Academic literature on the topic 'Songs (Low voice) with harp'

Background. In recent scholar resources musicologists actively study the problem of typology of chamber song cycle. The article cites analytical observations of M. Kolotylenko on works in this genre by R. Strauss (2014), of I. Leopa – on G. Mahler’s (2017), of N. Vlasova – on A. Schoenberg’s (2007). It is stated, that unlike Austro-German phenomena of this kind have been studied to a certain degree, song cycle “Summer Nights” by H. Berlioz hasn’t received adequate research yet, although it is mentioned by N. Vlasova as on of the foremost experiences of this kind. It allows to regard the French author as a pioneer in tradition of chamber song cycle. The aim of given research is to reveal the essence of orchestration as a part of songs cycle’s artistic whole. In order to achieve it, semantical, compositionally-dramaturgical and intonational methods of research are used. Originally, “Summer Nights” were meant to be performed by a duo of voice and piano (1834). It was not until 1856 that composer orchestrated this cycle, similarly to the way G. Mahler and in several cases R. Strauss done it later. The foundation of cycle by H. Berlioz are six poems from a set by T. Gautier «La Comédie de la mort», published in 1838. In spite of having epic traits, this set is still an example of lyrical poesy, where subjective is being generalised, while chosen motive of death, according to L.Ginzburg, corresponds to existential essence of lyric (L. Ginzburg). French poet, prose writer, critic, author ow the poems set to music in “Summer Nights” by H. Berlioz – Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) – is one of the most enigmatic and singular figures in history of XIX century art. He was eclipsed by his contemporaries, although his creativity paved the way for upcoming symbolism, that incarnated in poetry of C. Baudelaire, and set “Émaux et Camées” became an aesthetic ideal for Parnassian School. A work by H. Berlioz on lyrics by T. Gautier consists of four songs: “Villanelle”, “Le Spectre de la Rose”, “Sur le lagunes”, “Absence”, “Au cimetiere. Clair de Lune” and “L`ile Inconnue”. It is founded on a plot of lyrical type, that is built according to the principle of appearing associations. Lyrical “I”, whose inner world is revealed during the cycle, provides logical congruity of the work. Each mélodie has its own spectrum of images, united by general lyrical plot. The first and last songs, grounding on a theme of nature, create thematic arch. The denouement of the plat falls on “L`ile Inconnue”, where hero’s conclusion about impossibility of everlasting love is proclaimed. The orchestra part is equal significance with the voice and intonated verbal text, simultaneously playing an important role in illuminating underlying meaning of the lyrics. H. Berlioz doesn’t tend to use supplementary woodwind instruments. Although, each instrument reveals its unique sonic and expressive possibilities, demonstrating its singular characteristics. Due to that an orchestra becomes differentiated, turning into a flexible living organism. Composer doesn’t use exceedingly large orchestra, moreover, each song has its unique set of performers. However, there are stable players: strings (including double basses), two flutes, 2 clarinets (in A and in B). Besides of that, H. Berlioz occasionally uses the timbre of solo oboe, bassoons, natural French horns in different keys, and in the second song he employs coloristic potential of the harp. From a standpoint of the semantics, the score is built according to the principle of the opposition between two spheres. The former one is attached to the motives of the nature and has pastoral mod. At the same time, it reveals idealistic expanse of dreams and vision, thus being above the existing realm. This sphere is represented by woodwinds and brass. The latter, on the contrary, places the hero in real time. It is a sphere of sensuality, of truly human, it also touches themes of fate and inevitable death. It is characteristic that this sphere is incarnated through string instruments. Although, the harp cannot be bracketed with either of the groups. This elusive timbre in instrumental palette is saved for “Le Spectre de la Rose” and creates unsubstantial image of a soul ascending to Heaven. H. Berlioz evades usage of mixed timbers in joining of different groups of the orchestra. Even when he does it, it has sporadic nature and provides emphasis on a particular motive. Orchestral tutti are almost non-existent. Composer uses concerto principle quite regularly as well. Additional attention must be drawn to psychologising of role of clarinet and semantisation of flute and bassoon. Clarinet becomes a doppelganger of lyrical “I” and, quite like a personality of a human, acquires ambivalent characteristics. Because of that, it interacts not only with its light group, but with low strings as well, thus demonstrating an ability to transformation of the image. Bassoon reflects the image of the death. This explains its rare usage as well as specific way of interaction with other instruments and groups. Flute is attached to the image of the nature, symbolises a white dove, that in a poetry of T. Gautier represents an image of beautiful maiden. Consequently, this allows to state that timbre of flute incarnates the image of lyrical hero’s love interest. The most significant instruments of string group are the low ones, accenting either the aura of dark colours or sensuality and passion. Neglecting the tradition requiring lyrical hero to be paired with a certain voice type, H. Berlioz in each mélodie uses different timbres, that suit coloristic incarnation of the miniature the most in the terms of tessiture and colour. A conclusion is made, that composer become a forefather of chamber song cycle of new type, with its special trait being equivalence of the voice and the orchestra, that allows them to create united multi-layered integrity

Evolution of dominant frequencies in songs of Eneopterinae crickets was studied with respect to phylogeny. Two characters are optimized on the tree: the first describes the frequency resulting from the vibration of the harp (Fda), and the second is due to the vibration of other tegminal areas (Fdb). Fda was found to be relatively stable through the subfamily. Its low ancestral state is replaced by a high Fda only once, resulting in high-frequency calling in [Cardiodactylus (Lebinthus-Agnotecous)]. A high Fdb component is added to the low ancestral Fda in Eneoptera guyanensis, resulting in frequency modulation. The onset of high Fd in this first subclade is accompanied by a high cladogenesis rate, which supports a hypothesis of adaptive radiation for high frequencies. The effectiveness of high-frequency calling is discussed in relation to the species behavior ecology.

