scholarly journals Krzysztof Knittel's chamber opera and Agnieszka Stulgińska's music theatre: Examples of a new syncretistic medium in contemporary Polish music

2021 ◽  
pp. 136-154
Author(s):  
Monika Karwaszewska

This essay analyses and interprets the scores, recordings, and media used in Knittel and King's The Heart Piece - Double Opera (1999) and Stulgińska's Three Women for three women and ten instruments (2017), two semi-improvised Polish operas using performance art and interaction between sound, text, choreography, lighting, theatrical form and electronic medium. In Stuglińska's modern music theatre, the listener follows different sound sources and the setting: choreography, performers' and speakers' arrangement on stage, props and lighting, whose intensity dictates the form. The Heart Piece chamber opera is a two - Polish and American - composers' take on Müller's play Herzstück, with separate movements in their native languages. Music and text create an interactive setting, and their notation and semantics make music both seen and heard. These works use the concept of hybridization and, in Wolf's terminology, intracompositional intermediality, where different means of expression create an intermedial discourse, a complementary whole and a new syncretistic medium.

Notes ◽  
1952 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 607
Author(s):  
Frank C. Campbell ◽  
Madeleine Goss

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 205920432090195
Author(s):  
Nina Düvel ◽  
Reinhard Kopiez ◽  
Anna Wolf ◽  
Peter Weihe

Over the last decades, the simulation of musical instruments by digital means has become an important part of modern music production and live performance. Since the first release of the Kemper Profiling Amplifier (KPA) in 2011, guitarists have been able to create and store a nearly unlimited number of “digital fingerprints” of amplifier and cabinet setups for live performances and studio productions. However, whether listeners can discriminate between the sounds of the KPA and the original amplifier remains unclear. Thus, we constructed a listening test based on musical examples from both sound sources. In a first approach, the psychoacoustic analysis using mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients (MFCCs) revealed a high degree of timbre similarity between the two sound sources. In a second step, a listening test with N = 177 showed that the overall discrimination performance was d’ = .34, which was a rather small difference (0.0 ≤ d’ ≤ 0.74). A weak relationship between the degree of general musical sophistication and discrimination performance was found. Overall, we suggest that listeners are rarely able to assign audio examples to the correct condition. We conclude that, at least on a perceptual level, our results give no support for a commonly accepted pessimistic attitude toward digital simulations of hardware sounds.


Author(s):  
Jan Frohburg

In November 1957 Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall at IIT broke with convention when it became the venue for a jazz concert by Duke Ellington and his orchestra. This extraordinary event is reconstructed based on personal recollections, campus newspapers and other archival material. In the context of architectural pedagogy Crown Hall is appreciated as a supreme expression of Mies’s architectural philosophy, both for its spatial openness and its spiritual character. Here, influences from Mies’s own evolution as an architect intersected with developments in modern music and performance art it inspired. Parallels are uncovered between Ellington’s jazz and Mies’s steel and glass architecture, both distinctly American idioms that characterise post-war modernity. The Ellington concert at Crown Hall presented the perfect synthesis of people, space, light, music and nature. At the same time it attested to the disruptive potential that exists in jazz and modern architecture alike.


Author(s):  
Sharon Mirchandani

This chapter focuses on Marga Richter's compositions during the 1990s. In the 1990s, the compositional world was still fragmented as composers focused on serial and electronic music, performance art, and numerous other styles. Richter continued to created choral music as well as music for opera, which she combined with vocal and orchestral works. Her compositions were fewer in number during this decade, but large in scale for the most part. This chapter first considers Richter's works after the death of her husband Alan Skelly, beginning with the seven-poem cycle, Into My Heart, which she dedicated to him. It then examines Richter's Quantum Quirks of a Quick Quaint Quar, along with two large-scale works from the 1990s that mark the apex of her output to date: the triple concerto, Variations and Interludes on Themes from Monteverdi and Bach for violin, cello, piano, and orchestra (1992); and the chamber opera, Riders to the Sea. It also discusses Sarah do not mourn me dead, which has hints of transcendentalism and love.


Author(s):  
Raphael Georg Kiesewetter ◽  
Robert Muller

1999 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 170-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara S. Muller ◽  
Pierre Bovet

Twelve blindfolded subjects localized two different pure tones, randomly played by eight sound sources in the horizontal plane. Either subjects could get information supplied by their pinnae (external ear) and their head movements or not. We found that pinnae, as well as head movements, had a marked influence on auditory localization performance with this type of sound. Effects of pinnae and head movements seemed to be additive; the absence of one or the other factor provoked the same loss of localization accuracy and even much the same error pattern. Head movement analysis showed that subjects turn their face towards the emitting sound source, except for sources exactly in the front or exactly in the rear, which are identified by turning the head to both sides. The head movement amplitude increased smoothly as the sound source moved from the anterior to the posterior quadrant.


2015 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 207-221
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Mastnak

Abstract. Five overlapping eras or stages can be distinguished in the evolution of music therapy. The first one refers to the historical roots and ethnological sources that have influenced modern meta-theoretical perspectives and practices. The next stage marks the heterogeneous origins of modern music therapy in the 20th century that mirror psychological positions and novel clinical ideas about the healing power of music. The subsequent heyday of music therapeutic models and schools of thought yielded an enormous variety of concepts and methods such as Nordoff–Robbins music therapy, Orff music therapy, analytic music therapy, regulatory music therapy, guided imagery and music, sound work, etc. As music therapy gained in international importance, clinical applications required research on its therapeutic efficacy. According to standards of evidence-based medicine and with regard to clearly defined diagnoses, research on music therapeutic practice was the core of the fourth stage of evolution. The current stage is characterized by the emerging epistemological dissatisfaction with the paradigmatic reductionism of evidence-based medicine and by the strong will to discover the true healing nature of music. This trend has given birth to a wide spectrum of interdisciplinary hermeneutics for novel foundations of music therapy. Epigenetics, neuroplasticity, regulatory and chronobiological sciences, quantum physical philosophies, universal harmonies, spiritual and religious views, and the cultural anthropological phenomenon of esthetics and creativity have become guiding principles. This article should not be regarded as a historical treatise but rather as an attempt to identify theoretical landmarks in the evolution of modern music therapy and to elucidate the evolution of its spirit.


This research article highlights the temperament, inference, scope, and motives of code-mixing in Pakistani English works. One novel from Pakistani English novels namely, An American Brat by Bapsi Sidhwa, and one short story namely, The Escape by Qaisra Shehraz are being selected as an illustration of this reading. In this novel and short story, the writers have already dealt with the characteristics of postcolonialism. English language and literature pierced into the privileged civilizations of the sub-continent, after the end of British Imperialism. Pakistani writers in English are the best interpreter of the post-colonial communal language. In this study, I have hit upon code-mixing in English works written by Pakistani authors to a bigger echelon. These works are paragons of arts and the unbelievable mixture of rhetorical and fictitious study. In these works, the writers have not abased the confined diversities. They have tinted the value of Pakistani English in order to achieve the chatty desires of native people. These borrowings from the native languages are used to fill the lexical fissures of ideological thoughts. The reason of these borrowings is not to represent the English as a substandard assortment. Through the utilization of native words, we conclude that the significance of native languages has been tinted to question mark the dialect as well. The words of daily use also have an area of research for English people without having any substitute in English. That’s why in English literature innovative practices and ideas of code-mixing have been employed.


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