Naturalistyczna muzykologia systematyczna wobec poglądów Meyera na emocje i znaczenie w muzyce

Leonard B. Meyer’s book Emotion and Meaning in Music was published more than half a century ago. It still provides inspiration for musicologists with various specialisms to undertake research aimed at understanding the intriguing link between music and emotions and the relationship between musical structure and meaning. Since the publication of this outstanding volume we have seen extraordinarily dynamic development of the musicological disciplines constituting that part of systematic musicology which is based on the premises of naturalism. The article focuses on those selected research areas of thisbranch of musicology where the influence of the ideas first presented in the above volume is particularly significant. The most important of Meyer’s postulates in naturalistically oriented systematic musicology that continue to be discussed include: the key role of expectation in shaping our emotional reactions to the musical passages we hear and the inner musical character of the affective meanings created in this way. The main challenges faced by Meyer’s postulates during the recent decades are examined, and the solutions to them proposed within the framework of naturalistically oriented thinking about music.

The 13th International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus20)

Held entirely online, the 13th International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus20) saw early stage researchers sharing ideas at the intersection of musicology and empirical scientific research. At this student-led conference, presenters were able to showcase exciting research projects, disseminate findings from recent studies, and learn valuable skills from virtual workshops. Keynote addresses were held by Dr Freya Bailes (University of Leeds) and Prof. Ian Cross (University of Cambridge). A summary of the sessions and an overview the conference is here presented by this report.

The 12th International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus19)

At the 12th International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus19), students from all over the world came together to share and discuss their work spanning this interdisciplinary and diverse field. As a student-led conference, the SysMus series aims to provide a platform whereby early-stage researchers can hone their skills and gain experience in an open and friendly environment. Additionally, keynotes held by Dr. Klaus Frieler (Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt, Weimar) and Dr. Helga de la Motte-Haber (Technische Universität Berlin), as well as workshops on different research tools and approaches, added to the depth and variety of the event. This report provides an overview of the conference and a summary of the work presented.

Expression Types of 19th-Century Symphonic Music: The Cases of the Glorifying Hymnic and the Majestic Chorale

We take music’s expressive power for granted. Yet, this aspect poses many puzzling problems for musicological research. One of them is how to approach the effect of music historically since satisfactory sources about music’s emotional qualities are rare and one needs to be cautious in transferring results of recent music psychology or cognitive musicology back to the 19th century. Therefore, the present article proposes a kind of historical music psychology. Developing a method partly inspired by systematic musicology, yet clearly historical, this study offers a possible solution to that problem. It does so by way of a case study on two specific and closely related kinds of loud music passages that have been labeled the ‘Glorifying Hymnic’ and the ‘Majestic Chorale’ respectively. It provides a definition of these types of music passages and—combining qualitative and quantitative approaches—it investigates the contemporary perception of these passages using evidence from contemporary witnesses. The sample focuses on orchestral music such as symphonies, concertos, symphonic poems, and overtures including works from Beethoven, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Bristow, Brahms, Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky, Cliffe, and many other composers. In a final step, the article explores the dissemination of the ‘Glorifying Hymnic’ in 19th-century music and draws attention to contemporary historical events in an attempt to link the expression type of the ‘Glorifying Hymnic’ to historical events and phenomena such as nationalism, religion, and imperialism.

Report on the 10th International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus17)

The 10th annual International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus) took place on September 13–15, 2017, at Queen Mary University of London (UoL). The SysMus series has established itself as an international, student-run conference series aimed at introducing graduate students to networking and discussing their work in an academic conference environment. The term “Systematic Musicology,” first coined by Guido Adler (1885), nowadays covers a wide range of systematic or empirical approaches to theoretical, psychological, neuroscientific, ethnographic, and computational methodologies in music research. Presentations for SysMus17 focused on three central topics in relation to music: cognition and neuroscience, computation, and health and well-being. Each of these topics was the subject of workshops as well as keynotes by Prof. Lauren Stewart (Goldsmiths University of London and Music in the Brain Centre, Aarhus University), Prof. Elaine Chew and Dr. Marcus Pearce (both Queen Mary UoL), Dr. Daniel Müllensiefen (Goldsmiths UoL), and Prof. Aaron Williamon (Royal College of Music). Further presentations addressed issues relating to harmony and rhythm, musicians and performance, music and emotion, and sociology of music. This year’s conference brought together early-career researchers from the fields of musicology, psychology, and medicine, allowing them to socialize, share their work, and gain insight into interdisciplinary approaches to their subjects. SysMus17 was organized by students at Queen Mary’s Music Cognition Lab and was particularly marked by the series’ 10th anniversary, the live streaming of all presentations via social media, and a carbon-offsetting Green Initiative. The proceedings of SysMus17 will be available on demand from the conference website ( www.sysmus17.qmul.ac.uk ) and the videos will be made available for public access.

Conference report SysMus 2016

Each year students from all over the world come together to share and discuss their knowledge on varying topics from the field of systematic musicology at the SysMus Conference. The 9th edition of this conference series, organised by students for students, took place in the idyllic town of Jyväskylä in Finland, and therefore for the first time in SysMus-history in one of the Nordic Countries. The 2016 conference was organised by student chairs Joshua Bamford and Susan Johnson with tremendous support from Birgitta Burger as supervising chair. With its international community and critically acclaimed researchers, SysMus 2016 proved to be a fruitful and exciting gathering.

Visualizing and Interpreting Rhythmic Patterns Using Phase Space Plots

Structure in musical rhythm can be measured using a number of analytical techniques. While some techniques—like circular statistics or grammar induction—rely on strong top-down assumptions, assumption-free techniques can only provide limited insights on higher-order rhythmic structure. I suggest that research in music perception and performance can benefit from systematically adopting phase space plots, a visualization technique originally developed in mathematical physics that overcomes the aforementioned limitations. By jointly plotting adjacent interonset intervals (IOI), the motivic rhythmic structure of musical phrases, if present, is visualized geometrically without making any a priori assumptions concerning isochrony, beat induction, or metrical hierarchies. I provide visual examples and describe how particular features of rhythmic patterns correspond to geometrical shapes in phase space plots. I argue that research on music perception and systematic musicology stands to benefit from this descriptive tool, particularly in comparative analyses of rhythm production. Phase space plots can be employed as an initial assumption-free diagnostic to find higher order structures (i.e., beyond distributional regularities) before proceeding to more specific, theory-driven analyses.