The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago was a watershed moment in U.S. organ culture. Over the course of four months, twenty-one of the finest organists in the country, along with Alexandre ...Guilmant of Paris, performed sixty-two solo organ recitals on a large new organ built by Farrand and Votey, paving the way for the rise of the solo organ concert in the United States. Although this was a seminal event in the organ world, it has largely been overlooked in modern musicological scholarship. This article contextualizes the series within the wider program of the fair's Bureau of Music and compares the programming strategies between Bureau of Music director Theodore Thomas and organ series director Clarence Eddy. Thomas chose to promote a hierarchical programming model that ultimately failed, but the organists endeavored to offer programs that appealed to both the uninitiated and the connoisseur. A detailed analysis of organ concert programs at the fair using a new database reveals the way in which organists embraced a mixture of “popular” and “profound” elements in their programming that was later disseminated in magazines, pamphlets, and performing editions after the event.
Repressive and economic threats drive much of the popular mobilization in Central America, but those conditions need to be articulated to publics in a manner that emphasizes the need for collective ...action to ameliorate worsening harms. Examination of protest songs in both periods of heightened state repression (1970–1990) and heightened economic threats (1990–present) in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua demonstrates that musicians and cultural producers actively construct lyrics and musical styles that resonate with subaltern populations and encourage social movement participation in the face of state repression and neoliberal policy implementation.
Las amenazas represivas y económicas han inducido buena parte la movilización popular en Centroamérica, pero estas condiciones deben articularse ante los públicos de manera que enfaticen la necesidad de acción colectiva como respuesta a problemas cada vez más graves. Un análisis de las canciones de protesta pertenecientes a los períodos de mayor represión estatal (1970-1990), así como a aquellos con mayores amenazas económicas (1990 al presente) en Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras y Nicaragua demuestra que tanto músicos como productores culturales construyen activamente letras y estilos musicales que encuentren resonancia entre las poblaciones subalternas. Así fomentan la participación dentro de los movimientos sociales, aun frente a la represión estatal y la implementación de políticas neoliberales.
Digital geographies and musical geographies are proliferating. This article considers a topic at the intersection of both: videogame music. It argues that, through attention to such music, ...geographical approaches to videogames, and to music, can be radically expanded. Specifically, it argues that instrumental score, increasingly employed in major videogame franchises, should be subject to greater focus. Close analysis of instrumental score offers new ways of understanding the spatiality of musical style, structure and form. This article illustrates the potential of greater geographical engagement with instrumental music through the case study of the Legend of Zelda: one of the most popular videogame franchises. It concludes by suggesting new directions for research in the geographies of gaming, and in the geographies of music.
Digital music has become a hot spot with the rapid development of network technology and digital audio technology. The general public is increasingly interested in music similarity detection (MSD). ...Similarity detection is mainly for music style classification. The core MSD process is to first extract music features, then implement training modeling, and finally input music features into the model for detection. Deep learning (DL) is a relatively new feature extraction technology to improve the extraction efficiency of music features. This paper first introduces the convolutional neural network (CNN) of DL algorithms and MSD. Then, an MSD algorithm is constructed based on CNN. Besides, the Harmony and Percussive Source Separation (HPSS) algorithm separates the original music signal spectrogram and decomposes it into two components: time characteristic harmonics and frequency characteristic shocks. These two elements are input to the CNN together with the data in the original spectrogram for processing. In addition, the training-related hyperparameters are adjusted, and the dataset is expanded to explore the influence of different parameters in the network structure on the music detection rate. Experiments on the GTZAN Genre Collection music dataset show that this method can effectively improve MSD using a single feature. The final detection result is 75.6%, indicating the superiority of this method compared with other classical detection methods.
I argue that core aspects of musical rhythm, especially "groove" and syncopation, can only be fully understood in the context of their origins in the participatory social experience of dance. Musical ...meter is first considered in the context of bodily movement. I then offer an interpretation of the pervasive but somewhat puzzling phenomenon of syncopation in terms of acoustic emphasis on certain offbeat components of the accompanying dance style. The reasons for the historical tendency of many musical styles to divorce themselves from their dance-based roots are also briefly considered. To the extent that musical rhythms only make sense in the context of bodily movement, researchers interested in ecologically valid approaches to music cognition should make a more concerted effort to extend their analyses to dance, particularly if we hope to understand the cognitive constraints underlying rhythmic aspects of music like meter and groove.
