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"Solmization History."
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Whence Came Mandarin? Qīng Guānhuà, the Běijīng Dialect, and the National Language Standard in Early Republican China
While the language of Běijīng served together with Manchu as the court vernacular in the Qīng dynasty, the city's dialect was not widely accepted in China as the standard for Guānhuà even in the late nineteenth century. The preferred form was a mixed Mandarin koiné with roots going back much earlier, such as that represented in Lǐ Rǔzhēn's mid-Qīng rime compendiumLǐshì yīnjiàn. A similar form of mixed Mandarin served briefly as the National Pronunciation of China in the early twentieth century and came to be calledlán-qīng Guānhuà‘blue-green Mandarin’. This heterogeneous norm incorporated features of a variety of Mandarin dialects and eventually came to be disparaged as an unrefined cousin of the pure Běijīng standard. Yet in origin the old National Pronunciation was designed to encompass a mix of regional forms and intended to contain the most broadly accepted elements of various Mandarin types. The evolution and development of the composite Guānhuà norm reveal much about Chinese linguistic attitudes of the early nineteenth through early twentieth centuries and shed light on various perspectives about what standard Chinese should be and what a Mandarin-based norm should represent. Broad popular acceptance of Běijīng as the governing norm for pronunciation began slowly to take hold only after the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China finally officially promoted Běijīng as the national standard in the 1930s. Yet it then had to compete with a new mixed vernacular orthography calledLatinxua sinwenz. Běijīng was not firmly established as the norm until the People's Republic of China definitively declared the city's dialect as standard in the 1950s.
Journal Article
Eepha-Soffa-Dill and Eephing: Found in Ragtime, Jazz, and Country Music, from Broadway to a Texas Plantation
Garber seeks to rectify the phenomena surrounding the nonsense syllable singing practice called eephing (also spelled eefing) and the phrase eepha-soffa-dill (which also has various forms and spellings). For a few years epha-soffa-dill represented what was newest and most exciting in ragtime-era show business, where it supplies an important context for jazz scatting and the country music practice still called eefing. The eephing phenomenon is discussed both on the Internet and in print in an enthusiastic but loose manner. Many singers in many genres use nonsense syllables, and this fact supplies the context for eephing and scatting. The eeph trope is one of countless instances of nonsense syllables being used in song, from the centuries-old fa-la-la to many American popular songs of the mid-nineteenth century.
Journal Article
“Et le moyen plain de paine et tristesse”: Solution, Symbology, and Context in Ockeghem's “Prenez sur moi”
For five hundred years, scholars, theorists, and performers have searched for solutions to the puzzles encoded in Ockeghem's “Prenez sur moi.” Most of the literature to date has concentrated on the opening pitches and matters of mode. Much less attention has been paid either to the text or to the illumination found in the sole surviving contemporary source, the Copenhagen Chansonnier.
This article explores connections among text, music, and illumination in an attempt to go beyond prescriptions for performance and instead to explain what the canon might have meant to Ockeghem and his contemporaries. In particular, Ockeghem seems to have drawn on the line “et le moyen plain de paine et tristesse” (and the middle full of pain and sorrow) as inspiration for a series of complex references to center, symmetry, and mirror image in the canon’s musical structure and solmization. The illumination in the Copenhagen Chansonnier also appears to participate in these references, as well as to demonstrate connections to other aspects of medieval French court culture, in particular theRoman de la roseand astrology/astronomy. Further, Ockeghem's explorations of center, symmetry, and mirror image allow us to posit that “Prenez sur moi” may be construed as a musical labyrinth.
Journal Article
Reconstructing phonological change: duration and syllable structure in Latin vowel reduction
During the fixed initial-stress period of Latin (sixth to fifth centuries BC), internal open syllable vowels were totally neutralised, usually raising to /i/ (*per.fa.ki.oː>perficiō ‘I complete’), whereas in closed syllables /a/ was raised to /e/, but the other vowels remained distinct (*per.fak.tos>perfectus ‘completed’). Miller (1972) explains closed syllable resistance by positing internal secondary stress on closed syllables. However, evidence from vowel reduction and syncope suggest that internal syllables never bore stress in early archaic times. A typologically unusual alternative is proposed: contrary to the pattern normally found (Maddieson 1985), vowels had longer duration in closed syllables than in open syllables, as in Turkish and Finnish, thus permitting speakers to attain the targets for non-high vowels in closed syllables. This durational pattern is manifested not only in vowel reduction, but also in the quantitative changes seen in ‘classical’ and ‘inverse’ compensatory lengthenings, the development CVːCV > CVC and ‘superheavy’ degemination (VːCCV > VːCV).
