Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology
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A critical (and interdisciplinary) survey of popular music genre theories
Full text linkGenres are among the most discussed topics in popular music studies. The attempt to explain issues as complex and layered as how musical genres are born, how they work and what they ontologically are cannot avoid opening a box full of theoretical problems, questions and tools that need to be understood and used in order to say something significant on genre today. Despite the long story of this theoretical debate (roots of which can be traced back to ancient Greece) and the variety of disciplines involved (e.g. literature, music and film studies, but also philosophy, sociology, cultural studies and semiotics), it is difficult to find survey papers that can give an overview of such a rich research environment. This paper attempts to fill that void by trying to systematize the main (contemporary) perspectives on musical genre, in particular non-essentialist theories coming from the overlapping fields of musicology and sociology. Most importantly, its overview stresses the necessity of an interdisciplinary study of musical genre, which – as an exemplum of extraordinarily layered phenomenon of the human production of culture – intertwines technical, social, discursive, commercial, historical and other elements, thus requiring an approach capable of accounting for as much of its many layers of meaning as possible
Archives and blank spots: scholarly perspectives for recovering Polish music (1794–1945)
Full text linkIn this article, the author tries to present the issue of blank spots in the history of Polishmusic since 1794 (the world premiere of Cud mniemany, czyli Krakowiacy i Górale [The supposedmirtacle, or Cracovians and highlanders] composed by Jan Stefani to the libretto of Wojciech Bogusławski is regarded as a symbolic beginning of national style in Polish music) up to the end of the SecondWorld War. It was a great period in history when Poland twice did not exist as a state (between1795 and 1918 and between 1939 and 1945).At the beginning the attention is drawn to the Polish music in the nineteenth century. Author describes new discoveries such as the Second Piano Quintet in E flat Major (with double bassinstead of second cello) by Józef Nowakowski (Chopin’s friend), and String Quartets op. 1 and monumentaloratorio Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi by Józef Elsner who was Chopin’s teacher in the Conservatory of Music in Warsaw (Elsner’s Passio discovered at the end of the twentieth century isregarded now as the most outstanding religious piece in the history of Polish music in the nineteenth century). Among other works author also mentions romantic opera Monbar (1838) by Ignacy Feliks Dobrzyński and first opera of Stanisław Moniuszko Die Schweitzerhütte (about 1839) written to the German libretto during composer’s studies at Singakademie Berlin. Addressing the issue of Polish music of the first half of the twentieth century author draws attention to the composer Eugeniusz Morawski regarded as the leading Polish author of programme music next to Mieczysław Karłowicz (unfortunately Morawski is still forgotten figure in the Polish musical life). Among others the importance of symphonic heritage of Feliks Nowowiejski, an author ofextremely popular in Europe during the second decade of twentieth century oratorio Quo vadis, is mentioned. At the end of article, the author takes up the problem of the enigmatic figure of Adolf Gużewski.The whole musical output of Gużewski, whose opera Dziewica lodowców [The Ice Maiden] was applauded in Warsaw and Russian opera houses in the second decade of the twentieth century, is now considered lost
Walking the streets of a virtual metropolis. The audiosphere of the game Grand Theft Auto IV
Full text linkOn the basis of works devoted to the topic of sound studies and video games, the author presents ways of processing and using sounds in order to create virtual phonic spaces. He examines the means by which contemporary game developers influence immersivity, i.e., the process of immersing the gamer in virtual environments, as well as indicating the mutual influences of audial and visual spheres. Analysig the video game Grand Theft Auto IV from the perspective of the sound which accompanies the action, he compares in this respect three areas of the game’s Liberty City with their equivalents in New York on which the virtual city is modelled. The similarities and differences between the digital and virtual spaces are identified, and the reasons for them explained. This makes it possible to show how the use of the tools (explained earlier) employed by the developers of the game enable them to create a credible sounding virtual metropolis
Poetic Images of Nightingale in the Art Song. On Some Aspects of Musical Meaning
Full text linkBirds are not only part of nature, but also an important element of culture. The life and behaviour of some bird species has been reflected in literary tradition in the form of poetic images and representations reflecting existential problems and stereotypically associated with specific states of the human psyche. These images and their poetics inspired composers of the Romantic era to create their musical, semantically charged counterparts. A special place in European poetry and music is occupied by the nightingale, which has wide symbolic connotations. My article discusses the musical replicas of the nightingale’s poetic representations in the songs of F. Liszt, J. Brahms, F. Schubert and K. Szymanowski. Each of the presented songs constructs meaning and relates to the poetic images in a different manner, despite the suggested or even expected repeatable nature of the emotional expression and experience symbolically associated with this bird
Contemporary composer Vladimir Jovanović and his role in the renewal of church Byzantine music in Serbia from the 1990s until today
Full text linkThis work focuses on the role of the composer Vladimir (Vlada) Jovanović in the renewal of church Byzantine music in Serbia from the 1990s until today. This multi-talented artist worked and created art in his native Belgrade, with creativity that exceeded local frames. This research emphasizes Jovanović’s pedagogical and compositional work in the field of Byzantine music, which mostly took place through his activity in the St. John of Damascus choir in Belgrade. The author analyzes the problems in implementation of modal church Byzantine music, since the first students did not hear it in their surroundings, as well as the responses of the listeners. Special attention is paid to students’ narratives, which help us perceive the broad cultural and social impact of Jovanović’s creative work