Formulation of the problem. An analysis of the genre-dramaturgical patterns in a poorly studied composition by the Chinese composer Zhao Jiping (2011) has been proposed. The relevance of the topic and the novelty of the received results of the genre-semantic analysis of the chosen vocal cycle are concluded in the search for the definition dictated by the artistic concept of its author – a cantata-type vocal poem (a small choir is introduced into the score). Among its criteria there are reliance on the orchestral accompaniment, the timbre variation of each song of the cycle, the poetry dictated by the presence of the image of the Poet, the symbolization of the poetic and intonation language, the cultural chronotope uniting the Time of History and its inclusion into the culture of the 21st century. The purpose of the article is to perform a genre-semantic analysis of “The Eight Songs” for Zhao Jiping’s voice and orchestra and to identify the main sound-image concepts of “the Chinese world view” that make up the drama of the vocal cycle. Analysis of the recent publications on the topic. In the second half of the 20th century, a new compositional approach to organizing vocal songs into a whole, poemness, appeared. In the articles by A. Belonenko (about “Petersburg” by G. Sviridov) and T. Zharkikh (about “Poemes pour Mi” by O. Messiaen), the research emphasis is placed on other problems of the organization of the vocal whole. For the first time, in the conditions of the poly-timbre vocal and orchestral synthesis and the national picture of the world poemness becomes the subject of a special interest of the singer-researcher. Research methods: the structural-functional analysis concerns the components of the composer’s text (the vocal melody and textural and timbre thematism of the orchestral part); the semantic one – reveals the symbolism of poetic texts; the genre analysis – aims to identify the individual interpretation of typical models of vocal music. The presentation of the main material. The poem principle became the embodiment of the author’s desire to unite several vocal miniatures into a single musical universe based on the common concept – the image of the Poet. The philosophical and religious feelings and thoughts contained in the texts chosen by the composer reflect not only his worldview, but also the national mentality and psychology of the world view of the “Chinese world view” (the chronotope of History). This rare quality of poetry – to unite the personality (I) and society (We) into a single “national image of the world” – is the essence of the symbolism of the ancient Chinese poetry of the Tang era. The desire to individualize the timbre composition in each of the parts of the cycle is a characteristic feature of many vocal and instrumental compositions of the 20th century. However, in Zhao Jiping’s work, the search for diversity acts simultaneously with the desire to preserve the timbre constants. As such, with this composer this role is represented by a string and bow group, as the carrier of the song beginning, which performs the function of the instrumental “nimbus” (more rarely, of the dialogue-counterpoint) in relation to the singer. In contrast to Western composers, Zhao Jiping does not seek to use “pure” timbres: vocals and xiao can be duplicated with the wind and plucked strings. The composer does not look for contrasting timbres in search of the associative community: on the contrary, he creates single-timbre groups (pipa + guzheng + harp, triangle + bells + cymbals) to vary the shades of the poetic text. Their “consonance” is close to assonance in poetry (from assono – “I sound in tune”), which in the musical context creates the timbre assonance. The symphonic instruments are combined in timbre groups (string, wind), and the ethnic often perform an individualized function (for example, guzheng with its irregular glissando in No. 2–4 gives a national flavour). The orchestral density, along with the gradual “academic turning” of timbres, increases from the second half of the sound of the cycle (No. 5) to the final. Xiao is replaced by the wind and brass (with No. 5), while the ethnic plucked is replaced by the harp. The gradual increase in the timbre multidimensionality of the texture also has the “opposite effect”, since it is combined with the enhancement of the timbre contrast in the final parts of the cycle and as a result of the “aggravation” of the chamberness. The most chamber part is number 6, where the brass is for the first time silenced, and only the pipa and guzheng are heard. The culmination of the “chamberness” is in the first stanza of the final: a duet of the voice and harp. Conclusion. The vocal-instrumental synthesis in the poem genre, identified in Zhao Jiping’s “The Eight Songs”, is characterized by the organic interaction of the national and European principles of musical thinking. The performers are faced with complex technical and psychological tasks that require a developed orchestral-timbre hearing, intellectualism and associative thinking. A vocal-instrumental poem is a way of modelling spiritual reality, in which the unity of time and space is manifested due to the poetic text, in which the integral sense-image of the Poet acts, personifying the sound-like concepts of the culture of its time and the history of an entire people (“national view of the world”), their “inclusion” into the musical chronotope of the 21st century.

Subject area Pricing, digital marketing, marketing management and strategic marketing. Study level/applicability The case can be used for pricing or digital marketing courses as well as marketing management courses to MBA students and/or for management development programmes. Case overview Goldfinch Mobile Solutions, a Hong-Kong based value added services (VAS) and gaming platform provider, had an exclusive tie up with Bharti Airtel in India for providing value added voice applications on an interactive voice response system (IVRS) platform. The Goldfinch flagship service is “Guru Ki Bani” which may be subscribed to by dialing the short code 58282. This “58282” service has a repository of all Sikh religion daily prayers, religious songs, teachings, stories from Guru's life and similar information that is derived from the Sikh Holy book Guru Granth Sahib Ji. As per mutual agreement between Goldfinch Mobile Solutions and Bharti Airtel, the telecom operator had the responsibility to promote Goldfinch's Guru Ki Bani service amongst its subscriber base through its below the line (BTL) promotional channels such as short messaging service (SMS), outbound calls, cell information, notification SMS after call and above the line (ATL) activities such as posters, leaflets, print, promoters, regional TV, outdoors, etc. The revenue sharing arrangement between Airtel and Golfinch was in the ratio of 75 percent and 25 percent. However, with recent changes in the policies of Telephone Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), promotional marketing used by telecom operators has been constrained. Declining customer share, decreasing profits (after Bharti Airtel halted promotions) and increasing organization cost per customer have made MD and CEO Mr Newton Bubber think of various options including low-cost marketing initiatives besides digital marketing to promote Guru Ki Bani services. Value communication to its huge potential customer base, i.e. 184.19 million Bharti Airtel subscribers was another challenge facing Mr Newton and his marketing team at Goldfinch. Expected learning outcomes The case enables students to learn the concepts and application of value creation, effective value communication, price waterfall analysis, importance of costing parameters in pricing decisions, low-cost marketing strategies and digital marketing. Supplementary materials Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

The article deals with the problem of organizing the methodical work of a teacher on the quality of timbre sound of the pop vocal ensemble depending on the level of development of vocal skills of singers. Throughout the period of students’ education in ensemble singing at the Department of Pop and Jazz Art, the author managed to highlight four stages in the trans-formation of the quality of the timbre sound of singing voices and to give special recommendations to the methodology of the teacher’s work in accordance with the tasks of training. Stage 1: from the very beginning of work with the singers of the ensemble it is necessary to rely on the quality of sound that is available at the moment. The joint sound of the singers «voices, is distinguished by the absence of unison, the forcing of sound and the diversity of pronouncing the phonemes as a result of the various manner of work of the articulation apparatus. A special task of the teacher is to prevent sound forcing, that is, when singing not to exceed the dynamic range: mf - mp. Stage 2: Multi-voice works are included in the educational repertoire. In connection with this, new tasks arise in the work of the teacher — building the structure and ensemble. When singing it is necessary to use special exercises for the development of harmonic hearing of singers, requiring activation of auditory attention and independent work. However, there is some stagnation and even degradation in the development of the singers ’vocal skills. After removing the forcing of the sound, there appears a dullness of the timbre sound of their voices, as singers do not always know how to use singing breath, besides, the reasons for this are general fatigue of the body of students, reduction of cognitive interest, loss of motivation, which can be eliminated by introducing new methods or techniques of work into the learning process. The 3rd stage: timbre sounding of vocal ensemble can be characterized as lighter, facilitated, but rectilinear, that is without singing vibrato. In the process of performing songs, when the melody is transferred to sounds in the area of low tessitura, there is a split of voice due to non-level of voice registers. The educational repertoire should include works that contribute to the formation of the ability to enjoy wide breathing by maintaining the position of inhalation and economical phonation exhalation when singing, as well as works that require flexible nuance and contrast in the type of the sound: staccato, legato, marcato. Stage 4: further consolidation of the acquired knowledge, skills and practices takes place. In the process of singing, the stability of the skill of proper muscle coordination of the whole voice-forming complex is demonstrated as a result of systematic singers’ work. The timbre sound of the singing collective in multi-voice singing is distinguished by the slightness of voices, good structure and ensemble, variety of timbre paints, clarity of articulation and muscle freedom in voice formation. As a result, singing vibrato, smoothness of voice registers, and full voicing of thoracic and head resonators appear in singers’ voices. To consolidate the results, it is necessary to use special vocal exercises in the classroom to master the vocal difficulties of the performed works. The educational repertoire should include works of diverse characters in style, contrasting in pace, rhythm, dynamics and types of sound science. The author emphasizes that the vocal abilities and skills formed by the singers at the previous stages of training require fixing in the process of constant training and improvement in further independent and professional practical work.

