Music Examples Research Articles

Listening for Realism in Charpentier’s Louise

AbstractOn 2 February 1900, Gustave Charpentier’s opera Louise premièred at Paris’s Opéra-Comique. Set in contemporary Montmartre, the work was discussed ubiquitously by its earliest critics as réaliste (translatable as both ‘realistic’ and ‘realist’) – a tendency that has continued in more recent musicological writing. In this article, I focus on Louise and discourse around it in order to re-examine the complex relationship between opera and realism. After sketching the terms of the opera’s reception to assess the case for understanding it as a ‘realist’ work, I position the opera in relation to theoretical conceptualizations of realism in other art forms. I then present two music examples to explore how Louise might not only resonate with existing understandings of late nineteenth-century French realism, but also expand or disrupt them. Ultimately, this article ponders the possibility that the act of listening might shape its own distinct form of realism.

Jakob Adlung’s ‘Anweisung zum Fantasiren’ (c.1725–7): edition, translation and introduction

Abstract Jakob Adlung’s recently rediscovered manuscript treatise, ‘Anweisung zum Fantasiren’ (‘Instruction in improvisation’, c.1725–7), proves definitively that some 18th-century musicians understood improvisation modularly in terms of stock voice-leading patterns, or schemas. The manuscript is a compendium containing 28 typical voice-leading patterns that are to be memorized, varied and combined in myriad ways. Adlung’s treatise is thus of particular value, not only because of its numerous musical examples and extensive textual commentary, but because it reveals some of the musical and social expectations of the average central German church organist in the early 18th century. This article offers an introduction to the treatise in the context of Adlung’s biography, with an online appendix containing a critical edition of the treatise and an English translation.

Slovene Musical Stage Works

This second installment of a two-part article on Slovene music literature and lyric diction surveys musical stage works in the Slovene language, with a large chart of composers and works, along with sample music examples and further commentary on Slovene composers.

Guillaumier , Christina The Operas of Sergei Prokofiev (review)

REVIEWS 755 Part 5 on cultural crossovers is the most variegated part of this stimulating collection, including Tat´iana Chernova who describes the triumph of Medtner’s Romantic Sonata in Britain, after he had settled there, also offering ideas as to why it was so successful. Elena Petrushanskaia finds the influence of English music in the poetry of Iosif Brodskii and, with less certainty, in the music of Shostakovich, despite his ‘dialogue’ with Britten. Kseniia Suponitskaia discusses the image of Ophelia in the works of Valerii Gavrilin. Ol´ga Krasnogorova explores the interpretation of British piano music, especially that of Thomas Adès and Brian Ferneyhough. A more conventional composer, John Taverner, dedicated to Princess Elizabeth Fedorovna Romanova ‘full of grace’ a musical prayer in 2002, which is analysed in the article by Elena Miklukho. A Bulgarian scholar Liudmil Dimitrov tries to analyse Pushkin’s ‘Pir vo vremia chumy’ as more than a translation of John Wilson’s ‘City of the Plague’, perhaps fancifully finding a code in the name Walsingham. Finally may be mentioned Elena Savitskaia’s piece on Russian music in the works of British rock bands, including The Nice (Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C sharp minor), Renaissance (marginally, Rimskii-Korsakov’s Shekherazade) and, particularly, Emerson, Lake and Palmer (Musorgskii’s Pictures at an Exhibition). There is much to enjoy as well as to learn in this rich collection of articles, reminiscences and interviews, which undoubtedly deserves a place in all serious libraries of both Russia and Britain. London Arnold McMillin Guillaumier, Christina. The Operas of Sergei Prokofiev. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge and Rochester, NY, 2020. xii + 286 pp. Illustrations. Music examples. Notes. Synopses. Bibliography. Index. £40.00; £19.99 (e-book). Christina Guillaumier’s The Operas of Sergei Prokofiev is a comprehensive, up-to-date and scholarly monograph based on extensive archival and bibliographical research. Guillaumier has consulted major Prokof´ev biographies, articles, operatic monographs (Polevoi, 1949; Klimovitskii, 1961; Tarakanov, 1996; Ruch´evskaia, 2010; Savkina, 2015; Seinen, 2019), PhD theses (McAllister, 1970; Petchenina, 2006; Landis, 2007; Ermolaeva, 2018), Prokof´ev’s Diaries, unpublished correspondence and the surviving autograph manuscripts. Guillaumier uniquely traces Prokof´ev’s complete operatic oeuvre, from juvenile works, both unfinished and completed, to major operas and largely unknown uncompleted operatic projects from late in the composer’s life (Epilogue). The book is well structured with a wealth of musical examples and offers a balanced text of historical and contextual information, musical SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 756 analyses and discussion of Prokof´ev’s operatic ideal, aesthetics and influences. According to Guillaumier, her intention is to shed light into Prokof´ev’s ‘stylistic and aesthetic decisions, his changing compositional style, and his continual re-evaluation of his own idiom’ (p. 1). This aim is well communicated throughout book, and, though it offers no overall conclusions, the evolution of Prokof´ev’s operatic ideal is well presented and merits the reader’s attention. The book’s chronological structure, with its cogently written chapters, offers an overview of Prokof´ev’s compositional growth: from the musical gestures of his earliest piano works and first attempts at orchestration in Maddalena, to the extensive use of declamation in The Gambler and The Fiery Angel, exploration of characterization through visual images and harmonic language in The Love for Three Oranges, to exploration of libretto adaption and lyricism in Prokof´ev’s Soviet operas. Guillaumier traces several of Prokof´ev’s operatic ‘gestures’ from the composer’s shorter juvenile compositions for piano, in which he uses ‘pianistic figurations and flourishes, repeated ostinato notes and chords, dramatic tremolos, long chromatic lines, and a broken-chord bass’ (p. 15). The musical gestures are presented in connection to plot, dramatic pacing and characterization. For example, ‘the ostinato is used to control the rhythm of the events […]; it often holds entire sections and sustains episodes’ (p. 64), while chromatism and tritones are often associated with evil characters (e.g. Renata in The Fiery Angel). Declamation, theatrical rhythm, dramatic pacing and scenographic plasticity are the main elements that, according to Guillaumier, constitute Prokof´ev’s operatic ideal. Prokof´ev’s preference for declamation, avoidance of arias and emphasis on theatrical acting in The Gambler were...

