bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Viennese: ‘MOB art & tone ART’ Group
Authors: Heinzelmann Josef
Published: February 2010

The ‘MOB art & tone ART’ Ensemble made its debut in 1967 and played a lively role in Austrian musical life during the five years of its existence. All three of the composers who directed the Ensemble were also professional instrumentalists—Zykan as pianist, Gruber as double-bass in the Austrian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Schwertsik as hornist in the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. Zykan and Gruber both appeared regularly with the Ensemble, whose other performing members were Volkcr Altmann (horn), Leonhard Wallisch (cello), Roland Altmann and Kurt Prihoda (percussion). The violinist Ernst Kovacic and the cellist Heinrich Schiff appeared with the Ensemble from time to time as guests.
HK Gruber: A formal introduction from two sides
Authors: Drew David
Published: February 2010

In 1960, at the age of 17, Gruber wrote the first two pieces which he is still prepared to acknowledge: the Suite for 2 pianos, wind instruments, and percussion, and the Mass for mixed chorus, two trumpets, cor anglais, double bass and percussion. It is worth considering what that acknowledgement implies, for the works themselves clearly do not measure up to the high technical standards Gruber sets himself today, or even to those which he achieved in the Concerto for Orchestra sketched that same year.
Markevitch: The Early Works and Beyond
Authors: Drew David
Published: February 2010

The subject has suddenly become volatile, and even the simplest facts have a heady aroma. Let us nevertheless begin with a few that may, without evaporating altogether, help place Markevitch in his context.

Should posterity number him among the historically essential composers of our century, his nearest contemporaries in that sense would be Britten and René Leibowitz, who were born a year later, in 1913; the next nearest, Messiaen and Carter, who are four years his senior.
‘Icare’
Authors: Bennett Clive
Published: February 2010

The facts. L'Envoi d'Icare (The Flight of Icarus) was written in the summer of 1932 for a projected ballet by Serge Lifar which was never staged. Its first concert performance, on 26 June 1933, caused a sensation—‘Cette musique, pure comme le diamant, represent une aspiration à la vie éternelle d'une puissance inouïe’ wrote Henri Prunières in La Revue musicale—and over the next few years many musicians and even some critics praised it highly. ‘Il y a dans la musique de Markevitch, cette force claire, (non pas froide), concentrée, que I'on trouve chez les mystiques, cette poésie qui vient de son caractére statique et de sa perfection’, observed Joseph Weterings in La Revue musicale after Scherchen had conducted the last two sections in Brussels in April 1935.
The Path to ‘Le Paradis Perdu’: Extracts from a correspondence with Alex de Graeff
Authors: Markevitch Igor
Published: February 2010

Markevitch's correspondence with the Dutch pianist Alex de Graeff began in 1932, at the time of her article on his Partita, and has continued to the present day. The following excerpts have been selected specifically for the present issue of TEMPO, and represent only very small fraction of the whole.
In Search of a Soviet Pioneer: Nikolai Roslavets
Authors: Foreman Lewis
Published: February 2010

At centenaries we usually invite those who have special knowledge of a given figure to attempt a statement of a career, and argue for revaluation. At the very least the ordinary music-lover is usually given the opportunity to hear a range of unfamiliar music and make a personal decision. (Furthermore, with the modern phenomenon of home tape-recording, unofficial tapes get into circulation which ensure that judgements, whether right or wrong, are never again merely the handing-down of prejudiced statements from one writer to the next.) However, the centenary which falls on 5 January is particularly worthy of note, for it is that of a composer potentially of great interest—the subject of innumerable footnotes in reference books—but almost totally unheard, owing to a long history of suppression of his art in his native Russia. I refer to Nikolai Andreievitch Roslavets, one of the most advanced composers of his time: an early investigator of serial techniques, whose musical revolutionary passion was strongly linked to his support for the proletarian revolution, and who ultimately had to sublimate his musical tenets in order to accord with political developments with which it would appear he was not musically at ease.
The Wind Quintet
Authors: Nash Peter Paul
Published: February 2010

Roberto Gerhard wrote his Wind Quintet (for flute doubling piccolo, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn) in 1928, and conducted the first performance in Barcelona in 1930. At the time of writing it, Gerhard had reached the end of his five years of study with Arnold Schoenberg, whose own gigantic Wind Quintet had appeared just four years previously. Gerhard's Quintet is a short, concentrated work. It is also—at least as far as considerations of its origins and future implications are concerned—rather a complex one. To put it in a wide historical perspective, it stands among the foremost of the first generation of post-Viennese-school serial works. Looking closer, one can see revealed in it—aside from those craftsmanly skills, the mastering of which was the primary task of any Schoenberg pupil—a young composer, alive to many of the possibilities now open to him, possibilities beyond just those pertaining to his teacher's more revolutionary ideas, and at the same time perhaps uncertain which general direction to take.
Gerhard's Cantata: 1) Gerhard, Carner, and King James ‘The Conqueror’
Authors: Walker Geoffrey J.
Published: February 2010

