by | September 7, 2013 · 1:00 am

Ikonografia muzyczna: Studia i materiały

new series

In 2012 the Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk launched the series Ikonografia muzyczna: Studia i materiały, edited by the team of the Katalog Źródeł Muzycznych led by Paweł Gancarczyk. The first issue of the series is the collection Z badań nad ikonografią muzyczną do 1800: Źródła – problemy – interpretacje (Research into music iconography before 1800: Sources, issues, interpretations).

The series will publish studies on inventory, analysis, and interpretation of art works with musical themes. Its interests include all the traditional areas of musical iconography (depictions of musical instruments, musical scenes, images of musicians, etc.) as well as wider issues of the presence of music in visual arts.

Comments Off on Ikonografia muzyczna: Studia i materiały

Filed under Instruments, New series

Tagged as ,

by | September 5, 2013 · 1:00 am

Dance Your PhD

 

In 2008 Science magazine and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science hosted the first ever Dance Your PhD Contest in Vienna.

Calls for submission to subsequent annual Dance Your PhD contests followed suit, attracting hundreds of entries.

For these contests, practitioners transform their bodies into animating media and conduct body experiments to test their hypotheses. This body-work offers a medium through which they can communicate the nuanced details of their findings among students and colleagues. The Dance Your PhD contests expand and extend what it is possible for scientific researchers to see, say, imagine, and feel.

This according to “Dance Your PhD: Embodied animations, body experiments, and the affective entanglements of life science research” by Natasha Myers (Body & society XVIII/1 [2012] pp. 151–189). Above and below, the winning dance from 2017.

BONUS: John Bohannon, who started the contest, presents a TED talk about it here.

Comments Off on Dance Your PhD

Filed under Curiosities, Dance, Humor, Science

Tagged as ,

by | September 1, 2013 · 1:00 am

Pachelbel and immune response

pachelbel

In an experiment, 80 students were each randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions: no treatment (control), music only, imagery only, and music and imagery combined.

The first group was asked to sit quietly for 17 minutes. The second group listened to a recording of Pachelbel’s D-major canon. The third treatment used directed imagery to help the subjects visualize the bone marrow, a primary source of lymphocyte production, and the radiation of cleansing lymphocytes to various areas of the body. The fourth treatment combined the music and the directed imagery.

The second, third, and fourth treatments resulted in significant increases in the subjects’ immune response. The fourth treatment, however, did not show a significant increase over those of the second and third.

This according to “The effects of music and biological imagery on immune response (S-IgA)” by Chung Tsao Chien, et al., an essay included in Applications of music in medicine (Washington, D.C.: National Association for Music Therapy, 1991, pp. 85–121.

Today is Pachelbel’s 360th birthday! Below, Rob Paravonian discusses other uses of the celebrated canon in D.

BONUS: The notorious rubber-chicken performance.

1 Comment

Filed under Baroque era, Curiosities, Science

Tagged as , , , ,

by | August 27, 2013 · 1:00 am

Current research in systematic musicology

sound-perception-performance

In 2013 Springer launched the series Current research in systematic musicology with Sound—perception—performance, edited by Rolf Bader.

The collection covers recent concepts of synchronized systems, evolutionary concepts, the basic understanding of performance as Gestalt patterns, theories of chill as performance goals or historical aspects, the neurocognitive basis of motor action in terms of music, musical syntax, and therapeutic aspects.

Also presented are state-of-the-art applications in performance realizations, such as virtual room acoustics, virtual musicians, new concepts of real-time physical modeling using complex performance data as input, and sensor and gesture studies with soft- and hardware solutions.

Comments Off on Current research in systematic musicology

Filed under New series

Tagged as

by | August 25, 2013 · 1:00 am

Wayne Shorter’s punishment

 

In a 2012 interview, Wayne Shorter described a life-changing incident.

One day when he was in high school, Shorter, who was not a musician at the time, was called to the vice-principal’s office, “and there’s my mother and father, and they had all the forged letters I wrote, signing a doctor’s name, my parent’s name, and everything like that.”

“I was put in the music [theory] class because I played hooky, and the teacher was a disciplinarian—when people were talking in the back of the room, he took the chalk and threw it at them.”

“This teacher said that music could take form in three avenues. He had a record of a lady from Peru named Yma Sumac; she had that range—high octaves and all that stuff. Then he brought out another record, Igor Stravinsky’s The rite of spring, which is happenin’. The third record he pulled out was Charlie Parker. And then, when he was talking, I was thinking of a movie unfolding. And I was like, ‘I want to be in that movie.’”

This from “Moment to moment: A conversation with the Wayne Shorter Quartet” by Renee Rosnes (JazzTimes XLIII/2 [March 2013] pp. 22–27).

