Publication details: In From Folklore to World Music: On Memory, edited by Irena Přibylová and Lucie Uhlíková, 145-50. Náměšt nad Oslavou: Municipal Cultural Center, 2018.
Description: Offered as a companion to a Dálava performance that occurred at the 2018 iteration of the
Folk Holidays Festival, this essay posits the body as a receptacle of collective memory, and folk song as a key which activates or unlocks those memories. Author draws upon the work of Indigenous scholar/performer Monique Mojica and Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski, the burgeoning field of epigenetics, testimony from renowned Horňácko violinist Martin Hrbáč, and embodied research with folk songs from the Slovácko region (Moravia, the Czech Republic) to consider song performance, even in diasporic conditions lacking continuity of transmission, for its trans-temporal, inter-subjective potentialities.
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.
Release Year: 2018 Recorded at Fazioli Concert Hall, Sacile, Italy Engineer: Federico Furlanetto
Description: Celebrating the 100th anniversary of Claude Debussy’s death with works by Debussy, along with a new commissioned piece by Ming-Chi Chan, Robert McClure, and Yao Chen.
Abstract: The story of the metronome is the story of humankind coming to terms with evolving conceptions of time and coordination as mediated through technologies of the modern age. What began as a tool for regulating and documenting tempo soon became the temporal yardstick by which aspiring musicians strove to emulate in practice and performance. In the early twentieth century the metronome took on the new role of synchronizing live musicians with moving images on a screen (the so-called “click track”), and as the century progressed the metronome would come to dictate the manner in which musicians related to each other in the recording studio and in live events. This paper focuses on the latest manifestation of this phenomenon, the tactile metronome, looking at how vibrotactile stimulation is being used for temporal synchronization as well as an enhanced sense of embodiment for the performer, including haptic feedback. Four modern products tailored to performing musicians will be introduced and analyzed in the overlapping contexts of synchronization and embodiment. It is my argument that the metronome has now come full circle, returning a sense of human feel to the experience of making music.
Presentation details: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition and the 10th Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music Conference (Parncutt, R. & Sattmann, S., Eds.), Montreal (QC), Canada, 23-28 July 2018, pp. 355-360
Abstract: Rhythmic complexity, as represented by polyrhythm (the superposition of two or more contrasting rhythms, meters or speeds), is often identified as one of the central features of twentieth-century
Western art music. This project uses computational analysis to explore the development of polyrhythm in a corpus of 719 examples extracted from 450 works by composers from Europe and North America from 1900 to 1950 (Suter, 1980). The current study aims to develop complexity metrics to examine the use of polyrhythm in this period, test competing claims about its development, and explore the cognitive processing of complex rhythms. Corpus examples and associated metadata were processed to be analyzed using the Humdrum Toolkit (Huron, 1995). Exploratory analysis was conducted using a stratified sample dataset (N = 80) that includes four randomly selected examples for each composer (N = 20). Correlational analysis using global complexity measures (average nPVI, event density, entropy) showed that differences in entropy and variability between rhythmic groups within each excerpt could be predictive of genre, and that the entropy of the composite rhythms seems to decline in the 1930s and 1940s, before increasing again in the 1950s. These results are taken as starting points for future avenues of research on the interaction of rhythmic groups, variability, and complexity in the use of polyrhythm in Western art music of the twentieth century.
Publication details: “Opera and Monuments: Verdi’s Ernani in Vienna and the Construction of Dynastic Memory.” Cambridge Opera Journal 29, no. 2 (2017): 215-39.
Abstract: This article examines the first production and early reception of Verdi’s Ernani in Vienna in relation to cultural processes supporting strategies of imperial representation promoted by the Habsburg Court. By discussing newspaper reviews, archival documents, sketches of the sets for the first Viennese production, I show how the opera responded to official narratives of the Habsburg Empire and to specific facets of the local culture of monumentality. I argue that particularly the Act III Finale functioned along the lines of memorial practices that projected the Habsburg dynasty as the source of unity of the empire and its peoples. Finally, I consider the Viennese reception of Ernani in the broader context of its Italian dissemination, suggesting how fluctuating political readings of the opera depended upon (rather than undermining) multidirectional cultural exchanges.
Composer: Farshid Samandari (MMus’07, DMA’14) UBC Music Performers: Mark Takeshi McGregor flute, Joy Yeh harp Recording details: Redshift Records, June 15, 2018 Link iTunes | Spotify
Publication details: “Sobbing Cupids, Lamenting Lovers, and Weeping Nymphs in the Early Zarzuela: Calderón de la Barca’s El laurel de Apolo (1657) and Durón and Navas’s Apolo y Dafne (circa 1700).” Bulletin of the Comediantes 69, no. 2 (2017): 69-95.
Abstract: How did the mythological zarzuela develop following its creation in 1657? And when did weeping, cross-dressed characters emerge as mainstays of this genre? In this essay I bring together the fields of literary studies and historical musicology to examine the lament, a climactic solo song that peaked in popularity in the zarzuela from the turn of the eighteenth century. I begin by providing an overview of the development and transformations in Spanish musico-theatrical lamenting traditions, and then turn to examine three laments in a little-known zarzuela produced circa 1700: Apolo y Dafne (text anonymous, music by Sebastián Durón and Juan de Navas), based on the same subject as Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s first zarzuela, El laurel de Apolo (1657). Through the analysis of text, music, and performance, I explore changing musico-theatrical conventions in the later seventeenth century. To make this research accessible to a wider audience, I provide English translations of all excerpts in this essay.
