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This article explores the role of music in eliciting emotional states among the Hamdouchiya Sufi order in Morocco. It highlights the aesthetic aspects of Sufi rituals as relational activities that impact sensory perceptions and mystical experiences. Music serves as a medium through which emotions are expressed, self-imagination takes form, and challenges to the study of rituals are presented. Aesthetics plays a pivotal role in Sufi practice and belief, involving the body as a vessel for spiritual transformation and interaction with music as reflections of the divine. The article also discusses the concept of aesthetics within a cultural context, emphasising its influence on socialisation and morality. Sufism provides an opportunity to contemplate the limits of the mind, self and emotions, thereby unveiling the ritualistic shaping of one's spiritual existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forecasting the popularity of new songs has become a standard practice in the music industry and provides a comparative advantage for those that do it well. Considerable efforts were put into machine learning prediction models for that purpose. It is known that in these models, relevant predictive parameters include intrinsic lyrical and acoustic characteristics, extrinsic factors (e.g., publisher influence and support), and the previous popularity of the artists. Much less attention was given to the social components of the spreading of song popularity. Recently, evidence for musical homophily—the tendency that people who are socially linked also share musical tastes—was reported. Here we determine how musical homophily can be used to predict song popularity. The study is based on an extensive dataset from the last.fm online music platform from which we can extract social links between listeners and their listening patterns. To quantify the importance of networks in the spreading of songs that eventually determines their popularity, we use musical homophily to design a predictive influence parameter and show that its inclusion in state-of-the-art machine learning models enhances predictions of song popularity. The influence parameter improves the prediction precision (TP/(TP + FP)) by about 50% from 0.14 to 0.21, indicating that the social component in the spreading of music plays at least as significant a role as the artist's popularity or the impact of the genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MUSIC EXPERIENCE IS CONSIDERED A HIGHLY pleasant activity, with musical stimuli evoking emotions and activating reward brain circuits. The Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (BMRQ) evaluates the main facets of music experience that could describe individual differences in music-associated reward. In this work, we validated an Italian version of the BMRQ since only Spanish, English, and French versions are currently available. The original version was translated into Italian, adapted and validated following the methodology proposed in the original BMRQ. The questionnaire was administered to adult participants through an online survey. A total of 1,218 participants were considered for the analysis. Our primary factor analysis showed an overall good structural validity (goodness of fit index > .999). The reliability estimates of each facet varied from .839 and .930, with some items showing higher factor loadings for a different facet than the expected one. Similar findings resulted from an additional analysis performed on a restricted sample (age <= 30 years and upper secondary education level), more comparable with those of the other studies. The Italian BMRQ appears overall valid and reliable despite some differences with the previous studies, suggesting its applicability might be worth testing with different populations and contexts (e.g., clinical context). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the openness to ideas about sexuality, not least in music, in post-Wagnerian turnof- the-century Vienna, Mahler's outwardly rather guarded and seemingly conservative approach to sexual experience is examined in the light of more recent biographical research (as in the German edition of Mahler's letters to Anna von Mildenburg). Discussion focuses upon a reconsidered approach to the evidence of his first two extended musical works: Das klagende Lied (a copy of whose score he gifted to von Mildenburg at the end of their relationship and to Alma Schindler at the beginning of theirs) and the First Symphony. Aspects of the critical reception of both works--presented in Vienna for the first time by Mahler, in reverse order, in 1900 and 1901--revealed the disapproval of more conservative commentators and their implicitly anti-Semitic interpretation of the works' questionable audience appeal in terms of a kind of mass-culture critique. The link between the evasion of or indulgence in musical representations of sexuality and changing attitudes toward musical taste and reception might heighten our awareness of how the complex modernity of those works was tending in a quite different direction to that of the nascent modernism of Mahler's younger contemporaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between early German Romanticism and Wagnerian aesthetics, focusing on the concept of Universalpoesie and the role of irony in both movements. It discusses the German Romantic ideal of theatre as a syncretic medium and criticizes the dogmatism of French Neo-Classical theatre. The article also examines Richard Wagner's interest in German fairy tales and his development of the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk. It highlights examples of Wagnerian irony in his operas, particularly through the use of leitmotifs, and emphasizes the importance of the spectator's critical reflection in understanding these moments. [Extracted from the article]

Early childhood music education has garnered recognition for its unique contribution to cognitive, emotional, and social development in children. Nevertheless, the industry grapples with numerous challenges, including a struggle to adapt traditional educational paradigms to new curriculum reforms, and an excessive emphasis on skill training at the expense of nurturing a love for music and aesthetics in children. To navigate these challenges and explore growth strategies for the early childhood music education industry, we initiated a comprehensive approach that involved distributing surveys to practitioners and parents and engaging experts for insightful discussions. Consequently, we proposed an analytical method based on dynamic social networks in conjunction with Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets (IFS), Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), and Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis, collectively referred to as IFS-AHP-SWOT. This integrated methodology synergizes the capabilities of dynamic social