Roberto Gerhard's widow tells of how at some time in the early 1930's, when the Gerhards were still living in Barcelona, their friend Josep Carner—perhaps the foremost poet of the Catalan language in the 20th century and dubbed by his contemporaries ‘the prince of poets’—complained to the composer that Gerhard had not yet honoured him by setting any of his verses to music. Gerhard readily accepted this invitation, couched as it was in the form of a mild reproach! It was Carner himself who suggested the text to be used, a specially re-worked version of a poem which had first appeared in a sort of pastiche medieval novel entitled La malvestat d'Oriana, written by Carner in 1910. The re-drafted poem and the new Gerhard cantata received the title L'alta naixença del rei En Jaume (The Noble Birth of the Sovereign Lord King James).
Gerhard's Cantata: 2) A Note on the Music
Authors: Drew David
Published: February 2010

No-one familiar with the Gerhard of the Catalan Folksongs, Don Quixote, or The Duenna should have any difficulty in guessing the authorship of the Cantata. Admittedly, its stylization of Catalan popular idioms owes a little to the declamatory writing of Falla's Master Peter's Puppet Show; but it owes very much more to the already typically Gerhardian tonal and free-tonal harmony of the folksong arrangements. The rhythm and modality of the opening flute solo, and of the soprano aria (no. 2) which is derived from it, are clearly of folk origin. But whether in its unaccompanied or in its dissonantly harmonized form, the theme instantly calls to mind the second of Gerhard's 12-note serial Impromptus of 1950.
Symphony No.2/Metamorphoses—The Compositional Background
Authors: Bradshaw Susan
Published: February 2010

It was not until the early 1950's, when the ideas of the young Darmstadt composers (Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio, Nono, Maderna, Pousseur and others) began to seep across the channel, that Gerhard found himself indirectly influenced by the contemporary avant-garde: like them, he too came under the spell of numbers. Unlike the Darmstadt generation, however, Gerhard refused even temporarily to allow technical considerations to become the sine qua non for his music. Never afraid of appearing naive—and certainly not by then, in relation to composers half his age—he took a childlike pleasure in sifting through the debris of the post-war avant-garde explosion for such fragments of neo-serial technique as might be used to expand his own expressive horizons. Like Stravinsky (who came under the influence of Webern at an even later stage of his career), Gerhard was incapable of quasi-scientific musical experiment for its own sake; rather, his fascination with simple numerical relationships was to become inseparable from his concern for the proportional balance of harmonic rhythm as an essential means of defining structure.
‘In Sleep, in Thunder’: Elliott Carter'S Portrait of Robert Lowell
Authors: Schiff David
Published: February 2010

Elliott Carter's new work for the London Sinfonietta, In Sleep, In Thunder, is a setting of six poems by Robert Lowell scored for tenor and fourteen instrumentalists and composed ‘in memory of the poet and friend’. With it Carter completes a triptych on contemporary American poetry that began with A Mirror on Which to Dwell (six poems of Elizabeth Bishop) and continued with Syringa, on the poem of that name by John Ashbery. Since Lowell himself suggested to the composer the initial choice of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry it seems appropriate that Lowell should receive a parallel (though posthumous) tribute.
An American in Albion: The Music of Bernard Benoliel
Authors: MacDonald Calum
Published: February 2010

Bernard Benoliel is best known, perhaps, as the Secretary of the RVW Trust—a position he has held for the last 4½ years. But his reputation as a postserial composer has been growing recently, largely through BBC broadcasts of his music. The forthcoming world premiere of his Symphony makes this a particularly fruitful time to introduce a remarkable and highly individual body of work.
Andrzej Panufnik and his ‘Sinfonia Sacra’
Authors: Hall Barrie
Published: February 2010

Panufnik's third symphony, entitled ‘Sinfonia Sacra’, represents in many ways the coalescence of his technical, stylistic and spiritual development. Its choice as winner, out of 133 entries from 38 countries, in the Prince Rainier III Composition Prize in Monaco in 1963, was an important step in the recognition of an artist whose notably individual style eludes easy classification. One usually looks to teachers, to other contemporary composers, and to predecessors, for traceable influences upon a new talent. In Panufnik's case, they help us very little.
Peter Maxwell Davies's Five Motets
Authors: Payne Anthony
Published: February 2010

The first version of the Five Motets, completed in 1959 while Maxwell Davies was still at Cirencester, was laid out for two choirs, a cappella, and four soloists. Realising the difficulty of the work as it stood however, the composer withheld it for the time being, and eventually re-wrote it in 1962 immediately after reaching Princeton, adding instrumental accompaniments to each of the three groups. These parts double the voices, but at the same time achieve a life of their own by means of the interchange of parts and other unobtrusive decorative devices. Stylistically the work moves away from the strict techniques characteristic of the composer's preceding works (isorhythm, canon, serialism, etc.) towards a greater freedom of melodic and harmonic expansion. One important factor in the articulation of this new manner is the all-pervading use of cori spezzati effects, the three groups of performers being directed to be placed as far apart as is reasonably practical to obtain true antiphony. The central group comprises SATB soloists and string quintet; the left hand group choir I (SATB), 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and chamber organ I; and the right hand group choir II (SATB), flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, double bassoon and chamber organ II.
Martinu's Musical Development
Authors: Šafránek Miloš
Published: February 2010

