Transmission and Innovation of Kasidah (Lagu Islam) in Indonesian (1975~) Take a Case Study on Nasida Ria Kasidah Modern in Semarang

Indonesian Islamic music has its own performance occasion, musical function, music characteristic, and the style of musical performance. It has lyrics that represent direct relationship between Moslems and God in religion ceremonies. However, the musical structures are changed due to external stimulation coming along with the changes of Indonesian social structure during its development especially in 1975. Kasidah, a sort of Indonesian Islamic music, is the best exemplification to manifest the interaction between social development and music cultural changes, peculiarly performed by the music group of Qasidah Modern Nasida Ria in Semarang, Indonesia. The reason is that kasidah is more liberal than other Islamic music genres in Indonesia, especially on musical performance, usage on instruments, etc. This research sees “music” as a communication system of sound which passes through social usage and cultural contexts in Ethnomusicological perspective. The focus of discussion in on this group to explore some topics in order to comprehend the interaction between social structural development and the innovation of kasidah musical structure in Indonesia, such as the transmission and development of the group Qasidah Modern Nasida Ria, innovation of the group Qasidah Modern Nasida Ria and its music, and the musical function of modern kasidah. By which to understand the current development of kasidah in Indonesia, explore the concept and the role of the word „modern‟ plays in the development of modern kasidah, and point out the cultural syncretism and impact occured in the development of modern kasidah.

Intonation in Iraqi Musical Melodies

This paper deals with intonation in Iraqi musical melodies (MMs). As such, it aims to analyze the intonational patterns in the Iraqi music. The main musical melodies in the Iraqi music are Rast, Dasht, Hijaaz, Kurd, and Bayaat. In this vein, the current study attempts to answer the following questions: the current paper attempts to answer the following questions: (i) What are the intonational patterns of Iraqi MMs? And (ii) What is the additional function of intonation in MMs? In the light of these questions, the corner hypothesis is that Iraqi MMs have their own specific definable intonational patterns. On the basis of the analysis, it is concluded that intonation can be a useful tool for analyzing musical variations in the basic Iraqi MMs. Moreover, musical intonation, which is the task of musicologists, is accompanied by phonological intonation to create the final form of the melody. Finally, in addition to previous functions of intonation, such as grammatical, semantic, and so on, intonation has a new one, namely ‘musical function’ because it gives music special effects and evaluations.

جمالية النسق التعبدي في الكون، أو موسيقى الكائنات من منظور النورسي: دراسة في الكليات

للكائنات في تأملات النورسي وظيفة موسيقية جمالية في الكون، تتشكَّل من حركاتها المادية وتسبيحاتها الروحية، في دلالة ازدواجية مركبة تأبى التفكُّك؛ ما يستفز التدبر في الإنسان، ويدفعه إلى إعادة قراءة الكون والكائنات؛ قراءة تراعى فيها الوحدة الكونية والقانون التعبدي المشترك الجامع بين طبيعة الشيء المادية ووظيفته التوحيدية المعنوية، وليس الاكتفاء بإحداهما. Nursi's reflections show that creatures have an aesthetic musical function which is composed of their physical movement and spiritual glorification, which comes in inseparable compound duality. This function provokes human contemplation that requires rereading the natural cosmos and creatures in such a way that takes into account the cosmos unity and the common worship law which bring together both the physical nature of things and their moral monotheistic function.

The Meaning and Function of the Pause in Chekhov's “The Seagull”

This article examines the phenomenon of the pause in A. P. Chekhov’s play “The Seagull.” What does the instruction “pause” mean, and why did Chekhov think it was so important that he wrote the word into the text of the play? In exploration of these questions, this article analyzes the text of “The Seagull,” as well as three stage productions. Such analysis reveals three functions of the pause: 1. Dramatic Function. The pause highlights the characters’ words or attracts the attention of the audience. In other words, the pause gives the characters’ speech additional dramatic significance. 2. Musical Function. The pause controls the dynamic unfolding of the play, thereby controlling the audience’s reaction and, ultimately, the success of the play. 3. Negative Function. The pause acts in a fashion similar to Iuriy Lotman’s “minus-device.” That is, by making a lacuna in the scene the pause adds some meaning that cannot be expressed in words. In this way, the pause serves to highlight the limits of communication, and draw attention to those moments which cannot be captured by language.

