Search Results (13)

Background: Anxiety disorders are among the most prevalent mental health issues of the 21st century, significantly impacting individuals and healthcare systems worldwide. Within higher education research, academic anxiety is particularly significant, as it encompasses the specific anxieties students face within academic environments, such as exams and public speaking. This study aims to provide a contemporary overview of academic anxiety within Spanish universities by addressing three key questions: (1) How has research on academic anxiety evolved in Spain? (2) What tools have been used to measure academic anxiety? (3) What factors and variables have been analyzed in relation to academic anxiety, and what are the main findings? Methods: A systematic review was conducted following PRISMA guidelines for study selection, data extraction, and synthesis. The analysis focused on PubMed, PsycINFO, and Web of Science databases, examining 25 eligible articles published before January 2023. The objective was to evaluate, organize, and synthesize the evidence presented in these articles. Results: The findings revealed that the majority of studies were conducted in the last decade, employing 20 distinct measurement tools and examining more than 40 associated variables. The academic anxieties investigated included various types such as test anxiety, language learning anxiety, math anxiety, public speaking anxiety, and discipline-specific anxieties like dissection or music performance anxiety. Additionally, the studies explored the relationships between these academic anxieties and other variables such as gender and age. Conclusions: The implications of these findings for education and potential avenues for future research are discussed. Full article

The enigmatic 72 Verses for St. Martial is one of the many works by Ademar de Chabannes (989–1034) crafted to promote the false narrative that St. Martial of Limoges, rather than being a third-century bishop, was actually a first-century apostle. The composition is visually striking due to the acrostic formed from the first letter of each tercet, MARCIALIS APOSTOLVS XRISTI, and its two overlapping melodies, one in black ink and the other in red. The relationship between the two notations is the subject of debate: Paul Hooreman’s conclusion that they are two variations of the same monophonic chant is countered by Manuel Pedro Ferreira, who argues that Hooreman’s reasoning is insufficient to rule out polyphony. I use Ferreira’s assessment as a jumping-off point for the current analysis, which investigates the compositional processes underlying the creation of the 72 Verses. Hooreman describes many details in the chant as subject to disorganization, scribal error, lack of ability, etc., but when the chant is analyzed polyphonically, these problems resolve. Beyond the music itself, the chant’s unusual polyphonic structure features reveals that the chant is structured around medieval maps, moving between a mappa mundi and the celestial spheres. Full article

Contrary to the critical understanding of the cultural and/or creative industry that unduly emphasizes demoralized commercial activities of profit-maximizing, accompanied by the concomitant destruction of individual self-realization, the 21st century perception of the industry highlights its potentials for both creativity and more importantly, sustainability. The global success of Korean pop music (K-pop) unlocks a new possibility for the creative industry in a postcolonial country, with a newly constructed value chain that strategically allows female empowerment through radical empathy, a concept that bridges social empathy among formerly oppressed groups with their new political opportunities of political struggles. Based on survey data and structural equation modeling, this paper empirically corroborates a theorized conceptual link between participation in the K-pop industry and the resulting radical empathy among female fans toward industrial sustainability. Full article

Our study aimed to map the family milieu of 21st-century music students. With the help of the applied social science methods, we studied what patterns facilitated children’s music education and whether there were objectively justifiable differences in the socioeconomic status of music students and non-musical students. In our survey, we used a quantitative method in the form of paper-based, self-administered questionnaires. We sampled eighth-grade students of elementary art schools in several county seats that had a long history of teaching (n = 270) and eighth-grade students in several elementary schools (n = 285) as a control group. We assumed that students learning music are children of families with higher cultural capital, mostly with backgrounds in music education, who consider extracurricular activities investments. We tested our hypothesis using SPSS program, the methods included logistic regression and cluster analysis. Our results prove the existence of differences in the socioeconomic status of music and non-music students. Full article

Music and its study have always been present among people. Its learning is significant, as it provides benefits and helps in the acquisition of many abilities and skills. However, didactic, methodological, and pedagogical changes have begun to appear that nurture and provide new challenges to their learning. Fully adapting to the 21st century and abiding by the great demand for technologies, we have seen the rise of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies), which have also been conceived as educational technology (EdTech), when applied to education. Due to these reasons, the need to conduct a systematic literature review in four databases has arisen to find out whether the use of technology in music education helps to facilitate the teaching-learning process of students. Evidence from this research has been collected using concept mapping to organize the training process. Finally, it is relevant to comment that evidence has been found and verified that the use of Edtech helps in the learning of Music Education; given that, in various documents, it is observed that they increase motivation, musical-technological thinking, critical thinking, creativity, musical practice, and musical improvisation and that they give rise to fun, playful, enjoyable, and stimulating learning. Full article

