scholarly journals Clean as a Whistle

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Leydon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
George Crumb ◽  
Purity And Impurity ◽  
Interpretative Framework ◽  
Black Angels

This essay attempts to develop an interpretative framework for effects of timbre in selected twentieth-century instrumental music. My approach draws on ethnomusicologist Cornelia Fales’s concept of “perceptualization” in order to establish expressive associations of transparency and turbidity with sinusoidal purity and spectral noise, respectively. I explore how these sonic tokens of purity and impurity are in turn mapped onto concepts of spirituality and corporeality in music of Varèse, Stockhausen, Messiaen, Gubaidulina, and especially George Crumb, whose workBlack Angelsis singled out for a detailed discussion of its timbral processes and their interpretive possibilities.

Queering Musical Biography in the Writings of Edward Prime-Stevenson and Rosa Newmarch

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-118
Author(s):  
Kristin M. Franseen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Benjamin Britten ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Symphonic Music ◽  
Biographical Knowledge

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.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Marion Schmid
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Film History ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Struggle For Recognition ◽  
Purity And Impurity

The introduction contextualises the French New Wave's ambivalent relationship to the older arts with regard to cinema's wider struggle for recognition in the course of the twentieth century. Surveying the debates around medium specificity, cinematic 'purity' and 'impurity' from the classical avant-garde to the Nouvelle Vague, it addresses the French New Wave's complex discursive construction in relation to the more established arts. Reframing traditional studies of the French New Wave, it argues for an intermedial approach to illuminate this seminal movement of film history. The corpus, rationale and approach of the book are also introduced and clarified.

Heaven & Hell Parties

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Gussow
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Mississippi Delta ◽  
Black Youth ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way ◽  
Great Revival

This chapter explores the origins and meaning of the phrase "the devil's music," paying particular attention to the way in which black southern blues performers, male and female, contest the term. Africa, through the mechanism of the slave trade and the condemnation of instrumental music by Islamic clerics, offers one possible origin for devil's music concept. The prelude to the demonization of the blues and its representative instrument, the steel-stringed guitar, is the evangelization of the slaves and the demonization of the fiddle during the second Great Revival. As blues emerged in the Mississippi Delta early in the Twentieth Century, blues musicians like John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, and the Mississippi Sheiks, along with an irreverent "young modern" generation of black youth, mocked the hypocrisy of black ministers and spurned the religious certainties of their parents and the church.

The Doctrine of Appropriation as an Interpretative Framework for Karl Barth's Pneumatology of the Church Dogmatics

2007 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 278-290
Author(s):  
Adam McIntosh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Trinitarian Theology ◽  
Church Dogmatics ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Doctrine Of The Trinity ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Trinity ◽  
Interpretative Framework

Although Karl Barth is widely recognised as the initiator of the renewal of trinitarian theology in the twentieth century, his theology of the Church Dogmatics has been strongly criticised for its inadequate account of the work of the Holy Spirit. This author argues that the putative weakness of Barth's pneumatology should be reconsidered in light of his doctrine of appropriation. Barth employs the doctrine of appropriation as a hermeneutical procedure, within his doctrine of the Trinity, for bringing to speech the persons of the Trinity in their inseparable distinctiveness. It is argued that the doctrine of appropriation provides a sound interpretative framework for his pneumatology of the Church Dogmatics.

Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age

2004 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Cohn
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Heinrich Schenker ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Richard Strauss ◽  
Consonance And Dissonance

Early twentieth-century psychological theorists (Ernst Jentsch, Sigmund Freud) associated the uncanny with the occlusion of the boundary between real and imaginary, and with the defamiliarization of the familiar. Their music-theoretic contemporaries (Heinrich Schenker, Ernst Kurth, Alfred Lorenz) associated reality with consonance, imagination with dissonance. Late Romantic composers frequently depicted uncanny phenomena (in opera, song, and programmatic instrumental music) through hexatonic poles, a triadic juxtaposition that inherently undermines the consonant status of one or both constituents. Quintessentially familiar harmonies become defamiliarized liminal phenomena that hover between consonance and dissonance, thereby embodying the characteristics they are called upon by composers to depict. Examples of uncanny triadic juxtapositions are drawn from music of Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Haydn, Wagner, Mahler, Grieg, Richard Strauss, Sibelius, Puccini, Ravel, and Schoenberg.

Spatiality of sound and stream segregation in twentieth century instrumental music

1998 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARIA ANNA HARLEY
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Stream Segregation ◽  
Concert Hall ◽  
Pitch Class ◽  
The Web ◽  
A Performance

Let us imagine a situation: a listener seated in a concert hall witnesses a performance by a trumpet player (standing on the stage) of a sequence of four quarter-notes, with the pitches of B[flat ]3–A3–C4–B3. The listener chooses to ignore the immediate physical surroundings and hears one of the following: (i) four trumpet sounds equally spaced in time, (ii) a sequence of intervals – minor second, minor third, minor second, (iii) an instance of set 4-1, (iv) a motive referring to the name of BACH. The `web of interpretants' (term from Nattiez 1987/1990) surrounding a simple musical fact is already quite dense, even though we have only considered its aspects relating to pitch, pitch class and pitch notation (representation by letters). What if the performer's gestures, the facial expressions, the direction of the bell of the instrument became important? Might one say, then, that the music has become theatre?

