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The aim of this study is to analyze the beginning of different dance tunes in connection with variously performed dance tunes. The purpose of this paper is also to draw attention to the need for micro-analysis, which has been neglected for a long time in instrumental folk music research, in order to better understand instrumental musical melody creation. The selected musical examples come from different (partly historical) eras and different geographical areas of Western Transdanubian and Transylvanian Hungarian folk music collections. Typical starting elements (fifth-forth changes, direction of moving of scales, etc.) are related to dance music with different names. The analysis ignores the evolution of tempo and variation throughout the piece, as well as the ensemble's "Primas" ornamentation, timbre, harmonies and unique solutions of the accompaniment. At the same time, the author paid attention to the form and structure of the entire piece in addition to the beginnings of the melody. The study was written in honor of the 100th birthday of Walter Deutsch, the creator of modern Austrian ethnomusicology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that the 52 concertos for keyboard(s) or other solo instruments of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach constitute a repertoire that crosses the borderline of Baroque and Classic eras from both a chronological and a stylistic point of view. However, their analogous position concerning the Baroque ritornello form and the various Classic concerto-sonata types is not yet as clear as it should be, since most scholars tend to examine and classify these works in a rather one-sided way, basing their views either on the earlier ritornello form or on both theory and practice of (only) the late eighteenth-century concerto, thus ignoring many important aspects of formal design in Bach's concerto movements in particular. The present paper submits the findings of a comprehensive research on Bach's whole concerto output, clearly distinguishing between movements in ritornello and concerto-sonata forms; furthermore, it highlights the impressive variety of concerto-sonata structural types that Bach uses in his works: ternary but also binary sonata forms with five, four, or three ritornellos, the specific role and function of which (and especially of the intermediate ones) cannot be always restricted to the specifications of even the most recent (and seemingly all-embracing) related typologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading the past solely through the lens of the present can take several forms. The most obvious is the reading that uses contemporary ethical/moral categories to evaluate and discriminate against past cultural positions, resulting in various forms of the so-called “cancel culture” that we have witnessed in recent years, including in many academic settings. I believe, however, that the “presentism” we are addressing in this group meeting is also at work in seemingly less obvious situations, such as the outright denial (or, more subtly, the “suspension”) of historical perspective per se. This may be motivated by perfectly respectable claims of scientific caution, but in the end it cannot help but deny the contemporary researcher not only (and rightly) the possibility of direct access to the socio-cultural contexts of the past, but also the ability to read, however critically, past cultural phenomena through hermeneutic categories derived from that same past. As an example of the above, I will describe a highly representative case from a research topic that I have been working on for many years, namely the organisation of tonal space in Renaissance music. Building, among other things, on an intuition of Frans Wiering, Marco Mangani and I have tried to reconstruct what can be called “inevitable presentism”, that is, the recognition that cultural phenomena of the past can, for obvious reasons, only be observed from outside the culture that produced them. For us, this means fulfilling a duty of scholarship in the humanities: to enter into dialogue with the past with our contemporary questions and methodologies, without weakening historical consciousness.

