György Ligeti's Cultural Identities, eds Amy Bauer, Márton Kerékfy (Routledge: New York, London, 2017)., 2017
This essay looks at aspects of Ligeti's musical style in the light of his experiences during the ... more This essay looks at aspects of Ligeti's musical style in the light of his experiences during the holocaust and under communist rule in post-war Hungary. Based on Jeffrey C. Alexander's concept of cultural trauma and Maria Cizmic's study of trauma expressed in the music of other Eastern-European composers, elements such as micropolyphony, the treatment of text or the play with tuning systems, but also the use of allusions or of the lament are linked to fragmentation, collage, irony, non-teleological structuring and other strategies described by Cizmic as related to musico-artistic responses to traumatic experiences.
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Papers by Wolfgang Marx
academia (as well as for the general public) since the emergence of ChatGPT in late
2022. Based on the concept of large language models (LLMs), apps like ChatGPT
easily beat the Turing test and in their reactions can easily be mistaken for a human
being (even though they are usually programmed to admit to their status as AI if
asked). However, the methods applied by LLMs can be and are applied in other
domains: AI also now creates pictures and music, operating on a basis similar to that
of LLMs: the software analyses a large number of models representing a specific
style, genre, artist etc. and creates a new picture or piece of music representing the
core features distilled from the models. The larger the number of examples it can
analysis the more convincing the result will be (down to convincingly imitating the
voice of an artist, as in the much-discussed case of the Canadian rapper Drake) – and
the software is getting better all the time.
What does this development mean for musical interpretation? Is AI conceptually less
“creative” than human beings would be, or is it creative in a different way? How do
art and science interact in this case? Given the same prompt twice modern AI apps
such as ChatGPT or “Suno AI” will produce different textual, pictorial and musical
results, just like human beings would. Does AI tell us something about how our own
minds work underneath an “illusion” of free will, or is there still a fundamental
difference between the creativity of humans and machines? This paper explores
these questions in relation to recently produced AI music and speculate about where
the AI journey might lead us in the future.
In its early days, reviews in Irish newspapers could be of very low quality, often written by journalists without any music-specific knowledge. Statements about the pieces performed and the quality of their renditions were regularly bland and uninformed.
Charles Acton’s term as main concert reviewer of the Irish Times marks a high point of music criticism in Ireland. The quality of reviews had improved significantly, and Acton’s influence beyond the pages of his newspaper attests to the regard he was held in by the Irish musical scene.
The changes in music criticism triggered by the digital revolution are not specific to Ireland; they occur everywhere in equal measure. An online journal such as GoldenPlec demonstrates how only unpaid work can keep a small enterprise going, yet informal music criticism on social media reaches across geographical boundaries and can easily involve people from several continents.
This chapter compares musical life in the Irish long nineteenth century in an administrative, an economic and an ecclesiastical centre: Dublin, Belfast and Armagh. It looks at the extent of the concert life in those cities, its amateur and professional culture, and key players/institutions/societies that influenced its development up to the First World War and Irish independence in 1922. A special focus will lie on the role of the Gaelic revival movement. Its goal of a “De-Anglicisation of Ireland” was pursued via a three-pronged strategy: reintroducing/furthering the use of the Irish language, of specific Irish sports (Irish football, hurling/camogie) and – last but not least – of Irish music. The Gaelic League (founded in 1893) was a key player in this effort, as was the Feis Ceoil (an annual competitive music festival first held in 1897).
Keywords: Music and genre, musical classification, music and taxonomy, music and the digital economy, micro-targeting, music and power,
emic and etic approaches to music, post-genre.
So far, musicological engagements with Bloch (for example by Benjamin Korstvedt, Michael Gallope, or Matthias Henke and Franceska Vidal) have mainly focused on what kind of knowledge about music Bloch had, what he had read, and also what his limitations were and how he got certain details wrong (paying special attention to "Geist der Utopie"). My proposed chapter will rather look at music’s role from a political and philosophical point of view, focusing on "Das Prinzip Hoffnung": Why did Bloch associate music with such a high degree of agency when it comes to evoking or sustaining utopian hope? What is its special potential compared to all the other arts, crafts and activities he analyses? And what has the political concept of utopian hope to offer in the early 21st century? In intellectual circles the proclamation of the end of grand narratives seemed to have killed off utopian concepts while on the other hand utopian worlds appear to have migrated to the digital universe where they can be accessed individually by role players via avatars (and where music plays yet again a central role in creating those worlds). Maybe our post-factual age of often dangerous nostalgic retro-utopias (“Make America great again!”) should re-engage with Bloch’s positive, future-oriented hope, and with it the potential music has to unlock it.
