Iconography, Nomenclature, and Sound: Building a Musical Database

Musicians who possess functional sight singing and dictation skills have unified into a single entity three discrete bodies of knowledge about music: iconography, nomenclature, and sound. Iconography refers to the visual representation of music. By nomenclature, I mean any labeling system for pitch, rhythm, and harmony. The third component—musical sound—is abstract, being invisible to human eyes and intangible to human touch. In this essay, I suggest approaches to unifying iconography, nomenclature, and sound into a "musical database," as well as propose a curricular reform in which aural skills precedes courses in written theory.

Music Iconography, Opera, Gender and Cultural Revolution – The Case Study of the Kwok On Collection (Portugal)

This study aims to revisit the creation of opera, symphonic versions of opera and ballet (yangbanxi) during the period of the Cultural Revolution of Mao's China. Beginning with the Kwok Collection (Fundação Oriente, Portugal), I aim to establish a new vision of the yangbanxi (production and reception) by means of an analysis of sources with musical iconography. The focus of the study is on questions of gender and the way in which the feminine was an indispensable tool for the construction and dissemination of the idea of a new nation-state. This study thus aims to make a new contribution to the area, showing how the construction of new opera heroines, communist and of the proletariat, is built on the image of the first “heroine-villain” constructed by the regime, Jiang Qing, the fourth wife of Mao Zedong. The title chosen demonstrates the paradox of the importance of woman in opera and in politics at a time when the only image to be left to posterity was that of a dominant male hero, Mao Zedong.

The Making of World Flutes

All cultures have their specific ways of constructing their flutes, which fit within their particular and usually unwritten music theories, aesthetics, and practices. Folktales and mythology, like music iconography, however, offer very little reliable descriptive information about flute construction techniques or even flutes as material objects; artistic license, such as exaggeration, understatement, ambiguity, hyperbole, deception, exists in both the narrative and visual arts. To understand why cultures construct their flutes in the ways they do, the narrative arts with their use of metaphor, symbolism, double entendre, and other ways of saying (and writing or singing) things often provide indigenous perspectives about processes, including flute construction. This chapter discusses the construction of some world flutes in three case studies: the Warao of Venezuela, the Buganda of Uganda, and the Japanese.

The Music Repertoire of the Society of Jesus in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1565–1773)

The paper presents the research project coordinated by the University of Warsaw and financed by the Minister of Science and Higher Education as part of the “Tradition 1a” module of the National Programme for the Development of Humanities. The main task of this research project is the documentation of the Jesuit music repertory produced and disseminated on the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The results of the project work will be published in a new editorial series, which will include catalogues of sources and music iconography, monographs, databases and critical editions of music-related sources of Jesuit provenience. The publications will appear in print and on-line. The expected research results will serve not only musicologists, but also representatives of other fields of humanities. The work of the international research team is hoped to restore to the national heritage the forgotten monuments of Jesuit musical culture and should lead to a reliable assessment of their historical value. The results of the research of the international team of scientists will influence the present-day sense of identity of the countries which in the past jointly formed the literary culture our Commonwealth.