Musical Discourse Research Articles

The Dominance of Gamelan in South Korea in a Discursive Perspective

This article provides a genealogical investigation through a postcolonial perspective about gamelan discourses in South Korea. Gamelan is known as a traditional orchestra representative of Indonesia, especially in academic circles. Whereas Indonesian culture is still not well known in South Korea, Indonesian traditional instruments are not limited to gamelan. There are also a great many other traditional instruments on each island and among different ethnic groups in the nation. How and why has gamelan come to be seen as such a representative Indonesian musical instrument within South Korea? Knowledge of gamelan or Indonesian music is a more recent issue in South Korea where there has been no long history of Indonesian musical discourse. The aim of this article is therefore to understand how gamelan was decontextualized from its origin through orientalism and colonial era research into the performing arts, and how this led to it becoming a representative Indonesian traditional music form in South Korea throughFoucault’s theory of discourse. To do this, historical data was investigated using genealogical methodology. Gamelan was one of the popular objects during the colonial era for Western musicians and musicologists. The popularity of gamelan has been parallel with the development of ethnomusicology, and it has flown into South Korea with increasing Korean students who study in the West and through interactions between musicologists in the ethnomusicology field.
 Keywords: Korean gamelan, Indonesian music, colonialism, postcolonial, ethnomusicology

Interpretative Trends of Beethoven’s Ornamentation

"Outstanding representative of the classical music composed in the transition period from XVIIIth to XIXth centuries, Ludwig van Beethoven remains memorable in the history of music through the strength, audacity, and remarkable rhetoric of his musical discourse. With the mastery of a demiurge, he coalesces in the texture of his thematic ideas’ heroic, pathetic or pastoral configurations, making the most of the technical-expressive possibilities of the epoch’s instruments into a authentic instrumental-interpretative manner. Advocate of a prevailingly monumental interpretation, Beethoven will perfect his instrumental style through authentic details which are the subject of the varied attack modes, of ornamentation, articulation, pedaling, etc., which are the personalized elements of a challenging technique. Approaching the aspect of Beethoven’s ornamentation, the present article will bring into focus the identification of the dominant ornamental components and their treatment from an interpretative viewpoint with emphasis on the authenticity of the artistic representation. Keywords: Art & Music, piano, Beethoven’s language, ornamentation, interpretation, authenticity"

The Exoticism of Olivier Messiaen

"In the final decades of the 19th century and in the 20th century, exoticism and orientalism contributed greatly to the evolution and innovation of Western music composition. Using the rules and techniques of Western music, composers incorporated in their works elements pertaining to or inspired by foreign cultures and their music. The current study continues the investigations brought to attention by the authors in their previous articles: it desires to reveal and analyze the way exoticism and orientalism influenced the creation of various composers, pointing to those aspects that represented innovation brought about by the contact with the music and culture of other cultures than the Western world. The musical language of Messiaen is deeply rooted in the universal musical heritage, comprising elements belonging to the music of the Ancient Greeks, the Orient, Africa, or Europe. The present paper presents and offers examples regarding the way rhythm and melody are organized and employed by Messiaen using means that are inspired by Hindu music: the correspondence between the deçî-tâlas (Hindu rhythms) and Messiaen’s use of rhythm, as well as the similarities between the Hindu rāga and the modes of limited transposition. Apart from the Hindu influences on rhythm and melody, Messiaen was also inspired by the Japanese Gagaku, its instruments, and relation between harmony and melody, as well as Indonesian music (Balinese and Javanese), both having an important influence on the way the composer perceives and creates timbre. But apart from striving to create new means of musical expression using exotic elements, Messiaen desired to unveil certain spiritual and theological truths, mirrored in his music and the construction of his musical discourse. Keywords: exoticism, Hindu, Japanese, Bali, Messiaen"

Waltzifiability hypothesis

We present a composition for solo classical guitar. This work comprises four pieces in 3/4 that share the same harmony, but the composition restrictions differ for each. The results are four distinct "waltz" movements. The main contribution of this work is showing composition not as rooted in inspiration, emotions, or innate talent but as a process of learning, critics, and performance. Also is an example of the paradox of choice, i.e., one may be more creative with less freedom of choice. Of course, in this learning environment, the artistic work becomes the musical discourse based on the interaction between the student/composer, the teacher, and the performer.

