Musical Meaning Research Articles

Ligatures and Musical Meaning

In mensural notation, certain combinations of notes could be notated either individually or bound together as ligatures. The choice of whether or not to use a ligature provided an opportunity for composers and scribes to encode different types of musical meaning. It has long been accepted that ligatures could help to show text underlay, and scholars have also proposed that ligatures could clarify aspects of musical structure, such as melodic and rhythmic patterns, phrasing, and articulation. It is difficult to prove wide applicability of these proposals, not least because they tend to rely primarily on the evidence of practical sources. Fortunately, there is more theoretical evidence about the purpose and function of ligatures than has been heretofore recognized. While much of the evidence unsurprisingly points toward the textual significance of ligatures, a substantial amount of theory from the early fifteenth century to the mid-sixteenth century shows that ligatures were also important for clarifying aspects of mensural context, sometimes forcing perfection and alteration. The evidence leads us to reconsider widely held assumptions about the significance of ligatures and to look beyond text underlay as the primary meaning that may (or may not) be signified. Drawing on these insights, contextual analysis of notation can provide a clearer window into the concerns and priorities of composers and scribes.

АКТИВАЦІЯ СТРЕС-ПЕРЕБОРЮВАНИХ СТРАТЕГІЙ МАЙБУТНІХ УЧИТЕЛІВ ПОЧАТКОВИХ КЛАСІВ ЗАСОБАМИ МУЗИКИ

The article examines the use of music in the process of students’ implementation of stress-relieving strategies during the period of martial law. A theoretical analysis of musical means (imaginative music-making, therapeutic song-writing, active music-making, joint music-making, joint improvisation, music listening, integrative music therapy techniques, in particular using the Orff approach) as factors in the activation of stress-overcoming strategies was carried out. An empirical study of the structure of personal stress coping strategies of future teachers in war conditions was conducted with the help of a survey and the Coping Strategy Indicator (CSI) method by James H. Amirkhan. The optimal musical techniques for the activation of the mentioned strategies have been found out. According to the empirical study, it was found that the vast majority of students choose musical techniques in view of their positive effect on communication processes, activation of mechanisms of social and psychological adaptation, psychophysiology. Moreover, students choose musical techniques taking in consideration the influence on the processes of excitation and inhibition, self-awareness and self-regulation, and regulation of psycho-emotional and cognitive activity. The analysis of students’ stress-coping strategies indicates a significant advantage of the stress-coping tendency of ‘problem solving’ and ‘seeking social support’, which are considered to be more effective strategies in a stressful situation compared to the ‘avoidance’ strategy, which is not often used by students. Using Spielberger – Hanin State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) the dynamics of changes of anxiety levels as a result of the musical intervention were analyzed. Based on the results obtained, a positive relationship between musical techniques and the level of situational and personal anxiety was revealed. The tendency to decrease the level of situational anxiety is more pronounced compared to personal anxiety, which corresponds to the norms of response to stressful factors in the conditions of a war situation. According to the research results, a conclusion was made about the expediency of using certain musical techniques during the performance of stress-relieving strategies, in order to do certain tasks that ensure efficiency of their introduction.

“Music is my life”: Examining the connections between music students’ workload experiences in higher education and meaningful engagement in music

Enhancing our knowledge about students’ experiences during their studies in higher music education is essential to understand and support them as they cope with their specific workloads in studying music. This study provides a research-based understanding of what engaging in music means to music students when they reflected on their experiences of their studies and workloads. The data were collected from interviews with 29 students in higher music education institutions in Finland and the United Kingdom, and the analysis was conducted by following the framework of transcendental phenomenology. Music students’ experiences of their workload are connected in multifaceted ways to the meanings they ascribe to their engagement in music, such as intense and complex experiences that are also a source of vitality, their development as musicians, their creative self-expression, their interaction with others and in building a community, their personal growth and coping approaches during their studies, and the transcendental experiences they encounter during their engagement with music. Thus, the findings indicate that engaging in music is a holistic experience for music students. This study shows the importance of understanding and investing in music students’ unique workload experiences through research on the teaching and learning practices of higher music education institutions, which can in turn support music students’ well-being, learning, and future careers.

