Musical Organization Research Articles

National Versions of Worship as a Basis for a New Mass to Come

Deals with the regional aspects in the musical organisation of Mass related to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. The author concretises the features of liturgical music reform and notes the specificity of its realisation in the practice of Catholic commons of the Asian part of Russia, from the Urals to the Far East. It is argued that a combination of musical material integrated in a holistic canonical invariant gives original features to worship in each parish.

George E. Lewis in Conversation with John Corbett

From “Black Collectivities: A Conference,” held May 3–4, 2013, at Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the University of Chicago’s Arts Incubator. This conversation followed presentations by George E. Lewis and John Corbett on the second day of the conference. Corbett and Lewis address the structures of improvisational jazz as well as forms of musical pedagogy and organization, in discussing the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Afrofuturist discourse, and the legacy of Sun Ra.

Neurophysiological evidence that musical training influences the recruitment of right hemispheric homologues for speech perception

Musicians have a more accurate temporal and tonal representation of auditory stimuli than their non-musician counterparts (Musacchia et al., 2007; Parbery-Clark et al., 2009a; Zendel and Alain, 2009; Kraus and Chandrasekaran, 2010). Musicians who are adept at the production and perception of music are also more sensitive to key acoustic features of speech such as voice onset timing and pitch. Together, these data suggest that musical training may enhance the processing of acoustic information for speech sounds. In the current study, we sought to provide neural evidence that musicians process speech and music in a similar way. We hypothesized that for musicians, right hemisphere areas traditionally associated with music are also engaged for the processing of speech sounds. In contrast we predicted that in non-musicians processing of speech sounds would be localized to traditional left hemisphere language areas. Speech stimuli differing in voice onset time was presented using a dichotic listening paradigm. Subjects either indicated aural location for a specified speech sound or identified a specific speech sound from a directed aural location. Musical training effects and organization of acoustic features were reflected by activity in source generators of the P50. This included greater activation of right middle temporal gyrus and superior temporal gyrus in musicians. The findings demonstrate recruitment of right hemisphere in musicians for discriminating speech sounds and a putative broadening of their language network. Musicians appear to have an increased sensitivity to acoustic features and enhanced selective attention to temporal features of speech that is facilitated by musical training and supported, in part, by right hemisphere homologues of established speech processing regions of the brain.

Sinnlighetens slott. Eva-Marie Liffners Drömmaren och sorgen som queert allkonstverk

This article is a close reading of Eva-Marie Liffner’s 2006 novel Drömmaren och sorgen (The Dreamer and the Sorrow). Drawing on theories of queer and lesbian literature and on the writings of Gilles Deleuze, I argue for a queer aesthetics of sensual excess. Liffner’s novel is a mystery without a solution, a beautiful enigma resisting reader expectations of plot and closure. Its labyrinthine or kaleidoscopic structure connects and reconnects a large amount of vivid, concrete figures. I read the novel through five of its key figures: the castle, the sea, the heart, the song and the knight. The castle is the architectural principle of the novel, which features gothic elements such as the trapdoor and the secret passage. The sea lends atmosphere to the novel and is best understood as an element in the humoural sense, permeating landscapes and characters alike. The heart exemplifies Liffner’s use of intensely sensual figures and connects to the genre of anatomical blazons. The song points to an alternative, musical organisation of the novel and works to transcend barriers of sex and species. The knight, finally, is identified as the androgynous hero(ine) of queer literary history riding through works such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood before showing up in Liffner’s novel.

Improvisation as Tool and Intention: Organizational Practices in Laptop Orchestras and Their Effect on Personal Musical Approaches

Improvisation is a practice as old as music; the laptop orchestra possibly the newest of ensembles. How can this ancient practice and this ultra-modern ensemble intersect? How does technology affect the way music is organized? How does such musical organization affect the performers?
 
