Music Research Research Articles

Exploring approaches to community music delivery by practitioners with and without additional support needs: A qualitative study

Previous community music research indicates a diverse field with many forms of practice. Understanding the views of community music practitioners about their approaches offers an important way to understand their professional identities and strategies they employ. A qualitative study interviewed five community music practitioners from the same company to investigate their approaches. Two had 30 years of experience and were training three practitioners in workshop leading; one trainee (Joseph) has additional support needs (ASN). Two lay researchers with ASN contributed to thematic analysis. Two themes were identified: pedagogical identities accentuated personalization and enacting inclusivity as key dimensions of being a workshop leader; interpersonal processes demonstrated the crucial nature of individualized communication, humour and building relationships. Although Joseph’s interview shared these themes, he also identified confidence, adaptability and creativity as key qualities for himself to develop and expressed a strong personal identification with participants’ development of self-efficacy. While interviewees had varied musical backgrounds and skills, common principles may offer a basis for the translatable beneficial impacts of community music across the highly diverse facilitators and settings that characterize this field. Appreciating pedagogical contributions of practitioners with ASN can help in envisaging new identities and ways of being creative and inclusive in community music practice.

越劇과 女性國劇의 비교 연구 - 발전과정과 특징을 중심으로

Yue-ju Opera and Female Gukkeuk are representative traditional theater styles in which only actresses perform. In the 20th century, women’s social advancement had become more frequent, so women’s stage performances are no longer unfamiliar. Yue-ju Opera and Female Gukkeuk are popular and traditional plays developed in Seolchang(說唱), and have similarities such as the actress’ male costume acting and romance narratives. The history of Female Gukkeuk and Yue-ju Opera is a process in which women, who were excluded from stage performances and were taboo, became the central body of the stage.BR First of all, I reasearched the process of women becoming the central body on the stage. Yue-ju Opera and Female Gukkeuk were theatricalized from Seolchang Art. Changgeuk was established by the Joseon(朝鲜) Vocal Music Research Association, and Yue-ju Opera was established as Yue-ju Opera through Nakji Changseo, Sogaban, and Shaoxing-Munhee. Both theater styles had performed only by men at the beginning period. Since then, Changgeuk has partially performed by Ki-saeng or female singers of Pansori, but Yue-ju Opera had established a female troupe and let male troupe push out.BR Since Female Gukkeuk and Yue-ju Opera are performed only by actresses, the actress’ male costume is the core of these two styles. Female Gukkeuk was established by Im-Chun-Aeng, who participated in the early days, and Yue-ju Opera was established by YIn-guifang through various resuscitation actors in the late 30s and 40s. Unlike the Female Gukkeuk established actress’ male acting and then the other actors’ acting was highlighted, the Yue-ju Opera was centered on the Huadan(花旦) at first and later on, Xiaosheng(小生) became centered. In terms of makeup, costumes, romance narratives, and singing method, Female Gukkeuk has a relatively strong and powerful images, compared to Yue-ju Opera which has a soft images.BR After liberation from Japanese colonial rule, Female Gukkeuk had a desire to become the representation of national theater with the motto of establishing a nation- state and national musics. This desire was also expressed in a national formation narrative. However, the Female Gukkeuk, which wanted to be the representation of the nation-state, became marginalized when Korean society had rebuilt the traditional gender order again.BR In Shanghai, many immigrants from Zhejiang(浙江) and Jiangsu(江蘇) province accounted for the majiority, and Yue-ju Opera had the locality to put them together. After the establishment of People’s Republic of China, thanks to the marriage law campaign, romance narrative-oriented works gained popularity nationwide and even were introduced to foreign countries, functioning as the representation of the nation-state.

