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Object-oriented micro-video background music recommendation is a complicated task where the matching degree between videos and background music is a major issue. However, music selections in user-generated content (UGC) are prone to selection bias caused by historical preferences of uploaders. Since historical preferences are not fully reliable and may reflect obsolete behaviors, over-reliance on them should be avoided as knowledge and interests dynamically evolve. In this article, we propose a Deconfounded Cross-Modal matching model to mitigate such bias. Specifically, uploaders' personal preferences of music genres are identified as confounders that spuriously correlate music embeddings and background music selections, causing the learned system to over-recommend music from majority groups. To resolve such confounders, backdoor adjustment is utilized to deconfound the spurious correlation between music embeddings and prediction scores. We further utilize Monte Carlo estimator with batch-level average as the approximations to avoid integrating the entire confounder space calculated by the adjustment. Furthermore, we design a teacher–student network to utilize the matching of music videos, which is professionally generated content (PGC) with specialized matching, to better recommend content-matching background music. The PGC data are modeled by a teacher network to guide the matching of uploader-selected UGC data of student network by Kullback–Leibler–based knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments on the TT-150k-genre dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code is publicly available on https://github.com/jing-1/DecCM [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alzheimer's disease (AD), the most prevalent neurodegenerative disorder, is escalating globally. Characterized by cognitive decline, emotional instability, and neuropsychiatric symptoms, AD presents a growing challenge for effective management. Current pharmaceutical treatments, primarily acetylcholinesterase inhibitors and memantine, offer symptomatic relief but fail to halt disease progression or significantly address psychiatric manifestations. Consequently, non-pharmacological interventions, particularly music therapy, have garnered attention as potential adjunctive treatments. Musical memory is regarded as completely distinct from other memory processes, and patients with AD retain some musical recall despite the significant cognitive decline. In addition, music therapy is well-tolerated by the vast majority of patients and easy to administer. Herein, the mechanisms of music as a memory enhancer, how musical memory is preserved in AD, active and passive music therapy methods and their effects on each function, and factors affecting the efficacy of music therapy, such as music selection and genre, are discussed. Additional research is required to determine the optimal duration of music therapy sessions for patients to experience long-term benefits. In addition, as patients in severe stages cannot participate fully in music therapy sessions due to their disability, additional research finding a solution to this issue would be helpful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research suggests that a core lexical structure characterized by words that define plot staging, plot progression, and cognitive tension underlies written narratives. Here, we investigate the extent to which song lyrics follow this underlying narrative structure. Using a text analytic approach and two publicly available datasets of song lyrics including a larger dataset (N = 12,280) and a smaller dataset of greatest hits (N = 2,823), we find that music lyrics tend to exhibit a core Arc of Narrative structure: setting the stage at the beginning, progressing the plot steadily until the end of the song, and peaking in cognitive tension in the middle. We also observe differences in narrative structure based on musical genre, suggesting different genres set the scene in greater detail (Country, Rap) or progress the plot faster and have a higher rate of internal conflict (Pop). These findings add to the evidence that storytelling exhibits predictable language patterns and that storytelling is evident in music lyrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music genre classification is significant to users and digital platforms. To enhance the classification accuracy, this study proposes a hybrid model based on VMD-IWOA-XGBOOST for music genre classification. First, the audio signals are transformed into numerical or symbolic data, and the crucial features are selected using the maximal information coefficient (MIC) method. Second, an improved whale optimization algorithm (IWOA) is proposed for parameter optimization. Third, the inner patterns of these selected features are extracted by IWOA-optimized variational mode decomposition (VMD). Lastly, all features are put into the IWOA-optimized extreme gradient boosting (XGBOOST) classifier. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed model, two open music datasets are used, i.e., GTZAN and Bangla. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed hybrid model achieves better performance than the other models in terms of five evaluation criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a group of Japanese‐born experimental musicians who make their lives in Tokyo and New York as a case study, this article examines how new musical genres are created, shared, and mediated through layers of circulations, identities, and locations. The author argues that these musicians' lives and music have a kind of "noisy" quality, complicating genre boundaries and identity binaries in their wake. Through ethnographic "thick descriptions" and the words of the musicians themselves, the author shows the web of musical genres, languages, geopolitical identities, and gender relations that combine to make up the texture of musical performances. This article is also thinking through and with a sea change in the study of Japanese music. In recent years, building on the work of scholars of Japanese cultural studies, ethnomusicologists have critiqued how monocultural and mono‐ethnic mythologies have influenced the study and production of Japanese music. Ethnomusicology and area studies are Cold War enterprises, designed to create research that would help maintain that world order, educate Americans as global leaders, and change hearts and minds in foreign lands, leading to a cultural conservatism that often led scholars to focus on "traditional" Japanese music. Recently, however, research on Japanese music has increasingly focused on popular and experimental musics and examines how Japanese contemporary identity is created and maintained through music. Thus this article gives readers a view of how US‐based Japanese music scholarship is moving away from such Cold War paradigms and contributes to this shift in studies of Japanese music and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While certain musical genres and songs are widely popular, there is still large variability in the music that individuals find rewarding or emotional, even among those with a similar musical enculturation. Interestingly, there is one Western genre that is intended to attract minimal attention and evoke a mild emotional response: elevator music. In a series of behavioral experiments, we show that elevator music consistently elicits low pleasure and surprise. Participants reported elevator music as being less pleasurable than music from popular genres, even when participants did not regularly listen to the comparison genre. Participants reported elevator music to be familiar even when they had not explicitly heard the presented song before. Computational and behavioral measures of surprisal showed that elevator music was less surprising, and thus more predictable, than other well‐known genres. Elevator music covers of popular songs were rated as less pleasurable, surprising, and arousing than their original counterparts. Finally, we used elevator music as a control for self‐selected rewarding songs in a proof‐of‐concept physiological (electrodermal activity and piloerection) experiment. Our results suggest that elevator music elicits low emotional responses consistently across Western music listeners, making it a unique control stimulus for studying musical novelty, pleasure, and surprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages a (post)feminist-aligned critical reading of women's gendered performances in Afrobeats music videos to highlight—in the visual culture of this popular African musical genre—the visibility of sexually assertive black African women who variously subvert heteropatriarchal moral public scripts about "respectable" African womanhood and expression of their sexualities in relation to black African men. In my considerations of postfeminist sensibilities, I align with Simidele Dosekun by regarding postfeminism as a transnational cultural sensibility with flexible contours that render it analytically applicable and valuable as a scholarly lens in an African popular cultural landscape. I deploy a multimodal discourse analysis of five Afrobeats music videos (derived from a larger corpus of videos from my PhD study), their storylines, plot progressions, and the accompanying lyrical contents, to advance my arguments. The article draws significantly on postfeminist literature and key perspectives from bodies of feminist critiques of popular culture to demonstrate inflections of feminine subjectivities that I theorise as "sexssertive," given their active constructions of counter-narratives in relation to conservative and restrictive meanings of black African womanhood. I conclude by considering the implications hereof for broader feminist efforts towards the just treatment of women across diverse African contexts in the domains of sexuality and sexual expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Selecting appropriate musical stimuli to induce specific emotions represents a recurring challenge in music and emotion research. Most existing stimuli have been categorized according to taxonomies derived from general emotion models (e.g., basic emotions, affective circumplex), have been rated for perceived emotions, and are rarely defined in terms of interrater agreement. To redress these limitations, we present research that served in the development of a new interactive online database, including an initial set of 364 music excerpts from three different genres (classical, pop, and hip/hop) that were rated for felt emotion using the Geneva Emotion Music Scale (GEMS), a music-specific emotion scale. The sample comprised 517 English- and German-speaking participants and each excerpt was rated by an average of 28.76 participants (SD = 7.99). Data analyses focused on research questions that are of particular relevance for musical database development, notably the number of raters required to obtain stable estimates of emotional effects of music and the adequacy of the GEMS as a tool for describing music-evoked emotions across three prominent music genres. Overall, our findings suggest that 10–20 raters are sufficient to obtain stable estimates of emotional effects of music excerpts in most cases, and that the GEMS shows promise as a valid and comprehensive annotation tool for music databases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the significance of Franz Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major in the history of piano concertos. Liszt, a renowned composer, created this concerto during his time as a music director at the Weimar court. The article delves into Liszt's creative process and the challenges he faced, comparing his journey to other composers of his time. It emphasizes the importance of Liszt's concerto in the genre's history, highlighting its innovative structure and its impact on the development of piano concertos in the 19th century. [Extracted from the article]

