Music and Language

Developing Tone Based on Feel

by Jessica Quiñones

'Developing Tone Based On Feel', Flute Talk Magazine, 31 (1), 24-28.

In working with a deaf flute student, Quiñones discovered not only tips for teaching hearing-impaired musicians, but... more In working with a deaf flute student, Quiñones discovered not only tips for teaching hearing-impaired musicians, but also ideas that will help all flutists. “The discoveries I made working with Stephenson suggest that tone production is not only about hearing inaccuracies in playing but about feeling them. A heightened awareness of how notes feel as well as how they sound, might help hearing flutists improve their tone as well.”

(Un)touched by Words: Psychoanalytic writing on Music and Musical aspect of Psychoanalysis

by Odelia Hitron

Published in Ma’arag: The Israel Annual of Psychoanalysis, 2011, Volume 2 (pp. 55-82). © 2011 Magnes Press/The Sigmund Freud Center, The Hebrew University

(UN)TOUCHED BY WORDS:PSYCHOANALYTIC WRITINGS ON MUSIC AND MUSICAL ASPECTS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS


ODELIA... more (UN)TOUCHED BY WORDS:PSYCHOANALYTIC WRITINGS ON MUSIC AND MUSICAL ASPECTS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS


ODELIA HITRON

This essay reviews the development and changes in psychoanalysis’ theoretical account of music, in an attempt to better understand the nature of the relations between the two as art, science and technique. I attempt to recount the slow process by which music has been transformed from being perceived as an "opponent" of psychoanalysis, to being seen as it’s complementary.
In my review, I show how the early Freudian perspective conspicuously failed to refer to music – that is, to take it up as a subject of study – since the type and quality of the psychic excitements that are generated by music could not be accounted for in classical psychoanalysis’ content-oriented and symbol-seeking investigations. This conceptual discrepancy necessarily led to a conflict, one which manifested as disinterest and/or ignorance.
With the establishment of ego psychology this began to change, as its expanded theoretization of the mechanisms of sublimation was better able to formulate a number of important concepts in respect to the various functions of music. This approach pointed out formal similarities between the psychical structure of primary and secondary processes, and the respective musical structure of a primary rhythmical layer and a secondary melodic layer, which, in turn, made it possible to speak about the unique character of the therapist’s listening faculty, which makes him or her attuned to each of these layers.
Soon after, object relations theories, and especially Donald W. Winnicott’s theory concerning the relations between creativity, being and formlessness, provided a the framework for further and firmer theoretization of the role of music within these processes. In my view, this aspect of Winnicott’s work constitutes the point of transition leading to what was later to develop into recognition of the musical dimension inherent to the field of psychoanalysis. This recognition of the musical components of therapy gives us the opportunity to examine not just their form, but also their content and meaning. It is only by establishing the relations between them, and by viewing them as irrevocably mixed, that we understand them both properly. Only in that manner can the “music” of psychoanalytic therapy be “touched” by words.
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© 2011 Magnes Press/The Sigmund Freud Center, The Hebrew University
Ma’arag: The Israel Annual of Psychoanalysis, 2011, Volume 2 (pp. 55-82).

DE RICHARD STRAUSS À PASCAL DUSAPIN

by Jacques Coulardeau

Je vais concentrer mon regard sur deux opéras, Salome de Richard Strauss et Faustus The Last Night de Pascal Dusapin. L’opéra de Richard Strauss, créé à Dresde en 1915, n’est que la traduction directe de la pièce éponyme d’Oscar Wilde créée en français à Paris en 1892. L’opéra de Pascal Dusapin a été créé à Berlin en 2006 et repris la même année à Lyon.
Je n’envisagerai pas ici la pièce d’Oscar Wilde que j’ai couverte pour Les Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, n° 72, Montpellier, 2010. Par ailleurs je vais considérer l’opéra de Pascal Dusapin sous un jour différent de celui retenu pour Theâtres du Monde, n° 21, Avignon, 2011, bien que j’utiliserai l’entretien avec Pascal Dusapin publié dans la même revue.

