The Journal of Music Research Online (JMRO) is a peer-reviewed journal for the publication of scholarly research in music and is published by the Elder Conservatorium of Adelaide University. It has broad scope and only publishes research which is of the highest international standard. JMRO is freely accessible and does not charge author fees. JMRO publishes English language (traditional) research text articles in PDF format and film or video (non-traditional) research accompanied by an exegesis in PDF format. JMRO encourages the inclusion of audio and video samples, high quality images and music scores where those items enhance the presentation of the research. JMRO has no page limits and minimizes the time from submission to publication. Articles include, but are not limited to, research on Composition, Early Music, Ethnomusicology, Gender Studies in Music, Interdisciplinary Studies in Music, Music Education, Music Technologies, Musicology, Music Theory and Analysis, Opera, Performance Practice, Popular Music, Ludomusicology.
Ambient Music as Sonic Ambiance: Space, Atmosphere, and Sound
The terms 'ambiance' and 'atmosphere' are often used interchangeably to describe affective states of space that engage the senses, yet their implications for music have only recently become a focus of scholarly attention. Sound plays a central role within the practical production of ambiance, shaping how spaces are felt, experienced, and imagined. From this perspective, the genre of ambient music, originally conceived as background music, can be understood as a deliberate practice of filling environments with particular moods. This article contributes to this emerging conversation by advancing an original tripartite conceptual model that brings the concept of sonic ambiance into dialogue with soundscape and atmosphere, offering a framework for understanding ambient music as a spatial, affective, and embodied mode of sonic world-making rather than as a closed musical genre. The analysis suggests that the experience of sonic ambiance requires bodies to be enveloped within a sound field, to adapt to its presence, and to be drawn into its affective captivation. In this sense, ambient music is not merely background sound but an auditory mode of shaping spatial experience, generating collective feelings, and fostering environments of tranquility and absorption.
Copyright (c) 2026 Uğur Aslan, Kübra Şahin Topal
The Concept of ‘Chinese Style’ Embedded in Chinese Piano Adaptations of the Guqin
In early twentieth-century China, some intellectuals believed that the country’s modernisation required comprehensive reforms across politics, the economy and culture. These efforts were seen as essential to building a stronger nation and responding to the crisis of national identity caused by internal turmoil and foreign invasion. The field of music inevitably faced new contradictions and challenges in the process of modernisation, particularly in negotiating the balance between tradition and modernisation. Chinese piano composers have attempted to selectively absorb and integrate elements from the Western musical system, while simultaneously retaining traditional musical elements that might be able to represent nationality, such as configuring chords for the pentatonic scale. The aim was to find a soundscape that was in line with the modernisation process and could reflect the national identity — ‘Chinese style.’ This process of selective inheritance and adaptation of old culture has been called ‘invented tradition’ by Hobsbawm and Ranger, who claimed that in the process of rapid social change and modernisation, old social patterns and traditions may not continue to be able to adapt to the new demands, and that new traditions need to be invented to maintain social cohesion and identity. Therefore, based on the theory of ‘invented traditions,’ this study examines three piano compositions adapted from the guqin during the Culture Revolution (1966–1976) — Three Stanzas of Plum Blossoms (Wang Jianzhong), Farewell at Yangguan Pass (Li Yinghai) and Flowing Water (Chen Peixun) — as case studies to explore how the composers interpreted and expressed the notion of ‘Chinese style.’ This is achieved through an analysis of the cultural context and aesthetic perspectives involved, focusing on both the inheritance and transformation of traditional culture and the reception and adaptation of Western culture. This study ultimately reveals that Chinese style is not only a personal stylistic preference of composers, but also a concrete manifestation of the general national aesthetic consciousness: an attempt to construct a sonic landscape that reflects the newly emerging cultural identity of the nation.
