by | September 8, 2012 · 1:00 am

ReSonare

ReSonare, an online peer-reviewed graduate music journal, was launched by the Department of Music at the University of Alberta in 2011. The journal strives for an interdisciplinary focus both within the various domains of music study and across other academic fields in the arts, humanities, and sciences.

ReSonare aspires to serve as an effective sounding board for all areas of music research, including but not limited to: ethnomusicology, musicology, music theory, composition, performance, philosophy of music, music technology, music pedagogy, music cognition, and interdisciplinary studies.

Experimental and cross-disciplinary work and research in popular music, electronic music, voice, poetics, dance, theater, and visual art are welcomed. Authors, composers, and performers are encouraged to take advantage of the multimedia capabilities of ReSonare in developing creative scholarship.

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by | September 5, 2012 · 1:00 am

John Cage unbound

John Cage unbound: A living archive is an online multimedia project about the American composer and avant-garde music pioneer.

Hosted by the New York Public Library, the project invites musicians and others to submit videos of their own interpretations of Cage’s work for addition to the online archive. Visitors to the site can view submitted videos as well as a portion of the library’s collection of Cage’s original notes and manuscripts.

Today is Cage’s 100th birthday! Below, his classic 1960 appearance on I’ve got a secret.

BONUS: Cage’s own recipe for dogsup.

Related article: Source: Music of the avant-garde

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by | September 2, 2012 · 1:00 am

Journal of sonic studies

Launched in 2011, Journal of sonic studies provides a platform for theorists and artists to share relevant work regarding the sonic environment.

JSS presents, stimulates, and brings together a versatility of possible approaches; that is why it pays attention to the sonic design of consumer articles (cars, washing machines, coffee-makers) as well as to the influence of hearing on the relation between mother and fetus; to urban noise pollution as well as the use of sonic weapons in war zones; to interventions in public space by sound artists as well as the effects of background music in shopping malls.

JSS advocates multidisciplinary research and is open for knowledge from various fields of study—from history to philosophy, sociology and anthropology; from medical studies to architecture, legal and technical sciences; from ecology to sound art, performance and media studies; and so on.

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by | August 30, 2012 · 1:00 am

Glass harmonica horrors

Although it was championed by the likes of Mozart and Benjamin Franklin, in its heyday the glass harmonica was also the object of considerable trepidation.

In the 18th century music was regarded by some as a form of nervous stimulation that could cause a range of maladies, and the glass harmonica was considered especially dangerous.

The glass harmonica player and composer Karl Leopold Röllig stated that the instrument could “make women faint, send a dog into convulsions, make a sleeping girl wake screaming through a chord of the diminished seventh, and even cause the death of one very young”, and physicians warned of possible ill effects including muscle tremors, prolonged shaking of the nerves, fainting, cramps, swelling, paralysis, and seeing ghosts.

This according to Bad vibrations: The history of the idea of music as cause of disease by James Kennaway (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). Below, Thomas Bloch menaces us with Mozart’s adagio, K.617.

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by | August 27, 2012 · 1:00 am

Operatic degeneracy II

 

La verità mascherata (Milan, 1681), an anonymous and apparently fictional account of a libertine’s reform, includes a description of an elaborate opera performance on the occasion of a royal wedding.

The account suggests that 17th-century Italian audiences were neither silent nor attentive during overtures and instrumental interludes; that the danced intermezzi were barely considered part of the opera at all (Italians apparently regarded stage dancing as comical and grotesque at that time); and that drunkenness and lasciviousness were freely depicted on the stage. The story ends with the hero renouncing opera and retiring to a monastery.

This according to “A Jesuit at the opera in 1680” by Edward Joseph Dent, an essay included in Riemann-Festschrift: Gesammelte Studien–Hugo Riemann zum sechzigsten Geburtstage überreicht von Freunden und Schülern (Leipzig: Hesse, 1909, pp. 381–393); the book is covered in RILM’s Liber amicorum: Festschriften for music scholars and nonmusicians, 1840–1966 (2009, 100 years after the article was published).

Below, an excerpt from a 1996 performance of La Calisto, a 1651 opera by Francesco Cavalli that could have helped to form the impression of Italian comic opera depicted in La verità mascherata.

Related article: Operatic degeneracy I

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by | August 25, 2012 · 1:00 am

Performing Islam

Launched by Intellect in 2012, Performing Islam is the first peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal about Islam and performance and their related aesthetics. It focuses on the sociocultural, historical, and political contexts of artistic practices in the Muslim world.

