The Music of Human Hormones

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 38-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tsvetana Ivanova ◽  
Leandar Litov ◽  
Rositza Marinova ◽  
Todor Ivanov ◽  
Mihail Iossifov ◽  
...  

In this study, the authors take on the challenge to translate biological form (science) into musical form (art). Through scientifically developed methodology, the authors link two aspects of human experience that influence human emotions: hormones, from the inside, and music, from the outside. The authors develop an original algorithm, which they use to represent the properties and the effects of the human hormone oxytocin in a musical composition. The authors performed a neurological test to verify the accuracy of the musical interpretation and investigated the parallel neurological impacts of the hormone’s biological and musical form. This article describes the preliminary results of the study.

2020 ◽  
pp. 53-69
Author(s):  
Р.Х. Лаул

Настоящий материал продолжает серию публикаций лекций Рейна Лаула по анализу музыки в Санкт-Петербургской (Ленинградской) консерватории. Шестая лекция завершает обзор приемов разработочного развития музыкального материала. В нее вошли шесть из двадцати пяти приемов в авторской классификации (эпизодическая тема, производная тема, варьирование, полифонические варианты, приемы подвижного контрапункта, полифонические структуры), способствующей систематизации разработочных процессов. В поле зрения автора включены неспецифически сонатные способы преобразования музыкального материала, благодаря чему сонатность предстает в гибком и взаимодополняющем взаимодействии с иными принципами формообразования. Особое внимание уделено специфике применения полифонических средств развития музыкального материала в контексте сонатного формообразования. В ходе детального рассмотрения финала симфонии В. А. Моцарта Юпитер оказываются тесно связанными технологический, композиционно-драматургический и стилевой аспекты становления музыкальной формы. Заключительный раздел, обобщающий содержание лекции в целом, содержит пример практического применения предлагаемой автором методологии. Тем самым доказывается ее целесообразность и высокая эффективность как в аспекте анализа интонационной драматургии музыкального произведения, так и в достижении главной аналитической цели в формировании объективного представления о содержательной сути каждого этапа в развёртывании музыкальной композиции. This material continues the series of publications of R. H. Lauls lectures on music analysis at the Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory. The sixth lecture concludes the review of techniques for developing musical material. It discusses six of the twenty-five techniques in the authors classification (episodic theme, derived theme, variation, polyphonic variants, mobile counterpoint techniques, polyphonic structures), which contributes to systematization of the development processes. The authors field of view includes non-specific Sonata methods of transforming the musical material, so that sonateness appears in a flexible and complementary interaction with other principles of formation. Special attention is paid to the specifics of using polyphonic means of developing musical material in the context of Sonata formation. The detailed examination of the finale of Mozarts Symphony Jupiter, shows that technological, compositional, dramatic, and stylistic aspects of the formation of a musical form appear to be closely related. The final section summarizing the content of the lecture as a whole contains an example of practical application of the methodology proposed by the author, proving its expediency and high efficiency not only in the aspect of analyzing the intonation drama of a musical work, but also of achieving the main analytical goal to form a reasoned judgment about the content of each stage in the deployment of a musical composition.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bekti Setyo Utomo

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the creative process of the song entitled Youth, and also the meaning of the lyrics. The lyrics and the structure of the music presented is a contradiction between the lyrics and the musical form. The song Youth created by the Soloensis music group used the major scales. Then, the character of their musical composition is cheerful and uses instruments that are not normally played in their works. The song Youth is a song with a message about the anxiety of the creator's youth. In the end, the content of the message is transformed into a song with a contrasting musical composition. This music constructs an atmosphere of anxiety and sadness using the diatonic major scale which is usually cheerful. Kata kunci : musik youth, soloensis, makna teks lagu


2021 ◽  
pp. 240-253
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Helsinger

