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MUSICOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM

05/10/2018

Musical Parsing in the Age of Spotify

Colloquium Musicology
Dr. Sebastian Klotz, Humboldt University

Thursday 11 October 2018, 15:30-17:00

Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01


This talk addresses the interface of empirical music psychology and commercial music technology
applications. Music streaming and recommender systems rely on advanced semantic searches and
similarity queues. The software defines some 1.000 musical events per track, generated from real
consumer behaviour during streaming & listening. While these parsing algorithms are shielded by the
companies, they beg the question which theories stand behind these clustered segmentations and
synthesized user profiles.

New parsing strategies coincide with potential changes of the formal design of tracks: in main-
stream maximal pop (Hannah Pilarczyk), in-song structural and dynamic changes are replaced by persistent hook-lines which affect the overall lay-out. Should this be the case, non-syntactic
algorithmic parsing would be the ideal tool to capitalize on this tendency.

The presentation argues that user-based approaches to musical events add a new dimension to the
primarily syntax-based concepts used by music psychology and computational feature extraction.
Following up on research undertaken by Robert Prey, the talk will examine the ideologies and the
technical operativity of listening and of corpus-based analysis. Does Spotify re-define listening? Are
streaming platforms part of an ubiquitous audio-governementality (Tom Holert, Terre Thaemlitz)?

Dr. Sebastian Klotz is professor of Transcultural Musicology and the Historical Anthropology of Music
at Humboldt University Berlin. He is particularly interested in the ways music and sounds inform
knowledge cultures. Last year, he initiated the Erich von Hornbostel Audio Emergence Lab (HAEL) at
the Department of Musicology and Media Studies.

07/09/2018

Stomping Ground: Modern Female Bodies and Flamenco in Tokyo


Colloquium Musicology
Dr. Yolanda M. van Ede, University of Amsterdam

Thursday 20 September 2018, 15:30-17:00

Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

 
This presentation addresses the complex interactions between localization and globalization through bodily practices in the context of Japanese flamenco. Spanish Flamenco has gained immense popularity in Japan, especially among women. A highly gendered phenomenon, Japanese appropriation of flamenco links the dancers bodily to certain imageries and representations of places far away; in this case, southern Spain. In the course of its adaptation, however, flamenco has become adjusted to local meanings and practices. Sensory structures in processes of transmission are the cultural incentive; the dance is embedded in local cultural aesthetics as well as re-enacting particular local practices. A comparison of Japanese flamenco dancing with both Spanish flamenco performance and dominant Japanese sensory orientations highlights the importance of sound. On one hand, “Japamenco” is embedded in global developments whereby flamenco has become more of a spectacle than a musical collaboration between singers, musicians, and dancers. On the other hand, its focus on the dancer’s footwork emphasizes sound, particularly the amplification of sound, which runs against hegemonic Japanese aesthetics of femininity. Viewed in the context of modernity’s association with hyper-aesthesia, or an overabundance of sensory stimuli, flamenco offers Japanese women a localized stage on which they can present themselves as modern and cosmopolitan, not merely visually, but foremost aurally.
 
Dr. Yolanda van Ede is senior lecturer at the anthropology department at the University of Amsterdam. She has been researching gender, ritual and religion, and the anthropology of the senses, until she returned to her initial passion, dance. She conducted field research on flamenco in Tokyo and social/ballroom dancing in Manilla. Currently, she is a part-time student in fine arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, in a quest for more creativity in anthropological methodology and knowledge (re)presentation.

