Papers by Ana Llorens
Súmula: Revista de Teoría y Análisis Musical
La historiografía de la interpretación musical ha tendido a presentar a Andrés Segovia y Julian B... more La historiografía de la interpretación musical ha tendido a presentar a Andrés Segovia y Julian Bream como figuras opuestas, en su forma tanto de tocar la guitarra como de concebir su repertorio. En esta tarea se ha limitado a reproducir apreciaciones que obvian el sonido de estos dos músicos. De hecho, no sorprende que las grabaciones que ambos hicieron de la Fantasía para un gentilhombre de Joaquín Rodrigo –de 1958 y 1987 respectivamente– sean testimonio de una realidad muy diferente a la escrita. A pesar de exagerar las diferencias entre las duraciones de las notas de algunos motivos, las técnicas agógicas de Segovia parecen responder a una sensibilidad fraseológica, métrica y armónica obviada en la literatura. Por su parte, Bream, que se vuelve más irregular en los pasajes de figuración constante, parece adoptar algunas técnicas de la interpretación históricamente informada. A través del análisis de tempo y duraciones –de pulsos y notas–, este estudio de caso demuestra que un re...
Music Theory Online, 2021
The analysis of the structural repercussions of musicians’ strategies has traditionally focused o... more The analysis of the structural repercussions of musicians’ strategies has traditionally focused on their handling of timing and dynamics, not only because of the correlation found in performances between hierarchical phrase structure and coordinated decreases in both parameters—usually referred to as phrase arching (".fn_cite($gabrielsson_1988).") or phrase-final lengthening (".fn_cite($todd_1985).
2020 24th International Conference Information Visualisation (IV), 2020
Some complex musical parameters might be especially difficult to understand for someone with no t... more Some complex musical parameters might be especially difficult to understand for someone with no theoretical expertise in music. Musicians and music scholars alike normally evaluate such parameters visually by departing from scores, which present the musical events at once. Yet for the under-standing of such symbolic representations, musical training is essential, making scores mostly incomprehensible for amateurs. Data visualisation has been applied to meaningfully represent complex musical parameters, thus enabling music amateurs to grasp concepts such as texture or structure. Although scores are one of the "primary" sources to understand music, previous work shows a strong bias towards the visualisation of acoustic data, in detriment of the visualisation of symbolic information. To bridge the gap, we present SymPlot, a web-based open source tool to automatically visualise textural density, scoring, and structure from MusicXML files. Due to the multidisciplinary nature of...
Music Encoding Conference Proceedings 2021, 2022
Musicology is a small discipline within the wide spectrum of human knowledge, yet it is already d... more Musicology is a small discipline within the wide spectrum of human knowledge, yet it is already divided into various branches, each with its own societies, conferences, journals, jargons, degrees, prejudices, …, and jobs. Although they share their object of investigation-"the art of music as a physical, psychological, aesthetic, and cultural phenomenon" [4, p. 153]-, these branches very often ignore one another. Research in musicology is mostly a solitary task, as investigations, papers, and publications are commonly signed by single authors, in contrast with STEM disciplines where teamwork is the rule. This is in part the result of tradition-the "Musicological Toolbox" [22]-but also the aftermath of the job market and financing programs. Large funding schemes such as the European Research Council (ERC) grants are becoming a major disruptive factor in many disciplines in the humanities, including musicology. Scholars in all fields now have the opportunity to build research teams, and most of their members receive their salaries to exclusively work on the project. In other words, we are starting to build what could be called a Musicology Lab, learning along the way how teamwork is reshaping and transforming the Musicological Toolbox, the look and feel of our discipline, the way we work as well as the way we publish and disseminate our results. This paper presents some of the key features of the ERC Didone project, one of its principal tasks being to create a digitally encoded corpus of some 3,000 arias in MusicXML format from about 180 musical settings of a small number of opera librettos by Pietro Metastasio. It focuses on some of the project's research tasks, emphasizing how the skills of a team of eighteen scholars with very different expertise-historical musicology, music theory and analysis, cultural history, librettology, archival research, music performance, music engraving, MIR, computer science, and statistical modeling-combine to explore the potential answer(s) to the main research question of the project: How are emotions expressed through music?