Gayaki in sitar was historically associated with Ustad Vilayat Khan and the Etawah gharana. However, its influence has now expanded across all sitar traditions. This study aims to explore the use of gayaki in sitar music from various gharanas beyond those traditionally known for playing gayaki ang. The research involved collecting audio samples from performances by artists across different sitar traditions. The methodology included manual listening and transcription of the audio samples, followed by a detailed analysis of structural patterns and stylistic nuances. The study found that complex phrasing and expressive techniques are essential for creating the vocal-like quality of gayaki ang in sitar performances. A comparative analysis across different gharanas revealed the widespread integration of gayaki ang while preserving each tradition's distinctive attributes. The findings highlight the lasting impact of gayaki ang on sitar music, emphasizing its vital role in shaping the emotive and artistic richness of performances. Additionally, the research underscores the ongoing evolution and innovation within the sitar tradition as musicians skillfully combine technical proficiency with emotional depth, contributing to the expansion of the sitar's musical language and offering new insights into the changing landscape of Indian classical music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I argue for a culturally specific and historically informed understanding of Black voice and musical identity through an examination of the musical practices of vocalist Alberta Hunter (1895–1984), whose long career can be broken into two distinct periods: first from the middle of the 1910s to 1956, and a second between 1977 and her death in 1984. Within, I reframe musical practices emergent from and developed within Black American communities as musical "qualia"—socio-culturally informed and chronotopically situated embodiments of something's properties—of Blackness, to enable a more direct investigation of how and why certain sounds signal or index Blackness to both listeners and performers. To demonstrate the musico-semiotic function of Black vocality and musical performance, I employ a synthetic methodology combining theorizations of qualia from the field of linguistic anthropology with detailed transcription and analysis of four recordings of "Downhearted Blues," a piece she co-composed with pianist Cora "Lovie" Austin and recorded several times throughout her long career. Close examination of three recordings made by Hunter (1922, 1939, and 1977) and one made by vocalist Bessie Smith (1923) allows for a more granular understanding of how Hunter's musical practice transformed over time in dialogue with broader genealogies of Black musical history. I focus particularly on Hunter's relationships with other Black women in the performance of this tune, arguing that "Downhearted Blues" ultimately becomes a site for the development of a Black feminist epistemology exemplary of what musicologist Tammy Kernodle has identified as "Black Women Working Together" (2014). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the adoption of chaos theory into Etude No. 5 by Razak Abdul Aziz. Using pitch-class set to analyse the work, the study unveils several chaotic elements. By providing a unique perspective of investigating musical works from the viewpoint of chaos, this study enriches music scholarship.

Although the organ frequently occupies a prominent place in an acoustic space, the player of the instrument is often barely visible. In this special concert and listening situation, questions are raised regarding certain (missed) expressive-visual opportunities. In this article, we explore how an analysis of the organist's score-driven movements and performative experiences can lead to the development of a basic choreographic framework. Olivier Messiaen's organ piece Subtilité des Corps Glorieux (1939) is our case study. The ultimate goal is to use that framework as a practical tool for interdisciplinary creation and communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review provides a summary and discussion of the 'Music Literacy' strand (day 1) of the Society for Music Analysis's OxMAC conference (University of Oxford, July 2023). The review highlights how the ever-expanding range of musics currently studied in higher education calls for an increasingly multifaceted understanding of the term 'music literacy'. This was explored at the conference through presentations focusing on diverse aspects of music literacy, including its relationship with music technology, popular music, music pedagogy, musical hermeneutics and musical traditions grounded in the concepts of vibration and timbre. The review contextualises these presentations by outlining how they relate to wider current debates within music education at a variety of levels as well as the agenda of the Society for Music Analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present article we describe and discuss a framework for applying different topological data analysis (TDA) techniques to a music fragment given as a score in traditional Western notation. We first consider different sets of points in Euclidean spaces of different dimensions that correspond to musical events in the score, and obtain their persistent homology features. Then we introduce two families of simplicial complexes that can be associated with chord sequences, and leverage homology to compute their salient features. Finally, we show the results of applying the described methods to the analysis and stylistic comparison of fragments from three Brandenburg Concertos by J.S. Bach and two pieces from the Graffiti series by Mexican composer Armando Luna. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the pitch content of the delivery of anaphoric lyrics in hip-hop. Anaphoric lyrics consist of lines with a reiterated beginning and a novel ending. Because new information is presented at the ends of lines, the "linguistic focus" of the line is at the end. Therefore, from the standpoint of intonational phonetics, pitch height would tend to rise to highlight the new information. However, from the standpoint of hip-hop delivery, lines tend to descend toward the end. Using a corpus approach, I document a general tendency toward "focally consistent" delivery in which pitch height supports new information. Then, I explore the afforded meanings of "antifocal" delivery—delivery in which the repeated text is pitched higher—in examples from B-Real, the poet Najee Omar, and Kendrick Lamar. I hope that these examples will attract other scholars to view vocal performances simultaneously through lenses of intonational phonology and music analysis and, further, that correspondences between pitch contours and principles of phonology might prove useful as singing, reciting, and rapping increasingly coexist under the banner of "hip-hop." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first half of the 20th-century, our composers, who mix the usûl, scale and variety structures of Turkish makam music sound materials with Western music sound system and harmony techniques, form, resorted to scale-based approaches. It is consider that Erkin was composed Piano Concerto in these approachs. However, in the common practice of the sonata allegro or the rondo form in the classical period, there is a systematic plan in the harmonic progression. The aim of this study is to examine Ulvi Cemal Erkin's style of harmony through the example of the Piano Concerto. In this context, it will be tried to determine the harmonic path, the tension-relaxtion regions and points in the melodic and the harmonic progression that the composer constructed in this work. Our main concern will be the tonal/modal construct that Erkin establishes while handling these forms. Our sub-problem is to investigate whether there is a systematic relationship between sections in Erkin's Piano Concerto in the context of tonal/modal constructs. Specifically, we will examine whether Erkin adhered to the harmonic progressions commonly used in the Classical period while handling the sonata allegro and rondo forms. If not, we will try to find the tonal/modal setups he employed. In this study, answers will be sought to the questions of what are the qualities of the scales as the sound material used. This study was employed a literature review and musical analysis method. A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (GTTM) was used as a musical analysis method. The literature review was carried out in theses, articles, reviews, and biographical publications on Erkin's works and The Piano Concerto, as well as papers, articles, and theses on GTTM. As a result of the study, harmonic progression that we defined in global regions in the Erkin's Piano Concerto coincide with strong prolongation and weak prolongation patterns, except for two regions and repetitions of regions. In this direction, we consider that while composing this work, Erkin adhered to the tonal harmonic progression, and composing the first part of the work in the form of sonata allegro form and the fourth part in the rondo-chain form. However, a specific harmonic construct was designed in both sections. In this dissertation, it has been observed that Erkin used tetratonic, pentatonic and heptatonic scales, which are sound materials used in Turkish makam music and Western music in the 20th century. In our dissertation, four rule proposals and one rule revision were made for GTTM in the context of the Erkin's Piano Concerto. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese culture is depicted in a profound manner through opera music. With the advancements in deep learning and IoT technology, numerous studies have increasingly utilized neural networks to supersede conventional acoustic models. This paper explores the emotion classification of Qinqiang Opera through the utilization of cutting‐edge research methods. Firstly, we improve the convolutional neural network and adopt the residual network model to increase the model's fitting and stability. Secondly, the attention mechanism is integrated to reinforce the expression of each weight information, allowing the network to differentiate feature information more effectively and elevating the overall performance of the network. Thirdly, we use five sensors to form a local Internet of Things to collect a large amount of Qin opera audio data for experiments. Finally, multiple experiments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed model in the emotional classification of Qinqiang Opera. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a probabilistic approach for extracting time-varying and irregular time signature information from polyphonic audio extracts, subsequently providing beat and bar line positions given inferred time signature divisions. This is achieved via dynamically evaluating the beat tempo as a function of time through finding an optimal compromise in beat and bar alignment in the time and tempo domains. Time signature divisions are determined based on a new representation, termed the Metrogram, that presents time-varying information regarding rhythmic and metric periodicities in the Tempogram. Our methodology is characterised by its ability to provide a distribution over metric interpretations, offering insights into the diverse ways music can be rhythmically perceived. Results indicate high-level accuracy for a variety of polyphonic extracts containing irregular, complex, irrational, and time-varying time signatures. Accuracy rivalling state-of-the-art methodologies is also reported in a beat tracking task performed on the standard Ballroom Dataset. The paper offers insights into the field of dynamic time signature recognition and beat tracking, offering a valuable and versatile resource for the analysis, composition, and performance of music.

El presente artículo aborda analíticamente la Sonatina para guitarra del compositor uruguayo Jaurés Lamarque Pons, importante figura de la corriente musical  que se denominó nacionalismo musical ciudadano. Se estudiará la obra desde una mirada analítica y desde la teoría tópica, resignificando algunos aspectos inherentes de la música.

