Art of Contemporary Composer Jia Daqun in Context of Chinese Culture

На современном этапе развития китайской профессиональной музыкальной культуры композитору и музыкальному теоретику Цзя Дацюню принадлежит особая роль. В статье рассматриваются его жизненный путь, композиторское творчество и музыкально-теоретические работы. Цель исследования — определить роль композитора в развитии современной китайской академической музыки; создать панораму его творчества; выявить в произведениях специфические формы претворения китайских национальных традиций, сочетающихся с элементами композиторских техник XX–XXI веков. Многие аспекты китайской музыки до сих пор не изучены и представляют исследовательский интерес; в результате получают характеристику яркие черты стиля Цзя Дацюня, как основная идея его творчества выделяется органичный синтез китайской народной музыкальной культуры и европейских универсалий. Цзя следует современным музыкальным тенденциям: он применяет в сочинениях такие композиционные техники, как серийность, сериализм, пуантилизм, минимализм, микрополифония, алеаторика, пространственная музыка, а также активно работает в области музыкального театра. Во всех его музыкальных произведениях присутствуют национальные китайские элементы, которые представлены музыкальными инструментами, народными темами и звукорядом пентатоники, воплощая образы китайской культуры в их неповторимом своеобразии. The article examines life path of a contemporary Chinese composer Jia Daqun and his art as a composer and music theorist. The purpose of research is to determine the role of the composer in the development of modern Chinese musical culture; to create a panorama of his art; to identify the main features of his style; to designate in his compositions specific forms of implementation of Chinese national traditions, combined with characteristic tendencies of musical compositions of the XX–XXI centuries. The scientific novelty of the article lies in fact that many aspects of Chinese music have not yet been studied and are of a research interest. At the present stage of development of the Chinese professional musical culture, special role belongs to the composer and musical theorist Jia Daqun. The research highlights bright features of the composer’s style and the main idea of his art, namely the idea of organic synthesis of Chinese folk and European musical cultures. In his compositions Jia follows modern musical trends, uses such compositional techniques as seriality, serialism, pointillism, minimalism, micropolyphony, aleatorics, spatial music. He also actively works in the field of musical theater. All his musical works contain national Chinese elements, which are represented by musical instruments, folk musical themes and pentatonic scale, and images of Chinese culture.

The Polish Contribution to Central European Musical Culture in the Seventeenth Century. The Case of Marcin Mielczewski

The seventeenth-century Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania, embracing the lands of the Polish Crown (together with the territory of present-day Ukraine) and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, belonged geographically to both Central and Eastern Europe. It was a multiethnic and multiconfessional state, in which the Latin and Greek cultures were mutually interactive. With regard to the musical culture of the royal court, however, itwas the close ties with Italy that were of the greatest significance. The Polish kings of the Vasa dynasty (above ali Zygmunt III and Władysław IV) maintained music chapels consisting to a considerable extent of Italian musicians, among whom were Luca Marenzio, Giulio Cesare Gabussi, Asprilio Pacelli, Giovanni Francesco Anerio and Tarquinio Merula. Thanks to the Polish patronage, they not only composed newworks, but also trained musicians of various nations belonging to the royal ensembles. Among the composers trained at the Polish court was the Italian Marco Scacchi (d. 1662), chapel-master to Władysław IV, the composer of operas staged in the royal theatre, and also a music theorist – the author of a classification of musical genres which was produced during Scacchi's dispute over music theory with the Gdansk organist Paul Siefert. This dispute contributed to the popularisation across Europe of the works of Scacchi and also of other musicians associated with the court of the Polish Vasas. Extant handwritten sources of Silesian provenance (belonging to the Emil Bohn collection, currently held in the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin) testify the considerable interest in this region (now within the Polish borders, but in the seventeenth century constituting a dominion of the Empire) in the religious compositions of Marcin Mielczewski (d. 1651), musician to Władysław IV (until 1644) and subsequently, until his death, chapel-master to Karol Ferdinand Vasa, Bishop of Płock and Wrocław. Of Mielczewski's compositional output for the needs of the Roman Catholic Church, copyists from Lutheran circles in Wrocław chose primarily psalms that were universal to the Christian repertory, furnishing those works whose texts chimed with the doctrine of the Augsburg confession with more appropriate texts of German-language contrafacta. However, this method was not always successful in eliminating traces of Catholicism, which remained, for example, in the melodies of works based on pre-compositional material drawn by Mielczewski from Marian songs that were popular in Poland (e.g. the church concerto Audite gentes et exsultate, also preserved in a version with the text of a German-language contrafactum entitled Nun höret alle, based on the song O gloriosa Domina, which in the former Commonwealth was treated as a chivalrous hymn).