Le premier drame ne peut se clore que dans le sang de celui qui se dit prophète et de celle qui capricieusement... more Le premier drame ne peut se clore que dans le sang de celui qui se dit prophète et de celle qui capricieusement prétend le posséder, bien qu’elle ne possèdera que la tête morte de l’objet de son désir, et il s’agit bien là d’un objet. Le deuxième drame ne peut se clore que dans la mort de l’impossible savant et dans la déconfiture complète des maîtres de ce monde que sont les deux faces de la divinité, la face sombre et la face claire, Satan et Dieu ou même l’inverse.
La mise en scène de David McVicar et son bourreau nu tout autant que la mise en scène de Peter Mussbach et son cadran nu d’une horloge mettent à nu ou en abîme l’élément essentiel de chaque drame : le temps historique déréglé par les désirs de sang des hommes d’une part et le temps cosmique déréglé par les désirs de savoir des mêmes hommes d’autre part.
Le temps est hors de ses gonds quand Jochanaan sort de sa cellule souterraine, sorte d’oubliette que nous n’oublierons plus jamais, ou quand Faustus est emporté dans un trou au cadran de l’horloge à la troisième heure, l’heure de la mort du Christ à la croix, la neuvième heure de tous les évangiles qui sont parole de Dieu.

Happy New Era. Graphic Design in the 21st c. Robert Appleton. Zhuangshi Magazine, Tsinghua University, 2012

by Robert Appleton

Sprache, Musik und mediale Differenz. Einige Überlegungen zur Ableitung kompositorischer Strukturen aus Sprache

by Stefan Drees

in: Dissonanz 106, Juni 2009, S. 24-28

Trotz der Einsicht in die grundlegende mediale Differenz von Musik und Sprache ist letztere bis heute eine wichtige... more Trotz der Einsicht in die grundlegende mediale Differenz von Musik und Sprache ist letztere bis heute eine wichtige Inspirationsquelle und ein zentraler Gegenstand dauerhafter musikalischer Auseinandersetzung geblieben: Komponisten haben es in der Vergangenheit immer wieder unternommen, musikalische Strukturen wie Melodik und Rhythmik aus Diktion und/oder Artikulation von Sprache abzuleiten und dadurch eine Anbindung von Semantik an strukturelle Kennzeichen der Musik zumindest nahe gelegt, und auch in jüngeren Werken lässt sich vielfach beobachten, dass Sprache im Hinblick auf das Komponieren als Katalysator fungiert. Vor diesem Hintergrund skizziert der Aufsatz anhand dreier Beispiele von Rolf Riehm ("aprikosenbäume gibt es, aprikosenbäume gibt es", 2006), Stephan Winkler ("Von der Natur des Menschen", 2005) und Oliver Schneller ("Joyce Paraphrases", 1996/97), was der Bezug auf Sprachstrukturen für die Musik und ihre Wahrnehmung in der Musik der Gegenwart bedeuten kann.

The politics of listening – Luigi Nono’s Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima

by Håvard Enge

Trial lecture for the PhD degree, University of Oslo, 07.09.11.

The string quartet Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima from 1979 is described as a turning point not only in Luigi Nono’s... more The string quartet Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima from 1979 is described as a turning point not only in Luigi Nono’s oeuvre, but also in the history of musical modernism. Often, the reception focuses on the surprise of having these introvert sound fragments and silent Hölderlin quotations presented by a composer who had had a reputation for three decades of producing intense, confrontational music with revolutionary political intentions.
However, Nono’s use of silent Hölderlin quotations in the quartet can be understood as a continuation of an approach to texts and extra-musical meaning which characterises his works in all of his periods, an approach where conveying a text is less important than creating an engaging human context.
And while Nono’s quartet clearly signals a heightened emphasis on musical self-reflection, the overarching context is no less political than before:  it is concerned with the utopian transformation of the act of listening.

Feminist Music By Gina Messina-Dysert

by Feminism and Religion

Last week Caroline Kline shared the article “Feminist Films” and discussed the Bechdel Test as a way to identify... more Last week Caroline Kline shared the article “Feminist Films” and discussed the Bechdel Test as a way to identify whether or not a film is feminist.  It left me wondering – can we identify music as feminist in the same way?  Music generally does not offer dialogue between two women.  But there are instances where we find two women singing together about feminist issues like the 80’s classic “Sisters are Doin’ it for Themselves.”  There are also women singing about or to women, like Juliana Hatfield’s “My Sister.” And there is music that acknowledges women’s struggles as women like Ani Difranco’s “I’m No Heroine,” No Doubt’s “I’m Just a Girl,” and Pink’s “Stupid Girls”.    But is this the only way to identify feminist music? 

