Musical Canon

This article aims to introduce into the national scientific circuit some theories that deal with the specificity of jazz at the present stage of its evolution through the theory and practice of postmodernism. Some concepts are briefly presented and analyzed, which can complement the methodological basis of the works dedicated to the analysis of national jazz phenomena at the confluence of the 20th-21st centuries. Based on the concepts of international researchers, a verifiable scientific apparatus is endorsed in the analysis of universal jazz phenomena. Intertextuality, deconstruction of artistic and cultural meanings, semantic re-codification and other methods are highlighted.

The methodical work The Structure and Classification of Musicology is intended as a support for the course Introduction in Musicology meant for first-year  students  who  major  in  Musicology  and  Composition.  Modern
musicology is a highly complex scientific discipline materialized through a set of scientific branches, all of them having the same object – knowledge of music
art in its various hypostases. The structure of musicology is determined by various subjective and objective factors. It shapes the structure of musicological activities and reflects not only the reality of musical culture, but also the methodological device available in science. The main points for the systematization of knowledge, including musicology are the two fundamental categories – space and time, existential axes representing human life and activity. The science of music also adopts the epistemological concept of space and time and organizes the subjects of its branches according the two main principles  taken  from  philosophy:  systematic  and  historical.  In  different
historical periods scholars have delimited the fields of musicology in several
ways, proceeding from various principles. The paper presented and analyzed several classification systems of the musical science from Antiquity to the present day.
Keywords: classification, historical, musicology, music practice, music theory, systematic, systematization.

Michael Spitzer’s Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style (Indiana University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-253-34724-6) pursues multiple lines of scholarly enquiry. As a musicological study, the book advances an historicist agenda, which grounds the understanding of Beethoven’s music in an extension of its contemporaneous philosophical context. As a music-analytical study, it proposes an approach based on fluid philosophical and style-historical categories, and so opposes the quasi-scientific, theory-heavy strategies that increasingly dominate transatlantic music analysis. As a template for current scholarly practice, Music as Philosophy fights a rearguard action against the postmodern opprobrium that Adorno and his descendents have recently endured. This review article evaluates Spitzer’s study against the background of recent critical engagements with Adorno’s legacy, especially that advanced by Richard Taruskin, estimating the analytical efficacy of Spitzer’s Adornian appar...

In this article we aim to develop the concept of socially robust knowledge, in the context of the relationship between the knowledge produced, validated in academic institutions or universities and the ones produced by quotidian practice and cultural paradigms in non academic spaces. That it, between “academic knowledge” and “street knowledge”, amid the “alma mater” and “master life”. Our principal reference framework will be the musical creation and its potential to produce connections or links with other social life areas, as well as its ability to embrace creative emotions and feelings which run through the academic sphere and disciplines, and places in the transdisciplinarity ground. Some specific examples of popular music culture are presented, where socially robust knowledge perspectives contribute to explain productive and politically pertinent reasoning.

En los últimos años, ha crecido el número de publicaciones destinadas a reflexionar sobre el impacto que las nuevas tecnologías tienen en el campo de la música. Una de las más célebres e interesantes –aunque discutidas— es el libro Retromanía de Simon Reynolds (2012). En este trabajo, el autor plantea que “el gigantesco archivo colectivo de YouTube” ha provocado un cambio sin precedentes, consistente en que la presencia del pasado en nuestras vidas ha aumentado de manera “inconmensurable e insidiosa”. En el ámbito del pop y el rock, esto habría conllevado el desarrollo de lo retro, tendencia que se caracterizaría, entre otras cosas, por aludir a un pasado cercano, implicar un recuerdo exacto del original e incluir artefactos de la cultura popular –no solo de la “alta cultura”—.
A partir de las reflexiones de Reynolds, el presente ensayo compara los fenómenos que se observan en la música popular masiva de años recientes con tendencias ya observadas en la música de tradición escrita de siglos anteriores (particularmente el XVI y el XVII). Sus conclusiones son que los fenómenos descritos en Retromanía están lejos de ser inéditos y que ha existido, en la historia, una estrecha relación entre los cambios culturales de mayor alcance, la nostalgia por las músicas pasadas y el desarrollo de nuevos medios para archivarlas.

In recent years, the number of publications aimed at reflecting on the impact that new technologies have on the music field has grown. One of the most famous and interesting –although controversial– is the book Retromania by Simon Reynolds (2012). In this work, the author argues that “YouTube's gigantic collective archive” has caused unprecedented changes since the presence of the past in our lives has “insidiously” increased. In the field of pop and rock, this would have led to the development of the retro trend, characterized, among other things, by alluding to a close past, implying an exact memory of the original and including artifacts from popular (and not only “high”) culture.
Drawing from Reynolds' reflections, this essay compares the phenomena observed in the mass popular music of recent years with trends already observed in the music of the written tradition of previous centuries (particularly the 16th and 17th centuries). It concludes that the phenomena described in Retromania are far from being unprecedented and that there has been, in history, a close relationship between the most far-reaching cultural changes, nostalgia for past music, and the development of new means to archive it.

