbux6a/s320/0IMG_00014.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://s3-ap-sin-103-prod.digitalhub.com/017a120e32830d676f2ba96abbae27b84bf84249eb/IMG_00014.jpg?v=0&p=7&x=1&a=A%2Faf76bJVLyDHbAZ&e=1363313058000&t=CAEQARoQFuMUnCSwG-RgF3ii7P7gpw&r=98fc6f10-58ce-4568-9330-05d7a4e5ea31-32&c=CuEDCr8DCuICCh1hcC1zaW4tMDAwMDEuczMuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbRBQGgNHRVQixgEvRzRZVXB4NEJQVlFTZkxNQk85MjU_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-EJJ6xIECAAQACAC&s=b9fUw9weEv18l6axIR3COvw6pDE" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a></div>
<br />
The next is an image of a real neighbour. This is Jupiter with her four brightest moons. Actually this is a composite of two images - no single exposure can capture the detail of the bright planet as well as the faint moons, so I had to do a bit of Photoshop jiggery-pokery.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNNrbAGNXt5WDwWDnzHOXN66rUm05Pxr3uBGT_uB5CCPH-5jGs-RUI7zbdMfeoCTa__TQ3WkByAgw1KuSfid6ZWTO1h59FsHsHH-44FXZj0lqj83VhVa5KyB0q1MCQakK6c2-InUlycx3o/s1600/00jup.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNNrbAGNXt5WDwWDnzHOXN66rUm05Pxr3uBGT_uB5CCPH-5jGs-RUI7zbdMfeoCTa__TQ3WkByAgw1KuSfid6ZWTO1h59FsHsHH-44FXZj0lqj83VhVa5KyB0q1MCQakK6c2-InUlycx3o/s320/00jup.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
Finally, here is a fuzzy incomplete image of galaxy NGC1365 in Fornax. For various reasons (clouds, trees, my own inexperience) I've only been able to collect 30 mins of total exposure time where it really needs about four times that much. The reason I'm posting it now is because last November a star in this galaxy (56 million light years away) went supernova. It was quite bright last year, but is beginning to fade. The star is still visible - it's the blue dot marked with the arrow. The galaxy is starting to get too low in the Western sky to shoot properly - I'll image it again next year but by then the supernova will be gone.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNPkBYbTbvoP8cwsNL0KtEezfvuJesgfoTJA0pdiS1uSRXTQpGVZyTIjqsvCyDFUwqwojnRt7tSOE02lvGQNn0f8lSYcxyYNN1YXzCgJg23wJzL1ZXWJmfORZoT-4vgAr-njN4pTBgj41i/s1600/01365.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="249" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNPkBYbTbvoP8cwsNL0KtEezfvuJesgfoTJA0pdiS1uSRXTQpGVZyTIjqsvCyDFUwqwojnRt7tSOE02lvGQNn0f8lSYcxyYNN1YXzCgJg23wJzL1ZXWJmfORZoT-4vgAr-njN4pTBgj41i/s320/01365.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<br />Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-24704394881171997782013-03-14T18:51:00.001-07:002013-03-14T18:51:19.744-07:00A matter of perspective ...<span class="userContent">This is my favourite astrophoto yet. I took it
last week- 16 exposures for a total f 90 minutes. It is Centaurus A, a
large, quite close galaxy that has its unusual shape owing to the fact
that it is currently in the process of swallowing<span class="text_exposed_show"> a smaller spiral galaxy. At its heart is a supermassive black hole with a mass 100 million times that of the sun. That sort of size puts things in perspective.</span></span><br />
<span class="userContent"><span class="text_exposed_show"><br /> </span></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNyVqPROiuvq-GyJbPC6flWwoZ1GQb5LvpiHEMIxcME0SseYKYEIZ9dZzyLfQe8Xl5Y8QSk8yV5zdCrcREuiYgBOCqMwe6Rn0f3q6sE5td1xhZNADma-0IGiGpWJuHrknNu6aGndYCS12u/s1600/centA.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNyVqPROiuvq-GyJbPC6flWwoZ1GQb5LvpiHEMIxcME0SseYKYEIZ9dZzyLfQe8Xl5Y8QSk8yV5zdCrcREuiYgBOCqMwe6Rn0f3q6sE5td1xhZNADma-0IGiGpWJuHrknNu6aGndYCS12u/s320/centA.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<span class="userContent"><span class="text_exposed_show">The other issue of perspective, and the reason I really like the photograph, is that you can easily see the foreground stars - the ones in our own galaxy. The sense of distance is quite acute. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="userContent"><span class="text_exposed_show">I say it's a close galaxy, but I'm speaking cosmologically. It's around 13 million light
years away, meaning the photons which hit the sensor of my DSLR left
Centaurus A and began their long journey to earth at pretty much the
same time as this chap, a Sivapithecus, came down out of the
trees and on to the African grasslands, and began the complex process
of trial and error that led to the tool-use and then ultimately to the invention of the DSLR ... </span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn5tOuhehZeMEAURgUUT7Z_tNthAJ0ME2X6srcGP4Mc05XTMH7Qw9bgNh37O1df3uTvcj_H_Kv9aXMTMhRShuwPjVYzh6NWQQXD7W4ZJo8ABas6U7qNwa-MJzHfe0VwZN-AbRcLcFWvayY/s1600/ape.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgn5tOuhehZeMEAURgUUT7Z_tNthAJ0ME2X6srcGP4Mc05XTMH7Qw9bgNh37O1df3uTvcj_H_Kv9aXMTMhRShuwPjVYzh6NWQQXD7W4ZJo8ABas6U7qNwa-MJzHfe0VwZN-AbRcLcFWvayY/s1600/ape.jpg" /></a></div>
Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-58017939093613149752013-03-14T17:13:00.001-07:002013-03-14T17:13:48.540-07:00The Jewel Box<span class="userContent">As a child in the 1970s, I loved astronomy and
space. It wasn't until I was 20, in 1986, that I was able to get a
telescope. If you were alive then, and at all interested in what might
rain down from above, ;-) you<span class="text_exposed_show"> will
remember that 1986 was all about Halley Comet fever. So in April 1986 I
finally got a telescope - a modest 5" Newtonian - and with my reference
materials (a newspaper article on Halley, a planisphere, and a Patrick
Moore book on astronomy that I'd had for years) pointed my new treasure
eagerly at where Halley was supposed to be.<br /> <br /> Amazing! The
eyepiece was filled with a glorious shperical burst of light. I couldn't
believe what I was seeing:</span></span><br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOHp-Km2x81XuFV7L7KGaHcq7pP2Eo6HjV80JXc0Un66SCnYy_mKDBH8trX5kVkHbP58d-tUm8ioUk64ZJxpaWJD7pX3DReh5sLOyjQWBuJlyETXCZWuCQrwBy5w-nrA3nBqnrGg4sD_dI/s1600/0IMG_00005.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOHp-Km2x81XuFV7L7KGaHcq7pP2Eo6HjV80JXc0Un66SCnYy_mKDBH8trX5kVkHbP58d-tUm8ioUk64ZJxpaWJD7pX3DReh5sLOyjQWBuJlyETXCZWuCQrwBy5w-nrA3nBqnrGg4sD_dI/s320/0IMG_00005.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVBXFLshrvx-uTQ4hRJ8fPSh_fmah9TtRXoJpLkzujfBeGLnxTBLDnKp_evnv__SELCgXGcGqaNqOWp8vcqkGnccchXBIjHC4pHdFejIISN6qJrDZHgZSpEVI-btZokpCRF0KlqpTcbx4t/s1600/0jb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a></div>
<span class="userContent"><span class="text_exposed_show"> I looked harder at the image - interesting
that the diffuse cometary halo semed to resolve into individual points
of light ... And no sign of a tail, but then I had heard that this visit
of Halley was disappointing. What I was seeing was anything but
disappointing. But the longer I looked, the less it looked like what a
comet was supposed to look like.<br /> <br /> Well, eventually I realised
that I was a few degrees off, and what I was looking at was Omega
Centauri. Wonderful it was! I was looking for this comet, but was the
sky really full of unexpected treasures? I started to slew the scope
around (in those days, "slew" was something we did by hand) and came
across something that literally took my breath away. There was a little
pocket of gems in the sky that Aladdin had left behind. A sparkle of
red, blue and green (I'm SURE I remmeber green!) stars in a tiny little
treasure-chest just below the Southern Cross:</span></span><br />
<span class="userContent"><span class="text_exposed_show"></span></span><br />
<span class="userContent"><span class="text_exposed_show"></span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUWn2hZbeuAG7DOJJh2OCkeaFPwyGaylty7yHtavCCfQsTTgjHliwgXV69st2zPkvYJQmchoBW5bRmE-z9O8kMtP1HytkdsNdIP1kMNQ879zpoyVWakECZrHE0djgTkwGqVT32f0ABj932/s1600/0jb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUWn2hZbeuAG7DOJJh2OCkeaFPwyGaylty7yHtavCCfQsTTgjHliwgXV69st2zPkvYJQmchoBW5bRmE-z9O8kMtP1HytkdsNdIP1kMNQ879zpoyVWakECZrHE0djgTkwGqVT32f0ABj932/s320/0jb.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span class="userContent"><span class="text_exposed_show"><br /> It was the Jewel Box, and it hooked my into the delights of the sky in a way that has lasted a lifetime.<br /> <br />
So, nearly 30 years later, when I finally fulfilled a lifetime's
ambition and acquired a new telescope and a camera, and after three
months of technical bedding in during which I finally got autoguiding
working, there was only one object I could possibly photograph. This
little box of jewels.</span></span><br />
<span class="userContent"><span class="text_exposed_show"><br /> </span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq5TzpyIRQnkZLIZU9csIw_c6rnKdTpUPZx8PUrga8cpyAnFTP9IskA9TCDDaryMps0r5iRmrOlgB-PdHQzHU4Kd8PNM3GF1szobrR3gYZ298FcsbHh_Yob082G_WzwjsTCI2_1C3QKkjr/s1600/0jbIMG_00015.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq5TzpyIRQnkZLIZU9csIw_c6rnKdTpUPZx8PUrga8cpyAnFTP9IskA9TCDDaryMps0r5iRmrOlgB-PdHQzHU4Kd8PNM3GF1szobrR3gYZ298FcsbHh_Yob082G_WzwjsTCI2_1C3QKkjr/s320/0jbIMG_00015.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span class="userContent"><span class="text_exposed_show"><br /> Meade 10" SCT, F/10, with a Canon EOS
60Da. Next time I'll go for it with my focal recucer to F/6.7, which
will enhance the sense of this little treasure of gems secretly buried
in the deep south of the sky.<br /> <br /> 10x2' exposures, ISO 800.<br /> <br /> Thanks for reading this far in the nostalgic musings of a lifetime star addict :-)</span></span>Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-82093495652286891512012-10-16T03:58:00.001-07:002013-08-11T19:33:41.181-07:00 A digital trobairitz: musical chivalry in the cyberspace age<i>This post is the abstract for my paper at the Annual Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia in December 2012</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Recent tectonic shifts in the economics of music (and by
extension, its political economy) have generated unprecedented challenges: for
the music industries; for those concerned with defining and applying musical
intellectual property; for the technologies of the production and distribution
of music, both live and recorded; <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and
for the artists themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is hard
to believe that it has only been a decade since Napster first made headlines as
a threat to the hegemony of the CD-based recording industry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ten years on, not only is the music CD in the
last yards of its journey towards obsolescence, it is more-or-less accepted
that the battle to control (and sell) the intellectual property of recorded
music as a commodity has been lost.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Social
media are rapidly challenging mainstream media as the conduit for distributing,
accessing, discussing, marketing and discovering music and musicians.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Recorded music is now, to all intents and
purposes, free.</div>
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<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8fj-lAsLkLP7x6cZe-pfqI5uhmXeGlNiXdNkfv6RiXXi_fRYZ0O7i8REe9tQrlurYtD8tRadud2Iq9LYGMdopjIKst9Fr9QLaTcOEwYzNueJKETIPi7ZpzWT2vgcFpoTMRGC9XsKcTJkN/s1600/3126389074_bbf03d6e77.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8fj-lAsLkLP7x6cZe-pfqI5uhmXeGlNiXdNkfv6RiXXi_fRYZ0O7i8REe9tQrlurYtD8tRadud2Iq9LYGMdopjIKst9Fr9QLaTcOEwYzNueJKETIPi7ZpzWT2vgcFpoTMRGC9XsKcTJkN/s320/3126389074_bbf03d6e77.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by Brian Adams, <a href="http://baphotos.com/" target="_blank">http://baphotos.com</a>.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Marian Call is an Alaskan singer-songwriter who is one of a
cohort of emerging musicians building a career and a creative <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">oeuvre </span>within these new realities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Classically trained and university educated <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(she is a composition graduate from Stanford),
she writes and performs songs that span genres from medieval, classical, jazz,
folk/acoustic and many others. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She
eschews contracts and labels - her audience base is entirely self-generated
through social media and a frenetic touring schedule.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On tour she prefers house concerts to traditional
venues – she will typically crowdsource venues via Twitter in advance of a tour,
and rely on her supporters and followers on social media to publicize the event
locally. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is currently (Oct. ’12) touring
Europe on this basis – a major logistic collaboration between Call and her
supporters that she describes as “like a barn-raising”. Audiences at concerts are
