What Was ““Shostakovich,”” and What Came Next?

2007 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-338
Author(s):  
PETER J. SCHMELZ
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Remarkable Change ◽  
Dmitri Shostakovich ◽  
Western Art ◽  
In Memoriam ◽  
Soviet Music ◽  
Musical Styles

The title of this article is borrowed from anthropologist Katherine Verdery's 1996 study What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? In her book Verdery surveyed the recent changes in Eastern Europe, and specifically Romania, from her vantage point in the uncertain period following the momentous events from 1989 to 1991 in the former Soviet bloc. Similarly, this article explores how Shostakovich, widely perceived in 1975 as the musical representative of socialism, influenced what came after him. It details how Soviet composers from the younger generations, including Edison Denisov, Mieczysłław Weinberg, Boris Tishchenko, Alfred Schnittke, and Valentin Sil'vestrov, dealt with Shostakovich's legacy in their compositions written in his memory, including Denisov's DSCH, Weinberg's Symphony no.12, Tishchenko's Symphony no. 5, Schnittke's Prelude In Memoriam Dmitri Shostakovich and Third String Quartet, and Sil'vestrov's Postludium DSCH. In their memorial works, as they wrestled with the legacy of Shostakovich and his overwhelming influence, these composers also grappled with the shifting nature of the Soviet state, changing musical styles both foreign and domestic, and fundamental issues of aesthetic representation and identity associated with the move from modernism to postmodernism then affecting all composers in the Western art music tradition. The 1970s came at the heels of a decade of remarkable change in Soviet music and society, but at the time of Shostakovich's death, change in Soviet life began to seem increasingly unlikely. Despite recent interpretations by scholars such as anthropologist Alexei Yurchak that emphasize the fundamental immutability of the 1970s, however, these memorial compositions show that audible and significant developments were indeed occurring in the musical styles of the 1970s and early 1980s. Examining Shostakovich's legacy therefore also reveals the larger changes of the Soviet 1970s and early 1980s, both musical and otherwise.

Early Country Music

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-42
Author(s):  
Stephanie Vander Wel
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Musical Styles

Chapter 1 explores the theatrical context of 1930s country music on radio, specifically daily and weekly shows, including the National Barn Dance, on Chicago’s WLS. Similar to vaudeville, radio programmed the diverse strands of vernacular expression with music (including Western art music) that pointed to the high and popular aesthetics of the middle-class mainstream. With an emphasis on reception, this chapter demonstrates that listeners debated the merits of early country music as well as other musical styles and genres with a class-based understanding of aesthetics. The syncretic nature and theatrical characters of early country music (such as the singing mountaineer, the crooning cowboy, and the rustic buffoon) fit radio’s attempts to negotiate the crossing and blurring of the serious and the popular, the urban and the rural, and the sentimental and the parodic. Thus, through the technology of radio, early country music first secured a place in the American consciousness by rubbing against other styles and genres that transgressed cultural and musical divides.

scholarly journals The Clarinet as Extension of the Voice and Expressive Conduit of Musical Styles in Diverse Ensembles

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lucy Rainey
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Original Research ◽  
Leadership Roles ◽  
Musical Identity ◽  
Tone Quality ◽  
Western Art ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Musical Styles

<p>Original research into the links between vocal and clarinet tone reveals how clarinettists act as expressive conduits of musical styles in diverse ensembles. This research is relevant to musicologists and anthropologists as well as clarinettists and composers, who wish to gain an understanding of the vocal links in clarinet playing, and how clarinettists function in socio-musical contexts. Research is mainly based on Musicology and Music Education (vocal-clarinet links), and also refers to sources in Anthropology (musical identity), and Ethnomusicology (music in ensembles) in order to find some insightful connections. Ethnographic fieldwork is based on four professional freelance clarinettists in four different ensembles in Wellington, New Zealand. Their function in western art and contemporary art music, jazz and klezmer music is explored, to discover how these clarinettists extend, mirror, partner, or replace the voice in these musical contexts. Additional work undertaken on bodymind integration is designed to complement the musical identity work in the thesis and to enhance the musicianship and physical wellbeing of clarinettists. The section on clarinet design illustrates how different combinations of instruments and mouthpieces can vary the tone quality of the clarinet and enhance individual playing styles. The research shows that due to the versatility and flexibility of the instrument, clarinettists are able to transcend gender, ethnic, and ensemble boundaries, to take on leadership roles and to act as expressive conduits of musical styles in and between diverse ensembles. The outcome of the research highlights the intersection between the physiological relationship between the voice and the clarinet and scholarship on musical identity.</p>