 This paper looks at the variety of improvisational practices in laptop orchestras and ensembles using the repertoire of the Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana (of which I am a member) as a starting point. Laptop orchestras have developed out of musical situations rooted in the Western European classical tradition (and its experimental fringe). Although this tradition has lost much of its connection to improvisation, the rise of laptop orchestras has (re)introduced improvisation as a fertile musical practice. This paper will consider how practicing improvisation has affected the musical outlook of members of these ensembles.
 
 Five pieces from the repertoire of the Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana (LOLs) serve as case studies for exploring improvisation as an organizational practice. We see how improvisation is used as a tool to facilitate the discovery and development of new instruments, and to address local content in situations where a commonly understood system of notation does not exist. We also see how improvisation becomes the intention of other musical settings. These findings are reinforced by a survey of leaders of other laptop orchestras.
 
 The last century of traditional academic performance studies has not privileged improvisation in a significant way; therefore, many musicians participating in laptop orchestras are new to improvisation, or even biased against it. Interviews with some of these musicians show how their experiences have changed their attitudes and approaches towards improvisation.
 
 Through these perspectives, one can see how technological constraints and aesthetic ideals interact to create a variety of organizational approaches for laptop orchestras, and how these approaches in turn affect the musical lives of the participants. While these ensembles will not likely cause improvisation to become a dominant mode of operation in academic music, they constitute another step in the continued development of improvisation as a respected and sanctioned musical practice.

Metacognitive strategies in learning sight-singing

This paper presents a part of a wider study that is based on interdisciplinary research of sight-singing (psychology and music education). Our intention was to join the psychological knowledge of cognitive processes on the one hand, and the practical approach of music teachers, based on methods, techniques and procedures of mastering sight-reading-singing skills on the other. We aimed: 1. to determine the kinds and levels of strategies that music students use in the cognitive processes involved during sight-singing; 2. to explore strategies of problem solving when difficulties appear; 3. to investigate the self-evaluation perspectives of students; and 4. to relate students' learning experience to the strategies used. The sample consisted of 89 music students from higher music education in Belgrade and The Hague. They filled in the questionnaire based on self-reports, covering general data about their music education background, different issues of sight-singing, such as planning, problem solving, monitoring and evaluation of outcomes, and three melodic examples written in different musical styles. Results showed that strategies used during sight-singing can be roughly sorted into three groups that differ according to the 'key accent' given: cognitive, intuitive and no-strategy. The music cognitive strategies involved cover three levels of musical organization and representation: a) relying on smaller chunks of the musical piece, referring to existing knowledge and learning experience; b) leaning on a slightly 'bigger picture' of familiar patterns; and c) mental representation of melodic/rhythmic/harmonic structures. When faced with a problem, half of the students employed analytic approaches. Comparisons between sub-samples showed, for example, that future performing musicians more often used 'tone-to-tone' thinking and 'bottom-up' strategies in approaching musical structure, while music theory students had better insight into the whole and used 'top-down' strategies. Research results provide a possibility for evaluation of learning outcomes and improving teaching practices.

A Song of Dawn: The Jerusalem Sephardi Baqqashot at the Har Tzyion Synagogue (review)