encouraged, but not required, to make a donation; similarly, her music is
freely streamed online, and payment for the recordings are essentially a matter
of honour.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Essentially, Call’s artistic and business practice
diminishes or removes the notion of music as a commodity, an object of
transaction. Instead, the emphasis is placed on relationships, or community –
she has critiques the description of her as an indie or independent artist,
suggesting that a better term is an “interdependent” artist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this paper I argue that this shift from
music as commercial commodity to music as community catalyst has profound
implications not just for the business<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>models of music, but for its aesthetics and semantics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Call’s authorial voice within her music
speaks and sings to and with her audience on a number of levels – literally, in
the case of “Good Morning Moon” in which she sourced the chorus in the song as
sound files individually submitted by her supporters. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her music has an authenticity of expression
and an imaginative range that, I argue, stems from its basis in a communicative
premise that is, at root, ethical in nature – a code of musical chivalry that
underpins the virtual and actual encounters on her journey as a modern-day trobairitz.</div>
<i>
</i>Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-76204281289976225082012-10-06T06:25:00.001-07:002013-03-14T17:14:34.524-07:00A sonnet for Alan JonesSome have said Jones' fall from grace is almost Shakespearean. So here goes:<br />When I have seen by silly cows defaced<br />The rich, proud pomp of righteous, right wing rage;<br />When lofty Liberal Members are down-razed<br />By Helen Razer writing in The Age;<br />When I have seen queue-jumping darkies gain<br />The cushy jobs real Aussies had before,<br />And middle-eastern youths have clearly lain,<br />With nice white girls from the upper North Shore;<br />When I have seen that Bligh bird screw her state,<br />And JuLiar find ways to make us pay:<br />I'd go on air, spray and pontificate -<br />And now they've come to take my merc away.<br />Oh, I am such a goose - and here's the point:<br />My own big mouth in fact destroyed the joint.<br /><br />Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-35287982342290951942012-09-18T05:46:00.001-07:002013-03-14T17:14:44.309-07:00Universities and the Domino's Effect<i>How can the university sector best respond to the rise of online learning, and what will be the impact on teaching, learning, the student experience and the physical infrastructure of university campuses?</i><br />
<br />
By and large, the rise of online learning has caught universities woefully unprepared. The "flipped" classroom, massive online courses, open educational resources, private-sector online commercial providers - at an institutional level these are all seen as recent threats to a university sector struggling to respond to a new reality. At the individual level, lecturers often seem to be fighting a losing battle for the hearts and minds of their students - dropping attendances at lectures, a reliance on recordings and online notes in lieu of face-to-face engagement; I have more than once seen lecturers vainly request for the university wireless network to be turned off during lectures to prevent the students logging into Facebook when they should be attending to the sage on the stage.<br />
<br />
But this is curious. As research-intensive instituions, universities typically are among the first to embrace new technologies that support academic work - from the first electronic library catalogues, through discipline-based newsgroups and email lists, to online journals, new technologies have happily and quickly been embraced by the research community. So why have we as a sector so clumsily and cantankerously engaged with new technologies for teaching and learning?<br />
<br />
The answer is simple: it's because education is not pizza.<br />
<br />
Since the 1980s we have seen four factors working together to fundamentally shift the way we think about and organise higher education. A rapid increase in the percentage of the population which attends university has led to a "mass-production" model of teaching. University managers can now talk about "efficient mechanisms for content delivery" with straight faces - ignoring the fact that there is nothing actually delivered during learning; nothing changes hands. Second, the increasing cost to the student since the introduction of HECS has resulted in a far more transactional model of education: what do students "get" for their money? Thirdly, partly as a consequence of both students and the Government wanting to know exactly what they are paying for, we have seen increasingly prescriptive requirement for univesities and teachers to spell out exactly what students need to do, what they will learn, and how this will be assessed. Opportunities for learning to be subjective, to be about personal growth and the serendipity of epiphany, are squeezed out in favour mundane learning outcomes that can be measurably demonstrated by the majority of a student cohort. Finally, a much larger university population, with very diverse aspirations and equally diverse levels of ability, all of whom are paying substantial sums for their courses, has led to degree structures and options dominated by the market: students choose their courses from a menu available, and only popular choices are sustainable within an increasingly tight resource environment. <br />
<br />
Attending a modern university is uncomfortably like placing an order with Domino's: choose your options online from what's available and affordable, and the university will attempt to deliver your educational content as quickly and efficiently as possible. Rarely will you have your content delivered by a pimply-faced youth on a motor scooter; more usually you will be placed in a lecture theatre with 400 other people and have your content delivered by a lecturer who for two hours bravely wades upstream through a river of facts. But the business model is the same.<br />
<br />
Now, before you write me off as an old fogey pining for the bygone golden age of education (i.e. whenever I happened to do my own undergraduate degree), let me say that I am in complete support of the four factors I have identified. I believe Australia needs mass participation in higher education, which therefore needs to be sustainable, accountable, and demonstrate value for money. I also am in favour of student choice, as the research evidence suggests (unsurprisingly) that students learn better if they are studying a subject that interests them. However I believe that the factors dominating recent trends in HE have led universities to a model of education that is wrong-headed: one that sees education as about the "delivery" of "content".<br />
<br />
Early misadventures in online learning enthusiastically embraced the notion of "content delivery". Put the content online for the students to download themselves and you don't even need to pay for the lecturer! How efficient a mechanism for delivery. But the experience of the last decade as shown us how educationally undernourished this leaves the students. Learning by absorbing content simply doesn't work very well, and the new online environments merely reinforce this point. Interestingly, the history of the internet parallels the history of online learning. The late 1990s and early 200s was the era of Web 1.0 - static online content: company web pages and large slabs of course content. The commercial and social web has moved on to 2.0 and beyond. The educational web hasn't, quite.<br />
<br />
Educational theory and research-based practice is at odds with the "content delivery" model. Learning is fundamentally a social activity - it happens when your ideas are challenged or put to the test by others: teachers, tutors, authors, peers, even your own students. Ultimately we can never measure how much "content" has been absorbed by a student; we can't know what they know. We can only watch what they do - what they say, write, paint, play ... The origin of universities themselves stems from this recognition that learning comes through interaction, challenge and debate. Plato's Academy was founded on this principle that one learns though dialogue. The "colleges" of mediaeval Oxford and Cambridge were spaces in which intellectual fellow-travellers, "colleagues", came to learn from each other. Curricula are all well and good, but a good deal of research shows that a great deal of learning - perhaps the majority - occurs in the extra- and intra-curricular spaces where students, teachers and colleagues interact spontaneously and creatively.<br />
<br />
The point many universities still miss is that online technologies are radical in that they connect people dialogically like never before. Social media such as Twitter and Facebook have allowed virtual colleges - communities of like-minded individuals - to spring up regardless of geographic and institutional borders. If I want to find something out, nowadays I'll go online and ask an expert. If I say something stupid, chances are I'll say it online and get called on it by a collegue in Newcaste-on-Tyne or Accra or Alaska (to think of three examples from last week). And I'll probably learn something as a result. As a music and education academic, I have two distinct professional and disciplinary spaces online. Even more interesting, the social community from which I learned the most - a multi-disiplinary gaggle of individuals who were my student colleagues at Magdalen College, Oxford, twenty years ago - has reconstituted itself online in recent years, and has resumed being one of the (now virtual) places where I learn. Not formally; but very deeply.<br />
<br />
The pianist Arthur Schnabel once said this of his ability to perform profound and moving music: "I don't think I handle the notes much differently from other pianists. But the spaces between the notes - ah, there is where the artistry lies!". I could paraphrase this for education - "The content of university degrees is nowadays much of a muchness. But the spaces between the content - ah, that's where the learning happens!". Those spaces are increasingly online. And unless universities are able to rethink the fundamental paradigm and business model they use to manage education, from one predicated on "content delivery" back to one predicated on dialogue and communication, they will find that they will be increasingly on the margins of where the educational action is in the twenty-first century. <br />
<br />Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-56184322748292060462012-07-17T14:32:00.003-07:002013-08-11T19:33:41.179-07:00Music and physics – the connections aren't trivial<p>My ANU colleague John Rayner’s <a href="https://theconversation.edu.au/this-is-a-love-song-the-physics-of-music-and-the-music-of-physics-7799">excellent recent article</a>
on the physics of music seemed to touch a nerve with the readership of The Conversation.</p>
<p>Although beautifully framed by the personal and anecdotal – John’s piece was subtitled “a love song” – the issues he explores about the relationship between music and physics go back to the ancient Greeks, and are as old as the disciplines themselves.</p>
<p>It certainly inspired me – a musicologist – to write something from the other side, to meet my scientific colleague in the middle in a speculative conversation about the parallels between our two worlds.</p>
<p>Musical meaning is tantalising and elusive. For most of us, music has the power to reach us profoundly and directly. The temptation is to speak of music as a language: the notion of music as a kind of “language of the emotions” is pervasive, centuries old, and nowadays has some limited empirical <a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090319132909.htm">experimental support</a>.</p>
<p>Most theoretical work now done on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_semiology">musical semiotics</a> treats music as just another flavour of discourse, another language of signs; albeit one with its own special characteristics.</p>
<p>But this runs against an age-old notion: that
music is a <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/737974">natural law</a>. The medieval concept of “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musica_universalis">music of the spheres</a>” held that the movement of the celestial bodies – what we now describe as astrophysics – was, at root, musical: the planets move in the heavens according to principles of harmony and resonance, with a set of common <a href="http://ray.tomes.biz/alex.htm">Pythagorean ratios</a> governing both music and cosmology.</p>
