Musical Space Research Articles

Genre and style priorities of accordion performance in traditional common culture of USA

The relevance of the study is determined by the wide popularity of accordion in various genres and styles of American folk music, significant achievements of American accordionists in preserving and developing performing traditions in accordance with the ethnocultural specifics of a particular region of the country and presentation of creative achievements of famous American folk groups in the world music space, as well as by lack of the studies on this issue in the field of musicology in Ukraine.
 The aim of the study is to define the genre and style priorities of accordion performance in the traditional common culture of Americans, highlight the regional specifics of styles and genres of American folk music, in the reproduction of which the accordion is directly involved, as well as describe textural, articulatory and picking, metric and rhythmic features of playing the instrument.
 The methodology. The methodological basis of the study is the interaction of scientific approaches, among which an important place is occupied by historical, cultural, systemic, structural and functional, musicological methods.
 The results. In the traditional common culture of Americans, the performance on the accordion is presented quite diversely in terms of the instruments, distribution areas, genre, and style palette of music performed. Historical, sociocultural and geopolitical factors, ethnocultural influences, multicultural tendencies determined the regional specificity of the instruments. The Cajun accordion, the diatonic button accordion, and the chromatic piano accordion have gained considerable popularity in the traditional common culture of various regions of the United States. Each of them took leading positions in the reproduction of a certain musical style: Cajun accordion — Cajun and Zydeco, diatonic button accordion — Cojunto, chromatic piano accordion — Zydeco. The button (diatonic or chromatic) and piano accordions were mainly used in the instrumental composition of dance music groups, in particular in the genre of polka, depending on the region with the corresponding ethnic specificity. The accordion performance vividly embodies the genre and style features of American folk music in the context of its historical dynamics and capability of artistic expression, including intonation expressiveness and characteristic techniques of playing, inherent in a certain design model of the instrument.
 The topicality of the study is to reproduce the genre and style specifics of accordion performance in the traditional common culture of Americans.

Using Formal Grammars as Musical Genome

In this paper, we explore a generative music method that can compose atonal and tonal music in different styles. One of the main differences between regular engineering problems and artistic expressions is that goals and constraints are usually ill-defined in the latter case; in fact the rules here could or should be transgressed more regularly. For this reason, our approach does not use a pre-existing dataset to imitate or extract rules from. Instead, it uses formal grammars as a representation method than can retain just the basic features, common to any form of music (e.g., the appearance of rhythmic patterns, the evolution of tone or dynamics during the composition, etc.). Exploring different musical spaces is the responsibility of a program interface that translates musical specifications into the fitness function of a genetic algorithm. This function guides the evolution of those basic features enabling the emergence of novel content. In this study, we then assess the outcome of a particular music specification (guitar ballad) in a controlled real-world setup. As a result, the generated music can be considered similar to human-composed music from a perceptual perspective. This endorses our approach to tackle arts algorithmically, as it is able to produce novel content that complies with human expectations.

Editorial

This first issue of volume 2 of NRME Journal encompasses nine research articles addressing a variety of themes relevant to music education. They are all loosely connected through the notion of space: how we physically, metaphorically or virtually inhabit musical spaces; the tools that are needed for entering a music knowledge domain or space; the thresholds that exist for accessing educational spaces; and the ways various professional spaces in music education facilitate learning and identity formation, as well as cultural reproduction and power battles.

“We Provide a Place to Not Be Okay”: Emotional Labor in Performance and Queer Amateur Music Spaces

“We Provide a Place to Not Be Okay”: Emotional Labor in Performance and Queer Amateur Music Spaces

What are the affordances of the digital music space in alternative education? A reflection on an exploratory music outreach project in rural Australia

In Australia, access to music education is inequitable due to the challenges of distance, different state education systems and a lack of resources in schools. As a means to address this social justice issue, we explore here the viability and effects of a digitally based music outreach programme undertaken in collaboration with Hands on Learning (HOL), an alternative education provider. The programme was delivered over 6 weeks using GarageBand to children in a small rural town who were experiencing difficulties in upper primary and lower secondary school years. A qualitative approach was taken, holding focus groups, observing sessions and accessing HOL daily notes. The programme had a significant impact on the teachers and children involved, showing promise for a larger scale project in the future.