“What is daring and bold in Martinu”, wrote Ansermet, “is the impossibility of characterising in one word, as can be done with other composers, either his melody, which is nothing exceptional, or his harmony, which is complex and daring in tonal treatment but keeps to a recognised and proven path, or his stylistic approach. But one thing forces itself on the attention and that is the expressive character of his work… achieved by means which are his alone. Few contemporary composers have embodied the modern slogan of ‘back to pure music’ in their work as happily as Martinu, in the sense that the subjects of his music are truly integrated in the musical substance.”
Stravinsky's ‘Abraham and Isaac’ and ‘Elegy for J. F. K.’
Authors: Payne Anthony
Published: February 2010

The nature of feeling in Stravinsky's art, variously described as depersonalised, ritualistic or monumental, finds its epitome in the small memorial pieces which have appeared throughout his life. Here one can say that personal grief does not in the least affect the means of expression, yet paradoxically it is the music's sole raison d'être. With such an oblique relationship between personal feeling and artistic expression, it is not surprising that the composer's three most recent memorials, Epitaphium, Dirge Canons, and the new Elegy for JKF, find in the pre-compositionally determined factors of twelve-note serialism a most convincing discouragement to personal indulgence. It is even more instructive that the row is used with simple rigidity, and little of the licence which elsewhere in the composer's serial works encompasses the more improvisatory and empirical demands of his highly characteristic harmonic sense. This rigidity of technique perfectly corresponds to the plain fact of the carved epitaph, and is close to the universal poignancy of some Roman memorial inscriptions.
Whose Fault is the Speaking Voice?
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: February 2010

It is more than half a century since Schoenberg first introduced rhythmically organized speech, with relative—not absolute!—pitch outlines defined, into his music; significantly enough, the abandonment of normal song first happened in his earlier atonal works, such as Pierrot lunaire and Die Glückliche Hand (which I call ‘The Knack’ in English). That this disintegration of pitch followed hard on the heels of the disintegration of tonality is a simple historical fact which criticism has hitherto altogether neglected. We have been so preoccupied with the loss of key on the one hand and the speaking voice's loss of pitch on the other, that we have never stopped to consider that—and, most important, why—the two belong together.
A Great Mind and a Great Spirit
Authors: Roth Ernst
Published: February 2010

It is never quite easy for the publisher to write about ‘his’ composer because the composer is ‘his’ in a very special and complex way. Abraham Mendelssohn once said in a letter to his family that he was but a dash between his famous father, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn who profoundly influenced liberal thinking in the second half of the 18th century, and his better known and equally famous son Felix. But Abraham Mendelssohn was the founder of the family fortune which enabled his son to devote himself entirely to his hobbies and to make his house the focal point of musical and artistic life in Berlin and Leipzig.
Requiem Canticles
Authors: Payne Anthony
Published: February 2010

As its title implies, Stravinsky's latest work is by no means comprehensive in its choice of texts from the Mass for the Dead, and clearly shows an idiosyncratic and personal attitude. Of the seven main sections of the Mass as set by, say, Verdi, Stravinsky taps only three, the Introit, Dies Irae and Responsory (Libera Me), extracting from them six short vocal movements which are symmetrically framed and divided by three sections for the orchestra. Significantly, four of these settings use the Dies Irae text, a thirteenth-century Latin hymn whose persistently dramatic and memorable poetic imagery thus dominates the canticles and produces the groundplan: Prelude—Exaudi. Dies Irae. Tuba Mirum—Interlude—Rex Tremendae. Lacrimosa. Libera Me—Postlude. It will be seen that there is no use made of the Requiem Aeternam sections which colour most settings, and the impression is that the cautionary aspects of the Mass have cast their aura over the concept of the work as a whole. While providing suitable material for an essay in dramatic ritual, this choice also presents something of the composer's personal attitude to life and the hereafter.
Stravinsky's Choral Music
Authors: Walsh Stephen
Published: February 2010

For well over fifty years Stravinsky has been a prolific choral composer, using the medium widely within the framework of larger works, as well as turning out a stream of works which are either exclusively choral or which depend sufficiently on chorus to be categorised alongside such pieces. Even so the flow has never been entirely regular. Of the 102 separate works listed in Eric Walter White's recent survey, 20 are in some sense choral (I include operas like The Nightingale or The Rake's Progress, both of which have appreciable parts for chorus, as well as one like Oedipus Rex, where the chorus is a central and substantial figure in both the music and the drama). But no less than seven post-date The Rake's Progress—a proportion of seven out of 19 works—and all but two of these are settings of religious texts. Out of twelve choral works composed before The Rake only six are religious, and of these half are short unaccompanied settings of liturgical texts.
Record Guide
Authors: Payne Anthony
Published: February 2010

