Polyphonic Composition Research Articles

Collective tissues of the systering body

This text is a collage of perspectives and considerations of how we work as a collective. It is an entry from wandering around, conversing and, ultimately, agreeing that we are in the process of figuring out what it is that we do and how we want to do it. It does not follow a linear narration but it is a polyphonic composition expressing our co-existence over the last two years. Our meeting was possible thanks to the fellowship programme which enabled our paths to cross, creating space for the intersection of different generations, socioeconomic circumstances, and geopolitical contexts. It then led us to form a collective as a way of building up on the work we had done together and expanding it beyond the timeframe and scope of Critical Practice (Made in Yugoslavia)*. Still, we held onto the idea of collectivity, horizontal knowledge sharing, decentralised group structure and reciprocity as guiding principles for that future evolution of our work which has been instilled in us through the CP experience.

Music, Liturgy, and Confraternity Devotions in Paris and Tournai, 1300–1550 by Sarah Ann Long

Reviewed by: Music, Liturgy, and Confraternity Devotions in Paris and Tournai, 1300–1550 by Sarah Ann Long Leah Morrison Music, Liturgy, and Confraternity Devotions in Paris and Tournai, 1300–1550. By Sarah Ann Long. (Eastman Studies in Music.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2021. [xxv, 350 p. ISBN 9781580469968 (hardcover), $125; ISBN 9781787449275 (e-book), price varies.] Figures, music examples, tables, notes, print and online appendixes, bibliography, chant and polyphonic composition indexes, primary source index, general index. The struggles of the past two years with COVID-19 cannot help but remind us of the devastating tolls of earlier pandemics, especially the episodes of bubonic plague that raged with chilling regularity during the Middle Ages. On the first page of her masterful study, Sarah Ann Long bridges a seven-century gap with the statement, "Plague epidemics affected everyone, forcing men and women of all walks of life to come face to face with their mortality. … One can imagine a certain [End Page 398] helplessness that people felt when confronted with this disease, causing them to routinely seek divine intervention from patron saints thought to have special protective powers" (p. 1). It is the devotion to these saints, specifically to the music and liturgy inspired by that practice, that provides the focus of Long's work. She examines fourteen liturgical books containing devotional music and texts produced between 1300 and 1540 for organizations in Paris and Tournai. Significantly, the books were not intended for monastic or cathedral use but rather for the various confraternities having a presence in these two cities. Confraternities, Long explains, were smaller institutions than the ecclesiastical communities that sponsored them. Purely devotional in purpose, their membership could be drawn from trades and professions, social groups, and religious laity, and included both men and women. The devotional material in the volumes pertains to four saints: Sebastian, Barbara, Catherine of Alexandria, and Nicholas, bishop of Myra. These were among the fourteen holy helpers—saints venerated together because their intercessions were believed especially effective against sickness and death—most often invoked in the environs of northern France for protection against the plague. Long lays out in detail the importance of confraternities to the rising trend of popular piety in the late fourteenth century, along with the development of devotional practices and their importance in sponsoring new music and texts for their services. It is in this last area that her study breaks new and important ground. Hers is the first to directly connect the confraternities of northern France as patrons to the composers of plainchant and polyphony in honor of these specific saints, as well as to describe the place the chants had within the devotional life of the organizations. The book is divided into five chapters, with a comprehensive introduction and a brief conclusion. Most of the content of each chapter is interrelated. Notes and bibliographic references are comprehensive and abundant (fifty-six pages of explanatory endnotes and twenty-six pages of bibliographic references necessary for understanding the notes) and together serve as an invaluable summary of scholarship pertaining to Mass and Office composition in late medieval northern France. There are six appendixes that are also integral to understanding the contents of all the chapters: three are provided after the conclusion, and three are available through a companion website that must be either downloaded or viewed online. In the engagingly written introduction, Long not only explains her goal—to demonstrate how liturgical books for confraternities mirror the popular devotional trend in northern France—but also outlines the importance of these confraternities and describes their relations with sponsoring institutions. She discusses the limitations of available sources, documents the structure and importance of the liturgy (and, consequently, liturgical books) to these societies, and chronicles the resulting development of specialized liturgies in response to the plague. Long describes a fascination with mortality, "which resulted in the production of new literature which circulated widely, first in manuscripts and later in print" and explains how her study of these fourteen books demonstrates "why specific chant melodies were chosen and how contrafacta were carefully crafted with an awareness of the theology they expressed" (p. 8). In her introductory discussion, Long also explains the important connection...

