‘JUST A WORD ON A STAVE AND THERE IS THE OPERA’: THE INTERACTION BETWEEN MUSIC AND LIBRETTO IN PHILIP VENABLES’ 4.48 PSYCHOSIS

The success of Philip Venables’ opera adaptation of Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis is underpinned by its powerful presentation of the play's text. This is predominantly facilitated by the other musical forces present, rather than through clever text-setting alone. Venables uses an array of timbral techniques, theatrical performance directions, referential sound effects, interactions with literary devices in the text and allusions to other musical genres in the opera to support and supplement his vocal writing. This article argues that the instrumental composition in 4.48 is critical in ensuring comprehension of the libretto and that, because of his working methods, Venables’ adaptation is faithful to Kane's sensitive play.

Madrigals, Part 6

Il sesto libro de madrigali a cinque voci, Marco da Gagliano's final book in the genre, was published in 1617, nine years after its predecessor. In the book's dedication Gagliano indicated that its music was composed the year before, and not earlier in the gap between the two books. Book 6 was popular enough that it was reprinted in 1620, and although he lived another twenty-six years, Gagliano published no more madrigals. There are sixteen compositions in the book, fourteen of them by Gagliano, one by Lodovico Arrighetti, and one by an unnamed composer who was most certainly Ferdinando Gonzaga, duke of Mantua. The poets now recognized as authors of the texts are Giovanni Battista Guarini, Torquato Tasso, Francesco Petrarca, Ottavio Rinuccini, Gabriello Chiabrera, Gasparo Murtola, and Antonio Ongaro. In the diversity of their style, the madrigals of the Sesto libro provide a conspectus of the compositional craft evinced in Gagliano's earlier books: now the rush and brevity of canzonetta-influenced madrigals like those in the fourth and fifth books stand next to madrigals with the more traditional manner of text setting so often found in his first three books. There is also a drinking song that alternates duets with a refrain and a seven-voiced concertato piece, both taken from Medici court entertainments. One of the most telling madrigals in the book, “Filli, mentre ti bacio,” is an abbreviation and a recasting of the madrigal as it appears in his Primo libro, thereby disclosing the remarkable change in Gagliano's aesthetic thinking about the genre during the fifteen years that lie between his first and last books. Shortly after the appearance of the Sesto libro, a vicious attack on its madrigals and on Gagliano himself was made by Mutio Effrem. Although its condemnation of the book on theoretical grounds is misguided and without merit, Effrem's Censure seems to have damaged Gagliano's standing in Florence and to some degree may have influenced his decision to abandon the genre.

Feeling the Beat in an African Tone Language: Rhythmic Mapping Between Language and Music

Text-setting patterns in music have served as a key data source in the development of theories of prosody and rhythm in stress-based languages, but have been explored less from a rhythmic perspective in the realm of tone languages. African tone languages have been especially under-studied in terms of rhythmic patterns in text-setting, likely in large part due to the ill-understood status of metrical structure and prosodic prominence asymmetries in many of these languages. Here, we explore how language is mapped to rhythmic structure in traditional folksongs sung in Medʉmba, a Grassfields Bantu language spoken in Cameroon. We show that, despite complex and varying rhythmic structures within and across songs, correspondences emerge between musical rhythm and linguistic structure at the level of stem position, tone, and prosodic structure. Our results reinforce the notion that metrical prominence asymmetries are present in African tone languages, and that they play an important coordinative role in music and movement.

Babbitt’s Gestural Dialectics

The array structures of Babbitt’s music, which present twelve-tone series fixed in narrow registers, seem abstract and impersonal. Nevertheless, numerous commentators on Babbitt’s music have celebrated the sense of motion the music inspires in its listeners. This chapter explores the tension between the music’s static contrapuntal structures and the dynamic experience that results, drawing from research on musical embodiment by Matthew Baileyshea and Seth Monahan, Candace Brower, Arnie Cox, Robert Hatten, Mariusz Kozak, Justin London, Patrick McCreless, and Andrew Mead. An exploration of these gestural dialectics sheds light on a variety of topics: virtuosity, text setting, the liminal periodicity of Babbitt’s later rhythmic practice, anomalous deviations from serial expectations, closing rhetoric, and partitioning. The chapter ends by discussing how scholars may navigate the distinction between Babbitt’s formalistic prose and the gestural experience of his music.

Hafiz between Nations: Song Settings by Daumer/Brahms and Peacock/Beamish

Consciously ‘othered’ cultural practices have long allowed musicians and poets to express different national identities to varying extents, without having to relinquish a geographically rooted sense of home. My aim is to examine such transnational links, symbols, and ties through a consideration of the songs ‘Wie bist du, meine Königin’ by Johannes Brahms (1833–97) and ‘Fish’ by Sally Beamish (b. 1956). Both are settings of translations of poetry by the Persian poet Hafiz, made respectively by Georg Friedrich Daumer (1800–72) and Jila Peacock (b. 1948). I offer insights into changing attitudes to Hafiz over time (the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries) and place (Germany, Persia/Iran, and Great Britain). I employ text- and score-based analysis, supplemented by interviews with Peacock and Beamish carried out in early 2019, which probed approaches to translation, text setting, and music, as well as issues of biography and national identity. I conclude that selective transnationalism, as I describe it, is a means of expanding one’s artistic range, while not entirely alienating the familiar self.