Anuario Musical, 2021
La excepcional acogida de las obras de Pietro Metastasio en el siglo XVIII, en Europa y en la pen... more La excepcional acogida de las obras de Pietro Metastasio en el siglo XVIII, en Europa y en la península ibérica en particular, está ampliamente documentada. Debido a este éxito sin parangón, es posible afirmar que España y Portugal participaron de los gustos y redes artísticas internacionales del momento. Sin embargo, esta internacionalización ha de ser matizada, ya que el repertorio escrito específicamente para la península muestra que las audiencias cortesanas peninsulares pudieron tener expectativas diferentes a las del público de otros teatros en el resto del continente. Por ello, este trabajo investiga en qué formas varió el estilo de cinco compositores de talla internacional —Perez, Galuppi, Jommelli, Conforto y Corselli— a la hora de enfrentarse a los encargos de opera seria para las cortes ibéricas. El análisis estadístico de quince versiones compuestas específicamente para Madrid y Lisboa nos permite evaluar, en comparación con las tendencias generales de un corpus de 2.404...
Quodlibet. Revista de Especialización Musical
Ruperto Chapi Nuevas Perspectivas Vol 1 2012 Isbn 978 84 482 5798 9 Pags 283 302, 2012
Empirical Musicology Review
This report describes the open-source Recorded Brahms Corpus (RBC) dataset, as well as the method... more This report describes the open-source Recorded Brahms Corpus (RBC) dataset, as well as the methods employed to extract and process the data. The dataset contains (micro)timing and dynamic data from 21 recordings of Brahms's Cello Sonatas, Opp. 38 and 99, focusing on note and beat onsets and duration, tempo fluctuations, and dynamic variations. Consistent manual annotation of the corpus in Sonic Visualiser was necessary prior to automatic extraction. Data for each recording and measurement unit are given as TXT files. Scores in various digital formats, the original SV files and diamond-shaped scape plots visualizations of the data are offered too. Expansion of the corpus with further movements of the sonatas, further recordings thereof and other compositions by Brahms is planned. The study of the data may contribute to performance studies and music theory alike.
2020 24th International Conference Information Visualisation (IV), 2020
Some complex musical parameters might be especially difficult to understand for someone with no t... more Some complex musical parameters might be especially difficult to understand for someone with no theoretical expertise in music. Musicians and music scholars alike normally evaluate such parameters visually by departing from scores, which present the musical events at once. Yet for the understanding of such symbolic representations, musical training is essential, making scores mostly incomprehensible for amateurs. Data visualisation has been applied to meaningfully represent complex musical parameters, thus enabling music amateurs to grasp concepts such as texture or structure. Although scores are one of the "primary" sources to understand music, previous work shows a strong bias towards the visualisation of acoustic data, in detriment of the visualisation of symbolic information. To bridge the gap, we present SymPlot, a web-based open source tool to automatically visualise textural density, scoring, and structure from MusicXML files. Due to the multidisciplinary nature of the topic, in this project we have applied the Scrum's agile methodology, an iterative incremental approach specifically tailored for interdisciplinary projects. The tool, aimed at enhancing musical understanding in amateurs and students, as well as in scholars of other disciplines who need to incorporate music into their discourses, i.e., historians, philologists, etc., enables visualisation of local features at various hierarchical levels, highlighting similarities both within and across scores. Our evaluation of SymPlot-based on a five-level rating-scale test performed by 50 participants-suggests that colours increase users' understanding of complex musical parameters.
Books Chapters and Edited Books by Ana Llorens
Il libro è stato sostenuto con un finanziamento dell'Accademia delle Scienze della Repubblica Ceca.
