Cubaneo In Latin Piano: A Parametric Approach To Gesture, Texture, And Motivic Variation

ABSTRACT CUBANEO IN LATIN PIANO: A PARAMETRIC APPROACH TO GESTURE, TEXTURE, AND MOTIVIC VARIATION COPYRIGHT Orlando Enrique Fiol 2018 Dr. Carol A. Muller Over the past century of recorded evidence, Cuban popular music has undergone great stylistic changes, especially regarding the piano tumbao. Hybridity in the Cuban/Latin context has taken place on different levels to varying extents involving instruments, genres, melody, harmony, rhythm, and musical structures. This hybridity has involved melding, fusing, borrowing, repurposing, adopting, adapting, and substituting. But quantifying and pinpointing these processes has been difficult because each variable or parameter embodies a history and a walking archive of sonic aesthetics. In an attempt to classify and quantify precise parameters involved in hybridity, this dissertation presents a paradigmatic model, organizing music into vocabularies, repertories, and abstract procedures. Cuba\u27s pianistic vocabularies are used very interactively, depending on genre, composite ensemble texture, vocal timbre, performing venue, and personal taste. These vocabularies include: melodic phrases, harmonic progressions, rhythmic cells and variation schemes to replace repetition with methodical elaboration of the piano tumbao as a main theme. These pianistic vocabularies comprise what we actually hear. Repertories, such as pre-composed songs, ensemble arrangements, and open- ended montuno and solo sections, situate and contextualize what we hear in real life musical performances. Abstract procedures are the thoughts, aesthetics, intentions, and parametric rules governing what Cuban/Latin pianists consider possible. Abstract procedures alter vocabularies by displacing, expanding, contracting, recombining, permuting, and layering them. As Cuba\u27s popular musics find homes in its musical diaspora (the United States, Latin America and Europe), Cuban pianists have sought to differentiate their craft from global salsa and Latin jazz pianists. Expanding the piano\u27s gestural/textural vocabulary beyond pre-Revolutionary traditions and performance practices, the timba piano tumbao is a powerful marker of Cuban identity and musical pride, transcending national borders and cultural boundaries

Melody

Melody is a fundamental concept in Western musical thought; it connotes the form and affective power of successive sounds in motion, perceived as an aesthetic unity. Yet for many writers, melody does not exist as an autonomous form, and for those who credit its existence, few agree on what it is, or how it functions in relation to harmonic voice leading and phrase rhythm. This chapter examines the historical emergence of a theory of melody in the West, from Aristoxenus to Leonard Bernstein; it traces the rich intellectual currents that saw melody variously coupled to ideas of voice, schemes of rhythmic symmetry, overtones, spatial organization, theories of evolution, and computational analysis

Melody

Melody is a fundamental concept in Western musical thought; it connotes the form and affective power of successive sounds in motion, perceived as an aesthetic unity. Yet for many writers, melody does not exist as an autonomous form, and for those who credit its existence, few agree on what it is, or how it functions in relation to harmonic voice leading and phrase rhythm. This chapter examines the historical emergence of a theory of melody in the West, from Aristoxenus to Leonard Bernstein; it traces the rich intellectual currents that saw melody variously coupled to ideas of voice, schemes of rhythmic symmetry, overtones, spatial organization, theories of evolution, and computational analysis

Tools for Analyzing Verbal Art in the Field

Song is a universal human phenomenon that can shed much light on the nature of language. Despite this, field linguists are not always equipped with the knowledge and skills to analyze song texts and draw out their significances to other areas of language. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for a language community to ask linguists working in the field to record and document their songs. Barwick (2012) identifies a number of reasons why linguists should work on songs and identifies iTunes as a local repository for recordings of songs. This paper expands on these reasons and describes how iTunes software can be used for comparing, retrieving and managing recordings of songs. This not only assists analysis of song structure and text, but is also a useful means of providing the community with recordings, even in the absence of a local repository. The paper draws on our use of iTunes during fieldwork on central Australian Aboriginal songs. Our aim is to share the methodology and workflow we use and to encourage linguists to work on this universal, yet often neglected, aspect of language that is often highly valued within the language community.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Tell Me A Story: A Multi-Model Analysis of Select Lester Young Solos

