scholarly journals Rebonds: Structural Affordances, Negotiation, and Creation

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Duinker
Keyword(s):  
Musical Structure ◽  
Musical Work ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Iannis Xenakis ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Solo Percussion ◽  
Structural Fabric ◽  
Recording Analysis

This paper presents a comparative recording analysis of the seminal work for solo percussion Rebonds (Iannis Xenakis, 1989), in order to demonstrate how performances of a musical work can reveal—or even create—aspects of musical structure that score-centered analysis cannot illuminate. In doing so I engage with the following questions. What does a pluralistic, dynamic conception of structure look like for Rebonds? How do interpretive decisions recast performers as agents of musical structure? When performances diverge from the score in the omission of notes, the softening of accents, the insertion of dramatic tempo changes, or the altering of entire passages, do conventions that arise out of those performance practices become part of the structural fabric of the work? Are these conventions thus part of the Rebonds “text”?

scholarly journals Musemes in affect. Philip Tagg’s model of music analysis

2020 ◽  
pp. 97-105
Author(s):  
Stefania Zielonka
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Music Analysis ◽  
Musical Structure ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
Musical Work ◽  
Multi Level ◽  
Musical Communication

The paper is an attempt to synthesize the most important aspects of a model of popular and film music analysis proposed by British musicologist Philip Tagg. Tagg, using the category of musemes – universal meaning units, isolated from the musical structure of the composition on the basis of criteria established for every given case – examines selected pieces using multi-level semiotic analysis. In his model Tagg takes into account both the importance of the broadly understood cultural context and the intertextuality of the piece. He also emphasizes the role of affect in musical communication, which is necessary to fully understand the meaning of a musical work.

scholarly journals Crossing Over with Brad Mehldau’s Cover of Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android”

2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
René Rusch
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Crossing Over ◽  
Musical Structure ◽  
Musical Work ◽  
Piano Performance ◽  
Solo Piano ◽  
Original Rock ◽  
Jazz Performance

This paper explores the intertextual relationships between popular music songs and their jazz adaptations, or “covers.” In a jazz adaptation of a pop song, the improvisatory section—wedged between two more or less complete statements of the pop song—forms the crux of the jazz performance. Improvisation affords musicians an opportunity to create something new out of an existing musical work and, as I suggest in this paper, has the potential to transform the expression perceived in the popular song’s lyrics and musical structure. Using Brad Mehldau’s live solo piano performance of Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” (1997) from his promotional albumDeregulating Jazz([1999] 2000) as a case in point, I show how his adaptation both highlights the motivic repetitions in the original rock song and heightens the song’s expressions of anxiety and apprehension.The article unfolds in two sections. The first section provides an overview of Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” as a means to ground my discussion of Mehldau's recording. Here I consider how the rock song’s musical content can be heard as the analog of its lyrical content. In the second section, I explore the intertextual relationships that emerge between Mehldau's adaptation and Radiohead's rock song, drawing from my transcriptions and analyses of both musical texts.

Redeeming the Study of African Essentialism

2021 ◽  
pp. 29-53
Author(s):  
Juan Diego Díaz
Keyword(s):  
Musical Structure ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Diasporic Identities ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

Chapter 2 provides the book’s theoretical foundations by positioning tropes of Africanness as central to the analysis of musical constructions of diasporic identities. After introducing six well-known tropes—rhythmicity, percussiveness, embodiment, spirituality, spontaneity, and collectivism—with the baggage and symbolism attached to them, it presents their role in the debate of African survivals. By interpreting early writings on Africanisms, Paul Gilroy’s concept of anti-anti-essentialism, and Steven Feld’s notion of interpretive moves, this chapter argues for the importance of taking seriously musicians’ ideas and rhetoric about essentialisms as well as the ways in which they materialize them in sound, musical structure, and performance practices. This implies an analytical shift of focus from Africanisms as cultural imponderables to tropes of Africanness that are rhetorically asserted and overtly manifested, enabling better understandings of diasporic cultural creation and people’s agency.

scholarly journals REFRAMING THE LISTENING EXPERIENCE THROUGH THE PROJECTED SCORE

Tempo ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (284) ◽  
pp. 37-50
Author(s):  
David Kim-Boyle
Keyword(s):  
Graphic Design ◽  
Structural Level ◽  
Musical Work ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
The Past ◽  
Listening Experience ◽  
Listening Process ◽  
Mnemonic Function

ABSTRACTOver the past ten years, performance scores have been radically foregrounded in a variety of performance practices. Whether such notations assume a prescriptive function, visually projected for musicians to interpret, or a descriptive one, unfolding as a documentation of a live coding performance, how might such a foregrounding reframe the listening process for an audience? Does a notational schema help promote a deeper, structural level understanding of a musical work? This article will consider these various questions, exploring how principles of graphic design and the transparency of notation contribute to the listening experience. It will suggest that works featuring projected scores find aesthetic value in the juxtaposition of notation's traditionally mnemonic function and the unique temporal modalities that projected scores establish.

