Different-Age and Mentally Handicapped Listeners' Response to Western Art Music Selections

1997 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 568-579 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzanne Rita Byrnes
Keyword(s):  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Second Grade ◽  
Mentally Handicapped ◽  
Digital Interface ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Continuous Response ◽  
La Boheme

The purpose of the study was to provide insight into the musical responsiveness of different groups of participants. A listening activity was developed to measure likeability of pre-selected excerpts in different performance media. One-hundred-and-sixty-three subjects, students from Grades 2, 5, 8, 11/12, and trainable mentally handicapped (TMH) students, participated in the study. Students listened to excerpts from Puccini's La Bohème, Haydn's Symphony No. 104, Mozart's Vesperae Solennes, and Hoist's First Suite in E-flat, while simultaneously manipulating a Continuous Response Digital Interface (CBDI) dial. Overlays used with the CRDI dial were developed specifically for the populations tested and included a pictographic scale continuum. Results indicated that (a) second-grade participants rated all excerpts higher than did the other groups, and (b) instrumental music examples were rated higher than vocal music examples. Results concur with findings reported in music preference research literature.

Comparing Continuous versus Static Measurements in Music Listeners' Preferences

1995 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth V. Brittin
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Significant Interaction ◽  
Rating Scale ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Music Majors ◽  
Digital Interface ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Continuous Response ◽  
Preference Ratings ◽  
Nonmusic Majors

In this investigation, we compared listeners' preferential ratings of art music, derived by conventional static ratings taken through 10-point Likert-type scales, and continuous ratings taken throughout the duration of each excerpt with a Continuous Response Digital Interface (CRDI). Music majors (n = 100) and non-music majors (n − 100) rated twelve excerpts of Western art music, including three substyles (Baroque, Romantic, and 20th-century) and three performance media (strings, keyboard, and winds). Music majors' preference ratings were significantly higher than were nonmusic majors' preference ratings. Although no significant effect was found due to using the CRDI or static rating scale, there was a significant interaction between type of measurement and major. Music majors' static and continuous ratings were similar; however, nonmusic majors' continuous ratings were noticeably higher than were static ratings. Nonmusic majors using the CRDI averaged almost one Likert-scale rating higher than those using the static measure.

Time–space structuring in spontaneous play on educational percussion instruments among three- and four-year-olds

2003 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Young
Keyword(s):  
Grounded Theory ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Instrument Design ◽  
Children's Music ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Relational Processes ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Percussion Instruments

This article reports on a study which investigated the spontaneous instrumental music-making of three- and four-year-olds in typical pre-school educational settings in London, UK. It argues that many prior studies of children's music-making have analysed and evaluated such activity against models drawn from the practices of Western art music and its conventions of analytical theory, and suggests that this approach has certain drawbacks. The study adopted a grounded theory methodology moving through three phases in different nursery classrooms. Each phase was characterised by successive focusing and refinement of methodological tools in response to the emerging findings. Data were collected on videotape which was then repeatedly reviewed, transcribed and categorised. The children's music-making was analysed as relational processes in time and space involving the two-way interplay of child and instrument. Structures in space delineate the child's movement within the spatial potentials and constraints of the instrument design. Structures in time describe how movements and movement ideas were strung together in ever-lengthening portions.

Focus of Attention and Aesthetic Response

1997 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifford K. Madsen
Keyword(s):  
Focus Of Attention ◽  
Aesthetic Response ◽  
Digital Interface ◽  
Specific Element ◽  
Continuous Response ◽  
La Boheme ◽  
Musical Elements

