̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - performance

Time, crime and how can the arts interact with a Natural World in decline?

zs332 — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 10:44:21 +0000

Each year the Cambridge Festival’s (13-28 March 2024) rich programme of events celebrates the arts across the city and this year is no exception.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library stages first public play in its 600-year history

sjr81 — Wed, 01 May 2019 14:45:53 +0000

Performance marked the launch of digital edition of Arthur Schnitzler's works and archive.

Into the woods with Shakespeare

amb206 — Sun, 01 Oct 2017 23:00:00 +0000

Fear and forests, writes Shakespeare scholar Professor Anne Barton, go hand in hand. Forests are where we get lost and meet wild men, where chaos rules and anything can happen. Shakespeare uses forest settings, sometimes magical, sometimes menacing, in many of his plays. In As You Like It, the Forest of Arden is a place of freedom, transformation and love – but also hardship for the shepherds who work there. When in Macbeth Birnam Wood does come to Dunsinane, Macbeth knows he is doomed.

Barton, who died in 2013, was Professor of English and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Her many published works included Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (1994) and Ben Jonson, Dramatist (1984), and she was also an influential editor of Shakespeare’s plays. She was vitally interested in performance and staging, and her work has substantially altered and enriched the ways in which Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists have been understood and performed.

Now Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press has published ̽��ֱ��Shakespearean Forest, Anne Barton’s final book, based in part on her Clark Lectures in 2003. It has been prepared for publication by Dr Hester Lees-Jeffries, a former research assistant to Barton and now a Shakespeare scholar herself, and a ̽��ֱ�� Lecturer in the Faculty of English. In an editor’s note, Lees-Jeffries describes Barton’s seminars, held in her beautiful rooms at Trinity College, as often intimidating but always with a sense of occasion.

Woods and forests in the English language

̽��ֱ��six chapters of ̽��ֱ��Shakespearean Forest set the playwright’s work within a historical, social and literary world of forests, as well as exploring the surviving evidence for the ways in which forests might have been staged in the early modern theatre. ̽��ֱ��opening chapter reminds us how big a part woodland plays in the story of the British Isles. ̽��ֱ��English language is rich with references to wood and woods. We talk about ‘not being able to see the wood for the trees’ and ‘not being out of the woods yet’. We ‘touch wood’ to forestall ill fortune.

If Britain is wooded today, it was much more so in Shakespeare’s lifetime. ̽��ֱ��names of these forests and woods entered the lexicon. ̽��ֱ��maiden name of Shakespeare’s mother Anne was Arden. His birthplace, the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, was once surrounded by the ancient woodland of the Forest of Arden. It was even said that a squirrel could jump from tree to tree right across the county of Warwickshire.

But this forest was already in decline in Shakespeare’s time. Trees provided timber for house and ship building, fuel for cooking and heating. In his Description of England in 1587, William Harrison commented that both England and Wales “have sometimes been very well replenished with great woods and groves, although at this time the said commodity be not a little decayed in both”.

Shakespeare wrote for the ‘wooden O’, as the open-air, timber-framed Globe Theatre is described in the Prologue to Henry V. ̽��ֱ��origin of many of our current environmental anxieties can be found in the early modern period, and in the writings of Shakespeare and his contemporaries; they too were concerned by deforestation and pollution. Like the theatre itself, the forest is a place of transformation, growth and change.

Hunters, poachers and wild men of the woods

Forests were all about hunting – a pastime seen as preparation for warfare. Complex laws gave royalty rights and privileges to hunt deer and boar. Elizabeth I was a keen hunter, as well as being readily associated by poets in her courtly cult with Diana, virgin goddess of the hunt. Her successor James’ passion for the chase, writes Barton, “verged on the pathological”. He even insisted on being lowered into the gaping bellies of dead stags in the belief that the blood would strengthen his ankles.

Poaching was widespread and, though illegal, was not regarded as socially disreputable. ̽��ֱ��gentry, and even nobility, engaged in poaching – either for fun or to pursue family vendettas. Popular tradition holds that Shakespeare, too, may have been a poacher in his youth. Barton paints a vivid portrait of a group of poachers as a motley crew of unruly thrill-seekers united by blood-thirsty machismo.