Revisiting the South Korean Youth Culture and T’ongkit’a Music

ABSTRACT T’ongkit’a music grew out of the 1960s Korean youth culture, which was centered on elite university students. Previous studies on t'ongkit’a music often highlight its political and social consciousness, but even in its heyday, t’ongkit’a music’s relationship with political activism was limited and accidental. Though it should not be overlooked that the youth’s music was a new mode of social and aesthetic interaction and communication, its political values and effects are rather a later invention of the progressive popular music researchers

Analysis of Computer Visualized Sound Parameters of Vocal Music Singing Based on Deep Learning

The first impression of the early historical recordings on the contemporary audience is often not ideal; the overall speed is relatively fast, the rhythm is relatively loose and free, and the strings are slippery. In recent years, a large number of research achievements have emerged at home and abroad that apply computer visualization analysis methods to music performance practice. It is feasible and necessary to gradually apply the visual audio parameter analysis method to music research and performance practice teaching. In this study, a prosody hierarchy prediction model based on the CNN (convective neural network) is proposed, and word vectors are added as semantic features. The DL (deep learning) method is applied to vocal music recognition, and a recognition method based on the DL framework is proposed by combining traditional audio signal processing methods. After introducing word vectors as features in the CNN model, the F-score value increased from 77% to 80%. The feasibility of the proposed vocal music recognition algorithm based on DL is verified by experiments.

Connected Alone

This exposition examines the possibilities and problems of using the elements of ancient musical culture for producing new music. It contains eleven video clips and associated texts explaining my artistic research on the Karelian kantele improvisation of the 19th century and earlier, which the kantele players called "soittaa omaa mahtia" ("playing their own power"). The word "mahti" ("power") means inner strength and knowledge. In this article, I call this particular music inner power improvisation. In addition, the article includes two case studies that exemplify the use of tradition and its philosophy as tools in creativity education. I address the question of whether I can surpass the challenges of understanding a musical culture from a different time era and of an entirely different society than my own. Is it possible to receive an insider view through artistic research, by learning to make music according to the information found in the archives, historical texts, and folk music research? How do I perform responsible research and introduce my conclusions and musical interpretations when there is not enough reliable information about the original tradition?

Briefs / Feuilletons

Briefs / Feuilletons Deborah Campana, Richard Griscom, Judy Pinnolis, and Sandi-Jo Malmon The Board of Directors of Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) is delighted to announce that Tina Frühauf, current Deputy Executive Director of RILM, will become its next Executive Director effective 29 August 2022. She will be the fifth person to lead RILM, succeeding Barry S. Brook (1966–1989), Terrence E. Ford (1989–1991), Adam P. J. O'Connor (1991–1996), and Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie (1996–2022). Following an international search, the Board of Directors unanimously selected Dr. Frühauf as RILM's next Executive Director. 'Tina brings to the position a unique breadth of experience at RILM and in the academic community', said Dr. Mackenzie, RILM's current Executive Director and President of the Board of Directors. 'At RILM she has already worn many hats, all successfully, including as an editor, as head of marketing, and as licensor of full-text content for RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text and RILM Music Encyclopedias. Tina is also a widely published and active scholar and teacher. What impressed the Board most about Tina is her passion for RILM's global mission and her vision for the organisation and its role in music research of the 21st century'. 'I am thrilled and honored to serve as RILM's next Executive Director and, by extension, all researchers, educators, students, and librarians worldwide who seek to access music literature and scholarship in all its facets and contexts', says Dr. Frühauf. 'Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie created a stable and entrepreneurial work environment, and I am excited to head an organisation that is well prepared to continue its development. As a scholar, teacher, and editor, I have relied on RILM's research tools for over two decades and I strongly believe in their scope, which is driven by the global mission they represent. Expanding RILM's global network and strengthening the appreciation of bibliography and historiography as crucial pillars of solid academic work is at the forefront of RILM's future work. With this, I hope that RILM's resources remain indispensable sources of knowledge that support all those who are engaged in the study of music'. RILM's 2021 Board of Directors served as the search committee: Zdravko Blažeković (RILM), L. Charles Fink (RILM), Elizabeth Davis (Columbia University), Richard Freedman (Haverford College), Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie (RILM), Philippe Vendrix (CNRS), and Richard W. Young (Quarles & Brady, ret.). The committee benefited from the assistance of Mary Gail Biebel, succession consultant, and Sara McWilliams, executive search consultant. Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM), New York publishes a suite of online reference works for music research, including the German music encyclopedia Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (as MGG Online) and the lexicographic collection RILM Music Encyclopedias. Its well-known bibliographic database RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text has some 1.5 million records representing publications concerning all types of music, published in more than 170 languages, coming from some 150 countries, and includes several hundred journals in full text. RILM also published the Index to Printed Music, and the forthcoming online version of Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti (as DEUMM Online). RILM functions under the auspices of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres; the International Association for the Study of [End Page 327] Popular Music; the International Musicological Society; the International Council for Traditional Music. RILM is housed at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in New York City. Tina Frühauf has been a core member of the RILM staff since 2003, working in a number of capacities over the years. She is an active scholar and writer; the study of Jewish music in modernity has been Dr. Frühauf's primary research focus for two decades, culminating in monographs such as Orgel und Orgelmusik in deutsch-jüdischer Kultur and Transcending Dystopia: Music, Mobility, and the Jewish Community in Germany, 1945–1989. Her most recent scholarly work focuses on the historiography of music scholarship and migration, examining the mass dislocation of peoples in the twentieth century and the conditions of globalisation, genocide...