<p>Indeed, we music academics are rather nostalgic for the time (in medieval universities) in which music was considered one of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrivium%22>quadrivium">four core disciplines</a> alongside astronomy, geometry and arithmetic, and we held pride of place above the three lesser (hence “trivial”) language-based disciplines of logic, grammar and rhetoric.</p>
<h2>Highs and lows</h2>
<p>Physics permeates the language we use to describe music, and the concepts we use to understand it. For instance we
talk about “high” and “low” musical pitch, perhaps without realising how deeply metaphorical this is.</p>
<p>There is no altitude to musical pitch: “high” pitches are caused by faster vibrations than “low” pitches. But we don’t talk about “fast” and “slow” music with reference to pitch (we use those metaphors for something else entirely).</p>
<p>And yet, the notion of musical altitude makes sense if we think about the energy states of the music. If, as
in the excerpt below from Puccini’s opera <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tosca">Tosca</a>, we listen to a soprano sustain a top B flat (as at 2:40 into the recording below), we are aware that she is sustaining a high-energy state, which must eventually relax.</p>
<p><figure><iframe width="440" height="260" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/_OIExoUb8jk?wmode=transparent#t=2m29s" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></figure></p>
<p>The pitch seems invested with the kinetic energy required to produce it (of course, in Tosca’s case she has a literal encounter with the force of gravity, but that’s quite another story).</p>
<p>Singers, wind and brass players expend energy to reach “altitude”, while string players, keyboardists, guitarists and all the rest work no harder for the high notes than the low.</p>
<p>Yet, perhaps because of the centrality of the
human voice to all music, this idea of fighting against musical “gravity” is ubiquitous, whether in a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2onBnMHLNE&feature=youtu.be&t=8m">Paganini violin concerto</a> or a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo, as per the video below. In music, as in physics, what goes up must come down.</p>
<p><figure><iframe width="440" height="260" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Wf-zEQkXrjE?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></figure></p>
<p>And it doesn’t come down just anywhere. Most systems of musical organisation have a fixed point of reference – a pitch that functions as an attractor, pulling the music
towards it.</p>
<p>In Western music, we call this the “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonic_(music">tonic</a>”, and most people, regardless of their level of formal musical training, can hear and sing the note to which the music is “pulling”. This idea of gravitational or magnetic attraction to a pitch was arguably the single most important characteristic of Western music between 1600 and 1900, and much music thereafter.</p>
<p>This may be a characteristic of Western music, but in other cultures' musics, the idea of a point of attraction is often even more powerful, as in the example below from Classical Indian music.</p>
<p><figure><iframe width="440" height="260" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/7QuDEx3_Ygo?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></figure></p>
<p>Not all music has a tonic, a fixed point of reference – in 1908 in Vienna <a href="http://www.bookrags.com/biography/arnold-schoenberg/">Arnold Schoenberg</a> famously departed from the principle with the “atonal” concluding movement of his second string quartet (as per the video below), thereby heralding a new and controversial musical age.</p>
<p>By coincidence, three years earlier, across the border in Switzerland, Albert Einstein had thrown the world of physics into disarray by similarly demolishing the idea of a fixed point of reference, in a paper on electromagnetism that described what later would become known as the <a href="https://theconversation.edu.au/explainer-einsteins-theory-of-general-relativity-3481">Special Theory of Relativity</a>.</p>
<p><figure><iframe width="440" height="260" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/MlrITcGqoWw?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></figure></p>
<h2>Questions and answers</h2>
<p>It’s worth observing that language has nothing resembling this notion of gravity or attraction: to understand this principle in music the metaphors must come from physics.</p>
<p>There are other concepts that bridge the disciplines in the same way. Balance and symmetry are also ideas that are fundamental to musical structure, and that seem to have more of a physical than a linguistic origin.</p>
<p>In classical music, perhaps the most common phrase structure is often described informally (and somewhat puzzlingly, to me) as “question and answer” – or more formally, as “<a href="http://musicalcrematorium.blogspot.com.au/2004/08/antecedentconsequentcause-and-effect.html">antecedent-consequent</a>” – two phrases that complement each other structurally, as in two phrases that make up just the opening eights seconds of Mozart’s Sonata in C KV545 (below).</p>
<p><figure><iframe width="440" height="260" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/JcUh-ggBfzI?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></figure></p>
<p>There’s no question that rhetoric plays a role in shaping the way in which these two phrases echo each other. But on a structural level, there is an identity that seems almost mathematical in nature.</p>
<p>The two phrases are in balance: their (gentle) energies are complementary; their shapes are an image of each other; they are like two sides of an equation.</p>
<h2>Time and memory</h2>
<p>For me, the most important parallels between music and physics happen on a more philosophical level.</p>
<p>The late musicologist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Kramer">Jonathan Kramer</a> started his book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Time-Music-Temporalities-Strategies/dp/0028725905">The Time of Music</a> with the observation that small children play with blocks and toys to learn the fundamental
concepts of space; by contrast, by singing and clapping, they play with music to learn about time.</p>
<p>There is something profound about the way in which music can accelerate, retard, bend and colour our sense of time’s passing. We can sit in a concert hall or opera theatre for an hour and hear 90 different people make thousands of noises on bits of wood, metal and flesh, and yet walk away with the impression we have heard one thing – a symphony, or an opera.</p>
<p>Music joins up time, and allows us to hear time as patterned and organised. These patterns allow us to predict the future – we listen in anticipation: that a melody will come to rest, or a harmony will move in ways that make sense to us, wordlessly.</p>
<p>Music is also a powerful stimulus of memory – overhearing a piece of remembered music can instantly rekindle long-forgotten memories.</p>
<p>It is much easier for most of us to memorise a song (words and all) than it is to memorise a poem. Music is a tool for grasping the order and sense between what has happened in the past, what is happening now, and what will happen in the future.</p>
<p>And to me, that sounds suspiciously like a definition of physics.</p>
<h2>Threat and survival</h2>
<p>Sadly, there is one last way in which music
and physics are currently bedfellows. Worldwide, both disciplines are under threat at universities. In <a href="http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201101/edcorner.cfm" target="_blank">America</a> and the <a href="http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2006/oct/03/uk-physics-department-faces-closure" target="_blank">UK</a>, several physics departments have closed or are in danger.</p>
<p>Music education no longer receives government funding at UK universities, and in Australia <a href="https://theconversation.edu.au/anu-music-school-cuts-musicians-need-to-keep-in-time-7731">recent controversies</a> at ANU and Edith Cowan are symptomatic of the fact government funding for music is problematic.</p>
<p><figure class="align-left"><img src="https://c479107.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/files/13015/width237/rccph7xm-1342413937.jpg"><figcaption><span class="source">pfly</span></figcaption></figure></p>
<p>And the provision and quality of music and physics education in our secondary schools, crucial to support and enable undergraduate study, are always competing with the demands for more and more literacy and numeracy in the curriculum.</p>
<p>There is not yet a crisis – at least, not at the high end: it remains, at least for the moment, sexy enough in policy terms to fund the elite practitioners.</p>
<p>The select few physics virtuosi who will discover whatever comes after the <a href="https://theconversation.edu.au/cern-discovers-a-higgs-like-particle-let-the-party-and-head-scratching-begin-8036">Higgs boson</a>, or their musical equivalents who will perform the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP9SX7V14Z4">Queen of the Night</a> aria at the Sydney Opera house or Covent Garden, still capture both the public imagination and the public purse.</p>
<p>But the opportunities for students to study fundamental and abstract ideas – such as music and physics – as part of a liberal arts education that supports a civilised and educated society are becoming fewer and fewer.</p>
<p>John Rayner was right to call the relationship between music and physics a love song. Let us just hope it’s not also a swansong.</p>
<br><p><strong>Further reading:</strong>
<a href="https://theconversation.edu.au/this-is-a-love-song-the-physics-of-music-and-the-music-of-physics-7799">This is a love song: the physics of music and the music of physics</a></p>
<p><em>Jonathan Powles does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.</em></p><img src="//counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/8188/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1"/><link rel="canonical" href="http://theconversation.edu.au/music-and-physics-the-connections-arent-trivial-8188" />
<meta name="syndication-source" content="http://theconversation.edu.au/music-and-physics-the-connections-arent-trivial-8188" />
<p>This article was originally published at <a href="http://theconversation.edu.au">The Conversation</a>.
Read the <a href="http://theconversation.edu.au/music-and-physics-the-connections-arent-trivial-8188">original article</a>.
</p>Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-64386302140779309722012-06-17T18:12:00.000-07:002012-10-16T04:00:34.258-07:00Musicians need to keep in time<i>This post was written as an opinion piece for </i><a href="http://theconversation.edu.au/">The Conversation</a>.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/2012-06-17/4068582">The
current crisis at the ANU School of Music</a> has widely been reported as
being, fundamentally, about money. The
ANU VC has cut ten academic and two general staff positions to address an
operating deficit at the School of nearly $3 million per annum. This is the fourth review of the School in
twelve years, and by far the most drastic.
The resultant outrage in the community has been swift and vociferous: a
largely middle-class Canberra population has reacted angrily to what it
perceives as an assault on high culture.
Almost all the reporting of the story has focused on a very simple
black-and-white opposition: the profound and inestimable value and deeply
humanizing practice of arts in general and music in particular, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">versus</i> a corporate culture of
management, bureaucracy and bean-counting.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But are things really that simple?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Nearly all music schools in Australia are in financial
crisis. The ANU has made headlines
simply because its response has been swift and uncompromising. But all seven of the nation’s traditional
conservatoires are struggling to make ends meet. Many have blamed the level of Federal
Government funding for music as inadequate, and indeed the 2011 <a href="http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CFEQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.deewr.gov.au%2FHigherEducation%2FPolicy%2FBaseReview%2FDocuments%2FHigherEd_FundingReviewReport.pdf&ei=AGneT8O5B6WSiAej0e27Cg&usg=AFQjCNEV7HTd8TZP0NyKpJBNb">Lomax-Smith
review</a> of university funding found this to be the case. But the situation is the same or worse
overseas: music schools are operating in increasingly straitened circumstances,
and their graduates are finding it increasingly difficult to get employment in
the area of elite classical music performance in which they are being trained.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But this is all very curious, because the arts themselves,
and the creative industries, are booming.
