Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology
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Meanings of music in film from a cognitive perspective
Full text linkCognitive psychology, with its focus on mind and its processes, is one of the approaches to study film music. Although music alone is said to be already meaningful, it gains and transfers specific meanings in the film context. This article aims to contribute to understanding of what film music means and how these meanings are processed in the cross-modal perception of a film. A review of the selected empirical research on film music with regard to meaning is followed by a short overview of the Annabel J. Cohen’s Congruence-Association Model (CAM) of media cognition. The model provides a framework for the experiments’ results and encourages future interdisciplinary studies in this area
Freedom in music on the example of the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis
Full text linkIn her article titled Niebezpieczne związki, czyli o granicach wolności w sztuce i w życiu [Dangerous liaisons, or on the limits of freedom in art and life] Elżbieta Korolczuk (2013) claimsthat ‘the sense of personal freedom and independence from other people – not only in the senseof intellectual and aesthetic influences, but also familial and emotional ties – is often perceived asnecessary in order to create new, original works, to be a truly creative individual’. It is not difficult to find new and original works in the oeuvre of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis and,paraphrasing the words of Maria Anna Potocka (2013) – it is thanks to them that ‘the world has moderniseditself and freed itself from outdated values’. In relation to creative work in music, this ‘senseof personal freedom and independence from other people‘ leads, on the one hand, to the ‘freedom ofmusic’ and, on the other, ensures achieving ‘freedom in music’. The aim of this discussion is to pointto those threads in the statements of Stockhausen and Xenakis, and those features of their works,which testify to the specific manifestations of the ‚‘freedom in music’ created by them
InMI and its potential originality – musical creativity in composers’ minds
Full text linkThe current article explores the potential innovativeness of Involuntary Musical Imagery and presents the current state of InMI researches. There is a lack of precise definition of the term, as well as related terms (such as earworm or musical imagery). InMI is often equated to earworms which does not do justice to its creative potential. Several authors suggest that InMI can be a source of new melodies useful for composers in their composition process. The article proposes that InMI can consist of new melodies and appear as a single event. Composers use their working memory and musical abilities to volitionaly loop the tune in their head, then transcribe it into external realm (notation, recording). Composers can later use it in their creative process. The use of InMI in composing is a matter of individual differences between composers
On the genesis of absolute pitch
Full text linkThe clear majority of people with a professional or amateur contact with music do not possess absolute pitch and get by perfectly well without it, making use of relative musical pitch. Yet many people dream of also fixing in their memory the actual pitches of the notes of the musical scale, which would effectively give them the chance to recognise and reproduce any chromatic pitch (C, C#, D, D#, etc.) without recourse to a reference note. Unfortunately, it almost always proves too late for them to develop absolute pitch. The question of the factors determining the forming of absolute pitch is still the subject of quite heated discussion. Practically from the outset of the interest in the phenomenon of absolute pitch (i.e. from the second half of the nineteenth century) controversial theories arose regarding its origins. In discussion on the subject, there was a clash of two fundamental views, regarding absolute pitch either as an innate ability or, on the contrary, as an ability that could be acquired at any age. With time, there emerged an increasing number of hypotheses accounting for the origin of absolute pitch: from the theory of the limitless possibility of absolute pitch acquisition through the theories of innate factors and of early learning, to the latest theory that links absolute pitch to tonal languages. The present paper shows the results of the research project on the occurrence of absolute pitch among young people in musical education in Poland (1175 pupils, aged 11-29) carried out in the years 2004-2007. The test results (pitch-naming tests) supported by the data from the survey (concerning e.g. musical education, familial aggregation of AP and etc.) are presented in the context of theories which attempt to investigate the source of absolute pitch (especially early musical training theory and genetic factors theory)
Easter horseback processions in Upper Lusatia - from ‘waking’ nature to the religious and national idea
Full text linkHorseback processions are an historical phenomenon still alive today in many parts of Europe. In western Slavic lands (Poland, Czech Republic, Lusatia) they are all inseparably connected with the period of Easter, and one of the crucial elements of the processions is song. Behaviour observed in Slavic horseback processions can be directly related to the establishing of the world by delimiting boundaries and ordering and sacralising space. Taking place as they do in specific conditions undoubtedly exemplify a rite of passage. In this rite, the costume and pious symbols serve to take the participants away from the world of the profane and bring them to the realm of the sacred, while the ‘carrying on horseback’, besides its utilitarian use during chases, serves to maintain them in an ‘intermediate state, between earth and heaven’, for them to ‘transcend themselves’ and undertake a ‘mystical journey’. Processions cultivated among the Upper Lusatians and the available sources allow one to draw conclusions regarding not only the function of song and of the tradition itself, but also the way they have changed down the ages. Interesting to the musicologist is the change in the functions of the processional singing from a signal directed at nature, through a documented religious medium, to the symbolisation of social (national) meanings, making use of contemporary media. As such, these functions may serve indirectly the interpretation of such complex and poorly documented customs as Silesian processions, and especially the special social role of the processional spiewak (cantor)
