Acoustic spaces of Fritz Kater’s dramatic collages

The article examines the GDR Trilogy by Fritz Kater as a dramatic collage, characterized by the multiplicity and heterogeneity of its constituent elements, re-coding the meanings of each fragment in the context of the whole, synthesis of various dramatic and epic techniques, elements of music, painting and other types of arts. The relations of connection, repulsion, parallelism, contrast that arise between the scenes in the context of the trilogy are traced. The authors strategy of constructing an auditory image in the play is described. On the example of the first of the plays Vineta or Vodomania / Vineta or Oderwassersucht, 2001), the author analyzes the sound score written in the authors remarks, emphasizing the division of the piece into two parts according to the principle of the golden section. The motive analysis used in the article shows how the extra-musical sound palette of the play, built in the spirit of John Cage, reveals and enhances the motive of loss the main motive of the first movement, and the silence that occurred in the last scenes helps to highlight the shame-motive that arises in them. Musical fragments of the play are associated with the mythological image of the sunken city, the lost paradise, the flourishing Vineta.

Dante’s Models in Romantic Music

Dante’s impact on music has been studied completely enough, but so far mainly in an empirical and descriptive way. The article examines the works of romantic composers of the 19th - early 20th centuries, based on the plot of Dante’s “Divine Comedy”: Liszt’s fantasy-sonata “After reading Dante” and the “Dante-Symphony”, the “Francesca da Rimini” by Tchaikovsky (symphonic fantasy) and Rachmaninoff (opera). The author analyses compositional and stylistic models of the romantic music inspired by Dante’s poetry as a system, which is relevant for modern musicology, in particular, for the theories of musical language, style, and musical meaning. Along with the traditional musicological methods of analysis of form and intonational dramaturgy, an interdisciplinary methodology is applied, associated with the coverage of the entire system of musical compositional prototypes as a structuring of meaning. This has a pronounced narrative poetic nature in romantic music. The results of the study demonstrate a system of structural and semantic invariants (secondary, musical models) conditioned by Dante’s figurative world and manifested in melody, harmony, fret organization, composition. The conclusions of the article reveal the roles of Dante’s models of the world in the works considered in the following aspects: in the process of extreme intensification of the contrasts of romantic music in the semantic coordinates of “Hell – Paradise”; “Love – Death”; in the approval of the concept of Liebestod; in the creation of new, extreme expressive possibilities for the given style, which significantly expanded the idea of the boundaries of beauty and caused transformations in musical sound (harmony, texture, melody); in the formation of stable idioms of romantic music from Liszt to Rachmaninov; in the modification of the structures of a one-part sonata, of the cyclic symphony, and of opera, which have received the quality of a vectorial dramaturgical process and open dramaturgy.

The Performer

Skillfully singing or playing an instrument, even at a very advanced level, is not enough by itself to ensure success as a performer. Musicians who give live performances must also use body gesture, facial expression, and other elements of stage presence to enhance their musical sound production. The visual aspects of live performance are influential to how audiences perceive the music, and therefore critical to performance. Additionally, outside of unaccompanied solo performing, musicians must know how to function effectively with coperformers, both in terms of musically coordinating performance (e.g., synchronizing multiple parts and performing in tune with each other) and communicating—both verbally and nonverbally—with each other. This chapter examines aspects of being a performer that are sometimes overlooked. Music performers can gain much by giving explicit attention to mastering the visual aspects of live performance and the interpersonal skills of musical collaboration.

Interconnection of rhethoric and music art

From the beginning of its formation, rhethoric had an undeniable impact on music. It mostly concerns rhethoric being the basis for the construction of a musical sound continuum which is valuable for developing the skills of improvisation. The process of transformation of the basic elements of rhetoric was presented. The authors mentioned the initial positions of rhetoric and their connection with music art. Ways of realization of traditional parts of rhetoric (Inventio, Dispositio, Elocutio, Memoria, Pronuntatio) in music were studied. Attention was paid to stringed and plucked instruments, including domra as an academic folk instrument, and possible ways to use rhetorical components. The process of academization of domra was characterized. It led to aggravating the problem of improvisation in the presentation of material. The intensity of the artistic component in the creative construction of the instrumental playing and in the essence of the artist’s performing position was determined.

Changes in Brain Responses to Music and Non-music Sounds Following Creativity Training Within the “Different Hearing” Program

The “Different Hearing” program (DHP) is an educational activity aimed at stimulating musical creativity of children and adults by group composing in the classroom, alternative to the mainstream model of music education in Czechia. Composing in the classroom in the DHP context does not use traditional musical instruments or notation, instead, the participants use their bodies, sounds originating from common objects as well as environmental sounds as the “elements” for music composition by the participants’ team, with the teacher initiating and then participating and coordinating the creative process, which ends with writing down a graphical score and then performing the composition in front of an audience. The DHP methodology works with a wide definition of musical composition. We hypothesized that the DHP short-term (2 days) intense workshop would induce changes in subjective appreciation of different classes of music and sound (including typical samples of music composed in the DHP course), as well as plastic changes of the brain systems engaged in creative thinking and music perception, in their response to diverse auditory stimuli. In our study, 22 healthy university students participated in the workshop over 2 days and underwent fMRI examinations before and after the workshop, meanwhile 24 students were also scanned twice as a control group. During fMRI, each subject was listening to musical and non-musical sound samples, indicating their esthetic impression with a button press after each sample. As a result, participants’ favorable feelings toward non-musical sound samples were significantly increased only in the active group. fMRI data analyzed using ANOVA with post hoc ROI analysis showed significant group-by-time interaction (opposing trends in the two groups) in the bilateral posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus, which are functional hubs of the default mode network (DMN) and in parts of the executive, motor, and auditory networks. The findings suggest that DHP training modified the behavioral and brain response to diverse sound samples, differentially changing the engagement of functional networks known to be related to creative thinking, namely, increasing DMN activation and decreasing activation of the executive network.

