Printing and Publishing of Music

This article covers the dissemination of musical scores by technical means. The function of both printing and publication is to produce multiple copies of a work or a group of works and to arrange for the distribution of those copies to many purchasers. This requires diverse skills: on the one hand, the ability to print, involving preparing a copy of the music in a form suitable for the printing press, and then producing the copies; on the other, to make marketing decisions, to handle advertising and distribution of copies to individuals or to music shops, and to budget and plan for profits. Since the first printed music produced by Ottaviano Petrucci at the beginning of the 16th century, printing has been developed in Europe on a broad scale. Its technical requirements have changed from movable type to engraving, lithography, and, most recently, the computer. Entries are arranged to cover these activities separately, and then provide an introduction to bibliography, the scholarly study of both activities. Descriptive bibliography and analytic bibliography are recent in the field of music; they have been primarily devoted to the study of the printers and publishers from the 16th to the 18th centuries established in the main centers in Europe, including Venice, Paris, Antwerp, Frankfurt, London, and Vienna. Specific topics have become of increasing interest in recent years, including patterns of distributing copies and reaching markets and music appearing in general cultural periodicals and magazines. In addition, two subjects have risen to importance, the first, the paratext, or matters of design, which is sparsely discussed in connection with music; and the second, the place of music and its editions in cultural and intellectual history. Use of printed music has changed during the 20th century. Employed as a mean for performing and circulating music among musicians, professionals, and amateurs during four centuries, printed music became a support to produce performing rights when audiovisual media became the main access to music. Another important evolution has been the production of different kind of editions. During a long period, publishers sold the music written day by day for the entertainment of specific groups in society and for a specific purpose—liturgy, concert life, house music. Following a growing interest in the music of the past, they began to produce collected works and critical editions that reconcile mass production to the quality of the publishing.

The Motive of Peace in the Works of B. Pasternak and M. Bulgakov

The concept of peace entered into Russian culture from the Bible and became its important spiritual tradition. With the development of secular literature, peace has gradually come out of the sacred field and become the significant aesthetic concept rich in connotation. In their works, Pasternak and Bulgakov reflect on the peace in the field of existence and art, especially the ontological value of family and love, thoughts about history, death and creativity. The concept of memory plays an important role in the artistic world of the two writers. Bulgakovs and Pasternaks books are testimony to rebirth and immortality, which is the way they participate in the sacred cause. The paper analyzes the place and role of the motive of peace in the novels of B. Pasternak Doctor Zhivago and M. Bulgakov The Master and Margarita in their similarities and differences. In this regard, the images of the house, music, creativity as the focus of the artists world are compared, the typological related figures of the beloved muse and the savior are considered, the specificity of the disclosure of the theme of immortality in creativity is noted.

“Like a Cosmic, Invisible Umbilical Cord”

In summer 2002, New York City-based DJ Sadiq Bellamy and his two partners, DJs Tabu and Jeff Mendoza, organized the first Soul Summit Music Festival: a free, open-air, and open-to-the-public weekly series of house music dance parties set in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn, during the summer season. The party ran every summer without incident for many years, and twenty years later, continues to receive global recognition among house heads for its success in bringing house music culture—and its legacy of liberation as a sensorial practice—to a broader and more intergenerational crowd than one would find in a club. Keeping in mind its rich genealogies, this article considers the social significance of open-air house music culture, and how various forms of participation within these house music topographies rearticulate the social in a way that refuses the spatiality of peripheralization and the temporality of extinction imposed on Black, brown, and queer of color life in New York City and beyond. In the case of Soul Summit, however, it is not just who participates, but also when and where that matter—in public space and in a historically Black neighborhood situated in a post-9/11, post-Bloomberg New York City—particularly as gentrification devastates the material and symbolic conditions that made possible house culture’s multi-faceted expression in the first place. This article proposes that in resistance to the “revanchist” urbanism of gentrification, the affects and arrangements cultivated on the open-air house music dance floor offer an alternate epistemology of, or way to re-imagine, the social. This lens of “house epistemology” illuminates how the gentrification of Fort Greene brought not only a shift in residential demographics, but also the displacement of a certain modality of public culture by foreclosing the social infrastructures that serve to remediate cultural memory and mobilize Black life.