Sweet Alcaic Metres: Engaging with Regional Communities to Develop a New Creative Work
Sweet Alcaic Metres is an audiovisual work commissioned by Create NSW to contribute to the Regional Futures project in 2023. The creators were asked to respond to the prompt 'What does the future look like in your region?' and were encouraged to engage with experts and members of the community to develop a creative response. This audiovisual project began by exploring historical creative responses to changes in the environment through the writings and poetry of Judith Wright, followed by discussions with soil scientists, engineers, and station owners to capture the use, misuse and underuse of natural and civic resources within the New England North West area of New South Wales. This project is an example of qualitative arts-based research combining both arts-informed and arts-informing inquiries as a representation and response to an issue or situation.
Less Glamorous but Essential: Australian Composers’ Perspectives on Writing Art Music for Children’s Performance
In Australia, writing art music for children to perform has often been viewed as existing at the less glamorous end of the composition business. Yet, for those who compose music for young performers, it is an essential part of their role as creative practitioners. Many notable Australian composers, in addition to their writing for professional musicians, have written music for this age group. This article seeks to show, for the first time, the aims of Australian composers in writing music for children’s performance. The results of quantitative and qualitative surveys with 77 Australian contemporary composers divulge the complexities of writing music for this genre: the reasons that Australian composers write music for young performers, the process of composing for this genre and the specialised skill set required. This study shows that many Australian composers aim to offer children an experience that transcends musical ideas and connects them to a wider world of learning, which is significant when considering the development of music education at both pre-tertiary and tertiary levels. Ultimately, it is anticipated that the current research will help to give due recognition to the value of the genre and highlight its potential benefits to composers and children alike.
Copyright (c) 2024 Holly Caldwell, Dr Carolyn Philpott, Dr Maria Grenfell
From Categories to Continua for Composition and Improvisation: Manipulating Distributions of Pitch Intervals in Prime Number Tuning Systems
I have recently codified and analysed general and potentially valuable approaches to finding novel musical vehicles for expression. One of these is the process of gradually converting any set of categorical elements of musical structure into a continuum, assessing the utility and expressive applicability of each gradation. The purpose of this article is to illustrate this with respect to pitch structures, starting from normal Western tuning such as that of the piano, and moving towards continuous pitch structures, in this case emphasising intermediaries based on prime number systems, one from my earlier work, others created for the article. I provide pointers towards the perceptual and cognitive aspects of pitch structures, alongside the consideration of their utility for performance. I complement the article by providing examples of ensemble and keyboard music made with some of the graded tuning intermediaries.
music creation; music computation and cognition
The Basis of Johann Mattheson’s Musical Aesthetics
This paper aims to capture the overview of Johann Mattheson's musical aesthetics. Mattheson's writings have often been cited in studies on music in the eighteenth century. Any particular topic, such as performance practice, musical rhetoric, acoustic sensationalism, Incisionlehre, Melodienlehre, has been given a wide range of interpretations. As a consequence, his own musical aesthetics have rarely been discussed. His public image, moreover, as a relentless Enlightenment disputant was so widely disseminated that his musical thought has often been viewed from rather biased perspectives. For example, his religious aspect has been unduly downplayed. As a result, these partial views have led to narrow if not completely wrong interpretations of his musical thought. The author elucidates selected key concepts, with some misleading views corrected, to show consistent interrelations between them and to show that Mattheson's musical ideas can form a consistent and coherent system of musical aesthetics in the age of classicism, even though he never articulated his views in a fully systematic manner. The author also argues that the idea of heavenly music in Lutheranism must have played a pivotal role in integrating Mattheson's musical ideas into the system.
Symbols in Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande
This paper argues that when interpreting Pelléas et Mélisande we should not speak of static symbols which are potentially translatable into verbal language, but of symbolic encounters which unfold through time and whose meaning is almost incapable of expression in words – which is why Debussy's music is so effective in illuminating Maeterlinck's enigmatic play. The four main scenes of interaction between characters and symbolic events or processes are analyzed to shed light on the use of symbolism by the playwright and composer in Pelléas et Mélisande. The Conclusion argues against the common view that this opera portrays victims of destiny.
