English Musicians Research Articles

Does musicianship influence the perceptual integrality of tones and segmental information?

This study investigated the effect of musicianship on the perceptual integrality of tones and segmental information in non-native speech perception. We tested 112 Cantonese musicians, Cantonese non-musicians, English musicians, and English non-musicians with a modified Thai tone AX discrimination task. In the tone discrimination task, the control block only contained tonal variations, whereas the orthogonal block contained both tonal and task-irrelevant segmental variations. Relative to their own performance in the control block, the Cantonese listeners showed decreased sensitivity index (d') and increased response time in the orthogonal block, reflecting integral perception of tones and segmental information. By contrast, the English listeners performed similarly across the two blocks, indicating independent perception. Bayesian analysis revealed that the Cantonese musicians and the Cantonese non-musicians perceived Thai tones and segmental information equally integrally. Moreover, the English musicians and the English non-musicians showed similar degrees of independent perception. Based on the above results, musicianship does not seem to influence tone-segmental perceptual integrality. While musicianship apparently enhances tone sensitivity, not all musical advantages are transferrable to the language domain.

Towards a Native OPERA Hypothesis: Musicianship and English Stress Perception.

Musical experience facilitates speech perception. French musicians, to whom stress is foreign, have been found to perceive English stress more accurately than French non-musicians. This study investigated whether this musical advantage also applies to native listeners. English musicians and non-musicians completed an English stress discrimination task and two control tasks. With age, non-verbal intelligence and short-term memory controlled, the musicians exhibited a perceptual advantage relative to the non-musicians. This perceptual advantage was equally potent to both trochaic and iambic stress patterns. In terms of perceptual strategy, the two groups showed differential use of acoustic cues for iambic but not trochaic stress. Collectively, the results could be taken to suggest that musical experience enhances stress discrimination even among native listeners. Remarkably, this musical advantage is highly consistent and does not particularly favour either stress pattern. For iambic stress, the musical advantage appears to stem from the differential use of acoustic cues by musicians. For trochaic stress, the musical advantage may be rooted in enhanced durational sensitivity.

Artamonova , E. A. Lukina , G. U. Tabachnikova , O. M. Russian-British Intercultural Dialogue: Russian Music in Britain (review)