networks, IFS, AHP, and SWOT analysis to offer a nuanced perspective on industry development strategies. The findings underscore that institutions within the early childhood music education industry need to adopt a development strategy that leverages their strengths and opportunities to foster sustainable growth. Ultimately, this research aims to provide critical decision-making support for industry practitioners, policymakers, and researchers, contributing significantly to the ongoing discourse on strategic development in the early childhood music education industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the constructive potential of noise in contemporary music, challenging the traditional view that noise is chaotic and ugly. The author explores various subgenres of music, including psychedelic post-rock, industrial, hardcore punk, trash, rave, avant-garde classical music, sound poetry, and free jazz, to demonstrate the use of noise as a form of resistance and expression. The article also examines the different definitions of noise, both acoustically and intentionally, and includes contributions from music analysts. The book is divided into two parts, with the first focusing on historical, theoretical, aesthetic, and cultural perspectives, and the second consisting of music-analytical case studies. Overall, the article provides a comprehensive and insightful exploration of the relationship between music and noise. [Extracted from the article]

The human brain receives stimuli in multiple ways; among them, audio constitutes an important source of relevant stimuli for the brain regarding communication, amusement, warning, etc. In this context, the aim of this manuscript is to advance in the classification of brain responses to music of diverse genres and to sounds of different nature: speech and music. For this purpose, two different experiments have been designed to acquire EEG signals from subjects listening to songs of different musical genres and sentences in various languages. With this, a novel scheme is proposed to characterize brain signals for their classification; this scheme is based on the construction of a feature matrix built on relations between energy measured at the different EEG channels and the usage of a bi-LSTM neural network. With the data obtained, evaluations regarding EEG-based classification between speech and music, different musical genres, and whether the subject likes the song listened to or not are carried out. The experiments unveil satisfactory performance to the proposed scheme. The results obtained for binary audio type classification attain 98.66% of success. In multi-class classification between 4 musical genres, the accuracy attained is 61.59%, and results for binary classification of musical taste rise to 96.96%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Josef Kotek (1928–2009) was one of the founders of Czech musicological research into popular music. His professional career is mainly connected with the musicological workplace of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and later the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, where he worked from 1962 to 1998. Kotek’s career, as well as the thematic focus of his research, was significantly determined by the cultural and political situation in the Czech lands at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, when the appeal of Marxist musicology to research so-called mass/applied genres combined with the emergence of modern popular music and its wide social appeal. Kotek’s research was fundamentally influenced by the central project of the Institute for Musicology of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, which was assigned to the Institute by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in the early 1960s and which sought to provide comprehensive treatment of 20th century Czech musical culture, including so-called mass/applied genres. In this sense, from the beginning of his career, Kotek developed research activities in three main areas: (a) the historiography of Czech popular music, anchored in rigorous source research; (b) the sociology of popular music, focusing on questions of the development of popular music reception and taste, with an overlap with practical issues of musical life and music education; and (c) the general theory of popular music, including definitional, terminological, classification and other issues. Kotek’s lifelong work concentrating exclusively on issues of popular music in the 1990s resulted in the remarkable book synthesis Dějiny české populární hudby a zpěvu [The History of Czech Popular Music and Singing] (1994, 1998). The present study examines the above on the basis of an extensive analysis of available sources and takes into account the international situation, in which the institutionalization of popular music research occurred under different circumstances and with some delay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bernhard König’s research project investigates the interactions between music and the climate and spans various disciplines. The planned book aims to sensitise music lovers and musicians to climate protection and to emphasise the socially transformative role of music. The writing process revealed many research gaps, particularly in the climate vulnerability of different musical cultures, the role of music as a driver of the Great Acceleration and the lack of theory on the interaction between inner-musical and societal transformation. The book is intended to be understandable for non-experts and introduces fundamental climate and music topics. Despite the challenges in the writing process, the author emphasises the urgency of his topic in the face of climate change. He is actively committed to the integration of culture into climate policy and is planning the practical musical realisation of his research findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metal music is here to stay, by all outward appearances, mainly, as I shall argue, by virtue of its expressive properties. Old calumnies excoriating metal for promoting immorality and the dark arts have collapsed under their own weight. Yet this article makes the harder case for representation as a value added to metal aesthetics. Metal goes so far as to assess ancient and modern foreign policy and to represent classical art forms. Philosophical aesthetics offers new insights into metal music, as shown via the article's discussion of debates involving Roger Scruton, Stephen Davies, and Peter Kivy, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt" by Andrew Simon explores the rise and decline of cassette culture in Egypt from the 1970s to the 1990s. The book examines the social and cultural implications of cassette circulation, including its impact on consumerism, class relations, and debates over high and low culture. Simon argues that cassettes decentralized state-controlled media and gave people unprecedented control over cultural production and dissemination. The book relies on a "shadow archive" of visual, textual, and audio materials to trace the movement of cassettes across Egypt's borders and through different sectors of society. It also discusses how cassette players and tapes challenged the Egyptian state's efforts to forge a national culture through music, as well as the difficulties of studying the recent past in Egypt due to media censorship and limited access to national archives. While the book provides valuable insights into cassette culture in Egypt, it could benefit from a more sustained engagement with the content of the tapes and a discussion of imports' impact on the Egyptian soundscape. Overall, "Media of the Masses" offers an intriguing study of the influence of cassette technology on Egyptian culture in the late 20th century. [Extracted from the article]

