by | August 20, 2020 · 6:00 am

Musimid: Revista brasileira de estudos em música e mídia

 

In 2020 the Centro de Estudos em Música e Mídia launched Musimid: Revista brasileira de estudos em música e mídia (ISSN 2675-3944), a peer-reviewed journal published every four months. Musimid focuses on interdisciplinary texts on music with an emphasis on musical semiotics, along with topics in musicology, history, and criticism.

Among the topics of interest to the journal, issues related to performance and its models stand out: relationships with the body and its different layers of mediation throughout history; the role of technology and media platforms in the processes of poetic communication; the conception of a musical instrument and its interpolation with various devices, existing or obsolete (microphones, amplification, high-fidelity), and media platforms; variations in listening patterns, taste, and aesthetic sensitivity, through the introduction of different sound media; soundscapes and changes in sensitivity; the interfaces of the musical language with other artistic languages; issues related to contemporaneity, globalization, identity, belonging, and affective bond, through music; cultural, musical and media memory; and the constitution of stable values ​​in the ephemeral era.

Below, a music-forward excerpt from Back to the future, the subject of an article in the inaugural issue.

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by | August 18, 2020 · 6:00 am

Salieri’s wit

Unlike the troubled fictional character of stage and screen, the real Antonio Salieri was described by Lorenzo Da Ponte, the master librettist of Mozart’s operas, as “a most cultivated and intelligent man…whom I loved and esteemed both out of gratitude and by inclination…more than a friend, a brother to me.” He also had a nimble wit and enjoyed jokes at his own expense.

Salieri wrote a memoir that is now lost, but some quotations from it have survived. In one particularly winning anecdote, Salieri is recounting the première, in 1770, of his second opera, Le donne letterate. The applause is vigorous, and the young composer follows the audience out into the street, hoping to soak up more praise. He overhears a group of operagoers:

“The opera is not bad” said one. “It pleased me right well” said a second (that man I could have kissed). “For a pair of beginners, it is no small thing” said the third. “For my part” said the fourth, “I found it very tedious.” At these words, I struck off into another street for fear of hearing something still worse.

This according to “Salieri’s revenge:  He was falsely cast as music’s sorest loser, and he’s now getting a fresh hearing” by Alex Ross (The New Yorker XCV/15 [3 June 2019] 26–31; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2019-6047).

Today is Salieri’s 270th birthday! Above, a portrait by Joseph Willibrord Mähler; below, excerpts from Axur, re d’Ormus, one of Salieri’s collaborations with Da Ponte.

BONUS: The finale of Axur as depicted in the film Amadeus.

Related article: Telemann’s wit

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by | August 13, 2020 · 6:00 am

Sopranos and intelligibility

Many English-speaking people attending concerts sung in English readily state that they cannot understand the words being sung.

In a study, 21 subjects (15 women, 6 men), all Western classically trained performers as well as teachers of classical singing, sang 11 words—“beat, bait, Bob, boat, boot,” representing the most frequently occurring vowels in practice, and “bit, bet, bat, bought, but, book,” representing the other six vowels that occur less frequently—arranged in six random orders, singing on two pitches a musical fifth apart.

The sung words were cropped to isolate the vowels, and listening tapes were created. Two listening groups, four singing teachers and five speech-language pathologists, were asked to identify the vowels intended by the singers. In general, vowel intelligibility was lower with the higher pitch, and vowels sung by the women were less intelligible than those sung by the men.

This according to “Vowel intelligibility in classical singing” by Jean Westerman Gregg and Ronald C. Scherer (Journal of voice XX/2 [June 2006] 198–210; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2006-8289).

Many thanks to Improbable research for bringing this article to our attention! Above, an illustration from the study; below, Jason Eckardt’s Dithyramb).

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by | August 10, 2020 · 6:00 am

Bhatkhande’s vision

The four all-India music conferences that were organized between 1916 and 1925 by Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande were seminal events in the formation of a nationally based urban middle class and a predominantly Hindu-oriented music culture that encompassed performers, patrons, and audiences.

The conferences were the first modern gatherings on a national scale to combine discussion and analysis of musical practice and theory with a showcase of musical performance. A close examination of the reports generated by the conferences offers an opportunity to examine the conflicting social and political ideologies that were shaping north Indian classical music over a critical decade, as the aristocratic music of the courts was transformed into a national music.

Bhatkhande believed that music had to be taken over by the Western-educated, nationally conscious middle class, and that the patronage of the wealthy princes formerly given to support their private music establishments should be transferred to national institutions supporting music. Through the medium of the conferences he took the initiative of bringing together these disparate groups: traditional musicians, traditional patrons, and the new, primarily Hindu intelligentsia.

A number of topics recur through all four conferences: discussion of śrutis and rāga variations; a call for adoption of a uniform, systematic notation for Indian music; and a proposal for the creation of a national academy of music. The extent to which agreement and action on these proposals proved elusive can be read as indicating the degree of cross-cultural conflict that underlay the conferences, and gives a sense of the extent to which Bhatkhande’s vision resonated with the broader concerns of his day.

This according to “The All-India Music Conferences of 1916–1925: Cultural transformation and colonial ideology” by David Trasoff, an essay included in Hindustani music: Thirteenth to twentieth centuries (Nai Delli: Manohar, 2010 331–56; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2010-15196).

Today is Bhatkhande’s 160th birthday! Below, a documentary on the Music Institute that he established.

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by | August 6, 2020 · 6:00 am

Songs in times of plague

Plague, an indiscriminate and deadly disease, was an important aspect of European intellectual and cultural life during the Renaissance. Perennial outbreaks throughout the period, both small and catastrophic, provoked changes and reactions in religion, medicine, government, and the arts—from literature, sculpture and painting, to music.