REVIEWS 753 All in all, it is extremely disheartening that such a worthwhile project based on a wealth of research material has been handled in such a way as to be so much less rewarding than anticipated. London Nick Worrall Artamonova, E. A., Lukina, G. U. and Tabachnikova, O. M. (eds). RussianBritish Intercultural Dialogue: Russian Music in Britain — British Music in Russia / Rossiisko-britanskii kul´turnyi dialog: russkaia muzyka v Velikobritanii — britanskaia muzyka v Rossii. Gosudarstvennyi institut iskusstvoznaniia and the University of Central Lancashire, Moscow, 2020. 447 pp. Illustrations. Music examples. Notes. Price unknown. This handsomely produced volume on British-Russian musical relations derives from what must have been a most stimulating conference held in the State Institute of Art Studies in Moscow and the Music Department of the University of Central Lancashire, as part of the Russian-British year of music in 2019. The team of contributors comprises approximately twice as many Russians (whether or not they still live in that country) as others, and for that reason the main, although very far from only, readership may be of those with Russian. The book is in five parts, 1: Historical Comprehension of Russian-British Cultural Dialogue (Interviews and Meetings); 2: Creative Heritage of Russian and British Musicians in the Cultural Life of the Twentieth and Early TwentyFirst Centuries; 3: Russian Musicians in England and English Musicians in Russia; 4: Historical Evidence for Russian-British Cultural Interaction; 5: Artistic Facets in the Cultural Crossover: Music, Literature, Theatre. It ends with brief notes about the authors with portraits, substantial abstracts of their contributions as well as keywords, all in both Russian and English. The interviews and reminiscences of Part 1 are fascinating, ranging from Britten to Iudina, with some typically lively anecdotes surrounding Rostropovich (including his practising obeisance in a quiet churchyard in expectation of a meeting with Princess Mary in Harewood House). Also entertaining is Elizabeth Wilson’s account of her stay in Russia (where early on she was sternly informed that Handel was not only not English, but also a socialist, the proof being the Hallelujah Chorus, which demonstrated conclusively that the workers were joyful). In Part 2 there are two articles about a man who epitomized musical links between Russia and the West, the late Professor Aleksandr Ivashkin: by Ol´ga Tabachnikova in a Russian translation of an article first published in English, and by his pupil, Elena SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 754 Artamonova, who writes of a dialogue of cultures, revealing many aspects of this remarkable man; she also contributes an interesting article based on recent archival findings and publications relating to musical links between the countries during World War Two and the Thaw. Viktoria Zora writes about the musical exchanges of the 1940s, while Rustem Kudoiarov considers Britten’s Piano Concerto and its creative connections with Soviet Russia, a land with which Alan Bush (as Amrei Fleichsig reminds us) had political as well as cultural sympathies. Finally in this section, Paolo Eustachi writes about Michael Nyman, who wrote music for Dziga Vertov’s silent film, Man with a Movie Camera. The latter article is only in English, as are Vladimir Marchenko’s piece on Tarkovskii’s production of Boris Godunov as an artistic credo, and Caitlin Smith’s on the merits of Brodkii’s rather than Auer’s version of Chaikovskii’s Violin Concerto. Many more contributions are only in Russian, except those by Vladimir Jurowski and Gerard McBurney reviewing musical connections between Britain and Russia, violist Martin Outram’s interview, which touches particularly on the interest of Bax and MacMillan in Russia but where he speaks mainly about Peter Maxwell Davies, and, thirdly, Jane Hanson’s recollections of working with Evgenii Svetlanov. All these are published in both languages. Unfortunately, the interview with Aleksandr Vustin and Elizabeth Wilson is only in English. Part 3 on musicians visiting each other’s countries include Elena Dolinskaia, who adds some details to our knowledge of Medtner in Britain; pianist and composer Ivan Sokolov reminisces about his connections with this country; and Svetlana Lashchenko writes about the disastrous visit to Russia of the otherwise successful prima donna Clara Novello in 1839. Part 4 begins with George Lapshynov (De...

Performing Ornaments in English Harpsichord Music. Part I

The article deals with the problems of interpreting English ornaments (embellishments, graces) of the second half of the 17th century in the process of their evolution. The authors consistently analyze the recommendations of the early English musicians Edward Bevin, Christopher Simpson, Matthew Locke, John Playford, and Henry Purcell. Emphasis in this study is allotted to the first ever published in England full table of ornaments with their execution written by Christopher Simpson in his The Division-Violist (London, 1659). Detailed consideration here is given to the ornament named “Shaked Beat”. It should be noted that the first full table “Marques des Agréments et leur signification” in France was enclosed only in D’Anglebert’s Pièces de Clavecin (c1689). For comparison, recommendations of the performance of ornaments are provided by some Italian, German and French composers and theorists of this time, such as Emilio del Cavalieri, Guillaume-Gabriel Nivers, Jean Rousseau, Gilles Jullien, Étienne Loulié and Johann Gottfried Walther. A critical revision of scholarly publications on the problems of this study beginning from Edward Dannreuther and Arnold Dolmetsch to the present time has been carried out. Serious inaccuracies were found in the works of modern researchers and in reference and encyclopedic publications, including The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.

What Do Signatures Signify?