Keywords: Aesthetics; agency; games; phenomenal experience; C. Thi Nguyen EN Aesthetics agency games phenomenal experience C. Thi Nguyen 380 391 12 12/22/21 20211101 NES 211101 In his fascinating new book I Games: Agency as Art i , C. Thi Nguyen claims that games construct and frame forms of human agency in a way that gives rise to a genuine I aesthetics i of agency. Three extensions of Nguyen's view I'll argue that the aesthetics of agency can incorporate three elements Nguyen left out: emotions of agency, patterns of attention, and affordances. Like Dewey, Nguyen begins with a refreshingly expansive understanding of those experiences that can have (or confer on their objects) genuine aesthetic value.[2] What Dewey left out, according to Nguyen, is the role of a I player i in a game. This is a tall order, but Nguyen does constrain his task: 'I don't mean to imply that aesthetic experiences are essential to art, nor to claim that games' sole purpose is to provide aesthetic experiences', he writes. [Extracted from the article]

The use of the voice in everyday communication is vital for our understanding of human interaction. The singing of popular music often amplifies vocal features from speech, which can provide insights into vocal activity in the context of the intense emotional impact of music. Three studies with a mixed-methods approach aimed at evaluating rationales and features of disliked voices in the context of popular music. In an interview study (n = 20), rationales and features for disliked voices were identified using self-selected voices. In a group testing session (n = 48) and an online survey (n = 216), these disliked voices were presented to new participants, and the vocal features and evoked emotions by the singers were investigated, assuming that the participants did not have strong opinions about the voices. The results showed that participants justified their dislikes based on object-related/sound and emotional reasons, similar to findings from studies on musical taste. Specific features of disliked voices were confirmed in the following studies, including a specific feature of popular singing styles, the twang, perceived as a squeaky and nasal sound. Further disliked features include a pressed sound, imprecise and ordinary articulation, and a uniform expression. Notably, a rough voice was no predictor of aesthetic judgments. Evoked feelings relate to vocal features with similar tension levels. The measures created in the current study will also be informative for studying voice perception and evaluation more generally, which is a tool to evaluate vocal expression and items to evaluate reasons for disliked voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the early medieval authors, Amalarius of Metz (8th–9th century) is one of those who discussed the impact of religious music and song on the body and soul. In his main work: the Liber Officialis, listening and singing liturgical music are depicted as having a corporeal effect that generates sensations of an intense sensory and emotional character. In Amalarius, living the musical religious phenomenon not only coincides with the idea that music can evoke emotions but there is something that goes further. What Amalarius emphasizes is a particular emotion: a "spiritual state" of the nakedness of the heart, almost a weakness of those who are capable of tears and sensitive to God's voice. During the patristic era, especially in the East, "penthos" (compunction) was used to describe the experience of tears in prayer or meditation; however, Fathers of the Church described liturgical music as an obstacle to compunction. For this reason, an evolution of that compunctory doctrine emerges from the exposition of Amalarius. In this context, it is not a question of crying for one's sins but of exploiting a natural power (vis) of music. By simply listening to music, a person would seem capable of being moved and reaching a particularly "receptive state" to welcome the Word of God and make it bear fruit. What Amalarius describes in religious music seems to be the natural experience that one feels when, just listening to a melody, a tear spontaneously falls. This physical reaction is connected to a spiritual transformation that seems to pass through the flesh (carnalia) of our humanity. The result of this singular experience, strongly connected to musical ethics, is the conversion to good action and the possibility to dispose human beings to attentive, deep, and fruitful listening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study takes a cultural anthropological approach to address the use of music taste as an instrument of self-presentation on online dating platforms by examining the partnership between Spotify and Tinder, which not only allows Tinder users to pick an anthem from Spotify's catalog, but also displays a list of "top artists" based on data aggregated through their activity on Spotify. Using Cheney-Lippold's formulation of the "measurable type" and Bucher's notion of "conscious clicking" as foundational frameworks, this paper offers the term "conscious listening" to explore the ways that users play with their music taste-based identities on Tinder. In order to better theorize this phenomenon, a wide array of thinkers ranging from communications, sociology, and data/platform studies are coalesced along with the results of in-depth interviews with 10 Tinder users to analyze the recent convergence of music streaming and social dating platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not only do music streaming platforms offer on-demand access to vast catalogues of licensed music, they are actively shaping what and how it finds us through personalisation. While existing literature has highlighted how personalisation has the potential to transform the part that music taste and consumption play in the performance of class identities and distinction, little is empirically known about its sociological consequences. Drawing on 42 semi-structured interviews with a combination of key informants and Spotify users, this article demonstrates that personalisation