The concept of a soundscape is found in both ecology and music studies. Nature soundscapes and soundscape compositions are analyzed by both disciplines, respectively, to understand their biological diversity and ecosystem functioning and to interpret their compositional structure. A major challenge for both disciplines is visualizing the information embedded in a large variety of soundscapes and to share it with different audiences, from non-professionals to experts. To analyze soundscapes, both disciplines have independently developed similarity visualizations. However, no attempt has been made yet to combine these two fields of research to improve our ecological and musical perception of environmental sounds through shared similarity analysis methods. In this paper, we introduce a new visualization tool, the soundscape chord diagram (SCD), a circular similarity representation method that can be applied to any type of soundscape, either in ecoacoustics or electroacoustic studies. Our approach consists of visualizing spectral similarities between predefined sound segments based on the computation of a b-diversity acoustic index and on automatic clustering. SCDs were tested on two ecoacoustic forest databases and two electroacoustic soundscape compositions. SCDs were performant for the identification of specific acoustic events and highlighted known diel periods for nature soundscapes and written parts for soundscape compositions. This new visualization tool allows us to easily decipher the structure of musical and ecological acoustic data. SCDs could be applied to a large variety of soundscapes and promote their knowledge and preservation. This study opens a new way of investigating soundscapes at the interface between ecology and music, bringing together science and the arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Variations in dynamics are an essential component of musical performance in most instruments. To study the factors that contribute to dynamic variations, we used a model approaching, allowing for determination of the individual contribution of different musical features. Thirty monophonic melodies from 3 stylistic eras with all expressive markings removed were performed by 20 pianists on a Disklavier piano. The results indicated a relatively high agreement among the pianists (Cronbach's alpha = 0.88). The overall average dynamics (across pianists) could be predicted quite well using support vector regression (R2 = 66%) from a set of 48 score-related features. The highest contribution was from pitch-related features (37.3%), followed by phrasing (12.3%), timing (2.8%), and meter (0.7%). The highest single contribution was from the high-loud principle, whereby higher notes were played louder, as corroborated by the written feedback of many of the pianists. There were also differences between the styles. The highest contribution from phrasing, for example, was obtained from the Romantic examples, while the highest contribution from meter came from the Baroque examples. An analysis of each individual pianist revealed some fundamental differences in approach to the performance of dynamics. All participants were undergraduate-standard pianists or above; however, varied levels of consistency and predictability highlighted challenges in acquiring a reliable group in terms of expertise and preparation, as well as certain pianistic challenges posed by the task. Nevertheless, the method proved useful in disentangling some underlying principles of musical performance and their relation to structural features of the score, with the potential for productive adaptation to a wider range of expressive and instrumental contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hong Kong, often hailed as "Asia's World City," has long been a vibrant cultural crossroad between Eastern and Western influences. This article delves into the unique international character and individuality inherent in Hong Kong's musical landscape, with a specific focus on the compositions of Chan Wing-Wah--a prominent pioneer in the development of contemporary "art" music in the city. Our investigation navigates the aesthetic concept of "dialectical fusionism" within Chan's musical creations, offering close readings of three symphonies: "Three Kingdoms" (1995), "The Great Wall" (2005), and "This Boundless Land" (2006). By charting the contextual evolution of Hong Kong's musical style, this research provides references for contemporary Hong Kong music and its scholarly exploration, shedding light on the city's distinctive artistic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to investigate the possible differences or similarities found in the acousmatic and instrumental creative processes based on the comparative analysis of the pieces Nani and Menus morceaux par un autre moi reunis, by composer Patricia Alessandrini. Considering the concept of technomorphism as a possible compositional model, we seek to understand the influence of technological use on composition and the particular constructions of musical discourse and its differentiations in acousmatic and instrumental contexts. The methodology adopted in this article consists of a literature review on the topic, considering Pierre Schaeffer's theory and his type-morphology and Tatiana Catanzaro's research on technomorphism as theoretical references. Furthermore, scores, interviews and recordings by Patricia Alessandrini are considered so that one can understand the creative processes adopted in this specific case. Finally, it is considered that studio creation procedures have become common to different creative processes and that, in the case of Alessandrini, they demonstrate an intimate relationship between acousmatic and instrumental writing, in which the two languages influence each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study analyses the orchestral piece Picassiáda (1958) by Ostrava-based composer Karel Kupka (1927–1985), focussing on the part Smrt Orfeova (in English: The Death of Orpheus). Kupka uses the method of editing assembly, causing a specific excited expression. An important moment of the piece is the inspiration by Pablo Picasso’s illustrations accompanying the edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The analysis looks for elements of musical narrative, which create a unique narrative programme by means of references to the artistic and mythological component. Pieces inspired by ancient themes represent an important part of Kupka’s work. Picassiáda is his most famous piece. The editing assembly method is used throughout Picassiáda; it has a form-creating function within the layout of the piece’s various forms. The inspiration by Picasso’s illustrations is rather free, reflecting the world of ancient culture and