Reviewed by: A Song of Dawn: The Jerusalem Sephardi Baqqashot at the Har Tzyion Synagogue Mark Kligman (bio) A Song of Dawn: The Jerusalem Sephardi Baqqashot at the Har Tzyion Synagogue. Recordings and notes by Essica Marks. Jerusalem: Jewish Music Research Centre, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2007. Anthology of Music Traditions in Israel, Vol. 20, Edwin Seroussi, editor. Six CD recordings and a 102-page bilingual booklet. The singing of baqqashot (liturgical poems of requests) is a practice hundreds of years old for Sephardi/Mizrahi Jews, those living along the Mediterranean. The baqqashot ritual takes place early in the morning on the Saturday of the Sabbath. Congregants arrive at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. and sing for several hours before sunrise; at sunrise they begin the morning prayers. Singing in the dark of night for hours until sunrise is a meditative and preparatory experience for the Sabbath prayers. The recording A Song of Dawn: The Jerusalem Sephardi Baqqashot at the Har Tzyion Synagogue, by Essica Marks, contains 6 CDs of the baqqashot ritual at a synagogue in Israel. A Song of Dawn is unique as a real-time recording of an entire event in context in 2003. Previous available recordings were made in a studio, not in context, and with only one to three singers. The presentation of the tracks on A Song of Dawn replicates the correct singing order of these texts in the actual ritual. The singing of baqqashot at Har Tzyion Synagogue is regularly performed in its complete form; they are one of few carriers of this tradition. [End Page 146] Har Tzyion Synagogue is located next to the Old City of Jerusalem. The synagogue was established in the time after the 1967 war; prior to the war the area was governed by Jordan. Although the ritual is usually performed on the eve of the Sabbath, to facilitate participation by members of various ages, Har Tzyion moved the regular baqqashot ritual to Thursday evening. The origins of baqqashot singing are not clear. Baqqashot texts have been found in prayer books since the fifteenth century among Jewish communities in Spain. Nocturnal sessions and singing of religious texts were part of Jewish musical practices in general. Some poems of the baqqashot are of unknown origin and date, others are from the Golden Age of Spain (eleventh to twelfth century), from well-known Jewish poets like Shlomo Ibn Gabriol and Abraham Ibn Ezra. Another prominent poet is Israel Najara (c. 1555–1625) who lived in Damascus. Still others were part of the Syrian community in Aleppo, men such as Mordecai Abadi (d. 1883), the codifier of standard baqqashot arrangement, and Rahael Antebi Tabush (1873–1919) the author of over 400 piyyutim (religious poems), a few of which are used in the baqqashot service. Additional texts used in the ritual are drawn from the book of Psalms. The booklet accompanying these CDs richly annotates the tradition with text in both English and Hebrew in two different sections (there are 49 pages in the English section and 53 in the Hebrew). A description of each track comments on the author of each poetic text, if known, and the organization of the musical piece. The maqam (or mode) is given and the modulations that often occur when moving from the end of one baqqasha (singular) to the start of another are described and analyzed. There is a separate section with a brief biography of each poet (10–14 English; 10–14 Hebrew) and a description of the maqamat (14–15 English; 15–16 Hebrew). The musical structure of the baqqashot varies; some songs are composed strophically and some melodies are through-composed. Solo embellishments and improvisation take place during certain passages. No singular musical organization pattern exists. Some examples, such as Or ‘elyon (Supreme Light) in maqam Bayyat CD 2 (track 8), have a responsorial section with a call and response between the soloist and the choir, others have various soloists or group singing. In some parts of the baqqashot ritual soloists alternate with community members. The timbres of the performances are mixed with the gruff voices of older members juxtaposed by the relative clarity and sweetness of younger voices. The...