On the chronotope of the ethno-music worldview of the Kalmyks

The research subject is the national parameters of the chronotope of the Kalmyk ethno-music worldview. In the mindset of the Mongolian language peoples, time and space are inseparable, interconnected, and interpenetrating. The chronotope composes a unique system of axes which is later complemented with other components of the national worldview. This explains the topicality of the research subject. The purpose of the research is to detect the music peculiarities of the national chronotope. The research is based on the previously studied manifestations of the national chronotope as a whole (the philological and linguistic aspect of the Kalmyk chronotope is studied by Ts. Ayushova, E. Golubeva, E. Omakayeva, V. Salykova, and others); the author systematizes them and establishes the most significant features. In the understanding and feeling of a nomad, a steppe-dweller, a Kalmyk, space is an unlimited, vast and extended category, which is measured not only horizontally, but also vertically. In the study of the music space patterns, the most significant are the properties of sound, its spatial and acoustic characteristics. The dominant idea in the interpretation of time within a Kalmyk worldview is repeatability, which manifests itself in a twelve-digit period of the national calendar and other things. The temporal properties of the national chronotope are concentrated in a binary opposition of two genres of singing: Ut dun (long song) and Akhr dun (short song). The music culture of the Kalmyks is one of the ways of semiotization of the space and time of the steppe world.   

Rationalizing Popular Music Discourses in Contemporary Ghana: A Media and Communication Perspective

This paper will attempt to discuss the issues that pervade the popular music sphere in contemporary Ghana. It will also attempt to answer the questions: What is popular music in Ghana? What is the cultural form of popular music in Ghana? What is the cultural environment impacted upon by popular music discourses? How can we study popular music in Ghana as an authentic field of media and communication? What is the functionality/dysfunctionality of popular music discourses in the contemporary Ghanaian socio-musical cultural space? It is also the thesis of this paper to look at popular music as a historical and social construct. The stance of this paper is that it is possible to analyse socio-cultural change, fathom new psycho-social perceptions by a holistic study of popular music. The popular music space is, further, set off as the locus where the systemic world meets the life world for meaning and communication. This paper is informed by the notion that popular music consumption is not an obscure enterprise directed entirely to an exclusively esoteric audience with padded layers of sub-cultures. Its universality in the contemporary Ghanaian socio-cultural space is emphasized.

Using Principal Paths to Walk Through Music and Visual Art Style Spaces Induced by Convolutional Neural Networks

Computational intelligence, particularly deep learning, offers powerful tools for discriminating and generating samples such as images. Deep learning methods have been used in different artistic contexts for neural style transfer, artistic style recognition, and musical genre recognition. Using a constrained manifold analysis protocol, we discuss to what extent spaces induced by deep-learning convolutional neural networks can capture historical/stylistic progressions in music and visual art. We use a path-finding algorithm, called principal path, to move from one point to another. We apply it to the vector space induced by convolutional neural networks. We perform experiments with visual artworks and songs, considering a subset of classes. Within this simplified scenario, we recover a reasonable historical/stylistic progression in several cases. We use the principal path algorithm to conduct an evolutionary analysis of vector spaces induced by convolutional neural networks. We perform several experiments in the visual art and music spaces. The principal path algorithm finds reasonable connections between visual artworks and songs from different styles/genres with respect to the historical evolution when a subset of classes is considered. This approach could be used in many areas to extract evolutionary information from an arbitrary high-dimensional space and deliver interesting cognitive insights.

Literature’s listening spaces

Literary descriptions of music are – of course – pure fi ction. However, such narratives are also windows into the phenomenological and sociological workings of music in modern society. Many novels share detailed descriptions of music in their fi ctional worlds, and this article examines what two contemporary novels reveal about modern-day music listening as both a cultural and private practice. The article will analyse the nature of ‘listening spaces’ represented in A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010) and Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (2005). Both novels have been published within the fi rst decade of the 21st century and describe Western popular music. Music experienced by fi ctional characters can be valuable empirical data, because novels represent different listening situations varied by geography, epochs and genres, and they depict characters with different demographics, lives and musical/cultural backgrounds. This enables scholars to collect and compare multi-faceted datasets. The aim of this article is to use literary descriptions to ask qualifi ed questions about sociological and phenomenological aspects of contemporary music listening practices. The analysis will focus on the atmosphere of listening (Böhme, 2017) – and especially the fi ctional listeners’ bodily presence in musical spaces – in dialogue with sociological studies of music listening by especially Tia DeNora (2000), David Hesmondhalgh (2013) and Even Ruud (2013). The analysis indicates how fi ction articulates a connection between music, body (in space and place) and mind (emotions, temporality and memory).

