Musical Gesture: Prospects for a New Universal

10.34690/79 ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 226-232
Author(s):  
Евгения Владимировна Хаздан
Keyword(s):  
Musical Gesture

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

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.

A taxonomy of musical gesture in African American gospel music

Popular Music ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-129 ◽  
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.

scholarly journals Reading Adorno’s Reading of the Rachmaninov Prelude in C-sharp Minor

2011 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen M. Bottge
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Musical Gesture ◽  
First Time

The unprecedented popularity of Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor is well documented. Having written it at the age of 18, Rachmaninov performed it for the first time in 1892, thereby launching the career of what many have called one of the world’s most popular piano pieces. Yet, despite its fame, many critics—as well as the composer himself—have pondered the reasons for the prelude’s adoration. Both critics and composer agree: thesurfeitin audience enthusiasm is incongruous with the Prelude’sdeficitin musical content. Perhaps the most intriguing commentary on this Prelude is that written by Theodor Adorno, whose discussion invokes a rich and unusual palette of metaphorical imagery by referencing such distinct items as “heavy artillery,” “lion’s paws,” “megalomania,” and “Nero’s complex.” This essay will explore more closely these juxtaposed aspects surfacing within Adorno’s essay. Any such exploration of Adorno’s literary ciphers will inevitably lead far afield, hence my paper will touch upon such disparate topics as Marxist economic theory, the Nero Complex, and recent studies on musical gesture. In so doing, however, we may not only recover a deeper appreciation of Adorno’s keen musical insights, but also gain potential keys to understanding the central paradox of “the C-sharp.”

scholarly journals A Musical Gesture of Growing Obstinacy

2006 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yosef Goldenberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Dynamic Stress ◽  
Musical Gesture

A musical gesture of growing obstinacy appears in many phrases whose last segment is repeated, usually two more times, creating a climax, e.g., by means of higher peak, dynamic stress and syncopation. Usually phrase expansion is involved, but not necessarily. The gesture is flexible and may appear with various types of cadences. The gesture is especially typical of Mozart, although it appears in nineteenth-century music as well.

scholarly journals A retrospective of the research on musical expression conducted at CEGeME

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurício Loureiro ◽  
Tairone Magalhaes ◽  
Davi Mota ◽  
Thiago Campolina ◽  
Aluizio Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Graduate Program ◽  
Music Performance ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Digital Signal ◽  
Audio Signals ◽  
Professional Musicians ◽  
School Of Music ◽  
Musical Gesture ◽  
Belo Horizonte ◽  
Music Performance Research

CEGeME - Center for Research on Musical Gesture and Expression is affiliated to the Graduate Program in Music of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), hosted by the School of Music, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, since 2008. Focused on the empirical investigation of music performance, research at CEGeME departs from musical content information extracted from audio signals and three-dimensional spatial position of musicians, recorded during a music performance. Our laboratories are properly equipped for the acquisition of such data. Aiming at establishing a musicological approach to different aspects of musical expressiveness, we investigate causal relations between the expressive intention of musicians and the way they manipulate the acoustic material and how they move while playing a piece of music. The methodology seeks support on knowledge such as computational modeling, statistical analysis, and digital signal processing, which adds to traditional musicology skills. The group has attracted study postulants from different specialties, such as Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, Phonoaudiology and Music Therapy, as well as collaborations from professional musicians instigated by specific inquiries on the performance on their instruments. This paper presents a brief retrospective of the different research projects conducted at CEGeME.

Another Approach to Musical Interpretation

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 439-458
Author(s):  
Hao Ding
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Expression ◽  
Sensory Systems ◽  
Linear Arrangement ◽  
Musical Interpretation ◽  
Musical Gesture ◽  
Different Dimensions

AbstractMusic is neither a construction of pitches nor a linear arrangement of vocal parts, but rather an energetic shaping through time that integrates articulation, harmony, melody, and rhythm. Music expresses a kind of gesture in the dimension of sounds. In most cases, musical expressions, compared to linguistic expressions, are more like a state of motion or a behavior of sounds originating from physical sensations. Musical gesture can interpret the emotional expression and meaning of music from a perspective that is closer to the nature of music. Such an interpretation is not constrained by the traditional analysis of form and content, self-discipline and heteronomy, subjectivity and objectivity. It is more about how to stimulate the sensory systems to join in and understand the behavior and contents of music expressions in order to synthesize the meaning of music in different dimensions.

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