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...

Kelly , Catriona Soviet Art House: Lenfilm Studio under Brezhnev (review)

REVIEWS 757 and montage, with montage scenes and declamation being used ‘to achieve a sense of realism’ (pp. 207, 209). Here the ‘concepts of theatrical rhythm, declamation, and characterisation remain largely intact despite the enormous political pressure’ Prokof´ev underwent (p. 210). That said, Guillaumier largely stays clear from discussing the external political forces that prompted revisions of his Soviet operas. Overall, the book gives an in-depth analysis and vivid narrative of the music and would be of particular interest to musicologists and operatic producers, but also to the non-specialist reader. Reading the book, one is often prompted to study the operatic scores, as the text sometimes refers to bars which are not included in the given musical examples. The musical description of acts and scenes sometimes does not follow the logical progression of the plot, which is partially compensated with the inclusion of Synopses at the end of the book. Despite these minor caveats, this well considered and compelling monograph does indeed provide ‘a coherent and illuminating narrative of Prokofiev’s operatic career’ (p. 2) and Guillaumier’s scholarly work certainly contributes significantly to the existing Prokof´ev scholarship. Department of Music Viktoria Zora Goldsmiths, University of London Kelly, Catriona. Soviet Art House: Lenfilm Studio under Brezhnev. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2021. xxii + 512 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £81.00; £29.99. When she was an exchange student in Voronezh in the early 1980s, Catriona Kelly sought ‘salvation’ (p. xiv) in cinema, perhaps to dispel the boredom of provincial life. While astonished by acclaimed films from Abuladze, Paradzhanov and Tarkovskii, Joseph Heifitz’s now obscure Married for the First Time (Lenfil´m, 1979) ‘stayed with her as well’ (p. xv). The author was moved by Heifitz’s film, which is indeed an affective, if of course, clichéd, example of Lenfil´m’s efforts to convey the personal, to evoke emotional registers among the (often quite appreciative) audiences. Aleksei German’s My Friend Ivan Lapshin (Lenfil´m, 1984), an ‘art house’ film of the time, demonstrated to her what types of experimental films Lenfil´m Studios was still able to produce. Kelly’s work reads like the product of someone enthusiastically interested in Soviet film of the ‘Brezhnev era’. This enthusiasm often leaps from the pages and has brought me back to re-watching many of the films I had forgotten. Far too much scholarly work in film studies has focused on specific films or ostensibly groundbreaking directors. The resulting generalizations have tended to obscure rather than enlighten cinematic history. Kelly’s absorbing SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 758 monograph is a rare study, based on a significant documentary base (in addition to an impressive array of archival and secondary sources, she enriches her discussion with interviews with many figures active now or previously in Lenfil´m) of the most critical site in cinema, the production studio. The work under review is an original contribution to the study of Soviet film. Her diachronic study of Lenfil´m from the early 1960s to the collapse of the Soviet Union (and in a concise conclusion, into the 1990s) includes compelling analyses of dozens of films, both now obscure and those long celebrated. Kelly also advances convincing arguments as to why the collective nature of Lenfil´m’s (indeed Soviet film efforts generally) often produced captivating cinema. More on this later. Kelly examines the people: directors, editors, camera operators, set and costume designers, and studies directors and Leningrad (city and regional) officials, among others, who collectively, as it were, constituted Lenfil´m and shaped its productions. She states that, as opposed to banal invocations of an overarching era of stagnation, Lenfil´m, during the 1960s and 1970s, produced an array of films ‘at once lyrical and obscure’ (p. xvi). Many Lenfil´m productions were also, as she observes, ‘some of the most widely discussed cultural events of the era’ (p. 23), including Gelb Panfilov’s No Path through Fire (1968), Il´ia Averbach’s Monologue, Dinara Asanova’s Woodpeckers Don’t Get Headaches (1976) and Aleksei German’s Twenty Days without a War (1976). Of the nineteen chapters in her book (not counting the introduction and...