The journal covers dance, ritual, theater, performing arts, visual arts and cultures, and popular entertainment in Islam-influenced societies and their diasporas. It promotes insightful research of performative expressions of Islam by performers and publics, and encompasses theoretical debates, empirical studies, postgraduate research, interviews with performers, research notes and queries, and reviews of books, conferences, festivals, events, and performances.

Below, UNESCO’s introduction to the semā ceremony of Turkey’s Mevlevi order.

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by | August 20, 2012 · 1:00 am

Singing and safety

In a study investigating how singing while driving affects driver performance, 21 participants completed three trials of a simulated drive concurrently while performing a peripheral detection task (PDT); each trial was conducted either without music, with participants listening to music, or with participants singing along to music.

Results suggest that singing while driving alters driving performance and impairs hazard perception while at the same time increasing subjective mental workload. However, singing while driving does not appear to affect driving performance more than simply listening to music. Drivers’ efforts to compensate for the increased mental workload associated with singing and listening to music by slowing down appear to be insufficient, as evidenced by relative increases in PDT response times in these two conditions compared to baseline.

This according to “A simulator study of the effects of singing on driving performance” by Christina M. Rudin-Brown (inset), Genevieve M. Hughes, and Kristie L. Young (Accident analysis & prevention, 30 July 2012). Many thanks to the Improbable Research blog for bringing this study to our attention!

Related article: Expression Synthesis Project

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by | August 18, 2012 · 1:00 am

A Knud Jeppesen resource

Sponsored by  Det Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen, the free online resource Knud Jeppesen (1892–1974) presents lists of the composer’s works, his music editions, his musicological writings, and literature on Jeppesen, along with a discography and portraits.

Jeppesen was one of the 20th century’s foremost musicologists, and as such he gained an international reputation. Professionally, Jeppesen worked as an organist at Sankt Stefans Kirke (1917–32) and Holmens Kirke (1932–46), both in Copenhagen, as a teacher at Det Kongelige Danske Musikkonservatorium (1920–47) in Copenhagen, and as the first professor of musicology at Aarhus Universitet (1946–57). Jeppesen, who was a pupil of, among others, Thomas Laub and Carl Nielsen, produced many compositions, most of which were both performed and published.

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by | August 15, 2012 · 1:00 am

Jimi Hendrix’s asteroid prophecy

A timely prophecy remains hidden in the words of Jimi Hendrix—a connection between history and religions, linking the future with the past—that predicts the existence of an asteroid on course to impact the earth.

Hendrix was an authentic Afro-American Cherokee seer, the World Shaman who glimpsed a trajectory of extraterrestrial events already in place during his lifetime. The dominators have silenced the seers throughout the ages and retarded history by impeding humanity’s advance towards anti-asteroid technology.

In 1993 Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who acquired rights to a large collection of Hendrix memorabilia for the Experience Music Project in Seattle, loaned the Hendrix family a sum of money to finance a lawsuit against a Hendrix production company in Hollywood, thus facilitating the coverup of Hendrix’s asteroid prophecy.

This according to Rock prophecy: Sex and Jimi Hendrix in world religions—The original asteroid prediction and Microsoft connection by Michael Fairchild (Rochester: First Century, 1999). Below, Hendrix’s If 6 was 9—a song closely connected with the prophecy.

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by | August 12, 2012 · 1:00 am

Gabrieli crosses the border

Giovanni Gabrieli’s unique achievement was the unification of two opposing styles that had been developing throughout the Renaissance: the local Venetian technique involving antiphonal masses of sound and the international technique of interwoven melodic strands.

Having assimilated both traditions, he resolved their conflicts in his Symphoniae sacrae of 1597 and especially of 1615; in so doing, he crossed the border between Renaissance and Baroque and penetrated well into the new territory.

To allow full appreciation of these works, the choirs must not be widely separated: The optimum situation is that depicted in the frontispiece of the tenor part of the fifth volume of Praetorius’s Musae Sioniae (1607, inset; click to enlarge), with one choir on the floor and the other two in balconies on their right and left. The impact must come not from the juxtaposition of masses of sound, but from clarity of texture.

This according to “Texture versus mass in the music of Giovanni Gabrieli” by George Wallace Woodworth, a contribution to Essays on music in honor of Archibald Thompson Davison (Cambridge: Harvard University Department of Music, 1957, pp. 129–138.

Today is the 400th anniversary of Gabrieli’s death! (His birth date is not known.) Below, Green Mountain Project performs his Magnificat à 14, which was published posthumously in 1615.

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