How Many Kinds of Rhythm Are There?

Author: Tenzer, Michael

Publication details: The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics, edited by Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, and Max Paddison, 199-215. New York: Oxford, 2019.

Weblink: https://oxfordscholarship.com

Abstract: The universe of possible rhythms comprises a timescape with a timescape embedded within it; that is, the full complement of rhythms that can be imagined engulfs its own subset, namely those rhythms already created or discovered by human agents. But if, in response to the question posed by the title, we endeavor to partition this whole to construct a typology of rhythm, we face from the outset a stark methodological choice. Do we opt to separate out perception and experience to create an abstract rhythm science mapping the terrain of the possible, or do we seek an anthropology of the rhythms humans have made and perceived? Chapter 13 views rhythm’s potential along various continua: via comparison with language, in the development of human culture, in the life of an individual’s experience, perception and cognitive prowess, and in the non-human natural world.

Music for Woodwind Choirs

Composer: Christopher Tyler Nickel (BMus’01)
Featured UBC artists: Roger Cole (oboe), Beth Orson (oboe), Christie Reside (flute), Paolo Bortolussi (flute)
Recording details: Centrediscs, Nov 15, 2019
Link

Experiencing Resonance as a Practice of Ritual Engagement

Author: Julia Ulehla, Manulani Aluli-Meyer, Delphine Armstrong, Mariel Belanger, Jill Carter, Cori Derickson, Claire Fogal, Vicki Kelly, Carolyn Kenny, Virginie Magnat, Joseph Naytowhow, and Winston Wuttunee

Publication details: In Research and Reconciliation: Unsettling Ways of Knowing Through Indigenous Relationships, edited by Shawn Wilson, Adrea V. Breen, and Lindsay Dupré, 157-178. Toronto: Canadian Scholars, 2019

Weblink: ebookcentral.proquest.com

Description: In this edited collection, leading scholars seek to disrupt Eurocentric research methods by introducing students, professors, administrators, and practitioners to frameworks of Indigenous research methods through a lens of reconciliation. The foundation of this collection is rooted in each contributor’s unique conception of reconciliation, which extends beyond the parameters of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to include a broader, more global approach to reconciliation. More pointedly, contributors discuss how effective research is when it’s demonstrated through acts of reconciliation. Encouraging active, participatory approaches to research, this seminal text includes a range of examples, including a variety of creative forms, such as storytelling, conversations, letters, social media, and visual methodologies that challenge linear ways of thinking and embrace Indigenous ways of knowing and seeing. This collection is a go-to resource for all disciplines with a research-focus, including Indigenous studies, sociology, social work, education, gender studies, and anthropology. FEATURES: A focus on Indigenous methods of knowledge transmission that are not traditionally embraced in academia and challenges the Eurocentric concept of research Explores research methodologies through the lens of reconciliation on a global scale A unique text that utilizes reflections of individual contributors, emphasizing the narrative of each chapter relevant to Indigenous traditions of storytelling.

Ma contrebasse chèrie

Artists: Henry Chen double bass and Lucas Wong piano

Release Year: 2019
Recorded at Fazioli Concert Hall, Sacile, Italy
Engineer: Federico Furlanetto

Description: A program of great French works, in arrangements for double bass and piano. These are great additions to the very limited double bass literature.

Mozart Piano Sonatas

Artist: David Fung
Mozart Piano Sonatas

Steinway & Sons (STNS 30107)

Release Date: 07/05/2019

Recorded November 7, 2017 & July 23, 2018 at Steinway Hall, New York City.

Producer: Jon Feidner
Engineer: Lauren Sclafani
Assistant Engineer: Melody Nieun Hwang
Production Assistant: Renée Oakford
Mixing and Mastering: Daniel Shores

Executive Producers: Eric Feidner and Jon Feidner
Art Direction: Jackie Fugere
Design: Cover to Cover Design, Anilda Carrasquillo
Piano Technician: Lauren Sclafani
Piano: Steinway Model D #597590 (New York)

Cover Photo: Daniel Moody

Pianist David Fung brings an almost operatic flair to his performances of Mozart’s sonatas on his STEINWAY & SONS debut album

Musicalische Friedens-Freud: the Westphalian Peace and Music in Protestant Nuremberg

Author: Fisher, Alexander

Publication details: Rethinking Europe: War and Peace in the Early Modern German Lands, edited by Gerhild Scholz Williams, Sigrun Haude and Christian Schneider, 277-99. Chloe 48. Leiden: Brill, 2019.

