The Subject of Holodomor in the Ukrainian Artistic Space

The Great Famine (Holodomor) is man-made famine that convulsed the Soviet republic of Ukraine in the 1930s. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government. The article aims to highlight specific historical, cultural and social conditions that contributed to the dynamics of the Holodomor theme in music. It focuses especially on the musical compositions of this historical tragedy performed at the Kyiv Music Fest Competition. We can observe the linguistic and musical semantics of the opus of tragic imagery, along with the ethnic motifs of the Ukrainian cultural space, including musical rhetorical figures of the Baroque period, Christian symbolism of suffering and salvation, infernal stylistics.

Music of Razak Abdul Aziz: Preparing Chosen Solo and Collaborative Piano Works for Two Academic Recitals

For the first time in history, full-scale performances on musical compositions by a Malaysian composer, Razak Abdul Aziz, were presented through two academic recitals—27 July 2019 and 6 February 2020—at Orchestra Hall, Akademi Seni Budaya dan Warisan Kebangsaan (ASWARA). These recitals consisted of solo and collaborative piano works, performed by me and a team of music collaborators that were specifically selected for this purpose. Razak Abdul Aziz, who is still actively composing, spent most of his career life as an academic, first serving for Institut Teknologi MARA (ITM), then Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) until his retirement in November 2019. Besides fulfilling the academic requirements set by Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI) for my doctoral degree, I had chosen to perform works by this composer as he is generally known to the local music community as one of the earliest contemporary composers in the country (started composing in the 1980s). Yet, a full-scale performance of his works was long overdue, though he had the opportunities to have some of his works premiered and performed on local and international platforms as part of concert programmes. This artist project talks about the preparation I made for both recitals, briefly explaining the creative process I journeyed through and the challenges I faced during this time span, discussing each work I had selected for these academic recitals. These recitals could, perhaps, be the pioneers in studying and performing works by Razak Abdul Aziz, hoping to expand this effort to national and international levels.

What the Climber Saw: Strauss's Alpensinfonie and the Romantic Tradition of Nature Representation

Initially criticized for its naïve representation of landscape features, Strauss's Alpensinfonie (1915) has in recent years been reinterpreted by scholars as a deliberate challenge to metaphysics, a late outgrowth of the composer's fascination with Nietzsche. As a consequence, the relationship between Strauss's tone poem and earlier artworks remains underexplored. Strauss in fact relied heavily on long-established tropes of representing mountain scenes, and when this work is situated against a backdrop of similarly themed Romantic paintings, literature, travelogues and musical compositions, many points of resemblance emerge. In this article, I focus on how human responses to mountains are portrayed within artworks. Romantic-era reactions were by no means univocal: mountains elicited overtly religious exhalations, atheistic refutations of all supernatural connections, pantheistic nature-worship, and also artworks which engaged with nature purely in an immanent fashion. Strauss uses a range of strategies to distinguish the climber from the changing scenery he traverses. The ascent in the first half of Eine Alpensinfonie focuses on a virtuoso rendition of landscape in sound, interleaved with suggestions as to the emotional reactions of the protagonist. This immanent perspective on nature would accord well with Strauss's declared atheism. In the climber's response to the sublime experience of the peak, however, I argue that there are marked similarities to the pantheistic divinization of nature such as was espoused by the likes of Goethe, whom Strauss admired enormously. And while Strauss's was an avowedly godless perspective, I will argue in the final section of the article that he casts the climber's post-peak response to the sublime encounter in a parareligious light that again has romantic precedents. There are intimations of romantic transcendence in the latter part of the work, even if these evaporate as the tone poem, and the entire nineteenth-century German instrumental tradition it concludes, fades away into silence.

Group behaviors as music

A framework for thinking about group behaviors in music as a compositional strategy is set out, drawing on research in social psychology and game studies to explore how different aspects of group behaviors can be explicitly explored in musical compositions. Using Forsyth’s notion of group dynamics as “the influential interpersonal processes that occur in and between groups over time,” the chapter considers how behavioral–musical systems use rules to govern interaction between people, how decisions are enacted through the ways players make choices, and how values are suggested by the outcome of these decisions. Forsyth suggests five processes that influence the behavior of groups: formative, influence, performance, conflict, and contextual processes. These are discussed in relation to some of the author’s recent work and the strategies evident in work by others.