Sources of Jewish Music: Active and Passive Assimilation Revisited

Sources of Jewish Music:Active and Passive Assimilation Revisited Jonathan L. Friedmann (bio) General theories are scarce in the current field of Jewish music research. Most attempts at all-encompassing rules or principles have proven untenable due to the complexity of the terms involved—"Jewish" and "music"—as well as the overwhelming historical and regional diversity of Jewish music cultures. Past efforts to draw maps or timelines connecting the various forms, styles, and contexts have invariably led to what Israeli musicologist Edwin Seroussi calls "unfortunate overgeneralizations."1 According to Seroussi, the central flaw of such theories—whether they seek to connect various strands of musical expression to a single, long-ago source (commonly the Second Temple) or search for a "stable," "unilinear," or "authentic" musical expression—is the "ontological notion of 'tradition,'" which "assumes the existence of unambiguous boundaries separating sonic spaces" while ignoring the complex roles of individual contributors, performance contexts, cross-cultural contacts, shifting tastes, historical circumstances, and other shaping forces.2 The elusiveness of a stable or definable tradition speaks to challenges in musicological inquiry more generally, where attempts at empirical or objective claims often clash with the experiential and subjective nature of the subject matter.3 [End Page 389] Part of the problem is that theories of Jewish music tend to be prescriptive, concerned with how things ought to be, rather than objective frameworks derived from meticulous a posteriori observation. Jewish music scholars of the past, virtually all of whom were Jewish themselves, approached the subject with vested cultural, aesthetic, and religious interests.4 As a result, their theories more closely resemble statements of ideals or principles than scientifically acceptable schemes or systems of facts.5 What Hannah Arendt identified as a flaw in political theory also applies here: the very concept of "theory" assumes that the theorist is detached from the object instead of an active participant in a "phenomenon" involving a web of relationships "from which the theorist cannot extricate herself."6 Eric Werner's theory of active and passive assimilation is among the few far-reaching concepts of Jewish music to have largely evaded scrutiny. The theory, which he proposed in 1949 and repeated for decades thereafter, categorizes musical examples based on the presence (active assimilation) or absence (passive assimilation) of a "Judaizing" process as communities absorb foreign musical elements.7 It acknowledges the reality of musical sharing between Jews and their neighbors, as well as the existence of musical mainstreams or minhagim ("customs") that mix indigenous developments and outside influences. For Werner, the theory served as an academic leitmotif, appearing at semiregular intervals and with almost repeated language in a half dozen publications between 1949 and 1981. It was an unusually consistent and durable concept for an author whose voluminous writings can be difficult to parse, alternating as they do between elitism, polemics, speculation, music theory, and historical analysis—sometimes in the same work—and connected as they were to his activist work in Jewish professional and educational settings.8 Werner presented the active and passive categories as objective and incontestable labels applicable to examples from any region, period, or population; musical elements filtered through an existing Jewish mainstream are actively assimilated, while elements that enter unchanged [End Page 390] are passively assimilated. Like other twentieth-century theories in the field, however, active and passive assimilation are basically dressed-up extrapolations of Werner's own standards and principles. Beneath the clean definitions are prejudices, distortions, and value judgements rooted in his biography. Born near Vienna in 1901, Werner graduated from Berlin's Hochschule für Musik in 1924 and earned a doctorate at the University of Strasbourg in 1928. After lecturing at the rabbinical seminary in Breslau from 1935 to 1938, he sought refuge from the Nazis at Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati, Ohio, succeeding famed musicologist Abraham Z. Idelsohn, who had recently passed away. In 1948, Werner oversaw the establishment of the School of Sacred Music at the HUC campus in New York, the first cantorial school in the United States and a locus of Jewish musical authority in the post-Holocaust period. A proud Central European and aggressive defender of his own musical tastes, Werner used his position to...

