Musicological Knowledge Research Articles

Reparative Public Musicology: Empowering and Centering Community Knowledge Production through Counter-Storytelling Practice

Reparative Public Musicology: Empowering and Centering Community Knowledge Production through Counter-Storytelling Practice

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.

A computational exploration of melodic patterns in Arab-Andalusian music

Here we present a computational approach to identifying melodic patterns in a dataset of 145 MusicXML scores with the aim of contributing to centonization theory in the Moroccan tradition of Arab-Andalusian Music – a theory in development by expert performer and researcher of this tradition, Amin Chaachoo. Central to his work is the definition of a set of characteristic patterns, or centos, for each ṭab‘, or melodic mode. We apply three methods: TF-IDF, Maximally General Distinctive Patterns (MGDP) and the Structure Induction Algorithm (SIA) to identify characteristic patterns at the level of ṭab‘. A substantial number of the centos proposed by Chaachoo are identified and new melodic patterns are retrieved. A discussion with Chaachoo about the obtained results promoted the elicitation of other categories of recurrent patterns in the tradition different from the centos, contributing to a deeper musicological knowledge of the tradition.

Музыковедение: «знание о незнании» – постановка и решение проблем

The article is devoted to the relevant issue of chronotypology of 20th and 21st century art and its interpretation in the philosophical-aesthetical and musical-artistic scholarship. Considering the rapidly changing landscape of the contemporary humanitarian field, the author poses questions of reevaluation of both basic scholarly concepts and newly introduced concepts directed at the explanation of new and unusual phenomena of art. The work addresses itself to the concepts and utterances of well-known scholars (including Victor Bychkov, Nadezhda Mankovskaya, Yuri Kholopov, etc.), as well as presently active composers (Victor Ekimovsky, Vladimir Martynov, Anton Batagov, etc.). Special attention is paid to the discrepancies found in the interpretations of certain fundamental categories of art, which provide a general characterization of the present state of musicological knowledge. Questions of classification of the stages of artistic-aesthetical knowledge; questions of the lexicon of cultural and musical phenomena; questions of the methodology of studying new phenomena – this is the range of issues which require definition and endowment of terms, appearing during the process of the development of contemporary art. Keywords: musicology, chronotypology, avant-garde, modernism, postmodernism, postpostmodernism, metamodernism, aesthetics, lexicon of nonclassics, author.

MUSIC EDUCATION IN RUSSIA: RETROSPECTIVE AND FORECAST (ACCORDING TO THE MATERIAL OF THE SEVENTH SESSION OF THE SCIENTIFIC COUNCIL ON THE PROBLEMS OF THE HISTORY OF MUSIC EDUCATION)

The article analyzes the results of Russia's largest scientific and practical event dedicated to music education: the seventh session of the Scientific Council on the problems of the history of music education, held in Vologda on April 23-26, 2019. The program of the session included the international scientific conference “Preparing of a music teacher: Historical Experience, Problems, Prospects”, the Russian Scientific Seminar and the All-Russian Symposium. The results of the session, which brought together more than 70 leading researchers in the history of music education in Russia and the near abroad, are summarized in key areas. A retrospective analysis of the activities of music and pedagogical faculties of pedagogical universities, operating in the country since 1959 and practically eliminated at present, is considered as the leading theme. The results in other areas of the session are also generalized: the development of the history of music education as a field of historical, pedagogical and musicological knowledge; history of vocational and school music education. Crisis phenomena in music-pedagogical education are marked.

Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement by Naomi André

Reviewed by: Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement by Naomi André Gwynne Kuhner Brown (bio) Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement. By Naomi André. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018. 282 pp. In this bleak age, I sometimes find myself wondering whether musicological scholarship is worth doing. Judging from conversations with colleagues, I’m not the only one thinking this way, but it is rare to see the question acknowledged in print. I was gratified to read this, then, on the very last page of Naomi André’s splendid Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement: “It is one thing to do ‘activist’ work when people are being poisoned by toxic water or when an emergency manager has been appointed to take over a school system (two cases I mentioned in the introduction [End Page 191] regarding Flint and Detroit, Michigan, respectively). It is quite another thing to take a stand on an issue that is not about life and death wherein the stakes seem to be so different” (208). The circumstance in which André served as musicological “activist” was a performance in her community of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio). This work features problematic depictions of Muslims that are all the more disturbing in “Post 9/11 Michigan” (204), and as a board member for the opera company, André wrote a thoughtful and illuminating insert for the program. In it, she provided historical context for the opera’s musical and dramatic treatment of its Turkish characters, acknowledged the modern circumstances that had the potential to render the opera particularly hurtful, and concluded, “As we strive to share the beauty these works continue to hold, we also recognize the need to engage the ways these works resonate in multiple meanings for contemporary audiences” (206). The board, fearing to create controversy where perhaps none would otherwise exist, ultimately chose to put a far briefer and more general statement into the program. André shares this story as an example of what she calls “engaged musicology,” a set of scholarly practices that reach out to consider and include present-day circumstances and people—not only composers and other creators but also audiences, performers, and others both within and outside of art music’s inner circle. In contrast (but not opposition) to the “public musicology” advanced in recent years by the American Musicological Society, which seeks to make musicological knowledge relevant and helpful to the broader public, engaged musicology “is more of an ideology that incorporates the vantage points of the current diverse publics interpreting a work” (198). By “incorporat[ing] the shared lived experiences of everyone involved” in the creation of music (1), André’s approach makes musicology feel less like aesthetic or historical escapism and more like a way of meaningfully connecting music and music history to our present grim but still-malleable reality. The topic of “black opera”—opera by, about, performed by, and/or received by black people—is fertile ground for André’s rich demonstration of what engaged musicology looks like. She writes in her first chapter, “I want to resituate the genre of opera from a mouthpiece of the oppressor to a vehicle that can be utilized by anyone. There is nothing inherently ‘white’ or ‘nonblack’ about the music, text, and possibilities within the choices one can make in composing opera” (26). Black Opera focuses on the United States and South Africa, covering familiar pieces like Porgy and Bess and legendary performers such as Marian Anderson, along with newer South African works such as Bongani Ndodana-Breen’s Winnie: The Opera and South African artists whose names may be new to many readers, such as performer-director Pauline Malefane. André notes that in treating the topic of black opera, she deals not only with black creations and accomplishments but also with “music that was at times hostile to blacks in terms of representation, the practice of minstrelsy (here in the United States and in South Africa), and participation in the segregated opera houses as whites-only spaces for the first half of the twentieth century in the United States and nearly the full century in South Africa” [End Page 192] (29). André’s vision...

BASIC METHODOLOGICAL FUNDAMENTALS OF MUSICOLOGY HISTORY (ABOUT IDENTITY OF SCIENTIF IC DIRECTION)

Setting problems. The high degree of development of many sciences and the demands of time lead induce generalized reflections on the conglomerate of the gained, history of its origin.Much of the thinking in the field of musicology, like other fields, is gradually becoming the subject of particular attention of specialists. They are interested in the content of the gained, the history of works and their existence.Relevance of the study. It is necessary to justify methodologically the science of musicology history as a separate special direction, to find out the place and significance of historical and musicological research in the problems of development of historical and musicological sciences, to develop the basics of the method of the corresponding two-unified analysis of the subject against the background of known works on the history of musical knowledge.Analysis of recent researches and publications. In past studies researchers have covered the history of the development of music-theoretical systems in the full sense, demonstrated the personal explanation of separate music problems, or propous various synthetic analysis. The following examples of works by G. Riemann, L. Chevalier, Y. Khominskiy, I. Kotlyarevsky, groups of Moscow theorists – authors of a special monograph on this subject.The purpose of this article is special methodological substantiation of science of History of musicology, development of fundamentals of the method of corresponding two-unified analysis of the subject. The subject of proposed work is the basis of the methodology of the history of musicology. Therefore the methodological fundamentals of the History of musicology there are the subject of proposed work.Summary of the research. The fulfillment of these tasks is carried out by preliminary articulation of the essence of this theoretical science as a sphere of study of the sound composition of musical matter, the essence of its elements, the laws of connection between them, the related phenomena and their direct perception, and then by argumentation of identity history of musicology as a science, explanation of the subject and object of its study. The article explains the peculiarities of scientific specification history and musicology as an essential feature of the brunch.Results and their significance. The importance of compensating historical and musicological knowledge for the researcher of the history of musicology is emphasized. The methodological scheme of historical-musicological researches is explained, which boils down to the construction of a one-line process, the content of which creates a number of musicological interpretations of its subject of attention within the relevant direction. The dialogism of the science of musicology history is covered: it is at the same time the history of musicologists and the history of musicology, representing the thinking tradition of Ukrainian intellectuals to promote-have-explore music. We look for its sources in worldviews that are revealed through the ontology of beauty, symbolization of creativity, respect for Wisdom, special natural musicality, which were first manifested in the initial analyzes of song folklore and church singing.

