Sumary (from www.brepols.net): These eleven essays, all centrally concerned with the intimate relationship between sound, religion, and society in the early modern world, present a sequence of test cases located in a wide variety of urban environments in Europe and the Americas. Written by an international cast of acclaimed historians and musicologists, they explore in depth the interrelated notions of conversion and confessionalisation in the shared belief that the early modern city was neither socially static nor religiously uniform. With its examples drawn from the Holy Roman Empire and the Southern Netherlands, the pluri-religious Mediterranean, and the colonial Americas both North and South, this book takes discussion of the urban soundscape, so often discussed in purely traditional terms of European institutional histories, to a new level of engagement with the concept of a totally immersive acoustic environment as conceptualised by R. Murray Schafer. From the Protestants of Douai, a bastion of the Catholic Reformation, to the bi-confessional city of Augsburg and seventeenth-century Farmington in Connecticut, where the indigenous Indian population fashioned a separate Christian entity, the intertwined religious, musical, and emotional lives of specifically grounded communities of early modern men and women are here vividly brought to life.
Publication details: 9th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM2022), July 28, 2022, Prague, Czech Republic, pp. 65-73. ACM, New York, NY, USA
Abstract: We introduce a computational tool that allows comparison and classification of polyrhythms in notated music. By reducing different musical textures into unpitched rhythmic strands, the composite tool enables visualization of the rhythmic reductions and computation of features related to polyrhythmic design, such as event density, nestedness, and polarity. The visualizations and extracted data can then be used to compare polyrhythms within a specific repertoire or between music in contrasting styles. The composite tool is available for online or offline use and is incorporated into the Polyrhythm Project website for exploration of polyrhythmic examples from the Suter (1980) Corpus.
Abstract: This article argues that deaf musical knowledge became epistemically excluded from systems of musical thought in the United States as the result of a battle between two competing philosophies of deaf education in the nineteenth century: manualism and oralism. It reveals how oralist educators explicitly framed music as exclusively involving “normal hearing”—and thus as outside of deaf knowledge except through technological intervention—by drawing on ideas about eugenics, race, and authenticity. Ideas about morality and technology also colored views of deaf musicality in the United States, shaping the reception of deaf music-making throughout the twentieth century until today. This article tells the story of how deaf music-making came to be forgotten and discovered, again and again, in the U.S. consciousness. By way of conclusion, I suggest that in order to address the epistemic exclusion of deaf musical knowers, we must carefully attend to what deaf epistemologies bring to music studies.
Artist: Marina Thibeault, viola Recording details: ATMA Classique, released March 25, 2022
With her latest album, Viola Borealis, violist Marina Thibeault explores the musical links between several northern cultures. From the 2016 concerto by Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks to solo works by Anishinaabe composer Melody McKiver to the very first viola concerto—composed around 1716 by Telemann—the elections on this album showcase the spellbinding talent of Thibeault, who is joined by Orchestre de l’Agora under Nicolas Ellis.
Abstract: This study investigated how signed performances express musical meaning and emotions. Deaf, Hard-of-Hearing (HoH), and hearing participants watched eight translated signed songs and eight signed lyrics with no influence of music. The participants rated these videos on several emotional and movement dimensions. Even though the videos did not have audible sounds, hearing participants perceived the signed songs as more musical than the signed lyrics. Deaf/HoH participants perceived both types of videos as equally musical, suggesting a different conception of what it means for movement to be musical. We also found that participants’ ratings of spatial height, vertical direction, size, tempo, and fluency related to the performer’s intended emotion and participants’ ratings of valence/arousal. For Deaf/HoH participants, accuracy at identifying emotional intentions was predicted by focusing more on facial expressions than arm movements. Together, these findings add to our understanding of how audience members attend to and derive meaning from different characteristics of movement in performative contexts.
Ryan Davis, Of Glow and Abandon. Debut EP of compositions for viola + electronic
Featured UBC Faculty Artist: Ryan Davis viola
Recording details: Released on all platforms on December 2021.
Praised by The WholeNote as showcasing multitudes of colours and possibilities, with much skill and imagination, Radia, the moniker for Saskatchewan-raised artist Ryan Davis, has swiftly emerged as a singular creative force. Unifying his extensive classical training with the inspiration of folk, electronic, and hip-hop music, he finds himself seamlessly blending in between creative spaces, having been described as a “composer, violist, and electronic Wunderkind” (OperaRamblings).
Ensemble: UBC Symphony Orchestra, UBC Choirs
Jonathan Girard, conductor Featured UBC composers: Dorothy Chang, Stephen Chatman, Keith Hamel Featured UBC artist: Paolo Bortolussi Recording details: Redshift Records, released October 1, 2021 Link
Artist: Krisztina Szabó
Singing 2020 Azrieli Prize Winner, Yotam Haber’s Estro Poetico Armonico III Recording details: Analekta, released October 1, 2021 Link
Outstanding Multi-authored Collection Award given for a distinguished multi-author collection for a volume edited by Leigh VanHandel, The Routledge companion to music theory pedagogy. It’s the first pedagogically-oriented scholarship to win a Society for Music Theory Publication award.
From publisher: Today’s music theory instructors face a changing environment, one where the traditional lecture format is in decline. The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy addresses this change head-on, featuring battle-tested lesson plans alongside theoretical discussions of music theory curriculum and course design. With the modern student in mind, scholars are developing creative new approaches to teaching music theory, encouraging active student participation within contemporary contexts such as flipped classrooms, music industry programs, and popular music studies.
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, biologist/ethnomusicologist Vladimír Úlehla (1888-1947) transcribed hundreds of folk songs from Strážnice, his hometown in the rural region of Slovácko, which lies at the border of present-day Czech and Slovak Republics. For Úlehla, Slovácko songs were living organisms, intimately related to the landscape and carried through time by family clans. Some of his interlocutors were relatives. Others were relations forged by decades of friendship. Vladimír was my great-grandfather, and his monograph Živá píseň (Living Song, 1949) provided a means for me to enter into a musical-cultural heritage that was ruptured when my father escaped communist Czechoslovakia and entered North America as a refugee. Informed by song transcriptions, Vladimír’s ideas about living song, childhood experiences musicking with family members, and ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation seeks to address the life of song, even when hybridity, rupture, and transplant figure into that inquiry. Through a networked, rhizomatic framework and mixed-methods approach, this research brings a number of theoretical, historical and methodological contexts to bear on addressing the living nature of song. Family oral history, interviews with musicians, and folk song poetics gesture towards a Slovácko cosmology that inscribes a world co-inhabited by humans, ancestral spirits, birds, trees, waters, mountains, and storms, all of which are conceived as animate and interrelated. Participant observation, my own research-creation and subsequent song-bartering (Bovin 1988) offer glimpses into the powerful role that songs play in connecting people with one another and with their ancestors. I describe how during fieldwork, the cultural hybridity of my performing body called many complex and painful histories into question and disrupted folk song’s alliance with cultural purity, which was especially provocative in an era of heightened xenophobia. Weaving together a consideration of the formal qualities of songs, their affectual, emotional power, and the historical/political contexts in which they appear, Slovácko songs emerge as agentive entities with which a human might collaborate in a variety of culturally-specific performance ecologies, thereby opening possibilities for ethical, anticolonial research practices and interpersonal encounters within a heterogeneous, multicultural society facing crises of social injustice, the COVID-19 pandemic, and impending climate catastrophe.