07/06/2018

The Politicization of Melody: Religious Musical Performance and the Indonesian Culture Wars of 2017

Colloquium Musicology
Prof. Dr. Anne K. Rasmussen, The College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, Virginia, USA)

Thursday 14 June 2018, 15:30 - 17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

Although religious praxis in Indonesia is underestimated by both scholars of Islam and co-religionists in the Arab world and Middle East, connoisseurs recognize a rich culture of Arabic language performance in Indonesia ranging from Quranic recitation to various styles of devotional song.
A proactive adaptation of popular tunes from the Arab Eastern Mediterranean along with the canonization of Egyptian maqam has characterized this Indonesian Islamic soundscape since before the country’s independence in 1945, however; local arts and Indian Ocean networks have always shaped cultural practice fueling not only hybrid forms but also vigorous debate. Put into the context of 20 years of experience with Islamic performance in Indonesia and based on new fieldwork conducted in 2017, this presentation illustrates the intense political culture wars sparked by the use of local, Javanese melodies for Quranic recitation at the Presidential Palace.
As voices from the country’s Islamist extremist activists arose in hostile objection, even a pious public began to hear the reciter’s use of langgam Jawa as the perfect example of the flaws, immorality, and objectionable permissiveness of Indonesian Islam vis à vis the models of puritanical Salafism and literalist modernism that, today, guide globalized Islamic movements in Southeast Asia. Swept up in the Tsunami of racist nativism both Indonesian and Mediterranean Arab performance aesthetics have been on the chopping block as the country struggles to contain the vociferous presence of religious hardliners (Islam keras). In contextualizing these events, I theorize the ways circulation and signification politicize melody in two interconnected Ocean worlds.


Prof. Dr. Anne K. Rasmussen is professor of music and ethnomusicology at the College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, Virginia, USA). She did her Ph.D. in music at the University of California-Los Angeles and has repeatedly been elected to the board of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Since 1994 Rasmussen has directed the William and Mary Middle Eastern Music Ensemble, a forum for the study and performance of music and with musicians form the Middle East and Arab world.

26/04/2018

Crafting the Sound of Hildebrandt’s Organ Pipes


Colloquium Musicology
Dr. Peter Peters, Maastricht University

Thursday 24 May 2018, 15:30 - 17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01


As ‘mirrors of their time’ (Snyder, 2000), pipe organs have always reflected the artisanal knowledge and skills of their makers. Given their complexity as technological artefacts that are endowed with artistic qualities, these musical instruments offer a valuable contribution to an epistemic history of art that focuses on the travelling of facts and insights through technologies and materials. Since the 1990s, replicating instruments from the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth-century has opened new ways of studying knowledge practices that revolve around historical organs. The actual building of these replica’s not only required a close reading and interpretation of sources, both archival and material, but also a relearning of historical organ building skills. In my presentation, I will present ethnographic fieldwork on the design and building of a new baroque organ at the Orgelpark, a concert venue in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. This recently inaugurated instrument takes the sound of historical Hildebrandt organs as a reference, and provides access to this baroque sound material through both a mechanical action and a digital console. Drawing on the work of the anthropologist Tim Ingold, I focus on the way the pipes for the new organ were crafted to trace the relations between knowledge, skills and aesthetics.

Dr. Peter Peters is assistant professor at the department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University. He has published on music, time, and travel in technological cultures. His current research is concerned with (1) the production of knowledge in artistic practices, and (2) the innovation of musical cultures. In the past five years, followed the design and construction of a new baroque organ at the concert venue the Orgelpark in Amsterdam. He recently acquired a NWO Smart Culture grant to study and experiment with audience participation in symphonic music concerts, in collaboration with Zuyd University (Maastricht Conservatory and research centre Art, Autonomy and the Public Sphere) and the South Netherlands Philharmonic.

12/04/2018

Chiasmus and Reversal in the Works of Henry Purcell

Presentation Musicology
Dr. Alon Schab, University of Haifa

Monday 23 April 2018, 15:30 - 17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 1.01

The concept of temporal reversal seems to have occupied English composers throughout the seventeenth century. In some cases reversal is applied to general structural elements (like scoring and musical form, creating overarching structures that somewhat resemble later 'arch' forms). In other cases, however, as in Purcell's trio sonatas, reversal permeates the very foundation of contrapuntal technique. Thus, the allocation of imitative material to the various parts, as well as the disposition of imitative material along time, are directly dictated by a small number of palindrome-like patterns. In my lecture I will analyse some of Purcell's fugue movements, and discuss the various ways in which identifying temporal reversal challenges our understanding of Purcell's rhetoric, his compositional process, and the identity of those who influenced his technique.