Les trois concerts de Charles de Vivray

Charles de Vivray's Three Concerts Music is a keystone in the entire work of Marie Krysinska, who was first and foremost a musician. Guided by the rule of universal harmony, the perfect realisations of which are musical compositions, she applies it in her poems as well as in her narrative texts. Krysinska's novel, La Force du désir [The Force of Desire], was read in its time primarily as a roman à clef. Behind the literary characters are real people: poets, writers, actresses, singers, journalists, composers. One of the portraits is particularly touching, that of de Vivray whose real-life prototype was Charles-Erhardt de Sivry. A musician, conductor, poet and music theorist, de Sivry charmed listeners with his compositions. In the diegesis, all his professional activities are mentioned, more or less revealed. Thanks to Charles de Vivray's three concerts, the novelistic space transforms into a musical space.

ПРОЦЕС ФОРМУВАННЯ ЦІННІСНИХ ОРІЄНТАЦІЙ ОСОБИСТОСТІ У ПРАКТИЧНІЙ ПІДГОТОВЦІ

The article considers the process of formation of personality value orientations in practical activities during higher education, identifies the stages of this process, analyzes each stage, offers a theoretical analysis of practical activities for the formation of personality value orientations in the educational process. The phenomenon of culture as a second nature, which is created by man and in turn is its product, constantly brings to life many theories that try to understand the diversity of cultures, to determine the patterns of its development. They explain the features of the cultural-historical process, the role played by art and its integrative part – music, which is a necessary component of knowledge and value understanding of the world around us. The mechanisms of value orientation formed in pedagogy contradict the regulatory activity of teachers, who continue to offer means of mastering the world «in the finished form», which hinders the development of the process of ascent of the individual to the values ​​of life and culture. Practical activity on the formation of personality value orientations in music pedagogy can be defined as the formation of a creative personality, which strives for a holistic understanding of the musical space, occurs in several stages, each of which corresponds to the periodization of the process of personality value orientations. The formation of value orientations of the individual in practice is based on the concept of dialogic communication and is based on the formation of value orientations of the individual in the development of modern music, is built through the use of associative, genre-style and intonation-style approaches. The set of these approaches forms an evolutionary-synergetic method, which treats the object of study music culture – as a self-developing system, and the subject– the emerging personality – as a self-developing and self-tuning system. The formation of the mechanism of orientations is at the same time the formation of the mechanism of self-adjustment, which allows empathy, and this opens the way to co-creation.

«Компьютерная аранжировка». Программа дисциплины для студентов — инвалидов по зрению

The article is devoted to the issues of instruction of computer arrangement to students with strong vision impairment. The author of the publication has developed the original methodology discussed in the article which refl ects the content-based and practical elements of the process of instructing music students with vision impairment the discipline of “Computer Musical Arrangement” at the Kursk Musical Boarding College for the Blind. The special conditions for realizing the process of instruction of the course of “Computer Musical Arrangement” adapted for blind and partially sighted, as well as the methodological recommendations compiled for the instructors who carry out the educational process in the specialized musical boarding college comprise the crucial moments of the research carried out by the author. The results of the work expounded in the article elucidate the paths for solving the problem connected with the search for new educational methodologies conducive to the process of rehabilitating invalid students with serious vision impairments, as well as the problems of their social adaptation in the cotemporary highly technological educational and artistic musical space.

Дальневосточный обряд «Медвежий праздник» в пространстве музыкально-компьютерных технологий

In the present article music computer technologies are examined as an instrument of preservation, modeling, and construction of lost timbres, intonational models and sound spaces. The musical sequencer, which is one of the basic elements of contemporary music computer technologies, is perceived within the frameworks of comprehension of the theory of the “complex model of the semantical space of music.” The possibility of reconstruction (or, simply, construction) of the previously existent sound semantic space, or the creation of a new space by means of a sequencer, is examined. An example of such a reconstruction of the ritual of the Bear Holiday pertaining to the peoples of the Russian Far-East is presented on the basis of a variation-rondo-type poly-structural composition consisting of several different movements. The development of a complex model of the semantic space of music is recognized as one of the topical conceptions of understanding the contemporary processes in the sphere of computer music technologies. The authors arrive at the conclusion about the possibility (and the necessity) of a special type of construction by means of a sequencer of sound semantic spaces of lost traditional rites, as well as the reconstruction of the timbres, manners of intonating and sound effects. Special mention is made of the potential for forming a new unique structure of a musical space existing with the aid of a sequencer. Keywords: Bear Holiday, sound beam, music computer technologies, integrative model for the semantic space of music, sequencer.