A Cultural History of the Chinese Language

by Sharron Gu

This book has been released last week. You can order it directly from the publisher, McFarland Publishers 800-253-2187, Barnes and Nobles, or Amazon.com.

It is the first multimedia history of the Chinese language and also the first book that compares the history of... more It is the first multimedia history of the Chinese language and also the first book that compares the history of Chinese with Greek, Latin, English and Semitic languages

Language ideology and women's speech: talking community in the Northwest Amazon

by Janet Chernela

Sprachbezug als Werkzeug zur Wirklichkeitsbefragung. Zu einer kompositorischen Fragestellung im Schaffen Peter Ablingers

by Stefan Drees

in: Musik | Kultur | Wissenschaft, hrsg. von Hartmut Möller und Martin Schröder (= Rostocker Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft und Musikpädagogik 1), Essen: Die Blaue Eule 2011, S. 133-150

Der Aufsatz befasst sich schwerpunktmäßig mit der seit 1998 entstehenden, bislang noch unabgeschlossenen Werkfolge... more Der Aufsatz befasst sich schwerpunktmäßig mit der seit 1998 entstehenden, bislang noch unabgeschlossenen Werkfolge »Voices and Piano« von Peter Ablinger (*1959), in der die kompositorische Auseinandersetzung mit Sprache auf der Basis eines computergestützten Analyse- und Transkriptionsverfahrens zum Ausgangspunkt einer spezifischen Erfahrung und Durchleuchtung von Realität - in diesem Fall repräsentiert durch historische Sprachaufzeichungen bekannter Persönlichkeiten - gemacht wird.

Models of creativity in language and music. (poster)

by Anna Jordanous

2008. Poster with Nick Collins. In Proceedings of Language, Communication and Cognition conference, Brighton, UK

Models of creativity in language and music

Much can be learnt from the inter-disciplinary study of music... more Models of creativity in language and music

Much can be learnt from the inter-disciplinary study of music and language through the common medium of human creativity.

Intriguing neurological evidence links music and language processing in the brain, illustrating the strong overlap between these very human activities.

A newly flourishing field within cognitive science and artificial intelligence considers creativity as a computational phenomenon: capturing the vagaries of a seemingly free and unconstrained human activity into a formally modelled set of observations and structures.

This work draws on the literatures on music, linguistics and creativity to compare various computational approaches to generative creativity, both from a theoretical standpoint and in practice. Inspired by Mark Steedman’s application of a generative grammar to jazz, we explore the cross-application of linguistic generative models to the domain of music creativity, combining knowledge from both language and music to further our understanding of human creativity.

Music Hath Charms for Literacy... In the ESL Classroom.

by Kristin Lems

Case Study Using Music in Foreign Language Education: Teaching French to 13-Year-Old Schoolchildren

by Karen Ludke

Songs to support foreign language education

by Karen Ludke

Aspectos culturales y evolutivos de una pragmática de la musicalidad humana

by Maurício Benfatti

In: Alejandro Pereira Ghiena, Paz Jacquier, Mónica Valles y Mauricio Martínez (Editores) Musicalidad Humana: Debates actuales en evolución, desarrollo y cognición e implicancias socio-culturales. Actas del X Encuentro de Ciencias Cognitivas de la Música, pp. 795-804.

Con este trabajo tenemos la intención de proponer una argumentación a favor de la concepción de que una pragmática de... more Con este trabajo tenemos la intención de proponer una argumentación a favor de la concepción de que una pragmática de la musicalidad humana es un camino plausible para la afirmación de que música es lenguaje y, por lo tanto, una herramienta comunicativa. Para esto, argumentamos que modelos semióticos o sociales a la cuestión abogan por modelos no plausibles de cognición porque asumen una postura determinista acerca de los significados. Nuestra propuesta concibe un abordaje probabilística en que los significados transmitidos por la existencia ambiental de músicas emergen de interacciones entre individuos capaces de percibir una manifestación musical como un evento culturalmente reconocible como significativo.