Discovering structural similarities among rāgas in Indian Art Music: a computational approach

Indian Art Music has a huge variety of rāgas. The similarity across rāgas has traditionally been approached from various musicological viewpoints. This work aims at discovering structural similarities among renditions of rāgas using a data-driven approach. Starting from melodic contours, we obtain the descriptive note-level transcription of each rendition. Repetitive note patterns of variable and fixed lengths are derived using stochastic models. We propose a latent variable approach for raga distinction based on statistics of these patterns. The posterior probability of the latent variable is shown to capture similarities across raga renditions. We show that it is possible to visualize the similarities in a low-dimensional embedded space. Experiments show that it is possible to compare and contrast relations and distances between ragas in the embedded space with the musicological knowledge of the same for both Hindustani and Carnatic music forms. The proposed approach also shows robustness to duration of rendition.

Zwischen drei Kulturen: Musik und Nationalitätsbildung in Triest by Matej Santi

Reviewed by: Zwischen drei Kulturen: Musik und Nationalitätsbildung in Triestby Matej Santi Steven R. Cerf Matej Santi, Zwischen drei Kulturen: Musik und Nationalitätsbildung in Triest. Studien zur Kultur, Geschichte und Theorie der Musik. Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Analyse, Theorie und Geschichte der Musik an der Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien 9. Vienna: Hollitzer, 2015. 230 pp. This unique book covering the flourishing life of musical performance and its key nationalistic implications in Trieste throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and into the first two decades of the twentieth is singularly enriched by the author's fluency in the three languages—Italian, Slovene, and German—of this, the largest sea harbor of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy. It also benefits from Santi's deep musicological knowledge, which allows [End Page 190]him to appraise the musical scores and the many journalistic sources under discussion. Santi's graceful translations from the Italian and the Slovene into German make the book all the more seamlessly accessible for the German-language reader. Upon opening and closing the tome, one is greeted by a vibrantly colored two-page map of 1850 focusing on the proximity of the three cultural venues featured in the study: the Teatro Verdi, standing across from the German-language Schiller Verein on the Piazza Grande, and just three avenues away, the site where the Narodni dom (the Slovene National Hall) was built between 1901 and 1904. The clear structure of the book begins with Santi's lucidly written forty-page introduction covering his critical methodology of analyzing contemporary nineteenth-and early twentieth-century journalistic articles that trace the simultaneous growth of the performing musical arts in the most prosperous Austrian-Hungarian seaport. The three major chapter blocks that follow, each between 40 and 60 pages, trace respectively the significant role of Italian opera in the city's cultural life, the growing Slovene cultural presence in Trieste's city center, and the German-language musical dominance through the relatively long-lasting Schiller Verein. Early on, Santi convincingly claims that the contemporary journalistic articles found in Trieste's magazines and newspapers that reside at the heart of his research served a double function: On the one hand, they were centripetal in manifesting a growing confidence in music as innately nationalistic, if not chauvinistic, and on the other hand, they were centrifugal in convincing the entire community of Trieste of the intrinsic value of the given musical pieces and their performances. The first chapter traces the dominance of Italian opera in Trieste from the late eighteenth century to the outbreak of World War I. Although Santi discusses the first decades of the nineteenth-century operatic life and the myriad performances of the belcanto opera, it is his thirty-page discussion of Giuseppe Verdi's operas in Trieste that gives a sense of Verdi's artistic and political importance to the growing tide of Risorgimento sentiment among the most populous segment of Trieste—the Italian-language community, numbering 65 percent of the city's population in 1910. In particular, there are three areas of Santi's Verdi discussion that are most convincing: the continually central Verdi operatic productions that served as a successful repertory lynchpin; the changing of the name of the Teatro Communale to the Teatro Verdi in 1901, Verdi's death year; and the erection of the Giuseppe Verdi statue in 1906. One major plus of this edition is the manifold visuals contained amidst the pages [End Page 191]of verbal narrative: they include a page-long program cast listing of the star-studded memorial concert for Verdi, the vocal portion of which began with his stirring nationalistic chorus of "Va pensiero" from Nabucco. Although Verdi enjoyed two premieres of earlier operas in Trieste, it was the major commitment of the opera house to his later mature operas that made him the most important of the three Risorgimento Giuseppes: unlike Garibaldi and Mazzini, the regular performances of his works themselves, with their social and psychological immediacy, manifested the composer's undying commitment to a united Italy. Santi's focus on the Narodni dom (the Slovene Town Hall) as the cultural central gathering place...

