Mead once heard a radio announcer list the movements of a French suite, becoming flustered as he attempted to pronounce the final one. After some hesitation, he sputtered out "GIG-you" and quickly ...started the recording to cover his embarrassment. If only someone had told him it was just a jig with a French accent. The gigue seems to have taken its name from a lively dance of the British Isles. The name "jig" was used for a variety of tunes, but--like its cousins, the hornpipe and the reel-suggested a hearty, leaping dance with possibly bawdy undertones. By the time it was adopted by the French court in the mid-seventeenth century, it had become somewhat more demure, though it kept its quick pace and light-hearted character. The pattern was so commonly used in this type of dance that people often refer to it today as "gigue rhythm."
A meta-analysis was performed on the results of previous studies investigating the association between personality traits and music preferences. Regarding the categorization of personality traits, ...the Big Five and sensation seeking were used most often and were therefore chosen as the most appropriate categories in the meta-analysis. Regarding the categorization of musical style preferences, the five-dimensional MUSIC (mellow, unpretentious, sophisticated, intense, contemporary) model was used most often and was therefore employed in the meta-analysis. Hence, we included studies in the analysis when they had investigated the relationship between at least one of the Big Five personality traits or sensation seeking and at least one of the five MUSIC dimensions. In total, there were 30 subanalyses. All weighted averaged correlation coefficients were very small, with most of them near zero. Only 6 of the 30 coefficients exceeded 0.1 in magnitude (|r|≥0.1). The largest effects were observed for the openness to experience personality trait, which exhibited small correlations with preference for three musical styles. Thus, personality traits barely account for interindividual differences in music preferences. Musical functions are discussed as an alternative explanation for these differences. The predictability of musical style preferences based on individual psychological variables is questioned in general.
•Big Five and sensation seeking were correlated with 5 categories of musical preferences.•Most correlations were small or close to zero; all coefficients averaging to 0.058.•Only 6 of the 30 coefficients exceeded 0.1 in magnitude (|r|≥0.1).•Personality traits barely account for interindividual differences in music preferences.•Musical functions may provide a better explanation for these differences.
Drawing on a mix of collaborative autoethnography, secondary literature, interviews with leading improvisers, and personal anecdotal material, Jamming the Classroom discusses the pedagogy of musical ...improvisation as a vehicle for teaching, learning, and enacting social justice. Heble and Stewart write that to “jam the classroom” is to argue for a renewed understanding of improvisation as both a musical and a social practice; to activate the knowledge and resources associated with improvisational practices in an expression of noncompliance with dominant orders of knowledge production; and to recognize in the musical practices of aggrieved communities something far from the reaches of conventional forms of institutionalized power, yet something equally powerful, urgent, and expansive. With this definition of jamming the classroom in mind, Heble and Stewart argue that even as improvisation gains recognition within mainstream institutions (including classrooms in universities), it needs to be understood as a critique of dominant institutionalized assumptions and epistemic orders. Suggesting a closer consideration of why musical improvisation has been largely expunged from dominant models of pedagogical inquiry in both classrooms and communities, this book asks what it means to theorize the pedagogy of improvised music in relation to public programs of action, debate, and critical practice.
The phenomenon of musical consonance is an essential feature in diverse musical styles. The traditional belief, supported by centuries of Western music theory and psychological studies, is that ...consonance derives from simple (harmonic) frequency ratios between tones and is insensitive to timbre. Here we show through five large-scale behavioral studies, comprising 235,440 human judgments from US and South Korean populations, that harmonic consonance preferences can be reshaped by timbral manipulations, even as far as to induce preferences for inharmonic intervals. We show how such effects may suggest perceptual origins for diverse scale systems ranging from the gamelan's slendro scale to the tuning of Western mean-tone and equal-tempered scales. Through computational modeling we show that these timbral manipulations dissociate competing psychoacoustic mechanisms underlying consonance, and we derive an updated computational model combining liking of harmonicity, disliking of fast beats (roughness), and liking of slow beats. Altogether, this work showcases how large-scale behavioral experiments can inform classical questions in auditory perception.
