Music

This paper examined the notion of a musical combination — how do musicians interact and relate to one another in musical terms? I argued that a key part of Queen’s ‘sound’ was gestural unity; that is, the gestures or traits of one part were often doubled or imitated by another part. This feature is evident in a range of songs using a range of techniques, from instrumental doubling to rhythmic ‘hits’ to imitative articulation gestures.

This paper came out of my Masters thesis on Nature’s Best. First, I examined the analytical results in relation to wider popular music analysis findings; second, I proposed the notion of an anti-virtuosic streak running through these New Zealand songs, in relation to the instrumental and vocal techniques of these New Zealand artists. This was one of the most enjoyable papers I have presented, primarily because the general themes meant a great deal to people in the audience, and thus, it sparked a lot of interesting debate afterwards.

This was another paper that came from my Masters thesis, although it had more of a methodological bent. In this paper, I looked at what traditional methods from musicology could offer popular music analysts, while acknowledging the difficulty in reconciling these methods with the ‘un-trained’ nature of most popular musicians. For my thesis, I had interviewed a range of New Zealand songwriters; the last part of the paper presented some excerpts from the interviews about how their compositions related to the ‘rules’ of music theory. The anecdotes from Fane Flaws were a real highlight of that research.

Stylistic pastiche is a standard technique in popular musical theatre. With origins in the early works of Andrew Lloyd Webber (e.g. Jesus Christ Superstar) and other rock musicals of the 1960s, (Hair!), recent shows (The Last Five Years, The Book of Mormon) rely on expansive networks of style references. This paper explores how an analytical understanding of different types of stylistic pastiche may inform composing and arranging practices.

I propose a three-part distinction between different forms of pastiche, with several further sub-distinctions. Firstly, styles can evoke a particular time and place, such as the 1920s jazz era of Lippa’s The Wild Party or late-1970s Philadelphia in Sister Act. Secondly, different styles can underscore or reveal the emotional tone of a song: the Latin inflections of ‘Shiksa Goddess’ (TLFY), for instance, reflect the perceived ‘exotic’ (i.e. non-Jewish) character of Jamie’s new girlfriend. Finally, pastiche often serves a humorous purpose, in three main ways: anachronistic styles are connected with authority figures (‘You’ll Be Back’ from Hamilton); camp connotations (‘Turn It Off’ from TBOM); and, juxtaposition between lyrical content/characters and stylistic associations (‘The All-American Prophet’ from TBOM).

I conclude by relating the analytical findings to my own collaborative practices as an arranger and composer for several original musicals. With examples from The Quest (2017) and Artful Dodgers (2018), I show how the different types of pastiche at the level of both composition (e.g. harmonic/melodic language) and sound-world (instrumentation/arrangement) may add greater depth and nuance to the characters and narratives of the musicals.

One of the conventions of contemporary musical theatre is its recourse pastiche: composers and arrangers frequently play with the techniques and associations of specific styles, artists, and songs, in order to support or embellish the lyrical and thematic content of the show. While such an approach can serve a range of purposes—for instance, establishing emotional tone, time and/or place—this paper examines the relationship between pastiche and humour in musical theatre. Drawing on theories of musical humour from Covach (1991, 1995) and recent work by Brøvig-Hannsen (forthcoming), I present three types of humour arising from pastiche.

The first involves an incongruity between the lyrics and the musical style, and its associations. Thus, in “Give Up Your Dreams” (from School of Rock), the negative tone of the words is juxtaposed by the celebratory musical style of Queen (specifically “We are the Champions”). The second type involves the pairing of anachronistic styles and authority figures, such as the ragtime of “King Herod’s Song” (Jesus Christ Superstar). This underscores the idea that the characters are humorously “out of touch” with contemporary times. The third type draws on camp aesthetics, whereby an older style is reinterpreted in a “spirit of extravagance” (Sontag 1964). Here, the humour rests in the overblown nature of the musical style relative to the the lyrical tone. “Turn It Off” (The Book of Mormon) is an exemplary recent example. These archetypes can provide a model for musical theatre composers in their stylistic choices. From an analytical perspective, it provides us with greater understanding of how musical styles are interpreted and the associations they bear.

Searching for tradition in New Zealand music is itself now a tradition, one that began in earnest with Douglas Lilburn’s famous talk given at the Cambridge Summer School of Music in January 1946. At that time, the seminal talk had no title. It was only forty years later that Lilburn gave it the name A Search for a Tradition, when music historian John Mansfield Thomson edited it for publication.

Throughout the history of Western art music, death has been a major stimulus for composers, and it continues to be so for contemporary musicians. Composer responses to death have been predominantly associated with emotions of grief, sadness and loss. An examination of responses in the Western art music repertoire of the past five hundred years, however, reveals that there is a diversity of composer reactions, from mourning through prophetic imaginings to resignation, and extending to spiritual affirmation or theological affirmation of an afterlife. Informed by surveying a number of composers’ diverse responses, this article outlines differences found in order to propose a taxonomy of varying creative musical approaches to death.