A <a href="http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CE4QFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.australiacouncil.gov.au%2F__data%2Fassets%2Fpdf_file%2F0004%2F71257%2FFull_report_More_than_bums_on_seats_Australian_participation_in_the_arts2.pdf&ei=y2ve">2010
report by the Australia Council</a>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">More
than bums on seats: Australian participation in the arts</i> found that
Australians’ engagement with the arts, both as creators and consumers, was
increasing. Young people especially were
becoming more engaged with the art and music, and across the population there
was a growing sense of the importance of the arts to society’s wellbeing. Importantly, the internet was identified as
an increasingly important means of engaging with the arts, with one in three
Australians already using the internet to engage with art in some form. These statistics are borne out by the
economic figures. A 2009 <a href="http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CFAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.enterpriseconnect.gov.au%2Fwho%2Fcreative%2FDocuments%2FEconomic%2520Analysis_Creative%2520Industries.pdf&ei=rm3eT-PNMaqjiAfuouC9Cg&usg=AFQjCNG81wixcSfhLzM">economic
analysis of the creative industries</a> in Australia found that the creative
industries (including music) contributed around 3% to our GDP (more than the
agriculture or energy industries), and moreover over ten years was growing at
5.8% p.a. - nearly twice the rate of the
economy as a whole. It’s a good news
story of flourishing artistic practice and community engagement that is
increasingly bringing both social benefits and hard cash to the Australian
people.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So why are all our music schools going broke?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The issue is one of relevance. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Looking at the history of music, we see that quite
regularly, there are moments of tectonic shift in the styles, economics and
technologies that underpin music-making.
In the 1920s in Australia there were thousands of freelance professional
musicians in Australia – more than four thousand in Sydney alone - earning their
keep performing in cafes, music halls, theatres, and movie theatres, playing to
accompany silent films. That all changed
in the space of five years. The
invention of the ‘talkie’ – the film with sound – spelled an end to the
movie-house orchestra. The rapid spread
of radio, and the foundation of the ABC in 1932, saw professional music-making
start shift out of the cafe and music hall and into the studio. The Depression accelerated the changes – why
would a cash-strapped restauranteur hire a dance band every night when he could
buy a radio? </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This led to the institutionalisation of classical music in
Australia. Under the aegis of the ABC,
by 1960 there was a much smaller number of elite performers, mainly comprising
the orchestras in each state capital.
Each capital had a music school with a curriculum designed to produce
players to support that orchestra . The
curriculum included rigorous performance training in the classical tradition;
aural skills and theory for sight-reading; a survey-style overview of classical
music history.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Astonishingly, more than fifty years later, this same curriculum
either still exists, or has existed quite recently, in Australian music
schools. Yet almost every other aspect
of music-making has changed.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The modern music professional needs to be fluent in a wide
variety of styles – classical, jazz, contemporary and cross-cultural. He or she needs to be familiar with a quickly
changing range of technologies for the creation, notation, recording,
manipulation and dissemination of music.
He or she needs to understand the shifting nature of the music business,
requiring a single individual to at different times (or simultaneously) play
the role of performer, educator, entrepreneur, and producer, and take advantage
of music-making opportunities far beyond the concert hall, but in schools, community
groups, studios, art galleries, hospitals, and increasingly online, in computer
games and other applications. Above all,
as modern and younger Australians engage with the arts as participants not just
passive “consumers”, the modern professional musician needs to be able to
facilitate the music-making of others , at a whole range of standards, not just
be an expert practitioner themselves.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There are some shining examples in Australia of curricula
that have arisen to meet the needs of the modern world – those at QUT, the
University of Newcastle, and the University of South Australia spring to
mind. But the old, traditional conservatoires
have struggled to keep up. Unless they
do, I fear the agonies of cuts and forced restructure currently being visited
on ANU School of Music are bound to be repeated elsewhere. </div>Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-26562405505313947762011-11-29T02:41:00.001-08:002012-10-16T04:00:03.507-07:00Classic 100 top ten predictionsHere\'s by best guess as we reach the 50s:<br /><br />Vaughan Williams - The Lark Ascending<br />Prokofiev - Peter and the Wolf<br />Elgar - Cello Concerto<br />Orff - Carmina Burana<br />Holst - The Planets<br />Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue<br />Shostakovich - Symphony No.5<br />Sibelius - Finlandia<br />Barber - Adagio<br />Copland - Fanfare for the Common ManJonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-41334605890706349522011-11-26T15:09:00.000-08:002012-10-16T04:00:34.255-07:00Firing the canonI am not a huge enthusiast for perpetuating the classical music canon - or any other kind of canon, for that matter. I had no interest at all in the ABC's original Classic 100, or the JJJ version that runs each year. But I guess because my own research used to be about twentieth-century music, and how it communicates (or doesn't), and becuase I so much enjoy debating almost anything on Twitter, I got sucked in to following the most recent: <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/classic/program/classic100/">ABC's Classic 100 Countdown of the Twentieth Century</a>. And as this exercise in musical democracy has unfolded, I have been disappointed and then annoyed by two things.<br />
<br />
What disappointed me, of course, was the reams of mindless pap that got voted into the list. Of course it did not surprise me in the least. Nevertheless, it was a bit demoralizing to have to actually watch Lloyd-Webber's <i>Requiem</i> following the music from <i>Lord of the Rings</i> as the sort of stuff that the Australian Classic-FM-listening community voted as the 100 best, favourite or most important pieces of that fascinating century. I, like several, expressed my disappointment on Twitter.<br />
<br />
And that leads to what annoyed me. There was a backlash of commentators on Twitter decrying the "elitism". Like this tweet from @bonfesse:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">I was dismayed about the presence of purists in the #classic100 on @abcclassic but their "art music" only exists in their imaginations.</blockquote>Or @cosmicdancer's observation (to be fair I think he or she was observing, not advocating):<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">Seriously people. It's a popularity contest, ahem, poll of favourites. What were you expecting? No real surprises so far #classic100</blockquote> Actually, people, you are completely wrong. The whole point of this exercise is to establish a canon. You might not agree with that aim - I think it's amusingly ludicrous - but logically, if you are running a "top 100" list, then by definition you are accepting the premise that some music is better than others. I personally have a totally relativistic notion of musical taste, in which people are free to like what they like. That's why I don't really agree with exercises like this. But if you are going to have the canon-forming exercise, you have to accept value judgements. If you are going to get irritated about purists, you are simply not understanding.<br />
<br />
I'm perfectly happy for people to enjoy McDonalds more than a healthy home-cooked Jamie Oliver recipe. I'm perfectly happy for people to enjoy <i>Celebrity Apprentice</i> more than <i>Casablanca</i>. And I'm perfectly happy never to make a list of the top 100 meals, or top 100 bits of film and television.<br />
<br />
But if you do want to go ahead with such projects, and you genuinely want to rank McDonalds higher than Oliver on the list of 100 best foods, then expect people to call you an uninformed trogdolyte.<br />
<br />
#justsayingJonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-34530137182335611162011-11-08T22:46:00.001-08:002012-10-16T04:00:34.254-07:00ANU student pieces for radioHere is a central comilation of all the music tracks for the UC/ANU reporting refugees project:<br />
<br />
[Kimberley/Ewan Companion House story]<br />
2 tracks of slow fairly desolate violin and clarinet music:<br />
<a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/lament1.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/lament1.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/lament1.mp3</a><br />
<a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/lament2.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/lament2.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/lament2.mp3</a><br />
<br />
[Jane/Michelle Vietnamese refugee]<br />
2 tracks of ambient piano music (Hannah):<br />
<a _mce_href="http://soundcloud.com/hannah_murray/radio-music" href="http://soundcloud.com/hannah_murray/radio-music" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://soundcloud.com/hannah_murray/radio-music</a><br />
<a _mce_href="http://soundcloud.com/hannah_murray/radio-music-3" href="http://soundcloud.com/hannah_murray/radio-music-3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://soundcloud.com/hannah_murray/radio-music-3</a><br />
<br />
[Elise/Natasha - child's perspective]<br />
James - some ambient electro music:<br />
<a _mce_href="http://www.soundcloud.com/jamesadler-1/sudanese-uc/download" href="http://www.soundcloud.com/jamesadler-1/sudanese-uc/download" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.soundcloud.com/jamesadler-1/sudanese-uc/download</a><br />
<br />
[Linda/Clare refugee jobseekers]<br />
Fast uneasy quartet music:<br />
<a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/uneasy.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/uneasy.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/uneasy.mp3</a><br />
<a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/uneasy2.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/uneasy2.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/uneasy2.mp3</a><br />
<br />
[Ting Walker UNHCR story]<br />
Hannah provided music :-)<br />
<a _mce_href="http://soundcloud.com/hannah_murray/synth-radio-music" href="http://soundcloud.com/hannah_murray/synth-radio-music" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://soundcloud.com/hannah_murray/synth-radio-music</a><br />
<br />
[Xiyue/Benhamin - Burmese student]<br />
Leonard's piece:<br />
<a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/673100/Theory%202%20Composition.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/673100/Theory%202%20Composition.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/673100/Theory%202%20Composition.mp3</a><br />
<br />
[Mel/Brock - Sudanese refugee]<br />
Using Jonathan's ambient music, plus an upbeat version:<br />
<a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/fast_gamelan.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/fast_gamelan.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/fast_gamelan.mp3</a><br />
and some more upbeat gamelan improvisation:<br />
<a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/gamelan_upbeat.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/gamelan_upbeat.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/gamelan_upbeat.mp3</a><br />
<br />
[Jaime/Jessica - refugee sexual health]<br />
James and Nichaud:<br />
<a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/james-nichaud.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/james-nichaud.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/james-nichaud.mp3</a><br />
<br />
[John/Courtney - refugee resettlement]<br />
No extra music required<br />
<br />
[Patrick/Alex football]<br />
Zimbabwean football song:<br />
<a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/tornados%20vs%20dynamos.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/tornados%20vs%20dynamos.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/tornados%20vs%20dynamos.mp3</a><br />
<br />
[Dion/Gabrielle - Calvary]<br />
Vorarit Treyanurak guitar solo 2:<br />
<a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/wistful%20guitar.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/wistful%20guitar.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/wistful%20guitar.mp3</a><br />
<br />
<br />
[Grace/Joe - Steve Doszpot]<br />
Edges - Stephanie Jones et al:<br />
<a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/edges.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/edges.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/edges.mp3</a><br />
<br />
[Karen/Stephanie - Review Tribunal]<br />
Hannah Murray live:<br />
