He is also well-known, particularly in North America, for his Connections series as well as for his innovative American Popular Piano series.Ĭhris has presented in literally dozens of countries around the world, with recent touring taking him from to the USA and Canada, Australia and India. He has become particularly well-known for his appealing, educationally sound pieces in popular styles, pre-eminently the Microjazz and Microstyles collections, published by Boosey & Hawkes, the world's leading classical music publisher. Rather than seeking clarity, the proposed paper sheds light on one problem within the discourse on absolute music: its shifting status after the advent of mechanical reproduction.Christopher Norton's ever-popular Microjazz Collection 2 for flute and piano, played by Julie Johnson (flute) and Jason Alfred (piano)Ĭhristopher Norton is acclaimed as a composer, producer, arranger and educationalist and has written stage musicals, ballet scores, piano music, popular songs and orchestral music as well as jingles and signature tunes for TV and radio. In this paper I will show how the player piano revises standard definitions of absolute music - music about music, defined by Ashby (2010), Bonds (2014), Dahlhaus (1995), Goehr (1992), and others - by suggesting a performance without the present, laboring body and fallible emotive interpretation of a human pianist. Mechanical music reshapes the definition of absolute music by allowing composers to explore music without the pianist-as-mediator influencing the musical product. But the absolute offered by mechanical music - a performance unfettered by the live performer - uncovers a new and previously unimagined aesthetic space, a space free of physical and expressive human limitations. In 1854 Eduard Hanslick discusses absolute music as music that speaks only through sound the performer " coaxes the electric spark out of its obscure secret place and flashes it across to the listener " to animate the work (1986, 49). The player piano promises a new kind of absolute music to its listener, free from a performer's personal, affective influence or error, but the achievement of absolute music remains elusive even in its mechanical execution. As such, it represents one particularly vexing step on music's path from an exclusively human and a-mechanical endeavor, to a mechanically recorded, stored, and mediated experience. The player piano reneges on one of the basic promises of musical performance: the fallible performer. Thus, a secondary goal is to increase awareness of the often intricate elements of design that the repertory embodies. Although the primary focus is the compositional practice of this particular songwriter, many remarks and observations also have greater currency, relating as they do to the repertory in general. Van Heusen’s music is shown to have a carefully coordinated structure that underpins an engaging and seemingly simple surface his songs often embody a concealed compositional sophistica-tion that is as remarkable as it is overlooked. Proceeding from a comprehensive study of the original sheet music of nearly one hundred songs, the author examines Van Heusen’s output from the standpoints of several parameters, beginning with harmony, progressing to linear-melodic aspects including melody construction itself, and lastly addressing the integration of all the previous into formal schemes. This essay is intended to enrich the reader’s understanding of the craft of this talented artist, through a survey of his compositional techniques and mannerisms. His songs are also highly interesting as music, and often embody ingenious compositional designs. He attained great critical and commercial success with both film and non-film songs, many of which have become standards. Jimmy Van Heusen (1913–90) was a significant popular songwriter in the U.S., during the middle third of the twentieth century.
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