Publication details: In Listening to Confraternities: Spaces for Performance, Patronage and Urban Musical Experience, edited by Tess Knighton, 272–304. Leiden: Brill, 2024.
The fate of confraternities in post-Reformation Germany was profoundly shaped by the history of religious division. On the eve of the Reformation, major cities like Cologne and Augsburg enjoyed a vibrant confraternal tradition balancing spiritual devotion and public charity, but the advancement of Lutheranism would undermine confraternities alongside traditional clerical, monastic and devotional culture. The Council of Trent would lay the groundwork for a revival in confraternities in the German-speaking lands (as elsewhere), but a crucial question would be the degree to which they would be instrumentalised in the service of Catholic reform and renewal. If some late-medieval confraternities managed to persist, many new confraternities emerging in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries devoted themselves to potentially divisive spiritual objects – the Virgin Mary, the Eucharist, the Rosary, and the communion of Saints – and explicitly embraced a Tridentine agenda. The most striking development was the Jesuit establishment of Marian Congregations whose membership cut across lines of social class and, eventually, gender as well. The marked increase in confraternities and Jesuit-led congregations in German cities was accompanied by a soundscape that embraced songs, litanies, polyphony and a variety of other acoustic phenomena. The periodic meetings of confraternities were a locus for music of varying sophistication, while the processions that increasingly shaped urban space featured sounds ranging from songs, litanies and polyphony to bell-ringing and even gunfire. Songs were prescribed in confraternal statutes and handbooks, and some confraternities (such as the Andernach Confraternity of St. Cecilia and the Ingolstadt Congregation of Mary Victorious) even enjoyed bespoke songbooks printed for their use. Collections of litanies were published with the devotions and processions of confreres in mind, most notably the great Thesaurus litaniarum (1594) by the music director of the Munich Jesuits, Georg Victorinus. Some confraternities enjoyed rather sophisticated musical cultures and formed ready audiences for the burgeoning amount of distinctly Catholic polyphony issued by German presses after 1600. Specific collections issued by composers like Bernhard Klingenstein, Gregor Aichinger, and Rudolph di Lasso – some of them confreres themselves – offered music suited to a range of abilities, thus situating confraternities as a nexus where varied Catholic acoustic cultures might blend and interact.
First monograph-length analytical study of sign language music
Introduces and explicates the concepts of a singing signing voice, sign language melody, sign language rhythm and meter, and meaning in sign language music
Includes interviews with Deaf musicians that have never been published before, and some of whom have never been interviewed before
Publication details: Edita Gruberová’s Wig: Belcanto Revival and Staging Practices at the Turn of the 21st Century, Belcanto: Tradition and Fascination Today, edited by Isolde Schmid-Reiter and Aviel Cahn (Regensburg: ConBrio, 2024), pp. 167-187.
Details: Internationally renowned scholars and artists reflect on Belcanto from different angles rooted in research and practice and open up new insights through novel viewpoints and renewed questioning. The publication takes its starting point with the historical practice, but focuses mainly on the question how artists today recreate this complex phenomenon and reinterpret the particularities of historical sound ideals, of which the very latest state of the art is also presented. Moreover, it is discussed how performers can reconcile historical aspects of vocal artistry and the conventions of modern singing as well as the requirements set for voices in the current opera business. Given the multi-faceted nature of music theatre, the publication additionally addresses the staging of the musical language of Belcanto, and reflects on the current practice of today’s performances.
Publication details: WONG, LUCAS. “Humour in Late Debussy: Multiple Perspectives on ‘Douze Études.’” The Musical Times 157, no. 1935 (2016): 77–98. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44862507.
Release Year: 2018 Recorded at Fazioli Concert Hall, Sacile, Italy Engineer: Federico Furlanetto
Description: A great program of major keyboard works by Couperin and Rameau, two of the greatest French composers of the Baroque, performed on a modern piano with 4 pedals by Lucas Wong.
Where Waters Meet is an Indigenous/settler partnership built on friendship, deep respect and admiration, and the desire to communicate through our shared sung medium. It is a culmination of several joint projects in different regions of Canada over the course of many years. We are thankful to many for contributing their talents and engaging with the CCC on numerous levels in the creative phases: composer Carmen Braden, poet Yolanda Bonnell, incubation collaborator Sarain Fox, tour partners Wesley Hardisty (violinist) and Aaron Prosper (singer/drummer), and non-Indigenous collaborator Hussein Janmohamed, who has inspired us all in the CCC to consider what our music can be like if we honour and respectfully incorporate cultural traditions into our creative process. Hussein has modelled this in envisioning the expansion of his composition Sun on Water to include Sherryl Sewepagaham’s spoken word, drumming, and sung improvisations. We also thank the many Elders, Knowledge Keepers, and community members who have guided us along the way in our reciprocal creative collaborations. The music on this album has evolved organically as we have listened, asked questions, and responded honestly and in relationship with each other.
Where Waters Meet: Sherryl Sewepagaham + Canadian Chamber Choir was released worldwide on September 6, 2024. Solo pieces written and performed by Sewepagaham are nestled around each movement of Where Waters Meet, mirroring the way in which Braden’s contemporary choral suite has been performed live during the CCC’s past tours.
Featured UBC Faculty Artist: Alexander Weimann, organ
Redshift Records
Recorded at Holy Rosary Cathedral in Vancouver
Producer: Denise Ball Recording/mix engineer: Brian Chan Mastering: Will Howie
Recording details:
Organ – A Prayer for Peace
Gregorian Chants serve as the foundation for the piece, played on the wonderful organ at Holy Rosary Cathedral in downtown Vancouver. What’s captured here really happened “ex tempore”, in one complete take.
My improvisation re-imagines the so-called Organ Mass in which parts of the religious service alternate between singing the chant and playing/improvising on the organ. The sequence loosely reflects the Christian liturgy. For Plain Chant, I included parts of the “Missa Cunctipotens Genitor Deus” (Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, Agnus Dei), and added two free, unbound and fancier movements, one after the Gloria and one after the Sanctus. The first is a meditation on change or the conversion of thinking, perceiving and living (µετάνοια); the second was inspired by the “elevation toccata”, music that depicts the mystery of death and transfiguration.
The last line in the “Agnus Dei” serves as the cornerstone of the whole improvisation. Its words are “Give us peace”. For the conclusion of this musical prayer, I picked the Lutheran hymn “Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan” (What God ordains is always good). ~ AW
Abstract: The current study investigates the influence of pitch and register (ordered vs. randomized) on listeners’ ratings of five emotional dimensions (mood, energy, movement, dissonance, and tension) using excerpts from multi-part musical compositions that feature complex rhythmic and pitch structures. In addition to listeners’ ratings, computational measures derived from nine rhythm and pitch features were used to assess the influence of specific structural elements on listeners’ perceived emotions. The results show a large main effect of pitch presentation on all five emotional dimensions. Participants tended to rate ordered excerpts as more positive in mood, higher in energy, and with a greater impulse to move along the music, while randomized excerpts were perceived as more dissonant and more tense. Several rhythmic and pitch features were also reliable predictors of listener’s ratings, providing support for the use of naturalistic stimuli accompanied by more fine-grain measures of structural elements in experimental studies of listeners’ experience of music.