Song Just Beyond the Nation, or Debussy via Verlaine

Hailed as the epitome of French musical style, Debussy also excelled at ‘creat[ing] works based on vernacular idioms from other cultures’ (Brown 2012: 6). Debussy’s mélodies may be the hallmark of ‘Frenchness’, but they also mediate other cultures through the choice of poetic texts, including subtle interweaving of cultures close to home. This chapter offers a close reading of Debussy’s Trois mélodies (composed 1891, published 1901), settings of three Verlaine poem’s from the Sagesse collection of 1881 which depict Belgian and English landscapes and seascapes. Debussy’s text-setting techniques (prosody and repetition) temper the apparent ‘Frenchness’ of the poetic language, by revealing that inhabiting just one national idiom is fundamentally at odds with the creative act of song-making.

Thinking In and About Music

Milton Babbitt (1916–2011) was, at once, one of the century’s foremost composers and a founder of American music theory. These two aspects of his creative life—“thinking in” and “thinking about” music, as he would put it—nourished each other. Theory and analysis inspired fresh compositional ideas, and compositional concerns focused theoretical and analytical inquiry. Accordingly, this book undertakes an excavation of the sources of his theorizing as a guide to analysis of his music. Babbitt’s idiosyncratic synthesis of ideas from Heinrich Schenker, analytic philosophy, and cognitive science—at least as much as more obviously relevant, and more frequently cited, predecessors such as Arnold Schoenberg—provide insight into his aesthetics and compositional technique. Examination of Babbitt’s newly available sketch materials sheds additional light on his procedures. But a close look at his music reveals a host of concerns unaccounted for in his theories, some of which seem to directly contradict theoretical expectations. New analytical models are needed to complement those suggested by Babbitt’s theories. Departing from the serial logic of Babbitt’s writings, his compositional procedures, and most previous work on the subject—and in an attempt to discuss Babbitt’s music as it is actually heard rather than just deciphered—the book brings to bear theories of gesture and embodiment, rhetoric, text setting, and temporality. The result is a richly multifaceted look at one of the twentieth century’s most fascinating musical minds.

Text-setting in Kaytetye

Singing is a universal human activity. Across the vast range of song traditions throughout the world, native speakers have consistent intuitions about how the syllables in a given line of song text should be set to the tunes and/or rhythms within their various song traditions. This paper presents an Optimality Theoretic analysis of text-setting in a set of ceremonial songs traditionally sung and passed on orally by groups of Kaytetye-speaking women in Central Australia. Australian Aboriginal songs are renowned for the degree to which they diverge from speech. For our analysis, we use a computational method to exhaustively generate all permitted ways sung forms may diverge from their spoken equivalents along with all possible ways each form may be set to rhythm. We show that the seemingly idiosyncratic nature of text-setting strategies in this song set can be accounted for through a relatively generic set of constraints (even when thousands of competing candidates are considered), reflecting many of the fundamental processes that govern the interaction of language, meter, and music.

Optical properties of rotating Hayward-de Sitter black hole surrounded by quintessence

In this paper, we discussed optical properties of the nonlinear magnetic charged black hole surrounded by quintessence with a nonzero cosmological constant [Formula: see text]. Setting the state parameter [Formula: see text], we studied the horizons, the photon region and the shadow of this black hole. It turned out that for a fixed quintessential parameter [Formula: see text], in a certain range, with the increase of the rotation parameter [Formula: see text] and magnetic charge [Formula: see text], the inner horizon radius increases while the outer horizon radius decreases. The cosmological horizon [Formula: see text] decreases when [Formula: see text] or [Formula: see text] increases and it increases slightly when [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] increase. The shapes of photon region were then studied and depicted through graphical illustrations. Finally, we discussed the effects of the quintessential parameter [Formula: see text] and the cosmological constant [Formula: see text] on the shadow of this black hole with a fixed observer position in the domain of outer communication.

“Behind the Sounds”

In this article I explore the aesthetics and political valence of shirei meshorerim (SM), a body of Israeli sung poetry that emerged out of a series of radio programs, festivals, and recording projects beginning in the 1970s and drawing on long-standing local practices in both Palestine/Israel and contemporary Mediterranean sung-poetry movements. I argue that the development of SM was characterized by an aesthetic distinction, wherein the high cultural register of poetry—a value produced by both the domestic discourse on art vis-à-vis politics and the broader global discourse in which the local field was embedded—and an associated move to cosmopolitanize music production contributed to the “cultural accreditation” of post-1967 pop-rock in Israel. This article explores what poetry meant for song, and vice versa, in Israel during the 1970s and 1980s through sociopolitical analysis and close listening to the text-setting practices and stylistic affinities of two musicians strongly identified with SM: Matti Caspi and Shlomo Gronich.