Experiments on the bowed string are often carried out on monochord setups [1] and with specialized bowing machines [2, 3, 4, 5] in order to study the excitation in detail. These setups simplify the equipment with the necessary sensors. Furthermore, by using rigid body monochords, measurement uncertainties can be minimized by eliminating vibrating components such as the resonating body, bridge, neck, etc. When the string is then excited or bowed using a machine, there are further advantages in terms of reproducibility or controllability of the excitation and bowing parameters. This technical report provides technical details of a monochord built at the acoustic laboratory of the Department of Music Acoustics – Wiener Klangstil (IWK). The advantages of using strain gauge sensors for string vibration analysis are presented and discussed. In contrast to a custom- made bowing machine, however, an industrial robotic arm was used for string excitation, thereby allowing for highly versatile applications. Enclosed detail pictures, circuit diagrams and software flowcharts provide the possibility of simple replication of the setup described.

Rechtspopulistische Bewegungen und Diskurse greifen auf neue, ästhetisierte Politikstile und bis dato links konnotierte, künstlerisch erprobte Provokationsformen zurück. Zudem besetzen sie Geschlecht, Familie und Sexualität als Trigger-Themen. Die Beiträger*innen bringen die Populismusforschung mit geistes- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Ansätzen zusammen und fokussieren dabei auf das kulturelle Feld und Geschlechterdiskurse als spezifische Aushandlungsterrains. Neben einer Analyse, wie der »rechtspopulistische Komplex« jeweils aktuelle gesellschaftliche Problemlagen instrumentalisiert, eröffnen sie auch Gegenstrategien im Sinne radikaldemokratischer und emanzipatorischer Politiken.

Understanding the dynamics of bowed-string attacks involves exploring the relationship between bow acceleration, bow force, and the generation of Helmholtz motion during transients. This study addresses the following research question: How do theoretical limits of “playability” predict these parameters? Motivated by the need for experimental evidence in this domain, we present a comprehensive investigation into bowed-string transients within the bow acceleration and bow force parameter space, known as the Guettler diagram. This study exclusively employs an experimental methodology. The setup, employing a robotic arm, permits the collection of transient data under varying bowing conditions. Analysis of the bridge force waveform allows for the extraction of pre-Helmholtz transient times. Our results reveal a triangular playable region in the Guettler diagram, consistent with theoretical predictions and previous experimental findings. However, Guettler’s analytical limits for playable regions during transients show limitations. We investigate the role of friction, a key parameter idealized in the model used for obtaining these limits. Measured friction coefficients from transients reveal discrepancies with prior experimental studies, highlighting the need for further investigations in this direction.

Keyboards served as essential commodities in early modern European overseas exploration and expansion, and circulated as a motivation of colonial, diplomatic, commercial and religious interests. Yet while we know much about the circulation and use of keyboards in trading centres, missionary and ambassadorial ventures, and educational institutions in the New World and Asia, few studies have focused on their presence, dissemination and cultural functions in sub-Saharan Africa, aside from some traces in the kingdom of Kongo and in South Africa. Drawing on 15th–17th-century travellers’ accounts, Portuguese dignitaries’ letters, and the voluminous surviving Jesuit documentation, this essay explores the dissemination, musical functions and cultural significance of the earliest documented Western keyboards, including harpsichords, in the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia in the early modern period, exploring themes around musical circulation, keyboards as diplomatic and evangelical tools, and how keyboard music served as a construct for representation, identity, agency and power in Afro-European encounters and colonial perspectives. It draws on two significant encounters between Ethiopia and Latin Europe during the early modern age of exploration, namely some of the earliest documented Ethiopian contacts with European music on Ethiopian soil from both secular and sacred contexts. First, one of the earliest documented encounters between a Portuguese embassy and the Ethiopian royal court of King Lebnä Dengel in 1520 provides significant new insights into the use of European music, a harpsichord and other keyboard instruments for diplomacy and gift-giving, the local faranji (foreigners) community, and arguably the earliest recorded Western keyboards to be brought into Ethiopia in a complex dissemination itinerary from Lisbon to Shewa, via Goa. The 1520 import of a harpsichord to the North-East African highlands appears to be the earliest documented exemplar of the use of a harpsichord as a diplomatic tool in sub-Saharan Africa. Then, encounters between Portuguese Jesuit missionaries from Goa and the Ethiopian indigenous communities during the Jesuit period (1557–1632) on the highlands reveal the import of keyboards for Jesuit missionary strategies and their musical art of conversion, which employed music as both evangelical and pedagogical tools, and blended indigenous and foreign elements. These Ethio-European musical encounters offer tantalizing views on the spread of keyboard instruments in Portuguese courtly and Jesuit liturgical musical traditions across three continents, and how they served as central components of ambassadorial and evangelical ventures by colonial powers. The sources provide new documentation about how keyboard instruments were transmitted along the Portuguese routes of discovery, allowing the Oriental and Old Worlds to collide in interconnected musical experiences, thus giving broader insight into the role of harpsichords and other keyboards in constructing identity, religion, and the collisions of political, social and cultural hierarchies outside of Europe in an entangled global early modern period. Further investigation is now needed into other African locales to discern how widespread the use of Western keyboards was on the continent and how these were perceived by local indigenous communities in the context of wider Afro-Eurasian encounters and relations in these distant outposts of Renaissance music.

Musical instrument playability can be analyzed by visualizing a subspace defined by musicians' control parameters. This is common for bowed-string instruments in the form of Schelleng diagrams. Such diagrams can be populated either through experimental measurements or physical modeling. It was recently suggested to use similar diagrams for analyzing wind instrument playability. This study explores this direction using a physical model, previously validated against experimental measurements. It is shown that reed beating needs to be taken into account before playability analysis. This could help arrive at specific reed and mouthpiece designs according to the musicians' desires.

Nicola Vicentino’s description of singers varying the beat in order to clarify the affect of the words and the harmony may seem to be relevant to certain keyboard music, all the more since sources point out that solo performers enjoy greater freedom than do ensembles. Tempo changes sometimes seem to be implied by striking differences between predominant note values in sections of a piece. One might expect shorter note values to be generally associated with a slower tactus, and longer note values with a quicker one, but some composers demand the opposite, so that the contrasts in the music are amplified rather than understated. Ornamented keyboard intabulations can occasionally be seen to imply textually and musically motivated tempo changes via noticeable variation in the density of ornamentation.

Andrea Antico’s 1517 print of keyboard intabulations of frottolas is rather well known to modern scholars, mostly because it is the first print of keyboard repertoire in Italy. Frottolas were a codified genre where a strophic text often predated the music and followed strict literary rules. Since Antico published instrumental arrangements, the texts are not immediately visible, yet they were very well known to the reader of those days. How was the music then performed when no text was heard? How was this monodic repertoire understood by the contemporaries? Did the player infer the correct accentuation of the music from an implicit text? If so, a correct understanding of the meter and of poetical conventions would be an essential element for an adequate performance of Antico’s arrangements of this vocal repertoire.

The volume deals with various topics related to keyboard music in the sixteenth century. These include aesthetic ideas associated with keyboard playing, the spread of the harpsichord in the sixteenth century, keyboard notation and its specific features, questions of tempo, rhythm and ornamentation, and iconographic sources as a basis for reconstructing playing techniques. It gathers the proceedings of a conference held at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna in 2021. The contributions cover a wide range of aspects of musical style, repertoire and performance practice, as well as the socio-cultural significance of plucked instruments in the sixteenth century. It is aimed at musicologists and musicians.