Musical Sensibility Research Articles

Coexistence of particularity in the universality of musical sensation

Coexistence of particularity in the universality of musical sensation

“Spaces of Silence” and “Secret Music of the Word”: Verbo-Musical Minimalism in the Poetry of Gennady Aygi and Elizaveta Mnatsakanova

Two major poets of the Russian Neo-Avant-Garde—Gennady Aygi and Elizaveta Mnatsakanova—created textual works that transgressed the limits of language and the borders between the arts. Each pursued their own method of the visualization and musicalization of verbal matter, yet both share a particular musical sensibility, which guarantees the integrity of the linguistic structure of their verse, despite the fragmentation and logical incoherence of its elements. The atonal (serial) musical tradition has a special significance for these experimental poetics of minimalism. Mnatsakanova, herself a musicologist, who was friends with Dmitri Shostakovich, not only used the techniques of contemporary music composition in her visual and sound poetry, but also collaborated with electronic musicians in her recorded poetry performances. Aygi experimented with language, not only crossing the boundaries between music and poetry, but also between sound and silence. For him, music was a way of expressing pre-verbal subjectivity and reproducing signs of meaning that are hidden from ordinary perception. In his poems, Aygi brought together Chuvash folk music with experimental techniques of minimalism, correlating his own work with such Soviet unofficial composers as Andrey Volkonsky and Sofia Gubaidulina. This paper will address the issues of transmutation between verbal, visual, and sound art in poetic minimalism of the Soviet-era underground.

Bodily maps of musical sensations across cultures

Emotions, bodily sensations and movement are integral parts of musical experiences. Yet, it remains unknown i) whether emotional connotations and structural features of music elicit discrete bodily sensations and ii) whether these sensations are culturally consistent. We addressed these questions in a cross-cultural study with Western (European and North American, n = 903) and East Asian (Chinese, n = 1035). We precented participants with silhouettes of human bodies and asked them to indicate the bodily regions whose activity they felt changing while listening to Western and Asian musical pieces with varying emotional and acoustic qualities. The resulting bodily sensation maps (BSMs) varied as a function of the emotional qualities of the songs, particularly in the limb, chest, and head regions. Music-induced emotions and corresponding BSMs were replicable across Western and East Asian subjects. The BSMs clustered similarly across cultures, and cluster structures were similar for BSMs and self-reports of emotional experience. The acoustic and structural features of music were consistently associated with the emotion ratings and music-induced bodily sensations across cultures. These results highlight the importance of subjective bodily experience in music-induced emotions and demonstrate consistent associations between musical features, music-induced emotions, and bodily sensations across distant cultures.

Auenbruggers, Sensibility, and the Instrumental Bodies

ABSTRACT In conceiving the ideal of the man or woman of sensibility, many eighteenth-century philosophers and writers described the human body as a living instrument. The Austrian physician Josef Leopold Auenbrugger, who wrote the libretto for Salieri’s Der Rauchfangkehrer (1781), held just such a view. Auenbrugger’s musical sensibility led to his invention of the percussive technique as a diagnostic method for cardiac and respiratory diseases, a method that has received little attention by music historians despite widespread recognition in medical studies. This article reassesses the significance of Auenbrugger’s work, arguing that his musical-medical understanding of sensibility, as demonstrated in his treatise Inventum Novum (1761), effectively reinforces the eighteenth-century idea that the responsive body functions like a sensitive string and percussive instrument. Not only so, but Auenbrugger’s theory also offers applications to Haydn’s “Auenbrugger” sonatas, dedicated to Leopold Auenbrugger’s daughters, Caterina Franziska and Marianna.

