Musical Writings Research Articles

Varieties of Revelation, Varieties of Truth—A Comparative Ontological Study of Revelation through Music and Sciences

Accounts of revelation and contemporary views of these are based on beliefs and historical citations. These accounts shall not be limited to the understanding and interpreting of historical and other events within writings but must present the possibility of an objective analysis of the nature of revelation as a phenomenon, an object of our sensory and mental conscious experiences. This paper approaches the act or phenomenon of revelation regardless of the revealer and its nature. Can we abstract the revealer and the revealed from revelation and have an ontological account of revelation solely focusing on the occurrence itself? The central part of the discussion is based on the object/property pair as ontological categories through which the means are analyzed. A comparative method is used where Scripture, musical writings, and mathematical/physical formulae (as potential means of revelation) are scrutinized. As a result, without any need to determine the revealer, revelation can be based on and described through pure properties (not tropes) in human experience, intellect, and understanding. The possibility of revelation beyond Scripture and Jesus Christ—following a type of liberal and general theory of revelation—presents itself in arts and sciences. The “true” of a musical work, when found and experienced during musical performances and scientific truths represented by the formulae, which describe the world and a meta domain, can be derived from the chains of signs and symbols as it is through Scripture. Human cognitive faculties present a universal natural limit to our direct experiencing of the transcendent, of the supernatural. A new dualist conception of logos as a metaphysical category marks the domain bridging the non-transcendent with the transcendent.

MID-FiLD: MIDI Dataset for Fine-Level Dynamics

One of the challenges in generating human-like music is articulating musical expressions such as dynamics, phrasing, and timbre, which are difficult for computational models to mimic. Previous efforts to tackle this problem have been insufficient due to a fundamental lack of data containing information about musical expressions. In this paper, we introduce MID-FiLD, a MIDI dataset for learning fine-level dynamics control. Notable properties of MID-FiLD are as follows: (1) All 4,422 MIDI samples are constructed by professional music writers with a strong understanding of composition and musical expression. (2) Each MIDI sample contains four different musical metadata and control change \#1 (CC\#1) value. We verify that our metadata is a key factor in MID-FiLD, exerting a substantial influence over produced CC\#1 values. In addition, we demonstrate the applicability of MID-FiLD to deep learning models by suggesting a token-based encoding methodology and reveal the potential for generating controllable, human-like musical expressions.

From Musical Writings To Writing Music: Book-Writing Leading to Music School in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta

Print created the urge to innovate new modalities of musical knowledge production and dissemination in nineteenth-century Bengal. Publication of music books made the bifurcation between music theory and practice clearer, but only as a textual category. As the literature suggests, these were two categories for organizing musical knowledge, intimately entwined, where one produces the other and also doesn't exist without each other. The technology of ‘swaralipi’ (musical notation) used in the modern printed books materialized the project of disseminating music to the reader who could now ‘read’ the music from the book. For some book writers, music books were meant to be a replacement for the oral tutelage, published as ‘self-instructors’. But, on the contrary, the most prolific book-writers of the time used their books as the basis of oral tutelage in the music school. In the modern setting of the music school, the person of the ‘guru’ or ‘ustad’ was replaced by the formalized, systematic teaching of the ‘professors’ of music. Music books, as the medium of modern music pedagogy, thus changed not only the way students learned – making it possible to learn from the book with no instructor – but also the role of teachers, whose teaching was validated by the book. The music books came to function as the ‘modern shastras’ – to exercise regulatory authority over music practice, and how music is learned and taught. The ‘orality’ of music emerges as a liminal space in the gap between the writings on music and the writing of music. What emerges is an unlikely milieu where a new form of musical education is devised, the possibility of an education without a guru is conceived, and the schema of musical notation brings the entire process to life.

Higher Ground: A Panel Discussion on Questlove’s Summer of Soul

ABSTRACT Organized by music writer Chris Williams, this panel discussion on Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s Academy Award–winning 2021 documentary Summer of Soul ( . . . Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), which examines the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, was recorded on Zoom in September 2021 during the COVID-19 lockdown. Williams served as moderator, and panelists included Melissa A. Weber, Fredara Mareva Hadley, Scot Brown, and Tony Bolden. In addition to artists featured in the film, panelists shared views on a wide range of related topics, including the meaning of soul and the musical genre of soul, not to mention Harlem, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power movement, and more. As such, the discussion served a medicinal, community-oriented function not unlike soul during the pandemic.

