Classical Composers Research Articles

Musical rhythm spectra from Bach to Joplin obey a 1/f power law.

Much of our enjoyment of music comes from its balance of predictability and surprise. Musical pitch fluctuations follow a 1/f power law that precisely achieves this balance. Musical rhythms, especially those of Western classical music, are considered highly regular and predictable, and this predictability has been hypothesized to underlie rhythm's contribution to our enjoyment of music. Are musical rhythms indeed entirely predictable and how do they vary with genre and composer? To answer this question, we analyzed the rhythm spectra of 1,788 movements from 558 compositions of Western classical music. We found that an overwhelming majority of rhythms obeyed a 1/f(β) power law across 16 subgenres and 40 composers, with β ranging from ∼0.5-1. Notably, classical composers, whose compositions are known to exhibit nearly identical 1/f pitch spectra, demonstrated distinctive 1/f rhythm spectra: Beethoven's rhythms were among the most predictable, and Mozart's among the least. Our finding of the ubiquity of 1/f rhythm spectra in compositions spanning nearly four centuries demonstrates that, as with musical pitch, musical rhythms also exhibit a balance of predictability and surprise that could contribute in a fundamental way to our aesthetic experience of music. Although music compositions are intended to be performed, the fact that the notated rhythms follow a 1/f spectrum indicates that such structure is no mere artifact of performance or perception, but rather, exists within the written composition before the music is performed. Furthermore, composers systematically manipulate (consciously or otherwise) the predictability in 1/f rhythms to give their compositions unique identities.

A Walk Through an American Classic

The music of Walt Disney’s classic films was written by a number of hand-picked composers who, working with Disney, ingeniously crafted the music to fit animation and bring musical inspiration to the homes of viewers leaving America and the world with a beloved legacy. Though Walt Disney was a cartoonist and not a musician, music was given a distinct, almost central, role in the creation of his cartoons. Special techniques such as Mickey-mousing or the click track were developed by composers and used to synchronize this music and animation. These processes really began with Disney and have formed the basis for all music synchronized to cartoon animation. From the very beginning with Mickey Mouse, to The Silly Symphonies, to the beloved classic Disney movies music has been an ever-present and developing center. Walt Disney, though not a composer himself, hired a number of key composers from which we have many cherished melodies. Unlike most other cartoons Disney’s were focused on using music of the classical style rather than the popular style. The music from a number of classical composers was used or drawn upon as a model. Disney had a special purpose for the music in his animated films. Most of his films contained a story other than the music, but his movie Fantasia really seeks to find the purpose music itself has with visual interpretation. College students have done research on these ideas of simply listening to music or listening while seeing an image. All of Disney’s animated films would not be the classics they are without the music that holds them together. Disney music has become recognized as its own individual art form. It has inspired America to dream and to think more deeply than realized. Walt Disney’s indirect effect on music history may be considered a stretch, but there is no doubt that the music developed through Disney Bros. has left an inspiration on the hearts of Americans.