A Volume of Beethoven’s Lieder in the Childhood of Alexandra Feodorovna (1872–1918), the Last Empress of Russia
In 2007 a volume of selected songs by Beethoven was offered at a public auction in Adelaide, South Australia. This publication from C. F. Peters (Leipzig) would be quite unremarkable except the writing on both the cover and fly leaf is in the hand of the young Grand Ducal Highness Princess Alix Viktoria Helene Luise Beatrix of Hesse and by Rhine (1872–1918), the German-born granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who married the heir to the Russian throne in 1894. Markings in this copy of Beethoven’s songs indicate those she had studied in her childhood, either for performance or for the poetry of Goethe. Although the means by which this volume came to Adelaide is unknown, the provenance of this volume is almost certainly related to the illegal looting by occupying Allied forces at the end of World War II of Kronberg castle near Frankfurt, Germany, where the Hesse family belongings were taken in 1944. A list of names in Princess Alix’s hand at the opening of this volume is titled ‘My best friends’. It suggests the solitude she experienced following the deaths from diphtheria in 1878 of her younger sister Marie and her musically talented mother Alice, the third child of Queen Victoria and Albert.
The antiperiod, which James Webster’s 1991 book, Haydn’s Farewell Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style: Through-Composition and Cyclic Integration in His Instrumental Music, describes as ‘a period whose consequent cadences off the tonic and hence is more “open” than the antecedent’, has received short shrift in the literature. This study seeks to remedy the antiperiod’s relative neglect, proposing that this form-functional type, common ca. 1750 in a variety of designs at many different formal levels, influenced thematic- tonal procedures through to at least 1800. The study identifies two basic models: the parallel antiperiod, wherein the two phrases begin alike, and the contrasting antiperiod, where the second phrase develops from opening material or begins with new motivic content. The antiperiod, unlike the standard periodic model, is dynamic and open-ended, much like the sentences and sentence-like hybrids identified in Caplin’s 1998 book, Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Its harmonic plan, moreover, can expand to encompass larger formal regions (main theme or transition as a presentation phrase, for which the subordinate theme acts as continuation).
Stenographic Music Notation as a Musical Memory Aid among Dulcimer Players in Switzerland’s Alpine Region
Music stenography is a method for the simple and fast transcription of sound. Many systems have been developed, primarily during the nineteenth century, but did not find a practical application among musicians and composers. Examples of nineteenth-century music stenography, previously only documented in didactical treatises, were discovered during digitisation projects in the archive of the Centre for Appenzell and Toggenburg Folk Music in Switzerland. Some dulcimer players from the Alpine region of Appenzell mastered their own form of musical notation based on stenographic symbols. To decipher the code of pitch and rhythm symbols, I compare these to standard notations of the same pieces. Music notation in an ethnomusicological sense is widely understood as a tool to outsource memory. The study of music stenographs contributes to our understanding of the relationship between oral and written traditions of music memory and the partition of musical information into graphemic representations and knowledge based on musicians’ experience and practice. In this article, I analyse a sample of the idiomatic notations found among instrumentalists in the Swiss region of Appenzell in the context of transcription theories and concepts of music cognition. The details of musical information included in, and excluded from, music stenographs provide insight into the musical thinking of their transcribers and performers.
