Department of Music
Permanent URI for this community
Browse
Browsing Department of Music by Issue Date
Now showing 1 - 20 of 121
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Open Access Constructs for Modality, ca. 1300-1550(Canadian Association of University Schools of Music Journal, 1978) Rahn, JayItem Open Access Melodic and textual types in French monophonic song, ca. 1500([New York: s.n.], 1978) Rahn, JaySeveral monophonic songs in French survive from the period 1480-1520. These songs appear in about twenty manuscript and printed sources of the time. Most of these sources can be assigned fairly precise dates. The songs found in these sources are inter-related by a network of concordances but are seldom found in collections of courtly poetry and vice versa. This suggests that the monophonic sources represent a distinctive tradition of poetry. The songs are also associated with different social groups than are courtly products: preachers (e.g., Jean Tisserand and Olivier Maillard), nuns (e.g., the Madelonnettes), law clerks (e.g., members of the Basoche), itinerant entertainers, and members of the general public -- both literate (but not necessarily wealthy) and illiterate -- composed, performed, or listened to the pieces. Monophonic songs differ considerably in prosody and diction from elite poetry and in melodic style from contemporary polyphonic works based on courtly poems. Nevertheless, the systematic bases of both the courtly and monophonic repertoires are substantially similar allowing comparisons to be made between them. Furthermore, recurrent features of the monophonic corpus generally accord well with systems of versification and music theory expounded at the time by writers such as Pierre Fabri, Henri de Croy, L'Infortuné, Johannes Tinctoris, Franchinus Gaffurius, Pietro Aaron, and Heinrich Glarean. Musical features selected for analysis include meter, text underlay, phrase lengths, range (or ambitus), maneria (or mode), phrase finals (or differentiae), initial tones, cadence formulas, melismas linking phrases, leaps (i.e., disjunct motion), form, and variation. The melo-textual forms of the songs are related to the formes fixes: ballade, virelai, and rondeau, as well as contemporary developments of these (including the bergerette and chanson jolie). One can discern stereotyped rhyme schemes and patterns of phrase finals and melodic repetition. These appear to be described best in terms of a hierarchical arrangement of prosodic, rhythmic and tonal units, and all three types of organization are found to be closely connected with one another. The polyphonic songs with which the monophonic corpus is compared consist of settings of courtly rondeaux by Compère, Agricola, and Josquin, as well as other rondeau settings which appear in Petrucci's Odhecaton and Canti B. Throughout the study, the songs of Paris, Bib. nat., f. fr. 9346, the "Bayeux manuscript", are found to resemble the polyphonic pieces more than the monophonic songs of MS 12744 of the same collection. The latter in turn are found to resemble printed collections of monophonic song texts more closely in prosody than "Bayeux." Some special features of the study include the use of statistical tests (e.g., chi-square, Student's t, x- and z-scores, and r rank), an annotated index of the monophonic songs, transcriptions of all the previously unpublished texts, and re-transcriptions of MSS 12744 and Bayeux. Finally, a minimal list of undefined concepts required to describe the prosodic and musical regularities of the songs is developed and the findings corroborated by comparing the corpus with monophonic songs preserved in MS Dijon, Bib. mun. 517 (ca. 1475).Item Open Access Structure, Frequency, and Artificiality in South Indian Melas(Greater Cleveland Ethnographic Museum, Cleveland, Ohio, 1981-04-01) Rahn, JayItem Open Access Research for Standard Pitch and Scale of Thai Music(College of Music, Mahidol University, 1997) Charoensook, SugreeItem Open Access Recent Diatonic Theory and Curwen's Tonic Sol-Fa Method: Formal Models for a Kinesic-Harmonic System(European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM), 1997-06-01) Rahn, JayItem Open Access The First Noëls(Camargo Foundation, 1998) Rahn, JayItem Open Access A Theory for All Music: Problems and Solutions in the Analysis of non-Western Forms(University of Toronto Press, 1998) Rahn, JayProfessor Rahn takes the approach to the analysis of Western art music developed recently by theorists such as