개정 2015 중학교 음악과 공통교육과정과 기본교육과정 및 음악 교과서 생활화 영역 비교⋅분석

Objectives In this study, we compared and analyzed the educational content of the common curriculum, the basic curriculum applied to students with difficulty in applying the common curriculum, and the educational content of the music textbook accordingly, and the revised 2022 middle school music basic curriculum and music textbook should move forward. It aims to discuss the direction to be taken. Methods Revision 2015 Comparison and analysis of the curriculum competencies, goals, content system, achievement standards, and music textbooks of the characteristics of the middle school common curriculum and the basic curriculum, which are special education curriculums, and the music textbooks according to them, centered on common themes in the area of daily life, and revised 2022 middle school This is a literature analysis that presents implications for the direction that music textbooks and basic curriculum of music should go. Results Musical sensibility, creative convergence, and musical communication competency were presented as the curriculum competencies of the nature of the curriculum, but the cultural community competency and self- management competency presented in the common curriculum were excluded from the basic curriculum. In terms of goals, it was found that there was no significant difference in the direction pursued by the two curricula. Although there are differences in the way content systems are expressed, there is no significant difference in terms of core concepts, generalized knowledge, and functions. However, in terms of learning elements, music and industry in the common curriculum and Korean traditional music elements in the world were excluded from the basic curriculum. Looking at the achievement standards and explanations of the common curriculum and the basic curriculum, the two learning elements of the basic curriculum can be interpreted as being included in the category of music and events, which are learning elements of the common curriculum. In other words, the basic curriculum did not fully reflect the educational contents of the common curriculum. Conclusions Revision 2022 Middle school special education music department curriculum and textbooks should be revised based on educational contents that all students can learn equally. In addition, it is necessary to reflect the degree of disability and the characteristics that reflect the characteristics of students with disabilities so that they can live an independent and happy life by raising the quality of life by making music a part of life after graduation.

The Decay of Singing: Remembering the Castrato

AbstractThe advent of a new political regime in Italy in the 1790s led to decrees banning castrati from the stage and the closure of the singing academies where they taught. But seventy years later the composer Gioacchino Rossini looked back to the castrati as the last adepts of the art of bel canto: “As to the castrati, they vanished, and the usage disappeared in the creation of new customs. That was the cause of the irretrievable decay of the art of singing.” This essay focuses on the eighteenth-century castrato Gasparo Pacchierotti—friend of Charles, Frances, and Susan Burney, idol of William Beckford—and on the efforts of the novelist and critic Stendhal to “remember” Pacchierotti’s lost voice. Stendhal never heard Pacchierotti in his prime, but in his 1824 Vie de Rossini he declared that the art of bel canto had reached its apogee with Pacchierotti in 1778: five years before the writer’s own birth. Stendhal sought to demonstrate that the lost voice could be remembered by way of both historical evidence and the textual and viva voce “recordings” of earlier listeners: Beckford, the Burneys, and the singer Gabriel Piozzi. In Stendhal’s erotics or mnemonics of musical sensation, such textual and performative recordings allow us to remember the sensations elicited by an absent voice as vividly as the phonographic or digital recordings on which later listeners would rely.

Prosodic Experimentation in Hopkins’ Poetry

The paper aims to explore prosodic experimentation and musical sensibility designed for limning the dynamism observed in the Victorian world by the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poetry, especially, in “The Windhover”, “God’s Grandeur”, “Pied Beauty”, “Inversnaid” and “Spring”. Through a close reading of the prosody, rhythm, rhyme, metrics, alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia in Hopkins’ poems from the theoretical paradigms of the prosody, and sprung rhythm, propounded by Hopkins himself, and some other theorists, the study is an attempt to prove how Gerard Manley Hopkins exploits the rhythmic novelty to give each poem a distinctive design to capture his apprehension of dynamism, the intense thrust of energy in nature. The finding is that it was the Victorian culture and milieu evoked by the Second Industrial Revolution, technological advance, and Hopkins’ conviction that God manifested in the material world that influenced him to use innovative rhythmic patterns in his poetry so that we could perceive how the universe is characterized by a distinctive design that constitutes individual identity. It is expected that researchers intending to observe the prosodic techniques in poetry in general and Hopkins in particular can take the paper as a reference.

Between Hoffmann and Goethe: The Young Brahms as Reader

AbstractThis article provides a critical account of Brahms’s early collection of quotations, aphorisms and poems commonly known as Des jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein in the context of the composer’s youthful engagement with German literature. Drawing on archival materials housed in Vienna, it evaluates the 1909 publication of the Schatzkästlein by the Deutsche Brahms-Gesellschaft and traces Brahms’s path in assembling his quotations to reveal borrowings from sources he encountered in the Schumann house in Düsseldorf in 1854. The second section of the article considers the different modes of reading implied by Brahms’s collection, while the third reflects on the artistic worldview articulated by the assembled entries. While scholars have viewed the Schatzkästlein largely as evidence of Brahms’s adolescent infatuation with the writings of the German Romantics, this investigation emphasizes the competing conceptions of artistry present in these fascinatingly messy notebooks and argues that this youthful collection points to the important role played by literature in the development of Brahms’s distinctive musical sensibility.

