Text and Musical Gesture in Brahms's Vocal Duets and Quartets with Piano

Many group-living animals cooperatively signal to defend resources, but what stops deceptive signalling to competitors about coalition strength? Cooperative-signalling species include mated pairs of birds that sing duets to defend their territory. Individuals of these species sometimes sing ‘pseudo-duets’ by mimicking their partner's contribution, but it is unknown if these songs are deceptive, or why duets are normally reliable. We studied pseudo-duets in Australian magpie-larks, Grallina cyanoleuca , and tested whether multimodal signalling constrains deception. Magpie-larks give antiphonal duets coordinated with a visual display, with each sex typically choosing a different song type within the duet. Individuals produced pseudo-duets almost exclusively during nesting when partners were apart, but the two song types were used in sequence rather than antiphonally. Strikingly, birds hid and gave no visual displays, implying deceptive suppression of information. Acoustic playbacks showed that pseudo-duets provoked the same response from residents as true duets, regardless of whether they were sequential or antiphonal, and stronger response than that to true duets consisting of a single song type. By contrast, experiments with robot models showed that songs accompanied by movements of two birds prompted stronger responses than songs accompanied by movements of one bird, irrespective of the number of song types or singers. We conclude that magpie-larks used deceptive pseudo-duets when partners were apart, and suppressed the visual display to maintain the subterfuge. We suggest that the visual component of many species' duets provides the most reliable information about the number of signallers and may have evolved to maintain honesty in duet communication.

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VOCAL DUETS

Music and Letters ◽

10.1093/ml/liv.2.253-b ◽

1973 ◽

Vol LIV (2) ◽

pp. 253-b-253

Author(s):

T. H.

Keyword(s):

Vocal Duets

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Reading between the Lines: An Approach to the Musical and Sexual Ambiguities of Death in Venice

Journal of Musicology ◽

10.1525/jm.2005.22.3.327 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 22 (3) ◽

pp. 327-364

Author(s):

RUTH SARA LONGOBARDI

Keyword(s):

Discourse Analysis ◽

Sexual Identity ◽

String Quartet ◽

Coming Out ◽

Power Dynamics ◽

Untimely Death ◽

Musical Gesture ◽

Death In Venice

ABSTRACT Framing opera as a collaborative genre compels an examination of differences. In particular, opera's media may be understood as simultaneous but not necessarily as cooperative or neutral. This conception of opera raises issues of power dynamics and the politics of voice, both within the work and among its artists. In Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice, musico-dramatic dissonances center on the protagonist's homoerotic obsession with a young boy. His momentous ““I love you”” at the end of the act 1 finale is accompanied by a musical gesture that does not affirm but rather resists this coming-out event. The gesture's subsequent transformations in other passages that contain no text, and two years later in Britten's Third String Quartet, reinforce the sense of musical opposition to the libretto's homosexual trajectory——a trajectory that results in the protagonist's shame and untimely death. If musical detachment from the libretto suggests subtext, then it also points to alternative voices. Britten's homosexuality, and the pressures that accumulated around sexual identity in postwar England, argue for connections between musical distance and closeted discourse. Analysis must acknowledge the role of the composer's experiences in the varying characterizations of the protagonist but must also cope with the limits to this type of investigation: The attempt to draw definitive connections between music and sexuality limits the suppleness of our critical apparatus. Conceiving of opera as collaboration prompts a reevaluation of the work as potentially contradictory and fragmented but also advocates against the resolution of such contradictions into coherent authorial statements. Collaboration dislodges autonomy and unity and in their place recommends polyphonies——of authors and voices, among media but also within them.

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A taxonomy of musical gesture in African American gospel music

Popular Music ◽

10.1017/s0261143009990407 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 29 (1) ◽

pp. 103-129 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Andrew Legg

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Popular Music ◽

Gospel Music ◽

Musical Style ◽

Performance Practices ◽

Music Research ◽

Conventional Notation ◽

Analytical Research ◽

Musical Gesture ◽

And Performance

AbstractAfrican American gospel music seems without obvious parallel as a musical and social phenomenon of the twentieth century. It is a powerful musical and ‘spiritual’ expression that is to a larger extent defined by the musical style, vocal techniques and performance practices of one of its central figures: the gospel singer. Although these originally African American gospel vocal techniques and practices have now also significantly influenced the development of contemporary popular music and the broader gospel vocal style, the specific terminology used to describe them lacks precise definition, and also highlights the failure of conventional notation in successfully capturing or representing them.This article seeks then to firstly define and annotate some of the key descriptive terms commonly applied to African American gospel singing techniques in order that greater consistency and clarity can be achieved in relation to their usage within contemporary popular music research. Secondly, it will also introduce an analytical notational system, accompanied by a series of annotated musical transcriptions, that forms the basis of the author's taxonomy of musical gesture for African American gospel music, and which may provide a framework for comparative analytical research within the field of gospel-inspired contemporary popular music.

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