Тахрир как внесловесный музыкальный элемент в искусстве аваза

The essay explores the phenomenon of tahrir, one of the most important elements of the avaz vocal art in Iranian classical music. As a hereditary avaz performer and an active concert soloist who has sung in this tradition for a number of years, the author bases his reasoning on the extensive practical experience of several generations of Iranian singers. As a result, instead of interpreting tahrir as a purely ornamental device, which is quite a widespread approach to this phenomenon, the author presents its detailed explanation as an extra-verbal multifunctional element in the evolvement of the avaz sonic texture, noting its deep semantic, psycho-emotional and form-structural meaning in each particular musical utterance. Audio files and music examples are attached to the essay.

The Musical Language of Rock

The Musical Language of Rock

Oedipus returns to the opera: The repressed in psychoanalysis and musicology

After publishing a psychoanalytic inquiry on Enescu’s and Stravinsky’s Oedipal operas, it seemed worth offering comments about other artistic depictions based on Oedipus’ myth. Josep Soler’s and Xiao-song’s versions were studied in relation to their orientalist sources. Soler’s opera shed further light on Oedipus’ paranoid crisis in his duet with the blind seer. Seneca, Soler’s main inspiration, also influenced Méreaux’s Oedipal opera, which portrays the phantom of Laius requiring vengeance for his murder, a situation similar to the one Freud and Jones commented on in their analysis of Hamlet. Another ghost was found in Pierre Bartholomée’s Œdipe sur la route, which depicts a return of Oedipus’ own complex and its psychopathological comorbidities even after he chastised himself. Psychopathological symptoms were also observed in Sacchini’s version, probably the most famous of all Oedipal operas in its century. Furthermore, the focus now is not only on Oedipal operas, but also on a version of the Jocasta debate. Also attended to in this article are other operas and artistic representations that do not deal directly with the Oedipus myth. A list of 30 Oedipal operas with musical examples offers a fruitful space for debates on psychopathological issues related to the most important complex in psychoanalysis.

Heritage

Heritage

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

Формирование венецианской народной баркаролы: жанровые истоки и типология

The purpose of the research is to consider historical and theoretical aspects of the previously unexplored Venetian folk barcarole, to study origins of its formation, etymology of meanings of the genre that is unique in its musical embodiment of the theme “man and nature”. The article is novel in that it is the first to create a typology of the folk barcarole on the basis of the Russian theory of music genres. Foreign works previously unknown in the Russian musicology are translated by the author and introduced into scientific use. Comparing the barcarole and examples of functional music of Western Europe, the researcher determines their commonalities and differences. The findings amount to identification of the genre structural and semantic complex, which then becomes an invariant for composers’ works.