A long history exists between improvisational analysis models and the jazz improvisation they seek to examine and evaluate. Though often undertaken as a comparison among a varied group of soloists, this qualitative research study employs existing research on improvisational analysis models to examine and analyze select solo transcriptions of tenor saxophonist Lester Young. The purpose of this research is to determine not only the presence and applicability of existing improvisational analysis models to his improvisational work but also identify the multiple unique characteristics of his influential improvisational approach and illuminate those accessible strategies musicians may implement to improve their improvisational understanding and technique. The results of this study demonstrate the extent to which Young’s improvisational approach reflects the characteristics of Chord-scale Base, Motivic Development, Formulaic Usage, and Midlevel improvisational analysis models. In an improvisational sense, results concerning chord-based motivic development and formulaic usage network could be far too general and thus less applicable when comparing Young\u27s improvisational approach to the improvisers before, during, and after him. However, Midlevel analysis results provide a substantially more significant, more accurate perspective of Young’s accomplishments, approach, and influence. An additional implication of this study serves to spotlight the accessibility of improvisation itself. A more precise understanding of the fundamental components of solo construction and performance would greatly benefit many musicians and music educators

Melody as Prosody: Toward a Usage-Based Theory of Music

MELODY AS PROSODY: TOWARD A USAGE-BASED THEORY OF MUSIC Thomas M. Pooley Gary A. Tomlinson Rationalist modes of inquiry have dominated the cognitive science of music over the past several decades. This dissertation contests many rationalist assumptions, including its core tenets of nativism, modularity, and computationism, by drawing on a wide range of evidence from psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and cognitive music theory, as well as original data from a case study of Zulu song prosody. An alternative biocultural approach to the study of music and mind is outlined that takes account of musical diversity by attending to shared cognitive mechanisms. Grammar emerges through use, and cognitive categories are learned and constructed in particular social contexts. This usage-based theory of music shows how domain-general cognitive mechanisms for patterning-finding and intention-reading are crucial to acquisition, and how Gestalt principles are invoked in perception. Unlike generative and other rationalist approaches that focus on a series of idealizations, and the cognitive `competences\u27 codified in texts and musical scores, the usage-based approach investigates actual performances in everyday contexts by using instrumental measures of process. The study focuses on song melody because it is a property of all known musics. Melody is used for communicative purposes in both song and speech. Vocalized pitch patterning conveys a wide range of affective, propositional, and syntactic information through prosodic features that are shared by the two domains. The study of melody as prosody shows how gradient pitch features are crucial to the design and communicative functions of song melodies. The prosodic features shared by song and speech include: speech tone, intonation, and pitch-accent. A case study of ten Zulu memulo songs shows that pitch is not used in the discrete or contrastive fashion proposed by many cognitive music theorists and most (generative) phonologists. Instead there are a range of pitch categories that include pitch targets, glides, and contours. These analyses also show that song melody has a multi-dimensional pitch structure, and that it is a dynamic adaptive system that is irreducible in its complexity

Music adapting to the brain: From diffusion chains to neurophysiology

During the last decade, the use of experimental approaches on cultural evolution research has provided novel insights, and supported theoretical predictions, on the principles driving the evolution of human cultural systems. Laboratory simulations of language evolution showed how general-domain constraints on learning, in addition to pressures for language to be expressive, may be responsible for the emergence of linguistic structure. Languages change when culturally transmitted, adapting to fit, among all, the cognitive abilities of their users. As a result, they become regular and compressed, easier to acquire and reproduce. Although a similar theory has been recently extended to the musical domain, the empirical investigation in this field is still scarce. In addition, no study to our knowledge directly addressed the role of cognitive constraints in cultural transmission with neurophysiological investigation. In my thesis I addressed both these issues with a combination of behavioral and neurophysiological methods, in three experimental studies. In study 1 (Chapter 2), I examined the evolution of structural regularities in artificial melodic systems while they were being transmitted across individuals via coordination and alignment. To this purpose I used a new laboratory model of music transmission: the multi-generational signaling games (MGSGs), a variant of the signaling games. This model combines classical aspects of lab-based semiotic models of communication, coordination and interaction (horizontal transmission), with the vertical transmission across generations of the iterated learning model (vertical transmission). Here, two-person signaling games are organized in diffusion chains of several individuals (generations). In each game, the two players (a sender and a receiver) must agree on a common code - here a miniature system where melodic riffs refer to emotions. The receiver in one game becomes the sender in the next game, possibly retransmitting the code previously learned to another generation of participants, and so on to complete the diffusion chain. I observed the gradual evolution of several structures features of musical phrases over generations: proximity, continuity, symmetry, and melodic compression. Crucially, these features are found in most of musical cultures of the world. I argue that we tapped into universal processing mechanisms of structured sequence processing, possibly at work in the evolution of real music. In study 2 (Chapter 3), I explored the link between cultural adaptation and neural information processing. To this purpose, I combined behavioral and EEG study on 2 successive days. I show that the latency of the mismatch negativity (MMN) recorded in a pre-attentive auditory sequence processing task on day 1, predicts how well participants learn and transmit an artificial tone system with affective semantics in two signaling games on day 2. Notably, MMN latencies also predict which structural changes are introduced by participants into the artificial tone system. In study 3 (Chapter 4), I replicated and extended behavioral and neurophysiological findings on the temporal domain of music, with two independent experiments. In the first experiment, I used MGSGs as a laboratory model of cultural evolution of rhythmic equitone patterns referring to distinct emotions. As a result of transmission, rhythms developed a universal property of music structure, namely temporal regularity (or isochronicity). In the second experiment, I anchored this result with neural predictors. I showed that neural information processing capabilities of individuals, as measured with the MMN on day 1, can predict learning, transmission, and regularization of rhythmic patterns in signaling games on day 2. In agreement with study 2, I observe that MMN brain timing may reflect the efficiency of sensory systems to process auditory patterns. Functional differences in those systems, across individuals, may produce a different sensitivity to pressures for regularities in the cultural system. Finally, I argue that neural variability can be an important source of variability of cultural traits in a population. My work is the first to systematically describe the emergence of structural properties of melodic and rhythmic systems in the laboratory, using an explicit game-theoretic model of cultural transmission in which agents freely interact and exchange information. Critically, it provides the first demonstration that social learning, transmission, and cultural adaptation are constrained and driven by individual differences in the functional organization of sensory systems

