Musical Idiom Research Articles

Decolonizing Western Conducting: Gospel Music Conducting Practices in Twenty-First Century Southern Nigeria

At the initial stages when Western conducting was introduced to Nigeria, it was mainly used to direct European art music. This was the practice from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. However, in twenty-first century, Western conducting is utilized to direct gospel ensembles, especially in Southern Nigeria. Although some of the nuances used to conduct gospel music in the locale predate twenty-first century Nigeria, literature is scant on how gospel music is conducted; and how such practice decolonizes Western conducting in Southern Nigeria. In this paper, I purposively selected eighteen (18) gospel music conductors, utilized non-participant observation, interview; and the theories of decolonization and conducting dynamism to descriptively discuss gospel music conducting practices and how the conducting practices are decolonizing Western conducting in twenty-first-century Southern Nigeria. Findings indicate that gospel music conducting in the region rarely engages basic conducting beat patterns, lavishly utilizes audible counting and finger snapping, feet stamping, clapping; and dance/kinetics that are traceable to popular music traditions to remove the restraints of conducting classicism, and to elicit kinetics in tandem with gospel music performance tradition in Southern Nigeria. These decolonize Western conducting, produce a form of conducting that combines Western and popular music idioms; that is predominantly opposed to the restrains of classical conducting. These warrant canonization for conducting taxonomy and education in Nigeria and beyond.

The Creation Of The Composition Of The Musical Work Of Kemepyar As Representation Of Traditional Music Diversity

The creation of the work "kemepyar" is a response to the typical archipelago food containing many spices, one of which is soto. Soto is made from a variety of spices and spices from all corners of the country, be it in the form of tubers, leaves, grains, and so on. The mixture of various Indonesian spices produces a distinctive taste and makes the body feel warm and fit. This was used as an inspiration for the creation of the artwork entitled Kemepyar. Kemepyar is a term used by Javanese people to describe a situation that very bright, clear, warm, satisfying, satisfied, and delicious in enjoying a dish of food or drink with a fresh taste. The musical idea of the work comes from Javanese gamelan and Macapat dhandang gula. Musical idioms use Javanese, Balinese, Kalimantan, and Sumatran karawitan. Meanwhile, the medium of cultivation uses gamelan, swipe instruments, saxophone blowing instruments, and tambourines. The purpose of creating this work as a form of response to the social environment, in this case the diversity of spices/spices used in soto dishes as a representation of ethnic diversity and traditional music in Indonesia. This work is useful as a stimulus for Music Composition students to create works derived from the phenomenon of daily life, in this case food. The method of creation was chosen to realize the phenomenon of food diversity of soto spices into the form of musical works. The creation process consists of initial stimulation, idea emergence, exploration, improvisation, formation, and presentation.

‘Types’ of Popular Musicians: From Musical to Professional Styles: Some Epistemological Reflections Based on the Case of French-Speaking Swiss Musicians

In academic research on popular music, the framing by musical genres and styles such as ‘Rock’, ‘Jazz’, and ‘Electro’ often seems obvious to social sciences scholars. The history, aesthetic features, and boundaries of musical idioms are major concerns for cultural studies, and the notion that musical styles shape the professional musical landscape is commonly accepted. This article is based on a survey involving 125 respondents in French-speaking Switzerland. It combines network analysis based on musical pairings during the year before the survey, with a typical socio-economic approach to understanding the features and resources of musicians. We demonstrate that the conventional approach of classifying musicians by ‘musical styles’ is not the most effective way to understand the structure of the musical occupational group. Instead, work pairings in music, and more broadly, sub-networks that emerge within our population, effectively group musicians according to their ‘professional style’ rather than their ‘musical style’. The focus is not on playing ‘Rock’, ‘Pop’, or ‘Jazz’, but rather on performing original compositions or covers, and whether one is a unique creative artist playing concerts or a service provider performing for entertainment gigs.