<a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/review%20tribunal.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/review%20tribunal.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/review%20tribunal.mp3</a><br />
<br />
[Sarah/Grant - refugee student]<br />
Hannah coming up with something<br />
<br />
[Ashley/Lucy - yasameen]<br />
Jonathan providing music:<br />
<a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/yasameen.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/yasameen.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/yasameen.mp3</a><br />
<br />
[Sean/Michael - Cambodian chef]<br />
String music:<br />
<a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/reflective%20strings.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/reflective%20strings.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/reflective%20strings.mp3</a><br />
<a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/animated%20strings.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/animated%20strings.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/animated%20strings.mp3</a><br />
<br />
[Ashley/Rach - JJJ style vox pops]<br />
James Adler:<br />
<a _mce_href="http://soundcloud.com/jamesadler-1/uc-project-3" href="http://soundcloud.com/jamesadler-1/uc-project-3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://soundcloud.com/jamesadler-1/uc-project-3</a><br />
<br />
[Rachel/Olivia - Teclu]<br />
Vorarit Treyanurak guitar solo<br />
<a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/mellow%20guitar.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/mellow%20guitar.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/mellow%20guitar.mp3</a><br />
<br />
<br />
[Thomas/Simon - Football]<br />
JP to source - maybe something like:<br />
<a _mce_href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6xkheBCi9M" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6xkheBCi9M" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6xkheBCi9M</a><br />
<br />
[Amy/Kathleen - female sexual health]<br />
<a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/reflective%20strings.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/reflective%20strings.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/reflective%20strings.mp3</a><br />
<br />
[Jing/Ryan - refugee student]<br />
<a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/animated%20strings.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/animated%20strings.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/animated%20strings.mp3</a><br />
<br />
[Huw/edwin - Sudanese refugee]<br />
African drumming: <a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/djembe.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/djembe.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/djembe.mp3</a><br />
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[Ambient sound files by Jonathan]<br />
Anyone feel free to use:<br />
Bells/ocean: <a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/ocean-bells.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/ocean-bells.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/ocean-bells.mp3</a><br />
Whales/thunder: <a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/whales-thunder.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/whales-thunder.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/whales-thunder.mp3</a><br />
Gamelan/whales: <a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/gamelan-whales.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/gamelan-whales.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/gamelan-whales.mp3</a><br />
Drifting music: <a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/drifting.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/drifting.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/drifting.mp3</a><br />
<br />
Djembe drumming: <a _mce_href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/djembe.mp3" href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/djembe.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/djembe.mp3</a>Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-1145594801842443882011-11-01T06:02:00.001-07:002012-10-16T04:00:34.251-07:00Prize-Giving<i>Prize-Giving</i><br />Gwen Harwood<br /><br />Professor Eisenbart, asked to attend<br />a girls’ school speech night as an honoured guest<br />and give the prizes out, rudely declined;<br />but from indifference agreed, when pressed<br />with dry scholastic jokes, to change his mind,<br />to grace their humble platform, and to lend<br /><br />distinction (of a kind not specified)<br />to the occasion. Academic dress<br />became him, as he knew. When he appeared<br />the girls whirred with an insect nervousness,<br />the Head in humbler black flapped round and steered<br />her guest, superb in silk and fur, with pride<br /><br />to the best seat beneath half-hearted blooms<br />tortured to form the school’s elaborate crest.<br />Eisenbart scowled with violent distaste,<br />then recomposed his features to their best<br />advantage: deep in thought, with one hand placed<br />like Rodin’s Thinker. So he watched the room's<br /><br />mosaic of young heads. Blonde, black, mouse-brown<br />they bent for their Headmistress’ opening prayer.<br />But underneath a light (no accident<br />of seating, he felt sure), with titian hair<br />one girl sat grinning at him, her hand bent<br />under her chin in mockery of his own.<br /><br />Speeches were made and prizes given. He shook<br />indifferently a host of virgin hands.<br />“Music!” The girl with titian hair stood up,<br />hitched at a stocking, winked at near-by friends,<br />and stood before him to receive a cup<br />of silver chased with curious harps. He took<br /><br />her hand, and felt its voltage fling his hold<br />from his calm age and power; suffered her strange<br />eyes, against reason dark, to take his stare<br />with her to the piano, there to swap<br />her casual schoolgirl’s for a master’s air.<br />He forged his rose-hot dream as Mozart told<br /><br />the fullness of all passion or despair<br />summoned by arrogant hands. The music ended,<br />Eisenbart teased his gown while others clapped,<br />and peered into a trophy which suspended<br />his image upside down: a sage fool trapped<br />by music in a copper net of hair.<br /><br />Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-33346311834617590112011-09-02T17:37:00.001-07:002011-09-02T17:37:20.188-07:00Smells in the cityFor me, the most vivid way to recollect a city is through its smells.<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href='https://picasaweb.google.com/112537065992692811223/BloggerPictures?authkey=Gv1sRgCOiwl8r2-MqGBA#5647925898968455378'><img src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmvFutjBd99CH4A9Vuq6r2jqHCYLmZKmDdtG1ypz8ohhZBVvMyJo6qXYwuLd3l9zWF9P6EielYO47ZTD0Jch6xcNMlq7MEotc7YyLxiwBtohYXb4brxRkaA_qdxHDV9v_Xow9ULw5jX3Q/s288/3.jpg' border='0' width='281' height='227' align='left' style='margin:5px'></a><br />Every city I have lived in or visited for any length is imprinted on my memory as a unique collection of smells. Take New York, for instance. For me, New York is a combination of slightly rotted vegetables, the steamy acridity of the subway vents, and above all the smell of money. Arriving in New York meant exchanging crips plastic Australian bills for a wad of smelly green paper, seemingly imprinted with the sweat of a thousand bluffed poker hands. Not being as particularly visual person, the skyline left me underwhelmed. The Empire State Building looked bigger on TV. But the smells made a deep and unique impression.<br /><br />London, I'm afraid, is the smell of sweaty Englishmen. Packed together on the Tube; packed in the streets and shops of un-airconditioned Oxford Street. Overlaid with a hint of the ubiquitous dog shit and underlaid with the faintly miasmatic background smell of the Thames. I don't have many happy memories of London and I guess I have the memories of the smells to match.<br /><br />Liverpool is another matter. I spent five years in London and Oxford, packed into the centre of a teeming Britain, and I shall never forget first getting off the train at Lime St Station in Liverpool, walking outside and smelling the salt tang of the sea breeze for the first time in years. It smelled like home: that sea-smell could wind its way around the world like a nineteenth-century clipper and draw me back to Sydney harbour like Ariadne's thread. Add to that sea-salt smell a dash of mango chutney and a pinch of gunpowder, and it could be the smell of the British Empire itself.<br /><br /><br /><br /><a href='https://picasaweb.google.com/112537065992692811223/BloggerPictures?authkey=Gv1sRgCOiwl8r2-MqGBA#5647925926602101714'><img src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDmdEhJ_6vBzADo_Az8BoS_4SHBdzEKWxlUWKo5ADiMUiiHDWTJ9IghA3buOT9OEYuvjnA2Vk0ttFf38Vl23raL-nXY-qCtQWRpqujoZl2XMTYwHk40ymE71wZIx3aWmRfN8bpjVUxTfY/s288/4.jpg' border='0' width='281' height='200' align='right' style='margin:5px'></a><br />Of course, the world is full of exotic-smelling cities. Bangkok is uniquely by its particular blend of river, spice and two-stroke petrol-oil fumes. Cairo is sand: the sand of the desert, the sand of the sandstone used to construct just about everything, and a sort of gritty sand that guts up your nose and in your eyes and in your pores. Not exactly a smell, but hard to pin down to any one of the senses.<br /><br />Canberra, where I now live, has no smell. It is prohibited by by-law. Once, it had a faint tang of pine, from the pine-plantations, but they burned down in 2003 and in any case the smell of pine only ever served to reinforce the antiseptic flavor of the place. Now there is nothing. Sanitization is complete.<br /><br /><a href='https://picasaweb.google.com/112537065992692811223/BloggerPictures?authkey=Gv1sRgCOiwl8r2-MqGBA#5647925962630765122'><img src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg0UbC7PkFrT57zPgrhCH0USt1cc3jtz2jMMHXBjbMsmMo-WqxauI60skDm6qxoMqlE60qcd2vQ5ef4F6WmiNEdaa1lqXNzMq5x9BsU4JnDwuwozKLC0I1KzWDgRrH7uemw9C9JFYxaaZA/s288/2.jpg' border='0' width='210' height='281' align='left' style='margin:5px'></a><br />And my favorite? Sydney, of course. I guess that is why I am writing this now. Spring in Sydney brings the smell of warm jasmine over the top of the background smells of the harbour - seawater and the marine diesel of the harbour ferries. Add to the mix the crackling ozone tang of a November thunderstorm just over the horizon, and it smells like paradise, and it smells like home.<br />Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-18279830977034896102011-07-17T08:19:00.000-07:002012-10-16T04:00:34.252-07:00Students document the Canberra International Music FestivalThose of you following my tweets over recent months may have picked up that I have been running a course for first-year students in the ANU School of Music that has involved them responding in a variety of creative ways to the Canberra International Music Festival. I asked the students' permission to share some of the outcomes publicly, and here they are.<br />
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The responses ranged from the creative through to the journalistic. In the latter category were some newsletters produced by students,<a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/Magazine_1_.pdf"> one focusing on the student experience of the festival</a>, the other dealing with the audience experience of the venues, as did <a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/VENUES_AND_MEANINGS_3.pdf">this report</a> based on audience surveys. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglT4CCEY5AOeyvmBVkfxrlJUcEWxmEFZH6a7dSb_vczi11vhyQCNAzFlzyjb4fe-PLASeQIFsstZdBIfBzlzWdLejNo4f4abGaSQYWVZMEjibtfwovir9s23kZ4Kxma2nXzitCIbkmQFoV/s1600/Graeme+Koehne-+Archive+2011-07-18+00-23-14.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglT4CCEY5AOeyvmBVkfxrlJUcEWxmEFZH6a7dSb_vczi11vhyQCNAzFlzyjb4fe-PLASeQIFsstZdBIfBzlzWdLejNo4f4abGaSQYWVZMEjibtfwovir9s23kZ4Kxma2nXzitCIbkmQFoV/s320/Graeme+Koehne-+Archive+2011-07-18+00-23-14.png" width="320" /></a>Many groups embraced online media. <a href="http://graemekoehne.tumblr.com/">This tumblr </a>about the Australian composer graham Koehne contains videos, compositions, reflections and photos of the students' experiences working with Koehne during the festival.<br />
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The Bachelor of Education students produced a fascinating project reflecting on the role of "conductor as educator", which they published as <a href="http://cimfconductors.blogspot.com/">this blog</a>. Another group interviewed performers and composers, blogging the results <a href="http://cimfinterview.blogspot.com/">here</a>.<br />
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Another group put together <a href="http://centralconcepts.wordpress.com/">a blog about Steve Reich's <i>Deserts</i> <i>Music</i>.</a><br />
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One powerful group project was this video made by a group of students about a concert of works focused around the Australian composer Frederick Septimus Kelly. Kelly was a soldier in World War One, surviving Gallipoli only to die on the Somne. He wrote two sonatas in the trenches, one unfinished.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/VefrjxeL6Xo" width="560"></iframe><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglbSPwhGj5dZRuC8a8bnigER3Hd1xwfZye3P80c8jzAMZffOaNAi9e_hwTON8VKHHeMxgOfleDufkoYbjVSsEoGJOBJ1sHF6dDkH6dAGQI2Ec4_HnPqey_8ZeIgL2dtdVkoYFhg3CqDNs5/s1600/ranger.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="221" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglbSPwhGj5dZRuC8a8bnigER3Hd1xwfZye3P80c8jzAMZffOaNAi9e_hwTON8VKHHeMxgOfleDufkoYbjVSsEoGJOBJ1sHF6dDkH6dAGQI2Ec4_HnPqey_8ZeIgL2dtdVkoYFhg3CqDNs5/s320/ranger.jpg" width="320" /></a>There were several extremely creative responses. Students wrote compositions in response to the music they heard and played at the Festival, such as <a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10160070/Ranger.pdf">this work for string quartet</a>. Another group made a <a href="http://centralconceptcpx.tumblr.com/">series of arrangements of the same music</a>, reflecting their individual responses to the festival.<br />