In Search of Benjamin Patterson: An Improvised Journey

In Search of Benjamin PattersonAn Improvised Journey* George E. Lewis (bio) Benjamin (Ben) Patterson. Born 1934 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I wish I knew Ben Patterson. In a way, I’ve been searching for him all my life, even though he was always and already there. I’ll explain that in a moment, but I should say at the outset that the work being performed by this article somewhat exceeds my original intent to examine Patterson’s work in terms of contemporary ideas about improvisation. There’s a long tradition in jazz of referring to musicians by their first names, shortened first names, or nicknames. Insiders—musicians and listeners but not necessarily the general public—refer confidently to Miles and Duke and Hawk and Bud and Trane. Although Ben Patterson’s life and work did not have much to do with jazz, at least according to the standard portrayals, Fluxus narratives also asserted first-name familiarity with alacrity. The stories always seemed to invite you to imagine (or wish) that you yourself had been on the Fluxus scene. There was another Ben—Ben Vautier—whose e-mail listserv I was on for years. I have no idea who put me on his list, but as a longtime denizen of several experimental music scenes, I enjoyed being able, on an irregular basis, to keep up with the doings of George and Shigeko and Emmett and Alison and so on. These e-mails presented lots of stories, more than a few complaints, and a strong, celebratory sense of community. So many Fluxnarratives—like the narratives of its predecessor movement, the Beats—trade on the familiar: personal stories and histories, sometimes with a point or edge, sometimes not. During my early years in New York, the mid-1970s, I would sit placidly—by turns mystified, fascinated, nonplussed, and here and there a bit bored—as older artists who knew the principal players in the drama—or, as I found out later, were players themselves—told Fluxus stories that never made the books but that “everyone” somehow knew. I was flattered to be there since I’m considerably younger than the Fluxus originators, and I don’t think they’re taking on new members—or rather, we want our own clubs and our own names anyway. George Maciunas’s 1967 mapping of Fluxus and its relationship to the avant-garde presented the exoskeleton of a socio-artistic network concerned with the production of knowledge—oral, written, graphic—about itself.1 This epistemologically centered identity-formation project is central to many art movements, but the degree to which Fluxus publicly [End Page 979] articulated this kind of networked affinity consciousness is particularly noteworthy. It is this sense of affinity that produces art, movements, and genre membership, and the oral histories I absorbed in those bar and backstage sessions not only constituted valuable preparation for the textual histories and collegial connections I encountered later, but also whetted my appetite for actually meeting this mysterious black figure, Ben Patterson. A later reason why I wanted to get to know Patterson in some way—at least historically, if not personally—is that a fair amount of my current scholarly direction casts a critical, contextualizing eye upon the frequent discrepancies between scholarly and popular histories of experimentalism and what artists actually experienced in and around those experimental art worlds. This isn’t quite the same thing as reading a history of the period and complaining, “That’s not the way it happened”; rather, what is of concern here is an analysis of mediation, critically examining differences between what James Scott would call “public” and “private” transcripts. Another reason why I wanted to get to know Patterson is more personal. I’ve been associated for many years with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an influential African American musical avant-garde that is roughly contemporaneous with Fluxus. As I noted in my book on this musical collective, “AACM musicians updated and revised a model pursued by black classical composers, an important group of creative music-makers who, I maintain, have been all but ignored by the major black cultural critics and public intellectuals who have come to prominence...

Guerra-Peixe: arranjador de orquestras de rádio

Revisão biográfica sobre o músico brasileiro Guerra-Peixe e sua carreira como arranjador de orquestras de rádio. Objetiva-se compreender como compositores clássicos, como Guerra-Peixe, encontraram na esfera popular um meio de vida. Inclui dados biográficos pouco conhecidos sobre o compositor.

