Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology
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Fryderyk Chopin in popular instrumental music
Get PDFThe author considers whether Fryderyk Chopin and his oeuvre may be regarded as part of popular culture - and if so, to what extent. However, the text is mostly taken up with analysis of popular instrumental music inspired by Chopin’s works in various ways: from simple quotation, adaptation and transcription to more sophisticated instrumentation and arrangement, free improvisation or even the creation of a completely new work derived from a single motif or sample from Chopin. Consequently, the author deals with the problem of reception, but also with the issue of transculturation and the relationship between high and popular culture. The article shows and describes the variety of Chopin inspiration in a wide range of styles and genres of popular music, such as rock music, easy-listening, electronic music, dance music and disco
Interpreting Puccini’s Suor Angelica: An application of the semiotics of temporality
Get PDFThis article summarizes recent discussions in the secondary literature of the semiotics of temporality, understood not as time per se but as the “time signified” by the signs in any semiotic system. Drawing especially on theories of the late Raymond Monelle and noting parallels with Monelle in work of, for example, Abbate, Daverio, Kinderman, Hatten, and Berger, the article posits that states of “temporality” in music can correlate with the syntactic signification of linear, teleological motion through time, whereas states of “atemporality” can correlate with syntactic signification of suppressed linear motion through time. As one of the distinguishing semantic characteristics of post Classical music, the signification of extended moments of atemporality is understood as a central expressive issue in the structure of Puccini’s Suor Angelica (from the II trittico of 1918), an opera that divides approximately into two halves: an atemporal half focused on portraying the Roman Catholic church, and a temporal half focused on exploring the character of Angelica, where both halves also include “tropes of temporality” cued by juxtapositions of temporal and atemporal signifiers. That the church in Suor Angelica is elevated to the position of the drama’s primary antagonist is asserted as one of the ways with which the piece engages with the aesthetics of “realism”, an aesthetic that, in turn, informs an interpretation of the opera’s ending, which includes a deus ex machina in the form of an appearance of the Virgin Mary and an apparition of Angelica’s dead son
On certain ‘tools’for research into the perception and creation of music and the complex ways in which they affect one another
Get PDFPerception is a constructive mental process, which cannot be considered impersonally. Similarly, music cannot be cognised solely on the basis of its score, since its coming into being is strictly connected to the activation of human memory and sound imagination. The patterns that emerge from the sounds of heard music enable the listener to draw conclusions regarding the structures those sounds embody. However, such conclusions are accompanied by a degree of uncertainty, which concerns not just the perceived moment of the heard music, but also the way in which it is represented in the listener’s memory. Perception is an inferential, multi-layered, uncertain process, in which particular patterns seem more likely than others. Mental representations of those probabilities lie behind such essential musical phenomena as surprise, tension, expectation and pitch identification, which are fixed elements of theperception of music. The aim of the present article is to describe the essence of three selected types of music modelling, based on spectral anticipation (Shlomo Dubnov), based on memory (Rens Bod), and exploiting the dynamic character of music to obtain information (Samer Abdallah and Mark Plumbley). All these models take account of the element of uncertainty that accompanies the perception of music; hence they make use the foundations of information theory and statistical analysis as measurement ‘tools’. The use of these tools makes it possible to obtain numerical rates, which inform us of the degree of predictability of the musical structures being analysed. One crucial advantage of these methods is the possibility of evaluating them in respect to the use of real musical structures, deriving from actual music, and not abstract structures formed for the purposes of research. We obtain cognitive insight into the analysed music by employing methods of a mathematical provenance, and so we have the possibility of examining music whilst taking account of the role of the listener, but with the use of objectivised methods
About music, philosophy and science...
