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From the perspective of a new century and millennium, preoccupied with the new directions in the stylistic evolution of language, be it musical or otherwise, a retrospective look over the works of an overwhelming personality of Cluj-Napoca musical life such as Sigismund Toduţă creates a bridge towards a past which yet has mysteries to be solved. Hundreds of pages dedicated to Sigismund Toduţă were written - musicologist, founder of cultural institutions as well as founder of the Cluj composition school - yet every time their authors would state that they had much to learn from the Maestro while finding answers to their own dilemmas. Unsolved mysteries regarding the life and works of Sigismund Toduţă remain, one of them being the subject of the present lecture: what was the reason for relinquishing the final passacaglia in Symphony no. 3, dedicated to the equally mysterious Latin poet Ovid, whom he greatly admired. At the Sigismund Toduţă anniversary symposium in 2004, the author of the present text presented an aesthetic analysis of the symphony, accompanied by a historical recording. The analysis of the third and last part, the Passacaglia4, was difficult because the original score was missing, the author only working with the piano reduction, in a form which did not match any of the two interpretations (Chisadji and Elenescu). The score, printed in 1975, contains additional passages, which do not appear in the interpretations, showing the composer's constant strive for an ideal version. In July 2009, composer Dan Voiculescu, one of Toduţă's disciples, managed to obtain the manuscript score from the Library of the Composers' Union in Bucharest. In 2013 the manuscript score of the final part of the Symphony was offered to us by the secretary of the "Sigismund Toduă" Foundation and we renewed the research. There are quite important differences between the manuscript and the two interpretations with the composer's participation; therefore, putting together one final version of the score could be a challenge for the present composition class. For a musicologist, diving into the written text, deciphering and revealing its message remain essential. The most "recent" complete interpretation belongs to the Symphonic Orchestra of the RTR conducted by Emanoil Elenescu and dating back to October 16, 1981. After two decades of absence from the concert programs (27 years), conductor Romeo Rîmbu conducted Symphony no. 3 on May 15, 2008 with the Philharmonic Orchestra in Sibiu, without a finale however, as the score was considered destroyed. In 1975 only the first two parts of the symphony were printed (!), a unique situation, as Toduţă has never composed a symphonic work in two parts. The critics' appreciation, as well as the acclaim won by the performance of the Symphony prove the author's compositional mastery and entitle him to new rehabilitation. Hopefully, it will not take a millennium, as in the case of the Symphony's protagonist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Concerto no. 1 for violin and orchestra, the soloist is facing a very difficult page, hich emphasizes all the resources of the instrument, especially when the violin is accompanied by an extensive orchestral ensemble. The score provides, through its structural unity, a wide range of symphonic and concerto elements, as well as content of the forms included in it. Concerto no.1 for violin and orchestra in A minor op.99, has a quadripartite structure and unfolds in an atypical succession of the traditional concerto genre: the first part Moderato- Nocturna, the second part Scherzo (Allegro), the third part Passacaglia (Andante) and the fourth part Burlesque (Allegro con Brio). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an attempt to apply several fundamental phenomenological concepts regarding the perception of sound, and music in particular, to the analysis of a concrete musical composition, the Passacaglia of Dmitriy Shostakovich's Symphony No. 8. We aim at exploring the underlying compositional structures that determine how a musical composition presents itself to consciousness, and how it is perceived. An approach is used that combines the views of two of the most prominent researchers in the field of phenomenology of music, F. Joseph Smith and Don Ihde. Our main concern is the structure of primary perceptions and how the latter are intended as a unified phenomenon (akoumenon). A specifically descriptive method is used to analyze the way in which the music presents itself to us acoustically and how we perceive it as sounding in time. After that reference is made to techniques of composition used to mediate and achieve the described sounding. As a result our research has revealed a deliberately structured dialectical play of awakened retentions, of fulfilled and unfulfilled protentions, a play with intentionality, touching upon the most subtle mechanisms of perception. The current research has also shown that the categories of musical composition and dramaturgy reflect an underlying dramaturgy of phenomenological categories of perception related to the listener's intentionality. These categories include shifts in the focal-fringe ratio, as the focus of intentionality narrows or broadens in accordance with the auditory field of the music it is intending. They also include shifts between different focal cores as such that we have called regional shifts of focus. On a more fundamental level regional shifts of focus occur between various musical parameters, such as rhythm, tonalitymodality, orchestration, melody, timbre, playing technique. Also, the bidimensional character of sound makes it possible for the noetic act to shift its focus between the roundish and the directional dimensions of the auditory field-shape of the music intended. Finally, we have shown how musical time is thematized as a region of intentional focus by way of a desynchronization of various layers of the polyphonic textures within the framework of the fundamental repetitive structure of the Passacaglia. Shostakovich forms three processes of desynchronization within each of the work's three parts (exposition, development, and recapitulation), each of which starts with a synchronization of the musical material and its layers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The Passacaglia finale from György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (1974-7, rev. 1996) has been described as a point of stylistic crisis, marking Ligeti's return to more traditional compositional means. Consonances and tonal allusions in the music are regarded as indicative of this retrospective tendency. However, notions of functional hierarchy or even pitch centres do little to explicate the underlying processes that contribute to the sense of perpetual unfurling in the Passacaglia. Contained within the resistance to tonal teleology is a process of differentiation in the pitch material. In this respect, the Passacaglia might be considered a further development in Ligeti's continuing effort to inject process into musical material, albeit with increasing levels of intervallic transparency. I further substantiate this argument by situating the analytical findings in this article in a historical context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leonard Meyer was the first musicologist that recognised the importance of expectation in the strong relationship between music and emotion. In his influential book Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956), he proposed that 'emotion or affect is aroused when a tendency to respond is arrested or inhibited'. The Imagination, Tension, Prediction, Reaction, Appraisal (ITPRA) theory, developed by David Huron, is a recent expansion and improvement of this theory. In this paper, I will examine the ITPRA theory and use it as a basis for an analysis of Simeon Ten Holt's Canto Ostinato (1976-1979). This composition combines classical with minimalist composition techniques and incorporates a performance practice in which the performers are free to make their own decisions as to which notes to play and how many times to repeat certain sections. Through my musical analysis of Canto Ostinato, I will connect melodic, rhythmic, harmonic and dynamic characteristics of the music to some issues in relation to the emotional listening experience, including memory, attention and surprise. The analysis involves a close examination of the musical score as well as an evaluation of the performance practice, based on a recording of the performance on two pianos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including growth of art form pasacalle, pestle-and-mortar music, and book review of "Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia."