‘As long as we Dance and Sing we Will Stay Alive.’: Indigenous North American Resistance against Assimilation through Song and Dance

ABSTRACT In Indigenous American culture singing and dancing hold a central position within the passing on of cultural knowledge from generation to generation. The beat links the people to the earth, the sound to the surroundings. Song and dance express commonly shared emotions and connect the people in the present to the past and to the future. This article focuses on how the colonisation of North America by the settlers has been mirrored, articulated and dealt with through a system of „singing memory“ by its original peoples. Contemporary Indigenous musicians are using a combination of present and traditional expressions for voicing out their way of dealing with that impact. The article addresses first aspects of the traditional characteristics of North American Indigenous ways of translating cultural knowledge through song and dance; second draws a historical overview of how changes have been interpreted through this way of expression and under the impact of paradoxical interest by the settlers; and third presents some contemporary musical examples of articulating these experiences. The information is mainly based on personal fieldwork and interviews with contemporary North American Indigenous musicians, reflecting the orally transmitted Indigenous historical perspectives of the issue, as well as on archival research documenting mainly the settler perspective of the question.

Kohlrausch , Martin Brokers of Modernity: East Central Europe and the Rise of Modernist Architects, 1910–1950 (review)

REVIEWS 561 BogusławSchäfferformsanimportantcasestudyforthebook,asacomposercritic who divided opinions: crucially, he ‘was not eager to adapt lack language as the foundation for an aesthetic program because he rejected the notion that catching up could be achieved by imitating an external example’ (p. 119). From Schäffer’s obsession with experiment for experiment’s sake, a younger generation took up the mantle to eventually be proclaimed the Polish avantgarde group (including Górecki and Krzysztof Penderecki). In the context of recent studies (see especially, Jakelski, Making New Music in Cold War Poland: The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956–1968, Oakland, CA, 2016), Vest achieves an impressive new contextualization for Polish music: that the actual discourse was composer-led, with multiple agents debating what ‘modernity’ meant to their particular situation. The book is well-suited for a non-specialist readership, though music analysts might prefer to have had more in-depth appraisals of key works. Music examples help to illustrate Vest’s argument, particularly with the more visual scores of the later avant-garde group. Perhaps the most revealing message of Awangarda is its illustration of just how much Western scholars have reinforced Cold War stereotypes in their writing on Polish music: since this detailed study will surely be required reading for any scholar on the subject, I would hope that such attitudes will be put to rest in future. Royal Holloway, University of London Daniel Elphick Kohlrausch, Martin. Brokers of Modernity: East Central Europe and the Rise of Modernist Architects, 1910–1950. Leuven University Press, Leuven, 2019. 399 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €55.00; open access e-book. A review of this book must begin with the problems of the title: ‘East Central Europe’ is very misleading as the book is devoted entirely to Poland, with the occasional brief comparison with matters in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The long table of contents does not make this situation clear either. The list of periodicals consulted cites exclusively Polish and Western titles. Taking something like the author’s own position on this, one could claim that the very broadly ventilated issues relating to Modernism would apply to all the new East European states in like manner. Much is made of Polish international contacts, the membership of the CIAM (Congress International d’Architecture Moderne)andthepersonalrelationshipsbetweenitsmembersandLeCorbusier in particular; but all this is far from sufficient to justify the exclusion of Poland from the title. SEER, 99, 3, JULY 2021 562 The use of ‘the term ‘brokers’ in the book’s title is intended ‘to evoke a group at the interface of state and society, a group which negotiated Modernity from a central position as a new reality and a desirable goal’. Martin Kohlrausch holds that ‘the architects [in Poland] were ‘almost sought out by society as epitomes of modernity’ (pp. 25, 26). Indeed, architectural Modernism appeared to suit the new and aspiring post-1918 nation states particularly well, with Warsaw appearing especially ‘mouldable’ (p. 209), especially when the ‘Plan Warszawa Funkjonalna’ was formulated in the early 1930s. Kohlrausch studiously avoids what one may call a monographic approach: there is no comprehensive, detailed and rounded treatment of the issues. There are patches of greater detail, for example, on the workings of state patronage, on the processes of professionalization, on journals and on the planning for Warsaw which includes information about the relatively benevolent German regime during World War One. Kohlrausch eschews any kind of a more detailed biographical approach, stressing, instead, the task of evaluating group work, chiefly by Syrkus, Lachert and Brukalski. Furthermore, he underlines that the book is not about buildings as such, though there are good number of illustrations, for example of the 1929 Poznań Exhibition, which have so far not been overused. Furthermore, the author did not see it as his task to take on board recent Polish historical investigations. Regarding the crucial question as to who and what exactly should come under Modernist architecture it appears that Kohlrausch is interested only in the most narrowly circumscribed circle of International Style protagonists. How then does one characterize the author’s approach? It consists chiefly of an array of general perceptions, conducted freely and discursively from a seemingly elevated position, which is meant to...