The rhythmic interplay of accent, tempo, and musical mood is expressed in the bodily postures, gestures, and expressions of attuned responsiveness in Salsa Dura, a genre of salsa music from the 1970s featuring improvisational dance solos. These dancers embrace the feelings and flows of soloing musicians going off and breaking free from any predictable form and structure. We inquire into how world-class salsa dancers and educators feel themselves moved by such intricate rhythms to experience soul connections. Video recordings and interviews yield insight into the call and response dynamics of this essentially tactful practice of alterity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The perception of tension and release dynamics constitutes one of the essential aspects of music listening. However, modeling musical tension to predict perception of listeners has been a challenge to researchers. Seminal work demonstrated that tension is reported consistently by listeners and can be accurately predicted from a discrete set of musical features, combining them into a weighted sum of slopes reflecting their combined dynamics over time. However, previous modeling approaches lack an automatic pipeline for feature extraction that would make them widely accessible to researchers in the field. Here, we present TenseMusic: an open-source automatic predictive tension model that operates with a musical audio as the only input. Using state-of-the-art music information retrieval (MIR) methods, it automatically extracts a set of six features (i.e., loudness, pitch height, tonal tension, roughness, tempo, and onset frequency) to use as predictors for musical tension. The algorithm was optimized using Lasso regression to best predict behavioral tension ratings collected on 38 Western classical musical pieces. Its performance was then tested by assessing the correlation between the predicted tension and unseen continuous behavioral tension ratings yielding large mean correlations between ratings and predictions approximating r =.60 across all pieces. We hope that providing the research community with this well-validated open-source tool for predicting musical tension will motivate further work in music cognition and contribute to elucidate the neural and cognitive correlates of tension dynamics for various musical genres and cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Sound is one of the primary forms of sensory information that we use to perceive our surroundings. Usually, a sound event is a sequence of an audio clip obtained from an action. The action can be rhythm patterns, music genre, people speaking for a few seconds, etc. The sound event classification address distinguishes what kind of audio clip it is from the given audio sequence. Nowadays, it is a common issue to solve in the following pipeline: audio pre-processing→perceptual feature extraction→classification algorithm. In this paper, we improve the traditional sound event classification algorithm to identify unknown sound events by using the deep learning method. The compact cluster structure in the feature space for known classes helps recognize unknown classes by allowing large room to locate unknown samples in the embedded feature space. Based on this concept, we applied center loss and supervised contrastive loss to optimize the model. The center loss tries to minimize the intra- class distance by pulling the embedded feature into the cluster center, while the contrastive loss disperses the inter-class features from one another. In addition, we explored the performance of self-supervised learning in detecting unknown sound events. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed open-set sound event classification algorithm and self-supervised learning approach achieve sustained performance improvements in various datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jazz arrived in mainland China as early as the 1920s. It has since been a popular music genre among the middle and upper classes. Similar to that in the West, jazz education in China has been increasingly formalized, with a growing number of universities and academies offering jazz degree programs or courses. Despite a few studies on jazz and its early education in China, little is known about how formal jazz education is implemented in contemporary Chinese academic settings. In the present study, we examined and contrasted jazz program policies across three higher education institutions in China wherein at each one, a specialized unit for implementing jazz education has been established. The comparison foregrounded commonalities and differences across the three programs. We also discussed how the institutions responded to the local political and economic contexts in developing their jazz programs. We have concluded by deliberating on the future of jazz education in China in relation to public acceptance of jazz and the recent development in school curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Produced, distributed, and consumed in a de-territorialised way, modern popular music presents a set of challenges to cultural heritage policies which largely rely on spatial frameworks, as needs for the preservation of local, regional, or national cultural heritage are typically highlighted. Moreover, certain popular music genres dating back to the mid-20th century are both representations and re-inventions of local and 'folk' or 