Demofoonte come soggetto per il dramma per musica: Johann Adolf Hasse ed altri compositori del Settecento, 2020
ANA LLORENS-GORKA RUBIALES-NICOLA USULA Operatic Sources for Demofoonte: Librettos and Scores aft... more ANA LLORENS-GORKA RUBIALES-NICOLA USULA Operatic Sources for Demofoonte: Librettos and Scores after Metastasio's "figliuolo" Documentazione fotografica del convegno Documentazione fotografica della rappresentazione dell'opera Il Demofoonte nel teatro barocco a Český Krumlov Biografie degli autori
by Ana Llorens, Fernando L C Pereira, Lena Duchesne, ANA RODRIGO DE LA CASA, Francisco Manuel López Gómez, MARIA VICTORIA ARJONA GONZÁLEZ, Rosa Pampillo, Elsa Calero-Carramolino, Juan Carlos Justiniano, António Ventura, Olimpia García López, Alessandra Palidda, Eduardo Chávarri Alonso, Pablo Tejedor-Gutiérrez, Iñigo de Peque, Enrique Mejías Rivero, Ruth Abellán Alzallú, and Fernando Tamayo Proceedings of the VIII Jornadas de Jóvenes Musicólogos, 2015. Edited by Ana Llorens
Allegro cum laude: estudios musicológicos en homenaje a Emilio Casares, 2014
Ruperto Chapí. Nuevas perspectivas, 2012
Con ocasión del homenaje a Rafael Altamira , uno de los principales humanistas e historiadores li... more Con ocasión del homenaje a Rafael Altamira , uno de los principales humanistas e historiadores ligado a la Institución Libre de Enseñanza, llegó a mis manos una copia del microfilm correspondiente al manuscrito del Trío para piano, violín y violonchelo de Chapí conservado en la Biblioteca Nacional de España. 1 La Fundación Altamira había programado un concierto como clausura del congreso que iba a tener lugar en Madrid en octubre de 2011, para cuya realización quiso contar con la ayuda del Departamento de Musicología de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Dissertations by Ana Llorens
Essai… 10 El aumento de publicaciones para el instrumento es síntoma de los beneficios que estos ... more Essai… 10 El aumento de publicaciones para el instrumento es síntoma de los beneficios que estos libros producían a los editores y de la creciente demanda que de ellos se tenía en los ámbitos doméstico y profesional.
From the mid nineteenth century onwards, musical form has primarily been defined in terms of pred... more From the mid nineteenth century onwards, musical form has primarily been defined in terms of predetermined paradigms, which ostensibly provide a framework for hierarchically ordered materials. Despite its pervasive presence in theoretical literature, however, this Formenlehre tradition is not universal in musical thought. Since antiquity, theorists have resorted to images of dynamism, change, process, energy, intensity, and narration to denote a more elastic conception of (musical) form. However, most of them – such as, for instance, Kurth, Asaf’yev, or Maus – have not recognised that it is ultimately performers – not composers – who individually shape musical materials on the basis of the structural relations that they perceive within the music and then project in performance.
This dissertation explores how such apparent incompatibility between theory and practice might be bridged. To that aim, the first part discusses how ‘dynamic’ notions of musical form might realise their full explanatory potential by accounting for the reality of performance. It also reviews previous investigations of performers’ strategies to project their structural understandings of musical works, with a special focus on their handling of timing, dynamics, articulation, intonation, and timbre.
Using recorded interpretations of Brahms’s Cello Sonatas as sources for three case studies, the second part evaluates dynamic ideas of musical form from an analytical viewpoint. Through their personal approaches to these works, I show how select performers create a wide range of structural connections, which are never alike across their different recordings. Likewise, these performers neither resort to the same parameters nor ‘shape’ the select movements in the same manner or with the same intensity.
I ultimately posit that musical structure is inferred, created, and experienced in a unique way on every occasion a given piece is performed – and also whenever it is composed, analysed, or listened to. This research does not dismiss music theory as having no explanatory potential in the investigation of abstract notions such as musical structure as we sense them in performance. Rather, it aims to contribute to the dialogue between theory and practice by showing how, and why, music theory should reconceptualise musical form as a set of possibilities affording multiple choices and interpretations, that is to say, as a ‘multiverse’ that emerges across time and in sound.
Teaching Documents by Ana Llorens
SONIC VISUALISER Tutorial de iniciación, 2019
Articles by Ana Llorens
Proceedings of the Sound and Music Computing Conference, 2023
In this work, we introduce musif, a Python package that facilitates the automatic extraction of f... more In this work, we introduce musif, a Python package that facilitates the automatic extraction of features from symbolic music scores. The package includes the implementation of a large number of features, which have been developed by a team of experts in musicology, music theory, statistics, and computer science. Additionally, the package allows for the easy creation of custom features using commonly available Python libraries. musif is primarily geared towards processing high-quality musicological data encoded in MusicXML format, but also supports other formats commonly used in music information retrieval tasks, including MIDI, MEI, Kern, and others. We provide comprehensive documentation and tutorials to aid in the extension of the framework and to facilitate the introduction of new and inexperienced users to its usage.