"Love Will Tear Us Apart" When routine bites hard, And ambitions are low, And resentment rides high, But emotions won't grow, And we're changing our ways, taking different roads. Then love, love will tear us apart, again. Love, love will tear us apart again. Why is the bedroom so cold? You've turned away on your side. Is my timing that flawed? Our respect runs so dry. Yet there's still this appeal that we've kept through our lives But love, love will tear us apart, again. Love, love will tear us apart, again. You cry out in your sleep, All my failings exposed. And there's a taste in my mouth, As desperation takes hold. Just that something so good just can't function no more But love, love will tear us apart again. Love, love will tear us apart again. Love, love will tear us apart again. Love, love will tear us apart again. Ian Curtis (1980) [in Curtis 1995:170-71] Watching the film 24 Hour Party People (2002), I remembered how much I used to love the bleak and danceable music that came from Manchester, England in the 1970s and 1980s. The early part of the film focuses on the aftermath of the Sex Pistols’ first visit to Manchester in 1976 and depicts the creation of Factory Records by Tony Wilson and the formation of Joy Division, one of the label’s most promising bands. Most of the band members were part a small group of people who were present at the Sex Pistols’ concert. The film shows the rise of the band and the strange allure of singer Ian Curtis, who killed himself in 1980 days before the band was set to embark on its first tour of the United States. After his death, Curtis became a figure of cult adoration and fascination. He remains so today. One of Joy Division’s most popular songs is “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (1980), reputedly about the dissolution of Curtis’s marriage (for more on this relationship, see the memoir of Curtis’s wife [1995]). In his brief life, Curtis’s recorded vocals were more announced than sung. In a dark, distant baritone, his lyrics sounded almost android-like, hinting at melody without indulging in the maudlin excess of the pop song. His distance from love song sentimentality often moved to a near yell that revealed painful sadness instead of irony (as in the lyrics and style of Morrissey of The Smiths, for example). Unlike the angry manic vocals that had already become a cliché in punk following Sex Pistols Johnny Lydon’s nasal wailing, Curtis offered the disturbing chest voice of melancholia. The band’s sound, as it began to evolve from three-chord punk to a more complicated and innovative collaboration of elements, included syncopated drum beats, a prominent bass line that flirted with funk rhythm, and a dirge-like guitar. In some songs, such as “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” a synthesizer was included, repeating and harmonizing to the repeated chorus. Such an embellishment was unheard of in guitar-oriented rock music at the time. Thus “Love” succeeds on three levels: it is an anthem of the “doom element” in relationships; it is musically adventuresome, and at the same time it is a dance song, played ad infinitum in the new wave dance halls of the 1980s. (Later, New Order, a band created in the wake of Curtis’s death and also on Factory Records, had an even bigger dance hit with the song “Blue Monday,” depicting another kind of failed romance.) To suggest an interpretation of the song lyrics: the couple’s love is all but doomed. Set in a depressing Northern England, there is no way for love to succeed: there is no room for “something so good”. Curtis doesn’t blame the failure of the relationship on either himself or the beloved in the song; there are traditions at work that cause the closeness of the relationship to dissolve into distance. In the song, it is suggested that the protagonist is unable to satisfy his lover, and yet the couple are unable to speak about it and the beloved turns away. Thus, he and his lover inherit a scenario that sets a mechanism to work against them. They cannot conquer their silences. Romeo and Juliet had the visible force of warring clans to defeat their love. In Curtis’s song, however, there are invisible social forces and the inadequacy of communication itself working against the couple. That their love is doomed is not so new. What makes the song sad is not that love tears them apart; the sadness is that love tears them apart again. Even though they have been through this torment before, there is no way to avoid its return. Without knowing it, they have called upon Love to bring it back. Of course, romantic love is often – if not usually – the province of popular song, from the ballad to the contemporary dance song. Disco, for example, perpetuated two sides of this fixation on love. One was the declaration of the ecstasy and spirituality of sexual love heard in Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” (1977) or Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real” (1979); the other was the manifesto of outliving the heartbreak caused by a deceitful lover (Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” [1978] or more recently, Whitney Houston’s “Its Not Right But Its Okay” [1999]). Love could be a savior to a lonely soul, providing the singer (and by extension, the dancing listener) with bodily pleasure. When disco singers, (usually female, usually black) sang of love’s demise, it was due to a lowly, no-good man revealing his true self. Yet in these tales, the failure of love sparked the ability of a smart, able woman to live an honorable life – even if she must do it on her own and find a divinity in herself. In disco, Love flirted with religion. Punk rock, at its inception, turned away from love as subject matter. For example, John Lydon, lead singer of the Sex Pistols (then known as Johnny Rotten) was quoted as saying that love was something felt for a cat or a dog. In a setting squeezed dry of spirituality and sexual bliss, for him love was illusionary and diversionary. Punk seemed to invest itself in other emotions, such as anger, and screamed about institutions, leaders, traditions—including the traditions of pop music itself. Yet love quickly returned as subject matter to punk music. The Buzzcocks, unlike the polemically political band The Clash, turned to romance and sex as subject matter. They debuted as the opening act at the Sex Pistols’ second visit to Manchester, and became known for bittersweet, uptempo love songs such as “What Do I Get?” (1978) and “Ever Fallen In Love With Someone (You Shouldn't've Fallen In Love With)?” (1978). Even “Orgasm Addict” (1977) tells the tale of a Casanova of sorts. The beloved in a Buzzcocks’ song was gender ambiguous, and the lyrics’ tone was ironic – if not sarcastic – about love’s misery. The band matched buzzsaw guitar with catchy melodies; the Buzzcocks wrote breakneck love songs you could dance to, even if the dancing was a bit of a flail. Singer Pete Shelley may seem to suffer from near-abject rejection, but he did so with abundant energy. Even John Lydon, in his later incarnation as the singer of Public Image Limited (PiL), penned the lyrics to the song “This is Not a Love Song (1983).” He screeched the words in the title over and over, and hence suggested that as much as the song was anti-romance, there was no way around Love. It returns endlessly, even if love was – as concept, as reality – to be rejected as part of a political conspiracy to turn one into a duped consumer of sounds, images, and stories. Love was inevitable. You are just going to end up feeling something for somebody. To rephrase a million pop songs (as done in the film Moulin Rouge (2001) in its medley of “silly love songs”): love is going to get you, it lifts you up where you belong, but it doesn’t live here anymore, although it may come back when you least expect it, you can’t hurry it… We, as listeners, let the song’s sentiment substitute for what we cannot say. Songs are emotional surrogates for the couple as well as the single in recovery. Regardless, we search the airwaves for our song. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was this song in 1980, perfect for the failed romantic who dressed in dark colors, drew up lists of things s/he hated, and was prone to mourn a relationship even as it was beginning. As such this song was perfect for me back then, especially since it had a good beat and I could dance to its timely and timeless sadness. The pop song, then, is a site of endless, popular philosophizing on the nature of Love. Many of these songs, when they don’t blame the world for not letting love last, depict Love as if were a force, or an entity out there in the universe. When it enters our atmosphere (via Cupid?), it wreaks havoc and produces harmony, however fleeting. This metaphysical story of love, however, is far from the psychoanalytic tale of the origins of love. For psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, love is no mystery. It’s a production process. The baby learns to love through its relationship with the mother and, in particular – at least at first – with the mother’s breast. The mother’s breast provides nourishment for the hungry infant as well as sensuality and security. Through this activity the infant learns to love, for love is made through these intimate connections. Also for Klein, the ability to hate is created when the mother does not provide for her child. The dynamics of this relationship enable fantasy on the part of the child. Melanie Klein writes in “Love, Guilt, and Reparation” that “the baby who feels a craving for his mother’s breast when it is not there may imagine it to be there, i.e. he may imagine the satisfaction which he derives from it” (60). Thus, even as an infant, one is given to flights of fantasy, imagining all sorts of sources of nourishment and sensuality. One can surmise that since every child has to grow up and lose the intensity of this first connection, one can see that love becomes affiliated with loss. All sorts of complaints toward parents, and later, lovers, are unavoidable – blame it on our psyches which are factories of fantasy and embedded remembrances. We have to grow up and move from a succession of psychic and real homes. No wonder everyone worries about the beloved leaving, for each of us has been left before. The story of love that Klein tells does, though, have a tentative happy ending, for we are not entirely prisoners of our experiences: “If we have become able, deep in our unconscious minds, to clear our feelings to some extent towards our parents of grievances, and have forgiven them for the frustrations we had to bear, then we can be at peace with ourselves and are able to love others in the true sense of the word” (119). But no doubt, it is a big “if” that begins her sentence. Importantly, in Klein’s view, love is not an external, or otherworldly force; it is made via the needs and interactions of the infantile and maternal body. Equally importantly, though, this process necessitates separation and hence the psychoanalytic love story is one in which the protagonist is taught to love and lose in rapid succession – and requires reparation. Love is both inescapable and impossible. With such a sad narrative lodged in our unconscious, one can understand the reasons why songwriters resort to the metaphysics and divinity of love. Even though love hurts in its endings, as Curtis suggests, we have a history of trying it all over again. No listener ever believed Dionne Warwick when she sang the Burt Bacharach/Hal David song “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” (1969). Dionne probably picked up the pieces of her broken heart and found the next guy who she knew in the back of her mind was all wrong for her. As Freud insists, we are compelled to repeat behavior patterns that do not always result in pleasure. This is not because all humans are born masochists. Rather, as Freud argues in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1961), humans have “an instinct for mastery” that requires repetition. (10). Freud discovered this “instinct” through observing a child playing a game with a wooden reel and a piece of string when his mother leaves him alone. In the game, the child holds onto the string and throws the reel over the edge of the bed. He narrates his action by saying “fort” (gone) and then “da” (there). Freud reads this game as a kind of allegory for the loss he feels with his mother’s sporadic disappearances. The good doctor wonders why a child would replicate such a hurtful experience. He suggests that this game gives the child a compensatory sense of power over the inability to control the actions of his mother. Freud deems the child’s game “a cultural achievement” and an “instinctual renunciation” (of satisfaction). Contemporary readers may well be wary of Freud’s use of the word “instinct.” But I suggest that the will to continue to find love is not only due to a desire to find’s one soul-mate (or to put it more mundanely, “life partner”) although this desire is indeed a crucial impetus for the renewed search. We persevere in this almost futile endeavor to find the perfect romantic love in part due to a compulsion to repeat. The love song, even when it pontificates about remorse and pain in pseudo-abstract terms, is often a grown up version of the child’s “fort-da” game. The sad love song is a social device for coping with pain by restating it in a narrated and sung form. That’s why some of the best tunes are the most woeful ones. And “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is one of the best—it provokes many a listener to sing along with the song’s sorrow while dancing in brooding near-abandon. Works Cited Curtis, Deborah. Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division. London: Faber, 1995. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: Norton, 1961. Klein, Melanie. “Love, Guilt and Reparation.” Love, Hate and Reparation. Eds. Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere. New York: Norton, 1964. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Miller, Edward D.. "Why Does Love Tear Us Apart? " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/whydoeslovetearusapartagain.php>. APA Style Miller, E. D., (2002, Nov 20). Why Does Love Tear Us Apart? . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/whydoeslovetearusapartagain.html