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One of the most interesting responses, sadly too large to upload, was a video of an interview with a flute and guitar duet that performed on original early nineteenth-century instruments during the Festival. The students - another duet - attempted to recreate the stylistic elements of the performance on modern instruments. <br />
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Drawing on the symbolic use of colour in the programming of the Festival, one group created artwork and improvised in response to the various colours and images, and discussed this on a video:<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="300" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/24916083?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="400"></iframe><br />
<a href="http://vimeo.com/24916083">Colourisation</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user7388042">James Adler</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-82369020226324046072011-06-20T22:18:00.000-07:002013-03-14T17:15:13.542-07:00Online learning - why bother?So this is a blogpost as rant/cry for help. I have read plenty of these before, but never written one.<br />
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I'm Head of Musicology at ANU School of Music, and Chair of the Education Committee there. <br />
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My main responsibilities in the first job are to coordinate the academic areas of music students' study - music history, cultural inquiry, music theory and analysis, non-western musics - and to teach the first-year course in same (of course the most important course the students take!). I'm just coming off a hugely successful blended course in first semester, about which I am <a href="http://moodlemoot.org.au/mod/page/view.php?id=54#JPowles" target="_blank">presenting at Moodle Moot AU</a> in a month.<br />
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In the second part of my job (Chair of Education Committee) I'm responsible for coordinating the introduction of a wholly new BMus degree by 2013, one that is built upon principles of flexibility, student-centered learning, and makes full use of current and future learning technologies. <br />
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Just now, I have had to make a change in staffing for music theory teaching in semester 2: the person scheduled to teach it now won't be. So, looking to make an opportunity out of adversity, I decided to teach the course myself, online.<br />
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Now, this makes excellent pedagogic sense. Learning music theory requires students to learn a set of skills and concepts that are essentially compositional: how to put notes together to make coherent structures of pitch and voice. They do this individually - while I am a big fan of group learning, music theory is probably one thing that needs an individual focus. But the plus side of this is that students can work at their own pace - theory is probably best taught asynchronously, with the students having as much (or as little) time as they need to tinker, to get it right. There is minimal "content" - the notion of a music theory lecture is almost absurd. The students need to practise these skills, sometimes many times (thus whetting my appetite for a gaming-based course progression). They need individual feedback on their attempts - an individual dialogue with me the tutor. They above all need to hear their work, see it written down, and make corrections - music theory is an ideal instance for multimedia learning.<br />
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For all these reasons, music theory is just made for online learning, if it's put together well. I intend to put together 16 or so 15-minute podcasts - all of which can be accessed from the beginning of the course - with me talking through some concepts and examples while the student see them unfold on the score. The students will then work through some examples themselves, which I'll post as MusicXML files; they can upload their attempts, with questions, and I'll give them feedback. As they successfully complete the exercises, this will unlock new pathways and concepts. I'll stream the students into groups on Moodle so they can see the questions and feedback of students at about their level. I'll give extension/creative work for the students who really have a flair, and who want to extend the slightly artificial world of the harmony exercise into full-blown composition. Finally, I'll offer a two-hour "drop in" face-to-face opportunity each week, if the students really and literally need me to hold their hands as they complete these exercises. Summative assessment will by the submission of a folio of sixteen completed exercises. They can do all these in week one, or in week twelve, or do one or two a week - whatever suits them.<br />
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Now the rant part.<br />
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So, I explain all this to my colleagues who I am supposedly leading to a bold new educational future, expecting at the very least some thanks for bailing them out of a difficult staffing situation. But what do I get? Sheer, unadulterated horror at the idea of the students not getting "face-to-face support". An automatic assumption that online learning is to save time and cut corners. That is is second-rate. One colleague, a very nice guy, even offered to take some tutorials himself, if I didn't have time, so "the students weren't disadvantaged".<br />
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I patiently explained that the students were going to be better supported this way than if I had crammed them into tutorial groups of twenty and spent two hours wandering about looking over their shoulders correcting consecutive fifths; that in fact, doing it online was going to take considerably more of my time than doing it face-to-face (LOTS of preparation time and LOTS of feedback time, whereas face to face I could literally do with no preparation, half asleep); but that the reason why I'd teach it online was to give the students a better-quality learning experience.<br />
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No dice. The colleagues offered sheer, blank incomprehension of this argument; worse, a smug certainty that, whatever I said, they were never going to question their own assumption that being in the holy physical presence of the divine lecturer was going to be a superior learning experience, come what may.<br />
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Must be something in the deodorant they wear, I guess.<br />
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So, frankly, I'm wondering why I should even bother. I'm going to be putting myself out doing something innovative (but not all that innovative!), something better - but I'll have several vultures looking over my shoulder waiting for something to go wrong. I feel like binning the whole idea, and hiring some matronly back-room piano teacher to drill the poor buggers in cadences, Dulcie Holland style, for two hours a week for thirteen weeks.<br />
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I'm not going to, of course. I'm going to go ahead with my plans. But I'd really appreciate some moral support from the eLearning crowd who might have been here before.Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-79011102152237037022011-05-14T15:43:00.000-07:002012-10-16T04:00:34.259-07:00Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgehn: presence in absence<i> The following is the text of a talk I gave about the first of Mahler's</i> Kindertotenlieder<i> at the ICTM "Laments" Symposium at the ANU on April 20, 2011</i><br />
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For some months, in preparation for this symposium, I have been trying to define the characteristics of the idea of “lament” in somewhat structural terms. In fact, this goal of articulating “lament” as a concept, as opposed to merely letting the multiple meanings of the word resonate as they will, has been, for me, a persistent irritation – like a mosquito constantly buzzing about one's head, impossible to swat. Or perhaps it is more like one of those occasions when one forgets a name, or a word, that then remains frustratingly, infuriatingly on the tip of one's tongue, because the tantalising idea that underpins the concept of “lament” is surely one of<i> absence</i>.<br />
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Every lament is an encounter with an absence. The classic, canonic and central laments are the elegies and threnodies that mark the felt absences of death. But, life being what it is, there are many other subjects for lamentation: lament for lost love, lament for lost youth, all the way to Beethoven's rage over a lost penny, which certainly qualifies as a lament, even if an infantile one. And what has been frustrating me in my definitional musings is that I cannot think of one single example of a lament that does not encounter the lost, the absent; either actual or potential.<br />
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The nature of this encounter with absence vary by context. A musical ritual of mourning usually serves to place an individual's grief in a communal context: to share, and to locate mourning within a cultural tradition. In the lament as ritual, private grief is made public through communal enactment. <br />
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By contrast, an artistic response to absence usually creates a presence: through art, music, poetry, an image of what or whom is lost is created within the work. In the lament as art-form, from a real or literal absence, a figurative presence is generated: an image of the departed. Here, private grief is made public through communicative representation.<br />
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The majority of my paper concerns the nature of this communicative representation in the first of Mahler's <i>Kindertotenlieder</i> - “Songs on the Death of Children”. The notion of “presence” is loaded, theoretically speaking, and is a contested one, and in some senses this short song of Mahler's is about to become the battleground on which the theoretical struggle for presence will be waged. But first I'd like to fling a few visual and textural laments into the mix, to provide some depth and perspective on the relationship between presence and absence. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisUh8XOLRZxe8_eRYdld6vpGA3Q-44_qA_qHxQ88Uxlg9MWHhUTrL6-GlUNBjYaeOW43Ztmif1KoIyifhLBQuP5xx9TeNRpxproI_-xRQ3CNpQYvJjVHpmSCA7As5zR83iwDxF6nZ2Ntwh/s1600/clausen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="310" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisUh8XOLRZxe8_eRYdld6vpGA3Q-44_qA_qHxQ88Uxlg9MWHhUTrL6-GlUNBjYaeOW43Ztmif1KoIyifhLBQuP5xx9TeNRpxproI_-xRQ3CNpQYvJjVHpmSCA7As5zR83iwDxF6nZ2Ntwh/s320/clausen.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
Sir George Clausen painted <i>Youth Mourning</i> in 1916. Interpretation here is not problematic: the image is of youth, as a vulnerable, naked young woman, lamenting the dead young men of the First World War. The kneeling figure in a ritual posture of grief, together with the partial cross, frame in the background the waterlogged shell-holes of a Flanders field. The interesting thing here is the portrayal of absence: in particular the cross being truncated at the edge of the canvas tells us that the focus of the composition of the painting has been shifted to what is central, to what is even more important. The cross and the woman frame, enfold – cradle, if you will – what is at the centre of the painting. And what is central is … absent. A palpable absence. We could imagine the mourning woman as Isolde, singing to a dead Tristan that only she can see. It is not that there is nothing at the centre of the painting: on the contrary, there is something, gone. A presence through absence.<br />
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Rather than my waxing lyrical about this conceptual inseparability of absence and presence in the lament, it is probably better to let Shakespeare do so for me. Certainly, Harold Bloom would approve of letting art speak in place of criticism. Shakespeare's Sonnet 64 is both a lament and a love song, and makes the point of presence in absence more compellingly than I could:<br />
<blockquote><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">When I have seen the hungry ocean gain</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">And the firm soil win of the watery main,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Increasing store with loss and loss with store;</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">When I have seen such interchange of state,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Or state itself confounded to decay;</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">That Time will come and take my love away.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">This thought is as a death, which cannot choose</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">But weep to have that which it fears to lose. </span></blockquote><br />
