scholarly journals The Forgotten History of Repetitive Audio Technologies

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-194
Author(s):  
Christophe Levaux

In the literature dedicated to twentieth-century music, the early history of electronic music is regularly presented hand in hand with the development of technical repetitive devices such as closed grooves and magnetic tape loops. Consequently, the idea that such devices were ‘invented’ in the studios of the first great representatives of electronic music tends to appear as an implicit consequence. However, re-examination of the long history of musical technology, from the ninth-century Banu Musa automatic flute to the Hammond organ of the 1930s, reveals that repetitive devices not only go right back to the earliest days of musical automation, but also evolved in a wide variety of contexts wholly unconnected from any form of musical institution. This article aims to shed light on this other, forgotten, history of repetitive audio technologies.

Author(s):  
Tomasz Jasiński

AbstractThe article is a comprehensive presentation of the history of music in the twentieth century, taking into account the main trends and phenomena of this period, inter alia impressionism, expressionism, neoclassicism, dodecaphony, punctualism, and total serialism, then avant-garde solutions and pluralism after World War Two (inter alia electronic music, concrete music (musique concrète), graphic music, aleatoric music, open forms, instrumental theater, minimal music), and finally the most recent trends (e.g. spectral music, new complexity, polystylistics), including a clearly marked return to the Romantic tradition. The chronologically presented discourse includes opinions that concisely explain some compositional solutions, as well as the list of composers and the titles of their works that exemplifi ed the problems discussed. The paper ends with the thoughts on the future of music in the new, twenty-first century.The article is meant as teaching material for the arts and humanities programs.


2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-118
Author(s):  
Kristin M. Franseen

Beginning with the “open secret” of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears's relationship and continuing through debates over Handel's and Schubert's sexuality and analyses of Ethel Smyth's memoirs, biography has played a central role in the development of queer musicology. At the same time, life-writing's focus on extramusical details and engagement with difficult-to-substantiate anecdotes and rumors often seem suspect to scholars. In the case of early-twentieth-century music research, however, these very gaps and ambiguities paradoxically offered some authors and readers at the time rare spaces for approaching questions of sexuality in music. Issues of subjectivity in instrumental music aligned well with rumors about autobiographical confession within Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique) for those who knew how to listen and read between the lines. This article considers the different ways in which the framing of biographical anecdotes and gossip in scholarship by music critic-turned-amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson and Tchaikovsky scholar Rosa Newmarch allowed for queer readings of symphonic music. It evaluates Prime-Stevenson's discussions of musical biography and interpretation in The Intersexes (1908/9) and Newmarch's Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works (1900), translation of Modest Tchaikovsky's biography, and article on the composer in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians to explore how they addressed potentially taboo topics, engaged with formal and informal sources of biographical knowledge (including one another's work), and found their scholarly voices in the absence of academic frameworks for addressing gender and sexuality. While their overt goals were quite different—Newmarch sought to dismiss “sensationalist” rumors about Tchaikovsky's death for a broad readership, while Prime-Stevenson used queer musical gossip as a primary source in his self-published history of homosexuality—both grappled with questions of what can and cannot be read into a composer's life and works and how to relate to possible queer meanings in symphonic music. The very aspects of biography that place it in a precarious position as scholarship ultimately reveal a great deal about the history of musicology and those who write it.


1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 549-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
William R. Pinch

According to Sir George Grierson, one of the pre-eminent Indologists of the early twentieth century, Ramanand led ‘one of the most momentous revolutions that have occurred in the religious history of North India.’Yet Ramanand, the fourteenth-century teacher of Banaras, has been conspicuous by his relative absence in the pages of English-language scholarship on recent Indian history, literature, and religion. The aims of this essay are to reflect on why this is so, and to urge historians to pay attention to Ramanand, more particularly to the reinvention of Ramanand by his early twentieth-century followers, because the contested traditions thereof bear on the vexed issue of caste and hierarchy in colonial India. The little that is known about Ramanand is doubly curious considering that Ramanandis, those who look to Ramanand for spiritual and community inspiration, are thought to comprise the largest and most important Vaishnava monastic order in north India. Ramanandis are to be found in temples and monasteries throughout and beyond the Hindi-speaking north, and they are largely responsible for the upsurge in Ram-centered devotion in the last two centuries. A fairly recent anthropological examination of Ayodhya, currently the most important Ramanand pilgrimage center in India, has revealed that Ramanandi sadhus, or monks, can be grouped under three basic headings: tyagi (ascetic), naga (fighting ascetic), and rasik (devotional aesthete).4 The increased popularity of the order in recent centuries is such that Ramanandis may today outnumber Dasnamis, the better-known Shaiva monks who look to the ninth-century teacher, Shankaracharya, for their organizational and philosophical moorings.