Dr. Alon Schab is a musicologist, a composer and an early music performer. He wrote his doctoral dissertation in Trinity College Dublin on the subject of 'Compositional Technique in Purcell’s Early Instrumental Works'. Since 2012 he is a faculty member in the Department of Music at the University of Haifa. He is a committee member of the Purcell Society, and the secretary of the Israeli Musicological Society. His forthcoming book The Sonatas of Henry Purcell: Rhetoric and Reversal will be published (University of Rochester Press) in June. His recent rediscovery of the 1832 ‘Israeliten’ manuscript (together with his research partner David Rees), brought to light the earliest known source of Schubert’s Psalm 92 D.953.

19/03/2018

Learning rhythm and meter: The roles of statistical learning and dynamic entrainment

Colloquium Musicology
Dr. Benjamin Schultz, University of Amsterdam (Music Cognition Group)

Thursday 19 April 2018, 15:30 - 17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

Temporal expectancies play a crucial role in perceiving and producing music. Rhythm learning is hypothesized to occur through the statistical learning of temporal intervals but these theories are often insensitive to aspects of beat (i.e., perceived regular pulses at multiple timescales). The dynamic attending theory states that attentional oscillations synchronize with and adapt to regularities in an auditory scene and suggests that temporal expectancies are formed more readily for rhythms that imply a beat (i.e., metrical rhythms) compared to those that do not (i.e., nonmetrical rhythms). I present two behavioural experiments that show how rhythm and meter are learned through statistical learning and beat entrainment using highly controlled metrical and nonmetrical rhythms that contain identical statistical probabilities but differ in metrical structure. Results demonstrated that metrical and nonmetrical patterns are both learned. However, only one experiment showed that metrical patterns are learned more readily than nonmetrical patterns. In both experiments, abstraction of a metrical framework was evident in the metrical condition. Overall, results indicate that rhythm learning cannot only be explained by statistical learning but also requires dynamic temporal processing (e.g., entrainment). 

Dr. Benjamin Schultz was previously a post-doctoral fellow working with Caroline Palmer from November 2012 to June 2014 and Isabelle Peretz from July 2014 to July 2015. He received a Bachelor of Arts (2006) and Bachelor of Health Sciences (2008) in Psychology from the University of Adelaide, a PhD (2013) in Auditory Psychology from the MARCS Institute, University of Western Sydney (Prof. Catherine J. Stevens), and a PhD (2013) in Cognitive Psychology from the Université de Lyon 2 (Prof. Barbara Tillmann). His primary research interests include how people learn rhythmic sequences, entrain and move to the beat, and coordinate their speech and actions with others. In particular, he is interested in how people adapt the acoustic properties and the timing of sound productions in response to those of others in speech and music. Benjamin’s current projects examine the mechanisms that underlie acoustic cueing in persons with Parkinson’s Disease and other motor-related deficits (with Sonja Kotz) and plasticity (i.e., neural changes) that occur during rhythm learning (with Henkjan Honing).

01/03/2018

Solfeggio in the Long Eighteenth Century


Music Theorist in Residence 2018
Dr. Nicholas Baragwanath, University of Nottingham 

Thursday 8 March 2018, 15:30 - 17:30

Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

Each year the Vereniging voor Muziektheorie invites a guest from abroad to come to the Netherlands and Flanders to offer lectures, workshops, and seminars on a topic of choice. This year, Dr. Nicholas Baragwanath will present on:


