wim

About wvdm

Wim is a cultural musicologist. What? Yes, a CULTURAL musicologist! What do musicologists do anyway? Frankly no idea, I'm retired and I do what I want. When I was young I did what my mother told me to. The rest is vague. And what is culture? Everything we learned somehow. More: Press MOI in the top menu.

On (de-)polarisation

and if today its poetry is white it is very black at heart Samba da Benção, Baden Powell e Vinícius de Moraes Recent events, leading to the impressive Black Lives Matter movement, even got our prime minister to reflect on racism in the Netherlands. Quite something, because he is proud of not having a vision and restricting himself to function as CEO of Netherlands Inc. One had the feeling that something was really happening finally. But as soon as Zwarte Piet (the blackface attendant of Saint Nicholas) came into the [...]

On (de-)polarisation2020-06-23T09:05:34+02:00

La Musique Barbare

Hell is other people's music  Paraphrasing Kristeva – the barbarian is the subject whose music is so unknown to us that it doesn’t even appear to be music. It sounds like “noise”.  The question of cross- or transcultural listening to music is hopelessly confused. Moreover, we can extend this problem to cross-subcultural listening and also historical listening. When the journalist Momus noted:  ‘Hell,’ said Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘is other people’. I'd qualify that slightly. People are fine; it's their music that's hell”, he was talking about a subcultural issue: “When I [...]

La Musique Barbare2020-06-22T08:43:27+02:00

What you hear isn’t what you see…

WHAT YOU HEAR ISN’T WHAT YOU SEE: THE REPRESENTATION AND COGNITION OF FAST MOVEMENTS IN HINDUSTANI MUSIC Wim van der Meer, Dept. of Musicology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, wvdm[at]me.com Suvarnalata Rao, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai 400021, suvarnarao[at]hotmail.com Abstract Keywords: visual representation, melography, ornamentation, pitch perception. In Hindustani music the space ‘between the notes’ is often more important than the discrete notes themselves. With the help of melography, and more in particular the use of advanced models of pitch perception in computer software, we can actually ‘see’ the precise forms of meend [...]

What you hear isn’t what you see…2020-06-08T07:58:06+02:00
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