Finding a Home in House

Discussed most often as a musical genre and queer familial structure, house has long been a home for Blackness—and for femininity. This chapter theorizes a notion of Black queer femmeness along the sounds, affects, and vibrations of house. Through charting the use of Black female vocals across the genre’s origins in the early 1980s, dance pop in the early 1990s, and the mid-2010s’ house resurgence in both the mainstream and indie spheres, this chapter explores how house simultaneously amplifies the femininity of Black female house vocalists and detaches femininity from gendered bodies altogether. In the process, it posits that house works as an affective, or felt, political and cultural configuration, one that opens up the space for new relationalities within and between Black, queer, and/or femme communities. By charting how musical artists continue to return to house’s aesthetics and affective power, this chapter invites readers to listen and feel with the recent past(s) of house music for guidance and inspiration on navigating structural oppressions that continue to reverberate across time: governmental neglect of the life chances of Black and Brown people, police violence against Black and Brown people, and the looming presence of anti-Black racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. Through such an engagement with the recent past, house accentuates the ongoing resonances between the 1980s and today.

Anne Smith, Ina Lohr (1903-1983). Transcending the Boundaries of Early Music

This is a book that had to be written. And that is meant in a thoroughly positive way. Ina Lohr, ‘Paul Sacher's assistant’, is a well-known figure in insider circles, who contributed immensely to the creation of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, one of the most important international teaching institutions for Early Music and historically informed performance practice. Lohr made a significant contribution to the emergence of the Basel Chamber Orchestra, which made a name for itself not only in Early Music but also, through regular commissions from the Sacher-family, in the field of New Music as yet another unique Basel contribution to the international music life. However, the exact nature of the contributions of Lohr is not entirely clear even to locals and insiders who did have the privilege of meeting her themselves. Especially, her own compositional activity has so far been carefully left out of the prevailing ‘image’ of the conservatively dressed and coiffed Lohr who taught ‘house music courses’ (the name of teacher training at the time).

Gabber: Raising hell in technoculture1

Gabber is a hardcore electronic dance music genre, typified by extreme speed and overdrive, which developed in the Netherlands, with Rotterdam as its epicentre, during the early 1990s, when house music-inspired dance events dominated. The use of distorted noise and references to popular body horror, such as Hellraiser, dominated its scene, and soon gabber was commented on as ‘the metal of house music’, a statement that this article aims to investigate. Applying a genealogical discographic approach, the research found that the electronic noise music aesthetic of industrial music was crucial for the formation of the sound of gabber. The hardcore electronic dance music that developed from this is at once ironically nihilistic, a contrary critique, and a populist safety valve. The digital machine noise of hardcore seems to offer an immersive means to process the experience of (emasculating) fluidity within post-human accelerated technoculture, itself propelled by rapid digital capital and information technologies.

Teaching Songwriting with MIDI Projects

The projects in this chapter introduce MIDI recording, sequencing, and editing techniques for composition and songwriting. The projects include strategies for enabling students to quickly generate a large amount of original musical material quickly. Beginner songwriters and composers find empty DAW sessions to be daunting, so it is essential to build their confidence. Therefore, the chapter gives techniques for quickly generating melodic and drum sequences, duplicating them, and creating variations on them. This approach also has the benefit of mirroring “real-world” professional production practice. The projects cover drum programming and arranging, as well as writing chord sequences, basslines, and short melodies. A pragmatic instrument taxonomy of “drums” and “not-drums” is used, and the typical instrumental layers in contemporary electronic music genres are explained. Also presented is a practical approach to relevant music theory concepts. Finally, three popular genres—future bass, house music, and trap—are used to introduce musical form.

Zur Kompatibilität von Maßsystemen der Akustik und zu den Wirkungen von Energie-äquivalenten, zum Gehör jedoch mehr oder weniger kompatiblen Schallbelastungen