Mahler and His Programs vis-à-vis Strauss
Gustav Mahler had, by the late 1880s, achieved considerable prestige as a conductor, yet Richard Strauss’s early success as a composer of tone poems earned him wider fame and fortune. Around the time of Strauss’s triumphant premieres of Don Juan and Tod und Verklärung, Mahler was securing performances of his own programmatic orchestral works, the Symphonisches Gedicht in zwei Teilen and Todtenfeier. After disappointing results, he revised both, adding descriptive movement titles and other programmatic details, seemingly following Strauss’s lead. But further unsuccessful performances followed and Mahler grew wary of publicly sharing such descriptions of his works. The so-called ‘Munich Declaration’ of 1900 in which he denounced the programme seemed to react to this negative reception, which stood out in stark relief compared to the acclaim Strauss received. Scholars have long reflected on Mahler’s comments on his programs, but the extent to which his adoption and subsequent rejection of such descriptions was influenced by Strauss has remained elusive. Viewing the early symphonies against the backdrop of works such as Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, this article illuminates how Mahler’s stance on the descriptive programme shifted. Later he was more concerned with comprehension and with setting himself apart from Strauss. But Mahler’s earlier approaches to his own programmatic compositions, including what he chose to share publicly, were clearly bound up with Strauss’s own creative output and suggest envy of his rival’s success and frustration with his own failures.
The Dramatic Structure of Zemlinsky’s Eine florentinische Tragödie
This article discusses Zemlinsky’s opera Eine florentinische Tragödie, based on an unfinished play by Oscar Wilde. After the Introduction and a brief note on leitmotifs, the paper analyses the nine challenges that the fabric merchant, Simone, sets to Prince Guido Bardi. The emphasis is on how the text and music show the development of Simone’s thoughts and feelings. The cumulative results of the first eight challenges convince Simone that Guido is having an affair with his wife Bianca. He challenges Guido to a duel, wins it and kills him. Husband and wife are then reconciled. But this conclusion to the opera has been controversial since the first performances. The discussion concludes by evaluating two ways of improving on Wilde and Zemlinsky’s ending, both of which have been seen on stage in twenty-first century productions.
Introduction of a Protestant Choral Music Method to Melbourne’s Jewish Community:
One of the principle methods of teaching vocal music literacy during the nineteenth century in Britain was John Curwen’s Tonic Sol-fa. The original aim of the method was to provide a simple means of promoting Sunday School singing and it soon became the medium for hymn singing in Protestant churches, in community choral singing and later in school music education. In contrast to Orthodox Judaism, Jewish communities in England were influenced by the Jewish Reform Movement and a distinctive form of Anglo-Judaism emerged which gave greater prominence to music within the synagogue worship. The majority of Jews emigrating to Australia from England at this time were influenced by the Anglo-Judaic religious practices which reflected a certain degree of ‘protestantisation’. This article describes one such aspect of Protestantism, Tonic Sol-fa, introduced to the Melbourne Hebrew Congregation, then located in Bourke Street, and to the St Kilda Hebrew Congregation in Charnwood Grove. The two choirmasters at these synagogues, Raphael Benjamin (1846–1906) at Melbourne and Joel Fredman (1860–1943) at St Kilda, were proponents of Tonic Sol-fa and trained their choral singers in its use. They were also enthusiastic supporters of the Victorian Tonic Sol-fa Association and advocated use of the method and its letter notation in Victorian State Schools. It is maintained that the assimilation of Tonic Sol-fa into Melbourne’s Jewish musical culture and the contributions by Benjamin and Fredman to synagogue music during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries laid down a solid musical foundation for these two communities.
This paper investigates spacetime and auditory sense in the context of the American composer and sound artist Pauline Oliveros and that of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. For both thinkers a radical empirical engagement with sensation produces a suite of concepts foreground the immanence of experience, in particular, the radical particularity of embodied encounter between bodies, spaces, and sonic events. Building the structure of encounter through primarily Deleuzian terms, disrupting sedentary binaries, affirming a sense prior to language, and tracing the conditions of sonorous becoming, a concept emerges of the spacetime of sense and sensory objects released from the control of the mediation of the Western Image of Thought.
The literature on the role of double bass players has predominantly focused on musical practices which reflect the tradition of swing and the walking bass lines. The performance practices of contemporary jazz musicians, however, are far more diverse and reflective of the music’s hybridity. Taking as a case study Lloyd Swanton, double bassist with acclaimed Australian trio The Necks, I explore the ways that double bass players have reimagined the roles and sound of the double bass. I argue that the development of Swanton’s musical practices goes hand in hand with the changes to traditional jazz ensemble roles that occur in the group which open up space for innovative performance practices which reimagine the sound of the instrument.
