Sung Texts Research Articles

Music and exercise as therapeutic resources in dementia

Music and exercise have played amajor role in the care of people with dementia for decades. The scientific evidence for such interventions is still relatively scarce but growing. The fact which has been known for nearly 10 years that brain regions associated with musical long-term memory remain intact up to advanced stages of dementia made music amajor therapeutic resource in cognitive decline. Therefore, sung texts are learned and recalled better than spoken texts. Furthermore, the specific music-related stimulation of frontal brain regions has frequently shown positive effects on conspicuous behavioral disorders associated with dementia. Exercise in combination with music, in the form of dance or eurhythmics, not only seems to positively affect cognition but also balance and gait safety among patients with dementia.

The Formation of Traditional Music and Regional Pop Music Community in Popular Social Media

Traditional music and regional pop music are two music genres in Pahang. Both music genres provide the cultural meanings to the Pahang people. They have shared similar characteristics consisting of traditional elements inherited from the past. Quatrains of pantun and Malay traditional proverbs are adopted as sung texts in both music genres. Interestingly, the implementation of Pahang spoken language (Pahang dialect), one of the Malay dialects in Peninsula Malaysia, is an additional characteristic of regional pop music. Both music genres incorporate tradition and modern elements of tempo, melody and music structure. In both music genres, the combinations of modern and traditional musical instruments are used. Music practitioners, Roslan Madun and vocal groups Anok Semantan represent traditional and regional pop, respectively. To investigate community formation through the genres, there methodological components are used: participant-observation, interviewing and textual analysis. The findings suggest that community in traditional music (in this regard, syair songs) is formed through syair concert, and the formation of virtual community in media social of Facebook as continuity of the concert community. Regional pop music, on the other hand, forms the community on the popular music web of YouTube. The findings also expose different in attitudes, motivations and practices between traditional and regional pop communities.

Music enhances verbal episodic memory in Alzheimer’s disease

Introduction: Although previous studies suggest that music may facilitate verbal learning in a healthy population, such a mnemonic effect has seldom been investigated in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Moreover, memorization of texts was generally compared when either sung or spoken. In the present study, it was examined whether the benefit observed on verbal learning was specific to music or whether an associative context binding items together led to similar benefits, regardless of the nature of the association. Method: Twelve patients with mild AD and 15 healthy controls learned texts presented with either a musical (sung) or a nonmusical association (spoken associated to a silent movie sequence) or without association (spoken alone). Immediate and delayed (after a 5-min delay) recall was measured. Results: Main results showed that (a) sung texts were better remembered than spoken texts, both immediately and after a retention delay, for both groups; (b) the musical benefit was robust, being observed in most AD patients; (c) the nonmusical association may also facilitate verbal learning but to a lesser extent. Conclusions: A musical association during the encoding stage facilitates learning and retention in AD. Furthermore, this advantage seemed quite specific to music. The results are discussed with respect to the clinical applications in AD; theoretical implications are highlighted to explain the power of music as a mnemonic technique.

Music of the Gods: Solo Song and effetti meravigliosi in the Interludes for La pellegrina

During April and May of 1589, some three thousand foreigners made their way to the city of Florence to take part in the wedding celebrations for Ferdinando I de' Medici and the French princess Christine of Lorraine. Because of the magnitude of the events that took place and the wealth of surviving information, historians of art, theater, and music have written much about these festivities. The set of interludes that were performed in the Uffizi theater between the acts of Girolamo Bargagli's comedy La pellegrin ai-the high point of the wedding celebrations-have been given special attention. With a seventy-two page official booklet by academician Bastiano de' Rossi and numerous other surviving sources, the Pellegrin a interludes have generated a considerable literature dedicated to explicating intertextual connections relating to the classical allusions that inspired their conception (for more recent additions, see Ketterer 1999; Marignetti 1996). Yet, as many scholars have at least pointed out-beginning with the work of Aby Warburg-much of the erudite imagery that was presented went completely over the audience's heads (1932:280-81). Similarly, there is evidence to suggest that many audience members did not comprehend the vocal music's sung texts on a word-by-word basis, but that the music was nevertheless meaningful to them. This study addresses the performative efficacy of the Pellegrina interludes' solo songs because the songs garnered considerable attention during their performance in the Uffizi theater. The sense of wonder or meraviglia that the solo songs evoked for spectators was articulated in numerous accounts, in both eyewitness descriptions (usually diary entries by foreign visitors) and in unofficial printed accounts. Indeed, in these accounts the solo songs were typically singled out for special attention, which is striking in light of the relative brevity of many of the descriptions. Conversely, in the detailed Descrizione issued by the Medici court, Rossi rarely addresses audience response in relation to the music's affective quality (solo song or otherwise), and when he does, he projects an anticipated response, because his booklet (unavailable for the premiere performance) was written before the performances took place.

Song Texts or Sung Texts in Trecento Italy

Previous musical studies of Trecento songs have concentrated on those manuscripts that contain the songs with musical notation, luxury sources like the Squarcialupi Codex and other parchment codice...

Cotton Mather Brings Isaac Watts's Hymns to America; or, How to Perform a Hymn without Singing It

This essay reconstructs Cotton Mather's efforts to introduce Isaac Watts's hymns into New England print culture using sermon pamphlets and family prayer guides. These forms framed hymns as read rather than sung texts, but they also enabled the performance of hymns as expressions of personal faith during the Great Awakening.