“A thought … which cannot choose but weep to have that which it fears to lose” actually maps the absent onto the present by force – weeping in the presence of the beloved in the face of the inevitability of absence. There are two powerful presences in this sonnet: one is the speaker, invoking the personified force of time, ruin and destruction. The other is his beloved – but she is absent. She does not speak. Her presence is only affirmed, held, cradled, by the words describing her inevitable departure. There is, it seems, inhabiting the concept of the lament as artwork a structural pairing between presence and absence, in which the figure, the image of one gone is enfolded or framed by what is present: the metaphor I have been using is that of “cradling”.<br />
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This notion of cradling the lamented is useful in thinking about the first of Mahler's <i>Kindertotenlieder</i>. The original <i>Kindertotenlieder</i> were a group of 428 poems written by Friedrich Rückert in 1833–34 in reaction to the illness and death of his two children Luise and Ernst. They were an essentially private set of laments, not intended for publication and only published after Rückert's death in 1872. Mahler chose five of the poems for his setting, which he wrote between 1901 and 1904. I want to look in detail at the first.<br />
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<blockquote><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgehn,<br />
Als sei kein Unglück die Nacht geschehn!<br />
Das Unglück geschah nur mir allein!<br />
Die Sonne, sie scheinet allgemein!<br />
<br />
Du mußt nicht die Nacht in dir verschränken,<br />
Mußt sie ins ew'ge Licht versenken!<br />
Ein Lämplein verlosch in meinem Zelt!<br />
Heil sei dem Freudenlicht der Welt!</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> Now the sun will rise as brightly<br />
as if no misfortune had occurred in the night.<br />
The misfortune has fallen on me alone.<br />
The sun - it shines for everyone.<br />
<br />
You must not keep the night inside you;<br />
you must immerse it in eternal light.<br />
A little light has been extinguished in my household;<br />
Light of joy in the world, be welcome</span></blockquote><br />
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Already we have several presences. Mahler's music enfolds and cradles the presence of the poet, himself gone, but allowed to speak through and with the music. And the poet inscribes a protagonist, the one who speaks and sings; a father who has lost as child in the night. Overwhelmingly, though, the most palpable presence in the song is the absent one – the dead child to whom the second stanza of the poem is (perhaps) addressed. Mahler's music cradles an image of the dead poet, whose poetic imagination enfolds an imagined grieving father, who speaks of, holds, cradles in words his absent child.<br />
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Now, at this point, as presences multiply alarmingly, it might be wise to invoke some theoretical and semiotic perspectives. The aim is to seek clarification, but the probable result will be no doubt to further complicate the issue. In a different domain – or possible different - the battle between “presence” and “absence” is the central issue of theory and criticism of the late twentieth century. The deconstruction of what Derrida termed the “illusory metaphysics of presence” is the first item on the post-structuralist agenda. For the criticism of literature and the arts, Derrida's assault on presence, simultaneous to and cognate with Barthes declaration of the death of the author, had the effect of rendering impossible the idea of authorial presence in a work. Meaning is generated through the interplay of texts, the constellation of signs and codes brought together and to bear by the reader or listener in the act of interpretation. The very idea of authorial presence – the notion that Mahler, or Rückert, are speaking to us through the words and music, bring a privileged and essential meaning to the work – is called into question by the inherent nature of language itself (and here, we treat music as a language) to subvert its own meanings: meaning is always partial, incomplete, deferred, provisional, in an endless cycle of intertextual interpenetration that Derrida terms difference.<br />
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This post-structuralist and deconstructive position is theoretically compelling. However, it does have its opponents: John Searle was Derrida's most famous sparring partner in the world of philosophy, but in literary criticism the key figure is perhaps Harold Bloom. Bloom's concept of artistic meaning is so centred in the notion of the artist wrestling with tradition, with the oedipal ghosts of his or her predecessors, that some notion of real authorial presence by necessity underpins his conception of meaning. Christopher Norris described it well when he wrote “Bloom [seems] torn between a defence of poetry which holds to the ethos or Romantic individualism, and a deconstructive poetics which tends to dissolve such themes into an abstract system of tropes and relationships. In the last resort, however, Bloom is always willing to invoke the terminology of 'voice', 'presence' and subjective origin which Derrida so resolutely tracks down to its metaphors”.<br />
<br />
Less well-known than Bloom is George Steiner. Steiner's 1989 essay <i>Real Presences</i> - subtitled “is there anything in what we say?” acknowledges the theoretical unarguability of a deconstructive position, but takes issue with it on ethical rather than theoretical grounds. I shall return to Steiner's intriguing position at the end of my talk.<br />
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In the Mahler, we can see representational and intertextual signification at work in the song at the most obvious and accessible level of interpretation of musical meaning. This is at the level I would term <i>mimetic</i> <i>semiosis</i>: the music makes imitative reference to ideas in the text, or to ideas that are easily inferred from the context, through the invocation of a referential musical language, to the vocabulary and grammar of which each listener has different and provisional access. <br />
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For instance, the repeated, paired couplets are a familiar musical figure, standing for, signifying “sighing” and invoking musical texts from Dowland through Mozart to Wagner, for those able to understand the code. Second, the abrupt shifts of modality from major to minor evoke the shifts from light to dark in the poem, for listeners with even the most cursory familiarity with the affective references of Western music since 1500.<br />
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There are more specific intertextualities. The ascending chromaticism, descending diatonic minor vocal lines, and tonic pedals all recall Schubert's <i>Der Tod und das Mädchen</i>, clearly a resonant and appropriate text for the Mahler to evoke. There are other parallels with songs from the <i>Schwannengesang </i>cycle, Schubert's last. Once the door of intertextuality is open, of course, many visitors come flooding in; for instance, Kofi Agawu has observed the presence in the music of the <i>Kindertotenlieder</i> of Brahms-like developing variation, and harmonic practice that echoes agner's <i>Tristan</i>.<br />
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One aspect of mimetic semiosis that draws attention to itself is the Mahler's use of the repeated glockenspiel strokes. This recalls the sound of bells tolled to announce a death – the eponymous “death knell”. Sometimes the age of the deceased dictated the number of bell strokes – and here, there are two strokes. <br />
<br />
Semiotically, these bells are doing more than making a mimetic imitation of funeral bells. They are of course small, and high – child-sized tolling, if you will – and quite specifically echo the text “Ein Lämplein verlosch in meinem Zelt!” - a little lamp has gone out in my household. The little lamp is the soul of the child, and with these glockenspiel strokes Mahler offers an aural depiction of that childlike soul.<br />
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The graphic explicitness of this aural image of the soul is slightly trite. Indeed, it is possible to find it quite comic – although revealing that we do not do so. There is a visual analogy for this depiction which could be illuminating. I think what Mahler has done sonically is similar to what the director has done visually in this piece of film:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEWYSI0zSZDSUg2ctmjaQkyDS2eacXdgstrfNwDwp4_wEqj7QMan9xhPAxs1rNVwAh4XfBRN1zkG9FtJhP1BZYK8sVrz5vlqxnAWQTmVExfXRhfv06PfrY80ovTUMudsfB4uMWAChq5bFs/s1600/Sirius_Soul.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEWYSI0zSZDSUg2ctmjaQkyDS2eacXdgstrfNwDwp4_wEqj7QMan9xhPAxs1rNVwAh4XfBRN1zkG9FtJhP1BZYK8sVrz5vlqxnAWQTmVExfXRhfv06PfrY80ovTUMudsfB4uMWAChq5bFs/s320/Sirius_Soul.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
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The visual representation, from the third <i>Harry Potter</i> film, is of the soul leaving the body - a bright white point of light, the visual analogue of Mahler's glockenspiel strokes. This is extreme mimesis, representation or metaphor driven to excess. It permits the most anachronistic intertextualities, between Mahler and Harry Potter – although I wouldn't go so far as to deny the aesthetic similarities between to two. It is also, in both cases, trite in the extreme.<br />
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So where does this leave us in terms of presence and absence in the lament? A surface level investigation of semiosis, which highlights the intertextual interplay of mimetic reference, quickly confirms a post-structuralist reading of presence in the musical text. There is a shifting, provisional and partial presence of Rückert, Mahler, the imaginary father and child, conveyed through bells, sighs, and overtly referential musical symbolism. It's not that difficult to follow the chain of intertextuality to find the presence of Schubert, Brahms, Wagner … or indeed Harry Potter. <br />
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Indeed, perhaps because of this lack of interpretative difficulty that the entire deconstructionist project left music relatively untouched, compared with literature and philosophy. The notion that referentiality in music is provisional, deferred, partial and incomplete is not exactly earth shattering, as it proved for language, as the specific nature of referential signification of music has always been problematic. On the contrary, traditionally, the quest for musical presence, for authorial voice, has been located in the domain of structure; in the musical syntagm, rather than the musical vocabulary. The presence of the composer has been observed in ideas like the unity and organicism of the musical work as a demonstration of compositional vision; or through the conceptual superstructures afforded by syntactical tools such as the leitmotif, or dodecaphonic organisation. <br />
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Seeing the work's structure, rather than referents, as the site of meaning is what I shall term allegorical semiosis. This terminology follows that of postructuralist Paul de Man who sought to reprioritize structure – the 'rhetoric of pure figuration' – over symbolic or referential modes of meaning. What happens when we look for meaning in the syntactical structure of music, without reference to possible mimetic, intertextual or extra-musical signification; but equally without reference to pre-ordained codes of musical structural interpretation – sonata forms, presuppositions of unity whether motivic or harmonic, as well as more recent a priori music-analytic symbologies such as gendered structures? <br />
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The results of this allegoric structural reading of the first of the Kindertotenlieder are significant. Structurally, the music is extremely predictable. There are two generative voice-leading principles at work. One is a classic Schenkerian descent from the fifth scale degree towards harmonic closure:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOJL_M76QUyZldFPNyF6zn6UcWj-ASZ3Ev7coPgIdGScCyAXWclrHZHO7ulg4uT3LchWoW-8mlnuIDiM1dt2DGd2Af72gU5116WmW3UL9-9E99liIbJa9D0dn8vq4h-y-SvnttWUQ1VUme/s1600/mahler1.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="77" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOJL_M76QUyZldFPNyF6zn6UcWj-ASZ3Ev7coPgIdGScCyAXWclrHZHO7ulg4uT3LchWoW-8mlnuIDiM1dt2DGd2Af72gU5116WmW3UL9-9E99liIbJa9D0dn8vq4h-y-SvnttWUQ1VUme/s400/mahler1.bmp" width="400" /></a></div><br />
But of course simple harminuc closure is never achieved. Rather, the upper voice resolves upwards by semitone (another “sigh” in the mimetic plane). From this point of quasi-resolution then initiates the second generative voice-leading principle: a non-functional ascending linear chromatic motion that rises as high as the B-flat (the highest point, as an accented upper neighbour-note, of the original structural descent) at which point harmonic function kicks back in, the B flat is reheard as a dominant minor ninth and the passage moves back towards the first principle of tonal resolution by stepwise descent.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtI7nERL1QRyT7sTSECdvPUaPcOZS6B30tr71Dm4uUpNsx3YwjUXjSYevvRoqIrO0UFVa7UUzlJO1vGtX85fmhAWGrkZr8yF4i7LwSyttOR616OuUQU3SL4kpn1gwb3FiciRgasR7sHfHW/s1600/mahler2.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="91" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtI7nERL1QRyT7sTSECdvPUaPcOZS6B30tr71Dm4uUpNsx3YwjUXjSYevvRoqIrO0UFVa7UUzlJO1vGtX85fmhAWGrkZr8yF4i7LwSyttOR616OuUQU3SL4kpn1gwb3FiciRgasR7sHfHW/s400/mahler2.bmp" width="400" /></a></div><br />