Are Popular Music Curricula Antiracist?: The CCNY Music Department as a Case Study

In a recent virtual talk at the Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music, music theorist Philip Ewell considered how music educators and researchers might begin to “undo the exclusionist framework of our contemporary music academy.” Ewell's enterprise resonated with me not only as one who teaches undergraduate courses in music theory, history, performance, and ear training, but also as an instructor in a recently adopted Popular Music Studies program at the City College of New York (CCNY). The CCNY music department's shift in focus from a mostly white, mostly male, classical-based curriculum towards a more diverse and polystylistic repertory of popular music chips away at the exclusionist framework to which Ewell refers.

The Teacher of Dance

The De musica of Aristides Quintilianus, an author and music theorist unknown apart from this treatise, presents several tantalizing claims about the relationship between dance and the three sciences of mousikē: i.e., harmonics, metrics, and, most importantly, rhythmics. Elliptical as his remarks on dance may be, if they are taken together with his treatment of the musical phenomena as essentially governed by systēmata, both a technical discourse around dance can be elicited from the evidence as well as the philosophical and aesthetic reasons why such a discourse was so modestly developed in comparison with the three sciences attending to musical phenomena. I conclude that the theorist considers the dancing body to be only minimally conformable to the systēmata imposed on bodies by the Platonic demiurge’s art, almost as a leimma unassimilable to the perfections of musical order, and yet somehow orderly enough to be treated according to their proportional order.

Perceiving Sound Objects in the Musique Concrète

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, there emerged a radically new kind of music based on recorded environmental sounds instead of sounds of traditional Western musical instruments. Centered in Paris around the composer, music theorist, engineer, and writer Pierre Schaeffer, this became known as musique concrète because of its use of concrete recorded sound fragments, manifesting a departure from the abstract concepts and representations of Western music notation. Furthermore, the term sound object was used to denote our perceptual images of such fragments. Sound objects and their features became the focus of an extensive research effort on the perception and cognition of music in general, remarkably anticipating topics of more recent music psychology research. This sound object theory makes extensive use of metaphors, often related to motion shapes, something that can provide holistic representations of perceptually salient, but temporally distributed, features in different kinds of music.

Anton Bruckner

Bruckner was born in Ansfelden (rural Upper Austria) in 1824 and was originally trained as a schoolmaster. He only left this career path in his early thirties when he assumed the organist position at the Linz cathedral, his first full-time employment as a musician. It was also in Linz that he completed six years of training in harmony and counterpoint with Simon Sechter (1855–1861) as well as lessons in form and orchestration with Otto Kitzler (1861–1863) after which he commenced work on his first symphony in 1865. Bruckner’s three large masses also date from his Linz period. Concert tours to France in 1869 and England in 1871 brought Bruckner major successes as organ improvisor. In 1868 Bruckner became professor of counterpoint and thoroughbass as well as professor of organ at the Vienna conservatory. Success as a composer did not follow suit as quickly. His passionate admiration of Wagner—to whom he dedicated his Third Symphony in 1873—rendered Bruckner the target of hostility from the supporters of Brahms in Vienna, especially of music critic Eduard Hanslick. The latter was also instrumental in obstructing Bruckner’s employment at the University of Vienna until 1875, when Bruckner finally became lecturer of harmony and counterpoint at the university. Despite his fame as an organist and music theorist, Bruckner saw himself, above all else, as a symphonic composer and it is the development of the symphony as a genre that occupied most of his compositional interest throughout his career. Accordingly, the multiple versions of Bruckner’s symphonies have long been a main focal point of Bruckner scholarship. These revisions were variously motivated. Earlier works, including the three masses and symphonies 1–5, underwent reworking during Bruckner’s “revision period” (1876–1880), largely as a result of the composer’s evolving notions of phrase and period structure. Later revisions were often the results of performances or were made to prepare the manuscripts for publication. Bruckner’s former students, most notably Franz and Josef Schalk and Ferdinand Löwe, were involved in these revisions, although the extent of this involvement has never been entirely revealed. Starting in the 1920s, scholars began to raise questions about the validity of the revisions made during the preparations of the editions published during the 1880s and 1890s. While some accepted the authenticity of these texts, other influential figures—among them Robert Haas, coeditor of the first Bruckner complete edition—claimed that Bruckner’s students had urged the composer, wearied by rejection in Vienna, into making ill-advised changes or, worse yet, altered his scores without his knowledge and permission. The resulting debate, the Bruckner Streit, involved serious source-critical issues, but eventually devolved on ideological claims more than factual analysis. The process led to the first Bruckner Gesamtausgabe, which published the manuscript versions of Bruckner’s works starting in 1934, first under the editorship of Robert Haas and later of Leopold Nowak. However, these editions are now largely outdated due to the many manuscript sources that have become available since the mid-20th century. Haas’s work has also been criticized in more recent years for rather subjectively mixing sources. Therefore, two new complete editions have recently been started. Another topic that has fascinated Bruckner scholarship for much of the last century is the unfinished finale of the 9th symphony and its possible completion.