This article explores the place of music in the classical liberal arts curriculum, which consists of the trivium (the arts of language) and the quadrivium (the arts of number). Music is part of the quadrivial disciplines and studied as applied arithmetic. However, as argued in this article, it is also a bridge to the discipline of rhetoric, which is part of the trivium. The article begins with a brief review of St. Augustine’s De Musica, the first in a planned (but unrealized) series of dialogs on the value of the classical liberal arts to the emerging Christian culture of Antiquity. It proceeds to a discussion of music and its relation to the contemporary American liberal arts curriculum. Two case studies follow that address the ontological reality of music as a time-bound medium, and attempts to mute this reality in the service of creating a sense of timelessness. Thus subsuming the temporal into the Divine–what Augustine called “a poem of the universe”. The first case study is Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso, which is a journey through the heavens with each planet representing one of the seven liberal arts as preparatory to the Beatific Vision. The second case study focuses on J.S. Bach’s attempts to create a sense of timelessness in the St. Matthew Passion by the use of musical forms and musical rhetorical devices that tend to abolish time. The article concludes with suggestions on how teachers can use 20th and 21st-century movements in Western art music as pathways to appreciate music’s pivotal role in the Catholic liberal arts tradition. Full article

Hip-Hop is a cultural phenomenon steeped in the conservative ideologies of individualism and capitalism. It sells a lifestyle and its most recent surge of rap music and popular culture spotlights Black women more than ever before. Although Black women have always been significant piece in Hip-Hop culture, their artistry has jolted its systemic capitalism and patriarchy to engage intersectionality through a discourse of classism, sexual orientation, and racism while upending White supremacy’s either:or binary. Applying the principles of Womanism, Black female Hip-Hop artists negotiate cultural identity politics as activists to innovatively expand thought on gender performance and produce a fusion of contemporary Blackness for the 21st century. Their artivism builds a safe environment of differences within society using conscious thought, language, and performative methods to defy the White American ethos of sexism, misogyny, and materialism. By garnering a better knowledge of their existence through Indigenous African spirituality, Black women reclaim ownership of their bodies from Western European standards, including race, and gender to challenge Christianity’s meaning of martyrdom. This act of reclamation provides a reformative tool of inclusion and being fluidity through Hip-Hop music and its culture. Full article

Study of swinging clapper bells involves aspects encompassing sound and acoustic engineering, mechanical engineering, and structural engineering. From the musical point of view, clapper bells are directly played idiophone instruments, where the playing device, the clapper, although directly excited, is not explicitly controlled by the bell ringer. The achievement of a clear and optimal sound mainly depends on the acoustic characteristics of the bell and on the regularity of the clapper strokes, which is not only governed by the ringing style and the relevant parameters of clapper and bell but also by the real time corrections to the excitation introduced by trained bell ringers. In fact, despite centuries of experience allowed to optimize the bell performances, standardizing proportions and mounting arrangements, effective sound control requires some fine tuning of the forcing function. Another crucial topic, especially in view of assessing existing structures, regards the evaluation of time histories of the actions transmitted by the bell to the pivots and the study of the interactions between the bell and the supporting structures, belfries, and bell-towers. “Ringability” of swinging bells and bell-structure interactions are usually tackled in the framework of rigid body dynamics, so arriving at an initial value problem, governed by a system of two second order nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs), whose solutions are piecewise-defined functions. In the relevant literature, numerical solutions of the system are commonly sought using built-in algorithms provided in advanced software packages; since the use of such general algorithms is subject to some restrictions, especially regarding the forcing functions, validity of the results is often limited. The present study focuses on an innovative procedure to solve the equations of motion. The method, extremely fast and effective, is based on original numerical explicit-implicit predictor-corrector integration algorithms with constant time step, duly validated reproducing the outcomes of relevant reference case studies. Each time the clapper strikes the bell a new “piece” of the solution is initialized, so avoiding user interventions in the elaboration phase. Independently on the oscillation amplitude and on the duration of the considered time interval, the algorithms can successfully manage undamped oscillations; friction and viscosity damped oscillations; free oscillations in transient and stationary phases; and can be applied also to solve stiff equations. Furthermore, the capability of the proposed methods to deal with arbitrary forcing functions is particularly innovative. The outcomes of relevant case studies, regarding the oscillations of the old tenor bell of the Great St. Mary church in Cambridge, confirm the potentialities of the method, also highlighting some topical issues, involving, for example, the assessment of damping equivalence. Finally, a pioneering feature of the algorithms is their ability to handle and to define “resonant” forcing functions, continuously tuning the frequency of the excitation to the natural frequency of the oscillation, according to the oscillation amplitude. Full article