is undermining opportunities to achieve social distinction by taking over the labour of music curation and compressing the time needed to appreciate music for its own sake. It demonstrates that those with cultural capital at stake – in the case of this study, young, (primarily) male cultural omnivores – experience personalisation as a threat, highlighting how particular claims to social distinction are being contested in the platform age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part I of the book follows the trail through some of Schumann's earlier music, bringing out the often fragmentary or divided character of the self that this music presents, most obviously in the plural selves with which chapter 3 is concerned. There has been a steady stream of books and articles tackling different aspects of music and subjectivity over the last twenty-five years or so. Into this complex ecosystem comes Benedict Taylor's fascinating and engaging book on musical subjectivity explored through the music of Robert Schumann. [Extracted from the article]

Malaysian music was influenced by British, Portuguese, Indian, and Chinese cultures, which created syncretic music. Aesthetics values strengthen the existence of syncretic music by molding taste and interest among the listeners. It somehow creates various feelings whether to appreciate, accept, or against the music, further developing musical preferences among individuals. Exploring aesthetic values in popular and traditional music is crucial as many cultures have influenced Malaysia due to colonization, trading, wedding, and migration. This paper reviews on Malaysian syncretic music, the aesthetic values in Malaysian popular and traditional music, and the influence factors of Malaysian music. It is found that there was a confluence of various intercultural musical elements in the early era, while assimilation has taken place due to traditional Malay rhythmic patterns and traditional folk themes. This led to the Malaysian conception of music and musical composition, creating the idea that Malaysian music has drastically expanded its artistic resources since the pre-colonial era. We also found communities living in the pre-modern or modern era have different unique taste in the aesthetic characteristics. Despite this, most remote communities are compelled to participate in postmodernity in some way due to the globalization of media, capital, and mobile networks. These combinations result in many theories, concepts, and discourses that enrich aesthetic values in Malaysian syncretic music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This forum presents a conversation among seven scholars who explore the theme of discomfort in the emergent field of global music history. Prompted by Yvonne Liao and Olivia Bloechl, co-founders of the American Musicology Society's Global Music History Study Group in 2019, these contributions address ideas of globality by decentering knowledge production and productively engage different ways to resist hegemonic pasts, narratives, and processes entrenched at home, whatever and wherever home may be. This forum thus confronts home-based challenges that resist or obstruct the implementation of this decentering principle: What does it mean to locate a "home" and to identify various "discomforts" in the global musical and sonic spheres? How does the thinking of "home" relative to "discomfort" help to theorize the concepts of agency, locality, temporality, community, regionalism, and nationality? All seven articles share one structural feature--an extensive selfintroduction in the spirit of Jessica Bissett Perea's call for "intertribal visiting protocols" developed by critical Indigenous studies. This grounds each contribution by exposing the contingency of arguments and allows for a weaving of themes of space, boundary, and interconnection across articles. The forum's topics range from world-making to relationality, from cripping musical taste to making Siamese music legible to colonial ears, and from listening for political taboos to problematizing "Latin American" music and theorizing intimacy through the notion of "scale" itself. Writing with candor, all contributors bring global music history into uncomfortable terrains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a new method that computes the aesthetics of a melody fragment is proposed, starting from dissonances. While music generated with artificial intelligence applications may be produced considerably more quickly than human-composed music, it has the drawback of not being appreciated like a human composition, being many times perceived by humans as artificial. For achieving supervised machine learning objectives of improving the quality of the great number of generated melodies, it is a challenge to ask humans to grade them. Therefore, it would be preferable if the aesthetics of artificial-intelligence-generated music is calculated by an algorithm. The proposed method in this paper is based on a neural network and a mathematical formula, which has been developed with the help of a study in which 108 students evaluated the aesthetics of several melodies. For evaluation, numerical values generated by this method were compared with ratings provided by human listeners from a second study in which 30 students participated and scores were generated by an existing different method developed by psychologists and three other methods developed by musicians. Our method achieved a Pearson correlation of 0.49 with human aesthetic scores, which is a much better result than other methods obtained. Additionally, our method made a distinction between human-composed melodies and artificial-intelligence-generated scores in the same way that human listeners did. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the history of the oboe in 18th-century London, specifically focusing on the performers Giuseppe Sammartini and Johann Christian Fischer. It challenges the commonly held belief that Fischer's arrival in London brought about a significant improvement in oboe playing, arguing that earlier performers like Thomas Vincent Jr. were also highly skilled. The article examines Vincent's career as a performer and composer, highlighting his technical abilities. Ultimately, the article suggests that the preference for Fischer over Vincent was more a result of changing musical tastes rather than a true assessment of their abilities. It also discusses the technical abilities and musical styles of both Vincent and Fischer, noting the influence of changing musical styles and instruments on the demands placed on the oboe. Despite Vincent's success and the continued use of the straight-top oboe, Fischer's arrival marked a shift in London's musical style. [Extracted from the article]

