bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Recitative of Lully’s Alceste: French Declamation or Italian Melody?
Authors: Palisca Claude V
Published: November 2023

This article was first published in Actes de Baton Rouge, edités par Selma A. Zebouni, as volume 5 (1986) of the annual Biblio 17, Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature (Paris, Seattle, Tiibingen, 1986). These were the proceedings of a conference held in March 1985 at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge by the North American Society for Seventeenth-Century French Literature. The topic of the meeting was the year 1674 in French literature and music. My paper was delivered at a session entitled ‘1674 et la musique’, organized by Georgia Cowart of the University of South Carolina.
Chopin
Authors: Hudson Richard
Published: November 2023

Frédéric Chopin (1810–49) marked the word rubato in fourteen different compositions which he wrote between 1828 and 1835 and which were published, except for one manuscript and two posthumous works, between 1832 and 1836. He usually wrote simply the single word rubato. Twice he marked poco rubato, once sempre rubato, and on another occasion languido e rubato. He never included the word tempo.
The United States
Authors: Ehrlich Cyril
Published: November 2023

The expansion of American piano manufacture after the Civil War was without parallel in any other country. By I 900 more than half of the world’s instruments were made in the United States, the industry employed six times as many men as in I 860 and the value of production had increased sevenfold. The number of firms increased more slowly, but this was indicative of a remarkable expansion in the average size of business unit and scale of production; in 1896 the five largest piano manufacturers in the world were all American. This efflorescence has been variously attributed to the quality of American iron and wood, or ‘the general atmosphere of freedom and enthusiastic encouragement of individual initiative and industry’. But such explanations neglect the fundamental economic determinants: an enormous and continuous increase in effective demand within a highly protected market which was amply satisfied by ideally elastic conditions of supply.
The English Piano Goes to War
Authors: Ehrlich Cyril
Published: November 2023

A hazard awaits the historian who writes of small matters at a time of great events: a sense of proportion evaporates as his narrative assumes the mantle of self importance affected by his protagonists. In this chapter, therefore, it is advisable to begin with a reminder that the ‘great war’ was a hideous catastrophe in which millions existed or perished in conditions of uprecedented squalor, while creatures like Bottomley became national heroes. In such a context the achievements and sufferings of piano makers deserve a minor place. Yet the industry’s experience of new patterns of demand, supply and governmental interference are part of a wider economic history and its documentation, even its shabby vituperative jingoism, reflects aspects of a fundamental social upheaval.
Collective Creativity
Authors: Cohen Sara
Published: November 2023

Members of the Jactars and Crikey it’s the Cromptons! originated from the Wirral but their social and cultural activities had become focused in Liverpool. The four members of the Jactars were from West Kirby, a pleasant-looking borough situated along the seafront, whilst members of Crikey it’s the Cromptons! were from neighboring areas. All of them were good friends and the two bands usually performed together.
The Origin and Development of the Early Violin 1520-50
Authors: Boyden David D
Published: November 2023

Most accounts of the ‘inventor’ of the violin and the precise date and place of its origin bog down in the quagmires of history and terminology. The earliest stages of the violin’s emergence are obscured by a process of evolution from earlier instruments, and the date of origin depends on a somewhat arbitrary definition of what a violin is. What structural features must it have? How many strings? And so on. If, among other things, a violin is defined as having four strings, one approximate set of dates may be assigned to its origin; but if three strings will satisfy the definition, an earlier date may be given. However, even if the term violin is clearly defined, the date and place of origin can be determined only approximately, since not enough sixteenth-century violins have survived-indeed, only one or two before 1550-and the documentary evidence is scanty and often imprecise. Moreover, should all the instruments involved in the violin’s evolution before 1550 still exist, the date and maker of each would be almost impossible to determine. For these reasons, one cannot say precisely where, when, and by whom the violin was invented.1 Nevertheless, by means of a careful study of art objects, documents, and the few extant instruments of the early sixteenth century, these questions can be answered with sufficient clarity and accuracy for our purpose.
The New Violin Idiom. Violin Music and its Uses in Different Countries, 1600-50
Authors: Boyden David D
Published: November 2023

Gb. Doni’s enumeration of the violin’s many expressive possibilities may seem extravagant. Nevertheless his statement, however regarded, is a clear tribute to the progress of the violin and to the appreciation of its inherent qualities by musicians in the first half of the seventeenth century. What is true of the violin is true of all instruments in one degree or another, the specific and idiomatic capabilities of individual instruments being realized more and more clearly after r6oo. Mersenne expressed the new attitude very clearly: ‘While each instrument can be used to play such pieces as one desires, nevertheless experience shows that some pieces are more successful than others when they are played on certain instruments, and what is good on one is not so agreeable or so fitting on another.’
General Matters affecting the Violin to 1650
Authors: Boyden David D
Published: November 2023