Interactive Visual Profiling of Musicians.

Determining similar objects based upon the features of an object of interest is a common task for visual analytics systems. This process is called profiling, if the object of interest is a person with individual attributes. The profiling of musicians similar to a musician of interest with the aid of visual means became an interesting research question for musicologists working with the Bavarian Musicians Encyclopedia Online. This paper illustrates the development of a visual analytics profiling system that is used to address such research questions. Taking musicological knowledge into account, we outline various steps of our collaborative digital humanities project, priority (1) the definition of various measures to determine the similarity of musicians' attributes, and (2) the design of an interactive profiling system that supports musicologists in iteratively determining similar musicians. The utility of the profiling system is emphasized by various usage scenarios illustrating current research questions in musicology.

Listening Out for Musical Homing: Critical Approximations of Hindustani Instrumental Music

Examining three entangled notions of ‘home’, this paper opens up and expands ‘the scope and critical sensibility’ [Soja, E. W. (1996). Thirdspace, journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Oxford: Blackwell] of frequently accepted accounts of Hindustani instrumental music. In this critical ‘approximation’ (Soja, 1996) of assumed innate relations between conceptions of home and abstracted elements of acoustic events perceived as Hindustani instrumental music, the paper borrows insights from cultural, post-colonial and spatial theory. Listening away from formalised, closed and essentialist assumptions about Hindustani instrumental music, the paper explores processes through which components of acoustic events come to be perceived, rejected or legitimated in terms of a specific home during encounters with the music in western Europe. On a meta-level, the argument of the paper also reads as a plea for a re-negotiation of the boundaries of musicological knowledge production, emphasising the potential that a radically open listening has to offer.

Combining Musicological Knowledge About Chords and Keys in a Simultaneous Chord and Local Key Estimation System

In this paper, we present a probabilistic framework for the simultaneous estimation of chords and keys from audio. The framework is formulated in terms of acoustic models for both keys and chords, and a prior model that contains musicological knowledge about chords and keys. The latter consists of a compound of four components: a duration and a change model for both keys and chords. This division allows us to modify each of the components separately and to choose the most appropriate sources of knowledge for each of them. Furthermore, this makes it easier to interpret their role and their relevance in the estimation procedure. We compared multiple configurations of our system, increasing in complexity. This has permitted us to explore the relation between keys and chords, and the importance of integrating prior musicological knowledge into an automatic estimation system. It was found that chord estimation scores mostly depend on the integration of durational knowledge, while key estimation also requires prior information about the broader context.

Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities, and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond (review)