On the Art and Craft of Film Music: A Conversation with James Newton Howard

On the Art and Craft of Film Music:A Conversation with James Newton Howard Christopher Reynolds (bio) and Mark Brill (bio) James Newton Howard has for the past twenty years demonstrated a versatility rare among film and television composers. From early film scores such as Pretty Woman (1990) and The Fugitive (1993) to his recent work in M. Night Shyamalan's films, Howard has earned his reputation as one of the top film composers of his generation. There are various ways one can measure his success: in awards and award nominations (there are many of both), in the critical acclaim of films he has done, or in the number of websites and YouTube postings devoted to his work. Ultimately the most significant indication of his standing is simply this: only a handful of film composers active today will attract musically aware viewers to a film, and Howard is one of them. Howard's film career shows a trajectory from keyboard to symphony, exhibiting in his early years the influences of the pop and rock styles of his friend and employer Elton John to more recent scores that have been influenced by composers such as Stravinsky. The chance to work with orchestra and choir in Flatliners (1990) opened new possibilities for Howard, but the pop background still shows in the electronic percussion sounds of his first action movie, The Fugitive (1993). By Wyatt Earp (1994), after a decade of writing for film, Howard had begun to think orchestrally. Howard's music can rival the aggressive rhythms of Stravinsky or the airy melodies of Copland when the dramatic moment calls for action or heroism. His penchant for driving rhythms has led him to use meters that have five or seven beats to a bar in several films (Waterworld from 1995 and King Kong from 2005, [End Page 320] for example), and in Wyatt Earp, one of his best scores (whatever one thinks of the film), he even managed to pull off the sauntering walk to the OK corral in 5/8 time, a feat worthy of Bartók. The best of the symphonic film composers have closely studied the scores of great classical composers such as Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky. They may have gleaned even more from the ranks of the near great such as Anton Bruckner, Aaron Copland, and Gustav Holst. One difference between James Newton Howard and some of his contemporaries is that his debts to these composers rarely call attention to themselves. There is little in his work that compares to the overt debt that James Horner owes Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man in Apollo 13, or that John Williams has to Holst, Bruckner, and several others in Star Wars or to Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite in his brilliant score for Home Alone. Successful film composers often find themselves collaborating repeatedly with a particular film director, notably as in the partnerships of John Williams and Steven Spielberg or that of Nino Rota and Fellini, both of which spanned decades. In these two cases, as in that of Bernard Herrmann and Hitchcock, it is frequently difficult to separate images from sounds, so thoroughly do they contribute to each other. Among many recent pairings, Hans Zimmer has scored half a dozen films for Ridley Scott, James Horner has partnered often with Ron Howard, and Danny Elfman with Tim Burton. Howard has worked extensively both with Lawrence Kasdan and M. Night Shyamalan, composing all of Kasdan's films since 1991 (including Grand Canyon, Wyatt Earp, Mumford, and Dreamcatcher) and all of Shyamalan's since 1999 (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, Lady in the Water, and The Happening). The next installment of this latter collaboration will be The Last Airbender, scheduled for release in 2010. Howard's versatility is evident in his willingness to accept markedly different projects at the same time. In the eighteen months during 1999-2000 that he worked on Dinosaur, for instance, he also composed [End Page 321] The Sixth Sense, Runaway Bride, Stir of Echoes, and part of Snow Falling on Cedars—a remarkable variety (not to mention productivity), and testimony that one Howard film does not necessarily sound like another. He is, as...

Simulating, mirroring, morphing, and blurring acoustic space as an extended instrumental technique.

The paradigm for musical performance is the sound of musical instruments in a fixed acoustical space. Ordinarily space does not shift and change during performances. An ideal space for performing classical composers such as Mozart is the Shaffy Theater in Amsterdam with a relatively short reverberation time 1.5 s. Instruments couple to the space, and space is part of the instrument and vice versa. Players develop special relationships with favorite spaces. After experiencing many different types of acoustics this leads to the desire to change the space during performance in order to hear the different qualities that emerge from spatial coupling. Spatial progressions can be made so that rather than moving sound in space, space can be moved around the sound and produce a variety of qualities.

The great composers: the lives and music of the great classical composers

The great composers: the lives and music of the great classical composers

Four Voices, One Canon?

■ In different countries, radio stations broadcast what is regularly categorized as classical music. The question arises, however, whether the various stations rely on the same concept of the genre and whether they apply the same programming strategies. In an analysis focusing on the composers of the works broadcast, programmes of four radio stations — two in Germany, one in France and one in the US — were compared. The results are interpreted with regard to the concept of a ‘canon’ of classical composers, changes in ‘legitimate culture’ and debates on the function and performance of classical music stations. Findings are also compared to the composers’ importance in the educational and scientific system. The study shows that the stations essentially rely on an internationally common repertoire of classical composers, but that programming strategies rely on different understandings of legitimate culture and different functions of the canonical works. ■

The Decline and Fall of Musical Art: What Happened to Classical Composers?

The Decline and Fall of Musical Art: What Happened to Classical Composers?

Longitudinal hit ratios of classical composers: Reconciling "Darwinian" and expertise acquisition perspectives on lifespan creativity.

Longitudinal hit ratios of classical composers: Reconciling "Darwinian" and expertise acquisition perspectives on lifespan creativity.

Performance time productivity and versatility estimates for 102 classical composers

Performance time productivity estimates for 102 classical composers are reported. For each composer, the grand total and totals within several musical genres (e.g., symphonies, concerti, operas) are provided, which are used to generate a measure of composer versatility, or the extent to which each composer's output spans multiple genres. Estimated durations of lost works for each composer are also summarized. Descriptive results identify the most prolific composers in the overall sample and within each genre. Illustrative correlational analyses revealed reliable overall associations between average annual productivity, eminence and composer birth year; versatility was related only to birth year. However, composers in different periods of musical history (Baroque/Classical, Romantic and 20th century) showed different patterns of correlations between the variables, with 20th-century composers showing no reliable correlations at all. Implications and suggestions for incorporating the reported productivity estimates into multi-level statistical analyses of composers' lifespan creative productivity are discussed.