Poeme Elecroniqe fusion concept of nationalism in “Feel the Sounds of Kenya”

This study sought to find out Poeme Elecroniqe fusion concept of nationalism in "Feel the Sounds of Kenya". Edgar Varese, a French composer, is hailed as the pioneer of electronic music with his signature Poeme Eletronique composition, which was performed in 1958 in Brussels. Attributes of similitude with Edgar Varese's Poeme Electronique style have come to identify certain African contemporary music idioms. Transcending conventional sonic boundaries that have long defined the Kenyan music space, the piece "Feel the Sounds of Kenya” by CeeRoo exemplifies this innovative fusion concept of electronic elements with social-cultural schemas akin to the Kenyan nationhood, a blend of native nuances with technological progress. Using the content analysis method, the researcher analyses Poeme Electronique concepts in ‘Feel the Sounds of Kenya’ with the aim of establishing the intersection between artistry and technology within the broader discourse of nationalism while propagating national consciousness. This is achieved by using Sofia’s model approach to examine CeeRoo’s ‘Feel the Sounds of Kenya’ on both descriptive and conceptual analysis levels. From the analysis, it is clear that CeeRoo’s “Feel the Sounds of Kenya” exemplifies a perfect union of definitive cultural nuances with electronic music in a space that has long been defined by conventional musical schemas. This information provides a model of how music composers, listeners and performers in Kenya can use normative cultural schemas to augment the conventional musical parlance, grammar and vocabulary. The researcher recommends a contextual-conscious approach for music making, practice and education in Kenya for relevance.

Teaching Cultural Competency through Early New Orleans Jazz

Abstract: Studying the inception of early jazz in 20th-century New Orleans can provide opportunities to address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion by increasing cultural competency. Providing students with a historical framework for the creation of jazz may promote empathy with musicians of diverse races, cultures, and musical backgrounds while applying these lessons to students' lives today. Early jazz itself can be examined as a combination of African and European musical ancestry brought together by Black, White, and Creole musicians for the birth of a unique musical idiom to the United States. Along with historical information, this article integrates three suggested lessons connecting cultural competency to the National Association for Music Education's 2014 Music Standards through the creation of jazz for a diverse array of students.

The “Economy of Incarnation” and the Cherubic Hymn in Nineteenth-Century Russia

The Russian Orthodox liturgy constantly hovers on the boundary of representation and supposed real presence of the divine. This tension is dramatically illustrated by the Cherubic Hymn, which purports to “mystically represent” angelic song and accompanies the transfer of the bread and wine that will be transformed into the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. The Cherubic Hymn was the most commonly set liturgical text in modern Russia, attracting many of Russia’s leading composers, including Dmitry Bortniansky, Mikhail Glinka, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Milii Balakirev (who arranged the text to Mozart’s Ave verum corpus), and Alexander Kastalsky. In this article I analyze Cherubic Hymns from Bortniansky to Kastalsky to demonstrate a gradual shift from an emphasis on formal clarity and localized mimetic devices to a musical idiom based on medieval chant melodies and folk-inspired polyphony. I argue that this shift embodied a profound transformation in Russian religious thought across the long nineteenth century, wherein rational, enlightenment sensibilities ceded to a mystical emphasis on the interpenetrability of the material and spiritual worlds, or the “economy of incarnation.” Drawing upon intellectuals ranging from the novelist Nikolai Gogol to theologian Sergius Bulgakov and prominent critics of the so-called New Direction that emerged in Russian sacred music at the end of the nineteenth century, I show that the Cherubic Hymn, and liturgical music at large, became invested with the ability not simply to imitate angelic song but to join in it, a perceptible and embodied participation in the activity of the divine. In doing so, I aim to demonstrate the persistence of sacred epistemologies in the modern world and develop an analytic approach that attends at once to musical detail and liturgical meaning.

Four Songs op. 41 to Rabindranath Tagore’s poems in musicological reflection: aspects of exploring Karol Szymanowski’s Oriental visions

Four Songs op. 41 to Rabindranath Tagore’s poems in musicological reflection: aspects of exploring Karol Szymanowski’s Oriental visions

