The Blues and Older Minority Musicians XXVIII: More Than Just Music

The Blues has been a ubiquitous music genre for over 150 years throughout the United States. It's not Mississippi, but Phoenix shares a thriving Blues scene and many GeroBlues performers. This year, the “Bo Diddley Track” celebrates 28 years of continued performance of the Blues and Older Minority Musicians: More Than Just Music at GSA, a legacy of and memorial to former Executive Director Paul Kirschner. Join with your colleagues and local notable musicians for a rousing story of challenge, resilience, and some great music worthy of the true spirit of GSA and these great Blues performers to survive, thrive, and grow in the face of challenge and adversity. Enjoy the lecture, mini-performance and then a special musical event at an outstanding local music venue later in the evening. Enjoy one of the best parties at GSA!

A Multifunctional Model of a Modern Listener’s Behavior

The article focuses on strengthening positions of a modern listener in the context of the development of academic musical art. Since the end of the last century, there has been a surge in scientific interest in studying the audience of classical music. Listening experience is being analyzed on an equal basis with composition and performing. Interdisciplinary researches touch upon historical practices, semantic aspects and communication characteristics. However, today the very nature of listeners’ relationship with art is changing, too. The listener becomes an active participant in musical events, playing new roles — that of a musical critic, manager, expert, and even a co-author and performer of works. The formation of new listener’s functions in addition to the perception of music requires a revision of the audience evaluation factor, now based only on the sophistication of the “listening function”. The issue of justifying a new scheme, which would take into account the positions of all participants in a musical event in relation to each other, is extremely relevant. The public refuses the “vassal” role and steadily strengthens its position in the intergroup hierarchy by choosing new behaviors. While the leitmotif of the musical life of the 20th century was the theme of educating a wide audience of genuine taste and a deep understanding of musical content, today the listeners defend their freedom of choice. It is important to understand the reasons and predict the consequences of the increasing emancipation of not only the experienced listener, but also of the neophyte. Music streaming services make a significant contribution to this process. The growing popularity of two youth subcultures demonstrating a high interest in classical art — Dark Academia and Light Academia — deserves attention too.

Abwesenheit and Anwesenheit in Beethoven's Op. 81a

A sense of absence can be evoked in a piece of music through various means. For instance, the appearance of a musical event may be suggested through certain features while being noticeably obscured by others, or the arrival of an event that is strongly prepared ultimately may be conspicuously thwarted. Such strategies may be witnessed in the second movement of Beethoven's Sonata for Piano in E♭, Op. 81a. Significantly, Beethoven subtitled this movement "Abwesenheit"—that is, "Absence." This subtitle and also the layout of the movement arguably have programmatic implications possibly understandable as relating to landmark events that occurred in Vienna around the time of the sonata's composition.

The Memory About Skopje and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9

In 2013, the International Skopje Summer Festival (founded in 1980) was traditionally opened on June 21, the World Day of Music, with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. The opening ceremony had a symbolic message: the performance of the symphony marked the 50th anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Skopje in 1963. This musical event was the starting-point of the research which is aimed at presenting a contemporary redefinition of Beethoven’s musical legacy and to analyze the meaning of the composition in the context of memory about a particular urban environment. At the same time the primary topic for analysis was expanded with the recent cultural-political project titled “Skopje 2014,” realized in the last decade, with purpose to obtain a more dynamical level of discussion that marks the relationship between music and memory in the urban history of Skopje.

Perception

This chapter argues that the perception of music involves more than the syntactic and other relations recognized in most music theory. More precisely, the perception of music involves hearing features of the music metaphorically-as mental states and other states of affairs. It also involves hearing the musical event as an action. There are many examples of the aesthetic exploitation by composers of the capacity for perception of various relational properties of these general kinds. There are also differences and similarities between music and poetry, for which there is an account in the presented framework. The account also explains the possibility of music communicating new and unnamed emotions. The perception of relational properties is equally crucial in articulating the distinctive features of live performance. Music also contrasts with other art forms, in that the perception of relational properties, unlike literature, depiction or dance, is almost the only resource available to the composer. This makes the perception of relational properties of music uniquely significant for this art form.