Synergism of Music and Word in Polyphonic Forms of Choral Works a Cappella by Modern Russian Composers

The article is devoted to the consideration of a polyphonic choral composition as a polycode text, in which literary and musical texts as paralinguistic means contain heterogeneous information and add additional shades to the content of the score, i.e., the musical text as a whole. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time, synthesizing scientific achievements of linguistics and musicology, the polyphonic forms of a cappella choral works are analyzed as polycode texts. Due to the specifics of the choral art form as a musical and performing art, the nature of the perception of a musical text is multimodal. For performers who ‘decipher’ and ‘voice’ a musical notation, a musical text has one visual mode. For listeners, multimodality characterizes the practice of communication in terms of auditory, linguistic, spatial and visual resources, for example, the auditory mode when listening to a work without a visual range, or a polymodus complex when listening with a visual range. This refers to listening to music while simultaneously viewing the musical text of a work, observing the process of public performance, which in modern practice is often accompanied by a specially selected video sequence. The leading paradigm is the synergy of literary and textual sources and polyphonic form in works for a cappella choir by contemporary Russian composers. Based on the differentiation of the structure of a literary and textual source, the attribution of polyphonic forms of motet, madrigal, fugue and fugato is the subject of the work, while the goal is to form a research picture based on a close ‘polyphonic’ connection between word and music. In polyphonic analysis, it is important to determine the content of choral compositions and the composer’s method of dealing with the structure of a text source. A whole poem can be taken as the basis of a musical work (an example is the text-musical forms of motets and madrigals), one strophe, one line, one word (the analysis of fugato and fugue becomes the evidence base). An interesting case is the use as a text base of a polyphonic composition of individual syllables and phonemes (preludes and fugue-vocalizes) and a ‘silent’ performance - with a closed mouth. Thus, it is proved that the musical text is a complex multimodal complex in which the main information is conveyed by semiotically heterogeneous components. It is concluded that, on the one hand, a literary text influences the choice of a polyphonic form, on the other hand, it is often a static text that does not have an external plot development in the context of polyphonic dramaturgy and form and acquires internal dynamics of development to expand its semantic field.

PERSPECTIVES FOR LOST POLYPHONY AND RED NOTATION AROUND 1300: MEDIEVAL MOTET AND ORGANUM FRAGMENTS IN STOCKHOLM

This article presents, contextualises and analyses four bifolios of medieval polyphony (Stockholm Riksarkivet, fragments 535, 813 and 5786) probably copied in Northern France around 1300. These fragments – recording three-voice organa and Latin motets – feature two different non-rhythmic uses of red notation described in fourteenth-century theoretical treatises following Philippe de Vitry but never seen before in practice: an organum uses red ink to highlight ‘alien’ notes added to its chant foundation and a motet tenor to prompt octave transposition.This article synthesises new and existing evidence for a transitional and still little-studied period in the history of Latin-texted polyphony. It makes the case for an apparent gap in evidence for polyphonic composition and circulation at the turn of the thirteenth century into the fourteenth, exploring the possible explanations for and ramifications of a lacuna in surviving sources around 1300 and proffering new insights into what has been lost.

Designing with the Dialogic Self: A Framework for a Polyphonic Practice of Architectural Design

This paper questions the degree of inclusivity and equity in the treatment of voices at play in the architectural design process and advocates for an approach whereby architecture can be realized as a harmonious and polyphonic composition of multiple voices and values. Based on a dialogic ontology, the paper examines how a designer’s sense of self can contribute to their method of practice and proposes a new methodology (Narrative-based Dialogic Design-NDD) that can allow a decentralization of the sense of self to facilitate the uptake of narrative positions of others.