'traditional' music and have become a part of many living heritage practices. Slovenian folk-pop (FP) music is a case in point: a modern genre in terms of history and production conditions, nationally registered as intangible cultural heritage. This article offers an analysis of how FP music is integrated into authorised heritage discourse in Slovenia, foregrounding the results of extensive interviews with 14 heritage gatekeepers, such as organisers of FP festivals and curators of thematic museums. The article discusses how operational definitions of FP as heritage, used by various gatekeepers that operate locally, regionally, and internationally deviate from the definition provided in the national intangible heritage register. The analysis traces how discourses about national and cultural identity get intertwined with music and establishes that gatekeepers' understandings of culture as either territorialised or dynamic significantly impact their heritage activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As opposed to the discourse marking the division between the subculturalists and the post-subculturalists, we hold that subculturalisation and tribalisation are essentially the same social process. The process within which the Croatian ultras subculture was formed, took place from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. Nationalism and violence are broadly acknowledged as the main features of this new subcultural style in socialist Yugoslavia. However, to fully understand the process it is necessary to study broader spectrum of influences and relationships between actors on the social scene. Therefore we put emphasis on the interaction between football supporters and subcultural styles founded on rock and similar genres of music. This interaction proved to be crucial in anti-establishment and anti-mainstream sensibilities of the emerging football supporter scene. This is particularly important while these sensibilities have remained one of basic characteristics of the ultras subculture in modern Croatia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Latina women in reggaeton, a notoriously sexist music genre that can nevertheless encompass feminist goals of sexual agency, albeit in a narrow band defined and policed by capital. That contradiction is evident in the lyrics, videos, and media interviews of an avowedly feminist, straight reggaetonera, Becky G. Drawing on the genre's textuality and political economy, we argue that her media interviews, performances, and video "Sin Pijama" ["No Pajamas"] incarnate a commodified visual narrative that reifies masculine fantasies while exploring female agency and sexuality. Becky G presents herself as autonomous even as she embraces a hyper-sexuality that reproduces patriarchal normativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we will follow the development of electroacoustic music. This article focusses especially on the instruments that contributed to the apparition of this genre of music, starting with the beginnings, before the twentieth century. This will help us understand the evolution of musical instruments and how important they are when it comes to making music. What is more fascinating about electro acoustic music will be presented in the article, focusing on some of the pioneers of this type of music, and how electro acoustic music turned into what nowadays we call techno music. Also, we will follow the development of the instruments used back in the days to the processor which we use in the creation of electronic music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blind source separation is a popular research topic used for decomposing mixed signals, particularly in the field of music. In addition to exploring machine learning-based approaches, this study aims to examine the performance of classical algorithms in separating audio signal sources. The evaluation of different genres is a significant aspect of this study as the performance of the methods may vary across various musical genres and different audio components. This consideration provides a novel perspective and contributes to a comprehensive analysis of the algorithms. Using the MusDB-HQ dataset, we conducted experimental studies comparing classical algorithms, including FastICA, NMF, and DUET, with implemented architectures such as Hybrid Demucs, Spleeter, Open Unmix, and Wave-U-Net. The audio components were assessed based on several factors, including time, genre, and signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR) scores, after artificially mixing the signals. The results demonstrated the superior performance of machine learning models over classical methods. Specifically, Wave-U-Net achieved the highest SDR scores for drums, other, and mixture components (2.041, –2.087, and 0.941, respectively), while Spleeter showed the highest SDR scores for vocals and bass components (3.145 and 0.066, respectively). Additionally, this study highlights the influence of different genres on algorithm performance, providing valuable insights for music production and related applications. Overall, this study contributes to the existing knowledge in the field of audio source separation by comparing classical algorithms and machine learning models, considering genre variations, and evaluating performance across different audio components. The findings have implications for the development of improved algorithms and their application in various musical genres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the evolving landscape of music education, emphasizing the need for adaptation to new technologies, genres, and student interests. It discusses the challenges and opportunities presented by calls for reform, urging educators to embrace change while considering the diverse needs and experiences of students.