To understand the history of violin playing involves more than a narrow focus on the mechanics of manipulating the violin and bow. In earlier chapters we have dealt with the historical ‘why’ of many matters relative to the progress of the violin, violin music, and the technique of playing it. In this concluding chapter to Part II we consider those questions of a general musical nature which are pertinent to our subject. The performance of violin music belongs to a larger context of musical performance in general, and such matters as ornaments, including the vibrato, often need special discussion in connexion with violin music. In addition, certain general musical facts of the time are imperfectly understood-for instance, rhythm and tempo in the early seventeenth century-and in so far as these questions affect the performance of violin music, we will report any significant results of the most recent investigations.
General Matters affecting the Violin, 1650-1700
Authors: Boyden David D
Published: November 2023

Tn the early seventeenth century ornaments were frequently written out in the music; and the terms, occasional signs, and execution of these ornaments were nearly as varied as the individual composers who used them. About the middle of the century the French lutanists and especially harpsichordists began to introduce a more rational order into this chaos, standardizing the ornaments and the names and signs for them. As a consequence, ornaments were less commonly written out, and instead, stereotyped conventional ornaments were indicated by signs which gradually came to have a more uniformly understood meaning. This state of affairs first became general in seventeenth-century France, and the lead of France was followed elsewhere in the eighteenth century. In Italy few specific ornaments were indicated by signs, the performance of the unadorned notes being left mainly to prevailing tradition and the discretion of the performer. Trills, for it stance, were conventionally inserted at cadences, and vibrato on long notes. In France improvised ornaments and passage-work decreased in favour as specific ornaments and their signs became conventionalized. On the other hand, the Italians seldom indicated the specific ornaments they played, and as a rule they improvised additions to the written notes in the slow movements.
The Technique of the Violin, 1700-61 (I): The Treatises. Holding the Violin and Bow. The Left Hand
Authors: Boyden David D
Published: November 2023

Technique is the indispensable means of transmitting the musical intentions of the composer to the listener. As Quantz rightly says, ‘The good effect of a piece of music depends almost as much on the performer as on the composer himself’. This is a general and simplified statement of the vital role of the performer in realizing the intentions of the composer. Broadly considered, a performer’s technique embraces far more than the mere mechanics of the instrument; to the latter must be added an understanding of contemporary notions of good taste, rhythm, dynamics, and expression.
Tempo. Alterations of Rhythm. Dynamics. Expression
Authors: Boyden David D
Published: November 2023

By the early eighteenth century time signatures had lost much of the tempo connotation they once had (cf. p. 181). Any tempo could be assigned to any note value-in principle, the modern system. As a result, there were more terms for tempo. Leopold Mozart, for instance, gives a large number of terms ranging from grave to prestissimo,1 and some of his terms are fairly subtly distinguished. Largo, for example, is still slower than adagio pesante (which, in turn, is somewhat slower than adagio), and should be performed with ‘long strokes and much tranquility’. For grave, Mozart says: ‘Sadly and seriously, and therefore very slowly ... long, rather heavy and solemn bowing ... consistent prolonging and maintaining of the various notes.’
Playing Techniques for the Baroque Clarinet
Authors: Rice Albert R
Published: November 2023

There are two main written sources concerning the playing techniques of the two-key clarinet-the German treatises by J. F. B. C. Majer (1732, 2nd edn. 1741) and J.P. Eisel (1738, 2nd edn. 1762). Both include sections devoted to music theory and provide elementary instructions or general comments regarding a variety of wind, keyboard, percussion, and stringed instruments. These books are the earliest and most important published sources dealing with the baroque clarinet.
Music in Religious Thought and Education
Authors: Webber Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

Throughout the history of Lutheranism the writings of Martin Luther himself have provided powerful ammunition for pastors and others seeking to defend the work of church musicians. Luther declared that the study of music was second only in importance to the study of theology, and he underlined the value of music both as a fitting way of rendering praise to God and as a vehicle to convey the word of God to the listener. But despite Luther’s sanction, the role of music in Lutheran worship developed during the seventeenth century into a source of considerable argument between conservatives and reformers.
Texts
Authors: Webber Geoffrey
Published: November 2023

The nature of the texts employed in North German church music in the Baroque period reflected directly the principal concerns of Lutheran teaching. The first priority of worship was the praise of God. In addition, the church encouraged the faithful to nurture a personal relationshipwith God, and sought to elucidate the Scriptures through its teaching.
Musical ‘Progress’ and Richard Strauss (1902)
Authors: Tilmouth Michael , Kimbell David , Savage Roger
Published: November 2023

Today, when music is obviously passing through many important changes, musical theorists naturally find that a purely historical treatment of their subject is interesting and profitable. But artistic historians are not always success-ful in guarding against a confusion of thought which betrays them into treating art exactly as if it were science, and into talking as if ‘artistic progress’ always ensured that old art was false compared with new.
The Hovingham Musical Festival (1902)
Authors: Tilmouth Michael , Kimbell David , Savage Roger
Published: November 2023

