Plaza, Juan Bautista (1898–1965)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Elizabeth Labonville
Keyword(s):  
Folk Music ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Music History ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Music Appreciation ◽  
Music School ◽  
Music Manuscripts ◽  
Choral Society

Juan Bautista Plaza (Caracas, 19 July 1898–1 January 1965) was a Venezuelan composer, educator, writer, and musicologist active in Caracas; he was one of the principal figures in the development of the modern Venezuelan musical establishment. Trained in Rome as an organist and composer of sacred music, he served as chapel master of the Caracas cathedral for twenty-five years. At the same time he composed sacred and secular music in all genres except opera and symphony. As one of the first Venezuelan composers of art music to adopt a nationalist esthetic, he incorporated elements of Venezuelan folk music into some of his secular works. A dedicated educator, he taught the first music history course in Venezuela and created a music school for children. He helped organize Venezuela’s first choral society and first stable symphony orchestra. To create knowledgeable audiences, he developed a series of radio programmes on music appreciation. He contributed often to Caracas newspapers and magazines, publishing articles about music and local concert life. In 1936 he took charge of an archive of old music manuscripts, which enabled him to publish a set of scores from Venezuela’s colonial period and write scholarly articles about the music. His accomplishments led to his service as Venezuela’s Director of Culture (1944–46).

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

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

Landmarks in the Study of Improvisation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno Nettl
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Research Study ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Jazz Improvisation ◽  
Single Model ◽  
Oral Transmission ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Music Making ◽  
History Of

Historically, research on improvisation has been related to the discovery of non-Western musics, folk music, and jazz, and has depended on the development of recording techniques for its principal kinds of data. The concept of improvisation is not unitary, but includes many vastly different kinds of un-notated music-making, which casts some doubt on the efficacy of the term itself. In the history of Western art music, improvisation was originally ignored or seen as craft rather than art, but since ca. 1980 it has occupied increased attention. The association of improvisation with oral transmission has sometimes been misunderstood. The most successful standard research study has been the comparison of performances based on a single model, for example, raga in India, maqam and dastgah in the Middle East, or a series of chord changes or a tune in jazz. Improvisation as a concept—for example, as a metaphor of freedom—has been important in recent research.

scholarly journals Conception and Origination of folk tune in Long March Cantata(长征组歌)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siyu Tian ◽  
Huibing Tan
Keyword(s):  
Folk Music ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Bel Canto ◽  
Narrative Poetry ◽  
Mountain Ranges ◽  
Choral Repertoire ◽  
Northern Shaanxi ◽  
Instrumental Accompaniment

Thoughtful introduction of Chinese choral repertoire, the Long March cantata is contemporarily highly recognized music heritage of large-scale choral work of 10 movements last century in China. The cantata is composed to commemorate 30th anniversary of Long March. The journey of the Long March covered 11 provinces over 4,000 miles and crossed 24 rivers and 18 mountain ranges for over 370 days. The libretto is a set of narrative poetry by General Hua Xiao in Sept, 1964. "Long March Cantata" is conceptually composed based on "Where to go and where to say, when you hear the melody, the audiences will realize that it’s Guizhou, Yunnan, North Shaanxi ... Wherever the music is performed, it should restore the imaging of local feeling". This article mainly discusses its absorption of Chinese folk music based on Chinese pentatonic scales in music composition. Among them, movement one "Farewell (Leave the Base Area)" uses Jiangxi folk tunes, and the movement three "The Zunyi Conference, the Brilliance" use Guizhou tunes according to composers. For examples, in the movement four " Raid of Four times Cross Red Water ", Yunnan tunes are used, and in the movement seven "Arrive Wuqi Town", the northern Shaanxi tunes are used. In movement eight “Cheers" and movement nine "Annunciation", the tune of Changsha in Hunan and Northeast Jiangxi were selected to salute the southeast soldiers respectively. With the instrumental accompaniment of the full western orchestra, bel canto and national folk style signing (non-classical voicing) are well balanced. In order to match folk tune and regional congruency, Chinese traditional musical instruments, erhu (二胡), pipa (三弦), zhudi (bamboo flute, 笛子), suona (Chinese trumpet唢呐), kuaiban (bamboo castanets, 快板) as well as other Chinese percussion etc. were used with the western symphony orchestra according to historical context.

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.

Bartók as Man of Letters

Tempo ◽  
1972 ◽  
pp. 10-16
Author(s):  
Benjamin Suchoff
Keyword(s):  
Folk Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
Bela Bartok ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Zoltan Kodaly

Bartok's literary efforts range from books and monographs to shorter essays. According to recent findings, there were no less than 119 extant works. Some of them were written in collaboration with Zoltán Kodály or Sandor Reschofsky; others were originally drafted as lectures which were for the most part given on the radio or at educational institutions.Bartók's first essay apparently appeared in print in Budapest in 1904. It is interesting to note that except in 1907 and 1915, at least one of his writings was published each year of his life, in a considerable number of languages, and frequently in widely-known journals. His essays may be divided, according to their topics, into eight basic categories (although there is some overlapping): I. The Investigation of Musical Folklore; II, National Folk Music; III, Comparative Musical Folklore; IV, Book Reviews and Polemics; V, Musical Instruments; VI, The Relation Between Folk Music and Art Music; VII, The Life and Music of Béla Bartók; and VIII, Bartok On Music and Musicians.

Music History and Appreciation in the Two-Year College Curriculum

1979 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-34
Author(s):  
Jack Friedlander
Keyword(s):  
Music History ◽  
Junior Colleges ◽  
Music Appreciation ◽  
Transfer Program ◽  
Two Year Colleges ◽  
College Curriculum ◽  
Two Year College ◽  
Time Period ◽  
The Status ◽  
Humanities Curriculum

The purpose of this study was to examine the status of music history and appreciation courses in the nation's community and junior colleges.1 Data on course offerings and enrollments in music history/appreciation courses were obtained in Spring 1975 and Spring 1977 from a representative sample of 178 two-year colleges participating in a nationwide study of the humanities curriculum in community and junior colleges. Among the findings reported were: (a) most two-year colleges offered a course in either music history or music appreciation in Spring 1975 (74.2%) and in Spring 1977 (70.2%); (b) enrollments in music history/appreciation courses declined by 9.5% in the same time period in which total college enrollments increased by 7.4%; and (c) nearly all of the music history and appreciation courses offered in two-year colleges are designed primarily for transfer program students. Recommendations on how music departments can increase their enrollments are offered in this paper.

Bartók's Notation: Tonality and Modality

Tempo ◽  
1983 ◽  
pp. 4-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Gillies
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Rural Music

Everyone knows that Bartók's compositions were strongly influenced by his work with folk music. For over 70 years commentators have repeated the fact in one form or another. Bartok himself noted shortly before his death: ‘It is almost a truism that contemporary art music in Hungary has Eastern European folk music as its basis. However, there is much misunderstanding and misinterpretation with reference to the relation between our higher art music and our rural music’. That ‘misunderstanding and misinterpretation’ was not entirely the fault of scholars and critics. Bartók's numerous essays on the subject, written between 1911 and 1944, all too often provide the reader with generalities. Where he is specific it is most usually about thematic, or occasionally harmonic, derivations from folk sources. With the exception of portions of the ‘Harvard Lectures’ (1943), however, Bartók avoids any sustained account of how folk music influenced the modal and tonal structures of his compositions. Above all, he never explains the principles behind his characteristic pitch notations, particularly those double sharps and double flats so frequently found in his scores.

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