At the beginning of the seventeenth century English composers used only a handful of keys: they combined five keynotes (G, A, C, D, and F) with the three signatures documented in English solmization theory (♮,♭, and♭♭). By the end of the century English theorists described eighteen keys—all of the modern major and minor keys with up to four signature accidentals. But the route from eight to eighteen keys was not straightforward. This article traces this route by examining how the function of signature flats and sharps changed in seventeenth-century England. At the beginning of the century signature flats and sharps were clefs, mere notational symbols that provided a shorthand for the probable pitches in a composition. As a result, English musicians used adjacent keys (i.e., ♮-D and -D), which were distinct, well-formed versions of a broader category of D minor. In the middle of the century, composers and theorists used ad hoc and asymmetrical strategies ♭ to create new keys. Composers explored new flat keys through the process of signature creep, while theorists devised new sharp keys when they identified the parallel key relationship. Finally, theoretical interventions at the end of the century “fixed” keys into our modern system but obscured the varied pitch structure that still animated musical practice. The messy, flexible circumstances in which keys arose complicate several assumptions about modern key; this evidence challenges notions of transpositional equivalence and reveals that different kinds of keys may be built on different conceptual foundations.

The Selectivity of Musical Advantage

The OPERA hypothesis theorizes how musical experience heightens perceptual acuity to lexical tones. One missing element in the hypothesis is whether musical advantage is general to all or specific to some lexical tones. To further extend the hypothesis, this study investigated whether English musicians consistently outperformed English nonmusicians in perceiving a variety of Cantonese tones. In an AXB discrimination task, the musicians exhibited superior discriminatory performance over the nonmusicians only in the high level, high rising, and mid-level tone contexts. Similarly, in a Cantonese tone sequence recall task, the musicians significantly outperformed the nonmusicians only in the contour tone context but not in the level tone context. Collectively, the results reflect the selectivity of musical advantage—musical experience is only advantageous to the perception of some but not all Cantonese tones, and elements of selectivity can be introduced to the OPERA hypothesis. Methodologically, the findings highlight the need to include a wide variety of lexical tone contrasts when studying music-to-language transfer.

Popular Music in the Post Digital Age ed. by Ewa Mazierska, Les Gillon, Ton Rigg

Reviewed by: Popular Music in the Post Digital Age ed. by Ewa Mazierska, Les Gillon, Ton Rigg J. Martin Vest (bio) Popular Music in the Post Digital Age. Edited by Ewa Mazierska, Les Gillon, and Ton Rigg. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Pp. 292. Hardcover £103.68. In their introduction to Popular Music in the Post Digital Age: Politics, Economy, Culture and Technology, Mazierska, Gillon, and Rigg define the present “post digital age” not as a stage after digital technologies, but one in which these technologies have become ubiquitous (pp. 2–5). In bringing together these thirteen essays examining post-digital popular music, the editors have created an illuminating cross-section of evolving musical cultures in a number of national and international contexts, primarily in Europe, but with occasional forays beyond. The essays in part one provide snapshots of a post-digital music industry in which longstanding verities of production, marketing, and distribution have been shaken. Galuszka and Wyrzykowska, for example, chart the shifting meaning of “independence” by examining fifty-two Polish record labels, while Kenny Forbes and Waldemar Kuligowski document the persisting (and even increasing) role for live music festivals across Europe. In part two, contributors explore the lives and works of post-digital age musicians themselves, rendering a collective portrait of increasingly precarious musical labor. The theme wends through Mazierska’s and Rigg’s examination of English musicians Peter Hook and Graham Massey; Lars Bröndum’s interviews with contemporary Swedish composers; and Ewa Mazierska’s study of Austrian and Hungarian indie rock bands. Conversely, Chris Inglis’s essay examines European electro-swing, a genre foreign to most Americans, but which encapsulates perfectly the post-digital age’s potential to transcend past, present, and future through digital “sampling” techniques. Finally, part three explores music consumption in the post-digital age and here an important and recurring theme is that of “curation.” Emília Barna argues that music curation services, such as 22tracks, have played a key role in crystallizing new forms of class distinction. Andrew Fry, on the other hand, voices concern that by giving us exactly what (they think) we want, streaming music platforms and their curatorial algorithms will contribute to an impoverished marketplace of ideas. In their introduction, the editors also evoke French music scholar Jacques Attali to argue that the dematerialized, borderless, and fluid nature of music production and consumption in this post-digital age not only mirrors the broader global economy, but also prefigures its incipient transformations (pp. 1–2). In that spirit, many of the collection’s essays offer thought-provoking analyses of post-digital music’s compatibility and complicity with the present and emerging neoliberal dispensation. In Manchester, UK, Kamila Rymajdo finds club owners engaging in high-risk investments in the name of novelty, diversifying their investments across several [End Page 382] ventures and employing volunteer “crowdsourced” labor. Mathew Flynn, on the other hand, looks to media history to distill a “heuristic” for predicting the future of music consumption in the post-digital age. Technologies that facilitate broader playlist choice and “situational control” while also reducing the necessity of skill and knowledge on the part of users, he argues, will carry the day. Paulo Magauddo assesses predictions that blockchain technology will undermine neoliberal currents in the music industry and (smartly) issues a skeptical “not so fast!” The blockchain’s much-trumpeted decentralism, he points out, is already being challenged by the incursion of massive firms such as Spotify, while its potential to make early song-downloaders “shareholders” in the song’s revenues threatens to extend the logic of capitalism even further into the heart of post-digital musical culture. Finally, Michael Huber analyzes the findings of a 2015 survey on musical attitudes and behaviors conducted by the Institute for Music Sociology in Vienna. By examining the answers of young respondents, he is able to offer some well-founded predictions for the future of music consumption. As the American philosopher Yogi Berra once warned, however, “it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Not surprisingly, then, contributors’ projections for the future of post-digital music are less consistently illuminating than their analyses of the present, with many opting for a non-committal prediction...

