Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology
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The reliability of evaluation musical performance by music experts
Get PDFTo test the reliability of the evaluation of musical performances by musical experts, the protocols of the jury of an international music contest have been subjected to statistical analysis. The object of the analysis were 2156 jurors’ points and rank ratings, given by 28 members of the jury, assessing 77 different performances of one of Fryderyk Chopin’s polonaises, evaluated during the first stage of an international music competition. The analysis revealed the following: 1. very large interpersonal (inter-rater) differences of the jurors’ ratings, 2. despite these differences, there was a very high level of statistical significance of the inter-rater agreement (p<.ool) of the jurors’ evaluation, 3. despite the high level of statistical significance of inter-rater agreement of the evaluation of musical performance, this accounts for only 1/3 of the general variance of ratings. Conclusion: individual ratings of musical performance are not a reliable measure of musical achievement, even when given by music experts of the highest level
On the tenors of the symphony of nature-culture
Get PDFThe question of nature-culture and music is approached in the text from several perspectives as points of gravity and profiles, as the ‘tenors’ of considerations of the nature-culture relationship within the context of musical behaviours: 1) the biological tenor - culture as the simulation or imitation of nature (the dominant feature of the art of the Palaeolithic and the rituals of the Neolithic; derivatives in agrarian cultures); in this context, all musical behaviours, the kinetic, verbal, social and symbolic were centred around obtaining and celebrating crops - the results of purposeful activity, patient waiting and the benevolence of supernatural powers. The joy from a powerful hope in the survival of a community through abundant harvests seems to have been the source of the synergy (mutual stimulation) of all the components of socio-musical events, collective rituals and free individual expression. 2) the social tenor, where verbal-dance-musical behaviours (generally speaking - amusement) serve to ‘hew off and distinguish an individual within a group (‘nature’). Thus the nature-culture relationship is translated or reflected in the interplay between the collective and the individual. The dance itself is a play between the (‘natural’) group action and the (‘cultural’) individualised performance. The oscillation between the action of a group and the display of an individual also occur in whirling dances of couples interspersed with individual sung ditties. The social tenor, the transition from collective nature to a culture that is also individual, also concerns the practising of song repertoire, and it is an important factor in understanding cultural change. 3) the conscious-psychological tenor, in which music and musical behaviour are conscious manifestations of culture within historical processes, without necessary references to nature. The fundamental question in this aspect of discussion is the relative extent to which culture is given or created. There is no doubt that nature is given to man, whilst culture needs time. Reflection on the link between music and the social environment leads to the conclusion that nature tightens, while culture loosens, music’s bond with the situational-social context that is strictly ascribed to it. 4) the structural tenor of the musical work/behaviour, which highlights the microworld of nature-culture, particularly the oscillation of openness/change and closedness/ constancy of musical works or behaviours. The nature-culture model can be referred to the logic of development or stylistic change in musical output itself. Following that quartet of tenors, it is worth posing the question as to whether there exists a fifth, linking all the previous four, a ‘cosmic’, theological tenor in the symphony of nature-culture; in other words, whether there exists a ‘school’ of tenors
The muzykant as a product of nature and of culture
Get PDFThe article considers of the relations between nature and culture in reference to the traditional (folk) musician (‘muzykant’). His functions went beyond the strictly musical. Historical and ethnographical sources mention his supernatural abilities, his sacred and magical activities. He has been ascribed magical power, allowing him to influence the forces of nature and people’s health. The powers of him were believed to derive from his metaphysical practices and connection to nature. Some times he was accused of having links with demonic creatures. His ritual function, possibly taken over from the priests or shamans of pagan cults, endured in folk rites. In the rites of passage (during some family and annual ceremonies), in times of transition, places of crossing, traditional (folk) musician can take part in making a ritual din, believed as an effective manner against to demonic powers. It was a music awry, parody of music, eyen its inversion - a sort of ‘anti-music’, performed on ‘antiinstruments’, or on simple instruments
Fryderyk Chopin’s correspondence from the perspective of body studies. The discovery of corporeality
Get PDFThe author analyses Fryderyk Chopin’s correspondence within the context of the new humanities field of body studies. The socio-cultural anthropology of the body has been an object of study since the 1980s. It has enabled the extraction of the picture of a cultural body inscribed in Chopin’s correspondence, and it has also shown how his conception of his own soma and of the bodies of other people diverge from the Romantic convention of writing about corporeality. In the age of romanticism, sickness and physical weakness were glorified like a gift and a badge of spiritual aristocracy. A suffering and frail complexion became a value in the salons - a laissezpasser to the world of artistic sensitivity. Chopin never succumbed to that fashion. His record of his corporeal experience is strikingly un-Romantic, as can be seen, for example, when comparing it with the narration of sickness contained in the correspondence of Zygmunt Krasiński. The