Exploring historic changes in musical communication: Deconstructing emotional cues in preludes by Bach and Chopin

A growing body of research analyzing musical scores suggests mode’s relationship with other expressive cues has changed over time. However, to the best of our knowledge, the perceptual implications of these changes have not been formally assessed. Here, we explore how compositional choices of 17th- and 19th-century composers (J. S. Bach and F. Chopin, respectively) differentially affect emotional communication. This novel exploration builds on our team’s previous techniques using commonality analysis to decompose intercorrelated cues in unaltered excerpts of influential compositions. In doing so, we offer an important naturalistic complement to traditional experimental work—often involving tightly controlled stimuli constructed to avoid the intercorrelations inherent to naturalistic music. Our data indicate intriguing changes in cues’ effects between Bach and Chopin, consistent with score-based research suggesting mode’s “meaning” changed across historical eras. For example, mode’s unique effect accounts for the most variance in valence ratings of Chopin’s preludes, whereas its shared use with attack rate plays a more prominent role in Bach’s. We discuss the implications of these findings as part of our field’s ongoing effort to understand the complexity of musical communication—addressing issues only visible when moving beyond stimuli created for scientific, rather than artistic, goals.

SURVEY, RECOVERY AND REGENERATION OF POST-MODERN ARCHITECTURE. THE BIM APPROACH IN THE CASE STUDY OF THE SPORTS HALL IN BASTIA UMBRA (ITALY)

This study deals with the redevelopment of buildings built in the last decades of the Nineteenth century, with a style that can be defined "post-modern". In those years, communication became an architectural theme superimposed and abstract by functional and structural needs, with "architectural elements" abstract in a hyperbolic way with respect to the function. The result of an architectural culture, interesting for the research they narrate but incongruous with functional needs, also because of the materials used, the energy and architectural requirements impose a review to combine functional performance, in nZEB projection, and structural with the need for "venustas", what is "done well", the same facet of the same architectural rationale. The need to renew these spaces must take into account the qualities of forms that, with their material decay and in the peculiar language, may not bring out the centrality of preserving and compositional choices of the work.

Collecting affect: emotion and empathy in World War II photographs and drawings of plastic surgery

This article compares drawings by Diana ‘Dickie’ Orpen (1914–2008) with photographs by Percy Hennell (1911–1987); both of their oeuvres depict plastic reconstructive surgeries from World War II in Britain. Through visual analysis, personal experience and interviews with archivists who have worked with the collections, this article aims to determine the affective effects of these drawings and photographs. I argue that Hennell’s images are the more affective and subjective objects, even though their original purpose was objective and scientific. This article asks why Hennell’s photographs of plastic surgery produce such a vehement emotive response.Investigating Hennell’s use of colour, his compositional choices and the unexpected visual particulars of the operating theatre that he captures—all of which ‘collect affect’ within the photo-archival object—this analysis uses a phenomenological framework to determine the limitations and strengths of two very different styles and mediums of World War II surgical imagery.Beyond establishing which group of images is more affecting, this article also shows why it is empathy that is the most fitting emotional description of the typical responses to Hennell’s photographs. This type of visual analysis of empathic images can be applied to objects-based medical humanities pedagogy that encourages empathy—historical empathy as well as empathy in the present day—for surgical practitioners and trainees.

Introduction

The book is arbitrarily structured around the parameters of melody, rhythm, harmony, texture, and pre-compositional approaches. All chapters start with a brief note on terminology and general recommendations for the instructor and the student. The first five chapters offer a variety of exercises that range from analysis and style imitation, to the use of probabilities. The chapter about pre-compositional approaches offers original techniques that a student composer can implement in order to start a new work. This last section of the book fosters creative connections with other disciplines such as math, visual arts, and architectural acoustics. Each of the 100 exercises contained in the book proposes a unique set of guidelines and constraints intended to place the student in a specific compositional framework. Through those compositional boundaries the student is encouraged to produce creative work within a given structure. Using the methodologies in this book, students will be able to create their own outlines for their compositions, making intelligent and educated compositional choices that balance reasoning with intuition.

