Origins and form
Persona
Sophia is a musicologist and a practising musician
Goal
Sophia is interested in understanding how the composer was influenced, e.g. by which other composers; how the music ‘works’; and why we react to the music in the way we do. She is interested in parallels between music and language.
Scenario
Current scenario: Sophia is making a detailed analysis of the music itself, e.g. looking at notes in a motif and analysing how the motif changes in the course of the music. This work involves very painstaking manual analysis, in part because the material is not digitized. She is also interested in performance practice, i.e. how the music was played and what conventions were used.
Future scenario: Sophia is interested in understanding the musical compositions of Frescobaldi, how they varied, relations between the music and the vocabulary, and identify similarities and differences to his contemporaries. Sophia is analysing a Frescobaldi composition and notices a particular motif that accompanies a reference to birdsong. She decides to see where else this motif can be found in the compositions of Frescobaldi, the compositions of his contemporaries and also investigate the language accompanying the motif. Sophia specifies a motif as a sequence of notes with a particular pitch and rhythm. She can search for precise matches of this motif across the catalogue. She can manipulate the precision level of the motif and colour code compositions depending on extent to which they match (e.g. a shade of blue is used to flag compositions containing a motif matching 3 of the 4 notes). Sophia can also see summaries of the words associated with the motif. Sophia can use the visualisation to see relationships to other composers in terms of the use of this motif and its variations. She also notices that the motif is sometimes associated with certain words or themes. The system can automatically provide Sophia with statistical analyses as to how the motif and its variations differ across composers and across compositions containing certain vocabulary. Sophia can save and annotate the result to use in her research.
Competency questions
CQ1. What parallels are there between the composition of music and the use of language, e.g. in the use of rhetorical delivery?
- What rhetorical strategies are used in a piece of music?
CQ2. Why was a piece of music written to be evocative of something, e.g. the call of a cuckoo?
- What does music evoke?
CQ3. What different motifs exist in a piece of music?
CQ4. What relationships exist in a multi-line piece of music, i.e. over time and between the lines?
CQ5. In early written music, what is left of the preceding unwritten tradition?
- What are the sources the musician used?
- What sources, musicians, traditions influenced the musician?
CQ6. How does the corpus of a composer compare with that of other composers, particularly those writing at the same time?
- What are the similarities? motifs, harmony, texts
CQ7. Can we use a statistical comparison, or a particular ‘thumbprint’ in the music, to identify the composer of a piece of music?
CQ8. When a musical structure, e.g. a motif, is found in two composers, is one copied from the other, or do they come out of a previous tradition?
Resources
Sophia works with musical scores, written in a notation which is not the same as the modern notation. She has now translated some of the music to modern notation, using Dorico; this enables her to hear the music.
Sophia’s work could be helped by:
- digitalisation of her source material;
- digital analysis techniques, e.g. statistical analysis, waveform analysis and visualization;
- manuscript OCR.