Thinking sound is an activity. Thinking with sound; thinking about sound; thinking through sound: these are all modalities of living with sound as a physical, vibrating reality. Because sound is matter in motion — resonating and reverberating — it resists conceptualization as an object or as a static concept. It cannot be held in a container but rather …
In Sacred Music in Secular Society, Jonathan Arnold highlights a strange phenomenon: ‘the seeming paradox that, in today’s so-called secular society, sacred choral music is as powerful, compelling and popular as it has ever been’.1 The explosion of new media through the internet and digital technology has created a new, broader audience for ‘the creative art of Renaissance polyphony …
In approaching this introductory text, I am struck by the difficulty of a begin-ning. When painter Emilio Vedova was teaching at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice and one of his pupils would be paralysed in front of the empty canvas, he would dip a brush in the paint and lash it against the white surface. Was the pupil facing the void, and was Vedova’s gesture int…
Czerny’s closeness to Beethoven, and his extraordinary musical abilities, have tendedto encourage confidence in him as a reliable source of information about Beethoven’sexpectations for the performance of his music. But despite his obvious reverence forBeethoven’s works, closer scrutiny suggests that he adopted a progressive rather thancuratorial position towards them: perhaps his concern…
According to a widely held view in 20th- Century aesthetics, a music work is equivalent to the performances that conform to a certain score? And this notion complies with at least three requirements of a satisfactory ontology of the music work, or so it seems?1Thus, although a Beethoven manuscript would command a very high price, it is not very interesting as a unique phys…
Composer, pianist, editor, writer, and pedagogue Mario Lavista (1943-2021) was a central figure of the cultural and artistic scene in Mexico and one of the leading Ibero-American composers of his generation. His music is often described as evocative and poetic, noted for his meticulous attention to timbre and motivic permutation, and his creative trajectory was characterized by its intersection…
The aim of this study was to pursue greater knowledge of vocal expressions in the borderland between speech and song through collaboration between researchers with different approaches, with a view to developing an interdisciplinary method for the analysis of such expressions. The research presented here is the outcome of the research project ‘In the Borderland between So…
The importance of music is difficult to overstate. As historian R W Malcolmson noted, it was the most accessible and democratic of the creative arts, with the ability to give expression to a range of fundamental emotions.4 From a different perspective, musicologist, Philip Tagg emphasised how music and dance are ‘particularly suited to expressing the affec…
Belonging, Detachment and the Representation of Musical Identities in Visual Culture is a volume of 28 essays exploring aspects of identity/ies in the field of music in visual culture. It is dedicated to the memory of Dorothea Baumann (1946–2022), an energetic champion of music iconographic research. Organised in six sections, the book explores theory and methodology; notation, intertextualit…
How are music and sound involved in the creation of audiovisual documents? What kind of quantitative and qualitative research permits the examination of music and, more generally, sound for Austrian (music) history on the basis of digitized audiovisual sources? These questions were approached in the interdisciplinary Digital Humanities project “Telling Sounds” at the Universität für Musik…