In the seven years since the first performance at Aldeburgh of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream it has already seen three British productions and several abroad, and at a time when our early enthusiasm for the work has ripened into a certainty of its profound qualities, Decca have issued a superb recording of it under the composer's direction (SET 338–40). Most of the roles have by now been taken by more than one interpreter, and the Lysander on this issue, Peter Pears, has previously been Flute, while Josephine Veasey, who took the part of Oberon at Covent Garden, is here an excellent Hermia.
Structure and Concept in Bartók's Sixth Quartet
Authors: Suchoff Benjamin
Published: February 2010

The melancholy thirteen-bar prefatory theme (“Mesto”) of the Sixth Quartet, which introduces each of the four movements in the work, has received much attention by writers on Bartók. Such terms as ‘motto theme’, ‘idée fixe’, ‘signature theme’, and ‘ritornello’ have usually been used to describe it, indicating that the work heralds Bartók's direction away from arch form—the structural method of his two preceding quartets—and towards cyclic form as a means of achieving overall unity. The sketches of the work, however, and the documents relating to it, suggest that the use of the prefatory theme as a cyclic link was not part of the original plan; that the work as first conceived would have shown an even more radical abandonment of the principles of thematic unification characteristic of nearly all Bartók's major works of the previous decade; and that the particular cyclic connection between the first and last movements was a structural modification based on new expressive needs which arose during the course of the composition of the work.
The Contemporary Problem
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: February 2010

Roger Smalley says that in Webern as opposed to Schoenberg, canon dominates the later music, which is “a reason for the spareness of Webern's textures… These characteristics are also true of Stravinsky's serial music, which is why on the deepest level he is a Webernian serialist and (pace Hans Keller) not a Schoenbergian one”.
The Music of Andrzej Panufnik
Authors: French Peter
Published: February 2010

Born into a musical family in 1914, Andrzej Panufnik began composing at the age of nine, made rapid and distinguished progress through the Warsaw Conservatoire, and then went abroad for further study in Paris, London and Vienna (including conducting lessons from Felix Weingartner). At the outbreak of war in 1939 he returned to Warsaw and devoted himself to composition, as far as this was possible in an atmosphere poisonous to artistic creation; he also composed patriotic songs under a pseudonym, and participated as a pianist in prohibited underground and charity concerts. In the Warsaw uprising in 1944 all that he had written up to then was destroyed, but the collapse of Germany and the removal of the Nazi occupation brought the seeming promise of a fresh start under a new regime. Panufnik was appointed permanent conductor of the Cracow Philharmonic Orchestra, and then of the Warsaw Philharmonic. From that time on he travelled extensively, conducting every leading European orchestra. Further honours and decorations came his way from the new Poland, where he was esteemed as one of the country's leading composers and conductors. In spite of this he felt unable to accept political intervention in artistic matters, and in 1954, as a protest, he left Poland to emigrate to England. Here too he has been active both as a composer and as a conductor, and for two years (1957–59) he was permanent conductor of the City of Birmingham Orchestra, but now gives most of his time to composition.
The Contemporary Problem
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: February 2010

David Simmons, introducing a recent concert of advanced works at the Purcell Room, has tried a frontal attack on the problem of contemporary music; but the trouble is that the attack, meant as a piece of propaganda, is a shade more problematic than the problem. There's hardly a sentence in the piece that I can swallow whole—and as for the virginal listener, he may have found the difficult music easier than the words that were intended to ease the way. Are we not, in fact, talking too much, all of us? You may ask, what's too much? Well, everything that is not submitted as demonstrable truth. I don't mean the whole truth, of course; what I do mean is nothing but the truth. At this problematic stage in musical history, it's cumbersome enough to have to take a lot of musical gas on the off-chance that it mightn't be gas; but to have to take gas about gas in the hope that you will be able to read sense into one or both of them is a bit of a task—and a task is something which culture, natural culture, shouldn't be.
Songs and Choral Music
Authors: Puffett Derrick
Published: February 2010

To an extent unusual among present-day composers, Robin Holloway is occupied with words—as a lecturer and teacher at Cambridge, as the author of many articles and reviews, as the compiler of his own libretti, and as one who sets the words of others to music. Of his forty-one works with opus number, eighteen are sets of songs; another five are unaccompanied choral works. He has also written an opera and three cantatas.
Reflection After Composition
Authors: Harvey Jonathan
Published: February 2010

The bass moves into the middle: this is our musical revolution. Several composers after Webern, myself included, have been fascinated by harmonic structures which radiate out from either side of a central axis in reflecting intervals. Unless a strong contrary line is taken in atonal music the bass will remain at the bottom of what sounds like dissonant music. But in symmetrical mirroring structures it is forced, focal attention is forced, into the axial middle, because all relationships converge there: the sounds point to it.
‘Threni’: Stravinsky's ‘Debt’ to Krenek
Authors: Hogan Clare
Published: February 2010