This article focuses on the effects of extensive melodic repetition in twelve Old French monophonic songs preserved in chansonniers (song books) from the thirteenth century. All these songs share a specific formal pattern: at least three initial poetic verses (or pairs of verses) set to the same melody. While the methodological point of departure for this study revolves around musical form and melodic construction, five songs within this group of twelve involve women speakers within their poetic texts--a relative rarity in medieval song. In addition to reviewing the cultural, cognitive, emotional, and performative implications of repetition, the article considers how repetitive melodic patterns intersect with and complement the feminine emphases of the text, arguing that this combination is not coincidental. As demonstrated by a close reading of these five songs, repetition has the potential to depict deliberately distinct female figures, ranging from a woman who longs for the touch of her absent crusading lover to the Virgin Mary herself. Repetition thereby serves in these songs to destabilize both the widespread trope of courtly love and the gendered implications of the chanson as a poetic and musical genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study compares three recent theories of expressive microtiming in music. While each theory was originally designed to engage a particular musical genre—Anne Danielsen's beat bins for funk, Neo-Soul, and other contemporary Black musical expressions, Chris Stover's beat span for "timeline musics" from Africa and the African diaspora, and Mats Johansson's rhythmic tolerance for Scandinavian fiddle music—we consider how they can productively coexist in a shared music-analytic space, each revealing aspects of musical structure and process in mutually reinforcing ways. In order to explore these possibilities, we bring all three theories to bear on a recording of Thelonious Monk's "Monk's Dream," focusing on Monk's piano gestures as well as the relationship between saxophonist Charlie Rouse's improvised solo and Monk's and bassist John Ore's accompaniments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study sought to gain an understanding of: (a) the formation and operation of four instrumental music programmes active in prisons between 1973 and 2020 and (b) the meanings ascribed to those programmes by their directors and their perceptions of the meanings that incarcerated instrumentalists ascribed to their participation in those groups, focusing on aspects of the programming that might contribute to desistance. Four retired music educators completed an online, open-ended questionnaire, describing their experiences teaching instrumental music in prisons. Using inductive thematic analysis, the following themes in participants' responses were identified: (a) the importance of support from those in power in starting and running prison-based music programmes; (b) the potential for participation in prison-based instrumental music programmes to help people overcome prejudice and establish community connections; and (c) satisfaction through the development of new abilities among incarcerated musicians. From these findings, I argue that prison-based instrumental music programmes can potentially foster activities and relationships that contribute to social rehabilitation and desistance. Furthermore, the finding that incarcerated musicians reportedly enjoyed a wide array of musical genres and pedagogical approaches invites further discussion about the potential inclusion of different kinds of instrumental music programmes in prison contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on various recently published music-related books and their diverse topics, which encompass a wide range of subjects such as historical figures like Vaughan Williams and Schubert, examinations of contemporary Black music in Britain, and explorations into concepts like parody in remixes, esotericism in music, and the role of technology in R&B. These publications cover a breadth of music-related themes, from historical and cultural analyses of specific periods and genres.

