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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by | August 6, 2012 · 1:00 am

The HandySinger system

The HandySinger system is a personified tool developed to express naturally a singing voice controlled by the gestures of a hand puppet.

The system’s hand puppet consists of a glove with seven bend sensors and two pressure sensors. It sensitively captures the user’s motion as a personified puppet’s gesture. To synthesize the different expressional strengths of a singing voice, the normal (without expression) voice of a particular singer is used as the base of morphing, and three different expressions—“dark”, “whisper”, and “wet”—are used as the target.

This configuration provides musically expressed controls that are intuitive to users. The experiment evaluates whether (1) the morphing algorithm interpolates expressional strength in a perceptual sense, (2) the hand-puppet interface provides gesture data at sufficient resolution, and (3) the gestural mapping of the current system works as planned.

This according to “HandySinger: Expressive singing voice morphing using personified hand-puppet interface” by Tomoko Yonezawa, Noriko Suzuki, Kenji Mase, and Kiyoshi Kogure, an essay included in NIME-05: New interfaces for musical expression (Vancouver : University of British Columbia Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre, 2005).

Below, a perhaps unrelated HandySinger.

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by | August 4, 2012 · 1:00 am

Quaderni del Centro Studi Canzone Napoletana

Libreria Musicale Italiana (LIM) launched the series Quaderni del Centro Studi Canzone Napoletana in 2011 with La canzone napoletana: Le musiche e i loro contesti. Edited by Enrico Careri and Anita Pesce, the book comprises papers presented at the eponymous conference held from 4 through 5 June 2010 at the Casa Murolo-Palazzo Maddaloni, Naples.

Below, Enrico Caruso, who brought canzone napoletana to the world’s attention, sings the genre’s most famous song, Giovanni Capurro and Eduardo di Capua’s O sole mio.

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by | July 30, 2012 · 1:00 am

DayDay MoeMoe’s boingboxes

David Moore (a.k.a. DayDay MoeMoe, a.k.a. Umburkus) is a musician, artist, furniture maker, and visionary hermit hidden away in a secretive corner of a haunted-looking house in the fading Delta cotton town of Rosedale, Mississippi.

The inquisitive, anarchic child of a family that once held considerable sway there, Moore now lives alone in a house covered in vines and filled with his own artwork alongside untold numbers of sweetly unnerving semicollectibles, a trusty dog, and myriad musical instruments and furniture of his own invention, including his signature schizoid zither, a.k.a. buzzstick,  a.k.a. boingbox. The music that he plays with them is unique and unforgettable.

This according to “SoLost: Discovering a visionary hermit musician-artist” by Dave Anderson (Oxford American, 25 July 2012). Below, Umburkus discusses his oeuvre.

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