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Over the past half century, China's music academies have achieved some success in national vocal education, but they have also exposed many problems, and the root cause of these problems lies in the lack of cultural foundation. The characteristics of vocal performance determine that the establishment of vocal singing methods and teaching systems originate from stage practice, so for a long time, the stage practice of Chinese national vocal music has been far ahead of theory.

The relevance of musical expression marks —technical words, symbols, phrases, and their abbreviations— in music is to guide the performer through a thorough interpretation and appreciation of the dynamics and subtleties of a piece of music. These marks, though fundamental to piano pedagogy, sometimes appear confusing to the enthusiastic piano student owing to the fact that some of the performance marks demand subjective expressions from the performer such as, 'furiously', 'fiercely' 'with agitation' 'brightly', tenderly, etc. Piano-keyboard education is still a 'tender' art in Nigerian higher institutions where most learners start at a relatively very late age (17-30 yrs) and so, it becomes burdensome and sometimes unproductive to encumber the undergraduate piano-keyboard student with a plethora of performance marks when he is still grappling with scales and arpeggios. This paper therefore suggests teaching keyboard basics and technique and employing fundamental musical expression marks/dynamics first for undergraduate piano teaching and learning in our institutions. Only when students have shown competences in the basic dynamic/expression marks such as, crescendo, accelerando, andante, moderato, allegro, larghetto etc, can the more complex and subjective ones be introduced in their keyboard repertoire.

This paper investigates the role of social media in mobilizing environmentalism amid authoritarian restrictions, focusing on the Vietnam coastal pollution of 2016. It contributes to current academic debates by showing how elements that are apparently mundane and irrelevant become the stage for political action within social media. We examined the interface of connective actions (social media activism) – collective actions (protests) and the role of food symbolism in translating digital activism into physical resistance that bridges the distance between rural and urban areas. Data were collected from Facebook and Twitter, as well as semi-structured interviews, policy documents, and national newspapers and broadcasts. Food symbolism, exemplified by #ichoosefish, helped personalize grievances and materialize protest actions amid the government's countermeasures. The results further show that by using social media, especially Facebook, the activists managed to rationalize their political engagement in a non-participatory context and mobilize protests during political restrictions by arguing that their 'apolitical' actions were motivated by food-based grievances associated with personal, environmentalist and nationalist concerns. Food symbolism is thus essential in transitioning from connective actions to collective actions.

Organised in an accessible A-Z format and fully cross-referenced throughout, this book is a comprehensive guide to the terminology commonly used in the music business today. It embraces definitions from a number of relevant fields, from e-commerce to intellectual property law.

"Roger Freitas firmly situates his book, Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage, and Music in the Life of Atto Melani, as biography, yet the text aspires to something more: both the blurb and the introduction promise to clarify 'what music at this time actually was.' More properly, Freitas offers an articulate analysis of the social valence of musical performance within the elite circles of the seventeenth-century Italian courts; he focuses on music as a skill with material benefits. The subject of Freitas's book, Atto Melani (1626-1714), was a castrato, trained as a singer, although eventually he moved away from performance, spending the latter years of his life as a diplomat. According to Freitas, Atto - referred to by his first name, as per contemporary convention - was the 'most highly documented' musician of the seventeenth century. With few exceptions, the documents that survive are letters written by Atto, and addressed to a cross-section of the most important political figures in Italy. In his relationship to courtly culture and as a court musician, Atto participated in an increasingly anachronistic model of 'musical performance,' one which persisted in contrast with newer, recognizably modern patterns of professionalization associated with the public operatic stage. This is, perhaps, one of the most valuable aspects of this study: Freitas has ably and coherently mapped out the way in which the intricate and asymmetrical obligations of patron and client functioned in seventeenth-century Italy, situating Atto's musical skills within a broad range of courtly services and deftly portraying the castrato's gradual shift from court musician to courtier."--page 87