Musical Signs Research Articles

Reconsidering the Orthodox notated manuscripts from the end of the 12th and 13th century, related to Bulgaria

Manuscripts with notation in the restored Bulgarian state, after Byzantine rule from 1018 to 1187, continued the tradition from former times of being written in Slavic (old-Bulgarian) and Greek, a bilingual practice that was established during the time of SS. Cyril and Methodios. The Greek language did not have an ethnic connotation: it was perceived as the language of the rich culture of Antiquity and as a liturgical language. Most of the manuscripts originated from the south-western Bulgarian lands. Those in Slavic belong to the type of Menaia and Triodia-Pentekostaria; fewer of them are Oktoechoi. The Menaion, the Triodion-Pentekostarion, and the Oktoechos all together constitute the book of the Sticherarion. The manuscripts in Slavic were notated in the Palaeo-Byzantine notation of the archaic adiastematic type. The musical signs in them could be characterized as "instructions" for singing: they did not fix the exact pitch of the tone but only gave the direction of the melody. The manuscripts in Palaeo-Byzantine notation can be systematized into three groups: manuscripts that were partly notated in the Palaeo-Byzantine notation of the Coislin and/or the Chartres type, manuscripts in theta notation, and manuscripts that were fully notated in Palaeo-Byzantine notation. In the Bulgarian libraries from the period under consideration, there are also preserved manuscripts in Greek. They are of the Sticherarion type and were notated in Middle Byzantine notation. The origins of these Sticheraria are linked to the Bachkovo monastery. Manuscripts in Slavic notated in Middle Byzantine notation have not been found and there is no evidence that this notation was adapted to the Slavic language ? either in Bulgaria, or in any other Slavic Orthodox country. However, it does not mean that this notation was not known in any one of them: the Middle Byzantine manuscripts in Greek preserved in the Bulgarian libraries prove that this notation was known. As a whole, till the end of the 13th century, the manuscripts with notation offer a picture of a very dynamic musical practice. Various types of notation show the various levels to which church music developed and functioned: all of the notated manuscripts display a high professional level; the partly notated manuscripts and these in theta notation ? indicate an oral level with particular characteristics.

Topic Theory: Analytical, Hermeneutical and Historical Approaches to Musical Sign

Topic Theory: Analytical, Hermeneutical and Historical Approaches to Musical Sign

Desafiando o ocidente: Tagore e a canção "Meu ser interior"

O estudo da canção “Amar praner manus” (“Meu ser interior”), composta pelo poeta e músico indiano Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), analise a relação intersemiótica entre os signos verbal e musical que compõem a canção. Para isso, utiliza-se a teoria geral dos signos (elaborada por Charles Peirce) e as ferramentas da semiótica musical (desenvolvidas por W. Dougherty, José Luiz Martinez, T. Turino e outros). Partindo-se de uma análise de cada signo separadamente, alcança-se o campo da referência – da relação entre o poema e a música – procurando-se considerar o problema da significação musical e da capacidade do signo musical de representar objetos não-acústicos. Ao final, procura-se compreender como essa canção está inserida numa rede mais ampla de signos culturais. Neste sentido, a pesquisa do contexto cultural da época de Tagore, marcada pela redefinição das identidades e pela valorização da cultura nativa, esclarece a relação entre a canção e seu tempo.
 
 Palavras-chave: Canção. Relação Intersemiótica. Teoria Geral dos Signos. Ferramentas da Semiótica Musical.

Hook‐Ups and Train Wrecks: Contextual Parameters and the Coordination of Jazz Interactions

This article discusses the importance of several parameters of context integral to jazz musicians' ability to hear musical signs as meaningful, such as performers' individual backgrounds and the various other styles of music available in the aural landscape, and how those parameters influence what the musicians play. Several examples from an ongoing ethnography of jazz jam sessions suggest that context is constituted by several variables, that different variables may become salient at different times, and that different interactants vary in their ability to attend to these variables. This study thus extends and elaborates frame analysis by showing that, while an interaction frame of the sort described by Goffman (1974) may perdure, it is subject to change, and the nature of the context it provides for interactions can change whenever a new interaction is initiated.

