Hogrefe Verlag für Psychologie inaugurated its series Praxis der Musiktherapie in 2009 with Spiel—Musik—Therapie: Methoden der Musiktherapie mit Kindern und Jugendlichen by Sandra Lutz Hochreutener. The book explores numerous approaches to music therapy for children and adolescents, including silence, improvisation, song composing, instrumental music, body-centered music games, language, and role-playing.
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Along with its wide-ranging discussions of theoretical topics, the 1650 treatise Musurgia universalis by the German Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) includes what may be the first transcriptions of bird songs.
The illustration gives the nightingale’s song followed by those of the chicken, the cuckoo, the quail, and the parrot; the latter says χαίρε (“hello”). Vox cuculi is notated as the familiar falling minor third heard in cuckoo clocks (see below).
A facsimile edition of the treatise has been issued by Georg Olms (Hildesheim, 1970; reprinted 2006).
Related article: Athanasias Kircher’s global reach
Filed under Animals, Baroque era, Musicologists, Nature, Notation, Science, Visual art
“Spatial performance as a function of early music exposure in rats” (Third triennial ESCOM conference: Proceedings [Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 1997], pp. 688–694) reports on an experiment in which 90 rats were randomly assigned to one of three groups: The Mozart group (30 rats) was exposed to a Mozart piano sonata 12 hours a day for 21 days in utero and 60 days after birth. The Glass and White Noise groups were similarly exposed to the music of Philip Glass or to white noise. The rats’ spatial performance in a 12-unit T maze was then assessed; the Mozart-bred animals ran significantly faster and made significantly fewer errors than the Glass-bred or white noise-bred animals.
In “Do rats show a Mozart effect?” (Music perception: An interdisciplinary journal 21/2 [2003], pp. 251–265), Kenneth M. Steele points out that the in utero exposure would have been ineffective because rats are born deaf. Further, a comparison of human and rat audiograms in the context of the frequencies produced by a piano suggests that adult rats are deaf to most of the pitches in the sonata.
Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music, Animals, Classic era, Curiosities, Nature, Reception, Science
Intended for a wide community of artists, researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers, the Journal of applied arts and health (ISSN 2040-2457) was launched by Intellect in 2010. Seeking to provide a forum for interdisciplinary studies of arts in health care and health promotion, it defines health broadly to include physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, occupational, social, and community health.
The journal’s inaugural issue includes two music-related articles: “Choral singing and psychological well-being: Quantitative and qualitative findings from English choirs in a cross-national survey” by Stephen M. Clift, Grenville Hancox, Ian Morrison, Bärbel Hess, Gunter Kreuz, and Don Stewart; and “Emotional responses to music listening: A review of some previous research and an original, five-phase study” by Michael J. Lowis.
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Besides his training as a graphic artist, Jean Paucton, the prop man at the Palais Garnier in Paris, studied beekeeping at the Jardin du Luxemboug. In the mid-1980s he ordered his first hive, which was delivered to him at the Opéra, sealed and full of bees. He had intended to take it to his country house north of Paris, but when his plans changed the building’s fireman—who had been raising trout in a huge firefighting cistern under the building—advised him to place them on the seventh-floor roof at the back of the Palais Garnier.
Paucton gradually increased the number of hives to five, and from approximately 75,000 bees he annually collects about 1000 pounds of honey, which he packages in tiny jars, each with the label “Miel récolté sur les toits de l’Opéra de Paris, Jean Paucton”.
Thanks to the concentration of fragrant flowering trees and shrubs at the Bois de Boulogne, the chestnut trees in the Champs Élysées, and the linden trees in the Palais Royal, his honey has an intense floral flavor; it is sold at the Opéra’s gift shop and at the Paris gourmet shop Fauchon.
This according to “Who’s humming at Opera? Believe it or not, bees” by Craig S. Smith (The New York times 152/52,526 [26 June 2003] p. A:4).
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Filed under Animals, Architecture, Curiosities, Dramatic arts, Food, Nature, Science
Cows respond strongly to changes in the muted, subliminal strata of the cowshed soundscape; the elimination of such sounds, or their masking through music and other designed sound foregrounds, causes pronounced disturbances in the animals’ physiology and behavior.