Paul Price and American Percussion Practices During the ‘Golden Age’ of Higher Education

In 1950, percussionist and pedagogue Paul Price established an accredited collegiate percussion ensemble course at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the first of its kind in the country. In this article, I argue that Price’s accreditation of the genre, coupled with his many other entrepreneurial initiatives, was made possible by the higher education’s renewed desire for democracy and intellectual achievement that emerged after World War II and ultimately led to percussion’s own ‘Golden Age’ that endured until the late 1970s. I achieve this objective by highlighting Price’s role as an institutional entrepreneur, as demonstrated through his relationships and compositional collaborations with two American composers of midcentury percussion works, Michael Colgrass and Vivian Fine. By advocating for new standards of learning, musicianship, and composition, Price negotiated institutionalized norms to help turn percussion into an art form worthy of professional performance standards, accredited courses, a thriving repertory, and institutional recognition in the United States. An investigation of the correlations between midcentury collegiate percussion practices and the patterns of change and growth evident in higher education at the time help illuminate the powerful influence of educational institutions on music discourse in the postwar era.

Six miniatures for violin and piano composed by Fritz Kreisler. Formal analysis and aspects of the accompaniment technique

This article treats aspects of the accompaniment technique in six of Fritz Kreisler’s most widely played miniatures: Liebesfreud, Liebesleid, Schön Rosmarin, Caprice Viennois, Tambourin Chinoise and Syncopation. The works are analysed both from a formal point of view and from an accompanist’s point of view, who has to also know in detail the soloist’s score in order to reveal certain meanders and agogic details of the musical discourse and in order to support and perfectly co-ordinate rhythmically and dynamically with the violinist’s intentions. To this end, several personal grounds related to the vision of interpretation and the problematics of the accompaniment technique are presented with solutions and suggestions of exercises of the imagination. Additionally, each analysed title is followed by a YouTube link, through which the respective track can be listened to as played by violinist Florin Croitoru, accompanied by the undersigned.

Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms by Kira Thurman

Reviewed by: Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms by Kira Thurman Kathryn Agnes Huether Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. By Kira Thurman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021. Pp. 368. Hardcover $32.95. ISBN 978-1501759840. In the field of musicology, several key studies have examined how categories of “Germanness” and “Otherness” have been constructed and negotiated in musical discourse, ranging from such topics as the musical practice of Martin Luther’s aesthetic reform, or the revival of J. S. Bach’s work under the auspices of the Enlightenment-era German Jewish patron Sarah Levy. The rise in antisemitism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found its way into music criticism, with composers and music critics—such as Rudolf Louis and Richard Wagner—frequently attacking German Jewish composers such as Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler for the supposed aural “tainting” and eastern “accents” of their music. The Third Reich escalated racist musical stereotypes by defaming certain music as “entartet,” including Jewish composers, African American jazz, and Roma traditions. Now, musicologist [End Page 326] Kira Thurman brings attention to another important but heretofore overlooked topic in the history of the construction and policing of “Germanness” in German classical music, specifically the prominent role that Black classical musicians have played in the performance of that music from the late nineteenth century to the recent past. In Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, Thurman follows a chronological three-part trajectory: Part I: 1870–1914; Part II: 1918–1945; and Part III: 1945–1961. In Part I, Thurman conveys that the “music of Reinecke and other German composers floated freely out of the windows of chapels [and] concert halls in the 1890s [America]” (22). Black Americans’ drive to educate themselves in the music of Reineke and others, in addition to other academic approaches, was a mass movement that “promised to cultivate new generations of politically minded, culturally sophisticated, and socially aware Black citizens to advance their rights in a nation that still refused to recognize them” (23). German classical music, in its own immigrant journey to America, found a place in the lives of African Americans. But there was also movement in the other direction. Thurman presents a series of case studies on Black migration to, and venture within Germany— including Will Marion Cook, William H. Tyers, J. Elmer Spyglass, and Portia Washington— to name a few. Thurman is careful to explain the unique components of each individual’s transatlantic travel. Even across the ocean, Thurman unveils how Jim Crow still haunted African American lives in Germany, predominantly at the hands of white Americans who also found themselves in Germany. Thurman dedicates an entire chapter to a discussion of how transatlantic notions of race influenced white listening experiences of Black classical musicians in German, emphasizing the aesthetic component of this construction, which forced white listeners to confront the juxtaposition of the visual and aural. In Part II, Thurman emphasizes the heightening of racial propaganda that led toward starker forms of discrimination in the 1920s, specifically the “Black Horror on the Rhine” campaign. The author tracks how these racial slurs then impacted the reception of Black musicians in Germany. Despite the exceptional mastering of the German Lieder by Black musicians in this period, Thurman finds, in her scrutiny of the archive of German music reviews, that critics “revisited their definitions of Blackness and whiteness in response to Black performers’ musical erasures of the Black-white binary” (158). Part III focuses largely on the process of denazification and the role that Black musicians played in it. Thurman shows that the US State Department saw in them the “best asset in the reorientation of Germans” (196), a role that I view as far more nuanced and difficult than Leonard Bernstein’s “Mahler revival” in Vienna. In her closing chapters, the author demonstrates the continuation of racial discrimination and the push for Black musicians to carry an agency that was simultaneously denied to them by their own government. [End Page 327] As a scholar of the Holocaust and contemporary antisemitism, I personally see a...