Benjamin Boretz and extends it to address non-Western forms. In the process, he rejects recent ethnomusicological formulations based on mentalism, cultural determinism, and the psychology of perception as potentially fruitful bases for analysing music in general. Instead he stresses the desirability of formulating a theory to deal with all music, rather than merely Western forms, and emphasizes the need to evaluate an analysis and compare it with other interpretations, and demonstrates how this may be done. The theoretical concepts which form the basis of Rahn's approach are discussed and applied: first to individual pieces of non-Western music which have enjoyed a fairly high profile in ethnomusicological literature, and second to repertoires or groups of pieces. The author also discusses the fields of anthropology and psychology, showing how his approach serves as a starting point for studies of perception and the concepts, norms, and values found in specific music cultures. In conclusion, he lists what he considers to be musical universals and takes up the more controversial issues implicit in his discussion.Item Open Access Implicit learning of Indian music by Westerners(2004) Rahn, JayStudies by Bigand and Barrouillet (1996), Perruchet, Bigand, and Benoit-Gonin (1997), Bigand, Perruchet, and Boyer (1998),Tillmann, Bharucha, and Bigand (2000) show that listeners exposed to only a few minutes of stimuli organized according to inherent rules of an artificial grammar successfully distinguish between stimuli that obey and disobey the rules. The present study considers the extent to which subjects learn rules of a musical tradition with which they have had no contact. Although master musicians have differed in detail for centuries concerning the rules or conventions of particular North Indian (Hindustani) rags, within Bhatkande's (1966) monumental anthology the examples of rag Alhaiya Bilawal are sufficiently regular in their melodic progressions to provide a basis for inferring quite precise specifications of what happens, or tends to happen, in particular realizations, and these specifications also accord with Bhatkande's explicit prescriptions. Of importance to the present study are the following regularities: i) Relative to a tambura drone comprising C and G, each melody employs all and only the tones C D E F G A B-flat and/or B, i.e., 7-35 or 8-23 in Forte's numbering (1973) -- the second understood as a 'chromatic' version of the first (Rahn 1991); ii) Among all the melodies, each possible stepwise progression between two of these tones occurs, except between B-flat and B. The study tested the hypothesis that after 15 minutes of exposure to Alhaiya Bilawal subjects who had not previously encountered classical North Indian music would correctly distinguish between instances of the rag and examples that diverged.Item Open Access From Drawings by the Blind to Music by the Deaf(2004-11-01) Rahn, JayItem Open Access Marchetto of Padua's Theory of Modal Ranges(Hawaii International Conference on the Arts and Humanities (HICH), 2007-01-01) Rahn, JayItem Open Access Glenda del E Live Recording(GdelE Productions, 2008) Vitier, Jose Maria; Lecuona, Ernesto; Cervantes, Ignacio; Saumell, Manuel; del Monte-Escalante, GlendaThis repertoire represents a continuous tradition of Cuban Piano Music dating from the nineteenth century. It has its origins in England, Spain, France, while its rhythm and syncopated style derive from Africa.Item Open Access Perceptually Based Theory for World Music Tunings(2011) Rahn, JayItem Open Access Suzuki Rhythm Mnemonics in Pedagogical Theory and Actual Realization(2011-08-01) Ebin, Zachary; Rahn, Jay;The Suzuki Violin School volumes begin with variations on “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Each variation consists of a repeated rhythmic figure. Suzuki teachers use mnemonics to teach these rhythmic figures. Two of these variations are pedagogically problematic. Both comprise six onsets: one consists of two triplets; the other repeats a figure comprising an eighth note and two sixteenths. Teachers have been observed using mnemonics for one variation that others use for the other variation. This study examines the rhythms produced and identified on reading 9 mnemonics that Suzuki teachers commonly employ. Thirty participants were asked to speak the mnemonics and their responses were recorded and measured with Audacity software. Twenty participants who were either Suzuki teachers or trained