“Heavily armed […] accompanied by a remarkably democratic mixture of friends, eager household servants, and people from the local village (sometimes including the vicar), men who had deer parks of their own, regularly broke into those of their neighbours, viciously assaulting keepers and killing more game than they could carry away.”

More benignly, green men and woodwoses (wild men of the woods) are key characters in the dramatis personae encountered in fields, woods and forests. In medieval churches and cathedrals, leaf masks are carved into stonework as decorative motifs, stubborn leftovers from a pagan past. They are, observes Barton, “reminders that forests are places of transformation, where the boundary between human life and that of animals, plants or trees are likely to become confused, or even obliterated”.

While for other dramatists, wild men were “a vogue that peaked and faded”, writes Barton, “Shakespeare’s interest in wild men seems to have extended throughout his writing career, taking in Oliver [As You Like It], Timon [Timon of Athens], the dancers in Bohemia [ ̽��ֱ��Winter’s Tale], Caliban [ ̽��ֱ��Tempest], Cardenio [ ̽��ֱ��History of Cardenio] and (in a sense) Herne the Hunter in ̽��ֱ��Merry Wives of Windsor.” Elsewhere in the book she explores the various traditions of Robin Hood and Merlin the enchanter, both of whom make appearances in plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, including Ben Jonson.

How did Shakespeare bring the forest to his audiences?

A central question of Barton’s work is how Shakespeare might have brought the physicality of forest and woodland to the stage. There is no documentary evidence to show how early performances of Shakespeare’s plays led audiences deep into the woods. ̽��ֱ��only clue comes from the Netherlands in form of an engraving, dated 1635, which shows an elaborate indoor stage at a fair. In the background two tall trees are visible, perhaps waiting their moment in the next scene.

To exemplify the effort and expense invested in creating spectacular entertainment, Barton describes in detail the extraordinary artificial forest commissioned by Henry VIII for a pageant performed to celebrate the birth of a son on New Year’s Day 1511. ‘La Forrest Salvigne’ took the form of a rolling stage (requiring 40 men to propel it) complete with a magnificent forest from which the king and three companions appeared, mounted on horseback and fully armed.

According to meticulous accounts kept by an official, this forest comprised 12 hawthorns, 12 oaks, 12 hazels, 10 maples. 10 birches, 16 dozen fern roots and branches, 60 broom stalks and 16 furze bushes. Also present were 6 fir trees, holly, ivy, fennel stalks and 2,400 acorns and hazelnuts. Most of these items (including the nuts and acorns) were not gathered from the countryside but man-made. As Barton writes: “ ̽��ֱ��individual shapes and sizes of its myriad leaves, for instance, were delicately cut from fine sarsnet, a fine silk material, and then backed with stiffened paper.”

Barton’s interest in the staging of Shakespeare’s plays reflects the way her own life brought together the worlds of theatre and academia, not least in her marriage to the director John Barton. In an afterword to ̽��ֱ��Shakespearean Forest, Shakespeare scholar Professor Peter Holland writes that many of Barton’s students became actors and directors and that many of her research students (including Holland himself) wrote dissertations centrally concerned with the questions of performance in early modern drama.

Holland writes: “Performance inflected her approach to plays and nothing in her writing […] allowed plays to be analysed as if their narratives could be divorced from the rhythms of performance.”

̽��ֱ��Shakespearean Forest by Anne Barton is published by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press.

Inset image: map of Warwickshire from ' ̽��ֱ��theatre of the empire of Great Britaine' (1611) (Atlas 2.61.1, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library)

̽��ֱ��Shakespearean Forest reimagines the real forests that our greatest playwright evoked in his works. ̽��ֱ��final book of renowned scholar, Anne Barton, it explores the changeable and sometimes sinister presence of the forest in literature and culture.

Forests are places of transformation, where the boundary between human life and that of animals, plants or trees are likely to become confused, or even obliterated.

