In 2013 a new scholarly journal, ҚұрманғазыАтындағы Қазақ ҰлттықКонсерваториясыныңХабаршысы/ВестникКазахскойНациональнойКонсерваторииим. Курмангазы/The Bulletin of the Kazakh National Conservatory of the Name of Kurmangazy (ISSN 2310-3337), was launched by the Kazakh National Kurmangazy Conservatory in Almaty.
This quarterly is published in Kazakh, Russian, and English. Its goal is to present a broad spectrum of research in arts, musicology, and contemporary music education, as well as in social studies, humanities, culture, criticism, and journalism. The full text of the first issue is available here.
Below, Kyz Žibek by Evgenij Grigor’evič Brusilovskij, a Kazakh opera discussed in the inaugural issue.
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Balázs Mikusi, the chair of RILM’s Hungarian committee and the head of the music collection at the Országos Széchényi Könyvtár in Budapest, was recently leafing through one of the library’s folders of unidentified manuscripts when he encountered four pages of what looked to him like Mozart’s handwriting.
He soon realized that he had stumbled upon the original score of the piano sonata in A, K.331—one of Mozart’s most beloved sonatas, with the famous “alla turca” finale! The finding has additional significance because the score clears up long-standing questions regarding certain passages.
Congratulations to RILM’s own Balázs Mikusi! Below, Olga Jegunova performs the work in 2012.
At an early age Charles Adrien Wettach (1880–1959) ran away to join a circus; there he became a highly accomplished clown.
In 1903 he teamed up with Marius Galante, who was already performing under the name Brick; they decided to call their act Brick and Grock, and Wettach’s stage name was born. Around 1906 Grock switched partners to work with the the already-renowned Umberto Guillaum, who performed as Antonet.
Grock’s signature was comic stunts with musical instruments; he was an expert performer on the violin, piano, guitar, clarinet, saxophone, and—most memorably—the concertina.
He performed in various duo and solo acts around the world with great success, and in 1951 Grock founded his own circus. After he retired in 1954 he continued to take great pleasure in showing visitors the gardens at his Italian estate, often fooling them by pretending to be the gardener.
This according to “Concertina clowns. II: Grock” by Göran Rahm (Concertina world 458 [June 2014] pp. 30–33). Below, some memorable concertina moments.
The roadhouse is an American institution—the little bar on the edge of town that comes alive when the sun comes down with back-to-basics roots music. Texas is the honorary home of roadhouse music, and Stevie Ray Vaughan was its uncrowned king.
Johannes Kreidler’s 2009 conceptual performance piece Fremdarbeit (Outsourcing) was composed, as the title suggests, by means of hiring foreigners. Kreidler payed a composer in China and a computer programmer in India to study his previous work and produce a chamber composition in his style.
This according to “Fremdarbeit: Kompositionsaktion für Ensemble, Sampler und Moderator–Ein Gespräch” by Carolin Naujocks (Positionen: Texte zur aktuellen Musik 93 [November 2012] pp. 26–29).
Below, a documentary about Fremdarbeit with English subtitles.
The system is based on one devised in the late 19th century by Victor-Charles Mahillon, the curator of musical instruments at the Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles/Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel. Mahillon divided instruments into four broad categories according to the sound-producing material—air column, string, membrane, or the instrument’s body. For the most part, Mahillon’s system was limited to instruments used in Western classical music; Hornbostel and Sachs expanded Mahillon’s system to make it applicable to any instrument from any culture.
The Hornbostel– Sachs system is formally modeled on the Dewey Decimal Classification for libraries. It has five top-level classifications, with several levels below those, adding up to over 300 basic categories; it was updated in 2011 as part of the work of the MIMO Project – Musical Instrument Museums Online.
Below, perhaps the grooviest time you’ve ever had with instrument classification.
Several of the statistics that were generated could give pause; for example, respondents overwhelmingly voted that celebrities should be scandalous (97%), while fewer than 20% believed that they should be likeable, intelligent, or decent (see above).
Particularly notable were the responses to a fictitious celebrity—Lukács Bíró, Vinczai’s dentist—among a group of 29 well-known names. 25% of the respondents claimed familiarity with Bíró, and 60% of them expressed dislike for him. He was the 8th most rejected person in the group.
