Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology
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Waste paper as a music source: fragments preserved with the incunabula at the University Library in Wroclaw
Full text linkPreserved with the incunabula at the University Library in Wroclaw are eighty-five fragments of music manuscripts. Alongside numerous antiphonaries, notated breviaries and missals, they also include a fragment with polyphonic music (PL-WRu XV Q1066). This contains three compositions typical of fifteenth-century Central European repertory. There are grounds for supposing that this fragment was written in Silesia during the second quarter of that century. Research into the music fragments from the University Library in Wroclaw has provided the author with a point of departure for discussing methodological issues. Questions are raised regarding the nature of fragmentary sources, with reference to the classification of historical sources proposed by Jerzy Topolski. The status of fragments differs from that of sources preserved intact, and this should be reflected in research procedures, such as the method of establishing provenance. The adoption of new methodological principles requires a critical re-examination of the interpretation of some musical fragments, including the sources preserved in Poland
From Kotoński to Duchnowski. Polish electroacoustic music
Full text linkFounded in November 1957, the Experimental Studio of Polish Radio (SEPR) was the fifth electronic music studio in Europe and the seventh in the world. It was an extraordinary phenomenon in the reality of the People’s Poland of those times, equally exceptional as the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, established around the same time - in 1956. Both these ‘institutions’ would be of fundamental significance for contemporary Polish music, and they would collaborate closely with one another. But the history of Polish electroacoustic music would to a large extent be the history of the Experimental Studio. The first autonomous work for tape in Poland was Włodzimierz Kotoñski’s Etiuda konkretna (na jedno uderzenie w talerz) [Concrete study (for a single strike of a cymbal)], completed in November 1958. It was performed at the Warsaw Autumn in i960, and from then on electroacoustic music was a fixture at the festival, even a marker of the festival’s ‘modernity’, up to 2002 - the year when the last special ‘concert of electroacoustic music’ appeared on the programme. In 2004, the SEPR ceased its activities, but thanks to computers, every composer can now have a studio at home. There are also thriving electroacoustic studios at music academies, with the Wroclaw studio to the fore, founded in 1998 by Stanisław Krupowicz, the leading light of which became Cezary Duchnowski. Also established in Wroclaw, in 2005, was the biennial International Festival of Electroacoustic Music ‘Música Electrónica Nova’
Seventeenth-century Gdansk instrumental music sources
Full text linkThis article represents an attempt to provide a synthetic presentation of seventeenth-century Gdańsk instrumental music sources, comprising three groups: 1 - manuscripts and old prints, currently found in Gdańsk or elsewhere, that include works by musicians who were active in Gdańsk; 2 - manuscripts from Gdańsk libraries that include works by composers not active in Gdańsk; 3 - manuscripts of Gdańsk provenance, now held in libraries outside Gdańsk, that include works by composers not active in Gdańsk. Several types of sources have survived that are characteristic of the age in which they were created. These include lute tablatures, keyboard tablatures and manuscripts and old prints with compositions for various forces, including keyboard instruments, solo instruments (violin, cornet) with b.c., a 2 and a 3 type compositions for violin (in one case for cornet and bassoon with b.c.) and also larger ensembles, chiefly strings with b.c. The repertoire of the Gdańsk sources is similar to that of other seventeenthcentury European sources. It includes dances, canzonas, fantasias, preambles, sonatas, suites and, in the earliest manuscripts, intabulations of both religious and secular songs. In total, there are some 800 extant compositions, of which the vast majority (around 700) are found in lute and keyboard tablatures. Some compositions may be considered unique in Old Polish instrumental music. They are works by the composers Marcin Gremboszewski and Heinrich Dóbel, who were active in Gdańsk, representing early examples of solo compositions for cornet and violin with b.c., as well as a chamber piece for cornet and bassoon with b.c. Bearing in mind that the number of extant Old Polish instrumental music sources is relatively modest, these Gdańsk sources should be considered a highly valuable supplement