Asian American Female Composers and Digital Memory

Asian American Female Composers and Digital Memory

The Significance of Chinese Film Music Research in the Perspective of Music History

Chinese culture is profound and has a long history. As a part of China's art genre, film music has a very deep history and particularly rich value connotation, and its continuous inheritance process not only brings people spiritual enjoyment, but also enhances national cultural self-confidence. The history of film music is an excellent film, which takes a complete story as a clue, and through the analysis and study of these stories, it creates a certain meaningful and worthy of people to appreciate and learn the dots. In the history of film music, Chinese music composition has a long and glorious history, it has always been breathtaking since its birth. With the continuous development and innovation of the times, China's film industry has been prosperous and developed rapidly. How to better promote the study of Chinese film music in the context of music history is the main question that will be explored in this paper, and its significance will be analyzed from three aspects.

Music in the Lives of Immigrant Children: A Review of Literature

As a growing number of immigrant children enter formal music education, research is crucial to understand their experiences and to promote culturally relevant and socially just music education pedagogies. Whereas, researchers have traditionally focused on immigrant adolescents and music, I chose to synthesize studies on musical childhood in immigration contexts. In addition, this review draws on the acculturation literature to interpret music research findings. Researchers have documented meanings and forms of immigrant children’s musical engagement in formal and informal learning contexts. Research findings have indicated that immigrant children mix different musical traditions while using music to navigate their bicultural identities. Several studies have also addressed the perspectives of immigrant parents and the challenges of music teachers in diverse classrooms. Although this body of literature has provided descriptive accounts of musical childhood in immigration contexts, studies have offered valuable suggestions for more effective musical activities in multicultural learning environments.

The Musical Idea Work Group: Production and Reception of Pre-existing Music in Film

AbstractHow do filmmakers work with pre-existing music? To answer this question, I conducted interviews with the musicians, composers, editors, sound designers, and music researchers for Lars von Trier's films. This article combines previously unpublished insider information with an original analytical methodology to clarify the working processes of contemporary filmmakers who utilize pre-existing music. I build on Ian Macdonald's production-situated conception of the ‘Screen Idea Work Group’ to posit the ‘Musical Idea Work Group’, a notional framework emerging from the teams who develop film-musical ideas. While previous film music research tends to analyse artists (persons) or music (products), here I focus on contrasting descriptions of highly collaborative working processes with the prescriptive mechanisms of film reception. In this way, I demonstrate a more holistic understanding of filmic authorship while accounting for previous constructions of Trier as an ‘auteur mélomane’ based on critical perceptions of how he utilizes music.

Sociable Musicopoetics in Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd’s In What Language

Through an extended analysis of an excerpt from Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd’s In What Language, this essay engages with the ongoing deepening of the theory of improvised interactivity. Few studies within music research have considered the rich body of works combining music and poetry in improvising contexts. This article advocates for listening to Iyer and Ladd’s co-created work through the lens of sociable musicopoetics, an analytical stance that hears the interactivity in their creative processes. Through analysis and interviews, this article suggests that the sociable musicopoetics framework helps work against the restrictive binaries of music/language and composition/improvisation and enriches the understanding of improvised music and poetry combinations by highlighting the meaningfulness of interaction itself.