Sound Design for Moving Image: From Concept to Realization by Kahra Scott-James

Reviewed by: Sound Design for Moving Image: From Concept to Realization by Kahra Scott-James Caitlan Truelove Sound Design for Moving Image: From Concept to Realization. By Kahra Scott-James. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. [vii, 192 p. ISBN 9781474235112 (paperback), $37.95; ISBN 9781474235143 (e-book), $190.] Illustrations, index. Claudia Gorbman, often referred to as the founder of film musicology, notes that film composers are participants in film music scholarship, since they "have a gift for explaining what they do," but that film music scholars find it difficult to apply analytical approaches on this music if the composer has already dictated what the music means ("Aesthetics and Rhetoric," American Music 22, no. 1 [Spring 2004]: 15). Yet musicologists have long studied film composers, their methods, and how these have changed since the advent of sound film. Even though it would appear as if researchers from many academic fields are producing film music scholarship using different methodologies, one of the main goals of current research is to bring these methodologies and different fields together. Most recently, musicologists and music theorists have used the phrase "theorists of the soundtrack" to describe their research in film music (see James Buhler and Hannah Lewis, eds., Voicing the Cinema: Film Music and the Integrated Soundtrack, [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020], jacket cover). Since the soundtrack consists of music, sound effects, and dialogue, these theorists choose to draw upon methodologies from many different areas. Perhaps it is no surprise then that a book emerged outlining the beginnings of how sound is worked incipiently but discreetly in the films of today. Although originally intended for sound-design practitioners, Kahra Scott-James's book—part historiography, part guidebook—offers a sound designer's perspective as a theorist of the soundtrack. This volume brings up more practical "behind-the-scenes" aspects of sound production, which may help to inform the current soundtrack discourse in musicology and music theory. The book is organized into six chapters: "Early Practice," "Sound as Design," "Contemporary Sound Design," "Preproduction," "Production," and "Postproduction." Scott-James's writing style is clear throughout the book, even when describing the more technical aspects of production. Additionally, she explores developments and innovations to sound design for screen and stage from locations across the globe, although her focus relates to more recent US film productions. In the first chapter, Scott-James explores sound production for the stage, talkies, and animation. She describes thunder, one of the first sound effects for stage, as an example of real, subconscious, and unreal representations of what audience members perceive: thunder exists in the physical world, but the sound can also suggest impending doom as well as an aural representation [End Page 573] of supernatural characters (p. 1). Early forms of sound design are also traced back to puppetry, slapstick, and vaudeville. Scott-James describes in detail the history of the slapstick, a device originally used in commedia dell'arte performances, and how it was a useful tool to recreate the sharp, snappy sounds of "a slap, thwack, whack, shot, or whip crack" (p. 3). Theatrical sound design continued to evolve when producers started to include audio-visual elements—such as projected photographs or scenes—to their stage shows. Scott-James does not touch on live film soundtracks until later in the chapter and cites Lyman Howe as potentially "the first person to use a phonograph and live sound effects in the presentation of movies" (p. 7). Developments in sound design are described in the same subsections as advances in technology, such as the use and production of sound effects in radio, television, and early forms of animation. Scott-James notes that as plots become more complex, audiences grow more attuned to noticing sounds heard in the media they consume. In chapter 2, "Sound as Design," Scott-James introduces sound theories. Although this topic may be more familiar to professional sound designers, this chapter provides insightful information to those studying the soundtrack. Scott-James focuses mainly on sound work and sound techniques in the early to mid-twentieth century, arguing that many of these established processes are still in use in contemporary films. This period is also a time of filmmakers experimenting with sounds, and...

육체감각을 통한 서사가능성

If the criteria for judging good and not good music correspond to the musical content or meaning, much popular music would not escape the judgment of yet being qualitatively low, and its representative genre is dance music. Compared with movies and dramas, pop music lacks clarity of reproduction and narrative structure. Dance music is more multi-layered and ambiguous than other pop music genres as it contains music, lyrics, and body movements as basic genre characteristics. To discuss the aesthetic aspects of dance music, focusing on the theoretical significance raised from the theory of affect, this study examines dance music (especially Korean dance music since the 2000s), the area farthest from meaning and narrative, as a process of acquiring “non-narrative narrative” based on physical sensibility and popularity.