Promoting the Musical Engagement of Autistic Children in the Early Years Through a Program of Parental Support: An Ecological Research Study

Some autistic children display an intuitive capacity to reproduce and restyle the musical stimuli that they encounter in their environments. Music also offers a safe space for the development of social competencies and, across the spectrum, musical interventions are regarded as an effective way of promoting engagement with others. Yet, there is a lack of empirically researched music programs for parents and carers of children with autism. In this study, 11 families with autistic children incorporated music making into everyday life, supported by researcher-practitioners and framed by resources outlining musical activities based on the Sounds of Intent in the Early Years framework. Assessment of video data and interviews revealed that the new resources were flexible enough to be adapted to each child and they helped parents to build confidence to engage with their children musically. It was found that children had an increased interest and engagement in music as well as in joint play, which impacted positively on their musical and social development. The interpersonal music spaces created by the parents provided opportunities for unlocking expressiveness and interactive behavior, which in turn supported verbal development, emotional regulation and social interaction. These findings have implications for arts-in-health research and highlight the potentially crucial role of parents as mentors for their child’s musical development. The study further demonstrates that specialist musical training is not a requirement to develop parent–child engagement in music making at home.

“Safer spaces for everyone”? The Ladyfest scene as an innovative field for the fight against gendered violence in the live music industry

PurposeLive music events have recently become more and more aware of the necessity to fight against gendered violence. In the meantime, research on gendered violence at live music events is also gaining a growing interest. Ladyfests and other punk-inspired queer and feminist do-it-yourself music festivals have often been presented as “safe spaces”, including in academic research. Yet, the exact goals and modalities of enactment of such safe spaces have mostly been overlooked. In this article, the author proposes to bridge this gap.Design/methodology/approachIn this article, the author relies on two sources of information: the first one is documentary and the second is ethnographical. The author first considers the festivals archives (flyers, presentation texts, programs booklets, websites and so one) to analyze the identities and goals of the festivals (“who were are” and “what we aim to do”). Crossing these sources of information with ethnographical fieldwork in 10 Ladyfests that happened in France and Germany between 2017 and 2019, the author observed the measures taken to reach such goals (“how we do it”).FindingsThe author begins with detailing the functions of safer spaces policies and shows that the festivals position themselves as transformative forces toward a safer nightlife. Then, the author introduces the means established by the festivals to enact their safer space policies. The author specifically underpins the crucial role of developing bystander intervention as well as self-managed security teams. Finally, the author sheds light on the limits of the safer spaces policies and posits that creating a safer environment demands a constant hard work to keep patriarchal structures away.Originality/valueVery few research studies have focused on live music, gendered violence and safe spaces. With this article, the author aims to contribute to the growing interest that these topics have gained in the last few years, by looking at an innovative feminist live music scene.

Religious Chants – The Diversity of Church Hymns Types

"In the Romanian musical space, in the Orthodox Church hymns’ repertoire, there is a great variety of non-liturgical chants intended to be sung in different moments of the liturgy. The moments these chants can be introduced are during the kinonikón, the believers’ communion and the end of the liturgy. Either they are called kinonikón, hymns, Calophonic Hirmos, spiritual or liturgical chants; the religious chants became a part of the Orthodox rite, training the Christians ‘community in the church chant. Having appeared in diverse historical contexts and being written by Byzantine music composers, by priests, by church singers and local liturgical communities, these religious chants have deeply been rooted both in the ancient liturgy ritual, and in the different moments of religious activities, pilgrimages, conferences, spiritual gatherings. Having an extremely accessible melodic line and being constructed on doxological, doctrinarian and moralizing character texts, the religious chants are an efficient means of making the Christian communities more dynamic. Keywords: kinonikón, hymn, religious chants "

Vedda Rosen’s life-creativity as the factor of development of the musical space of Chernihiv region