Music and Cephalic Capability

Pragmatists views, like those of John Dewey’s about music, emphasize the social nature of musical sensibility, instrumental expressions and adaptation to changing circumstances. Indeed, expectancy and violations of those expectations in music are tied to memory and human development. Cephalic (mind/brain/body) factors that underlie what we expect, and variation on the expected, inhere in musical experiences. Music is a piece of nature and is tied to movement and dance and rooted in social contact. Music of course serves many functions in our lives. From the first sounds to some of the last, human well-being and music are ripe across the life cycle of human experience.

Ханс Ротт – современник Густава Малера

Hans Rott (1858–1884) was a contemporary and a friend of Gustav Mahler, his fellow student in the composition class, a brilliantly gifted musician. The year he graduated from the Vienna Conservatory (1878), he began work on his First Symphony in E Major, which suddenly made the author's name famous more than 100 years after its completion. During Rott's lifetime, his music was not publicly performed or published. The manuscript of the symphony had been in the archives for a century before it was discovered in the Austrian National Library in the late 1970s by the British musicologist Paul Banks. The premiere of the work in 1989 became a musical sensation: the opus by a young musician that appeared several years before Gustav Mahler’s first symphony had numerous "Mahler" elements, forerunning the symphonic style of the great Austrian composer. The musicological literature of the 1990s is engaged in the debate about Rott's priority in the creation of a “new symphony”. The scholars even highlight the need to “write the history of music anew”. Over time, academic judgements lost their sensational relevance and acquired a more objective and balanced character. The article is a reminder about certain aspects of the 1990s debate. It examines the reasons for the dramatic fate of Rott's symphony. It also discusses the hypothesis proposed by E. van den Hoogen about the hidden meaning of some Mahler's allusions— fragments of his symphonies containing “quotations” from Rott’s works. They may be viewed as direct references, an emphasis on the similarity, apostrophized by Mahler as a manifestation of the spiritual “kinship” he himself noted with his dearly departed friend. The apostrophe—an appeal to an imaginary, invisibly “present” interlocutor —can turn citation into a special form of creative dialogue.

Beauty in the Age of Empire: Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education by Raja Adal