WHY ARE LEXICAL TONES DIFFICULT TO LEARN?

AbstractL2 sounds present different kinds of challenges to learners at the phonetic, phonological, and lexical levels, but previous studies on L2 tone learning mostly focused on the phonetic and lexical levels. The present study employs an innovative technique to examine the role of prior tonal experience and musical training on forming novel abstract syllable-level tone categories. Eighty Cantonese and English musicians and nonmusicians completed two tasks: (a) AX tone discrimination and (b) incidental learning of artificial tone-segment connections (e.g., words beginning with an aspirated stop always carry a rising tone) with synthesized stimuli modeled on Thai. Although the four participant groups distinguished the target tones similarly well, Cantonese speakers showed abstract and implicit knowledge of the target tone-segment mappings after training but English speakers did not, regardless of their musical experience. This suggests that tone language experience, but not musical experience, is crucial for forming novel abstract syllable-level tone categories.

Effect of Linguistic and Musical Experience on Distributional Learning of Nonnative Lexical Tones.

Evidence suggests that extensive experience with lexical tones or musical training provides an advantage in perceiving nonnative lexical tones. This investigation concerns whether such an advantage is evident in learning nonnative lexical tones based on the distributional structure of the input. Using an established protocol, distributional learning of lexical tones was investigated with tone language (Mandarin) listeners with no musical training (Experiment 1) and nontone language (Australian English) listeners with musical training (Experiment 2). Within each experiment, participants were trained on a bimodal (2-peak) or a unimodal (single peak) distribution along a continuum spanning a Thai lexical tone minimal pair. Discrimination performance on the target minimal pair was assessed before and after training. Mandarin nonmusicians exhibited clear distributional learning (listeners in the bimodal, but not those in the unimodal condition, improved significantly as a function of training), whereas Australian English musicians did not (listeners in both the bimodal and unimodal conditions improved as a function of training). Our findings suggest that veridical perception of lexical tones is not sufficient for distributional learning of nonnative lexical tones to occur. Rather, distributional learning appears to be modulated by domain-specific pitch experience and is constrained possibly by top-down interference.