There are musical festivals where the attention of the public and critics is claimed chiefly for the production of ‘novelties’, and there are musical festivals in memory of this or that great composer; but the Hovingham Festival [in Yorkshire] is remarkable as being purely in honour of music. The circumstance that novelties are composed for it, such as Dr Charles Wood’s Song of the Tem pest, is merely an additional point of interest in a programme of which the items were selected because they were enjoyable and valuable music.
Robert Schumann (1906)
Authors: Tilmouth Michael , Kimbell David , Savage Roger
Published: November 2023

The fifty years that have now passed since the death of Robert Schumann are crowded with musical developments of such various kinds and so variously related to Schumann’s work that, in the present state of musical party politics, opinions are as likely to differ about Schumann almost as much, though per haps not as violently, as about any of our own contemporaries. Few artists have so directly enlisted an almost personal affection for their work from the listener; and never has a musician’s work been more superbly, and yet unostentatiously, presented to the world by those to whom the task falls of founding the tradition of performance. Madame Schumann, whose death only ten years ago gives this week’s commemorative ceremony at the Beethoven-Fest in Bonn a double interest, was not only one of the greatest musicians within memory of the present generation, but also one of the greatest of teachers.
Julius Rontgen: A Great Musical Tradition (1932)
Authors: Tilmouth Michael , Kimbell David , Savage Roger
Published: November 2023

Julius Rontgen (whose death was announced in The Times last week) was the intimate friend of Grieg, Joachim, and Brahms, and the son and father of a Bach-like family of musicians carrying their musical tradition throughout the nineteenth century to the present generation. To those who have come into his sphere of influence he will remain rather as an inspiration for the future than as a link with the past. Nobody could see him in contact with younger musicians without thinking of Wagner’s Hans Sachs; and only the overwhelming great ness and richness of Bach’s art could inhibit a comparison between it and Ront gen’s enormous facility and industry as a composer.
Luigi Cherubini (1760-1842)
Authors: Tilmouth Michael , Kimbell David , Savage Roger
Published: November 2023

Luigi Cherubini, the Italian composer, (was born at Florence on 14 September 1760, and died on 15 March 1842 in Paris. His father was Maestro al Cembalo at the Pergola theatre, and began to teach him music when he was 6. By the time he was 16 he had composed a great deal of church music, and in 1778 he went to Bologna, where for four years he studied under Sarti.) This famous master well earned the gratitude which afterwards impelled Cherubini to place one of his double choruses by the side of his own Et vitam venturi as the crown of his Treatise on Counterpoint and Fugue, though the juxtaposition does Sarti’s music no good.
Orlandus Lassus (?1532-1594)
Authors: Tilmouth Michael , Kimbell David , Savage Roger
Published: November 2023

His first two books of motets appeared at Antwerp in 1555-6, the latter containing the motet in honour of Cardinal Pole. The style of Orlando had already begun to purify itself from the experimental incongruities that led Burney, who seems to have known only his earlier works, to call him ‘a dwarf on stilts’ as compared with Palestrina.2 But where he is orthodox he is as yet stiff, and his secular compositions are, so far, better than his more serious efforts. In 1557, if not before, he was invited by Albrecht V, Duke of Bavaria, to go to Munich. The duke was an intelligent patron of the fine arts, a notable athlete, and a man of strict principles.
Claudio Monteverdi (1567- 1643)
Authors: Tilmouth Michael , Kimbell David , Savage Roger
Published: November 2023

Claudio Monteverdi (or Monteverde), the Italian composer, was born at Cremona in May 1567; he learnt composition from Ingegneri, a good polyphonic church composer (his Responsoria were long ascribed to Palestrina). His attention was early directed to the infant art of instrumental music, and the Duke of Mantua gave him his first appointment as string player. In 1602 he succeeded Pallavicino as maestro di cappella to the duke; and in 1607 he made a decisive impression with his first opera, Oifeo, in which was revealed the emotional and dramatic value of a new treatment of discords which, in his unaccompanied madrigals, had merely seemed to indicate the downfall of pure polyphony.
[The Operas And Their Influence]
Authors: Tilmouth Michael , Kimbell David , Savage Roger
Published: November 2023

Wagner’s progress in opera has perhaps no parallel in any art, and certainly none in music, for even Beethoven’s progress was purely an increase in range and power. Wagner’s earlier works have too long been treated as if they represented the pure and healthy childhood of his later ideal; as if Lohengrin stood to Parsifal as Haydn, Mozart, and early Beethoven stand to Beethoven’s last quartets. But Wagner never thus represented the childhood of an ideal, though he attained the manhood of the most comprehensive ideal yet known in art.
Keyboard Talks: Second Series Musical Art-Forms
Authors: Tilmouth Michael , Kimbell David , Savage Roger
Published: November 2023

My subject for this series of Keyboard Talks is as general as a musical subject can be. It has, however, this principle of unity, on which I shall dwell with unscrupulous monotony from the first to the fifteenth talk-that it deals with musical compositions as wholes and also as individuals. I hope to show you that there is nothing abstruse or professional in viewing music in this light; on the contrary, the professional musician’s deepest and most comprehensive grasp of music is attained only when he has so completely cleared away all those technical and historical obstacles that trouble the naïve listener that he becomes a naïve listener himself, if a very experienced one.
Music and the Ordinary Listener
Authors: Tilmouth Michael , Kimbell David , Savage Roger
Published: November 2023

