By: Aaron Oppenheim,
on 4/9/2015
In a recent survey, 87% of UK graduates with first or second class degrees saw freelancing as highly attractive. 85% believe freelancing will become the norm. In the US, as reported in Forbes in August 2013, 60% of millennials stay less than three years in a job and 45% would prefer more flexibility to more pay.
The post A great precedent for freelancing appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Aaron Oppenheim,
on 4/6/2015
One of the most important and unremarked effects of the revolution in information technology is not to do with information services at all. It is the transformation of manufacturing. After a period of two or three hundred years in which manufacturing consolidated into larger and larger enterprises, technology is restoring opportunities for the lone craftsman making things at home.
The post We should celebrate the decline of large scale manufacturing appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Kirsty,
on 4/13/2011
“Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.” So wrote Salman Rushdie and he should know. Certainly free speech is routinely held up, often unreflectively, as an unambiguous, uncontroversial good – one of Franklin Roosevelt’s four freedoms, the right for which Voltaire would famously die, even if he disapproved of what was being said. In the age of WikiLeaks, the freedom to disseminate information and its corollary, the freedom to know what those in power have said or done in secret, have found ever more vigorous proponents, but also those who ask whether it has its limits.
It has always been problematic whether freedom of speech should be extended to those whose speech is considered abhorrent and who might even argue against others’ freedom of speech. Voltaire may offer to lay down his life and Chomsky may assert that “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all”, but the very power of speech which makes its freedom so desirable can also render it an instrument of discrimination, violence, and oppression. It is no coincidence that it is often groups such as the BNP or Qur’an-burning pastors who hold up free speech as a banner under which they can use that freedom to demand the curtailment of others’ freedoms. Even more directly, the dangers of verbal incitement to hatred – be it on racial, sexual, or other grounds – are increasingly recognized in both the statute books and the public consciousness.
WikiLeaks has highlighted the other potential danger of free speech, that, in the famous words of the World War II poster, “careless talk costs lives”. Many have used the rhetoric of being willing to die for the right to free speech, but the issue becomes more problematic when it is soldiers who are dying in Afghanistan because of outrage at revelations of undiplomatic diplomatic cables. Once again, there is no coincidence that it is in times of war and unrest that the issue of free speech becomes particularly fraught. It is then that its negative ramifications can be most keenly felt, but it is also then that it is most under threat from the pressures of power and expediency, then that it most needs defending.
So what does all this have to do with the Roman poet Horace? Horace too was writing in a time of war and political upheaval. As he composed his Satires in the 30s BC, Rome had suffered almost a century of civil unrest exploding into outright civil war at regular intervals, and the final bout between Octavian (the future emperor Augustus) and Mark Antony was just around the corner. Horace himself had fought on “the wrong side” at the battle of Philippi in 42 BC, in the army of Julius Caesar’s assassins, Brutus and Cassius, against the ultimate victors, Octavian and Antony. Taken into the circle of Octavian’s ally and unofficial minister of culture, Maecenas, Horace had his status and his finances restored. It was at this point that Horace wrote book one of the Satires. These poems are full of profound human insights and uproarious, often filthy, humour, as can be experienced in John Davie’s lively new translation, but there is one large oddity about them. Horace chose to write satire, the genre of the 2nd century BC poet Lucilius, famed above all for his fearless freedom of speech, and he chose to write it in the period of probably the greatest military and political upheaval Rome ever underwent, but he “doesn’t mention the war”.
Not only does he not mention it, he goes out of his way not to mention it. Again and again there are opportunities to engage with the important political events in Rome and around her Mediterranean empire, but Horace repeatedly refuses. Satire 1.7 is all about Brutus’ time as governor of the provi
By: Cassie,
on 7/28/2009
This news of Michael Steinberg’s death comes as a terrible blow, a truly sad moment that we had all hoped would never arrive. Yet it leads us to reflect upon the strength, passion, and grace of Michael’s character, the intelligence and infectious joy with which he approached music and his writing, and the integrity and clear mindedness which he carried throughout his life and illness. His gift to the world extends well beyond his rich and innumerable insights into the classical music repertoire, which invite generations of enthralled readers to enter into and explore this glorious art form. Micheal’s greatest gift, I believe, was his ability to show us, through his eyes, the beauty and the goodness of our own familiar world.