Song travels. Walt Whitman's poem ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’ (1859) travels across the Atlantic to generate first another poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne (‘On the Cliffs’, 1879) and then a cantata by Frederick Delius (Sea Drift, 1903–04). The three works share less a particular sequence of sounds or words than a scene which is also an aural landscape with three distinct parts: song, or its figure, the singing bird; a rhythmically moving body of water that shapes and carries sound; and a listening boy, moved to translate what he hears into poetic or musical form. Using as historical frame two examples pertinent to nineteenth-century debates about the relations between words and music, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1770 mélodrame, Pygmalion, and Richard Wagner's 1860 essay, ‘Lettre sur la Musique’, this essay maps a Whitman-Swinburne-Delius journey of musical translation. Repetitions of Whitman's scene pose the question of song's travels from birdsong to poetry to musical composition. What travels includes the force behind the original song (its emotional springs) as well as the formal strategies by which different listeners translate what they hear into a poem or a piece of music. The rhythmic presence of the sea, as much a figure for such strategies as the singing bird is for inarticulate song, becomes as significant as that song and the listener it moves.


2013 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myriam Desainte-Catherine ◽  
Antoine Allombert ◽  
Gérard Assayag

In this article, we consider the possibility of mixing two main paradigms of electroacoustic music: the writing-oriented and the performance-oriented paradigms. We show that these two opposing paradigms are the consequence of two corresponding conceptions of time. In addition, we assume that the temporal aspects of a performer's interpretation of a musical composition can be linked to both paradigms. Based on this theoretical study, we propose a formalism for composing pieces of electroacoustic music that can be interpreted in performance.


Author(s):  
Pavel G. Shinkevich ◽  

This article is devoted to the study of musical text in the context of the Plato ontology. Our task is to show the process of cognitive comprehension of a musical text as an ontological and hermeneutic reflection. It is fundamentally important for the author to become acquainted with two basic philoso-phical positions, showing fundamentally opposite views on the musical ontology as a whole. To reveal the existence of a musical text at the ontological and hermeneutic levels, we need to develop the neces-sary tools to “subtract” the authentic meanings that underlie the creation of the creator of the text. In the context of the problem under study, we will get acquainted with the various ontological positions of philosophers such as Peter Kivy, Jerome Levinson and other thinkers. Observing, for example, the invisible controversy of Kiwi and Levinson, we can track two radically opposite approaches to the study of musical text. Developing the position of classical Platonism that musical compositions are discovered rather than created, Peter Kivy shows us musical works as discovered eternal types. The opposite position is that of Jerome Levinson, showing a musical composition as a soluble idea, which lies in the potentiality of the author. This approach criticizes the idea of combining musical creations with Platonic universals (Kivy), arguing, on the contrary, about the author’s onto-logical principle. Choosing one of the approaches to understanding the authentic intent of the author’s text, we need to establish the primary and secondary levels of reflection. Given the direct relationship between the author and the interpreter of the text, it is important for us to identify the ontological conditions for the emergence of the text as the primary level of reflective immersion. The level of hermeneutic exist-ence, which implies the conditions and variability of the musical variant of the text, we will attribute to second-order reflection. Thus, in the context of the Plato ontology, it is important for us to identify the uniqueness of the historical text and show the self-existence of its existence. In this regard, the author comes to the con-clusion that the moment of birth of the text is in intuitive experience as an eternal idea that does not depend on anything and does not go anywhere. This level is the most basic, since the fact of fixing the idea of the text in direct graphics is secondary, and having recognized the graphics, the transcriptor creates the interpretation-thing of the idea, just trying to establish similarity as the principle of com-munication. An attempt to establish this connection in the form of a musical interpretation is multivari-ate and coincides with the original idea only partially. As a result, at the hermeneutic level, scoring of musical notations enlivens the musical being of the text, but at the same time alienates us from under-standing its original idea.