Sequenza IV в контексте фортепианного творчества Лучано Берио

The Italian composer Luciano Berio, a classic of modern music, is distinguished by a rare variety of creative solutions and a wide range of interests. Sequenza I, written by Berio in 1958, marked the beginning of a series of 14 pieces. They are dedicated to contemporary interpretation of possibilities of various instruments and voice in the genre of a solo concert piece. The Sequenzas are an example of virtuosity and an encyclopedia of the development of Berio’s aesthetics in the period from 1958 to 2002. In most of the pieces, Berio uses a combination of experimental instrumental techniques and dramatic elements. He calls his Sequenzas “extremely sophisticated gestural exercises”. Sequenza IV (1965) is one of the pieces with a more traditional approach. Berio avoids an experimental manner of playing and sound touche and continues to develop his own concept of a polyphonic composition. The article provides a comprehensive analysis of Sequenza IV, briefly focuses on the other Sequenzas and explores some aspects of Berio’s creativity.

Vita ceu harmonia. Jiří Carolides: A Poet and Composer between the Imperial Court and the New Town of Prague

Jiří Carolides was one of the most distinguished Czech Latin humanist poets, and in his works he combines interest in poetry with love for music. Already during his university studies, he wrote a congratulatory polyphonic composition, and he was also active as a composer when he was older. He came from a non-Catholic background, but he still managed to earn the title of poet laureate at the emperor’s court. His contacts with court intellectuals did not last long, but he had permanent ties the society of Prague’s Utraquist burghers. While he spent most of his time in Prague, and much of his poetry gives us an account of the people and buildings in Prague’s New Town, he maintained contacts with confraternities of literati and with lovers of music and of the arts in Bohemia and Moravia. From Carolides’s poetry, we also recognise his enthusiasm for music and singing, especially combined with his profound piety.

When discomfort enters our skin: Five feminists in conversation

AbstractCreated around, through and within discomfort, this piece weaves together the voices of five feminist scholars in an exploration of troubling affective and emotional experiences, offering material for critical theorizing and engaged scholarship. This inquiry started at a conference panel in July 2019. Taking on the invitation made by the editors ofFeminist Anthropologyfor the five of us to write in conversation, this piece also responds to April Petillo's piece in the first issue of this journal where she compelled us, feminist anthropologists, to listen through discomfort in order to challenge hierarchies of power and knowledge production. Through a polyphonic composition that draws on the different backgrounds, research and life trajectories of five feminist scholars through a collective online writing process, this piece purposefully plays with form, presenting reflections on naming relational discomforts, unsettling academic affects with our writing, violence, precarity and privilege, and how to work with discomfort through feminist solidarity.

