scholarly journals Pierrot lunaire in Studio and in Broadcast: Sprechstimme, Tempo and Character

2007 ◽  
pp. 69-91
Author(s):  
Avior Byron
Keyword(s):  
Full Text ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Arnold Schoenberg ◽  
Critical Element ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Excellent Performance ◽  
Recording Studio ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Live Broadcast ◽  
Pierrot Lunaire

A comparison of a recently-discovered broadcast of Pierrot lunaire with the famous 1940 commercial recording of the work, both with Arnold Schoenberg conducting performers of his circle (notably Rudolf Kolisch, Edward Steuermann and Erika Stiedry-Wagner), shows that the different contexts of the recording studio and the live broadcast, as well as other factors, had considerable influence on the performances. This article demonstrates how tempo, character and Sprechstimme contour were affected by these different contexts. Such factors caused many listeners to experience the broadcast as an excellent performance, one which was described as superior to the commercial recording. In increasing our awareness of the distinctions between live and studio recordings, a study such as this of historical performances contributes to our view of performance as a critical element in an understanding of Western art music. The article contains 18 sound examples from the original recordings, in mp3 files that may be streamed from the journal’s website: links are embedded in the full-text PDF file.

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.

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.

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.

Hearing Film Music Topics outside the Movie Theatre

2021 ◽  
pp. 548-574
Author(s):  
Janet Bourne
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Extraction Method ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Film Scores ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Movie Theatre

This chapter describes a cognitively informed framework based on analogy for theorizing cinematic listening; in this case, it tests the hypothesis that contemporary listeners might use associations learned from film music topics to make sense of western art music (WAM). Using the pastoral topic as a case study, a corpus of film scores from 1980–2014 determines common associations for this topic based on imagery, emotion, and narrative contexts. Then, the chapter outlines potential narratives a modern moviegoer might make by listening “cinematically” to a Sibelius movement. The hypothesis is empirically tested through an experiment where participants record their imagined narratives and images while listening to WAM and film music. The meaning extraction method, a statistical analysis for identifying associational themes, is used to analyze people’s responses.

Landmarks in the Study of Improvisation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno Nettl
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Research Study ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Jazz Improvisation ◽  
Single Model ◽  
Oral Transmission ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Music Making ◽  
History Of

Historically, research on improvisation has been related to the discovery of non-Western musics, folk music, and jazz, and has depended on the development of recording techniques for its principal kinds of data. The concept of improvisation is not unitary, but includes many vastly different kinds of un-notated music-making, which casts some doubt on the efficacy of the term itself. In the history of Western art music, improvisation was originally ignored or seen as craft rather than art, but since ca. 1980 it has occupied increased attention. The association of improvisation with oral transmission has sometimes been misunderstood. The most successful standard research study has been the comparison of performances based on a single model, for example, raga in India, maqam and dastgah in the Middle East, or a series of chord changes or a tune in jazz. Improvisation as a concept—for example, as a metaphor of freedom—has been important in recent research.

scholarly journals Evolving Musical Sight Reading Exercises Using Expert Models

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Pierce ◽  
Tim Hendtlass ◽  
Anthony Bartel ◽  
Clinton J. Woodward
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Algorithm ◽  
Reading Skills ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Resource Constraint ◽  
Difficulty Level ◽  
Sight Reading ◽  
Sheet Music ◽  
Traditional Practice ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Expert Models

Sight reading skills are widely considered to be crucial for all musicians. However, given that sight reading involves playing sheet music without having seen it before, once an exercise has been completed by a student it can no longer be used as a sight reading exercise for them. In this paper we present a novel evolutionary algorithm for generating musical sight reading exercises in the Western art music tradition. Using models based on expert examples, the algorithm generates material suitable for practice which is both technically appropriate and aesthetically pleasing with respect to an instrument and difficulty level. This overcomes the resource constraint in using traditional practice exercises, which are exhausted quickly by students and teachers due to their limited quantity.

scholarly journals The Evolution of GIM Programming

2010 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Meadows
Keyword(s):  
Art Music ◽  
Music Programs ◽  
Western Art ◽  
The Core ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Music Programming ◽  
Bonny Method

This article traces the origins and evolution of the music programs central to the Bonny Method (also called GIM or BMGIM). These programmed, sequenced western art music selections shape the core experience of GIM, eliciting intra-, inter-, and trans-personal phenomena through a range of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic feelings, images, memories, and metaphoric fantasies. Bonny’s original programs will be described and discussed in relation to GIM, and developments in programming will demonstrate how the Bonny Method programs have been expanded, including adaptations to music programming and selection.

scholarly journals The Rules of Engagement: Richard Taruskin and the History of Western Music

2007 ◽  
pp. 21-49
Author(s):  
Harry White
Keyword(s):  
German Idealism ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Tonal Music ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
Musical Discourse ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American

The Oxford History of Western Music (2005) is a scrutiny of the ‘literate tradition’ of music in European and North American culture from the beginnings of notation to the end of the twentieth century. Richard Taruskin’s monumental and profoundly erudite engagement with a thousand years of western art music is animated from the outset by a radical critique of German idealism and the influence which this has exerted on the formation and transmission of European and American musical thought. Taruskin takes the view that as a result of this influence, the history of music has been seriously distorted, especially in regard to the contractual intelligibility of musical discourse in relation to society. The prestige of progressivism, as this is manifested in atonal and serial composition, in primitivism and neoclassicism, has enjoyed an excessive pre-eminence which eclipses in turn the narrative clarity of tonal music in the twentieth century.In this review essay, Taruskin’s indictment of historicism as a primary agent in the perpetuation of (German and Anglo-American) musicological orthodoxy is appraised in the context of his own obligations to narrative, musical analysis and the reception history of musical works. Taruskin’s identification of an historicist ‘master-narrative’ in earlier surveys of western music is considered in relation to a new master- narrative, of Taruskin’s own making, which condemns the hegemony of musical idealism at every turn. The tension which arises between this enduring preoccupation and the author’s sustained engagement with individual musical texts tends to confirm the autonomy of the musical work, not as an object immune (or indifferent) to history, but as a nexus of social, ideological and political expression which attains to a self-standing aesthetic integrity.

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