In Colombia, the tumultuous second half of the twentieth century kicked off with a fierce conflict between the Liberal and Conservative parties known as La Violencia (The Violence, ca. 1948-1958). Following a brief period of military rule (1953-1957), a bipartisan system of shared governance, the National Front (1958-1974), brought about some respite to the sectarian bloodshed. However, the exclusionary two-party system precipitated new lines of conflict between the state and communist guerrillas. Along with the political turmoil, the nation was also undergoing an era of profound cultural change. This essay examines three countercultural-oppositional movements that captivated a wide swath of youth in Colombia’s biggest cities during the 1960s: the canción protesta (protest song) movement, the rock and roll subculture denominated as nueva ola (new wave), and nadaísmo, a rabblerousing avantgarde literary movement. I analyze the correspondences and discontinuities in the ways adherents of these movements conceived of the ideal means to carry out social, cultural, and political resistance. While there were fundamental tensions between the “discourses of resistance” linked to these three countercultural streams, I argue that their convergence in the late 1960s facilitated the emergence of a commercial form of canción protesta.

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Protest Song and Countercultural Discourses of Resistance in 1960s Colombia

Not only poets may respond to a work of visual art with a
creative act in their own medium, transposing the style and structure,
the message and metaphors from the visual to the verbal. Composers,
more and more frequently, are also exploring this interartistic
mode of transfer. Although the musical medium is reputedly abstract,
composers, just like poets, can respond in many different ways to a visual
representation. They may transpose aspects of both structure and content;
they may supplement, interpret, respond with associations, problematize,
or play with some of the suggestive elements of the original image. This
article begins with some methodological considerations regarding the
musical equivalent of what literary scholars know as ekphrasis
(see Spitzer 1962 [1955]; Hagstrum 1958; Krieger 1967, 1992; Lund
1992 [1982]; Cluver 1989, 1997; Scott 1991, 1994; Mitchell 1992,
1994; Heffernan 1993; Yacobi 1995, 1998). Central questions concern the
definition of musical ekphrasis in relation to "program music"
and music's ability to narrate or portray extramusical realities,
that is, to relate to them by way of mimesis or reference. In a second
section I attempt to position musical ekphrasis within the grid of
interartistic interactions laid out by Hans Lund and address some central
issues of terminology in research on musical ekphrasis. Next I draw on three groups of symphonic compositions
 and two hybrid works (one pairing music with dance, the other pairing
 music with a biblical text), all composed in response to works of
 visual art, in order to attempt an assessment of the possible scope
 (and limitations) of the undertaking to reflect images in tones. To
 concretize the idea of correspondence between pictorial and musical
 configurations, I conclude with a comparative case study. My overall
 aim in this essay is thus threefold: to survey the range of artistic
 expression available for such transmedializations, to examine the
 degree to which the composers' creative responses draw on a body
 of shared cultural conventions, and to develop some first steps toward
 a methodology of "musical ekphrasis."

A Concert of Paintings: "Musical Ekphrasis" in the Twentieth Century

Si Alfred Cortot se definit comme interprete de Frederic Chopin, c’est non seulement comme pianiste mais aussi comme theoricien. Le travail d’exegese qu’il mene, notamment au travers de nombreux ecrits, est le correlat de toute execution instrumentale. Notre recherche a ainsi pour objet de montrer comment ces deux acceptions du terme « interpretation » se completent et suscitent un dialogue fructueux entre la concretude d’un objet sonore et l’abstraction d’une pensee. Cela suppose de considerer non seulement la maniere dont Cortot nous donne a reflechir, en tant que biographe, sur une image particuliere de Chopin et de sa musique, mais aussi le procede par lequel il passe d’une formalisation theorique a une concretisation de sa pensee dans et par l’interpretation. Notre travail s’organise selon trois axes : un examen des methodes historiographiques employees par Cortot, une etude de sa demarche hermeneutique – en particulier dans l’edition de travail des œuvres de Chopin – et enfin une analyse de quelques enregistrements des Preludes op. 28.

Alfred cortot, interprète de Frédéric Chopin

Frank Martin's Arranged Works for Flute: Sonata Da Chiesa and Deuxieme Ballade

Musical Motif Discovery in Non-Musical Media Daniel S. Johnson Department of Computer Science, BYU Master of Science Many music composition algorithms attempt to compose music in a particular style. The resulting music is often impressive and indistinguishable from the style of the training data, but it tends to lack significant innovation. In an effort to increase innovation in the selection of pitches and rhythms, we present a system that discovers musical motifs by coupling machine learning techniques with an inspirational component. The inspirational component allows for the discovery of musical motifs that are unlikely to be produced by a generative model, while the machine learning component harnesses innovation. Candidate motifs are extracted from non-musical media such as images and audio. Machine learning algorithms select the motifs that best comply with patterns learned from training data. This process is validated by extracting motifs from real music scores, identifying themes in the piece according to a theme database, and measuring the probability of discovering thematic motifs verses non-thematic motifs. We examine the information content of the discovered motifs by comparing the entropy of the discovered motifs, candidate motifs, and training data. We measure innovation by comparing the probability of the training data and the probability of the discovered motifs given the model. We also compare the probabilities of media-inspired motifs with random motifs and find that media inspiration is more efficient than random generation.

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Musical Motif Discovery in Non-Musical Media

In our visually-oriented society, music appears to stand apart from other arts. Yet just as a poet can write a poem whose focus is a painting, so musicians have composed scores based on poems, paintings, and other non-musical art forms. In instrumental music such reinterpretations are especially intriguing as the verbal or visual stimulus does not appear in performance but is rendered in musical form. In this study, Siglind Bruhn investigates how three French composers of the twentieth century, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Oliver Messiaen, express extra-musical subtexts in their piano works. She shows how the relation between the subtexts and the musical works can be broadly catagorized in terms of pictoriality and interiority. In all cases, Bruhn analyzes each musical piece and each source text in its entirety and in depth, drawing on her broad background in both literary and musical interpretation of the twentieth century. For pianists who seek to better understand an individual work, for scholars in the growing field of musical hermeneutics, and for lovers of music in general, this volume explores and makes explicit connections between music and other arts.

Images and Ideas in Modern French Piano Music: The Extra-Musical Subtext in Piano Works by Ravel, Debussy, and Messiaen

The extensive journals of the English gentleman composer John Marsh, which cover the period from 1752-1828, represent one the most important musical and social documents of the period to have hitherto remained unpublished. Drawing on the recently discovered original (Now in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California), the selection covers the first fifty years of Marsh's life, a period of intense musical activity in the southern cathedral cities of Salisbury, Canterbury and Chichester. But Marsh was far more than a provincial composer and music director; the journals also cast much valuable light on musical life in London-his account of the great Handel Commemoration of 1784 is without parallel for its colorful evocation of the huge event. A lively interest in a wide range of topics gives the journals a scope rare in the writings of a musician and the volume will be of indispensable value not only to the musical but also the social historian. The unfailingly vital and often witty writing also ensures considerable appeal to the more general reader with an interest in an eventful period of English history. The volume has been comprehensively annotated and includes illustrations and contemporary maps in addition to the first complete published listing of Marsh's compositions and writings.

Siglind Bruhn

Papers

Images and Ideas in Modern French Piano Music: The Extra-Musical Subtext in Piano Works by Ravel, Debussy, and Messiaen

Frank Martin's Musical Reflections On Death