Music, Cage's Silence, and Art


 
 
 Stephen Davies taught philosophy at the University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. His research specialty is the philosophy of art. He is a former President of the American Society for Aesthetics. His books include Definitions of Art (Cornell UP, 1991), Musical Meaning and Expression (Cornell UP, 1994), Musical Works and Performances (Clarendon, 2001), Themes in the Philosophy of Music (OUP,
 2003), Philosophical Perspectives on Art (OUP, 2007), Musical Understandings and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Music (OUP, 2011), The Artful Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution (OUP, 2012), The Philosophy of Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016 second ed.), and Adornment: What Self-decorations Tells Us about Who We Are, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).
 
 

“I go. I return. I am confused”: Reflections on Armenian Music Ideas in Multi-sited Research

Doing ethnomusicological research about diaspora and music means travelling. Travelling back and forth to Armenian groups in Italy and France and being in the Republic of Armenia to understand and interpret, using the dialogical approach, the musical knowledge of particular individuals of communities and their self-identification as Armenians through music. By sharing and pondering opinions and experiences in different situations, the article discusses ‘Armenianness’ in the music of the protagonists of Milan’s musical practices comparing their discourses with those of other Armenians in Paris and Yerevan. It analyses how perceptions formed in Milan were a conditioning factor at the beginning of the research. It discusses also how the researcher had to adjust her understanding after discovering other musical identities in Armenian groups in France and Armenia and how coming back to Milan with a renewed awareness was pivotal in reflecting the diverse and divergent ways of being Armenian in music. Music can accommodate and direct shifting senses of self. Discovering several Armenian musical identities has revealed a reality where music expresses a will to remember history and at the same time an increasingly multiethnic, globalised Armenian culture, rather than a monolithic musical culture.

The realization of M. Tsvetaeva's poetry in the choral concert "Trinity Day" by Y. Falik

The name of the St. Petersburg composer Yuri Alexandrovich Falik is known both in Russia and abroad. He has created a large number of compositions in different genres. Falik pays considerable attention to choral music. His choral legacy is represented by a wide range of genres. These are miniatures, a choral concert, a poem and a choral cycle, Orthodox hymns and a Catholic ordinary mass. The range of the composer's poetic preferences is also rich. Falik refers to the poems of A. S. Pushkin, M. Y. Lermontov, A.A. Tarkovsky, A.I. Solzhenitsin, N. A. Klyuev, A.A. Akhmatova, N.S. Gumilev and M.I. Tsvetaeva. The article discusses the peculiarities of the implementation of the content of M. Tsvetaeva's poems by musical means in the choral concert "Trinity Day" by Yu. Falik. Starting from the folklore motifs embedded in the poems, Falik creates stylizations referring to Russian drawling songs, ditties, and the dialect characteristic of the folk tradition. The composer uses variation of melodic motifs, rhythmic variation, combines natural-fret means and chromatics, uses such techniques as choral staccato, glissando, imitation of instrumental tunes, introduces ostinate layers of sound. It is established that the composer managed to find such structural, melodic, rhythmic techniques and musical means that not only illustrate the content of the poems, but also reveal its new facets.

‘A sense sublime’: The Harmony of Hearing and Re-Hearing in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’

In a close reading of ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’, my article examines the poem’s musical quality that is central to our understanding of the theme of revisitation and memory. My article posits a significant coherence between readers’ aural involvement with the poem’s formal musicality and the poet-speaker’s own hearing and re-hearing experience within the poem. Situating the performative nature of ‘Tintern Abbey’ in relation to the theory of musical meaning and emotion inaugurated by music psychologist and philosopher, Leonard B. Meyer, my article presents a novel perspective on how the associative process of Wordsworth’s auditory memory shapes the poet’s unique definition and representation of harmony. By reading the poet’s associative auditory experience and the poem’s musical expressiveness as manifestations of the constructive tension between Wordsworth’s tragic consciousness and personal optimism, I argue that ‘Tintern Abbey’ does not create harmony by diminishing and dissipating dissonance, but by sounding and sustaining a range of possibilities and varieties.

Inside Arabic Music: Arabic Maqam Performance and Theory in the 20th Century

Inside Arabic Music: Arabic Maqam Performance and Theory in the 20th Century

LINGUISTIC ICONOGRAPHY AND MUSIC AS THE EMBODIMENT OF MEANINGS

The interaction of philosophy and literature is clarified in the relationship between literature and music. As distinct genres of art, literature and music have much in common when we consider them in the theoretical context of overcoming the traditional dichotomy of mind and body. The phenomenon of so-called linguistic iconography illustrates the movement of literature beyond the substantial split of man into mind and body. Music also avoids this dichotomy, denying the difference between subject and form. Then the form does not symbolize or express something, but represents a musical meaning. In both cases, literature and music produce embodied meanings, that is, those that lie in reality itself. Semantic poverty and fixation on real linguistic iconography and music enable the process of embodiment of meanings. Perception of the latter involves the use of not only mental but also bodily abilities of man in their cognitive integrity.

