scholarly journals From men to machines and back: Automata and the reception of virtuosity in European instrumental art music, c.1815-c.1850

New Sound ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 65-80
Author(s):  
Žarko Cvejić
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Musical Performance ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Automatic Technique

In most histories of Western music, the 1830s and 40s are typically described as "the age/era of virtuosity and/or virtuosi". Indeed, major contemporary sources, including leading musical journals of the time, teem with reports on the latest exploits of Liszt and his rivals and in much of this body of criticism, piano and violin virtuosi were commonly celebrated for pushing the limits of humanly conceivable excellence in musical performance. However, a significant number of these critical responses were also negative, critiquing individual virtuosi for playing not like humans, but like automata. My claim in this article, documented with a detailed perusal of contemporary music criticism, is that this line of anti-virtuosic critique was part of the larger 19th-century suspicion of virtuosity as super but also, perhaps, non-humanly accomplished, automatic technique, devoid of all emotion, expression, that is, of human presence and content. Also, I propose to interpret this line of criticism with reference to the even broader 19th-century anxiety over the issue of human subjectivity, that is, its freedom, evident not only in contemporary philosophy (Schelling, Schopenhauer, Novalis, etc.), but also in literature. Such narratives and, as I argue in this paper, much of contemporary criticism of virtuosity were shaped by the uncanny feeling that the human subject, too, like automata and "automatic" virtuosi, may not be free, contrary to the Enlightenment view of the human subject in Rousseau, Kant, and others, but actually under the power of mechanisms beyond itself, operating automatically and not of its own accord. In contemporary criticism of virtuosity, the elusive notions of expression, expressivity, expressive playing and the like, which were deliberately kept under-explained, were then marshalled to preserve the supposedly ineffable or at least ineffably human core of musical performance, in line with the contemporary Romantic view of music as the only means of expressing what is otherwise inexpressible, that is, ineffable.

Orientalism in the Art Music of the Ionian Islands

2019 ◽  
pp. 296-317
Author(s):  
Kostas Kardamis
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Ionian Islands ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The 19Th Century

The Ionian Islands were at an early stage cut off from the Eastern Roman Empire, experienced the changes that came with the Renaissance, actively participated in the Enlightenment and were in contact with the multifarious ideologies of the 19th century. These factors transformed their art music, which followed the ‘western’ trends. In this context, ‘orientalism’ appeared as an additional creative element in certain indigenous composers’ works. Its use ranged from the stereotypical ‘western’ approach regarding the Orient to the employment of ‘oriental’ elements as media of political (especially during the struggles for the Islands’ annexation to the Greek Kingdom), national (as a conventional ‘Greek characteristic’) and social statements, and as a way for the works’ entrepreneurial promotion to a larger audience. The chapter discusses these changing—and often concurrent and diverging—attitudes through case studies; it stresses that ‘orientalism’ never became a compositional fixation for Ionian Islands composers.

scholarly journals New Riffs on the Old Mind-Body Blues: “Black Rhythm,” “White Logic,” and Music Theory in the Twenty-First Century

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-348
Author(s):  
TOM PERCHARD
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
University Departments ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Light Skin ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Whiteness Theory ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
European University

AbstractContemporary music historians have shown how taxonomic divisions of humanity—constructed in earnest within European anthropologies and philosophies from the Enlightenment on—were reflected in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of musical-cultural evolution, with complex and intellectualized art music forms always shown as transcending base and bodily rhythm, just as light skin supposedly transcended dark. The errors of old and now disreputable scholarly approaches have been given much attention. Yet scientifically oriented twenty-first-century studies of putatively Afro-diasporic and, especially, African American rhythmic practices seem often to stumble over similarly racialized fault lines, the relationship between “sensory” music, its “intelligent” comprehension, and its analysis still procedurally and politically fraught. Individual musical sympathies are undermined by methods and assumptions common to the field in which theorists operate. They operate, too, in North American and European university departments overwhelmingly populated by white scholars. And so this article draws upon and tests concepts from critical race and whiteness theory and asks whether, in taking “black rhythm” as its subject, some contemporary music studies reinscribe what the sociologists Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva have called “white logic”: a set of intellectual attitudes, prerogatives, and methods that, whatever the intentions of the musicologists concerned, might in some way restage those division practices now widely recognized as central to early musicology.

scholarly journals From "Bach" to "Bach's son": The work of aesthetic ideology in the historical reception of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach

New Sound ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 90-108
Author(s):  
Žarko Cvejić
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
20Th Century Music ◽  
Sonic Art ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Music Aesthetics ◽  
Shadow Cast ◽  
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach ◽  
19Th And 20Th Century

The paper explores the historical correlation between the marginalization of C. P. E. Bach in his posthumous critical reception in the early and mid 19th century and the paradigm shift that occurred in the philosophical, aesthetic, and ideological conception of music in Europe around 1800, whereby music was reconceived as a radically abstract and disembodied art of expression, as opposed to the Enlightenment idea of music as an irreducibly sensuous, sonic art of representation. More precisely, the paper argues that the cause of C. P. E. Bach's marginalization in his posthumous critical reception should not be sought only in the shadow cast by his father, J. S. Bach, and the focus of 19th and 20th-century music historiography on periodization, itself centred around "great men", but also in the fundamental incompatibility between this new aesthetic and philosophical ideology of music from around 1800 and C. P. E. Bach's oeuvre, predicated as it was on an older aesthetic paradigm of music, with its reliance on musical performance, especially improvisation, itself undervalued in early and mid 19th-century music criticism for the same reasons. Other factors might also include C.P. E. Bach's use of the genre of fantasia, as well as the sheer stylistic idiosyncrasy of much of his music, especially the fantasias and other works he wrote für Kenner ("for connoisseurs"). This might also explain why his music was so quickly sidelined despite its pursuit of "free" expression, a defining ideal of early to mid 19th-century music aesthetics.

Music after the Fall

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War

By the start of the 21st century many of the foundations of postwar culture had disappeared: Europe had been rebuilt and, as the EU, had become one of the world’s largest economies; the United States’ claim to global dominance was threatened; and the postwar social democratic consensus was being replaced by market-led neoliberalism. Most importantly of all, the Cold War was over, and the World Wide Web had been born. Music After The Fall considers contemporary musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing on theories from the other arts, in particular art and architecture, it expands the definition of Western art music to include forms of composition, experimental music, sound art, and crossover work from across the spectrum, inside and beyond the concert hall. Each chapter considers a wide range of composers, performers, works, and institutions are considered critically to build up a broad and rich picture of the new music ecosystem, from North American string quartets to Lebanese improvisers, from South American electroacoustic studios to pianos in the Australian outback. A new approach to the study of contemporary music is developed that relies less on taxonomies of style and technique, and more on the comparison of different responses to common themes, among them permission, fluidity, excess, and loss.

EVIDENCE OF THE PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF SOLFEGGIO PATTERNS IN THE MANUSCRIPT FOR THE 1707 NEAPOLITAN PERFORMANCE OF LA FEDE TRADITA E VENDICATA BY GASPARINI AND VIGNOLA

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-184
Author(s):  
ERIC BOARO
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Strong Evidence ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Schema Theory ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
Practical Application ◽  
Recent Contribution ◽  
Corpus Studies ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

The last two decades have seen the opening of several new paths in eighteenth-century musicology, and Robert O. Gjerdingen has opened one of these: schema theory. Schemata are ‘stock musical phrases employed in conventional sequences’ that function as harmonic, melodic and rhythmic frameworks for musical passages. Evidence of such schematic thinking has emerged through related studies on partimento and solfeggio. Solfeggio practice of the time manifests a schematic way of thinking about music, being mostly based on simple hexachordal patterns which, as studies progressed, could be embellished in different ways. Vasili Byros has addressed the ‘archaeology’ of hearing through reception history, and offered strong evidence that eighteenth-century ears did hear schemata. Interweaving corpus studies on music of the long eighteenth century (1720–1840), contemporary music criticism and reception history, as well as didactic documents from that era, Byros sheds new light on the ways in which schemata were perceived at the time. A recent contribution by Gilad Rabinovitch uses a live improvisation in the style of Mozart by Robert Levin to demonstrate the importance of conventional schemata for historical improvisation.

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.

Prologue

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Margaret C. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Western World ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Secular World ◽  
Gradual Process ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Secular Terms

This prologue provides an overview of the Secular Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was an eighteenth-century movement of ideas and practices that made the secular world its point of departure. It did not necessarily deny the meaning or emotional hold of religion, but it gradually shifted attention away from religious questions toward secular ones. By seeking answers in secular terms—even to many religious questions—it vastly expanded the sphere of the secular, making it, for increasing numbers of educated people, a primary frame of reference. In the Western world, art, music, science, politics, and even the categories of space and time had undergone a gradual process of secularization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the Enlightenment built on this process and made it into an international intellectual cause. This book then aims to understand the major intellectual currents of the century that gave birth to the label “secular.”

