bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Shostakovich and Kruchonykh
Authors: Komok Olga
Published: November 2023

It is not easy to find in the life of Dmitry Shostakovich any calm period when there was nothing to interfere with the composer’s thought processes. Each year, each decade, had its full share of the dramas, stresses, and complicated situations that are meat and drink to biographers. Yet even so, the decade of the 1940s was so filled with high drama, and with such highs and lows of fortune, as to seem positively theatrical. Among the events of those years were the blockade of Leningrad, evacuation, the death of Shostakovich’s closest friend Ivan Sollertinsky, the world-wide triumph of the ‘Leningrad’ Symphony, the composition of the Eighth and Ninth Symphonies, the Trio, Op. 67, and the Second Piano Sonata, the devastating 1948 Decree from the Communist Party Central Committee, which was followed by Shostakovich having to join an official delegation to the USA. Against this turbulent background there is one aspect of Shostakovich’s life during this period which has never been noticed by commentators, and it forms the subject of the present article.
A New Insight into the Tenth Symphony of Dmitry Shostakovich
Authors: Kravetz Nelly
Published: November 2023

Forty years after the premiéere of the Tenth Symphony, it is hard to believe that there could be something which might change our approach to a work which has been so thoroughly analysed and which has had such an unusually fine performance history. New evidence enables us to gain a new insight into this symphony, however, and the present article is based on eight letters written by Shostakovich in I 953, which have until now have been unknown to the musical world. The letters were addressed to Elmira Nazirova, who studied in Shostakovich’s class in 1947. In the interview with Elmira Nazirova which follows this article, she explains that her correspondence with Shostakovich began after they met during his visit to Baku, although she does not remember precisely when this was. According to Sofya Khentova, Shostakovich was in Baku from I to I 2 March 1952. During his visit Shostakovich performed at a recital his Six Preludes and Fugues from Op. 87. Elmira Nazirova remembers attending this concert.
Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century builds on the foundations of Music since the First World War (first published 1977, revised edition 1988). It updates and reshapes the original text and places it in the wider context of twentieth-century serious music before 1918 and after 1975. The focus is on matters of compositional technique, with sections of detailed analytical comment framed by more concise sketches of a range of twentieth-century composers from Fauré to Wolfgang Rihm. Extensive music examples reinforce this technical focus. Though in no sense a history of music concerned primarily with the institutional and critical climate within which composers live and work, nor an encyclopedia dealing with every significant composer, Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century offers a critical engagement with that confrontation between tradition and innovation to which twentieth-century composers have responded with resourcefulness and vitality.
Symphonic Music After 1918: I
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

The main part of this chapter looks in detail at three composers, born between 1865 and 1872, who wrote symphonies after 1918. Carl Nielsen (1865—1931), Jean Sibelius (1865—1957) and Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872—1958) were, in various productive respects, independent of the German late romantic symphonic mainstream, culminating in Mahler. Of the three, Sibelius may well prove to have had the most far-reaching impact, if only because more recent symphonists, from Vagn Holmboe to Peter Maxwell Davies, have revealed specific debts to him, but the fact that the symphonic principle itself (usually, if not invariably, in connection with some kind of tonality) has been reaffirmed and reinvigorated in the century’s later years lends new significance to the achievements of all three composers considered here.
Alban Berg
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

Alban Berg (1885–1935) studied with Schoenberg from 1904 to 1911, and although their subsequent relationship was nothing if not complex, Berg was able to achieve significant creative independence without rejecting the association between an expressionistic atmosphere and intricate structures based in traditional concepts of musical design which Schoenberg himself had favoured in his most radical works. Although Berg’s early compositions, from the many songs and the Piano Sonata Op. 1 to the Three Pieces for Orchestra Op. 6, are far from negligible, it was his first opera Wozzeck which fully revealed his originality and greatness for the first time. Berg began it in 1914, soon after seeing the play by Buchner from which he adapted his own libretto, and it occupied him until 1922: it was first performed, with great success, in Berlin in 1925. On one level Wozzeck continues the progress away from Wagnerian heroics begun by Richard Strauss in Salome and Elektra. Wagner’s last music drama dealt with Parsifal, the saviour in spotless armour, the fool who becomes wise. Wozzeck is a fool who goes mad, a common soldier who saves no one but kills his mistress and, apparently, commits suicide. The three acts of Wozzeck together are shorter than the first act of Parsifal. The contrast would be even greater had Berg adopted the kind of musical approach which emerged in the 1920s in the more determinedly anti-romantic operas of Hindemith and Weill, but he had no desire to keep his audience at a distance from the drama. Rather, the justification for showing so much squalor and brutality was to evoke feelings of compassion even more intense than those usually inspired by Wagner’s larger-than-life mythological characters.
Three Individualists
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

