Театралізація інструментального виконавства у зарубіжній музичній культурі
History course of instrumental theatre in western music is analyzed; typical methods of theatricality of instrumental performing are researched in the article.
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History course of instrumental theatre in western music is analyzed; typical methods of theatricality of instrumental performing are researched in the article.
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In the article it looks for the problem of the theatress and the music critic’s on the exzample’s evolution the Dneepropetrovsk region as complete ideas system. The idea of evolution to the problem.
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In the article modern scientific looks are analysed to functioning of concept «communication» in music on the basis of researches of musicologist of V. Medushevskogo, O. Yakupova, O. Cheremisina, O. Beregovoy and L. Oparik. In the noted approaches a separate place is selected the study of level of influence of interpretation on a musical information transfer by the links of communication chain.
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There is about the place and jazz role in the modern musical art, the distinctive lines and specific features jazz playing are generalised in the article.
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The rapid increase of technologically enhanced listening platforms gives listeners access to music with ever-increasing ease and ubiquity, giving rise to the suggestion that we should now conceptualize music as a resource similar to water; something that is utilized to achieve everyday goals. This paper proposes that music is a utilitarian resource employed by listeners to augment cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and physiological aspects of the self. To better explore these notions this paper examines the potential role of the “functions of music,” first espoused by Alan P. Merriam in 1964. Merriam suggested music has a situational use and an underlying function (music’s ability to alter the self through listening). The research presented here asserts that listeners interact with specific musical materials to achieve or orientate themselves towards contextually-rooted goals. Reinforcing Tia DeNora’s suggestion that music is a “technology of the self” this research presents the results of a 41 publication meta-analysis exploring the possible functions of music. The resultant Aggregate Thematic Functions Framework (ATF framework) identifies 45 possible utilitarian functions of music, spread across five domains of action. The framework also proposes a meta-domain and an emotional sub-domain.
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I have recently suggested that some of the processes involved in the collaborative composition of new music could be analogous to several ideas introduced by Izhikevich in his theory of cortical spiking neurons and simple memory, a process which he calls Polychronization. In the Izhikevich model, the evocation of simple memories is achieved by the sequential re-firing of the same Polychronous group of neurons which was initially created in the cerebral cortex by the sensual stimulus. Each firing event within the group is contingent upon the previous firing event and, in particular, contingent upon the timing of the firings, due to a phenomenon known as “Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity.” I argue in this article that the collaborative creation of new music involves contingencies which form a Polychronous group across space and time which helps to create a temporary shared memorial space between the collaborators.
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These questions were addressed both through historical analysis of collaborations within contemporary dance, and exploration of how choreomusical collaboration can be successful or unsuccessful in terms of co-creation and the satisfaction of each party within current artistic practice. Informed practical research and the use of journals coincide with a grounded theory approach: through analysis of both sets of data, factors which help and hinder choreomusical collaboration in terms of co‑creative approaches were identified. The results of this analysis are presented in a spectrum model of possible working relationships between composer and choreographer; this paper applies this to case studies identified within the research in terms of cognitive innovation.
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Historical aspects of development of electro-mechanical musical instruments of the 1-st half of the XX century are researched in the article. Classification of electronic musical instruments is provided, along with the main working principles of several electro-mechanical musical instruments.
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Mahler will remain a bard of his times, the permanent witness of the suffering and injustice lived by himself and his people. Despite various turning points, Mahler the child often found refuge in nature and music. His thinking and creation were greatly influenced by the first fourteen years of his childhood. Won over by Czech folklore, whose echoes can sometimes be heard in his later melodic developments, and by German musical traditions, that he had become acquainted with while listening to the music being played on Sundays in the town’s central park, and in the house of his new neighbours in Iglau (the so-called Hausmusk), the child was equally influenced by another form of city music – military music. The child was charmed not only by music, but also by the stories told by Nanni – the nursemaid of children living nearby, that his family had also adopted. Among the first teachers Mahler had in Iglau, the most important are Heinrich Fischer – the conductor of the choir and a professor of chromatic scales at the local high-school – and Wenzel Pressburg, one of the students of Anton Bruckner. In what concerns the merit of creating cycles of lieds, Mahler continued the concept that Schubert inaugurated, and Schumann reprised under various forms (or Brahms, in the cycle Magelone’s Romances). In what concerns the interpretation design, this composer from the late Romantic period was the first of the creators of this genre who called the orchestra to collaborate with the solo voice. 1875 is the year that a 15-year old Gustav Mahler headed towards the famous Vienna Conservatory, where he had Hugo Wolf as a mate and the prestigious Iulius Epstein and especially Anton Bruckner as teachers
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The suites represent an important part of composer Gheorghe Neaga’s instrumental repertoire, as well as of the golden patrimony of chamber music written in the territory between the Prut and Nistru rivers. Included to different extents in the didactic repertoire of the artistic education institutions, but also in the concert repertoire, these works perfectly reflect the composer’s artistic predilections, more or less influenced by the constant evolution of the compositional techniques. This paper aims to highlight, from the perspective of the composer's works in suite form, a few examples that are representative of composer Gheorghe Neaga and of his three creative periods: the 50s-60s, when the young violinist makes his début as a composer; the 70s-80s, characterized by a linear evolution towards a quantitative and qualitative accumulation of experience in the field; the 90s-2003 (spent mostly in the U. S. A.), when each work reveals a high level of professional mastery. In this respect, in a diachronic presentation, the paper will synthesize details about the thematic profiles, ideational contents, formal structures, compositional principles and techniques, as well as about the multitude of musical elements incorporated into the works, all of them in a certain relationship with tradition or modernity.
