Repetition, Reception, Response: Minimal Music and the Use of Affect in Analysis

Affect reorients our approach to expressivity in music. Instead of searching for emotions embedded in the music, we can consider the moment of reception and begin to associate affective responses with musical structure. This approach differs from one that supposes an emotion is felt after the significance of a musical event is consciously apprehended. Music analysis typically shies away from affect; it is often considered too close to emotion, and therefore too subjective, to be treated as an appropriate object of study. In this paper, I use repetition as an entry point into a discussion of how the affective response of the listener plays a key role in identifying and understanding musical structures. In the first analysis, an early Steve Reich piece, I look at how affect can anchor our interpretation of a work’s repetitive elements and their timbral characteristics. For example, the analysis shows how beating phenomena are perceived to be a musical component of the piece rather than an unwelcome artifact of electronic performance. The second analysis, a late chamber work by Morton Feldman, looks at how the perception of similarity and identity is linked to the work’s ability to guide our attention to different aspects of structure. In the third analysis, an electronic composition by Ryoji Ikeda, I examine how the piece calls for an embodied approach to music reception, one that explicitly recognizes the role of affect in perception. Such an approach is necessary in order to notice the presence of recurring musical motives and account for the unexpected reconfiguration of the listening space that the work provides

Musical Sound and Spatial Perception: How Music Structures Our Sense of Space

It is not uncommon to read claims of music’s ability to affect our sense of time and its rate of passage. Indeed, such effects are often considered among the most distinctive and prized aspects of musical aesthetics. Yet when it comes to the similarly abstract notion of space and its manipulation by musical structures, theorists are generally silent. My dissertation addresses this gap in the literature and shows how music’s spatial effects arise through an affective engagement with musical works. In this study, I examine an eclectic selection of compositions to determine how the spaces we inhabit are transformed by the music we hear within them. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of embodied perception, as well as research on acoustics, sound studies, and media theory, I deploy an affective model of spatial perception—a model that links the sense of space with the moment-to-moment needs and desires of the perceiver— to explain how these musical modulations of space occur. My claim is that the manner in which the music solicits our engagement affects how we respond, which in turn affects what we perceive. I begin by discussing the development of recording technology and how fixed media works deemed “spatial music” reinforce a particular conception of space as an empty container in which sound sources are arrayed in specific locations relative to a fixed listening position. After showing how innovative studio techniques have been used to unsettle this conventional spatial configuration, I then discuss examples of Renaissance vocal music, instrumental chamber music, and 20th century electronic music in order to develop a richer understanding of the range of spatial interactions that musical textures and timbres can provide. In my final chapter, I draw upon these varieties of affective engagement to construct a hermeneutic analysis of the spatial experience afforded by Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, thereby modeling a phenomenological method for grounding interpretation in embodied, rather than strictly discursive, practices. By soliciting movement through the call for bodily action, music allows us an opportunity to fit together one world of possibilities with another, thereby providing an occasion for grasping new meanings presented through the work. The spatial aspect of music, therefore, does not consist in merely recognizing an environmental setting populated by individual sound sources. Through the embodied practices of music perception and the malleability of space they reveal, we are afforded an opportunity to reshape our understanding of the world around us

MEI and Verovio for MIR: A Minimal Computing Approach

While the increase in digital editions, online corpora, and browsable databases of encoded music presents an extraordinary resource for contemporary music scholarship, using these databases for computational research remains a complex endeavor. Although norms and standards have begun to emerge, and interoperability among different formats is often possible, researchers must devote considerable time to discover, learn, and maintain the skill sets necessary to make use of these resources. This talk will discuss our work with the Serge Prokofiev Archive and the creation of a prototype to browse, display, and play notated music from Prokofiev’s notebooks via a web browser. The project is an example of how using the principles of minimal computing can reduce the burden of technological expertise required to both disseminate and access encoded music

A model for annotating musical versions and arrangements across multiple documents and media