H34 自動ピアノのための演奏情報編集支援システムの開発 : 奏法記号に関する情報処理システム(H3 機械力学(システム制御の支援))

H34 自動ピアノのための演奏情報編集支援システムの開発 : 奏法記号に関する情報処理システム(H3 機械力学(システム制御の支援))

The temporal musical sign: In search of extrinsic musical meaning

Generally speaking, musical analysis does not sufficiently involve the temporal nature of music to facilitate making connections between music and language. In search of extrinsic musical meaning, this association could be enhanced by following the changing character of the music as it unfolds in time, its texture, musical shapes, contours, and patterns of inflection. As the music is considered in its unreduced rhythmical state, it facilitates immediate contact between listener and music. In an attempt to make sense of music, this essay focuses on its performative function by linking up with musical effects that are directly audible. My argument is based on the notion that the listener acts as the mediator of the musical sign, and that the musical trace could act as facilitator for constructing meaning.

Performance data modifying method, Performance data modifying apparatus, and storage medium

An application program for generating performance data of a user input musical score performs a modifying process of modifying only a note with a musical sign such as a turn sign, so that as the generated performance data is reproduced, unnatural musical sounds are generated. For example, as a player uses a turn rendering with an acoustic piano or the like, there is a tendency that a key depression force for a note just after the turn rendering also becomes weak. With conventional techniques, however, this state cannot be automatically realized. In order to generate performance data whose notes are coupled naturally, output performance data is first generated at Steps SP 10 or SP 18 for a note (subject note) with a turn sign. Then, a velocity of performance data for a note (related note) positioned immediately after the subject note is weakened at Step SP 12 or SP 20.

La Place du Surtitrage Comme Mode de Traduction et Vecteur D'échange Culturel pour les Arts de la Scéne

Despite the fact that surtitling is a rapidly expanding field which enables plays and operas to be understood by audiences in different countries unfamiliar with the original language, this research area is quite new and relatively unexplored. The question of how the actual verbal and non-verbal material is structured in surtitling has received only minimal analysis in scholarly terms so far. Very little has been written on the reasons for reduction methods. Up to now scholars seem not to have considered the new context which surtitling offers for an intertextual approach to translations. This study starts from the idea that surtitling is a translation constrained by its context, by time and space as much as by culture and the multi-semiotic levels of the performance. Opera, puppet theatre and drama are not only made of text; they involve visual and musical signs which may be looked at in a new light, from an inter-artistic semiotic perspective. Surtitling enables cultural exchanges; further investigation of its role as such is not only needed, but makes it one of several interesting new fields of research in translation and intercultural studies.

The sonic self: musical subjectivity and signification

Preliminary Table of Contents: Introduction Musical Initiations Subjects and Subjectivity A Philosophical Outlook 1. Signs of Subjectivity Physical Disciplines and Signs A Semiotic View of Musical Subjectivity Expressive Individuation and Uncertainty 2. Listening Subjects and Semiotic Worlds The Uncertainties of Musical Signification Interntionality and Metaphor Subjects and First-person Authority Regaining an Interpretive I 3. Musical Signs Signs and Objects Questions and Typologies 4. Naming Qualities Hearing Signs Qualities and Qualities-as-Signs Disciplinary Boundaries: How Does Semiotics Relate to Psychology? 5. Gesturing Gesture as Performance and Convention To Perform or to Dissimulate? Voice and Gesture as Virtualities 6. Framing Willfulness in Tonal Law Theorists: Giving Roles to Rules The Dialectics of Tonal Semiosis 7. Complex Syntheses Expressive Complexity and Musical Personae Modes of Synthesis 8. Culturally Embedded Signs Emergent Qualities Skeptical Issues 9. Values and Personal Categories Sounds and Sensuality Encounters Rehabilitating the Subject Appendix: Theorizing Generals Real or Nominal Rules? Finding Constancies, Explaining What One Hears, or Seeking Enlightenment?

Resignification and Cultural Re/Production in Japanese Television Commercials

Resignification and Cultural Re/Production in Japanese Television Commercials

Essays on Medieval Music in Honor of David G. Hughes (review)