John Dunstaple's reputation as the most famous English composer of the Middle Ages has stood almost unchallenged since his death. Two epitaphs attributed to one of his patrons, John Wheathamstead, Abbot of St Albans between 1420–40 and 1452–64, give him equal credit as a mathematician and astronomer (or rather, astrologer). Dunstaple was evidently proficient in the quadrivial arts of music, astronomy and mathematics (arithmetic and geometry), but only his musical activities have been thoroughly explored. At least two books that were in his library may provide hints about the level of his attainment in mathematics and astronomy. One is a fascicle within another volume that carries the often quoted ‘Iste libellus pertinebat Johanni Dunstaple cum duci Bedfordie musico’. The other and more extensive of the two manuscripts, Cambridge, Emmanuel College, MS 70, contains treatises on astronomy and astrology by standard authors in various hands. Some of these have what must be a scribal ...

This paper aims to conform a theoretical approach around the process of insertion and translation of jazz music into the canon of cultured western music, monopolized in a paradigmatic way by European classical music. Starting from a theoretical substratum formed in relation to polysystem theory, postulated by the Israeli researcher Itamar Even-Zohar, the synergies, conjunctures and conditioning factors underlying a movement of translation that has led to the change of consideration of a musical genre such as jazz, from a conception as marginal and minority music, associated with a specific socio-cultural context, to its recognition as one of the most avant-garde, refined and valued artistic expressions of Western culture are analysed.El presente artículo pretende constituirse como una aproximación teórica en torno al proceso de inserción y traslación de la música de jazz en el canon de la música culta en Occidente, monopolizado de manera paradigmática por la música clásica europea. ...

This is the first introductory survey of western twentieth-century music to address popular music, art music and jazz on equal terms. It treats those forms as inextricably intertwined, and sets them in a wide variety of social and critical contexts. The book comprises four sections – Histories, Techniques and Technologies, Mediation, Identities – with 16 thematic chapters. Each of these explores a musical or cultural topic as it developed over many years, and as it appeared across a diversity of musical practices. In this way, the text introduces both key musical repertoire and critical-musicological approaches to that work. It historicises music and musical thinking, opening up debate in the present rather than offering a new but closed narrative of the past. In each chapter, an overview of the topic's chronology and main issues is illustrated by two detailed case studies.

In this article we aim to develop the concept of socially robust knowledge, in the context of the relationship between the knowledge produced, validated in academic institutions or universities and the ones produced by quotidian practice and cultural paradigms in non academic spaces. That it, between “academic knowledge” and “street knowledge”, amid the “alma mater” and “master life”. Our principal reference framework will be the musical creation and its potential to produce connections or links with other social life areas, as well as its ability to embrace creative emotions and feelings which run through the academic sphere and disciplines, and places in the transdisciplinarity ground. Some specific examples of popular music culture are presented, where socially robust knowledge perspectives contribute to explain productive and politically pertinent reasoning.

My 2021 book "Sound and Sense in Franco-Flemish Music of the Renaissance: Sharps, Flats, and the Problem of ‘Musica ficta’" is accompanied by a website of sound examples with scores. The urls are included in this pdf of excerpts, and will provide an idea of the issues that the book addresses.

The terms classics and classical music have been central to discussion of music history and musical performance for the last two centuries, providing guide-posts for defining a hierarchy of how the more sophisticated musical taste can be defined in Western musical culture. But since about 1970 or so the terms canon and canonic music began in effect to take precedence, providing what has been thought to be a more sophisticated sense of the standards see in orchestral and chamber-music concerts.

The terms classics and classical music have been central to discussion of music history and musical performance for the last two centuries, providing guide-posts for defining a hierarchy of how the more sophisticated musical taste can be defined in Western musical culture. But since about 1970 or so the terms canon and canonic music began in effect to take precedence, providing what has been thought to be a more sophisticated sense of the standards see in orchestral and chamber-music concerts. These terms are inherently problematic, particularly at the present state of musical culture. The term popular music had long been used to refer to a broader range of what was seen to be less sophisticated music but that was still respected in its own right, especially as new ways of valuing what is performed in commercial or domestic contexts.