Talking Drums in Los Angeles: Brokering Culture in an American Metropolis

My mission in life is not only to make the dundun a universal instrument, but also to transmit the family aspect of African life to all the people of the universe. I am interested in using this medium to unify the people of all races and colors. My students at present are reflecting this dream, because I have students from all ethnic groups learning to play the drum. Francis Awe, liner notes to Oro ljinle (1997) Nigerian musician Francis Awe has been performing and promoting dundun, a family of Yoruba drums, in Los Angeles concert halls, communities, and classrooms for over twenty-five years. Awe exhibits a persona both rooted and worldly: a Yoruba talking drummer on a mission to bring his music to the people of the world. Adopted as his home in 1983, Los Angeles would come to embody this world--a global metropolis in which he would realize much of his life's work. Performing in American film and television, and recording with major-label stars like Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson, Awe adapted dundun to new idioms and contexts. He used the instrument to enter into cross-cultural dialogues with Cuban and Indian musicians, and opened up new creative and commercial potential by designing a signature drum for Remo World Percussion. Awe's expansive vision is evident, as well, in the multiethnic composition of his Nigerian Talking Drum Ensemble, an accomplishment about which he expresses great pride. In pedagogy and performance, Awe aims to make Yoruba music accessible and meaningful in new contexts while at the same time retaining the particular symbols and organizational principles that ground it in Yoruba musical heritage. Whether working with public school students or prison inmates, Awe tries to articulate the social and cultural dimensions of his music in ways relevant to the diverse audiences he encounters. In this way, he seeks to universalize the Yoruba talking drum tradition and weave African cultural wisdom, as he interprets it, into the fabric of American life. Awe's work is more than savvy cultural marketing; it is grounded in a sense of mission and commitment to human emancipation. This global musician, then, not only adapts music to foreign contexts, but also uses music to transform those contexts. The concept of the culture broker is useful in highlighting Francis Awe's self-defined role as both culture bearer and cultural mediator. As one who was, in his words, born into a drumming family, Awe may be viewed as a culture bearer; that is, an embodiment or representative of a Yoruba performance tradition. At the same time, he is reflexively engaged with this tradition, idiosyncratically interpreting it and mediating its reception in new contexts. More generally, the idea of culture brokering begs attention to individual agency and its conditions of possibility in the global remapping of musical traditions. Cosmopolitan musicians like Francis Awe may be creatively reformulating tradition, but they are doing so, as anthropologist Paulla Ebron (2002, 15) puts it, dialogically ... within multiple arenas including local, regional, and global politics and culture. Their agency, in other words, is historically produced, socially situated, and culturally inflected (for recent discussions of agency, see Ortner [2006] and Werbner [2002]). This is a key insight of recent literature on the twentieth-century globalization of African performance traditions: as they are innovatively reshaping their music to meet a wider range of contexts and expectations, African musicians are also reproducing their own culturally particular models of patronage, musical organization, and musical transmission across wider domains. And they are doing so within and against a variety of global and local discourses, such as images of African difference and imaginings of African authenticity. These global musicians, in other words, both reproduce and transform tradition in dialogue with the people, places, and ideas they encounter (see, especially, Ebron [2002] and Klein [2007]). …

Characterizing Idiomatic Organization in Music: A Theory and Case Study of Musical Affordances

A theory of idiomaticism is developed and illustrated using music for B- flat valve trumpet. Physical measures were collected from two trumpet performers and used to construct a computer model of the instrument/performer. Using this model, several works composed by both trumpet virtuosi and non-trumpet players were analyzed. A conceptual distinction is made between measures of performance difficulty (how hard it is to play a particular passage) and measures of performance idiomaticism (how well suited a passage is to a specific instrument). Methods for characterizing both difficulty and idiomaticism are described. In general, the results suggest that detailed modeling of the mechanics of performance can help to pinpoint aspects of musical organization that arise from performance idioms or affordances. Repercussions for ethnomusicology, historical musicology and music analysis are discussed. Submitted 2009 June 8; accepted 2009 July 15.

Neighborhood indicator based on tonality and arrangements in musical organization: Automatic system for selecting similar excerpts based on musical information.

Recently, various methods for searching similar musical excerpts have been studied. However, it has not yet been realized that a method of automatically selecting similar excerpts based on features was obtained from musical information in consideration of a music theory. Therefore, this study was to realize the method. Concretely, employed parameters are “chord trigram,” modeling sequence of chords based on the n‐gram model, “emotional parameter,” corresponding to emotional expressions such as tempi, modes, and average of duration for melody, and “note density,” corresponding to the occurrence frequency of notes. Excerpts dealt with here are grouped into several categories based on proposed parameters by the CART algorithm, and degree of similarity is calculated between excerpts in each category. Developed here is a system for automatically selecting similar excerpts based on features obtained from musical information, named “NITAMO,” which stands for neighborhood indicator based on tonality and arrangeme...