Get PDFThe text attempts to answer the question whether musicians need a philosophy of music. The answer to the question of what music contributes to philosophy - a question superordinate in relation to the investigations of the links between philosophy and music - can be formulated clearly, since we find it in the texts of the most prominent representatives of European philosophical thought, including Schopenhauer, whose ideas are discussed in the paper. These issues are also discussed in literature which explores philosophical issues, by such classics of the genre as Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse, whose profound descriptions bring us closer to an understanding of that which music does directly, by expressing spheres beyond words that cannot be expressed otherwise than through music. Karl Popper regards polyphony as the greatest discovery of European culture, and provides evidence of the closeness of science and philosophy. These three levels of approaching the relationship between philosophy and music lead to demonstrating the axiological essence of music, revealed by performers, who make it possible for music to exist to the full in its sonority, unveiling its metaphysical perfection to its listeners
The cataloguing of musical sources in Silesia by German musicologists from the University of Wroclaw during the first half of the twentieth century
Get PDFThe most important task undertaken by German musicologists in Wroclaw during the first half of the twentieth century was to catalogue the musical sources of the whole of Silesia, supervised by the Institute of Music (Seminar of Musicology) at the University of Wroclaw, which arose out of the former Royal Academic Institute of Music, established in 1812. The Institute of Music was the first centre to catalogue local musical sources in Wroclaw and the whole region. The Institute’s library was founded during the secularisation process of 1810, and large collections of musical sources were transferred there from regional Catholic churches and monasteries. Thanks to the efforts of Otto Kinkeldey and his doctoral student Hans Erdmann Guckel, the library’s stock was set in order for the first time at the beginning of twentieth century, with clear, uniform shelf-marks given to individual items. In the late 1920s, complex cataloguing was established by Max Schneider and four of his students, Heribert Ringmann, Fritz Koschinsky, Fritz Feldmann and Josef Wittkowski, who searched for unknown and uncatalogued musical sources in the provinces of Silesia. Cooperation with Berlin’s Central Catalogue led to the preparation of detailed descriptions of sources in the form of index cards, though unfortunately only one copy of each card was made and they are now believed to be lost. More detailed evidence was recently found in Schneider’s papers, including reports and correspondence. This enables us to partially reconstruct the scope of the cataloguing campaign, the localities visited and the repertoire that was found. Some of the collections discovered during that campaign and taken to Wroclaw have survived, giving us the possibility of further research orientated towards reconstructing the picture of musical life in Silesia
On the need for methodocentrism in music teachers training system
Get PDFThe main idea of this paper, dedicated to Professor Andrzej Rakowski, is to emphasize that the pedagogy concentrated around the school curriculum and school subjects (eg. Music) has become more and more outdated. More useful seems to be a pedagogy oriented towards the so-called Great Author Concepts (Methods) of Music Education, eg. Dalcroze, Orff, Kodaly, Gordon and others. The author of the report provides a justification for his opinion, as well as specifying its purpose and the conditions under which it was formed. Primarily, the proposed approach involves combining the universality of the Methods with the individual preferences of both the teachers (representing the Method) and the students, providing the possibility of choice. The author sees the special value of that point of view in the integrative character of these Methods - combining an active and creative approach to music with the students’ perceptual and intellectual development. The report also highlights the requirement for a high level of teacher competence in the use of all the methods. Taking into the consideration all of the above (discussed in more detail in this report), the author puts forward a proposal for the reform of the system of training music teachers. According to the author, the system ought to be founded on the Methods (e.g. on one of them, particularly where the Concept/Method is already well developed)
Gdańsk carillon tablatures
Get PDFThe music collections of Gdańsk State Archive include music written for the automatic carillon of Gdańsk Main Town Hall. These are four tablatures with a unique notation system that appears only in Gdańsk sources. The oldest tablature (consisting of four volumes) was produced in the years 1769-1775; two others (one volume each) were copied in 1775 and 1776; the fourth was compiled in the years 1808-1812. The tablatures contain a total of 653 chorale settings. Their author was Theodor Friedrich Giilich, who programmed the Town Hall carillon from 1764 to 1776. The Main Town Hall carillon played the chorales every hour. Two different chorales could be programmed on the carillon drum simultaneously. A longer chorale signalled the passing of an even-numbered hour and a shorter chorale an odd-numbered hour. The chorales were changed every Saturday. The four-volume tablature contains chorale settings for the whole year, settings of funeral hymns and instructions for changing the chorales on the carillon drum and programming chorales for special occasions (such as the arrival of the king, the death of a prominent figure, such as the monarch, the mayor, a city councillor or a councillor’s wife, and elections to the City Council, as well as the opening and closing of St Dominic’s Fair). One of the single-volume tablatures includes Old Lutheran Church songs, another has Reformed Evangelical Church songs, and the fourth tablature contains chorales arranged for successive weeks of the year. This article presents the Gdańsk carillon tablatures and explains the principles behind their musical notation