Music: a natural phenomenon or a cultural invention? A few remarks on the currency of the polemic and its musicological consequences
Full text linkThe question of musical naturalness has increasingly often been the subject of lively debates within both natural and human sciences. In the present paper the issue is discussed primarily in terms of the propositions which accord with the contemporary naturalistic vision of a human and the world. One of the most important problems in this context is the opposition between a natural phenomenon and a cultural invention. Among the vast amount of different human achievements, some demand strenuous learning whereas other emerge spontaneously in all societies. The latter type of achievements is the result of the natural selection of human abilities. Recently, it has been hotly debated whether or not music is a biological adaptation. If it is, musical abilities should give an important advantage to individuals. There are numerous examples of the possible advantages. Namely, the music abilities play an important role in the enhancement of bonding between the mother and her infant child. Moreover, they are salient in the indication of fitness during sexual display. The abilities are also vital in the consolidation of a group during social music performance as well as in the transmission of information about the stability and cohesion of the group. If musical abilities are indeed a vital form of adaptations, they may imply some further questions such as the existence of music-specific abilities and of musical univesal, as well as the distinction between music understood as art and music understood as universal communication (like language). All these issues have different methodological consequences for the shape of musicology as a discipline of science. These are, among others, pre-empting Europocentrism in research, the possibilities and extension of the use of comparative methods in ethnomusicology, the scope and applicability of the interdisciplinary studies based on the reductional structure of knowledge
It all began with George Sand. Novelistic portraits of Fryderyk Chopin and his music in foreign literature. A survey
Full text linkThe literary works discussed in this article exploit the motif of Fryderyk Chopin and his oeuvre in a variety of ways. The earliest novel is Lucrezia Floriani (1846), penned by the French writer George Sand, Chopin’s companion. The creation of Prince Karol (Chopin’s name in the novel), as if “detached” from the Polish composer’s biography, is an interesting, although none too original (even within the context of Sand’s oeuvre) example of the Romantic hero. Popular output, aimed at a readership seeking above all scandal and emotion, is represented by the German writer Hermann Richter’s novel Drei Frauen um Chopin (1935) and the contemporary thriller of collective authorship The Chopin Manuscript (2008). In these works, the composer is a tool designed to give readers the illusion of becoming acquainted with his biography or to interest sensation-seekers. Artistically the most interesting novel is Preludes, by the Danish writer Peer Hultberg (1989). Besides its original artistic form, the author is the only one to deal with musical material, attempting to present in prose that which ought to form the heart of every work about the brilliant musician, but which was achieved only by Cyprian Norwid in Fortepian Szopena [Chopin’s piano]
Towards perfect completeness remembering Lutosławski
Full text linkThe text is in its character a statement by a “witness to an era”. It is an attempt at describing Lutoslawski’s artistic path and his culture-forming activity from the perspective of an evolution within a concrete historical and political situation. This aesthetic evolution is evidenced in the composer’s utterances: significant interviews and private, confessional notes. They outline his creative path from the impact of Chopin as the emotional arche, through subsequent phases and breakthroughs: from academic aesthetics based on the Hanslick paradigm, through socialist-realist indoctrination and uncritical fascination with the avant-garde, to a gradual crystallisation of his own idiom. Eventually, this entirely own idiom, marked with a lyrical opening, consists in a return to everlasting values, expressly defined by the composer: the truth and the beauty of a work of art
Musical life in Slutsk during the years 1733-1760 in the light of archive materials
Full text linkThis article represents the very first attempt at reconstructing musical life in Slutsk (Pol. Sluck) during the first half of the eighteenth century, and it merely outlines the issues involved. Slutsk was a typical private town - a multicultural centre inhabited by Jews, Orthodox Ruthenians, Lithuanians and Poles of the Protestant and Roman-Catholic faiths. Among the representatives of the Roman-Catholic faith, the Jesuits were the main animators of the town’s cultural and educational life, alongside the court of Prince Hieronim Florian Radziwiłł. A medium-sized music boarding school attached to the Jesuit College in Slutsk existed from around 1713. Musical instruments were purchased for the school quite regularly, often in faraway Koenigsberg. The contacts between the boarding school and the prince’s court were relatively frequent and good, and some school leavers found jobs at the court, chiefly in the garrison or janissary band, and sporadically also in Prince Radziwill’s music ensemble. The court was the main centre of the town’s cultural life. Among its numerous artistic ventures, stage shows seem to have been the most spectacular. For the purposes of such performances, a free-standing theatre was built in the centre of Slutsk at the turn of 1753. This building is worth mentioning because of the rarity of such projects in the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania during the 1750s. The repertoire of the Slutsk theatre was initially dominated by commedia dell’arte in German and the occasional dramma per música, but during the second half of the 1750s, one-act ballets began to dominate. Among the instrumental works performed in Slutsk were compositions by Carl Heinrich and Johann Gottlieb Graun, Georg Christoph Wagenseil, and musicians active at the Radziwiłł court (Andreas Wappler, Joseph Kohaut and Johannes Battista Hochbrucker), as well as improvisations by Georg Noelli. The town’s artistic heyday ended with the death of Prince Hieronim Florian Radziwiłł, in 1760, and the dissolution of the Society of Jesus, a decade or so later