A positive soundscaping for cowsheds must take advantage of the subjective implications of sounds such as the first moo of a newborn calf, which carries the strongest psychological impact even if it cannot be described as aesthetically beautiful.
This according to “The blessed noise and little moo: Aspects of soundscape in cowsheds” by Maru Pöyskö, an essay included in Soundscapes: Essays on vroom and moo (Tampere: Tampereen Yliopisto, Kansanperinteen Laitos, 1994). Below, a newborn calf demonstrates the little moo.
Related article: Radio for cows
Filed under Acoustics, Animals, Curiosities, Nature, Science
After Haydn’s funeral in Vienna his former employer, Prince Esterházy, obtained permission to have the body exhumed and moved to Eisenstadt. The matter apparently then slipped his mind until, 11 years later, a distinguished visitor remarked to him that it was fitting that he possessed the composer’s remains.
Not wishing to contradict his guest’s assumption, Esterházy quickly arranged for the coffin to be brought to Eisenstadt; but when it was opened for identification, the horrified officials discovered a headless body—only Haydn’s wig remained. Inquiries led to the revelation that two students of phrenology had bribed the gravedigger and stolen the composer’s head a few days after the funeral.
Esterházy was furious, and demanded that the skull be returned, but efforts to claim it were thwarted when the wife of its keeper secreted it in her straw mattress and lay down on top of it, feigning illness. When Esterházy offered a bribe, he was given the skull of an old man, and this was placed in Haydn’s coffin. The composer’s skull was not reunited with his other remains until 1954.
This according to “An incongruous postlude” in Haydn: A creative life in music by Karl and Irene Geiringer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). For more on Haydn’s physiognomy, see this Bibliolore post.
Above, a drawing of the marble tablet—now lost—erected by Haydn’s devoted pupil Sigismund von Neukomm at the composer’s Viennese resting place in 1814 (click to enlarge). The inscription includes Haydn’s favorite quotation from Horace, non omnis moriar, set by Neukomm as a puzzle canon.
More posts about Haydn are here.
Filed under Classic era, Curiosities, Science
A black hole situated in the center of a galaxy amid a group of thousands of galaxies collectively called the Perseus Cluster (shown above) emits waves in a frequency equivalent to a B♭ 57 octaves below middle C, or one million, billion times lower than the lowest sound audible to the human ear. The Perseus black hole’s sound waves have a frequency of 10 million years.
This information, from an article published online by NASA, resonates with the philosophical concept often associated with Pythagoras and Johannes Kepler of Musica universalis or music of the spheres.
Filed under Curiosities, Science
Franz Niemetschek’s legendary report that La clemenza di Tito was composed in 18 days was not seriously challenged until 1960, when Tomislav Volek published important archival materials relating to the chronology of the opera’s composition. Physical evidence from the autograph manuscript, including the remains of a fly squashed on the paper (probably by the composer in the heat of August), contributes to discrediting the hypothesis that Mozart’s work had begun before he signed his July 1791 contract for the opera.
This according to “The chronology of Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito reconsidered” by Sergio Durante (Music & letters, 80, no. 4 (Nov 1999): 560–594), where the evidence is described thus:
“On folio 114 of the autograph . . . a thick black spot in the shape of a cross is found. . . . On direct and close examination, the centre of the spot proves to host the remains of a fly (a kind of evidence not often found in music sources!). After a long reflection, my best guess is that the fly was smashed under the loose bifolium at the very time of composition, after it had unduly annoyed Mozart at work; he also provided a witty ‘service’ to the insect by marking a cross over it (‘requiescat’!); in any case, such was the force and determination of the action, combined with the gluing action of the ink, that the corpse is still stuck on the page after two hundred years of musicological investigations.” (p. 574)
More articles about Mozart are here.
Filed under Animals, Baroque era, Curiosities, Nature, Science, Source studies
Launched in 2009, Music and medicine (ISSN 1943‑8621) is a peer-reviewed journal published by the International Association for Music and Medicine (IAMM). The journal is intended for medical professionals, aiming to be “an integrative forum for clinical practice and research initiatives related to music interventions and applications of clinical music strategies in medicine.” While it naturally includes research in music therapy, the journal also invites work on “cultural implications of music in medicine in research and practice” as well as opinion papers on controversial topics.
Filed under New periodicals, Science
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