Description: In the charged religious context of post-Reformation Germany, debate ensued about the power of weather bells to disperse the thunderstorms traditionally thought to be the work of demons and witches . Catholics and Protestants alike inherited medieval notions of demonic agency in the atmosphere, but they differed on the appropriate remedy . Protestant critics ridiculed the consecration of bells as a corruption of baptism and rejected their sonic agency as a violation of God’s providence, retaining weather bells as a compulsion to the collective prayer that alone could assuage God’s wrath . Defenders of Catholic practice, however, rehearsed medieval arguments for bell apotropaism and insisted on their efficacy against storms, appealing variously to their consecration or to the prayer they compelled . If published Catholic opinion shifted markedly against apotropaic sound in the Enlightenment, local populations continued to hear weather bells in traditional ways, and to posit bells as powerful deterrents against demonic listeners
Abstract: In this article, I argue that deafness is not a deficit for musical experience; rather, it is a source of musical ability. I do so by summarizing some of the different techniques used by Deaf musicians who create music in a signed language. I focus on how signing musicians use different types of movement to create rhythm, and use the movement of their bodies through space to create a sense of melody. Rhythm in signed music is created in a visual-tactile medium, rather than a sonic one. Specifically, it is created through movement of the hands, body, face, and head. Melody in signed music involves the directed, purposeful movement of the body through the signing space, which uses movements and holds to create dynamic, kinetic lines. I explore these concepts using examples from signed rap music by the artist Sean Forbes, and an asl cover of Carrie Underwood’s song Blown Away by Rosa Lee Timm.
From publisher: Finding the Beatexplores humankind’s ability, propensity, and enjoyment in finding the beat in live and recorded experiences of music-making through the lens of entrainment, the human capacity to perceive a beat and to synchronize to it. Anyone who has attended a concert, gone to a club, or watched a sporting event has witnessed and/or participated in tapping, clapping, or dancing along with a piece, song, or chant. It doesn’t matter who or where you are in the world-as humans we spend a lot of time taking pleasure in matching our bodily movements with a perceived beat.
Publication details: In Italian Opera in Vormärz Vienna: Bartolomeo Merelli, Gaetano Donizetti, and Habsburg Cultural Politics in the mid-1830s: Re-Imagining Italianità, ed. by Axel Körner and Paulo Kühl, 96–112. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Description: Through musical analysis of compositions written in the first half of the twentieth century, Analytic Essays on Music by Women Composers: Concert Music, 1900-1960 celebrates the achievements of eight composers: Alma Mahler-Werfel (1879-1964), Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979), Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), Ruth Crawford (1901-53), Florence B. Price (1887-1953), Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006), J. M. Beyer (1888-1944), and Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912-90). Written by outstanding music theorists and musicologists, the essays provide thought-provoking in-depth explorations of representative compositions, often linking analytical observations with questions of meaning and sociohistorical context. Each essay is introduced by a brief biographical sketch of the composer by editors Laurel Parsons and Brenda Ravenscroft.
This collection – Volume 2 in an unprecedented four-volume series of analytical studies on music by women composers – is designed to challenge and stimulate a wide range of readers. For academics, these thoughtful analytical essays can open new paths into unexplored research areas in the fields of music theory and musicology. Post-secondary instructors may be inspired by the insights offered in these essays to include new works in music theory and history courses at both graduate and upper-level undergraduate levels, or in courses on women and music. Finally, for soloists, ensembles, conductors, and music broadcasters, these detailed analyses can offer enriched understandings of this repertoire and suggest fresh, new programming possibilities to share with listeners.
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.
