Set Of Songs Research Articles

Sampling Increases Music Sales: An Empirical Copyright Study

The Supreme Court instructs that the most important consideration in analyzing fair use is the effect on the market for the original. Employing music sales data, this article presents evidence of digital sampling's effect on the sales of sampled songs. Our results indicate that a reassessment of fair use in the area of music sampling is needed since sales of sampled songs increased after being repurposed within new songs. These results are robust and highly statistically significant. Findings of this nature favor a judicial determination that sampling constitutes a fair use, even when considering the influence that a new work has on extant licensing markets for sample clearance. This article argues that the current sample–licensing market is a product of aberrant antisampling case law arising from a lack of relevant empirical data and nonutilitarian judicial opinions. As set forth herein, the goal of encouraging creative activity without hindering copyright owners’ capacity to financially gain from their work is served by implementing a limited presumption of fair use for sampling. The findings are further applicable outside of the fair use analysis, as the study is important in the private law when viewed through a law and strategy lens. Forward thinking music firms should reframe their approach by encouraging sampling of their works to secure cost‐free advertising and achieve a competitive advantage.

Collaboration as Communication in the Works of W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten, 1935–1941

W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten's 1941 opera Paul Bunyan marked the most public production of their almost decade-long collaborative relationship. Like the song settings that preceded it, the opera highlights the influence of Britten on Auden's aesthetic regarding musical and literary collaborations. This article argues that the poems Auden dedicated to Britten, and that Britten subsequently set to music, establish collaboration as a form of communication through which Auden challenges Britten to respond to public statements he has made about Britten's sexuality – trying to coerce him to bring private sentiments into the open. Without the Britten material, much of what would be known of Auden's engagement with music would come from the essays he wrote about music in the 1960s, thirty years after this first major musical collaboration. Despite the fact that Auden's own account of the relation between words and music later shifted toward an aesthetic in which words must be subordinate to music, particularly in operatic works, in his work with Britten, Auden explored more fluid and indirect forms of collaboration. In fact, their direct collaborative relationship evolved out of mutual admiration for the products of their initial, indirect collaborations.

“In, on, or about the Words”: The Latent Music of Stevens’s Poetry

“In, on, or about the Words”: The Latent Music of Stevens’s Poetry Bart Eeckhout I. Prelude: Adagio molto, senza espressione LET’S START at the very end, which in classical music is so often where the whole composition leads to. Let’s have another look at that supposedly last poem Wallace Stevens wrote, “Of Mere Being.” To most readers, a visual image will be flashing up automatically—that of a palm tree in which a gold-feathered bird is sitting. The painterly impetus for this image is clear: our view of that palm tree, rising on a horizon of sorts, is intrinsically perspectival, and the pictorial quality of the brightly sparkling bird is enhanced by the vocabulary of a “bronze decor” against which the tree emerges (CPP 476). The worlds typically imagined in painting are no doubt implied also, in part, when the speaker subsequently concludes “that it is not the reason / That makes us happy or unhappy” (CPP 477). For a lover of the visual arts such as Stevens, the pictorial imagination has its own irrational manner of sufficing. Still, the aesthetic satisfactions afforded by the scene imagined in “Of Mere Being” obviously derive as much, if not more, from the bird’s singing. And what the bird appears to be singing, “without human meaning, / Without human feeling,” is “a foreign song” (CPP 476). Would it be too far-fetched to suppose that this song was somehow associated with one of Stevens’s ancestral languages, German, or emerged out of it perhaps? To be sure, the song itself couldn’t have been in German, as little as it was in English, both being full of “human meaning.”1 But a poet’s images don’t just come out of nowhere. “Poetry is a renovation of experience,” Stevens notes in one of his “Adagia” (CPP 914). “The real” may be “only the base,” he suggests in another, “But it is the base” (CPP 917). A few years earlier, in 1948, the German composer Richard Strauss completed his own last work, a set of songs for soprano and orchestra. They are known by their posthumous title, Vier letzte Lieder or Four Last Songs. The final and longest song is titled “Im Abendrot” (“At Dusk”) and is set to a poem by the romantic poet Joseph von Eichendorff. It’s the song in which Strauss most clearly confronts his own imminent death, characteristically depicted in a sunset scene whose romantic clichés lie at the back [End Page 191] of Stevens’s more original imagery of a gold-feathered bird caught in a bronze decor. The text of the song ends with the conventional first-person speaker—notably absent from Stevens’s poem—wistfully wondering, “ist dies etwa der Tod?” (“is this, perhaps, death?”). The music at this point fleetingly evokes a motif from Strauss’s own earlier symphonic poem Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration). All of this would be a tenuous link to establish were it not for what follows those final words: what Strauss invites the listener to attend to, after a number of bars in which the strings slowly wind down to darkness— and thus while the mind is gradually moving “Beyond the last thought” of the farewell poem’s text (CPP 476)—is the foreign song, without human feeling, of two warbling flutes, announced earlier in von Eichendorff’s text by the figure of two ascending larks. On the cusp of death, in his own evocation of a state of mere being, Strauss invites us to bask at some length in the delight provided by these flutes’ foreign, meaningless warbling, beyond anything that can be conveyed in language or reason. The analogy of the extended basking in a sensation that gives irrational pleasure is of importance here, because it is all that is left for the observer’s mind to engage in, and we find it reflected in the tempo organization of Stevens’s poem: having set the scene of the singing bird and the palm tree in a long six-line sentence occupying two full stanzas, having then extracted from this scene the briefer, two-line conclusion “that it is not...