The ‘Nautch’, the Veil and the Bayadère: The Indian Dance as Musical Nexus

2019 ◽  
pp. 213-235
Author(s):  
Margaret E. Walker
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
Indian Dance ◽  
The Veil

During the early period of mercantile contact with India, the exotic spectacle of the Bayadères or Nautch Girls seized the imagination of western sojourners and inspired an abundance of artistic production back in Europe. The ‘dancing girl’ is found everywhere in late 18th- and 19th-century orientalist paintings, poetry, novels, and of course, ballets, operas and other musical compositions. Although there are substantial studies exploring musical orientalisms in western art music, little attention has been paid to the role of real-life performances in such musical creation. This chapter explores the influence of the colonial interaction with Indian dance performances over the long 19th century. It argues not only for a nuanced and historicised approach to musical encounter but also, given the centrality of the Nautch in the Indian context, for the crucial inclusion of dance in the global history of music.

Grupo de Renovacion Musical (1942–1948)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marysol Quevedo
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Igor Stravinsky ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Sonata Form ◽  
Compositional Techniques ◽  
American Composers ◽  
Premature Deaths ◽  
The U.S

The Grupo de Renovacion Musical was a school of Cuban composers that emerged out of the Conservatorio Municipal de La Habana during the 1940s. The young composers were pupils of Spanish-born composer José Ardévol, who served as the leader and mentor of the group. After the premature deaths of Amadeo Roldán and Alejandro García Caturla (1939 and 1940 respectively), Ardévol took over some of their duties as music professor at the Conservatorio Municipal. Ardévol and his pupils saw a need for Cuban composers to focus on compositional techniques and strongly believed that all composers should master traditional compositional methods, such as traditional counterpoint, sonata form, and fugues (most commonly used by composers of the Baroque and Classical periods) in order to fully develop their music-writing abilities. They also rejected the obvious nationalism that Roldán and Caturla had popularised and that was also found in the works of many other Latin American composers from the previous generation. Instead, they preferred the neoclassical trends of Europe—mostly of France and Spain—with composers Igor Stravinsky and Manuel de Falla serving as their models. However, they never denied the importance of the legacy established by Roldán and Caturla for future generations of Cuban composers. The group acknowledged that Roldán and Caturla were visionaries in their own time, influential through their compositions, which brought Cuban music up to date with contemporary music developments in the U.S., Latin America, and Europe, and for introducing the use of traditional Cuban music elements to contemporary art music—particularly the use of rhythm and percussive instrumentation.

scholarly journals “Bold and Ragged”: A Cross-Cultural Case for the Aesthetics of Melodic Angularity

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 205920432094906
Author(s):  
Aaron Carter-Ényì ◽  
Quintina Carter-Ényì
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Musical Aesthetics ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Music Practice ◽  
Interval Size ◽  
Two Measures ◽  
Tone Level ◽  
The 19Th Century

Smaller corpora and individual pieces are compared to a large corpus of 2,447 hymns using two measures of melodic angularity: mean interval size and pivot frequency. European art music and West African melodies may exhibit extreme angularity. We argue in the latter that angularity is motivated by linguistic features of tone-level languages. We also found the mean interval sizes of African-American Spirituals and Southern Harmony exceed contemporary hymnody of the 19th century, with levels similar to Nigerian traditional music (Yorùbá oríkì and story songs from eastern Nigeria). This is consistent with the account of W. E. B. Du Bois, who argued that African melody was a primary source for the development of American music. The development of the American spiritual coincides with increasing interval size in 19th-century American hymnody at large, surpassing the same measure applied to earlier European hymns. Based on these findings, we recommend techniques of melodic construction taught by music theorists, especially preference rules for step-wise motion and gap-fill after leaps, be tempered with counterexamples that reflect broader musical aesthetics. This may be achieved by introducing popular music, African and African Diaspora music, and other non-Western music that may or may not be consistent with voice leading principles. There are also many examples from the European canon that are highly angular, like Händel’s “Hallelujah” and Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. Although the tendency of textbooks is to reinforce melodic and part-writing prescriptions with conducive examples from the literature, new perspectives will better equip performers and educators for current music practice.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document