My title to these talks-’what the composer expects from the listener’-suggests a number of difficult questions, most of which depend more upon the composer than the listener. [In broaching this subject] I am much more frightened of you than you can possibly be of me; I have often myself administered the click of my switch on my portable wireless which so ruthlessly garrottes a speaker, or I might have been more particular in my title. I could have given offence to every living composer who does not agree with me by proposing to talk on what the sane composer expects of the listener.
Permanent Musical Criteria (1903)
Authors: Tilmouth Michael , Kimbell David , Savage Roger
Published: November 2023

I must apologize for the misleading appearance of my synopsis, but a line of argument such as I propose to follow always looks more complicated and dis jointed in a synopsis than it really is.1 The real argument may prove to be a series of logical steps so gradual and so obvious as to seem a pile of platitudes, while the synopsis, which can only give the chief points, and those only in the shortest possible phrases, may seem to be a bundle of paradoxes.
Communication
Authors: Maconie Robin
Published: November 2023

Seeing a strange footprint in the sand, the castaway understood the most fundamental of human messages: that he was no longer alone.

The message was unintentional, unexpected, but none the less utterly unmistakable. Somebody had passed by that way. Someone else was on the island. The tide had not washed the print away; wind and rain had not dispersed it. It had to be recent; it had to mean somebody nearby.

Impressions taken from life are extraordinarily vivid. A thumb print on an ancient pot, or a paw print on a medieval floor tile, are written in a universal language which transcends all sense of time, culture, and dialect. Anonymous hand prints preserved for tens of thousands of years in cave paintings of Australia and Europe are signatures which speak to us across the ages with the same fresh insistence of being as a child’s finger painting today.
Notation
Authors: Maconie Robin
Published: November 2023

Seores and sheet music are facts of musical life. For a majority of composers of serious music within the Western tradition, musical invention is inseparable from writing notes on manuscript paper, just as, for a majority of practising musicians, the performance of music is inseparable from reading a score. Written music has its own traditions, which are not entirely the same as those of oral musical cultures; the latter embrace folk, popular, and improvised art music and an increasing number of serious composers now taking advantage of computing and recording technologies to invent music direct to recorded form. It is possible to imagine musical draughtsmanship declining as mechanisms for bypassing manuscript continue to proliferate.
Marriage and the Lure of Bayreuth
Authors: Thomson Andrew
Published: November 2023

On his return to Paris, d’lndy immediately plunged hack into his normal life of intensive activity and study. In January 1874, he re-entered Franck’s organ class as a full student member, with the hope of gaining a first prize, an award which would justify his chosen path in the eyes of his family. In the same month, on 25 January, student in status as he was, he received the honour of a performance by Pasdeloup of his concert overture Piccolomini, laboriously composed under Franck’s guidance. This work, the first part to he completed of an ambitious orchestral project, will he discussed later in this chapter.
Dogma and Symbolism
Authors: Thomson Andrew
Published: November 2023

In May 1890, Franck had an accident on the way to visit his pupil Paul Brand. Struck in the side by the pole of an omnibus, he struggled on to Brand’s house, hut after arriving, lost consciousness. Nevertheless, with great determination, he fought his pain, and carried on with his usual programme of teaching and playing. A serious attack of pleurisy with com plications eventually forced him to take to his bed, and he died on 8 November.
Introduction
Authors: Steptoe Andrew
Published: November 2023

Mozart’s passionate desire to prove himself in Italian opera—the most popular and cosmopolitan of contemporary genres—was repeatedly frustrated by the lack of good libretti. The fragments of unfinished operas that survive even from his maturity bear witness to Mozart’s enthusiasm, and the way in which it foundered in the absence of an inspired collaborator.
Musicians, Opera, and Audience in Mozart’s Time
Authors: Steptoe Andrew
Published: November 2023

Throughout his early years, Mozart was encouraged by his father to enter the service of a noble or princely household. Leopold Mozart believed that an appointment as kapellmeister was the surest route to security and success. The status of the musician in service was not high, but with perseverance a faithful and talented composer might reach a senior position; and for members of Leopold Mozart’s generation, there were few alternatives.
Da Ponte and the Buffa Plot
Authors: Steptoe Andrew
Published: November 2023

Lorenzo Da Ponte lived his life with much the same adventurous opportunism that characterizes his buffa creations. Talented and ambitious, he turned his hand to a variety of occupations as circumstances dictated. He supplanted less ruthless men in favoured positions, not on the basis of well-tried ability or reputation, but by seizing the chances that presented themselves. A certain moral flexibility brought-him success, yet more than once guided him to disaster on the rocks of social and political convention. His early life tells us much about the origins and style of his libretti for Mozart.
The Techniques
Authors: Barclay Robert
Published: November 2023