Michael Tippett (1905-98), Olivier Messiaen (1908–92), and Elliott Carter (b. 1908) have been highly regarded throughout the second half of the twentieth century for their integrity and individuality. All three began as relatively conservative, tonal composers. Then, after 1945, they moved away from an overriding reliance on tonality and traditional formal designs, though without making any significant commitment to the kind of post-tonal structuring available through the twelve-note technique. Both Tippett and Messiaen reintroduced elements of tonal thought during their later years, while Carter did not, but all three maintained an essentially modernist approach to style and structure.
The Music of Berlioz
Authors: Rushton Julian
Published: November 2023

The Music of Berlioz offers an overall assessment of Berlioz's musical achievement as we approach the bicentary of his birth in 2003. This is the first full-length musical study of the composer to take into account the rediscovered Messe solennelle, and discusses all aspects of his work, without undue emphasis on a few more popular pieces. The first section consists of a comprehensive biography of his musical works, tracing shifting patterns of productivity, approaches to genre, and the contrast between works which are aesthetically progressive or retrospective. The second section considers aspects of Berlioz's musical style, building upon earlier studies by the author and other recent scholarship; topics include Berlioz's practice of self-borrowing, his use of programmes and texts, characteristic rhetorical devices, and an emotional language. The third section takes four categories of works - song-forms, sacred music, symphonic works, and dramatic works - for more substantial analysis of selected passages and an overall critical assessment.
Provincial to Prize-Winner
Authors: Rushton Julian
Published: November 2023

Berlioz worked within a composing tradition founded on notated scores. The earliest surviving trace of this activity is usually an autograph, the basis for copies, manuscript performing material, and publication. Berlioz destroyed much of the paper mountain generated by his musical activities. We know from letters and memoirs that he sketched extensively, but little survives; had he had any conception of the value-financial, aesthetic, and scholarly —that posterity places on such things, he might have been still more ruthless. Survival of informal documents depends on the accidents of economy.
The Finale in Western Instrumental Music
Authors: Talbot Michael
Published: November 2023

The knowledge that finales are by tradition (and perhaps also necessarily) 'different' from other movements has been around a long time, but this is the first time that the special nature of finales in instrumental music has been examined comprehensively and in detail. Three main types of finale, labelled 'relaxant', 'summative', and 'valedictory', are identified. Each type is studied closely, with a wealth of illustration and analytical commentary covering the entire period from the Renaissance to the present day. The history of finales in five important genres -- suite, sonata, string quartet, symphony, and concerto -- is traced, and the parallels and divergences between these traditions are identified. Several wider issues are mentioned, including narrativity, musical rounding, inter-movement relationships, and the nature of codas. The book ends with a look at the finales of all Shostakovich's string quartets, in which examples of most of the types may be found.
The Summative Finale
Authors: Talbot Michael
Published: November 2023

What makes a summative finale different from a relaxant one? Is the difference one of kind or only of degree? If the latter were the case, one would expect a relaxant finale to turn into a summative one if it received an increment of length or weight, or if its cumulative and regressive character became more pronounced. The choice between the descriptions, relaxant, and, summative, would then give up all claim to have a technical foundation and would instead resemble that between, small, and, large,.
The Guitar and its Music
Authors: Tyler James , Sparks Paul
Published: November 2023

More than twenty years ago James Tyler wrote a modest introduction to the history, repertory, and playing techniques of the four- and five-course guitar. Entitled The Early Guitar: A History and Handbook (OUP 1980), this work proved valuable and enlightening not only to performers and scholars of Renaissance and Baroque guitar and lute music but also to classical guitarists. This new book, written in collaboration with Paul Sparks (their previous book for OUP, The Early Mandolin, appeared in 1989), presents new ideas and research on the history and development of the guitar and its music from the Renaissance to the dawn of the Classical era. Tyler's systematic study of the two main guitar types found between about 1550 and 1750 focuses principally on what the sources of the music (published and manuscript) and the writings of contemporary theorists reveal about the nature of the instruments and their roles in the music making of the period. The annotated lists of primary sources, previously published in The Early Guitar but now revised and expanded, constitute the most comprehensive bibliography of Baroque guitar music to date. His appendices of performance practice information should also prove indispensable to performers and scholars alike. Paul Sparks also breaks new ground, offering an extensive study of a period in the guitar's history--notably c.1759-c.1800--which the standard histories usually dismiss in a few short paragraphs. Far from being a dormant instrument at this time, the guitar is shown to have been central to music-making in France, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and South America. Sparks provides a wealth of information about players, composers, instruments, and surviving compositions from this neglected but important period, and he examines how the five-course guitar gradually gave way to the six-string instrument, a process that occurred in very different ways (and at different times) in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Britain.
Mendelssohn’s First Composition
Authors: Jones Peter ward
Published: November 2023