On behalf of all at Oxford University Press, I extend our deepest condolences to Jorja, to Michael’s family, and to his friends and communities. He will, most sincerely, be missed. To celebrate Michael’s life and amazing career, please enjoy this excerpt from his book For the Love of Music: Invitations to Listening, co-written with Larry Rothe. More information about his amazing contributions to music and scholarship can be found at the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle.
I fell in love with music in a murky alley when I was eleven. Sometimes I ask friends when and where and how it happened to them, and they recount childhood memories of hearing a beautiful cousin play a Chopin etude, of being stunned by a broadcast of the Saint Matthew Passion, or sent into reveries lying under the family piano while Mother practiced Songs without Words. My own fall was less romantic.
More precisely, I was seduced and then proceeded to fall in love. It was Fantasia…that did me in. 
I saw it just once, at the Cosmopolitan, a dingy movie house in Cambridge, England, and although this was more than sixty-five years ago, I remember it more vividly than most of the movies I’ve seen in the last sixty-five weeks. I saw it just once because as a schoolboy on threepence a week in pocket money…I couldn’t afford to go again. Besides, the guardians of Good Taste would not have encouraged, let alone subsidized, a return visit. But I also realized I did not need to see it again because the most important part was available for free. Behind the sweet little fleabag where Fantasia was playing, there was this alley where I could stand every day after school, stand undisturbed, and listen to the soundtrack of Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra playing Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and Stravinsky…
…Not that Fantasia was my first encounter with “classical” music. I had done the first phase of my growing up in Breslau in a cultivated, affluent, German Jewish household with a Bechstein grand and a good radio (but no record player, not an uncommon lack for the day)… Going to concerts in Breslau was out because by the time I was old enough to be taken, public events of that sort were forbidden to Jews. Not knowing what I was missing, I was much more bothered by not being able to go iceskating or to the zoo anymore. So, while there was a general sense at home that music was A Good Thing, and a few names and titles were familiar…I had nearly nothing by way of actual musical sounds to tie to them…
At ten I went to England on a Kindertransport. There I spent most of the year in boarding school, the rest with the highly literate, politically aware, and quite unmusical English family that had taken me in. Even so, the paterfamilias maintained a surprising totemic reverence for two symphonies, Beethoven’s Ninth and Elgar’s Second, actually suspending his obsessive gardening when they showed up on the radio, which we still called “the wireless.” Otherwise, [their] indifference to music was complete…
All of this meant that I had to find my way to music on my own. Or, rather, it found me. Fantasia came to the rescue at the right moment, and after that it was a question of learning how to still my growing hunger… I discovered record stores, which in those days had tiny listening rooms in which one could try those imposing, shiny, black, dangerously fragile disks. (When I revisited Cambridge for the first time more than twenty years later I wanted to go into Miller’s to thank them for what, unwittingly and probably not happily, they had done for me on my journey toward music, but I am sorry to say I didn’t actually do it.)…Miller’s was a treasure trove, and I took pains to learn the schedules of the various salespeople so that no one of them would see me too often and I would not wear out my thinly based welcome…
…What have I learned? In the alley behind the Cosmo I learned…that I did not need Mickey Mouse or those bra-clad centaurettes or even the beautiful images of darting violin bows…to make the music enjoyable. I learned that music repaid repeated listening. Most music anyway… I learned to pay attention, because if I missed something it was gone… I learned that my focus changed from details to at least something like the whole, from the raisins to the cake. And I learned that there was a lot to hear in some of those pieces and that they did not cease to be full of surprises. I could of course not have articulated any of this then…
…What else did I eventually learn? To pay heed to my first reactions but also not to take them too seriously and certainly not to assume that they have permanent value. Not to think too much at the beginning and not to think at all about what I thought I was maybe supposed to be thinking. To be patient or—better—suspenseful, to wait and see how the piece or I might change (the former is of course an illusion)… That in the end the only study of music is music, that good program notes and pre-concert talks are helpful ways of showing you the door in the wall and of turning on some extra lights, but that the only thing that really matters is what happens privately between you and the music. That, as with any other form of falling in love, no one can do it for you and no one can draw you a map. That listening to music is not like getting a haircut or a manicure, but that it is something for you to do. That music, like any worthwhile partner in love, is demanding, sometimes exasperatingly, exhaustingly demanding. That—and here I borrow a perfect formulation from Karen Armstrong’s memoir, The Spiral Staircase—”you have to give it your full attention, wait patiently upon it, and make an empty space for it in your mind.” That it is a demon that can pursue us as relentlessly as the Hound of Heaven. That its capacity to give is as near to infinite as anything in this world, and that what it offers us is always and inescapably in exact proportion to what we ourselves give.