Musical interpretation of Hezekiah’s illness in Johann Kuhnau’s Biblical sonata

The article discusses Johann Kuhnau’s fourth keyboard sonata, Der todtkranke und wieder gesunde Hiskias (The Mortally Ill and Then Restored Hezekiah), from his last volume of six keyboard sonatas published in Leipzig in 1700, known popularly as “Biblical Sonatas.” Titled as Musicalische Vorstellung einiger biblischer Historien (Musical Representation of Several Biblical Stories), the set presents a remarkably thorough and detailed musical depiction of selected scenes from the Old Testament. This is also a rare collection of keyboard music to provide a detailed narrative commentary, consisting of verbal synopses of selected stories in German, which preface each sonata, and commentaries in Italian written into notation, which underline portrayed situations, events and affections. To examine the plot-based narrative underlying the storyline of this particular sonata, some authentic discourses have been taken into consideration for analytical purposes. These included the composer’s foreword to the collection of his “Biblical Sonatas,” synopsis of the story depicted in the fourth sonata, and a comprehensive theory of musical rhetoric and the doctrine of the affections found in various 17th and 18th century sources. In this article, the author specifies distinct musical-rhetorical figures that resemble (by analogy) or refer to certain extra-musical objects or phenomena and serve as vehicles for creating different moods and establishing the atmosphere. Depending on which narrative element – action or affections – is brought into focus in each of the six sonatas, the author distinguishes between two types of sonatas, namely ‘action sonatas’ and ‘affective sonatas.’ Affections and shifts in mood experienced by Hezekiah make an important narrative element in the storyline of the fourth sonata. Hence this particular sonata falls under the category of ‘affective sonatas.’ The analysis of this sonata revealed that the narrative is constructed therein in several layers. Firstly, there is a verbal layer: to depict the story in detail and with much consistency, the composer thought it necessary to accompany notation with the synopsis of the story and verbal commentaries. Moreover, quotations from the Protestant chorale Ach Herr mich armen Sünder (Ah Lord, poor sinner that I am) imply verbal connotations of their verses. Secondly, it contains a musical-affective layer: musical devices (such as musical-rhetorical figures, key, rhythm, metre, and the like) are employed there to convey the indicated affections, such as wailing (lamento) or, in other words, sorrow, confidence (confidenza) and joy (allegrezza). The author observes that many compositional choices made by Kuhnau adhere to the standard methods of expressing affects as they were defined in the Baroque treatises. Thirdly, there is an associative layer: certain fragments and elements resemble (by analogy) and refer to extra-musical objects and/or phenomena, such as Belshazzar’s face turning pale and his limbs trembling in terror, the sesquialtera ratio (3:2), which symbolizes the numerical proportion of steps on Ahaz’s sundial and the years of Hezekiah’s life. The alternating musical textures, normally associated with sadness (adagio) and merriment (allegro), can be also mentioned as a characteristic narrative feature in this sonata. Although Kuhnau claimed to have depicted Biblical stories according to his own imagination, the analysis revealed that his writing in this sonata does not veer away from the typical musical vocabulary of the Baroque era, which nowadays requires a more sensitive ear and keener insight into compositional conventions of the period.

Glinka’s Three Symphonic Acorns

This article challenges the privileged position that Glinka’s Kamarinskaia (1848) has assumed in accounts of Russian instrumental music. The first half of the article investigates nineteenth-century reception of Glinka’s orchestral works and demonstrates that his Jota Aragonese (1845) and Memory of a Summer Night in Madrid (1851) were just as popular as Kamarinskaia among Russian audiences of the time. It also traces the persistent references that critics such as Vladimir Stasov and Alexander Serov made to the organic qualities of all three of these orchestral fantasias. Although the variational techniques that Glinka employs in the fantasias have commonly been viewed as the very opposite of organic, Stasov and Serov appear to have been relying on a different theorization of musical organicism, namely that of Adolf Bernhard Marx. A Marxian framework helps to explain the popularity of Jota and Madrid alongside Kamarinskaia in nineteenth-century Russia, and it also provides an entry point for closer analytical investigations of the three fantasias. These analyses, comprising the second half of the article, illustrate certain distinguishing features of each fantasia as noted by nineteenth-century musicians and suggest that the fantasias represent highly divergent approaches to orchestral composition. Given the prominence of all three fantasias in nineteenth-century Russia, an awareness of these contrasting approaches allows for a more nuanced understanding of the compositional choices made by subsequent generations of Russian composers.

Gustav Jenner and the Music of Brahms: The Case of the Orchestral Serenades

Gustav Jenner (1865–1920) was Brahms’s only long-term composition student. Jenner, an outspoken proponent of the conservative musical values he shared with Brahms, left numerous songs and pieces for chorus, piano, chamber ensembles and orchestra. Despite his obvious stylistic affinities to Brahms, it is clear from Jenner’s prose writings that he placed high value on artistic independence. Although scholars have noted the circumstances surrounding Jenner’s interactions with Brahms between 1888 and 1895 and Brahms’s general aesthetic influence on the young man, Jenner’s music – and particularly its relationship to that of Brahms – has received scant attention. Deeper comparison of the two composers’ works yields insights into not only how Brahms influenced less prominent composers in his circle and in the generation that followed him, but also the extent and nature of Brahms’s direct influence as a teacher.This article compares Jenner’s only complete orchestral piece, his Serenade in A major (1911–12), with its most obvious precedents, Brahms’s orchestral serenades. Although correlations in general style are numerous, discrepancies arise naturally. Jenner furthermore avoids Brahms’s most distinctive compositional choices and takes care not to rely too heavily on any one Brahmsian model for his own Serenade, suggesting his desire to distinguish himself and a wariness of the inevitable comparisons with the works of his teacher. Thus we find in Jenner’s work the same dual emphasis on musical tradition and independence emphasized both in Jenner’s prose writings and in the music of Brahms himself.