This article examines the concept of musical character in its dual aesthetic and educational dimensions. Starting from the question of whether mousiké techné possesses any character, the evolution of the term character is reconstructed using the main lexicographical sources, revealing an essential absence of specific musical attribution. Building on this, the analysis subsequently examines the role of character in Plato’s musical education, focusing on Books II and III of the Republic and Book II of the Laws. The central idea here is that of the choir as an instrument through which musical education is translated into social practice. Finally, the article connects ancient thought to modern reception, demonstrating how the combination of rhythm and harmony remains a fundamental principle in defining musical character and producing recognisable effects on listeners.
Music and books on Music, Musical instruction and study
El movimiento de música Antigua en el Perú se inicia, como en otros países de Latinoamérica, con la formación de grupos de música renacentista y medieval en la segunda década del siglo XX. La presente investigación busca documentar el papel de Christiam Mantilla Mayer en la etapa inicial del movimiento en el Perú a través de la actividad de los conjuntos Ars Viva y Carmina Nova en Lima. Con ese fin se realizaron entrevistas a profundidad y se accedió a los archivos personales de Mantilla Mayer y de varios integrantes de los conjuntos. La conclusión es que existen coincidencias en el surgimiento de estos conjuntos y los de otros países del continente en cuanto a su liderazgo, conformación, su relación con los colegios peruanos alemanes y los músicos migrantes. Este primer estudio es un intento de dejar constancia de la actividad musical desarrollada por Mantilla Mayer y deja abiertas las puertas abiertas a futuras investigaciones.
This article explores the extent of gender disparities in: (a) formal non-compulsory music education (FNCME), (b) instrument uptake, choice and continuation, and (c) music composition and production within the Swedish adult population. A nationally representative online survey of 1096 respondents aged 18–79 years old was conducted in 2023 and analysed using chi-squared tests and binary logistic regression. Data indicated that gender was the main factor impacting on all three aspects, intersecting significantly with age. This was even when accounting for highest level of educational attainment, employment type, personal income, region and whether respondents were born in Sweden.
Musical experiences in early piano instruction tend to be led by visual-based methods, limiting opportunities to develop aural abilities for children to understand music. This study examines the exploratory behaviour of music listening through auditory approaches that support visual-based methods to foster musical comprehension. Drawing from case studies of young music learners between the ages of 7 and 8, qualitative data were collected through lesson observations, interviews, game-based assessments, and performance evaluations of a prepared piece. Positive instances of recall, calibration, association, and empowerment indicated how participants perceived and strengthened the association of heard sounds. The findings further highlight the demanding cognitive ability needed to process visual elements in method books and how auditory approaches can relieve the attention to visual score-reading that enables students to better tune in to the coordination of hands with music. This discussion therefore opens the possibility for exploring how we may uncover nuanced differences in learning when we design teaching methods that straddle both auditory and visual approaches.
The purpose of the present research is to study the issues of inheritance and promotion of Chinese traditional music culture in college piano education. The research methodology builds on an empirical approach through a survey using a questionnaire for data collection. The present study involved 174 students from six Chinese colleges. Accordingly, students were divided into two groups based on the training approach. The experimental group included 87 students who received education under the previously elaborated program aimed at promoting Chinese traditional music culture; and the control group consisted of 87 students who received piano training under the conventional program. The results showed that for only 8% of the respondents the use of traditional Chinese music is the basis of learning, for 61% this type of music is practically not used. 88% of teachers concluded that there is a need to use Chinese traditional music in education because it displays elements that convey the symbolism of the Chinese people. The teaching criteria were to inform students about the need to apply Chinese national music while playing the piano; to introduce folk compositions for practicing technical elements into instruction; to update the repertoire and build students’ interest. Training based on the aforementioned criteria demonstrated that traditional music has become more popular. In particular, many students in the experimental group began to use this type of music while creating videos and shows (29%), participating in competitions and concerts (25%), and arranging musical compositions (21%). In the control group, students used folk music only while listening to musical compositions in their free time (57%) and teaching private piano lessons (11%). The present study has scientific and practical value as it demonstrates the effectiveness of promoting national music in educational institutions.
Contiene tres textos dedicados a Federico Gerdes: "LIED" poesía de Alberto Ureta, "Un Lied de Federico Gerdes" de Antonio Pinilla Rambaud, y “Homenaje a Watteau, de Federico Gerdes" de G. S. C., transcritos literalmente de los textos originales.
