We tend to take for granted the labels we put to different forms of music. This study considers the origins and implications of the way in which we categorize music. Whereas earlier ways of ...classifying music were based on its different functions, for the past two hundred years we have been obsessed with creativity and musical origins, and classify music along these lines. Matthew Gelbart argues that folk music and art music became meaningful concepts only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and only in relation to each other. He examines how cultural nationalism served as the earliest impetus in classifying music by origins, and how the notions of folk music and art music followed - in conjunction with changing conceptions of nature, and changing ideas about human creativity. Through tracing the history of these musical categories, the book confronts our assumptions about different kinds of music.
Once More to Mendelssohn's Scotland Gelbart, Matthew
19th century music,
2013-July, 2013-07-01, 20130701, Letnik:
37, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Many of Mendelssohn's letters and statements demonstrate his aversion to any music, including the traditions he encountered on his travels in Scotland and other destinations, when it stood outside ...certain aesthetic and technical teachings that in his student years he took to heart as universal axioms. Friction becomes evident between this rejection of rule-breaking styles and his Romantic desire to be connected to folk music, furthered by his visual and literary attraction to Scotland particularly. I argue that this cognitive dissonance spurred Mendelssohn to transform folk modality—real and imagined—into a personalized form in his work. A striking example is the “double tonic” effect associated with many Scottish modal melodies: the rapid alternation between outlined triads a whole step apart. Though this tool could potentially create the type of exoticism the composer tried to avoid in his mature work, he nevertheless later adapted the feature to articulate all the main cadential passages of his “Scottish” Symphony's first movement; but he found a way to rework the double tonic's inherent melodic dynamism into harmonic stasis, thus preserving the artistic laws he valued while creating a special sound at the same time. Inflecting some theories by other scholars on Mendelssohn's “Scottish” style(s), I examine how this and his other altered evocations of modality temper or even displace functional harmonic tension, and elements of this style permeate some of the composer's other works to become a topos. Nevertheless, the “Scottish” music, especially the Symphony, is more deeply affected than the other works—reflecting a unique set of circumstances.
The Clash's London Calling was released just at the moment when the British punk movement seemed to be imploding. From the earliest reviews, it was received as a musical masterpiece that drew on many ...styles while still managing to be `punk' in some sense. This article argues that London Calling normalized punk, allowing it to be more than an event: punk could henceforth be assimilated into traditional musical discourse and aesthetics. As a careful balancing act between punk street-cred and mainstream musical values, London Calling allowed a double reading. Punk fans could find in it what they sought: anti-establishment anger and at times a messy, disdainful approach to conventional musicianship. At the same time critics and listeners who had come since the late sixties to assimilate rock into a Romantic (or post-Romantic) system of `art' values could find in it what they sought: stylistic growth, organic coherence, originality, and even a `universal' narrative of struggle, triumph, and redemption played out across the album. It is possible to isolate not only a story, but musical connections between the songs (keys, recurrent motifs, and topoi) all laid out in a logical manner. However, unlike concept albums in the seventies' progressive rock style against which punk reacted, London Calling often calls attention away from its musical coherence, and even its textual coherence, rather than towards it—such as by the last-minute addition of a bonus track that disrupts the narrative and key schemes established earlier. The ease with which the album can be praised in established musical language should not completely obscure its potential (and the general potential of punk) to undercut and confront conventional musical discourse.
Gelbart features an annotation by Scotland's national poet Robert Burns on music as a language of nature and poetry, which seems at first sight like an expansion of a bland cliche. But, according to ...Gelbart, it explains a situation that has not been sufficiently documented in the literature: for about a century and a half, musical folklorists operated differently from those studying other genres of folklore. Here, he charts the background of these assumptions and compare some methodologies.
I start from the position that it is impossible to “speak of music” in more than the most vague and abstract terms without broaching the issue of genre. I mean genre broadly conceived as the place ...where music as text meets music as social act or communication: the place where expectations are met or defied, where individual performative utterances fit into cultural contexts and habitus—in short, the place where music makes its meaning.² Of course, genre in this broad sense is a huge and messy conglomeration of ideas and rules of engagement. It operates not only on several levels
Scale Gelbart, Matthew
The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory,
01/2020
Book Chapter
The word “scale” in English today is used both by practicing musicians to denote musical exercises or runs, and by theorists to denote abstracted, ordered collections of pitches. Although these ideas ...are closely related, they also seem partially separable. Their fusion in conception and terminology is the legacy of Latin treatises on the gamut, Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment empiricism (including an interest in what came to be called “comparative musicology”), and the rise of instrumental virtuosity in nineteenth-century Europe. This article discusses historical, theoretical, and psychological questions around concepts of “scale,” considering how etymological and cultural specifics interact with what appear to be hardwired cognitive tendencies, such as melodic movement by small intervals and the ordering of sets. Anglophone (and “Western”) ideas of scale, despite being products of historical happenstance, have parallels in most music.
During the later 1960s, the Kinks wrote many songs confronting the dominant reception trope of reading the rock star as iconic 'youth' who 'authentically' presented his or her life on stage. The ...present article approaches this issue through Edward T. Cone's and other work on voice and persona in music. Several specific Kinks songs from the period are analysed, focusing on the divergence between vocal 'protagonists' and other personae or voices appearing in the music, which make it difficult to map the protagonists onto the writer/performer directly. The methods explored have broader implications for analysing rock songs as musical-cultural artefacts.