By: Rebecca,
on 4/22/2009
Robert Carl is Professor of Composition and Theory and Chair of
Composition, Department of Music, The Hartt School, University of Hartford. In the post below he reflects on writing his book Terry Riley’s In C, in which he explores how the work’s emerging performance practice has influenced our very ideas of what constitutes art music in the 21st century. After reading this article consider seeing In C performed at Carnegie Hall this Friday, April 24th.
A few days ago, my editor, Malcolm Gilles, sent me an email celebrating the impending issue of my book on In C. Malcolm, along with being a musicologist, is the President of City University London, and I notice his messages tend to come from all over the world…Dubai, Singapore, London. And he’s Australian, so he truly straddles the globe.
But I mention Malcolm because he noted that our first contact about my project dates back five years. That’s right; that was the point I sent him an email out of the blue, asking if a study of In C as a repertoire “monument” was something he might support. To his everlasting credit in my eyes, he immediately responded “yes”. And so I began the process, which has been a labor of love.
I don’t know how many readers have a sense of that process, but it’s lengthy, and not just because of the writing and research. OUP has very rigorous standards, and to even get accepted into the pool of authors, you have to write sample chapters (I did about two and half), then be vetted by three outside readers, and respond to any criticisms. After that you just may get a contract. And then the real fun begins.
Back in Fall 2006 I began research in earnest. I was on sabbatical from the Hartt School, University of Hartford. My training is as a composer, and that’s what I teach. I’m not “officially” a musicologist or theorist, but I also believe that composers, of all the musical disciplines, have to come closest to knowing everything in order to do their work, which is make a piece of music out of nothing other than their vision and technique. And I always felt that one of the most important things I could do was to talk to as many as possible of the participants in the preparation, premiere, and recording of In C. They’re almost all still around, a feisty group of septuagenarians, foremost being the amazing Terry Riley. For some scholars, oral history is suspect, and of course it’s never totally reliable…people forget, get mixed up. If you’re musician, could you remember how you rehearsed a particular piece forty years ago? Well, it depends on different factors, like how sharp your memory is to begin with, and how distinctive the experience was, how important it felt to you. The good news is that the group of Terry’s fellow creative musicians tends to pass these tests with flying colors. And one, the trombonist Stuart Dempster, kept a copious diary, notes, and programs from everything he did professionally. So the job was not as ambiguous or contradictory as one might think.
My meetings were concentrated on the two coasts–the Bay Area and New York City in fall and early winter 2006. I spent a long afternoon at Terry’s home in Richmond, CA, overlooking Wildcat Canyon, me grilling him about all sorts of details over tea. Fortunately it wasn’t all minutiae; Terry also has lucid and penetrating thoughts about the very nature and role of music, and he presents them gently and firmly. I met Ramon Sender and Bill McGinnis (the recording engineer for the premiere) in a funky café in San Francisco; it felt like discovering two long-lost cool uncles. Bill pulled out his copy of the original manuscript, and we rushed to a copy shop to get an initial image for me. In his spacious trailer home in Sonoma, Warner Jepson revealed a stash of amazing photos he took of Terry, one of which is now the cover image of the book. Mel Weitsman (who played sopranino recorder in the premiere!) is now the abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center, and sweetly suggested he thought he still had the original score of Terry’s “lost” Autumn Leaves; a couple of weeks later it showed up (the original!) in my mail. [I had it performed later at Hartt, and it will get its professional premiere this September at the International Minimalist Studies conference in Kansas City]. Pauline Oliveros spoke to me in a pillow-filled living room of her house in Kingston, New York, festooned outside with prayer flags. Morton Subtonick was quick-witted (and quick-spirited) in his Village apartment studio. David Behrman and Jon Gibson both presented relaxed reminiscences in their Tribeca lofts. Anthony Martin in Williamsburg gave detailed descriptions and demonstrations of his light projections that adorned the premiere’s hall.