창작노동에 대한 합리적 보상 방안에 대한 국제적 관행 및 선례

For copyright to achieve its original purpose, creators should be entitled to fruits of successful exploitation of their work after they license or transfer their rights. Due to imbalance of bargaining power, creators often sign away their rights to compensation. To respond that, we need to think about legislating an unwaivable right. Its operation resembles the fee collecting systems already set up for television writers and actors in Korea and for music writers and performers around the world, which originate from historical reasons, collective power, or the statutory compensation for performing music recordings. The last example is enshrined by Rome Convention and WPPT, and its modus operandi can be easily applied to audiovisual recordings. When the 2016 Beijing treaty does exactly that for audiovisual performers (i.e., actors and actresses) and where digital technology makes collection of fees for various ways of communicating the audiovisual works to the public, the time is ripe to seriously consider the audiovisual authors’ unwaivable right to remuneration extending beyond performers and inclusive of directors and script writers. In doing so, it will be desirable to take the form of compulsory licensing for copyright limitation so that the right to remuneration exists even when the creators have not made licensing or transfer. Collective management societies’ collecting activities may be more efficient than filing lawsuits for copyright infringement.

Review: God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the California Myth, by David Leaf

Book Review| June 01 2023 Review: God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the California Myth, by David Leaf David Leaf. God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the California Myth. London: Omnibus Press, 2022. 480 pages. Grant Wong Grant Wong University of South Carolina Grant Wong is a Ph.D. student in history at the University of South Carolina specializing in the study of twentieth-century American pop culture and consumerism. Email: gwwong@email.sc.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Email: gwwong@email.sc.edu Journal of Popular Music Studies (2023) 35 (2): 127–129. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.127 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Grant Wong; Review: God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the California Myth, by David Leaf. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 June 2023; 35 (2): 127–129. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.127 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Popular Music Studies Search Brian Wilson concerts are strange affairs. The 80-year-old rock virtuoso, for all of his skill as a producer, composer, and vocalist, never truly has been comfortable as a live performer. His bandmates sound fantastic. What else to expect from Beach Boys Al Jardine and Blondie Chaplin? The real allure of a Brian Wilson concert is not the music, but the artist’s presence. During most shows, Brian sits solitary at his piano, flubbing lyrics in an aging baritone distant from the angelic falsetto of his youth. The crowds cheer anyway. They give him standing ovations and yell for encores. This past July, at the Jones Beach Theater on Long Island, I know I did. He’s Brian Wilson. And he deserved all of the love we gave him. This love drives God Only Knows: The Story of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys, and the California Myth, the latest edition of music writer... You do not currently have access to this content.

The National Collective Management Institute (LMKN) as an Appraiser of Economic Value in the Binding of Music and Song Copyrights as Objects of Fiduciary Guarantees

One of the creations protected by copyright is songs and/or music. Legal protection for them is a necessity in order to create a conducive climate to the development of music industry in Indonesia. In order to facilitate song and/or music writers with better control over their works, they can appoint representatives to regulate the management of their royalty, in this case LMKN (The National Collective Management Institute). Law number 28 of 2014 concerning copyrights regulates that copyright can be used as an object of fiduciary guarantee. However, its use is still hampered by the fact that the economic value of music and song copyrights cannot be determined easily, especially if it is used for fiduciary guarantee. Most banks do not accept it for loan collateral. The objective of this research was to analyze the roles of LMKN as the determiner of the economic values of song and music copyrights for the purpose of binding them for objects of fiduciary guarantee. This normative study uses statutory approach, conceptual approach, analytical approach, and futuristic approach. The determination of the economic values of song and music copyrights can be done by LMKN, a one- stop service institution that collects the royalty of music and song in Indonesia. The National Collective Management Institute (hereinafter briefly referred to as LMKN) as an institution that can provide an appraiser of the economic value of Music and Song Copyrights. The use of SILM (a music and song information system and data center) can help the estimation of music and song’s economic value based on the royalty accepted by the art’s creator or copyright holder. The amount of royalty can determine the binding of music and song copyrights for the objects of fiduciary guarantee.