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Starting from the idea of the evolution and function of the great ensemble scenes in opera performance, this research aims to illustrate the indelible link between scenic and musical dramaturgy, by concentrating the entire expressive force of an opera into a single point of maximum tension, with scenic and musical ramifications in subsequent key moments of the opera. We will highlight this aspect, typical of the Romantic musical and dramaturgical conception introduced by Giuseppe Verdi's mature operas, by analysing the ensemble scene at the end of the second act (the auto-da-fé scene) of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Don Carlo (the four-act Italian version), in which the musical dramaturgy of the entire opera is based on three prominent and recurrent musical “gestures”: the interval of a fourth as a melodic element, chord repetition as a harmonic projection and the isorhythmic triplet formula as a rhythmic figure.
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The Muzica journal is a Romanian specialized publication of the twentieth century which throughout its century-old history has witnessed the events of the two World Wars and of the December Revolution. My aim is to provide an interdisciplinary approach (music mathematics) to several examples of criticism taken from this periodical, in the form of a “cube of music criticism”. This approach will reveal six variants of the critical act: overrating, underrating, fair judgement and three more cases in which criticism could not exist due to the absence of the critic, performers, or public from the concert hall. I will analyse the valid possibilities, while making reference to the four periods that marked the history of the journal: pre-war (1916), inter-war (1919-1925), post-war (1950-1989) and post December (1990-2016), specifying, where appropriate, the socio-political context as well.
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This paper contains the text of a lecture delivered at the “George Enescu” University of Arts in Iași, on April 8, 2015. Its argumentation starts from the evocation of an international symposium which the author had attended in 1993 and which served him as a model in shaping an image of the stage reached by the science of musicology in the European culture of the time. Drawing on autobiographical material related to his first steps in musicology, the author examines and diagnoses the beginnings and evolution of Romanian musicology, while also including reflections related to its destiny. Furthermore, he offers valuable suggestions for the alignment of Romanian musicology with European and American musicology, while also providing young Romanian musicologists with guidance in accomplishing such a goal, as well as in raising Romanian musicology to an international professional level.
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The idea of writing piano studies is not a new one, but it was only after my admission to the doctoral program that it blossomed into an extensive and challenging project. The piano study allows the exploration of the broad range of expressive and technical capabilities of the chosen instrument. The fertile ground of the pianistic adventures proposed in the piano studies remains open, as an extensive work still in the making, lending itself to the compositional surprises and solutions that may emerge along the way. This paper describes briefly some of the challenges encountered during the compositional process of the piano studies, which will find their fulfilment in the doctoral thesis.