This article discusses the recent phenomenon of Taylor Swift's arrival and departure in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. The author initially admits to not being particularly excited by Swift's music but becomes curious about her appeal to so many people. After listening to her music more closely, the author recognizes Swift's vocal range and the emotional depth of her lyrics. The author also praises Swift's ability to connect with her fans and maintain her dignity in her performances. The article concludes by suggesting that health professionals, like performers, have a stage to engage with patients and promote lung health from birth, emphasizing the importance of primary prevention and lifestyle factors. [Extracted from the article]

Accordingly, the authors argue that for a correct perspective on music theory, one should realize the insignificance of the whole current musicological enterprise and contemplate the Golden Record in space to theorize rightly about music from earth. Around the "mission impossible" of the Golden Record, Daniel K. L. Chua and Alexander Rehding develop a new music theory of everything that is based on an object-oriented ontology of sound. I was holding my heart when I read in the first sentence of I Alien Listening i that the book began in 2016 on the back of a napkin, when the two highly esteemed authors met during a conference and shared their ideas about a revolutionary "theory of everything" (p. 7). [Extracted from the article]

Music is a ubiquitous stimulus known to influence human affect, cognition, and behavior. In the context of eating behavior, music has been associated with food choice, intake and, more recently, taste perception. In the latter case, the literature has reported consistent patterns of association between auditory and gustatory attributes, suggesting that individuals reliably recognize taste attributes in musical stimuli. This study presents subjective norms for a new set of 100 instrumental music stimuli, including basic taste correspondences (sweetness, bitterness, saltiness, sourness), emotions (joy, anger, sadness, fear, surprise), familiarity, valence, and arousal. This stimulus set was evaluated by 329 individuals (83.3% women; Mage = 28.12, SD = 12.14), online (n = 246) and in the lab (n = 83). Each participant evaluated a random subsample of 25 soundtracks and responded to self-report measures of mood and taste preferences, as well as the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI). Each soundtrack was evaluated by 68 to 97 participants (Mdn = 83), and descriptive results (means, standard deviations, and confidence intervals) are available as supplemental material at osf.io/2cqa5. Significant correlations between taste correspondences and emotional/affective dimensions were observed (e.g., between sweetness ratings and pleasant emotions). Sex, age, musical sophistication, and basic taste preferences presented few, small to medium associations with the evaluations of the stimuli. Overall, these results suggest that the new Taste & Affect Music Database is a relevant resource for research and intervention with musical stimuli in the context of crossmodal taste perception and other affective, cognitive, and behavioral domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Symbolist novella Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887) by Édouard Dujardin (1861-1949) is the first work of fiction in Western literature to be entirely written as an interior monologue. Yet it took more than thirty years for Dujardin's innovation to be recognized thanks to James Joyce acknowledging Les Lauriers as an important formal influence for Ulysses (1922). Subsequently, Dujardin claimed in the essay "Le monologue intérieur" (1931) that his goal had been to transpose Wagnerian procedures into writing. Since then, scholars have either denied or confirmed the novel's Wagnerian inspiration. The latter interpretation has become the consensus in scholarship. However, in their efforts to connect Les Lauriers with Wagner, previous studies have neglected the constant presence of French musical theater references in the novel, presumably because their presence represents a form of paradox for a devout Wagnerite like Dujardin. This article is the first to analyze them. It also ties these references together with Symbolism's interest in metafiction, that is to say, in fiction that reflects on its own existence as fiction. I argue that Dujardin was eager to follow the model of the Wagnerian novel proposed by his friend Teodor de Wyzewa in the Revue wagnérienne, that of setting on paper the poet's entire existence by depicting his/her every emotion, sensation, and thought. In his discovery of the difficulty involved in performing such a task, Dujardin switched his focus to what his mentor Mallarmé called a "Type": a depersonalized character, who is supposed to stand in as a representative of France's youth. Hence, the protagonist of Les Lauriers sont coupés being an average character, with musical tastes that are illustrative of his time. Thus, the numerous musical references peppering Les Lauriers are not connected to the elitist world of Wagnerism in the 1880s, but rather to what were then beloved favorites like François-Marie Boieldieu's La Dame blanche (1825), or Edmond Audran's La Mascotte (1880). But there is an added twist, as Dujardin did 271 not let go of Wagner's influence entirely and used Audran's operetta as a springboard with which to experiment with Wagnerian leitmotifs in literature. Ultimately, I show that the musical references in Les Lauriers are systematically divorced from real-life performance in order to become strictly mental creations that highlight just how isolated and self-absorbed the protagonist- and, by extension, the author himself in the act of creation-really is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Steege nimbly works across many complex topics, from debates within phenomenology to the fractious politics of the Weimar Republic. Benjamin Steege's I An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought i is a welcome addition to scholarship on music and philosophy, the history of music theory, and the culture of the Weimar Republic and post-Second World War West Germany. Steege recovers this early history of music phenomenology from a "loosely counterfactual historiographical perspective" (p. 22), in which he attempts to listen to and analyse music through the writings of the period's music phenomenologists. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the work and reception of singer-songwriter Anohni to investigate sonic and discursive negotiations of transfeminine vocality in 21st-century popular music culture. Developing Haraway's concept of feminist figurations, it introduces the concept of vocal figurations, which articulates a performative, relational and multiply mediated understanding of voice, wherein gendered voice takes shape through processes of voicing and listening. I initially examine Anohni's reception to analyse how biologist, trans-exclusionary and othering discourses surrounding voice and gender inform emergent discourses of transfeminine voices in the first decades of the 21st century. Subsequently, I build on trans and queer theorisations of voice and listening to engage Anohni's variably vibrating voice as a vocal figuration that may challenge biologist and marginalising constructions of transfeminine vocality. I suggest that it may attune us to recognise all gendered voices as thoroughly situated yet changeable configurations of sounding voices, bodies, and subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1991, Gilbert O'Sullivan sued Biz Markie for sampling without permission: this lawsuit, Grand Upright v. Warner , became a landmark case for music copyright, and for some scholars, represented a symbolic end to hip hop's golden age. This paper uses the lawsuit as a point of entry into debates about hip hop during a time of aesthetic transformation. Specifically, I present a corpus study spanning 1988–1993, consisting of hip hop songs of various subgenres drawn from Billboard charts. Unlike previous studies on this period, I consider both canonical artists, whose mastery of sampling is widely admired (such as Public Enemy), and more commercially successful artists (like the Fresh Prince), who used fewer samples. My study reveals a decrease in the average number of samples per song, and a radical shift in how these remaining samples are used. I situate Grand Upright at the intersection of legal institutions and musical aesthetics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Johann Sebastian Bach can be considered the greatest pre-classical composer for keyboard instruments, respectively piano, his works being universally present in concert programmes. Also, due to his experience as a teacher, the creation of J. S. Bach also has a great pedagogical importance: among the compositions intended for musical education we mention: Two- and Three-part Inventions (1723). The invention is a small free-form polyphonic composition, written in an imitative style, with a pronounced improvisational character. The two-part inventions that we have focused on (the first six), true jewels in terms of perfection of form, Bach's fundamental works for the piano, do not contain features of outward virtuosity, but music full of content and depth, the various thematic hypostases emphasizing their emotional substance. Another important aspect is the didactic function of this music, Bachian inventions constantly accompanying the training and improvement of pianists, being ideal due to their complexity, for deepening musical thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although two of the madrigals from his Third Book of 1615 end in lovelorn questions, Sigismondo d'India furnishes one of them with a far stronger final cadence than the other. To understand why, this corpus study investigates the expressive meaning of cadences in a quantitative analysis of the 85 madrigals that d'India published within his first five books (1606--16). Three determinants of cadential strength--cadence type, fullness, and modal degree of resolution--test the hypothesis that the cadences which d'India employs at the close of interrogative sentences will tend to be weaker than those he employs at the close of other sentences. The results are consistent with the argument that d'India sought to account for the sense and intonation of an interrogative sentence when setting it to music, yet also suggest that such concerns sometimes conflicted with his obligation to present a coherent musical structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What causes turnover on the Billboard charts? The neutral model of cultural evolution, which assumes that taste is transmitted via an unbiased copying process, provides precise predictions regarding expected popularity distributions and turnover within a popularity-ranked list. Recent advances in this line make it possible to characterize the likelihood of music taste transmission mechanisms by investigating departures of observed turnover rates from neutral model predictions. Here, I bias the neutral model to investigate four alternative conceptions of individual music taste transmission (song quality, individual status, social network, and anticonformist) and use agent-based simulations to examine the impact on turnover. I then compare modeled with empirical turnover data from the Billboard Hot 100 over the period from 1958 to 2021 and find that observed turnover patterns are reproduced only in an anticonformist model simulating the systematic rejection of the most popular songs. This finding was unexpected and challenges the notion of a generalized "preference for the popular." Overall, this study contributes to ongoing debates regarding the mechanisms involved in the transmission of taste and the mechanics of fashion change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In I Aesthetic Theory i , however, Adorno is more conciliatory towards surrealism: "Movements such as expressionism and surrealism, whose irrationality alienated, were an attack on violence, authority, and obscurantism. This essay discusses how surrealist automatic writing may break an impasse in the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno's work.[1] Adorno argues that, since the advent of instrumental rationality in modernity, the subject has repressed an aspect of her self - mimesis - that expresses the desire to attain proximity to an object through imitation rather than conceptualization ( I Aesthetic Theory i , 145-46). [3] However, Adorno and Horkheimer also warn against viewing mimesis as a site of utopian possibility, because instrumental reason also employs mimesis to reproduce reification: "The reason that represses mimesis is not merely its opposite. Michael Spitzer, special issue, I Music Analysis i 29 (2010), 126-48; Miriam Bratu Hansen, "Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer", in I The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern i , ed. [Extracted from the article]

The goal of thisstudy wasto examine the social influence on music liking with respect to individual musical taste. To measure musical taste, participants (N = 95, mean age 20.4 years) filled in the STOMP scale. They were then asked individually to listen to 16 musical excerpts from different genres using a computer program and rate how much they liked them. They were divided into three groupsthat were shown different information about other participants’ ratings of the same excerpts. The first group was shown ratings allegedly based on others’ positive judgments, the second group wasshown ratings allegedly based on others’ negative judgments, and the third group was given no information. The results showed that the participants’ ratings were susceptible to social influence, i.e., they conformed towards the shown group norm. As expected, musical taste was related to the ratings of the music excerpts, but did not moderate the effect of social influence. Thus, the results show that social comparison, which has been confirmed by research in various areas of human judgment, also exists in rating music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