188 Reviews limits of Languedoc to include much of Europe and the 'frontier' states of Spain and England. She shows how the clergy huilt walls, invoked saints and retics, and applied sculptural messages to control the forces of disorder and to encourage peace', a task many would like to see better done today. John James Lawson's Long AUey Hartley Vale N S W 2790 Boone, Graeme M., ed., Essays on Medieval Music in Honor of David G Hughes (Isham Library Papers 4), Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Department of Music, 1995; cloth; pp. 496; 21 plates; R.R.P. US$40.00. This Festschrift is the result of a conference held in October 1990 to honour the sixtieth birthday of the dedicatee, Robert G. Hughes, Fanny Peabody Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University. Hughes is an important scholar of medieval music who has been a seminal influence on a number of very prominent musicologists, as i s testified in this volume. His importance is despite the fact that the number of his own publications is relatively small. Probably the best known is An Index of Gregorian Chant jointly authored with John R. Bryden (2 vols., Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1969) which provides an index to the melodies and texts of chants in readily available sources and has been much used by students of chant. A recent significant article, and one which is cited regularly in the volume being reviewed here, is 'Evidence for the Traditional View of the Transmission of Gregorian Chant', Journal of the American Musicological Society XL, 3 (1987) pp. 377-404. The l i s t of contributors to this volume is impressive. Many of the articles concern chant and in fact many of the most prominent chant scholars have contributed, often dealing with issues of central concern to this field of musicological endeavour. As a result the book presents a valuable insight into the state of chant research in the early 1990s, and in particular into issues relating to transmission of chant, one of Reviews 189 Hughes' fields of interest. The articles are arranged alphabetically according to author with the result that one m a y be surprised by sudden changes of topic, such as occurs when Nino Pirrotta's article on Itatianfourteenth-centurypolyphonic manuscripts follows a long series of articles on chant. Charles M . Atkinson begins the coUection with an important discussion of the origin of music notation, in which he revises one of the standard theories of the subject. Through discussion of early grammatical treatises, he demonstrates that the commonly proposed 'accent theory' of the origin of notation is problematic and should be replaced by a more correct understanding of musical signs as having their source in the prosodic accents actuaUy described in the grammatical treatises and probably learnt as part of a Carolingian education. In the following paper, John Boe seeks the origins of Roman music notation through manuscript evidence, finding it perfected during the period 1020-70; a note added at the end refers to a later paper (but published earlier) where Boe presents new data that alter his previous conclusions. Thomas H. Connolly has been known for his work on Old R o m a n chant. From there he moved to the study of the R o m a n and patron saint of music, St. Cecilia. His fascinating work on the subject extends weU beyond the boundaries of musicology and wtil be of interest to scholars in various other disciplines including hagiography and art history. In this essay 'The Antiphon Cantantibus Organis and Dante's Organi Del Mondo', he presents some ideas also discussed in his book Mourning into Joy: Music, Raphael, and Saint Cecilia (1995) including reflections on the use of the word 'organs' in an antiphon for St. Cectiia and in Dante's Paradiso, and finally moving to the symbolism in Raphael's L'Estasi di Santa Cecilia. Another essay of notable relevance beyond musicology is Joseph Dyer's exploration of aspects of the liturgy and music of medieval R o m e in which he sets out to show sources which need to be taken into account in future research and to stress the...

Peopling the Stage: Opera, Otherness, and New Musical Representations in the Eighteenth Century

T began my musical career as a teaching assistant my freshman year in college, where the music department needed a couple of students to assist in an introductory music theory course. I remember trying to teach students scales and modes, including the three minor scales. In reviewing the harmonic minor scale before the exam, one of the students clearly experienced some kind of revelation: it's Arabian! he exclaimed. He was referring to the augmented second in that scale, which to this day, if his observation has any validity outside that Vermont classroom in 1980, and I'm sure it does, still signifies the Orient to the Western ear.' In this essay, I want to consider how this particular musical sign and others that signify non-Western Others entered the

The Image of Music and the Bodies of Knowledge in the Late Middle Ages: Rhythmic Procedures as Cultural Representations

The ArgumentThe paper argues that the distinction between modernism and postmodernism can be applied metaphorically to clarify the changing image of music during the late Middle Ages. The paper discusses the scientific and rational strategies that thirteenth century musical theorists applied to revise earlier musical conceptualization. It highlights the thirteenth-century innovative affiliation of music with Aristotelian physics and argues that in a very subtle and seemingly contradictory way music theorists expressed the nascent awareness, if not tacit acknowledgment, of the mundane nature of music. It argues further that in the fourteenth century the issue of representing musical-rhythmical variability by means of a suitable language shifted to the forefront of musical theory and practice. The unprecedented emphasis on musical signs and their semantic behavior as well as the demand to demystify the discourse about rhythmical concepts — so as to question the necessity of metacategories — all point to an affinity between fourteenth century musical thought and postmodern sensibilities.

Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music

In this book Jean-Jacques Nattiez, well-known for his pioneering in musical semiology, examines both and discourse about as products of human activity that are perceived in varying ways by various cultures. Asking such questions as what is a musical work and what constitutes music, Nattiez draws from philosophy, anthropology, music analysis, and history to propose a global theory for the interpretation of specific pieces, the phenomenon of and the human behaviors that music elicits. He reviews issues raised by the notion of the musical sign, and shows how Peircian semiotics, with its image of a chain or web of meanings, applies to a consideration of music's infinite and unstable potential for embodying meaning. In exploring the process of ascribing meaning to Nattiez reviews writings on the psychology of non-Western metaphorical descriptions, music-analytical prose, and writings in the history of musical aesthetics. A final analytical chapter on the Tristan chord suggests that interpretations of music are cast in terms of analytical plots shaped by transcendent principles, and that any semiological consideration of music must account for these interpretive narratives.

Dialectal Peculiarities in the Performance of a 17th Century Hungarian Folkhymn

Bela Bartok was the first who defined the Hungarian folkmusic dialects according to musical signs characteristic of geographical regions in his book "lghe Hgngarian foZksong" published in 1924.1 His four dialects the Transdanubian, the Northern, that of the region of the GEreat Plain and Transylvanian were soon expanded by a fifth one, the Moldavian discovered by Pa1 Peter Domokos.2 This classification is still valid and has been justified by newly discovered musical material.3 Bartok states that the different musical dialects can only be observed in old tunes. Each region has got its own typical "old types" so it's mainly the repertoires and the rate at which these various old styles occur-that differ from each other. Nevertheless it seems that there are various ways of performing these melodies owing mostly to musical ornaments. Bartok points out that the 8-syllable parlando-rubato tunes are rich in ornaments in the Transylvanian dialect. He makes no mention of the decorations of the other dialectal regions. Since then we have found that the songs with the most ornaments come from Moldavia but different variations in various quantities can be observed in Slavonia, the Zobor-region, the upper Tisza-region and not so often in Southern Transdanubia. The question arises whether this phenomenon is caused by the variety of ornamentation, its increased variability, which occur far more frequently in comparison with the basic notes, or by definite local tendencies, oinamentation peculiarities which vary by region. Owing to economic, social and historical reasons there are big differences of development between our regions. It can be seen in the different ways that

The beginnings of music-writing in the west: Historical and semiotic aspects

The earliest systems of European musical notation were Carolingian inventions, accomplished, like the Carolingian Miniscule hand and the full array of Carolingian punctuation signs, as products of a concentrated drive toward an augmented role for writing and reading that was energized and directed from the centers of Carolingian political power. To us musical notation is an autonomous sign-system sufficiently capable of encoding the essential sound features of musical works so that musical texts (scores) both convey the structures and qualities of such works—in effect, stand for works—and constitute prescriptive programs for their performance. Initially European notations were conceived in neither sense. They were marks added to language texts, to serve as guides in their oral performance; in that respect their function was a further refinement and specialization of the function of the punctuation signs. That the repertory of notational signs was substantially an adaptation of the repertory of punctuation marks is the obverse side of that functional continuity. The texts to which musical signs were added are principally scriptural, performed within the ritual practice of the Roman church, and the signs had reference to the oral-formulaic melodic tradition for the ritual performance of those texts. But it was at least two generations before one began to think of them in the sense of an autonomous and prescriptive system of musical notation; and that was a radically new way of thinking that engendered fundamental changes in the notation and in the nature of its signification.

The Earliest Music Printing in France

The printing of music from movable type was a relatively late development in the history of printing. The Gregorian chant of the church, which involved only one voice or voices in unison and notes of uniform duration, could be reproduced in print from wooden blocks without the use of metal type. Such music appeared in printed books as early as the 1470s. But the newer polyphonic music involved several voices and more complex notation. In polyphony each voice sings different music, and the notes have various durations, indicated by separate note forms and dots. Furthermore there are rests, clefs, and proportional signs for a printer to deal with. It took a great deal of experimentation to solve the problems of casting these elements in metal and then placing the music type together in a coherent fashion. The first successful printing of polyphonic music from movable type was not achieved until 1501, when Ottaviano dei Petrucci published in Venice a group of French chansons and other works for three or four voices, under the title Harmonice musices odhecaton A. Petrucci's process required three impressions at first: one for the staves, one for the notes and other musical signs, and a third for the text, initial letters, signatures, and page numbers. Later the number of impressions was reduced to two, but his system still remained cumbersome and costly. Another method, that of incising all the music with the note shapes and other signs on a wooden block, was adapted by the Italian engraver Andrea Antico for polyphonic music from its earlier use for printing chant. He left a shallow trench in the wood to insert the text in metal type under each staff, so that a single impression was made for each page. And yet the time involved in cutting all these shapes into wood must have made this process too very expensive. Petrucci printed music in Venice until 1520, with some periods of interruption. Antico printed woodcut music books in Rome and then in Venice from 1510 to 1521. From 1522 to 1533 there is no trace of him, but from 1533 to 1539