The traditional Colombian vallenato was declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO on 1 December 2015 with urgency for it to be safeguarded, which led the government of Colombia in the head of the Ministry of Culture and the vallenato music cluster to develop a safeguarding plan that contains different activities, among which stands out a platform for the management of vallenato through educational processes. In this sense, this document proposes an ontological model for the representation of vallenato as cultural heritage in a context-aware system called Vallenatic. The ontology was developed using the NeOn methodology, designed in the Protégé software, and has 15 concepts (Vallenata Songs, Artist, Devices, Persons, Environment, Cultural Managers, Interface, Location, MOOC, Learning Object, Profile, Preference, Net, Time Cultural, Event, Cultural_Sites). The model was evaluated by means of nine (9) situations described in natural language and SWRL; this language was used since it allows expressing OWL concepts in combination with RuleML. The proposed model can be used for other musical genres that have the recognition of cultural and intangible heritage, such as the Spanish flamenco, Argentine Tango, Mexican Mariachi music, Peruvian scissors dance, Brazilian capoeira, Dominican bachata, Jamaican reggae, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music is better recognized when it is liked. Does this association remain evident when music perception and memory are severely impaired, as in congenital amusia? We tested 11 amusic and 11 matched control participants, asking whether liking of a musical excerpt influences subsequent recognition. In an initial exposure phase, participants—unaware that their recognition would be tested subsequently—listened to 24 musical excerpts and judged how much they liked each excerpt. In the test phase that followed, participants rated whether they recognized the previously heard excerpts, which were intermixed with an equal number of foils matched for mode, tempo, and musical genre. As expected, recognition was in general impaired for amusic participants compared with control participants. For both groups, however, recognition was better for excerpts that were liked, and the liking enhancement did not differ between groups. These results contribute to a growing body of research that examines the complex interplay between emotions and cognitive processes. More specifically, they extend previous findings related to amusics' impairments to a new memory paradigm and suggest that (1) amusic individuals are sensitive to an aesthetic and subjective dimension of the music-listening experience, and (2) emotions can support memory processes even in a population with impaired music perception and memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Capriccio sopra la lontananza del fratello dilettissimo, BWV 992 was written not only in youth and in search of compositional identity, but also in a period when several meanings and musical genres overlapped under the term of capriccio. Moreover, among specialists, there is still no full agreement on the date and dedicatee of Bach’s work. Who departures and from whom? Is he a family member or a friend? Due to the extra-musical program of the movements’ subtitles, besides the formal and rhetorical analysis psychology-related concepts might help to highlight these questions. However, by farewell sometimes new perspectives open, and other possible influences and models become clear either, within family for a father’s son (Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach) or outside of it, in a composer generation distance (Ludwig van Beethoven). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a compilation of forty songs featuring guitarists favored by Peter Beilharz, with topics encompassing the musical tastes of Beilharz, a collection of blues and rock songs, and the influence of guitarists across different music genres. Compiled by Trevor Hogan, Christopher Robbins, and Sian Supski, the Spotify playlist presents a range of blues, rock, and other musical genres, showcasing the preferences of Peter Beilharz through iconic guitarists and their notable tracks.

Adrian Daub's study, "What the Ballad Knows: The Ballad Genre, Memory Culture, and German Nationalism," explores the hybrid literary and music ballad genre. Daub argues that the ballad genre lived off the fantasy of tapping into an earlier, premodern, oral mode of relating to poetry and the community, while also embodying modernity. The book delves into the ballad's relationship to orality, its incorporation into operatic narratives, its gender dynamics, and its role in German nationalism. Daub's work offers insights into the lives and creativity of ballad authors and meditates on the genre's complexities and contradictions. [Extracted from the article]

Adam Kielman's book, "Sonic Mobilities: Producing Worlds in Southern China," offers an ethnomusicological account of two Chinese bands, Mabang and Wanju Chuanzhang, and their impact on Guangzhou's contemporary music scene. Kielman explores the bands' diverse musical genres, language choices, and creative branding, performance, and circulation choices. He also delves into the concepts of cosmopolitanism and mobility, linking them to the Chinese context and the idea of tianxia (天下) as a utopian alternative to a neoliberal world order. The book provides a nuanced analysis of the production and consumption of music in Guangzhou, appealing to readers in various disciplines. [Extracted from the article]