Pons profiles Samir LanGus, a Moroccan musician who plays Gnawa music, an ancestral art form originating from Sub-Saharan African countries. Gnawa culture is a blend of pre-Islamic African cultures ...and Sufism, brought to Morocco by formerly enslaved Africans. The music tells the stories of their journey, trials, and history, capturing their pain and serving as a way to survive psychologically. Gnawa music is a mix of various African languages and instruments, with the guembri being an essential instrument for this style. LanGus, trained by Gnawa master Hamid el Kasri, believes that his music also resonates with the experiences of Black Americans. Gnawa music is often played during ritualistic ceremonies and is described as mysterious and spiritual. It establishes links between community members and represents freedom and liberation. LanGus sees similarities between Gnawa music, blues, and jazz, as they all originate from Africa.
This paper deals with the musical phenomenon of the so-called Slovenian trubači, musical groups that have flourished on the Slovenian music scene since 2000. In their musical style, repertoire and on ...performative level they refer to mainly to the Serbian trumpet ensembles. The musicians have established their own performance spaces and ways of presenting themselves in Slovenia. This article presents a brief overview of the activities of these ensembles from their beginnings to the present day, highlights the spaces in which the music of the troupes is performed, and, on the basis of interviews with the performers discusses the performative strategies that performers consciously use with a purpose to approach a certain image that is created in relation to the audience through visuality, physicality, behavior, sound and words.
Among the keyboard pieces in a recently discovered autograph collection by Johann Jacob Froberger (the Montbéliard Manuscript, now in private hands) is a méditation composed ca. 1666 and inscribed ..."Memento Mori Sibylla." A complete transcription is given here. The work exemplifies the style of pieces to be played "avec discrétion," according to the composer's instructions. Froberger presumably intended to dedicate the manuscript to his patroness and pupil Princess Sibylla of Württemberg, in whose household he lived in the last years of his life.
The new types of music in Italy around the year 1600 led composers to introduce innovative rhythmic notation. Froberger, however, utilized only a few simple time signatures, though he clearly ...intended his compositions to include a variety of tempo changes. He cleverly interweaves various rhythms and rhythmic figures to make the tempo fluctuate without disturbing the tactus. This is evident especially in his strict contrapuntal compositions, but the idea of strict proportions can also be observed in his French-style music. There is apparently a close tempo relationship between the movements of the dance suites.
The paper analyses the evolution of the vibraphone in the development of musical styles. The vibraphone is recently built instrument in comparison to other percussion instruments. Its original ...version was built just over 100 years ago – in 1916. Although the evolution of the vibraphone is not a new subject of research in foreign literature, it is usually examined in the context of jazz performers. There are fewer works that discuss the evolution of the vibraphone in the development of various musical styles, and there are none that mention the Baltic countries, specifically Lithuania. During the research, the methods of analysis, synthesis and generalization of scientific literature and repertoires were used. The analysis of scientific literature showed that since 1921, when the vibraphone was presented at the World Instrument Exhibition in the United States, the performance style of this musical instrument has changed significantly, both in terms of timbre and technique. In the modern world of music, the vibraphone is used not only for melodic lines, but also for accompaniment, counterpoint, rhythm and harmony, damping, sound suppression and complex pedaling. This is a modern school of vibraphone performance. Unfortunately, due to historical and political circumstances in Lithuania, the vibraphone has not become a part of the music culture and is still considered a niche instrument.
This is a case study of the tune title Yulianhuan. I examine its scores in Guandong Han music, Chaozhou music, Minnan ancient music ensemble, beiguang music and the shisam/in ("thirteen sounds"), ...analyze its intertextuality, and probe into the variations between their musical pattern and content. According to my field work, the zheng scores of Yulianhuan, which make use of the jiahua ("embellishment"; literally "adding flowers") technique, share a common background in the performance among local music genres in southern Fujian, eastern Guangdong, and Taiwan. Meanwhile, there also exists a significant degree of variations. The five pieces of Yulianhuan zheng scores I studied reflects that a tune often generates multiple versions. This phenomenon highlights the intricate intertextuality of cross-genre qupai relations. The three versions of Yulianhuan from southern Fujian, Hakka, and Chaozhou share a basic skeleton melody, while the two versions prevalent in the music genre system of Taiwan demonstrate more simi
