scholarly journals Specifics of the structure of the cycle and the musical form in the Concerto for Persian Ney and Orchestra «Toward That Endless Plain» by Reza Vali

2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (59) ◽  
pp. 185-201
Author(s):  
Ehsan Tavakkol
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
Unusual Structure ◽  
Musical Tradition ◽  
Peculiar Form ◽  
Ternary Form ◽  
Form Part ◽  
Western European ◽  
Mosaic Form ◽  
Slow Tempo

The article considers the peculiarities of the structure of the cycle and the form of the Concerto for the Persian Ney with Orchestra «Toward That Endless Plain» by the modern Iranian-American composer of the XX–XXI centuries Reza Vali (b. 1952). It was found that the unusual structure and musical form of this Concert are manifested in the combination between traditional Western European principles of cycle composition with the principles of musical form each part that is characteristic of classical Iranian music. The cycle of the Concerto is three-part with additional sections. This model of a solo concerto has developed in the European musical tradition. However, due to the author’s program the structure of the cycle, in general, is extremely specific (Tavakkol, 2019: 271). It was found that the specifics of the structure of the cycle is the introduction of two additional sections, marked as “Prelude” (set out before Part I) and “Interlude” (placed between Parts II and III). It is established that each of the three parts and additional sections are set out in a peculiar form inherent in Iranian classical music: Parts I and III are composed in mosaic form, Part II is written in the form of nobats; “Prelude” and “Interlude” are created in Ternary form. It is revealed that the arched principle (the principle of symmetry) in the construction of the cycle is found between “Prelude” and “Interlude”, as well as between I and III parts. The alternation of tempo characteristics of the parts is revealed in the general composition of the cycle. The I and III parts have a slow tempo and the II part has a fast. (this kind of contrast between parts is not typical for the genre of a solo concert of Western European music). Two principles in the organization of the composition cycle and the form of individual parts are highlighted. It is proved that R. Vali’s choice of a specific composition of the cycle, the form of parts and additional sections, as well as the use of tempo of each part, is due to the concert program, which is a kind of interpretation of the meaning contained in the poem by S. Sepehri. The music of the work is closely connected with the program. All parts of the Concerto have titles in Persian and English, which are based on the postulates of mystical philosophy and Sufism. Prelude and Interlude, which are associated with images of the material world – aggression and war. In comparison with the saturated, solid sound of the Prelude and Interlude, the delicate sparsity of the three main parts of the cycle are meant to reveal the spiritual life of humanity (Tavakkol, 2020: 113–117).

Notation and identity in contemporary popular music

Popular Music ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 215-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Stith Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Term Changes ◽  
Western European ◽  
Rock N Roll

Popular music, like all manifestations of popular culture, lives on in spite of recurring criticisms that cast it as somehow inauthentic. In fact, defences against this discounting are built into popular music (for example, the Rolling Stones' classic: ‘It's only rock 'n' roll but I like it’) and built in, as well, to the identities of those who make the music a part of their lives, be they players, producers, consumers or critics. On the other hand, so-called classical music, not unlike other manifestations of Western European art culture, lives on in spite of popular music and provides the touchstone of authenticity that creates the defensive popular response. The ideas I am advancing here are intended to allow the players in this authenticity contest to be recognised as evidence of unique historical circumstances: recognised, that is, not only as stock dramatists of ethnocentrism, but as indicators of long-term changes in music cultures in all parts of the world.

Western European Union

1958 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 552-553 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Military Policy ◽  
European Security ◽  
Form Part ◽  
Western Germany ◽  
Western European ◽  
The Military ◽  
Fourth Session ◽  
De La Vallée Poussin

The first part of the fourth session of the Assembly of the Western European Union (WEU) was held July 2–5, 1958, in Paris, under the presidency of Sir James Hutchison (United Kingdom, Conservative). In the course of its discussion of military questions, the Assembly debated three reports and took note of a communication by M. Etienne de la Vallée Poussin (Belgium, Social Christian) on the responsibility of WEU in military policy. After its consideration of the request for an opinion from the Consultative Assembly on the military implications of regional or limited disarmament or of the policy of disengagement in central Europe, the Assembly adopted a resolution rejecting the Rapacki Plan and stating that disengagement which implied a withdrawal of United States and Soviet troops would be highly dangerous to the west unless it took place under certain express conditions, one of these being that neutralization of western Germany could not form part of such a policy. The Assembly also adopted a resolution and a recommendation on WEU's contribution to the production of armaments within the Atlantic alliance; the resolution allowed for the creation of a committee of investigation of five members, to be nominated by the Presidential Committee. In connection with the state of European security the Council approved by 50 votes to 6, with 8 abstentions, a recommendation from its defense committee calling for a minimum land force in central Europe of 30 divisions, with tactical nuclear weapons. There was to be no reduction in the contribution of member states, according to the recommendation, and they were to bring their contingents up to the agreed level.