Listening is one of the skills in learning English. The 11th grade students of IPA 1 SMA N 15 Semarang had low ability in listening. Therefore, this research was done in order to know the response of the 11th grade students of IPA 1 SMA Negeri 15 Semarang in English learning by doing listening a song as the media. The object of this research is the 11th grade students of IPA 1 SMA Negeri 15, Semarang. It is a descriptive qualitative study which employed observation and interview. The results showed that the 11th grade students of IPA 1 SMA Negeri 15 Semarang like to do listening activities, but they still had less exercises in listening to songs or watching English movies.

augmentvb [ɔːgˈmɛnt]1. to make or become greater in number, amount, strength, etc.; increase2. Music: to increase (a major or perfect interval) by a semitone (Collins English Dictionary 107) Almost everything associated with Robert Johnson has been subject to some form of augmentation. His talent as a musician and songwriter has been embroidered by myth-making. Johnson’s few remaining artefacts—his photographic images, his grave site, other physical records of his existence—have attained the status of reliquary. Even the integrity of his forty-two surviving recordings is now challenged by audiophiles who posit they were musically and sonically augmented by speeding up—increasing the tempo and pitch. This article documents the promulgation of myth in the life and music of Robert Johnson. His disputed photographic images are cited as archetypal contested artefacts, augmented both by false claims and genuine new discoveries—some of which suggest Johnson’s cultural magnetism is so compelling that even items only tenuously connected to his work draw significant attention. Current challenges to the musical integrity of Johnson’s original recordings, that they were “augmented” in order to raise the tempo, are presented as exemplars of our on-going fascination with his life and work. Part literature review, part investigative history, it uses the phenomenon of augmentation as a prism to shed new light on this enigmatic figure. Johnson’s obscurity during his lifetime, and for twenty-three years after his demise in 1938, offered little indication of his future status as a musical legend: “As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note” (Wald, Escaping xv). Such anonymity allowed those who first wrote about his music to embrace and propagate the myths that grew around this troubled character and his apparently “supernatural” genius. Johnson’s first press notice, from a pseudonymous John Hammond writing in The New Masses in 1937, spoke of a mysterious character from “deepest Mississippi” who “makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur” (Prial 111). The following year Hammond eulogised the singer in profoundly romantic terms: “It still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way to phonograph records […] Johnson died last week at precisely the moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall” (19). The visceral awe experienced by subsequent generations of Johnson aficionados seems inspired by the remarkable capacity of his recordings to transcend space and time, reaching far beyond their immediate intended audience. “Johnson’s music changed the way the world looked to me,” wrote Greil Marcus, “I could listen to nothing else for months.” The music’s impact originates, at least in part, from the ambiguity of its origins: “I have the feeling, at times, that the reason Johnson has remained so elusive is that no one has been willing to take him at his word” (27-8). Three decades later Bob Dylan expressed similar sentiments over seven detailed pages of Chronicles: From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up … it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition …When he sings about icicles hanging on a tree it gives me the chills, or about milk turning blue … it made me nauseous and I wondered how he did that … It’s hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these. You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience that only he could see, one off in the future. (282-4) Such ready invocation of the supernatural bears witness to the profundity and resilience of the “lost bluesman” as a romantic trope. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch have produced a painstaking genealogy of such a-historical misrepresentation. Early contributors include Rudi Blesch, Samuel B Charters, Frank Driggs’ liner notes for Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers collection, and critic Pete Welding’s prolific 1960s output. Even comparatively recent researchers who ostensibly sought to demystify the legend couldn’t help but embellish the narrative. “It is undeniable that Johnson was fascinated with and probably obsessed by supernatural imagery,” asserted Robert Palmer (127). For Peter Guralnick his best songs articulate “the debt that must be paid for art and the Faustian bargain that Johnson sees at its core” (43). Contemporary scholarship from Pearson and McCulloch, James Banninghof, Charles Ford, and Elijah Wald has scrutinised Johnson’s life and work on a more evidential basis. This process has been likened to assembling a complicated jigsaw where half the pieces are missing: The Mississippi Delta has been practically turned upside down in the search for records of Robert Johnson. So far only marriage application signatures, two photos, a death certificate, a disputed death note, a few scattered school documents and conflicting oral histories of the man exist. Nothing more. (Graves 47) Such material is scrappy and unreliable. Johnson’s marriage licenses and his school records suggest contradictory dates of birth (Freeland 49). His death certificate mistakes his age—we now know that Johnson inadvertently founded another rock myth, the “27 Club” which includes fellow guitarists Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain (Wolkewitz et al., Segalstad and Hunter)—and incorrectly states he was single when he was twice widowed. A second contemporary research strand focuses on the mythmaking process itself. For Eric Rothenbuhler the appeal of Johnson’s recordings lies in his unique “for-the-record” aesthetic, that foreshadowed playing and song writing standards not widely realised until the 1960s. For Patricia Schroeder Johnson’s legend reveals far more about the story-tellers than it does the source—which over time has become “an empty center around which multiple interpretations, assorted viewpoints, and a variety of discourses swirl” (3). Some accounts of Johnson’s life seem entirely coloured by their authors’ cultural preconceptions. The most enduring myth, Johnson’s “crossroads” encounter with the Devil, is commonly redrawn according to the predilections of those telling the tale. That this story really belongs to bluesman Tommy Johnson has been known for over four decades (Evans 22), yet it was mistakenly attributed to Robert as recently as 1999 in French blues magazine Soul Bag (Pearson and McCulloch 92-3). Such errors are, thankfully, becoming less common. While the movie Crossroads (1986) brazenly appropriated Tommy’s story, the young walking bluesman in Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) faithfully proclaims his authentic identity: “Thanks for the lift, sir. My name's Tommy. Tommy Johnson […] I had to be at that crossroads last midnight. Sell my soul to the devil.” Nevertheless the “supernatural” constituent of Johnson’s legend remains an irresistible framing device. It inspired evocative footage in Peter Meyer’s Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? The Life and Music of Robert Johnson (1998). Even the liner notes to the definitive Sony Music Robert Johnson: The Centennial Edition celebrate and reclaim his myth: nothing about this musician is more famous than the word-of-mouth accounts of him selling his soul to the devil at a midnight crossroads in exchange for his singular mastery of blues guitar. It has become fashionable to downplay or dismiss this account nowadays, but the most likely source of the tale is Johnson himself, and the best efforts of scholars to present this artist in ordinary, human terms have done little to cut through the mystique and mystery that surround him. Repackaged versions of Johnson’s recordings became available via Amazon.co.uk and Spotify when they fell out of copyright in the United Kingdom. Predictable titles such as Contracted to the Devil, Hellbound, Me and the Devil Blues, and Up Jumped the Devil along with their distinctive “crossroads” artwork continue to demonstrate the durability of this myth [1]. Ironically, Johnson’s recordings were made during an era when one-off exhibited artworks (such as his individual performances of music) first became reproducible products. Walter Benjamin famously described the impact of this development: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art […] the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. (7) Marybeth Hamilton drew on Benjamin in her exploration of white folklorists’ efforts to document authentic pre-modern blues culture. Such individuals sought to preserve the intensity of the uncorrupted and untutored black voice before its authenticity and uniqueness could be tarnished by widespread mechanical reproduction. Two artefacts central to Johnson’s myth, his photographs and his recorded output, will now be considered in that context. In 1973 researcher Stephen LaVere located two pictures in the possession of his half–sister Carrie Thompson. The first, a cheap “dime store” self portrait taken in the equivalent of a modern photo booth, shows Johnson around a year into his life as a walking bluesman. The second, taken in the Hooks Bros. studio in Beale Street, Memphis, portrays a dapper and smiling musician on the eve of his short career as a Vocalion recording artist [2]. Neither was published for over a decade after their “discovery” due to fears of litigation from a competing researcher. A third photograph remains unpublished, still owned by Johnson’s family: The man has short nappy hair; he is slight, one foot is raised, and he is up on his toes as though stretching for height. There is a sharp crease in his pants, and a handkerchief protrudes from his breast pocket […] His eyes are deep-set, reserved, and his expression forms a half-smile, there seems to be a gentleness about him, his fingers are extraordinarily long and delicate, his head is tilted to one side. (Guralnick 67) Recently a fourth portrait appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in Vanity Fair. Vintage guitar seller Steven Schein discovered a sepia photograph labelled “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B. B. King???” [sic] while browsing Ebay and purchased it for $2,200. Johnson’s son positively identified the image, and a Houston Police Department forensic artist employed face recognition technology to confirm that “all the features are consistent if not identical” (DiGiacomo 2008). The provenance of this photograph remains disputed, however. Johnson’s guitar appears overly distressed for what would at the time be a new model, while his clothes reflect an inappropriate style for the period (Graves). Another contested “Johnson” image found on four seconds of silent film showed a walking bluesman playing outside a small town cinema in Ruleville, Mississippi. It inspired Bob Dylan to wax lyrical in Chronicles: “You can see that really is Robert Johnson, has to be – couldn’t be anyone else. He’s playing with huge, spiderlike hands and they magically move over the strings of his guitar” (287). However it had already been proved that this figure couldn’t be Johnson, because the background movie poster shows a film released three years after the musician’s death. The temptation to wish such items genuine is clearly a difficult one to overcome: “even things that might have been Robert Johnson now leave an afterglow” (Schroeder 154, my italics). Johnson’s recordings, so carefully preserved by Hammond and other researchers, might offer tangible and inviolate primary source material. Yet these also now face a serious challenge: they run too rapidly by a factor of up to 15 per cent (Gibbens; Wilde). Speeding up music allowed early producers to increase a song’s vibrancy and fit longer takes on to their restricted media. By slowing the recording tempo, master discs provided a “mother” print that would cause all subsequent pressings to play unnaturally quickly when reproduced. Robert Johnson worked for half a decade as a walking blues musician without restrictions on the length of his songs before recording with producer Don Law and engineer Vincent Liebler in San Antonio (1936) and Dallas (1937). Longer compositions were reworked for these sessions, re-arranging and edited out verses (Wald, Escaping). It is also conceivable that they were purposefully, or even accidentally, sped up. (The tempo consistency of machines used in early field recordings across the South has often been questioned, as many played too fast or slow (Morris).) Slowed-down versions of Johnson’s songs from contributors such as Angus Blackthorne and Ron Talley now proliferate on YouTube. The debate has fuelled detailed discussion in online blogs, where some contributors to specialist audio technology forums have attempted to decode a faintly detectable background hum using spectrum analysers. If the frequency of the alternating current that powered Law and Liebler’s machine could be established at 50 or 60 Hz it might provide evidence of possible tempo variation. A peak at 51.4 Hz, one contributor argues, suggests “the recordings are 2.8 per cent fast, about half a semitone” (Blischke). Such “augmentation” has yet to be fully explored in academic literature. Graves describes the discussion as “compelling and intriguing” in his endnotes, concluding “there are many pros and cons to the argument and, indeed, many recordings over the years have been speeded up to make them seem livelier” (124). Wald ("Robert Johnson") provides a compelling and detailed counter-thesis on his website, although he does acknowledge inconsistencies in pitch among alternate master takes of some recordings. No-one who actually