The “Cinematic Promise” of Video Game Music

Consonant with recent developments that have contributed to the ongoing convergence of film and video game forms, a common aspiration exists among many contemporary “Triple A” titles to fulfil what we might call the “cinematic promise” of video games. Many recent releases illustrate that a shift has taken place towards certain games’ stylistic harnessing and hybridisation of cinematic idioms that, in turn, transforms the experience being marketed to gamers. One title in which these dual-aspirations are especially conspicuous is Final Fantasy VII Remake (Square Enix, 2020), a game that straddles an intricate balance between channelling elements of both the cinematic and the game’s original identity as a fifth-generation video game. This article explores the ongoing convergence of scoring idioms for films and games. Remake is adopted as a central case study, considering the extent to which game and film music idioms coalesce as part of the game’s idiosyncratic musical identity and are foregrounded as a result of their interaction. I argue that the tension between Remake’s clear efforts to channel aspects of the cinematic alongside sounds, timbres, and compositional structures from the original game affords us new insights into: the relationship between film and game music; remakes and adaptations more generally; and game soundtracks that adapt pre-existing music. Beginning with overviews of existing research on (i) film and game music, and (ii) music in remakes, the article culminates in musical analyses of both Final Fantasy VII and its Remake, illustrating the palpable tension that emerges between Remake’s concessions to both film and game scoring conventions: arguably the defining characteristic of the game’s musical identity.

Making Beethoven Black: The New Negro Movement, Black Internationalism, and the Rewriting of Music History

AbstractWhile the idea that Beethoven had African ancestry became popular in the 1960s during the Civil Rights struggle in the United States, its conception arose during an earlier moment: the global New Negro movement of the 1920s. Appearing in newspaper columns, music journals, and essays, Black American writings on Beethoven challenged white musicians’ claims to the canon of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. This article argues that the project of making Beethoven Black belonged to a greater and more ambitious endeavour to rewrite Western music history. Black musicologists sought to globalize the Western canon, and in so doing, critique its grand narratives. Locating Black musical idioms in eighteenth-century piano sonatas or conducting archival research on Black European figures such as George Bridgetower, their music histories challenged readers to re-examine just who, exactly, had contributed to the project of cultural modernity and on what grounds.

Europa cantat

Abstract This paper attempts to show how, at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, not only the relationship between text and music changed, but also and above all how the perception of language and speech established itself as a constituting medium for the musical invention. During the 16th century, when the content of the text guided the musical invention and polyphony created an emotional distance to the message of the text, it was still considered possible to compose in different textual and musical idioms (e.g. Orlando di Lasso’s Viersprachendruck). Later, musicians – composers as well as singers – concentrated increasingly on their respective mother tongues and the musical forms of expression available for these, especially in connection with the new instrumentally accompanied solo singing. The musical forms were closely related to the metrics of the respective language, but also to the idea of character stereotypes that were musically articulated in the different airs. Contemporaries were already aware of the difficulty of translating vocal music into another language. And so the first half of the 17th century is marked by a linguistic and musical differentiation of all the vocal forms that are subsumed under the name Lied.

Ghanaian Choral Music Compositional Styles: An Appraisal of The Approach of Jacob Paulinus Johnson

The paper sought to present a compositional style of J. P. Johnson emanating from a consensus of three of his choral art compositions. The paper also presented a background of J.P. Johnson tracing his musical background, influences and development as an astute Ghanaian art music composer. Data was collected through interviews and music score analysis. The selected songs were analysed to bring to the fore techniques of traditional indigenous Ghanaian music idioms employed in J. P. Johnson’s Wɔnhyɛ Twerampɔn Enyimnyam (Tell Ye the Glory), Wonyi Ewuradze Ayɛ (Let us Praise God) and Da Yi Na Ewuradze Ahyehyɛ (this is the Day the Lord has made). The analytical parameters adopted for the study included melody, harmony, rhythm, and form. The paper examined J. P. Johnson’s exploration of traditional idioms such as call-and-response phrasings, repetition, text-tune relationships, and parallel thirds in his creativity. These compositional techniques depict his cultural belief as an African composer with knowledge of Western music tradition. Keywords: Compositional Styles, Identity, Generation, Choral Art, Re-labelling, and Language.

