Musicology Commons^™

Mallorca: Centers For Musical Historical Research, Antoni Pizà, Joan Parets I Serra

Publications and Research

Majorque, la plus grande des îles Baléares, a une riche histoire musicale. Depuis plus de dix ans, le Centre de documentation musicale historique local a entrepris de recueillir, conserver et propager le patrimoine historique et musical des îles Baléares. L'article retrace l'historique de la recherche dans la région et donne un aperçu des collections et des activités du Centre, qui incluent des publications, des colloques réguliers et des rencontres scientifiques.

Mallorca, eine der größten Inseln der Balearen, hat eine reiche Musikgeschichte. Seit zehn Jahren ist das lokale Zentrum für historische Musikdokumentation dabei, das historische und musikalische Erbe der Balearen zu …

Flamenco Deep Song [Book Review], Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Timothy Mitchell's Flamenco Deep Song certainly is not a flamenco handbook describing the genres, forms, instruments, and biographies of flamenco music, but a critical study questioning the accounts of flamenco (its histories, one could say) that have been set forward by historians, anthropologists, folklorists, and even flamenco artists themselves.

Don Quixote (1950) [Music Review], Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

Far from being a culturally disengaged body of musical works, Roberto Gerhard's music is a rich and complex web of cultural references encompassing history, myth, literature, folklore, and contemporary social issues. Don Quixote (1950) exemplifies Gerhard's mature, fully developed style with this emblematic eclecticism.

The Invention Of "African Rhythm", Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

"African ryhthm" was invented in the 1950s when, thanks to pioneering research by the Reverend A. M. Jones, Alan Merriam, Gilbert Rouget, Erich von Hornbostel, and John Blacking, among others, "African music" was construed as an essentially rhythmic phenomenon. Three decades and a sizable body of empirical research later, it is easy to see that an overriding ideology of difference (between "Africa" and the "West") motivated these early efforts. This essay reinvents "African rhythm" not by denying its own ideological construction but by engaging in an imaginary dialogue with earlier researchers in an effort to concretize that which was missing …

Spanish Music In The Twentieth Century [Book Review], Antoni Pizà

Publications and Research

North-American audiences, musicians, and musicologists remain unfamiliar with twentieth-century Spanish music. Most concertgoers identify Spanish music with the folkloristic tunes associated with such composers as Isaac Albéniz, thus construing a true "other" facing the Germanic musical tradition. The musicological canon is not only almost closed to non-European musics, but also excludes the music of some countries that since the Industrial Revolution have been deemed "peripheral," forgetting, to be sure, that five and six hundred years ago the actual periphery was all lands north of Paris. Most of us were not surprised to hear in a special session on Hispanic music …

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.

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 …

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.

Tone And Tune: The Evidence For Northern Ewe Music, V. Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

Abstract:

One of the most intriguing features of most African languages is that of tone, by which variations in speech tone generate different meanings (Pike, 1948, offers a valuable introduction to this subject and includes an extensive bibliography; Fromkin, 1972, is a comprehensive evaluation of specialised studies). In the Ewe language, for example, the word to [H] pronounced with a high tone means ‘ear’, as in To le venye (HLMM), ‘I have an earache.’ To can also mean ‘through’, Meto akɔnta me [MHLHML], ‘I have gone through the accounts.’ But as soon as the high tone is replaced by a …

Music In The Funeral Traditions Of The Akpafu, V. Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

"Nna lo senu kuwe, fie oresire somoloo?" ("Who laid a mat for him, so that he slept so deeply?") With this rhetorical question, the Akpafu of Southeastern Ghana initiate a period of public mourning occasioned by the death of one of their number.1 The philosophic significance of death in Akpafu culture is twofold. First, it marks the completion of the earthly cycle of existence, birth-circumcision-puberty-marriage-death. Second, it opens the door to a higher, spiritual realm in which the deceased, as an ancestor, takes his place alongside the lesser gods and the Supreme Being in the higher reaches of the hierarchy …

The Rhythmic Structure Of West African Music, V. Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

The music of Africa has long intrigued many Westerners. From scattered comments in the accounts of explorers of the so-called Afrique Noire to the full-fledged ethnomusicological studies of the last fifty years, the constant theme has been the fundamental role of music-making in African life and society. And of all the elements of that music, rhythm has received the most attention.

There is something to be gained from looking closely at the early writings on African music, for although they represent the work of non-specialists, and for all their ethnocentricism and anthropocentricism, these accounts touch on the fundamental questions regarding …

Tonal Strategy In The First Movement Of Mahler's Tenth Symphony, V. Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

During his summer retreat of 1910, Mahler sketched a five-movement symphony in F# major that was to be his tenth. He did not live to see the work completed. In spite of this, or rather because of it, the Tenth has accumulated a fascinating history, evident in the series of attempts to "realize" Mahler sketches, the best known of which is Deryck Cooke's "performing version."

"'Gi Dunu,' 'Nyekpadudo,' And The Study Of West African Rhythm", V. Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

Rhythm has remained the focus of much study of West African music since the pioneering studies of Ward (1927), Hornbostel (1928), Waterman (1948), Brandel (1951), Cudjoe (1953), Merriam (1959), and Jones (1959).

Formal Structure In Popular Music As A Reflection Of Socio-Economic Change, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Language On Musical Composition In Ghana: An Introduction To The Musical Style Of Ephraim Amu, V. Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

In most cultures of the world, the creative act of composition may be defined simply as the transformation of pre-existing material into new, individualized structures. The precompositional resource may be a system such as the hierarchical arrangement of triads that forms the basis of Western tonality, a set of formulas that generates such genres as Gregorian chant and West African storytelling, or even a rigidly defined set of relationships such as those inherent in a twelve-tone row. In each case, the precompositional elements provide a framework for the analysis and interpretation of the composition.

The Musical Language Of Kindertotenlieder No. 2, V. Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

Three times during his compositional career, Mahler turned to the medium of the orchestral song cycle either to experiment with or to refine certain technical procedures. This resulted in a variety of methods for establishing large-scale tonal coherence, using song as a resource for later symphonic composition, and stylizing folk material, melodically and rhythmically. These compositional techniques are clearly exemplified in Mahler's three cycles, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (1883-85), Kindertotenlieder (1901-04), and Das Lied von der Erde (1907-08).