saw Robert Johnson perform ever called attention to potential discrepancies between the pitch of his natural and recorded voice. David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Robert Lockwood Jr. and Johnny Shines were all interviewed repeatedly by documentarians and researchers, but none ever raised the issue. Conversely Johnson’s former girlfriend Willie Mae Powell was visibly affected by the familiarity in his voice on hearing his recording of the tune Johnson wrote for her, “Love in Vain”, in Chris Hunt’s The Search for Robert Johnson (1991). Clues might also lie in the natural tonality of Johnson’s instrument. Delta bluesmen who shared Johnson’s repertoire and played slide guitar in his style commonly used a tuning of open G (D-G-D-G-B-G). Colloquially known as “Spanish” (Gordon 2002, 38-42) it offers a natural home key of G major for slide guitar. We might therefore expect Johnson’s recordings to revolve around the tonic (G) or its dominant (D) -however almost all of his songs are a full tone higher, in the key of A or its dominant E. (The only exceptions are “They’re Red Hot” and “From Four Till Late” in C, and “Love in Vain” in G.) A pitch increase such as this might be consistent with an increase in the speed of these recordings. Although an alternative explanation might be that Johnson tuned his strings particularly tightly, which would benefit his slide playing but also make fingering notes and chords less comfortable. Yet another is that he used a capo to raise the key of his instrument and was capable of performing difficult lead parts in relatively high fret positions on the neck of an acoustic guitar. This is accepted by Scott Ainslie and Dave Whitehill in their authoritative volume of transcriptions At the Crossroads (11). The photo booth self portrait of Johnson also clearly shows a capo at the second fret—which would indeed raise open G to open A (in concert pitch). The most persuasive reasoning against speed tampering runs parallel to the argument laid out earlier in this piece, previous iterations of the Johnson myth have superimposed their own circumstances and ignored the context and reality of the protagonist’s lived experience. As Wald argues, our assumptions of what we think Johnson ought to sound like have little bearing on what he actually sounded like. It is a compelling point. When Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and other surviving bluesmen were “rediscovered” during the 1960s urban folk revival of North America and Europe they were old men with deep and resonant voices. Johnson’s falsetto vocalisations do not, therefore, accord with the commonly accepted sound of an authentic blues artist. Yet Johnson was in his mid-twenties in 1936 and 1937; a young man heavily influenced by the success of other high pitched male blues singers of his era. people argue that what is better about the sound is that the slower, lower Johnson sounds more like Son House. Now, House was a major influence on Johnson, but by the time Johnson recorded he was not trying to sound like House—an older player who had been unsuccessful on records—but rather like Leroy Carr, Casey Bill Weldon, Kokomo Arnold, Lonnie Johnson, and Peetie Wheatstraw, who were the big blues recording stars in the mid–1930s, and whose vocal styles he imitated on most of his records. (For example, the ooh-well-well falsetto yodel he often used was imitated from Wheatstraw and Weldon.) These singers tended to have higher, smoother voices than House—exactly the sound that Johnson seems to have been going for, and that the House fans dislike. So their whole argument is based on the fact that they prefer the older Delta sound to the mainstream popular blues sound of the 1930s—or, to put it differently, that their tastes are different from Johnson’s own tastes at the moment he was recording. (Wald, "Robert Johnson") Few media can capture an audible moment entirely accurately, and the idea of engineering a faithful reproduction of an original performance is also only one element of the rationale for any recording. Commercial engineers often aim to represent the emotion of a musical moment, rather than its totality. John and Alan Lomax may have worked as documentarians, preserving sound as faithfully as possible for the benefit of future generations on behalf of the Library of Congress. Law and Liebler, however, were producing exciting and profitable commercial products for a financial gain. Paradoxically, then, whatever the “real” Robert Johnson sounded like (deeper voice, no mesmeric falsetto, not such an extraordinarily adept guitar player, never met the Devil … and so on) the mythical figure who “sold his soul at the crossroads” and shipped millions of albums after his death may, on that basis, be equally as authentic as the original. Schroeder draws on Mikhail Bakhtin to comment on such vacant yet hotly contested spaces around the Johnson myth. For Bakhtin, literary texts are ascribed new meanings by consecutive generations as they absorb and respond to them. Every age re–accentuates in its own way the works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re–accentuation [of] ever newer aspects of meaning; their semantic content literally continues to grow, to further create out of itself. (421) In this respect Johnson’s legend is a “classic work”, entirely removed from its historical life, a free floating form re-contextualised and reinterpreted by successive generations in order to make sense of their own cultural predilections (Schroeder 57). As Graves observes, “since Robert Johnson’s death there has seemed to be a mathematical equation of sorts at play: the less truth we have, the more myth we get” (113). The threads connecting his real and mythical identity seem so comprehensively intertwined that only the most assiduous scholars are capable of disentanglement. Johnson’s life and work seem destined to remain augmented and contested for as long as people want to play guitar, and others want to listen to them. Notes[1] Actually the dominant theme of Johnson’s songs is not “the supernatural” it is his inveterate womanising. Almost all Johnson’s lyrics employ creative metaphors to depict troubled relationships. Some even include vivid images of domestic abuse. In “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” a woman threatens him with a gun. In “32–20 Blues” he discusses the most effective calibre of weapon to shoot his partner and “cut her half in two.” In “Me and the Devil Blues” Johnson promises “to beat my woman until I get satisfied”. However in The Lady and Mrs Johnson five-time W. C. Handy award winner Rory Block re-wrote these words to befit her own cultural agenda, inverting the original sentiment as: “I got to love my baby ‘til I get satisfied”.[2] The Gibson L-1 guitar featured in Johnson’s Hooks Bros. portrait briefly became another contested artefact when it appeared in the catalogue of a New York State memorabilia dealership in 2006 with an asking price of $6,000,000. The Australian owner had apparently purchased the instrument forty years earlier under the impression it was bona fide, although photographic comparison technology showed that it couldn’t be genuine and the item was withdrawn. “Had it been real, I would have been able to sell it several times over,” Gary Zimet from MIT Memorabilia told me in an interview for Guitarist Magazine at the time, “a unique item like that will only ever increase in value” (Stewart 2010). References Ainslie, Scott, and Dave Whitehall. Robert Johnson: At the Crossroads – The Authoritative Guitar Transcriptions. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Publishing, 1992. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Banks, Russell. “The Devil and Robert Johnson – Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings.” The New Republic 204.17 (1991): 27-30. Banninghof, James. “Some Ramblings on Robert Johnson’s Mind: Critical Analysis and Aesthetic in Delta Blues.” American Music 15/2 (1997): 137-158. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin, 2008. Blackthorne, Angus. “Robert Johnson Slowed Down.” YouTube.com 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/user/ANGUSBLACKTHORN?feature=watch›. Blesh, Rudi. Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1946. Blischke, Michael. “Slowing Down Robert Johnson.” The Straight Dope 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=461601›. Block, Rory. The Lady and Mrs Johnson. Rykodisc 10872, 2006. Charters, Samuel. The Country Blues. New York: De Capo Press, 1959. Collins UK. Collins English Dictionary. Glasgow: Harper Collins Publishers, 2010. DiGiacomo, Frank. “A Disputed Robert Johnson Photo Gets the C.S.I. Treatment.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2008/10/a-disputed-robert-johnson-photo-gets-the-csi-treatment›. DiGiacomo, Frank. “Portrait of a Phantom: Searching for Robert Johnson.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/11/johnson200811›. Dylan, Bob. Chronicles Vol 1. London: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Evans, David. Tommy Johnson. London: November Books, 1971. Ford, Charles. “Robert Johnson’s Rhythms.” Popular Music 17.1 (1998): 71-93. Freeland, Tom. “Robert Johnson: Some Witnesses to a Short Life.” Living Blues 150 (2000): 43-49. Gibbens, John. “Steady Rollin’ Man: A Revolutionary Critique of Robert Johnson.” Touched 2004. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.touched.co.uk/press/rjnote.html›. Gioia, Ted. Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionised American Music. London: W. W. Norton & Co, 2008. Gioia, Ted. "Robert Johnson: A Century, and Beyond." Robert Johnson: The Centennial Collection. Sony Music 88697859072, 2011. Gordon, Robert. Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters. London: Pimlico Books, 2002. Graves, Tom. Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson. Spokane: Demers Books, 2008. Guralnick, Peter. Searching for Robert Johnson: The Life and Legend of the "King of the Delta Blues Singers". London: Plume, 1998. Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. Hammond, John. From Spirituals to Swing (Dedicated to Bessie Smith). New York: The New Masses, 1938. Johnson, Robert. “Hellbound.” Amazon.co.uk 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hellbound/dp/B0063S8Y4C/ref=sr_1_cc_2?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376605065&sr=1-2-catcorr&keywords=robert+johnson+hellbound›. ———. “Contracted to the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2002. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Contracted-The-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00006F1L4/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376830351&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Contracted+to+The+Devil›. ———. King of the Delta Blues Singers. Columbia Records CL1654, 1961. ———. “Me and the Devil Blues.” Amazon.co.uk 2003. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Me-Devil-Blues-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00008SH7O/ref=sr_1_16?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604807&sr=1-16&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “The High Price of Soul.” Amazon.co.uk 2007. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/High-Price-Soul-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000LC582C/ref=sr_1_39?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604863&sr=1-39&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “Up Jumped the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2005. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Up-Jumped-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000B57SL8/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376829917&sr=1-2&keywords=Up+Jumped+The+Devil›. Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. London: Plume, 1997. Morris, Christopher. “Phonograph Blues: Robert Johnson Mastered at Wrong Speed?” Variety 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.varietysoundcheck.com/2010/05/phonograph-blues-robert-johnson-mastered-at-wrong-speed.html›. Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? DVD. Universal Pictures, 2000. Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago’s South Side to the World. London: Penguin Books, 1981. Pearson, Barry Lee, and Bill McCulloch. Robert Johnson: Lost and Found. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Prial, Dunstan. The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “For–the–Record Aesthetics and Robert Johnson’s Blues Style as a Product of Recorded Culture.” Popular Music 26.1 (2007): 65-81. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “Myth and Collective Memory in the Case of Robert Johnson.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24.3 (2007): 189-205. Schroeder, Patricia. Robert Johnson, Mythmaking and Contemporary American Culture (Music in American Life). Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Segalstad, Eric, and Josh Hunter. The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock and Roll. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2009. Stewart, Jon. “Rock Climbing: Jon Stewart Concludes His Investigation of the Myths behind Robert Johnson.” Guitarist Magazine 327 (2010): 34. The Search for Robert Johnson. DVD. Sony Pictures, 1991. Talley, Ron. “Robert Johnson, 'Sweet Home Chicago', as It REALLY Sounded...” YouTube.com 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCHod3_yEWQ›. Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. London: HarperCollins, 2005. ———. The Robert Johnson Speed Recording Controversy. Elijah Wald — Writer, Musician 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.elijahwald.com/johnsonspeed.html›. Wilde, John . “Robert Johnson Revelation Tells Us to Put the Brakes on the Blues: We've Been Listening to the Immortal 'King of the Delta Blues' at the Wrong Speed, But Now We Can Hear Him as He Intended.” The Guardian 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/may/27/robert-johnson-blues›. Wolkewitz, M., A. Allignol, N. Graves, and A.G. Barnett. “Is 27 Really a Dangerous Age for Famous Musicians? Retrospective Cohort Study.” British Medical Journal 343 (2011): d7799. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d7799›.

