Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology
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Tonality and Neoclassicism in Stravinsky’s Sonata for Piano, Mvt. 2 (1924)
Full text linkIgor Stravinsky’s Sonata for Piano is an often overlooked yet important artifact of the composer’s neoclassicism. his treatment of tonality in the second movement is both literally and aurally more conventional than one might first guess. Stravinsky’s reliance on convention points to an ideology of continuity, one that honors the legacy of beethoven and other heroes. In doing so, Stravinsky’s Sonata brings forward old ideas wrought in new ways for a modern era. This essay examines ways of thinking about Stravinsky’s neoclassic style through analysis of the second movement of the Sonata focusing on the use of post-tonal techniques to create surprisingly tonal music.Igor Stravinsky’s Sonata for Piano is an often overlooked yet important artifact of the composer’s neoclassicism. his treatment of tonality in the second movement is both literally and aurally more conventional than one might first guess. Stravinsky’s reliance on convention points to an ideology of continuity, one that honors the legacy of beethoven and other heroes. In doing so, Stravinsky’s Sonata brings forward old ideas wrought in new ways for a modern era. This essay examines ways of thinking about Stravinsky’s neoclassic style through analysis of the second movement of the Sonata focusing on the use of post-tonal techniques to create surprisingly tonal music
The Second Death of Concept Albums World-Building and Unification Strategies in the Age of Streaming
Full text linkAs the end of the album format is apparently drawing near due to the radical change in music consumption habits motivated by streaming services, artists and genres interested in creating musical works with meanings broader than those of single songs find themselves in a situation worth analysing. Despite all appearances and expectations, I argue that nowadays artists willing to create narrative, thematic or generally conceptual contexts for their songs are living in a potential second golden age of concept albums. Some attempts at keeping the (concept) album alive are more alike to an act of resistance, others creatively take advantage of the same means of communication used by their digital enemy, in order to create something unique and capable of taking the place of the supposedly doomed CD/lP format. They are often transmedial works, thus requiring an interdisciplinary analysis. In this paper, I offer an overview of the contemporary situation of the album format (and concept album more specifically) and finally propose a classification of four forms of contemporary musical world-building strategies, starting from a selection of emblematic case studies.As the end of the album format is apparently drawing near due to the radical change in music consumption habits motivated by streaming services, artists and genres interested in creating musical works with meanings broader than those of single songs find themselves in a situation worth analysing. Despite all appearances and expectations, I argue that nowadays artists willing to create narrative, thematic or generally conceptual contexts for their songs are living in a potential second golden age of concept albums. Some attempts at keeping the (concept) album alive are more alike to an act of resistance, others creatively take advantage of the same means of communication used by their digital enemy, in order to create something unique and capable of taking the place of the supposedly doomed CD/lP format. They are often transmedial works, thus requiring an interdisciplinary analysis. In this paper, I offer an overview of the contemporary situation of the album format (and concept album more specifically) and finally propose a classification of four forms of contemporary musical world-building strategies, starting from a selection of emblematic case studies
Musemes in affect. Philip Tagg’s model of music analysis
Full text linkThe paper is an attempt to synthesize the most important aspects of a model of popular and film music analysis proposed by British musicologist Philip Tagg. Tagg, using the category of musemes – universal meaning units, isolated from the musical structure of the composition on the basis of criteria established for every given case – examines selected pieces using multi-level semiotic analysis. In his model Tagg takes into account both the importance of the broadly understood cultural context and the intertextuality of the piece. He also emphasizes the role of affect in musical communication, which is necessary to fully understand the meaning of a musical work
Tools of the trade: click-tracks and conductors
Full text linkThis essay will examine the manner in which composers and artistic directors have used conductors and click-tracks within the context of new music ensembles performing integrative concerts. The analyses and examples provided will rely for the most part on material gathered during in-depth interviews that I conducted with artistic directors, composers, conductors, and musicians, all of whom are professionally active in the new music field in Europe (and beyond). I will examine the application of both click-tracks and conductors and demonstrate that their implementation represents an active choice made by either the composer and/or artistic directors. Both click-tracks and conductors are viewed by the interviewees as potential tools with somewhat overlapping possibilities and capacities and their presence is no secondary phenomenon of the music. They become instead a means for the above actors to meet their objectives, be they artistic, pragmatic, technical, or otherwise
Art and emotion: the variety of aesthetic emotions and their internal dynamics