Reviewed by: Beauty in the Age of Empire: Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education by Raja Adal Eriko Tomizawa-Kay (bio) Beauty in the Age of Empire: Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education. By Raja Adal. Columbia University Press, New York, 2019. xviii, 268 pages. $65.00, cloth; $64.99, E-book. Raja Adal's Beauty in the Age of Empire: Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education is a historically grounded critique of aesthetic education provided in Japanese and Egyptian primary schools from the early 1870s to the early 1940s. It is drawn from what the author terms the "global archive" of curricula, textbooks, and educational manuals. Using these resources, Adal has endeavored to put a global group of educators in dialogue with one another to examine the similarities in the priorities of educators worldwide at the end of the nineteenth century and then to consider the independent responses to art education by the societies on the receiving end of Western expansion. This book presents an important transnational approach and highlights indirect connections that can be identified between Japan and Egypt during the period of modernization. Adal's approach is refreshing because it avoids the usual trope of an uncritical West-to-East transfer of knowledge, when, in reality, it has always been more complicated than that. Comparing Egypt and Japan gives insights into this complexity. The importance of this book lies in Adal's commitment to write a global history that extends not from the West out toward its colonies but rather from the perspective of those nations seeking to define themselves in opposition to the West. To do this, he turns to aesthetic education, an often-neglected [End Page 232] aspect of nation building. "What happens," he asks, "if for a moment we allow wealth and military power to recede to a backdrop and bring aesthetics to the fore? In so doing, not only are we adopting a different perspective, but we are giving voice to a different set of historical actors" (pp. 15–16). This is the crux of Adal's study. By examining ways in which Japanese and Egyptian educational policymakers turned to music, writing, and drawing as tools for cultivating the sensibilities of the young and shaping their ideas of nationhood, he shows how countries threatened by the imperialist West turned to aesthetics as a form of resistance. The first half of the book examines the educational trajectories of the subjects of art education in question. After an introduction to the importation of primary curricula from Western nations at the turn of the twentieth century, chapter 2 focuses on music education. By the end of the nineteenth century, educators in both Japan and Egypt had largely abandoned indigenous musical traditions in favor of Western music. In terms of curriculum, Japan incorporated music education from 1886, while Egyptian schools would lag behind by more than four decades, possibly a consequence of the less pervasive state control of education. By the late 1920s to 1930s, however, the situation was being re-evaluated and both countries began to turn to their indigenous traditions. Adal nonetheless highlights differences between their respective conceptions of traditional music: Japan celebrated local musical forms such as the courtly gagaku, its continued existence distinguishing Japan from other East Asian nations that witnessed the erasure of their ancient indigenous music, whereas Egyptian educators embraced a wider Arabic canon of "Eastern beauty." Yet the embrace of nativist traditions was highly significant in both countries. Late nineteenth-century philosophies of music posited musical sensibility as the most primal sensory experience of the individual. If music had such privileged access to hearts and minds, it followed that traditional forms of music had the power to cultivate not just humanist sensibilities, but nationalist ones. The intervention of music in the aesthetic economy surrounding children was thus a crucial tool of nation building. As Adal explains in a later chapter (the second "Interlude"), this, in turn, encouraged the adoption of national anthems. While anthems were colonial imports, they used patriotic lyrics to appropriate the emotional impact of rousing melodies for a national cause. Chapter 3 explores the evolution of writing pedagogies...

Musical Ear Syndrome: Prevalence and characteristics in cochlear implant bearers

IntroductionMusical Ear Syndrome (MES) is an uncommon phenomenon described as the perception of auditory musical sensations not corresponding to any external stimulus. It seems to be more frequent in case of profound hearing loss. Our objective was to evaluate prevalence, characteristics and risk factors in a population of cochlear implant patients. MethodsA retrospective study was conducted in cochlear implant patients, who were adult (>18 years) in 2020 and underwent cochlear implantation between 1993 and 2019. We analyzed the presence and characteristics of MES. Results118 of the 358 patients (33%) perceived or had perceived auditory musical sensations: 71 (19.8%) before, 100 (28%) after, and 53 (14.8%) both before and after implantation. The musical auditory sensations were usually short and well-tolerated, resembling instrumental music, and occurring several times a day. Thirteen patients (11%) considered them intolerable. Fatigue was a triggering factor in 40 patients (33.9%). Personal and medical characteristics, type of implantation, make of implant, etiology and tinnitus did not emerge as risk factors. On the other hand, MES+ patients were significatively younger (56±17.4 years versus 61.9±17.9 years; P=0.0009). Despite the phenomenon, patients were satisfied with implant functioning and subjective auditory performance was not affected. ConclusionPrevalence of Musical Ear Syndrome was high in cochlear implant patients, and especially in younger subjects. It is essential to improve knowledge of this phenomenon.

Humanism and the Hikari Event

This article tells the story of one reader’s search for an environmental humanities approach to the work of Ōe Kenzaburō. When the Fukushima Power Plant melted down in March 2011, Ōe had already been an antinuclear activist for almost fifty years. Yet the conviction that drove his opposition had always been humanist rather than environmental. Even after the disaster, he continued to address nuclear toxicity as a problem to be tackled with the power of language: the power to resist, to speak truth, to participate in democracy. But what if what Ōe has been saying for decades implicitly about his disabled son Hikari’s musical sensibility were more interesting for an ecological politics than what he repeated explicitly after the disaster? This article discusses the Hikari figure’s relation to music in two texts, both referenced by Ōe in his post–3.11 activism: a 1991 short story called “Hi o megurasu tori” 火をめぐらす鳥 (“Light Circling Bird”), and a 2009 novel called Suishi 水死 (Death by Water). I read these texts along with Isabelle Stengers’s 2009 ecomanifesto In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism to argue that the disabled musician offers powerful tools for environmental engagement.