Reviewed by: Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities, and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond Joshua S. Walden Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities, and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond. Edited by Erik Levi and Florian Scheding. (Europea: Ethno musicologies and Modernities, no. 10.) Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010. [viii, 207 p. ISBN 9780810863798 (hardcover), $75; ISBN 9780810872950 (paperback), $50.] Music examples, bibliographies, illustrations, index. The study of displacement, or forced migration, exile, and the formation and movement of diasporas, is a relatively young field of inquiry in musicology. Some scholars have recently begun to investigate the impacts of displacement on composition, performance, and listening in a transnational context, examining such questions as the relationship of music to the experiences of nostalgia and acculturation among dispersed peoples, the representation of exile in musical works, and the roles of music in the construction of identities in displaced communities. This new volume, edited by Erik Levi and Florian Scheding, considers this topic in a set of essays that explore music in Europe, America, Israel, and North Africa, paying particular attention to musicians forced into exile from Central Europe during the twentieth century. The book offers a useful investigation of some of the various techniques by which scholars might consider the significant effects of displacement in the history of music. Music and Displacement is divided into three parts that consider the consequences of displacement on the creation and reception of music from complementary perspectives. Part 1 investigates the ways forced migration, racist policy, and genocide have affected musicians and their work. Part 2 focuses on musical evocations of identities in exile, and on historical instances in which musicians have responded to the conditions of displacement to undertake innovative projects in the fields of composition and performance. Part 3 covers displacement’s impacts on music criticism, and the roles a theory of displacement might play in broadening musicological knowledge. Taken together, these groupings of essays provide a usefully broad range of approaches to the subject matter. The first chapter, by Philip V. Bohlman, addresses music composed and performed by prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. Bohlman interpolates his text with poetry, song, and musical notation, as he explores [End Page 107] examples of music that is extant in manuscript form alongside music that has not survived, about whose performance historians know only from reports of life in the camps. He also considers the presence of song and its potent symbolism in works of literary fiction about World War II by authors including Imre Kertész, Primo Levi, Irène Némirovsky, and W. G. Sebald, arguing that music’s role in this genre is to “provide the reader with rhetorical strategies for listening to silence,” for contemplating the displacement and loss brought about by the Holocaust (p. 26). The Holocaust also provides the historical context for the discussion in chapter 2, in which Peter Petersen studies the effects on music of the mass exile and genocide that took place under Nazi rule. Touching on Nazi controls on Jewish musical activities in the ghettos and camps, the representation of the Holocaust in postwar compositions, and the uneven treatment of Nazi anti- Semitism in German scholarship, Petersen outlines both the consequences of and responses to anti-Semitic ideology and violence in the realm of musical production and reception in Germany. In the following chapter, Michael Beckerman addresses the historiography of displaced composers and the challenges involved in interpreting their music as representative of the conditions of exile. Beckerman offers an insightful reminder of the danger of making assumptions about the ways historical subjects might have reacted to their contexts. He demonstrates, for example, how the biographies of exiled Central European composers Jaroslav Ježek and Eric Zeisl can be readily characterized as alternatively tragic or triumphant, based on the sometimes contradictory evidence of their ambivalent reactions to their experiences in America. With this caveat in mind, Beckerman proposes that the middle portions of works by composers forced into exile often operate as the “sonic subconscious,” the passages most likely to evoke the experiences of displacement and diaspora (p. 48). Jehoash Hirshberg opens part two with a study of the roles played by composers displaced from Germany during the Third Reich...

La diffusion de la musique chorale en France après 1890: Les voies de la décentralisation selon Charles Bordes

Charles Bordes, forerunner of the early music revival, was a tireless actor of the decentralization of French musical life. As early as 1892, he promoted the diffusion of the solesmian gregorian chant and of the Palestrinian a capella polyphonies through the liturgical and concert performances given by his Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais, in the hope to give a new impetus to religious music. To develop the movement he had created in Paris, he took his choir and musicians on repeated tours in French provinces, he supported the creation of numerous Scholae for the performance of choral masterpieces, which was then limited by the absence of mixed societies, and he started series of conferences on the 17th and 18th-century oratorios and operas he wanted to bring back to life. The periodical he had founded to promote his ideas, La Tribune de Saint-Gervais, soon became a means of disseminating musicological knowledge, complementing his modern publications of early music for choirs. Establishing the idea of interstate gatherings, bypassing political and aesthetical borders, he played, until he died in 1909, a central role in the shaping of French musical taste.

Remarks on Analysis

Abstract A number of different approaches to analysis are reviewed and compared as to their status with respect to the scientiflcity some of them lay claim to. Moreover, a plea is made for a branch of musicology that would be not only empirical in the weak sense of “taking account of” reality, but also in the stronger sense of incurring risks, of making theoretical predictions, being falsified by the “resistance” of reality, refining itself, and, in this way, giving rise to a new kind of growth in musicological knowledge.