Anne Barton

Glasgow ̽��ֱ�� Archive

Henry Peacham, 'Silvius', from Minerva Britanna (1612)

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Music in the tree of life

lw355 — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 10:00:29 +0000

When Joseph Haydn completed his Symphony No. 95, shortly before its first performance in 1791, he forgot to include the oboes.

Although Haydn corrected himself — his hastily scrawled ‘flauto’ and ‘fagot’ in the margin are crossed out and replaced by ‘oboe’ — this snapshot of musical history serves as an evocative reminder of human fallibility. It’s impossible to get things right all of the time, and no less so than for activities like the writing or copying of complex musical scores.

In fact, ‘mistakes’ are quite common in hand-copied texts and music. Before the introduction of printing in the late 15th century, the only means of spreading written culture was for monks and other scribes to replicate manuscripts. For music, the challenges of printing musical notation meant that hand-copying continued well into the 17th and 18th centuries.

Unwittingly, the careless scribes — and those who deliberately made changes, perhaps to fit their own style or contemporary fashions, or to ‘improve’ on an earlier literary or musical composition — were helping future historians.

Each time a piece was copied, the change was propagated, and occasionally joined by a fresh change. Scholars use these variations to build family trees of “which was copied from which” that chart the relationship between pieces, helping them to ask questions about the authors, and the history and even the movement of specific texts across continents.

Two such scholars are Professor Christopher Howe and Dr Heather Windram. Yet, they are neither historians nor musicologists. They are biochemists.

Howe is known for his work on photosynthesis and the molecular evolution of photosynthetic microorganisms. It turns out that there are important similarities between the evolution of a species and the evolution of anything copied successively — texts, music, languages and even Turkmen carpets.

“What’s exciting is how many different things follow this pattern of copying with incorporation and propagation of changes. It’s just a fundamental principle about how the world is,” said Howe.

“During the evolution of species, mutations that occur when DNA is copied are passed on and, as species diverge, you see their DNA sequences become increasingly different. Evolutionary biologists use what are called ‘phylogenetic’ computational methods to compare the variations and work out the family tree. We realised we could also do this for pieces of literature.”

His first work in the 1990s was on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. He and his collaborators found that the technique worked well and, with Windram, he proposed a new name for the process — ‘phylomemetics’ — “well, it’s easier to say than phylogenetic analysis of non-biological sequence data,” said Howe.

Very little work, however, has been carried out on music, until now. In what they believe is the first test case of this type of analysis, Howe, Windram and one of the UK’s leading early keyboard players, Professor Terence Charlston from the Royal College of Music, have used their sophisticated algorithms to trace the relationships among a set of 16 copies of the Prelude in G by Orlando Gibbons from the 17th and 18th centuries.

“Although music is a form of written tradition, we needed to pick up on the relationships between pieces in a different way,” explained Windram. “Music is a guide for performance so I was very conscious that some changes might be silent — like two tied quavers changing to a crotchet — but others might be sufficient to change the sound of the music.”

In each of the 38 to 39 bars of music (depending on the source), Windram looked for changes in, for example, the note pattern, pitch and rhythm. She knew it should be possible — she had previously worked on a text that had 16,000 points of variation — and, with Charlston’s expertise in 17th-century music, she was able painstakingly to unpick the ‘mutant manuscripts’ and turn the variations into a numerical code.

̽��ֱ��researchers are quick to explain that no computer analysis can replace the expertise of the musicologist, who considers a mass of other information in addition to the patterns of variation, such as the cutting edge research carried out by Cambridge’s Faculty of Music to capture the creative history of music in the Online Chopin Variorum Edition. Where Howe’s team sees a significant benefit of its evolutionary approach is the ability to exploit a large amount of complex information and then carry out multiple consecutive analyses very rapidly.

"Once the coding is complete, you can focus on specific aspects of the music,” explained Windram. “You can run the analysis again and again, perhaps considering only certain categories of changes, or only looking at a section of the music at a time. It’s another tool in the musicologist’s toolbox, and how you interpret what you are seeing is aided by their expertise.”

