Institute for Composition and Electro-acoustics

Igor Sposobin (Игорь Владимирович Способин, 1900-1954) was one of the most influential music theorists of the Soviet Russia. His scientific and pedagogical works primarily focus on musical harmony and forms. His textbooks have been translated into many languages and are used with certain adjustments as primary teaching tools in Eastern Europe and, above all, in China even today. This article will attempt to explain why Sposobin's harmony methodology has had so much success. Apart from the relations between politics and culture, which are apparent, we set out to explore whether there are other underlying reasons for the success of Sposobin's theories. The purpose of simplifying some of the previous theories, as well as the reasons for introducing the new ones shall be investigated.

Historical sources recount an anecdote about a class on organ improvisation taught by the already renowned composer and organist César Franck (1822 – 1890) and attended by young Claude
Debussy (1862 – 1918) in the 1880s. According to this testimony, Franck persistently kept telling his young, self-assured student to “Modulate! Modulate! Modulate!’ (‘Modulez! Modulez! Modulez!’); Debussy stubbornly refused to do so, asking his teacher why he wanted him to do that (‘Mais pourquoui voulez-vous que je module’) and professing that he felt very comfortable in the starting tone (‘je me trouve très bien dans ce ton-là’).
Of course, the representatives of two different generations had misunderstood each other, but the nature of their misunderstanding remains unclear: was it a matter of style and esthetics or merely terminology?
The term modulation is today unambiguously identified with the process of switching from one key to another. However, in the 19th-century French theoretical literature (as well as in European literature in general), the term experienced a long evolution: in line with older discussions in the period of Enlightenment, it was first seen as a much wider concept – a way of tonal manifestation (e.g. in the works of François-Joseph Fétis and Jérôme-Joseph de Momigny) until it later began to acquire its modern paradigmatic features, for example in Anton Reicha’s Course in Musical Composition (Cours de composition musicale).
However, even after modulation became synonymous with changing the tonal center, some younger theorists still insisted that the term could be used in a wider sense (Napoléon Henri Reber’s Treatise on Harmony/Traité d’harmonie).
This paper aims to present the paradigmatic evolution of the term modulation and show that different modern categorizations of tonal changes have roots in its earlier meanings. Hence, one of its aims is to attempt to infer if the abovementioned misunderstanding reflected an esthetic or merely a theoretical and terminological dissension between a composer educated in the first half of the 19th century and his several decades’ younger colleague.

In the history of music, compositions now seen as masterpieces were often given a harsh reception by both professional critics and the general public upon their first performance. This was also the case with the Symphony in D minor by César Franck (1822-1890). The premiere was very poorly received, and was criticized by Franck’s contemporaries and critics for (among other things) being too ‘German.’ The attacks were primarily aimed at the question of orchestration and instrumentation, as well as claims that the piece supposedly had a ‘hidden program’ – another possible element of the German tradition of the 19th century, although Franck strongly denied this accusation.
Anti-German feelings were on the rise in France after the country’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and this antagonism soon found its way into the cultural scene. As a result, in 1871 Société Nationale de Musique was founded in Paris with the aim of preserving the French music tradition. However, merely fifteen years later, the Société was split into two factions. The first faction, led by Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921), continued to insist on the 'purity' of French music. The other faction, led by Franck and his students, championed foreign (primarily German) influence. Although it was Franck's faction that eventually emerged victorious from this duel (with the group of Saint-Saëns leaving the Société), the circles of French music academia remained deeply divided and mostly continued to harbor chauvinistic inclinations. It was in this climate that Franck decided to compose his symphony in the late 1880s. Upon its completion in late 1888, the symphony could not be performed by any relevant institutions due to opposition in leading musical circles, and the composer had no choice but to have its premiere performed by the orchestra of Conservatoire de Paris, the college where he taught.
Of course, 130 years later, Franck’s Symphony in D-minor is seen as one of the most important works of this genre in both France and the Romantic era. However, in view of the historical information presented above, this analysis will attempt to explain if the accusations against its composer had been justified – in other words, if a work with marked German characteristics had really been written in France in the era of national purism.