Author(s):  
Valeriya Kovtoniuk

Background. Continuing trends dated back in the second part of XIX century music culture concentrate on a figure of performing musician. Commercialization an academic art: popularity of performance awards, media supporting for new formats of concert performance, etc. facilitates this largely. Objectives. Public interest conditioned an appearance a lot of scientific research inscribed to problems of musical interpretation. However, a performing oeuvre learning the product, fixation of which even taking to account modern recording capabilities are relative, warrants specific methods. In particular, engaging the conception of values for settlement of a question why performing art products are different with their significance: something becomes a culture phenomenon but something stays at self-actualization level. Methods. For comprehensive study the performing as separate kind of activity it is necessary to involve adjacent humanitaristics areas – psychology and philosophy, which problems of art and it’s osmosis are considered in. In particular, in philosophy art is understood as a kind of human activity aimed at creating new-look material and culture valuables. However, in our perspective more interesting and capacious definition is seem N. Berdyaev’s one: «Art is a human ability to create a new reality from valid material». That picturesque vision of the author’s work, which springs up during an interpretation, often has a wide public interest that let assign to interpretator a status of the creator. Such an understanding of performing musician’s figure significant we can find in foreign philosophers’ works (R. Ingarden, B. Croce) and native music scientists (B. Moskalenko, I. Sukhlenko). Such an understanding of performing musician’s figure significant we can find in foreign philosophers’ works (R. Ingarden, B. Croce) and native music scientists (B. Moskalenko, I. Suchlenko). Results. E. Husserl’s phenomenological conception had a great impact not only on XX th century philosophy but on many humanities science especially art history. It led to the fact that there are many definitions of phenomenon concept, which is interpreted as a reflection of world of ideas, an object that is accessible to the senses, a basic holistic unit of what can be isolated from consciousness, external properties and subject concern revealing its essence, etc. A unite part all of definitions is a sensorial perception as a base of human knowledge based on individual experience and ability of consciousness to self observation and reflection. Stickling example of this is a field of artistry, which individual sensorial perception takes such a big part in that identity of the creator, his feelings often become the centerpiece of work. In musical oeuvre, an outward subjectivization is an acoustic convergent thinking. However, musical thesaurus is enough for power of imagining wakening enabling reproducing and combination the phenomenal stored in composer-performer-hearer’s memory. Performing art based on searching the new acoustic and dramatic source material characteristics. Thereat performer’s work algorithm depends largely on personal intention based on world and mental outlook. The scale of performer identity, his internal conviction power whereby he creates the new acoustic reality is able to notably change all the elements of composer’s intention and affect our perception of musical composition. In that understanding, the special aspects of composer’s activities, its interconnection and correlation with his oeuvre are opened in other view. Brilliant performance reformatting an art space composer’s work frequently appropriates him «double authorship». As a result is a phenomenon of identification with the name of great composer: L. Beethoven’s 5th Symphony – G. Von Karajan / L. Stokowski; J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations – G. Gould / R. Tureck; F. Сhopin’s works – V. Sofronitsky / V. Horowitz; P. Tchaikovsky – M. Pletnev. Exactly this influence aspect of performing art on the musical culture interested B. Croce who confirmed that musical composition only exists at the time of execution. However, choice the pair «composer-performer» depends up our perception, our readiness to acceptance an alternative artistic concept. Herewith prescription, forming «set» of value orientation of some shared identity: from group of like-minded persons to mass convictions, has a great impact here. The latter’s impact differs under studying a creativity of famous musicians and soi-disant «second place» musicians who fall under external influence easier than others do. Even in the light of constant changes of public conscience, one can highlight some hard values in it that characterize certain social stratums. However, and these value systems undergo a review for a time and modern society reject what was topically a couple decades ago. The result is that fashion phenomenon on performers or performing style appears. Accordingly, to continue to be relevant performing musician needs to have a gust of latest tendencies in art and to able to save value bases of personal mental outlook. Conclusions. The phenomenological approach to the study of the creative activity of a musician-performer allows one to go beyond the theoretic analysis that is traditional for musicology. Acceptance that the product of performing creativity can be defined as a phenomenon, reflecting several vectors of personal communication (dialogue with oneself, with a composer, public, historical epoch), can help not only in understanding the “musical work of the performer”, but also in understanding the phenomenal significance of performers in modern musical culture.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-67
Author(s):  
N. V. Koshkareva ◽  