Chapters 2-5 have laid the groundwork for a description of the actual techniques of trumpet-making. One can now gain a historical and cultural perspective of the Nuremberg trumpet-makers, appreciate the diversity and complexity of their sources of raw materials, and understand to some extent their conditions of work and the kinds of tools they used. All of this is the very necessary background to the exploration of technique. It is now time to put all this together by following the construction of a trumpet from the sheet metal to the final twist of wire. As stated in the first chapter, perhaps the most efficient way of reconstructing early technique is to do it. No amount of theorizing upon the subject can quite rival a well-documented finished product.
Introduction: Webern and Lyric Expression
Authors: Shreffler Anne C
Published: November 2023

The music of Anton Webern (1883–1945) has been justly celebrated for its sparseness, severity, and control. Indeed because of these qualities Webern’s rarefied vision has never gained the place in the repertory or the popular consciousness accorded to Berg, Stravinsky, or even Schoenberg, and it is safe to suppose now that it never will. Though voices have been raised now and then in favour of a more humanist Webern–Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and Luigi Rognoni were among the first to oppose the ‘Darmstadt project’ – his association with a cerebral, detached aesthetic remains strangely unaffected.2 Since the Second World War, Webern’s music has served two causes: first, serial composition in Europe and America, and second, the closely related development of serial and atonal analysis in America. Held up as the model for the new serialism of the 1950s and 1960s, Webern’s twelve-tone instrumental works were said to embody a complete break with what Henri Pousseur called ‘sentimental nineteenth-century understanding’ by building structures from sound itself.
Webern and Trakl: Historical and Aesthetic Connections
Authors: Shreffler Anne C
Published: November 2023

That Webern encountered the poet Trakl should be taken symbolically. Both, in common, are at home in a realm where there is neither common interest nor home any more. The works of both grow out of detached, submerged inwardness; both cry out the need of the soul, bound by itself in suffering. Both bear pure witness to God’s abandonment of living creatures. Their [Webern’s and Trakl’s] discourse, whose echo has vanished, is intended for Him.
Compositional Process
Authors: Shreffler Anne C
Published: November 2023

Though the physical evidence of Webern’s sketching process during the decade between 1915 and 1924 remained remarkably consistent, the musical content of the sketches and fragments contradicts the appearance of routine. Most of Webern’s efforts during this time were devoted to composing vocal music, for which he had developed a fairly regular procedure of working. Each surviving sketch can be easily recognized as belonging to a certain stage in the compositional process, and for most pieces the whole sequence of events can be reconstructed. Yet the most common feature of the sketches, paradoxically, is their diversity; most drafts of the same piece explore radically different musical ideas. Instead of hammering out and refining a certain musical response to a poem, Webern’s imagination suggested a wide variety of realizations. The sketches are the remnants of a kind of musical diary; some are no more than isolated musings on a poem while others represent long-term preoccupations. Going through Webern’s manuscripts of vocal music, one gets a real sense of the urgency with which he composed songs. Sheet after sheet reveals hasty jottings of vocal lines, often trailing off into text and rhythms only.
Different Readings of the Same Text: Sketches for ‘Verkliirung’, ‘Nachtergebung’, and ‘Offenbarung und Untergang’
Authors: Shreffler Anne C
Published: November 2023

While Webern was able to set some poems quickly from start to finish, others took much longer. He often returned to the same text many times over the course of several years. The incomplete settings that result reveal widely divergent approaches, as if he wrote down all spontaneous ideas that the text evoked rather than taking one thought and developing it. Between 1915 and 1921, Webern sketched different music to the same texts repeatedly; this tendency was especially pronounced with Trakl’s poetry. Webern sketched his ‘Gesang einer gefangenen Amsel’ and ‘Verklarung’ each more than six times, completing ‘Amsel’ (as Op. 14 No. 6), but not ‘Verklarung’. He also drafted several incomplete versions of Trakl’s ‘Nachterge bung’ and ‘Die Heimkehr’, as well as a passage from the prose poem ‘Offenbarung und Untergang’.
‘Abendland III’ (Op. 14 No. 4): Multiple Reference in Music and Text
Authors: Shreffler Anne C
Published: November 2023

The Hölderlin poem begins with three statements using the oratorical second person plural, addressed to the mighty cities: ‘1hr Städte des Euphrats … ‘. Trakl’s ‘Abendland’ echoes these statements with three exclamations interspersed throughout the poem.
Introduction
Authors: Baldauf-Berdes Jane L
Published: November 2023

THE arrival of Napoleon’s forces on the Piazza di San Marco on 13 May 1797 may have ensured the unexpected—but possibly inevitable—suppression, annihilation, and loss to present-day human history of the story of the civilization of Venice. A curious amnesia among historians surrounds Venetian history, despite the steady flow of publications about Venice both in the popular press and in more serious historical and cultural works, most of which merely borrow from earlier studies.