The purpose of the article the coverage of the stages of the life of pianist, laureate of the international competition, Associate Professor at Nizhyn Mykola Gogol State University Vedda Rosen, determine its contribution to the development of the musical space of Chernihiv region second half of the 20th century. In the field of view of the author – the study of performing and pedagogical activities by V. Rosen of the period of the late 1950s–early 2000s in the context of the development of the artistic phenomenon of the Nizhyn as one of the cultural centers of Chernihiv region. The methodology of the article is based on historical and chronological, source studies, logical and generalizing methods for analyzing periodical sources, studying the creative biography of V. Rosen, identifying the influence of her performing and musical-pedagogical activities on the development of the musical space of Chernihiv region. The scientific novelty of the publication is the first in the Ukrainian musicology study of the life creation of V. Rosen as one of the outstanding artists of the Chernihiv region, the founder of the musical traditions of the region in the second half of the 20th century. Conclusions. The results of the study allowed us to conclude that V. Rosen for half a century played an important role in the development of the musical space of the Chernihiv region, presented the musical achievements of the region, in particular, in the field of piano culture in Ukraine and abroad. Beginning in the 1980s, V. Rosen and her students became the first representatives of the musical culture of the Chernihiv region to win the title of winners of national and international competitions. The study of the activities of leading artists of the Chernihiv region in the second half of the 20th century, carried out by the author of the article, showed that V. Rosen became the first artist of the Chernihiv region, which organically combined performing, pedagogical and scientific-methodical work. This allowed her to achieve significant results in performing, cultural, educational and pedagogical activities, to involve in piano art a significant number of future secondary school teachers – representatives of the region's intelligentsia, to become one of the prominent figures of music life of the Chernihiv region in the second half of the 20th century.

Комплексная модель семантического пространства музыки: структура и свойства

The article examines the complex model of the semantic space of music which developed in music scholarship in the second half of the 20th century as the result of a generalization of theoretic developments connected with the study of the fundamental categories of musical space and time. On the basis of a number of systemological research works relying on the application of an apparatus of present-day mathematics, the authors of the article examine substantial elements which characterize the structural foundation of the model, the unity of its constituent parts and the open character of the entire model as a system. These include the functional dependence between the model’s components, the presence of elements of indeterminacy in its construction and the concrete figurative content, as well as the reflection of the temporal parameters of music on the basis of the processes of simultaneous registry occurring in musical perception. The authors examine in detail such elements of the structure of the complex model of the semantic space of music as the association of dimensions of time, the functional dependence between the associations of dimensions, the variability of the structure of the dimensions and their associations, as well as computer music technologies as an instrument of research of the semantical space of music. The most important tendencies of applying the given apparatus with the participation of computer musical technologies are marked to be the following: modeling of the regularities of the musical creative process, systematization of the musical traditions of the peoples of Russia and the world, research of the synesthetic laws in music, a comprehensive study of the process of music history and its components, as well as the problem range of the gateway of the concrete results of music into other fields of knowledge and into their practical application. Keywords: music and mathematics, computer musical technologies, musical education, semantic space of music, synesthesia, synthesis of the arts, music theory.

Temporary musical identity as a tool for rebuilding social place

The armed conflict in Colombia leaves many families with no other option than to be displaced, which affects their social status and identity. This article reprises a qualitative study that analyses the life histories of eight families, all of whom were victims of the armed conflict, whose children participate in the Batuta National Foundation’s ‘Music for Reconciliation’ programme. The results of the study indicate that displacement impacted identity, resulting in the unsettlement of the social place of the participants. This was due to their anonymous state on arrival at their new places, with no support networks or social recognition. Together with the distrust created by the violence experienced, this led to attitudes of isolation, through which the individual became increasingly vulnerable to the dynamics of violence. This text analyses the concept of temporary musical identity, and the results show the possibilities that collective musical spaces offer for restoring the social place of the participants.

Scaling the scene: experimental music in Taiwan

ABSTRACT This article draws on three years of participation in the Taiwanese experimental music scene and argues that, in order to explain how different forms of sociality contribute to its construction and scaling, it is necessary to examine how musicians, organizers and audiences describe their own creative practices. After sketching a brief history of experimental music in Taiwan and contextualizing my positioning as an audience member, musician and critic, I discuss three central components of a music scene: genre, space, and circulation. By analysing the ideological, spatial and material shifts taking place around the Taiwanese experimental music scene in the late 2010s, I demonstrate how musical genres, performance spaces and material circuits are scaled up or down to specific domains of practice or to inclusive social contexts. In this article’s conclusion, I revisit scholarship on the concept of music scene and connect it to the role of scaling in the construction of Taiwan’s experimental music underground.