Choreographic Ghosts: Dance and the Revival of Shuffle Along

In 2016, director George C. Wolfe and choreographer Savion Glover created Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed, a backstage musical about the 1921 show Shuffle Along, noted for its all-black cast and creative team. Although Wolfe proclaimed dance to be the most important aspect of the original musical, his production does not mention Shuffle Along’s original choreographer, Lawrence Deas, nor does it examine the labor of choreography. These omissions expose how dance on Broadway remains subordinate to other aspects of a musical, thus reproducing racist and sexist logics about embodied performance.

Pleasure from music

Neuroscience Music can bring great joy to our lives, yet the extent to which humans find music pleasurable varies greatly. Several brain regions have been suggested to play a role in music perception, but we do not yet understand how they connect. Martinez-Molina et al. looked at brain areas such as the superior temporal gyrus, nucleus accumbens, and the orbitofrontal cortex known to be involved in experiencing reward and integration of information. They found differences in the microstructure of white-matter pathways between these brain regions in healthy adults. When the relationship of these pathways with the individuals' specific musical sensibility was tested, the authors concluded that details of the structure of the white-matter pathways influences the extent to which individuals perceive music as pleasurable. J. Neurosci. 39 , 5018 (2019).

Modeling Pitch Perception With an Active Auditory Model Extended by Octopus Cells.

Pitch is an essential category for musical sensations. Models of pitch perception are vividly discussed up to date. Most of them rely on definitions of mathematical methods in the spectral or temporal domain. Our proposed pitch perception model is composed of an active auditory model extended by octopus cells. The active auditory model is the same as used in the Stimulation based on Auditory Modeling (SAM), a successful cochlear implant sound processing strategy extended here by modeling the functional behavior of the octopus cells in the ventral cochlear nucleus and by modeling their connections to the auditory nerve fibers (ANFs). The neurophysiological parameterization of the extended model is fully described in the time domain. The model is based on latency-phase en- and decoding as octopus cells are latency-phase rectifiers in their local receptive fields. Pitch is ubiquitously represented by cascaded firing sweeps of octopus cells. Based on the firing patterns of octopus cells, inter-spike interval histograms can be aggregated, in which the place of the global maximum is assumed to encode the pitch.

Qualitative Analysis of Alcohol’s Acute Effect on Vocal Range

Alcoholic beverages are the most popular human-produced drinks in history. Whether it is wine, beer, or hard liquor, alcoholic beverages are included in all aspects of society. Presidents, town drunks, and the greatest musical sensations are seen drinking alcoholic beverages both at work and at home. In terms of its effects on individuals, alcohol is deemed to be a poison to the body, and drinking too much can destroy your liver and your body as a whole. This puts public speakers, political leaders, and specifically singers in an odd position when it comes to balancing casual alcohol consumption and retaining their vocal health. Scientific study of this subject is necessary, as well as close consideration of the effects of alcohol on singer’s lives and careers. There is already extensive research pertaining to the chronic effects of alcohol on the body. In terms of acute alcohol ingestion, research does not exist to the same level of detail or quality. The effect of alcohol on vocal range, both chronic and acute, has not been studied thoroughly. Alcohol has many negative effects on the voice. In this study, we suggest that acute alcohol ingestion may decrease the vocal range of individuals.

“Whose Music Was It?”: Unaccountable Art and Uncontainable Sex in Langston Hughes’s “Home” and Eudora Welty’s “June Recital”