Artificial Composition: An Experiment on Indian Music

It has been attempted to develop a neurocomputing paradigm for artificial music composition in Indian style. A musical organization, comprising a melodic pattern, a rhythmic pattern and a melody violation part, has been considered for this purpose. A simple feed forward hybrid neural network with a functional link hidden layer has been so designed as to integrate such a musical organization with Indian raga rules. The proposed artificial neural network can output a variety of compositions on any raga by generating random link weights that shape the musical organization in various ways within the freedom available in the raga framework. The neural network can be customized with specifications of any raga for outputting a large variety of musical sequences that abide by the particular raga rules. In an interactive mode, a musician user may compose non-classical and light classical songs in Indian style based on desired ragas. An evaluation of such outputs from the system on Hindustani music, as done by a group of musicians, is encouraging. The present system, when run in an “Auto Mode”, may also serve as a generator of “semi-finished” music for composing music of non-traditional structure.

Um objeto fugidio: voz e "musicologias"

Componente indissociável da fala e do canto, a voz é um objeto fugidio que escapa às abordagens parciais das várias disciplinas que dela se ocupam. A partir desta constatação, discuto o lugar da voz nos saberes sobre a música. As tipologias vocais geradas no canto erudito, comprometidas com as técnicas e estéticas desenvolvidas na Europa, modernamente, não são extensivas às vocalizações populares e folclóricas. As análises musicais que privilegiam o eixo sintático da música também dizem pouco sobre a voz. Revejo, então, alguns aspectos da “cantométrica” de Alan Lomax, metodologia que – juntamente com as etnografias da fala e da música – constitui um avanço na integração de fonética, antropologia e musicologia.

Rhythmic Patterns Reflecting Cognitive Constraints and Aesthetic Ideals

This paper focuses on basic rhythmic patterns in terms of their contribution to the characterization of various styles that reflect different aesthetic ideals, and thereby to link the fields of cognition and musicology. The aesthetic ideal is realized in various ways; the one examined here concerns the degree of definability (in comparative rather than precise quantitative terms) of the rhythmic organization, which may be manifested on various levels of musical organization. To this end, we examined three issues. (1) We compared some of the principles that govern the rhythmic “raw material” of classical Western and Arab music and poetry. (2) We conducted an experiment on perception and identification of three types of basic rhythmic patterns in Western tonal music. The experimental patterns were based on the bare minimum required for the perception of rhythm (the ratio between only two durations), but took into account the other parameters (intensity and pitch) that may be involved in the degree of definability of identification of the patterns. The findings of the experiment revealed hierarchies between the patterns and between the parameters, as well as the conditions for their degree of definability and their contributions to the characterization of style. (3) In light of all this, we examined a number of musical examples from diverse Western styles that illustrate the various appearances of the rhythmic patterns examined. For purposes of comparison, we also present examples from Arab musical literature.

"What Is about, Is Also of, Also Is": Words, Musical Organization, and Boretz's "Language, as a Music", "Thesis"