Vest , Lisa Cooper Awangarda: Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music (review)

REVIEWS 559 of their creative vision accessible to non-specialist, non-Russophone readers for the first time. Many Strugatskii readers know that the fantastical research institute, NIICHAVO, parodied in the brothers’ early novel Ponedel´nik nachinaets v subbotu (Monday Begins on Saturday, 1965), was informed by the Pulkovo Observatory where Boris Strugatskii worked between 1955 and 1964. It is less well known that antisemitic student quotas prevented Boris from undertaking further study in physics, thus channelling him towards Pulkovo and astronomy; or that poor supervision of his graduate dissertation (on binary stars) led him to accidentally duplicate results already proven by another astronomer. Consequently, Boris became a technician rather than a researcher; later, he and Arkadii repurposed their astrophysical expertise in their writing. Combining these biographical insights with wide-ranging literary analysis, Celestial Hellscapes is an outstanding asset to scholars of science fiction. Reese’s book is particularly timely now, as the Strugatskiis’ best novels are finally re-translated and re-issued in English. University of Exeter Muireann Maguire Vest, Lisa Cooper. Awangarda: Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music. California Studies in 20th-Century Music. University of California Press, Oakland, CA, 2020. xiv + 263 pp. Music examples. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $65.00: £54.00. In 1962 Polish composer Bogusław Schäffer brought a lawsuit against fellow composer Henryk Górecki, alleging that he had plagiarized his experimental style of music notation. Schäffer had previously been hostile to the question whether there was even a Polish avant-garde at all, but he had by this point changed course and wished to position himself as the originator of the movement. After numerous meetings, and testimony from experts, the case was thrown out. In this strange episode, we find a microcosm of the argument of influence versus innovation laid out in Lisa Cooper Vest’s brilliant study, Awangarda: Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music. Polish music had been shattered by World War Two, along with most walks of life in the country. Before the war, there had been a nascent national wave, led by Karol Szymanowski. Following the war, Poles sought to establish their own corner of modern music, though with some interference from the Soviet Union. Vest’s book provides a detailed overview of the key questions surrounding this period, but with an angle rarely encountered in Anglophone scholarship on the subject, which usually frames Polish music ‘as a direct response to Soviet political repressions and the subsequent cultural Thaw’ (p. 1). More specifically, SEER, 99, 3, JULY 2021 560 Vest asserts that ‘we cannot fully understand the specific arc of Polish musical avant-gardism through the periodicity of the Cold War’ (p. 3). Instead, Vest draws heavily on the documents and transcripts from discussions between Polish composers and music critics, illustrating how they drew on two key concepts to explain their predicament: lack (brak) and lag (opóźnienie). These terms encapsulate the ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ of Vest’s title: how fears of comparison with West-European counterparts combined with a sense of ‘being out of time’ to give a genuine urgency to the search for a new musical voice that could be seen as legitimate and equal to international contemporaries. Vest lays out how Szymanowski was constructed as a ‘foundation’ of Polish music after his death, similar to Adrian Thomas’s study on the same period (Polish Music since Szymanowski, Cambridge and New York, 2005), which orients itself as ‘post-Szymanowski’. Szymanowski’s vision brought its own issues: the composer believed that ‘to generate progress in Polish music, composers would need to turn simultaneously inward and outward, backward and forward’ (p. 15). Following the war, ‘the perpetuation of a Polish musical tradition took on a new urgency’ (p. 23). Vest expertly focuses on how the major trends of modernity and experimentalism were still active during Polish music’s short-lived engagement with socialist realism (which still had echoes of Szymanowski’s vision of nationalism and accessibility). In lucid detail, she traces how Polish composers protested against the aesthetic imposition, claiming they couldn’t write music ‘for the people’ if they weren’t confident in their own compositional techniques (p. 48). In this section, Vest restores agency to...

