Ignatius Sancho is largely known for a collection of his letters that were published by his friend after his death. Less well known is the fact that he holds the distinction of being the first published Black composer in Britain known to historians. In contrast to most of his letters, Sancho chose to write and publish at least one book of vocal music and four books of instrumental music over a period of thirteen years. In exploring the meanings of music in Sancho’s life through both production and consumption, this chapter argues that no one aspect of Sancho’s identity can be understood apart from his work in music. Music for Sancho was many things, including a personal avocation, a means of profit, and a vehicle for communicating his political opinions and honoring his friends and family. First and foremost, however, it was a sociable practice and a communal experience.

This chapter is concerned with Pindar’s poems as performance events, compounds of words, vocal melody, and instrumental music. My central claim is that such performances, as well as being events that are listened to, direct and refashion the act of listening. Following an overview of Pindar’s references to music, with which he positions himself as a creative participant in music’s still-developing history, I elaborate this claim in readings of Nemean 4, fr. 152, and Paean 8. In each of these texts, Pindar’s combinations of unusual diction, intertextuality, rhythmical framing, and other aspects of poetic form enable his audiences to listen to words and their meanings anew, and thereby to apprehend musical sound taking on fresh significance.

The timing of acoustic events in relation to different levels of structure building is a fundamental task in both language and music. While in music the timing of sounds and their relation to an abstract metrical grid is often used to create aesthetic effects, timing relations in language are commonly grammaticalized for the conventional construction of different levels of meaning, leaving only a narrow margin for rhythmic preferences of other sorts. Our chapter reviews functions of timing, and, specifically, metrical structure, in both music and language, suggests a unified form of representation inspired by autosegmental-metrical phonology and thereby directs the attention to principles of time-related structure building that are relevant for both communicative sound systems.

Music, like language, relies on listeners’ ability to extract information as it unfolds in time. One key difference between music and language is the strong rhythmic regularities of music relative to language. Despite a wealth of literature describing the rhythms of song as regular and the rhythms of speech as irregular, the acoustic features and neural processing of rhythmic regularity in song and (lack thereof) in speech are poorly understood. This chapter examines acoustic, behavioral, and neural indices of rhythmic regularity in speech and song. Our goal is to review which features induce rhythmic regularity and examine how regularity impacts attention, memory, and comprehension. This work has the potential to inform a wide range of areas, including clinical interventions for speech and reading, best practices for teaching and learning in the classroom, and how attention is captured in real-world scenarios.

Music rhythm and speech rhythm share acoustic, temporal and syntactic similarities, and neuroscience research has shown that similar areas and networks in the brain are recruited to process both types of signals. Rhythm is a core predictive element for both music and speech, allowing for facilitated processing of upcoming, predicted elements. The combined study of music and speech rhythm processing can be particularly insightful, considering the stronger regularity and predictability of musical rhythm. Although speech rhythm is less regular, it still contains regularities, notably at syllabic and prosodic levels. In this chapter, we outline different research lines investigating connections between music and speech rhythm processing, including the recently proposed processing rhythm in speech and music framework, as well as music rhythm interventions and stimulations that aim to improve speech signal processing both in the short term and the long term. Implications for developmental language disorders and future research perspectives are outlined.

In this chapter it will be focused on the topic about why and how Béla Bartók’s music was an important compositional point of reference for Elizabeth Maconchy, especially for her string quartets. The reception of Bartók’s music signalled her interest in the ‘ultra modern’ music of her time, something which was hardly the norm. Maconchy absorbed Bartók’s tendency towards objectivity and constructivism (in the sense of a constructive compositional practice consisting of short and concise elements), which he developed around 1926, when he explicitly distanced himself from the conventions, style and diction of nineteenth-century music, claiming that his music became more simple and more contrapuntal. Maconchy followed exactly this path, as, especially in her string quartets, she developed the monothematic technique, imitation and variation, and the contrapuntal combination of linear parts – similar to a conversation – in which four voices repeatedly recite almost the same arguments.

Elizabeth Maconchy’s family moved to Dublin in 1917. The five years in which they remained in Ireland coincided with a period of remarkable change in the country: the aftermath of the Easter Rising (1916), the War of Independence (1919–21) and the Irish Civil War (1922–23). Above all, it saw Ireland gain its independence from the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’ with the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922. This chapter outlines the trajectory of the revolutionary years in their broad historical and political context. It considers the Irish revolution against the wider background of the Gaelic Revival, with which it was intricately bound, while also considering musical culture in Dublin at that time.