Almost every major field of music-making today endows its most respected composers who enjoyed high reputations. That has happened in fields as diverse as jazz, pop, metal, and progressive rock, in some cases borrowing the term classical at the very time that musicologists abandon it for the terms canon and canonic.  As Robert Fink suggested twenty years ago, “classical music canons, performing and avant-garde, have lost their roles as cultural validators; they have lost control over what is defined as ‘art’ music.”  Thus the world called classical music has lost the unique lofty status it had acquired early in the nineteenth century, challenging us to define more substantively just what these terms mean in both historical and contemporary terms.

Canons—of music, video games, or people—can provide a shared pool of resources for scholars, practitioners, and fans; but the formation of canons can also lead to an obscuring or devaluing of materials and people outside of a canon. The four authors in this colloquy interrogate issues of canons relating to video game music and sound from a variety of perspectives. Each author considers an aspect of canonization and argues for a wider purview. In “Rewritable Memory: Concerts, Canons, and Game Music History,” William Gibbons examines the ways in which concerts of video game music may create canons and reinforce particular historical narratives. In “On Canons as Music and Muse,” Julianne Grasso views the music originally presented in a video game as itself a type of canon and argues that official and fan arrangements of original game music may provide windows into lived experiences of play. In “The Difficult, Uncomfortable, and Imperative Conversations Needed in Game Music and Sound St...

In the present article, the author undertakes a phenomenological-musicological analysis of the electronic music, namely of the works signed by Mihail Afanasiev, composer from the Republic of Moldova.<br> The Western European tendencies in electronic music combined with the multi-stage electronic processing technique are reflected in the studio music of the composer M. Afanasiev. The composer's concerns in developing a musical discourse of untempered origin and, at the same time, of a "high informational density" were highlighted in the first creations composed in the early 1990s - No Dream, No Light, No Sadness (1996) and SBA (2001) - both works present technological, aesthetic and musical innovations. Investigating studio music requires a complex approach, the application of traditional methods of musicology proves to be ineffective in many aspects. The author of the present study uses the phenomenological tools to reveal certain issues regarding to the electron...

This paper examines how the idea of musical genius, a mythical notion used as a device for musical practices, facilitates a split between the genius of an innate learner and that of an apprentice, thus creating an ambiguous discursive space. Genius was firstly a matter of nature, but also most discussed under the topic of nurture, that is, education. In order to understand how this nature and nurture ambiguousness developed in specific terms for the musical genius I focussed on analysing historical documents on the main resources for genius-building. In this article, these resources are considered the raw material for the embodying of the genius in every single person. What I discovered about the term ‘genius’ and its contradictory uses to support both elitist and democratic schooling made me realise that it is treated as an argument to advocate the merits of music and to take concrete steps in implementing educational excellence. The term ‘genius’ can serve any pedagogical purpose ...

This thesis examines the notion of 'music-theatre as music' in its relation to myth. It is provided as an indispensable tool of critical commentary for the accompanying performances (that are included in the submission in DVD documentation) and as an in-depth analysis of the issues that relate to the concepts at hand. In the context of this project, the term 'music-theatre as music' is understood as a music-theatre that derives musical strategies of organisation in the composition of 'all theatrical means' (Lehmann 2006: 91) from music-centric conceptual models. Initially based on the connection that Levi-Strauss draws between myth and music, the research explores alternative ways that the affinity between the two domains can be used in the creation of 'music-theatre as music' performances. In the first performance Clastocysm (2007), the project examines practically the idea of structuring and performing mythical fragments based on the notion of the &...

Like that of Liszt and Stravinsky, the composers by whom he was attracted in his adolescence and early youth, Aldo Clementi’s (Catania 1925-Rome 2011) musical production went through various phases, greatly changing on the surface and in appearance, though not in depth and substance. He himself suggests a division into fi ve phases: 1. Preliminary (1944-1955), juvenile and apprenticeship works. 2. Structural (1956-1961). 3. Informal material (1961-1964). 4. Non-formal optical (1966-1970). 5. Polydiatonic (1970-2011): groups of letters indicating musical notes (for example: B-A-C-H), or canti dati (modal or tonal – monodic or polyphonic – compositions of the western tradition, from the Stele of Sicilus to Stravinsky), but most often segments of melodic lines inferred from them. But – in the polyphonic counterpoint that derives from it – they are simultaneously intoned in the different voices in different tonalities: hence their superimposition restores the chromatic dodecaphonic tota...

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the canon narrative within Western Art Music continues to resist the critical deconstructions by feminists and the New Musicology. Its stronghold over the way we talk about musical styles and position our practice is so great that even when we do away with the score and the figure of the composer and improvise freely, we find ourselves still trapped within a logic of canon that pushes certain artists’ contributions to the margins. Emphatically free improvisation implies a conscious attempt to forget our musical training and heritage, and subsequently our musical “families”: style, performance practice, and instrument. Absolute forgetting is of course impossible, and so we are forced to deal with the uncanny traces of our heritage as they make their ghostly appearances in real time. In exploring a new concept of Uncanon, I draw on queer and anti-capitalist texts by Jack Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, Mark Fisher, and Donna Haraway, as well a...