That both Stravinsky and Krenek composed a setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah is not in itself especially startling, for it had been done before and has been done since. In his Conversations Stravinsky says that he was already familiar with Palestrina's complete service, as well as the other Lamentations of Tall is and Byrd. (He does not mention Krenek along with these, but acknowledges him elsewhere.) Stravinsky and Krenek both made selections from the Vulgate of the Lamentations: Stravinsky from chapters I, III, and V and Krenek from those sections which are used at a Catholic service on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Saturday. Both works are structurally tripartite, and both treat the Hebrew letters separately from the text.
A Note on Frank Bridge
Authors: Warrack John
Published: February 2010

This is not, I fear, the much-needed full critical assessment of Frank Bridge. The very size of his output makes such a task difficult, and it is not helped by the disappearance of several important scores, among them the Cello Concerto (1930) and Enter Spring (1927)—which Britten remembers “as a riot of melodic and harmonic richness, although it is thirty years since I heard it or saw the score.” Performances of his music, at any rate in public, are exceedingly rare, and no-one except Britten has shown any interest in correcting the fact. Fortunately it is possible to outline a rough sketch of Bridge—incomplete and undetailed, but fair so far as it goes—by concentrating on the chamber music, where he is at his most personal; and thus to suggest some of the reasons why, personal affection apart, Britten today cherishes Bridge's memory so warmly.
The Music of Nicholas Maw
Authors: Payne Anthony
Published: February 2010

Ten years ago when Europe had already experienced thirty years of experiment and achievement in the field of serial composition, there was emerging in Britain the first generation of young composers to have shown awareness of the revolution from the start. This time-lag, combined with a characteristically wary view of the latest continental developments, and naturally eclectic gifts, has borne fruit in a sensible but vital series of new styles and techniques—less liable, perhaps, in their innate conservatism, to achieve a visionary leap in the dark, but at the same time not prone to the excesses of some avant-garde experiments. Several of the young composers involved, Nicholas Maw among them, have shown facility in free atonal as well as twelve-note idioms and have tended recently towards a less rigorous application of serial methods. In fact in Britain at least the stage may well be set for a fulfilment of Krenek's prophecy—that the future development of atonal music will not depend on strict twelve-note regulation so much as on an instinctive preservation of the essence of the method.
The Italian Avant-Garde and National Tradition
Authors: Waterhouse John C. G.
Published: February 2010

Musical nationalism is sometimes looked on as a transient phenomenon, characteristic of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and closely associated with political nationalism. But such a view is only a half-truth: national characteristics have had a way of turning up in the music of most ages, and we find them not only in periods of militant political nationalism and parochialism, but also, often to a striking degree, at times when frontiers seemed to imply no cultural barriers. Medieval civilization was international to an extent that would have been inconceivable in the nineteenth century; yet there is no mistaking the quintessential italianità of, say, Landini. The Italian and English madrigal schools of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries could be regarded as closely-related phases of one great cultural flowering; yet one need not look at the words to assign madrigals by Marenzio and Weelkes, or Gastoldi and Morley, to their respective countries.
Budd and Gloriana Reconsidered
Authors: Henderson Robert L.
Published: February 2010

If it has done nothing else, the revival of Britten's two ‘underground’ operas, Gloriana in a concert performance last November, and Billy Budd more recently at Covent Garden, has more than vindicated that small group of enthusiasts who stood out against popular opinion when the operas were first produced some ten years ago, and have since then resolutely insisted on the importance of both works. Many of us, I think, who had not seen or heard either Gloriana or Billy Budd until now, have been much too willing to accept without question the general, and as we can now see, misleading critical assessment that greeted their first appearance. But there can be no longer any doubt as to the distinctive position that these two compositions occupy within the canon of Britten's stage works, and certainly Billy Budd at least must be counted among the finest of his achievements.
Seminal Works of Quartertone Music
Authors: Whitman George
Published: February 2010

The first complete biography of Alois Hába, who is now in his early seventies, is being prepared by Dr. J. Vyslouzil, lecturer in musicology at the University of Brno, and I owe thanks to him for valuable co-operation in selecting and analysing examples of Hába's work. Few other composers have followed as clear cut a pattern of a life's work as Hába, who in the years 1921–23 made a significant breakthrough in several directions in his first mature works. This gave him enough material for development as a composer, theoretical thinker and teacher to last a lifetime. Of these works I have selected three, all written in the quartertone system, and hope to show in what way Hába was ahead of his contemporaries at that time.
Form in Opera: ‘Albert Herring’ Examined
Authors: Stein Erwin
Published: February 2010

To watch the growth of a composer has been the great interest of my life. It is a fascinating experience to see how they all begin from some older composers whom they love, and how they assimilate from them congenial ideas and idioms until their own personality and language is fully developed. I have observed several composers from the start who later gained distinction and great fame, and though the cases were as different as the individualities, some incidents always seem to recur with the inevitability of natural laws. There is always at first more public reaction against, than receptiveness for, the new message; and later, when the composer has grown to fuller stature, his earlier, originally censured works, are often preferred to his new ones. Obviously it takes some time until people become accustomed to what is unfamiliar.
Leeds Looks Back
Authors: Stuart Charles
Published: February 2010