What is Mendelssohn’s first original extant composition? The earliest musical notation in his hand that we know of is that contained in the volume of harmony and counterpoint exercises done under the supervision of Carl Friedrich Zelter. As Larry Todd has indicated in his edition of this volume, the first entries were probably made in August or September 1819, although the advanced nature of the initial exercises in the book suggests that others, no longer extant, would have preceded them, perhaps done on loose sheets or possibly in another exercise book. Certainly Mendelssohn had been receiving tuition from Zelter since at least July 1819, and perhaps earlier. A number of original compositions are to be found amongst the formal exercises in thoroughbass, counterpoint, and canon, but the earliest of these exercises dates from July 1820, by which time there is plenty of evidence of compositions elsewhere.
Felix Mendelssohn and Fanny Hensel: The Search for Perfection in Opposing Private and Public Worlds
Authors: Tillard Françoise
Published: November 2023

Writers have discussed Fanny and Felix as two aspects of the same entity —at first, as complementary twin talents, and then opposed. F in Dur and F in Moll (F major and F minor), wrote Cécile Lowenthal-Hensel, greatgranddaughter of Fanny: Felix major, Fanny minor. ‘Major’ here denotes the dominant mode and ‘minor’ the dependent one (which might be irrelevant in music, as we know). This opposition and its use are the subject of this chapter. Felix is handsome, Fanny ugly; Felix travelled, Fanny stayed at home; Felix belonged to the light of the public world, and Fanny remained in the shadow of her damp home. They represent the two poles of perfection, one in the masculine world, the other in the feminine world.
The Composer as Other: Gender and Race in the Biography of Felix Mendelssohn
Authors: Kimber Marian Wilson
Published: November 2023

In the mid-nineteenth century, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy personified the Victorian gentleman; evidence of his ‘manliness’ was found in his class status, his success, his family relations, and his music. George Grove described the composer as ‘one perfectly balanced nature, in whose life, whose letters, and whose music alike, all is at once manly and refined’. Critic Henry Chorley wrote, ‘[d]emanding as it does, execution without grimace; fancy, cheerful and excursive, but never morbid; and feeling under the control of a serene, not sluggish spirit—Mendelssohn’s is manly music; and looses [sic] effect beyond that of almost any other of his contemporaries, when attempted by female hands’.
The Heritage of Pythagoras: Nineteen to the Dozen
Authors: Penrose Roger
Published: November 2023

There are four categories of influence that might be said to underlie the specific nature of music-or, indeed, of any other art. These are: (r) Platonic, (2) physiological, (3) cultural, and (4) magic. By the term ‘Platonic’, I mean influences that are absolute and unchangeable. These particular influences would be exactly the same for a ‘music’ that could be appreciated by any being who inhabited a different planet from ours, or even a different universe. Essentially what I refer to here are issues that are purely mathematical, though I am not at all averse to the notion that there might be aesthetic influences that are also of a Platonic nature. Plato himself argued, after all, that there should be an absolute notion of ‘the beautiful’ as well as an absolute (mathematical) notion of ‘the true’-and, further, that there should be an absolute notion of ‘the good’. These further Platonic notions will not be my particular concern here, as I have little to say about them. But the absolute nature of the mathematical influences will be of particular relevance.
Perception of Tonal Pitch Space and Tonal Tension
Authors: Cuddy Lola L , Smith Nicholas A
Published: November 2023

The focus of our study of tonal pitch space and tonal tension is the perception of key and key modulation. The perception of key and key modulation is an intriguing topic for music psychology. We may put forth two reasons in particular. First, the topic addresses a central issue in psychology, namely the identification of the mental structures and processes involved in the representation of abstract hierarchical relations. Second, and perhaps even more important, the study of modulation addresses the interface between cognition and emotion or affect.
Listening to a Piece of Music: A Schematization Process Based on Abstracted Surface Cues
Authors: Deli.Ege Ire.Ne
Published: November 2023

Listening to music is considered here as a schematization process postulating a mechanism of ‘cue abstraction’ and ‘imprint formation’ during listening. The basic theoretical lines of the model were established about ten years ago.1 It is probably worth emphasizing at the outset that it is assumed here that certain psychological constants underlie listening to music of whatever type. Indeed, the experimental approaches of the different aspects of the model were conducted using a broad repertory ranging from Bach to contemporary pieces-Boulez, Berio, and Reich-which might indicate that the underlying psychological processes are similar even though the styles of the pieces are quite different. It may thus be argued that it is unlikely that the listener draws on specific psychological tools depending on the music to which he or she is listening. Moreover, as will be suggested, it would appear that identical means preside over the treatment of stimuli of different origins. These points have been central in developing the following steps.
First Response to the Respondent:
Authors: Selfridge-Field Eleanor
Published: November 2023