Music Theory as Productivity

The author here proposes Julia Kristeva's notion of "productivity" as a way of conceiving of the relations between different theories of music. By such a notion, rather than confirming, disconfirming, or exemplifying a theory, a particular musical work (or works) may redistribute the theory. The redistribution, in fact, might not only modify the initial theory—something certainly not original to productivity—but may also bring it into articulation with fundamentally opposed models of musical function, without which, nevertheless, the original theory remains incomplete. An extended example is adduced from Schubert's Schubert's Impromptu in G-flat Major, D. 899, in connection with, first, Schenker's Free Composition (Der freie Satz), and second, Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony (Harmonielehre); Schenker's inconsistent practice with respect to first-order neighbours, along with certain issues in the Impromptu, become the occasion for examining a case of productivity.

Processing of Musical Syntax Tonic versus Subdominant: An Event-related Potential Study

The present study investigates the effect of a change in syntactic-like musical function on event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Eight-chord piano sequences were presented to musically expert and novice listeners. Instructed to watch a movie and to ignore the musical sequences, the participants had to react when a chord was played with a different instrument than the piano. Participants were not informed that the relevant manipulation was the musical function of the last chord (target) of the sequences. The target chord acted either as a syntactically stable tonic chord (i.e., a C major chord in the key of C major) or as a less syntactically stable subdominant chord (i.e., a C major chord in the key of G major). The critical aspect of the results related to the impact such a manipulation had on the ERPs. An N5-like frontal negative component was found to be larger for subdominant than for tonic chords and attained significance only in musically expert listeners. These findings suggest that the subdominant chord is more difficult to integrate with the previous context than the tonic chord (as indexing by the observed N5) and that the processing of a small change in musical function occurs in an automatic way in musically expert listeners. The present results are discussed in relation to previous studies investigating harmonic violations with ERPs.

Repetition priming: Is music special?

Using short and long contexts, the present study investigated musical priming effects that are based on chord repetition and harmonic relatedness. A musical target (a chord) was preceded by either an identical prime or a different but harmonically related prime. In contrast to words, pictures, and environmental sounds, chord processing was not facilitated by repetition. Experiments 1 and 2 using single-chord primes showed either no significant difference between chord repetition and harmonic relatedness or facilitated processing for harmonically related targets. Experiment 3 using longer prime contexts showed that musical priming depended more on the musical function of the target in the preceding context than on target repetition. The effect of musical function was decreased, but not qualitatively changed, by chord repetition. The outcome of this study challenges predictions of sensory approaches and supports a cognitive approach of musical priming.

Lyric Form in Ottocento Opera

In a study of Verdi's debt to Bellini published over 20 years ago, Friedrich Lippmann set the course for subsequent investigations of phrase structure in ottocento opera by using letters to describe the archetypal shape of many melodies written by Italian composers after 1830. He identified the most common pattern in the music of Bellini and the young Verdi as a1 a2 b a2, in which each letter represents a four-bar phrase in a prototypical 16-bar melody. The method has obvious risks of turning uncomfortably antiseptic for the analyst, but there is much to be said for its virtue of concision. It served Lippmann for his subsequent work on Bellini as well as Julian Budden for his three-volume study of Verdi's operas. With a minimal addition of bulk, Joseph Kerman and Scott Balthazar subsequently formulated a more elaborate alphanumeric system. Both replace Lippmann's use of arabic numerals to demonstrate musical variation with primes (AA' BA’ instead of al a2 b a2; Kerman uses lower-case letters, Balthazar upper-case) and they communicate the number of bars in each phrase, including those longer and shorter than the four-bar norm, with subscript numbers (for example, A4A‘4B3C6). The relationship of each phrase to the standard double quatrain or sestet of Italian poetry is also accounted for by a parenthetical tracking of verse lines for each musical phrase; for example, A4(S11–2)A'4(S13–4) illustrates how the first quatrain is distributed across the first eight bars of a normative melody. More important, Kerman and Balthazar recognize the musical function of phrases within the prototypical 16-bar group. Balthazar, in particular, identifies the first two four-bar phrases as an ‘opening thematic block’, the B phrase as both ‘contrasting’ and ‘medial’, and the last phrase as a ‘closing’ unit ('some version of A or C, depending on whether motives from the opening phrases are present).