A Distinctive Album in Turkey: Bülent Ortaçgil’s Benimle Oynar Mısın

In this study, we aimed to explore prominent musician Bülent Ortaçgil’s album Benimle Oynar Mısın (1974). Built upon a musicological and sociological analysis, our main goal is to investigate the effects of this album, which did not attract attention when it was first published, but gained visibility in the following years. This album, which arguably had a protest structure, emerged in the period when the Anatolian Pop movement was dominant, yet showed very different features from this genre. In this investigation, in which we also conducted an analysis considering the concepts of ‘protest music’ and ‘protest musician’, we focused on the features of the album that differed from the early musical examples of the Anatolian Pop movement, which also exemplifies the 1970s protest music in Turkey. We utilized Howard Becker’s “art worlds” approach to discuss how this album, which has different musical elements and unusual lyrics for the time period when it was released, has become a milestone for music production in Turkey over the years. Then, we examined how divisions of labor occurred in the art worlds in which Ortaçgil positioned himself. One of the most important findings of this study is that, starting from his first album, Ortaçgil’s positioning in the various art worlds in Turkey, in relation to the most prominent artists from Turkey, increased his opportunities to make his album and other songs recognizable over years.

Improvising Musical Structure with Hierarchical Neural Nets

Neural networks and recurrent neural networks have been employed to learn, generalize, and generate musical examples and pieces. Yet, these models typically suffer from an inability to characterize and reproduce the long-term dependencies of musical structure, resulting in products that seem to wander aimlessly. We describe and examine three novel hierarchical models that explicitly operate on multiple structural levels. A three layer model is presented, then a weighting policy is added with two different methods of control attempting to maximize global network learning. While the results do not have sufficient structure beyond the phrase or section level, they do evince autonomous generation of recognizable medium-level structures.

(De)composing the Mongrel

Improvisation is an attempt to transcend the self in a moment of intuitive action. It is an expression of knowledge beyond ordinary consciousness, the embodied wisdom of emptiness. Unlike composition, as a musical practice, improvisation is a way to express the depths of the (un)known and the knowing in the (un)knowing. As a framework for artistic research, improvisation can provide insight into knowledge that is embodied yet not easily articulated. In this article, I will document the development of my research practice through what I call (de) composition strategies: multi-modal approaches to improvisation that combine my experiences both as a musician and scholar. The article will mirror the multi-faceted nature of my work through interweaving academic discourse on consciousness and critical improvisation studies (Sarath 1996; Oliveros 2004; Fischlinn 2009) with musical examples, auto-ethnography, poetry and visual art inspired by dreams.

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

Musical pantophagy: Is there an effect on changes in preference resulting from repeated exposure?

The purpose of this research was to examine the effects of musical pantophagy, classical music consumption, and initial receptivity to select musical examples on changes in preference rating resulting from a program of repeated exposure. Participants included undergraduate students enrolled in a section of music appreciation at a large Southeastern university ( n = 67). Data were collected using a research designed preference rating measure (PRM) administered during a 5-week period within which there were eight test measures. Participants were divided into quartiles. Pre- to post-test measures resulted in a general positive trend for all participants. Comparisons of Q1 (lowest pantophagy) and Q3 (highest pantophagy) on PRMs 1–8 yielded no differences between groups, and PRM 8 was significantly different from PRM 1 for both groups. The same comparisons for Q1 (non-Classical music consumption) indicated significant difference with large effect size and for Q1 (lowest initial receptivity) indicated significant difference. Results suggest that regardless of musical pantophagy, repetition is an effective means by which to increase affective response to music, and that students who do not currently consume formal art music and who have low initial receptivity may report greater increases in affective response to music over time.