Common practice in special schools is to sing rather than speak to children with Profound and Multiple Learning Difficulties (PMLD), in order to initiate and maintain interactions; however, there is little formal evidence to support this practice. This study explored the extent to which singing is effective with this ‘hard to reach’ cohort. Five pupils participated, who had PMLD and low social tolerance. These individuals do not like to be touched, talked to or to be in close proximity with other people. This research set out to explore the effectiveness of different sorts of interactive approaches, notably singing or speaking, as a starting point for building an evidence base to underpin practice. The study used a single subject research methodology, with an adult as a communication partner who initiated interactions, and responded to the behavioural cues of the child. Interactions were video recorded. A system to code participants’ responses to different interactions was developed, based on detailed descriptions of each individual’s behaviour on three major dimensions: Attention Focus, Social Proximity, and Facial Expression. Pupils’ vocalisations and coordinated actions were also recorded. Events were presented graphically; statistical analyses explored the effectiveness of different interaction approaches; sessions were described qualitatively. The research revealed consistent communicative behaviours (and a means to identify these) in individuals with PMLD and poor social tolerance. Participants were able to express their internal states through consistent patterns in their eye gaze, social proximity, facial expression, and vocal behaviours. The communication partner played a critical role in structuring and directing the interactions; interactions were shaped and influenced by both environment and context. Simple behavioural descriptors are insensitive to context. The research showed that, used on their own, they can lead to misinterpretations of events, and so must be complemented by qualitative descriptions. Nevertheless, the microanalysis of behaviours revealed ‘moments of wonder’ which overturned expectations about who was leading interactions; none of the participants was thought (by staff) to be capable of the secondary intersubjectivity and attention directing behaviours that were documented. There were individual differences in response to singing: however, overall, singing was associated with more positive facial expressions (smiles), higher levels of social tolerance (to touch and proximity), and improved communicative responses (eye contact, vocalisations, and coordinated actions). This provides evidence to support current practices of singing to children with PMLD. This thesis modelled a strategy for collating a profile of communicative behaviours. A practical outcome of the research was that details of the communicative behaviours of participants were circulated via a ‘communication passport’ for each participant, and shared with parents and carers. The use of song became a more explicit part of the daily routine and a planned element in lessons. Findings are related to research on mother-infant communication and infant development, and on the role of music in emotional regulation, and the psychology of music. Directions for future research are discussed.