More than perhaps any other composer, the story of Dimitri Shostakovich's life invites socio-political readings of his works. His preference for the passacaglia is well known and during a period of forty-two years, from 1930 to 1971, Shostakovich chose this musical form on eleven different occasions. It was the particular features of the passacaglia, its slow tempo and repetitive structure, minor keys and often sorrowful chromaticism, that seemed to fly in the face of the aesthetic doctrine of socialist realism. Recent Anglophone studies that have gone beyond purely formalistic perspectives to consider Shostakovich's work in its historical context, legitimise a socio-political reading of his abundant use of the passacaglia. Situated between academicism and deviance, allegories of determined perseverance and morbid expressionism, Shostakovich's ambiguous writing style inculcates his passacaglias with a deep and subversive semantic duality. Using both analysis and reception theory, the multi-layered meanings of these works-and their different rhetorical expressions-are investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the text of composer Stefan Wolpe's Frances Parker Lecture. According to Wolpe, the "Passacaglia" was written at a time when he was concerned with the possibilities of writing music based upon a minimum of material. In the piece "Form for Piano," Wolpe says that the main concern is the art of molding opposites into adjacent situations. In the "Piece in Two Parts for Flute and Piano," a canvas of autonomous sound is created by the two instruments, says Wolpe. In "Two Parts for Six Players," Wolpe says the pitches are arranged in a structural order in which certain tones or combinations of tone have a characteristic mode of behavior.

The reason for this analysis of the work Sinfonia - passacaglia, one of Jugoslav Bošnjak's (1954) latest works, was its premiere in 2007. In terms of style, compositional technique and genre, this one-movement orchestral composition proves the author's loyalty to the creative poetics he began to build in the early 1990s. It confirms Bošnjak's devotion to orchestral sound, his skill in exploiting the expressive resources of this medium, virtuosity in using and correlating instrumental colours, and determination to create communicative music. The author of this text particularly focuses on the way in which compositional procedures paradigmatic of the passacaglia have been combined with procedures typical of symphonic thought and symphonic style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author discusses the choreography and the music of the dance form Passacaille de Scylla. The author states that the dance is complex in nature where the characters display aggressiveness, violence, charm and seduction in their performance. It is mentioned that the discourse is achieved as a result of interaction between the music and choreography. Also presented is the analysis of dance form along with musical notation.

The article examines composer Johann Sebastian Bach's organ music "Passacaglia" in C minor. Topics discussed include the structure and symmetry of the music with Bach presenting twenty variations, indications that the structure is a Bachian, the parallels of the music in the old Buxtenhude style and change of rhythmic motion as an important aspect of the Baroque music.