“Whose Music Was It?”: Unaccountable Art and Uncontainable Sex in Langston Hughes’s “Home” and Eudora Welty’s “June Recital” Donnie McMahand and Kevin Murphy That classical, blues, and jazz performances become transcendent happenings in the writings of Langston Hughes and Eudora Welty keenly suggests the importance of music in the authors’ lives and literary imaginations. Hughes documented his musical sensibility throughout his career in such poems as “Jazzonia,” “The Weary Blues,” and “Theme for English B” and in the stories “The Blues I’m Playing” and “Home,” both published in the collection The Ways of White Folks. Lenox Avenue in Harlem serves not only as a setting for “The Weary Blues,” but also as an actual site of artistic production, one that marks Hughes’s heyday in the Harlem Renaissance. Welty signals her sensitivity toward musicians and musical performance in her early story “Powerhouse” and in three later stories, “June Recital,” “Music from Spain,” and “The Wanderers” from The Golden Apples cycle. At Welty’s historic home in Jackson, Mississippi, visitors will find her writing desk upstairs at a window overlooking the Music School of Belhaven University, a possible source of inspiration, located just across the street. As places of musical influence, Welty’s Mississippi and Hughes’s New York could hardly contrast each other more, but as much as Jackson differed from Harlem and Hughes’s life from Welty’s, both writers produced pristinely similar concepts in their stories, “Home” and “June Recital” respectively, of nonconforming musicians and the insular communities that repudiate them. Like their imaginary musicians, Welty and Hughes themselves experienced the loss of an artistic opportunity due to the insularity of 1940s America, which largely prohibited interracial contact, especially between black men and white women. Lovers of music and literature can only wonder what might have been had Hughes and Welty followed through on adapting Welty’s novel The Robber Bridegroom into an operetta. In a letter to friend and agent Diarmuid Russell, Welty confided, “If I had my wish, I wouldn’t have anything to do with any libretto, and hope I won’t have to” (qtd. in Marrs 153). While Welty heartily approved of Hughes writing [End Page 43] the libretto, she expressed trepidations about the feasibility of their collaborating in Jackson. Welty biographer Suzanne Marrs points out Welty’s added intent not to expose her mother to any hazard Hughes’s presence in Mississippi might incite. Ever wary of the potential for racialized violence, Welty admitted to Russell that “Mr. Hughes … probably knows better than I the difficulties” (qtd. in Marrs 153). Her assumption qualifies as an unaffected understatement, given Hughes’s lifelong activism against lynching and vigilante justice. Speaking at the Windy City Press Club Banquet in 1957, Hughes presented a clear picture of his childhood fear of lynching, commenting how “headlines in the Negro press used to scare me to death. I grew up in Kansas, and for years I was afraid to go down South, thinking … I might be lynched the minute I got off the train” (“Humor” 354). Not coincidentally, Hughes’s image of a doomed artist-outsider disembarking a train in hostile territory specifically recalls the opening scene of his story “Home.” Recurring, then, in rhetoric and fiction, Hughes’s hyperbole of instant death clearly attests to the writer’s visceral reaction to the reality of race killing. The idea of the outsider’s emergence within a rural, clannish community dominates both “Home” and “June Recital,” as does the modernist clash between cosmopolitan artists and small-town residents. As outsiders, Roy Williams in “Home” and Miss Eckhart in “June Recital” escape Europe’s urban wastelands wrought by the ravages of the First World War. Battling tuberculosis, Roy flees war-torn Berlin to see his mother again in Hopkinsville, Missouri, while Miss Eckhart, a German national, relocates with her mother after the war to Morgana, Mississippi. Roy, a concert violinist, and Miss Eckhart, a devoted piano player, never achieve acceptance within their respective communities; the same proves true for Miss Reese, a native Missourian music teacher who briefly befriends Roy after his return to Hopkinsville. Racially segregated and sexually conservative, Hughes’s Hopkinsville and Welty’s Morgana commonly...

THE ROLE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF COUNTING-OUT RHYMES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF MUSICAL ABILITIES IN PRE-SCHOOL CHILDREN

The aim of this paper was by relying on the relevant theoretical sources to enlighten the role and significance of counting-out rhymes in the development of preschool children’s musical abilities. The starting point was the fact that contemporary music pedagogy more often maintains the stance that all children are quite musically talented and capable of performing musical activities, although their achievements are of unequal quality. It is emphasized that a child’s musical ability is demonstrated through musical sensibility (hearing which implies sensitivity for the height and strength of musical tones, the sound colors, the relationship between tones based on their length) and the arousal of interests in music (which as a cognitive, emotional and voluntary reaction of a child to music can be interpreted as children's musicality). It is also pointed out that counting-out rhymes, as a type of musical activities, present the child’s most musical poetic, rhythmic and metric creativity, and that their specificity is that the counting-out rhymes stand out as children's creativity mirroring the beauty (educational, emotional, aesthetic) in the unbreakable bond between the creators and the performers of the same content within the same age range. Furthermore, it is highlighted that children interact with each other creating musical content and musical activity, and the specificity of such collaboration is that some counting-out rhymes reflect the environment (the region) in which a child as a creator lives, so, not rarely, the same counting-out rhyme undergoes a change when transferred to another environment, and thus it appears as a new version (variant) of the same counting-out rhyme. The special importance of counting-out rhymes is observed in the correlation with other contents and children activities.