LAKOĆA ŽIVLjENjA I STVARANjA

In the monograph Mosaic of Memories, Snežana Nikolajević presented the life and work of Zoran Hristić, a composer, radio and TV editor, music writer, a man who loved art, family, people, socializing. His work and life were inspiring to look at from different aspects – both biographical and musicological. The author of the monograph and the composer had an extremely harmonious, friendly and collegial relationship that resulted in wonderful texts, compositions, dedications, interpretations, shows. Therefore, it is quite natural that Zoran Hristić wanted, and Snežana Nikolejvić realized in an original, but above all interesting, accessible and interesting way, a monograph that will be interesting to both music professionals, music students, as well as art lovers and Zoran’s admirers, of which there were many. Through chapters with the titles: piano, orders, highlights, stage, screen, radio, roots, attitude, coda, we follow the chronology of Hristic’s life and professional path, along with honest, warm statements of friends and associates. The following spoke about Zoran: pianist Vesna Kršić, theologian Dragan Vukić, violinist Jovan Kolundžija, choreographer Slavko Pervan, composer, arranger, instrumentalist Slobodan Marković, Marija Ćirić, music theorist, sound engineer Zoran Jerković, traditional flute player Bora Dugić and dentist Gordana Lazarević, Zoran’s life companion during the last years. In addition to the textual material, which in a natural flow leads from the description of life events, periodization and chronological events to musicological analyses, valuable material is represented by photographs from a private archive as well as parts of sheet music, Zoran’s texts, synopsis and manuscript scores. In the coda of the Mosaic of Memories, there is a clear conclusion that Zoran Hristić had a rich, meaningful and successful life, and endowed with talent and beauty, he was ready to enjoy it.

Bogdan Milankovic’s contribution to the development of musical culture in Sarajevo between world wars

Dr Bogdan Milankovic was one of the key figures in the musical life of Sarajevo between two world wars. A doctor of Romance philology who spent his working life as a high school teacher, Milankovic also served as director and teacher of the District School of Music, president of the Sarajevo Philharmonic, music writer, and violin maker. The article is a contribution to the biography of Bogdan Milankovic based on archival sources and historical press, while trying to determine his influence to the development of musical culture in Sarajevo in the interwar period.

‘A Collation of Badly Disguised, Well-Known Themes’: Shostakovich Symphonies in the Parisian Press, 1936–1946

AbstractThis article examines the reception of Shostakovich's symphonies in the Parisian press, from the late interwar period to the years immediately following the Second World War. In doing so, it continues the conversation around international responses to Shostakovich's music in the twentieth century, adding a consideration of the composer's symphonies in France from 1936 to 1946 to the existing literature on Shostakovich reception in the United States, Britain, and Germany. By interrogating the commentary of Parisian critics and music writers during this period, the article reveals how the reception of Shostakovich's symphonies in Paris reflects the rising and falling influence of the French Communist Party, and offers a novel way to view the shifts in Franco-Soviet relations either side of the Second World War.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Heavy Metal and Love Labor Journalism

How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Heavy Metal and Love Labor Journalism

Hector Berlioz’s Neurophysiological Imagination

Abstract There is, Berlioz writes in his essay “De la musique en général” (1837), “a strange agitation in my blood circulation: my arteries beat violently … a trembling overtakes my limbs and a numbness my hands and feet, while the nerves of sight and hearing are partially paralyzed.” The composer here is not, as one might think, describing the symptoms of an opium overdose, but rather the powerful effect of “good music” on his own body. Challenging our tendency to dismiss Berlioz’s musical writings as merely overheated Romantic effusions, I argue that the remarkable medical detail presented in his arguments reveals a hitherto neglected dimension of nineteenth-century engagement with the embodied effects of music. Contextualizing Berlioz’s claims within the neurophysiology of his age, and in particular the physiological psychology of Cabanis, the anatomy of Bichat, and the acoustic theories of Lamarck, I recover the medical and scientific epistemes that motivated the composer’s assertions about the power of music to effect embodied and emotional transformation—a constellation of ideas that I term his “neurophysiological imagination.” An analysis in these terms of some of Berlioz’s major compositional innovations reveals how both his writings and his music explore an explicitly neurophysiological dimension of early Romantic listening. Specifically, I propose that Berlioz repeatedly attempted both to represent and to induce an experience that was of great interest to the artists and audiences of his day: an overpowering mental and physical response to music experienced as an embodied, neurophysiological form of the sublime.

Deciphering the Spell‐Book of the Score: Musical Intelligibility and Notational Citation in E.T.A. Hoffmann's Music Writing

A problem for those writing about music around 1800 was delivering persuasive judgments about works that readers had not heard, especially for journals that sought to mold a self‐conscious musical public. One tactic was the citation of musical examples in the form of interpolated images from the score. After surveying the development of this technique in the eighteenth century, this article examines the shifting use of musical citation in the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann. His review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony for Leipzig's Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung pioneered a new use of citation that went beyond evaluation to deliver an aesthetic impression of the work. In his Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier, however, Hoffmann disavows musical examples, rewriting his Beethoven review without examples and creating a parodic notation to suggest the inability of citation to communicate musical effect.