If we are habits, nothing but habits, is music a feminist failure?
As an exterior force of relations and habits, feminism is conceived as a failure that needs a radical rethink. In this conceptualisation, feminism has failed to remove gender bias from institutions of work and in music it has failed to solve the inequalities of gender and race. Drawing on the philosophy of Deleuze as applied by Elizabeth Grosz, I explore what an immanent approach to thinking about the dynamics of feminist work and its habits in music might do to generate new understandings. I begin from the premise that the disciplinary apparatus of the modern institution makes everything the same, neutralising gender differences and eradicating any possibility for variation and unpredictability. I then shift into immanent thinking, arguing that when music performance in the higher education music institution is separated from the strictures of music curriculum and assessment regimes, transformations become possible. To illustrate this idea, I discuss a student performance of Bruno Mars’ song, Chunky, mashed with Michael Jackson’s PYT (Pretty Young Thing), at a Western Sydney University Art of Sound Concert presented in the Playhouse Theatre in October 2018. I argue that the performance, moves out of the rigidly coded gender norms of the institution into the plane of immanence.
The World of Cocos Malay Music and Dance:
The Cocos (Keeling) Islands, located halfway between Perth and Sri Lanka and part of Australia’s Indian Ocean Territories, are home to around 400 Cocos Malays and 150 others. Uninhabited until 1826, the islands became a coconut plantation controlled by the Scottish Clunies-Ross family and worked by Malay labourers from 1827 until 1978. In this isolated community there arose a unique and distinctive set of cultural practices, which drew from Malay, Javanese, and (some) Scottish influences. The rhythms of Cocos Malay life involve regular musicking and Islamic religious ritual: on specific occasions, including the week-long celebrations following Hari Raya (Eid al- Fitr), the birthday of the Prophet (Maulud Nabi), and weddings, the community comes together for festive public performances. This film and article present an ethnomusicological survey of Cocos Malay music and dance, based on fieldwork conducted in 2015 and 2016 during the festivities for Hari Raya. Among the genres presented and discussed are: zikir (remembrance of the Prophet), joget (popular Malaysian dance), nasyid (devotional songs), Scottish reels with Scottish dance music, traditional Cocos Malay dance with biola (violin), silat (a martial art), rudat (seated dance) with percussion, and bangsawan (popular theatre). Interviews explore the Cocos Malay biola tradition and projects for its revitalisation, and memories of music and dance for the Nuyar (New Year’s Eve) party that was held in the house of the Clunies-Ross family until the 1990s. The history and modern-day practice of Scottish dancing within this Malay Muslim community form a major focus of the narrative.
Copyright (c) 2020 David R. M. Irving & Jenny McCallum
Towards a Chronology of the Chansons of Gilles Binchois
An analysis of the chansons of Gilles Binchois used the graphical multivariate statistical technique of multidimensional scaling to quantitatively evaluate a carefully selected set of musical variables associated with the early fifteenth-century chanson repertory. The variables used in the analysis acknowledged that the superius and tenor voices of an early fifteenth-century chanson create a self- sufficient duet that forms the contrapuntal and harmonic core of the work and that this two-part contrapuntal framework (the Gerüstsatz) is enriched by a subordinate contratenor voice that makes an essential contribution to the overall musical texture. The findings indicated that this analytical framework was able to (i) resolve conflicting manuscript ascriptions, discover incorrect ones, and verify scholarly attributions of songs to Binchois, (ii) divide his complete secular output into four style periods approximately 8 to 10 years in length, (iii) date individual songs and manuscripts to within an accuracy of approximately plus or minus two years by mapping biographical data onto the results, and (iv) confirm and clarify the findings of previous manuscript studies. The internal consistency of the findings and their remarkable degree of agreement with the musicological literature strongly suggests that they could be used as a basis for future research and that the analytical framework could be applied to other repertories or composers whose works utilise a similar two-part contrapuntal core.