On my desk lies the prospectus for the Leeds Triennial Musical Festival (October 7th to 11th), founded in 1858, twice suspended for the duration of wars, predestined, apparently, to survive all modern tribulations—financial crises included—without turning a hair. In a world which has graduated bewilderingly from Sterndale Bennett's May Queen (the first “Triennial” novelty) to the bleakness and concomitant blah-blah of Twelve Tone music, the Festival promoters have contrived to keep cool heads, forgetting little and prudently refraining from learning too much.
“My Many Lives”
Authors: Lehmann Lotte
Published: February 2010

The Rosenkavalier has run like a lovely musical theme through my whole life in opera. Sophie was the first important rôle which was entrusted to me as a beginner. The conductor, Gustav Brecher, even considered letting me do the première in Hamburg. I think that was in 1911—the second year of my engagement there, but then he thought better of it and gave the part for the first performance to Elisabeth Schumann. She was dramatically much more talented than I, and in spite of her youth had already given evidence of her delightful gift for acting and her ripening artistry in several rôles; while I was still very much in the background and really nothing more than an ignorant and awkward beginner with a nice voice. Then too, Edith Walker, who sang and acted Octavian quite enchantingly, wanted Schumann as Sophie, for which I certainly couldn't blame her. But at the time I was bitterly disappointed and saw everything in a very false light. I felt persecuted and surrounded by intrigue—how I laughed later on over this ridiculous idea! Elisabeth's whole being is worlds apart from any intrigue; she has always been the best colleague one could imagine—a wonderful character through and through. And Edith Walker certainly had no ground for persecuting me with disfavour as the stupid little beginner imagined. She only wanted the performance to be as fine as possible, and so very wisely chose Elizabeth. But suddenly I found myself only the understudy, and sat through the stage rehearsals in the hall gnashing my teeth and comforting myself with the thought that I was the dramatic victim of a finely woven intrigue. Later, when Schumann was not available, I was allowed to sing Sophie and had a very nice success with it.
The Mantle of Diaghileff
Authors: Squire W. H. Haddon
Published: February 2010

A ballet, like every work of art, has what may be called a “life” or “time-body,” that something which remains a unity or whole, under all changes of condition, approach and fashion—the “Linga-Sharira” of Hindu philosophy.

In his interesting book “This Thing Called Ballet,” George Borodin touches the fringe of this idea when he points out that there is no system of dance notation comparable to that of music; none capable of recording with exactness the intricate movements and rhythms of modern ballet. As the reproduction and revival of works depend almost entirely upon the memory of choreographers and individual artists, “even often repeated ballets are in a constant state of change … From generation to generation there are minute changes until the whole is subtly and fundamentally altered.” These changes include, of course, differences in casting, orchestral direction, renewal of décor and costumes, with other elements too numerous to mention. Even one performance is never precisely the same as another. In short, the balletomane finds himself in the not very congenial company of the “weeping philosopher,” Heraclitus. “You cannot step twice,” he said, “into the same river; for the water into which you first stepped will by now have flowed on, and other water will have taken its place.” Is it the same river? The same ballet?
Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet
Authors: Morley Iris
Published: February 2010

In the Soviet Union of today, as in the Imperial Russia of the past, ballet occupies the position of a major art and enjoys all the privileges of that station, not the least of which is having original music composed for each new work. Few of the distinguished names in Soviet music have not, at some time or other, appeared upon the score for a ballet, and as these are all three or four acts long, composing for the ballet can be compared to writing an opera—a major work requiring time and co-operation with the other arts involved.
A Forgotten Goethe Song by Richard Strauss
Authors: Schuh Willi
Published: February 2010

On the eve of the 200th anniversary of Goethe's birth, we call to mind a little known Goethe song by Richard Strauss that does not appear in any of the Master's song collections. It is based on a poem from the Westöstlicher Divan. Goethe's homage in a Persian disguise to the Grand Duke Karl August, which was written in the early months of the year 1815, and was published under the title Schach Sedschan and His Equals in the Buch der Betrachtungen, was set to music by Richard Strauss on the 11th June, 1925—that is to say, on his 61st birthday. He intended this hymn-like canto for the presentation to Romain Rolland which Maxim Gorki, Georges Duhamel and Stefan Zweig were preparing and which as Liber Amicorum Romain Rolland under the editorship of Emile Roniger (Rotapfel-Verlag, Erlenbach-Zürich), appeared on the 60th birthday of the poet on 29th January, 1926. The song appeared in facsimile in that volume, but has never been otherwise published.
Béla Bartók: A Recollection by his Publisher
Authors: Hawkes Ralph
Published: February 2010

Much has been written about Béla Bartók since his death in September, 1945; sorrow and regrets have been virtually poured out by some when discussing the last days of this great master. Indeed, harsh words have been uttered that could be interpreted as indicating that he died utterly penniless and completely neglected. This is not true and those who knew him well will vouchsafe that he himself would have had strong views on such statements.
On Collecting Folk Songs in Turkey
Authors: Bartók Béla
Published: February 2010