German pianist Anna Caroline de Belleville was one of the foremost viraioso pianists in the 1820s and 1830s, deemed the "Chamber Virtuoso of Her Royal Highness" by Princess Louise of Prussia and "Queen of the Piano" by Paganini. Although a few modern biographical accounts provide an oveniew of her life and career, there has been no critical examination of her virtuositv within the context of early nineteenth-century performance culture. Drawing on periodicals, magazines, correspondence, memoirs, and contemporary writings, this article reconstructs Belleville's early career and illustrates her significance by examining her strategic programming, pianism, and reception. I argue that Belleville's reorientation of her public concert repertory in the mid-1830s, particularly her incorporation of works considered "classical" or "serious," enabled her to mediate the conflicting musical tastes of her critics and audiences, and to reinvent herself as a pianist renowned not for a bravura style but for a versatile, eclectic virtuosity centering on the faithful interpretation of "serious" works. This course of action marked Belleville as a significant forerunner to the interpreter-performer pianists who came to dominate the vii-tuoso scene from the mid-nineteenth century onward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the protestant Christian missionaries arrived in Nigeria in the 19th century, they disallowed native music as well as the use of musical instruments in the church because of the fear that these would encourage their converts to retain their heathen practices. However, today the solemn congregational hymns they introduced have been either supplemented or replaced with vibrant instrumental music in most churches. The article investigated the reasons why the missionaries banned instrumental music and assessed whether the musical innovations made by Nigerian Christians have hindered or helped the growth of Christianity. Applying the reader-oriented and phenomenological approaches, the article found that phases of musical adaptations in terms of indigenous genres, instruments and traditional and modern dance modes were introduced principally through the youth fellowship groups, indigenous choirs, the Aladura and the Neo-Pentecostal churches. While some critics have argued against these innovations, they have been found to have biblical support, particularly in the psalms. Among other advantages, the indigenous adaptations enhance interest in worship and cater for preferential musical tastes among worshippers. Most churches have come to value the new musical genres so much that they no longer can do without them during worship. Therefore, instrumental music has helped the growth and development of the church in Nigeria in several ways. Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This research involves both the Old and New Testaments as well as Christian music. It holds that rather than being a hindrance to the Christian faith in Nigeria, instrumental music has helped its growth tremendously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "From Constellation to Dialectical Image: Adorno on Musical Works" by Christoph Hubig discusses Adorno's considerations on music aesthetics. Adorno uses the term "non-identical" and refers to Hegel to describe the nature of music. He also analyzes Beethoven's Appassionata and considers it as a realization of identity and non-identity. The text deals with constellation as a method of philosophizing and giving meaning. It is explained that constellations serve to preserve the non-identical as its own identity and to reveal the relationships between subjects and things. The text also refers to jazz as an example of the functionalization of subjective emotional expression. It also addresses Adorno's essay on Schubert, in which constellation, emotional expression, and dialectical image are already mentioned. The text deals with the relationship between technique and content in music and examines the use of meaning-expression in the music of Wagner and Mahler. Adorno argues that Wagner reinforces reification in music, while Mahler uses meaning-expression to create a dialectical visual language. The text also discusses Adorno's engagement with material categories in relation to Beethoven and Wagner. It is argued that in his analysis of the Missa solemnis, Adorno misses the mark and does not compose in terms of dialectical development. The text also deals with Adorno's interpretation of Beethoven's question about the possibility of an objective spiritual order and its parallel to Kantian philosophy. It is argued that Adorno overlooks the naive-believing Spinozism of Beethoven as an important element. Furthermore, Adorno's interpretation of Wagner is discussed, criticizing that he inserts meaning into his dialectical images and thus does not adequately analyze the phantasmagoria of Wagner's operas. Adorno argues that within the dramaturgy of the total work of art, every person and action is defined by a leitmotif and the world context becomes a tautology. The research of Carl Dahlhaus on the transformation of leitmotifs in Wagner is cited as a counter-argument. In his monograph on Mahler, Adorno describes the thoroughly broken nature of Mahler's music and emphasizes reflection and the non-identical. The text also considers the music of Alban Berg and Gustav Mahler in the context of Negative Dialectics. It is argued that Mahler's music creates a wholeness that does not let the characteristic disappear. Mahler's music is considered a kind of protest against the prevailing ideology of the true, the beautiful, and the good. The text also discusses the music of Igor Stravinsky and argues that his music represents a static dead end that goes against the development and dialectical nature of music. The text deals with the composers Stravinsky and Schoenberg and their musical works. Adorno analyzes Stravinsky's music and sees in it a destruction of the organic and a lack of freedom due to the lack of thematic work. In Schoenberg, on the other hand, Adorno recognizes a movement between expression and order, which is based on an exemplary change of the composer to his material. This text discusses Adorno's position as an advocate of material in music. Adorno rejects the artificialization and formalization of music in thoroughly determined systems and instead emphasizes the non-identity of the material. He argues that music cannot be reduced to its images and overforming constructions, but that the material itself should be recognized. Adorno pursues a materialism that does not dissolve into the indeterminate, but rather recognizes the material as it is. [Extracted from the article]