Journal Article
Congruence between Poetry and Music in Schumann's Dichterliebe
Poetry and music have in common various ways of structuring sound. In both, one can speak of rhythm, meter, loudness (e.g., accent), and pitch. Beyond sound in the narrow sense, one can also speak of syntax in that both language and Western tonal music create expectations that are satisfied or not in a variety of ways. These material aspects of poetry and music can be the basis for exploring how poetry and music fit together in vocal music in general and in individual works. The study of poetry in these terms came to prominence in the work of Roman Jakobson and others beginning in 1960 and has more recently been taken up by Marjorie Perloff and colleagues. The study of music with words has in general not considered the materiality that they share, especially not in the analysis of individual works. Writers on music have generally placed emphasis on expression of the semantic content of texts instead, privileging texts that can be read in relation to Romantic lyric theory. This has led to the search for word painting of one kind or another that has shaped the understanding of whole periods in the history of music and that is very much with us still, though this semantic domain cannot ultimately be separated from the material aspect of language.
This article analyzes Songs 1, 2, 4, and 6 of Schumann's Dichterliebe in terms of this materiality with a view to showing how closely congruent poetry and music can be in their own terms in individual works without dwelling first on what they might be thought to express. This is to speak not at first about meaning but rather about the means by which meaning is created. Analysis of this kind in no way precludes hermeneutics. It is but one starting point and one that bears directly on the act of listening and perhaps performance.
Journal Article
Tonally conditioned vowel raising in Shuijingping Mang
In the Mang (Hmongic) dialect of Shuijingping, Guizhou, China, vowels are raised in certain tonal contexts. When a syllable bearing the historical A2 tone occurs in sandhi context, it surfaces with a low tone (historical S) and a raised vowel nucleus. When a syllable bearing the C2 tone occurs out of sandhi context, it also surfaces with a raised vowel. In most other documented cases of tone-vowel quality interactions, there is some factor, such as syllable structure, metrical structure, or vowel duration that mediates between tone and vowel quality. These earlier analyses cannot be straightforwardly extended to Shuijingping Mang since no synchronie mediating factor seems to be present. However, this paper shows that, historically, there was another mediating factor between tone and vowel quality, namely voice quality. It is common for tones in East and Southeast Asian languages to have characteristic phonation types. It is also common for phonation type to affect vowel quality. Comparative evidence shows that the tones that condition the vowel alternation in the present-day language historically underwent a tonallydriven breathy-modal voice alternation. Subsequently, the tonal grammar has changed; however, vowel raising remains as a synchronie alternation.
Journal Article
On the positional asymmetry of consonant gemination in Japanese loanwords
Japanese loanwords from English exhibit many peculiar patterns with respect to the occurrence of geminate consonants. In this paper we focus on a positional asymmetry whereby coda consonants in the source words tend to be geminated in word-final position but not in word-medial position. Considering this phenomenon both from cross-linguistic and experimental perspectives, we first demonstrate that the positional asymmetry cannot be attributed to position per se but rather to some phonetic differences between word-final and non-final coda consonants in the source words. We then report perceptual and acoustic data to explore the phonetic features that trigger consonant gemination in loanwords. The perceptual data show that native Japanese listeners respond sensitively to differences in pitch when perceiving consonant length. In addition, the acoustic data demonstrate that final syllables in English are longer than non-final ones and are often produced with a noticeable pitch fall. These data suggest that Japanese listeners are sensitive to the phonetic differences between final and non-final coda consonants in the source words, thus showing a positional asymmetry in loanwords.
Journal Article
Middle Dutch back vowels in rhymes
Dutch underwent many changes in its vowel system in the course of its history. One way of exploring the phonology of the vocalic system at an earlier period of the language is to examine rhymes. The rhyming verse which is used in the moral didactic text of Ms. Marshall 29 offered an excellent opportunity to not only establish the differences between Modern and Middle Dutch, but also to trace any variation in the transition period from early to late Middle Dutch. We focused on rounded vowels, which were indicated by seven graphemes: , , , , , , and . Our crucial findings are the following: (i) descendants of Proto Germanic (PGmc) */au/and */o:/never rhyme with each other, although they could be spelt in an identical fashion and are pronounced the same in Modern Dutch, which leads us to conclude that the Middle Dutch vowel qualities were different; (ii) descendants of PGmc */u/ became /o/, but when this vowel is lengthened in open syllables, it never rhymes with vowels derived from PGmc */au/, although they do in Modern Dutch; (iii) although added to a vowel can mark length, in a small subset it must have indicated fronting.
Journal Article
An automata theoretic approach to the generalized word problem in graphs of groups
We give a simpler proof using automata theory of a recent result of Kapovich, Weidmann and Myasnikov according to which so-called benign graphs of groups preserve decidability of the generalized word problem. These include graphs of groups in which edge groups are polycyclic-by-finite and vertex groups are either locally quasiconvex hyperbolic or polycyclic-by-finite and so in particular chordal graph groups (right-angled Artin groups).
Journal Article