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In order to understand the specific nature of the musical act both in its ontological reality and as a hermeneutical projection, we have organized our paper into 11 successive sections, as follows:1. It is a matter of course that although natural language and music have their distinct characteristics, they are based essentially on the same fundamental premises that ensure their presence as an act. To clarify the relationship between the linguistic act and the musical act, we will start from the basic considerations introduced by Humboldt. Essentially, they tend to consider language as an essential form that lives through unity and vitality. 2. To understand the musical act as a language, the considerations on language are paramount. Thus, the musical phenomenon is a language put into action, which presents both a sensibly real interface and a deeper projection that lies in the essential unity of compositional thinking based on invention.3. Given that “the artistic miracle of a musical work” implies more than we can physically hear, it is necessary to investigate the “relationship of appearance” that characterizes the mode of being of the musical act. Thus, the musical art does not transpose the idea to reality, but only represents it on a higher plane. 4. While further investigating the composer and the realization of the musical composition, the same “relationship of appearance” is immediately brought to the fore. Thus, two strata are identified in the presence and effect of the musical act – the foreground (Vordergrund) and, necessarily, the background (Hintergrund), which the act of composition brings in a sensible and also significantly hermeneutical synthesis. 5. The essential thing is therefore this different thing, which is no longer sensible. Given that in music, the foreground and the background are much closer than in other arts, their duality has long been misunderstood. This tense dynamic contrast between strata is the very essence of a musical work.6. This unity and opposition between strata is even more necessary in music than in other arts. Music needs to be transposed to reality through the art of execution, in order for the musical work to be brought into effect and presence. The composer and the performing musician constitute what in philosophy we would call the “condition of possibility” of the musical work, which, beyond being a creation, has to be brought into presence, into effect, through the audible performance.7. The background is often mysterious and difficult for the aesthetic understanding. We will resort here to N. Hartmann's analyses, particularly to those addressing the “the phenomenon of the background in music”, which are both aesthetically and philosophically exemplary. 8. The paradox of music lies in that it is capable of bringing to the senses something that is entirely different and distanced from what can be sensibly heard. To solve this essential duality is an ontological undertaking. The aesthetic object enters into a larger set of cultural phenomena, but at the same time falls entirely under the law of objectivation.9. What is mysterious in the nature of objectivation is and always remains this: how can the modelling of a sensible thing in the foreground be the carrier of a content that has an entirely different mode of being and that is there only for a consciousness? Here, a parallel must be drawn with the mode of understanding of the concept that appeals both to the sensible intuition and to the higher forms of intuition that lead to understanding. 10. The parallel between the concept and the work of art highlights the necessity of the permanent and higher synthesis of the musical act. The status of this unique unity may be understood by appealing to what Leibniz called the principle of the “identity of indiscernibles”, which in fact interferes with the principles of order and continuity, thus allowing the quasi-identity of musical strata, as well as the essential ontological difference between them to be viewed in a fair light. 11. The problem, therefore, is finding the “internal difference” between the two strata, which in the musical work lies both in itself and in its actual performance. At the same time, this subtle difference between the strata appears and varies constantly with every performance, which leaves the musical act perpetually available for possible new consummations.
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Review of Cristina Șuteu, Critica muzicală. Perigeză, exegeză, hermeneutică. Cum se scrie o critică muzicală? Editura RISOPRINT, Cluj-Napoca, 2016
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The following text is part of my doctoral studies and provides a historical overview of the evolution and development of the piano étude as a genre, until the second half of the twentieth century. The analytical approach proposed herein starts from an attempt to define the genre and continues with a presentation of what we considered to be its roots, namely the prelude and the toccata. The analysis focuses on the chronological evolution of the two aforementioned genres throughout the major music history periods, identifying the aspects that validate them as precursors of the piano étude. The pinnacle of the piano étude was reached during the Romantic period, with the development of the concert étude, invested with strong poetic and expressive resonances. Thus, the piano étude was freed from its essentially didactic or pedagogical label and became a viable and compelling means of artistic expression. Its didactic function continued to be an important component in the works written in the Romantic period or in the first half of the twentieth century, while allowing, however, the free exploitation of ideas and thus expanding the genre’s horizons through the compositional play between synthesis and experiment.
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The general purpose of this study is the search of the progresses and differences of clarinet mouthpieces and their effects on clarinet performances. In accordance with this purpose, under which circumstances clarinet players choose the mouthpieces and the effects of these chosen mouthpieces on clarinet are studied. In the study, while comparing the mouthpieces the data were picked and classified by taking into consideration the previous studies. Also, thesis, articles, reviews and books which are relevant to this matter were researched, the notions of clarinet players and producers were taken and similar and different aspects of mouthpieces were presented. The structures and features of mouthpieces used in our country were compared by scrutinized. In the end of the study it is seen that such theses and information are not so many in number and it is thought that this study will make a contribution to clarinet players in the light of data which were determined with scientific acceptability and reliability.
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The paper focuses on the opera Brundibár. The authorial couple – composer Hans Krasa and librettist Adolf Hoffmeister – wrote it in the period of growing interest of artists in pedagogical aspects of the works of art. The changed social climate, however, meant for the work an unplanned journey – during the Second World War it was performed inside the Terezin ghetto by its inhabitants. The human message of the fairy tale story has thus been elevated into a higher symbolic frame – a resistance against the arrogance of power and violence. Especially the post-war era followed this symbolism. The author of the paper contemplates the innovative interpretative levels whose ambition is to cross the traditional performance frame of the work and to find connections with problems of contemporary society.
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The paper examines the work of the acclaimed German opera and theatre director Peter Konwitschny at the Opera of the Slovak National Theatre. The authoress bases herself on an analysis of the productions of Eugen Onegin (2005) [Eugene Onegin], by Tchaikovsky, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (2007) and Bohéma (2013) [La bohème], Janáček‘s Vec Makropulos (2015) [The Makropulos Affair], and Halévy‘s Židovka (2017) [La Juive], all of which, save for Janáček‘s opera, the Opera of the Slovak National Theatre has borrowed from foreign theatre scenes. The authoress makes a stocklist of the basic principles of Konwitschny’s direction signature and his contribution to theatre production, as well as to the artistic ensemble of the Bratislava Opera.
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