Introducing the "Pushkinalia"

Introducing the "Pushkinalia" Ilya Vinitsky and Michael Wachtel On 20–21 April 2018 Princeton University hosted the first annual "Pushkinalia," under the broad title "Pushkin Unlimited." The purpose of the event was to bring together scholars of different generations working on Push-kin's legacy. The format was closer to a brainstorming session than to a conference. The poster, an attempt to set a playful tone for the event itself, depicted Pushkin and Arina Rodionovna riding on an elephant. Outside of the keynote address, a lecture by Alexander Dolinin, Professor Emeritus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison ("What Can We Do with the Books in Pushkin's Library? The Case of 'Puteshestvie v Arzrum'"), the participants were encouraged not to read prepared texts, but to speak freely on any aspect of Pushkin's work that they considered significant for the development of Pushkin studies, from his poetry to his correspondence to his historical and political thinking to the work of his contemporaries. Each presentation, based on brief excerpts distributed before the meeting, lasted approximately fifteen minutes and was followed by twenty minutes of discussion. The event culminated in a one-hour concert of song settings of Pushkin's poetry, presented by performance faculty of Princeton's Music Department, followed by a festive dinner that included a fierce yet friendly competition of Pushkin trivia. In addition to Alexander Dolinin, the following scholars participated: Alexey Balakin (Pushkinskii Dom), Edyta Bojanowska (Yale University), Angela Brintlinger (Ohio State), Ivan Eubanks (University College of the Cayman Islands), Alyssa Gillespie (Bowdoin College), Luba Golburt (University of California at Berkeley), Joe Peschio (University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee), Oleg Proskurin (Emory University), Ilya Vinitsky (Princeton University), and Michael Wachtel (Princeton University). An account of the meeting, authored by Princeton graduate student Laura Christians, appeared in the most recent Vremennik Pushkinskoi kommissii. Building on the success of that initial event, the second annual "Pushkinalia" moved to the Cayman Islands on 11–12 January 2019. It was hosted by the University College of the Cayman Islands and, in particular, by Ivan Eubanks, a faculty member and former editor of The Pushkin Review. Titled "Pushkin Offshore: Привет, свободная стихия!" it followed the same format and included many of the same participants. Oleg Proskurin gave the keynote presentation: "Pushkin's Fake Passports: 'From Pindemonte' [End Page 1] and Its Political Background." Other participants were Edyta Bojanowska (Yale University), Caryl Emerson (Princeton University), Ivan Eubanks (University College of the Cayman Islands), Alyssa Gillespie (Bowdoin College), Luba Golburt (University of California at Berkeley), Olga Hasty (Princeton University), Svetlana Korshunova (Princeton University), Kirill Ospovat (University of Wisconsin at Madison), Ilya Vinitsky (Prince-ton University), Michael Wachtel (Princeton University), and Emily Wang (Notre Dame). Enrichment took the form of a twilight cruise ("Погасло дневное светило" or "Шумят Карибы подо мною"). The poster for the event—reproduced in this issue of The Pushkin Review—featured the famous shot of Pushkin in formal dress gazing at the ocean, surfboard in hand. Since the "Pushkinalia" was conceived as an experimental forum where participants could share unfinished work and request input from their peers, not every presentation was expected to result in a publication, and the publications that did emerge often had only a tangential relationship to the initial presentation. Whether ultimately published or not, the papers and discussion were deemed highly productive by participants, as reflected in a high rate of return for "Pushkinalia II." Many of the earlier participants will be coming to the third "Pushkinalia," which will take place again at Princeton University in January of 2020, with Igor Pilshchikov scheduled to give the keynote address. In this issue of The Pushkin Review, we are delighted to publish a selection of papers inspired by our first meeting. It is our hope that future issues will likewise feature work initially presented at the "Pushkinalia" events. [End Page 2] Click for larger view View full resolution Poster © Nina Zhong [End Page 3] Copyright © 2019 Ilya Vinitsky and Michael Wachtel

