Christopher Fox will discuss a number of his recent works, including qui/nt/et (written for the Quiet Music Ensemble and premiered at UCC in 2014)),The Dark Road, and Topophony, and the ways in which they use acoustic phenomena and found materials as the means for creating large-scale musical forms. He made the useful distinction between absolute expressionists and referential expressionists and identified his own position as formalist-absolute expressionist.” In acknowledging that music can and does express referential (designative) meanings as well as nonreferential ones, Meyer exhibited an eclectic and certainly permissive view.
From the days of the church fathers down to the present, there has been conflict between the concerns of the church musician, who wishes to elevate the faithful with his music, and the preachers, who regard music that is too copious as a distraction from religious meditation.
This means that our courses are focused on practical work, from performance, composition and improvisation to musical theatre performance, training in instrumental or vocal teaching, music business, music therapy and community music, as well as traditional music analysis and critical theory.
They publish hymn books, and besides their significant influence upon broad, popular musical culture, they stage major events themselves, including services with orchestral and choral accompaniment and church concerts that are outside the liturgical framework (or else they make the churches available for such performances).
However, the influence of sociomusical theory on those traditions has grown substantially since the mid-twentieth century, and increasingly it has become fundamental to contemporary interdisciplinary musical thought, in the process sharply revising many deeply entrenched ideologies of musical value and assumptions about music’s essential sociality.