The David and Goliath principle: Cultural, ideological, and attitudinal underpinnings of the normative protection of low-status groups from criticism

Two studies documented the “David and Goliath” rule—the tendency for people to perceive criticism of “David” groups (groups with low power and status) as less normatively permissible than criticism of “Goliath” groups (groups with high power and status). The authors confirmed the existence of the David and Goliath rule across Western and Chinese cultures (Study 1). However, the rule was endorsed more strongly in Western than in Chinese cultures, an effect mediated by cultural differences in power distance. Study 2 identified the psychological underpinnings of this rule in an Australian sample. Lower social dominance orientation (SDO) was associated with greater endorsement of the rule, an effect mediated through the differential attribution of stereotypes. Specifically, those low in SDO were more likely to attribute traits of warmth and incompetence to David versus Goliath groups, a pattern of stereotypes that was related to the protection of David groups from criticism.

Under this Sky: Logan's Musical Celebration

A creative practice as research, UNDER THIS SKY is the latest investigation in a 12-year study into the “QMF Model”, an application of principles of community and cultural practice that generates large-scale, music spectacle events that derive their narrative and expression from the communities in which they are performed. UNDER THIS SKY is a large-scale musical specially commissioned for the city of Logan (Queensland) as the signature work of the 2015 Queensland Musical Festival. The investigation centres around the capacity of the “QMF Model” to engage with performers and musicians of Logan and then, through community consultation, create a narrative based on idiosyncratic stories and themes that would culminate in a performance event in August 2015. Previous creative projects, Boomtown (Gladstone), Behind the Cane (Bowen) and The Road We’re On (Charleville), were conducted in relatively small communities, Gladstone being the largest. In UNDER THIS SKY, the model is being tested in a large metropolitan city (Logan – 300,000). The core principles of CACD (community arts and cultural development) are being interrogated and adapted to fit this large-scale, whole of community environment. The purpose is to refine and further validate the “QMF Model” as a viable and effective process for community/artistic partnerships. Since February 2014, professional artists and managers have facilitated and shaped the work, up-skilling performers over a periods of 12 months, developing new relationships and creating opportunities for participation at all levels of experience. The research methodology involved creative practice through a continuous cycle of action, reflection, adaptation and application.

Space in Musical Semiosis : An Abductive Theory of the Musical Composition Process

Space in musical semiosis is a study of musical meaning, spatiality and composition. Earlier studies on musical composition have not adequately treated the problems of musical signification. Here, composition is considered an epitomic process of musical signification. Hence the core problems of composition theory are core problems of musical semiotics. The study employs a framework of naturalist pragmatism, based on C. S. Peirce’s philosophy. It operates on concepts such as subject, experience, mind and inquiry, and incorporates relevant ideas of Aristotle, Peirce and John Dewey into a synthetic view of esthetic, practic, and semiotic for the benefit of grasping musical signification process as a case of semiosis in general. Based on expert accounts, music is depicted as real, communicative, representational, useful, embodied and non-arbitrary. These describe how music and the musical composition process are mental processes. Peirce’s theories are combined with current morphological theories of cognition into a view of mind, in which space is central. This requires an analysis of space, and the acceptance of a relativist understanding of spatiality. This approach to signification suggests that mental processes are spatially embodied, by virtue of hard facts of the world, literal representations of objects, as well as primary and complex metaphors each sharing identities of spatial structures. Consequently, music and the musical composition process are spatially embodied. Composing music appears as a process of constructing metaphors—as a praxis of shaping and reshaping features of sound, representable from simple quality dimensions to complex domains. In principle, any conceptual space, metaphorical or literal, may set off and steer elaboration, depending on the practical bearings on the habits of feeling, thinking and action, induced in musical communication. In this sense, it is evident that music helps us to reorganize our habits of feeling, thinking, and action. These habits, in turn, constitute our existence. The combination of Peirce and morphological approaches to cognition serves well for understanding musical and general signification. It appears both possible and worthwhile to address a variety of issues central to musicological inquiry in the framework of naturalist pragmatism. The study may also contribute to the development of Peircean semiotics.