Solfeggio in the Long Eighteenth Century

Apprenticed musicians in the eighteenth century would spend three or more years singing solfeggio before they were allowed to undertake lessons in playing an instrument, counterpoint, or composition. Solfeggio training provided the fundaments for almost every musician, regardless of their later specialism. Many thousands of their solfeggio manuscripts survive. They record compilations of sung lessons, usually conceived by a maestro and written-down for a pupil to sing, but sometimes originating in the pupil’s own improvisations. What they reveal about the art of melody is just as relevant to sonatas and concertos as arias.
To reconstruct how solfeggi were used, I will present evidence drawn from the following: (1)hitherto unremarked performance indications that regularly appear in manuscripts; (2) contemporary solmization and its founding principles; (3) a broad range of contemporary vocal repertory and singing treatises; and (4) consideration of the practical demands and pedagogical purposes of individual solfeggi.
Knowing how to “speak” galant melody explains how castratos managed to amaze audiences by singing the same aria five or six times in completely different ways, and how composers could write an opera in a matter of days. The secret lies in understanding how the same basic cantus firmi, learned in the first weeks of training, were sung for up to six years.

Following studies as a pianist, Nicholas Baragwanath completed postgraduate degrees at the University of Sussex. From 1998 he was Lecturer in Music at the University of Wellington, New Zealand, moving in 2001 to the Royal Northern College of Music, where he was Head of Postgraduate Studies and subsequently Dean of Research and Enterprise, overseeing the establishment of a new Graduate School and the introduction of PhD programmes. He joined the University of Nottingham in 2010.

21/02/2018

Volume and Vibration. A Sound and Music History of Loudspeaker Systems, Germany circa 1930

Colloquium Musicology
PD. Dr. Jens Gerrit Papenburg
Thursday 15 March 2018, 15:30 - 17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01
For the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, the Nazis built the “Reichssportfeld“ (now: “Olympiapark Berlin”). An important part of this gigantic sport field were various loudspeaker systems, which were installed by the electroacoustic department (ELA) of the company Telefunken. In my presentation I sketch a sound and music history of these systems that is informed by cultural and media theory. For this purpose I analyse different sonic strategies employed for addressing open air stages and stadiums and other fields and rooms circa 1930. To be able to elaborate the aesthetical, political and epistemological implications of these strategies I analyse the installation, application, use and reception of the sport fields’ loudspeaker systems, its sounds between “tender outdoor music” (Carl Orff) and monumental “mass rally music“ (Friedrich Trautwein) and the development of powerful tube amplifiers and giant loudspeakers by the companies Siemens & Halske and Telefunken.
Via 1920s and 1930s loudspeaker systems, I argue, sound was conceptualised more and more as an entity with “volume”. I introduce volume as a productive and fuzzy, primarily spatial concept that is situated between physics and traditional music theory, between measurable amplitude and musical dynamics. What discourses, practices and media technologies correlated circa 1930 with a new conceptualization of sound as a voluminous entity? In the second half of the 20thcentury massive sound volumes became a central aesthetic dimension of multiple forms of popular music. By exploring sound systems of the 1920s and 1930s aspects of a pre-history of this dimension can be studied productively.

PD. Dr. Jens Gerrit Papenburg studied musicology, communication research, and economics in Berlin, obtaining his PhD in 2012 with the dissertation “Hörgeräte: Technisierung der Wahrnehmung durch Rock- und Popmusik” and his postdoctoral qualification (Habilitation) in 2016 with “‘Para-auditive’ Subjekte der populären Musik: Eine Kultur- und Mediengeschichte, 1890–1936.” In 2017, he was visiting professor at the Institute for Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media (ICAM) at Leuphana University Lüneburg, and in 2016/17 visiting professor for History and Theory of Popular Music at the Humboldt University, Berlin, where he taught and researched from 2006 to 2016 and again from October 2017.
Jens Gerrit Papenburg is the coeditor of  Sound as Popular Culture: A Research Companion (MIT Press, 2016). He cofounded the international research network “Sound in Media Culture: Aspects of a Cultural History of Sound” (funded by the German Research Foundation DFG, 2010–2016) and serves on the editorial board of Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (Routledge). His research interests are popular music, culture, and media since 1890; sound studies; sonic media theory and historiography; and the history and culture of engineered music listening.