Sibelius as a Tool to Improve Student’s Ability of Making Counterpoint Melody

As a subject for music students, counterpoint contributes to the ability to create a melody. The melody in counterpoint usually consists of two or more layers. In order to make a counterpoint melody, students must acknowledge the rules to construct the counterpoint melody. A good counterpoint melody involves two important things: the flow of the melody in a vertical and horizontal in vertical line (interval) and the musical texture of the melody. As a beginner in learning counterpoint, writing a counterpoint melody might be difficult at first. Learning counterpoint investigation was found that students spent a lot of their time following the counterpoint rules. They particularly did not focus on the musical sense of the counterpoint melody causing the melody loses its musical senses. Sibelius was used here as a tool to solve the problem. Sibelius is a music software which commonly used in writing musical scores. This study examined Sibelius in making a counterpoint melody in learning counterpoint. The data were gathered through observation and interviews with students during learning counterpoint course. The result showed that by using Sibelius, making counterpoint melody more efficient, and it helped student not only focused on the counterpoint rules but also the musical senses of the counterpoint melody. Furthermore, students also showed the improvement of their skills in making a counterpoint melody.

Analiza kompozicijskega stavka Alojza Srebotnjaka v orkestralni skladbi Slovenica / Analysis of Compositional Tehniques of Alojz Srebotnjak in the Orchestral Work Slovenica

The following article presents a detailed analysis of compositional techniques in the orchestral work Slovenica for Brass, Percussion and Strings (1976) by Alojz Srebotnjak. It discusses the composer‘s intertwinment of folklore elements with the sonority of compositional processes in the 20th century. Throughout all three sentences Srebotnjak uses multiple linking compositional elements that he complexly intertwines on different levels of musical texture. The structure is also tightly connected to the concept of constructing different musical textures, melodical patterns, orchestral and dinamic constrasts, and harmonic systems.

Free Jazz and the “New Thing”

Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz was at the center of controversy in early 1960s music journalism. Released in 1961, the album contains a single thirty-seven-minute performance that is abstract and opaque. Its presumed cacophony and lack of order made Free Jazz emblematic of the “new thing,” the moniker journalists used to describe jazz’s emergent avant-garde, and links were drawn between the album’s sound and the supposed anti-traditionalism and radical (racial) politics of its artists and their supporters. This article does three things. It examines prominent reportage surrounding the album and the “new thing,” outlining the analytical shortfalls that helped to promulgate common misunderstandings about the music. It presents a new analytical framework for understanding Free Jazz, and it explains how the performance was organized and executed by exploring the textural provenance of its abstraction: heterophony. Heterophony, a term commonly used in ethnomusicology but with various shades of meaning, is theorized here as an opaque, decentralized musical texture. It opens up new epistemological terrain in the context of experimental improvised music by affording multiple simultaneous subjectivities (i.e., different sonified identities), interpolating the listener into a dynamic and constantly shifting sonic mesh. The experiment that was Free Jazz, I argue, is one of collective musical agency, in which the opacity of that sonic mesh—woven by the musicians in coordinated action—subverts traditional expectations of clarity, cohesion, and order, beckoning the listener to hear more openly, or more “freely.”

Reading Textural Functions, Instrumental Techniques, and Space Through Partition Complexes

Partitional complexes are sets of discrete textural configurations (called shortly of partitions in Partition Analysis) that successfully interact to construct a global textural structure. This textural mode is called the Textural Proposal of a piece, where referential partitions (those that represent the main features of textural configurations in the excerpt) stand out. This conceptual environment, developed in musical texture formalization through observation and musical repertoire analysis, is now applied to musical practice. In the present work, we highlight three of these situations. The first one deals with the creative flow (compositional process) and its relation with textural planning. The second observes how these same textural functions condition the body's physical coupling to the instrument (fingers, hands, pedals, instrumentation). Finally, just as an introduction, we envisage some spatial relations, involving instrument distribution on stage, emphasizing historical concert music.

The Akazehe of Burundi: Polyphonic Interlocking Greetings and the Female Ceremonial. By Serena Facci. Translated by Alessandra Ciucci.

Akazehe is one of the names in Burundi for forms of sung greeting performed exclusively by women. Studies carried out during the colonial era (in particular Rodegem 1965, 1973) and in more recent times (Ndimurwanko 1985-6) have shown how the contents of these greetings among women are closely linked to the feminine world in which these greetings are used—in specific private and public spaces in accordance with rural tradition. Although these greetings were becoming less common at the time the research for this article was conducted, the author was able to record a number of akazehe after listening to examples of them in the sound archives of the Centre de civilisation burundaise. A greeting is defined by linguists as a formalized parenthesis that defines, reiterates, and encloses the relation between two participants. The formulaic character of a greeting makes it different from ordinary speech. In the case of the akazehe, the greeting emphasizes gestural and sound qualities to such an extent that it creates a veritable musical texture. This article presents transcriptions and analysis of some models of akazehe, focusing on one that features procedures of vocal interlocking. The two parts—gutera and kwakira—are organized according to musical rules that manifest a strong spirit of cooperation between the two women who sing the two parts in dialogue. Furthermore, well-defined rules of exchange for the two roles semantically remind us of the social equality between the two participants. The musical enrichment of the time reserved for the greeting is experienced as amusing by the performers. The greeting also represents an opportunity for artistic expression in a social reality that otherwise allows few performance spaces for women. Citation: Facci, Serena. The Akazehe of Burundi: Polyphonic Interlocking Greetings and the Female Ceremonial. Translated by Alessandria Ciucci. Ethnomusicology Translations, no. 10. Bloomington, IN: Society for Ethnomusicology, 2020. Originally published in Italian as "Akazehe del Burundi: saluti a incastro polifonico e cerimonialità femminile." In Polifonie: Procedimenti, tassonomi e forme: una reflessione a più voci, edited by Maurizio Agamennone, 123-61. Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 1996.

Motives and Motivations

A broad survey of Britten’s compositional output reveals a predilection toward linkage technique––the carrying over of pitches from the end of one phrase or segment to form the beginning of the next. Whereas linkage can be found in many genres, Britten frequently employs this technique in his operas to depict certain aspects of a character’s thoughts and motivations, either spoken or unspoken, as the drama continues to unfold on stage. Consideration of musical texture reveals three typical uses: (1) accompaniment linkage between the vocal melody and the instrumental accompaniment, (2) interlude linkage between vocal phrases separated by an intervening instrumental interlude, and (3) character linkage between the music sung by different characters in an opera. Consideration of linkage has practical implications for performers, directors, and choreographers, who may use insights gained through score analysis to craft a staged, gestural interpretation at moments of linkage.