Decolonizing the African musical language and Identity through Onyeji’s ‘Research Approach to music composition’ in Nigeria

Ongoing research in the arts, humanities and social sciences has largely explored different subjects on decolonising African socio-cultural perspectives, including music composition and performances. Art music composers in Nigeria and diaspora beyond creative expression have adopted their native languages as a viable tool for decolonising their continent. More recently, works and arguments of music scholars like Meki Nzewi, Dan Agu, Bode Omojola, Olusoji Stephen, and Christian Onyeji, among so many, have emphasised the deliberate creative engagement of indigenous languages and musical idioms as a tool for recovering Nigerian indigenous identity and sustainability of their indigenous musical cultures. Building on Hofstede’s theory on cross-cultural interactions and Vygotsky’s Sociocultural theory in addressing the issue of decolonising Africa through music and language, the study employed qualitative and ethnographic research methods to investigate the significance of Onyeji’s research compositional approach in sustaining African musical culture and identity. The study findings based on the analysis of the music piece “Abigbo for Modern Orchestra” and its creative milieu within the context of decolonisation conclude that art music composition based on thorough cultural investigations of a particular musical style or ensemble for heritage preservation is an effective medium of decolonising African music and language.

“I'm Workin’ on My Buildin”: Freedom and Foundation-Building in Florence Price's Two Violin Fantasies

AbstractFlorence Price (1887–1953) was instrumental in establishing a “black musical idiom” in the twentieth century (Samantha Ege, 2020) by embedding vernacular songs into her works, including Violin Fantasy No. 2 in F-sharp minor, built on “I'm workin’ on my Buildin.’” In 1940 she arranged the melody as the second of the Two Traditional Negro Spirituals, finished on March 26, 1940. On March 29 and 30, 1940, she quickly dispatched Fantasy No. 2. Price often performed the piano part of her works herself. The performative act of playing Fantasy No. 2 with its embedded spiritual “I'm workin’ on my Buildin’ […] All for my Lord” would have solidified her faith, which rested in part in her own interpretation of its lyrics: Her “work” on her “buildin” and foundations, in composition and in life. Furthermore, each performance of Fantasy No. 2 would have created an embodied performed commemoration, from her perspective, of historical events of injustice and oppression in the Jim Crow South, which she abandoned in 1927 for Chicago. By engaging with Price's fantasies through the lens of performance studies and genre theory, and by drawing on Ege (2020), Rae Linda Brown (2020), Cooper (2019, 2020), and Douglas Shadle (2021), this article examines Price's vernacular foundation and sonic foundation-building symbolically. Meanings of freedom emerge on several levels, which we relate to creative freedom and to “freedoms in the most oppressive of social environments,” such as Price's environment, to which she responded with “a powerful musical language” (Ege, 2020).

The Forging of a “Singapore Sound” in Saxophone Compositions of Zechariah Goh

The main objective of this study is to examine two of Goh’s saxophone works that demonstrate how the composer realized Singaporean identity through the synthesis of Western, Tibetan, and Indian musical elements. The research design of this qualitative case study is narrative research with data collection carried out by semi-structured questions, email interview with the composer and review of text, videos, and journal articles that relate to the government policies of racial integration and multiculturalism in Singapore, followed by analysis of two of the recent works that evolved from the fusion of Eastern and Western styles. The two works for this qualitative study are Images of Tibet for Soprano Saxophone and Piano, and Confluence for Saxophone Ensemble and Mridangam. The findings show that 1) Images of Tibet uses Western formal structures, the technique of thematic development, and Tibetan musical idioms; and 2) Confluence for Saxophone Ensemble and Mridangam employs the Indian Tala, motivic modification technique used in the Fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach, and pandiatonicism as employed in Impressionistic works of Debussy and Ravel. This study reveals the two ways in which the composer uses to intertwine the East and West in his connection to his cultural roots.

Proses Kreativitas Yus Wiradiredja dalam Mengaransemen Pupuh Magatru Raehan

The creative process carried out by Yus Wiradiredja in arranging Pupuh Magatru to become Pupuh Magatru Raehan is a form of anticipation of an increasingly global era. Pupuh Raehan is the result of creativity that emerged as a response to increasingly global conditions. The influence of Western music can sometimes be found in various musical compositions that have been influenced by the process of globalization. Today, Western music has an almost equal influence in various countries around the world. Yus Wiradiredja arranged the Sundanese Pupuh Art to be more modern by adding western music idioms but not eliminating the Kasundaan elements in Raehan's Pupuh. This study aims to find out the meaning of Pupuh Raehan and to find out the creativity of Yus Wiradiredja in arranging magatru pupuhs. This study uses a descriptive qualitative method with non-interactive analysis techniques by examining documents and writings regarding Yus Wiradiredja's creativity in arranging Pupuh Magatru Raehan. Through this research it is known that Wiradiredja's creativity in processing pupuh art into dynamic and relevant performances is an inspiring example in facing the challenges of an ever-changing era.