We present a model for the annotation of musical works, where the annotations are created with respect to a conceptual abstraction of the music instead of directly to concrete encodings. This supports musicologists in constructing arguments about musical elements that occur in multiple digital library sources (or other web resources), that recur across a work, or that appear in different forms in different arrangements. It provides a way of discussing musical content without tying that discourse to the location, notation or medium of the content, allowing evidence from multiple libraries and in different formats to be brought together to support musicological assertions. This model is implemented in Linked Data and illustrated in a prototype application in which musicologists annotate vocal arrangements of the Allegretto from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony from multiple sources

Supporting musicological investigations with information retrieval tools: an iterative approach to data collection

Digital musicology research often proceeds by extending and enriching its evidence base as it progresses, rather than starting with a complete corpus of data and metadata, as a consequence of an emergent research need. In this paper, we consider a research workflow which assumes an incremental approach to data gathering and annotation. We describe tooling which implements parts of this workflow, developed to support the study of nineteenth-century music arrangements, and evaluate the applicability of our approach through interviews with musicologists and music editors who have used the tools. We conclude by considering extensions of this approach and the wider implications for digital musicology and music information retrieval

A New Conceptual Model for Musical Sources and Musicological Studies

We present a new multi-layered, conceptual model for associating musical source materials to musicological arguments. We describe our proposal for operationalizing these concepts through a framework for musical annotation which we have implemented using RDF. Briefly stated, this model shows how portions of digitized data in various files and formats can be identified, selected, labelled, and compared

Beethoven’s Large-Scale Works outside the Concert Hall: Toward a Digital Representation of Domestic Arrangements

The dissemination of Beethoven’s large-scale works—as usual in the nineteenth century—occurred mainly in diverse forms of domestic arrangements, not in concert hall performances. This fundamental musical repertoire has, up until now, only scarcely been studied. Arrangements challenge traditional definitions in several ways: They enlarge our concept of work, which is usually connected to a composer’s authority; they shed light on other agents like arrangers, publishers, and performers; and—because of the widespread popularity of domestic music making—they reached a much broader audience, as public concerts were rare at the time. Additionally, arrangements with varied scorings engaged amateurs, including female musicians. Therefore, arrangements could build bridges between different national, geographical, and socially distant areas. Lastly, vocal arrangements could add new meanings to a work of “absolute” music. Despite the fact that the authors of the Beethoven thematic catalog (Dorfmüller et al. 2014) listed known arrangements up to 1830, many more sources can be traced—not to mention later adaptations. For documenting and analyzing this immensely rich repertoire, historical approaches need to be complemented with the new possibilities offered by digital frameworks and tools on three different levels: the documentation of the arrangements, the encoding of the music, and the presentation of the results. We will shed new light on this historically highly relevant repertoire and the opportunities for its study using digital methods: 1. Christina Bashford will focus on hidden “musicking,” using Beethoven in the Victorian home as an example. Based on a group of overlooked archival sources, this introductory talk will discuss what can be learned about the works being played; the social, musical, and demographic profile of the performers and listeners; the responses engendered; and the broader significance that this “musicking” may have had in how conceptions of Beethoven came to be constructed in Britain. 2. The following case study by Lisa Rosendahl and Elisabete Shibata will consider musical and pedagogical ambitions in piano trio and vocal arrangements of the Allegretto in Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, op. 92, one of the most popular Beethoven movements. 3. David Lewis’s contribution will situate a wide variety of domestic arrangements between general characteristics and individual solutions. 4. The challenge of categorizing the material will be discussed in in Andrew Hankinson’s and Laurent Pugin’s contribution, which considers arrangements, collections, and the work from the perspective of cataloguing and the use of metadata. 5. Richard Sänger will demonstrate how the VideAppCorr tool, developed by the project “Beethovens Werkstatt,” includes perspectives of arrangements, using Beethoven’s piano version of the Große Fuge, op. 134, as an example. 6. This will lead to suggestions for harmonizing models. Johannes Kepper and Mark Saccomano will discuss challenges of sharing concept, data, and tools between digital projects 7. Concluding, Kevin Page will address the Music Encoding and Linked Data framework perspective and demonstrate how the tools used by the presented research project will widen our understanding of the repertoire in question. The seven lightning talks (ten to twelve minutes each) will be followed by a general discussion, chaired by the organizer