A Court in Decline? Examining the Regality Court Records of Melrose, Roxburghshire, 1657–84

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Vivienne Dunstan
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Local Area ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Seminal Work

McIntyre, in his seminal work on Scottish franchise courts, argues that these courts were in decline in this period, and of little relevance to their local population. 1 But was that really the case? This paper explores that question, using a particularly rich set of local court records. By analysing the functions and significance of one particular court it assesses the role of this one court within its local area, and considers whether it really was in decline at this time, or if it continued to perform a vital role in its local community. The period studied is the mid to late seventeenth century, a period of considerable upheaval in Scottish life, that has attracted considerable attention from scholars, though often less on the experiences of local communities and people.

Primary education students' experience of the expressiveness of authentic modes in Gregorian chant

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tihomir Prša ◽  
Jelena Blašković
Keyword(s):  
Primary Education ◽  
Fourth Grade ◽  
Second Grade ◽  
Gregorian Chant ◽  
Musical Structure ◽  
Education Students ◽  
School Year ◽  
Second Grade Students ◽  
Fourth Grade Students ◽  
The Church

Expressiveness of the church modes is reflected in their character and association of certain states with a specific mode or single Gregorian composition which possesses unique expressiveness. An important characteristic of Gregorian chant on the tonality level is diatonic singing based on scales without chromatics, using only one semitone in the tetrachord whose musical structure reflects the expressiveness of Gregorian chant. Such expressiveness achieves character specificities which each mode respectively reflects. Various modal material in the form of typical melodic shifts in a certain composition conditions the expressiveness of Gregorian music and influences the listening impression and assessment of individual Gregorian tunes. The goal of this work is to examine primary education students' experiences of the expressiveness of Gregorian modes and explore if today's auditory sense accustomed to two tonality genres, major and minor, recognises what has been stored in the heritage of Gregorian chant repertoire for centuries. The research was conducted in the school year 2018/2019 with students of first, second, third and fourth grade of primary school (N=100). The results have shown that first and second grade students express higher auditory sensibility in recognizing specific characteristic of authentic Gregorian modes. Third and fourth grade students are audibly less open and perceptive considering tonal character differences in the authentic Gregorian modes. Key words: Gregorian chant; modality; old church scales; students in primary education

John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Iddon ◽  
Philip Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Arnold Schoenberg ◽  
Musical Work ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Piano Solo ◽  
Comprehensive Examination ◽  
Compositional Practice ◽  
Similar Basis ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Way

The book is a comprehensive examination of John Cage’s seminal Concert for Piano and Orchestra. It places the piece into its many contexts, examining its relationship with Cage’s compositional practice of indeterminacy more generally, the importance of Cage’s teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, on the development of his structural thought, and the impact of Cage’s (mis)understanding of jazz. It discusses, on the basis of Cage’s sketches and manuscripts, the compositional process at play in the piece. It details the circumstances of the piece’s early performances—often described as catastrophes—its recording and promotion, and the part it played in Cage’s (successful) hunt for a publisher. It examines in detail the various ways in which Cage’s pianist of choice, David Tudor, approached the piece, differing according to whether it was to be performed with an orchestra, alongside Cage delivering the lecture, ‘Indeterminacy’, or as a piano solo to accompany Merce Cunningham’s choreography Antic Meet. It demonstrates the ways in which, despite indeterminacy, the instrumental parts of the piece are amenable to analytical interpretation, especially through a method which exposes the way in which those parts form a sort of network of statistical commonality and difference, analysing, too, the pianist’s part, the Solo for Piano, on a similar basis, discussing throughout the practical consequences of Cage’s notations for a performer. It shows the way in which the piece played a central role, first, in the construction of who Cage was and what sort of composer he was within the new musical world but, second, how it came to be an important example for professional philosophers in discussing what the limits of the musical work are.

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