The purpose of the study is to reveal the genre-stylistic specificity of S. Monіuszko’s cycle “Home Songbooks” in the context of the spiritual and stylistic instructions of Biedermeier’s art, including in his Polish “model”. The methodology of the work is based on general scientific and special methods, among which intonation-stylistic, historical-cultural, genre-stylistic methods in their complex application are essential. The scientific novelty of the work is determined by the fact that it summarises for the first time the genre-stylistic specificity of S. Monіuszko’s “Home Songbooks” cycle in the context of Biedermeier’s typological features and his Polish “hypostasis”. Conclusions. The creativity of S. Monіuszko is an important component of Polish musical culture of the middle of the 19th century, which developed at the intersection of typological signs of romanticism and Biedermeier. The specificity of the latter, presented in almost all European cultures of the mentioned period, including the Polish one, is focused on the revival of spiritual patriarchal guidelines for human existence, on the reproduction of “life imbued with religiosity”. In the artistic and musical sphere, Biedermeier’s typology appeals to the typical and generally significant, to various forms of amateur music-making or to their stylisation. Within the framework of Polish culture, his instructions interact with the signs of Polish nobility and Sarmatism, as well as with the traditions of the national song and dance culture. The large-scale series “Home Songbooks” by S. Monіuszko was created on the basis of the best examples of Polish (A. Mickiewicz, S. Witvytskyi, J. Chechot, L. Kondratovych, etc.), as well as European poetry of various eras (J. Goethe, H. Heine, V. Hugo, V. Scott, J. Byron, V. Shakespeare). It includes about three hundred songs and is oriented to the artistic demands of a family circle or salon gathering, carries a spiritual and educational burden, reproducing the Polish “image of the world” and its ethical values. Key words: Polish musical culture of the 19th century, chamber and vocal cycle, chamber and vocal creativity of S. Monyushka, “Home Songbooks” by S. Moniushko, Biedermayer, Sarmatism.
The purpose of the study is to reveale the poetic and intonation uniqueness of G. Bizet’s “The Pearl Fishers” in the context of the genre-style canon of French lyric opera. The methodology of the work has a complex nature and is based on a combination of the principles of cultural, historical-typological, hermeneutic, and genre-intonation studies. The scientific novelty of the work is determined by the fact that it examines for the first time the genre-stylistic and spiritual-meaning specifics of G. Bizet’s “The Pearl Fishers” in the realm of the poetics of French lyric opera. Conclusions. Lyrical opera is a bright stage in the development of French musical theatre in the middle and second half of the 19th century. The opposition of this genre in relation to “grand” opera at the same time does not exclude their mutual influence, which is manifested in the antitheses of the personal drama of the main characters, ennobled by a high sense of love, and the patriarchal instructions of the environment in which they are. This also determined the stylistic specificity of lyric opera, formed at the intersection of romantic and Biedermeier traditions. The mysterious genesis of the European musical theatre was reflected in the lyric opera in the potential direction of the fate of its main characters towards spiritual transformation. G. Bizet’s romantic-exotic opera “The Pearl Fishers”, created in 1863, is based on the dramatic story of a priestess who broke her vow and her lucky escape from punishment. The genre canon of the lyric opera is manifested in the named opera in the appeal to the oriental plot, in the presence of a traditional love drama for lyric opera, which is in contradiction with the generally accepted patriarchal norms of the spiritual and religious order, which are dominant in the society in which the main characters live, in a significant the role of genre scenes, which generally reproduce within the framework of the European musical tradition, without corresponding folklore quotes, the exotic flavour given by the plot (fifth-note bourdons, the essential role of the metro-rhythmic factor and the timbre of percussion, the figurative-improvisational type of the vocal part of Leila the priestess). Key words: musical culture of France of the 19th century, French lyric opera, musical theatre by G. Bizet, “The Pearl Fishers” by G. Bizet.
