scholarly journals Roland Barthes' "Text" and aleatoric music: Is "The birth of the reader" the birth of the listener?

Muzikologija ◽  
2002 ◽  
pp. 263-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe Jeongwon ◽  
Hoo Song
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Music History ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Interesting Phenomenon ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Compositional Control

The history of Western classical music and the development of its notational system show that composers have tried to control more and more aspects of their compositions as precisely as possible. Total serialism represents the culmination of compositional control. Given this progressively increasing compositional control, the emergence of chance music, or aleatoric music, in the mid-twentieth century is a significantly interesting phenomenon. In aleatoric music, the composer deliberately incorporates elements of chance in the process of composition and/or in performance. Consequently, aleatoric works challenge the traditional notion of an art work as a closed entity fixed by its author. The philosophical root of aleatoric music can be traced to post structuralism, specifically its critique of the Enlightenment notion of the author as the creator of the meaning of his or her work. Roland Barthes' declaration of "the death of the author" epitomizes the Poststructuralists' position. Distinguishing "Text" from "Work," Barthes maintains that in a "Text," meanings are to be engendered not by the author but by the reader. Barthes conceives aleatoric music as an example of the "Text," which demands "the birth of the reader." This essay critically re-examines Barthes' notion of aleatoric music, focusing on the complicated status of the reader in music. The readers of a musical Text can be both performers and listeners. When Barthes' declaration of the birth of the reader is applied to the listener, it becomes problematic, since the listener, unlike the literary reader, does not have direct access to the "Text" but needs to be mediated by the performer. As Carl Dahlhaus has remarked, listeners cannot be exposed to other possible renditions that the performer could have chosen but did not choose, and in this respect, the supposed openness of an aleatoric piece is closed and fixed at the time of performance. In aleatoric music, it is not listeners but only performers who are promoted to the rank of co-author of the works. Finally, this essay explores the reason why Barthes turned to music for the purpose of illustrating his theory of text. What rhetorical role does music play in his articulation of "Work" and "Text"? Precisely because of music's "difference" as a performance art, music history provides the examples of the lowest and the highest moments in Barthes' theory of text, that is, those of Work and Text. If, for Barthes, the institutionalization of the professional performer in music history demonstrates the advent of Work better than literary examples, the performer's supposed dissolution in aleatoric music is more liberating than any literary moments of Text. This is because the figure of music - as performance art-provides Barthes with a reified and bodily "situated" model of the Subject.

Folk Music, Art Music, History of Music

Notes ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bence Szabolcsi
Keyword(s):  
Folk Music ◽  
Music History ◽  
Art Music ◽  
History Of

Incan or Not? Building Ecuador’s Musical Past in the Quest for a Nationalist Art Music, 1900–1950

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 228-260
Author(s):  
Vera Wolkowicz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Music History ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Primary Component ◽  
Global History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Musical Discourse ◽  
History Of ◽  
Musical Heritage ◽  
Selection Of

When the development of Ecuadorian national art music began at the end of the nineteenth century, composers and music historians followed European models and studied folklore as a window onto the past. In this quest to discover and articulate what was truly “Ecuadorian,” Incan culture occupied a complex position, sometimes hailed as a primary component of Ecuador’s musical heritage and sometimes dismissed as irrelevant. This article explores the music histories written by composers Pedro Pablo Traversari, Segundo Luis Moreno, and Sixto María Durán, and investigates a selection of Traversari’s compositions and Moreno’s music analyses. It demonstrates how they either included Incan culture in or excluded it from a national music history, in dialogue with scholars outside Ecuador. Early twentieth-century musical discourse in Ecuador produced a series of conflicting and converging perspectives on national and continental music that contribute to our understanding of the global history of nationalistic art musics.