Tempo ◽  
1966 ◽  
pp. 2-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurelio de la Vega

For a long time now—long when we consider the quick, changing time-scale of our days—electronic music has been with us. The public at large usually remains cold, confused or merely dazed when faced with any new aesthetic experience. Critics, musicologists and the like still seem, as usual, to be unable to predict what will happen to this peculiar, mysterious and often anathematized way of handling musical composition, while many traditionally-minded composers consider it a degrading destruction of the art of music. On the other hand, the electronic medium seems to attract a long, motley caravan of young, inexperienced and often unprepared ‘beatnik type’ self-titled composers, who believe that the world began yesterday and that you only have to push buttons and prepare IBM cards to obtain magical results. Probably not since Schoenberg proclaimed the equal value of the twelve semitones of our sacred but by now obsolete tempered scale has twentieth-century music been faced with such a bewilderment.


Traditio ◽  
1957 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 431-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Ashworth

The late Edmund Bishop's suggestion that Merovingian liturgical circles had possibly been influenced by a ‘Gregorian’ type of Service Book seems to have remained unnoticed and unappreciated. Yet it has appeared to me to be important for the early history of the Gregorianum. Scholars have always had a sense of frustration about this Sacramentary since no manuscript earlier than that of Cambrai 164, written about 811 or 812, for Bishop Hildoard of that see, has come down to us. To get behind this text has always been their goal, and it has often been assumed that the ninth-century Sacramentary of the Chapter Library of Padua did in fact contain such a text. Whether this is so or not (and Rev. Klaus Gamber has recently shown there are grounds for rejecting it), the series of documents here examined would seem to point to the years circa 680, as marking the terminus ad quem of the Gregorianum.


Notes ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 844-848
Author(s):  
J. Peter (James Peter) Burkholder

1995 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 141-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Eisenhofer

The kingdom of Benin has the reputation of being one of the most important examples for a king-oriented state-formation in sub-Saharian Africa. In the past few decades much research has appeared on the early history of this kingdom, the origin of its kingship, and the time of the early Ogiso kings, who are considered by many historians as the autochthonous founders of Benin kingship around 900. These Ogiso rulers are assumed to have been replaced between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries by kings of the later Oba dynasty, which supposedly descends from the Yoruba town of Ife and which continues in office at the present.The abundance of literature on the early history of the Benin kingdom often hides the fact that, apart from sporadic—and for the most part isolated—reports from travelers, a few archeological accounts, and some vaguely dated objects from Benin, the reconstruction of the early history of Benin is based almost exclusively on the data of the Bini local historian Jacob Egharevba, who published prolifically on Benin history and culture from 1930 to 1970. The most famous of his works is the Short History of Benin—a small publication, where the author deals with the history of the kingdom from its origins until the twentieth century.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 265-287
Author(s):  
Feras Krimsti ◽  
John-Paul Ghobrial

Abstract This introduction to the special issue “The Past and its Possibilities in Nahḍa Scholarship” reflects on the role of the past in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nahḍa discourse. It argues that historical reflection played a pivotal role in a number of scholarly disciplines besides the discipline of history, notably philosophy and logic, grammar and lexicography, linguistics, philology, and adab. Nahḍawīs reflected on continuities with the past, the genealogies of their present, and the role of history in determining their future. The introduction of print gave new impulses to the engagement with the historical heritage. We argue for a history of the nahḍa as a de-centred history of possibilities that recovers a wider circle of scholars and intellectuals and their multiple and overlapping local and global audiences. Such a history can also shed light on the many ways in which historical reflection, record-keeping practices, and confessional, sectarian, or communalist agendas are entwined.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Pasquale Orchard

<p>As a young singer, it is inevitable that one is bombarded with the history of singing. ​Not only are we asked to listen to vocalists of previous ages, but we are also encouraged to analyse their methods and scrutinise their seminal performances in order to better identify the strengths of each singer​. Curious about the extent to which the lauded seventeenth and eighteenth-century ​bel canto vocal techniques hold relevance to contemporary classical singing and newer compositions, my research focused on whether these well-tried techniques are transferable. While the application of ​bel canto principles to the ​bel canto repertoire are clearly pertinent, my investigation concentrated on the feasibility and applicability of transferring these vocal techniques to modern repertoire, specifically songs and arias written in English, my mother tongue. This exegesis details my exploration of the application of such techniques to these two different sets of repertoire, and aims to shed light on the experience of the process of applying the ​bel canto ​principles to such works, and the potential benefits afforded by the practice of them.</p>


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document