This article is in two parts. The first part elucidates the meaning of Béla Balázs's symbolist mystery play, which Bartók set to music in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. I consider first whether it is designed to illuminate universal truths about relationships between men and women, or just the relationships of intensely private men like Bartók himself. Then the psychologically complex sequence of events at each door is analysed. The second part is devoted to Bartók’s music. The occurrences of the ‘blood motif’ are evaluated, followed by a discussion of the music for each sequence in which Judit persuades Bluebeard to give her another key. The article concludes with an analysis of the almost ritualistic sequence in which Bluebeard invests Judit with a crown, jewels and a cloak, and sends her to take her place alongside his three former wives.
Love and Faith in the Theatre of Music Philosophy
In this paper, I present a unique, interdisciplinary contribution to the continuing discourse on music’s spiritual significance by developing, after Gilles Deleuze, a theatre of the ineffable for music philosophy. The purpose of this work is to open out, rather than resolve, the existential complexity of the Romantic belief in the spirit of music, a belief which enjoys tragic, ironic, and burlesque transformation in contemporary arts theory and practice. I begin by forging and extending connections between Nietzsche, Jankélévitch and Langer where the ineffable is writ large, where the logician’s imposturous, theological aura is at stake, and where the sublime magnitude of love, faith, and mystery creates the poetic framework for rethinking anthropocentric, logocentric ontologies of music. I then introduce Deleuze’s theatre of philosophy to show its remarkable suitability for reimagining the seriousness of the ineffable, and for working with the forms of tragedy, irony and burlesque, which together render a more complex, poetic image of the music philosopher. I then look to the following works in contemporary music studies and film practice, each of which further extends the theatrical and spiritual complexity of a love and faith in the spirit of music: Steinberg’s theory of musical desire from 2014, Marcel Cobussen’s poststructural jazz studies of 2008, and Guy Maddin’s 2003 film The Saddest Music in the World. Throughout, and toward the interdisciplinary possibilities of complexity, I approach each station as an exercise in collaborative, experimental thinking, within which plural images of the music philosopher emerge.
Musical Practices in Early Melodic Death Metal
This article investigates early examples of melodic death metal, a subgenre of metal that developed mainly in Gothenburg, Sweden, in the early- to mid-1990s. I examine how harmony is used in melodic death metal by undertaking a musical analysis of excerpts from three albums: The Gallery by Dark Tranquillity (1995), Slaughter of the Soul by At The Gates (1995), and The Jester Race by In Flames (1996). These analyses reveal a transformation of harmonic practices from melodic death metal’s parent genres of New Wave of European Heavy Metal and Swedish death metal. Melodic death metal also develops its own unique harmonic practices that point to a need to consider this style as a discrete subgenre beyond its development as The Gothenburg Sound. This enables a discussion of how these practices defined melodic death metal during its formative years and develops an argument for the differentiation of melodic death metal from local death metal sounds on musicological grounds. This article complements existing studies of melodic death metal by investigating an earlier period in the genre’s development than previous studies have observed and provides a foundation for further investigation into the development and proliferation of extreme metal subgenres.
Copyright (c) 2020 Benjamin Phillip Hillier
The songs for solo voice and piano of Meta Overman (1907-1993)
In this paper I aim to introduce the piano-accompanied songs of Dutch-Australian composer Meta Overman to scholars and performers. A brief biographical survey sketches her musical training in Rotterdam, especially under important composer-teacher Willem Pijper, and then a short survey of major Dutch song composers of the preceding two generations sets her songwriting in context. I will argue that the music of Willem Pijper and Alphonse Diepenbrock influenced her compositional technique and I point out affinities with other song composers, notably Matthijs Vermeulen, Henri Zagwijn and Henriëtte Bosmans. All of her songs are examined critically, with straightforward harmonic analysis. It is helpful to divide her song output (twenty-three in total) into two loose groups: those written before 1932 as she searched for her individual voice and those after she emigrated to Australia in 1947 and achieved her mature powers. Her best work is in settings of short suggestive lyrics where she captures the music of the words in a sensitive lyricism with colourful piano parts tied closely to the text.