Dialogues with the Archives: Arrarrkpi Responses to Recordings as Part of the Living Song Tradition of Manyardi

AbstractThis article explores the role of legacy recordings of song for a family of Arrarrkpi (Mawng-speaking people), who are contemporary singers and dancers of manyardi, a public ceremonial performance of western Arnhem Land, in their collaborative work with a team of Balanda (Euro-diasporic) researchers. Drawing inspiration from the dialogical approach of the Yolŋu ceremonial leader and scholar Joe Gumbula, the article reflects on various dialogues that inform the research, practice and archival recording of manyardi. We demonstrate how legacy recordings reinvigorate contemporary performance practice in collective settings, rather than serving as canonical or ideal versions of song sets to be replicated by an individual singer. We suggest that maintaining the linking and organisation of enriched song metadata from this community to the archival collection will enable future song inheritors to maintain dialogues with archives that hold recordings of manyardi.

Blending the past and present in a retro branded music concert: the impact of nostalgia proneness

PurposeRetro branding is gaining unprecedented momentum. This study aims to empirically examine the moderating impact of nostalgia proneness on the relationship between retro branding and consumer behavioral intentions in the music industry. Nostalgia and retro branding are two paramount elements conceptually discussed in literature but rarely investigated together empirically despite their interconnections.Design/methodology/approachAn experiment including four different scenarios blending retro and contemporary stimuli was conducted on 181 subjects. Two rock band variables were manipulated: song set list (i.e. list of songs) and band lineup.FindingsThe findings suggest that mixing the past and present for a retro brand impacts consumer behavior. A more nuanced explanation is suggested by showing that a retro brand has a strong effect on consumers’ intentions to attend and willingness to pay, but not on their WOM intentions, when these consumers are more prone to feeling nostalgia.Originality/valueNostalgia and retro branding appear to be interconnected concepts, but few studies have assessed how nostalgia proneness can impact consumers’ intentions toward a retro brand. Fewer have investigated consumers’ intentions toward an experiential, intangible retro brand.