TRANSMISSION & THE INTERNET: THE CONTEMPORARY RESPONSE OF A TRADITIONAL MUSICAL COMMUNITY

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/2385 on 14.03.2017 by CS (TIS)This thesis is a study of the performance, interpretation and transmission practices of traditional instrumental musicians in Scotland and Ireland. Extensive original research was undertaken over a period of four years including a survey of current transmission practices amongst traditional musicians from Britain and Ireland. Both preservation and the study of change are vital elements in maintaining a flourishing oral culture. However, my focus is on definition. The study is an attempt to clarify the many contemporary and often conflicting expressions of musical experience that constitute part of the oral tradition in Scotland and Ireland. By examining the work of the practitioners of this music it is possible to see that innovative and diverse approaches to arrangement, performance, education, transmission and reception are generating clearer ways of defining cultural values within the community. The emergence of a clearer set of definitions will help practitioners establish a grammar from which interactions with other cultural and socio-economic models can be undertaken. This in turn may help reduce perceived threats and alleviate the fears of some members of the traditional music community and clarify for those from other musical, academic and economic cultural groups the importance of acknowledging differences between the values of disparate systems of exchange. In terms of research methodology it is clear that, in the case of a subject area whose very existence depends on the conscious experience of individuals, we must accept the role that our specific and subjective contact with the world plays in the study of oral transmission. We must also reassess the value of oral traditions in their own right, away from textual analyses. Within an academic setting this approach must be validated as part of a system that is geared towards the understanding of all aspects of western cultural practices

The musical, notational and codicological evidence of W1 for an oral transmission of Notre Dame polyphony to Scotland

The repertory of thirteenth–century polyphony commonly known as the Notre Dame school has traditionally been thought of as one of the first repertories of music to have emerged through composition rather than improvisation. Often conceived of as a product of the work of two men, Léonin and Pérotin, who each contributed to the creation of a ‘Magnus Liber Organi’ and began this tradition, Notre Dame polyphony is frequently discussed as the first polyphonic music to have been conceived in writing. Of the central manuscripts that contain this supposed ‘Magnus Liber Organi’, D-W Cod. Guelf. 628 Helmst. (W1) is the most difficult to fit into the standard view of the repertory, as its provenance from St Andrews in Scotland places it far beyond the Parisian milieu that is usually associated with the repertory. The question of how this music came to be transmitted from Paris to St Andrews has never been satisfactorily answered, leaving open questions as to who, how, and why the music was transmitted to and written down in Scotland. Reframing the discussion as an issue of cultural phenomena rather than literate music composition, I argue that indications of Notre Dame polyphony being transmitted orally rather than through exemplar manuscripts are not as far–fetched as many believe. This is due in part to our modern distrust of oral transmission, a conception of the Notre Dame repertory as a prototype of the Western art music tradition, as well as an academic failure to move beyond the flawed assumptions of much twentieth–century scholarship. Analysing the music and notation of W1 in comparison to concordant settings in other manuscripts, I bring to the forefront those large and small divergences between the music and its notation that indicate aspects of an oral tradition present in the writing of W1. I argue that these differences provide evidence to support a theory that Notre Dame polyphony was transmitted orally and was not likely to have been transmitted by direct manuscript transmission between far–flung liturgical institutions such as Notre Dame and St Andrews; rather, that Notre Dame polyphony was a pan-European cultural and musical phenomenon that spread gradually throughout Europe through oral–formulaic processes