ZusammenfassungDie Stärke von Schallbelastungen wird bekanntlich durch den Pegel L mit einem logarithmischen Maß angegeben. Dieses, formal richtig nach dem Weber-Fechner’schen Gesetz aufgebaute Maßstabs-System der Lautstärke in dB (Dezibel) ist allerdings alles andere als empfindungsgerecht und damit inkompatibel zum Gehör. Das zeigt sich z. B. daran, dass ein Pegel von 100 Dezibel (dB) nicht lediglich doppelt so laut empfunden wird wie ein Pegel von 50 dB. Ein solcher Messwert repräsentiert sogar das „100.000-fache“ von 50 dB, und damit eine unvorstellbar höhere Belastung. Selbst in einer nur um 3 dB höheren Belastung steckt bereits die doppelte Energie bzw. Belastung für das Gehör. Weil eben nicht das Weber-Fechner’sche Gesetz, sondern das Stevens’sche Potenz-Gesetz erwiesenermaßen Gültigkeit besitzt, sollte bei der Einstufung der Stärke von Schallbelastungen zumindest das einigermaßen empfindungsgerechte Maßstabs-System der Lautheit mit der Einheit „Sone“ Verwendung finden. Eine Zunahme des Pegels um 10 dB, die erfahrungsgemäß mit einer gefühlten Verdopplung des „Empfindens“ verbunden wird, führt dabei auch zu einer Verdopplung des Sone-Wertes. Das Benutzen des allseits bekannten „dB“ schafft nicht selten Verwirrung und führt oftmals zu gravierenden Fehleinschätzungen. In graphischen Darstellungen werden das inkompatible Maßsystem der Lautstärke und das zum menschlichen Gehör eher kompatible Maßsystem der Lautheit in „Sone“ konkretisiert und veranschaulicht. Dabei werden auch erhebliche Diskrepanzen bei der Beurteilung von Schallexpositionen aufgezeigt, die bei unterschiedlicher Höhe und Einwirkdauer mittels des Halbierungsparameters q = 3 als gleich hoch eingeschätzt werden. Auszugsweise dargestellte Ergebnisse aus umfangreichen audiometrischen Untersuchungen belegen, dass energie-äquivalente, aber zeitlich unterschiedlich verteilte Schallbelastungen von in der Arbeit noch zulässigen 85 dB(A)/8 h höchst unterschiedlich starke zeitweilige Hörschellenverschiebungen (Temporary Threshold Shifts, TTS-Werte) verursachen. Ferner wird veranschaulicht, dass auch gleich starke moderne Musikschallbelastungen von 94 dB/1 h bei otologisch normalen Probanden zu audiometrisch messbaren, ähnlich hohen Hörschwellenverschiebungen wie Industrielärm führen. Das gilt z. B. für „Heavy Metal“, „Techno“ oder auch „House Music“. Besteht die gleich starke und genauso lang anhaltende akustische Belastung jedoch z. B. aus „Klassischer Musik“, so kommt es allenfalls zu „Physiologischen Kosten“ in der Größenordnung von ca. ¼ dessen, was zum menschlichen Gehör inkompatible akustische Belastungen verursachen. Daraus ist zu folgern, dass das Gehör nach dem Motto „Der Ton macht die Musik“ mit sinusförmigen akustischen Belastungen eher „klar kommt“ (dazu kompatibel ist) als mit stochastischen und u. U. impulshaltigen Schallereignissen, wie sie durch Metall-auf Metall-Schläge auftreten oder bei Maschinengeräuschen in der Metallverarbeitung vorkommen.

“We gon be alright:” containment, creativity, and the birth of hip-hop

In the United States, Black cultural production is bound up with geographic containment, restrictions on mobility, and racial segregation. Jazz, hip-hop, house music, and the Minneapolis Sound (the music associated with late recording artist, Prince) were mid-wifed by some of the most repressive systems of geographic order. Indeed, containment and creativity, geographies of trouble and hope are hallmarks of Black cultural production. This dialectic calls into question the belief that art can only be created in conducive or untroubled spaces. Hip-hop provides a perfect case study to challenge this assumption. Born in the Bronx, NY in the early 1970’s, hip-hop was a cultural movement that emerged in against the backdrop of racial and economic segregation, mass incarceration, and joblessness. Yet, hop-hop “danced its way of these constrictions” and created geographies of hope. In doing this, hip-hop shows that Black cultural production and the radical imagination from which it springs, have the capacity to create counter-spatial imaginaries that challenge those under which it was produced. To that end, this article addresses the relationship between creativity and containment. Through linking the rise of carceral power, racially restrictive housing practices, a deindustrializing economy, and expanding prison populations with the hip-hop, I demonstrate the dialectic between systematic spatial containment of poor and working-class Black and Latinx Americans and the role it played in creation of the world’s most powerful cultural force.