Aldo Clementi musicus mathematicus
Full text linkLike that of Liszt and Stravinsky, the composers by whom he was attracted in his adolescence and early youth, Aldo dementi’s (Catania 1925-Rome 2011) musical production went through various phases, greatly changing on the surface and in appearance, though not in depth and substance. He himself suggests a division into five phases: 1. Preliminary (1944-1955), juvenile and apprenticeship works. 2. Structural (1956-1961). 3. Informal material (1961-1964). 4. Non-formal optical (1966-1970). 5. Polydiatonic (1970-2011): groups of letters indicating musical notes (for example: B-A-C H), or canti dati (modal or tonal - monodic or polyphonic - compositions of the western tradition, from the Stele of Sicilus to Stravinsky), but most often segments of melodic lines inferred from them. But - in the polyphonic counterpoint that derives from it - they are simultaneously intoned in the different voices in different tonalities: hence their superimposition restores the chromatic dodecaphonic total. Clementi himself proclaims the constitutional continuity of this development. The substance of his music consists in the direct transposition of a figurative project into a sonorous structure. Geometrie di musica: the title of the 2001 book by Gianluigi Mattietti refers first of all, as the subtitle says, to The <poly> diatonic period of Aldo Clementi, but it perfectly defines his whole musical production, all pervaded by dense polyphonic counterpoints. For Clementi construction is a goal, not a means to articulate discourse: indeed, he was even to do without discourse in his three central creative periods; and when in the fifth and latest one he has returned to it, he has enslaved it entirely to construction : he draws fragments from it, to be used as raw material, i.e. the diatonic subjects, of his dodecaphonic counterpoints. After the different phenomenology of the eruptions of sound matter of Varèse and Stravinsky, dementi’s music represents a further peak of pure construction in the sonorous space. His counterpoint however, like Webern’s, is limpid, subtly articulated, and dominated by reason: but here construction reigns supreme, and the composer in accordance with his requirements uses discursive melodic segments as raw material, as bricks (“modules” he says, and he describes them as mosaic tiles). “The idea of a construction achieved with the dovetailing of mirror-like images is also at the base of the figurative research of Escher, hinging on the concept of division of the plane, through repeated figures, mirror-like and congruent” (Mattietti). Indeed, dementi’s music is “disciplina quae de numeris loquitur” (discipline that speaks of numbers), according to the definition by Cassiodorus, rather than “scientia bene modulandi” (art of singing well), according to the definition by Augustine; and it is, more precisely, paraphrasing the famous definition by Leibniz, “exercitium arithmeticae manifestum coscientis se numerare animi” (evident arithmetical exercise of the mind aware of counting). Three compositions of dementi’s polydiatonic period are here thoroughly considered: two canons for string quartet, the very simple four-voiced Canone on a fragment by Platti (1997) and the very complex eight-voiced Tributo (1988) on “Happy birthday to you!”; and a de-collage, Blues and Blues 2, “fantasies on fragments by Thelonious Monk”, for piano (2001)
George Crumb - between reflection upon nature and contemplating it
Full text linkThe author investigates the unique aesthetic program of George Crumb, one of the most important contemporary American composers. Crumb certainly occupies a unique place in the music of 20th century, not only because of his cultural background, or originality of artistic expression, but first of all, due to the presence of most dilemmas of the contemporary culture in his music. The question about the form of a relationship between human beings and nature at the turn of 20th/2ist century is one of them. In his artistic output Crumb remains an advocate of a concept of music which, as the most spiritual and magical of all arts, derives from deep reserves of human psyche on the one hand and from primal forces of nature, on the other one. The analytical aspects of the paper concern the problems of onomatopoeic imitation of the sounds of birds and a whale, symbolic allusions to the other composers (Debussy, Mahler), the concept of “larger rhythms of nature”, the phenomenon of echo and its forms in Crumb’s music, his search of natural pre-sounds of music (resulting in using non-traditional instruments), the idea of distant music, etc. Especially three pieces: An Idyll of the Misbegotten, Vox balaenae and Echoes of Time and the River are considered as the most characteristic