Музыка и язык: мышление–восприятие–практика

The article aims to shed light on some recent empirical neuroscience and psychology researches, which target music perception and cognition. The explosive growth of data collected and the measurement preciseness should correlate with the clarity of conclusions made on their basis. However, for the skilled music practitioners, such correlation is not obvious. The author propose a definition of the term musician, based on the concept of musical cognitive status. The purpose is to provide the adequate support and refinement of the experiment design procedures for the cross-disciplinary researches, dealing with selection of music stimuli material, conceptual theoretical foundations, and cultural-dependent cognitive backgrounds of the participants. The author considers that music cognition of performers is framed by the specific music idea, represented in the acoustically certain sound image, transformed to the appropriate gesture. This clear image is generated successfully when the performer has a clear artistic idea of musical sense and content. The specific types of perception determine the content-consuming habits. The degree of perceptual accessibility of sounding musical phenomena is also determined by the peculiarities of both musical and linguistic perception matrix, rooted in culture. In order to avoid the waste of research resources, author considers several investigation paths, coming from the methodology of philosophic anthropology, focused on the cultural and language-dependent dimension of music discourse.

Do What You Love? New Music, New Work—After 2020

This article analyzes musical labor and notions of love in relation to gig work with a focus on musicians in new music in New York City. Working in new music as a gig worker entails many skills, many tasks, and many jobs, which hardly guarantee a release from precarity. Meanwhile the neoliberal myth of a “labor of love” propagates the conviction that love and hard work can overcome any challenge, including those posed by racialized and gendered difference. The account of contemporary musical labor I offer concurs with recent critiques of the complicity of new music discourse with neoliberal agendas. Yet I argue that even as contemporary practices of musical work demonstrate how new music is entrepreneurial work embedded in a capitalist system, the everyday experiences of working musicians confound a totalizing account of the neoliberal agenda. Musical work takes place alongside and despite neoliberalism. Based on ethnography and interviews, I argue that the unsettled norms of musical gig work in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore ways in which musical work is more than the perfect manifestation of exploitable “labors of love.”

Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms

Classical music is universal, or is it? Kira Thurman’s Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms reveals how the answer to this question depends on who is listening, who is performing and even who is mediating classical music performances. Thurman sets the musical record straight on the German classical repertoire, unmasking the persistence of racial thinking and racism that pervades music discourses and informs the reception of black musicians’ performances in predominantly white spaces throughout Central Europe. In the reception of their concerts and acts, black musicians are either whitewashed—they are perceived as not so black after all—to assimilate them into a constructed elite white European and, more specifically, German national culture, or they are rendered naturally talented with their abilities deemed a product of their race and racial history. As such, Thurman examines how black musicians’ performances resonate with white listeners who espouse the universality of German classical music, while they simultaneously engage in processes of gendered racialization that have their roots in colonialism, nationalism and biological racism. Race, despite claims to the contrary, is at the very heart of the reception of black musicians’ performances of German classical music throughout Central Europe, and it is documented in reviews that render the sound of singers’ voices in colour (blue, black, brown) and that use language to naturalize their talents as something inherent or even primitive.

Franz Liszt’s Early Formal Excursions

Franz Liszt reformulated the Classical sonata form by coalescing the structures of a single movement and a multimovement cycle into a two-dimensional sonata form. Most of his mature sonatas are constructed following this structure’s principles (e.g., the Piano Concertos in E-flat, S. 124, and in A, S. 125; the Piano Sonata in b, S. 178; and the symphonic poems Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne, S. 95, Tasso: Lamento e Trionfo, S. 96, Les preludes, S. 97, and Die Ideale, S. 106). As the first two-dimensional sonata, De Profundis: Psaume Instrumental marks Liszt’s early maturity, when he established the combination of formal paradigms necessary for the creation of this form. By conceptualizing and framing the required two-dimensional strategies (i.e., thematic transformation, frequent shifts in the musical discourse, progressive formal loosening, and formal incompleteness) in Liszt’s earliest Classical sonata forms (Duo, S. 127 and Malediction, S. 121), this study traces the compositional advent of the two-dimensional sonata produced in the 1830s. These analyses link the works of Liszt’s youth with his mature repertoire, a task so far neglected by the scholarly literature.

13. The Acoustic Analysis of Violins and the Artistic Impressions Evaluated by Musicians

Abstract Violin studies can be classified into two main types: psychoacoustic studies, which are based on the artistic perception of audibility by violinists and vibro-acoustic studies, which are based on the spectral analysis of the vibrations and sounds produced by the instruments. The paper presents the acoustic analysis of violins by means of specialized software, their main acoustic characteristics being extracted in the form of frequency spectrum, spectrograms, specific modes and number of harmonics. These results were compared with the results of the opinion poll among musicians regarding the acoustic qualities of violins, based on musical auditions. The results highlighted the fact that the acoustic analysis technique cannot detect in totality the psycho-acoustic effects of musical sounds, therefore the establishment of the acoustic quality of the instruments on objective foundations, since the personal touch of an instrumental artist aims at the approach and articulation of the musical discourse, in a complex manner, combined with the interpretation of forms and styles.

Looking back and looking forward: A content analysis of the International Journal of Community Music, 2007–2022

This study examines the contents of 45 issues of the International Journal of Community Music from 2007 to 2022, noting the type of article, authorship, location by country, participants involved, setting, form of music making and discussions of paramusical issues of community music discourse. Findings suggest that the journal has evolved, expanding its range of content while increasing the proportion of research articles. The authors use their findings to discuss ‘What should the journal include?’

The Tragic Pages of Armenian History in Alan Hovhaness’ Works

The American Armenian composer Alan Hovhaness’ “otherness” in the context of the 20th century musical discourse can be explained by his Armenian-Scottish origins, Armenian-Eastern musical identity and his unique interpretation of different artistic traditions of eastern musical cultures - Indian, Japanese, Korean etc., available in his works. The tragic pages of Armenian history are reflected in Alan Hovhaness’ immense heritage; this article particularly focuses on the “Exile” symphony (No. 1, 1939), dedicated to the Armenian Genocide. The “Exile” is a kind of catharsis in the long run of Hovhaness’ pursuit of national spirit and musical identity to achieve solution to his psychological and creative crisis. The symphony became a symbolic self-acknowledgement of the composer’s Armenian identity, and an offering in commemoration of the Genocide victims in the realm of the musical space of the composer’s individual perceptions.