The book opens with an overview of the tensions that increasingly define hip-hop’s role in contemporary culture, namely the way that the music continually shifts between complicity and critique in its assessment of capitalism and racialized inequality. This ambivalence is related back to the currents of pleasure and pain that run through the work of such rappers as Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion, and to the usage of hip-hop in a recent film soundtrack. After briefly discussing the editor’s own position in relation to the culture, the introduction moves on to an overview of the collection’s general aims. These include the attempt to reflect both the diverse styles and regions of contemporary hip-hop, and the political commitments of the contributors. A short discussion of editorial conventions follows, as well as an account of the book’s approach to hate speech. The section ends with a brief overview of each of the nineteen chapters.

Although most salonnières of the eighteenth century were members of the elite European classes, this was not always the case. In some instances, professional artists became salon hostesses themselves. This chapter discusses one such story – that of Marie-Emanuelle Bayon (1746–1825), a professional composer and keyboardist who went from being a salon habituée and participant to assuming the role of hostess herself. While the surviving evidence about Bayon’s life and career is scant, it seems that Bayon may have used the institution of the salon as part of a strategy to navigate the complexities of being a woman artist. On the one hand, she needed to make a living through her artistry, and for this, she attained the patronage of her wealthy contemporaries, as well as taking up opportunities for teaching and publication. On the other, she needed to balance displays of her creativity and talent with the strictures that were increasingly placed on women around public performance and participation in the public sphere. Thus, even as some women sought opportunities to perform at venues such as the Concert Spirituel, there is no record that Bayon ever performed publicly. This chapter suggests that this may have been a deliberate decision to avoid exposing herself to the scrutiny and criticism that sometimes resulted from such public activities. She appears to have used the institution of the salon, first as habituée and later as salonnière, to navigate these social constraints.

According to Dazai Shundai, ritual and music are essential elements of the government of the sages. They complement each other, with ritual drawing strict distinctions of status and establishing ethical standards for different types of human relationships, while music functions as a gentle force for bringing people together in harmony. Compared with other methods of governing, the superiority of ritual and music lies in their ability to enter people on a deep level and transform their customs, creating long-lasting stability without the need to rely solely on explicit laws. In order for ritual and music to work properly, though, they must be established by rulers who look back to the traditions of the ancient Chinese sage kings. In earlier times, Japan learned such ritual and music from China and used these to govern, but in recent times, vulgar ritual and music have arisen from among the common people, with detrimental effects for Japanese society. To remedy this situation, vulgar ritual and music need to be suppressed and replaced with proper ritual and music.

Describes Meade’s family background and education at preparatory and public schools.

This chapter is concerned with the decline of Greek and Roman poetry and the rise of European culture in the Middle Ages. The decisive difference between the ancients and the moderns concerns poetry in the widest sense, that is, the culture of beauty. A number of fragments address this difference. The significance of Christian hymns and the Psalms for the European nations is discussed, with particular attention to national traditions in music, language, and the sciences. A distinction is made between the way the northern and southern European traditions use tone and alliteration. The culture of Arabic is seen as a strong influence on the culture of medieval Europe, passing through Spain by way of the troubadours. The difficulties in defining national character or national poetry are discussed, and the value of medieval poetic arts in Europe is described as an awakening of independent thinking and unencumbered judgement. This makes the medieval poetic arts of Europe a gay science, an expansion of the fields of science, and a general unification of the nations.

Music is associated with reduced pain, anxiety, and sedative requirements in ICU patients. Slow-tempo music (60 to 80 beats per minute) in particular has been associated with a neuromodulatory effect. The minimum duration of music listening associated with decreased pain may be as brief as 20 to 30 minutes, resulting in a nearly 2-point decrease in self-reported pain scores (on a 0-10 scale). Longer duration of music listening (i.e., more than 45 minutes) is associated with improved sleep quality and less depressive symptoms after critical illness. Through its interaction with various cortical areas, music may also offer beneficial effects on cognition. Neurocognitive processing of music invokes brain centers related to emotion, perception, cognition, and the autonomic nervous system. In EEG and functional MRI studies, music increased communication between the functional neural networks typically disrupted in delirium and dementia. Whether music listening in ICU patients with delirium can improve long-term cognitive function is not clearly understood but is being evaluated in randomized controlled trials. Ongoing clinical and scientific work will lay the groundwork to identify the neuroprotective mechanisms by which music may reduce the risk of ICU delirium and long-term cognitive impairments.

Chapter 22 examines music in more detail, considered as a theoretical science dealing with the relations (or proportions) between numbers. The ontological status of the objects studied in theoretical music (‘harmonics’) is described and the primary proportions (or intervals), identified as concords, are presented. The importance of music as providing models for subordinate sciences, in particular ethics and physics, is sketched.