Folk Music, Art Music, History of Music

1965 ◽  
Vol 7 (1/4) ◽  
pp. 171
Author(s):  
B. Szabolcsi
Keyword(s):  
Folk Music ◽  
Music History ◽  
Art Music ◽  
History Of

INTEGRATING MUSIC INTO INTELLECTUAL HISTORY: NINETEENTH-CENTURY ART MUSIC AS A DISCOURSE OF AGENCY AND IDENTITY

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN E. TOEWS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Production Performance ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
History Nineteenth Century ◽  
Agency And Identity

Few intellectual historians of nineteenth-century Europe would deny that the tradition of art music that evolved between the revolutionary watershed at the end of the eighteenth century and the international wars and domestic convulsions of the first half of the twentieth century—a body of musical works from Haydn and Mozart to Mahler and Strauss that has been passed down to us in canonized form as the “imaginary museum” of “classical music” —was an enormously significant dimension of European cultural and intellectual history, especially in German-speaking central Europe. In the territories of the German Confederation, the Kingdom of Prussia and the Habsburg Empire, and later in the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, the production, performance and consumption of classical music was not just an important element in the history of aesthetic and cultural forms but also a privileged site for imagining and enacting the organization of individuals into historical subjects (the Bildung of modern individuals) and for the integration of individuals into collectivities through processes of subjective identification. Broad interest in the relations between agency and identity among historians, including European intellectual historians, should have drawn many of them, one would have thought, toward investigation of the ways the cultural work undertaken by music was connected to, and interacted with, the cultural role of the textual and visual arts, or of how musical performance and experience helped European individuals organize and perform their self-activity and self-consciousness in relation to the past, to other individuals within the networks of communal relations, and to the transcendent. The history of music would appear to be critical for understanding historical experiences of the relations between memory and expectation at both the individual and communal levels.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Randall
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
James Madison ◽  
Modern Conception ◽  
Political World ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constitutional Thought

The changed conception of conversation that emerged by c.1700 was about to expand its scope enormously – to the broad culture of Enlightenment Europe, to the fine arts, to philosophy and into the broad political world, both via the conception of public opinion and via the constitutional thought of James Madison (1751–1836). In the Enlightenment, the early modern conception of conversation would expand into a whole wing of Enlightenment thought. The intellectual history of the heirs of Cicero and Petrarch would become the practice of millions and the constitutional architecture of a great republic....

Vyshnivetsky Castle Library of Prince Mychailo Servaty Vyshnivetsky – Historical Book Heritage and Object of Bibliological and Historical Reconstruction

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 166-182
Author(s):  
Iryna Tsiborovska-Rymarovych
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Cultural Images ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
History Of ◽  
Grand Duchy Of Lithuania ◽  
Definition Of

The article has as its object the elucidation of the history of the Vyshnivetsky Castle Library, definition of the content of its fund, its historical and cultural significance, correlation of the founder of the Library Mychailo Servaty Vyshnivetsky with the Book.The Vyshnivetsky Castle Library was formed in the Ukrainian historical region of Volyn’, in the Vyshnivets town – “family nest” of the old Ukrainian noble family of the Vyshnivetskies under the “Korybut” coat of arm. The founder of the Library was Prince Mychailo Servaty Vyshnivetsky (1680–1744) – Grand Hetman and Grand Chancellor of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Vilno Voievoda. He was a politician, an erudite and great bibliophile. In the 30th–40th of the 18th century the main Prince’s residence Vyshnivets became an important centre of magnate’s culture in Rich Pospolyta. M. S. Vyshnivetsky’s contemporaries from the noble class and clergy knew quite well about his library and really appreciated it. According to historical documents 5 periods are defined in the Library’s history. In the historical sources the first place is occupied by old-printed books of Library collection and 7 Library manuscript catalogues dating from 1745 up to the 1835 which give information about quantity and topical structures of Library collection.The Library is a historical and cultural symbol of the Enlightenment epoch. The Enlightenment and those particular concepts and cultural images pertaining to that epoch had their effect on the formation of Library’s fund. Its main features are as follow: comprehensive nature of the stock, predominance of French eighteenth century editions, presence of academic books and editions on orientalistics as well as works of the ideologues of the Enlightenment and new kinds of literature, which generated as a result of this movement – encyclopaedias, encyclopaedian dictionaries, almanacs, etc. Besides the universal nature of its stock books on history, social and political thought, fiction were dominating.The reconstruction of the history of Vyshnivetsky’s Library, the historical analysis of the provenances in its editions give us better understanding of the personality of its owners and in some cases their philanthropic activities, and a better ability to identify the role of this Library in the culture life of society in a certain epoch.