The Importance of Diction in the Art of Singing

The idea for this article’s subject started from the importance of diction that accompanies the music. It’s essential to be able to understand very well the words that are sung, because they give the “tone” of the entire lyrical-dramatical action. The listeners will perceive the emotion that is conveyed through the verses, and the music, as a unity. I have listened to various interpretations of singers that approached arias, leads, etc, who don’t have good diction, therefore in their musical discourse I could hear the predominance of the vowels A - E - O - U, and I could barely hear the consonants. This way, instead of following the lyrical-dramatic action itself, brought by the music and the words, I was experiencing auditory discomfort. In order to bring their own interpretation to the musical language, and to express mastery, the artist must have theoretical knowledge, and technical training and use them precisely. This way they would be able to reach high performances of the vocal tract, which will lead to the harmonious delineation of a singing style that matches the demands of the musical piece.

Reason and Time in the French Baroque: François Couperin’s “Leçons de ténèbres pour le mercredi saint” (1714)

The present paper aims to investigate the manner in which the structure of a certain musical discourse can suggest the superiority of reason above senses, as well as the static or flowing quality of time. In this sense, François Couperin’s (1668-1733) Leçons de ténèbres pour le mercredi saint (1714) was analyzed, striving to observe the manner in which the composer approaches certain parameters of the musical discourse (rhythm and metre, tempo, dynamics, ornaments) in order to suggest the meaning of the sacred text and to induce the listener a certain feeling of withdrawal, the absorption of the senses that can eventually lead to the mystical union with the Divine, accomplished through reason. The paper strives to highlight the differences between the Italian and French Baroque, as reflected in the work of Couperin, who strove to accomplish in his compositions the union between the French and Italian styles and forms. The question that arises is whether music is capable to express the passive state of devotion and contemplation, despite its unfolding in time, and whether it is possible to conceive the musical discourse in a manner that refrains from the anticipation of its future evolutions.

Colored Music in America: a Colored Sense of Belonging? A cultural-linguistic study of hip-hop music lyrics

As all people and nations experience a state of flux, national culture loses its solidity in the context of a global unified culture to which we are called, or rather forced, to belong. Here arise such vital questions as identity and belonging. The case study of this paper concerns the African-American sample as a minority group striving to seize its proper status in a ruthless West. This struggle comes highly significant when treading the edge of popular culture. The research is an inquiry into the extent to which belonging is felt, expressed and staged by the community in question throughout their representative popular culture, to mention hip-hop music. The complex nature of the topic requires, in fact, a multidisciplinary approach that encompasses, first, an anthropological examination of the backgrounds of the African-American ethnical group; second, a linguistic investigation of the African-American musical discourse (hip-hop lyrics); and third, a critical analytic deduction of the activist mission played by such musical genre concerning questions of identity and belonging. Practically speaking, the linguistic part will analyse a selected corpus of hip-hop song lyrics. The methodological process will use a qualitative content analysis technique to extract the linguistic patterns reinforcing the scope of identity and belonging. The concluding part will state some limitations that the research had encountered.

What my body told me: towards a bodily interpretation of Clare Loveday’s Johannesburg Etude No. 1

The relationship between performance and analysis has been a consistent point of discussion in music discourse for at least the past four decades. This article uses Johannesburg Etude No. 1 (2012) by South African composer Clare Loveday as a case study to explore ways in which searches for musical meaning may proceed from insights generated in and through a performer’s body – how bodily knowledge may become an entry point into music analysis. I draw on musicologists Nicholas Cook and Suzanne Cusick to establish frameworks through which performance may be approached not as an ‘end point’ of structural music analysis, but rather as the primary point of entry into analytical endeavours. I offer a ‘bodily analysis’ of Johannesburg Etude No. 1, which I first performed in 2014 as part of the Cape Town public arts festival Infecting the City. This analysis is connected to notions of an ‘urban imaginary’, an affect which I suggest is characteristic of an African metropolis such as Johannesburg. .