My concept of psychology is here limited to experimental research in music perception and cognition. This research probes very specific questions about how we hear and how we interpret what we hear, how we learn, how we err in performance tasks, how we conceptualize musical form, tonality, and timbre, and how we respond (or do not respond) emotionally to music. My concept of musicology is broadened from its frequent association with historical and interpretative studies to include musical performance and pedagogy, music theory and analysis, and ethnomusicology, areas in which the resonance between fields is most audible.
‘All Russian Music is So Sad’: Two Constructions of the Russian Soul, through Literature and Music
Authors: Frolova-Walker Marina
Published: November 2023

This paper is a tribute to the memory of Yuri Lorman, professor at the University of Tartu (Estonia), who became the founder and host of the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics. On the banks of a picturesque Estonian lake, summer schools and conferences on semiotics, gathering together scholars from all disciplines, were held from the early 1960s, at the height of the Thaw, until the mid-7os, when the authorities finally discovered that activities of a distinctly non-Marxist/Leninist nature were taking place and swiftly brought them to a dose. These activities had a distinctly dissident character: everything was informal, relaxed, and therefore subversive in the context of any large academic gathering in a totalitarian state, from Lotman’s own eccentric appearance to the traditional toast to Queen Elizabeth II, all the more poignant for people of whom the majority had never been and could hardly hope to travel beyond the Iron Curtain. It is not surprising that many of them later took the first opportunity to emigrate.
Closing Remarks by
Authors: Dell’Antonio Andrew
Published: November 2023

At the risk of simplifying (and thus trivializing) the complex series of responses to my and Stefano Castelvecchi’s papers, I none the less would like to hazard a couple of closing remarks. In the first place, I must thank Stanley Sadie for convening this panel and ably moderating a potentially antagonistic situation; and I also thank my fellow panellists for their thoughtful responses, with special thanks to those (notably Annegret Fauser and Ralph P. Locke) who addressed crucial issues that I had not raised in my all-too-cursory opening remarks, issues which I will be forced to overlook again here for lack of time. A number of panellists raised the issue of insularity in the question of a putative ‘New Musicology’; indeed, as Margaret Bent pointed out, within a perpetually changing field such as ours the use of monikers such as ‘old’ and ‘new’ to describe scholarship trends is pointless. Thus, I agree with those who find the idea of an old/new split artificial and tendentious; in the course of discussion following the panellists’ remarks, Roger Parker called for a moratorium on the term ‘New Musicology’, and I am only too pleased to heed such a call.

In these
Closing Remarks by
Authors: Castelvecchi Stefano
Published: November 2023

In the space given here I shall, of course, be unable to discuss in any detail the points made by the respondents, or the passages where I feel that my thought has been misrepresented (‘creatively misread’?). I can only restate my position briefly, with a few clarifications.
The Problem of the French Revolution in Music Historiography and History
Authors: Fend Michael
Published: November 2023

The French Revolution of 1789 supposedly brought about a momentous change in all aspects of French society, and already in 1791 Edmund Burke concluded that it was a ‘crisis’ affecting ‘the whole human race’.1 From then on, the French Revolution became the subject of numerous oral and written accounts, with the result that the term came to refer to a series of events, participants, ideas, and, last but not least, their interpretation, to the extent that those interpretations have become for us an indistinguishable part of what went on in the eighteenth century and beyond. Although the historical phenomenon can be studied in music, the visual arts, literature, and all sorts of texts created by our ancestors at the time, none of these can be understood without recourse to the interpretations they have already received over the last 2ooyears.
From Music-Makers to Virtual Singers: New Musics and Puzzled Scholars
Authors: Magrini Tullia
Published: November 2023

Christian Kaden opened this Round Table by pointing out that a ‘decisive breakthrough’ was reached in music sociology when music began to be seen no longer as ‘an image or an imitation of social reality’, but rather as ‘a social reality in itself, a form of human life’. The view that music is a ‘form of life’ was traditionally held by music anthropologists and many ethnomusicologists too, whose research focused on the human and social meanings implied by different kinds of musical behaviour, events, and interactive group communication, and, more generally, on music-making as a basic form of being human. But what is happening in music and music disciplines at the end of the twentieth century challenges this well-established way of studying music, not only because scholars today question ‘the possibility of a neutral and objective understanding both of music from other times ... and of musics belonging to other cultures or traditions’, to quote from Mario Vieira de Carvalho (see below), but, first and foremost, because in recent decades many forms of musical life have undergone far-reaching changes. Many musical practices have been abandoned or are seriously endangered, particularly those belonging to communities once characterized by a widely shared capability of making music and interacting through it. A few years ago Steve Feld opened his presentation of a CD of the music of the Kaluli (Papua New Guinea) thus: ‘Kaluli ceremonial life has stopped; people have sold or burned their dance paraphernalia.
Authenticity’, ‘Interpretation’, and ‘Practice’: Probing their Limits’
Authors: Katz Ruth
Published: November 2023

