Intercultural musical dialogue in St John Passion by Sofia Gubaidulina

Sofia Gubaidulina is one of the most important composers living today. Among her many works acknowledged and awarded prizes on the international forum, the diptych St John Passion and St John Easter [The Resurrection of Christ according to St John], the opus magnum of that outstanding Russian composer, occupies a special place. This work focuses the most important features of her music, such as a profound theological message based on a compilation of fragments from the Old Testament, Gospels and the Apocalypse of St John, as well as her musical rootedness in the cultural tradition of the churches of both East and West. Gubaidulina adapts the achievements of the artistic avant-garde in new and original ways, while at the same time she is an ardent champion of traditional universal values grounded in the message of the Bible and Christian cultural tradition. This paper presents St John Passion by Sofia Gubaidulina in the context of its theological and intercultural dialogue, as well as attempting to characterise the phenomenon represented by this composer, who raises anew reflection on the fate of humankind in the context of existential questions, while remaining faithful to the idea of high art, exquisite and open to various understandings of the idea of beauty.

A critical (and interdisciplinary) survey of popular music genre theories

Genres are among the most discussed topics in popular music studies. The attempt to explain issues as complex and layered as how musical genres are born, how they work and what they ontologically are cannot avoid opening a box full of theoretical problems, questions and tools that need to be understood and used in order to say something significant on genre today. Despite the long story of this theoretical debate (roots of which can be traced back to ancient Greece) and the variety of disciplines involved (e.g. literature, music and film studies, but also philosophy, sociology, cultural studies and semiotics), it is difficult to find survey papers that can give an overview of such a rich research environment. This paper attempts to fill that void by trying to systematize the main (contemporary) perspectives on musical genre, in particular non-essentialist theories coming from the overlapping fields of musicology and sociology. Most importantly, its overview stresses the necessity of an interdisciplinary study of musical genre, which – as an exemplum of extraordinarily layered phenomenon of the human production of culture – intertwines technical, social, discursive, commercial, historical and other elements, thus requiring an approach capable of accounting for as much of its many layers of meaning as possible.

Philology as a systematic method of documentation and its application to the study of Constança Capdeville’s musical works

The advent of new music technologies has led to a rapid growth of the audio preservation field. Music is not independent of its medium, and this growing loss of independence calls for a transdisciplinary approach with a strong technological component. Musical compositions created in the second half of the twentieth century exist in the intersection of technology, embodiment, and sound and thus widen the importance of aspects such as human and non-human interactions. This article will reflect on these issues and how they reframe (digital) philology methods through the works of Constança Capdeville. The works by this seminal artist are accompanied by an extensive archive that includes scores, recorded sounds, video and images, among other documents. It will be demonstrated how a reflexive approach to digital philology can bring concealed archival stories to light while fostering new meanings on what it means to preserve our sound heritage. Resource optimisation is one of the reasons methods of traditional philology are particularly useful for the preservation of contemporary musical heritage. Today the amount of information is excessive, and categorisation and organisation are complex. Most information exists in the form of digitised documents, that comply with certain requirements traditionally applied to secular paper registers while assessing qualities such as reliability and authenticity. Traditional philology approaches framed around these qualities are insufficient for born-digital documents. A reflexive approach to digital philology, focussed both on the creation of digital resources (from digitalisation to cataloguing) and the criticism of digital sources, as a solution the digital treatment of documents is proposed. A comparative approach will be used to understand in what ways digital and analogue media intertwine in the forms we think, reflect, historicise, and preserve our sound archives, and how we make visible aspects that were previously concealed through new forms of categorising and digitising documents.