21st century audiences are finding new methods of engaging with the Broadway musical, and fandoms are beginning to establish a visible online presence. In turn, this is creating a shift in paratexts surrounding the musical. Using social media to cultivate relationships, communities and fandoms, Generation Z are responding to the musical in new and innovative ways. Fan-created paratexts are becoming more popular, as fans become more intent on establishing connections to the production. Younger audiences’ tendency to engage with these interactions has allowed them to become the most active audiences on social media, both critically engaged and creative. The access to online interactive platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr bring new opportunities for paratextual creations. Examples of this “next stage of engagement” can be seen through the production Dear Evan Hansen (2015), which is now pushing the limits of social media and successfully utilising Dolan’s utopian performatives to draw in audiences and engage its fandom, or, as they call themselves, the Dear Evan “Fansens”. The fandom is using these paratexts in establishing one-to-one connections with its fans, allowing the fan-created material to “speak back” to the performance moment itself, and it is this which validates a transactional relationship between fan and production. This work ultimately sets out the fandom’s desire to “be found”. Full article

Recent Broadway theatre seasons consistently saw record-breaking numbers of admissions and grosses, with musicals’ ticket sales making up 78–89% of annual Broadway grosses. The annual Tony Awards continue to serve as an influential theatre industry establishment that helps define a Broadway musical as exceptional and worthy of audiences, especially the awarding of the ‘Best Musical’ category (which can statistically have a profound impact on a production’s longevity). This article offers comprehensive surveying and discussions of significant components of a musical’s initial Broadway success in the 21st century. All 82 musicals that were nominated for or won the ‘Best Musical’ Tony Award between the years 2000 and 2019 are assessed for their source material and original Broadway run length. Subsequent discussions center on diversity and genres of musicals recognized by the Tony Awards, followed by conclusions and predictions of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on Broadway’s future and the influence of the ‘Best Musical’ Tony Award. The results of this study display observable patterns among the musicals surveyed, including screen (film/tv) being the most prominent source material and at least a 10–12 month run after the Tony Awards ceremonies for all ‘Best Musical’ winners. Full article

After more than a century of neglect of the form, over thirty major concert works with “Passion” within the title have emerged into the choral landscape during the past 50 years. These settings use diverse libretti, drawing from sources both sacred and secular; some of the composers of these works profess Christianity, some adhere to other religious traditions, and some do not profess any particular faith at all. Their only common threads seem to be their self-identification with the title of “Passion”, and their depiction of a story in which a particular individual undergoes suffering and death. The purpose of this article is not to analyze specific Passion settings but rather to explore the structural form and content of the Passion genre as a whole, and begin to develop an interdisciplinary framework for future analysis of this body of music, using the tools offered by the field of liminal studies. Additionally, this essay will explore how the concept of Postmodernism, both as it manifests both in Western culture and through that culture’s artistic and musical expression, might give some insight into the Passion form’s resurgence into modern musical thought. Full article

This article shares objectives, teaching methods, and sources of inspiration as I lead 21st-century students in engaging a Reformed/Calvinistic vision for the arts generally, and music specifically. Special explanation is made of Calvinistic concepts such as sphere sovereignty and sensus divinitatis. To conclude, I discuss aspects of a recent composition titled The God of Material Things by Jonathan Posthuma, a graduate of our college music program, whose work exemplifies many of the elements that my colleagues and I hope distinguish the accomplishments of music students beyond their education at Dordt College. Full article

Augustine’s De musica is all that remains of his ambitious plan to write a cycle of works describing each of the liberal arts in terms of Christian faith and is actually unfinished; whereas the six books extant today primarily examine rhythm, Augustine intended to write about melody also. The sixth book of De musica was better known in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages than the first five, and it takes up philosophical questions of aesthetics related to the proportionate ordering discernable throughout creation. After a brief introduction summarizing De musica’s content and its importance in subsequent Christian writings, my presentation outlines and explains how I have used this document in my own music classes. For example, my students learn that a vital notion in Augustine’s writings, and in Neoplatonism more broadly, is the spiritual benefit of academic study. That is, through study of music, one gains insight into the created order, but, more importantly, one’s soul is strengthened and trained to perceive higher realities of the cosmos such as the ordering of the planetary spheres and the progression of celestial hierarchies, which span the spiritual distance from God to humanity. Full article