Below, Jimmy Zámbó, a formerly extant, but still potentially hateful, Hungarian celebrity who is profiled in the article.
In 1657 Samuel Capricornus was summoned from Pressburg (now Bratislava) to take up the position of Kapellmeister to the Stuttgart court of Duke Eberhard III of Württemberg—to the surprise and disappointment of the organist of the Stuttgart collegiate church, Philipp Friedrich Böddecker, a distinguished composer in his own right, who had hoped to obtain the job himself.
Disputes quickly arose between Capricornus and Böddecker, as well as Böddecker’s brother David, a zinck player, who complained that Capricornus had required him outside the provisions of his contract to play the quart-zinck and to sing “such high-pitched, difficult passages” (so hohe und schwehre Stückh) that he was unable to comply “because of bodily weakness, short breath, and also declining vocal ability” (Leibsschwachheit, kurzem Athems, auch vergehende Stimme halber); and furthermore had insulted him publicly, saying he played the zinck “only like a cow-horn.”
Capricornus responded with a lengthy complaint of his own, presenting a gloomy picture of conditions in the ducal musical establishment and accusing the organist Böddecker of gluttony and drunkenness (Fressereien und Saufereien) and of being at the center of a whole network of intrigue against the Kapellmeister; moreover, “[he] did not deal especially gently with his inimical rival from the organ bench, and used all the arts of dialectic and learning to convict him of musical ignorance.”
This according to “Samuel Capricornus contra Philipp Friedrich Böddecker” by Josef Sittard (Sammelbände der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft III/1 [November 1901] pp. 87-128), which includes a complete edition of Capricornus’s grievance letter as found by the author in the ducal archives.
Leonard Cohen’s recordings and performances in the 1960s were situated ambiguously between popular and art culture.
This division had traditionally been maintained through a strict hierarchy of socially enforced aesthetic barriers, but in the 1960s and 1970s popular genres staked a claim to high culture status by framing their creators as autonomous artists. In film this was achieved through auteur theory, where the director was viewed as the sole creative force, and in popular music through the rise of singer-songwriters such as Cohen, who both composed and performed their own material.
Another means of authenticating popular music in the 1960s was through the mythologizing of performance. In happenings and other gatherings, performance was valued for its apparent immediacy and lack of premeditation. On the other hand, performance is also understood in precisely the opposite manner—a clever performance is by implication not genuine, but calculating. This ambivalence is expressed repeatedly in Cohen’s own songs and performances.
This according to “Racing the midnight train: Leonard Cohen in performance” by Stephen Scobie (Canadian literature 152–153 [spring–summer 1997] pp. 52–68).
Below, performing Suzanne, an iconic song from the 1960s, in 2008.
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An experiment tested the assumption that music plays a role in sexual selection.
Three hundred young women were solicited in the street for their phone number by a young male confederate who held either a guitar case or a sports bag in his hands or had no bag at all.
Results showed that holding a guitar case was associated with greater compliance to the request, thus suggesting that musical practice is associated with sexual selection.
This according to “Men’s music ability and attractiveness to women in a real-life courtship context” by Nicolas Guéguen, Sébastien Meineri, and Jacques Fischer-Lokou (Psychology of music XLII/4 [July 2014] pp. 545–49).
Below, a study of men’s reactions to a man with a guitar case.
The main entrance to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’s exhibition Lou Reed: Caught between the twisted stars opens up on Lincoln Plaza, directly adjacent to the The Metropolitan Opera house. On a sunny day, the Met’s … Continue reading →
Seven strings/Сім струн (dedicated to Uncle Michael)* For thee, O Ukraine, O our mother unfortunate, bound, The first string I touch is for thee. The string will vibrate with a quiet yet deep solemn sound, The song from my heart … Continue reading →
Introduction: Dr. Philip Ewell, Associate Professor of Music at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, posted a series of daily tweets during Black History Month (February 2021) providing information on some under-researched Black … Continue reading →
For it [the Walkman] permits the possibility…of imposing your soundscape on the surrounding aural environment and thereby domesticating the external world: for a moment, it can all be brought under the STOP/START, FAST FOWARD, PAUSE and REWIND buttons. –Iain Chambers, “The … Continue reading →
