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The Musical Topic discusses three tropes prominently featured in Western European music: the hunt, the military, and the pastoral. Raymond Monelle provides an in-depth cultural and historical study of musical topics -- short melodic figures, harmonic or rhythmic formulae carrying literal or lexical meaning -- through consideration of their origin, thematization, manifestation, and meaning. The Musical Topic shows the connections of musical meaning to literature, social history, and the fine arts.

The American musical has long provided an important vehicle through which writers, performers, and audiences reimagine who they are and how they might best interact with the world around them. Musicals are especially good at this because they provide not only an opportunity for us to enact dramatic versions of alternative identities, but also the material for performing such alternatives in the real world, through songs and the characters and attitudes those songs project.

Many people listen to music that conveys challenging emotions such as sadness and anger, despite the commonly assumed purpose of media being to elicit pleasure. We propose that eudaimonic motivation, the desire to engage with aesthetic experiences to be challenged and facilitate meaningful experiences, can explain why people listen to music containing such emotions. However, it is unknown whether music containing violent themes can facilitate such meaningful experiences. In this investigation, three studies were conducted to determine the implications of eudaimonic and hedonic (pleasure-seeking) motivations for fans of music with violent themes. In Study 1, we developed and tested a new scale and showed that fans exhibit high levels of both types of motivation. Study 2 further validated the new scale and provided evidence that the two types of motivations are associated with different affective outcomes. Study 3 revealed that fans of violently themed music exhibited higher levels of eudaimonic motivation and lower levels of hedonic motivation than fans of non-violently themed music. Taken together, the findings support the notion that fans of music with violent themes are driven to engage with this music to be challenged and to pursue meaning, as well as to experience pleasure. Implications for fans’ well-being and future applications of the new measure are discussed.

Presents an overview of the pervasiveness of western themes in recent rock music, marked by a special emphasis on lyrical, narrative content rather than musical, formal construction, and by only carefully qualified attempts at linking lyrical content to cultural trends. Attempts to provide information on the actual presence, and ultimately a sense of the scope and scale, of western themes in rock music since the early 1970s. Examines songs that play into and popularize mythic conceptions of the West and the theme of the \"West as Promised Land,\" and those that seek to demythologize the West and are generally marked by a degree of cynicism and view the place more as a veritable Badland. Indicates that the second section includes coverage of songs that explore Native American themes and issues. Includes notes.

The theme, background, and signal music usage history information consists of general information such as music information, platform information, and music usage information, and sensitive information such as rights management information, music usage permission range, and contract information. If sensitive information among these is disclosed, disputes such as trade secrets and infringement of personal information protection between companies or between companies and individuals may arise. We propose a selective encryption/decryption method to secure the confidentiality, integrity, reliability and non-repudiation of sensitive music usage history information used in the theme, background, and signal music blockchain environment. In the proposed method, a monitoring company encrypts sensitive information using a secret key for usage history information, which is combined with general information, and digitally signs it using a private key to register it in a block. A trust group can view and access the information at the time of inquiry by verifying the digital signature with the public key of the monitoring company and then can decrypt the sensitive information using the private key.

This volume contains a selection of nine essays with an interdisciplinary perspective. They were originally presented at the Sixth International Conference on Word and Music Studies, which was held at Edinburgh University in June 2007 and was organized by the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA). The contributions to this volume focus on self-reference in various systematic, historical and intermedial ways. Self-reference - including, as a special case, metareference (the self-conscious reflection on music, literature and other medial concerns) - is explored, among others, in instrumental music by Mozart, Mahler and Satie, in the structure and performance of (meta-)operas, in operatic adaptations of drama and filmic adaptations of opera, as well as in intermedial novelistic references to music. The essays cover a historical range from the 18th century to the present and are of interest to literary and opera scholars and students, musicologists as well as all readers generally interested in medial self-reference and intermediality studies.

God's dramatic curse of Adam, Eve, and the serpent, as recorded in Genesis 3:14–15, contains a theological ambiguity that played out in the visual arts, literature, and, as this article contends, music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Translations of this passage leave in doubt whether a male, a female, or both, will defeat sin by crushing Satan's head (“caput”). This issue lies at the heart of the three Caput masses by an anonymous Englishman, Johannes Ockeghem, and Jacob Obrecht, and the Caput Motet for the Virgin by Richard Hygons from the Eton Choirbook. Fifteenth-century discussions of the roles of Christ and Mary in confronting sin, often called the “head of the dragon,” help unravel the meaning of these works. The Caput masses are Christ-focused and emphasize the Savior or one of his surrogates suppressing the beast's head, as seen in illumination, rubric, and canon found in the masses. Folklorically based rituals and concepts of liturgical time are similarly built around the idea of the temporary reign of the Devil, who is ultimately trodden down by Christ. Hygons's motet appears after celebration of the Immaculate Conception was authorized in the late fifteenth century. This feast proclaimed Mary's conquest of sin through her own trampling on the dragon; the motet stresses Marian elements of the Caput theology, especially the contrast between the Virgin's spotlessness and Eve's corruption. Features of the Caput tradition mirror topics discussed in astrological and astronomical treatises and suggest that the composer of the original Caput Mass may also have been an astronomer. The disappearance of the Caput tradition signals its lasting influence through its progeny, which rise up in yet another renowned family of polyphonic masses. Together, the Caput masses and motet encompass the multifaceted doctrine of Redemption from the late middle ages under one highly symbolic Caput rubric.

The problem of the question of the existence of Hell opens the way to some theological speculations and connections between the beliefs of the Catholic Church and Stockhausen's \"Sunday\" as the final day of his \"Licht\" cycle. It might be that Lucifer is reintegrated into Heaven, reconciled with God, or redeemed through Grace. In \"Hoch-Zeiten,\" he becomes one of the multitudes. One notes how intertwined within the counterpoint of the music texture the Lucifer strand is and is not distinctly characterized within the music. The process of universal salvation - even Lucifer's - is not

One can easily discover the value of music in the \"Disney Experience\" by tracing its role throughout the history of the company, from its early use in cartoons to its current incarnation as a stand-alone product (for example, soundtrack recordings). In this paper, I explore some of the ways in which music operates in the Disney theme park experience. In the context of Walt Disney World, my belief is that music functions in at least three specific capacities: 1) music links current Disney experiences to (often romanticized) experiences of the past through nostalgia; 2) music defines the boundaries which separate \"same\" from \"other\" in terms of both geography and, ultimately, identity; 3) and music serves as an index for the \"Disney Experience\" in general; an experience which itself is built upon a commixture of the aforementioned modes of identity and nostalgia.

Various compositional problems and opportunities may accompany the return of a main theme that has a non-tonic opening. There are four overlapping strategies for approaching such 'off-tonic returns': (1) the thematic return may be preceded by V of the main key; (2) the returning theme may be preceded by an applied chord which points to the theme's opening, non-tonic harmony; (3) the theme may return in the middle of a larger progression; or (4) the theme may be recomposed so as to start on the tonic when it returns. In many compositions, these various strategies have deep harmonic, motivic, or narrative implications. Beethoven was particularly adept in handling off-tonic returns, as may be witnessed in works such as his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in G Major, Op. 58.