Timbral perception is influenced by unconscious presentation of hands playing musical instruments

Timbre is an integral dimension of musical sound quality, and people accumulate knowledge about timbre of sounds generated by various musical instruments throughout their life. Recent studies have proposed the possibility that musical sound is crossmodally integrated with visual information related to the sound. However, little is known about the influence of visual information on musical timbre perception. The present study investigated the automaticity of crossmodal integration between musical timbre and visual image of hands playing musical instruments. In the experiment, an image of hands playing piano or violin, or a control scrambled image was presented to participants unconsciously. Simultaneously, participants heard intermediate sounds synthesised by morphing piano and violin sounds with the same note. The participants answered whether the musical tone sounded like piano or violin. The results revealed that participants were more likely to perceive violin sound when an image of a violin was presented unconsciously than when playing piano was presented. This finding indicates that timbral perception of musical sound is influenced by visual information of musical performance without conscious awareness, supporting the automaticity of crossmodal integration in musical timbre perception.

Musicalizing the Heart Sutra: Buddhism, Sound, and Media in Contemporary Japan

In Japan, explicitly religious content is not commonly found in popular music. Against this mainstream tendency, since approximately 2008, ecclesiastic and non-ecclesiastic actors alike have made musical arrangements of the Heart Sutra. What do these musical arrangements help us to understand about the formation of Buddhist religiosity in contemporary Japan? In order to answer these questions, I analyze the circulation of these musical arrangements on online media platforms. I pursue the claim that they exhibit significant resonances with traditional Japanese Buddhist practices and concepts, while also developing novel sensibilities, behaviors, and understandings of Buddhist religiosity that are articulated by global trends in secularism, popular music, and ‘spirituality’. I suggest that they show institutionally marginal but publicly significant transformations in affective relationships with Buddhist religious content in Japan through the mediation of musical sound, which I interpret as indicative of an emerging “structure of feeling”. Overall, this essay demonstrates how articulating the rite of sutra recitation with modern music technologies, including samplers, electric guitars, and Vocaloid software, can generate novel, sonorous ways to experience and propagate Buddhism.

Virtuosity, Obviously

This chapter employs a phenomenological framework to argue that virtuosity—often understood as individual musical excellence—is an intersubjective phenomenon that centers on skill made apparent and socially meaningful. Rather than locating virtuosity solely in a performer’s body, a piece’s demands, or a listener’s opinions, the author argues that it arises within the dynamic relationships—what Maurice Merleau-Ponty would call the “intentional threads”—that connect audiences, performers, and musical sound. Drawing on Edmund Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of intersubjectivity, intercorporeality, and apperception, the author utilizes Ravi Shankar’s early reception in the United States as a case study in how audiences come to experience musical performances as virtuosic, despite their lack of background knowledge or musical understanding. A phenomenological approach to virtuosity reframes the issue not as one of objective measure or subjective opinion, but of intersubjective experience and value.

Artistic reconstruction of the folklore text in the works of Yu. Illienko (on the example of a film-apologue “A well for the thirsty ones”)

The topicality. The factors that influence the disclosure nature of the director’s and composer’s creative concept are the leading artistic polystylistic tendencies — stylistic layers and trailblazing experiments in the formation of sound-timbre and visualized combinations, where ancient intonations together with modern sound formation and video performance create new sound and performance realities. The purpose. To determine the role of artistic reconstruction of the folklore text and the specifics of their artistic embodiment in the film parable “A well for the thirsty ones” by the popular Ukrainian film director Yu. Illienko; to determine the specifics of the embodiment of the signs of cultural codes in the musical-sound score of the film by composer L. Hrabovskyi. The methodology. The culturological approach applied in revealing the issues of the article made it possible to consider the peculiarities of the drama and musical-sound score of Yu. Illienko’s film “A well for the thirsty ones” in a broad cultural context. The interpretive approach helped to highlight the importance of cultural codes of the folklore text, the specifics of their embodiment in the director’s idea through the artistic reconstruction of the folklore text. The results. Yu. Illienko and L. Hrabovskyi, addressing the folk song tradition, create a new intonation world, embodied in separate “emergings” of female solo singing (verses of the ballad one by one are strung like beads throughout the picture), in lamentations, in incantations, in children’s amusements when playing on pots, that intersperse with a general, very concise and minimalist sound score of the film. The characteristic and figural semantics of the musical-sound background of the film is saturated with active rhythmics, complex sound palette of combination of electronic sounds with natural ones, which demonstrates the author’s (at the choice of director and composer) special sound complex. Folklore texts in the film create a single hypertext, which is manifested at the appropriate levels — auditory, visual and dramatic. The novelty. The article considers for the first time the specifics of the embodiment of artistic reconstruction of a folklore text as the basis of the drama of Yu. Illienko’s film “A well for the thirsty ones” and defines sense forming and semantic role of the embodiment of the cultural codes signs in the musical-sound score of the film by composer L. Hrabovskyi. The practical significance. The artistic reconstruction of the folklore text in the film is based on the introduction of polystylistic tendencies and features of sound (timbre) thinking into the cinematographic process. Prospects for further study of this issue is the study of modern manifestations of artistic reconstruction of the folklore text, the processes of formation of semiotic space both in cinema and in culture in general.