In 2020 A-R Editions published Songs in times of plague, an anthology that brings together, for the first time, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century motets and madrigals, for three to six voices, written in response to plague (RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2020-4123). These pieces, with texts commemorating outbreaks and addressing holy figures and secular patrons, reveal how music was imbricated in the wider concerns of societies habitually caught in the grips of pestilence.

Above, The triumph of Death, a 1503 depiction of the death of Petrarca’s Laura; below, one of the works included in the edition, Roland de Lassus’s setting of Petrarca’s Standomi un giorno.

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by | August 3, 2020 · 6:00 am

Zao and “champagne socialism”

In the mid-1980s Congo-Brazzaville was chafing under the heel of a military regime that fed its impoverished people irrelevant political slogans while the elite dined on champagne and caviar. Zao, a humorous band led by Casimir Zoba, a former schoolteacher in a comical pseudo-military uniform singing in an extravagant mixture of Senegalese French and local slang, seemed to pose no real threat to the authorities.

But Zoba was no ordinary humorist or village idiot, and underneath his buffoonish image was a hard-edged political and social critic. While Zao’s music was tolerated as comic relief, the group delivered sharp critiques of bureaucracy, corruption, gender relations, and abuse of power in the “champagne socialism” of the military dictatorship.

This according to “Couching political criticism in humor: The case of musical parodies of the military in Cameroon and Congo-Brazzaville” by Lyombe S. Eko, an essay included in Music and messaging in the African political arena (Hershey: IGI Global, 2019, 87–107; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2019-16663).

Below, Ancien combattant, Zao’s most popular song, and a case study in the article.

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by | July 29, 2020 · 6:00 am

Paul Taylor’s musicality

While his contemporaries were moving away from conventional music and toward experimental styles, Paul Taylor embraced folk music and Baroque composers.

Both genres typically have simple meters and lend themselves to choreographically friendly units of eight counts, and Taylor created movement that works through the expected meter, and, consequently, the phrasing of the music. But musical and choreographic phrases are often at odds in Taylor’s works, a discrepancy that creates intricate and engaging work that has expanded the scope and significance of American dance.

This according to “Paul Taylor’s meticulous musicality: A choreomusical investigation” by Todd Coulter (Dance chronicle XXXVII/1 [2014] 63–84; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2014-2397).

Today would have been Taylor’s 90th birthday! Above, Taylor in 1960 (photo by Carl Van Vechten); below, Esplanade, one of the works discussed in the article (The introduction—mostly quoting from Taylor— lasts about 1¾ minutes).

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by | July 27, 2020 · 6:00 am

Pina Bausch and Tanztheater

Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater draws upon elements of both dance and theater, juxtaposing, for example, choreographed gesture, the spoken word, and popular song. It echoes her heritage of Ausdruckstanz, but extends that tradition in a radical approach to form, content, and subject matter.

In impulse, Bausch has much in common with the postmodernists: in her rejection of illusion, her reconceptualization of what constitutes dance, and the imperative to make dance aware of itself. Her retention of realism, wrapped in a theatrical though fragile framework, results in a very different mode of dance making and performing.

The seeming authenticity of the performers’ experiences onstage and the unapologetic presentation of everyday bodily experience demand a reciprocal sensory response from the audience. The stark presentation of gender conflict, both within individuals and between women and men, and the raw and gutsy energy of performance that demands a visceral response, seem to hold a special attraction for a young audience, particularly in Europe.

This according to “Pina Bausch: Dance and emancipation” by Norbert Servos and Patricia Stadié (RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 1998-31027), an essay included in The Routledge dance studies reader (London: Routledge, 1998, 36–45; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 1998-31023).

Today would have been Bausch’s 80th birthday! Above, Pina Bausch (©Joerg Lange) is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0; below, an excerpt from Pina by Wim Wenders.

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by | July 23, 2020 · 6:00 am

Serenatas for Dublin

Johann Sigismund Kusser (or, as he was known in England and Ireland, John Sigismond Cousser) was a Hungarian-born musician who, after a varied and successful career in the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire, settled in Ireland in July 1707.

In Dublin Kusser composed and directed the performances of at least 21 festive serenatas that marked important state occasions in Dublin between 1709 and his death in late 1727. Presented before the elite of local society in semistaged productions featuring costumes, stage machinery, and dancing, these works functioned as something of an operatic substitute in the city’s cultural life.

In 2020 A-R Editions issued Kusser: Serenatas for Dublin (RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2020-1963), a critical edition comprising the three serenatas for which music remains extant. Two of these can be proven definitively to be of Kusser’s own composition, and the third, due to its musical style, overall structure, and subject matter, is almost certainly his creation as well. These works provide remarkably rare musical evidence of a key component of the artistic offerings of Dublin’s viceregal court during the early decades of the eighteenth century.

Below, “Come, lovely peace, the conqu’ror calls” from An idylle on the peace, one of the works included in the volume.

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by | July 20, 2020 · 6:00 am

Slahal and individual expression

Slahal is an Indigenous team-oriented gambling game that involves skill, luck, strategy, supernatural assistance, and a specific song genre. As part of a long tradition of Indigenous gaming in the Pacific Northwest, it has become a popular form of intertribal competition throughout the region.

Song is integral to slahal; the songs, with their catchy melodies and driving frame drum accompaniment, are sung loudly and enthusiastically by the hiding team. Group singing provides opportunities for individual expression through variation of form and rhythmic accompaniment, as well as polyphony and antiphonal singing.

This according to Slahal: More than a game with a song by James Everett Cunningham, a dissertation accepted by the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1998 (RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 1999-22855).

Below, an example from British Columbia.

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