mythology with a symbolic background in a modern way. The parallel of both artists’ musical and artistic expression demonstrates itself in Kupka’s work in the form of contrasting cuts of musical surfaces, and in Picasso’s work by the contrast of his monumental and lyrical paintings. Both Kupka’s and Picasso’s work captures the dramatic and ambiguous death of the mythical Orpheus. The narrative analysis of the piece is carried out with a modified methodology of narrative analysis according to Eero Tarasti, who perceives musical narrative as a specific succession of musical events and the creation of tension among binary musical elements. The organising narrative principle of music is isotopy. The articulation of the musical narrative of Picassiáda takes part at three levels of spatiality, temporality and actoriality. The music is modalised through the relationship of the musical structure to myth and artistic inspiration. The narrative analysis of Picassiáda points to a specific, meaningforming alternation of contrasting isotopies, following the narrative structure of the Orpheus myth. The method of editing assembly is the narrative element in music. Modalisation of music through a myth is a supporting method of its interpretation; it points to the deep meaning-related interconnection of the musical and mythological components of the analysed work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Musica Theorica is the property of Musica Theorica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Musicological Annual / Muzikoloski Zbornik is the property of University of Ljubljana, Faculty of the Arts and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of ICT in Muzical Field / Tehnologii Informatice si de Comunicatie in Domeniul Muzical is the property of Tehnologii Informatice si de Comunicatie in Domeniul Muzical / ICT in Musical Field and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Variations in dynamics are an essential component of musical performance in most instruments. To study the factors that contribute to dynamic variations, we used a model approaching, allowing for determination of the individual contribution of different musical features. Thirty monophonic melodies from 3 stylistic eras with all expressive markings removed were performed by 20 pianists on a Disklavier piano. The results indicated a relatively high agreement among the pianists (Cronbach's alpha = 0.88). The overall average dynamics (across pianists) could be predicted quite well using support vector regression (R² = 66%) from a set of 48 score-related features. The highest contribution was from pitch-related features (37.3%), followed by phrasing (12.3%), timing (2.8%), and meter (0.7%). The highest single contribution was from the high-loud principle, whereby higher notes were played louder, as corroborated by the written feedback of many of the pianists. There were also differences between the styles. The highest contribution from phrasing, for example, was obtained from the Romantic examples, while the highest contribution from meter came from the Baroque examples. An analysis of each individual pianist revealed some fundamental differences in approach to the performance of dynamics. All participants were undergraduate-standard pianists or above; however, varied levels of consistency and predictability highlighted challenges in acquiring a reliable group in terms of expertise and preparation, as well as certain pianistic challenges posed by the task. Nevertheless, the method proved useful in disentangling some underlying principles of musical performance and their relation to structural features of the score, with the potential for productive adaptation to a wider range of expressive and instrumental contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we propose a reading for the first piece of the suite Les Espaces Acoustiques, Prologue, written in 1976 by Gerard Grisey, for solo viola. In considering that this set of pieces constitutes a musical systematization of the compositional techniques that would be applied and developed by Gérard Grisey in the rest of his works, this analysis is referenced by academic writings about Grisey's composition and, above all, by writings by the composer himself in his efforts to conceptually present the epistemological construction that subsidizes such procedures. In this way, the biomorphism that serves him as an analogical field, as in his threefold notion of musical time (skeleton, flesh and skin of time) and in his proposal of a formal process (inspiration and expiration), is understood by us as a field of compositional operations and, consequently, as analytical criteria, allowing us to propose interpretative approaches and applications in new compositional processes after the notion of energy flow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Turkish Music (TM) / Türk Müziği is the property of Young Wise Publishing and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The concept of a soundscape is found in both ecology and music studies. Nature soundscapes and soundscape compositions are analyzed by both disciplines, respectively, to understand their biological diversity and ecosystem functioning and to interpret their compositional structure. A major challenge for both disciplines is visualizing the information embedded in a large variety of soundscapes and to share it with different audiences, from non-professionals to experts. To analyze soundscapes, both disciplines have independently developed similarity visualizations. However, no attempt has been made yet to combine these two fields of research to improve our ecological and musical perception of environmental sounds through shared similarity analysis methods. In this paper, we introduce a new visualization tool, the soundscape chord diagram (SCD), a circular similarity representation method that can be applied to any type of soundscape, either in ecoacoustics or electroacoustic studies. Our approach consists of visualizing spectral similarities between predefined sound segments based on the computation of a β-diversity acoustic index and on automatic clustering. SCDs were tested on two ecoacoustic forest databases and two electroacoustic soundscape compositions. SCDs were performant for the identification of specific acoustic events and highlighted known diel periods for nature soundscapes and written parts for soundscape compositions. This new visualization tool allows us to easily decipher the structure of musical and ecological acoustic data. SCDs could be applied to a large variety of soundscapes and promote their knowledge and preservation. This study opens a new way of investigating soundscapes at the interface between ecology and music, bringing together science and the arts.