Weblink: https://go.exlibris.link/FYz6Jw52

Timely Negotiations: Formative Interactions in Cyclic Duets

Author: Roeder, John

Publication details: Analytical Approaches to World Music 7, no. 1 (2019)

Weblink: https://aawmjournal.com

Abstract: Susanne Fürniss’s (2006) magisterial survey of Aka polyphony analyzes a remarkable duet in which each singer draws material from a regularly repeating cycle but varies it on the fly to complement her partner’s likewise varying repetitions. This texture of two independently cycling but interacting voices, although well-suited to the Aka’s conception of musical structure, is not unique to them; indeed, examples from many traditional cultures have been recorded. In some instances, the musicians may be heard coordinating their variations to forge large-scale musical form out of what would otherwise be uniform repetition. This paper analyzes three items that illustrate the potential of such equal-voice cyclic duets to support formative interactions of timbre, timing and grouping that are not possible in monophony and not so effective in other polyphonic textures. In a funeral lamentation from the Solomon Islands, the singers’ timbral variations set up and realize large-scale formal articulations. In a flirtatious song of the Ecuadorian Amazon, as the singers repeat irregularly timed cycles at different tempos, they adjust the placement of their respective beats to create phases of greater or lesser synchrony and changing leader-follower relationships. Lastly, in a communal dance of French Guyana, one part adjusts its timing to accommodate the addition and deletion of events by the other, creating an unpredictable, dramatically charged process that they gradually direct towards a stable regular groove. Like the Aka duet, these compositions transform what might be a rote, mechanical procedure into a lively vehicle for distinctive formal and expressive effects.

Naming and Singing the Psalter in Counter-Reformation Germany

Author: Fisher, Alexander

Publication details: In Names and Naming in Early Modern Germany, edited by Joel F. Harrington and Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, 87-108. New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 2019.

Weblink: https://go.exlibris.link/tH46cDHx

Music and the Book of Nature: Vincenzo Galilei on the Conundrum of Musical Consonance

Author: Konoval, Brandon

Publication details: I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 22, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 93-119.

Weblink: https://journals.uchicago.edu

Abstract: Few figures have drawn more scholarly attention to the relationship between Renaissance musical humanism and early modern science than Vincenzo Galileo (c.1520/30–1591). From the Dialogo della Musica Antica et della Moderna (1581) through to the late discourses in manuscript, the acoustic investigations and theoretical contributions of Vincenzo have been conventionally understood to represent the defeat of numerology and the disenchantment of a traditional Pythagorean or neo-Platonic worldview. Where the source documents themselves strikingly diverge from such an account, the discrepancies are correspondingly portrayed as departures from an empirical orientation and as wholly extraneous to Vincenzo’s genuine findings and fundamental intentions.

An alternative perspective may be brought to these matters, informed by Foucault’s account of an “incomplete” Renaissance in The Order of Things. Vincenzo’s seeming departures from empiricism are reconsidered here as a considered response to the serious challenges confronting physico-mathematical approaches to music and acoustics in the sixteenth century, above all in the problem of musical consonance. From this perspective, Vincenzo’s signal contribution can be understood as a reframing of the problem of consonance, establishing new parameters for acoustic investigation that thrust a mathematical conundrum upon his inheritors—as directly evidenced in the work of his son, Galileo—thus setting a challenge to which they were obliged to respond. Furthermore, Vincenzo’s own recognition of this challenge might help us to understand the otherwise perplexing record of his claims, which marked an incomplete Renaissance of music theory and acoustic investigation that stimulated important developments in the early modern science of motion.

That’s All It Does: Steve Reich and Balinese Gamelan

Author: Tenzer, Michael

Publication details: Rethinking Reich, edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Pwyll ap Siôn, 303-322. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Weblink: https://oxfordscholarship.com

Abstract: Though integral to his formation as a composer, Steve Reich’s studies of Balinese gamelan have been overlooked. In part this is because of a certain redundancy: features of Balinese overlap significantly with the West African music whose impact on Reich’s formative works of the 1970s has been amply demonstrated. These include predominance of percussion, repetitive cyclic structures, interlocking rhythms, systems of oral transmission, and the nonprofessional ethos of the performing ensemble’s interactive behaviors. But what of the features of the Balinese music Reich studied and did not assimilate? Among these are malleable tempo, extended and minimally repetitive cycles, and tonally hierarchic melodies rooted in Southeast Asian traditions of sung poetry. Their eschewal opens pathways for insight into Reich’s music, as well as his cultural subjectivity, in the process illuminating unsuspected aesthetic affinity between his detractors among “uptown” composition apologists of the time and traditional Balinese musicians.