Just as scholars of texts are using family relationships to ask broader questions about literature, the same can be carried out with music, as Charlston explained: “We can use these techniques to look at the corrections made by a single composer. Take Bach for instance. He was an inveterate reviser of his own music as he performed or taught it, and we can use these techniques to look at the creative process from notation to how it lives through performance.”

What pleases the researchers is how the tool could also help performance choices in the future: “Current musicology tends to look for a single correct version but, for a piece like Gibbons’s Prelude in G, there may be as many versions as there are people playing it at the time. My ideal would be to suggest to players today that within certain confines they should be seeking to make their own variants,” said Charlston.

For Howe, the excitement of the approach also lies in what it might do for evolutionary biology. “We can use this technique to identify if a copyist is copying from more than one piece at the same time — called contamination. There is a parallel in biology called lateral gene transfer where unrelated organisms exchange DNA. We now want to see if a program that can handle contamination in text can tell us something about lateral gene transfer in living organisms.”

̽��ֱ��hope is that, like handwriting, musical notation will betray the hand of its composer or copyist. Analysis of variations in ‘mutant’ manuscripts — now carried out more quickly using the team’s phylomemetic tools — will help both to reconstruct musical history and to provide a tantalising glimpse of a creative process evolving.

Inset image, left to right: Christopher Howe, Heather Windram and Terence Charlston.

See and hear the visual and audible effects of the variants found between different sources of the same piece of Orlando Gibbon’s Prelude in G:

Example 1

Example 2

Both are from the same passage taken from the middle of Orlando Gibbon’s Prelude in G but from different sources; the variants occur in both hands. Example 1 is the original printed edition and Example 2 is a much later source held in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��right changes concern subtle alterations of pitch (often between f-sharp and f-natural) while the left hand bars differ mainly in rhythm and texture, but also with occasional changes in pitch. In addition to seeing the differences in music notation, you can hear each passage played on a 17th-century style harpsichord by Terence Charlston.

̽��ֱ��sound files were recorded by Terence Charlston in February 2015 using a single-manual harpsichord by David Evans built in 2014, after an anonymous French original dated 1676. ̽��ֱ��instrument is tuned in 1/4 –comma meantone at a pitch of a1 = 415Hz.

Modern scientific methods for mapping the evolution of species are being applied to centuries-old hand-copied music, providing new inspiration for how it is performed.

Evolutionary biologists use what are called ‘phylogenetic’ computational methods to compare the variations and work out the family tree. We realised we could also do this for pieces of literature

Christopher Howe

̽��ֱ��District

Music in the tree of life

Reconsidering the master of harpsichord

If you were a harpsichord player in the 17th century you almost certainly will have played Prelude in G by Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625). In fact, you are likely to have written out your own version, perhaps even ‘by ear’ while listening to your teacher.

Such was the esteem in which Orlando Gibbons was held that six of his compositions, including the Prelude in G, were included in the Parthenia – ‘the first musicke that ever was printed for the Virginalls [an instrument of the harpsichord family]’ in 1612-13, to commemorate the marriage of ‘the high and mighty Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Reine: and his betrothed Lady, Elizabeth the only daughter of my Lord the king [James I]’.

On one copy of the Prelude, now held in ̽��ֱ��Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, an unknown hand has annotated it with the words ‘This is No 21 in the Parthenia & was a favorite Lesson(s) for upwards of a Hundred years’.

When Chris Howe, Heather Windram and Terence Charlston decided to try using their phylogenetic analytical techniques on music, Gibbons’s Prelude in G seemed a natural choice to make.

“Although it was available in print, few would have been able to afford to buy Parthenia, and yet almost all harpsichord players will have come across it,” explained Charlston. “It would have been copied and recopied by hand.”

̽��ֱ��researchers were able to track down 16 copies in existence in museums and libraries across the UK and in Japan and the USA. Although further copies may yet come to light, 16 copies were enough to carry out the analysis as a proof of principle.

“We wanted to see if the variants segregated into ‘families’ with similar relationships using phylomemetics,” explained Windram. “Even in this test case we found two main families that corresponded to manuscripts copied earlier and later in the 17th century.”