This scholarly lacuna is particularly characteristic of present understandings of four of the most prominent cultural foundations or comprehensive charitable institutions for the unique civilization of Venice after its decline as a dominant world power: the ospedali grandi. Those complex comprehensive welfare institutions sponsored sacred and secular, vocal and instrumental ensembles which originated as choirs, or cori, for the performance of liturgical music in the chapels and churches annexed to them.
City of Man
Authors: Baldauf-Berdes Jane L
Published: November 2023

THE original genius displayed by the Venetians for adapting nature to found their city pre-echoes their adaptation of ideas borrowed from others, and, indeed, of human nature itself, in order to lay the foundations of the cori. A brief review of the Venetian context in which the ospedali and the cori existed is in order. In dealing with the ospedali, one faces a complex of historical, sociological, and cultural details. The scholarly canon for Venetian charity, culture, and music, mostly written before the adoption of modern research techniques, requires study. One soon discovers that, despite increasing interest in Venice among scholars, there has been little delineation of the elements crucial to understanding the background of the ospedali in which music found so congenial a seedbed.2 The magnitude and complexity of the problem are daunting.
City of God
Authors: Baldauf-Berdes Jane L
Published: November 2023

THE concept of ‘sacral Venice’ ensues from the union of two historically fixed points of authority—secular state and sacred church.1 Venetian scholars, such as Paolo Prodi, assert that the Venetian idea of a unified church and state with its sacral concept of power was a principal mark that distinguished Venice from the rest of Christianity.2 The union of state and church gave a double axis to the Venetian civilization and an ellipsoidal, or ovoid, quality to its form of government that appears to have passed unnoticed by historians.
Internal Musicians: Figlie del coro
Authors: Baldauf-Berdes Jane L
Published: November 2023

WHEN the time came for maestro di coro Legrenzi to request permission to leave the Mendicanti, he stated pointedly to the governors that he had devoted himself for seven rears to devel¬ oping the talent of each musician in the coro there. When maestro di coro Porpora at the Derelitti wished to have adult women musicians accepted into his coro, as was already being done in other ospedali, he reassured his governors that the change in procedure would not damage the carefully honed image of ‘angelic messengers’ that had been assigned to the coro as part of the self-dramatization of a nation that dared to boast that it had been born on the Day of the Annunciation.3•
Music in the Jewish Community of Palestine 1880–1948
Authors: Hirshberg Jehoash
Published: November 2023

This book presents a social history of the music of the Jewish community in Palestine from the beginnings of Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1880 to the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948. The story is a fascinating case study of a small society of immigrants and refugees who established an internationally recognized professional musical establishment against the backdrop of two world wars, the absorption of successive waves of immigrants, local skirmishes, and a full-scale national war. Though under Ottoman and later British rule, Jewish society in Palestine was virtually autonomous in cultural matters; its musical culture struggled for a balance between a transplanted European heritage and a powerful, ideologically driven desire to find inspiration from the East. Professor Hirshberg opens with a description of music in Palestine under Ottoman rule, and then proceeds to chart the momentous history of the next 70 years in a broadly chronological framework. His final chapters centre on the broad array of ideological and social polemics which dominated the musical scene for the entire period. As such, his book will be of interest not only to music historians (especially those interested in national schools and in twentieth-century music), but also to social historians, cultural anthropologists, and historians of contemporary Jewry.
Sources: Important Solo and Ensemble Repertoire with Recommended Editions
Authors: Solum John , Smith Anne
Published: November 2023

The transverse flute acquired one of the largest repertoires of any musical instrument in Western art music throughout the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth. Not only is it extensive-many thousands of works were written for it during this period of approximately a hundred and twenty-five years-but the greatest composers of that era created flute works of enduring beauty. J. S. Bach, Handel, Telemann, C. P. E. Bach, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, all gave the fruits of their talents to the writing of music involving the transverse flute. In particular, J. S. Bach and Mozart explored many different aspects of the flute and bestowed upon it qualities of dignity, humanity, and nobility which have never been surpassed. These were the finest moments of the flute in terms of its repertoire.
Verdi And The World Of The Primo Ottocento
Authors: Budden Julian
Published: November 2023

The primo ottocento (a term loosely used to cover the first half of the nineteenth century in Italian music) has up to now received scant attention from scholars; nor does it form any part of the ordinary music student’s education. Most professors, with the authority of Berlioz, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Wagner to support them, have been content to dismiss it as a provincial backwater, an era of decadence in taste and craftsmanship. (They might do well to remember, however, that ‘Wop-bashing’ was always a favourite occupation of Germans-the result of two centuries of artistic subjection.) Even so staunch a champion of Italian music as E. J. Dent describes the period as, comparatively speaking, a desert, ‘golden only in so far as it is glittering’.* It is not the purpose of this chapter to challenge such a view: rather to try to explain the aims and values of an age which formed the background of one of music’s supreme geniuses.
Characteristics Of The Early Operas
Authors: Budden Julian
Published: November 2023