Copyright (c) 2019 David Charles Wickham
This article is about several contests. It begins with an overview of how the relationship between performance and composition has been recast in recent scholarship, focusing as it does on collaboration and improvisation, and it includes a discussion how these ideas have reformed some of the hierarchical assumptions about music making. The article then addresses ontological questions raised with an analytical focus on a recording of a Superb Lyrebird. In transforming an argument about performance and composition through the analysis of birdsong, the article aims to (i) disrupt some of the emerging disciplinarity that has been key to performance-centred research (ii) further challenge some of the disciplinary lines between performance and composition and (iii) open up new questions about scholarly work at large. The article is therefore undisciplined, and, at the same time, it is formed from key arguments that are occupying musicology, such as — What is the role that performance plays in musicological discussion? What claims are made about musical ontologies? How can those claims be examined without relying on traditional definitions of music? How can analysis of a recording proceed without comparison with other, similar recordings? What, in other words, does performance analysis look like without the possibility of style? And, underlying all these questions, what work is undertaken in negotiating disciplinary lines?
This article explores the ways in which multiple recordings of Irving Berlin, Edgar Leslie and George Meyer’s ‘Let’s All Be Americans Now’ highlight different messages of patriotism, assimilation, and uplift in the United States at the beginning of World War I. During the years before the United States’ entry into the conflict, discussions about the nature of American identity and the proper performance or display of that identity became a central political and social issue. These discussions were particularly directed towards new American immigrants whose loyalties were frequently questioned. At the same time, recordings of Tin Pan Alley songs had become popular commodities separate from their sheet music counterparts. In order to differentiate different recordings made by different labels, musicians and producers employed a number of techniques including: additional instrumental sections, the inclusion of barbershop quartets and Sousa-esque band orchestration and, most notably, formal interruptions of the notated song structure with musical allusion to or direct quotation of popular patriotic songs. This article examines ‘Let’s All Be Americans Now’ by deploying contextualized comparative analyses of multiple versions as a way to engage with the discourse of Americanness and immigrant identity. Ultimately, the variation between multiple recorded versions of the song function as a lens by which we may view greater negotiations of the individual within the larger national identity, specifically within the context of patriotism, assimilation, and uplift.
'Where powers are boldly stirring, I counsel open war':
It is commonplace to situate Schoenberg as the subject of music criticism, much of it staunchly negative. Schoenberg’s entire biography is coloured by his oppositional orientation towards music critics and criticism, and he frequently blamed the arbiters of his work for coming between himself and what might have otherwise been a more receptive listening public. This article makes a case for Schoenberg as not merely the subject of criticism, but rather, by virtue of his life-long engagement with critics and criticism—in letters, essays, and on canvas — as a key participant in the discourse of music criticism in the early 20th century, and as an important music critic in his own right.
Copyright (c) 2019 Alexander Owen Carpenter
Johannes de Grocheio, the Ars musice and the Transformation of Chant Theory in the Late Thirteenth Century
In this paper, I attempt to trace the music theorist Johannes de Grocheio, author of the Ars musice (ca. 1275). I consider his Norman background, the two monks responsible for preserving his only known treatise, and his disputed magisterial standing in the university city of Paris. I then focus on Grocheio’s treatment of chant theory, which has received scant attention in the literature compared with his remarks on secular music and his ‘Aristotelian’ method of describing his subject. I contemplate the social context for writing anew on chant theory in a city known for not stipulating music in its arts curricula and consider the influence of Aristotle’s writings on Grocheio’s treatment. I end the paper with a survey of the chants that he names in his treatise, confirming that his examination of chant is ‘according to the use of the people of Paris’.