MUSICAL AND AESTHETIC VIEWS OF V.F. ODOEVSKY

Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky (1804-1869) was a man of truly encyclopedic knowledge and interests: writer (author of the first philosophical story in Russia and SF), philosopher, scientist, educator, popularizer of science, inventor, music theorist, researcher of Old Russian song art, founder of professional musicology in Russia, pianist, composer. This article deals only with his musical and aesthetic activities. Odoevsky was a Schellingian philosopher and fully shared the concept of art of the early German romanticists, in unison with whom he opposed the dogmas of rationalist classicist aesthetics. He is characterized by the romantic affirmation of music as the highest science and highest art. Odoevsky made a huge contribution to the formation of the Russian musical school. Paying special attention to specific forms of nationality in a musical composition, he constantly emphasizes that the composer's borrowing of folklore material without vivid melodic images only leads to a handicraft «cobble together» the rented material. The music critic does not miss a single attack by semi-literate scribblers directed against Glinka, Dargomyzhsky and other representatives of the Russian music school; he is engaged in musical enlightenment of the public. At the end of his life, Odoevsky wrote with hope: «The thought that I have sown today will rise tomorrow, in a year, in a thousand years…».

Les trois concerts de Charles de Vivray

Charles de Vivray's Three Concerts Music is a keystone in the entire work of Marie Krysinska, who was first and foremost a musician. Guided by the rule of universal harmony, the perfect realisations of which are musical compositions, she applies it in her poems as well as in her narrative texts. Krysinska's novel, La Force du désir [The Force of Desire], was read in its time primarily as a roman à clef. Behind the literary characters are real people: poets, writers, actresses, singers, journalists, composers. One of the portraits is particularly touching, that of de Vivray whose real-life prototype was Charles-Erhardt de Sivry. A musician, conductor, poet and music theorist, de Sivry charmed listeners with his compositions. In the diegesis, all his professional activities are mentioned, more or less revealed. Thanks to Charles de Vivray's three concerts, the novelistic space transforms into a musical space.

