When French Music meets Jazz
Thu, 27 Mar 2014 13:00:00 GMT
On Thursday 3 April at 5.30pm (for 6.00pm) there will be a Professorial Lecture with speaker Professor Deborah Mawer - When French Music Meets Jazz: Intertextuality and Borrowing in Music by Ravel and Bill Evans. The lecture will take place in the Phipps Concert Hall in the Creative Arts Building.
French music and jazz often seem to have enjoyed a special creative, cultural exchange: French modernist composers were receptive to early jazz in the 1920s and 1930s, and American jazz musicians, especially in the later 1950s, showed a real affinity with French impressionist and neoclassical styles.
But how do these different worlds actually relate? How is the resulting music inflected by its association, and what effect might this have upon a work’s meaning? What are the implications for performance? In order to gauge and nuance these relationships, Deborah brings into play broad-based theories of intertextuality (listener-centred), as well as more specific notions of cultural borrowing (composer-centred).
Two balancing case studies are presented to show the scope and detail of this topic, with a focus upon instrumental repertoire. The first looks at Ravel’s theory and practice of the ‘Blues’, especially in his well-known Violin Sonata (1923–27). The second considers resonances of Ravel (together with Chopin, as an adoptive Frenchman) and even parallels with Messiaen in exquisite music from 1958–59 by the American modal jazz improviser and pianist, Bill Evans.
Professor Deborah Mawer
Deborah Mawer is Professor of Music at the University of Huddersfield and Research Professor at Birmingham Conservatoire. She studied at King’s College London, completing a doctorate with Professor Arnold Whitall on the music of Milhaud, and as a viola player at the Royal Academy of Music. Before coming to Huddersfield, she held a personal Chair at Lancaster University and previously a lectureship at the University of Newcastle. Her main publications are on twentieth-century French music, with her fifth book, French Music in Conversation with Jazz, 1900 - 1965: From Debussy to Brubeck (Cambridge University Press), forthcoming later this year. She is a founder and former Vice-President of the Society for Music Analysis and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She also has long-standing interests in education, as a member of the Editorial Board of the British Journal of Music Education, and as a National Teaching Fellow.
For further information contact:
Tel: 01484 47(2359)
E-mail: j.jefferies@hud.ac.uk
This lecture is free and open to all