MANIFESTATIONS OF VARIANCE IN THE BELARUSIAN CALENDAR AND RITUAL TRADITION (ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE SPRING SONG “VOL BUSHUE – VIASNU CHUYE”)

The article is devoted to the study of the variation of the Belarusian calendar-ritual songs on the example of the ancient and widespread spring song “Vol bushyе – viasnu chuye”. Dozens of tunes and lyrics of songs recorded in various places of Belarus at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 21st century were analyzed. In modern folklore, variation is understood as a specific feature of folklore which manifests itself in the existence of works of folk art in variants. The method of comparing options has become one of the main ones in the process of revealing the features and patterns of the existence of song folklore in variants. As a result of the research, the facts of the existence of a variant set of Belarusian folk songs “Vol bushyе – viasnu chuye”, differences of local styles and traditions, revealed a number of reasons that influence the occurrence of song variants (place, time, form of being, age and individual abilities of performer and other). The rich material made it possible to draw some conclusions about the structural and semantic laws of the existence of variations of songs, the nature of metrorhythmic, melodic types, modes, plot variants. Variation, as one of the primary features of folk art in the cycle of Belarusian ritual songs and directly in the spring songs has its own characteristics. The peculiarity of rhythmics and melodies give the songs plasticity, drama, perfectly convey the emotional states that artistically combine with the plot-shaped system of spring song-calls.

An Aboriginal Women’s Song from Arrwek, Central Australia

Songs are a fundamental part of Indigenous Australian cultures. They are vehicles for transmitting experiences about a region, including the stories and ancestral entities from the creation. Yet relatively little is known about the musical characteristics of songs from many parts of Australia. In this article we present the first musical analysis of traditional songs of the Anmatyerr people of central Australia. We analyse a selection of songs from recordings of a women’s song set owned and performed by the landholders of Arrwek, an estate that straddles the Anmatyerr-speaking and Warlpiri-speaking regions. We analyse three basic acoustic elements of a central Australian Aboriginal song: rhythmic text, pitch, and the relationship between them. Our analysis finds that these have much in common with Warlpiri songs, despite their Anmatyerr geographic affiliation.

Las «Canciones manchegas» para piano y voz de Pedro Echevarría Bravo. Un hito en el regionalismo musical manchego

Pedro Echevarría Bravo es conocido por su trabajo de recopilador de folklore musical en La Mancha. Utilizando una selección del material que recogió compuso, entre los años 40 y 60 del pasado siglo, una serie de canciones de concierto para voz y piano. Echevarría fue ampliando y modificando con el paso de los años esta pequeña colección dotando a seguidillas, romances, jotas, fandangos, etc. de un acompañamiento de piano que se inspira en estilos y movimientos tan diversos como el posromanticismo, impresionismo, neoclasicismo o jazz. Con estas características, las Canciones manchegas de Pedro Echevarría se convierten en una de las composiciones más reseñables del regionalismo musical manchego.

No one is an island.