scholarly journals КОМПОЗИЦІЙНИЙ ВПЛИВ КАМЕРНІЗАЦІЇ ЯК ОДИН З ФАКТОРІВ СТАНОВЛЕННЯ ДРАМАТУРГІЧНОГО ПРОЦЕСУ У КОНЦЕРТНИХ ТВОРАХ ДЛЯ ФОРТЕПІАНО З ОРКЕСТРОМ ХХ СТОРІЧЧЯ

World Science ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (12(40)) ◽  
pp. 56-59
Author(s):  
Решетілов Б. Ю.
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Chamber Orchestra ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Semantic Component ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Innovation Patterns ◽  
Compositional Properties

The subject of this research is to consider the compositional properties of the chamber tendency in relation to drama in compositions for solo instruments within a chamber orchestra. As twentieth century composers' raised interest in chamber-orchestral concert genres, this caused a number of consequences affecting the formation of dramatic specifics. Some of these include those trends of chamber tendency, which relate to timbre, form, genre, neoclassical manifestations, aesthetics, character directivity, etc. Revision of the semantic component of the chamber orchestra toolkit can appear as a movement towards single-timbre or an emphatic ensemble style. Neoclassical trends through the prism of chamber tendency influence the semantic content of character spheres. Keeping and development of chamber-instrumental music traditions create a special kind of musical material presentation, manifested in the deepening of the sphere of individualization and characterization of a subject. Genre orientation, addressed to the rebirth of the main achievements of past epochs, affects not only the semantic load of character spheres, but also a drama in general. Overall miniaturization as one of tendencies of the twentieth century in the context of the chamber nature leaves its trace in formation of character spheres as a tendency to concentration or continuity. Thus, in general, in the concert genre of the twentieth century the specific innovation patterns are created in the formation of conceptual intonation of character dramaturgy.

Sonorism

Artful Noise ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 136-145
Author(s):  
Thomas Siwe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Relaxed Controls ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Crumb ◽  
The Arts ◽  
American Composer ◽  
Tone Color ◽  
Media Work

In this chapter, the use by twentieth-century composers of tone color, or timbre is explained with examples by those who made its use central to their compositional output. Poland, freed from the bonds of communism and the Soviet state, relaxed controls over the arts and in 1956 initiated the Warsaw Autumn festival where avant-garde Polish and Western music could be heard. Kazimierz Serocki cofounded the festival, contributing to the percussion canon his timbre-based sextet, Continuum. In the United States, the American composer George Crumb definitely had an ear for timbre coupled with a love for percussion evident in the works discussed. A young Polish/American composer, Marta Ptaszynska, created a number of works for both solo and ensemble percussion in the latter half of the century. Her work Siderals was conceived as an audio-visual, or mixed-media work utilizing ten percussionists, magnetic tape playback, and lighting. The three composers highlighted in this chapter approached the use of timbre in differing ways.

Flowers over the Abyss: A Musical Uncanny in Nineteenth-Century Criticism

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-120
Author(s):  
Amanda Lalonde
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ninth Symphony ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Definition Of

The term unheimlich (uncanny) comes into usage in German music criticism in the nineteenth century and is often used to describe instrumental music, particularly sections of works featuring the ombra topic. While the idea that instrumental music can be uncanny regardless of text or program is not novel, this work differs from most existing scholarship on the musical uncanny in that it presents a possible precursor to the twentieth-century psychoanalytic uncanny. Instead, it examines Schelling's definition of the uncanny in the larger context of his ideas in order to form a basis for theorizing a version of this aesthetic category that is active in the nineteenth-century critical discourse about music. In the early nineteenth century, music becomes uncanny because it discloses what should remain hidden from finite revelation. Critics understand passages of instrumental ombra music as uncanny moments when music calls attention to itself as the sensuous manifestation of the Absolute. They remark on these passages’ effacing of boundaries and sense of becoming, residues of eighteenth-century uses of the topic in operatic supernatural scenes and as part of a chaos-to-order narrative in symphonic music. The article concludes with the reception of the opening of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the finale of Schubert's Octet, D. 803, using critics’ comments as a basis for extrapolating, through new analyses, as to the features that might make the particular works remarkable as examples of music's uncanny power made manifest.

Britten's use of the Passacaglia

Tempo ◽  
1970 ◽  
pp. 2-6
Author(s):  
Darrell Handel
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Song Cycle ◽  
The Other ◽  
High Point ◽  
Impending Death ◽  
Peter Grimes ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Vocal Works

Among twentieth-century composers Britten and Hindemith are those who have made perhaps the most notable use of the passacaglia—one of the few points of affinity between them. To Hindemith, predominantly a composer of instrumental music of sonata or symphonic proportions, the passacaglia is a confirming movement. It confirms a tonal centre, recalls earlier thematic material, and in general gives a sense of finality through its systematic progress and growth. Britten too has used the passacaglia as a confirming finale, but he also employs it to create a point of stability around which other movements can gravitate. More important, he has found its tension-building qualities a good means for expressing and intensifying certain moods in his operas and vocal works, where the passacaglia's persistent ground becomes a kind of animated pedal-point that supports the unfolding of the dramatic situation. The contrapuntal polarity between the ground and the expressive flow of the vocal line is one that is carefully controlled to convey the text's innermost expression. He often elevates the passacaglia to some crucial dramatic high point of an opera or song-cycle to reflect on a tragedy or intensify a dialogue. Several examples immediately come to mind associated with the subject of death. The well-known passacaglia in Peter Grimes, an instrumental interlude between scenes, depicts the derangement of Grimes and is, as it were, oppressed with the sense of his impending death. In The Rape of Lucretia there is a dramatic passacaglia after Lucretia's suicide, in which the other characters express their feelings on the finality of death.

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