Rodion Shchedrin's choral work represents the most interesting area of modern musical culture. The object of the analysis is the composition "Epigraph by Count Tolstoy to His Novel "Anna Karenina" for mixed choir a cappella as a demonstration of the key feature of Rodion Shchedrin's compositional style — polyphonic thinking. This aspect becomes an argument for the relevance of the topic. Through the synthesis of research methods, the parameters of musical composition are studied: literary source, musical form, texture, and melody. In addition, the author reveals the "Russian theme" in the choral work of R. Shchedrin, identifies the specifics of the composer's individual choral style, and defines the aspects of polyphonization of the means of musical language. The "Epigraph" explains the main idea of L. Tolstoy's novel and concentrates on the most important contextual continuum development of all the events that take place. A wide semantic field of textual basis becomes an impulse for polyphonization of all musical expressive means. Polyphony as an idiom of R. Shchedrin's composer's handwriting is born, among other things, in the fusion of artistic trends and styles. In conclusion, it is emphasized that the literary basis of the "Epigraph", woven from historical, theological, philosophical, artistic and poetic layers, required a synthesis of traditional and innovative musical expressive means — "a new polyphonic word" in the author's expression of the main paradigms of the Russian theme by R. Shchedrin.


Author(s):  
A. Gedi

Subject actuality. The article highlights the evolution of the compositional style of the Hungarian composer, taking into account the performance component of Bartok as a pianist. Based on existing musicological sources (works by A. Alekseev, B. Sabolcha, S. Sigitov, J. Uyfalushi, I. Martynov, I. Nestev, A. Malinkovskaya) the historical periodization of the general interest in Bartok’s work is indicated. Despite the study of many aspects of his creative activity, the performance of B. Bartok still remains without special analysis. Therefore, the process of studying the work of B. Bartok today can not be considered completed. The issues of interaction between the compositional and performance style of B. Bartok, modern interpretations of his works remain opened. The Ukrainian listener is familiar with a limited range of B. Bartok’s works, so the emphasis on the artist’s performance serves as an additional stimulus for the actualization of his art in our time. The main presentation of the material. The evolution of B. Bartok’s piano style was identified as a problem by L. Gakkel through the constituent parameters of the piano style: 1) the “realistic-non-pedal” sound image of the piano; 2) coloristic shock-noise method of sound construction; 3) textured accentuated tone as a tonal-harmonic ground. Indeed, many works of the composer testify to this interpretation of the piano: “Two elegies op. 8 / b, Burlesque three pieces op. 8c, Suite op. 14, Etudes op. 18, Sonata; three concertos for piano and orchestra. However, there are a number of works written quite traditionally, in the classical key. In these works B. Bartok uses the coloristic possibilities of the piano quite avariciously (wide range of registers, pedal effects), a striking example is the “Romanian folk dances” op. 8-a). Milestones of the piano evolution of the artist’s style are marked: Rhapsody, cycles “Romanian folk dances”. Etudes op. 18 – a sample of expressionist aesthetics, extremely complex in pianistic terms. They use extreme technical difficulties that require maximum arm stretching and great physical strength.Most of Bartok’s piano works were written in the first two creation periods – early and experimental. The composer’s attention was focused on three genre areas: folklore, pedagogics, innovation. The communicative semantics of these spheres, of course, influenced the composer’s decisions in the formative field, texture, piano technique, the level of virtuosity. The regularities are traced: B. Bartok’s “commitment” to primary (song and dance) and romantic genres (elegy, rhapsody, rich people), program cyclicity; constant interest in creating a repertoire for children, which solves two tasks at once: the promotion of folk music and the children involvement into a new musical language. Note as a contradiction the fact that the analysis of the works of B. Bartok, created in the first and second period, does not fully confirm the version of L. Gakkel, about a radicalistic change in the sound image of the piano. Probably, in B. Bartok’s work the new did not exclude the old one. The basic quality of B. Bartok’s piano style is its national characteristic, which is shrouded in the resources of the latest technique of musical composition. Conclusions. B. Bartok-pianist by genotype belongs to the Liszt’s branch of European pianism. The Liszt’s tradition is a combination of classical-romantic performing principles, which is especially evident in the works of disciples and followers of F. Busoni, K. Martinsen, K. Arrau, and G. Gould. In general, the evolution of B. Bartok’s piano style can be seen as a movement from the romantic – through folklore – to the neoclassical tradition, which is manifested in the change of musical-linguistic resources (rhythm, harmony, features of musical form, texture, melody). As a result, also the sound image of the piano was being changed. Auditory analysis of B. Bartok’s performing style allowed us to conclude that, unlike many pianists of the romantic tradition, B. Bartok uses pedal effects very avariciously, preferring clear and precise pronunciation (utterance) of all elements of the texture. We state the «imposition» of the classical tradition, which originates from harpsichordists, and new trends associated with the percussive understanding of the piano. From the point of view of the temporal organization of the musical form, his works are distinguished by metrical variability and polyrhythm; rhythmic discrepancy of textured layers; extensive use of repetition techniques and ostinato techniques. The foundations of Bartok’s mode-harmonic mentality (reliance on ancient modes of folk music; mode variability in the conditions of chromatic tonality) determine the difficulties of mastering the «intonation dictionary» of his piano works, and in general the technical equipment of the texture. Thus, Bela Bartok’s piano writing style is an expression of the artist’s innovative thinking, in which the performing component of his own abilities played a key role.