My supervisor waved goodbye and boarded a plane. I had just started my Ph.D. studying invasive species on a remote oceanic island, where I would be spending most of the next 3 years bashing through rainforest to count invertebrates. My supervisor had done his own Ph.D. here on Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean 2 decades earlier. He had found me a place to stay and introduced me to the handful of other ecologists who were managing the national park or conducting their own research, but I wasn't working directly with them. Everyone else attached to my project was more than 5000 kilometers away—and so were my friends, family, and entire support network. I told myself I could manage on my own. ![Figure][1] ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT NEUBECKER Despite my enthusiasm about my research, it wasn't long before I began to feel lonely. At times, I struggled to find the motivation to get out into the field. I was suffering from a sense of isolation that is not uncommon for Ph.D. students, which in my case was amplified by literal isolation. I hesitated to reach out to the locals—a small community that developed after the island was first settled at the end of the 19th century. I was worried that socializing would distract from my work, and I was nervous that the locals might not welcome an “outsider.” But I eventually realized that the only way I would get through my remote Ph.D. was to reach out and create a new support network. My first move was to visit the epicenter of any small remote community: the local pub. One afternoon, after a long day in the field, I finally dropped in for a beer. Almost immediately, someone asked how long I had been working at the power station. I was confused, but then I realized I was wearing a work shirt bearing the company logo, which I had gotten at the secondhand shop. We both had a laugh after I explained who I was and what I was doing. This shirt confusion turned out to be a great conversation starter: I ended up having that same introductory chat with a bunch of people over the next few weeks. Soon, each visit to the pub involved catching up with friends and talking about different aspects of my research, which helped keep me motivated about my work. Connecting with the community helped with more than just my emotional well-being. When I asked a new friend to help me assemble some fences I needed for my experiments, for example, he said he was more than happy to—but not if he needed to do it the way I had planned. My friend, who was a builder, suggested a bunch of practical improvements to the design, and together we were able to get the fences up with much less trouble. I don't think I would have been able to get the experiment done without him. My final step in becoming a full member of the Christmas Island community was to give something back. Quite a few people on the island played music, and afternoon acoustic guitar shows were not uncommon, but rock 'n' roll gigs at the pub were unacceptably rare. So along with some friends, I sniffed out equipment scattered around the island; helped organize musicians into bands; and headlined the show with a raucous set of White Stripes songs, complete with my own blues guitar stylings (although attendees were far more impressed by the drummer's skills). It felt like everyone on the island attended the show, and some were still talking about it years later. Since finishing my Ph.D., I have moved twice for research positions, and each time I have found myself in new communities. The surroundings haven't been as extreme, but again, in the beginning, I was tempted to ignore any feelings of isolation and focus solely on work. But I knew better. I remembered how reaching out to the welcoming and supportive local community during my Ph.D. not only helped me get through the isolation, but also improved the quality of my work. And whenever I felt like a stranger, I made a point of visiting the pub. [1]: pending:yes

A preliminary study on effect of buddhist pirith chanting and pop music on the growth and yield performance in rice (<em>Oryza sativa</em> L.)

Music influences the growth of plants through either promoting or restricting the growth of plants. The effects of Pirith chanting and pop music were focused in the present study. Seeds of Two (02) rice varieties (Bg300 and Kaluheenati) were subjected to dormancy break treatment, kept in a soundproof confined chamber and arranged in Completely Randomized Design (CRD) with two (02) replicates and 10 seeds per replicate. Seeds were allowed to germinate under the sound rhythms; pop music, Pirith chanting and silence separately in sound proof chamber. A set of pop songs and Thunsuthra in Pirith chanting were chosen as the two (02) sound rhythms. Seeds were kept under silence served as the control. Music and Pirith were played separately for an hour, at 30cm distance away from the seeds with an intensity of 55-60 dB for seven (07) days continuously, maintaining equal environmental conditions. Following seven (07) days, the percent germination was recorded. The same germinated seeds were planted in plastic pots filled with paddy soil, up to ¾ of the total depth and pots were arranged in Completely Randomized Design (CRD) with two (02) replicates and five (05) plants per replicate. Following one week, plants were subjected to the sound rhythm treatments and silence separately for three (03) months continuously. Measurement on growth and yield performance were recorded every fortnight. Significantly different (p < 0.05) in growth and yield performances were observed under Pirith and pop music. Considerably higher rates of growth and yield were observed for varieties exposed to Pirith and comparatively, the effect of Pirith on growth and yield performance was higher with respect to pop music thus implying that the rhythmic chanting of Pirith is the most appropriate type music that improved the growth performance of Oryza sativa.

Key Learnings from an International Social Entrepreneurship Collaboration: Songs to Change Our World

Free to read on publisher website This project is an international collaboration between music industry educators at higher education institutions in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. The main goal of the project was to provide a case study and guidelines for collaborative pedagogical practices in higher education music programs in order to promote intercultural understanding, creativity, and social entrepreneurship. After the educators completed their initial planning work, the project was conducted in three phases. During the first phase, groups of songwriting students collaboratively wrote a set of songs that commented on a range of contemporary social issues. The second phase addressed the challenges encountered in successfully realizing international collaborations. In the final phase of the project, entrepreneurship and music industry students evaluated the original songs and incorporated a selection of these songs into student-driven collaborative social entrepreneurship projects. Finally, music industry students came up with promotional strategies to move the final successful project forward. The following identifies and discusses the social, cultural, educational, and logistical issues we encountered during the project, and concludes with our recommendations on how to mitigate and avoid these difficulties in similar projects.