Menapak Jejak Seni Gambuh dalam Naskah-Naskah Panji Melayu

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 139
Author(s):  
Priyo Joko Purnomo ◽  
Wahyudhi Wahyudhi
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Close Relation ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
Historical Aspects ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
University Library ◽  
Critical Method ◽  
History Of ◽  
Performing Art

Gambuh as the performing art in Malay area became one of the cultural transformation evidences of the close relation between Java and Malay. The history of gambuh performance in Malay area recorded in the archipelago’s manuscripts, one of them is a manuscript entitled Surat Gambuh which is being the collection of Leiden University Library. This paper attempts to examine the contents of the manuscript in order to reconstruct the gambuh performance art in Malay and also trace the historical aspects. As far as the research had been done, there have been no studies of this manuscript so it is necessary to first transliterate it using a critical method. Furthermore, the historical aspects are explored using a historical approach by adding data from other texts of Panji. The analysis result of the reflection of Malay gambuh performance rules and historical aspects show that there is a transformation of work from oral tradition to written tradition, the cultural acculturation between Java and Malay, and the Islamic influence behind Malay gambuh.

The Enlightenment Turns to China: The International Flow of Concepts and Their Geographic Dispersion

Cultura ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-52
Author(s):  
Chien-shou CHEN
Keyword(s):  
Joint Production ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
International Flow ◽  
Geographic Dispersion ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Chinese History ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article attempts to strip away the Eurocentrism of the Enlightenment, to reconsider how this concept that originated in Europe was transmitted to China. This is thus an attempt to treat the Enlightenment in terms of its global, worldwide significance. Coming from this perspective, the Enlightenment can be viewed as a history of the exchange and interweaving of concepts, a history of translation and quotation, and thus a history of the joint production of knowledge. We must reconsider the dimensions of both time and space in examining the global Enlightenment project. As a concept, the Enlightenment for the most part has been molded by historical actors acting in local circumstances. It is not a concept shaped and brought into being solely from textual sources originating in Europe. As a concept, the Enlightenment enabled historical actors in specific localities to begin to engage in globalized thinking, and to find a place for their individual circumstances within the global setting. This article follows such a line of thought, to discuss the conceptual history of the Enlightenment in China, giving special emphasis to the processes of formation and translation of this concept within the overall flow of modern Chinese history.

Child Composers in the Old Conservatories

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert O. Gjerdingen
Keyword(s):  
Teaching Methods ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Mental Ability ◽  
Original Music ◽  
Innovative Teaching ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
History Of ◽  
Youtube Videos ◽  
Typical Day

The original music conservatories were orphanages. Through innovative teaching methods the masters of these old institutions were able to transform poor and often illiterate castoffs into elite musicians, many of whom became famous in the history of classical music. The book tells the story of how this was done. It shows what the lessons were like, what a typical day was like for an orphan, and how children progressed from simple lessons to ones more advanced than any seen today in colleges and universities. Recent rediscoveries of thousands of the old lessons have allowed us to understand how children’s minds were systematically developed to be able to “think” in music. That is, the lessons slowly built up the mental ability to imagine the interplay of two or more voices or instruments. Today we think of Mozart as having a miraculous ability to imagine musical works in his head, but in truth many of the conservatory graduates of that era had attained a similar level of controlled musical imagination. They could improvise for hours at the keyboard, and they could quickly compose whole works for ensembles. The book is accompanied by 100 YouTube videos so that readers can hear what the lessons sounded like.

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