Narrative moment. Musical performance according to Lawrence Kramer and James Baldwin

My aims are to investigate how the concept of narrative moment may be helpful in capturing the role of music in creating profound communication on the level of performing as well as listening to musical performance. I aim to show how sharing a culminating moment in a musical experience may lead to inducing a state of self awareness and confidence in place of critical separation and distrust. I discuss Lawrence Kramer’s idea of the narrative moment explained in original in reference to a literary example and an improvised music. It is presented as an example of communicative potential in music performance, which as I argue, is worth exploring and explaining further. Suggesting a possibility of narrative moment in the experience of musical performances offers a comprehensible and applicable vision of communicative potential of music that is far reaching even if rarely achieved; a possibility of communication that is direct and intuitive, flexible and affective. Defining musical meaning in terms of its music’s communicative power and far reaching social consequences suggests deep connections between the social/intersubjective, individual/subjective and aesthetic aspects of life. The proper explanation of the meaning of music requires drawing from different domains, including metaphors and highly persuasive literary and musical examples.

Tools of the trade: click-tracks and conductors

This essay will examine the manner in which composers and artistic directors have used conductors and click-tracks within the context of new music ensembles performing integrative concerts. The analyses and examples provided will rely for the most part on material gathered during in-depth interviews that I conducted with artistic directors, composers, conductors, and musicians, all of whom are professionally active in the new music field in Europe (and beyond). I will examine the application of both click-tracks and conductors and demonstrate that their implementation represents an active choice made by either the composer and/or artistic directors. Both click-tracks and conductors are viewed by the interviewees as potential tools with somewhat overlapping possibilities and capacities and their presence is no secondary phenomenon of the music. They become instead a means for the above actors to meet their objectives, be they artistic, pragmatic, technical, or otherwise.

Back to structures and signs – remarks on the possibilities of structural aesthetics of music

Is it possible to talk of mental patterns underlying aesthetic reflections, and has the constant recurrence of particular ideas in the area of aesthetics some deeper explanation? Structural aesthetics of music is an authorial research conception which enables interpretation of phenomena from the area of history of music aesthetics, and in this way provides its systematised picture. The conception uses the ideas of structural linguistics: binary phonological opposition and the historicalliterary process in the approach of Jan Mukařovský. The article also contains an example of using this conception in relation to the aesthetics of antiquity (sophists, Plato, Aristotle), Descartes and impressionism.

Art and emotion: the variety of aesthetic emotions and their internal dynamics

The aim of this paper is to propose an interpretation of aesthetic emotions in which they are treated as various affective reactions to a work of art. I present arguments that there are three different types of such aesthetic emotional responses to art, i.e., embodied emotions, epistemic emotions and contextual-associative emotions. I then argue that aesthetic emotions understood in this way are dynamic wholes that need to be explained by capturing and describing their internal temporal dynamics as well as by analyzing the relationships with the other components of aesthetic experience.

Musemes in affect. Philip Tagg’s model of music analysis

The paper is an attempt to synthesize the most important aspects of a model of popular and film music analysis proposed by British musicologist Philip Tagg. Tagg, using the category of musemes – universal meaning units, isolated from the musical structure of the composition on the basis of criteria established for every given case – examines selected pieces using multi-level semiotic analysis. In his model Tagg takes into account both the importance of the broadly understood cultural context and the intertextuality of the piece. He also emphasizes the role of affect in musical communication, which is necessary to fully understand the meaning of a musical work.

Experience as cognition: musical sense-making and the ‘in-time/ outside-of-time’ dichotomy

Musical sense-making relies on two distinctive strategies: tracking the moment-to-moment history of the actual unfolding and recollecting actual and previous sounding events in a kind of synoptic overview. Both positions are not opposed but complement each other. The aim of this contribution, therefore, is to provide a comprehensive framework that provides both conceptual and operational tools for coping with the sounds. Five major possibilities are proposed in this regard: (i) the concepts of perspective and resolution, which refer to the distance the listener takes with respect to the sounding music and the fine-grainedness of his/her discriminative abilities; (ii) the continuous/discrete dichotomy which conceives of the music as one continuous flow as against a division in separate and distinct elements; (iii) the in time/outside-of-time distinction, with the former proceeding in real time and the latter proceeding outside of the time of unfolding; (iv) the deictic approach to musical sense-making, which conceives of an act of mental pointing to the music, and (v) the levels of processing, which span a continuum between primitive sensory reactivity to actual sounding stimuli and high-level symbolic processing.