(For the whole piece, you'll need Spotify, and De Staat is a better reason than most to sign up for it if you haven't already!) The title means The Republic, and this 1976 piece is an imagination of what Plato's Republic means and meant for music; a musical discourse on how his ideas about music might relate to contemporary society.
Knussen hasn't added to his symphonic canon these last 35 years, but the principles that this piece embodies - its way of thinking and feeling made into sound, its connections, compressions, and concentrations of musical discourse and music-historical references – are still signature phenomena of Knussen's music today just as they were then.
If it does, the more sophisticated musical elements take center stage and demand attention, pulling the listener out of the reverie of self-actualization and into the world of musical discourse, detracting from pop music's purpose.
On his blog and in interviews, Shadow has grouchily attacked file-sharing and free downloads (it devalues music), as well as trolling (it debases musical discourse).
However, by processing vast amounts of raw data and performing unprecedented large-scale analyses beyond the reach of teams of human experts, they can provide valuable insight into some of the most basic aspects of musical discourse, including the evolution of popular music over the years.
The genius of Reich's – and Philip Glass's – minimalism was that it was, on one hand, a riposte to what the experimental Americans saw and heard as the aridity of European modernism, and that it gave back to contemporary music the pulse, harmony, and repetition that defined musical discourse in the past.
This course explores Parisian musical life during the long nineteenth century, situating musical discourses, institutions, and forms within the broader landscapes of literary and artistic Romanticism.
A specialist in 19th- and early 20th-century opera, and music and modernist cultures of the Viennese fin-de-siècle and Weimar eras especially, her recent interests include forays into sound studies and musical discourses of nature and landscape.
Such instrumental mimesis in Euripides' tragedies does more than just show off his own skill and engagement with contemporary musical trends and discourse: it is also always used for a particular dramatic effect, thus providing evidence of his increasing experimentation towards the end of his career with the role(s) music could play within a tragedy.
This course explores through the prism of Beethoven's music the relationship between musical practice and philosophical discourse in the aesthetic critique of modernity.
But links between musical style and discourses of place are complex.