The article deals with the text-music relationship in the Italian Trecento focusing on the case of the madrigal 'Non al so amante'; set in music by Jacopo da Bologna on a text by Francesco Petrarca. Some passages about text and music in Dante Alighieri's De vulgari eloquentia are also discussed.

Canonicality is one of the most intensively debated issues in cultural sciences. However, the historical development of the word "canon" experienced different meanings under which there are the metaphors of a list and of a standard. Also in the history of electroacoustic music, some compositions of the past received a very high level of recognition and a special status for being essential. Therefore, a canonic concept implies an exclusion of other artworks which are not regarded for being essential. Because of this subjective selection, it is worthwile to indicate it in the designation. But given the emerged juridical significance of the word "canon", its further application as a linguistic term could be an obstruction to this which is why other expressions like "classics" or "anthology" should be under consideration as substitutes.

Notre these se propose d'etudier les questions liees a la realisation sonore des fugae, a partir des sources musicales d'un corpus d'œuvres attribuees a Josquin Desprez. Au sein du vaste repertoire des fugae composees au tournant du XVIe siecle, celles composees par Josquin constituent un ensemble remarquable par sa diversite, sa richesse technique et musicale, ainsi que par la complexite des questions qu'il souleve. En effet, la realisation de ces fugae pose des difficultes liees d'une part a l'interpretation de leurs notations canoniques, et d'autre part a la realisation de leurs parties fuguees. Si les theoriciens contemporains du compositeur definissent en effet la fuga comme une imitation rigoureusement exacte entre la partie de dux et celle(s) de comes, force est de constater que toutes les fugae considerees dans cette these ne repondent pas a ce critere. Certaines ne permettent pas une imitation parfaitement exacte ; d'autres semblent permettre...

La ultima etapa del Frente Nacional corresponde a una coyuntura politica que devela un Estadoen crisis. Este articulo pretende identificar la manera en que algunos de estos elementos contextualesrepercuten en diversas formas de produccion visual que apuntan a lecturas divergentes.Si el diseno y la publicidad institucional y politica configuran un imaginario de solidez y fortaleza del Estado colombiano, por otra parte, la cinematografia independiente y la produccion artistica,cargadas de humor e ironia, cuestionan la imagen de bienestar social que pretenden mostrarlas primeras. Para construir esta hipotesis, ha sido fundamental un analisis directo de fuentesprimarias publicadas en prensa y la consulta de piezas visuales y obras de arte pertenecientes acolecciones publicas.

For a complete performance video see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK-EWKytoZw

With the theme of “teaching and learning” during 2021’s Fresh Inc Festival, I have designed this work to display some underexplored and newly developed rhythmic possibilities in music: namely, indivisible poly-mensuralism and “pan-rational” time signatures. This work also uses techniques in algorithmic and fractal-based music composition, which I have developed over the past five years to aid in my creative process. Thus, this work is both a learning experience for me as the composer, exploring some of the possibilities of poly-mensuralism and pantationalism, and a learning experience for the performer in parsing these rhythmic stratified and indivisible structures along with this modified system of time signature.

In addition to the learning process of the composer and performer, the fractal-based processes used to generate much of the rhythmic and pitch material in the first and second parts of the piece are created using a simple machine learning neural network. When I first begin developing some basic algorithmic and iterative processes to generate motivically related but rapidly developing and diverging musical material from rudimentary pitch and rhythmic cells, I found the process very long. These algorithms could generate vast arrays of potential musical variations and derivations, but most of these possibilities generated by the computer I would find uncompelling. I had to sort through a lot of data and modify many satisfactory results into something I found more compelling. Upon the suggestion of my husband, I began to use a simple machine learning neural network to teach the machine the results I liked best and, consequently, teach the computer to find solutions that I would like based on the “training set” of successful matches. Rather than try and prescribe limitless parameters of what pleases me in music, I let me computer attempt to learn through sorting many results into best, good, satisfactory, bad, and poor categories, even using extant pieces of music I had previously written. Consequently, the computer would produce only results that would theoretically compel me and sound like me. Of course, there are always potential false positives, but I hope with further use, this network might continue to prove extremely useful as I continue to compose using various generative processes.

As such, I am teaching my computer to not write music blindingly based only an iterative process, but to sort through those iterations and produce those which I will potentially think are the best. Thus, not only is this work a learning experience for me and the performer, but also the machine which aided in the process.