Spun Steel and Stardust: The Rejection of Contemporary Compositions

1989 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. David Smith ◽  
Jordan N. Witt

Audiences consistently reject contemporary orchestral music. One reason given for this is that inaccessible form and syntax cause cognitive/perceptual difficulties for listeners. Another possible explanation is that contemporary music is impoverished in emotional or referential expression. Why do listeners say they reject atonal music? We compared their responses to tonal and serial works by the same two composers (Schoenberg and Webern). Listeners rejected the atonal works, found them less expressive along some affective dimensions but not others, and found them less rich in referential meanings. In fact, emotional and referential considerations determined preference at least as strongly as syntactic considerations. We discuss the modern music revolution in this light and consider the importance of nonsyntactic aesthetic dimensions in a psychology of music.

Author(s):  
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis

Music can seem captivating and integral to our lives, yet these affective dimensions are precisely the ones for which understanding remains most elusive. It is relatively straightforward to study something like musical memory by manipulating excerpts in various situations and seeing whether people remember them; however, studying the way music moves us requires deeper thought. It also represents a unique opportunity for the psychology of music. “The appetite for music” considers emotional responses to music. How does sound so easily take on such powerful associations with the life circumstances in which it was encountered? Aesthetic responses to music, musical preferences, and the motivations behind people’s interest in music are also discussed.


Tempo ◽  
1953 ◽  
pp. 34-38
Author(s):  
Colin Mason

At the end of last November, Pittsburgh, on the initiative of Roy Harris, resident composer of the Pennsylvania College for Women, organized an ambitious First International Contemporary Music Festival. It was an attempt to give a survey of music written in the last quarter-century, and although lasting only one week, boldly challenged comparison with the American-sponsored Festival of Twentieth-century Masterpieces held in Paris throughout last May. It says much for all concerned that the Pittsburgh festival emerged from the comparison with much credit.


Tempo ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 57 (224) ◽  
pp. 47-50
Author(s):  
Martin Anderson

There's a heartening number of contemporary music festivals in the former Soviet-bloc countries, and in the three Baltic republics in particular: it's as if, after decades of the suppression of modern music – even though less severe there than elsewhere in the USSR – they're all desperate to make up for lost time. The Gaida Festival, founded in 1991 and an annual event in Vilnius in mid-October, is one of the most ambitious: ten concerts in as many days, presenting contemporary Lithuanian composers, usually in first performances, in conjunction with others from further afield (among them this year Saariaho, Tan Dun, Cage, Jan Sandström – with Christian Lindberg astride the ubiquitous Motorbike Concerto – and Gubaidulina). Naturally, such occasions are ragbags, with failures among the successes – but young composers have to be able to hear their miscalculations, and Gaida is commendably generous with its time.


1986 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Owens

This article is a revised version of a talk given by the author before an international symposium on music education in Hortos, Greece, in 1985. It considers the current state of modern music, suggesting that there have been some important changes in direction since the avant-garde styles of the 1950s and 1960s; and it reflects on some of the implications of these changes for secondary-school music teaching.Some proposals are made for factors likely to facilitate the success of contemporary music which children hear or perform. In the original talk these points were illustrated with recorded examples, indicated here by numbers in the text. The role of children as contemporary composers themselves is also discussed in terms of the method and motivation by which creative work may be encouraged.The educational writers on whom the author bases much of his argument are clearly acknowledged throughout the text. Otherwise, opinions derive from experience of teaching and writing music for children in England and in France.


Popular Music ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Slater

AbstractMiddlewood Sessions produced a kind of popular music that infuses the timbral aesthetics of jazz and orchestral music with the driving rhythms of dance music. This studio project, lasting for almost eight years, provided a rich resource for gaining insight into the increasingly prevalent context of the domestic project studio via a longitudinal case study approach. At the heart of this research is the desire to understand how people collaborate as part of a studio project, how people use technologies to make music and how all of this unfolds over time. To tackle the question of how to understand the shattered, scattered nature of creative practices, and in extending existing creativity research, I propose three ways of thinking about time: nests, arcs and cycles. While explicating this theoretical framework, something of the specific and idiographic nature of the case study, as an example of contemporary music production, is recounted.