INTERPRETATION PECULIARITIES OF THE CAPRICE GENRE IN F. MENDELSSOHN’S PIANO CREATIVITY

Statement of the problem. The centuries-old development of the genre of piano caprice (capriccio), which led to its flourishing in the work of romantic composers, is considered as an integral part of the genre system in Western European piano music. Insufficient study of Mendelssohn’s piano works, in particular caprices, determines the relevance of the research. The purpose of the article is to generalize stylistic qualities of the composer’s piano caprices in the context of genre evolution and their performance features. Analysis of research and publications. The genre of caprice is studied in the historical research of T. Livanova (1983), who equates the form of fantasy and capriccio-ricercare. V. Protopopov (1979) reveals the connection between fantasycapriccio and fugue in the early 17th century. K. Agisheva (2007) examines the historical aspects of the study of the capriccio genre. Modern Western European researchers, analyzing the genre of piano caprice, emphasize that its musical texture is filled with elements of vocal lyrics and mood swings (Lewandowski, 2017; Keym, 2009). At the same time, the issues of performance features remain unclear. Methods. Complex methodological approach applied in the article (historical, genre, structural-functional, performаnce research methods) allows us to trace the development of caprice from the Baroque era to Romanticism and conduct an intonational-dramatic analysis of Mendelssohn’s works in accordance with the following criteria: musical form (dramaturgy), textural presentation, thematic development, tempo-rhythmic characteristics, nature of thematism. Analysis of recent research and publications. Baroque caprice is a work of polyphonic composition and improvisational construction (J. S.Bach, G.F. Handel, I. Sweelink, J. Frescobaldi). In the era of Viennese Classicism, caprice was not very popular due to its improvisational, bizarre nature, contradicting to the aesthetic ideals of the time. The genre of piano caprice became widespread in the era of Romanticism in the works of F. Mendelssohn, whose distinguished style is marked by virtuosity, melody, grace, sentimentality, clarity of presentation. Among the works of F. Mendelssohn there are seven caprices for solo piano and with orchestra. The intonational-dramatic analysis of Mendelssohn’s piano caprices makes it possible to trace the main stylistic qualities of the genre and to reveal its performance features. Conclusions. The work outlines the stylistic traits of Mendelssohn’s piano caprices ассording to such parameters: – compositional structure of his piano caprices is a one-movement composition or a cyclic one, composed of two or three movements; – texture of the music is determined by polyphonic orchestral elements and broad cantilena themes; – thematic development is based on repetition, variability or variation; – tempo-rhythm is characterized by three-beat pulsation, syncopation of rhythm, sharp accentuation; – thematicism is determined by synthesis of lyrical and decisively acting images inherent in the style of Mendelssohn. Hence, the main task for the performer is clarity, expressive intonation of the melody in combination with a “pearl” light touch and energetic dynamic tempo rhythm.

Intabulation as process and practice (Master thesis)

Research Title: Intabulation as process and practice Research questions: When it comes to the manifold surviving solo lute intabulations from around 1500, where is the line between "unwritten" and "written" intabulation? Intabulating involves the writing out of several parts into tablature, but does this twofold distinction really apply to all pieces? What was the process of appropriation of vocal polyphony for a lutenist of the early 16th century? How can we apply this to our own processes? Abstract: Intabulation refers to the arrangement of vocal pieces for what Johannes Tinctoris refers to as a “perfect instrument”, amongst which he counts such instruments as keyboards and the lute – and it implies writing out the parts of a polyphonic composition into tablature. However, after playing many surviving intabulations for several years, I had a strong feeling that there must be an “unwritten” solo lute intabulation practice behind the “written” intabulations from the beginning of the 16th century, in contrast to the more “composed” intabulations from the time after the mid-16th century. While surviving sources provide us with much information on what lutenists played, they also hide the “unwritten” practice which they did not record. We can only imagine what was happening. In this thesis, I investigate the process of intabulation by lute players from this time by analysing and comparing different versions of the same song from different sources. Through this research, I trace the transition of the changing style of intabulation, which is in turn related to the transition of lute technique from plectrum to finger-plucked and the change in style of the vocal models. Moreover, the diffusion of printed music changed the manner of the transmission of music. To conclude, I hypothesise that lute players might have listened to and copied each other’s intabulations unconsciously, and when they wanted to preserve their work, they might have made some adjustments to their intabulations. The study also suggests how to apply these ideas to actual intabulation practice, which will be presented in the Research Symposium online as a video format. Biography: The Japanese lutenist Asako Ueda studied the lute at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague with Mike Fentross and Joachim Held and completed her Bachelor's with the highest achievable mark, which gives her the opportunity to continue to the Master’s program with the Excellence Scholarship of the Royal Conservatory of the Hague. She won first prize at the Biagio Marini Competition and third prize at the International Van Wassenaer Competition. She started playing the violin at the age of five. After finishing her Bachelor’s degree with the violin in Tokyo, she continued to study the Baroque violin and composition. https://asakoueda.com

Disruption: On the Rhythm of Radical Politics in Uwe Timm’sRot(Red)