scholarly journals Comprehensibility and Ben Johnston’s String Quartet No. 9

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Sinclair Willis
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Analytical Method ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Just Intonation ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Western Art Music ◽  
Compositional Practice ◽  
The Way

Ben Johnston’s just-intonation music is of startling aural variety and presents novel solutions to age-old tuning problems. In this paper, I describe the way that Johnston reoriented his compositional practice in the 1980s as evidenced in his musical procedures. Johnston became aware of the disconnect between Western art music composers and their audiences. He therefore set about composing more accessible music that listeners could easily comprehend. His String Quartet No. 9 gives an instructive example of the negotiation between just intonation and comprehensibility. By integrating unusual triadic sonorities with background tonal relationships, Johnston reveals an evolution of just-intonation pitch structures across the work. This paper provides an example of an analytical method for exploring Johnston’s works in a way that moves beyond simply describing the structure of his system and into more musically tangible questions of form and process.

Women Musicians of Uzbekistan

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanya Merchant
Keyword(s):  
Women Musicians ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
Western Idea ◽  
Concert Halls ◽  
Wedding Music ◽  
Soviet Music ◽  
Music Study

Influences by women's distinct influence on Uzbekistan's music, this book ventures into Tashkent's post-Soviet music scene to place women musicians within the nation's evolving artistic and political arenas. Drawing on fieldwork and music study carried out between 2001 and 2014, the book challenges the Western idea of Central Asian women as sequestered and oppressed. Instead, the book notes the ways Uzbekistan's women stand at the forefront of four prominent genres: maqom, folk music, Western art music, and popular music. The book's recounting of the women's experiences, stories, and memories underscores the complex role that these musicians and vocalists play in educational institutions and concert halls, street kiosks and the culturally essential sphere of wedding music. Throughout the book, the book ties nationalism and femininity to performances and reveals how the music of these women is linked to a burgeoning national identity.

scholarly journals The Clarinet as Extension of the Voice and Expressive Conduit of Musical Styles in Diverse Ensembles

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Lucy Rainey
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Original Research ◽  
Leadership Roles ◽  
Musical Identity ◽  
Tone Quality ◽  
Western Art ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Musical Styles

<p>Original research into the links between vocal and clarinet tone reveals how clarinettists act as expressive conduits of musical styles in diverse ensembles. This research is relevant to musicologists and anthropologists as well as clarinettists and composers, who wish to gain an understanding of the vocal links in clarinet playing, and how clarinettists function in socio-musical contexts. Research is mainly based on Musicology and Music Education (vocal-clarinet links), and also refers to sources in Anthropology (musical identity), and Ethnomusicology (music in ensembles) in order to find some insightful connections. Ethnographic fieldwork is based on four professional freelance clarinettists in four different ensembles in Wellington, New Zealand. Their function in western art and contemporary art music, jazz and klezmer music is explored, to discover how these clarinettists extend, mirror, partner, or replace the voice in these musical contexts. Additional work undertaken on bodymind integration is designed to complement the musical identity work in the thesis and to enhance the musicianship and physical wellbeing of clarinettists. The section on clarinet design illustrates how different combinations of instruments and mouthpieces can vary the tone quality of the clarinet and enhance individual playing styles. The research shows that due to the versatility and flexibility of the instrument, clarinettists are able to transcend gender, ethnic, and ensemble boundaries, to take on leadership roles and to act as expressive conduits of musical styles in and between diverse ensembles. The outcome of the research highlights the intersection between the physiological relationship between the voice and the clarinet and scholarship on musical identity.</p>

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.

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