The Mysterious Matthew Novell: An English Imitator of Corelli

Matthew Novell has hitherto been one of the more obscure of the English musicians who wrote trio sonatas based largely on Corellian models in the years around 1700. His set of twelve sonatas, self-published in London in 1704 and reprinted in Amsterdam by Estienne Roger in 1705, is unusual for conforming to the ‘da camera’ rather than the ‘da chiesa’ type. Although their musical quality is modest, the sonatas contain several interesting features, including the use of the still-rare key of B major. Their debt to Corelli emerges clearly in the paired grouping by key of the sonatas, their movement types and titles, and in the appearance of several stylistic hallmarks such as the ‘Corelli clash’ and walking bass. New biographical investigation reveals Novell to have been an amateur player of the bass viol, who was probably born around 1678 into a geographically mobile family that in previous generations had included a prominent churchman and a leading physician. He was apprenticed in 1692 to a vintner, and appears to have plied the same trade until his death in 1728 in Oporto, where he had lived for many years. His intense but seemingly short-lived engagement with musical performance and composition typifies the world of English amateur musicians of his period and milieu.

Thai Rate-Varied Vowel Length Perception and the Impact of Musical Experience.

Musical experience has been demonstrated to play a significant role in the perception of non-native speech contrasts. The present study examined whether or not musical experience facilitated the normalization of speaking rate in the perception of non-native phonemic vowel length contrasts. Native English musicians and non-musicians (as well as native Thai control listeners) completed identification and AX (same-different) discrimination tasks with Thai vowels contrasting in phonemic length at three speaking rates. Results revealed facilitative effects of musical experience in the perception of Thai vowel length categories. Specifically, the English musicians patterned similarly to the native Thai listeners, demonstrating higher accuracy at identifying and discriminating between-category vowel length distinctions than at discriminating within-category durational differences due to speaking rate variations. The English musicians also outperformed non-musicians at between-category vowel length discriminations across speaking rates, indicating musicians' superiority in perceiving categorical phonemic length differences. These results suggest that musicians' attunement to rhythmic and temporal information in music transferred to facilitating their ability to normalize contextual quantitative variations (due to speaking rate) and perceive non-native temporal phonemic contrasts.

Top-down linguistic categories dominate over bottom-up acoustics in lexical tone processing

Native tonal-language speakers exhibit reduced sensitivity to lexical tone differences within categories when compared to across categories (i.e., a top-down linguistic influence). However, increasing evidence suggests enhanced sensitivities to lexical tones among musically trained individuals (bottom-up influence), though previous studies examined non-tonal language speakers processing lexical tones. We investigated the relative contribution of top-down and bottom-up processing of lexical tones when both strategies are available. Seventeen native Mandarin speakers with extensive musical training completed a music test and a lexical tone discrimination task. The music test validated their enhanced pitch-processing abilities. The lexical tone discrimination task measured participants’ lexical tone sensitivities along a continuum. Results were compared to existing data from Mandarin non-musicians and English speaking musicians (Zhao & Kuhl, 2012). Despite their enhanced bottom-up pitch processing, Mandarin musicians’ performance exhibited patterns similar to Mandarin non-musicians, reflecting the dominant influence of linguistic categories (p = 0.504). Their sensitivities were also lower than English-speaking musicians (p = 0.011). However, further regression analysis suggests that bottom-up processing still plays a role in Mandarin musicians: their within-category tone discrimination is predicted by their musical pitch discrimination scores, similar to English musicians but opposite Mandarin non-musicians.