Picturing Music: Doubling Ekphrasis in Six Rossetti Sonnets

Abstract What happens when the visual subject of ekphrastic writing is itself a representation of music – music as it is made and heard by the figures in a picture? In the six sonnets considered in this essay, Dante Gabriel Rossetti – himself an artist as well as a poet – doubles the ekphrastic action to summon an elusive music from what is offered to the eye alone. The poems on the page, in these examples, explore both the promise and the limits of poetry’s long association with song. They participate in shared Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic efforts to conjure an experience of music from the resistant genres of painting and poetry, desiring (and regretting) a lost time when poetry and music were regarded as one. But Rossetti’s sonnets are less interested in evoking the sounds of music than in exploring in poetic form what music means – how it affects the mind through multiple senses and the emotions, how its harmonic and rhythmic structures shape those responses in time, and what a modern poetry might learn from a kinship with music. Music in these poems appears as a special kind of embodied knowing, one whose meanings can – perhaps – be conveyed by the different representational means and formal structures of a picture or a poem. What Rossetti’s ekphrastic sonnets on music offer, I suggest, is less a music that can be heard than a form of melopoetics: a literary-musical criticism.

Philosophical and Tragic Component of the Artistic Conception of Myroslav Skoryk’s Opera “Моses”

Relevance of the study. Myroslav Skorykʼs opera “Moses” is a landmark work in both the composer’s heritage and the modern Ukrainian musical theater. Inheriting the multilevel concept of the literary source of the libretto — the poem of the same name by Ivan Franko — the work causes interpretive discrepancies. In the I. Frankoʼs formulation the main theme of the work is connected with the tragedy of the personality, the leader and the biblical prophet Moses, who was called to lead the Jewish people out of Egyptian slavery. The analysis of the musical means of expressing the tragic constituent of the concept has not yet become the subject of a separate study, remaining in the shadow of the socio-political topics that are more relevant for the Ukrainian society. This determines the novelty and relevance of the study.
 Main objective of the study is to identify the signs of the musical embodiment of the philosophical and I. Francoʼs tragic plan of at the genre-dramatic and intonation-thematic levels of realization of the artistic concept of the M. Skorykʼs opera “Moses”.
 Methodology. The article uses the methods of system, genre-dramatic and intonationalsemantic analysis of musical work.
 Scientific novelty. For the first time the philosophical-tragic aspect of the concept of opera is specially considered, its priority is proved, the signs of intonational unity of the opera are revealed, the features of monotheism are indicated.
 Main results and findings of the study as well as a conclusion. The artistic concept of the opera “Moses” is read on the textual (reinterpreted b y I. Franco biblical history) and four contextual levels (allegories of Ukrainian history, religious and general philosophical, autobiographical). Disclosure of the multilevel concept is carried out by means of musical-intonational drama, built by M. Skoryk on the principle of hierarchically and logically organized spiritual-musical universe. By musical means the composer builds a system of biblical prototypes (Moses — Christ), correspondences (rebels Aviron and Dathan — evil spirits Azazel and Johavedda), symbols and subtexts (Poet and Moses in the opera as the Ivan Francoʼs alter ego) of poetic origin, spiritual and moral meanings.
 The intonational unity of the opera is based on the orchestral theme-epigraph from the Prologue. The main leitmotifs and characteristics of the actors are based on its modified elements. Careful elaboration of details, ingenuity of thematic work, appeal to baroque methods of revealing the sacred in the text are designed to express the concept of ontological unity of the world, genetically linked to the biblical worldview.
 The predominance of tragic signs on the plot (death of Moses and the rebels), dramaturgy (passion), intonation-thematic levels (catabasis, symbol of the cross) allows us to conclude about the philosophical tragedy of the genre of opera. In the aspect of revealing the tragedy of the personality M. Skoryk’s opera resonates with similar works by M. Mussorgsky, P. Tchaikovsky, D. Shostakovich, A. Schnittke, R. Shchedrin and others.
 The methodological paths outlined in this article allow us to further reveal new and new hidden meanings and subtexts of the opera.