A Taxonomy of Orchestral Grouping Effects Derived from Principles of Auditory Perception

The study of timbre and orchestration in symphonic music research is underexplored, and few theories attempt to explain strategies for combining and contrasting instruments and the resulting perception of orchestral structures and textures. An analysis of orchestration treatises and musical scores reveals an implicit understanding of auditory grouping principles by which many orchestration techniques give rise to predictable perceptual effects. We present a novel theory formalized in a taxonomy of devices related to auditory grouping principles that appear frequently in Western orchestration practices from a range of historical epochs. We develop three classes of orchestration analysis categories: concurrent grouping cues result in blended combinations of instruments; sequential grouping cues result in melodic lines, the integration of surface textures, and the segregation of melodies or stratified (foreground and background) layers based on acoustic (dis)similarities; segmental grouping cues contrast sequentially presented blocks of materials and contribute to the creation of perceptual boundaries. The theory predicts orchestration-based perceptual structuring in music and may be applied to music of any style, culture, or genre.

A PRISMA review of research on feedback in music education and music psychology

The purpose of this study was to conduct a systematic review of research literature about feedback in music. We employed the Preferred Reporting Systems for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method to systematically review literature about feedback in music education and music psychology from the first identified article in 1973 to November 2021. We identified a total of 4,499 records using our inclusion criteria, of which a total of 153 were identified as relevant for further analysis. We documented percentages and frequencies for publications over time, type of publications, sampling location, methodology, and topic. We also employed recent conceptions of feedback to categorize the type of feedback studied. Results suggest the extant literature in music may be outdated and lack methodological rigor. Most studies did not provide a working definition of feedback and were largely confined to teacher feedback. Music researchers have primarily studied feedback in relation to learner’s behavior rather than their cognition or affect. Consequently, feed-back (as opposed to feed-up or feed-forward) represents the overwhelming focus of this literature. This review highlights the need for more in-depth, nuanced, and empirically robust studies on feedback in music education and music psychology.

The Invention of Latin American Music: A Transnational History

Pablo Palomino's book The Invention of Latin American Music aims to trace the development and embrace of the notion of Latin American music as it is commonly used today, whether in academic circles, among listening audiences, in the realm of cultural policy and diplomacy, or with artists and performers themselves. The author argues that the concept, which began to take shape and exert its influence in the 1930s, did not emerge out of a cohesive and concerted regionalist project. Instead, it is the result of a process of layering of competing ideas regarding Latin America as a geographical entity, which intersect with modernist and nationalist desires for cultural distinctiveness and with more pragmatic concerns regarding the creation, protection, and expansion of networks and markets centered on different forms of musical production (live performances, radio broadcasts, recorded sound, music education programs, academic research, etc.). As a result, Palomino defines Latin American music as an aesthetic category, one that provides a convenient handle to those who engage with it, despite lacking a single discernible core or clear external boundary.Palomino further suggests that understanding this process of invention and naturalization also sheds light on the often-overlooked transnational dynamics that informed the various articulations of musical nationalism in Latin America. With this he adds a much-needed regional-level historiographical analysis of how musical nationalism and cosmopolitanism are interrelated and mutually constitutive rather than mutually exclusive. The book begins by considering how a heterogeneous collection of music performance circuits—local, national, regional, and intercontinental—led not to a unifying notion of Latin American music but instead to the emergence of multiple incarnations that partly overlapped and partly competed with one another. Additional conceptualizations of Latin American music grew out of a nascent commercial music industry, in which music critics, royalty collection organizations, and broadcasting stations used a variety of genre labeling practices to negotiate their positionality vis-à-vis national and transnational discourses of authenticity regarding the musics with which they were involved. Nationalist and populist state musical polices, for their part, relied on transnational notions of civilizing the citizenry and elevating the vernacular to help create a regional Latin American framework. That framework was then fleshed out by a transnational network of scholars who undertook the work of theorizing the nature of Latin American music and thus defining its aesthetic ethos. Finally, US foreign policy interests in the region, in particular as articulated by the Music Division of the Pan-American Union and later by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, helped to legitimize the work and expertise of these Latin American music scholars, naturalizing the aesthetic category defined by them and laying the foundation for decades of research, educational initiatives, cultural exchanges, music festivals, and music industry categories that continue to invoke the category.The Invention of Latin American Music covers a great deal of ground and offers a number of important insights for readers interested in the historiography of music research in Latin America. Based on meticulous archival research in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, and the United States, the various case studies included in this book are engrossing in their own right, many of them providing tantalizing leads for future research. The book is also important because of its emphasis on social actors, institutions, and perspectives within the regional context of Latin America, a much-needed complement to other recent research that has tended to privilege the role of US-based individuals and institutions. The book's regional emphasis also offers a good alternative vantage point from which to broach the subject of music nationalism in Latin America, one that meshes well with the work of music scholars like Cristina Magaldi, Fernando Rios, and Leonora Saavedra and that helps to highlight and complicate the overlaps and continuities between nationalism and cosmopolitanism.

