Verdi's Settings of Shakespeare : from Play to Liberetto to Opera

As a Senior Scholar pursuing the topic, Verdi's Settings of Shakespeare: From Play to Libretto to Opera, I have endeavoured to study a project relevant to my majors, Music and English. During first semester, I carefully analysed Shakespeare's plays, Macbeth, Othello and Falstaff. The highlight of my project was in January when I travelled to New York City and spent the day working with the Metropolitan Opera Guild. I was also able to see a performance of Verdi's Othello with Jon Vickers in the lead role. During the second semester, I studied the musical aspects of the compositions. I spent time analysing musical passages and relating them to the plays and the operas. I was also able to continue my study of Italian, which I find extremely beneficial while studying Verdi's libretti. On Monday, 13th May, 1974, I gave a lecture presentation of my project. At this time, I showed slides of Metropolitan productions of the operas, presented my own rendition of five arias (in costume) and talked about comparisions between the plays and the operas. I applied for a Rotary Fellowship to take my project to Europe and am presently waiting to hear the results. If I do receive the fellowship, I am planning to spend a year studying the plays and operas in England and Italy. Afterwards, I hope to publish a paper explaining my findings. The paper is divided into six sections. The first section is an introduction which explains the period of Romanticism and its relationship to Shakespeare and Verdi. The second section is devoted to discussing the librettist for Macbeth, Francesco Piave. Following this section the opera Macbeth is discussed. Arrigo Boito, the librettist for Otello and Falstaff is discussed in the fourth section. The last two sections deal with Otello and Falstaff. I have also included a number of musical selections to better explain certain passages. My project has been invaluable to me. My Senior Scholar project has allowed me the freedom of independent study as well as a means of tying my majors together.

Os fundamentos da interpretação musical: aplicabilidade nos 12 estudos para violão de Francisco Mignone

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

The role of musical aptitude in the pronunciation of English vowels among Polish learners of English

It has long been held that people who have musical training or talent acquire L2 pronunciation more successfully than those that do not. Indeed, there have been empirical studies to support this hypothesis (Pastuszek-Lipińska 2003, Fonseca-Mora et al. 2011, Zatorre and Baum 2012). However, in many of such studies, musical abilities in subjects were mostly verified through questionnaires rather than tested in a reliable, empirical manner. Therefore, we run three different musical hearing tests, i.e. pitch perception test, musical memory test, and rhythm perception test (Mandell 2009) to measure the actual musical aptitude in our subjects. The main research question is whether a better musical ear correlates with a higher rate of acquisition of English vowels in Polish EFL learners. Our group consists of 40 Polish university students studying English as their major who learn the British pronunciation model during an intense pronunciation course. 10 male and 30 female subjects with mean age of 20.1 were recorded in a recording studio. The procedure comprised spontaneous conversations, reading passages and reading words in isolation. Vowel measurements were conducted in Praat in all three speech styles and several consonantal contexts. The assumption was that participants who performed better in musical tests would produce vowels that are closer to the Southern British English model. We plotted them onto vowel charts and calculated the Euclidean distances. Preliminary results show that there is potential correlation between specific aspects of musical hearing and different elements of pronunciation. The study is a longitudinal project and will encompass two more years, during which we will repeat the recording procedure twice to measure the participants’ progress in mastering the English pronunciation and comparing it with their musical aptitude.

Efeitos do andamento musical sobre a frequencia cardiaca em praticantes de ginastica aerobica com diferentes niveis de aptidão cardiorrespiratoria

Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Faculdade de Educação Física

TRAVELLING THROUGH PITCH SPACE SPEEDS UP MUSICAL TIME

SEVERAL MODELS OF TIME ESTIMATION HAVE BEEN developed in psychology; a few have been applied to music. In the present study, we assess the influence of the distances travelled through pitch space on retrospective time estimation. Participants listened to an isochronous chord sequence of 20-s duration. They were unexpectedly asked to reproduce the time interval of the sequence. The harmonic structure of the stimulus was manipulated so that the sequence either remained in the same key (CC) or travelled through a closely related key (CFC) or distant key (CGbC). Estimated times were shortened when the sequence modulated to a very distant key. This finding is discussed in light of Lerdahl's Tonal Pitch Space Theory (2001), Firmino and Bueno's Expected Development Fraction Model (in press), and models of time estimation.