scholarly journals Against Nature? or, Confessions of a Darwinian Modernist

2014 ◽  
Vol 75 ◽  
pp. 151-182
Author(s):  
Murray Smith
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
Musical Expression ◽  
Musical Sound ◽  
Musical Sounds ◽  
Western Classical Music ◽  
The Way

A few years ago I gave a paper on the aesthetics of ‘noise,’ that is, on the ways in which non-musical sounds can be given aesthetic shape and structure, and thereby form the basis of significant aesthetic experience. Along the way I made reference to Arnold Schoenberg's musical theory, in particular his notion ofKlangfarbenmelodie, literally ‘sound colour melody,’ or musical form based on timbre or tonal colour rather than on melody, harmony or rhythm. Schoenberg articulated his ideas aboutKlangfarbenmelodiein the final section of hisHarmonielehre(1911). ‘Pitch is nothing else but tone colour measured in one direction,’ wrote Schoenberg. ‘Now, if it is possible to create patterns out of tone colours that are differentiated according to pitch, patterns we call ‘melodies’…then it must also be possible to make such progressions out of the tone colours of the other dimension, out of that which we simply call “tone colour.”’ In other words, traditional melodies work by abstracting and structuring the dominant pitch characterizing a musical sound, while ‘sound colour melodies’ work, Schoenberg argues, by structuring the combined set of pitches contained in a given musical sound (the overtones as well as the dominant pitch). Schoenberg is emphatic that, although a neglected and underdeveloped possibility within Western classical music, ‘sound colour melody’ is a perfectly legitimate and viable form of musical expression; indeed for Schoenberg it is a musical form with enormous potential.

scholarly journals Karlovac chant between tradition and innovation

2021 ◽  
pp. 207-223
Author(s):  
Dragan Askovic
Keyword(s):  
Necessary Conditions ◽  
Liturgical Music ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Music Transcription ◽  
Musical Tradition ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
Western European ◽  
Musical Achievement ◽  
Basic Characteristics ◽  
Musical Heritage

Church singing, which was created due to the circumstances that arose after the Great Migration, is better known as the Karlovac chant. It was named after the place where it was transcribed and represents our national way of interpreting liturgical music, characterized by accepted influences of Western European musical practice, manifested first in music transcription, notation, metrics, and Western European tonality. Those were necessary conditions for its further artistic transposition into a complex polyphonic choral facture, intended primarily for church music elite. Permeated with the standard authoritative Western European musical tradition, it succumbed to the influence of superior musical achievements. However, when exposed to Western European creative practices, it did not prove to be a harmonized expression of artistic subordination, but an example of an unpredictable musical achievement based on the synthesis of our rich musical heritage imbued with a unique confessional and national self-determination. Its basic characteristics go back to the traditional musical heritage of the Balkans and Byzantium, enriched by Western European influences.

“A Christy Minstrel, a Harlequin, or an Ancient Persian”?: Opera, Hindustani Classical Music, and the Origins of the Popular South Asian “Musical”

2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-350
Author(s):  
Rashna Darius Nicholson
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Musical Cultures ◽  
Marching Bands ◽  
History Of ◽  
Hindustani Music ◽  
Musical Genres