corporeal experience displayed by the great musician is striking in its modernity. Chopin rejects the Romantic lyricisation of sickness; his utterances are pithy, dominated by sarcasm and even physiological brutality, and the style of his description of corporeality employs grotesqueness, irony and absurdity. Human subjectivity sensed through the body paints a picture of a fragmentary, disharmonious self; people reveal themselves to the eyes of others not as a whole, but as an abbreviation, a representative detail. Visions of mechanised bodies, whose behaviour and actions are hyperbolised by the musician, bring us - especially during the last years of Chopin’s life - into a world where corporeality is a source of strangeness, and even repugnance. In the conclusion of the article, the author denies that Chopin’s music can be directly translated into a moving picture: she states that neither his illness nor any other experiences of his bodily existence can be treated in an illustrative way that purports to “illuminate” his music directly
‘Looking out fo r the Horizon The music of Gustav Mahler in the light of the theory of the aesthetic of reception by Hans Robert Jauss
Get PDFThe theory of the aesthetic of reception proposed by Jauss in the field of literature can be applied to research into the reception of the music of Gustav Mahler. In creating his symphonies ‘with every means of accessible technique’, the composer achieved what might be described as a reinterpretation of the conception of selected genres. In this way he disturbed the traditional ‘horizon of expectations’ of the potential audience, and significantly distanced himself from it. The most important consequence of this was the lack of understanding of his music by a section of his contemporary audience. Mahler justified the rightness of his own creative intuition with the famous sentence ‘my time will come’. In her article the author presents the fundamental theses of Jauss’s aesthetic of reception relating to his understanding of the ‘horizon of expectations’. She also indicates the manner in which Mahler distanced himself from that ‘horizon’, and how in individual symphonies he contributed to the expansion and reinterpretation of conceptions of genres which had previously been based on knowledge shared by the composer and the listener
Levels of modalization in existential and transcendental analysis: The matter of being-in-self
Get PDFThis essay reflects on some applications of Eero Tarasti’s existential semiotics to music analysis, starting from the asymmetry that marks the categories of “myself’ and “itself’. If it seems evident that we can know the musical being-in-itself, that is topics, norms, forms, and so on, we can wonder if and how we can know the being-in-myself, that is the pure kinetic energy before that it has token any kind of forms. As it is for Schopenhauer’s “Wille”, that firstly becomes objective as Platonic ideas, and secondly as spatio-temporal-causal natural realm; musical energy or “being-in myself’ takes shape firstly as virtual deep-level-figures, and secondly as spatio-temporal-actorial situations, within which being-for-myself struggles with the being-for-itself. Modalities (will, must, can, know) operate in both these two levels of taking shape, but at the first level we have to look for a transcendental musical subject, not characterized by specific historical and cultural features. Then, I introduce the notion of homeostasis, that is the principle that “regulates the global process of breaking away from an original state of rest or balance, and of the subsequent restoration of that balance”. Homeostasis allows us to analyze musical modalization at a deep level, where the transcendental subject takes the form of the being-in-itself. But the research of a transcendental subject is slightly different to that of the Moi, within which the being-in-myself is situated. To analyze the being-in-myself of an individual musical subject, we adopt a less universal homeostasis, that is a specific way to convey musical energy (melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, agogic, and so on) proper of Western music. So doing, I claim that one cannot recognize the first four measures of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata op. 7 as “the moment of Being-in-myself in all of its immediacy” as Tarasti does. Being-in-myself has to be examined in a different light
Investigating the pitch strength of short pur e-tone pulses in middle frequency range through their chroma recognition by absolute-pitch listeners
Get PDFA method is proposed for estimating the pitch strength of sounds by measuring the proportion of correct recognitions of their musical pitch (chroma) by expert listeners possessing full absolute pitch. Full absolute pitch (AP) is the ability of some musicians to preserve in their long-term auditory memory the pitch templates of the twelve chromatic tones of the contemporary music system (C, C#, D... etc.) based on the frequency A4 = 440 Hz. This ability is preserved across different octaves in most of the musical pitch scale. Five expert AP listeners, in individual, computer-run sessions, were asked to identify and name the pitch chromas of short tone pulses cut out of twelve sinusoidal vibrations corresponding to the chromatic scale C5 - B5 (523.3 - 987.8 Hz). These tone pulses were composed of n cycles. The value of n was 4, 8, and 16, and so the total number of stimuli investigated was 12 x 3 = 36. All these stimuli were presented in random order to the five AP listeners in a single test, which was run twenty-six times in consecutive sessions (the results of the first session were not used in computations). The results show an increase in correct chroma recognition (and consequently of the pitch strength of a pulse), with n rising from 4 to 16. At n = 4 or 8, the results show also a dependence of chroma recognition on the total pulse duration. Thus, for tone pulses with a low number of cycles (at n=4 and 8), the pitch strength diminishes with increasing pitch and is different in neighbouring parts of a withinoctave musical scale. The discovery of these differences may indicate the relatively high precision of the newly-presented method in estimating the pitch strength of musical sounds