musicians were also asked which notated rhythm each mnemonic corresponded to. Interonset intervals in the recordings were measured to determine the timing of the syllables in the spoken mnemonics. These timings were compared with the notated rhythms that had been identified by Suzuki teachers and the other trained musicians. Among the results, some mnemonics that Suzuki teachers have regarded as representing one rhythm were actually recited in a manner that more closely corresponded to the other. Two of the mnemonics were rendered closer to “swing” rhythm, and one of the mnemonics was often realized as five syllables rather than the anticipated six. This study has implications for Suzuki pedagogy, as well as music education more generally, as using verbal mnemonics to teach rhythms is a widespread teaching technique.Item Open Access Remodeling Southeast Asian Tunings(2013-08-09) Rahn, JaySince the pioneering reports of Ellis (1884, 1885) and Stumpf (1901), studies of Southeast Asian tunings have been methodologically problematic. Abstract numbers, empirical measurements, indigenous claims, and perceptual responses have been conflated; generalizations, vague; sampling, selective. In contrast, the present account takes as its starting point a formalization of the Gestalt Grouping Principles of Proximity and Common Fate in order to analyze the most comprehensive published measurements of Southeast Asian fixed-frequency idiophone tunings (Surjodiningrat et al., 1993; Charoensook et al., 1997). The resulting analysis is consistent with a relatively modest, but falsifiable, set of models for the acoustically measured sizes of intervals between successive steps: specifically, for Central Javanese sléndro, 11111; for Central Javanese pélog, 1121112; for 'equiheptatonic' Thai, 1111111. In these models, a) any interval whose hypothesized size (HS) is smaller than the HS of any other interval is also smaller in measured size (MS), but b) no two intervals of the same HS are necessarily the same in MS. For instance, in Central Javanese pélog, the MSs of all size-2 intervals (e.g., 2 and 1+1=2) are a) smaller than the MSs of all size-3, size-4, etc. intervals (e.g., 1+2=3, 2+1=3, 1+1+1=3; 1+1+2=4, 1+2+1=4, 2+1+1=4, etc.) and b) 'the same' only by virtue of analogical relationships, namely, by sharing 'smaller-than' MS relationships with precisely the same group of intervals. According to these models, one can clarify similarities and differences in trans-cultural realizations of 'the same' piece in contrasting tunings (e.g., Hughes 1992). In particular, sléndro, the 'usual' pentatonic (Clough & Douthett 1991), and well-formed (WF) 5-tone subsets of Thai equiheptatonic and Javanese pélog comprise successively greater numbers of differences, ambiguities and contradictions (Carey 2003). Moreover, these models provide a basis for re-framing experimental studies of inter-cultural responses to such tunings (e.g., Krumhansl & Perlmann 1996).Item Open Access Partials, Beats, Roughness, and ERBs(2015-02-13) Rahn, JayItem Open Access Notes to Accompany Partials, Beats, Roughness, and ERBs.xlsx(2015-02-13) Rahn, JayItem Open Access Item Open Access Pairs of Interval Classes in Southeast Asian Tunings(2015-02-21) Rahn, JayConstrued non-numerically (Rahn 2011, 2012, 2013), the following normal-Forte-order formulations accurately model southeast Asian fixed-frequency tunings: sléndro 11111…, the ‘usual’ pentatonic 22323…, Thai pentatonic 11212, 5-tone pélog 11313; Thai ‘equiheptatonic’ 1111111…, diatonis/diatonic 1222122, and 7-tone pélog 1112112. In well-documented instances, two or more of these tunings appear in single pieces that have been realized in one or more cultural settings. In order to convey the consequences of such ‘translations’ from one tuning to another, seemingly distinct tuning, one can observe that since each tuning is ‘well-formed’ (Carey and Clampitt 1989), each maximizes the number of interval-pairs within particular generic-specific interval-classes. In ideal, mathematical terms, if d is the number of steps in a register, the number of such interval-pairs is d2(d-1)/2in ‘degenerate’ sléndro and Thai equiheptatonic, and d(d-1)(2d-1)/6 in the remaining, ‘non-degenerate’ tunings. The formulation outlined above identifies salient structural relationships between realizations of single instrumental pieces in otherwise contrasting tunings and between passages comprising ‘exchange tones’ (métabole) within individual pieces.Item Open Access