The study of music has never been more aware of itself than it is today. This may be an optimistic remark, but I believe that, in the pursuit of knowledge, assessments and reassessments of assumptions, methodologies, and practices generally contribute to the improved understanding of one’s scientific endeavours. However, the reflexive stance of the so-called ‘New Musicology’ was primarily impacted, as were other fields of knowledge, by the sociologizing of science and by the developments in literary criticism that called objectivity into question. Interestingly, the deliberations in philosophy, beyond its ‘linguistic turn’, were never seriously entertained in musicology; neither, for that matter, were the underlying political assumptions of the more fashionable New Historicism and Social Constructionism.
The Circulation of Music in Europe 1700-1850
Authors: Rasch Rudolf
Published: November 2023

This Study Session was presented by a group forming part of the research project ‘Musical Life in Europe 1600-1900’ set up by Christophe-Helmut Mauling (D) and Christian Meyer (F), which was about to be launched in 1998 by the European Science Foundation (Strasbourg) for a period of four years. The group will deal with questions concerning the ways in which music found its way from the composer to the consumer or listener, passing through the chain of publisher, seller, reseller, and performing musician. Attention will be paid to the transmission of music in both printed and manuscript forms. Special focus will be placed on the transportation of printed and manuscript music across cultural, regional, or national borders (however defined), and the changes that music might under go when crossing these borders. The research group consists of Rudolf Rash (coordinator), Axel Beer (D), Klaus Burmeister (D), Anik Devries Lesure (F), Denis Herlin (F), Rosamond McGuinness, and Henri Vanhulst. Since not all these scholars could be present in London during the Congress, the panel consisted partly of other scholars. The goal of the Study Session was on the one hand to present the research group to the musicological community at large and on the other to ascertain the extent to which its specific research interests were shared by that community. The panel members were asked to give brief presentations about the most pressing aspects of those issues with which they are primarily engaged.
Music And/As Ethics
Authors: Morris Mitchell
Published: November 2023

The resonance between musical and ethical questions is an important subtext to many of the most recent controversies in musicology.1 Critics active in the so-called New Musicology write with explicit attention to a host of moral commitments respecting music and social arrangements; more traditional scholars are equally involved in this area. But so far very little has been done to bring specifically philosophical argumentation into contact with musicological concerns.
The Dating And Chronology Of The Works Of Joaquin Des Prez
Authors: Jas Eric
Published: November 2023

Herbert Kellman opened the session by reiterating its main objective: to help establish a rational basis for associating certain traits in Josquin’s works with particular periods and stages of his career, given that there are still no more than four or five works whose datings are relatively secure. Thus, the methodological basis of each speaker’s demonstration is of particular interest. Kellman then introduced all the participants. He noted that Paul Merkley and Lora Matthews had been invited at the last minute to present important biographical documents they had just discovered, and he expressed the panel’s appreciation for their willingness to share these now.
Research In Music Performance: New Methods And Tools
Authors: Bowen Jose
Published: November 2023

This session was co-sponsored by the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM) at the University of Southampton and the National Sound Archive (NSA) of the British Library, and consisted of three one-hour sections. While most musicologists are used to dealing with manuscripts, letters, and theoretical treatises, the first section of the session was devoted to the problems and advantages of dealing with temporal sources. Mostly, this means analysing recordings instead of scores, but Raymond Holden presented a brief introduction to the virtually untapped resource of performing materials, illustrated with examples from the Bruckner scores used by Sir John Barbirolli. (Given the absence of any general catalogue providing the location of these materials, it was suggested that a webpage be initiated at CHARM, which could eventually become such a catalogue; resource information should be sent to jbowen@soton.ac.uk.) This was followed by a report (read by Jose Bowen) on materials in the Conductors on Film Collection at the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound in California sent by Charles Barber (US), who was scheduled to attend but could not. There are over 900 hours of conductors in rehearsal, concert, and conversation, and this collection includes virtually no commercially released material.
Auditory Scene Analysis: Future Directions For Musicological Research
Authors: Harley Maria Anna
Published: November 2023

This session presented aspects of one of the recent developments in psychoacoustics which promise exciting new directions for musicological research. The concept of auditory scene analysis (ASA) was introduced in the 1980s by Albert S. Bregman (see especially his Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound, Cambridge, MA, 1990). The theory describes the ability of the human auditory system to organize the acoustic chaos created by multiple sound sources into separate though interacting perceptual ‘streams’ or ‘objects’. This process involves a two-tiered structure of stream segregation (primitive, i.e. innate, and schema-based, i.e. learnt), and a range of acoustic ‘cues’ for integrating simultaneous and sequential components of acoustic patterns (such as frequency proximity, temporal proximity, spatial location, timbre, repetitions, interaction with vision, etc.). The concept of the auditory scene encompasses all possible ‘soundscapes’, including environmental noise, speech, and music.
Study Session 19 british Music Since Britten
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