"What isabout, isalso of, ALSO IS": Words, Musical Organization, and boretz's language ,asa music, "Thesis" Dora A. Hanninen Language yAS a music (1978) is a polysemous, self-referentialmusic text in six parts.1 Part II, "Argument" is composed of notes; parts I and III-VI (except for the recording of Irving Berlin's "Remember" that begins part IV) are composed ofwords. Each of the six parts stakes out a distinct position in a music-text hyperspace inwhich notes and words, sonic qualities and transformations, rhyme and repetition, segmentation and continuity, associative and syntactic organization, and expository ver sus improvisatory mode of discourse, are all significant dimensions for variation. Boretz's recording brings out themusicality of the five spoken Words, Musical Organization, and Boretz's "Thesis" 15 texts, if most clearly in the great dynamic arch that spans the second half of part I, "Thesis," and in the endless-breathless melodic sawy-jive of part IV, "Red Hook." But both of these parts, and "Thesis" inparticular, are "music-texts" in amuch deeper sense: approaching the subject ofmusical experience from the inside out, "Thesis" is not only "about" music, but "is also of music, "also is" music. "Thesis" is a musical composition com posed ofwords, organized inways more characteristic ofmusic.2 As an analyst, Iwas intrigued. A fantastic fusion of clarity and richness, "Thesis" is a piece inwhich unruly ghosts of ideas take form, then flight, enticing pursuit but gently resisting capture. Yet the means (one might say, themechanics) of itsparticular brand of verbal expression eluded me. I wanted to know: Justhow does this piece carve out its own anti- (or ante-) categorical between-space of music-language, neither one nor the other, neither amapping of or onto, nor a schizophrenic bopping to and fro, but in and of both?3 Hoping to get a better handle on how "Thesis" is simultaneously "an utterance within" and "a view about," I started to look closely at rhyme and repetition, then to form collections of associ ated words and phrases which I called "wordspaces." I began to think about the internal structure ofwordspaces, associative proximity and dis tance within wordspaces, characteristics of wordspaces, and interactions between wordspaces. I looked at syntax?shades, traces, and transforma tions of syntax. Gradually, bits and pieces of observations and musings developed into a perspective on how "Thesis" deconstructs and reconstructs language in the image of a music, how it uses language in such away thatwords, subjected to patterns of association and syntactic transformation fairly typical of music, but not of language, come to speak ofmusic in itsown terms. I decided towork out and write up my ideas on "Thesis" as a tribute to Ben, whose abundant work in and about music has been an inspiration to me and so many others. Broadly conceived as an analytical essay con cerned with issues of object and reference; association and associative organization; syntax and syntactic transformation; and interrelations among these issues in music, in language, and in Language ,as a music, this paper has three parts. Part I surveys these issues with respect to lan guage and music in general, then reflects on some ways inwhich "The sis" uses words inways more characteristic ofmusic. Parts II and III turn to specific passages: part II looks at associative organization and form in the firstfour pages (4-7), focusing on organization within and interac tions between wordspaces; part III considers the workings of syntactic transformation, associations, their interactions, and some perceptual aspects of thewordstream of pages 13-20. I 6 Perspectives of New Music I. A language, amusic What is there to be on to, logically; or ontologically (4) Talk about "language and music" tends to center on notions of intersec tion: biological and cultural origins and histories; sound and rhythm in the imaginative, evocative, and distinctive language of poetry; reference and meaning in musical semiotics; perceptual capacities and cognitive processing; concepts and models of structural hierarchies. As a "musical thinker" (rather than, primarily, a poet or text artist), Ben Boretz has spent a good deal of his time probing differences between language and music, teasing out justwhat such perennial statements as "music is a lan guage" might mean in regard to...

The capacity for music: What is it, and what’s special about it?

We explore the capacity for music in terms of five questions: (1) What cognitive structures are invoked by music? (2) What are the principles that create these structures? (3) How do listeners acquire these principles? (4) What pre-existing resources make such acquisition possible? (5) Which aspects of these resources are specific to music, and which are more general? We examine these issues by looking at the major components of musical organization: rhythm (an interaction of grouping and meter), tonal organization (the structure of melody and harmony), and affect (the interaction of music with emotion). Each domain reveals a combination of cognitively general phenomena, such as gestalt grouping principles, harmonic roughness, and stream segregation, with phenomena that appear special to music and language, such as metrical organization. These are subtly interwoven with a residue of components that are devoted specifically to music, such as the structure of tonal systems and the contours of melodic tension and relaxation that depend on tonality. In the domain of affect, these components are especially tangled, involving the interaction of such varied factors as general-purpose aesthetic framing, communication of affect by tone of voice, and the musically specific way that tonal pitch contours evoke patterns of posture and gesture.

‘As Much by Force of Circumstances as by Ambition’: The Programming Practices of the Melbourne Liedertafel Societies, 1880–1905