Lirasniara, the sung language of Southwest Maluku (East-Indonesia)

This paper discusses a highly endangered sung style in Maluku Barat Daya along the lines of Sasse’s (1992) theory of language death and focusses on structural consequences, the speech behaviour, and the external setting of this oral tradition. It is concluded that if it really has existed and not only in local folklore, Lirasniara must have been a jargon that was replaced by Malay. Only because it already occurred in sung texts during the latter’s introduction prevented its total disappearance from the region thus far. The fear remains that in the process of the modernization of Indonesia, it may undoubtedly disappear after all in the near future.

Toward New Liturgical Texts with “Connected Indigeneity”: The Open Source Liturgy Project

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes David James Randolph, Ventures in Worship, 3 vols. (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1969, 1970, 1973). The 2001 Catholic Instruction, Liturgiam Authenticam, asserts the following about the Roman Rite: “Indeed, it may be affirmed that the Roman Rite is itself a precious example and an instrument of true inculturation [sic]. For the Roman Rite is marked by a signal capacity for assimilating into itself spoken and sung texts, gestures and rites derived from the customs and the genius of diverse nations and particular Churches—both Eastern and Western—into a harmonious unity that transcends the boundaries of any single region.” (Liturgiam Authenticam, par. 5 (2001): http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccdds/documents/rc_con_ccdds_doc_20010507_liturgiam-authenticam_en.html (accessed October 26, 2009). I have not seen this argument made with this kind of specificity anywhere in writing. This is my observation based on conversations about current projects in indigenous liturgical development among many of my colleagues who are members of the Consultation on Common Texts, an ecumenical body comprised mostly of mainline and Catholic worship officials in the United States and Canada. For more information on how this process works in the development of Ubuntu Linux, see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment. These cores are available for viewing and use. Go to http://wikigbod.org/wiki, click the Release Candidates link on the left side of the page, and then select the type of liturgical text from the menu that appears. Additional informationNotes on contributorsTaylor W. Burton-EdwardsThe Rev. Taylor W. Burton-Edwards is the director of worship resources for the United Methodist Church.

Nurturing Herself, Nurturing Her Baby: Creating Positive Experiences for First-time Mothers through Lullaby Singing

BECOMING A MOTHER IS ONE OF THE MOST defining moments in a woman's life. For the majority of women today the joys of motherhood are both real and plentiful. However, hand in hand with the great joys of motherhood can come great sorrow, anger, frustration, 2pain, confusion, and constraint. The modern mother lives in the constant shadow of her own mother's abilities and the mother myth. (1) She continually asks herself, Am I doing a good job? Is this the best thing for my baby? Why won't my baby stop crying? When will my baby go to sleep? and ultimately she may feel as though she doesn't measure up. The modern mother tries to balance attempt to conform to the romanticized and imagined constructions of motherhood with the reality of her daily experiences and life as a mother. (2) Women today are no longer thoroughly at home with being at home. (3) Instead, they are primed for achievement, to want and expect to have it all at once-career, house, husband, children, and happiness. (4) For many women, the reality of bringing a life into this world disrupts this picture-perfect image of the ideal woman. (5) There is a mismatch, long shrouded in a conspiracy of silence, between women's expectations of motherhood and what they experience, what they feel and how they manage as mothers. (6) Other realities set in such as feeling out of control, loss of freedom, loneliness and isolation, entrapment, lack of achievement and recognition, and interruption to personal interests. A mother catches sight of herself in the mirror and sees a clear message--she is not the woman who has it all and so is a failure. However, mothers have been taught how to wear the many masks of motherhood well. These masks are in fact an assemblage of fronts, mostly brave, serene and all-knowing, used as a coping mechanism to silence, muffle, and disguise the chaos and complexity of a mother's lived experience. (7) The modern mother lives in the constant shadow of her own mother's abilities and the mother myth. (8) The naked truth of motherhood is that not every woman copes, and prolonged feelings of not coping can lead to a number of mental health issues for the mother and her baby. They may also affect her relationship with her partner. Singing lullabies has long been a part of many mothers' coping and survival tools, particularly when soothing a distressed baby. Several studies have examined the effects that lullaby singing has on infants, their sleep patterns, and motherinfant bonding. For example, studies have examined the effects of music on selected stress behaviors, weight, and caloric and formula intake of low-birth-weight neonates in a newborn intensive care unit. (9) They have also examined the therapeutic effects of music and of mothers' voice on premature infants, with overwhelmingly positive effects. (10) Similarly, studies with newborns show the value in using lullabies to promote sleep (11) Other studies have shown how music, including lullabies, promotes meaningful mother-infant interaction. (12) While the primary purpose of the lullaby is to put children to sleep, in many cultures the performance of lullabies serves other secondary functions such as enculturation of the infant in musical as well as conceptual and social terms, (13) Babies are recipients rather than performers, and thus lullabies are not intended to be sung by children but rather to be sung to and for the child by adult. Most often, the performance of lullabies is considered to be the domain of women, and these musical moments can provide the infant with significant physical, emotional, mental, and social contact with female relatives, particularly the infant's mother. As sung texts, lullabies also serve as outlet for emotional engagement and expression by the performer, thus serving the dual function of soothing a child while simultaneously releasing the singer's own feelings of desire and discontent. (14) The song texts of lullabies can therefore reflect social and musical themes of interest to mothers and adult listeners. …