This gesture essentially happens the same way four times in the song: each time there is a moment of discontinuity, a point at which the upward chromatic linearity overpowers the gravitational pull of the functional harmony. This discontinuity is paralleled at the cadence points, in which linear chromatic motion arbitrarily intrudes and disrupts the goal-directed voice-leading.<br />
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The point is this: there is absolutely no rational - musical – reason for the change of modality that precipitates the upward chromatic motion and its consequent emotional intensification. It is precipitated by a musical deus ex machina – a sudden and entirely logically inexplicable assertion of lightness or positivity. This abrupt move from darkness to light entirely parallels the structural unfolding Rückert text : “The misfortune has fallen on me alone. The sun - it shines for everyone.” <br />
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Theoretically, there is an important distinction here. The music is not symbolizing grief, or giving some metaphorical representation of grief. Rather, we are given in the actual structure of the music a play of figuaration that is that of grief, in abstract: the chaotic and unpredictable shift from hope to despair that characterises the structure of mourning. This is where the fine distinction is to invoke the notion of <i>allegorical semiosis</i> - the rhetoric of pure figuration – instead of representative mimesis. <br />
<br />
We are nearly at the end, and have explored some of the theoretical issues to do with the location of meaning in the first of the <i>Kindertotenlieder</i>. We have looked at mimetic semiosis, representation, intertextuality, allegorical meaning, and musical structure as the site of the communicative power of the Mahler's music. However, I would wager that we have been left unsatisfied: that none of these semiotic processes have adequately described what it is we understand from this music, and certainly none has captured the trope of presence in absence which seemed so intuitively compelling at the start of this paper.<br />
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In <i>Real Presences</i>, Gearge Steiner writes:<br />
<blockquote><span style="font-size: small;">Face to face with the presence of offered meaning which we call a text (or a painting or a symphony), we seek to hear its language. As we would that of the elect stranger coming towards us. There is in this endeavour, as deconstruction would immediately point out , an ultimately unprovable hope and presupposition of sense, a presumption that intelligibility is conceivable and, indeed, realizable. Such a presupposition is always susceptible of refutation. The presence before us may be that of a mute (Beckett edges us towards that grim jest), of a madman uttering gibberish or, more disturbingly, of an intensely communicative persona whose idiom – linguistic, stylistic, hermetically-grounded – we simply cannot grasp. (p. 156)</span></blockquote>And here perhaps is the elephant in the room. This Mahler musical text comes towards us as a stranger, offering unprovable hope: that in this music, in these words, are cradled real presences, with whom we have genuinely transformative encounters: a grieving father, a lost child. It is not, ultimately, the processes of signification that generate the most important meaning; it is ultimately <i>ontological semiosis</i> – the nature of being, the being-in-the-work; the presence and absence of real mourners.<br />
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What moves us, what makes the music profound, is that Mahler cradles in music Rückert's real and authentic grief. The grief is not yet Mahler's own: Mahler had lost no children when he composed the <i>Kindertotenliede</i>r. Sadly, he lost his four-year-old daughter soon after completing the piece, and wrote “When I really lost my daughter, I could not have written these songs any more”. And maybe this comment should alert us to what is at stake.<br />
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Steiner argues that while the deconstructive position is theoretically irrefutable, ethically we need to make a wager on the real force of ontological semiosis; on the power of being-in-the-work to be a communicative force; and thus on the value of the arts to be a genuine tool with which to understand the human condition. Steiner particularly emphasis the role of music in this wager.<br />
<blockquote><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Music makes utterly substantive what I have sought to suggest of the real presence in meaning where that presence cannot be analytically shown or paraphrased. Music brings to our daily lives an immediate encounter with a logic of sense other than that of reason. It is, precisely, the truest name we have for the logic at work in the springs of being that generate vital forms. (p. 218)</span></div></blockquote>And there I have to put to rest my own investigations into the semiosis at work in this little song of Mahler's. It feels like I have conjured up a theoretical maelstrom whirling around the still, calm, centre of meaning in the song: which is the real, palpable presence of an absent child. And despite the luminous theoretical reputations of some of the spirits I have conjured; Jacques Derrida,, Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, George Steiner – I might, in the end, leave the last words on the subject of the ontological question of the reality of presence to Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore:<br />
<blockquote><span style="font-size: small;">'Tell me one last thing,' said Harry. 'Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?'</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: small;">Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry's ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-size: small;">'Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?' (p. 579)</span></blockquote>Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-90156569546241972652011-02-23T15:03:00.001-08:002013-03-14T17:15:25.469-07:00Stories<i>On the ABC Drum, editor Jonathan Green posted a marvelous piece about the media coverage of the Christchurch earthquake - <a target="_blank" href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/02/23/3146945.htm">"The media is not here to help. It does not feel your pain"</a><br /><br />I posted a comment, which I am reposting here in an expanded form. </i><br /><br />Great piece, Jonathan. <br /><br />There is a curious thing happening here: in the interest of "human interest", the actual humanity of the subjects the media reports is stripped away. The human dignity and respect; the families and relationships; the complexities of why, and how, and what it means for individuals to be caught up in these terrible events - these things are jettisoned so the media can easily and quickly project an uncomplicated, powerful, but ultimately superficial image. Get the bloody headshot on the front page, and bugger the consequences. Or the context, or the respect, or the sympathy.<br /><br />You pick yourself up on how the story becomes a "story" - going from a complex, human narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with characters and richness and depth, to a short, sharp, media moment. But the word - "story"- has lost its meaning. The actual story just an excuse for the images and their predictable effect. Just like porn, really, which a lot of this voyeuristic coverage is starting to resemble quite closely.<br /><br />Increasingly, the actors in these porn-films-masquerading-as-journalism are the media personalities themselves. It happened during Cyclone Yasi, where the focus most of the commercial television wasn't the cyclone and its impact, it was shots of Peter Overton standing <i>in</i> the cyclone. It happened during the flood coverage, with Peter Doherty turning himself into an image, the only reasonable story behind which had to be "Journalist Makes Himself Look Like a Goose". These were both covered deftly, and scathingly, by <a target="_blank" href="http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s3132387.htm">Jonathan Holmes on Mediawatch</a>. <br /><br />Worst, it happened in Egypt, where the world's commercial media seemed to queue up to report themselves reporting from Cairo. For a week a complex story unfolded: a story about history, the nature of political pressure from popular support, the values of the Egyptian military, the nature international reaction in the US and the Middle East, Mubarak's personal intransigence, and the unique cultural, post-colonial and political context informing Egypt's lengthy and difficult history of self-determination. This story was covered, in places brilliantly, by analysts, commentators, and writers around the world.<br /><br />Few of them were in Egypt. <br /><br />The commercial television journalists in Egypt were there, in truth, for one reason: to get the shots of bloody heads, corpses, and wailing women when the real fighting started. Thankfully, the Egyptian people and military displayed more sense than the hungry TV news editors, and catastrophic violence was largely avoided - except for that ludicrous cavalry charge that was staged by Mubarak's heavies, I can confidently assume, precisely <i>because</i> the world's media was there to report it.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><center><a href='https://picasaweb.google.com/jonathan.powles/BloggerPictures?authkey=Gv1sRgCOiwl8r2-MqGBA#5577034045896994530'><img src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWU9NPRuYAU9ugPVPucmksrGjpb75j99GUiSlvvKjjSPYEptMz999uqhT-iYMIQE8WB9C_8fTAUs59xj6Wf4toW-xBw4yj3U5h8MnhavUhdaRKuDiShKAJhjvJ2lUrJUmR6a84h2GHgoo/s288/2.jpg' border='0' width='276' height='183' style='margin:5px'></a></center><br /><br /><br /><br />On ABC local radio just now there was an interview with a NZ Salvation Army major who is in Christchurch helping with the necessary counselling for shock, loss and grief. He is staying in a motor park, and talked of overhearing the occupants of the next-door cabin, a father and daughter. The daughter was asking when she could go home; the father was gently telling the child that their home was broken; then it caught fire; and now it is gone. They will not go home.<br /><br />This is a story; and its a story that is being told hundreds of times across Christchurch.<br /><br />Maybe we need more stories, and should grow up enough to read the ones that don't have pictures.<br /><br /><br />Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2992923020469415248.post-80114271616024533262011-01-30T15:35:00.001-08:002012-10-16T04:00:34.260-07:00Why I use Twitter.<i>Just now, "educational technologist Mike Bogle" (or maybe just Mike Bogle) deleted his Twitter account, and wrote <a target="_blank" href="http://techticker.net/2011/01/27/why-i-deleted-mbogle/">this excellent blog post</a> describing why.<br /><br />I posted a comment on his piece, and because it touches on the whole reason I believe (or want to believe) that Twitter is valuable, I'm posting a slightly edited version of my original reply to Mike here:</i><br /><br />I’m determined to believe that the point of Twitter is precisely to break online identities out of professional or special interest silos, and give us the chance to interact as holistic individuals. I say I’m determined to believe it, in the sense that I think that’s what it can be, and maybe should be: but I remain to be convinced that’s what it is.<br /><br />Ultimately I think that the way forward for education lies in finding ways to engage whole people in learning interactions, not just the narrow slices of ourselves we choose to portray as our identities in any given context.<br /><br />Anyway, that’s my excuse for subjecting my twitter followers to a random mix of professional links to education and music articles, political commentary, word games, jokes (often ribald) and the odd tirade about the Australian rugby team. I know that mix sits oddly with those who started following me at (say) an education conference.<br /><br />But that’s who I am.<br /><br />I do wonder why we try so hard to present edited versions of ourselves , and I’m also convinced it has something to do with the level of disengagement currently endemic in Western education at all levels. Among students and teachers, if we are honest about it. It’s a crisis of relevance; of failure to see the point (and here I mean the human point, the existential point) of learning; and I think that’s because we don’t connect with whole people.<br /><br />Twitter lends itself to this role because of its intrinsically democratic structure: all tweets have equal place in the timeline, and the 140 character limit forces the dominant to "yield the conch" to the next speaker in a delightfully leveling way.<br /><br />I guess I could advocate a similar argument for how Twitter and other social media are potentially transforming journalism, politics ... but the bow I have drawn is already long enough.<br /><br />Sorry to use your comment section as a rant opportunity, but I think you have hit on something very important.<br /><br />Jonathan Powleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18141253556054065767noreply@blogger.com0