My Soul Upon My Lips

Author: Roeder, John

Publication details: Music Theory Online, Vol. 26 No. 3, 2020

Weblink: https://www.mtosmt.org/

Abstract: Chen Yi’s Ba Ban (1999) for solo piano, like many works of Western-trained Chinese composers, situates fragments of evocative traditional folk melody within a post-tonal discourse that is well described by transformation theory. The eponymous folk tune that it quotes is a standard of the sizhu (“silk-and-bamboo”) repertoire. In sizhu performance practice, the evenly pulsed rhythm of the 68-beat melody is augmented and each pitch is highly “flowered,” that is, decorated. Chen’s piece, often simulating the timbral quality of sizhu heterophony, reproduces some of the directed temporal qualities of this repertoire by quoting distinctive phrases and elaborating their pitches. Intermingled with this discourse, however, it presents multilinear threads of motivic transformation through virtuoso figurations typical of Western piano repertoire. The free rhythm evokes a different folk music tradition, mountain song, that Chen mentions as inspiration. At first, as the post-tonal structures are introduced, they disrupt the linear continuity of the Ba Ban folk tune and create an undirected associative network. Eventually, however, they gain control over temporality as firmly as Ba Ban did at first, and then Ba Ban itself is transformed into ametrical pulse. Considering the contrasting gendered connotations of mountain song and sizhu, I suggest how my narrative of these rhythmic processes might resonate with some ideas of feminist theory.

Source: https://www.mtosmt.org/ojs/index.php/mto/article/view/473

Author: Poudrier, Ève

Publication details: Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2020) 38 (1): 27–45.

Weblink: https://online.ucpress.edu/

Abstract: The parsing of undifferentiated tone sequences into groups of qualitatively distinct elements is one of the earliest rhythmic phenomena to have been investigated experimentally (Bolton, 1894). The present study aimed to replicate and extend these findings through online experimentation using a spontaneous grouping paradigm with forced-choice response (from 1 to 12 tones per group). Two types of isochronous sequences were used: equitone sequences, which varied only with respect to signal rate (200, 550, or 950 ms interonset intervals), and accented sequences, in which accents were added every two or three tones to test the effect of induced grouping (duple vs. triple) and accent type (intensity, duration, or pitch). In equitone sequences, participants’ grouping percepts (N = 4,194) were asymmetrical and tempo-dependent, with “no grouping” and groups of four being most frequently reported. In accented sequences, slower rate, induced triple grouping, and intensity accents correlated with increases in group length. Furthermore, the probability of observing a mixed metric type—that is, grouping percepts divisible by both two and three (6 and 12)—was found to be highest in faster sequences with induced triple grouping. These findings suggest that lower-level triple grouping gives rise to binary grouping percepts at higher metrical levels.

Source: https://online.ucpress.edu/mp/article-abstract/38/1/27/111730/The-Influence-of-Rate-and-Accentuation-on?redirectedFrom=fulltext