“Reminisces of a Dead World”: Neoclassical Impulses in Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge

In the years following World War II, integral serialist composers declared their intent to defy all previous musical conventions and eradicate all “rem-inisces of a dead world” from their music. Karlheinz Stockhausen was no exception, asserting his desire “to avoid everything which is familiar, generally known or reminiscent of music already composed.” However, Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, de-spite its reputation for technical innovation, bears a strong connection to prior musical traditions. In this regard, Stockhausen resembled the neoclassical school of composers that sought to accommodate antiquated musical materials within a modern con-text.To demonstrate these similarities, I apply to Gesang a model of neoclassicism developed by Martha M. Hyde, a scholar on twentieth-century mu-sic. Hyde identifies two modes by which a neoclassi-cal piece “accommodates antiquity”: metamorphic anachronism and allegory. I argue both are present in Gesang. First, Stockhausen adopts elements of the sacred vocal tradition—including a child’s voice and antiphonal writing—and morphs them into something modern. Second, Stockhausen uses the Biblical story on which Gesang is based as an alle-gory for his own conflicted relationship with the mu-sical past. This analysis reframes Gesang’s signifi-cance and connects Stockhausen’s work to seem-ingly unrelated trends in twentieth-century musical thought.

Reflection III

By the beginning of the seventeenth century speculative music, the branch of musical thought the origins of which can be traced back to Pythagorean and Platonic concepts of the ordering of the cosmos through the proportions of musical intervals and of the music of the spheres, had diverged completely from practical musical performance and composition. Thomas Morley, in his ...

Symphonic Volume in the Symphony-Requiem by Bohdana Frolyak “Pravednaya Dushe”

Relevance of the study. The article is relevant as it studies the works of Bogdana Frolyak, who is a popular contemporary Ukrainian composer. Her music attracts the attention of performers and researchers and reflects the current trends of contemporary art such as musical language, new forms of choral sound, synthesis of genres. The Requiem Symphony “Righteous Ssoul” (lyrics by T. Shevchenko) is an example of a complex multidimensional nature genre renewal. Therefore, lack of research devoted to this work outlines a scientific novelty of this article. The objective of the study is to identify the features of symphony in the symphonyrequiem “Righteous Soul” by B. Frolyak. The research methodology is based on the interpretation analysis method proposed by V. Moskalenko. The concept of A. Adamyan is used to study symphonic principles. Results. Analysing the requiem symphony “Righteous Soul”, it was determined that the leading role is devoted to chorus, which serves as a main mean of expression. The choir is regarded as a symbol of collegiality and stands in as an active participant in the formation of musical thought and sounds through almost the entire opus (except for two vocal episodes). T. Shevchenko’s poetic lines are entrusted to mixed chorus and embody a main idea of the work. Choral fragments serve various functions starting from the creation of a harmonic background to being a main storyteller. At the same time, B. Frolyak’s composition realizes symphonic principles, which display themselves at different levels of organization of musical material. Symphonic patterns are expressed in timbre-textured and thematic connections, cross-cutting development, national instrumentation color and intonation transformations of themes. The composer’s principle of artistic thinking reveals parallels with the symphonic concept developed by A. Adamyan. Conclusion. A special genre multidimensionality is expressed in the symphony-requiem “Pravednaya Dushe”. B. Frolyak enriches the semantic layer of the work due to the features of the requiem. Composer takes an advantage of the cathedral’s choral sonority rich possibilities and uses the symphonic intonation and dramatic basis. At the intonation level, she unites all these features with the help of solospiv (solosining) — a musical symbol of Ukrainian nation. Finally, unique synthesis of supersubstantial spiritual and philosophic ideas with universal (symphony, requiem) and national characteristic (solospiv) genres makes B. Frolyak’s work one of the most original in the series of Ukrainian choral symphonies.

Antonín Dvořák's New World Symphony

Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony exposed the deep wounds of American racism at the dawn of the Jim Crow era while serving as a flashpoint in broader debates about the national ideals of freedom and equality. Following several strands of musical thought during the second half of the nineteenth century, this richly textured account of the symphony’s 1893 premiere shows that even the classical concert hall could not remain insulated from the country’s fraught racial politics. The New World Symphony continued to wield extraordinary influence over American classical music culture for decades after its premiere as it became one of the most beloved pieces in the standard orchestral repertoire.