The advancement of music in Enlightenment England: Benjamin Cooke and the Academy of Ancient Music

'This is a book guaranteed to make waves. It skilfully weaves the story of one key musical figure into the story of one key institution, which it then weaves into the general story of music in eighteenth-century England. Anyone reading it will come away with fresh knowledge and perceptions - plus a great urge to hear Cooke's music.' Michael Talbot, Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Liverpool and Fellow of the British Academy. Amidst the cosmopolitan, fashion obsessed concert life of later eighteenth century London there existed a discrete musical counterculture centred round a club known as the Academy of Ancient Music. Now largely forgotten, this enlightened school of musical thinkers sought to further music by proffering an alternative vision based on a high minded intellectual curiosity. Perceiving only ear-tickling ostentation in the showy styles that delighted London audiences, they aspired to raise the status of music as an art of profound expression, informed by its past and founded on universal harmonic principles. Central to this group of musical thinkers was the modest yet highly accomplished musician-scholar Benjamin Cooke, who both embodied and reflected this counterculture. As organist of Westminster Abbey and conductor of the Academy of Ancient Music for much of the second half of the eighteenth century, Cooke enjoyed prominence in his day as a composer, organist, teacher, and theorist. This book shows how, through his creativity, historicism and theorising, Cooke was instrumental in proffering an Enlightenment-inspired reassessment of musical composition and thinking at the Academy. The picture portrayed counters the current tendency to dismiss eighteenth-century English musicians as conservative and provincial. Casting new and valuable light on English musical history and on Enlightenment culture more generally, this book reveals how the agenda for musical advancement shared by Cooke and his Academy associates foreshadowed key developments that would mould European music of the nineteenth century and after. It includes an extensive bibliography, a detailed overview of the Cooke Collection at the Royal College of Music and a complete list of Cooke's works. TIM EGGINGTON is College Librarian at Queens' College, Cambridge.

Purcell and the Reception of Lully's ‘Scocca pur’ (LWV 76/3) in England

ABSTRACTThis article examines the English reception of an Italian song by Lully, ‘Scocca pur tutti tuoi strali’ (LWV 76/3), and its importance for English music of the late seventeenth century. In English sources, this song exists in arrangements for keyboard, and for two violins and bass. It was also the source of a five-bar bass formula used variously in the 1680s. Purcell, for example, clearly used the bass, or an adapted version of it, as an ostinato pattern in three instances. ‘Scocca pur’ is the clearest example of a model composition in Italian style that was known to English musicians in the late seventeenth century. By implication, Italian-style compositional practice was developed from a limited number of models, which were adapted freely, disseminated aurally, and modified to suit native tastes and practices.

Effects of musical experience on learning lexical tone categories

The relationship between music and speech processing is of great interest. Lexical tones, contrastive pitch-modulation patterns at the word level, are an ideal tool to explore these relations. Previous studies suggest that musicians exhibit an advantage in discriminating lexical tones. The current study aims to explore whether having extensive musical training is associated with the ability to form robust lexical tone categories given highly variable natural speech tokens. A continuum of pitch contours was created with Mandarin Tone 2 and Tone 3 as the endpoints (see Zhao, Wright, & Kuhl ASA abstract). First, 20 monolingual English musicians and 20 monolingual English non-musicians completed identification and discrimination tasks that established individuals' perceptual boundaries on the continuum. Then, half of the musicians and half of the non-musicians were randomly assigned to an 8-session perceptual training procedure. Lastly, all subjects completed identification and discrimination tasks both with old and new stimuli to examine changes in perceptual boundaries and generalization. Results will be considered in terms of theories relating speech and music processing. [Research supported by NIH and NSF.]

Correspondence

Ann Lingas gives an admirable summary of my ‘Constructing the Archangel: Corelli in 18th-century editions of opus 5’ in her review of the proceedings of the 2003 Corelli congress in Fusignano (Early Music, xxxviii/4 (2010), p.594). I would like to clarify, however, that the point of my article was not to advocate playing Corelli unornamented. It is a reception study rather than advice to performers (though hopefully it helps widen performers’ sense of the range of possibilities in approaching this repertory). In attempting to explain why Roger's celebrated 1710 edition provoked such suspicion and even hostility in the years immediately following its publication I came to the conclusion that some English musicians in the 18th century did not think that florid ornamentation enhanced Corelli Adagios. This (though Lingas calls it ‘extreme’) is incontrovertible. The attitude of these musicians seems to have gone hand-in-hand with a view of Corelli as a master of counterpoint and harmonic structure—an idea that I further explore in a companion article, ‘Re-constructing the Archangel: Corelli “ad vivum pinxit”’, Early Music xxxv/4 (2007), pp.525–38. Clearly, this perspective ran in parallel with the very different view held by those producing the increasingly elaborate written-out ornamention for Corelli Adagios to which Lingas refers.

