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This article examines and contextualizes Nadia Boulanger's musical and non-musical mourning practices within fin de siècle French culture, her family history with mourning, and her personal approaches to loss. Through examination of archival materials, including letters, datebooks, and concert programmes, as well as her published writings, I argue that Nadia mourned her sister Lili after her death in 1918 through a set of embodied practices that either viscerally reminded her of Lili or allowed her to resemble an idealized image of her sister. In addition, through analysis of Nadia's and Lili's post-1914 compositions in the context of mourning, this article also shows how both Boulanger sisters' mourning practices and their idiosyncratic, although socio-culturally and spiritually inflected, understandings of loss and grief shaped their musical compositions. By detailing the ways that mourning and musical choices intertwined for Nadia Boulanger, this essay sheds new light on her career, while also demonstrating the importance of considering emotional practices in music history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduced in Brazil at the beginning of the 19th century and widely accepted by the economic and social elite of the time, the guitar was played in aristocratic venues such as the Quinta da Boa Vista palace, where the Empress Leopoldina would practice music daily. Beginning in the 1840s in the hands of foreign artists, who fostered the development of Rio de Janeiro's 19th-century musical life, a busy agenda of musical performances allows us to become acquainted with the guitar's repertory, which was composed of original works and, especially, transcriptions of opera arias. This information is in stark contrast with the highly negative image of the instrument in Brazilian society during the advent of the Republic, due to the guitar's unshakeable association with the cultural practices of the urban poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The incidence of skin cancer is increasing globally, leading to a greater need for dermatologists to perform skin surgery. However, skin surgery can be a potentially stressful experience for patients due to the fear of a possible cancer diagnosis coupled with anxiety related to pain and cosmetic outcomes. Aim: To examine whether there is any evidence to support the hypothesis that listening to music during dermatological surgery under local anaesthesia can help reduce patient anxiety. Methods: This systematic review considered all original research published until May 2020. Four relevant studies were identified, comprising a total of 381 patients (three randomized control trials and one case–control trial). Results: Two of the four studies showed a significant reduction in perioperative anxiety in patients who had listened to music during surgery. Both of the other studies showed no statistically significant difference between music and no music for patients, although one of these noted reduced anxiety in surgeons. Conclusion: There is currently limited evidence to support the use of perioperative music in clinical practice to reduce anxiety in skin surgery. However, given the potential benefits and the likely limited costs of this simple intervention, we believe that further research on this topic is warranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies suggested the possibility that the red nucleus (RN) is involved in other cognitive functions than motion per se, even though such functions have yet to be clarified. We investigated the activation of RN during several tasks and its intrinsic functional network associated with social cognition and musical practice. The tasks included finger tapping, n-back, and memory recall tasks. Region of interest for RN was identified through those tasks, anatomical information of RN, and a brain atlas. The intrinsic functional network was identified for RN by an analysis of connectivity between RN and other regions typically involved in seven known resting state functional networks with RN used as the seed region. Association of the RN network with a psychological trait of the interpersonal reactivity index and musical training years revealed subnetworks that included empathy related regions or music practice related regions. These social or highly coordinated motor activity represent the most complex functions ever known to involve the RN, adding further evidence for the multifunctional roles of RN. These discoveries may lead to a new direction of investigations to clarify probable novel roles for RN in high-level human behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a theoretical framework for understanding headbanging to metal music as an embodied practice of perception and offers several analyses to demonstrate how specific patterns serve as a common core of rhythmic patterning in the genre. Listeners express metal's flexible rhythmic style through headbanging, creating experiences of heaviness and community. This motion brings felt beats into existence, guided by what I call "metering constructions," familiar rhythmic/motional patterns that are both schematic knowledge of music and embodied practices of perception. I define metering constructions through theories of embodied meter and cognitive linguistics. Two constructions, the backbeat and the phrase-ending 332, are used throughout rock, but distinguished in metal by characteristic drum patterns and motional qualities. Headbangers thus create and perform their own beat interpretation, what I call a "patchwork quilt of recognized rhythms" stitched together in various orders and combinations—sometimes resembling regular isochronous meter, sometimes not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B Flute clocks in the Nydahl Collection b (Soundspheres rhlb11, I issued i 2014) showcases the mechanized flute clock, exemplifying interest in experimental and automated music-making in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and drawing on the Nydahl Collection, which can still be seen today in a permanent exhibition in Stockholm. The musicians set the scene with a pathos-driven opening movement that leads into a spacious Andante with deliciously idiomatic lyrical flute lines that remind us of J. J. Quantz's skill as a flautist and flute teacher as well as a maker of flutes. B J. H. Roman: The 12 flute sonatas nos.1-5 b (BIS 2105, I issued i 2014) transforms Roman's flute sonatas through performance on recorder. [Extracted from the article]

For over twenty years, music theory has tried to diversify with respect to race, yet the field today remains remarkably white, not only in the people who practice music theory but also in the race of the composers and theorists whose work music theory privileges. In this article, I offer a few explanations for why this is so. I posit a music-theoretical "white racial frame" that is structural and institutionalized, and argue that only through a deframing and reframing of this white racial frame will we begin to see positive racial changes in music theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers questions relating to the performance practice of listening to music in early modern contexts. The evidence of paintings by Pieter Lastman, Gerard ter Borch and Hendrik Sorgh, poetry by Robert Herrick, William Shakespeare and Edmund Waller, and accounts of performances by Francesco da Milano, Nicola Matteis and Queen Elizabeth I all help to bring into focus questions of attentiveness, affective response and analogical understanding. The source material also interestingly raises the possibility of occasionally understanding the act of listening within a frame of erotic relationship modelled on Laura Mulvey's well-known concept of the 'male gaze'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across the nineteenth century, Bengali songbook editors applied musicological theory to their tantric religious practices. Responding to the new possibilities of musical publishing, these editors developed innovative techniques of relating the body to music by tying together tantric tropes with music theory and performance practice. Theories about the affective potential and poetic connotations of rāgas were brought into conversation with understandings of the yogic body , cakras , and the visualization of goddesses. These different theories, stemming from aesthetics and yogic philosophy, were put into effect through lyrical composition and the ways in which songs were set to music and edited for printed anthologies. This article considers different examples of tantric musical editorial, and explores how esoteric knowledge was applied in innovative ways through the medium of printed musical literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]