Zayn Is Leaving One Direction!
It’s true. THIS IS NOT A JOKE! After five years Zayn Malik has decided to leave One Direction. Niall, Harry, Liam and Louis will continue as a four-piece group in the forthcoming concerts of their world tour, and will record their fifth album, due to be released later this year, without Zayn.
On the official One Direction Family website, Zayn says:
“My life with One Direction has been more than I could ever have imagined. But, after five years, I feel like it is now the right time for me to leave the band. I’d like to apologise to the fans if I’ve let anyone down, but I have to do what feels right in my heart. I am leaving because I want to be a normal 22-year-old who is able to relax and have some private time out of the spotlight. I know I have four friends for life in Louis, Liam, Harry and Niall. I know they will continue to be the best band in the world.”
One Direction say:
“We’re really sad to see Zayn go, but we totally respect his decision and send him all our love for the future. The past five years have been beyond amazing, we’ve gone through so much together, so we will always be friends. The four of us will now continue. We’re looking forward to recording the new album and seeing all the fans on the next stage of the world tour.”
You know you’re a Directioner when . . . you wish this was just a bad dream. I remember when I was first introduced to Zayn (not in real life, but you know what I mean!) when I read this crazy, hilarious interview. And remember this One Direction trivia quiz? And who could forget when Sam abducted him on iCarly? Oh, the memories!
What are your best Zayn memories? Leave your tributes in the Comments. We will miss you, Zayn! *sniff*
Sonja, STACKS Staffer
Zayn Malik photo courtesy of Sony Pictures, iCarly photo courtesy of Nickelodeon
Yesterday, a day of challenges and breakthroughs, I read just two things, briefly. The first was the James Wood essay in the October 20
New Yorker, "No time for lies," about the Australian novelist, Elizabeth Harrower.
I feel the need to share the entire first paragraph. If you are skimming, please read, at least, the last line.
The Australian novelist Elizabeth Harrower, who is eighty-six and lives in Sydney, has been decidedly opaque about why she withdrew her fifth novel, "In Certain Circles" (Text), some months prior to its publication, in 1971. Her mother, to whom she was very close, had died suddenly the year before. Harrower told Susan Wyndham, who interviewed her a few months ago in the Sydney Morning Herald, that she was absolutely "frozen" by the bereavement. She also claims to remember very little about her novel—"That sounds quite interesting, but I don't think I'll read it"�and adds that she has been "very good at closing doors and ending things.... What was going on in my head or my life at the time? Fortunately, whatever it was I've forgotten." Elsewhere, Harrower has cast doubt on the novel's quality: "It was well written because once you can write, you can write a good book. But there are a lot of dead novels out in the world that don't need to be written."
I don't know what these words do to you, but I am filled with melancholy as I read them. I am thinking about all the times we writers question our own work and purpose. How often we wonder if we are done in, or perhaps diluted. How greatly we fear this fate, of producing well-written dead novels. Bully for Elizabeth Harrower for being brave enough to name the fear. To care about the quality of the work she yields. To recognize that merely well written isn't good enough.
The second article I read yesterday was written by Alexandra Alter for
The New York Times—
an update on Anna Todd, the twenty-five-year-old erotica writer who "found inspiration in Harry Styles, the tousle-haired heartthrob from the British boy band One Direction." Todd shared her tale on Wattpad. Simon & Schuster has paid her a sweet six figures for the right to rebroadcast the Styles erotica under its Gallery imprint. The whole will be coming soon to a theater near you, thanks to Paramount Pictures.
Here is Todd, as reported by Alter, describing her process:
Then she found her calling — in the unlikely form of a baby-faced pop star. Ms. Todd started out as a reader on Wattpad in 2012, and quickly found herself spending several hours a day reading serialized fictional stories about One Direction. Last spring, she started writing her own story. “It took over my life,” she said.
With her husband’s support, Ms. Todd quit her job working at a makeup store counter to write full time. She updated “After” with a new chapter every day to meet readers’ demands and tapped out much of the book on her cellphone. She wrote for five hours a day and spent three hours trading messages with readers on Wattpad, Twitter and Instagram and drew on those comments to help her shape the story.
“The only way I know how to write is socially and getting immediate feedback on my phone,” she said.
One established, well-respected novelist pondering whether a book is alive enough, choosing to live quietly, without fanfare. A debut novelist tapping out a book on a phone based on a band, building a story according to Wattpad comments.
The bookends of my yesterday.
The ironies of publishing.
By Dorottya Fabian, Renee Timmers, and Emery Schubert
Picture the scene. You’re sitting in a box at the Royal Albert Hall, or the Vienna Musikverein. You have purchased tickets to hear Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony performed by an internationally-renowned orchestra, and they are playing it in a way that sounds wonderful. But what makes this such a powerful performance?
What is expressiveness? Let’s start by looking at these images …
Do you notice what they all have in common? They are all displaying different kinds of expression. Just as facial expressions communicate different information to us, musicians playing the same piece will still produce slight differences. You can’t hear the musicians in these pictures, but they may both be playing the same piece in a way that is not exactly the same as the other group of musicians.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Click here to view the embedded video.
