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The Tradition Of Autobiography In Music, Antoni Pizà

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A survey of autobiographical writings by composers from the fourteenth century to the present focusing on the question of how composers create a self. Although, the Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne (1528-96) can be considered the earliest autobiography by a composer, the genre also stems from lexicographical practices in eighteenth-century Germany (scholars such as Walther and Mattheson requested autobiographies from composers with the intention to include them in biographical dictionaries of music). In the nineteenth century, Wagner's autobiographies show the composer's concern with providing a solid image of himself through writing. Stravinsky's Autobiography demonstrates the composer's preoccupation for giving an exegesis …

Schubert's Sexuality: A Prescription For Analysis?, Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

What can Schubert's sexuality have to do with the analysis of his music? Four years ago, Maynard Solomon told a compelling story about a leading Austro-Germanic composer, one whose works are unlikely to be excluded from the narrowest definitions of the canon of European music since 1700: he was probably homosexual. Since then, Solomon's tentative argument has hardened into "fact" in the popular musicological imagination, not because additional evidence has become available, but because, in a field starved of headlines and scandal, such a revelation promised a much needed change of critical perspective.

Philosophy And The Analysis Of Music: Bridges To Musical Sound, Form, And Reference [Book Review], Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

In recent years there seems to have been a tendency (in theory at least) to view conventional academic disciplines with a certain hostility as intellectual chastisements that, rather than opening our minds to knowledge, merely hinder us. In the humanities especially, interdisciplinary studies have become a trend. Many scholars are tempted to abandon the cozy security of their methodology and embark on other, more adventurous hybrid enterprises. Philosophy and the Analysis of Music, one such enterprise, draws its premises from two apparently different fields, philosophy and musical analysis, in order to arrive at a better understanding of music.

Does Music Theory Need Musicology?, Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

Understood as a search for "the abstract principles embodied in music and the sounds of which it consists," music theory casts a wide net: it calls for a comparative sample and insists on a systematic methodology. As " the scholarly study of music, wherever it is found historically or geographically," musicology casts an even wider net. In practice, however, it has not been possible to transcend historical and geographical boundaries. (How often have you read an article on contemporary rock in JAMS or on Asian music in 19th-Century Music?) Obviously, any attempt to explore the juncture between music theory …

Representing African Music, Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

Of all the currents of change that have swept the humanities during the last half-century, the most far-reaching revolve around language. Philosophy, history, and literary criticism, among other language-based disciplines, have developed what is often presented as a largely unprecedented self-consciousness about representation. The message to scholars in nonlanguage-based disciplines is clear: to be taken seriously, one can no longer view language as a transparent window to an objective reality but must confront the foundational political and ideological baggage of the medium itself, as well as its constant slippage in the hands of the producer.

The "Llibre De Franqueses I Privilegis Del Regne De Mallorca": A Source Of Music Iconography, Antoni Pizà, Ramon Rosselló

Publications and Research

The Arxiu del Regne de Mallorca of Palma de Mallorca, Spain, holds numerous collections of manuscripts that have been assembled at random regardless of their unity in subject or time period. The codices kept at the Arxiu comprise many different types of documents whose provenance and compilation history is yet to be determined. One of the most valuable among these codices is the Llibre de franqueses i privilegis del Regne de Mallorca (Codex 1), also known as Códice de los Reyes.

Two "Mistakes" In Stravinsky's Lntroitus, Joseph N. Straus

Publications and Research

During the 1950s and 60s, Stravinsky learned, mastered, and significantly transformed a musical language that was, for him, entirely new—the language of twelve-tone serialism. As the abundant compositional sketches from this period in the Paul Sacher Foundation make clear, this process was not always an easy one for Stravinsky. Indeed, the sketches show him groping for solutions to basic compositional problems, including particularly the problem of creating meaningful vertical harmonies from the essentially linear nature of the twelve-tone system.

The Cassette Industry And Popular Music In North India, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

Since the early 1970s the advent of cassette technology has had a profound effect on music industries worldwide. This influence has been particularly marked in the developing world, where cassettes have largely replaced vinyl records and have extended their impact into regions, classes and genres previously uninfluenced by the mass media. Cassettes have served to decentralise and democratise both production and consumption, thereby counterbalancing the previous tendency toward oligopolisation of international commercial recording industries.

While the cassette boom started later in India than in areas such as the Middle East and Indonesia, its influence since the early 1980s has been …

The "Anxiety Of Influence" In Twentieth-Century Music, Joseph N. Straus

Publications and Research

The musical world of this century has been dominated, to an extraordinary and unprecedented degree, by the music of the past. Performers play music primarily by long-deceased canonical composers, composers learn their craft by studying the master-works of the past, including the distant past, and scholars devote themselves to studying increasingly ancient musical monuments. The past has never been so powerfully present as in this century. In this historical situation, composers have felt an understandably deep ambivalence toward the masterworks of the past. On the hand, those masterworks inspire admiration, even reverence. At the same time, they also inspire the …

The Progress Of A Motive In Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Joseph N. Straus