In his introduction to this Study Session Arnold Whittall commented that 1976-the year of Britten’s death-did not coincide with any significant change in compositional technique or style in British music, as distinct from the time of Vaughan Williams’s death, some twenty years earlier, which saw the emergence of a kind of modernism that had characterized continental European music since the first decade of the twentieth century. However, in the four position statements that formed the main part of this session a pattern of individual technical and stylistic shifts dating from the mid-r97os was detected, notably in the music of Michael Tippett, Alexander Goehr, and Peter Maxwell Davies-shifts that were characterized by what Whittall described as ‘certain accommodations with tradition’ which, in the cases of Goehr and Davies, ‘their earlier iconoclastic selves would have scorned’.
Sense And Sonority In Aquitanian Polyphony And The Conductus
Authors: Richard Crocker
Published: November 2023

A new confluence of scholarship and practical performance is revolutionizing our conceptions of two major repertories of medieval music: the Aquitanian versus and the so-called ‘Notre Dame’ conductus.1 Stimulated in part by two recent editions of the Aquitanian repertory, Richard Crocker, in collaboration with the Orlando Consort, is currently exploring new ideas about the synchronization of voice-parts in the versus. The germinating idea is that the Aquitanian music does not always require synchronized simultaneities: it is not always counterpoint in the standard Western sense. Mark Everist and Christopher Page have both proposed something very similar for what used to be called the repertory of ‘Notre Dame’ conductus. To reconsider the ways in which we make sense of the sonorities in this early polyphony is to reassess the entire history of Ars Antigua music as we are accustomed to conceive it. Scarcely any of our major structural assumptions about this formative period in Western music (say rr50-1250) are immune from the disturbances caused by thinking afresh about rhythm and sonority. The Aquitanian versus and the ‘Notre Dame’ conductus are now on the same agenda, and that thinking is moving very fast.
Study session 28chant and analysis: where are we, and where do we go now?
Authors: Dobszay Laszlo
Published: November 2023

This session, with two papers on Western and two on Byzantine chant, began with Laszlo Dobszay’s outline of a framework for the analysis of Western chant. Then Theodore Karp considered the subject of analysis as ‘frozen product or changing organism’, Maria Alexandru surveyed the history of analysis of Byzantine chant, and Christian Troelsgard compared two groups of chants of the same genre, liturgical function, and mode, but with different transmission histories. Alexander Lingas (GB) sang some Byzantine music examples. Formulas and modality as represented in the sources emerged as the greatest present concerns.
La Vie Musicale Sous Vichy, 1940-1944
Authors: Chimenes Myriam
Published: November 2023

Reunissant musicologues et historiens, cette session s’inscrivait dans le theme general de ce congres, ‘Musicologie et disciplines soeurs’, et temoignait de la necessite, pour traiter certains sujets, d’etablir partenariat entre des representants des deux disciplines. La vie culturelle des annees noires a suscite depuis une quinzaine d’annees des etudes historiques essentiellement ccntrees sur la litterature, Jes arts plastiques, le theatre, et le cinema. Evoquee parfois de maniere anecdotique, la musique est demeuree absente dice champ de recherches, cequi explique la formation, a )’initiative des musicologues, d’un groupe de recherche pluridisciplinaire sur ‘La vie musicale en France pendant la Scconde Guerre mondiale’,1 dont Vichy constitue le coeur. Les recherches en cours visent a determiner les incidences du temps de guerre d’une part sur Jes carrieres des musiciens, sur la reception des oeuvres, et sur leur esthetique, d’autre part sur certaines formes de sociabilite, la frequcntation des concerts OU la pratique en amateur devant etre considerees comme des derivatifs aux difficultes de la vie quotidienne. Une synthese devrait permettre d’evaluerles persecutions et de mesurer Jes engagements.
Session 3: Eighteenth-Century Opera
Authors: Heller Wendy
Published: November 2023

In Ludovico Muratori’s Della perfetta poesia italiana (1706), gender became an integral part of the discourse on operatic reform. Unlike the music of the ancients, in which ‘the praises of heroes’ were sung or the ‘heroes themselves sang’, modern music, Muratori argued, ‘exuded effeminacy from every pore’, depriving men of ‘manly valour’, and thus leading to a baseness and lasciviousness that corrupted rather than improved the souls of the audience. This paper explored the role of gender in the operatic reforms of early eighteenth-century Italy. I considered the ways in which the homogenization and regularization of the libretto by Zeno and Metastasio suppressed the idiosyncratic treatment of sexuality typical of Seicento opera. Finally, I suggested that these transformations allowed reformers not only to reclaim opera as a masculine art, but also to create a newly idealized operatic hero who was more compatible with Enlightenment gender ideology.
Session 6: The Sixteenth-Century Tradition Bernadette Nelson (GB): Sacred Music at the Court of Fernando de Aragon, Duke of Calabria: The Context of Barcelona MS u66/1967 and a ‘Parody’ Mass on Josquin’s Inviolata
Authors: Nelson Bernadette
Published: November 2023