In his study of Handel’s dramatic oratorio Samson (HWV 57), Winton Dean alludes to darkness and light as multi-hued poetical and spiritual elements perpetuating the narrative. Literature contextualised by rhetorical ideology, the aesthetic notion of the affections in which the composer sought to arouse and manipulate the emotions of the listener, and contemporary scholarship pertaining to Baroque performance practice offers scant evidence investigating Handel’s adaptation of rhetorical principles. This article surveys the composer’s manuscript sources, observing through a performative lens the depiction of darkness and light apparent within Handel’s rhetorical inventio. In Act One, Samson’s despair at his state of blindness is poignantly expressed through the aria ‘Total Eclipse!’, in which melodic contouring, tacet accompaniment (dispositio), and notated rests (elocutio) promote transparency of the text. Handel’s choral setting of the text ‘O first created beam’ creates a similarly translucent vocal texture. The composer’s musico-dramatic structures offer the singer opportunities for declamatory, modulated delivery (actio), while two cadenzas notated in the score provide evidence of rhetorical decoratio within contrasting aria and recitativo accompagnato movements. In the final aria and chorus, the endless blaze of light created by a burning row of bright seraphim signifies the praise of God, while alluding to the redemption of Samson’s honour. This article highlights the expressive rhetorical practices evident within one of the eighteenth-century’s finest English oratorios through an examination of the composer’s artistic response to poetical stimulus, while reflecting upon tangible pathways framing an expressive, rhetorically based vocal interpretation of the work.
The principal aim of this paper is to investigate the rhythm of Gregorian chant as it was performed prior to the eleventh century. Discussing the two main approaches, semiology and mensuralism, that have been followed since the beginning of the twentieth century to unravel the mysteries associated with the chant's rhythm, several hypotheses were formulated, which were further examined by conducting statistical research on the relationship between several note-length and text variables, which were measured in four randomly selected introit chants. The results proved to be partly in agreement with mensuralist theories and partly with semiology, thereby also corroborating the distinction between the ninth century concepts of rhythmus and metrum.
‘Kodava Hero’, ‘Appear Only Once Before Me’:
In this paper I examine the representation of a minority community, the Kodava, in film songs. The Kodava are frequently portrayed in popular discourse in India as ‘internal exotics’: the men warrior like, the women fair, beautiful but slightly racy. I first outline why representations in song and dance sequences matter, whilst framing discussion of exotic representation within a discourse developed in the study of exoticism in Western music. I will then make some observations on depictions of other Indian‘exotics within’ – tribal groups, Christians and indeterminately exotic women – showing how such groups are variously depicted as assimilable, unthreatening, or dangerous. After a brief description of the Kodava as a group, with attention given to their image in popular imagination, I will show that images projected effectively and affectively through songs in the two Kannada language films, Muthina Haara and Mungaaru Male, not only exoticise the Kodava, but do so along gendered lines, showing differentiated paths of ‘assimilation’ of the exotic to the Indian state: as Hinduised warrior on the part of the male protagonist of the first film, as a dangerous sexuality best controlled by marriage to the already assimilated Kodava warrior in the second.
The improvement of conditions for composers in Ireland was one of the primary objectives of the Music Association of Ireland (MAI, founded in 1948). With the presence of composers such as Aloys Fleischmann, Brian Boydell and Frederick May on the MAI’s first Council the plight of the composer in Ireland featured significantly on the MAI’s agenda and activities. The Association sought to develop an audience for modern music and agitated for increased performance, publication and recording opportunities for works by Irish composers. It also attempted to shift Irish contemporary music from its parochial focus towards an international focus. By concentrating on MAI initiatives such as the Composers’ Group (1953–1975) and the Dublin Twentieth Century Music Festival (1969–1986), I expound the major contribution of the MAI in fostering talented Irish composers from its inception and, most importantly, trace its contribution towards the development of a musical infrastructure for indigenous Irish composers. It is unfortunate that these activities have been largely forgotten with improvements credited to more recent professional organisations associated with contemporary music in Ireland today.