Mendelssohn and Irony

The songs belong to the few compositions by Mendelssohn that until now have received scant philological review. They languished long enough under the verdict of possessing less value and not being weighty enough, especially in German-speaking countries. Avoiding faulty comparisons to Schubert or Schumann song settings facilitates a clearer assessment of Mendelssohn’s compositional ingenuity and sublime melodiousness that serve to capture the tone of each poem. This is especially evident in the largest lied group-the Heine settings- through the subtle compositional means used to reflect Heine’s characteristic ironic shifts.

A Neural Parametric Singing Synthesizer Modeling Timbre and Expression from Natural Songs

We recently presented a new model for singing synthesis based on a modified version of the WaveNet architecture. Instead of modeling raw waveform, we model features produced by a parametric vocoder that separates the influence of pitch and timbre. This allows conveniently modifying pitch to match any target melody, facilitates training on more modest dataset sizes, and significantly reduces training and generation times. Nonetheless, compared to modeling waveform directly, ways of effectively handling higher-dimensional outputs, multiple feature streams and regularization become more important with our approach. In this work, we extend our proposed system to include additional components for predicting F0 and phonetic timings from a musical score with lyrics. These expression-related features are learned together with timbrical features from a single set of natural songs. We compare our method to existing statistical parametric, concatenative, and neural network-based approaches using quantitative metrics as well as listening tests.

Present Absence: Debussy, Song, and the Art of (Dis)appearing

Debussy's early song settings of Théodore de Banville and Paul Bourget foreground the Romantic topic by which the singing voice revokes lost presence. The closed aesthetic space of music becomes, in these songs, the space of the nocturnal garden in which the souls of lovers merge with the containing landscape. But Debussy's fascination with the poetry of Paul Verlaine, over a period of twenty-two years from 1882 to 1904, juxtaposes such evocations of intense sensuous presence with songs of alienated absence and ironic distance. The poems Debussy set from Verlaine's Fêtes galantes (1869) provoke both kinds of song, the latter embodied through the shadowy figures of the commedia dell'arte. In the case of two such poems, “En sourdine” and “Clair de lune,” Debussy produced two different settings of the same text, ten years apart. The usual account is that these show the composer's progression from Romantic lyricism to a more sophisticated but withdrawn style, a development paralleled by a biographical story moving from his youthful passion for the dedicatee of the early songs, Marie-Blanche Vasnier, to the breakdown of his first marriage in 1904. But neither the stylistic nor the biographical narrative provides an adequate account of the Verlaine songs, and both miss their exploration of the economy of desire at the heart of the piano song.

Johannes Brahms: Die Lieder. Ein musikalischer Werkführer. By Matthias Schmidt.