One-Hit Wonders in Classical Music: Evidence and (Partial) Explanations for an Early Career Peak

How can the creativity of “one-hit wonders” be explained? Anecdotes suggest one-hit wonders may peak early in their careers, but no quantitative investigation has specifically focused on this group. Here, objective recording count criteria were used to define samples of 89 one-hit and 89 “multi-hit” classical composers. One-hit composers peaked reliably earlier than their multi-hit counterparts, and this effect was greater between the most prototypical one-hit versus multi-hit composers. Lifespan, historical year, age at expertise acquisition onset, and overall hit popularity did not explain the effect. However, compared to multi-hit composers, one-hit composers’ hits tended to be easily elaborated, small-scale works like songs, which intrinsically peaked earlier than other genres. The pattern of career landmarks across five musical genres, using a sample of 394 composers, supported this interpretation. However, this is only a partial explanation, because one-hit composers began their musical careers significantly later than their multi-hit counterparts. Finally, one-hit composers’ operas were more highlight-dominated than those of multi-hit composers. Overall, the results suggest that chance factors play larger roles in the success of one-hit composers than multi-hit composers.

Uri Caine’s Mahler: Jazz, Tradition, and Identity

AbstractAlthough Uri Caine first made his mark as a relatively straight-ahead jazz pianist – ‘roots’ to which he returns regularly – he has, arguably, become most famous with his often controversial versions of works from the ‘classical music’ canon. These recompositions, which often involve a host of other styles from Latin to dub, are usually regarded as examples of postmodern eclecticism. While this view is certainly valid, it needs to be complemented by more detailed analysis of both Caine’s artistic methods and their aesthetic and ideological implications. Among his work on classical composers, Caine’s engagement with Gustav Mahler is the most sustained. The result of this engagement is not an exercise in ‘crossover’ or ‘jazzed-up’ Mahler, but a radical reinterpretation of Mahler’s music that situates it as a Jewish voice within the cultural cross-currents of fin-de-siècle Central Europe. Through this reference to Mahler, Caine constructs a Jewish tradition within jazz that complements but does not compete with jazz’s overwhelmingly African-American heritage. What emerges is a pluralistic subjectivity in which different cultural identities and traditions are negotiated in an equal and open dialogue.

Before the Beatles: International Influences on American Popular Recordings, 1940–63

This discographic study illustrates the influences of foreign‐born recording artists, classical composers, ethnic folk tunes, and other global music sources on Billboard‐ charted songs from 1 January 1940 to 31 December 1963. The research demonstrates that American popular music was impacted by a broad representation of international compositions and foreign performers prior to the British Invasion of 1964. A lengthy discography and supplementary bibliography are provided.

Making Tracks: The Ontology of Rock Music

listens is the result of two quite distinct groups of actions. First, the composer creates the work by writing a score. Then, a performing artist or group of artists performs the work, of necessity producing an interpretation of it.1 Often, the composer is closely involved in at least the first performance of a new work, but even then his or her contributions as a composer are clearly distinguishable from those made as a performer. Shortly after World War II, some classical composers began focusing on producing works that did not require any performance. Using technology developed to record and reproduce the sounds of performances, they began creating tapes that when played back produced sound events that could not be considered an accurate record of any performance occurring in the studio, in any sense. Any authentic copy of the master tape produced an authentic instance of the work when played back.2 In such music, the sound of the work, in an important sense, came straight from the composer, without the mediation of a performing artist. The end of traditional compositional techniques was solemnly predicted. In fact, in the classical tradition, electronic music remains a minority culture. It was a different musical tradition that took up the recording studio as its workshop.

Facing the Music: How Original Was Borodin's Chemistry?

Aleksandr P. Borodin (1833–1887) is lauded for being both a noted classical composer and a chemist, an almost unique example that has generated a large biographical literature. While his reputation as a composer is unquestioned, the originality of his chemistry has often been overstated. A return to the original sources demonstrates that the evidence for Borodin's reputation as a great chemist, as opposed to a merely good one, is exaggerated.