̽��ֱ��choice of Gibbons – who was a chorister in Cambridge’s King’s College between 1596 and 1598, where his brother was master of the choristers – has a personal resonance for Charlston. As Professor of Harpsichord at the Royal College of Music, and an internationally recognised performer, he knows Gibbons’s compositions well. “While he was famous in his own day, he isn’t widely known today,” he said. “This is a wonderful opportunity to reconsider him.”

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

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Following the money

sc604 — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 07:05:00 +0000

Pay for performance matters. It’s a practice that crosses sectors, affects millions of employees globally and regularly makes the headlines. But there’s a problem, says Dr Jonathan Trevor, Lecturer in Human Resources & Organisations and Co-Director of the Centre for International Human Resource Management (CIHRM). It might not work.

“Companies don’t like to talk about this,” he says. “But we need a debate on this issue, because pay for performance is widespread, and has become the dominant logic of employee reward – the notion that we can use pay as a carrot, or a stick, and drive positive employee behaviour. In reality, I believe pay is like plumbing. You only ever notice it when it goes wrong. It can be used in good or bad ways – but often it is the latter. It is often misused, or used inappropriately, as a crutch for poor leadership – especially in the financial sector.”

For five years, Dr Trevor acted as a retained academic advisor to ̽��ֱ��Remuneration Group, a consortium of senior remuneration directors working in FTSE 50 companies who met each year for a two-day round table and research exposition in Cambridge. As director of ConsultCambridge Ltd, he brings together the academic and business world to find new ways of applying theory to practice.

"It’s very much a two-way street,” he says. “We meet with extremely senior people from the UK’s most successful companies who work side-by-side with researchers to identify a research agenda. They, in turn, feed back from their own research and help the business leaders to understand what it means in their own context, and what they might do differently in terms of driving performance and, crucially, managing risk."

̽��ֱ��theory behind pay for performance is logical: it helps to establish a line of sight between the individual and their contribution to the organisation’s goals and purposes.

But when it goes bad, the consequences can be highly destructive. Dr Trevor points to the ongoing payment protection insurance (PPI) mis-selling scandal that has thus far cost banks £22.2 billion in compensation. Employees were given a financial incentive for each policy they sold. They were, indeed, highly motivated to sell more. But, says Dr Trevor, it didn’t work.

̽��ֱ��incentives in question drove a certain type of behaviour – aggressive sales at any cost. But that behaviour was not functional. It caused both reputational and financial harm and was ultimately counterproductive.

In the mis-selling scandal, the pay structures were relatively simple. But the other main problem with pay for performance, says Dr Trevor, is its complexity, a central theme of his book Can Pay Be Strategic? A Critical Exploration of Strategic Pay in Practice. ̽��ֱ��way we work is changing, and pay for performance is struggling to keep pace. Companies necessarily need to rely more and more upon the discretion of their people, as opposed to requiring them to simply follow, or perform against highly prescribed targets. In that context, pay for performance becomes vastly complicated and therefore less effective as a means of management control.

“Selling Mars bars is one thing,” says Dr Trevor. “Creating a market-changing innovation or technology is quite another. How do you incentivise someone in a research and development department when it might take 10 years for their work to bear any commercial benefit and when the actual innovation process is quite serendipitous?”

How indeed? Why might people work hard, if not for extra pay? Dr Trevor points out that, surprisingly, research shows that money consistently comes very low down the list of potential motivational factors. Although it’s often mentioned in exit interviews as the reason why someone leaves, more in-depth research shows that people don’t leave companies because of the money. (In fact, he says, they don’t leave companies at all. They leave managers.)

He cites three main motivators: “First: a common purpose. Does the company do meaningful work – and does the individual understand his or her role within it? Second: engaging work. Jobs can be constructed in such a way as to make them naturally engaging, challenging and have clear impact. And third: good management.

“ ̽��ֱ��by-product of these is that not only a more capable workforce, but actually they are naturally engaging processes. They can be more powerful than just simply an annual performance review and pay bump. And ultimately, the absence of those things cannot be made good by either paying people more, or paying people more aggressively.”