Syntaxes and metro-rhythmic categories in Viorel Munteanu’s Concerto for flute and string orchestra

the piece by composer Viorel Munteanu reveals the symbiosis between past musical ages and modernity, between established compositional techniques (of the string orchestra) and contemporary sound emission processes (the solo flute). The syntaxes of past trends in music, polyphony and homophony, as well as modern treatments of rhythm, such as polyrhythm, coexist felicitously and result in a type of musical thought that, although anchored in the past, looks forward to the future. Rhythm can be considered from various metric perspectives, especially in the faster parts of the concerto. Rhythmic layers are present both vertically (polyrhythms) and horizontally (polyphons of rhythms); the cross of the two variants is of particular interest. The aksak rhythm, characteristic of the Balkan area, may come as a surprise as it briefly occurs in Part III; this unexpected element brings an inspired change of horizon, followed by a return to the previous giusto expression. The form of the last part, Rondo, can also be discussed from a modern perspective, rooted in the past; it could actually be placed within in the Rondo-Sonata pattern; however, its sound contour does not belong to the tonal sphere, but rather to a form of extended modalism. The soloist instrument merges with the string orchestra and emerges from it, in a discourse that clearly bears the mark of the composer’s creative personality. The most successful element of the work is its expressiveness, the way in which the compositional and technical means are subordinated to the aesthetic message that Viorel Munteanu intends to transmit to the public.

1. Abstract Machines

Johan Fredrikzon spent one and a half years as a visiting research assistant at the Film and Media Studies Program at Yale University 2018/2019. Some months before he arrived, a two-day workshop on Simondon was held by the Yale-Düsseldorf Working Group on Philosophy and Media, titled Modes of Technical Objects, with scholars from the US and Germany. Fredrikzon decided to engage a few of the workshop participants for this special issue of Sensorium, with the purpose to discuss perspectives on Simondon as a theoretical instrument for thinking technology, how the French philosopher matters in their work, and why there seems to be a revival in the interest in the writing of Simondon these days. About Gary Tomlinson: Gary Tomlinson is John Hay Whitney Professor of Music and the Humanities and director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. Tomlinson has taught and written about the history of opera and early-modern musical thought and practice, but also on the philosophy of history and anthropological theory. In his current research, he combines humanistic theory with evolutionary science and archaeology to search for the role of culture in the evolution of man. Following A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity (MIT Press, 2015), his new book Culture and the Course of Human Evolution (Chicago, 2018) deepens the theoretical framework on how culture has shaped biology.

Musical discourse in the theory of musical semiotics

Music is an abstract language that is constantly evolving, and in this connection, one of the possible approaches to the interpretation of music as a discourse concerns the issues of the relatedness of music and speech, that is, the language of music and language of speech. In this way, the relationship between musical discourse and the musical thought of the composer and speech as a product arising from the opinions of the speaker is established. In this paper, through the examination of discourses on music as a product of human activity, which are recognized in different cultures in different ways, one considers the way in which individual works, the phenomenon of music and the forms of human behaviour caused by music can be interpreted. The aim of the paper is to emphasize the importance of a generative approach to the understanding of tonality through a critical consideration of the semiological approach for understanding the language of music, and to provide an insight into the similarities between music and language.

Boris Asafiev and soviet musical thought: Reputation and influence

The theories of Boris Asafiev, including musical process, symphonism, and intonatsiya, proved to be hugely influential in the Soviet Union and beyond. While Asafiev?s ideas were widely adopted by theorists and audiences alike, they were also appropriated by a generation of music critics. As composers struggled to come to terms with what might constitute socialist-realist music, critics built a discourse of projecting meaning onto works via Asafiev?s theories. At the same time, multiple theorists developed and expanded his ideas. The picture that emerges is of a multitude of applications and responses to a multivalent body of work that became a vital part of musical discourse in the latter half of the Soviet Union. In this article, I survey the main theories from Boris Asafiev?s writings on music, and their significance after his death. I begin by defining key terms such as symphonism, musical process, and especially intonatsiya. I then discuss the 1948 Zhdanovshchina and Asafiev?s involvement, and the less well-known 1949 discussions on Musicology. For the remainder of the article, I provide examples of key studies from Soviet music theorists using Asafiev?s terms to illustrate how their usage expanded and, in some cases, moved away from Asafiev?s myriad intentions.