Politics proper follows the rhythm of disruption, which recalibrates common expectations, takes issue with linear temporal trajectories, and sets in motion many different forms of communication between variously affiliated members of community. This article examines Uwe Timm’s 2001 novel <i>Rot</i>, first, as a polyphonic composition closely related to bebop and, second, as a literary attempt to disrupt the status quo in contemporary German political culture. As I argue, this multivocal novel illustrates how disruption, as a paradoxically rhythmic concept, touches upon individual action and communal coordination, flow and repetition, as well as structure and mobility. As an aesthetic, historical, and political legacy of 1968, it works as a matter of intergenerational communication and in opposition to the neoliberal oracles about efficiency, predictability, regularity, synchronicity, and uniformity. This simultaneously critical and creative inquiry offers important cultural and political insights into the relationship between rhythm and memory vis-à-vis the ’68 generation to which both the protagonist and the author belong. While consulting with the latest research in cultural criticism and political theory, I explain to what extent radical politics, as it is represented in the novel, is unimaginable without the disruption of rhythm in interpersonal relationships and in more abstract social contracts between citizen and state. (DK)

ДО ПИТАННЯ ІСТОРИКО-КУЛЬТУРНОГО РОЗВИТКУ КАМЕРНО-ВОКАЛЬНИХ ФОРТЕПІАННИХ ТВОРІВ

One of the leading groups of genres in which the interaction of vocal and instrumental principles is possible is chamber-vocal works, where one of the participants in the creative dialogue is the piano. The development of chamber and vocal works demonstrated the vitality and leading importance of the genre for musical culture. In the context of the history of music, we can distinguish various forms of interaction between voice and piano. The field of chamber and vocal creativity has repeatedly attracted the attention of scientists. However, due to the fact that it has been developing since the XIX century, the period of its existence to this day often remains little studied. Accordingly, the question of the formation of chamber and vocal piano works is a problem that opens a significant field for studying aspects of the formation of this group of genres. The combination of vocal and instrumental principles has an extremely long history. For a long period of time, vocal was given priority over the instruments that accompanied it. Regarding the question of the unity of vocal and instrumental principles in one work, it was present as early as the times of ancient cultures. As a rule, the instrumental accompaniment played a secondary function in relation to the voice, providing support, tuning, shading the voice or simply filling in the pauses necessary for the rest of the vocalist. With the advent of the Renaissance and the development of various secular vocal genres, there are various works, both purely vocal (polyphonic) and vocal-instrumental. Among the polyphonic genres can be distinguished barcarole, villanelli, frottoli, madrigals, canzones. They are dominated by a polyphonic composition, which provides for «equality» of all voices. Chamber-vocal piano works occupy an important place in the singer's activity. The process of forming a duet of voice and piano had a long prehistory. The stage of the final formation of this genre falls on the XVIII century, and this is facilitated by a number of factors – the arrival of the piano to replace keyboard instruments, its predecessors, and the worldview of the Classicist era. A very important factor is the formation of dialogue between the instrument and the voice, which changes the priority of the vocals. During this period, a kind of summary of the achievements of previous centuries is carried out and conditions are laid for the following directions, in which chamber vocal-instrumental piano works will acquire a fundamentally different quality level.

«Основной бас»: к истории одного музыкального образа в романе Л. Н. Толстого «Анна Каренина»

The article deals with the history of a musical term, transformed by L. N. Tolstoy in his novel Anna Karenina into imagery employed for the conveying of ideas about running farmlands in Russia, which are so important for the author and his character Konstantin Levin. Having chosen a musical term to express his idea in the most accurate way, Tolstoy draws parallels between various narrative arcs and certain parts in a polyphonic composition where the main role is that of the “thorough bass” which is Levin’s impressions of the household of an old and wise peasant. Quite expectable of the writer, who loved and studied music, this artistic solution seemed to be so unusual to the editors preparing the publications of Anna Karenina during the entire 20th century that they considered it to be a misspell of a copying clerk or a type setter. As a result, a polysemic musical term “thorough bass” was replaced by “fundamental basis”. Looking up in the autographs does not give the answer to the question, which of these two options is correct, as manuscript collection has not been fully preserved. The only formal source which allows a textual critic to reconstruct the initial version is the text of the first publication of the novel in the magazine Russky Vestnik (1875–1877) corrected by Tolstoy himself in 1877, in accordance with which Anna Karenina is being published in academic Complete works of L.N. Tolstoy in 100 volumes.