It’s still hard for companies to admit that new thinking is needed. But the numbers say that the conversation is changing. “If you look at trend statistics, many companies are actually moving away from pay for performance,” says Dr Trevor. “They are disconnecting performance management and pay – and realising that pay as a consequence to either good or poor performance is actually just disconnecting people from what performance management should be – an honest and forward looking conversation that connects the individual with the purpose of their employer.”

Does performance-related pay work? Dr Jonathan Trevor explores the issues.

Pay is often misused, or used inappropriately, as a crutch for poor leadership – especially in the financial sector

Jonathan Trevor

Bruce Thomson via flickr

Carrot and stick

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̽��ֱ��first book of fashion

amb206 — Wed, 01 May 2013 14:08:01 +0000

In 1530 Matthäus Schwarz, an accountant in the German city of Augsburg, was a man in his prime: slim, smart and successful. In a portrait that shows him in an outfit made for the occasion of the Imperial Diet of Augsburg, he is every inch the fashionable man about town, ready to step out of his door and join the party.

In the painting Schwarz wears a doublet made in panes of brilliant red and yellow silk over a shirt cut from fine linen. His slender calves are shown off in yellow leather hose and his knees are cross-gartered. On his feet are slim shoes and on his head is a flat black beret made in felted wool. At his waist are belts carrying the sword and red purse that complete the picture.

Now an experimental project undertaken by Dr Ulinka Rublack, Reader in Early Modern History at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, has brought this portrait alive in a historically accurate reconstruction of the outfit it depicts. ̽��ֱ��project reveals the role of dress in conveying complex social and political messages and the way in which fashion had a profound effect on mood and behaviour.

Head accountant of the Fugger merchant company, Schwarz commissioned paintings of himself showing in considerable detail the clothes that made up his changing and highly fashionable wardrobe. These portraits, known as the Schwarz Book of Clothes, represent a treasure trove of information for anyone interested in the history of fashion as well as Renaissance performances of the self as visual act.

In order to bring her project to fruition Dr Rublack enlisted the expertise of dress historian and theatre designer Jenny Tiramani to whom historical accuracy is of paramount importance. She has worked with some of the country’s leading theatre directors – including Sir David MacVicar and Tim Carroll – and recently set up the School of Historical Dress with the backing of Mark Rylance, Sir Roy Strong and Dame Vivienne Westwood. Her knowledge of the materials, shape and construction of early 16th century clothing of the type worn by Schwarz was vital to the success of the project.

To put together the outfit in the painting would have taken Schwarz many months of effort in sourcing materials and the craftspeople to make them up. It would have incurred him considerable expense. And to put the finished garments on in the privacy of his home Schwarz would have needed the assistance of servants to lace him tightly in. To achieve the narrow waist that such an outfit demands he would have denied himself rich foods.

As a historian of material culture, Dr Rublack seeks to get close to the past by looking at the things that people lived with and among, and exploring their complex relationships with the objects they used and collected. She is particularly interested in fashion and her research concentrates on the Renaissance and Reformation.

Many of the things that have survived from these periods are those which were looked at rather than used, precious items which were regarded as heirlooms and tied up with notions of continuing value - painting and sculpture, jewellery and curiosities, for example. Much rarer are items that had, at least in part, a practical function, such as textiles, clothing and footwear. And the further back one goes, fewer are the examples of this second group of things passed down to us.

Historians of material culture need to look at visual and written sources, such as portraits and diaries, in addition to inventories, to build up a picture of how people lived in relation to the things they possessed – and the roles that these things played in shaping their lives. In the instance of fashion, the shaping element takes on a literal sense: just as the body makes demands on clothes so do clothes make a demand on the body.

In her book Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford, 2011), Dr Rublack tells a vivid story of how people across society expressed their aspirations and emotions through appearances in an age which underwent fundamental changes in how things were made and marketed. ̽��ֱ��process of writing the book brought her close to the experience of what colours, textures and cuts appealed to men and women at the time - but she wanted to get a better grasp of both the practical processes that went into the making of dress and the experience of wearing garments that are, to our eyes, so outlandish.