Publications and Research

The progress of this passage from sketch to final version follows what for Stravinsky is a reasonably common pattern in the composition of The Rake's Progress. The initial sketches tend to be rhythmically square and harmonically rudimentary. They often have the appearance of a simple, classical prototype. As musical ideas are brought to a more final state, the sketches often become increasingly free rhythmically and increasingly remote from classical tonal norms harmonically. A significant aspect of Stravinsky's compositional process in The Rake's Progress, as documented by the sketches, involves the explicit transformation of relatively traditional tonal prototypes. In …

A Primer For Atonal Set Theory, Joseph N. Straus

Publications and Research

Atonal set theory has a bad reputation. Like Schenkerian analysis in its earlier days, set theory has had an air of the secret society about it, with admission granted only to those who possess the magic password, a forbidding technical vocabulary bristling with expressions like "6- Z44" and "interval vector." It has thus often appeared to the uninitiated as the sterile application of arcane, mathematical concepts to inaudible and uninteresting musical relationships. This situation has created understandable frustration among musicians, and the frustration has grown as discussions of twentieth-century music in the professional theoretical literature have come to be expressed …

Legitimate And Illegitimate Variation In Raga Interpretations, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Variation Procedures In Northern Ewe Song, V. Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

The major organizational principle of Northern Ewe song is one shared by numerous African, Oriental, and European musical traditions: a small number of models (variously described as "basic shapes," "archetypes," "background structures," "basic designs," "core patterns," "deep structures") is transformed in a wide variety of ways during performance. Variation takes place on different hierarchic levels both within and between songs and includes practically all of a song's dimensions (rhythm, interval, register, contour, harmony, and so on). This principle, although widely demonstrated in the literature on African song (see, among others, Jones 1976; Kauffman 1984; Schmidt 1984; and Erlmann 1985), is …

Conflicting Attributions In The Continental Motet Repertory From Ca. 1500 To Ca. 1550, Young-Han Hur

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study attempts to bring together all the conflicting attributions in the motets attributed to composers who worked on the Continent during the first half of the sixteenth century. In all, it accounts for a total of 266 motets (listed in the Inventory, Appendix A) that involve conflicting attributions among 122 composers. Rather than placing the emphasis on the problem of determining the correct authorship, however, I have used the conflicting attributions as a springboard in order to shed light on a number of different aspects of sixteenth-century music.

Chapter I briefly surveys conflicting attributions in various genres from ca. …

Musical Inspiration As Seen Through The Artist's Eyes, Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

The role of inspiration in the creation of a musical work has been a matter for conjecture and research by musicians and psychologists. But the realm of inspiration belongs to the creators themselves, who supply mythology, religion, and science to account for the source of an artwork. Throughout history, painters, too, have given their version of musical inspiration and the process of the creation of the work of art. What is musical inspiration? Where does it come from? What are its effects? The following essay explores some painters' responses by surveying some representative works of art.

Thumrī From 1770 To 1870, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

1920 To The Present: The Mature Bol Banāo Thumrī, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Literary Aspect Of Thumrī Compositions, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Contemporary Instrumental Thumrī Styles, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Thumrī Rāgas And Their Structural Interrelationships, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Andalusian, Gypsy, And Class Identity In The Contemporary Flamenco Complex, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

This article endeavors to illustrate the important role played by flamenco and related subgenres in expressing and, to a considerable extent, helping to shape modern Andalusian identity. In this way we will attempt to demonstrate how musical style as well as text content can function not merely as passive reflections of broader sociocultural phenomena that shape them, but also as active contributors to the processes of cultural change.

Modal Harmony In Andalusian, Eastern European, And Turkish Syncretic Musics, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

This article examined, in a cursory form, the standardized ways of harmonizing predominantly modal melodies in the contexts of a set of interrelated urban folk and popular musics of the Mediterranean area. Insofar as these music employ a harmonic-melodic system qualitatively distinct from that of Western common practice, they are worthy of scholarly attention in themselves. This article further seeks to revive the spirit of "Comparative Musicology" and to suggest ways in which cross-cultural comparison of selected musical parameters may reveal new sorts of pan-regional music areas.

The Origins Of Thumrī, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Talent And Technique: George Gershwin's "Rhapsody In Blue" And John Paul Ii's Mayday 1984 Address To New York Gay And Lesbian Socialists' League At Cooper Union's Great Hall (Transcribed Into Verse From Unauthorized French And Italian Versions Of The Official Soviet Translation Of The Polish Original By Norman Macafee) For Tenor Solo, Chorus (Satb), And Eight Players, Arthur Maisel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation consists of two parts, an analytical essay and a composition.

The essay starts from the fact that the musical worth of the Rhapsody in Blue has often been questioned, despite its having been a fixture of the repertoire since its premiere. A close (Schenkerian) analysis shows the flaws of the piece in detail. It also reveals considerable structural coherence, however, comprising very sophisticated treatment of motives in the foreground and middleground, and, in the background, the unfolding of a tritone as the boundary of a tonic that is both B-flat major-minor and a whole-tone collection. Since Gershwin was …

Stylistic Analysis Of The Bandish Thumrī, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

1870-1920: Thumrī In Transition, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Concept Of Tāla In Thumrī, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Dādrā, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Stylistic Analysis Of The Bol Banāo Thumrī, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Evolution Of Thumrī As An Instrumental Genre, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.