The Thought of Music by Lawrence Kramer

Reviewed by: The Thought of Music by Lawrence Kramer Toby Young The Thought of Music. By Lawrence Kramer. California: University of California Press, 2016. [xviii, 224 p. ISBN 9780520288799 (hardcover). $70; ISBN 9780520288805 (paperback). $34.95.] Music examples, bibliography, index. “It’s disgraceful,” said Donald Trump of a piece of sculpture modelled on him, “[that] they take your tax dollars to make this filth” (Philip Kennicott, “Would Donald Trump Make Art Great Again?,” Washington Post, August 19, 2016 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/would-donald-trump-make-art-great-again/2016/08/17/0c7300a2-60d1-11e6-af8e-54aa2e849447_story.html; accessed 5 January 2017). It is no secret that in today’s society there is a constant fear of the arts being undervalued and side-lined. This threat seems all the more ominous given the recent victory of Trump—a man who is known for deriding artists as being “lazy” or “losers”—as President-Elect (ibid.). It is in light of these circumstances that Lawrence Kramer’s recent book The Thought of Music (2016)—an epistemic study into the essence (and as such, the worth) of music—seems so utterly important. The Thought of Music forms the last part of Kramer’s epic trilogy on hermeneutics, which also includes Interpreting Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010) and Expression and Truth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). This series seeks to challenge models of music as inexpressible and to search for a new vocabulary to describe the multitude of ways in which music communicates. Kramer, a veritable elder statesman of (New) Musicology, approaches this monumental task with trademark flair and precision. He casts this book in seven chapters, the first three of which discuss issues of representation and language. The central fourth chapter explores the relationship between pleasure, entertainment, and value, and the final three chapters discuss extra-musical elements including context, authorship and performance. Unusually perhaps for New Musicology, there is a strong undertone here of an almost Adornian desire to seek objective meaning in the music, although such a desire is tempered by the main body of the book, which unpacks and extends the well-rehearsed argument of musical meaning as subjective, imparted by the broader sociocultural context of musicking rather than from the music itself (see for example Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance [New York: Ox ford University Press, 2013], 30–37). There is a lot to like in Kramer’s book. Particularly compelling is his discussion of the relationship between language, perception, and cultural expectation. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Kramer dedicates a substantial amount of space to a detailed discussion of the nature of music’s perceived ineffability, positing that the sociocultural context of the music “opens up” the ability of music to express linguistically (compare this with Kofi Agawu’s seminal work on the relationship or “play” between introversive and extroversive levels in Playing with Signs [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991], 12–25). Discussions like this form the basis of a powerful central chapter that examines the sensory force of music. In this chapter, Kramer masterfully balances discussions of beauty, desire (via Jacques Lacan), pleasure, and gratification, concluding that David Hume’s notion of “reason as the servant of passion” is still, to some extent, useful (pp. 74–5), and drives the formation of the multiple sensations of pleasure that music (and particularly musical narrative) offers (pp. 85–7). Work like this on musical sensation is still underrepresented in both musicology and philosophy, and it would be particularly interesting to see Kramer’s discussions extended into the realm of non-Western and popular music. [End Page 710] Central to many of Kramer’s arguments here are analyses—or perhaps “close readings”—of canonical works of Western art music, including pieces by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Frédéric Chopin, and Franz Liszt. This typifies Kramer’s trademark approach of thinking “through” the music and certainly provides a rich palette to contextualise the more subjective elements of the discussion. One such example is the opening of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky’s first Piano Concerto, which becomes the focus of an illuminating discussion on belonging. Kramer concentrates on two areas, the unsettled D♭ introduction...