Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology

Tonality and Neoclassicism in Stravinsky’s Sonata for Piano, Mvt. 2 (1924)

2022-08-22T12:01:11+02:00

Igor Stravinsky’s Sonata for Piano is an often overlooked yet important artifact of the composer’s neoclassicism. his treatment of tonality in the second movement is both literally and aurally more conventional than one might first guess. Stravinsky’s reliance on convention points to an ideology of continuity, one that honors the legacy of beethoven and other heroes. In doing so, Stravinsky’s Sonata brings forward old ideas wrought in new ways for a modern era. This essay examines ways of thinking about Stravinsky’s neoclassic style through analysis of the second movement of the Sonata focusing on the use of post-tonal techniques to create surprisingly tonal music.

Why does a creative city need its local music? A study of the contemporary Wroclaw jazz scene

2022-08-22T12:01:09+02:00

The aim of the article is to look at serious musical leisure activities in selected places in Wroclaw, in order to explain their significant contribution to making the capital of lower Silesia a creative city. Taking the perspective of research on music scenes and leisure studies, the author tries to demonstrate that the music scene in Wroclaw, although it didn’t develop its original sound, functions in a very effective way, providing a space for personal development, shaping the identity of individuals and the entire city. The discussed places not only serve as a physical space for a performance but primarily are communities based on internal and external cooperation. They are real “meeting places,” as the promotional slogan of Wroclaw says, for audiences and performers, amateurs, and professionals alike. The article is based on research on the Wroclaw music scene conducted since 2019. live performances that took place before the COvID-19 pandemic and between subsequent lockdowns were taken into account.

“Acoustic wallpaper” under control – the case of musique d’ameublement and Muzak

2022-08-22T12:01:07+02:00

Attention is one of the most important cognitive processes. Its functioning and key characteristics play a vital role in the perception of music, especially in everyday situations when music becomes an acoustical background. Thanks to selectiveness, shift and division of attention, the listener can balance between an active and a passive act of listening, however, the results of auditory perception may be difficult to determine.

Can the sender, in the process of musical communication, manage the listener’s attention in such a way as to achieve the effect of “acoustic wallpaper” understood as a perception-based effect of background music, where music, in line with the sender’s intentions, is located in the peripheral zone of the listener’s attention, within extensive attention? What function, from the perspective of the sender, is performed by “acoustic wallpaper”? Is it a target result or a mechanism leading to cer- tain reactions in an indirect way? What factors play a decisive role for the efficiency of an adopted strategy?

The main aim of this article is to answer the above questions by the analysis of two exemplary concepts of background music (musique d’ameublement by Erik Satie and Muzak) through the prism of the author’s theoretical model of “acoustic wallpaper” (Makomaska, 2021). This novel ap- proach derives from the psychologically-based reciprocal feedback model of musical response (hargreaves, et al., 2005) and socio-musicological studies on pragmatic forms of musical communication (brown, 2006). It assumes that the effectiveness of “acoustic wallpaper” being under con- trol of the sender (the composer or a professional company) is conditioned by correlations between structural characteristics of music, the listener, and historical-social context. The analysis shows that the intended functions of background music (seen from the perspective of the sender) can differ from the real ones and in the case of particular concepts can be moderated by various groups of factors. The results provoke further discussion on the application potential of the proposed model in psychologically, historically and/or marketing-oriented studies on such concepts as e.g. ambient music and contemporary audiomarketing strategies implemented in commercial environments, where music located on the periphery of the listener’s attention can become an effective tool of mani- pulation.

The Second Death of Concept Albums World-Building and Unification Strategies in the Age of Streaming

2022-08-22T12:11:41+02:00

As the end of the album format is apparently drawing near due to the radical change in music consumption habits motivated by streaming services, artists and genres interested in creating musical works with meanings broader than those of single songs find themselves in a situation worth analysing. Despite all appearances and expectations, I argue that nowadays artists willing to create narrative, thematic or generally conceptual contexts for their songs are living in a potential second golden age of concept albums. Some attempts at keeping the (concept) album alive are more alike to an act of resistance, others creatively take advantage of the same means of communication used by their digital enemy, in order to create something unique and capable of taking the place of the supposedly doomed CD/lP format. They are often transmedial works, thus requiring an interdisciplinary analysis. In this paper, I offer an overview of the contemporary situation of the album format (and concept album more specifically) and finally propose a classification of four forms of contemporary musical world-building strategies, starting from a selection of emblematic case studies.

Identity Representations: How Did the 1979 Iranian Revolution Affect Kurdish Folk Music?

2022-08-22T12:01:01+02:00

The following paper constitutes a part of my master thesis on the consequences of the 1979 Iranian Revolution on Kurdish folk music. The strong identity claimed by the Islamic Republic of Iran and particularly by Ruhollah Khomeini led to an obscuration of the Iranian cultural plurality, dominated by the Persian culture. Iranian music is often understood as Persian music while regional genres were confined to small areas. The domination of folk and regional identities by institutional, more-erudite identities is not limited to Iran but can be observed worldwide; however, the restricted access to music and research in the years following the Iranian Revolution enhanced this tendency in the country. In other words, vernacular genres including Kurdish folk music were denied a global presence and are still overshadowed by the dominance of classical music. Academic works made shortly after the revolution by important figures such as Jean During highlights a confusion between what was intended as folk music by the Kurdish population and what was perceived as such by foreign researchers. For this reason, the distinction between vernacular and classical music is still enforced nowadays, leading to an increasing gap between Persian culture and that of Iranian minorities. Furthermore, with Kurdish folk music being a regional genre and as political conflicts arouse between Iranian Kurds the Islamic Republic of Iran after 1979, Kurdish music is often perceived through a political lens only, denying the variety of reasons a genre may become popular and reducing music to a mean towards an objective. Through the perception of Kurdish folk music, this paper interrogates how political conflicts and cultural hegemony in music affects the representation of vernacular identities and seeks to explore how this participates in the discrimination of minorities.

Towards “The Nature and Secrets of Music”: W. C. Printz and the natural history tradition

2022-08-22T12:00:57+02:00

The present article provides arecontextualization of Wolfgang Caspar Printz’s (1641–1717) landmark music history published in 1690 (Historische Beschreibung der edelen Sing- und Kling-Kunst). later commentators have read it as a primitive, naïve and even failed attempt at writing the history of music. Still, they seem to agree that the text, in virtue of its subject matter, forms part of a canon of music historiography. The present article will seek the interpretative key in the wider intellectual context, outside of the narrow confines of texts about the musical past. It will advance the thesis that Printz built his music historiography from elements of the natural history tradition. Two arguments support this thesis. First, it will be argued that the organization of the material in chapters XIv, Xv and XvI betrays the influence of a classical version of taxonomy closely associated with the natural history tradition. Secondly, that Printz’s inquiry into the purpose of music reveals his reliance on a concept of nature similarly rooted in natural history.