That is, while similar to Peter Falk's character, Sanneh is a likeable sleuth in the end his musical tastes often tend, following Columbo's, to come across as agreeably middlebrow in pursuit of some higher goal (Columbo's is to catch the killer, while Sanneh's is to validate the genre). Kelefa Sanneh's I Major labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres i tries to apply some kind of controlling narrative to an esthetic category that is shambolic beyond any other. Bouncing between myriad genres, subgenres, and sub-subgenres, inserting elements of memoir along the way, following some threads obsessively while bypassing others altogether, neither is Sanneh's book really a history of popular music: it's his I own i history of popular music and how it has impacted his life. [Extracted from the article]

The purpose of the work is to identify the stylistic features of Biedermeier in the large forms of F. Chopin at the level of a piano concerto as bringing connections with spiritualised "light" playing in aristocratic salon gatherings, giving signs of a baroque obligatory concerto in a symphonic form. The constructed heroic-melancholic sub-base of Chopin's presentation of concert typology inspired the latter with a thought-oriented approach, according to the observation of researchers of this author's work. The methodological basis of the study is the intonation approach in the vision of the genetic unity of musical and speech beginnings in the development of the concepts of B. Asafiev and B. Yavorskyi in the works of D. Androsova, O. Markova, I. Podobas, L. Stepanova, L. Shevchenko, with an emphasis on the hermeneutical perspective of such an approach. Also highlighted are biographical-descriptive methods, with an emphasis on its intellectual-biographical aspect for the sake of the accuracy of the interpretive indicators of the analysis of compositions, analytical-structural as focused on the musicological specificity of the thematic and constructive presentation of the features of compositions, interspecies stylistic comparative for the awareness of artistic-artistic and scientific-religious interactions tendencies in F. Chopin's thinking. The scientific novelty of the work is determined by relying on Biedermeier's concept of "big in small" when analysing the large-scale form of the concert, especially as it relates to the initial Warsaw period, when the author created Concertos without returning to this genre in the subsequent stages of his creative life. Conclusions. Biedermeier notes the underappreciated textural and expressive essence of Chopin's presentation of the concert form, which at high tempos of the game "dematerialised" the theatrical dialogue of the classical concert in favour of approaching the thoughtfulness of the lyrical-epic monologue of the baroque forms, inseparable from the spiritual genesis of the named genre. The monologisation of the concert form in Chopin is related to the alleluia complex of Chopin's ultra-fast playing as a representative of spiritualised salon light pianism, no stranger to touches of romantic dramatic antitheticism in the epochal borderline Biedermeier pro-religious chamberisation of expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the study is to investigate the poetic and intonation features of ―Two Legends‖ for the piano in the context of spiritual search and to reveal the compositional guidelines of F. Liszt, aimed at embodying the poetry of non-antithetical content. The research methodology is determined by the use of historical-logical, analytical, cultural, hermeneutic, comparative methods, as presented in the works of representatives of the intonation approach of B. Asafiev in Ukraine - in the works of D. Androsova, O. Markova, O. Muravska, O. Roschenko, and O. Socol. Scientific novelty. For the first time in domestic cultural studies, the specifics of F. Liszt's spiritual ideas are highlighted according to their presentation in the named piano spiritual works of the late period of the composer's work, marked by his approach to the symbolic principles of thinking. Сonclusions. The analysis of the symbolic meaning of the music of F. Liszt's ―Two Legends‖ for piano showed that these are works based on the choice of the program plot - life descriptions of the images of the Saints - Francis of Assisi (XIII century) and the follower of the first Francis of Paoli (XV century), who represented the closely related to Byzantine Orthodoxy, the discovery of mysticism and aestheticism in Catholicism. In the compositional solution, monophonic recitatives (the theme-image of Francis of Assisi in the First Legend), the motif of the Cross, which in the context of the program acquires an interpretation in the aspects of the Old Christian confession, are essential. The tonus peregrinus in the leitmotif of St. Francis in ―Second Legend‖ also stands out, testifying to the imitation of the old liturgy of Byzantine origin. Compositionally, this poetry affirms the Divine unity of the world, in this case