Dmitri Shostakovich: His Life in Film by John s> Riley (review)

REVIEWS 329 performed that year gives little sense of a consensus on what Soviet music might be, but the celebrationof Beethoven'srevolutionarypathos hints at the faux classicism that would become Socialist Realism. The final chapter deals with what Nelson sees as 'the fairlymoderate nature of the CulturalRevolution in music' (p. 236). Such an assessmentshould perhaps not surprise;after all, these were years which saw successful performances of Shostakovich's opera TheNose.An epilogue considers the degree of normalitythat returned in 1932. In keeping with much recent scholarship(Caroline Brooke, Leonid Maksimenkov, Kirill Tomoff), Nelson sees this period as less centralized than often assumed, and cites the revealing fact that with the appointment of Genrikh Neigauz in 1934, 'the conservatory resumed its anomalous status as being the only institutionof higher leaning in the Soviet Union not administeredby a Partymember' (p. 243). One of the many threads running through the book is the peculiarityof music as a non-representationalart and the effectsthat this has, aesthetically and institutionally,on musicpolicy.Yet Nelson never fallsvictimto the potential abstractionof her subjectmatter, and has produced a clearlywritten and beautifullydocumented book which repaysfrequentand carefulreading. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies PHILIP Ross BULLOCK University College London Riley, John. Dmitri Shostakovich: His Life in Film. KINOfiles Filmmakers' Companion, 3. I. B. Tauris,LondonandNewYork,2005. ix + I50 pp. Illustrations.Notes. Appendix. Filmography.Furtherreading. ?35.00. FROM the 1920S onwards, many of the best-known classical composers have devoted significantenergies to the creation of film music; and among those who have not done so, several would like to have done, had they had the knack.It is the kind of activitythat can make a composer feel sociallyuseful, in the way that their forebearsdid when they were commissionedfor theatre scoresor celebratorycantatas,and of course it offersa means of keepingbody and soul together, generally rather more lucrative and often more creatively stimulatingthan teaching or performing. In the Soviet Union the stakeswere higher, obviously, as they were for all the arts. For Prokof'ev,famously, collaborationson Faintsimmer'sLieutenant Kzzhe and Eisenstein'sAlexander Nevsky and IvantheTemible helped to seal his reputation as the returning'prodigalson', but then to edge him close to the abyss, through unwitting association with political incorrectness.There are some equallyfascinatingstoriesto tell about many of Shostakovich'sforty-odd film scores, even if there is little in the music itself that can rival the intrinsic artisticworth of Prokof'ev's. With the exception of 7heNewBabylon at the outset of Shostakovich'sfilmmusic career, and Hamletand KingLearat the end of it, the films themselves have fallen into the dustbinof history.Yet in the late I930S the Maximtrilogy, tracing the growing revolutionaryconsciousnessand agitationalexploits of a 330 SEER, 84, 2, 2006 fictional Soviet Mr Average, was all the rage; generations of Soviet citizens grew up with Shostakovich'shit-songfor TheCounterplan (originallyreleasedin I932) ringing in the ears; and to this day Western concert-audienceswould instantlyrecognize the Romance from TheGadfly, without knowing anything of its provenance in a I955 film about revolutionaryagitationfor Italianunification during the Risorgimento (or indeed that this film was Faintsimmer'sonly other comparativelywell-knownachievement). But the potentialinsightsinto the careerof the composerwhose tribulations have so much to say about the fate of the intelligentsiaunder the Bolsheviks easilycompensatefor the dubiousaestheticand ethicalqualitiesof most of the artistic products. From Shostakovich'spoint of view, writing for films was almostliterallya life-saverat times of his virtualbanishmentfrom othermeans of gainfulemployment.And when the pressurewas not so intense, the musical imageryhe producedmore or less unreflectivelyin his film scoresoften seeded itselfin his concertworks,helping in the tripleprocessof his artisticmaturing, his negotiating of wriggle-room within the fuzzy prescriptions of Socialist Realism, and not least- though this is pure speculation -his atonementfor his unavoidable complicity with the regime by means of durable, universal works of art as opposed to trashy,ephemeral ones. John Riley is undoubtedly the world authority in this far from easy-toaccess area. Wisely perhaps, his book does not directly tackle the big sociopoliticalissues, and it makes little or no attempt to relate Shostakovich's work to the various available theories of film music composition. What it does do invaluably and uniquely is give every film with music by Shostakovichits due, sketchingthe story-line,placing musical cues in context, offeringjudicious assessments of the quality...