The works of the contemporary harmonic theorists and analysts intriguingly lack the consensus about when the traditional tonality broke down, or at least, when it began to dissolve. According to one group of researchers, the dissolution happened as early as in the mid-19th century, when “any chord could follow any other chord”.
The claims that the tonality virtually ceased to exist at the moment when the contemporaries still did not have a clear definition of this term seem very bold. They, however, did not appear without a reason. The traditional definitions of tonality (that explain it as a hierarchy of the pitches) were called into question in the music of the second half of the 19th century, which (according to many sources) undoubtedly had its influence on the listeners’ perception.
Additionally, the theories of the diffusion of tonality are not recent, and they were discussed by numerous researchers in the mid-19th century (with François-Joseph Fétis being among the most important ones).
César Franck (1822-1890) is one of the composers in whose oeuvre the diversity of this term is quite obvious. One of the main characteristics of his mature works is the deliberate substitution of the traditional tonality with the new system, in many instances within the same composition.
Using different analytical methods on Franck`s music, in this paper we will try to offer an explanation for the reason why the breakdown of tonality on the turn of the centuries was perceived as something shocking, despite its being a decades-long evolutionary process.

Musicians strive many years in order to connect their neural pathways to a vibrating segment of string, wood, metal or air. In many ways, learning how to play a musical instrument is dictated by the physical idiosyncrasies of the instrument design. A good instrumentalist typically ...

ABSTRACT For centuries, traditional musical instruments have been built to control specific types of sound production processes according to the same principles: their control and sound generation parts are typically tightly integrated with a solid physical interface. Current-day digital counterparts lack such requirement of physicality in their control, and very few last more than a couple of years. In this paper, we argue that the flexibility of computer music instrument designs has inhibited the development of dedicated control structures, as well as the training of musicians with associated motor skills. As a candidate solution to this problem we present SensOrg, first in a class of Cyberinstruments that we envision to be a more generic and hopefully long-lasting class of control structures for digital instruments. SensOrg is a hand controlled Cyberinstrument, sculpted from a modular assembly of input/output devices and musical software that are mapped and arranged according to essential functional characteristics of the Human-Instrument system. We discuss how the cognitive ergonomics of non-verbal performance and symbolic compositional tasks influenced the design of our hardware interface. We also sketch the design of our underlying software framework, IGMA (Interactive Gesture Mapping), which provides interactive musical functionality for improvisation, composition and performance alike.

ABSTRACT We present SensOrg, a computer music instrument designed as a modular assembly of input/output devices and musical software, mapped and arranged according to functional characteristics of the musician-instrument system. Using tangible bits and malleable atoms, we externally represented the musical software functionality in a physical interface which is freezable yet totally flexible. KEYWORDS Tangible Bits, Malleable Atoms, Affective Computing, Musical Instrument Design, Computer Music. INTRODUCTION Computer music instruments are musical instruments in which a computer is used to generate musical audio, on the basis of electronic input signals provided by a human performer. Unlike traditional musical instruments, computer music instruments are not governed by the real-world physics of the sound generation process. Designers of computer music instruments therefore enjoy the freedom to uncouple the physical input from the physical output. Such malleability of input devices and sound...

ABSTRACT In this paper, we present the SensOrg, a musical Cyberinstrument designed as a modular assembly of input/output devices and musical software, mapped and arranged according to functional characteristics of the Man-Instrument system. We discuss how the cognitive ergonomics of non-verbal and symbolic task modalities influenced the design of our hardware interface for asynchronous as well as synchronous task situations. Using malleable atoms and tangible bits, we externally represented the musical functionality in a physical interface which is totally flexible yet completely freezable. INTRODUCTION Musicians strive many years in order to connect their neural pathways to a vibrating segment of string, wood, metal or air. In many ways, learning how to play a musical instrument is dictated by the physical idiosyncrasies of the instrument design. A good instrumentalist typically needs to start almost from scratch when trying to play a new instrument. Even when musicians master their instrume...