Zwischen Lärmkontamination und Verstummen

In a time of ubiquitous availability of diverse musics, in which noise pollution and the silencing of sounds represent simultaneous challenges and make crises audible, a rethinking of hearing, listening and music-making becomes necessary. This builds upon an ongoing discussion on the understanding of the environmental crisis as a failure of culture and the demand to pay increased attention to the protection of the natural environment through music. Current developments in music research give new impetus to discussions about greening processes in and through sound as reactions to environmental and social crises. For example, in the areas of Acoustic Ecology, Ecomusicology, Multispecies Ethnomusicology, Soundscape Ecology, Zoomusicology, and Human-Animal Studies, other-than-human beings are understood as agents also in terms of music-making and receiving. These disciplines call for the openness of musics to dialogue across cultures, species, and academic disciplines. Hence, every sound – whether classifiable as music or not – is a legitimate topic of music research. This in turn questions human exceptionalism, speciesism, anthropocentrism, ethnocentrism, and their effects on the environment. This paper focuses on sustainable examinations of the role of sound and musics regarding the solution or intensification of current problems for which conscious listening is primarily required.

Fostering the “Art of Forceful Speech”: Music in the Century Club of California, 1888–1920

AbstractThe Century Club of California (CCC), founded in 1888, was San Francisco's most prestigious women's club in the early twentieth century. The club's aim was to promote intellectual growth and amplify female voices to help women enter the public domain with confidence. Weekly presentations featured renowned public figures and women who had achieved success in traditionally male fields. Rather than raising money for benevolent organizations, the CCC aimed to effect foundational social changes by informing women of the latest developments in all fields, thus empowering them to engage in political and social activism. Music played a critical role in furthering this ambitious goal; it had its own programming committee, which operated on an equal basis with those devoted to art, science, education, and current events. This article, based on the club's extensive collection of unpublished materials, looks at the CCC's first three decades, when the club promoted “the art of forceful speech” through modeling of successful women, providing opportunities for members to project their musical voices, elucidating new musical research, and supporting organizations such as the all-female Saturday Morning Orchestra. The CCC's activities underscore the significant role female musicians played in advancing the New Woman movement of the time.

The Songs of Old Europe—Ancient Belarusian Folk Songs

The Songs of Old Europe—Ancient Belarusian Folk Songs

Life-history in musical research. Leo Brouwer: A case study

The life-history method as a scientific research method in music gains prominence in the twentieth century and grows even more in the present. Its usefulness is appreciated when writing about referent characters in artistic practices for the human being, cultural exchanges, study of personalities, and their effects in the training of new generations of musicians, among others. This method motivated this work, which had as an objective to elucidate the steps that constituted the methodological strategy of application of life-history in musical research, rooted in a study of the artistic output of Leo Brouwer. From a predominantly qualitative approach, interviews and an analysis of documents were combined, which made possible a reflection on the life- history method and its implementation in music research.

Inheritance and Innovation of National Music Culture in Music Education

In the context of globalization, national music culture has become the focus of academic circles. How to protect, inherit and innovate the excellent national music culture is an important problem facing the current music education theory and practice research. This study argues that music education needs to keep a proper balance between “globalization” and “localization”, reasonably use the teaching materials of national music, and maintain the “root” and “uniqueness” of national culture, so as to better inherit and innovate national music culture. Thus, in this study, based on the summary of the concept of national music, the integrated teaching method of “teaching-practice-scientific research” is put forward from the perspective of inheritance, and the idea of integrating international music teaching method and national music culture is proposed from the perspective of innovation.