Thesis (D.M.A.)--Conservatory of Music and Dance. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2008.
A three movement work for orchestra and bass-baritone soloist using texts from three Shakespeare plays: Hamlet, Titus Andronicus and King Lear. "A dissertation in music composition." Advisor: James Mobberley. Typescript. Vita. Title from "catalog record" of the print edition Description based on contents viewed Aug. 07, 2009. Online version of the print edition.

In the Baroque period, the baritone voice was not yet well-defined, but many composers wrote vocal pieces with a range appropriate for the modern baritone voice. Composers used the general categories of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass for solo voice in their compositions. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) was no different from other Baroque composers in writing solo works to be performed by one of the four main voice types. The various ranges and tessituras of J. S. Bach's vocal works for bass solo voice are not limited to being sung by low basses, but may also be sung by more medium ranged baritones. The purpose of this research is to guide collegiate voice teachers and their baritone students in selecting appropriate repertoire from the works of Bach on the basis of each students' level of development and to categorize four groups of bass solos by Bach for collegiate baritone students: beginning level for freshmen, intermediate level for sophomores, advanced level for juniors and seniors, and pre-professional level for seniors and graduate students. This research was prepared in conjunction with a DMA lecture-recital of eight bass solos for collegiate baritone voice, selected from the study; two vocal works for each proficiency level.

D.M.A. final project--Department of Music, Stanford University, 2002.
For solo violin (1st mvmt.), 12 singers with 4-channel tape (2nd mvmt.), and solo bass with live electronics (3rd mvmt.). Words also printed as texts in pref. Includes performance notes and abstract. Sound disc contains 2-channel tape accompaniment for 2nd mvmt.