̽��ֱ��portrait that Dr Rublack chose shows an outfit that Schwarz wore in 1530. He had it made for one of the most important events of the era - the return of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to Germany after nine year period during which many parts of the country had turned to Protestant faiths. Augsburg witnessed long-standing confrontations between Protestants and Catholics and would eventually tolerate both faiths.

̽��ֱ��purpose of the outfit was to impress and, in particular, to signal Schwarz’s allegiance to Catholicism and to the Emperor. And impress it did: in 1541 Schwarz was ennobled, a tremendous leap in social status for a man who was the son of a wine-merchant. Although he was well off, he was essentially a scribe who worked with figures, recording the business transactions and managing the credits of the Fugger merchant company.

“ ̽��ֱ��colours red and yellow are associated with happiness – and they demonstrate Schwarz’s joy at the visit of the Emperor and his brother Ferdinand of Austria. Schwarz notes that he wished 'to please Ferdinand' and he did so by symbolically expressing gaiety, youthful agility, pride and beauty. His was an aesthetic performance of political values through the expense and effort he had invested in such having so wonderful an outfit created,” says Dr Rublack.

“What we’ve learned in the course of this project is just how spectacular and dramatic such an assemblage would have been. ̽��ֱ��effect of the bright yellow is almost dazzling when you look at it for some time. ̽��ֱ��coordination of the textures, dyes and materials is subtle and ingenious. ̽��ֱ��outfit was designed to lift the spirit, make people marvel at novelty and show off advanced civilization .”

Handling the garments made for the project has shown the extent to which last-minute styling contributed to getting the right look. Dr Rublack says: “ ̽��ֱ��shirt, doublet and hose would need to be skilfully fitted by at least one servant when Schwarz was dressed in the morning to make them work together perfectly. Once he had taken his sword and walked on the streets, a man like Schwarz would be completely confident of his sartorial achievement – but equally he would have been worried about any speck of dirt or loose seam as well as about over-eating and drinking.”

High fashion treads a dangerous line: in making a bold statement, it’s easy to look foolish. ̽��ֱ��Renaissance fascination with image-making encouraged self-display – but this had to be balanced by an awareness of the dangers of self-delusion and ridicule. In the Renaissance, as today, fashion encouraged fears as much as fantasies and fun, openness to change and reflection on what it means to be human.

Fashion conveys complex messages. ̽��ֱ��recreation of an outfit taken from one of an extraordinary series of Renaissance portraits reveals how one man made his mark on society.

̽��ֱ��outfit was designed to lift the spirit, make people marvel at novelty, and show off advanced civilization

Dr Ulinka Rublack

Full res

Gallimard

Matthäus Schwarz

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Six hours of total performance

bjb42 — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:00:17 +0000

More than 30 musicians will take part in a six-hour celebration of performance in Cambridge this weekend.

̽��ֱ��“Total Performance Event”, on Saturday evening at Robinson College, will start around dinner time and continue into the small hours of the morning. On the way, the audience will be treated to performances by “Sweete Violence” from Basel, the Hills Road Folk Group, the Ealdwick Ensemble, an Indian dancer, the jazz quintet METROPOLIS, and soloists such as the singer Lesley-Jane Rogers, oboist Christopher Redgate and clarinettist Roger Heaton.

Conceived by John Rink in collaboration with Jeremy Thurlow and Ewan Campbell, the event will mark the climax of a major conference on performance studies which is taking place in Cambridge this week.

For generations musicology has focused on the study of composers and compositions, but it has neglected the fact that music as an art has as much to do with the work of performers. Rather than just acting as mediators who convey someone else’s music to an audience, performers have to be highly creative in their own right. Whether they emerge on the spot or over time, the decisions of performers have the potential to shape music in altogether unique ways, influencing if not determining how listeners experience that music.

What performers do and how people respond to what they do are the key subjects of the conference, which has been organised by the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP), based in the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Faculty of Music.