People say music is expressive. They usually say it is expressive of emotions and therein lays its power. But is this true of all music in all cultures and historical periods? Does it matter how it’s performed and how it’s experienced?
Philosophers, psychologists, and musicians have been pondering these questions for centuries. Over the last hundred years psychologists have contributed much to developing an empirically-based understanding of the mechanisms at play. The distinction between what may be “in the music” and what the performer “adds” became a fundamental assumption leading to various theories and definitions of “expressiveness in music performance.”
Ever since the pioneering work of Carl Seashore in the 1930s psychologists have been studying individual performers to find out “what it is that a performer brings to a piece of music.” So what is it that One Direction does when covering “All You Need Is Love” that makes their performance expressive? Are they more expressive than the Beatles are in this clip? Is it the song that is expressive or does it matter how it is performed?
For those educated in western classical music, Seashore’s working definition of what is expressiveness seems reasonable: You are listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and different orchestras and conductors make it sound more or less dramatic, uplifting, emotional, riveting. But if we pause for a moment and think of all those ever listening to this great icon of western musical culture, is it reasonable to believe that they know what is “the music”, i.e. Beethoven’s composition, and what the performers “bring to it”? What about an audience who have never experienced the piece before? How do they know what is “the music” and what is the contribution of the musician? This dilemma is even more obvious in other styles, like jazz, traditional, popular, or world music.
One, wordier definition of expressiveness in music performance is “the micro-deviations from the notated dictates of the score a performer executes while playing.” So, if the notes of a score are played literally, the piece will sound dull and inexpressive — like an old MIDI notation player, or a student playing precisely in time with a metronome. The result is a “neutral” performance, like the computer image of the face above. But is this an acceptable definition? What about musicians who do not use a music score – improvisers, people who play music by ear?
Recent empirical work has shown that listeners tend to be unable to say if the expressiveness they are hearing originates from the composition or the performance. Studying the experience of professional musicians highlights how differently they approach their performance. For them the score is never just notes on paper but already music imagined as sound. This imagination depends on their socio-cultural, historical position, personality, and education. They use metaphors and heuristics, short-cuts that package up accumulated knowledge and speeds up problem solving in preparation for and during performance. They rarely speak of specific emotions to be conveyed but conceive of music as “emotional,” “dramatic,” “uplifting,” or “turbulent,” for instance.
This is true of music and musicians of other artistic traditions, like classical Hindustani music. According to the dhrupad singer Uday Bhawalkar, “Music without emotion is not music at all, but we cannot name this emotion, these emotions, we cannot specify them.” The sentiments or emotions that we encounter in daily life become transformed into aesthetic experiences in theatre.
Empirical work in the area of jazz and popular music shows the importance of rhythm, vocal gestures, persona, and the role of technology to create meaning through sound effects. One fascinating finding regarding the culturally construed nature of what is “expressiveness in music performance” comes from a study of the Bedzan Pygmies. They live in very small communities with 40-60 kilometres distance between them and come together only for large festivities like weddings and funerals. When singing together in intricate polyphony, each singer varies his or her line at will while maintaining the overall identity of the song. For them “expressiveness” increased when they could detect more voices in the ensemble.
Expressiveness is an important part of music performance and perception, and although we have an intuitive understanding of what expressiveness in music means, as it turns out expressiveness in music performance seems too malleable and slippery to be defined in a singular way. So what is more important is to formulate the perspective of future research and discussion, to reorient our approach and reconstruct the object of investigation.
Dorottya Fabian, Renee Timmers, and Emery Schubert, are all researchers and lecturers in music psychology. Their book Expressiveness in Music Performance offers a variety of approaches to talk meaningfully about expressiveness and music within a cross-cultural context, providing disciplinary overviews, discussion papers and case studies to show that debates of importance across the humanities and social sciences can be conducted in a richly evidence-based manner.
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Image credits: (1) Guilty Face, by Barry Langdon-Lassagne, CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. (2) Your Smiling Face, by Sibelle77, CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. (3) Изображение-Портреты-Михайлова Елена Владимировна, by участница Udacha, CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. (4) Addys Mercedes Kult 02, by Schorle, CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. (5) Adam Romański 1, by Konrad Wawrzkiewicz (Shannon5), CC-BY-SA-2.5 via Wikimedia Commons. (6) One Direction Glasgow, by Fiona McKinlay, CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. (7) The Beatles in America, by United Press International, photographer unknown, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The post Expressing ourselves about expressiveness in music appeared first on OUPblog.
We'll have captions in a bit but here's a look at the Hasbro showroom some new stuff and classics and the biggest Transformer ever!
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HarperCollins has bought another two books by "X Factor" boyband One Direction for publication this autumn.
Publishing director Natalie Jerome and brand development manager Richard Haines bought world rights from Modest! Management. Dare to Dream: Life as One Direction will be published on 15th September as a £16.99 hardback. The publisher said the book will be full of unseen photos and behind the scenes gossip.
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