Pathet : Musiikin symboliikka jaavalaisessa varjoteatterissa

The aim of this study is to define and analyse the symbolism hidden in the gamelan music of the Central Javanese, especially in the Yogyakartanese wayang kulit shadow theatre. This dissertation is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the theory, history and practice of Central Javanese shadow theatre. It also presents the tone symbol theory on which this study is based of B. Y. H. Sastrapustaka, the court servant and musician of the sultan s palace of Yogyakarta. For historical comparison, other theories and phenomena that seem to have some connections with the previously mentioned tone symbol theory are presented here as well as the equipment of the shadow theatre, its music, musical instruments and the shadow theatre in general in literature. The theoretic-methodological basis of the study is an enlarged model of research of cultural music, in which a person in the centre of the model with his/her concepts and by his/her behaviour creates a work of art and receives criticism through feedback, while the process of reciprocal action dynamically affects the whole development of the culture in question. In connection with the concepts of the work of art, the manner of approach of this study is also semiotic as the tone symbol theory gives a particular meaning to each musical note. Thus the purpose of this study is to find answers to how the tone symbol theory manifests itself in practical music making, what its origin is, if it is well known or not, and whether shadow theatre music supports this theory. The second part of this dissertation deals with material collected through interviews and observations as well as representative samples of musical pieces for shadow theatre and their analyses. In relation to this a special tool for analysing gamelan music, developed for the purpose of this study, is also presented. Sufficiently versatile material on the essence and meaning of the shadow theatre collected from many puppet masters of an older generation, many of whom are no longer with us, constitutes an important part of this study. This study proves that the tone symbol theory of Sastrapustaka is of tantristic tradition from the Hindu-Javanese period before the 16th century and before the appearance of Islam in Java. The variants of the previously mentioned theory can be found also in other fields of Javanese advanced civilization, such as architecture and dance. But it seems that knowledge about the tone symbolism connected to the shadow theatre especially has only been preserved in the sultan s palace of Yogyakarta and its intimate circles. The outsider puppet masters surely follow the theory, but they do not necessarily know its origin. As a result of the musical analysis, it is obvious that the musical pieces used for the shadow theatre bear different kinds of symbolic meanings which only an initiated person can feel and understand. These meanings are closely related to the plot of the play at the moment.

Sensory auditory processing and intuitive sound detection : an investigation of musical experts and nonexperts

The auditory system can detect occasional changes (deviants) in acoustic regularities without the need for subjects to focus their attention on the sound material. Deviant detection is reflected in the elicitation of the mismatch negativity component (MMN) of the event-related potentials. In the studies presented in this thesis, the MMN is used to investigate the auditory abilities for detecting similarities and regularities in sound streams. To investigate the limits of these processes, professional musicians have been tested in some of the studies. The results show that auditory grouping is already more advanced in musicians than in nonmusicians and that the auditory system of musicians can, unlike that of nonmusicians, detect a numerical regularity of always four tones in a series. These results suggest that sensory auditory processing in musicians is not only a fine tuning of universal abilities, but is also qualitatively more advanced than in nonmusicians. In addition, the relationship between the auditory change-detection function and perception is examined. It is shown that, contrary to the generally accepted view, MMN elicitation does not necessarily correlate with perception. The outcome of the auditory change-detection function can be implicit and the implicit knowledge of the sound structure can, after training, be utilized for behaviorally correct intuitive sound detection. These results illustrate the automatic character of the sensory change detection function.

Cortical processing of musical pitch as reflected by behavioural and electrophysiological evidence

In a musical context, the pitch of sounds is encoded according to domain-general principles not confined to music or even to audition overall but common to other perceptual and cognitive processes (such as multiple pattern encoding and feature integration), and to domain-specific and culture-specific properties related to a particular musical system only (such as the pitch steps of the Western tonal system). The studies included in this thesis shed light on the processing stages during which pitch encoding occurs on the basis of both domain-general and music-specific properties, and elucidate the putative brain mechanisms underlying pitch-related music perception. Study I showed, in subjects without formal musical education, that the pitch and timbre of multiple sounds are integrated as unified object representations in sensory memory before attentional intervention. Similarly, multiple pattern pitches are simultaneously maintained in non-musicians' sensory memory (Study II). These findings demonstrate the degree of sophistication of pitch processing at the sensory memory stage, requiring neither attention nor any special expertise of the subjects. Furthermore, music- and culture-specific properties, such as the pitch steps of the equal-tempered musical scale, are automatically discriminated in sensory memory even by subjects without formal musical education (Studies III and IV). The cognitive processing of pitch according to culture-specific musical-scale schemata hence occurs as early as at the sensory-memory stage of pitch analysis. Exposure and cortical plasticity seem to be involved in musical pitch encoding. For instance, after only one hour of laboratory training, the neural representations of pitch in the auditory cortex are altered (Study V). However, faulty brain mechanisms for attentive processing of fine-grained pitch steps lead to inborn deficits in music perception and recognition such as those encountered in congenital amusia (Study VI). These findings suggest that predispositions for exact pitch-step discrimination together with long-term exposure to music govern the acquisition of the automatized schematic knowledge of the music of a particular culture that even non-musicians possess.

The composer and conductor Leon Kopf holding a musical score Portraits Men

Kopf conducted the Jewish People’s Philharmonic Chorus, New York from 1948-1952

Musical program

Musical program for inmates of Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews, black ink on white paper, 4 pages.

