The music of Steve Reich; The music of John Adams

While many strategy games (both real-time- and turn-based-) use a fictionalized Earth history as a backdrop for their ludic elements, few seek to faithfully represent the progression of music history via the use of pre-existing music. Soren Johnson’s Civilization IV stands alone as it presents a thorough retelling of music history, with representative works from the Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern Eras, including works by Josquin, Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvořák, and American minimalist composer, John Adams. The game’s lead designer and AI programmer, Soren Johnson, personally selected each track included in the underscoring playlists. Drawing heavily upon new interviews with the game designers, this paper explores Soren Johnson’s personal representation of music history, analyzing in particular his use of John Sheppard’s Media Vita, Saint-Säens’s Cello Concerto No.1,  Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, and the works of John Adams. I also discuss the implications of Johnson’s personalized version of history and argue that we can identify him with auteur film directors. The paper also addresses the potential for Civilization IV to educate its players in genres they may have been unfamiliar with, helping them contextualize and appreciate previously unfamiliar musics.

A brief historical overview of critical issues in opera as contemporary music in the postwar period, with particular attention to the split between opera's traditional avant-garde role within musical culture and the explicitly anti-operatic tenor of the postwar avant-garde, epitomized by Pierre Boulez's 1967 call to "blow up the opera houses." Only with the advent of minimalism and a musical "transavantgarde" did opera return to the center of contemporary music discourse, allowing some critics to opine that opera would be the salvation of a classical music in perpetual decline. The critical reception of John Adams's 2005 opera "Doctor Atomic" demonstrates the dangers of relying on opera to revitalize the classical tradition of Western music.

The aesthetic and political sides of public art have recently been examined from different theoretical vantage points. Pragmatist accounts, however, have been largely absent from the discussion. This article develops a theory of public art on some central ideas of John Dewey's aesthetics and social philosophy. From a pragmatist perspective, the best cases of public art turn out to have high social significance, for they are means of promoting the sense of community, which Dewey saw as foundational for well-functioning democracies. The Deweyan account of public art developed in this article is set against theories that explain its social value by public artworks’ ability to disrupt people's everyday routines and beliefs, as well as by the political alertness they often raise. Diana Boros's recent treatment of what she calls “visionary public art” serves as the main specimen of this approach. The Deweyan understanding of public art is illuminated and defended with the help of a reading of John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls—a piece composed in memory of the victims of 9/11—that highlights its capacity to generate such communal experiences that have a fundamental role in Dewey's theory of democracy.

This music review critically analyses the 7pm, 18 September 2015 UWA School of Music's State of Flux Concert, with students offering 38 simultaneous, innovative performances. Curated by Asst/Prof Chris Tonkin and Lecturer Ashley Smith, this Friday evening performance was the encore to the highly successful Thursday Lunchtime Concert held on 10 September 2015 through the School of Music’s main building, the Eileen Joyce Studio and the outdoor areas surrounding the School and Library.