it is a presentation of a form devoid of thematic antitheticity. In his spiritual works, Liszt turns to the two-part nature of non-contrasting juxtapositions, which model compositional primary liturgical features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is the analysis of Y.H. Hummel's Second Piano Concerto from the perspective of Biedermeier's positions of "light" ("diamond") pianism of the Restoration era, which deployed saving the spiritual foundations of Rococo in the conditions of secularised art of the post-Vienna school. The methodological basis of the research is the intonation approach of the school of B. Asafyev in Ukraine, which is embodied in the works of D. Androsova, O. Markova, O. Muravska, L. Shevchenko and has direct implications for the institutions of Chinese musicology (see the works of Ma Wei, Wu Golin, others). The specifics of the methods of historical-descriptive, musicological analytical, cultural, stylistic comparative, interdisciplinary approach make up the specifics of the research apparatus of the author of the essay. The scientific novelty of the work is revealed in the fact that, for the first time in Ukrainian and Chinese musicology, the so-called Concerto of Y.H. Hummel is analysed in the light of the positions of Biedermeier's "diamond" pianism of "light play" in the continuation of Mozartianism in piano works (based on the works of D. Androsova and L. Shevchenko) and in the development of the concept of neo-symbolism of post-avantgarde modernity according to O. Markova in relation to the performing revival of Hummel's heritage. Conclusions. Piano concert by Y.N. Hummel's A-moll op. 85 is marked by the advantages of pianistic lyrical flourishes over the manifestations of theatrical drama. The predominance of the lyricism of piano flourishes feeds the positions of romanticism against the background of Biedermeier's ideal expressive instructions, inspired by religious sobriety and, like Rococo art, addressed to the ideal aspirations of the soul and a harmonious worldview. In the Concerto, we rely on Mozartian tectonics (the theme of the soloist in the second exposition, mainly a compensatory function of the orchestra), the structure is dominated by exposition, which "washes away" the sonata relations. The predominant position of "piano lyricism" of ultra-fast finger "small technique", the presence of genres (signs of march, nocturne, anthem) in the expressiveness of themes, "obliteration" of tempo-textural contrasts between the extreme and middle parts of the cycle are evident. The features of crescendoing drama with increasing movement intensity from the beginning to the end of the concert cycle in a two-phase (Parts I-II-III) presentation of energy accumulation are revealed, which corresponds to the two-phase nature of the early Christian liturgy honoured by the Biedermeier culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the study is to identify the features that distinguish the characteristics of the Polish violin school, which, since the time of K. Lipinski has established itself in an independent stylistic and creative position in the European artistic schedule. The analysis of Violin Concerto No. 2 by G. Wieniawski, which embodied the distinctive features of its author's performing handwriting, clarifies the stylistic face of the outstanding Polish musician. The methodological basis of the work is the intonation approach of the school of B. Asafiev in Ukraine, represented by the works of D. Androsova, O. Hysa, O. Markova, O. Chaika, and other scholars who made a difference in the development of instrumental music, violin, including in the direction of stylistic distinctions of performing schools. The methods of analysis involved are comparative-stylistic, musicological-hermeneutic, biographical-descriptive, cultural interdisciplinary, and others. The scientific novelty of the study is determined by the originality of the idea of the stylistic and performance independence of the Polish violin school based on the proto-symbolism of F. Chopin and the sense of national pathos of K. Lipinski's playing. For the first time in Ukrainian musicology, an analysis of Violin Concerto No. 2 by G. Veniavskyi is presented from the perspective of the stylistic representation of the named author, which embodied in the composition the acquisition of musical proto-symbolism of F. Chopin meaning in the direction of the compositional discoveries of K. Shymanovskyi, performed by E. Mlynarskyi and P. Kohanskyi. Conclusions. In the 19th century, the Polish artistic and musical school was noted for the work of composers and performers in one person, among whom M. Szymanowska, K. Lipinski, and F. Chopin became stars of the first magnitude. The significance of the performance achievements of the virtuoso violinist H. Veniavskyi, who is unconditionally associated with romanticism, is adjusted in this analysis in favour of proto-symbolist content. The "excessive" virtuosity of H. Veniavskyi, embodied in the passage "overload" of the Violin Concerto No. 2, has an obvious consequence in relation to vocal bel canto as the custodian of the church tradition of calophony, which separates from realistic mimesis and elevates a superhuman meaning to symbolism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]