Allowedly, singers of Baroque opera could influence the final musical and dramaturgical shape of the work. In our paper, we will focus on a case study of Hasse's compositional process, which will serve as a platform for presenting the digital outputs of the research project ‘Pasticcio. Ways of Arranging Attractive Operas’. The 1763 version of Hasse's opera Siroe, re di Persia featured the novice Elisabeth Teyber in the role of Laodice, whose dramaturgical weight seems to have been reconsidered several times by the composer, particularly in one instance: The seventh scene of Act I was written out twice by Hasse, once as an accompagnato and once in a secco version. In the first part of this article, the background and reasons for such measures, which carry crucial information regarding compositional practices in Hasse's self-pasticcio, will be discussed. Particular emphasis will be placed on the dramaturgical changes and their presentation in the project's synoptical overview of the textual sources of Siroe. The second part enters into detail about Teyber and her vocal peculiarities, which prompted the composer's new concept of this scene. The third section is devoted to another digital humanities tool, namely the database, which serves to visualise relations between sources, singers and composers and to picture the complexity of 18th-century pasticcio practice.
Game-based learning, or the process of adapting an educational concept into a game-based structure, has been studied by researchers for nearly a century. Over the last several decades, new technologies have allowed digital media to create a multibillion-dollar entertainment industry commonly known as video games. Video games have become a tool for many educators who have the potential to engage students to learn musical concepts and skills. The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of digital game-based learning in comparison to other teaching methods for music education and to explore the perspectives of young students regarding video games both in school and in their personal lives. Eighty-two (n = 82) fifth- and sixth-grade students in a northeastern U.S. elementary school completed a study consisting of a pretest/posttest control group design. Results showed that students who had access to educational video games combined with the assistance of an instructor achieved higher mean scores than students who had access to either video games without instruction or instruction without video games. These findings suggested that educational video games may potentially be used as an effective tool in the music classroom to teach musical concepts and skills.
Polyphonic music listening well exemplifies processes typically involved in daily auditory scene analysis situations, relying on an interactive interplay between bottom-up and top-down processes. Most studies investigating scene analysis have used elementary auditory scenes, however real-world scene analysis is far more complex. In particular, music, contrary to most other natural auditory scenes, can be perceived by either integrating or, under attentive control, segregating sound streams, often carried by different instruments. One of the prominent bottom-up cues contributing to multi-instrument music perception is their timbre difference. In this work, we introduce and validate a novel paradigm designed to investigate, within naturalistic musical auditory scenes, attentive modulation as well as its interaction with bottom-up processes. Two psychophysical experiments are described, employing custom-composed two-voice polyphonic music pieces within a framework implementing a behavioral performance metric to validate listener instructions requiring either integration or segregation of scene elements. In Experiment 1, the listeners' locus of attention was switched between individual instruments or the aggregate (i.e., both instruments together), via a task requiring the detection of temporal modulations (i.e., triplets) incorporated within or across instruments. Subjects responded post-stimulus whether triplets were present in the to-be-attended instrument(s). Experiment 2 introduced the bottom-up manipulation by adding a three-level morphing of instrument timbre distance to the attentional framework. The task was designed to be used within neuroimaging paradigms; Experiment 2 was additionally validated behaviorally in the functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) environment. Experiment 1 subjects (N = 29, non-musicians) completed the task at high levels of accuracy, showing no group differences between any experimental conditions. Nineteen listeners also participated in Experiment 2, showing a main effect of instrument timbre distance, even though within attention-condition timbre-distance contrasts did not demonstrate any timbre effect. Correlation of overall scores with morph-distance effects, computed by subtracting the largest from the smallest timbre distance scores, showed an influence of general task difficulty on the timbre distance effect. Comparison of laboratory and fMRI data showed scanner noise had no adverse effect on task performance. These Experimental paradigms enable to study both bottom-up and top-down contributions to auditory stream segregation and integration within psychophysical and neuroimaging experiments.
The aim of this research is to investigation of the relationship between students’ multiple intelligence based instructional (MIBI) areas and their assessment academic achievements the grade point averages of their students in Indonesia, mathematics, science and technology and social class. The research sample contains of 71 classroom Students’ who worked in primary schools in the Banten Province during the 2016-2017 academic year. The research method used is the evaluation method based on Stake model by using qualitative research. In the research, uses techniques using observation data, interviews, questionnaires and study documentation. In the analysis of the data obtained from this study, Descriptive Statistics, Independent Sample t-test and Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient were used. The findings of the study, suggest that there was no statistically significant difference between the classroom Students’ average scores of verbal-linguistic, visual-spatial, naturalistic, musical, logical-mathematical, intrapersonal, interpersonal and bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence areas in terms of the “gender” and “grade level” variables. The result stage is a very good learning outcome with assessment academic achievements that include cognitive, affective and psychomotor.