Franz Schubert en Màrius Torres

This study reviews the presence of the composer Franz Schubert in five poems by Màrius Torres. These texts were written between 1933 and 1938, while Torres consolidated and evolved as a poet. The writer from Lleida performed musical scores with the piano and the Austrian composer, through his Lieder, became a model, something that is evident in the different ways in which transtextuality is present, not only between the songs’ lyrics and Torres’ poems, but also between the musical compositions and these same poems. This study analyzes how, on the one hand, Schubert’s Lieder “Der Erlkönig” and “Der Tod und das Mädchen”, with texts by Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Matthias Claudius respectively, work as a starting point – or hypotext – for three poems by the Catalan poet, “El rei dels verns”, “La Mort i el Jove” and “Paraules de la Mort”, thus converted into hypertexts. On the other hand, Torres’ two poems “Adverbis de Schubert” and “Mai” refer to the Austrian composer from the intertextual relationship with the poem “Jamais” by Alfred de Musset. At the same time Torres mentions Schubert and the Lied “Ständchen” with text by Ludwig Rellstab in “Adverbis de Schubert”, but the Catalan poet hides Schubert’s copresence in “Mai”.

Material Connections

The architect Bruce Goff (1904–82) is often associated with Frank Lloyd Wright and Organic Architecture, but his concept of organicism was equally influenced by his interest in modern music, and in particular the work of Claude Debussy. Goff maintained correspondence with musicians throughout his life—including with composers Edgard Varèse and Harry Partch—and in the 1920s and 1930s, he actively composed works for piano and player piano. In Tulsa and then Chicago, Goff developed connections to other writers, artists, and musicians (notably Richard San Jule and Ernest Brooks) who cultivated modernist sensibilities across the arts. Following close consideration of his papers at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago, I examine Goff’s approaches to music and architecture as expressed not only through his correspondence, pedagogical writings, and architectural designs, but also through the analysis of some of his musical compositions. I also discuss a piece by Burrill Phillips that was inspired by the house Goff designed for John Garvey, violist of the Walden Quartet. By investigating the manifold contexts of these artworks as revealed by archival research, we can shed light on the divergent use of the term “organicism” as it is applied across the arts.

Project Metamorphosis: Designing a Dynamic Framework for Converting Musical Compositions into Paintings

The authors present an automated, rule-based system to convert piano compositions into paintings. Using a color-note association scale presented by Edward Maryon in his book Marcotone (1919), which correlates 12-tone scale with 12 hues of the color circle, the authors present a simple approach for extracting colors associated with each note played in a piano composition. The authors also describe the color extraction and art generation process in detail, as well as the process to create ‘moving art,’ which imitates the progression of a musical piece in real time. They share and discuss artworks generated for four famous piano compositions.

Nunggak semi Al Suwardi: organology and perspective of harmonic planet music creation

This article examines the artistry of a composer named Aloysius Suwardi. This composer, who grew up in the Javanese gamelan music tradition, has produced musical compositions and created musical instruments as a means/medium to express it on the journey of his creativity. His works have been staged in various forums or world music festivals. The musical instruments he has created fill the laboratory spaces to create his musical compositions. Two musical ensembles that have been created are Gamelan Genta and Gamelan Planet Harmonic. These two musical instruments complement the many personal musical instruments he has created, such as the vibrander, tering, gerendang, and other musical instruments. Regarding the two ensembles, this article examines the aspects of the creation process. For example, how did Al Suwardi choose the materials used, how to make them, to how he determined the barrel system for these tools. In terms of compositing, this article examines how Al Suwardi started his work, his models of creation, and how he composes his works until they are declared final. The gragas and dridis creeds and Nunggak Semi's concept are the main topics in this composition creation model. Both creeds and concepts have ushered in the landscape of making Al Suwardi's musical compositions expand, from the gamelan tradition to more contemporary models of music creation