Later on there were phone interviews: with a generous, animated, and precise Steve Reich from Vermont; with David Rosenboom from his office at Cal Arts, helping recreate the atmosphere of the recording session; with the ever-young Anna Halprin, from her home in Kentfield (CA), musing on the serendipity of chance encounters in art, and of Terry and Lamonte Young creating so much racket at a dance concert of hers that the audience became genuinely frightened. And this doesn’t cover everyone, nor show all the treasures that were unearthed from a grand cast of characters. But at least I hope it starts to give you an idea of the pleasures of the chase I’ve experienced.
Some of you may wonder how I got into this. The short answer is: reviews and students. For the first: I write for Fanfare, one of the last remaining non-blogging publications for classical recordings (though it does have an online version), and over the years I’ve heard multiple recordings of In C. After a while it dawned on me that this piece was something of a miracle–every note and rhythm specified, and the general contours remain similar from one performance to the next. But so much else can be different! Different sized ensembles; totally different timbres; durations from a few minutes to hours; and different characters, from rock-jazzy, to world music, to precise classical, to joyous hippy-dippy, to dark and driven. It’s more inclusive than almost any other music, truly global, but benign, an invitation, not a conquest.
For the second: I’ve watched my composition students over the years become more open, fluent, and unintimidated by improvisation as part of their practice, even if they self-identify as “classical”. Maybe it’s because so many grew up playing in rock bands. Whatever the reason, they are willing to trust other musicians with their ideas, and they don’t see it as a copout. The key is to find really good, ingenious ways to convey the essential music that defines their own vision, and not be so vague as to sacrifice personal character to others. In C is one of the greatest and first models of how to do so, and they know it.
When I was their age, a sophomore or junior in college, I first heard the Columbia recording of In C. That was probably around 1974 or ‘75, so it was only about six years since its release. At the time I was puzzled by it. I guess it scared me, because on the surface it was so simple. I was just starting to compose, and it seemed so essential to be complex, to prove your stuff that way. I didn’t know what to do with it (except that my father came in one time as I was listening and said “What is that crap?” and that made me even more interested in it). Well, look how the wheel turns. In a couple of weeks there will be a sold-out 45th anniversary concert of the piece in Carnegie Hall. Terry, never one to pursue career at the expense of substance, has emerged as an elder sage for an entire generation. My music is still pretty complex, but I surely learned an enormous amount about space and pacing from minimalism, which is all for the best. So maybe there are happy endings after all, and if so, I’m glad to be part of the crowd scene at the end-credits, happily waving and cheering the passing parade.
By: Rebecca,
on 7/15/2008
Tonight I am planning on attending the New York Philharmonic’s performance in Central Park, presented by Didi and Oscar Schafer. I’m not a classical music buff but I have clearly heard of Tchaikovsky and Beethoven the first two composer’s on the bill. The third though, Sibelius gave me pause. So I turned to the new Oxford Music Online gateway which led me to The Oxford Companion to Music’s biography of Jean Sibelius, which I have excerpted below. Enjoy- and if you are in New York come listen tonight!
Sibelius, Jean (Julius Christian) [Johan Julius Christian Sibelius] (b Hämeenlinna, 8 Dec. 1865; d Järvenpää, 20 Sept. 1957).