El uso de citas, referencias y alusiones a otras músicas es un fenómeno que reaparece con fuerza en la composición española de la década de 1970, relacionado con la crisis de los valores asociados a la vanguardia anterior y el auge de la posmodernidad. Entre los compositores que se valen de la intertextualidad destaca Miguel Ángel Coria (1937-2016), cuyo uso del revival elude la citación temática directa para recrear el estilo de autores como Falla o Ravel. El sentido de esta práctica en Coria parte de algunos de sus presupuestos estéticos e ideológicos, tales como el rechazo a la visión lineal de la historia, el carácter artesanal de la composición, o la recuperación de la comunicación con el público. En este artículo profundizamos en dos de las obras que mejor reflejan estas ideas, analizándolas bajo la tipología hipertextual del pastiche: Ravel for president (1973) y Falla revisited (1973-1976).
El presente artículo busca estudiar el gran cambio en el timbre y en las técnicas de interpretación que se ha dado en la música para violonchelo solo desde el siglo xx hasta nuestros días. Timbre, como una compleja cualidad sonora, empezó a explorarse más y a adquirir mayor importancia en el repertorio para violonchelo solo a principios del siglo xx. Sin embargo, esta exploración no se desarrolla sino hasta después de los años cincuenta, cuando el timbre se consolida como elemento primario dentro del repertorio. En primer lugar, se analizó las nuevas exploraciones tímbricas en el violonchelo y su influencia en el desarrollo del repertorio a solo y con medios electrónicos en el siglo xx y xxi. Después de este análisis, se examinó cómo el cambio de paradigma tímbrico en las obras para violonchelo solo del siglo xx y principios del xxi está ligado principalmente a dos grandes acontecimientos que han evolucionado de manera simultánea durante los mismos siglos: el desarrollo de las llamadas técnicas extendidas y el surgimiento de diversas tendencias musicales.
The Fifth Hellenic Week of Contemporary Music (Athens, 1976) has been mainly
considered in the context of a major political event: the fall of the
military dictatorship in 1974. However, it may also be seen as a landmark
for the transition to a postmodern era in Greece. The musical works
presented during the Week, as well as their reception by the musical
community are indicative of this transition. This paper aims at exploring
those two perspectives and places the emphasis on the second, through an
analytical comment on Le Tricot Rouge by Giorgos Kouroupos and the critiques
in the press.
Abstract The origin of rhythmic synchronization or entrainment to a musical beat in animals has been widely discussed. Parrots are suitable animals to examine the relationship between the capability of vocal learning and spontaneous rhythmic synchronization. In this study, budgerigars Melopsittacus undulatus learned to tap (peck) 2 keys alternately at a self-paced rate. Then, the metronomic sounds were played in the background during test sessions while the birds were performing the key pecking task, although they were not required to synchronize tap timing with the metronome. We found modest but significant effects of the metronome rhythms on the tap timing in some subjects. We also tested humans Homo sapiens using almost the same method. In contrast to the birds, a number of human subjects synchronized tap timing to the onset of the metronome without verbal or documented instructions. However, we failed to find an effect of the metronome on self-paced tap timing in some human subjects, although they were capable of rhythmic synchronization. This is the first report describing the effects of metronomic sounds on self-paced tapping in nonhuman vocal learners. This study introduces a new method that can be used in future research comparing birds that differ in vocal learning capacities, social structure, age, sex, hormonal status, and so on as part of examinations of the evolutionary foundations of beat processing.
O presente artigo, pautado na pesquisa da obra de Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, trata das contribuições que sua Rítmica pode vir a oferecer à preparação do pianista, com foco na colaboração musical, à medida que tem por objetivos a superação de arritmias, automatismos e a integração entre o corpo e a audição, bem como o desenvolvimento da escuta e da criatividade. Para isso, são delineadas as particularidades dessa atuação artística, tomando como principal referência teórica a obra de Martin Katz. Entende-se que essas contribuições podem, do mesmo modo, ser aplicadas a outros instrumentistas que se dedicam à música de câmara, pelas suas semelhanças performáticas, no que diz respeito especialmente à necessidade de perceber e corresponder musicalmente ao outro em uma interpretação conjunta.