Two male-voice singing societies – the Metropolitan Liedertafel and the Melbourne Liedertafel – occupied prominent positions in the concert life of Melbourne during the prosperous 1880s. At this time the Metropolitan Liedertafel, formed in 1870, had between 80 and 100 performing members and regularly attracted audiences of over two thousand to its ‘Social Evenings for Ladies and Gentlemen’. A concert described as the ‘greatest gathering of its kind every [sic] seen in this city’, given at the recently completed Exhibition Buildings on 7 July 1881 and attended by the Princes Albert Victor and George, drew a crowd of between five and six thousand. The farewell concert given on 13 February 1882 for the Mendelssohn Quintette Club, visiting from Boston, had an audience of approximately two thousand, even though as one of the society's ‘smoke nights’, attendance was limited to men. The Metropolitan Liedertafel played host to a number of other visiting international musicians, including Henri Kowalski, August Wilhelmj, Carlotta Patti, Ernest de Munck, and, somewhat later, Sir Charles and Lady Hallé. In the early 1880s, the Metropolitan was identified as the city's leading musical society; an 1881 review in the Argus made so bold as to suggest that it was ‘the most successful association of its kind ever established here – or probably anywhere else’! This sentiment is reflected in a satirical piece in Town Talk in October 1881 in which the Metropolitan's conductor, Julius Herz, refers to himself, in a mock German accent, as ‘the subreme conductor of the greatest musical organisation in the vorld“.

The Musical Subject, Technoculture And Curriculum In The Postmodern Condition

Through an engagement with the notion of `globalisation' and `subjectivity', I argue that the politics of musical knowledge involved in global empires not only defines and enframes the global musical subject, but subverts impulses towards democratic practices. The subjectifying experiences thus provided require music education's engagement with the state of musical knowledge in the postmodern condition - a critical awareness of the revolutionising of the arts, music, and communication through digital aesthetics. Technological ordering processes impinge upon institutional sites such as schools through curriculum prescriptions where discourses of official music educational knowledge are conditioned and unquestioned. Musical production is increasingly framed on technology's terms. I interrogate technology in the New Zealand music curriculum, exemplifying the political construction of musical knowledge within the global neoliberal policy environment. Collective memory involves a politics of knowledge, no less a politics of musical knowledge. The sites of construction of community in the musical organisation of collective memory require interrogation for ideological purposes. Critical philosophical questions therefore need to be brought to the music educators' table about technology. Heidegger's questioning concerning technology exposes ontological questions concerning technology's role in the ordering and construction of musicality as a site of identity — `being musical' and the protection of musicality become critical issues. Enlightenment metanarratives of individualism, autonomy and freedom are reinvoked suggesting the wisdom of Lyotard's (1984) claim that postmodernism is modernism in its “nascent state”.

The Relative Importance of Local and Global Structures in Music Perception

Research in experimental psychology has emotion in music is developed by L. B. Meyer.2 shown two paradoxes in music perception. By According to Meyer, listeners are not passive, mere exposure to musical pieces, Western lis- but rather constantly develop perceptual expectteners acquire sensitivity to the regularities ancies about the possible evolution of the underlying tonal music. This implicitly acquired music. Emotions arise from the way the comknowledge allows listeners to perceive subtle poser (or the improvising performer) fulfills relations between musical events and permits or frustrates these expectancies. To some musically untrained listeners to behave as music- extent, music perception may involve cognitive ally trained listeners, notably in experimental processes comparable to those occurring when settings that tap into implicit levels of music reading a novel. Like the plot of a novel, processing. The second paradox concerns the musical structures instill suspense until the end apparent inability of the cognitive system to of the piece. deal with large-scale musical structures. The For a cognitive approach, the crucial issue musical brain, which appears to be very smart raised by Meyer concerns the nature of these when dealing with fine musical structures in anticipatory processes.3 It is well documented short temporal windows, turns out to be some- in cognitive psychology that a context generates what defective when short time structures have automatic expectancies that prepare (or prime) to be integrated in larger structures. The present the processing of probable events. Most of these paper provides an overview of both issues. We expectancies remain at an implicit level, sugstart with reviewing research on implicit learn- gesting that the underlying processes are also ing in the music domain, and then present implicit. We first present the contribution of research investigating the perception of global implicit processes to music perception, and then musical organization. turn to the time-span of the musical expectanOne of the main reasons leading human cies involved. Several music theories have beings of Western culture to develop musical underlined the crucial role played by hierarchactivities is the expressive power of music. The ical structure in Western tonal music,4 but only content of this expressivity is probably extremely a few have argued for a more concatenationist large, rendering the domain of music expression understanding of musical structures.5 Cognitive and emotion difficult to address with scientific psychology aims to understand the influence of methods.' By contrast, the perceptual processes hierarchical musical structures on cognitive proinvolved in expressive reactions to music have cesses involved in music perception. For exambeen the object of substantial research in music ple, one of the questions raised concerns the cognition. For the most part, this research time-span of perceptual anticipations, notably admits more or less explicitly that emotional whether they occur from moment to moment or reactions to music derive from the cognitive whether they encompass larger temporal winprocessing of musical sounds and structures. dows. In the latter case, expectations at a given The foundation of a cognitive approach to moment in the musical piece may be linked to