Finnish composer. He was unquestionably the greatest composer Finland has ever produced and the most powerful symphonist to have emerged in Scandinavia. His father was a doctor in Hämeenlinna, a provincial garrison town in south-central Finland. Until he was about eight years old Sibelius spoke no Finnish. However, when he was 11 his mother enrolled him in the first grammar school in the country to use Finnish as the teaching language instead of Swedish and Latin. Contact with Finnish opened up to him the whole repertory of national mythology embodied in the Kalevala. His imagination was fired by this, as it was by the great Swedish lyric poets J. L. Runeberg and Viktor Rydberg and, above all, by the Finnish landscape with its forests and lakes.
In his youth Sibelius showed considerable aptitude on the violin and composed chamber music for his family and friends to play. There were few opportunities to hear orchestral music: even Helsinki did not have a permanent symphony orchestra until Robert Kajanus, later one of his staunchest champions, founded the City Orchestra in 1882. At first Sibelius studied law, but he soon abandoned it for music, becoming a pupil of Martin Wegelius. At about that time he decided to ‘internationalize’ his name (following the example of an uncle who had Gallicized his name, Johan, to Jean during his travels). It was not until he left Finland to study in Berlin and Vienna that he measured himself for the first time against an orchestral canvas.
It was in Vienna that the first ideas of the Kullervo symphony came to him, and it was this work, first performed in 1892, that put Sibelius on the musical map in his own country. The music that followed in its immediate wake is strongly national in feeling: the Karelia Suite, written for a pageant in Viipuri in 1893, has obvious patriotic overtones. So too has the music he wrote six years later for another pageant portraying the history of Finland which became a rallying-point for national sentiment at a time when Russia was tightening its grip on the country. One of its numbers, Finlandia, was to make him a household name; its importance for Finnish national self-awareness was immeasurable. From the time of Finlandia onwards, Sibelius was undoubtedly the best-known representative of his country, and many who would never otherwise have become aware of Finland’s national aspirations did so because of his music. (His birthday was a national event each year, and in 1935 his 70th culminated in a banquet at which were present not only all the past presidents of Finland but the prime ministers of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden.)
If the 1890s had seen the consolidation of Sibelius’s position as Finland’s leading composer, the next decade was to witness the growth of his international reputation. In 1898 he acquired a German publisher, Breitkopf & Härtel. (He later sold Valse triste to the firm on derisory terms, a decision he regretted to his dying day.) But his fame was not confined to Germany: Henry Wood included the King Christian II Suite at a Promenade Concert as early as 1901, and during the first years of the century his works were conducted by Hans Richter, Weingartner, Toscanini, and—in the case of the Violin Concerto—by no less a figure than his contemporary Richard Strauss. The Violin Concerto was very much a labour of love, as one would expect from a violinist manqué who had nursed youthful ambitions as a soloist.
Sibelius’s early compositions show the influence of the Viennese Classics, Grieg, and Tchaikovsky, and by the middle of the first decade of the 20th century, when Sibelius entered his 40s, his star had steadily risen. The Third Symphony (1907), however, brought a change in direction and showed Sibelius as out of step with the times. While others pursued more lavish orchestral means and more vivid colourings, his palette became more classical, more disciplined and economical. It was while he was in London working on his only mature string quartet, Voces intimae, that Sibelius first felt pains in his throat, and in 1909 he underwent specialist treatment in Helsinki and Berlin for suspected cancer. For a number of years he was forced to give up the wine and cigars he so enjoyed, and the bleak possibilities opened up by the illness served to contribute to the austerity, depth, and focus of such works as the Fourth Symphony (1911) and The Bard (1913). For tautness and concentration the Fourth Symphony surpasses all that had gone before. It baffled its first audiences and was declared ultra-modern; in Sweden it was actually hissed.
Although each of the symphonies shows a continuing search for new formal means, in none is that search more thorough or prolonged than in the Fifth (1915). Sibelius was a highly self-critical composer who subjected his music to the keenest scrutiny. In the early years of the 20th century En saga and the Violin Concerto were completely overhauled, and the Lemminkäinen Suite (1895) was revised twice, in 1897 and 1939. The Fifth Symphony gave him the most trouble of all: in its original form it was in four movements, and was first performed on his 50th birthday. It was turned into a three-movement work in the following year and entirely rewritten in 1919.