Chopin: Visual Contexts
Get PDFThe drawings, portraits and effigies of Chopin that were produced during his lifetime later became the basis for artists’ fantasies on the subject of his work. Just after the composer’s death, Teofil Kwiatkowski began to paint Bal w Hotel Lambert w Paryżu [Ball at the Hotel Lambert in Paris], symbolising the unfulfilled hopes of the Polish Great Emigration that Chopin would join the mission to raise the spirit of the nation. Henryk Siemiradzki recalled the young musician’s visit to the Radziwiłł Palace in Poznań. The composer’s likeness appeared in symbolic representations of a psychological, ethnological and historical character. Traditional roots are referred to in the paintings of Feliks Wygrzywalski, Mazurek - grający Chopin [Mazurka - Chopin at the piano], with a couple of dancers in folk costume, and Stanisław Zawadzki, depicting the composer with a roll of paper in his hand against the background of a forest, into the wall of which silhouettes of country children are merged, personifying folk music. Pictorial tales about music were also popularised by postcards. On one anonymous postcard, a ghost hovers over the playing musician, and the title Marsz żałobny Szopena [Chopin’s funeral march] suggests the connection with real apparitions that the composer occasional had when performing that work. In the visualisation of music, artists were often assisted by poets, who suggested associations and symbols. Correlations of content and style can be discerned, for example, between Władysław Podkowinski’s painting Marsz żałobny Szopena and Kornel Ujejski’s earlier poem Marsz pogrzebowy [Funeral march]. The testimony of people who visited the Cracow apartment of Stanisław Przybyszewski suggests crucial links between Wojciech Weiss’s lost painting Chopin that hung there and the host’s aesthetic writings and legendary sessions of nocturnal improvisations. Against the background of that iconography, Jerzy Duda-Gracz’s idea of painting all Chopin’s works, subsequently brought together in the cycle Chopinowi Duda-Gracz [From Duda-Gracz for Chopin], is quite exceptional, in terms of its genesis, the extent of Chopin’s oeuvre and also the way in which music is transformed into painting. The artist attempted to capture the atmosphere of Polish landscapes visited by the composer, linking them to particular works. The Chopin cycle possesses a clear stylistic and symbolic identity, although it is impossible to establish a universal pattern for translating music into visual art. Although Zbigniew Rybczyński employed a camera and advanced cinematographic techniques, his depiction of Chopin’s Marche funebre from the Sonata in B flat minor (in his suite of films The Orchestra) refers to Romantic-symbolic interpretations and to previous pictorial visualisations. The director dresses his actors in historical costumes and places them in front of the Paris Opera. To the rhythm of Chopin’s music, they play out - using theatrical expression typical of silent film, pantomime, ballet and tableaux vivants - a story of maturing and ageing
The notion of nature in modern music theory and history as seen hy Carl Dahlhaus and Karol Berger
Get PDFModern music theory, ignoring the problems connected with the subject’s auditive experience but referring to the objective laws of nature, was criticised by Carl Dahlhaus, although he accepted - to a certain extent - the hypothesis of historical determinism. Dahlhaus links this turning point in the history of reflection on music with the transition from the ‘ontological contemplation’ of the Tonsystem to the ‘aesthetic contemplation’ of the Tonkunstwerk, the fundamental characteristic of which is the idea of ‘wholeness’ (die Idee der Ganzheit). The new conception of the discourse on the theory and history of modern music proposed by Karol Berger in his book A Theory of Art (2000) bears testimony to crucial changes in the contemporary humanities linked to the so-called ‘cognitive revolution’. According to Berger, the fundamental characteristic distinguishing modern art from premodern art is its autonomy. Berger distances himself from the modern tradition of theoretic- aesthetic discourse treating the work of art, including the work of music, as an axiologically neutral entity independent of ‘human nature’, that is, of the functioning of our memory, imagination and cognitive mechanisms, and also not having a specific social function. At the centre of Berger’s theoretical interests is aesthetics, as broadly understood, coupled with ethics and history, poetics and hermeneutics. He is not interested - like Dahlhaus - in considering ‘what art is’ or ‘what music is’ , but poses the question: ‘What should the function of art be, if art is to have a value for us ?