Raymond Deane's "Seachanges (with Danse Macabre)", part of his "Macabre Trilogy", refers to death in several different ways. This brief essay outlines how the work's title, motivic and structural elements and its instrumentation support this notion before linking it to the state of Irish art music in general.
Among the other over seventy topics treated in this anthology are the following: the Galway girl who was buried with her horse in the fifth or sixth century; the account of the curious death of a little-known Irish saint in medieval Norway; the Black Death in Kilkenny; death and sexual transgression in medieval Ireland; grisly deaths from the Irish annals; the funerary monuments of clerical wives in early modern Ireland; the forgotten Connacht massacre of 1647; a seventeenth-century Belfast ghost story; an Irish story of cannibalism on the high seas; the records of an Offaly coroner during the Great Famine; the Derry ghost who imparted information on the missing Franklin expedition in the Arctic in 1849; Jewish burial customs in nineteenth-century Ireland; death and Irish freemasonry; the Irishman whose body was shipped back to Ireland from Italy in an upright piano; death in Irish folklore; the history of children’s burial grounds in Ireland; the ritual of tobacco use at Irish wakes; memorial cards and Irish funerary culture; death in Irish sermons; funeral rites among the Irish Travelling community; death and dying in contemporary Irish pagan belief; the link between commemoration of the dead and humour; deathbed visions; attitudes towards death and dying in modern Ireland, including the impact of social media on the culture of commemorating the dead.
academia (as well as for the general public) since the emergence of ChatGPT in late
2022. Based on the concept of large language models (LLMs), apps like ChatGPT
easily beat the Turing test and in their reactions can easily be mistaken for a human
being (even though they are usually programmed to admit to their status as AI if
asked). However, the methods applied by LLMs can be and are applied in other
domains: AI also now creates pictures and music, operating on a basis similar to that
of LLMs: the software analyses a large number of models representing a specific
style, genre, artist etc. and creates a new picture or piece of music representing the
core features distilled from the models. The larger the number of examples it can
analysis the more convincing the result will be (down to convincingly imitating the
voice of an artist, as in the much-discussed case of the Canadian rapper Drake) – and
the software is getting better all the time.
What does this development mean for musical interpretation? Is AI conceptually less
“creative” than human beings would be, or is it creative in a different way? How do
art and science interact in this case? Given the same prompt twice modern AI apps
such as ChatGPT or “Suno AI” will produce different textual, pictorial and musical
results, just like human beings would. Does AI tell us something about how our own
minds work underneath an “illusion” of free will, or is there still a fundamental
difference between the creativity of humans and machines? This paper explores
these questions in relation to recently produced AI music and speculate about where
the AI journey might lead us in the future.
In its early days, reviews in Irish newspapers could be of very low quality, often written by journalists without any music-specific knowledge. Statements about the pieces performed and the quality of their renditions were regularly bland and uninformed.
Charles Acton’s term as main concert reviewer of the Irish Times marks a high point of music criticism in Ireland. The quality of reviews had improved significantly, and Acton’s influence beyond the pages of his newspaper attests to the regard he was held in by the Irish musical scene.
The changes in music criticism triggered by the digital revolution are not specific to Ireland; they occur everywhere in equal measure. An online journal such as GoldenPlec demonstrates how only unpaid work can keep a small enterprise going, yet informal music criticism on social media reaches across geographical boundaries and can easily involve people from several continents.
This chapter compares musical life in the Irish long nineteenth century in an administrative, an economic and an ecclesiastical centre: Dublin, Belfast and Armagh. It looks at the extent of the concert life in those cities, its amateur and professional culture, and key players/institutions/societies that influenced its development up to the First World War and Irish independence in 1922. A special focus will lie on the role of the Gaelic revival movement. Its goal of a “De-Anglicisation of Ireland” was pursued via a three-pronged strategy: reintroducing/furthering the use of the Irish language, of specific Irish sports (Irish football, hurling/camogie) and – last but not least – of Irish music. The Gaelic League (founded in 1893) was a key player in this effort, as was the Feis Ceoil (an annual competitive music festival first held in 1897).
