Communications and Corrections

End matter and Advertisements from the Spring 1996 (9/1) issue of Performance Practice Review

Research and resources in North American studies : plus ca change, plus c'est la même chose ; sixth scientific symposium Frankfurt – 6. Wissenschaftliches Symposium Frankfurt, Saturday, 7 October 2006, panel 4, 9:45 – 11:00 a.m.

Large American research libraries have been acquiring - by purchase and by lease - huge multi-disciplinary electronic collections of primary and secondary source materials. For example, the Digital Evans and Canadian Poetry easily make available to scholars primary materials that once were scattered in libraries across North America and Europe. The American State Papers, 1789 – 1838 collection allows easier searching of fragile rare materials. Collections made by libraries digitizing their own holdings, such the Archive of Early American Images from the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, make research materials more discoverable and usable. Yet recent scholarship in American Studies by American and European scholars makes relatively little use of these new materials. Both disparities and congruities in what scholars use and what research libraries collect are apparent. Some simple reasons explain the dissonance. Furthermore, conversations with scholars suggest that materials and collections alone will not suffice to support research. Librarians’ skills and actions will increase the value of the new research materials

Musik und Film : Hilfsmittel, Lexika, Verzeichnisse

Inhalt: 1. Bibliographien 2. Musikographien, Diskographien, Filmographien 3. Biographica, Werkverzeichnisse, Personenlexik

Instrumentational complexity of music genres and why simplicity sells

Listening habits are strongly influenced by two opposing aspects, the desire for variety and the demand for uniformity in music. In this work we quantify these two notions in terms of musical instrumentation and production technologies that are typically involved in crafting popular music. We assign a "complexity value" to each music style. A style is complex if it shows the property of having both high variety and low uniformity in instrumentation. We find a strong inverse relation between variety and uniformity of music styles that is remarkably stable over the last half century. Individual styles, however, show dramatic changes in their "complexity" during that period. Styles like "new wave" or "disco" quickly climbed towards higher complexity in the 70s and fell back to low complexity levels shortly afterwards, whereas styles like "folk rock" remained at constant high complexity levels. We show that changes in the complexity of a style are related to its number of sales and to the number of artists contributing to that style. As a style attracts a growing number of artists, its instrumentational variety usually increases. At the same time the instrumentational uniformity of a style decreases, i.e. a unique stylistic and increasingly complex expression pattern emerges. In contrast, album sales of a given style typically increase with decreasing complexity. This can be interpreted as music becoming increasingly formulaic once commercial or mainstream success sets in.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures, Supporting Informatio

Review: The musical representation: meaning, ontology, and emotion

Review of the book: Charles O. Nussbaum: The Musical Representation: Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion

Musicologists and Librarians Working Together: The Lendület Archive and Research Group, Budapest

In July 2012 an archive was founded in Budapest. This archives have several tasks in two different aspects: as a research group (musicological aspect) and as an archive (librarian aspect). These aspects are not always on a common currency. The archive took over the collections of Hungarian composers and musicians of the twentieth century; the processing of the data is primarily a librarian task. But there will be also several databases created for musicological research and these databases will be created on musicological basis. In this paper I wish to present the newly founded archives and point out the differences between the tasks of a musicologist and a music librarian, which must be taken into consideration during work at this archives. On the basis of my examples it will be clear that as a member of the research group it is not enough to be a musicologist, we also have to be librarians

Communications and Corrections

End matter and Advertisements from the Spring 1996 (9/1) issue of Performance Practice Review

Rock and roll bands, (in)complete contracts and creativity

Members of a rock and roll band are endowed with different creativity. They match and eventually obtain credit for song writing as well as a share of the returns from sales. More creative members increase the probability of success but may also claim a larger share of the pie. In our theoretical model, the nature of matching (postive or negative assortative) as well as the covariation between the probability of having a “hit” and the dispersion of credits given to individual members are a function of the completeness of contracting. When members adopt a “gentleman’s agreement” to share credits equally, the covariation between the probability of a hit and the dispersion of credits is negative, which is the consequence of positive assortative matching in creativity. The data show that the relation between dispersion and success is significantly negative, and that rock bands are thus likely to sign incomplete contracts.overlapping generations, resource management, common pool resource, spatial interdependence, strategic behaviour, cooperative behaviour