In the present study, focus of attention to musical elements was investigated in an attempt to ascertain which elements are perceived as most prominent in relation to aesthetic response as demonstrated in previous work. One hundred experienced musicians listened to the last 20 minutes of Act I of Puccini's La Bohème. Fifty musicians indicated via the Continuous Response Digital Interface (CRDI) which of five musical elements (Melody, Rhythm, Timbre, Dynamics, or Everything) commanded their attention as they listened throughout the excerpt. Additionally, another 50 subjects, divided into five groups of 10 subjects each, registered their degree of attention for each specific musical element; these subjects had only one element presented on the CRDI dial with instructions to register their degree of attention to this specific element throughout the selection. Results from those subjects who tracked all elements simultaneously indicated that the highest percentage of attention throughout the entire excerpt was registered for Dynamics, followed closely by the elements Everything, Melody, Rhythm, and Timbre. For those subjects who responded to only one element, the highest degree of attentiveness was registered for Melody, followed by the elements Dynamics and Everything. Timbre was next in degree-of-attentiveness rating, and rhythm was by far the lowest. The element Melody was most closely related to aesthetic responsiveness for this Puccini excerpt.

Embodying Failure: Music Performance, Risk and Authenticity

Somatechnics ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Imogene Newland
Keyword(s):  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Music Performance ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Musical Experience ◽  
Charles Ives ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Interdisciplinary Practice ◽  
Musical Gesture ◽  
And Performance ◽  
A Site

Certain trends in the recital of Western art music composition and performance have embraced indeterminacy through an emerging sonic aesthetic that seeks to redefine the notion of failure. From Charles Ives' adoption of bi-tonality in the early twentieth century to the ‘glitch’ movement in contemporary computer music, this article traces ways in which musicians have sought to embrace the risk for failure in performance with special attention to virtuosic instrumental music ( Cascone 2006 ; Rodgers 2003 ; Godlovitch 1998 ; Rosen 2002 ). Drawing upon the author's recent interdisciplinary practice-led research ‘Woman=Music=Desire’ (2010) and adopting a choreographic approach to the re-appropriation of musical gesture, the author explores how the risk for failure contributes to live musical experience. This discussion is then extended to the process of corporeal acquisition necessary in rehearsing and performing a piece of music which, the author suggests, results in a degree of gestural self-simulation. In this way, the performer's personal authenticity is discussed as a potential locus of failure in which the physical manifestation of emotional expression helps to determine empathetic identification between performer, spectator and instrument ( Kivy 1995 ). Drawing upon Steven Baker's notion of ‘botched taxidermy’ (2000), the author suggests that this empathetic identification creates a space in which the potential risk for failure might be considered intrinsic to conceptions of corporeality in music performance. In this way, live musical experience is posited a site of risk in which the performer, as a desiring subject, emerges as the embodiment of failure. A short excerpt of the case study ‘Woman=Music=Desire’ may be viewed at: http://www.imogene-newland.co.uk/perf_women_md.php

Music after the Fall

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War

By the start of the 21st century many of the foundations of postwar culture had disappeared: Europe had been rebuilt and, as the EU, had become one of the world’s largest economies; the United States’ claim to global dominance was threatened; and the postwar social democratic consensus was being replaced by market-led neoliberalism. Most importantly of all, the Cold War was over, and the World Wide Web had been born. Music After The Fall considers contemporary musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing on theories from the other arts, in particular art and architecture, it expands the definition of Western art music to include forms of composition, experimental music, sound art, and crossover work from across the spectrum, inside and beyond the concert hall. Each chapter considers a wide range of composers, performers, works, and institutions are considered critically to build up a broad and rich picture of the new music ecosystem, from North American string quartets to Lebanese improvisers, from South American electroacoustic studios to pianos in the Australian outback. A new approach to the study of contemporary music is developed that relies less on taxonomies of style and technique, and more on the comparison of different responses to common themes, among them permission, fluidity, excess, and loss.