Eli, eli, lamma sabacthani: koralne melodije pasijonskih besed treh ljubljanskih rokopisov

Eli, eli, lamma sabacthani: koralne melodije pasijonskih besed treh ljubljanskih rokopisov

An Introduction to Byzantine Music

I regard it as a great privilege to be allowed to speak to you about Byzantine music and to introduce a performance of some melodies, chosen from MSS of the flourishing period of Byzantine ecclesiastical music.Members of the Hellenic Society will be aware how much we owe to the indefatigable work of my friendi and collaborator, Professor H. J. W. Tillyard, whose contributions in the Journal of Hellenic Studies and in the Annual of the British School at Athens during the last twenty-five years have gradually aroused interest in this particular field of studies, not only here, but in'all countries in which scholars are dealing with Byzantine studies. Our mutual interest in Byzantine music and ,our aim to decipher its musical signs have made us collaborators for a long time, and I am glad to say that this co-operation has proved felicitous.Our method of investigation may be compared with that of an archaeologist, who is obliged first to clear the foundations of a more recent place before he is able to unearth the traces of an old city. We, however—if I may continue the comparison—have had the good luck to discover a whole town, completely intact, in all its splendour. Our rather hard and often discouraging task to find the-clue to the riddle of Byzantine notation was finally rewarded. We discovered that the Byzantine neumes not only helped to read the melodic line, but also contained dynamic and rhythmical signs, providing the most subtle nuances of expression. This discovery enables us to revive Byzantine melodies as they were sung in the time of the Byzantine Empire.

The Music of Pindar's "Golden Lyre"

AMONG the major losses inflicted by the passage of time we must count the disappearance of the music which formed an essential part of the art of the Greek lyric and dramatic writers. Of the tragedians' music there remains only a pitiably mutilated scrap of a chorus from the Orestes of Euripides; whether we possess a genuine specimen of the music of the lyric poets or merely an audacious forgery is the problem discussed in this article. In 1650, on page 541 of Volume I of his Musurgia universalis,l Athanasius Kircher, a learned and well-known Jesuit, published a text of the first few lines of Pindar's first Pythian ode with suprascript Greek musical signs; on page 542 both the text and the signs were reprinted underneath a line for line transcription into modern musical notation. The authenticity of this musical fragment has, at various times during the last three centuries, been blindly accepted, attacked, defended, or silently rejected; but no unanimously agreed conclusion has been reached.2 The question has recently been reopened with vigor by A. Rome for the prosecution3 and by Paul Friedlander4 for the defense; both writers draw attention to points of fresh interest but neither, I think, takes all the pertinent factors into full consideration. The problem is somewhat intricate and can be properly studied only if we take the evidence point by point in a judicial and unbiased spirit. As a necessary preliminary to the discussion, readers may care to inspect the following copy of Kircher's text and melody: 1 Athanasii Kircheri, Musurgia untiversalis, sive ars magna consoni et dissoni in X libros digesta (2 vols.; Romae: Corbelletti, 1650); pp. 690 +462. 2 E.g., the fragment is included by Curt Sachs in his Musik des Altertums (Breslau: Jedermanns Biucherei, 1924), and by M. Emmanuel in his article on Greek music in Lavignac's Encyclope'die de la musique (Paris, 1924); but it is not to be found in von Jan's Musici scriptores Graeci (Leipzig, 1895), or in his Supplementum (1899), or in Th. Reinach's La musique grecque (Paris: Collection Payot, 1926). 3L'origine de la pr6tendue m6lodie de Pindare, Les etudes classiques, I (1932), 3-11. 4Die Melodie zu Pindars erstem pythischen Gedicht, Berichte iuber die Verh. d. Sdchs. Akad. d. Wiss. zu Leipzig, phil.-hist. Kl., Band LXXXVI, Heft 4 (Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1934). Pp. 54. [CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY, XXXI, April, 19361 120