Beyond the number of stereotypes concerning 1968, in that year the intersection between youth and music achieved a full-fledged Bildungsroman that recovered the poetry of disquiet as powerful tool ...for relief and self-affirmation, for modelling/transfer and self-knowledge, for imaginative search and existential project. After 1968, through chords and lyrics, the music styles and the identity differences are evolved as real strategies of dissent. Behind major discursivity, in fact, a rich relationship was built between music and the making of divergent personality, of the project of possibility and of the action against conformism, that ended up with making music the complex and very effective semantic field for an implied education so far rather underestimated by pedagogical culture.
This article discusses the function of Vincenzo Albrici and Charles II's Italian ensemble at the English Restoration court. The article cites newly discovered archival evidence to suggest that ...Albrici arrived at the English court in 1664 to become the leader of an exclusive ensemble performing Italian chamber music. The employment of the Italian ensemble imitated Mazarin's patronage of Italian music at the French court, arguably to rehabilitate the recently restored Stuart dynasty in the eyes of Continental courts. The article suggests that the ensemble performed chamber music privately at court, and also occasionally appeared in the queen's Catholic chapel after 1666. The recruitment of Albrici and the Italian ensemble shows that the English court participated in Continental musical fashions after the Restoration, and illustrates the complex webs of cultural exchange in mid-seventeenth-century Europe.
"1 In Berlin that same year, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, while in the service of King Frederik II of Prussia, published his only solo work for harp, the harp sonata in G major, as well as the second ...part of his Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments.2 The latter publication has come to be recognized as one of the most influential statements on performance practice of the period and one of the most useful sources for performers today for understanding the musical aesthetics of the Empfindsamer or "sensitive style," of which C.P.E. Bach was a major proponent.3 1762 was also the year when the philosopher and composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau published Émile or On Education, a then-controversial treatise on the nature of man and education, which was one of several influential philosophical tracts of the period that perpetuated a discourse of gendered emotion and morality within the paradigm of the Enlightenment project of natural human equality. The majority of literature tends to focus on the instrument's history in terms of both its mechanical and design evolution, and to some extent its sociocultural role, but not its performance practice.8 In understanding how the single-action harp's construction contributed to its particular emotional palette it is important to understand that this instrument represented a significant step in the harp's mechanical evolution and aesthetic qualities. The harpist and composer Philippe-Jacques Meyer, who wrote the first comprehensive method for the single-action harp in 1763,11 advocated the use of arpeggiation when realizing chordal passages as he believed that it rendered them more "expressive and attractive," stating that this method is preferable to all the others in that it produces an effect more harmonious and mellifluous than that of playing the chords flat which is very harsh on the ear and destroys all the merit of the instrument.12 An anonymous treatise in 1787 noted that batteries, which are continuous arpeggio or alberti bass type figures played in sixteenth-notes, could be suited to accompanying a tender, expressive, and languorous romance.13 The single-action harp's ability to execute continuous arpeggiation while modulating to various tonalities allowed for the composition of imaginative fantasias and preludes in an improvisatory style, which expressed what Richard Taruskin describes as the "fluidity of subjective feeling" present in Empfindsamer music.14 The single-action harp is lightly strung and capable of subtle dynamic nuances, while still maintaining absolute clarity of sound. The instrument's huge popularity as an attractive accomplishment for young, aristocratic women in order to render them more marriageable engendered a large number of methods designed for beginners, which were for the most part written by harpist/composer/teachers of the single-action harp in Paris.16 In Chapter 2 of Genlis' harp method, entitled "On Taste, Expression, and Instrumental Music in General,"17 she enumerates the harp's subtle dynamic qualities in the first paragraph:
Awakening Things Within Kurek, Michael
Journal of interdisciplinary studies,
06/2022, Letnik:
34, Številka:
1-2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In his engaging volume on fairytales, George MacDonald wrote that the purpose of a fairytale is "not to give the reader things to think about, but to wake up things that are in him." By contrast, ...many works of art, including contemporary musical compositions, are accompanied by statements of "things to think about," such as didactic program notes by the composer on pet social justice issues. This essay explores what can be done in a piece of music to "wake up things" already in the listener. These include invoking something familiar in the musical style, using essential building blocks of beauty in constructing the music, and providing a teleology of purpose and narrative flow in the music, in contrast to modernist trends that eschew these things. The essay explores also how and why these "awakening things" can and should be accomplished.
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