CREATING MS C: AUTHOR, WORKSHOP, COURT

Machaut's set of complete works manuscripts forms a central pillar of our understanding of musical and generic developments and their courtly reception in fourteenth-century France. By applying the continuing scholarly advances made during the study of courtly practice and the professional Parisian book-trade to the earliest of these artefacts, this contribution reassesses the creation-history of the manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 1586. The results tap into a number of enduring discussions within Machaut scholarship. These range from questions of patronage, to aspects of Machaut's authorial control and involvement in the production of his books, to the importance of order on the single-work level within a generic grouping, and to the practicalities of manuscript creation and intentionality. Finally, proposed adjustments to the dating of some compositions call for a review of existing notions of generic development and polyphonic composition in the early part of the century, thus resonating beyond Machaut's personal output.

Cadence formulas in instrumental music of the Renaissance and early Baroque in the context of that time’s theory of music and composition practice

Cadence (ending) formulas are one of the most intriguing phenomena in music. They occur in works of all historical periods and styles and they have a variety of forms: from melodic and harmonic turns to rhythmic or even dynamic ones. However, this issue is important not only from the perspective of theory of music or composition technique but also performance practice as the way how a singer or instrument player understands the functioning of separate elements of a piece will impinge on the sound shape of the work presented to the public. Reading the extramusical message hidden in the structure of a piece should be regarded particularly significant for the interpretation of pieces written in times when adding precise performance guidelines in the score was not practiced. In case of compositions written in the 16th and the first half of the 17th centuries, the way how ending formulas functioned was a result of the specificity of that time’s modal system and the principles of polyphonic composition, in which the role of melodic (horizontal) thinking prevailed over the harmonic (vertical) one. The issue of cadences gains special importance while analysing instrumental works in which the absence of verbal text hinders the division of the piece into segments. It only becomes possible thanks to analysing the structure of the piece, including the allocation of modal ending formulas in separate voices of the composition. Howsoever the topic of cadences in music of the 16th and 17th centuries has been discussed many times in the literature on the subject, it has had no satisfactory presentation related to that time’s instrumental repertoire. The present article is an attempt to elaborate on the deliberations on the topic of modal cadence formulas in instrumental works from the 16th and the first half of the 17th centuries. Its first part has an introductory character and it touches on the notion of cadence in modern theoretical-musical and encyclopaedic texts compared to composition theory and practice in the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. The second part of the article is an analysis of selected instrumental works from the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries meant for different types of line-ups – the four-voice canzona by Florentio Maschera, canzona by Girolamo Frescobaldi for solo instrument with basso continuo and one of the ricercati by Giovanni Bassano meant for solo melodic instrument without accompaniment.

Architectonic integrity of the polyphonic composition in the aspect of discourse-analysis

Relevance of the study. The application of the concepts of architectonics and tectonics to a polyphonic work in order to reveal the basic differences in the logical structure of imitative and non-imitative polyphony is undertaken for the first time.Main objective of the study is a discourse analysis of the architectonic integrity of polyphonic work on the texture and thematic levels, in conditions of imitative and non-imitative polyphony.Methodology of the study. The application of the discursive approach makes it possible to investigate the ratio of the general tectonic archetypes of a musical work (as a kind of “linguistic” principles with their typical model) and a polyphonic musical work in its chronotypologically defined genre-compositional discursive practice (as a givenness of a musical speech). The projection of the concept of “arched” architectonics (V. Moskalenko) to a polyphonic structure makes it possible to differentiate it into simultaneous (“contrapuntal”), succession (polyphonic) and resultant (synthesizing) varieties, in consideration of the multipartite and specific branching of the texture landscape of the polyphonic work by horizontal, vertical and diagonal simultaneously.Results and conclusions. The architectonic integrity of the polyphonic product is considered. It was revealed that the specificity of the polyphonic work, unlike the harmonious by its structure multivoiced music, is displayed primarily in its “texture landscape”. It found that in non-imitative polyphonic genres and forms (polymelodic and isorhythmic motets of the epochs Ars Antiqua and Ars Nova, contrapuntal or polythematical chorale arrangement on the cantus firmus, ostinato polyphonic variations, etc.), due to their many-tierity and gravitation toward compositional segmentation, the predominant effect of the simultaneous type of architectonic integrity is observed. In imitation polyphony (in particular, in ricercar or fugue), coordination “along the diagonal” causes the resulting type of architectonic thinking of the interpreter.