Musical genres: beating to the rhythms of different drums

Online music databases have increased significantly as a consequence of the rapid growth of the Internet and digital audio, requiring the development of faster and more efficient tools for music content analysis. Musical genres are widely used to organize music collections. In this paper, the problem of automatic single and multi-label music genre classification is addressed by exploring rhythm-based features obtained from a respective complex network representation. A Markov model is built in order to analyse the temporal sequence of rhythmic notation events. Feature analysis is performed by using two multi-variate statistical approaches: principal components analysis (unsupervised) and linear discriminant analysis (supervised). Similarly, two classifiers are applied in order to identify the category of rhythms: parametric Bayesian classifier under the Gaussian hypothesis (supervised) and agglomerative hierarchical clustering (unsupervised). Qualitative results obtained by using the kappa coefficient and the obtained clusters corroborated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

MUSICAL ANALYSIS OF THE PRELUDE N.1, LA COLOMBE, BY OLIVIER MESSIAEN

This work proposes an association between musical analysis techniques developed during the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, presented by authors like Felix Salzer and Joseph Straus, and the musical theory concepts presented by Olivier Messiaen, for the analysis of Prelude n(o) 1, La Colombe. The analysis contributes to broaden the theory concepts presented by the composer. In the Conclusion we trace lines of an authorial sonority by Olivier Messiaen.

MULTIDIMENSIONAL SCALING OF MUSICAL TIME ESTIMATIONS

The aim of this study was to identify the psycho-musical factors that govern time evaluation in Western music from baroque, classic, romantic, and modern repertoires. The excerpts were previously found to represent variability in musical properties and to induce four main categories of emotions. 48 participants (musicians and nonmusicians) freely listened to 16 musical excerpts (lasting 20 sec. each) and grouped those that seemed to have the same duration. Then, participants associated each group of excerpts to one of a set of sine wave tones varying in duration from 16 to 24 sec. Multidimensional scaling analysis generated a two-dimensional solution for these time judgments. Musical excerpts with high arousal produced an overestimation of time, and affective valence had little influence on time perception. The duration was also overestimated when tempo and loudness were higher, and to a lesser extent, timbre density. In contrast, musical tension had little influence.

Comparação dos Potenciais de Latência Média com ou sem estímulo musical

Os Potenciais Auditivos Evocados (PEA) constituem uma fonte rica e complexa de informações sobre as vias do sistema nervoso central e de estruturas ativadas por estimulação auditiva. Devido ao escasso número de trabalhos existentes correlacionando Resposta de Latência Média com diferentes estímulos sonoros, surgiu o interesse em se realizar esse estudo. OBJETIVO: Verificar o Potencial Evocado Auditivo de Média Latência (PEAML) em adultos normo-ouvintes frente à estimulação por clique e com música contralateral. FORMA DE ESTUDO: coorte contemporânea com corte transversal. MÉTODO: Foram realizadas as avaliações de PEAML em 10 sujeitos utilizando cliques na intensidade de 70dBnNA bilateralmente e posteriormente com estímulo musical, sendo que as latências e amplitudes foram medidas. Foi realizada a comparação da amplitude da onda Pa em relação ao eletrodo C3 e C4 e em relação à orelha direita e esquerda na presença e ausência de estímulo musical. RESULTADOS: todos os sujeitos apresentaram PEAML dentro dos limites de normalidade em ambas as orelhas e na avaliação com estímulo musical e clique foi observada uma diminuição das amplitudes na orelha contralateral a apresentação do estímulo musical em todas as posições do eletrodo, embora esta diferença não tenha sido estatisticamente significante. CONCLUSÃO: Sugere-se que o estímulo musical influencia na amplitude do PEAML, uma vez que houve diminuição da amplitude da onda Pa frente a esta estimulação.