The story of South Asian colonial modernity and music offers up a multidirectional and polymorphous conceptual terrain featuring, among many agents, Hindustani royalty, touring minstrel and burlesque troupes, Jesuit missionaries and orientalists, and not least, social reformists. Nevertheless, scholarship on the history of Hindustani music consistently traces its development through classicization against the rise of Hindu nationalism while overlooking other palpable clues in the colonial past. This article argues for a substantial reevaluation of colonial South Asian music by positing an alternative and hitherto invisible auditory stimulus in colonial Asia's aural landscape: opera. Janaki Bakhle contends that “as a musical form, opera put down even fewer roots than did orchestral, instrumental Western classical music,” even though she subsequently states that “Western orchestration did become part of modern ceremonial activities, and it moved into film music even as it was played by ersatz marching bands.” Bakhle further argues that Hindustani music underwent processes of sanitization and systematization within a Hindu nation-making project, a view that has been complicated by historians such as Tejaswini Niranjana. Niranjana describes how scholarship that focuses exclusively on the codification or nationalization of Hindustani music through the interpellation of a Hindu public neglects “sedimented forms of musical persistence.” Not dissimilarly, Richard David Williams highlights how the singular emphasis on the movement of Hindustani music reform risks reducing the heterogeneous and complex musicological traditions in the colonial period to the output of a single, monolithic, middle-class “new elite.” Previous scholarship, he argues, concentrates on “one player in a larger ‘economy’ of musical consumption.” Following these calls for more textured perspectives on South Asian musical cultures, I suggest a somewhat heretical thesis: that opera functioned as a common mediating stimulus for both the colonial reinscription of Hindustani music as classical as well as the emergence of popular pan-Asian musical genres such as “Bollywood” music.

Glinka in Soviet and Post-Soviet Historiography: Myths, Realities and Ideologies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniil Zavlunov
Keyword(s):  
Personal Style ◽  
Musical Tradition ◽  
Western European ◽  
Soviet Historiography

The advent of glasnost’ prompted a reassessment of many aspects of Russia’s musical past, especially in regard of key figures such as the composer Mikhail Glinka. The revisionism that swept Glinka scholarship in Russia itself thereafter promised much: new and better understanding of Glinka and his music, investigation of previously forbidden topics and reassessment of the sources. Although recent Russian studies have sought to re-contextualise and to reappraise the composer’s life and works in relation to the Western European musical tradition, problematically, this revisionist scholarship tends to fall victim to the clichés that it would seek to avoid: Glinka’s divergence from selected models is generally attributed not to his personal style, but to his Russianness, forcing us to perpetuate the myth of Glinka’s musical uniqueness vis-à-vis his nationality.

Motivic cohesion and parsimony in three songs from Gentle Giant's Acquiring the Taste (1971)

Popular Music ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-292
Author(s):  
Mattias Lundberg
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
Tonal Music ◽  
Musical Tradition ◽  
Progressive Rock ◽  
Small Set ◽  
Rock Movement ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Dominant Tendency ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractIn addition to a hierarchy of harmony and fundamental pitch, large-scale modal or tonal music generally needs to generate considerable portions of its substance from a limited number of melodic ideas in order to be readily comprehended as musical form. In Western musical tradition this has typically been achieved by means of motivic development. A distinctive trait in the mainstream of popular music in the 1960s and 1970s, on the other hand, is the predominance of clearly demarcated phrase-bound structures, where either no smaller unit than the phrase could be perceived, or where the smaller units (as in the case of riffs and ostinato figures) have functions that are subservient or complementary to the phrase-structure. Some genuine exceptions from this otherwise highly dominant tendency can be identified in the music from the so-called progressive rock movement in the early 1970s. This article investigates the case of the British group Gentle Giant (active 1970–1980). A motivic analysis of three songs from the album Acquiring the Taste (1971) elucidates how a small set of motives could be used in concatenations to unify larger and more dynamic song structures than what is possible in non-reducible phrase-bound forms.

scholarly journals Contributions to music play selection for music therapy on the patients with hypertension and coronary

2016 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 237-242
Author(s):  
Alexandru Chiţu ◽  
◽  
Ioan Bradu Iamandescu ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Music Therapy ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Statistical Processing ◽  
Hypotensive Effect ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Fast Tempo ◽  
Coronary Patients ◽  
Selection For ◽  
Slow Tempo ◽  
Selection Of

In one tentative selection of music songs for music therapy for the hypertensive and coronary patients, the authors tried to evaluate the predilection for this patients for one music with fast tempo which is contraindicate because the activation of sympathetic tone with hypotensive effect and with increasing myocardial oxygen consumption effect. Preferences for fast or slow tempo music were evaluated in 200 subjects (four groups of patients: hypertension, coronary heart disease, non-cardiac + a control group of healthy subjects). The attractiveness of the subjects investigated for music was performed by awarding marks from 1 to 10 couples of the 6 songs heard (fast vs. slow). Statistical processing of differences between the averages of 4 groups showed significantly increased preference for fast music group coronary (p <0.01) and hypertension (p <0.05). The opinion of the authors is to advise these patients to listen predominant cardiac slow classical music (especially baroque, with major psychological relaxing effects but also having the effect of decreasing sympathetic hypertension.

scholarly journals Music and choreography interaction in the stage dances of musical theater productions of the 17th – the first half of the 18th century