Thesis (M.M.)--Bowling Green State University, 2007.
Document formatted into pages; contains 1 score (36 p.) For soprano and chamber orchestra (flute, bassoon, viola, piano, harp and percussion) Includes bibliographical references.

Title from accompanying document.
A.M. Forbes, soprano ; J. Anschutz, piano, organ ; K. Irwin, oboe ; D. Bakke, T. McClure, violins ; E. Takehana, viola ; V. Pugh, violoncello ; J. Langenkamp, tenor ; S. Rushing, narrator.
Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Opus 25 is a collection of compositions which I created between September 1995 and April 1997. Instrumentation varies; there are works for choirs, chamber ensembles, solo voice, solo harp, solo piano, and orchestra. All the works included in this collection have been performed at some point during this same period, and recordings of these performances can be found on the accompanying cassette.

Each composition in the following document has resulted from my desire to explore problems and possibilities that are to be found in the various ensembles and/or techniques chosen. For each new composition a particular issue or set of issues was established at the outset and dealt with from different angles at all stages of the works' creation. [1] Chansons Precieux: In these three songs I was interested in reducing my material choices to a minimum and also in creating a small fragment for the text which could be exploded into syllabic utterances. These were, over the course of the three songs, utilized in small groups. Only in the final song is the entire text revealed. [2] Across The Gorge Is The Bridge: Synthesized and concrete sounds constitute the palette of this tape piece. In processing the sounds I selected evolutionary characteristics with the intention of exploiting these characteristics in a particular manner - the notes in the piece are of extremely long duration (c. 12') and so the evolution takes place at a very slow pace. In a sense time is slowed down in the work, almost to the point of absolute stasis. [3] Triangle: Here I examined the concept of an imagined triangular pathway in which each intersection of two lines consisted of the same object viewed in a different way. The lines themselves are manipulations of the object. The original inspiration for this piece came from reading about Stonehenge and other such prehistoric laboratories designed as viewing points for the sun and moon and their risings and settings at key times of the year. [4] Anya Manas: A small item, in this case a chord, is never presented literally, but begins its life in this piece by already having been bent, altered, linearized and otherwise mutilated. Eventually the chord has completely lost its own sense of its own reality. "Anya Manas" is a Sanskrit saying that refers to a state of mind in which confusion of identity prevails. [5] Wo Weilest Du?: This work involved the desire to eliminate such traditional concepts as motivic development, regular phrasing and clear form. Sound objects appear, vanish and may or may not return later. There is no formal goal or climax. The piece simply begins and ends where it does. The title is German and means where are you waiting? It comes from Wagner's Tristan und lsolde.

America in 1860 is enjoying a spirited musical age, and the men who march off to war take their music with them: fiddles banjos, guitars, mouth harps, strong voices. The Confederacy no longer recognizes US. Copyright, so best-selling songs like “Old Folks at Home” by Stephen Foster are pirated by presses in Charleston and New Orleans. “Dixie’s Land,” written by Daniel Decatur Emmett based on a tune he heard played by two African American brothers (Ben and Lew Snowden) becomes the anthem of the Confederacy. Music is played to soothe the grief of loved ones at home. Sacred music enlivens camp meetings. The slave cabins on the line reverberate with their own spirituals about liberation from bondage, and the USCT are remarkable for their singing. The best-selling song of all time is “When This Cruel War Is Over,” (a.k.a. “Weeping Sad and Lonely”). Its fatalistic lyrics are so demoralizing that many commanders in both armies ban it.

This chapter assesses Thomas Hyde’s Three Larkin Songs (2003). These three short, contrasting songs to richly-layered Philip Larkin texts constitute a cycle that is a boon for young singers seeking a piece of modest demands and unobtrusive craftsmanship which lies easily in the voice. A touching slow movement is framed by two fast-moving numbers, distinct in character. Even a baritone should not be taxed by the tessitura—the range is highly practical for all except basses and altos. Obligingly, the composer even offers to transpose the songs to suit individual singers. This is a return to an earlier practice, when vocal sheet music was issued in different keys: Low, Medium, or High. Piano parts, economically structured and relatively undemanding, are tailored sensitively to the voice part in perfect balance.

This chapter looks at French composer Yves-Marie Pasquet’s Music (2013). This is an undeniably challenging but rewarding vehicle for a soprano and pianist of exceptional ability: three songs of exhilarating virtuosity written in an elegantly disciplined idiom which could be termed ‘sensuous serialism’. Pasquet’s ear for vocal timbre and colour is unerring: he continually exploits the voice at its radiant best and shows a deep understanding of the physical aspect of singing. The pianist also will have a field day with a cornucopia of luscious harmonies, dynamic percussive effects, and exuberant passagework. A bright, pearly vocal quality must be found, in order to weave the highly decorative lines with agility and grace, even in pianissimo. Swinging over wide intervals keeps the voice pliable and relaxed. This means that the lower tessitura of the last song should cause no problems. The singer will be ‘sung in’ but not ‘sung out’, and low notes will still feel comfortably centred.

This chapter discusses American composer Katherine Saxon’s Sea Fever (2008). In this piece, the musical style is straightforward, uncluttered, and accessible, with elements of neoclassicism, and the four songs are well contrasted. The second has space-time notation, but the others are written conventionally, with key and time signatures. The relationship between voice and piano is well gauged, but there may be a few balance problem for lighter voices, especially when lines are low-lying. Verbal clarity is a crucial requirement. Words and music teem with watery images, and the sonic palette of John Masefield’s resonant poetry, full of alliteration and onomatopoeia, is a gift for composers, to which Saxon responds with empathy and panache. Some very fast articulation is called for, especially in the last song. The composer’s succinct instructions for mood and character are always pertinent.

The development of information technology is particularly noticeable in the methods and techniques of data acquisition, high-performance computing, and bandwidth frequency. According to a newly observed phenomenon, called a storage low (Fayyad & Uthurusamy, 2002), the capacity of digital data storage is doubled every 9 months with respect to the price. Data can be stored in many forms of digital media, for example, still images taken by a digital camera, MP3 songs, or MPEG videos from desktops, cell phones, or video cameras. Such data exceeds the total cumulative handwriting and printing during all of recorded human history (Fayyad, 2001). According to current analysis carried out by IBM Almaden Research (Swierzowicz, 2002), data volumes are growing at different speeds. The fastest one is Internet-resource growth: It will achieve the digital online threshold of exabytes within a few years (Liautaud, 2001). In these fast-growing volumes of data environments, restrictions are connected with a human’s low data-complexity and dimensionality analysis. Investigations on combining different media data, multimedia, into one application have begun as early as the 1960s, when text and images were combined in a document. During the research and development process, audio, video, and animation were synchronized using a time line to specify when they should be played (Rowe & Jain, 2004). Since the middle 1990s, the problems of multimedia data capture, storage, transmission, and presentation have extensively been investigated. Over the past few years, research on multimedia standards (e.g., MPEG-4, X3D, MPEG-7) has continued to grow. These standards are adapted to represent very complex multimedia data sets; can transparently handle sound, images, videos, and 3-D (three-dimensional) objects combined with events, synchronization, and scripting languages; and can describe the content of any multimedia object. Different algorithms need to be used in multimedia distribution and multimedia database applications. An example is an image database that stores pictures of birds and a sound database that stores recordings of birds (Kossmann, 2000). The distributed query that asks for “top ten different kinds of birds that have black feathers and a high voice” is described there by Kossmann (2000, p.436).