As the spring semester draws to a close, and you are working on papers, exams, etc, it can be fun to look back on what one has accomplished.
Our student employees have worked hard curating Parsons Playlists all semester, so here’s a roundup of all their spring semester posts for your enjoyment.
Clicking on the links will take you to each playlist post.
Editor’s note:Arachnophonia (“Arachno” = spider / “-phonia” = sound) is a regular feature on our blog where members of the UR community can share their thoughts about resources from the Parsons Music Library‘s collection.
Music and Manipulation, edited by Steven Brown and Ulrik Volgsten, delves into the complex ways in which music is employed as a tool for social influence and control. Through a collection of essays from various scholars, the book explores how music affects human behavior, shapes identities, and is used in contexts of power and manipulation.
The essays in this anthology investigate how music is used both to foster unity and to exert control, depending on the circumstances. For instance, one section of the book delves into the use of music in political propaganda, where governments and regimes leverage music to promote nationalistic sentiments and manipulate public opinion. This can be seen in examples ranging from national anthems to political campaigns, where music serves as a subtle yet powerful force to unite people under a common ideology.
The book also explores music’s role in advertising and commercial contexts, where it is utilized to shape consumer behavior and create emotional connections with products. This type of “manipulation” often goes unnoticed but is incredibly effective in influencing purchasing decisions and brand loyalty.
Another theme covered in Music and Manipulation is the therapeutic use of music. In contrast to the more coercive applications discussed earlier, music therapy is framed as a positive use of music to influence emotions and improve mental health. This section highlights how music can be used to heal and empower individuals, demonstrating its dual capacity for both control and liberation.
Religious and ceremonial uses of music are also examined, revealing how music shapes spiritual experiences and creates a sense of communal identity. In religious contexts, music often serves as a tool for guiding emotions and fostering a sense of unity among believers. The authors also explore how different cultures use music in rituals and ceremonies to reinforce social bonds and cultural values.
As the spring semester winds down and you are working on papers, exams, etc., it can be fun to look back on what one has accomplished.
Our student employees have worked hard curating Parsons Playlists all semester, so here’s a roundup of all their posts for your enjoyment.
Clicking on the links will take you to each playlist on YouTube.
Editor’s note:Arachnophonia (“Arachno” = spider / “-phonia” = sound) is a regular feature on our blog where members of the UR community can share their thoughts about resources from the Parsons Music Library‘s collection.
Although the country of Georgia is small, its history and culture are rich with no bounds. Over the millennia of struggle, Georgia has amassed history and myth. It’s hard to take in all of it, but one can experience a small piece of Georgian culture by listening to the traditional choir songs passed down through generations. The songs often talk about freedom, victory, faith, tradition, family, brotherhood, and more.
The Music Library has 3 CDs with mesmerizing collections of Georgian songs, for example, Table Songs of Georgia. This is a collection of songs that are, of course, commonly sung at tables during feasts.
Editor’s note:Arachnophonia (“Arachno” = spider / “-phonia” = sound) is a regular feature on our blog where members of the UR community can share their thoughts about resources from the Parsons Music Library‘s collection.
A new school year is upon us and everyone is getting back into the rhythms of classes and activities.
You’re excited about the new music class you’re taking this term, but feeling a bit trepidatious because the syllabus says you have to write a research paper/review/analysis as a big part of your grade. How on earth do you approach even picking a topic, much less writing a paper about it?
This pocket-sized style guide offers a practical introduction to many aspects of writing about music in an academic context. It offers useful tips and tricks for all stages of the writing process from choosing a topic and creating a thesis to the nitty gritty of researching and drafting a research paper.
Writing in Music will help you explore writing about music from a historical and cultural context and/or writing from a musical analysis point of view (or both!). This comprehensive intro will get you on your way to creating a great paper, thus making your professor happy and making the class a more enriching learning experience for you!
Editor’s note:Arachnophonia (“Arachno” = spider / “-phonia” = sound) is a regular feature on our blog where members of the UR community can share their thoughts about resources from the Parsons Music Library‘s collection.
If you or a musician you know have ever learned a challenging piece, one of the most important things you can do to successfully practice is count as you play. Measures, rhythms, polyrhythms, fingerings, tempo… numbers are all over music, whether explicitly or hidden between the notes. What you may not realize is that the mathematics of music has been studied for thousands of years and is a widely expanding field today. In the book Mathematical Music: From Antiquity to AI, Nikita Braguinski explores this relationship from 550 B.C. to the present-day and future.
If this doesn’t sound interesting yet, here are a few fun facts from the book:
– The first machine entirely dedicated to “composing” music was designed around 1650 and combined random snippets of notes to generate a melody. Referred to as a “musical thinking machine”, this demonstrates just how long people have been using machines and mathematics to create music – hundreds of years!
– Some of the same names we know from calculus and other advanced math reappear on the music scene as well. Both Euler and Leibniz published works searching for the hidden mathematics behind what makes different ratios of frequencies (or intervals) delightful or unappealing to the human ear. Although they didn’t find anything concrete, they introduced the idea of listening as an art of subconscious counting.
– The (then) newly-formed Soviet Union had an intense interest in structural formalism in music and created multiple initiatives dedicated to art as a science. This coincided with an era of musical exploration into dissonant, atonal music and shows how the new revolutionaries distinguished themselves from the traditional Russian music of years past.