Whereas Schumann and Wolf tended to write songs in bursts, Brahms produced lieder with some regularity throughout much of his creative life. In this recent book Matthias Schmidt suggests that the lied, viewed as Brahms’s constant companion, may provide a key to understanding the composer’s wider creativity (p. 7). Proceeding from this bold perspective, Schmidt has crafted an insightful introduction to the solo songs that also elucidates many of Brahms’s ongoing musical interests and aesthetic concerns. Though aimed at the general reader, this engaging study contributes to the scholarly understanding of Brahms as a song composer, and asserts the centrality of lieder within his oeuvre. Schmidt provides an overview of Brahms’s song output in eight short chapters, followed by an index of the solo songs and a bibliography that lists relevant academic studies in both English and German. In each chapter he intersperses commentary on individual songs with biographical vignettes and discussions of broader issues important to Brahms’s compositional activity. After an introduction devoted to the set of songs Op. 59, Schmidt works his way through Brahms’s lieder by collection. Throughout the book he is keen to stress the significance of German Romantic literature in shaping Brahms’s artistic values. Other topics explored include the dominant themes of the song texts and their potential connections to the composer’s own life, the singers and original performance contexts for the lieder, and Brahms’s engagement with folksong and historical musical styles. Biographical details are well chosen so as to shed light both on Brahms’s interests and the particularity of his historical position. At the start of chapter 5 we learn of Brahms’s wonderment at his initial encounter with a phonograph in 1889; later on Schmidt evocatively describes the composer’s apartment and collection of musical manuscripts (p. 84), and the final chapter of the book begins with an account of Brahms’s funeral, highlighting his celebrity status in late nineteenth-century Vienna.

Parallelism in Arandic Song-Poetry

Parallelism in Arandic Song-Poetry Myfany Turpin (bio) Introduction The song-poetry performed by the Arandic people of central Australia is characterized by parallelism of sound, form, and meaning in both auditory and visual modalities. Parallelism here refers to the organized co-occurrence of elements to the extent that each resembles the other, but the elements are not identical to one another (for example, Frog 2014 and Fabb this volume). In Arandic song-poetry we find that adjacent elements as well as elements presented simultaneously in different modalities like song and dance, often resemble each other in a variety of ways. Consider the Anmatyerr couplet below, whose lines A and B exhibit parallelism in both form and meaning: (1). 1 (w-ilkew25)2 The rhythm in both lines of the couplet is identical, but the text differs, albeit minimally. The syntax and vocabulary are largely the same, with both lines ending with the verb "to make a whooshing sound." Only the initial words differ in lines A and B, though both have the same number of syllables and refer to the same intransitive subject. Line A begins with a poetic word for a ceremonial headband, lyerlkarr. This term is replaced in Line B with an indirect expression, iltya-kenh, literally "belonging to the hands," a metonym for a hand-held ceremonial dancing prop. Each line thus concatenates different semantic aspects of a single argument: "a ceremonial headband held by dancers." This couplet is accompanied by a dance in which the performers hold both ends of a headband while moving it through the air to create a whooshing sound. Here semantic parallelism spills into the visual domain, as the objects and sounds lexicalized in the text are enacted through the hands and movements of the dancers. A similar dance to the one that accompanies the couplet in (1) is performed by other Arandic groups who have their own set of songs, differing in form but having similar themes (see Fig. 1): Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Lena Ngal and Rosie Ngwarray performing the accompanying dance for the Alyawarr Antarrengeny verse "The headbands made it glisten / The shimmering horizon" (Turpin and Ross 2013:33). (w-ntarr 14) Photo by M. Carew, 2011. Parallelism thus does not only operate at the level of the verse, but also at the level of the "song," that is, the set of inherited verses that belong to each land-holding group (often called "song sets" or "song series"). Across these land-holding groups that span multiple languages there are recurrent themes, dances, and poetic form. In traditional central Australian society, establishing far-reaching social networks was crucial to survival. Parallelism across the song sets of different linguistic groups may have helped create relationships and cohesion at a broad societal level, since a shared poetic-musical style may have contributed to a sense of shared identity. This essay shows that parallelism of form and meaning is a pervasive feature in Arandic song-poetry. As a point of departure, I take Jakobson's (1966) cross-linguistic survey of parallelism, in which he notes that there are gaps in many parts of the world (1966:103). Since the publication of this study, there have been numerous studies of parallelism in poetry from the Pacific (Fox 2014), Papua New Guinea (Rumsy and Niles 2011), and the Americas (Gossen 1974; Sherzer 1983; Sherzer and Urban 1986; and Epps et al. 2017), yet very little from Australia (although see Walsh 2010). Building on the work of Jakobson (1966), I show that parallelism operates at all levels of the structure of Arandic song-poetry (hemistich, line, couplet, verse, song, genre) and activates all aspects of language, including the visual domain of communication. I also consider the functions of parallelism, drawing on Jakobson's (1960) notion of the "poetic function," the use of language to draw attention to itself. One role of the poetic function is to delimit or constrain the interpretation of Arandic song poetry. For example, in (1) above, the line in a couplet acts as a guide or reference point for how to interpret the other line (compare with Jakobson 1966:102). Another role of the poetic function...