Eseistyczna chopinologia Piotra Wierzbickiego

Piotr Wierzbicki’s deep interest in Chopin’s music has been revealed in his volumes of essays published since 1993. What appears to make his music writings exceptional in comparison with other Polish essays dealing with Chopin’s life and work is the prevailing concentration on particular pieces or even single performances chosen by famous pianists. Wierzbicki develops his project of extradisciplinary essayistic Chopinology that blends together the musicological knowledge, critical involvement, philosophical reflection and highly individual psychosomatic experience. Having stated a fundamental difficulty of ‘translating’ sounds into words, he tries to elaborate a ‘musical’ style and form for his writing, e.g. he includes ekphrases full of metaphors and synesthetic figures. This wide array of music-centred properties encourages readers to treat these essays as a starting point for coming up with the question of whether it is possible to differentiate a type of ‘musical’ essay.

Review: Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound, by Daphne A. Brooks

Review: <i>Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound</i>, by Daphne A. Brooks

AN OVERVIEW ON ISMAIL BAHA SURELSAN’S PLACE IN TURKISH MUSIC AND HIS WRITINGS IN MUSIKI MECMUASI

It is necessary to know the history of music well in order to recognize and comprehend Turkish Music, which is a major element of the national culture. The works of Turkish Music researchers and composers are very important in this context. İsmail Baha Sürelsan, in terms of the period he lived in is important in the concext of history of Turkish Music with his musical writings and composer identity. Although Sürelsan, who has a versatile personality such as composer identity, educator identity and author identity, has articles in different sources, but his articles in Musiki Mecmuası, which he wrote between 1953-1968, were included in this research. In his writings, it is seen that he mainly deals with Turkish Music composers, Turkish Music concert interpretations, the situation, development and change of Turkish Music belonging to the period, he lived in, as well as instruments such as Kanun, Ud, Çenk and Rebab. Purpose of the study is to reveal the contribution of İsmail Baha Sürelsan, who has an important place in Turkish Music History, to Turkish Music with his identity as a writer as well as performing music. Documentary data and interview were used in the study. Keywords: İsmail Baha Sürelsan, Turkish Music, Musiki Mecmuası

Ancient Musical Writings as Persuasive Texts

Abstract This contribution is meant to shed light on how ancient Greek music theorists structure argumentations and address their readership in order to be understandable, effective and persuasive. On the one hand, some of the most important treatises, e.g. Ptolemy’s Harmonics (with Porphyry’s Commentary) and what remains of Archytas’ and Theophrastus’ works, are taken as case studies; on the other hand, the paper deals with some argumentative patterns recurring in harmonics demonstrations, especially with reference to the usage of everyday life experience as evidence supporting acoustic and harmonic theories.

Review: Switched-On Bach, by Roshanak Kheshti, and Wendy Carlos: A Biography, by Amanda Sewel

Review: <i>Switched-On Bach</i>, by Roshanak Kheshti, and <i>Wendy Carlos: A Biography</i>, by Amanda Sewel

Rebuilding the Music Industry through Community

Devon Léger is a music publicist (HearthPR) and music writer (Folk Alley, No Depression). In this piece, he describes how online music platforms Bandcamp and Twitch have supported musicians during the pandemic and provided new ways for artists to connect with fans, build community, and monetize their music.

‘To Unpack My Music’: Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Mixtape Aesthetics

ABSTRACT Elizabeth Wurtzel’s early career as a music journalist not only gave her a foothold in publishing but also informed her work as a memoirist and cultural critic. Like past music writers, particularly Ellen Willis, Wurtzel broke away from ‘objective’ critical orthodoxy and found musical touchstones to complement and amplify her most introspective writing. Often dispensing with linear narrative (or strict veracity), Wurtzel assembles episodes from her life (in the case of autobiography) or history as one would arrange songs on a mixtape, with subjective impressions and reference points channelled through music. As a medium for young-adult communication, the mixtape thrives on idiosyncrasy and both a deflection and absorption of inchoate emotion. Commiseration and a plea for empathy embed themselves within a mix’s ‘code,’ along with elements of gift-exchange; a similar urge to pack subjectivity into existing discourse distinguishes Wurtzel’s writings. Re-Evaluating Wurtzel’s body of work as an outgrowth of her ‘mixtape aesthetics,’ we encounter a bold alternative method for the collection and transmission of knowledge in life writing and cultural criticism.