Can musical aptitude and experience predict success in non‐native tone word learning?

Non‐native linguistic pitch perception is subject to influence from a variety of factors in addition to linguistic background, including musical experience. The present study investigated the effects of musical aptitude and musical experience on Cantonese tone word learning and how these musical factors interact with linguistic experience. Adult native Thai listeners whose native language (L1) is tonal and English listeners with a non‐tonal L1, subdivided into musician and non‐musician groups, engaged in a seven‐session perceptual training program, learning the meanings of 15 novel vocabulary words distinguished by five Cantonese lexical tones. Before training, a musical aptitude task was administered to establish the participants’ level of musicality and auditory discrimination skills. The results show significant group differences in tone word learning proficiency by the end of training. English musicians outperformed their non‐musician counterparts; however, the Thai musicians were not significantly different from the Thai non‐musicians. Results from regression analyzes further show that higher musical aptitude scores predicted tone word learning success for the English group but not for the Thai group. These findings suggest that the influence of musical experience in constructing novel lexical representations of tone words differs as a function of linguistic background.

SINGING THE SELF: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN SINGER AND COMPOSER JOHANNES VON SOEST

The German singer, composer and writer Johannes von Soest (1448–1506), also referred to as Steinwart or Steinwert, is the author of a vernacular autobiography in verse. One of the very few such documents written by a musician, it gives a highly personal insight into his career, which extended from his training as a chorister in Soest to the ducal chapel in Cleves and afterwards to Bruges (in the company of two unnamed English musicians), Aardenburg (Overijssel), Maastricht, possibly Cologne, Kassel and finally Heidelberg, where he was appointed as Kapellmeister. He subsequently decided to become a physician. The article includes a complete transcription of the text, whose original was destroyed during the Second World War, but has been preserved in Johann Carl von Fichard's rare edition of 1811, and a translation of the sections of musical interest. In an introduction his training and career choices are discussed, and his observations concerning musical practice are analysed.

Relative influence of musical and linguistic experience on early cortical processing of pitch contours

To assess domain specificity of experience-dependent pitch representation we evaluated the mismatch negativity (MMN) and discrimination judgments of English musicians, English nonmusicians, and native Chinese for pitch contours presented in a nonspeech context using a passive oddball paradigm. Stimuli consisted of homologues of Mandarin high rising (T2) and high level (T1) tones, and a linear rising ramp (T2L). One condition involved a between-category contrast (T1/T2), the other, a within-category contrast (T2L/T2). Irrespective of condition, musicians and Chinese showed larger MMN responses than nonmusicians; Chinese larger than musicians. Chinese, however, were less accurate than nonnatives in overt discrimination of T2L and T2. Taken together, these findings suggest that experience-dependent effects to pitch contours are domain-general and not driven by linguistic categories. Yet specific differences in long-term experience in pitch processing between domains (music vs. language) may lead to gradations in cortical plasticity to pitch contours.

‘Volk von Brüdern’: The German-speaking Liedertafel in Melbourne

A Liedertafel concert at which the former Governor His Excellency Sir Henry Loch and Lady Loch were present was reported in theIllustrated Australian News and Musical Timesof 1889 as follows:In the course of some remarks Lord Loch made the statement that the advancement of musical culture in Melbourne is to be attributed to the influence of Germans. Now although the community includes some excellent musicians of that nationality, the opinion expressed by our late governor is by no means in accordance with facts. It is only just that honour should be given where it is due and the untiring efforts of the English musicians in the colony in educating public taste ought to be thoroughly recognised.