More than 140 delegates from around the world will hear some 90 research papers on such subjects as how musicians imagine and visualise music before or as they play it; how composers and performers together create “new music”; improvisation across a range of styles and traditions; the complex relationship between recorded and live performances; and how to perform music in the first place – whether the works of the classical masters, modern compositions, or improvisations.

Unlike most academic conferences, however, this one will end by immersing its participants directly in the subject matter itself, with a six-hour journey through a vast range of musical idioms. Those attending the event at Robinson will have a radically different experience from that of most concertgoers.

John Rink, Professor of Musical Performance Studies at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said: “ ̽��ֱ��Total Performance Event is the culmination, if not the acid test, of three days of scholarly discussion about what performers do, how they do it, and how people respond to it.”

“Listeners will feast on a performance smorgasbord – a ‘tasting menu’ – that will celebrate the role performers play not only in bringing composers’ music to life, but in creating it themselves.”

More information about the work of the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice can be found here.

A “total immersion” event in Cambridge this weekend marks the climax of a conference examining the work of performers and their creative role in making music.

This is the culmination, if not the acid test, of three days of scholarly discussion about what performers do, how they do it, and how people respond to it.

John Rink

Rachel Titiriga from Flickr.

Musical instrument.

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You hymn it, we’ll play it

bjb42 — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 11:00:53 +0000

̽��ֱ��centrepiece of the music marathon will be a sound installation, called ̽��ֱ��Hours, which will be broadcast in the College's main court throughout the 24-hour period.

Interspersed with this there will be live performances, celebrating the sacred music of different world faiths, and culminating in a "Come and Sing" session on Thursday afternoon, followed by the performance of a piece by the Tudor composer, John Taverner.

̽��ֱ��entire event will be open to the public for free. Visitors can either wander into the College to experience the sound installation, or attend one of the live performances, which are listed on the College website here. ̽��ֱ��final concert will be ticketed and places should be booked by writing to music@caths.cam.ac.uk

Musical members of the public are also welcome to join in with the Come and Sing session, either by writing to music@caths.cam.ac.uk or just by turning up on the day.

̽��ֱ��event is intended to be a celebration and grand expression of the music and art produced by different religions around the world. ̽��ֱ��monastic hours - the daily order of seven gatherings for prayer - will provide a thread running through the 24 hour period, but the music used will have an inter-faith flavour.

Dr. Edward Wickham, Director of Music at St Catharine's College, who devised the event, said: "We want to express something of the way in which world religions sit side-by-side, without diluting the intensity of people's individual faiths."

"When you travel around the Middle East, you can often have remarkable musical experiences because of the proximity of one religion to another. In some cities you can hear the sound of Christian bells in one ear and the Muslim call to prayer in the other. We want to celebrate that complimentarity of musical expressions, without trying to put across any sort of glib message."

̽��ֱ��event will kick-off at 7pm on Wednesday with the premiere performance of a new piece, Luminaria, which will be performed by the St Catharine's Girls' Choir with the Egyptian soprano, Merit Ariane Stephanos.

" ̽��ֱ��Hours" itself will run continuously throughout the next 24-hour period. Co-written by Dr Wickham and Jonathan Green, the piece is a collage of sound art and live performance that has been recorded by people of different faiths from around the UK over the past 18 months, and features a tapestry of different voices, music and sounds.

Interspersed with this there will be live performances at the College by Georgian and Muslim choirs, as well as chants from the Jewish and Hindu traditions. ̽��ֱ��traditional monastic services of Compline, Lauds and Matins will all be marked over the course of the night. ̽��ֱ��event will close on Thursday with a performance of Missa Gloria tibi Trinitas by John Taverner, sung by the award-winning vocal ensemble, ̽��ֱ��Clerks.

For further details about any aspect of the event, please visit the College website here.

An epic, 24-hour celebration of religious music will be taking place at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, this week, starting on Wednesday evening (June 22).

We want to express something of the way in which world religions sit side-by-side, without diluting the intensity of individual faiths.

Edward Wickham

St Catharine's College

Detail from the event poster.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

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