The Concept - Text - Interpretation Triad in Piano Music of the Second Half of the 20th - 21st Centuries

The author of the article attempts to comprehend various aspects of the concept - text - interpretation triad, proposed as an analytical model to study the problems of performing arts in piano music of the second half of the 20th - 21st centuries. The concept, which is the quintessence of the composer's ideas developed in interpretation, is assigned the role of the initial stage of the composer's intention. The author conducts a comparative analysis of the term "concept" in Russian and Western European musicology, notes that modern humanitarian science allows one to determine approaches to the problems of interpretation from the standpoint of the methodology predetermined by the meaning of a concept. The study of the triad allows combining various methods of revealing musical meanings to comprehend the content of the interpreted object and present this phenomenon as a universal system. The author considers the concept of interpretation from the standpoint of conceptual metaphors and research in musical semiology. In the article, the broad interpretation of a musical text goes beyond the musical text itself into the field of signs, metaphors and metonymy. In this regard, the author draws a conclusion about the importance of the meaning of metonymy for a musical text and compares the approaches to the text in serialism and post-serialism in order to determine the characteristic features. In the study of the functions of performers and composers in the second half of the 20th - early 21st century and the projection of changes in the listener's perception in this process, it is emphasised that the authors of compositions were beginning to consider reception as an integral part of the work, taking this aspect into account in their creative strategies. Analysing the peculiarities of the psychology of “delayed perception” based on making musical connections and a composition form in a retrospective context, the author defines it as a “conceptual form” resulting from comprehending certain sound concepts. The article substantiates the need for a special meta-approach, characterised by the search for relationships in a situation of fundamental lack of balance in connection with introducing new aesthetic concepts into the process of interpretation and perception through composing practice. The phenomenon of the triad proposed by the author contributes to the introduction of the problems of contemporary performing arts into the general system of humanitarian thinking. It allows it to be presented as a scientific problem.

The Exotic in Nineteenth-Century French Opera, Part 2: Plots, Characters, and Musical Devices

Nineteenth-century French opera is renowned for its obsession with “the exotic”—that is, with lands and peoples either located far away from “us” Western Europeans or understood as being very different from us. One example: hyper-passionate Spaniards and “Gypsies” in Bizet’s Carmen. Most discussions of the role that the exotic plays in nineteenth-century French opera focus on a few standard-repertory works (mainly serious in nature), rather than looking at a wider range of significant works performed at the time in various theaters, e.g., the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique, and Offenbach’s Bouffes-Parisiens. The present article attempts to survey the repertory broadly. Part 1 examines various “different” (or Other) lands and peoples frequently represented on stage in French operas. Part 2 discusses typical plots and character types found in these operas (sometimes regardless of the particular exotic land that was chosen) and concludes by exploring the musical means that were often employed to impel the drama and to convey the specific qualities of the people or ethnic group being represented (as a community—through chorus and authority figures—and through the feelings and actions of individual characters). These musical means could include special or unusual traits: either all-purpose style markers of the exotic generally (oddities, one might say) or more specific style markers associated with an identifiable people or region (e.g., tunes, rhythms, and other devices understood as signaling one particular region). But the musical means could also include any of the rich fund of devices that opera composers normally used when creating drama and defining character: melodic, harmonic, structural, and so on. This last point is often neglected or misunderstood in discussions of “the exotic in music,” which tend instead to focus primarily on elements that indisputably “point to” (as if semiotically) the specific land or people that the work is seeking to evoke or represent. In both Parts 1 and 2, instances are chosen from works that were often quite successfully performed at the time in French-speaking regions and that, even if little known today, can at least be consulted through recordings or videos. The works come from the standard recognized operatic genres: e.g., five-act grands opéras, three-act opéras-comiques, and short works in bouffe style. Composers whose works are mentioned, or discussed in some detail, include (among others) Adam, Auber, Berlioz, Bizet, Chabrier, Clapisson, Félicien David, Delibes, Flotow, Gomis, Gounod, Halévy, Messager, Meyerbeer, Hippolyte Monpou, Offenbach, Ernest Reyer, Saint-Saëns, Ambroise Thomas, and Verdi (Les vêpres siciliennes, Don Carlos). Examining certain lesser-known works reveals merits that have gone relatively unheralded. As for the better-known works, approaching them in this wide-angled way grants us a richer appreciation of their strengths and their often-enlivening internal contradictions.