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Papers by Ana Llorens
Books Chapters and Edited Books by Ana Llorens
Dissertations by Ana Llorens
This dissertation explores how such apparent incompatibility between theory and practice might be bridged. To that aim, the first part discusses how ‘dynamic’ notions of musical form might realise their full explanatory potential by accounting for the reality of performance. It also reviews previous investigations of performers’ strategies to project their structural understandings of musical works, with a special focus on their handling of timing, dynamics, articulation, intonation, and timbre.
Using recorded interpretations of Brahms’s Cello Sonatas as sources for three case studies, the second part evaluates dynamic ideas of musical form from an analytical viewpoint. Through their personal approaches to these works, I show how select performers create a wide range of structural connections, which are never alike across their different recordings. Likewise, these performers neither resort to the same parameters nor ‘shape’ the select movements in the same manner or with the same intensity.
I ultimately posit that musical structure is inferred, created, and experienced in a unique way on every occasion a given piece is performed – and also whenever it is composed, analysed, or listened to. This research does not dismiss music theory as having no explanatory potential in the investigation of abstract notions such as musical structure as we sense them in performance. Rather, it aims to contribute to the dialogue between theory and practice by showing how, and why, music theory should reconceptualise musical form as a set of possibilities affording multiple choices and interpretations, that is to say, as a ‘multiverse’ that emerges across time and in sound.
Teaching Documents by Ana Llorens
Articles by Ana Llorens
This dissertation explores how such apparent incompatibility between theory and practice might be bridged. To that aim, the first part discusses how ‘dynamic’ notions of musical form might realise their full explanatory potential by accounting for the reality of performance. It also reviews previous investigations of performers’ strategies to project their structural understandings of musical works, with a special focus on their handling of timing, dynamics, articulation, intonation, and timbre.
Using recorded interpretations of Brahms’s Cello Sonatas as sources for three case studies, the second part evaluates dynamic ideas of musical form from an analytical viewpoint. Through their personal approaches to these works, I show how select performers create a wide range of structural connections, which are never alike across their different recordings. Likewise, these performers neither resort to the same parameters nor ‘shape’ the select movements in the same manner or with the same intensity.
I ultimately posit that musical structure is inferred, created, and experienced in a unique way on every occasion a given piece is performed – and also whenever it is composed, analysed, or listened to. This research does not dismiss music theory as having no explanatory potential in the investigation of abstract notions such as musical structure as we sense them in performance. Rather, it aims to contribute to the dialogue between theory and practice by showing how, and why, music theory should reconceptualise musical form as a set of possibilities affording multiple choices and interpretations, that is to say, as a ‘multiverse’ that emerges across time and in sound.
The statistical analysis of fifteen settings especially written for the court theatres in Madrid and Lisbon, in comparison to the average data extracted from a corpus of 2,404 arias from 126 versions of a select number of Metastasian librettos, allows us to evaluate some particular usages regarding key, metre, tempo, and treatment of the vocal part. In this manner, through quantitative analysis, this article places eighteenth-century Iberian music production and consumption in the context of European opera seria, at the same time that it ultimately sets forth that its unique musical characteristics were also partly dependent on local musical customs, gender stereotypes, and personal idiosyncrasies alike.
so-called tempo rubato, which was defined by the cellist himself as the continuous ability to “measure”
time, taking it from certain notes and giving it back to others such that the overall duration is kept
intact. Accounts of his manner of both playing and teaching, also refer to a “sense of proportion”
which allegedly governed his use of rubato. Nevertheless, explanations thereof are vague and by no
means clear. Furthermore, some of Casals’ pedagogic principles –enunciation of the first note and the
need for expressive variety– emerge as contradictory when observed from this perspective.
To explore the practical employment of rubato and likewise to disclose the potentially
structural meaning of this sense of proportion in Casals’ performances, empirical analysis of tempo,
beat duration, and agogic divergences between him and the pianist Horszowski will be undertaken,
focusing on their recording of the second movement of Brahms’s Cello Sonata, Op. 99. In this manner,
it will be possible to assess to what extent and in what ways the cellist’s theoretical teachings were
mirrored in his performance, and thus to understand better his particular style of playing.