The Small Imitation Form in the Sacred Chorale Concertos by Samuel Scheidt

Известный немецкий теоретик музыки XVII века Вольфганг Каспар Принц в труде „Historische Beschreibung der edelen Sing- und Kling-Kunst“ («Историческое описание благородного искусства вокальной и инструментальной музыки», 1690) назвал Генриха Шютца, Иоганна Германа Шейна и Самуэля Шейдта тремя лучшими композиторами их времени в Германии. Композиторское письмо двух из упомянутых Принцем персон, Шейна и Шейдта, остается малоизученным в отечественном музыкознании. В статье рассматривается малая имитационная форма в хоральных концертах Шейдта из собрания „Geistliche Concerte“ («Духовные концерты»), четыре части которого были опубликованы в 1631, 1634, 1635 и 1640 годах. Тридцатилетняя война (1618–1648), непосредственно коснувшаяся Шейдта, стала причиной обращения композитора к разновидности вокального духовного концерта для небольшого состава, включающего несколько вокальных голосов (в концертах Шейдта это, как правило, три партии) и бассо континуо. Исследуются тексто-музыкальные единицы, образующиеся на основе строки или сегмента строки хорала и становящиеся материалом для имитации, раскрываются особенности имитационной техники, выявляется связь свободной части малой имитационной формы с типом обработки — Cantionalsatz, типологизируются структуры, различающиеся порядком поступления материала строки в малую имитационную форму. В конце статьи прослеживаются изменения, которые претерпевает малая имитационная форма в хоральных концертах по сравнению с хоральными мотетами из первого собрания вокальной музыки Шейдта “Cantiones sacrae” («Священные песнопения», 1620). The famous German music theorist of the 17th century, Wolfgang Caspar Printz, in his work „Historische Beschreibung der edelen Sing- und Kling-Kunst“ (“Historical Description of the Noble Art of Vocal and Instrumental Music”, 1690) named Heinrich Schütz, Johann Hermann Schein and Samuel Scheidt as the three best composers of their time in Germany, the compositional technique of two of them, Schein and Scheidt, remaining poorly studied in Russian musicology. The article examines the small imitation form in Scheidt’s chorale concertos from the „Geistliche Concerte“ (“Sacred Concertos”) collection, four parts of which were published in 1631, 1634, 1635 and 1640. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), which directly affected Scheidt, caused the composer to turn to a kind of vocal sacred concerto for a small cast, including few voices (in Scheidt’s concertos, these are, as a rule, three parts) and basso continuo in the organ. The textual-and-musical units that are formed on the basis of a chorale line or a segment of a line and become the material for imitation are investigated; the features of the imitation technique are revealed; a connection of the free part with the type of arrangement — Cantionalsatz, is established, mapping the structures that differ in the order in which the line material arrives in the small imitation form. At the end of the article, the changes are traced that the small imitation form has undergone in chorale concertos in comparison with chorale motets from Scheidt’s first collection of vocal music “Cantiones sacrae” (“Sacred chants”, 1620).

On the Issue of the 16-Mode System in the Theoretical Treatises on Music by Grigor Gapasakalian

На протяжении своей истории церковная певческая практика и песнетворчество постоянно выходили за рамки, установленные церковным каноном Восьмигласия. Это отчетливо прослеживается при анализе мелодических образцов самых различных гимнографических национальных традиций. Статья посвящена 16-ти ладовой системе, упоминаемой в музыкально-теоретических трактатах видного константинопольского армянского музыканта-теоретика Григора Гапасакаляна (1740-1808) Книжка, называемая Музыкальное собрание , Книга о музыке и Книга Восьмигласия . Изучение этих трудов показало, что речь идет о некоем расширенном каноне , включающем 4 основных, 4 плагальных, 4 медиальных и 4 фторальных лада, что соответствует 16-ти ладам асмы в теории византийской церковной музыки. Проясняется сущность и назначение 16-ладовой системы, существовавшей и у греков, и армян, что свидетельствует о ней, как о сложной, разветвленной и многоярусной оригинальной модальной системе, не исчерпывающей тем не менее ладового многообразия живого певческого искусства. Throughout its history, church chanting practice and chant writing has constantly gone beyond the framework established by the ecclesiastical canon of the Octoechos. This can be clearly seen in the analysis of melodic samples of the most diverse hymnographic national traditions. The article is dedicated to the 16-mode system mentioned in the theoretical treatises on music by the prominent Armenian music theorist from Constantinople Grigor Gapasakalian (17401808) the Small Book Called Music Collection, the Book on Music and the Book of Octoehos. The study of these writings showed a presence of an extended canon that included 4 essential, 4 plagal, 4 medial and 4 phtoral modes, these corresponding to the 16-mode system of the asma in the byzantine theory of church music. This clarifies that the essence and purpose of the 16-mode system existed both among the Greeks and Armenians. And that testifies it as a complex, ramified and multi-tiered original modal system, which nonetheless does not exhaust the modal variety of living chanting art.