Music Thinking Process: Unfolding the creation of the piece Résonances manifestes

Beyond the social and even the human, sound opens onto the intertwining of movements animating the lived experience. A sonic epistemology considers not only that the acoustic ecologies are enunciative of social relations and power dynamics, but also that they tell about the way reality is lived, experienced, organised: they are expressive, in themselves. This means, for an epistemology of phonosophy, that every perception of a sound implies a conceptual movement, which carries a mental dimension that could become the material for another thinking practice, for a sophia. This article approaches music as thinking in itself: a thought of the sonic. This affirmation will be expanded through the contribution of process philosophy (Whitehead, Deleuze and Guattari, Manning, etc.), which allows a musical event to be considered as an ecology, produced by the encounter of a multiplicity of bodies (human, sonic, technological, etc.). The processes of capture of forces involved and the different techniques required to increase the expressive potentialities of the musical assemblage will be unfolded through the case of Résonances manifestes, a comprovised music piece based on a sound score composed of field recordings from autonomous demonstrations.

Shaping Brahmsian Themes

This chapter studies six themes from Brahms’s violin sonatas, exploring many different ways that he crafts musical expression. Each theme demonstrates different aspects of Brahmsian compositional techniques, illustrating the infinitely varied ways he used harmony, texture, motivic evolution, and continuity in what has been described as “developing variation.” These discussions repeatedly show how a musical event that seems to be new (such as a surprising turn of harmony) quite frequently develops from something already heard, imparting the sensation that Brahms’s music is simultaneously drawing upon what has been heard and becoming something new. Awareness of these techniques prepares us for the later chapters, which focus on musical narratives that span entire movements or entire sonatas.

Opera and Beauty

Chapter 1 considers the emergence of a spectacular sensibility for song and singing in Paris after the 1820s. Parisian mélomanes wrote imaginatively and at length about opera, leaving for posterity a treasure trove of “souvenirs.” When contemplating the idea of beauty in the contemporary opera stage, these recollections often revisited a single musical event led by Henriette Sontag and Maria Malibran in 1829, which, they claimed, bequeathed to them something extraordinary: a new lyrical mood, at once blissful and discontented, which ushered into opera the divided affect of modernity. Théophile Gautier elaborated on this divided affect a few times in his poetry and in the process, he invented the figure of the diva, the allegory of beauty.

Segmentation of music festival visitors by values of hedonia, life satisfaction and eudaimonia

PurposeWith the growing interest in eudaimonia in the past years and the need to better understand festival visitors' motivation in the context of music festivals, this study aims to propose visitor segmentation based on the values of hedonia, life satisfaction and eudaimonia.Design/methodology/approachThe analysis in this study employs a case research method that follows the abductive paradigm. The authors begin their conceptual foundation with a review of the literature on hedonia, life satisfaction and eudaimonia. The authors then use the preliminary conceptual foundation as the basis of rival analysis through a focus group and interviews with senior executives, government officials, communities and other related stakeholders. The authors also carry out an exploratory factor analysis to determine the building blocks of eudaimonic festival experiences. Last, using cluster analysis, the authors support their conceptual proposition from the initial qualitative inquiries.FindingsFrom the three studies that the authors performed, their findings suggest that, based on hedonia and eudaimonia, festival attendees can be divided into three distinct segments: (1) pleasure seekers (i.e. visitors who look for personal pleasure, enjoyment and affection), (2) playful learners (i.e. visitors who not only seek pleasure, but also consider the urgency to think about the need to grow as a person) and (3) transcendentalists (i.e. visitors who seek a balance of pleasure, escapism, self-reflection, personal meaning and impact through attending festival activities).Research limitations/implicationsThis study argues that the ideas of hedonia and eudaimonia are present in the context of the music festival. Theoretically, this paper suggests that festival-goers can be divided into three clusters based on the values of hedonia and eudaimonia: pleasure seekers, playful learners and transcendentalists. Practically, this study suggests that festival organisers should consider developing music concert events by taking into account the eudaimonic and hedonistic desires, intrinsically possessed by the festival-goers, which is expected to add value to the produced musical event.Originality/valueThis study is the first to present visitor segmentation in a music festival setting based on the values of eudaimonia, life satisfaction and hedonia.