Urisol That Conveys Musical Meaning in the Purananuru

In the middle of this century, Tamil isai Renaissance was achieved and tamil isai sangathar brought in a number of musical instruments. Tamil people are innisai of their pandai Yazh. Music in Tamil isai Sangam is the music of Pandai Yazh. Music research was conducted at the Tamil isai Sangam and music tamil scholars and composers gathered. From the grammars they had learned, they spoke of the handkerchief, the sleep, and the sound. Tamil is composed by all tamil people and tamil is played by tamil artist nall isai. The aim is not to tell the passionate history of the Tamil isai Renaissance. There is a feeling that the word music is given in the sense of music. But the history of the word music is remarkable. It provides not one thing but many things. Its appearance is also delicious and the aim here is to explain them.

Julian Dodd. Being True to Works of Music

The concept of being true to works of music and how true a performer is to the composer’s work has been an ongoing debate for many years. The idea of authenticity in the performance of musical works raises many questions, such as: what does it mean exactly to be authentic in music; how can one be authentic; to what exactly is one being faithful; which rules and conceptions should one follow to realise that authenticity; and can different performances of the same work both be authentic? Julian Dodd’s Being True to Works of Music is a short but insightful book about musical authenticity and musical meaning. It will be an important source not only for philosophers and musicologists, but also for students, and, most importantly, performers and listeners. It may also be of interest to general music readers…

Main strategies for conceptualization of musical meaning

The object of this research is music as a semantic process. The subject is problematization of the concept of meaning in music. The goal lies in outlining the main strategies for conceptualization of the musical meaning within the framework of the history of music-aesthetic teachings. The authors pursue the following tasks: conduct critical analysis of the basic music-aesthetic concepts, explore their metaphysical origins and ideological prerequisites, determine the conceptual boundaries of the concept of musical language. The acquire results lie in determination of the fundamental strategies for rationalization of music: music as mathematics, and music as language. Within the framework of these strategies, analysis is conducted on various concepts of the meaning in music and their metaphysical prerequisites. Among these concepts are musical ethos, world harmony, music affects, musical expression, and semiotics of music. The author clarifies the concept of music as language from the perspective of a range of discursive attitudes: musical language as a natural language of feelings (theory of musical expression), and musical language as a semiotic system. The scientific novelty of consists in application of the new approach towards reconsideration of the basic music-aesthetic concepts from the standpoint of the development of autonomization of the musical meaning. The research results justify drawing a clear boundary between the scientific and nonscientific discursive use of such common comparisons as “music as language” and “music as mathematics”. The conclusion is made the solution to problem of the specificity of formation and functionality of the autonomous musical meaning requires going beyond the narrow field of consideration of music as a semantic process towards the holistic experience of aesthetic perception.

Music, Myth and Story in Medieval and Early Modern Culture ed. by Katherine Butler and Samantha Bassler