The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music ed. by Delia Da Sousa Correa

Reviewed by: The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music ed. by Delia Da Sousa Correa Robert Lawson-Peebles The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music. Ed. by Delia Da Sousa Correa. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2020. xvi+ 726 pp. £180. 978-0-7486-9312-2. The first sentence of this Edinburgh Companion gives a clear statement of purpose: 'This volume explores literature and music's alliances over the course of nine centuries' (p. 1). Its chronological structure is unusual for the Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities. After the editor's general Introduction and three theoretical essays, there are five parts, each with its own Introduction. Parts i–iii, containing thirty essays and occupying some 340 pages, cover the medieval period to the close of the eighteenth century. Part iv, with eleven essays, deals with the nineteenth century. Part v, with twenty-one essays, concerns the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This edition is, by a short margin, the longest in the series. The reader gets more wordage for the high price. Whether the volume punches at its heavy weight is another question. [End Page 121] It is clearly impossible in a review to assess the individual merits of six introductory and sixty-five topical essays. This Companion will therefore be judged collectively against some developments in musicology. In a 1987 essay, 'Music and Feminism', Edward Said lamented that 'musical discourse is probably less available to Western intellectuals than the obscurer realms of medieval, Chinese or Japanese culture' and linked the constructed aesthetic autonomy of music to the 'subaltern' role enforced on women in both its practice and its criticism (repr. in Said, Music at the Limits (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), pp. 43–44). Said's complaint was promptly answered by a book sometimes tagged with the term 'New Musicology': Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, edited by Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). The best-remembered contribution to the collection, partly because of its strident title, was McClary's 'The Blasphemy of Talking Politics during Bach Year' (pp. 13–62). (McClary would later cause a rumpus by identifying moments of violent misogyny in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.) By proposing 'the elimination of the precept of musical autonomy' (p. xiii) and subjecting music, from Vivaldi to contemporary electronic reproduction, to such socio-cultural analyses as feminism, semiotics, and deconstruction, Music and Society opened the way for The Edinburgh Companion. Progress since 1987 has been notable in two areas. The first is modernism. The cultural breadth of modernism has prompted a dynamic and diverse group of cross-disciplinary publications, discussed in a review essay by Nathan Waddell ('Modernism and Music: A Review of Recent Scholarship', Modernist Cultures, 12 (2017), 316–30). The second is the long-term project of Lawrence Kramer. Beginning with Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), Kramer has been prolific in addressing problems of musical meaning. In moving away from detailed formalist study of music, Kramer's work provides an alternative to McClary, deploying broad cultural statements in order to scamper around the specifics of her analyses. In a nuanced 1994 review of the New Musicology, the pianist Charles Rosen praised McClary's precision (he was sympathetic to her attack on Beethoven), while depreciating Kramer, a little unkindly, as 'a valuable weathercock' (Rosen, Critical Entertainments (1994; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 261–64). In her general Introduction, Delia Da Sousa Correa identifies Kramer's work as 'foundational' (p. 2), and the collection contains two of his essays. In contrast, the work of other 'New Musicologists' is confined to a brief reference, and it is left to Stephen Benson's Introduction to Part v to acknowledge their impact and to include McClary's name in a footnote (pp. 2, 506–08, 514, n. 38). The sole reference to Said is a sentence about his 1993 Culture and Imperialism (p. 63 5). There is nothing about Said's work on music, and no reference to two of the critics, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, whom Said credits as demonstrating 'the way cultures operate' (Said, Musical Elaborations...

Muzički diskurs u kosmološkom pristupu Crkvi Klimenta Aleksandrijskog

The philosophical and theological basis of the musical allegories from the writings of Clement of Alexandria is unanimously confirmed by all previous research. One of the distinctive features of Clement’s theology is a specific ecclesiological model that directly shapes the understanding of the Eucharistic chant. The research problem of this paper is the appearance of musical discourse in the three writings of Clement of Alexandria. By situating the theological issues Clement raises through musical discourse in the works Protrepticus, Stromata, and Paedagogus, we will examine how Eucharistic chant and music relate to the understanding of the Church as a reality that was perfect in the beginning. The goal of the paper is to connect the cosmological approach of the Church with the theme of Eucharistic chant and music.