A Prayer for Peace
Alexander Weimann – A Prayer for Peace
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
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Listeners’ Perceived Emotions in Musical Excerpts with Ordered vs. Randomized Pitch and Register
Author: Poudrier, Ève, Bell, Bryan, Lee, Jason Yin Hei, and Sapp, Craig Stuart
Publication details: 2023 4th International Symposium on the Internet of Sounds, Pisa, Italy, 2023, pp. 1-9. IEEE.
Weblink: https://doi.org/10.1109/IEEECONF59510.2023.10335484
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.
Listener’s perceived emotions in synthetic vs. human performance of rhythmically complex musical excerpts
Authors: Poudrier, Ève, Bell, B. J., Lee, J. Y. H., Sapp, C.S.
Publication details: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Music and Multidisciplinary Research (CMMR 2023), 13–15 November 2023, Tokyo, Japan, pp. 599–610. CMMR 2023 & Laboratory PRISM, Marseille, France.
Weblink: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10076248
Abstract: Research on listeners’ perceived emotions in music draws on human and synthetic stimuli. Although research has shown that realistic synthetic audio can convey emotions, studies that compare listeners’ experience of synthetic audio and human performances are limited. Using short musical excerpts, we investigate the effect of performance (human vs. synthetic) and instrumentation (piano vs. string quartet) as well as the influence of twelve musical features on participants’ ratings of five emotional dimensions (mood, energy, movement, dissonance, and tension). Findings show a small main effect of performance and a large main effect of instrumentation. Synthetic audio was perceived as more positive in mood and less tense than human performances. Piano excerpts were also perceived as more positive and as conveying less tension and energy than synthetic excerpts. Several rhythmic and pitch measures were reliably predictive of participants’ perceived emotions, supporting the need for considering finer-grain structural features when using naturalistic stimuli.
A Left Coast
Artists: Tyler Duncan (BMus’98) and Erika Switzer (BMus’97, MMus’00)
Recording details:
A Left Coast is a heartfelt song collection for the place baritone Tyler Duncan and pianist Erika Switzer call home- British Columbia.
The distinguished artists write that: “Our particular connections to Vancouver’s communities, geography, and spirit, continue to nourish us as artists. Its lands and waters, the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory cared for since time immemorial by the Musqueam, Squamish, and Selilwitulh and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, provided us with an extraordinary upbringing. With these songs, (by composers Iman Habibi, Jean Coulthard, Jocelyn Morlock, Stephen Chatman, Leslie Uyeda, Melissa Hui, and Jeffrey Ryan) we wish to say thank you.”
Duncan and Switzer have been inspired by the vibrant Canadian new music scene, and offer an adventurous, deeply felt homage to Canada’s beautiful ‘left coast.’
Bridge Records, 2023
The Highwayman
Composer: Dean Burry
Featured UBC Faculty Artist: Krisztina Szabó,
Recording details:
Alfred Noyes’ narrative poem The Highwayman made an early impact on me when I discovered it in a faded book in my elementary school library. I remember committing it to memory for a school concert, delivering the sumptuous descriptive language with all the drama a 10-year-old imagination could muster. The poem stayed with me since that time.
Despite its slightly “old-fashioned” nature, it has endured as one of the most popular poems of the twentieth century. The story tells of a dashing robber riding through a stormy night to reach an English country inn for a tryst with his true love, Bess. The robber is betrayed to the British Army and Bess is forced to make a choice between her lover’s safety and her own brutal death.
The musical ensemble is inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s seminal work Pierrot lunaire, op. 21 (1912). Both works are narrated, divided into a number of short sections, and employ the moon as their central image. While the music of The Highwayman is often influenced by the atonality of that earlier work, it also veers at times into other referential styles as the drama of the narrative dictates.
-Dean Burry
Polyrhythm classification using the composite tool
Authors: Poudrier, Ève
Publication details: 2nd International Conference Música Analítica, Interdisciplinary Approaches to Music Time, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal, 12-14 October 2023, p. 48.
Weblink: https://www.uc.pt/site/assets/files/1190234/ma_abstracts_1.pdf
Abstract: This paper proposes a definition of polyrhythm that affords classification of a wider variety of polyphonic textures along a set of characteristics derived from”composite rhythms,” i.e., the sequential presentation of event onsets reduced to a single strand. Examples of notated rhythmic polyphony from the Suter 1980 Corpus (https://polyrhythm.humdrum.org/) that have been encoded in kern for computational analysis using the composite tool (https://doc.verovio.humdrum.org/filter/composite/) are provided as case study. One of the advantages of this approach is that it allows for comparison across different types of ensembles, regardless of the number of instrumental parts. By dividing the polyphonic texture into contrasting rhythmic strands, aspects of metric orientation, rhythmic patterning, event density, coincidence, and salience can be assessed. It is argued that measures derived from composite rhythms not only afford more fine-grain characterization of rhythmic structures, but also provide an opportunity to address issues of perceived complexity using realistic musical stimuli.
Source: https://www.uc.pt/site/assets/files/1190234/ma_abstracts_1.pdf
recurrence (in two parts)
Author: Julia Ulehla
Publication details: Performance Matters, Volume 9, Issue 1-2, 2023, pp. 187-204
Weblink: erudit.org
Description: This essay explores the author’s process of trying to understand how to responsibly forge a relationship with traditional song heritage given conditions of ethnocultural rupture. Weaving together Slovácko folk songs transcribed by the author’s great-grandfather, an archival recording of the author’s grandfather, audio/video documents of her own embodied performance, dreams, folk tales, and analysis, the piece meditates on the many facets of “living song” (živá píseň). The author explores her process of learning how to approach the life of song, and how songs might be cared for. The performance of practice-based research is posited as a means to confront and dismantle patriarchal white supremacy within one’s body and spirit, thereby making possible the recovery of exiled strands of self and the forging of ancestral connections.
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