Dictionary of American classical composers

Dictionary of American classical composers

Luca Marenzio: The Career of a Musician between the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation (review)

CLASSICAL COMPOSERS Luca Marenzio: the Career of a Musician between the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation. By Marco Bizzarini. Translated by James Chater. Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. [xvii, 370 p. ISBN 0-7546-0516-7. $84.95.] Music examples, plates, bibliography, indexes. This is a translation into English of Marco Bizzarini's Marenzio: La camera di un musicista tra Rinascimento e Controriforma (Rodengo Saiano, [Brescia]: Commune di Coccaglio/Promozione Franciacorta, 1998), published before the quatrocentenary of Marenzio's death in 1999. That book was quickly recognized as something exceptional: not just the first biography of the composer by an Italian, but a work which set new standards for Italian musical biography in its integrated use of both documentary and musical sources. Its appearance in English translation is thus very welcome indeed. Bizzarini builds on previous work by Hans Engel, Steven Ledbetter, and others but, by returning to the documents and rereading them in a sixteenth-century context, he brings a host of new insights to our understanding of Marenzio's milieu. In particular, Bizzarini uses his sources to place the composer's life and works in the complex network of relationships with which he surrounded himself. Marenzio held no church post-he was almost unique in this for his time-but carved out a career working for cardinals and members of Italian ruling families, with a brief spell in Poland towards the end of his life. For this reason the political and personal relationships between these patrons are significant, and Bizzarini's most important contribution is his deep understanding of the networking of Roman/Florentine fami lies and their interactions with papal politics and those of other Italian states. He shows an especially good understanding of the complex links which bound together the inhabitants of the city of Rome, at this period a relatively small city in which prelates, members of noble families or of confraternities, theatrical producers, artists, and musicians all rubbed shoulders constantly. Bizzarini makes particularly good use of the Avvisi di Roma, the regular reports sent by ambassadors to their masters at the Court of Urbino and other centers, for political insights as well as for gossip, which help clarify relationships and the social makeup at various events in which music played a part. This English version has been translated by James Chater, himself a formidable Marenzio scholar, which is greatly to the book's advantage. Chater has also translated all Italian documents afresh, giving originals in footnotes. His introductory note on the problems of translation is an honest and useful discussion of the translator's role especially in relation to sixteenth-century Italian and its nuances. Chater and Bizzarini have taken the opportunity to revise some of the footnotes and to make some small additions to the text (for example, some extra information on the singer Vittoria Accoramboni on p. 102). In general, the translation sticks closely to the Italian original and now makes available to a wider audience a book of special quality and significance. The bulk of the book deals with the madrigal. Marenzio also wrote some sacred music, but much of it has not survived, and there are still unanswered questions about that which has; these are honestly dealt with here. Bizzarini is particularly interested in studying each of Marenzio's madrigal publications in the round. As he says: A madrigal book can be viewed as the outcome of the play of numerous forces dictated by the complex political strategies of patrons or the private aspirations of the author himself. …

PRESENTATION OF THE HARRELL L. STRIMPLE AWARD OF THE PALEONTOLOGICAL SOCIETY TO WESLEY C. WEHR

The week before Wes Wehr received the Harrell L. Strimple Award, an article appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer with the headline: “Wes Wehr: Artist, Writer, Paleobotanist.” The night before the award luncheon, the Washington State Museum, commonly called the Burke, held a party in Wes's honor. The party was attended by artists, art historians, critics, carvers, art museum curators and directors, musicians, writers, poets, anthropologists, librarians, archivists, students, a state representative, and not a few paleontologists. It is fair to say that throughout his career, Wes has been an exporter of paleontology, and we are all the better for it. Wes was born in Everett, Washington, in 1929 and was trained as a classical music composer. Quiet and curious by nature, he collected agates and the signatures of interesting people. His requests for a signature sometimes grew into …