Full text linkThe aim of this paper is to propose an interpretation of aesthetic emotions in which they are treated as various affective reactions to a work of art. I present arguments that there are three different types of such aesthetic emotional responses to art, i.e., embodied emotions, epistemic emotions and contextual-associative emotions. I then argue that aesthetic emotions understood in this way are dynamic wholes that need to be explained by capturing and describing their internal temporal dynamics as well as by analyzing the relationships with the other components of aesthetic experience
Philology as a systematic method of documentation and its application to the study of Constança Capdeville’s musical works
Full text linkThe advent of new music technologies has led to a rapid growth of the audio preservation field. Music is not independent of its medium, and this growing loss of independence calls for a transdisciplinary approach with a strong technological component. Musical compositions created in the second half of the twentieth century exist in the intersection of technology, embodiment, and sound and thus widen the importance of aspects such as human and non-human interactions. This article will reflect on these issues and how they reframe (digital) philology methods through the works of Constança Capdeville. The works by this seminal artist are accompanied by an extensive archive that includes scores, recorded sounds, video and images, among other documents. It will be demonstrated how a reflexive approach to digital philology can bring concealed archival stories to light while fostering new meanings on what it means to preserve our sound heritage. Resource optimisation is one of the reasons methods of traditional philology are particularly useful for the preservation of contemporary musical heritage. Today the amount of information is excessive, and categorisation and organisation are complex. Most information exists in the form of digitised documents, that comply with certain requirements traditionally applied to secular paper registers while assessing qualities such as reliability and authenticity. Traditional philology approaches framed around these qualities are insufficient for born-digital documents. A reflexive approach to digital philology, focussed both on the creation of digital resources (from digitalisation to cataloguing) and the criticism of digital sources, as a solution the digital treatment of documents is proposed. A comparative approach will be used to understand in what ways digital and analogue media intertwine in the forms we think, reflect, historicise, and preserve our sound archives, and how we make visible aspects that were previously concealed through new forms of categorising and digitising documents
Narrative moment. Musical performance according to Lawrence Kramer and James Baldwin
Full text linkMy aims are to investigate how the concept of narrative moment may be helpful in capturing the role of music in creating profound communication on the level of performing as well as listening to musical performance. I aim to show how sharing a culminating moment in a musical experience may lead to inducing a state of self awareness and confidence in place of critical separation and distrust. I discuss Lawrence Kramer’s idea of the narrative moment explained in original in reference to a literary example and an improvised music. It is presented as an example of communicative potential in music performance, which as I argue, is worth exploring and explaining further. Suggesting a possibility of narrative moment in the experience of musical performances offers a comprehensible and applicable vision of communicative potential of music that is far reaching even if rarely achieved; a possibility of communication that is direct and intuitive, flexible and affective. Defining musical meaning in terms of its music’s communicative power and far reaching social consequences suggests deep connections between the social/intersubjective, individual/subjective and aesthetic aspects of life. The proper explanation of the meaning of music requires drawing from different domains, including metaphors and highly persuasive literary and musical examples.
 
Back to structures and signs – remarks on the possibilities of structural aesthetics of music
Full text linkIs it possible to talk of mental patterns underlying aesthetic reflections, and has the constant recurrence of particular ideas in the area of aesthetics some deeper explanation? Structural aesthetics of music is an authorial research conception which enables interpretation of phenomena from the area of history of music aesthetics, and in this way provides its systematised picture. The conception uses the ideas of structural linguistics: binary phonological opposition and the historicalliterary process in the approach of Jan Mukařovský. The article also contains an example of using this conception in relation to the aesthetics of antiquity (sophists, Plato, Aristotle), Descartes and impressionism
Intercultural musical dialogue in St John Passion by Sofia Gubaidulina
Full text linkSofia Gubaidulina is one of the most important composers living today. Among her many works acknowledged and awarded prizes on the international forum, the diptych St John Passion and St John Easter [The Resurrection of Christ according to St John], the opus magnum of that outstanding Russian composer, occupies a special place. This work focuses the most important features of her music, such as a profound theological message based on a compilation of fragments from the Old Testament, Gospels and the Apocalypse of St John, as well as her musical rootedness in the cultural tradition of the churches of both East and West. Gubaidulina adapts the achievements of the artistic avant-garde in new and original ways, while at the same time she is an ardent champion of traditional universal values grounded in the message of the Bible and Christian cultural tradition. This paper presents St John Passion by Sofia Gubaidulina in the context of its theological and intercultural dialogue, as well as attempting to characterise the phenomenon represented by this composer, who raises anew reflection on the fate of humankind in the context of existential questions, while remaining faithful to the idea of high art, exquisite and open to various understandings of the idea of beauty