Professional career and family life of Viennese Primadonnas. The case of Catarina Cavalieri and Aloysia Weber (Lange)
Full text linkThe aim of this article is to present the issue of female singers and their role in the society of eighteenth-century Vienna on the example of two women: Mozart’s sister-in-law Aloysia, née Weber, later Lange, and Catarina Cavalieri, the first Constance. These singers were rivals on the opera stage in late 18th century Vienna, as evidenced by the parts written for them by Mozart in his Der Schauspieldirektor. From the social point of view, the biographies of these two outstanding singers are very different
Aspects of Intertextuality in the Works of the ‘Stalowa Wola Generation’ (Eugeniusz Knapik, Andrzej Krzanowski, Aleksander Lasoń)
Full text linkIn the panorama of Polish music of the 2nd half of the 20th century the works of Silesian composers stand out. They were born in 1951 and thus they are referred to as the ‘Generation 51’ or the ‘Stalowa Wola Generation’ (from the place of their debut at the Festival ‘Young Musician for the Young City’ in Stalowa Wola in 1976): Eugeniusz Knapik, Aleksander Lasoń and Andrzej Krzanowski. They constituted the first generational phenomenon of such significance in Polish music since the debut of ‘Generation 33’ (Krzysztof Penderecki, Henryk Mikołaj Górecki and others). The musical style of these young authors was in tune with the Polish popular phenomenon of the 1970s of ‘New Romanticism’, consisting in a return to certain artistic and aesthetic values lost in modernism and avant-garde. One of the distinguishing features of Knapik’s, Lasoń’s and Krzanowski’s work is the application of various ‘intertextual strategies’ – quotations, allusions, and clear references to more or less specific musical traditions. In the works of ‘Generation 51’ composers, these strategies have a certain superior ‘axiological sense’ (Władysław Stróżewski), which is far from a purely ludic, postmodernist play on conventions and texts. The aim of the text is a review and an attempt to interpret those strategies. A methodological reference point will be the semantic analyses of possible intertextual references performed by Mieczysław Tomaszewski and Stanisław Balbus
Second Movement of Compartment 2, Car 7 for Vibraphone, Violin, Viola and Cello by Paweł Szymański in Light of Cognitive Musical Grammar
Full text linkThe article is composed of two parts. In the first I discuss Lawrence Zbikowski’s Foundations of Musical Grammar, published by Oxford University Press in 2017, which is one of the major musicological works inspired by the latest achievements in cognitive science. Musical grammar, sometimes called cognitive musical grammar by the author, is based mainly on two concepts: an analogy (the mapping of systematic structural relationships between a source domain and a target domain), and a dynamic process (a coherent sequence of phenomena that is distributed over time and typified by parametric modulation or change). The second part of the article is my attempt to apply Zbikowski’s theory to a piece of music. As a musical example I have chosen the second movement of Compartment 2, Car 7 for vibraphone, violin, viola and cello by Paweł Szymański. At the end I conclude that the composer created an analogy between music and a dynamic process known to us from everyday life ─ a journey by train, seen from a passenger’s perspective
Erik Satie – the ‘progenitor’ of muzak or the precursor of ‘pipedown’ movement? On the concept of musique d’ameublement
Full text linkErik Satie (1866–1925) was a colourful and intriguing artist in the world of Parisian avant-garde. In the turbulent times of the early 20th century he created the concept of musique d’ameublement (‘furniture music’) – a vision of music that did not require attentive listening because it was supposed to play an extravagant role (as it was perceived in that period) of an acoustic background accompanying all everyday events. A change in recording and sound reproduction techniques in the 20th century that led to the ubiquity of music in the contemporary world seems to confirm that Satie’s ‘furniture music’ can be treated as a prophetic idea. However, the problem of how the concept of musique d’ameublement should be interpreted still remains ambiguous. The main aim of the present paper is to discuss the two contrary ways of the interpretation of ‘furniture music’. The first approach assumes that Satie can be treated as ‘the progenitor’ of muzak – a musical genre initially associated with the activities of Muzak company and then gradually identified with any background music provided on a mass scale to the public space. The second approach is an attempt to interpret the concept of musique d’ameublement in a completely different way – as an expression of opposition to an increasingly mechanized Western world dominated by progress and technology, where the role of music boils down only to the function of the acoustic background. Therefore, Satie becomes one of the precursors of the actions taken by the opponents of muzak (e. g. pipedown movements), who seek to eliminate the imposed background music from the public space. The reconstruction of musique d’ameublement (basing, inter alia, on selected source materials) is treated as a starting point for the discussion that leads to the acoustic ecology perspective
Experience as cognition: musical sense-making and the ‘in-time/ outside-of-time’ dichotomy
Full text linkMusical sense-making relies on two distinctive strategies: tracking the moment-to-moment history of the actual unfolding and recollecting actual and previous sounding events in a kind of synoptic overview. Both positions are not opposed but complement each other. The aim of this contribution, therefore, is to provide a comprehensive framework that provides both conceptual and operational tools for coping with the sounds. Five major possibilities are proposed in this regard: (i) the concepts of perspective and resolution, which refer to the distance the listener takes with respect to the sounding music and the fine-grainedness of his/her discriminative abilities; (ii) the continuous/discrete dichotomy which conceives of the music as one continuous flow as against a division in separate and distinct elements; (iii) the in time/outside-of-time distinction, with the former proceeding in real time and the latter proceeding outside of the time of unfolding; (iv) the deictic approach to musical sense-making, which conceives of an act of mental pointing to the music, and (v) the levels of processing, which span a continuum between primitive sensory reactivity to actual sounding stimuli and high-level symbolic processing