E-Bc rr66/r967, a choirbook copied in all probability for San Miguel de los Reyes in Valencia, a monastery founded by the duke of Calabria in 1545/6, has been singled out as an important source for the music of Bartomeu Carceres. Besides a handful of works by other Spanish composers, this source also includes a previously unknown unicum by Noel Bauldeweyn, here identified as ‘Noel Valdouin’. The instance of the Bauldeweyn motet led the present writer to investigate the possible origins of other items in this source which are preserved only anonymously and without title, leading to the identification not only of a distinguished international repertory of works by Festa, Verdelot, and Morales, but also of an unknown six-voice Mass-setting largely inspired by all three partes of Josquin’s Inviolata. This paper proposed a context for the Mass and other items of sacred music in the musical establishment of the duke of Calabria. It further speculated as to its origins and compositional genesis, and explored the issue of emulation with particular regard to the Inviolata tradition.
Session 8: Methodologies
Authors: Stock Jonathan
Published: November 2023

Discussion of the contribution to musical understanding seemingly offered by an ethnomusicology of the Western art-music tradition has rumbled on for about as long as there has been a discipline named ethnomusicology. None the less, and despite the gradual appearance of a handful of studies which apply ethno musicological modes of enquiry to the institutions of Western music, this particular field of scholarly endeavour remains sparsely populated. Instead, it seems, ethnomusicologists remain happiest when concentrating on other musical traditions while new musicologists and critical musicologists would rather invent their own theories of social and cultural contextualization than borrow those already developed in ethnomusicologists’ research. This paper considered the musicological avoidance of ethnomusicological materials, methods, and theories. Differences in perspective and scope are identified and exposed, with the aim of clarifying why a fusion between these respective disciplines remains problematic and is, for many music scholars, undesirable.
Session 28: Transnationalism
Authors: Silverberg Ann L
Published: November 2023

With its focus on a canon of masterworks and source-driven studies, historical musicology has tended to ignore issues involving the transference of different types of musics across national borders, across oceans, and from continent to continent. Perhaps the most striking omission in this area is the lack of attention given to missionaries and their work. These individuals selectively presented the Euro-American music tradition to indigenous peoples and just as selectively represented the musical cultures they encountered to their homeland constituents. John Carroll, the first Prefect Apostolic of the American mission, attempted to adjust the European tradition of church music to the exigencies of missionary work. Joseph Marie Amiot, a missionary to China and the author of Memoire sur la musique des Chinois (1779), attempted to compose a musical ethnography about a musical culture contrasting sharply with his own.
Session 29: Hildegard of Bingen
Authors: Meconi Honey
Published: November 2023

What happens when the object of our musicological enquiry is examined by someone from outside the discipline? Such has happened in the case of the twelfth-century nun, mystic, early scientific observer, preacher, theologian, poet, and composer Hildegard of Bingen, a historical figure in her own right long before she took her place among the early great composers. Her achievements in other fields have traditionally overshadowed her musical accomplishments, which means we come to her in a way that differs dramatically from our approach to virtually any other composer. Her privileged canonical position is due in many respects to the scrutiny she received initially from other fields, while the story of her entry into the modern musical canon begins with other disciplines and cannot be separated from them. This paper demonstrated how this intensive study of Hildegard by our sister disciplines significantly shaped our reception and understanding of her in musicology.
Session 3: Databases
Authors: Durante Sergio
Published: November 2023

The Lessico italiano de/la didattica vocale is a relational database connecting bibliographical data, texts, and a thesaurus. In it, singing treatises written in Italian between around 1600 and 1800 have been collected and annotated in order to permit access to them in various ways: by author, place, date, and, more importantly, the keywords listed in the thesaurus. The basic principle of the Lessico is that a correct understanding of performance practice for the periods preceding recorded sound can best be gathered through the systematic study of the vocabulary used to describe musical performance. Each term or expression in the thesaurus is connected with others and all give access to the original sources, including any extant musical examples. Moreover, each term is provided with a note commenting on its history and implications. The overall architecture of the database provides a powerful research tool for musicologists and performers alike.
Milan and Paris: A Lasting Dialogue
Authors: Oberzaucher-Schuller Gunhild
Published: November 2023

To understand Verdi’s approach to ballet we have to proceed from at least two different appreciations of dance in opera: one arising out of the Italian cultural sphere, the other from the French. An event that occurred in London some 150 years ago clearly illustrates the gulf between them. In June 1833 the Italian choreographer Antonio Cortesi mounted one of his ballets, the celebrated Inez de Castro, at His Majesty’s Theatre, London.
The Feminization of Ballet
Authors: Clark Maribeth
Published: November 2023

Knud Arne Jürgensen raises many important issues with regard to Verdi’s intentions and development as a composer, and the benefits of resurrecting long-lost divertissements. My response to his essay aims to provide further background to the ideas he has developed rather than react to it directly. In particular, I want to reflect on the cultural circumstances surrounding the Parisian taste for divertissements as it was expressed at the Paris Opera during the Second Empire, when the state reclaimed control of the Opera management.
‘Reading’ Ballet
Authors: Harris-Warrick Rebecca
Published: November 2023