First of all I must tell you which part of the country we wanted to explore. We went to Southern Anatolia, near the Syrian border, where the Yürüks have their winter camps. The Yürüks are a nomadic tribe who camp in the hilly parts of the South during winter and live high up in the Taurus mountain in summer. We assumed that a tribe that has still kept this ancestral form of life would very likely have preserved many of their old musical customs. That is why we cast our eyes on their land when setting out on our first journey.
Arthur Benjamin and the Problem of Popularity. A Critical Appreciation
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: February 2010

The strongest single cause of the present-day cleft between composer and listener has been the increasingly swift raising of the norm of dissonance: if indeed “norm” is still the word: from modern music as a whole it is quite impossible to extract anything like generally valid harmonic formulae. It is true that with the increased availability of art to the inartistic the problem of popularity would in any case have arisen; but the dynamic development and—in 12-tone technique—dethronement of harmony has left the majority of listeners so far behind that most talents trying to be popular fall between the proletarian and the musical stools. It is in fact the Marxist musicians' bad luck that they have to attempt their extreme solution of the question how to be popular at the very time when the history of harmony and tonality makes their task extremely unsolvable. Thus they have come to demand more than the maximal musical conservatism, and to consider the atonalists right-wing. Meanwhile the right wing, while condemning Moscow's artistic approach, regards the atonalists as left wing, and an unhappy time is had by all. The paradox is easily solved: a political revolution needs the mass; an artistic revolution revolts against it.
Britten's Spring Symphony
Authors: Stein Erwin
Published: February 2010

Spring Symphony—the accent is on the first word. Musical pictures of the Spring have been combined in a symphonic cycle. The form deviates from the usual schemes: there is no sonata form nor are there any other of the traditional symphonic movements. Therefore, if someone has too hard and fast a notion of what a symphony should be, let him accept the word here in the metaphorical sense. But if a symphony means integrating the manifold aspects of one idea, here is a true example of the type. We have a series of twelve contrasting vocal pieces, the unity of which is provided not only by the one subject, Spring, but by the way in which the pieces are co-ordinated. They are grouped into four parts, similar to the traditional scheme of Allegro, Adagio, Scherzo and Finale, but our Allegro consists of several movements: an extended Lento introduction and four lively pieces which follow each other without pause. No thematic connection between them is apparent, nor between the movements of the second or third parts, representing, as it were Adagio and Scherzo. The fourth part is composed in one, as a Finale of large ternary form.
Impressions of Music in Jugoslavia
Authors: Weldon George
Published: February 2010

A recent concert tour of Jugoslavia has enabled me to see for myself a very healthy musical state in that country. Jugoslavia possesses really excellent Symphony Orchestras at Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana (all of which I conducted); and others, notably at Skoplie, are steadily being built up. Music in Jugoslavia is under the control of the Ministry of Science and Culture, at whose invitation I went there under the auspices of the British Council. Musically, the country is divided into three main sections, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia, and there is a healthy rivalry between them.
The Nordic Music Festivals: 1888–1938
Authors: Balzer Jürgen
Published: February 2010

Geographically, historically, linguistically and culturally the three Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, are closely connected with each other. The connexion was once closer than it is to-day; the course of history has deepened the gulfs between the Nordic peoples and the haughtiness of growing national arrogance promoted separatism. In the last hundred years however, efforts have been made to unite again what time had separated. The so-called “Scandinavism” arose among the university men, but gradually it spread to other circles in the three peoples. The Nordic Music Festivals were part of these endeavours towards common activity.
Producing “Elektra”
Authors: Beinl Stephen
Published: February 2010

The classical drama of Elektra was recreated through the spirit and language of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and through the limitless, manifold power of musical expression possessed by Richard Strauss. These two poets—of words and sounds—were really seismographs for the tidal wave of blood that was to overtake the world. We have come through the wave. We have seen mankind in the dungeon of its bestiality, we have witnessed its thirst for vengeance, its unlimited cowardice, its tormented anxiety. We have seen it, too, in its mute preparedness for sacrifice, its devotion to duty; or in its greed for life, now trampled on, now trampling, now doglike in devotion, now applauding the victor. We have known Elektra, Aegistheus, Klytemnestra, Orestes, Chrysothemis—we have encountered all of them, all the characters in this piece.
Kleiber: An Appreciation
Authors: Webster David
Published: February 2010

Kleiber had a reputation as a tyrant and a terror of Intendants. It may be that by the time he first came to Co vent Garden, which was in the 1950–51 season, he had mellowed, for the impression remaining with me was of a very impish kind of humour. I remember well sitting with him in an hotel in Switzerland. We had been negotiating for his coming to London. “There is just one other thing I would like to mention,” I said, “you have a great reputation for rows. By all means let's have a row at Covent Garden if it's really necessary, but otherwise don't let's have them. I hate rows.” He paused for a moment, then a great smile came over his face: “I don't think I make rows, but maybe it is true to say that where I am rows seem to be!” And although on another occasion he said “If there is not a row I make one” we never had a quarrel with him at Covent Garden.
Sergeii Ivanovitch Taneieff
Authors: de Hartmann Thomas
Published: February 2010

