Song Compositions Research Articles

Artistic and Creative Paradigms of Oral Narrative Performances: The Relevance of the Bakor Song Composer to His Contemporary Milieu

Performance has been recognized as the bedrock of Oral Literature thus contextual performance situations become the best avenues for the appropriate assessment and analysis of pre-literate traditions and their artistic endowments. In the past, Oral performances of the so-called pre-literate societies were erroneously classified as fossils and lacking artistic or aesthetic appeal. This paper, therefore, attempts an assessment of Bakor Song compositions within their contextual performance situations with a view, not only to bring out the artistic and creative potential of the artists but also to portray the contemporary relevance of the artists and their compositions

Model Development of Isan Country Song Compositions for Economic, Social and Cultural Value-Added

Problem statement: Country Song was related to history, society, culture and economic. The objectives of this study were: (1) the historical background in composing the Isan Country Song, (2) the current situation and problem of composing style of Isan Country Song and (3) the development of composing pattern the Isan Country Song for elevating the economic value. Approach: The research area consisted of Isan Region including Chiaya Phume, Ubon Rachatani, Amnat Charoen and Sri-Sa-ket Provinces. The samples providing information included 170 persons. The instruments using for collecting data included: The Survey Form, Interview Form, Focus Group Discussion and Participatory Workshop. The data were classified into groups. Qualitative data were analyzed according to the specified objectives. The research findings were presented in descriptive analysis. Results: The research findings found that the historical background of Isan Country Song, reflected lifestyle, social situation, ideal, and Thai Culture with the rhyme developed from traditional Country Song blending with Big Brand Music Band mixing with the local singing words and rhythm. The current situation and problem after listening to the Country Song was more increasing popular since there were many song composers and chords. There were advertisements through the media as radio, television, mobile phone and internet network. Therefore, the buying and selling of song were easier and quicker. For the song composing, the text of a song didn’t focus on the rhyme and lacked of morality enhancement. The supplementary music sometimes lacked of beauty based on aesthetic principle. For the commercial problems, there were many violations of right. Consequently, the entrepreneur sometimes faced with the lost. For development, the god points of Isan Country Song were analyzed both of the text and rhyme. The composed song model was created by bringing Pentatonic scale mixing with message of Dorian Mode. The musical instrument using for playing consisted of Isan Country Song and Western Music. Conclusion/Recommendations: Isan Country Song was still necessary for opposing the entertainment like the villager representatives. Besides, it could be developed for beauty based on music principle. In some viewpoints, it could be used as commercial usefulness. Therefore, in order to maintain the identity of Country Song which needed to be studied for knowing the development of song work, it would be good. This research could be able to be a model for new style Country Song.

‘Motz el Son’: Pound’s musical modernism and the interpretation of medieval song

ABSTRACTThe article explores an interdisciplinary conjunction of music, literature and modernism. I examine the relationship between aspects of early music scholarship and modernism, with specific reference to Ezra Pound’s critical and editorial work on medieval song, and to the composition, in the 1920s, of his modernist opera Le Testament. This analysis places Pound’s work as editor and composer not only in the context of recent critical reflections on the idea of authenticity, but also in relation to the histories and methodologies of medieval music interpretation. First, in drawing attention to Pound’s much–neglected collaborative edition of medieval songs entitled Hesternae Rosae, I contextualise his experiments in rhythmic reconstruction with reference to early and late twentieth-century musicologists working in this field. I make particular reference to the work of Pierre Aubry and rhythmic mode theory, and the later perspectives of Hendrik van der Werf. Secondly, I proceed to analyse Pound’s monophonic and dance song compositions in Le Testament, exploring the way in which serious medieval musicological scholarship prepared for, and is allied to, the development of a rhythmically and dramatically complex musical style.