– Today, we have the computerized tool of neural networks, a deep learning AI technique to generate music on the spot given a certain style (or input parameter). Where do you think this will take music?
All of these stories, experiments, and techniques can be found in the Parsons Music Library. If you’re intrigued, be sure to check out this book along with others on the interdisciplinary nature of music.
Editor’s note:Arachnophonia (“Arachno” = spider / “-phonia” = sound) is a regular feature on our blog where members of the UR community can share their thoughts about resources from the Parsons Music Library‘s collection.
While performing my duties as music library student assistant, I discovered a thin workbook titled Modern Method for Tympani. I come across hundreds of books, scores, and instruction manuals in my job, but it was the name of the author of the workbook that caught my attention: Saul Goodman, the namesake of one my favorite TV shows, Better Call Saul.
Further research showed Saul Goodman (the percussionist & author of Modern Method for Tympani) has a fascinating history. Born in Brooklyn in 1907, by the time he was 20, Goodman was the principal timpanist of the New York Philharmonic. He played with this premier orchestra for 46 years and taught at Juilliard, the premier U.S. music school, for 41 years.
Goodman was instrumental in innovating the timpani, introducing both new techniques and inventions such as replaceable-ball timpani sticks and chain-tuned timpanis. He also remains one of the most renowned and influential percussion teachers in history. To add to his long list of accolades, Goodman played the first performance of a timpani concert to be broadcast on air. When he died in 1996, the New York Times credited him with over 6,000 concerts and a place as the longest-held principal Philharmonic position in history. If you would like to try to follow in Saul Goodman’s steps, take a look at Modern Method for Tympani, found at library call number MT660.2. G6, or ask a Music Library student assistant for help.
Our exhibit highlights items (both physical and streaming) from UR’s collection as well as information about traditional Chilean instruments and dance. It also includes thumbnail biographical info on several Chilean musicians.
Here’s a little info on the music with some links to items in the library’s collection and a few video clips for good measure!
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The traditional music of Chile is a rich mixture of Spanish and Pre-Columbian influences.
Some of the traditional instruments commonly used in Chile include Andean instruments such as
* The charango – a small stringed instrument of the lute family. It was traditionally made from armadillo shell, but is more commonly made of wood today. It has 10 strings.
The Cueca is considered to be the “most traditional music and dance of Chile” and is officially the country’s national dance. While cueca’s origins are not entirely certain, indigenous, African and Spanish influences are evident.
It is a partner dance which is indented imitate the courtship of a rooster and hen. Men usually wear a traditional Chilean cowboy costume while women traditionally don a flowered dresses with an apron.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Chilean songwriters like Victor Jara and Violeta Parra used the tonada as a foundation of the “Nueva Canción,” explicitly political music that blended Chilean folk music with progressive politics, similar to the way Bob Dylan and Joan Baez led a political folk revival around the same time in the U.S.
The foundations of nueva canción were laid by Violeta Parra (1917-1967) who was a popular folk singer-songwriter and musicologist who researched and recovered the poetry and songs of rural Chile.
Víctor Jara (1932-1973) was a legendary Chilean folk singer and political activist who also pioneered nueva canción. His activism led to his murder by the Pinochet dictatorship in 1973.
Jara’s life and work continue to be celebrated by Latin American artists as well as globally known bands like U2 and The Clash. The 2018 documentary film The Resurrection of Víctor Jara is a great introduction to his life and legacy and is available to UR students, faculty and staff as a streaming video resource.
Here’s a trailer for the documentary:
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Claudio Arrau (1903-1991) was a Chilean pianist known for his interpretations of a vast repertoire, especially the works of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt and Brahms.
He is widely considered to be one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century.
Here are a couple of library resources about his life and work:
This playlist began as a discussion with a friend online a couple months ago. I had shared a song that I’d had stuck in my head and my friend said that it was their least favorite song by the group because (and I quote) “SHA LA LA is a terrible lyric 🙂”. The discussion that followed was all in good fun, but led me to want to research songs that have nonsense syllables in them just to prove that “sha la la” is NOT (necessarily) a terrible lyric.
Vocals like “sha la la” in songs are called non-lexical vocables. Basically, they are nonsense syllables which may or may not be mixed together with meaningful text and they appear in all manner of different musics. This, of course, led to me being extra geeky and having a lot of fun creating a playlist highlighting a variety of different songs that use nonsense syllables in this way. In point of fact, it goes all the way back to at least the middle ages with songs using things like “fa la la” in them – but I decided to stick to more modern examples for playlist purposes. Which means this playlist starts with some scat singing (from circa the 1920s-1940s) and goes on from there.
Your mileage may vary in terms of your tolerance of the non-lexical vocable, but I maintain that sometimes one doesn’t need an actual word to create musical meaning and that non-lexical vocables can be super fun!
The Music Library has more resources available than physical items. We’re highlighting some of our digital resources, and including information about them as told by our student employees.
Here is what student assistant Allison (class of 2022) had to say about Grove Music Online:
“Grove Music Online is an extensive online music encyclopedia that provides detailed information on composers, their music, and other music scholarship. I like how the resource is run by an editorial board at Oxford University Press so that there isn’t much question regarding the credibility of the content. I looked up Paul Hindemith and George Gershwin and found a lot of information about each of their respective lives along with some articles about their work. Grove Music Online seems like a very valuable resource for researching composers and music in the classical/jazz field.”