The aim of this paper is to analyze Mladen Tarbuk’s song cycle Sanjači [The Dreamers] within the context of high and low Croatian culture and on the basis of both musical parameters and the literary work of Nikola Šop. The paper also aims to place the song cycle in the realm of high, canonical culture. The paper summarizes the literature on the song cycle, as well as the perspectives that need to be established in order to critically investigate the musical style, compositional technique, performance and musical aesthetics of the work, and to position the results within the context of the data, comments and instructions of the composer. For the song cycle Sanjači the composer was inspired by the metaphysical lyricism of the great poet Nikola Šop. Under this lyrical veil, on the border between sleep and wakefulness, the composer has given us an exceptional, canonical neo-expressionist work. The song cycle (dedicated to Lidija Horvat-Dunjko) was created over eight years, from 1993 to 2001. In it, the poet searches for the meaning of existence and senses the metaphysical fullness of being. The composer, considering the literary template’s depth, outlines this metaphysical incorporeality at the edge of possibility with his neo-expressionist music. He has given the soloist soprano a part that is both exiting and one of the most difficult in the musical literature with a duration of forty minutes. The composer uses lush instrumentation in order to foreground the difference, through instrumental timbre, between the ethereal world of dreams and the much more hectic and louder world of reality, while the metric countdown of a repeated tone symbolizes the flow of time, which, even though it passes, does not represent progress in the world of the dreamer, but the endless repetition of the same situations. It is this timelessness that permeates all songs of the cycle. Besides possessing a high proficiency in sight-reading (because the musical structure is extremely complicated, both in rhythm as well as intonation), the soloist is required to have excellent voice control within a huge vocal and dynamic range, to be able to richly modulate and to use shading with vocal timbres, which must almost always remain light and airy in order not to compromise the atmosphere of incorporeality. It is very important to pronounce the verses as clearly as possible and to moderate as much as possible the use of vibrato in the voice. The voice of the dreamer is often in an extremely high vocal register and needs to be very fragile and quiet, which is quite demanding for any singer. After a thorough analysis of Tarbuk’s (Šop’s) Sanjači and bearing in mind all the mentioned parameters of evaluating a canonical piece of art, it is possible to conclude that this extremely valuable song cycle fulfills all the conditions of entrance to canonical culture. It is musically and poetically totally incomprehensible and unacceptable to an uneducated recipient, harmonically, rhythmically, musically and performance-wise extremely complex and very interesting and exciting in its ethereal metaphysics to an »elite« listener. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the controversies it has caused, Theodor W. Adorno's Philosophy of New Music (1949) is one of the fundamental texts of modernist musical aesthetics. The article discusses the complex personal background of the author as well as the historical context of this work, which can be understood at least partly as a complement to the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), co-written with Max Horkheimer. The problems of the dehumanization of art and the relation of modernity to mass culture, as well as the loss of communicativeness in 20th-century musical modernism, are discussed. Attention is paid to the background of the national ideology of Adorno's music philosophy, which sprouts from the German cultural ideology formed at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 19th century, music in general and the idea of the primacy of German music particularly played a significant role in the construction of German national identity, and at the beginning of the 20th century, both the defenders of the German musical tradition and the modernists started from a similar ideological base. The totalitarian cultural ideology of Nazi Germany was also formed on this ideological base, and its equivalent can be seen in Eastern Europe in the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The high rank of Igor Stravinsky’s works (especially for ballet) prompts a discussion about the meaning of corporeality and dance in his output, a meaning that goes beyond Stravinsky’s historically-documented interest in ballet music. Thus, the encounter with Diaghilev and Nijinsky could be justified as immanently emanating from his own musical aesthetics and poetics. If dance seems for the composer to form an additional, immanent level of the music, the question of the aesthetic sense of reference to the body in Stravinsky’s music remains unanswered. By attaining a “mediated immediacy” (Helmuth Plessner) in his works, his ballet music manages to maintain a certain distance – objectifying, alienating – from subjective expression, without becoming abstract, and at the same time without losing the subjective and intersubjective bonds in which it is immersed. Through dance, Stravinsky not only strengthens the aspect of mediation in his music, but in a reflective not primitive practice, he also looks for the origins of aesthetic expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recording and radio industries have faced a reckoning over their lack of gender equity. While Generation Z is poised to become the dominant music audience, research on the wants and needs of young women listeners is lacking. This study used focus groups to investigate how Generation-Z women feel about today's music and audio media options. Specifically, their musical tastes are more eclectic, but they find little appeal in current popular music, and they see widespread disrespect for women in music. Participants also recognize that current trends of male-dominated radio presentation are likely to turn potential women listeners away. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the symbolic relationship between the principles of mythological thought and music in the area of musical structures and forms. The basic foundation for interpretation is Carl Gustav Jung's archetype theory, notably the finding concerning the circular nature of the unconscious and its possible reflection in musical forms. The theoretical level of the text focuses on the methodological procedures for interpreting myths and music. Attention is paid primarily to artistic music with the focus on 20thcentury music, which exhibits -- within the scope of neo-mythologism -- an intensive renaissance of myths and their symbols on the thematic and especially structural level. The text analyses Jung's notes on music in correlation with theory of archetypes and music theory and aesthetics of music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]