Verdi was twenty-six when his first opera was produced at La Scala, Milan, in the autumn of 1839. By the standards of the time it was a late start. The previous three years he had spent as a music-teacher and conductor of the local orchestra in Busseto. The training he had received from Vincenzo Lavigna after the Milan Conservatoire had shut its door in his face was strictly academic :.:1d old-fashioned. Original compositions were corrected in the style of Paisiello. ‘In the three years I spent with him I did nothing but study canons and fugues Nobody taught me orchestration or dramatic technique.⃛’* On the subject of musical education Verdi became perverse in his later years and as usual inclined to exaggerate. Great composers often like to represent themselves as entirely self-taught-as indeed they are in everything that matters; and Verdi was more prone than most to look back in anger.
Falstaff
Authors: Budden Julian
Published: November 2023

At the end of 1890 the seventy-seven-year-old Verdi wrote to that indefatigable scribbler on matters theatrical Gino Monaldi, ‘What can I tell you? I’ve wanted to write a comic opera for forty years, and I’ve known The Merry Wives for_(Windsor for fifty; ... however, the usual “buts” which are everywhere always prevented me from satisfying this wish of mine. Now Boito has resolved all the “buts” and has written me a lyric comedy quite unlike any other. I’m enjoying myself writing the music; without plans of any sort and I don’t even know whether I’ll finish it ... I repeat ... I’m enjoying myself. Falstaff is a rogue who gets up to every kind of mischief ... but in an amusing way. He’s a type. Types are so various! The opera is entirely comic! Amen.’*
The Man
Authors: Harrán Don
Published: November 2023

What is known about Salamone Rossi the man is considerably less than what is not. The sources are too fragmentary and their reading often too uncertain to allow one to construct a running biography. Where blanks exist, and there are many, the only way to fill them in is by relying on circumstantial evidence and, for all its inadequacy, on imagination, stirred by probability. The documentation on early music composers is habitually riddled with difficulties, and here Rossi fares no worse perhaps than his esteemed Mantuan colleagues Giaches de Wert, Benedetto Pallavicino, and Giovanni Gastoldi. Even the biography of the illustrious Monteverdi, in its Mantuan phase, leaves much to be desired; and if there is any consolation from a scholarly standpoint, leaves much to be explored. Rossi, like Monteverdi, has ever been, and will no doubt remain, a promising subject for research.
Music for the Theatre
Authors: Harrán Don
Published: November 2023

While previous chapters dealt with as much as is known of Rossi, biographically, from scraps of evidence in various documents and his works, the present one will piece together, from even fewer scraps, one side of his activity that is largely ‘unknown’: his connections with the theatre. Beyond two concrete instances of theatrical composition, which did not escape the scholars,1 practically nothing remains, musically, to speak for closer ties with the theatre. Yet it is only reasonable to assume that, as the leading musician in the Mantuan Jewish community, Rossi contributed interludes of various sorts to the one or more annual productions of its theatrical troupe. Since the musical evidence for Rossi’s theatrical associations concerns the non-Jewish theatre, it is no less reasonable to assume that Rossi furnished music for productions of non-Jewish companies as well.
Conclusions
Authors: Frogley Alain
Published: November 2023

The manifold insights afforded by the Ninth Symphony manuscripts amply justify Vaughan Williams’s modest statement that in the case of this sym phony ‘it might be useful to show the scaffolding’. It remains to review some outstanding features of this scaffolding, to identify wider patterns in its development, and to consider to what extent its investigation has furthered the goals outlined at the beginning of this study. In the main, a detailed study of the manuscripts confirms the importance for Vaughan Williams of the written stages of composition. Hardly any principal themes or major compositional developments enter the written records fully fledged: the great majority pass through several stages of revision before coming very close to their final form. Even where there is a striking leap, such as in the climax of the first movement, the core elements of the new step are usually present in previous work; in some instances there may be evidence that manuscript material has been lost. Nevertheless, it would be rash to assume that wherever a pattern is broken written work originally filled the gap. For instance, obscurities in the genesis of the large-scale form of the fourth movement may indicate that material has been lost; on the other hand, for Vaughan Williams at least, problems at this level may not easily have lent themselves to resolution through written work.
Liturgical Books and Plainchant Sources
Authors: Hiley David
Published: November 2023

The books in which the plainchant has been recorded since Carolingian times are diverse in nature and complex in content. This is chiefly because different books contain material for different parts of the liturgical round and for the use of different personages involved in the celebration. The possible combinations are quite numerous, and at different times and places a multitude of different selections of material have been made. Some important distinctions which should be borne in mind are: between books containing texts and music to be recited or sung, and books of instructions as to how the liturgy is to be celebrated;
Practical Information about the Mandolino for Players and Makers
Authors: Tyler James , Sparks Paul
Published: November 2023

Needless to say, for sources of four-course music, only the highest four notes are required; for five-course sources, only the highest five notes. The only exception to this tuning in the mandolino repertory occurs in the Contini and Sauli manuscript (CS-CSSR:Pu II KK 36) in which items 2–7 require the fourth course to be tuned a semi-tone higher to f’.From its earliest history, gut strings have been used on the mandolino, as they are still used on the Milanese mandolino today (though the modern instrument normally has six single strings). These were plain strings of different thicknesses, and, even when overspun or wound strings came into use in the second half of the seventeenth century, they were generally used only for the sixth and possibly for the fifth course(s). Modern nylon strings are a reasonable substitute for gut, and nylon does have the advantages of being readily available and lower in price.
Vocal Music
Authors: Merwe Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