Some would argue that the idea we get of a composer by listening to his incomplete music in which a voice has been reconstructed is not “authentic”. But the idea we can get of him by ignoring his incomplete compositions altogether, as if they never existed, is much less “authentic”. The article examines the issue and validity of the reconstruction of polyphonic music with one or more missing parts in critical editions from a philosophical, philological and practical point of view and establishes some criteria for the acceptability of the results.

Variations in dynamics are an essential component of musical performance in most instruments. To study the factors that contribute to dynamic variations, we used a model approaching, allowing for determination of the individual contribution of different musical features. Thirty monophonic melodies from 3 stylistic eras with all expressive markings removed were performed by 20 pianists on a Disklavier piano. The results indicated a relatively high agreement among the pianists (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.88). The overall average dynamics (across pianists) could be predicted quite well using support vector regression (R2 = 66%) from a set of 48 score-related features. The highest contribution was from pitch-related features (37.3%), followed by phrasing (12.3%), timing (2.8%), and meter (0.7%). The highest single contribution was from the high-loud principle, whereby higher notes were played louder, as corroborated by the written feedback of many of the pianists. There were also differences between the styles. The highest contribution from phrasing, for example, was obtained from the Romantic examples, while the highest contribution from meter came from the Baroque examples. An analysis of each individual pianist revealed some fundamental differences in approach to the performance of dynamics. All participants were undergraduate-standard pianists or above; however, varied levels of consistency and predictability highlighted challenges in acquiring a reliable group in terms of expertise and preparation, as well as certain pianistic challenges posed by the task. Nevertheless, the method proved useful in disentangling some underlying principles of musical performance and their relation to structural features of the score, with the potential for productive adaptation to a wider range of expressive and instrumental contexts.

Throughout Western music from the 1960s until today, there is a peculiar phenomenon: musical works in which the music is organized around audio recordings of the speaking voice. This article explores the role of the recorded speaker as a virtual collaborator—distanced by time and space—in creating the structure of the musical work. Both the speaker and the composer are agents in the creation of musical works for recorded speech. The speaker provides emotional expression, linguistic meaning, and a sense of embodied sound, a human focal point for the listener. The composer builds on the sonic resources provided by the speaker and adds musical frameworks that provide additional structure for the vocal utterances, reinforcing the linguistic meaning of the speech and transforming it into a structural feature of the music. Both the speaker and the composer contribute to the resulting musical work, and as such authorship is as distributed between these two agents. To illustrate this point, this article analyzes Jacob TV's 2003 work "Billie" for saxophone and backing track, which is built around the speaking and singing voice of Billie Holiday. In doing so, the ethical tensions of the composer using an unknowing subject's voice are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Turkish Music (TM) / Türk Müziği is the property of Young Wise Publishing and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This teaching program focuses on the first book of J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, on the 300th anniversary of its completion, and is aimed primarily at the third and fourth grades of Liceo musicale (Music High School). The first part focuses on the study of the textual sources and the autograph title page, commenting on the historical, organological, didactic and aesthetic references. The second part deals with the study of the first two Preludes and Fugues in C major and C minor: using techniques borrowed from the didactics of listening, students are introduced to an in-depth understanding of the two forms, and learn to identify the rhetorical-compositional models that define them. Finally, guidelines are proposed for developing activities in an informal setting of music dissemination. The program adopts the models of integrated didactics, and sees the participation of a Music History teacher alongside the Music Theory and Analysis teacher, as well as the other teachers in the course.