Keywords: Music and genre, musical classification, music and taxonomy, music and the digital economy, micro-targeting, music and power,
emic and etic approaches to music, post-genre.
So far, musicological engagements with Bloch (for example by Benjamin Korstvedt, Michael Gallope, or Matthias Henke and Franceska Vidal) have mainly focused on what kind of knowledge about music Bloch had, what he had read, and also what his limitations were and how he got certain details wrong (paying special attention to "Geist der Utopie"). My proposed chapter will rather look at music’s role from a political and philosophical point of view, focusing on "Das Prinzip Hoffnung": Why did Bloch associate music with such a high degree of agency when it comes to evoking or sustaining utopian hope? What is its special potential compared to all the other arts, crafts and activities he analyses? And what has the political concept of utopian hope to offer in the early 21st century? In intellectual circles the proclamation of the end of grand narratives seemed to have killed off utopian concepts while on the other hand utopian worlds appear to have migrated to the digital universe where they can be accessed individually by role players via avatars (and where music plays yet again a central role in creating those worlds). Maybe our post-factual age of often dangerous nostalgic retro-utopias (“Make America great again!”) should re-engage with Bloch’s positive, future-oriented hope, and with it the potential music has to unlock it.
Raymond Deane's "Seachanges (with Danse Macabre)", part of his "Macabre Trilogy", refers to death in several different ways. This brief essay outlines how the work's title, motivic and structural elements and its instrumentation support this notion before linking it to the state of Irish art music in general.
Among the other over seventy topics treated in this anthology are the following: the Galway girl who was buried with her horse in the fifth or sixth century; the account of the curious death of a little-known Irish saint in medieval Norway; the Black Death in Kilkenny; death and sexual transgression in medieval Ireland; grisly deaths from the Irish annals; the funerary monuments of clerical wives in early modern Ireland; the forgotten Connacht massacre of 1647; a seventeenth-century Belfast ghost story; an Irish story of cannibalism on the high seas; the records of an Offaly coroner during the Great Famine; the Derry ghost who imparted information on the missing Franklin expedition in the Arctic in 1849; Jewish burial customs in nineteenth-century Ireland; death and Irish freemasonry; the Irishman whose body was shipped back to Ireland from Italy in an upright piano; death in Irish folklore; the history of children’s burial grounds in Ireland; the ritual of tobacco use at Irish wakes; memorial cards and Irish funerary culture; death in Irish sermons; funeral rites among the Irish Travelling community; death and dying in contemporary Irish pagan belief; the link between commemoration of the dead and humour; deathbed visions; attitudes towards death and dying in modern Ireland, including the impact of social media on the culture of commemorating the dead.
"Music & Death" investigates different musical engagements with death. Its eleven essays examine a broad range of genres, styles and periods of Western music from the Middle Ages until the present day. This volume brings a variety of methodological approaches to bear on a broad, but non-exhaustive, range of music. These include musical rituals and intercessions on behalf of the departed. Chapters also focus on musicians' reactions to death, their ways of engaging with grief, anger and acceptance, and the public's reaction to the death of musicians.
The genres covered include requiem settings, operas and ballets, arts songs, songs by Leonard Cohen and the B-52s, and instrumental music. There are also broader reflections regarding the psychological links between creative musical practice and the overcoming of grief, music's central role in shaping a specific lifestyle (of psychobillies) and the supposed universalism of Western art music (as exemplified by Brahms).
The volume adds many new facets to the area of death studies, highlighting different aspects of "musical thanatology". It will appeal to those interested in the intersections between western music and theology, as well as scholars of anthropology and cultural studies.
CONTRIBUTORS: Matt BaileyShea, Alexandra Buckle, Peter Edwards, Richard Elliott, Nicole Grimes, Mieko Kanno, Kimberly Kattari, Wolfgang Marx, Fred E. Maus, Jillian C. Rogers, UtaSailer and Miriam Wendling.
The series will be launched in 2022. Wolfgang Marx and Heather Sparling, the general editors, are now inviting ideas for monographs and edited volumes.