Vasyl Bezkorovayny’s vocal works in Ukrainian music of the first half of the XX century

2019 ◽  
pp. 500-515
Author(s):  
Nataliia Kosaniak
Keyword(s):  
Choral Music ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Western European ◽  
Vocal Works ◽  
Post War ◽  
Talented Artist

Vasyl Bezkorovayny (1880–1966) was a talented artist, an active figure in the musical life of Galicia and a representative of post-war Ukrainian emigrants in the United States of America. He wrote more than 350 works of various genres. Among them are compositions for symphony orchestra; vocal works — for chorus, ensembles or solo singing; chamber and instrumental music — for piano, violin, zither, cello; music for dramatic performances. The article deals with the archival and musicological analysis of expressive and stylistic features of V. Bezkorovayny’s vocal works, based on the materials of Stefanyk Lviv National Library of Ukraine. Attention is paid to the place of the composer’s vocal masterpieces in the context of Ukrainian vocal music of the first half of the XX century. The most important achievements of the composer related to the genres of choral and chamber vocal music. In style, the composer’s works combine the influences of M. Lysenko, composers of the «Peremyshl school» and Western European romantic and post-romantic models. The original secular choral music of V. Bezkorovayny covers genres of songs, plays, and large-form choirs. In his solo songs the influences of romantic western European music and Ukrainian folk songs affected the formation and approval of the composer’s style. Keywords: vocal music, chorus, solos, melodic-intonation means, harmony, rhythm.

Tiki Taane’s With Strings Attached: Alive & Orchestrated and postcolonial identity politics in New Zealand

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oli Wilson
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Performance Practice ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Performance Group ◽  
Representational Practices ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
Television Documentary

This chapter explores how the New Zealand popular music artist Tiki Taane subverts dominant representational practices concerning New Zealand cultural identity by juxtaposing musical ensembles, one a ‘colonial’ orchestra, the other a distinctively Māori (indigenous New Zealand) kapa haka performance group, in his With Strings Attached: Alive & Orchestrated album and television documentary, released in 2014. Through this collaboration, Tiki reframes the colonial experience as an amalgam of reappropriated cultural signifiers that enraptures those that identify with colonization and colonizing experiences, and in doing so, expresses a form of authorial agency. The context of Tiki’s subversive approach is contextualized by examining postcolonial representational practices surrounding Māori culture and orchestral hybrids in the western art music tradition, and through a discussion about the ways the performance practice called kapa haka is represented through existing scholarly studies of Māori music.

Musical training improves memory for instrumental music, but not vocal music or words

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-159
Author(s):  
Jonathan M. P. Wilbiks ◽  
Sean Hutchins
Keyword(s):  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Musical Training ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
Verbal Material ◽  
The Other ◽  
Musical Experience ◽  
Facilitative Effect ◽  
Musical Excerpts ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Brain

In previous research, there exists some debate about the effects of musical training on memory for verbal material. The current research examines this relationship, while also considering musical training effects on memory for musical excerpts. Twenty individuals with musical training were tested and their results were compared to 20 age-matched individuals with no musical experience. Musically trained individuals demonstrated a higher level of memory for classical musical excerpts, with no significant differences for popular musical excerpts or for words. These findings are in support of previous research showing that while music and words overlap in terms of their processing in the brain, there is not necessarily a facilitative effect between training in one domain and performance in the other.

THE NON-CANONIC STATUS OF MOZART’S CANONS

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
NEAL ZASLAW
Keyword(s):  
Art Music ◽  
Orchestral Music ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Circle Of Friends ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Peculiar Nature

Mozart's canons are rather inadequately represented in the Köchel catalogue and the Neue Mozart Ausgabe. The same may be said about other music for his immediate circle of friends, colleagues and patrons, as well as his dance music and his contributions to pasticcios. Neglect of these ‘minor’ genres perhaps arises at least in part from anachronistic paradigms, for instance ‘masterpieces for posterity’. And the canons suffer additionally from the peculiar nature of their sources and transmission, from uncertainty about the position of canons in the ‘canon’ of Western art music and probably also from embarrassment over some of Mozart’s texts. Mozart’s canons have been studied not only less often than his operatic, church, chamber and orchestral music, but also less well.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document