War time, June 1915. On the 8th a telegram reached me in the Tzarskoie Selo, the residence of the Emperor, where I was stationed as a reserve officer: it informed me of the death of my great friend Sergeii Ivanovitch Taneieff—a tremendous blow to me. I had met him first in 1896; later we had become friends, and remained so up to that moment.
Sergeii Prokofieff “The Flaming Angel”
Authors: Swarsenski Hans
Published: February 2010

After the failure of The Love of the Three Oranges in America at the end of 1921, and in spite of the lack of interest in the production of The Gambler and the early Maddalena, Prokofieff firmly decided on a new operatic composition. Accordingly, he settled himself in Ettal, near Oberammergau, for the sole reason, as it appears, of finding a suitable environment for his Flaming Angel. Although sketches of the thematic material go back to 1919, work on the scenario seems only to have been started in the United States and the musical themes put on paper earlier were probably intended for a symphony (subsequently No. 3) and, according to Nestieff, for a quartet “on the white keys.”
Richard Strauss and the Bavarian State Opera
Authors: Friess Hermann
Published: February 2010

Much has already been said about the relations between Richard Strauss and the opera house of his native city. During the course of two generations there were a number of misunderstandings and there were years, too, when Richard Strauss believed he had reason to complain that his works did not get the attention in the repertory of the Munich opera which they deserved. His works were never altogether neglected, however, and men like Hans Knappertsbusch and Generalintendant Clemens von Franckenstein, who was a friend of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ensured that adequate scope should be given to the creations of Munich's greatest son.
Music for Young America: A Washington Experiment
Authors: Mitchell Howard
Published: February 2010

During the orchestral year just concluded, about 83,000 young people living in the metropolitan area of Washington, D.C. heard 43 concerts played especially for them by the National Symphony Orchestra. Another 41,000 high-schoolers from all over the United States were our guests for 30 Music for Young America concerts played in the beautiful Pan American Union building between April 17 and May 21, after the close of our regular season.
The British Institute of Recorded Sound
Authors: Fisher Trevor
Published: February 2010

It is the aim of the British Institute of Recorded Sound to preserve copies of all published, and some unpublished, records of music, speech, animal and other varieties of sound in a collection on lines similar to that of printed matter in the British Museum Library. So far as music is concerned, the present aim is to obtain copies of records as they are published and to rescue as many of those made since recording first began, irrespective of their current value. It is of course impossible to predict the degree of value of any particular record—as to its music, performance, recording, or documentary interest—and it is quite probable that many will share the fate of Dussek's piano sonatas in relation to those of his contemporaries Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. It is fairly predictable however that records of Bartók, for instance, playing his own piano pieces will be of immense value for a very long time, in spite of the inferiority of the actual recording. But the Institute has no intention of forcing any kind of discrimination on the future—restriction is unavoidable, as with the Tate Gallery, only through an insufficiency of funds. Ideally its appetite must be gargantuan; classical and jive, romantic ballet and rock ‘n’ roll, Antonio's castanets and African drums, the voices of Flagstad, Norman Wisdom and Florence Foster Jenkins are all desired for its archives. Speech and music of the present day should be represented fully and impartially, and the future student be permitted to draw his own conclusions.
Piano Fantasy
Authors: Copland Aaron
Published: February 2010

My Piano Fantasy, completed in January of this year, is a large-scale work in one movement, lasting half an hour in performance. A long and continuous one-movement form has always seemed to me one of the most taxing assignments a composer can undertake. The word assignment is perhaps ill-chosen, since this particular task was self-imposed. My idea was to attempt a composition that would suggest the quality of fantasy, that is, a spontaneous and unpremeditated sequence of “events” that would carry the listener irresistibly (if possible) from first note to last, while at the same time exemplifying clear if somewhat unconventional structural principles. “The spontaneous,” says Paul Valéry, “is the fruit of conquest.” It implies a creator who can “keep the unity of a work's ensemble while realizing the separate parts and without losing its spirit or nature on the way.” To give free rein to the imagination without loss of coherence, to be “fantastic” without losing one's bearings, is venturesome, to say the least. And yet a work of art seems to me the ideal proving ground for just such a venture. At any rate, my Piano Fantasy is such a venture.
Guide to Contemporary Hungarian Composers — continued (II) The Later Decades and Outlook
Authors: Weissmann John S.
Published: February 2010

The composers of the second generation, whose personality and achievement were described in the preceding section, have all had opportunities of obtaining, for some of their music at least, a hearing abroad. Indeed some, like Géza Frid, Tibor Harsányi, Mátyás Seiber, had already decided, at the beginning of their careers, to settle abroad permanently and so, though belonging to this generation, cannot properly be included in the present survey.