Author(s):  
René Rosfort

Emotion plays a fundamental role in mental illness. A central part of understanding mental illness is to make sense of the fragile character of human emotional life. Emotion research has long been divided into a biological approach and cognitive approach, arguing that the nature of human emotions is to be found in either our specific human cognition or in our cross-species biology. In fact, although human emotions are indeed characterized by intentionality and cognitive structures, many human emotional phenomena, for example, our feelings and moods, are non-intentional and cognitively impenetrable. Phenomenological psychopathology can help to clarify this interplay without renouncing either the biology or the rationality of human emotions. It offers a phenomenology of human experience that allows us to make sense of how emotions feel combined with a hermeneutics of the existential significance of our emotions, that is, what they are and why we feel the way we do.


Genes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 1112
Author(s):  
Laurent Mottron ◽  
Alexia Ostrolenk ◽  
David Gagnon

What does the way that autistic individuals bypass, learn, and eventually master language tell us about humans’ genetically encoded linguistic ability? In this theoretical review, we argue that autistic non-social acquisition of language and autistic savant abilities provide a strong argument for an innate, human-specific orientation towards (and mastery of) complex embedded structures. Autistic non-social language learning may represent a widening of the material processed during development beyond oral language. The structure detection and manipulation and generative production of non-linguistic embedded and chained material (savant abilities in calendar calculation, musical composition, musical interpretation, and three-dimensional drawing) may thus represent an application of such innate mechanisms to non-standard materials. Typical language learning through exposure to the child’s mother tongue may represent but one of many possible achievements of the same capacity. The deviation from typical language development in autism may ultimately allow access to oral language, sometimes in its most elaborate forms, and also explain the possibility of the absence of its development when applied exclusively to non-linguistic structured material. Such an extension of human capacities beyond or in parallel to their usual limits call into question what we consider to be specific or expected in humans and therefore does not necessarily represent a genetic “error”. Regardless of the adaptive success or failure of non-social language learning, it is the duty of science and ethical principles to strive to maintain autism as a human potentiality to further foster our vision of a plural society.


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