Unexpected Aspects of Expectancy in Music

A well agreed discourse in music perception research is that affective response can be generated by music when a tendency in the music is delayed or inhibited. There is a consensus that this tendency is statistically driven, derived from exposure to culturally situated musical idioms. By presenting a neural-network inspired spreading activation model (SAM) this paper argues that the nature of the tendency is worthy of further investigation. SAM organises the music stream perceived by the listener continuously into segments such that a match with an existing ‘mental representation’ (node) is found, which is then linked to the node for the previously segmented part of the music stream, with the link between these nodes strengthening and consolidating with exposure. The currently activated segment (the music being sounded) will prime the best matching (strongest linked) node available, generating expectancy. Expectancy is defined as the most strongly primed segment, and emerges dynamically through experience with environmental and musical contexts, rather than schematic or prototypical means. Expectancy is the specific exemplar instance that the activated (currently sounding) segment of music and contextual factors prime. This hypothesis of veridical dominance has implications for enduring aspects of music expectancy theory: (1) individual experiences matter in the formation of expectations; (2) expectations are a dynamic process, that change and are updated with experience; (3) context plays a critical role in expectancy; and (4) schema, prototypes and statistical accounts of expectation should be treated as convenient approximations of underlying cognitive processes.

Al-Fārābī’s Conception of Music Theory as the Universal Science of Melody

Abstract Al-Fārābī conceived of music theory as a universal science of melody whose task is to determine the whole range of what is musically possible. It does not restrict itself to codifying the conventions of any particular musical idiom. In this, it is akin to logic – the universal science of all things thinkable, which does not reduce to the grammar of any given natural language.

Children infer the behavioral contexts of unfamiliar foreign songs.

Music commonly appears in behavioral contexts in which it can be seen as playing a functional role, as when a parent sings a lullaby with the goal of soothing a baby. Humans readily make inferences, based on the sounds they hear, regarding the behavioral contexts associated with music. These inferences tend to be accurate, even if the songs are in foreign languages or unfamiliar musical idioms; upon hearing a Blackfoot lullaby, a Korean listener with no experience of Blackfoot music, language, or broader culture is far more likely to judge the music's function as "used to soothe a baby" than "used for dancing". Are such inferences shaped by musical exposure or does the human mind naturally detect links between musical form and function of these kinds? Children's developing experience of music provides a clear test of this question. We studied musical inferences in a large sample of children recruited online (N = 5,033), who heard dance, lullaby, and healing songs from 70 world cultures and who were tasked with guessing the original behavioral context in which each was performed. Children reliably inferred the original behavioral contexts with only minimal improvement in performance from the youngest (age 4) to the oldest (age 16), providing little evidence for an effect of experience. Children's inferences tightly correlated with those of adults for the same songs, as collected from a similar online experiment (N = 98,150). Moreover, similar acoustical features were predictive of the inferences of both samples. These findings suggest that accurate inferences about the behavioral contexts of music, driven by universal links between form and function in music across cultures, do not always require extensive musical experience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Continental Reverberations of Angelus ad virginem and Questions of Rhythm

This study examines the peculiar dissemination of the English (French?) song Angelus ad virginem subintrans in central European sources from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth century. We know of one new composition which uses the text of the song’s first stanza while substituting the English melody with one based on a locally wellknown musical idiom. This composition exists in two further versions that are adapted to slightly different performance practices. There is also a seemingly different song on the same subject, whose melody however quotes the beginning of the English song. A closer examination of the continental versions and their settings reveals that there may be interconnections in rhythm and institutional origins of all the songs under discussion.

Musical practices and endangered heritage of Ataúro island (East Timor)

The paper draws up a preliminary inventory of the endangered musical heritage of the island of Ataúru (Timor-Leste), through a first survey in two villages (Makdadé, and Makili). After a summary of the musical forms presented through time, the analysis of the prevalent musical forms and styles show a common musical idiom between the two villages, and a lively musical tradition. A short musical glossary of the two villages is given with a distinction between musical forms and instruments.