Listeners can experience strong and often positive identification with music. Contemporary research has emphasized the importance of a listener’s own identity, including their sense of self and their desires, when forming such identifications. However, acknowledgments of the listener’s role in the listening experience have failed to productively engage discussions of...
Whether in the Synagogue or the Greek Orthodox Church, worshippers are physically active throughout chanted prayer, exhibiting a variety of metrical interactions between their voices and bodily movements. Existing scholarship on rhythm and meter, embodied music experience, and ritual indicate that metrical synchronization is a fundamental mode of sonic and...
Perhaps better suited for the mosh pit than the orchestra pit, David Lang’s 1991 tour-de-force for solo bass clarinet, Press Release, is a minimalist marvel. Comprised of seven “groove sections” that evolve in seemingly unpredictable ways, Lang cleverly employs monophony to tell a robust story of motivic and harmonic development....
Georg Friedrich Haas composed in vain in reaction to political events in his native Austria. The piece is well known for making use of clashing tuning systems and darkness in the concert hall. These two facets of Haas’s writing have been much discussed and written about. The political dimension of...