Knud Arne Jürgensen’s important book, The Verdi Ballets, now makes it possible to raise additional questions about Verdi’s contribution to the genre or, rather, about dance in Verdi’s operas, since the issues go beyond those scores in which Verdi composed free-standing instrumental ballet music.
Critical Performance
Authors: Degrada Francesco
Published: November 2023

I agree with both the arguments and the conclusions of Philip Gossett, but I should like nevertheless to offer some remarks from another point of view. Since Verdi’s time much has changed inside and outside the world of music. Our attitude towards opera is different. We address from an aesthetic or historical point of view subjects and plots that for Verdi’s contemporaries were part of a direct emotional and cultural experience.
Institutionalization: Semi-Ramism in Reformed Academies, 1580–1600
Authors: Hotson Howard
Published: November 2023

Ramism, as we have seen, spread in Germany not from a few prestigious universities outward to others and downward to academies and gymnasia but in precisely the opposite direction: from gymnasium to gymnasium, upward from them into the academies or gymnasia illustria, and finally in rare instances into full universities. The crucial stage in this process of diffusion was the percolation of Ramism from the gymnasia into the academies, for this upward movement altered the post-Ramist pedagogical tradition in three important respects.
Adaptation: Post-Ramist Methods in Reformed Universities, 1590–1613
Authors: Hotson Howard
Published: November 2023

In the years preceding the foundation of the Herborn academy, Piscator rapidly revised the Ramist textbooks which became the initial basis of philosophical instruction there. In the years immediately after the academy opened in 1584, Piscator, Althusius, and others poured equal energy into the development of a Ramist curriculum for the higher disciplines. Yet Herborn’s philosophical syllabus was not rapidly advanced in these early years. In part this may have resulted from principle: from Piscator’s minimalist approach to philosophical instruction.
The Tripartite Bride: Belief Systems as Structure
Authors: Hopkins David
Published: November 2023

To a degree Le Passage de la vierge á la mariée had the function of ‘constructing’ femininity in preparation for the Mariée and this thematic strand will continue to be under construction as the argument progresses. There was also a suggestion that the work was concerned, however ironically, with ‘illustrating’ the mental journey of a bride-to-be. In this respect the picture responds to an earlier painting, Dulcinée of 1911 (Fig. 4) which has barely been considered up until now. In this transitional work between his Symbolist and Cubist modes, Duchamp had, almost literally, explored the female—in line with the concentration on exclusively ‘gendered’ zones discussed earlier—in terms of a process of’stripping’, this being staggered in five stages across the canvas.
Six Characters in Search of an Author(ity): The Field Day Board of Directors
Authors: Richtarik Marilynn J
Published: November 2023

The enthusiasm generated by Translations was something that a number of interested observers believed should not be allowed simply to dissipate. Seamus Heaney recalls, ‘The excitement which that play caused was palpable and its gratifications had to do with a feeling that the dramatic form had allowed inchoate recognitions, both cultural and historical, to be clarified and comprehended. Most people talked about it with relish, some with resistance, all with awakened attention.’He remembers, ‘I was very much encouraging Brian Friel just after the production of Translations to do something ... to keep the energy rolling because my sense of that moment and that play was that this was what theatre was supposed to do’.
Things Done and Left Undone: The Fourth Field Day Tour
Authors: Richtarik Marilynn J
Published: November 2023

UP until 1983 it would have been possible to describe Field Day as a Northern Irish touring theatre company that produced Brian Friel plays. The directors of the company were eager, however, to broaden their scope to include new Irish plays by other playwrights. In keeping with their goal, announced publicly in the programmes for Three Sisters and The Communication Cord, to question old assumptions in the interest of forging a more inclusive notion of Irish identity, they were especially anxious to present the work of Protestant dramatists who might approach the issue of Irish identity from an angle that differed from traditional nationalist feelings about it. With this aim in mind, Friel contacted David Rudkin early in 1982 to ask if he would be interested in writing a play for Field Day.
Poets as Playwrights: Field Day’s Double Bill
Authors: Richtarik Marilynn J
Published: November 2023

The main business of Field Day in 1984 was, as it had always been, its theatrical tour. This year the company had plans to perform in seventeen venues in less than two months, visiting Ballycastle and Limavady for the first time. In a departure from previous years the programme was a double-bill, two short plays commissioned from two Northern Irish poets. As Friel had reworked Three Sisters, so Tom Paulin produced a version of Sophocles’s Antigone in Irish-English, and Derek Mahon did a verse translation of a Moliere play, The School for Husbands. Though radically different in style and tone, the plays were related in the Field Day production through the use of the same cast of nine and the highlighting of a common theme.