Yuebu of the Tang Dynasty: Musical Transmission from the Han to the Early Tang Dynasty

This paper studies the system and development of the yuebu, an official court music system during the Tang dynasty. Research on the music of the Tang dynasty has been quite abundant, mostly on the yanyue (court banquet music that was administered by the yuebu), with notable studies by scholars such as Ren Bantang (1982), Kishibe Shigeo (1973), Wang Xiaodun (1995), and Shen Dong (2000). However, previous research on music of the Tang dynasty emphasised acculturation and assimilation between China and cultures from bordering western countries; they did not look at music of the Tang court from the perspective of the yuebu as a complex bureaucratic system. Our interest focuses on yuebu as a functioning system that reflected a historically important route of transmission of traditional Chinese music. Through examining the cultural integration of several dynasties encompassing a period lasting more than three hundred years from the Han to the early Tang dynasties, as well as migration and training of the musicians of the yuebu and their method of musical transmission (particularly transmission within the family unit), this paper aims to gain an insight into the historical basis and cultural meaning of the yuebu. The discussion consists of two parts. Part one introduces the classification and the nature of the yuebu. On the one hand, as an official musical organisation in the court, the music repertory of the yuebu was the result of combinations of a variety of musical cultures from the Han to the Tang dynasties. On the other hand, as a bureaucratic organisation, yuebu represented a system consisting of “yue (music), qi (instruments), gong (musicians), and yi (uniform)”, legally sanctioned under the “yuelin (law on music)”. Part two concerns itself with the development of the yuebu in the Tang dynasty through scrutinizing the impact of migration and the training of musicians, and musical transmission during the pre-Tang era (namely, the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern, and Sui dynasties). From this, the paper ventures to explore, with a musicological approach, the typical means of propagating music traditions in China via training and transmission within a relatively closed system that was self-protecting and maintained within the family unit.

The Magical Number Two, Plus or Minus One: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Musical Information

Like all fields of human artistic endeavour, music is constrained by our cognitive processing requirements and limitations (Swain, 1986; Lerdahl, 1988; Huron, 2001). This articleconsiders particular forms of constraint pertaining to the relationships that the structure-seeking mind (subconsciously) fabricates between perceived musical events. It is proposed that 2±1 may be a universal limitation pertaining to the level of relationships so ideated. That is, in terms of Lewin'S (1987) theoretical framework in which “intervals” can be intuited between the “elements” of musical “spaces”, it is posited that the cognition of musical structure occurs either through intervals (level 1), through intervals between these (level 2), or — in some circumstances — through intervals between these(level 3). This proposition is explored through the psychomusicological model developed by Ockelford (1991, 1993, 1999), which too analyses musical structure in terms of the relationships that may be cognised between its discrete perceptual components. In particular, the model identifies a type of cognitive link through which events (at any level) arefelt to imply others the same or similar — through so-called “zygonic” relationships. This theory suggests a further general principle: that the highest level of relationship inoperation at any given point must be zygonic if the music is to be structurally coherent. Evidence for this, and for the limit on the level of relationships of 2±1, is offeredthrough a series of musical examples, which illustrate a variety of musical organisation in action. Finally, empirical work is suggested to explore further the theoretical ideas that arepresented here.