2021 ◽  
pp. 65-71
Author(s):  
A. Stashevskyi

The relevance of the topic and problem statement. In the process of formation and development of the original style of button accordion music one of the most important roles is played by the factor of texture, which fully embodies the instrumental specificity of the button accordion, and reflects the originality of forms and varieties of musical fabric in button accordion works. The study of the peculiarities of texture organization, as well as highlighting the main trends in texture formation in modern button accordion music, in particular in the works of Ukrainian composers, is seen as an urgent task to understand the essence of the phenomenon of modern button accordion, and in general — to develop domestic musicology in instrumental art. In previous works of the author of this article, an attempt was made to systematize the textured formations of modern button accordion music, which are determined by the specifics of the design of button accordion keyboards (Stashevskyі, 2021). Continuing further study of the textured organization of modern music for button accordion, there is a need to identify and systematize other typical for this work samples of texture and its components, the structure of which is not due to the structural configuration of sound keys on button accordion keyboards. That is, those that are more universal, but, at the same time, are characterized as typical of modern button accordion art. The purpose of the study is to study the most typical textural elements and combinations of modern button accordion music, as well as their systematization based on the analysis of their internal structural organization. The methodology used in this article is based on the use of methods of theoretical musicology (primarily, analysis of elements of musical language and means of expression), as well as methods of structural and system analysis, generalization and classification. The results. The systematization of typical original texture formulas of modern button accordion creativity carried out in this work provides their division into certain groups and kinds (subgroups) in the middle of these groups, in particular: reverberation (chordal and mixed); stereophony (pulsation, transmission, unison); pedalling arpeggio (rhythmic, non­rhythmic); pedal scale (cluster crescendo); monophonic structural­modular constructions (chromatic by broken intervals; gamma­shaped­arpeggio based on a 5­element fingering group); chord transpositions (interval­algorithmic (chromatics; m3; m2­B2; etc.), thematic­melodic); simplified accompaniment (alternation of tessitura­polar sounds); multi­octave duplications (unison, decomposed­arpeggio). The topicality of the work lies in the fact that for the first time in modern musicology the textured elements of modern button accordion music have received analytical discourse and systematization. The practical significance of the work lies in the possibility of its use in theoretical courses on the study of button accordion art, as well as in the practical work of button accordionists. Conclusions. To sum up, we can state that the considered original textural elements and formulas are typical for modern button accordion music, as they occur in works in many cases. The typical button accordion texture formulas considered in this article, which are often found in the artistic plane of musical works, play an important role in the formation of a kind of stylistic handwriting of modern button accordion speech. At the same time, they, in contrast to the group of determinant texture formulas, reflect a certain universalism of their presentation, as they can be transferred to other instrumental texture (keyboard instruments) conditions and implemented in them.


Author(s):  
Peiwei Zhang ◽  
Xin Sui

This paper expounds the concept and current development of digital music technology in modern times by exploration and analysis around the music technology, in order to better develop music pedagogy. In allusion to the contemporary music pedagogy, a new instruction idea is proposed by analyzing the digital music technologies such as MIDI, digital audio and other new music carriers, namely, an instruction model which integrates the digital music technology and the traditional teaching mode and means in the music classroom of middle school. In order to validate the availability of digital music technology, this paper also contemplates the current development of digital music industry and demonstrates the importance of digital music in modern music pedagogy by drilling down the digital music characteristics. In the end, it is concluded that the digital music technology introduced in music classroom instruction of middle schools contributes to cultivating students' music learning capacity.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Mark Reimer

Although steeped in Islamic religion and culture, Morocco is a land of varying influences and histories, including those of the native Berbers, the Moors and Jews driven out of Spain, those who follow the pious Sufi culture of Islamic spiritualism, and the Gnawa slaves who were brought into southern Morocco by Arabs. The music, customs, values, and everyday lives of these disparate peoples continue to not only blend with each other’s but also to fuse Moroccan music and culture with those of Europe, Africa, and America. The influence of Moroccan music continues to play a vital role in shaping contemporary music, especially in the study of rhythm. Music that was once heard by voices, flutes, oboes, strings, bagpipes, auxiliary percussion, and drums—symbolic of Moroccan cultural identity--may now be heard on electric guitars, keyboards, and amplified voices in popular and modern music styles that reflect Morocco’s continuing efforts to be active players in the international community.


Tempo ◽  
1946 ◽  
pp. 18-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Boys

A distinguished musician, having glanced through the programme of the twentieth Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music held in London this July, asked “Why in a festival of modern music is there so little modern music?”—thus alluding to the large proportion of works by long-established composers.


ICONI ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 116-124
Author(s):  
Oleksandr O. Perepelytsia ◽  

The article deals with the expressive role of gestures in the art of piano performance in relation to both classical and contemporary music. According to theoretical analysis, it is demonstrated that the issue of the performance gesture in contemporary music, in connection with the theatricalization of performance, as well as due to the fact that performance in many cases acquires the features of visual play-acting, stands out from the overall issue of artistry. The general provisions of the artistic gesture in contemporary piano music are complemented by multiple positions related to the art of playing the clusters, strings, pedals, using sound gestures, as well as theatricalization of the performed musical material. The article provides a detailed description of the categories of gestures adopted in the practice of modern music. They are: gestures related to performance of clusters; interspersed with verbal sounds in the process of playing the piano, the so-called verbal and sound gestures; related with playing on the strings by using fi ngers, sticks or other items; associated with playing pedals; theatricalized gestures. In conclusion: the expansion of the boundaries of musical language, and the emergence of performances and theatricalized compositions in performance practice has led to the expansion of the thesaurus of performance gestures’ and of its informative functions. In contemporary music gesture has become a bearer of meaning and forms one of the strata providing meaning to composition.


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