American musical theater occupies a unique space relative to other popular music genres. This is particularly true with regards to the ways aging performers are valued. Whereas aging or aged voices in popular music are often revered as “authentic,” aging musical theater performers face an industry largely uninvested in positive representations of…[Read more]

“To engage with CocoRosie requires absolute suspension of disbe- lief,” writes The Guardian. This has as much to do with their music as their appearance, for sisterly duo CocoRosie have embraced what they call a “posthuman kind of style” rooted in the dissolution of gender. In an effort to imagine a world beyond human constructions of gender,…[Read more]

Introduction to The Late Voice: Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music.

Popular music artists, as performers in the public eye, offer a privileged site for the witnessing and analysis of ageing and its mediation. The Late Voice undertakes such an analysis by considering issues of time, age, memory, innocence and experience in modern popular…[Read more]

This paper examines the aural conceptions of futuristic dystopias in episodes of The Twilight Zone, focusing on one specific episode, season five’s “Number Twelve Looks Just Like You.” I examine how the music director of CBS conceived of the future, aurally representing these episodes as having an affinity with the premise of Brave New World by re…[Read more]

Franz Waxman composed over 150 film scores, the most famous of which is Billy Wilder’s film noir Sunset Boulevard (1950). The film plot bears a striking resemblance to Rod Serling’s teleplay for The Twilight Zone, “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” (1959). Waxman, composer of the film, was approached to compose a score for a television episode…[Read more]

This PowerPoint accompanies Ramala: An American “Indianist” Opera Musicological Lecture Concert (http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M67K1J).

Ohio State University Opera & Lyric Theatre presents “Ramala”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6HEzeWw9SI Wednesday, November 1, 2017 – 7:30pm Weigel Auditorium Charles Wakefield Cadman, Francis La Flesche, and Nelle Richmond Eberhart began collaborating on this opera in 1908, at that time titled Daoma (sometimes spelled Da O Ma). In the 1930s,…[Read more]

‘Watch the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves’; so says the Duchess in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But can we be so sure of this? The Duchess, like her creator Lewis Carroll, often seems to put more emphasis on the sound of words than their sense, a technique that can also be detected in other written texts and in works of so…[Read more]

An audio taster of my book The Sound of Nonsense. The taster includes samples of recordings of the work of some of the novelists, poets, musicians and performers who are used as case studies in the book. The taster is designed to both provide an overview of the subject matter of the book and to model one of the types of sonic nonsense discussed in…[Read more]

These are examples to go with http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M64Z69. The handwritten examples existed only in hardcopy, so rather than simply scanning them, I redid them. Aside from a couple of clearly marked changes, they are the same as the 1981 versions.

This is an updated version of the 1981 paper. The first part, published in Theory and Practice, is substantially unchanged save for some details of the analysis and several added comments. The second part, written over the past year, is an appendix that addresses the role of memory in Ives’s music. There is an additional analysis of his song “The…[Read more]

Since its first attempts to understand natural phenomena, early modern science devoted great attention to the problematic issue of the origin of springs. This essay examines the lively debate that emerged from the studies on fresh water during the years spanning from the mid-sixteenth century to the early eighteenth. By focusing on the…[Read more]

In 1687, after he graduated in Medicine, young Antonio Vallisneri (1661-1730) returned in the Duchy of Modena and Reggio. In those years he mainly served as general practitioner; nevertheless, he also devoted many studies to various aspects of the natural sciences. He performed many observations, accurately reporting them in seven “Quaderni”…[Read more]

This paper deals with the identification of the microscope used by the Italian physician and naturalist Antonio Vallisneri (1661-1730) during his research activity. The investigation was structured in three phases: a) a first text analysis on published and manuscript sources, looking for information about the microscope(s) used by Vallisneri; b)…[Read more]

El presente trabajo versa en el diseño, implementación y evaluación de dos actividades de aprendizaje vinculadas con el contenido temático de asignaturas que se imparten en diferentes licenciaturas en instituciones de educación superior. El diseño de estas actividades se basa en las “Normas de competencia para el acceso y uso de la informa…[Read more]

In 1587 the Flemish composer Carolus Luython, employed by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, published an unusual motet collection in Prague. Titled Popularis anni jubilus, the collection describes the sounds and rituals beloved by Central European peasants, recasting them as the ecstatic songs of rustic laborers (jubilus) famously celebrated by Saint…[Read more]

This paper highlights the multiple modalities through which writer, activist, and educator June Jordan materialized a placemaking pedagogy, grounded in the art of structural critique and using language in the service of social change. In this paper, I show how Jordan “implicitly instructs” her students and young readers in cultivating a str…[Read more]

Originally published in Write 4 Children Vol IV issue II 81-8, no longer available online.

University of East London is based in London Borough of Newham, one of the most diverse boroughs in Britain, with one of the highest levels of child poverty (ONS 2012, Campaign to End Child Poverty 2012). Trainee teachers on the Primary with English route…[Read more]

Since the 1950s, Brigadoon has been accepted as a representation of Scotland. Brigadoon’s Scotland consists of a highland landscape with lochs, mists, castles populated by fair maidens, warlike yet sensitive kilted men and bagpipers. Much of this comes from the invented traditions of Scotland, particularly kilts and clan tartans; late n…[Read more]