After World War I Sibelius’s music struck ever stronger resonances in England and the USA, and (perhaps because of that) fewer in Germany and the Latin countries. None of the symphonies is more radically different from the music of its time than the Sixth (1923), especially when compared with the music composed in the same year by Bartók, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Hindemith, and the members of Les Six. The one-movement Seventh Symphony (1924), which can be seen as the culmination of a search for organic unity, demonstrates the truth of the assertion that Sibelius never approached the symphonic problem in the same way. Tapiola (1926) crowns his creative achievement, evoking the awesome power of nature with terrifying grandeur. Of all his works this is the one that makes the most astonishingly original use of the orchestra.
Sibelius’s inner world was dominated by his love of the northern landscape, and of the rich repertory of myth embodied in the Kalevala. The classical severity and concentration of his later works was not in keeping with the spirit of the times, and after World War I he felt an increasing isolation. As he himself put it, ‘while others mix cocktails of various hues, I offer pure spring water’. For more than 30 years after the completion of his four last great works—the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, the music for The Tempest, and Tapiola—Sibelius lived in retirement at Järvenpää, maintaining a virtually unbroken silence until his death in 1957. Although rumours of an Eighth Symphony persisted for many years, and its publication was promised after his death, nothing survives apart from the sketch of the first three bars. Near completion in 1933, it fell victim to his increasingly destructive self-criticism during World War II, probably in 1943.
Sibelius’s achievement in Finland is all the more remarkable in the absence of any vital indigenous musical tradition. Each of his symphonies is entirely fresh in its approach to structure, and it is impossible to foresee from the vantage point of any one the character of the next. His musical personality is the most powerful to have emerged in any of the Scandinavian countries: he is able to establish within a few seconds a sound world that is entirely his own. As in the music of Berlioz, his thematic inspiration and its harmonic clothing were conceived directly in terms of orchestral sound, the substance and the sonority being indivisible one from the other. Above all he possessed a flair for form rare in the 20th century; in him the capacity to allow his material to evolve organically (what one might call ‘continuous creation’, to adapt an image from astronomy) is so highly developed that it has few parallels. His mature symphonies show a continuing refinement of formal resource that (to quote the French critic Marc Vignal) makes him ‘the aristocrat of symphonists’. Vignal was referring to the sophistication of his symphonic means, but late Sibelius is also aristocratic in his unconcern with playing to the gallery and in his concentration on the musical and spiritual vision.
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 6/24/2008
By: Phenomenon Books,
on 1/28/2008
I do hereby promise to soon return to deal points and such.
(BIG YAWN) But today I am just so sleepy. Finished Duma Key (for those who live on another planet, that's Stephen King's latest) in the span of a couple days, way into the wee hours of the morning. How appropriate that Edgar Freemantle paints sunsets, because I was able to watch the sun rise on my second day of reading.
Not because I had stayed up that late reading (finished it at 3 am), but because I was so thoroughly spooked I simply could not--would not-- close my eyes. But this is more of a subtle spooky you feel, the subtle spooky that has you closing the book and telling you everything's fine, it wasn't really that scary.
Then you swear you just heard something in the rustle of the wind. Or maybe a shadow passed in the corner of your eyesight.
One thing must definitely be said for Duma Key--King is a Lost fan and it shows through. Just a couple parallels--
1- Some losties gain special abilities from the island (Locke can walk, Desmond sees the future) and some people on Duma Key gain special abilities (Wireman's telepathic abilities, Edgar's paintings).
2- Charley the lawn jockey, the twins, are both like the black smoke on the Lost island.
I bet the lostophiles are poring over Duma Key right now, searching for clues. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if there was something in there.
On a different note, anyone hear the news? Rumors are flying that The New Kids on the Block might be reuniting. http://www.nkotb.com/. Brings back memories, and a schoolgirl giggle or two.
Stay literate, my little beasties;)
