Explore the vast range of titles available.

The musical language of George Enescu (1881-1955) is sprinkled with symbolic valences that carry the imprint of the Romanian musical culture. For more than half of a century (57 years), Enescu wrote musical works inspired by the folkloric tradition. Between the , written when he was 16 (in 1897) and the , when he was 73 (in 1954), Enescu also composed: No. 1 (A major), op. 11 (in 1901), No. 2 (D major), op. 11 (in 1902), No. 3, A minor (in 1926), (in 1928), (From the country), op. 27, D major (in 1938) and the programmatic suite [Impressions of Childhood for violin and piano], op. 28 in D major (composed in 1940). The paper presents the temporal-spatial structure of the musical masterpiece which reveals a cyclical thinking based on a presentation of the exterior images, followed by the interior images and a return to the exterior. And by an extrapolation of meanings, I created an analogy with the stages of life: childhood, maturity and old age. This article also deals with elements of the musical language used by George Enescu in a manner that reveals a re-created Romanian folklore in a way which bears the imprint of personality and originality of the composer.

Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz was at the center of controversy in early 1960s music journalism. Released in 1961, the album contains a single thirty-seven-minute performance that is abstract and opaque. Its presumed cacophony and lack of order made Free Jazz emblematic of the “new thing,” the moniker journalists used to describe jazz’s emergent avantgarde, and links were drawn between the album’s sound and the supposed anti-traditionalism and radical (racial) politics of its artists and their supporters. This article does three things. It examines prominent reportage surrounding the album and the “new thing,” outlining the analytical shortfalls that helped to promulgate common misunderstandings about the music. It presents a new analytical framework for understanding Free Jazz, and it explains how the performance was organized and executed by exploring the textural provenance of its abstraction: heterophony. Heterophony, a term commonly used in ethnomusicology but with various shades of meaning, is theorized here as an opaque, decentralized musical texture. It opens up new epistemological terrain in the context of experimental improvised music by affording multiple simultaneous subjectivities (i.e., different sonified identities), interpolating the listener into a dynamic and constantly shifting sonic mesh. The experiment that was Free Jazz, I argue, is one of collective musical agency, in which the opacity of that sonic mesh—woven by the musicians in coordinated action—subverts traditional expectations of clarity, cohesion, and order, beckoning the listener to hear more openly, or more “freely.”

After the glorious reception of – a key contribution to the genre – Viorel Munteanu makes now a new “offering of sound and letter”, a “different” sort of eulogy for the Orthodox Byzantine monody, meaning to encourage us to embark on the difficult journey of salvation together with the endless train of “pilgrims to Saint Parascheva”. It is, thus, a daring compositional effort that will be spiritually experienced by both its creator and its public, from the first contact with the graceful resonance of the title to the last shimmer of sound at the end of the final scene. If one considers the Orthodox art and its spirit, Viorel Munteanu’s Oratorio for is more than a creative act; it is an , of hope and of love, “a prayer to”, and “joy in”, Jesus Christ; it is living tradition and self-giving truth, by which we partake to one of the most memorable unions of Christian experiences and symbols.

I propose an overview of some of the defining aspects of Ștefan Niculescu's composition, some of which link him to his much better known contemporary on the world stage, György Ligeti. The musical affinities between the two have evolved into a steadfast friendship, reflected in a newly published correspondence that is becoming significant for slices of recent music history. I do not intend a comparison or an analytical parallel between the compositions of the two: the focus will fall on Niculescu's musical springs, with some signs of his and Ligeti's compatibility. Niculescu's heterophony versus Ligeti's micropolyphony, the impulses both received from mathematics, linguistics, the natural sciences, as well as the search (since the 1980s) for a new diatonicism that would configure an alternative system to serialism, all can be examined accordingly. It is also not uninteresting that both composers are convinced that they belong neither to the avant-garde nor to postmodernism, but consistently follow modernism.