Reviewed by: Music, Myth and Story in Medieval and Early Modern Culture ed. by Katherine Butler and Samantha Bassler Bradford Lee Eden Music, Myth and Story in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Edited by Katherine Butler and Samantha Bassler. (Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music, 19.) Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2019. [xiii, 318 p. ISBN 9781783273713 (hardback), $99; ISBN 9781787444409 (e-book), $24.99.] Music examples, illustrations, color plates, bibliography, index. The interconnections between folklore, myth, and story are both numerous and varied. Many origin myths and legends incorporate aspects of music, song, and drama in their construction, along with both human and supernatural individuals who embody and glorify musical attributes and abilities. This book provides a kind of navigational guide to the rich mythological traditions of various cultures and countries from the fifth to the early eighteenth centuries, blending a range of musical perspectives. Case studies encompass literary, theatrical, and iconographical scholarship wrapped around musical meanings, musical philosophy, musical techniques, musical theory, and musical performance linked to various myths and stories throughout history. Divided into seven sections and fifteen chapters, arranged both thematically and chronologically, this book provides a rich source of music’s influence on numerous stories and mythologies. The editors provide a detailed historical introduction to the topic, framing the essays that follow through discussion of musical figures throughout history and myth, including Orpheus, Jubal, the Muses, Pythagoras, and Apollo, to name but a few. Butler and Bassler also explain three approaches to the study and interpretation of musical myths at various times and places: the cosmological tradition centered around classical mythology, the Euhemerist or historical tradition, which interpreted the classical gods as historical men, and the moral or allegorical tradition, which arose during the Renaissance and saw the allegory of musical myth and story separated from any gods or historical personages. The editors provide brief summaries of the chapters while linking the entire contents together philosophically, from the Neoplatonist view of music as universal harmony to the Cartesian viewpoint of the separation of mind and body. [End Page 416] Section 1 focuses on the medieval period, with three essays on the influence of myth in music theory. John MacInnis examines how medieval music theorists incorporated Greek mythological narratives surrounding the harmony of the planets and universe as well as theological underpinnings around the human soul. Ferdia J. Stone-Davis explores Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and similar early music treatises as blendings of music as myth and myth as music, providing meaning to the world and the universe in new ways. Elina G. Hamilton then considers the significance of origin myths and the genealogies constructed for music as an influence on fourteenth-century English singers and through the early fifteenth-century musical treatise De origine et effectu musicae. Section 2 contains two chapters on iconographical representations of myth and music during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Jason Stoessel traces the influence of Minerva through various biblical, historical, and allegorical figures, illustrating how the biblical figure Tubalcain in particular became associated iconographically with polyphonic, vernacular song collections. Stoessel provides this analysis through a reconsideration of Dosso Dossi’s Allegory of Music. Tim Shephard and Patrick McMahon then focus on early sixteenth-century Italian visual representations of the myth of the musical contest between Apollo and Pan, specifically how King Midas obtained ass ears and how various artists portrayed and reshaped this myth in ways that influenced moral and musical judgment in 1520s Italy. Section 3 has two chapters that examine Renaissance philosophies of music in relation to myth. Jacomien Prins contrasts two interpretations of the figure of Orpheus by the late fifteenth- century Italian philosophers Marsilio Ficino and Girolamo Cardano, showing how a mythical figure could engender new aesthetic standards and ideas. Katherine Butler then describes the nature of music in early modern England and how metanarratives around competing myths were used to justify new and changed perceptions of humanity’s relationship to nature and the ancient world. Section 4 moves from conceptual to practical aspects of musical performance in England and Italy in the sixteenth century. Jamie Apgar examines biblical stories of angel song from the early church and connections to alternatim choral singing in Protestant...

Musik von einem fremden Planeten?. Variationen über Struktur, Wahrnehmung und Bedeutung in der Musik des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts

The relationship between musical structure, perception and musical meaning can be understood as a key to the development of a theory of post-tonal music. Preliminaries of this theory are developed in three “variations”. First, a review of the difficult relationship between music theory and new music in the 20th century is explained by (1) an increasingly diverse compositional practice that has lead to a composer-centred “theory”, often amounting to nothing more than a scantily contextualized documentation of a composer’s intentions and techniques, and (2) the universalist and dogmatic tendency of music-theoretical discourse around 1900 which, however, has since developed into an “epistemological pluralism” (Nicholas Cook). The Graz research project “organisation of sound”, initiated and headed by the author, pursues just such a pluralistic methodology by integrating author- and listener-perspectives on post-tonal music based on a morpho-syntactical conceptual framework with references to gestalt theory. This approach emerged not least from the observation that new music, especially after 1945, has increasingly been conceived of “morphologically” with a strong focus on music perception, as argued in the second variation. The idea that musical structure, perception and “worldliness” [Welthaltigkeit] are inseparable allowed composers to retain the idea of musical auto-referentiality while at the same time claiming the social-political impact of contemporary music. This is illustrated by a short discussion of the relationship between structural coherence and (political) meaning in works by Brian Ferneyhough, Helmut Lachenmann and Salvatore Sciarrino. The third variation discusses these questions in more detail through an examination of two recent works by Chaya Czernowin and Isabel Mundry. In Czernowin’s Excavated Dialogues – Fragments Western and Chinese instruments are organized in a culturally hybrid space saturated with conflict emerging from a highly gestural material; in Mundry’s Ich und Du solo piano and orchestra go through several stages of an ambiguous identity discourse informed by an essay of Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida. Antinomies between the composers’ self-interpretations and the morpho-syntactical analysis can be understood as results of a music-specific polyvalence that should inform any theory of post-tonal music.