Detecting tāla Computationally in Polyphonic Context-A Novel Approach

In North-Indian-Music-System(NIMS),tabla is mostly used as percussive accompaniment for vocal-music in polyphonic-compositions. The human auditory system uses perceptual grouping of musical-elements and easily filters the tabla component, thereby decoding prominent rhythmic features like tala, tempo from a polyphonic composition. For Western music, lots of work have been reported for automated drum analysis of polyphonic composition. However, attempts at computational analysis of tala by separating the tabla-signal from mixed signal in NIMS have not been successful. Tabla is played with two components - right and left. The right-hand component has frequency overlap with voice and other instruments. So, tala analysis of polyphonic-composition, by accurately separating the tabla-signal from the mixture is a baffling task, therefore an area of challenge. In this work we propose a novel technique for successfully detecting tala using left-tabla signal, producing meaningful results because the left-tabla normally doesn't have frequency overlap with voice and other instruments. North-Indian-rhythm follows complex cyclic pattern, against linear approach of Western-rhythm. We have exploited this cyclic property along with stressed and non-stressed methods of playing tabla-strokes to extract a characteristic pattern from the left-tabla strokes, which, after matching with the grammar of tala-system, determines the tala and tempo of the composition. A large number of polyphonic(vocal+tabla+other-instruments) compositions has been analyzed with the methodology and the result clearly reveals the effectiveness of proposed techniques.

The polyphonic performance of testimony in Svetlana Aleksievich’s Voices from Utopia

ABSTRACTThis article claims that Svetlana Aleksievich’s Voices from Utopia should be read as testimony. Although based on eyewitnesses interviewed by Aleksievich, the voices represented in the five books are interpreted as the creation of an implied author. In contrast to a theoretical standpoint defining fact in a dichotomous relation to fiction, this study identifies the historical value of Aleksievich’s writing as intimately connected to the aesthetic composition. The article has two major aims. The first is to describe how the monologues and choirs in Voices from Utopia are represented. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the polyphonic novel, the internal focalization of the testimonies, in combination with a significant reduction of the external perspective, both on the level of dialogue and narration, are described as together constituting a polyphonic composition. The second aim is to demonstrate how this polyphony is interrelated to trauma theory and the psychological hardships experienced by the witnesses in the act of representing a traumatic experience. The hypothesis is that the polyphonic structure could be interpreted as an ethical representation of the interviews: first, it reflects an empathy with the witnesses’ ambivalence when confessing their traumatic past; secondly, because it contributes to ethically engaging the implied reader.

And I Still Love Them: On Touching Loss

In this article, the author performs a re‐membering practice that incorporates a relational materialist theory. It traces the disturbances that follow in the wake of three deaths in her family. Written in an autoethnographic voice, the article is a polyphonic composition of the narrative therapy approach of re‐membering entangled with the spacetimematter of silence, speaking, sitting, staying, presence, absence, loss of momentum, dreams, trees, books, cardiac pace‐makers, writing, breath, ashes, murmuring, suffering. Thus, the dispersed agencies of bodies, human and non‐human, reinvigorate a linguistic practice and the author's personal and professional life.

Echoes of Cape Verdean Identity: Literature and Music in the Archipelago

Abstract: This article addresses the close connection between music and literature in Cape Verde, which is able to harmonize those forces that are an index to Cape Verdean identity: bread, sound &amp; phoneme. A choir of illustrious voices plays a melody (or a polyphonic composition) whose theme is the thirst for survival of the Cape Verdean people and the permanence of a Creole culture founded upon a symbolic national trilogy—corn, the discourse on music, and literary discourse.