Specification Mining for Machine Improvisation with Formal Specifications

We address the problem of mining musical specifications from a training set of songs and using these specifications in a machine improvisation system capable of generating improvisations imitating a given style of music. Our inspiration comes from control improvisation , which combines learning and synthesis from formal specifications. We mine specifications from symbolic musical data with musical and general usage patterns. We use the mined specifications to ensure that an improvised musical sequence satisfies desirable properties given a harmonic context and phrase structure. We present a specification mining strategy based on pattern graphs and apply it to the problem of supervising the improvisation of blues songs. We present an analysis of the mined specifications and compare the results of improvisations generated with and without specifications.

Траектория вокального творчества Д. Д. Шостаковича

Dmitri Shostakovich’s contribution to vocal music presents one of the most remarkable pages of Russian music. Altogether he composed in this genre for over fifty years. His early oeuvres (“Two Fables by Ivan Krylov” and “Six Songs Set to Texts of Japanese Poets”) were to a large extent of experimental character, and they are distinguished by their use of the orchestra, which would subsequently become a largely prevailing factor in the composer’s artistic practice. Starting from the mid-1930s he makes a turn frontally to vocal genres, now already firmly relying on the traditions of vocal intonating and most frequently setting texts of the great Russian literary classics (“Four Songs to Texts by Alexander Pushkin,” “Four Monologues to Texts by Alexander Pushkin” and “Two Songs to Texts by Mikhail Lermontov.” A genuine masterpiece of the wartime years is the “Six Songs to Texts by English Poets,” in which the narration is carried out from the position of a person from the ordinary masses, but notwithstanding all the simplicity of utterance, its character is endowed by profundity and dimensionality. Somewhat later the vocal cycle “From Jewish Folk Poetry” was composed, the essence of which lies in the depiction of the image of the “small person,” so characteristic for Russian literature. The final period of Shostakovich’s vocal oeuvres was signified by extremely contrasting aspirations: the “high” genre of intellectual lyricism, on the one hand, expressed in such works as the “Seven Poems of Alexander Blok” and the “Six Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva,” and the consciously debased, almost “utilitarian” satire, on the other hand, such as the “Satires,” the “Five Songs set to Texts from ‘Krokodil’ Magazine” and “Four Poems of Captain Lebyadkin.” The concluding masterpiece of Shostakovich’s lyrical vocal music was the “Suite set to Poems by Michelangelo” (1974), in which the composer turns to the “eternal questions” of existence. Keywords: Shostakovich, Schostakovich’s vocal music, songs, vocal cycles.

Intimidade sexual e amorosa no discurso da música carnavalesca baiana

Este artigo realiza uma análise discursiva da intimidade sexual e amorosa impregnada no discurso da música carnavalesca baiana denominada axé music, pagode baiano e pagofunk. Um conjunto representativo de canções, colhidas entre 2012 e 2013 em sites que as disponibilizam aos internautas, constitui o corpus do estudo. A Análise de Discurso desenvolvida por Michel Pêcheux (2009) e a Ontologia do ser social formulada por György Lukács (2013) são os territórios teóricos que orientam o trabalho analítico e o inscrevem no continente do materialismo histórico. O discurso musical analisado impregna a intimidade sexual e amorosa com os sentidos da ideologia hedonista e eudemonista idealizada pela sociedade capitalista. A análise atravessou a opacidade do discurso e revelou os limites da alternativa hedonista/eudemonista.