Angra foi uma importante cidade do arquipélago dos Açores enquanto centro de passagem das rotas marítimas atlânticas, assento de diocese desde 1534 e, na segunda metade do século XVIII, da Capitania-Geral dos Açores. Foram fundadas várias instituições religiosas na cidade desde o século XVI, nomeadamente igrejas paroquiais e conventos, até à sua…[Read more]

Robert Kennedy proclaimed, “Except for war, there is nothing in American life which trains a boy better for life than football.” While the sport’s governing bodies are presently distancing themselves from violent connections—altering rules in order to make the game safer for players—football culture remains firmly connected with militaris…[Read more]

Proposta para trabalho final de Mestrado em Interpretação Artística – Piano, acerca do compositor italiano do século XX Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-1975) e da sua obra para piano. Serão abordados aspetos biográficos, o contexto sociopolítico e cultural na Europa e Itália na primeira metade do século, o enquadramento das obras para piano no contexto…[Read more]

Les usages de la reproduction sonore parmi les musulmans mauriciens illustrent les liens entre religion publique et médiation religieuse. Les usages de la reproduction sonore parmi les musulmans mauriciens illustrent les liens entre religion publique et médiation religieuse. Ces deux dimensions de la religion s’appuient sur des objets mat…[Read more]

This thesis examines the relationship of the ‘approved’ avant-garde culture to the ‘outsider’ culture of experimentalism. This relationship exhibits some parallels to the idea of cultural hegemony articulated by Edward Said in Orientalism and is informed by four basic aesthetic principles. These principles can be found in the work of Corneli…[Read more]

On June 17, 2018, the Aquarius, a boat carrying refugees, docked in Valencia. The wave of solidarity that ran through the city and neighboring towns in response to this arrival was intermingled with ignorance of a phenomenon—migration across the Mediterranean Sea—that has been a historical constant, and which indexes both the aspirations and fea…[Read more]

Call for papers for the II Historical Soundscapes Meeting – Évora 2019, that will take place at the University of Évora, October 16th-18th, 2019. The meeting is organized by the FCT research project PASEV – Patrimonialization of Évora’s Soundscape (1540-1910) (ref ALT20-03-0145-FEDER-028584 • LISBOA-01-0145-FEDER-028584). Further information and…[Read more]

Finite Element Analyses (FEA) was used to predict the resonant modes of the Tsar Kolokol, a 200-ton fractured bell that sits outside the Kremlin in Moscow. Frequency and displacement data informed a physical model implemented in the Faust programming language (Functional Audio Stream). The authors hosted a concert for Tsar bell and carillon with…[Read more]

In this chapter I discuss how contests about religious language have revolved around a contrast between, on the one hand, a preference for literalism, with its emphasis on reference and denotation; and on the other hand, a valuation of the poetic functions of language and its material properties. Turning to the issue of electronically mediated…[Read more]

Shipibo indigenous people perform a sophisticated array of vocal musical genres, including short ‘laughing songs’ called osanti. These song-jokes make fun of certain non-humans, mostly animals. They are by definition sung from within the non-humans’ perspective. Osanti are only performed by trained specialists in indigenous medicine and sorce…[Read more]

A ermida de Nossa Senhora dos Remédios, localizada junto ao solar da família Canto, na cidade de Angra (Ilha Terceira), foi construída por António Pires do Canto, um dos filhos do Provedor das Armadas Pero Anes do Canto, em meados do século XVI. Desde a sua fundação, esta ermida esteve ligada a uma das famílias mais influentes da ilha Terceir…[Read more]

This bibliography presents selected sources (mostly in English) at the intersection of music and architecture. Many of the sources approach the relationship between the practices through multiple case studies. Several books focused on particular artists in both disciplines have been included not because those artists are central to the study of…[Read more]

A brief blog post with some notes on the historical soundscape of Flores Island (Azores), its churches mostly in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (1314) portrays Hell as an alienated realm, in which the doomed spirits must spend eternity in isolation and regret. Franz Liszt’s two-movement Dante Symphony (1857), based on the Inferno and Purgatorio, gives musical form to Dante’s textual expressions of agony. These evocations of suffering are enhanced by Lisz…[Read more]

Contemporary developments in the medium of the moving picture, particularly in relation to the general digitisation of media, are bringing about substantial changes to long-held conceptions of both its theory and its practice. This thesis asserts that a significant factor in these, both historically and in terms of potential development, is the…[Read more]

What were the sounds of war in the early modern period? What were the sounds of peace? The period between 1570 and 1750—roughly coincident with the cultural era known in Western contexts as “the Baroque”—was characterized by almost continual conflict in Europe. Whether caught up in the French Wars of Religion, the English Civil War, the Thirty…[Read more]

For some years I have been meaning to upload some of the material I have gathered over the years, including interviews I conducted with experimental composers and performers. One of the most useful, clearest interviews was my interview with Michael Nyman, 23 March 1983, just a few days after I had seen him in Hammersmith with the eponymous Michael…[Read more]

In 1972–3, the American composer Barney Childs began work on a book of interviews with modern composers. Unfortunately, Childs could not find a publisher for the book and abandoned the project. The interviews have remained, unpublished and almost unseen, for over forty years. This paper will introduce Childs’ interview with Wolff in June 1972. H…[Read more]

This collection of essays represents the first international survey of minimalism and postminimalist music from a wide variety of analytical and historical perspectives; its authors include the central scholars in this area. This chapter is the first comprehensive study of the wide variety of minimalist styles in Britain, from the sparse,…[Read more]