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (14) ◽  
pp. 63-73
Author(s):  
K.A. Maksimenko
Keyword(s):  
Musical Theater ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Close Relation ◽  
Musical Structure ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
Symmetric Scheme ◽  
General Plan ◽  
Peculiar Form ◽  
Expression Of Emotions ◽  
Early 18Th Century

Background. One of the typical trends of modern musicology is the increasing interest in the problem of components dialogue in the synthetic forms of art. In the context of this global topic, the issue of music and choreography interaction in the stage dances of musical theater productions of the 17th – the first half of the 18th century is of particular interest. The connection of music and choreography in the art of stage dance of the 17th – the first half of the 18th century appears as a kind of continuation of the syncretic unity of ancient art seen through the prism of the professional experience of the creators of court musical and stage productions in the French classicism style. In the court operas, ballets and other types of performances such of the composers, as A. Kampra, J.-B. Lully, J. F. Rameau, the spirit of the antique art was reviving in its own special way representing the “ensemble of arts” in a miniature. The research objective is to identify the features of the combination and interaction of musical and choreographic arts in the stage dances of French musical and theatre productions of the 17th – the first half of the 18th century. The article uses the method of comparative analysis. This method allows to analyze the features and the ways of interaction between the elements of dance and musical syntax. Results. The art of choreography is a rhythm and plastic form of thinking and self-expression, which can reflect reality not only in its eventual plot related manifestations, but also to rise to the broad abstract generalizations. In view of its rather conditional nature, dance requires, to one degree or another, the interpretation of its content. In the 17th and early 18th centuries, the need for such an explanation increases significantly because of the great role of emblems and encoded content in various aesthetic and artistic phenomena. In the dance, the close relation to the court ceremonial, which did not allow the expression of emotions, initiated this feature additionally. For example, at that time one was believed that stepping a minuet means “drawing up secret signs of love”, which were recognized in movements, poses, facial expressions and gestures. In the Baroque Epoch the audience easily was recognizing the content of such dances, whereas for the modern observer and researcher it remains unknown. The dance moves and their combinations in stage dances of the 17th and early 18th century receive a specific meaning in the context of poetic, musical and dance phrases. However, first, the moves of dancers-performers were consistent with the music. As a rule, the result of making a choreographic production depended on the composer’s choice of the musical form. Most of the dances within the researched period were set to music in a two-part form. Less often we can find the samples in the form of a couplet rondo and ostinato variations. When making the dance productions, French choreographers took into account the features of other popular musical forms of the 17th –18th centuries. In some cases they emphasized or combined with their own author’s decision the symmetric basis laid down in the musical structure (the form of rondo), in others – they disclosed the effect of the continuity principle. An example of the embodiment of a choreographic idea set to music in the form of a rondo is the passepied production (fr. pass&#233;-pied) “La Gouastalla” realized by R. A. Feye to the music of the unknown composer. The choreographic composition consists of five dance periods corresponding to five sections of the musical form. A slightly different choreography scheme – ABCBC is combined with the symmetric scheme in the musical variation– ABACA. In this production the combination of the musical form and the choreographic composition is somewhat changed, however, this does not mean the complete neglect of the musical form regularities in the construction of the dance general plan. One of the aspects of the musical and choreographic arts combination in French stage dances of the 17th and 18th centuries is the connection with of the choreographic component of the latter with the tonal plan of the musical work. The tonal coloring of the music was reflecting in the formation of a choreographic drawing of dance, in the process of expressing in the movements of various emotions and feelings. Changes of tonalities, the most used of which, as a rule, a certain circle of images and affects, their own “character” carried along at that time, were associated with a variety of transitions in the emotional coloring of the dance. It is from such, emotional, the perception of tonality, the versions of the tonal plans of French dances follows, which are unusual for later canons of Viennese Classicism, in particular, with the violation of the harmonic sequence of T-D-S-T. Conclusions. Thus, the stage dance of the 17th and early 18th century is a peculiar form of embodiment of the “miniature ensemble of arts”, where dance moves and their combinations receive a specific coloring in the context of poetic, musical and dance phrases and certain allegorical meanings. Nevertheless, first and foremost, the moves of dancers-performers were consistent with the music. Obvious is the great dependence of the choreographic production on the musical form and its components – the rhythm as well as the tonal and harmonic plan, which combined with the choreographic elements, prompt the feelings transmitted in the dance, which give to it the life and inspiration.

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