Western Music In Japan: The Evolution of Styles In Children's Songs, Hip-Hop, and Other Genres

by Noriko Manabe

Project MUSE Journals Latin American Music Review Volume 30, Number 2, Fall/Winter 2009 Reinterpretations of the Son: Versions of Guillén's Motivos De Son by …

by Noriko Manabe

Reinterpretations of the Son: Versions of Guillén's Motivos de son by Grenet, García Caturla, and Roldán

by Noriko Manabe

published in Latin American Music Review 30/2 (Fall/Winter 2009)

This paper analyzes and compares the reinterpretations of the Cuban son by Nicolás Guillén in Motivos de son and their... more This paper analyzes and compares the reinterpretations of the Cuban son by Nicolás Guillén in Motivos de son and their settings by Eliseo and Emilio Grenet, Alejandro García Caturla, and Amadeo Roldán. Their distinct interpretations reflect the composers' divergent conceptions of the Afrocubanismo movement of the 1920s and 30s. For the Grenets, Afrocubanismo was an exotic style to be incorporated into popular songs for the theater and the salon; their catchy melodies in Cuban rhythms camouflage the bitterness of Guillén's text. For Caturla, Afrocubanismo was a blend of modernism and respect for Afrocuban folklore; his "Bito Manué" features vocal patterns and rhythms more in keeping with the music of santería than the son, along with text setting and harmonies that defied conventions. Roldán set texts naturally and mixed modern harmonies with the form, texture, and polyrhythms of the son, thereby paying homage to this genre.

Resumen:

Esta ponencia examina las reinterpretaciones del son cubano por los poemas de Motivos de son de Nicolás Guillén y las canciones basadas en ellos por Eliseo y Emilio Grenet, Alejandro García Caturla y Amadeo Roldán. Sus interpretaciones distintas reflejan sus conceptos diversos de lo que era el afrocubanismo. Para Grenet, el afrocubanismo fue un estilo que se incorporó en las canciones populares para el teatro y el salón; sus melodías pegadizas en los ritmos cubanos camuflan la amargura del texto de Guillén. Para Caturla, el afrocubanismo era una mezcla del respeto por el folklore afrocubano y el modernismo; él dio a "Bito Manué" una melodía más en el estilo de la música de santería que del son, puesto al contrario a las convenciones de la armonía y de la declamación. Roldán mezcló los ritmos y armonías modernos con la forma, la instrumentación y los ritmos complejos del son, para hacer un homenaje a este género.

Lovers and Rulers, the Real and the Surreal: Harmonic Metaphors in Silvio Rodríguez’s Songs

by Noriko Manabe

published in Transcultural Music Review 10 (2006)

This article, which analyzes 136 of Silvio Rodríguez’s over 500 songs and provides a close reading of seventeen,... more This article, which analyzes 136 of Silvio Rodríguez’s over 500 songs and provides a close reading of seventeen, highlights musical patterns that recur in songs with similar themes across three periods: 1967-1970, when Rodríguez was censured; 1971-1989, when nueva trova became institutionalized; and post-1990, in Cuba’s Special Period. Differing viewpoints and emotions are often set in different keys (“Debo partirme en dos” (1969)); songs with a political message are set in simple repeating patterns (“Resumen de noticias” (1969)); and many of his love songs are highly chromatic or harmonically unstable (“Ojalá” (1969)). Double-plagal progressions often signify fatalism and never-ending struggle (“Sueño con serpientes” (1974), “Reino de todavía” (1994)). Analyses are complemented by Rodríguez’s comments regarding his creative process.

Globalization and Japanese Creativity: Adaptation of Japanese Language to Rap

by Noriko Manabe

published in Ethnomusicology 50/1 (Winter 2006): 1–36.

    As a genre without the distraction of a melody but a well-defined beat, rap offers an opportunity to... more     As a genre without the distraction of a melody but a well-defined beat, rap offers an opportunity to explore the rhythmic and musical aspects of a language, yet this area remains neglected in hip-hop studies. An interesting case is Japanese rap, which has completely different syntax, vocabulary, accent patterns, and phonemes from English. While rhymes and stress accents punctuate the rhythm in American rap, Japanese verbal arts have traditionally not emphasized rhyming, and the language lacks stress accents. A combination of interviews with rappers, transcription, and analysis supports this exploration of the problems that Japanese rappers initially faced in rhyming and rhythm, the solutions they have applied, and the innovations they have made. Japanese rappers capitalize on their rich vocabulary of Chinese, Japanese, and Western-sourced words to form rhymes, and the pitch accents of the Japanese language and the rhythms of certain moras to create a melodious flow. Language is thus a key factor in adapting a global genre and in the process by which imitation leads to innovation.