Today is Shorter’s 80th birthday! Below, performing in 1986.

Related articles

 

 

 

 

1 Comment

Filed under Curiosities, Jazz and blues

Tagged as , , ,

by | August 23, 2013 · 1:00 am

St. Denis and Radha

isainyn001p1

Presenting a hyperbolization of categories of otherness through mapping markers of race, Orientalism, and sexuality onto the white middle-class female body, Ruth St. Denis’s Radha functions as a site of the condensation and displacement of desire.

In this work, St. Denis achieved a combination of Delsartism’s transcendent spirituality with the Oriental orgasmic in the spectacle of a goddess delirious with her own sexuality who chooses to renounce the powerful pleasure of her body for a chaste union with the transcendent.

This according to “Dancing out the difference: Cultural imperialism and Ruth St. Denis’s Radha of 1906” by Jane C. Desmond (Signs: Journal of women in culture and society XVII/1 [fall-winter 1991] pp. 28–49; reprinted in Moving history/dancing cultures: A dance history reader [Middletown: Wesleyan University press, 2001] pp. 256–270.

Above, St. Denis performing Radha in 1908; below, a documentary contextualizes the work in her career and influences.

Related post: Ted Shawn and Native American dance

2 Comments

Filed under Curiosities, Dance

Tagged as , , ,

by | August 21, 2013 · 1:00 am

The compleat mezzo

 

In a 2005 interview,  Dame Janet Baker explained some of her career choices.

“With the greatest respect to mainstream opera, a great many of the mezzo roles are not that interesting. You are either a nurse or a nanny or a companion or something…and I thought ‘My goodness me, I’m going to be bored witless!’”

“I wanted to do things that interested me from the theatrical point of view and from the musical point of view, which meant that I went down very lesser-known, interesting paths, because I was free from the repertory system. And I was glad about that.”

This from “The compleat mezzo´by David J. Baker (Opera news LXX/4 [October 2005] pp. 32–35).

Today is Dame Janet’s 80th birthday! Below, in recital with Schubert’s An die Musik.

Comments Off on The compleat mezzo

Filed under Opera, Performers

Tagged as , , ,

by | August 19, 2013 · 1:00 am

Primate dance

lemur

The only clear difference between human dance and primate dancelike behavior is that the former is culturally patterned; otherwise, attributes only vary in terms of their complexity.

Dance, therefore, is not a human invention—it is a human variation on a primate theme.

This according to “The origins of dance: The perspective of primate evolution” by Sandra T. Francis (Dance chronicle XIV/2–3 [1991] pp. 203–220). Above, a lemur trips the light fantastic; below, the story behind a popular YouTube video.

Comments Off on Primate dance

Filed under Animals, Curiosities, Dance

Tagged as

by | August 15, 2013 · 1:00 am

Mike Seeger, according to Bob Dylan

 

Although he was only eight years younger, Bob Dylan called Mike Seeger (1933–2009) a father figure, and considered him the ultimate embodiment of a folk-star persona. Recalling him in Chronicles. I (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), Dylan wrote:

“Mike was unprecedented. He was like a duke, the knight errant. As for being a folk musician, he was the supreme archetype. He could push a stake through Dracula’s black heart. He was the romantic, egalitarian, and revolutionary type all at once—had chivalry in his blood…”

“He played all the instruments, whatever the song called for—the banjo, the fiddle, mandolin, autoharp, the guitar, even harmonica in the rack….He played on all the various planes, the full index of old-time styles, played in all the genres and had the idioms mastered—Delta blues, ragtime, minstrel songs, buck-and-wing, dance reels, play party, hymns and gospel—being there and seeing him up close, something hit me. It’s not as if he just played everything well, he played these songs as good as it was possible to play them.” (pp. 69–71)

Today would have been Mike Seeger’s 80th birthday! Below, Seeger in 1976.

Comments Off on Mike Seeger, according to Bob Dylan

Filed under Curiosities, North America, Performers

Tagged as , ,

by | August 14, 2013 · 1:00 am

From the field

carnival of memory

The Society for Ethnomusicology and Smithsonian Folkways launched From the field, a series of multimedia reports for the online Smithsonian Folkways magazine, in July 2013 with Carnival of memory: Songs of protest and remembrance in the Andes by Jonathan Ritter.

Co-produced by Smithsonian Folkways and SEM, this peer-reviewed series presents recent ethnomusicological field research to a general audience. Reports combine audio and video recordings, photographs, and narrative to explore music-making and social issues at locales around the world.

(Photo by Jonathan Ritter)

3 Comments

Filed under Ethnomusicology, New series

Tagged as , ,