Socialist Realism instead of Formalism : the Formation and Development of the Soviet Music Control System 1932-1950

Whereas it has been widely assumed in the public that the Soviet music policy system had a “top-down” structure of control and command that directly affected musical creativity, in fact my research shows that the relations between the different levels of the music policy system were vague, and the viewpoints of its representatives differed from each other. Because the representatives of the party and government organs controlling operas could not define which kind of music represented Socialist Realism, the system as it developed during the 1930s and 1940s did not function effectively enough in order to create such a centralised control of Soviet music, still less could Soviet operas fulfil the highly ambiguous aesthetics of Socialist Realism. I show that musical discussions developed as bureaucratic ritualistic arenas, where it became more important to reveal the heretical composers, making scapegoats of them, and requiring them to perform self-criticism, than to give directions on how to reach the artistic goals of Socialist Realism. When one opera was found to be unacceptable, this lead to a strengthening of control by the party leadership, which lead to more operas, one after the other, to be revealed as failures. I have studied the control of the composition, staging and reception of the opera case-studies, which remain obscure in the West despite a growing scholarly interest in them, and have created a detailed picture of the foundation and development of the Soviet music control system in 1932-1950. My detailed discussion of such case-studies as Ivan Dzerzhinskii’s The Quiet Don, Dmitrii Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, Vano Muradeli’s The Great Friendship, Sergei Prokofiev’s Story of a Real Man, Tikhon Khrennikov’s Frol Skobeev and Evgenii Zhukovskii’s From All One’s Heart backs with documentary precision the historically revisionist model of the development of Soviet music. In February 1948, composers belonging to the elite of the Union of Soviet Composers, e.g. Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, were accused in a Central Committee Resolution of formalism, as been under the influence of western modernism. Accusations of formalism were connected to the criticism of the conciderable financial, material and social privileges these composers enjoyed in the leadership of the Union. With my new archival findings I give a more detailed picture of the financial background for the 1948 campaign. The independent position of the music funding organization of the Union of Soviet Composers (Muzfond) to decide on its finances was an exceptional phenomenon in the Soviet Union and contradicted the strivings to strengthen the control of Soviet music. The financial audits of the Union of Soviet Composers did not, however, change the elite status of some of its composers, except for maybe a short duration in some cases. At the same time the independence of the significal financial authorities of Soviet theatres was restricted. The cuts in the governmental funding allocated to Soviet theatres contradicted the intensified ideological demands for Soviet operas.

Carrie the Musical

When Carrie the Musical first debuted in 1988 it (in)famously closed eight days later, earning the dubious title of being one of the biggest flops in the history of Broadway. This revived version of the work, the Queensland premiere of the production, presented at the Brisbane Powerhouse in January 2016, was a calculated experiment in the commercialisation of an historical flop into a contemporary success. Through collaboration between some of Brisbane's most promising young creatives, designers, choreographers musicians and performers, this production became one of the Brisbane Powerhouse's most successful shows and gained local, national and international recognition for its achievements. By pushing the boundaries of the most current trends in contemporary Australian directing and performance making, the creative team was able to draw on their innovative capacity as independent theatre makers to turn a once-maligned work into a modern-day financial and critical success.

El teponaztli en la tradición musical mexica

Lecture about the teponaztli (a specific type of slit drum), traditionally used by the Aztec (or Mexica) people, and its associated repertoire. Special attention is paid to the usage of this instrument in the Cantares Mexicanos (a song compilation from the 16th century) accompaniment.

On Musical Self-Similarity : Intersemiosis as Synecdoche and Analogy

Self-similarity, a concept taken from mathematics, is gradually becoming a keyword in musicology. Although a polysemic term, self-similarity often refers to the multi-scalar feature repetition in a set of relationships, and it is commonly valued as an indication for musical coherence and consistency . This investigation provides a theory of musical meaning formation in the context of intersemiosis, that is, the translation of meaning from one cognitive domain to another cognitive domain (e.g. from mathematics to music, or to speech or graphic forms). From this perspective, the degree of coherence of a musical system relies on a synecdochic intersemiosis: a system of related signs within other comparable and correlated systems. This research analyzes the modalities of such correlations, exploring their general and particular traits, and their operational bounds. Looking forward in this direction, the notion of analogy is used as a rich concept through its two definitions quoted by the Classical literature: proportion and paradigm, enormously valuable in establishing measurement, likeness and affinity criteria. Using quantitative qualitative methods, evidence is presented to justify a parallel study of different modalities of musical self-similarity. For this purpose, original arguments by Benoît B. Mandelbrot are revised, alongside a systematic critique of the literature on the subject. Furthermore, connecting Charles S. Peirce s synechism with Mandelbrot s fractality is one of the main developments of the present study. This study provides elements for explaining Bolognesi s (1983) conjecture, that states that the most primitive, intuitive and basic musical device is self-reference, extending its functions and operations to self-similar surfaces. In this sense, this research suggests that, with various modalities of self-similarity, synecdochic intersemiosis acts as system of systems in coordination with greater or lesser development of structural consistency, and with a greater or lesser contextual dependence.