If anything, American vocal music is even more tangled, more maze like, than American instrumental music. In instrumental music one has only the tunes to worry about; in vocal music there are the words as well. When Newman White wrote of black American song, ‘Generally speaking, practically any stanza is at home in practically any song,’ he was hardly exaggerating. In 1845 it was remarked that Tunes show the same protean quality. The same tunes often did service for work songs, spirituals, and other purposes. British folk tunes might be transformed into blues. Instrumental and vocal tunes changed places. Take, as an example, the tune of ‘Pretty Polly’ (Exx. 18 and 82). It originated as a slightly Africanized version of a British ballad. In this form it may be sung either completely unaccompanied, in the traditional British way, or with a banjo accompaniment.
The Matrix
Authors: Merwe Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

Ernest Newman wrote of Beethoven that ‘a great deal of his work can easily be shown to be a series of variations upon some ten or twelve protoplasmic cell-formulae; and the same holds good of all other composers’. This is true, and it is all the truer of music which is content to follow traditional lines and aims for neither novelty nor variety. In folk music, which is so much more a natural growth than composed music, the biological metaphor comes that much nearer to being a literal truth.
More About Primitive Harmony
Authors: Merwe Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

A Regular back-and-forth motion like the swinging of a pendulum is one of the fundamental matrices of music. It is found at its most basic in simple chants like Ex. 92, to be heard at sports stadiums. This is a melodic example. Harmonic forms are equally possible, as in the regular swing between tonic and dominant so familiar in the Classical style, or the alternating discords of Debussy or Stravinsky. In fact it is such a simple idea that it can take almost any form, melodic or harmonic, diatonic or chromatic, consonant or dissonant. Some of the oldest harmonic progressions take this form, and here the most ancient and fundamental interval seems to be, not the fourth or even the minor third, but the tone.
Friendship with Van Dieren (1916-1917)
Authors: Smith Barry
Published: November 2023

Philip’s life was about to take another new direction. He now returned to Chelsea, where he rented a small two-roomed flat at 14 Whitehead’s Grove on the top floor of an old house surrounded by beautiful lime-trees just bursting into bud. He described it as very light and cheerful, ‘discreet and pleasant, quite un-English or at least un-Londonish with its queer-shaped rooms, full of nooks and crannies and secret cupboards, its casement windows and innumerable, gorgeous cats’1 who dined with him daily. It was scantily furnished with rows of books, two paintings by Adrian Allinson, a Tibetan devil, and a West African carving, features which Lawrence (having doubtless heard of them) would later incorporate into his description of Halliday’s fl.at in Women in Love, where ‘there were several negro statues, wood-carvings from West Africa, strange and disturbing’.
An Infamous Letter (1918)
Authors: Smith Barry
Published: November 2023

Soon after giving his Dublin lecture Philip had sent Taylor a copy of ten of van Dieren’s Dutch Melodies for piano, feeling sure that he would love them. Now, on 13 June 1918, he wrote again, this time asking him to try to find a publisher in London for these ‘exquisite works’. He felt that they were ‘of so delicate a nature that the mere dumb manuscript, left with a not over-intelligent or sympathetic publisher, might easily fail to convey the frail and subtle beauty of the music’. If, however, Taylor were to play them, Philip decided they would then have the best of all possible chances. He hoped, too, that Taylor would find an opportunity to visit the ailing composer and discover more about the man and his music. Although still confined to bed, van Dieren was working at a new string quartet which he was composing without any preliminary sketches or alterations, ‘directly into a fair-copy score, without any rough notes whatever’.
Folk Song and Nationalism
Authors: Kennedy Michael
Published: November 2023

It is convenient to date the beginning of the English folk-song revival from 1843, when the Rev. John Broadwood, who at the time was living in Worthing, published his Old English Songs as now sung by the Peasantry of the Weald of Surrey and Sussex. He had noticed the beauty of the songs sung by the country people at harvesting and other rustic festivities. His volume, which was published privately, contained sixteen songs harmonized by George A. Dusart, organist to the Chapel of Ease at Worthing. Dusart, unused to flattened sevenths, protested that the tunes contained wrong notes, but Broadwood told him: ’Musically it may be wrong, but I will have it exactly as my singers sang it.’ But Broadwood was not the first in the field. In 1812 R.
1914-1924
Authors: Kennedy Michael
Published: November 2023

‘I Feel that perhaps after the war England will be a better place I for music than before-largely because we shan’t be able to buy expensive performers etc. like we did.’ So wrote Vaughan Williams to Holst on Midsummer Day 1916, just before his ambulance unit left for France. ‘We don’t take music as part of our everyday life half enough-I often wish we could all migrate to some small town where there could really be a musical community-London is impossible from that point of view. Goodbye and good luck.’