This study is the first of two connected articles. The present article proposes an approach to the aesthetics of the vast but conceptually homogenous culture of the East European Jewish prayer chant. After an introduction presenting the problems of the scholarship on the topic, the article will discuss, in a summary fashion, two fundamental practices of East European Jewish prayer chant and their meaning: davenen (the simplest form of the recitative chant of the prayers) and heterophony (the soundscape of the prayer house). My argument is that East European Jewish prayer chant was idiosyncratic and unique — different from the coterritorial religious chants and folk music. At the end of the article the reader will find a summary of those aspects of this music that support this argument, listing also the main features of davenen and heterophony as these were discussed in detail in the text. The second article (“The Unique Character of Prayer Chant Among the East European Jews: Part II: The Emergence of the New Aesthetics — A Historical Hypothesis”) will propose a hypothesis for the time period and the sociocultural reasons for the emergence of this unique practice of prayer chant.

Este artículo aborda el antiguo problema de la diferencia entre filosofía y poesía partiendo de una interpretación del arte narrativo personificado por Ulises en la Odisea. Una lectura del episodio de las Sirenas permite reconstruir la trama de voces diversas que compone el relato homérico y comprender la significación de esta estructura polifónica en el imaginario odiseico. Frente a la neta oposición entre autofonía y alofonía que propone la filosofía platónica, la poesía homérica implica una idea de heterofonía que apunta más allá de una lógica binaria y sugiere la irreductibilidad de la voz poética a un juego entre extremos contrarios. La heterofonía consiste más bien en una voz figural que crea la «lógica difusa» del mundo ficcional mediante la neutralización de las diferencias entre sujetos enunciativos.

This essay tackles some aspects related to the attitude of the Romanian officials after George Enescu left his country definitively (in 1946). For example, recent research through the archives of the former secret police shows that Enescu was under the close supervision of Securitate during his last years in Paris. Enescu did not generate a compositional school during his lifetime, like for instance Arnold Schoenberg did. His contemporaries admired him, but each followed their own path and had to adapt differently to an inter-war, then to a post-war, Communist Romania. I will therefore sketch the approach of younger composers in relation to Enescu (after 1955): some of them attempted to complete unfinished manuscripts; others were in fluenced by ideas of Enescu's music. The posthumous reception of Enescu means also an intense debate in the Romanian milieu about his \"national\" and \"universal\" output.

The voice emerged as a repeated motif in the literature of the aftermath of the 2011 disasters in Japan. Many stage works responding to the disasters employed voice and song, especially the works of Fukushima-based theater troupe Unit Rabbits. This article examines why and how a Fukushima-based troupe might use the voice to do the political and social work of staking traumatic claims in the aftermath of disaster. Especially of interest are the ways in which multiple voices are used at once, referred to as “multi-vocality.” Using multiple voices in Are kara no rakki airando (Lucky Island in the Aftermath), playwright Sato Shigenori highlights desires for unity, individual variation, the community-making possibilities of dialect and the voice, and the introduction of harmony as viewpoints pluralize. Only allowing people with connections to Fukushima to sing, Sato inverts the real-life situation in which a totalizing national voice is typically foregrounded while regional voices recede.

Edward T. Cone was one of the most important and influential music critics of the twentieth century. He was also a master lecturer skilled at conveying his ideas to broad audiences.Hearing and Knowing Musiccollects fourteen essays that Cone gave as talks in his later years and that were left unpublished at his death. Edited and introduced by Robert Morgan, these essays cover a broad range of topics, including music's position in culture, musical aesthetics, the significance of opera as an art, setting text to music, the nature of twentieth-century harmony and form, and the practice of musical analysis. Fully matching the quality and style of Cone's published writings, these essays mark a critical addition to his work, developing new ideas, such as the composer as critic; clarifying and modifying older positions, especially regarding opera and the nature of sung utterance; and adding new and often unexpected insights on composers and ideas previously discussed by Cone. In addition, there are essays, such as one on Debussy, that lead Cone into areas he had not previously examined.Hearing and Knowing Musicrepresents the final testament of one of our most important writers on music.

A panel discussion regarding the improvisation, heterophony, politics and composition in regard to music, participated by Christian Wolff, Larry Polansky, Kui Dong, Christian Asplund and Michael Hicks, is presented. Among other things, they give advices and encouragements to young composers to stick with what they believed in is right.