Art song in the United States, 1759-1999: an annotated bibliography

This fourth edition of Art Song in the United States, 1759-2011 covers songs for solo voice and piano by American composers from the mid-18th through the early 21st centuries. The book is structured as an annotated bibliography with approximately 2,850 numbered entries listed alphabetically by composer and title and indexed in various ways to help teachers and singers locate the particular song they require for practice or performance. This edition adds eleven years' worth of new works, anthologies, and collections (about 450 new entries), reflecting the relatively recent outpouring of song compositions by American composers and a wealth of new song anthologies and collections. This bibliography features information on each song or song cycle or set. Users will find critical data on the poet, publisher and copyright date, key, vocal range, vocal tessitura, meter(s), tempo, length, difficulty of vocal line and piano score, most suitable voice type, mood and subject of the text, and brief description of the vocal line and piano score. It also includes commentary on special difficulties for performers and possible uses of the song in programming. In addition, individual titles of composite works are given, and those that appear in collections are indexed to the list of collections in the front matter. Composer, poet, special characteristics/subject, and title indexes-and even discographic lists recordings where available-all aid researchers in finding songs. The primary audiences for this bibliography are voice teachers and singers in search of appropriate art songs for their students or themselves, as well as libraries with collecting interests in music and American literature.

Chromatic Third-Relations and Tonal Structure in the Songs of Debussy

Chromatic third-relations, understood not merely as chromatic mediants (and submediants) but as a more comprehensive array of chromatic arpeggiations, constitute an essential element in Debussy's language of chromatic tonality. Such chromatic motions not only elaborate the musical foreground but may also create large-scale tonal designs that encompass entire song compositions, eventually even supplanting the presence of structural dominants. They arise in songs Debussy composed throughout his career, but are employed with increasing subtlety and expressive power around and after the turn of the century, in “La chevelure,” “Le tombeau des naiades,” “Colloque sentimental,” “Soupir,” and “Eventail.”

Linguistic prosody and musical meter in song

Four studies addressed the relation between linguistic prosody and musical meter in song. Analyses of song compositions indicated that the Compound Word and Nuclear Stress rules of English coincided with musical rules of metrical accent. Vocalists were asked to perform songs in which compound words and nuclear stress phrases were aligned or misaligned with the musical meter. Syllables aligned with either linguistic or musical accent were sung with greater duration than unaccented syllables. Additional analyses of adjective-noun phrases in song compositions showed musical accent aligned more often with nouns in clause-initial phrases and with adjectives in determiner-initial phrases, consistent with phonological principles of cliticization. Singers' performances showed larger durations for nouns than adjectives in clause-initial than in determiner-initial phrases. Prosodic structure and musical meter had independent effects on sung durations, suggesting that they contribute separately to song performance but with similar organizational principles.

A Numerical Approach to the Analysis of Solitary Vireo Songs

-Cluster and principal components analyses were used to represent the variation in Solitary Vireo digitized notes and song compositions. These vireos utter highly stereotyped notes which they sequence as a quasiperiodic Markov chain. Birds from the same locality sing similar compositions of note types, but vary among individuals in the morphology of their notes. Learning is probably important in the development of Solitary Vireo songs and individuals incorporate small changes in their notes. Songs of the Solitary Vireo (Vireo solitarius) consist of long sequences of separate notes, sung at the rate of 20 to 30 notes per minute, with no obvious superstructure. Many of the species in Vireo have songs of similar gross organization, but in others, several notes are coupled together forming discrete songs. Even for Solitary Vireos, notes from eastern and western populations are conspicuously different (Borror 1972). Vireos could be an extremely interesting group for studies of the evolution of vocal behaviors, but their songs are difficult to analyze by standard sound spectrographic techniques (for example, Lemon [1971] was able to detail the repertoires of only two individual Red-eyed Vireos, V. olivaceus). Vireo songs are well suited for analysis with computerized pattern recognition schemes. I have been studying some of the statistical tools useful for this new approach to bird vocalizations. In the interests of repeatability and rigor, I have employed methods by which large samples of songs from many different individuals and species can be numerically compared. In this paper, I apply cluster and principal components analyses to digitized sound frequencies, comparing Solitary Vireo notes within and among individuals from several localities in eastern North America. I compare song compositions on the basis of probability vectors of note occurrence, and show that sequencing of the notes can be represented as a Markov process. I then discuss several issues of methodology and speculate on the divergence of Solitary Vireo