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In the pedagogy of Western classical string music, creativity is often viewed according to the works of luminary composers, suggesting the question: how might string teachers, students, and musicians conceive of creativity? After problematizing standard definitions and ontological ideas of musical creativity, I outline an open model using the poststructuralist philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. Expanding upon Deleuze and Guattari's idea of mapping and tracing, this open model describes creativity as a continual process of exploration and rethinking, with or without full understanding of the paths of previous luminaries in the domain of Western classical music. The model further suggests that creativity might blossom from the soil of individual and group experience, regardless of expertise level, according to two conditions: awareness and imagination. Awareness describes the consciousness of creating using available materials, regardless of intention; imagination is defined as the difference between repeating what is and having the curiosity, willingness, and excitement to burst forth towards the possibility of what might be. In conclusion, this paper considers how this model might work in practice, considering especially how an open model might work alongside a pedagogy of systematic string technique.

Chamber music can spur us to reflect on the experience of families and friends when a patient dies—but also to celebrate and grieve for loved ones of our own, says Desmond O’Neill

(2024) conduct a comprehensive corpus analysis examining the relationship between musical texture and large-scale form in classical string quartets by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven. [...]polyphonic textures in the development section may heighten the listener's yearning for the return of the more homophonic primary theme. [...]although both transitions and development sections aim to build anticipation for upcoming themes, they differ significantly in how they handle tension and explore musical ideas. Similar slopes would indicate aligned pitch movements, typically corresponding to parallel motion, whereas significant differences in slope values may reflect contrary motion or the use of other contrapuntal techniques. [...]integrating expert evaluations into the analysis could enhance the validity of the findings. Oxford University Press. https://doi.Org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195146400.001.0001 Hills, T. T, Todd, P. M, Lazer, D., Redish, A. D., Couzin, I. D., & Cognitive Search Research Group.

The motion of a vibrating object is determined by the way it is held. This simple observation has long inspired string instrument makers to create new sounds by devising elegant string clamping mechanisms, whereby the distance between the clamping points is modulated as the string vibrates. At the nanoscale, the simplest way to emulate this principle would be to controllably make nanoresonators slide across their clamping points, which would effectively modulate their vibrating length. Here, we report measurements of flexural vibrations in nanomechanical resonators that reveal such a sliding motion. Surprisingly, the resonant frequency of vibrations draws a loop as a tuning gate voltage is cycled. This behavior indicates that sliding is accompanied by a delayed frequency response of the resonators, making their dynamics richer than that of resonators with fixed clamping points. Our work elucidates the dynamics of nanomechanical resonators with unconventional boundary conditions, and offers opportunities for studying friction at the nanoscale from resonant frequency measurements. The motion of a vibrating object is set by the way it is held. Here, the authors show a nanomechanical resonator reversibly slides on its supporting substrate as it vibrates and exploit this unconventional dynamics to quantify friction at the nanoscale.

Tonal harmony is one of the central organization systems of Western music. This article characterizes the statistical foundations of tonal harmony based on the computational analysis of expert annotations in a large corpus. Using resampling methods, this study shows that 1) the rank-frequency distribution of chords resembles a power law, i.e. few chords govern a large proportion of the data; 2) chord transitions are referential and chord predictability is significantly affected by distinguished chord features; 3) tonal harmony conveys directedness in time; and 4) tonal harmony operates differently at the hierarchical levels of chords and keys. These results serve to characterize tonal harmony on empirical grounds and advance the methodological state-of-the-art in digital musicology.

Clinicians should be advised to listen carefully to their patients, who might use atypical language to describe their illness. Desmond O’Neill explains how music can provide invaluable insights into the human experience of illness, and in particular gout

This paper presents a method for safe retuning of fixed-pitch string instruments to alternative musical scales with fewer degrees than their original design. Our approach uses a systematic monotonic surjective mapping to assign the existing set of strings to a new, smaller set of pitch classes. The primary goal is to preserve the instrument’s timbre and structural integrity by keeping string tension changes within safe limits. We demonstrate the method on a grand piano and an upright piano retuned from 12-tone equal temperament (12-TET, 12EDO) to 10-tone equal temperament (10-TET, 10EDO). Presented approach may be generalized for retuning from N- to M-step scales (N > M) and to other fixed-pitch string instruments. A grand piano was safely retuned using the proposed method and successfully used in a professional concert.

The purpose of this study was to explore factors that may affect string teachers' career decisions. Six hundred string teachers were mailed a questionnaire designed to elicit responses about multiple factors and projected career plans in 1 year and in 5 years, and 304 teachers responded. The majority of teachers planned to remain in their positions the following year, whereas only half planned to remain in their positions in 5 years. Analyses indicated that work culture, perceptions about music's importance in the curriculum, satisfaction with student characteristics, psychological factors, and teacher socioeconomic background may affect immediate career plans. Further analyses indicated that work culture, satisfaction with student characteristics, psychological factors, and teaching experience were related to long-term career plans. In the Year 1 discriminant analysis, Stayers was the only group adequately classified. In the Year 5 analysis, Stayers were classified most accurately. Migrators and Leavers were classified slightly above the level of chance.

The importance to reception history of the first complete cycle of Beethoven’s string quartets, given in London in 1845 by the Beethoven Quartett Society, is securely established. Less well recognized is the significance of the complete edition of the quartets prepared by the cellist Scipion Rousselot and published in London in 1846. This article offers the first close examination of Rousselot’s edition and posits that while its claims for unparalleled correctness were unsustainable, its inclusion, uniquely in the case of the late quartets, of two uncommon features – rehearsal letters and instrumental cues – constitutes a trace of the rehearsal practices of the four players responsible for these historically outstanding performances.

String instruments are complex mechanical vibrating systems, in terms of both structure and fluid–structure interaction. Here, a review study of the modeling and simulation of stringed musical instruments via the finite element method (FEM) is presented. The paper is focused on the methods capable of simulating (I) the soundboard behavior in bowed, plucked and hammered string musical instruments; (II) the assembled musical instrument box behavior in bowed and plucked instruments; (III) the fluid–structure interaction of assembled musical instruments; and (IV) the interaction of a musical instrument’s resonance box with the surrounding air. Due to the complexity and the high computational demands, a numerical model including all the parts and the full geometry of the instrument resonance box, the fluid–structure interaction and the interaction with the surrounding air has not yet been simulated.