bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Songs and Dances of Death: Last Songs
Authors: Brown David
Published: November 2023

Ong Composition is the One Thread That Runs Through Musorgsky’s entire creative life. Though as 1875 opened he was at last systematically working on Khovanshchina, he remained prepared to be deflected by other projects, and at the beginning of March he completed a new and substantial song, ‘Trepak’, which became the third of his four Songs and Dances of Death. This cycle was to be Musorgsky’s other major collaboration with Kutuzov.
Postlude: The Century Since
Authors: Brown David
Published: November 2023

Imsky Was as Good as His Word. Yet He Would Finally receive small thanks for his labours, especially when, a halfcentury after Musorgsky’s death, publication of Pavel Lamm’s complete edition brought into the public domain nearly all that composer’s original texts. After this it became fashionable to censure Musorgsky’s colleague for what was now seen as, at best, a patronizing service to his friend’s work, at worst a self-interested decking out of another composer’s creations in more glamorous and fashionable clothing that might advertise their couturier’s superiority in taste and workmanship. No accusation could have been more unjustified. When Musorgsky died Rimsky was already a composer with a personal reputation large enough and an output successful enough for him to need no reflected glory.
The Rape of Lucretia
Authors: Evans Peter
Published: November 2023

The success of Peter Grimes gave real substance to hopes for British opera that had for centuries been sustained more on intentions than on fulfilments. But it could not improve a national situation in which only two houses, both metropolitan, were devoted principally to opera throughout the main season. And since one of these, Covent Garden, was to become again a showcase for productions depending on internationally distinguished casts, while Sadler’s Wells had a demanding enough task in building its repertoire of classics-in-the-vernacular, practical prospects for native opera as any thing more than an occasional indulgence were not bright. Outside London, however, there was Glyndebourne, a small house intended for short summer seasons which, immediately after the war, was not yet able to draw together casts to revive the repertoire with which it had achieved fame. Presumably it was because the size of the house suited his purpose so well, and because productions of his new works helped towards a resumption of activities there, that Britten’s two chamber operas were presented at Glyndebourne in the summers of 1946 and 1947.
Billy Budd
Authors: Evans Peter
Published: November 2023

Britten’s opera, Billy Budd, to a libretto by E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier based on the novel by Herman Melville, was completed in Autumn 1951 and first performed at Covent Garden on 1 December of that year. Nine years later the composer conducted in a studio broadcast the first performance of a revised version in which the original four acts were drawn together into two; this operation was already foreshadowed in the original by the procedure (reminiscent of Wozzeck) of beginning Acts II and IV with the music that ended I and III.
Later Vocal Works
Authors: Evans Peter
Published: November 2023

The completion and popular success of an undertaking as ambitious as Peter Grimes gave Britten the dangerous right to assume that an interested public would eagerly await anything he now chose to produce. These years after Grimes show him a superbly confident and astonishingly prolific composer: whereas the first opera had occupied him for well over a year, with few and small distractions, the next two appeared at yearly intervals despite his also completing substantial scores in other media. Yet the chamber-operas, a tragedy and a comedy, jettisoned most of the resources he had deployed so fluently in Grimes, and demanded solutions to quite new problems, as we have seen.
Later Choral Works
Authors: Evans Peter
Published: November 2023

In his cantata, Saint Nicolas, Britten had been able to create a sense of unity across a succession of heterogeneous movements both by the unfolding narrative and by carefully ordered key relationships (see Chapter 13). The choral and orchestral work which he completed a year later, in June 1949, might seem to have contained in its title of’ Spring Symphony’ the promise of a still more rigorously unified musical structure, though the narrative thread had been abandoned in favour of a poetic anthology.
The Church Parables
Authors: Evans Peter
Published: November 2023

It was stressed at the outset that this study of Britten’s work would not be threaded on to a connecting narrative of his life. And for the most part, this is practicable enough. It is true, of course, that we need to know something of the company he kept in the immediately pre-war years to understand such works of protest as the Ballad of Heroes, and that the homesickness he experienced in North America directly prompted the determinedly English tone of the music that marked and followed his return.
The English Plainchant Revival
Authors: Zon Bennett
Published: November 2023

This study provides a general introduction to the sources of the plainchant revival in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Part I examines the eighteenth-century Catholic revival, in particular the work of John Frances Wade, a Roman Catholic plainchant scribe and publisher. His work centred on the Roman Catholic foreign embassy chapels in London during the waning years of the recusancy period, and his collaboration with contemporary publishers and musicians is evidenced in numerous contemporary letters, music manuscripts, and printed works. In Part II the starting point for the Roman Catholic revival is Novello’s A Collection of Sacred Music and for the Anglican revival, Reinagle’s A Collection of Psalm & Hymn Tunes. Pro-Gregorian enthusiasts monitored the progress of the revival well into the nineteenth century, but it was not until the late 1830s that plainchant became a cause cbre in Anglican and Catholic worship alike. A multiplicity of plainchant publications followed well into the 1870s, with Thomas Helmores ranking first among them. By this time plainchant had become an integral, albeit controversial, part of musical worship in both churches. Bennett Zon brings together a host of previously undiscovered or unknown eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources, drawing mainly upon printed and manuscript works. Contemporary periodical and occasional literature provide further insight into their musical and social contexts. This is as much a source book for ecclesiastical history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as it is a chronicling of the plainchant revival, and it will be of interest to ecclesiastical historians, plainchant enthusiasts, church musicians, and bibliographers.
Introduction: Locating the Popular Music Text
Authors: Middleton Richard
Published: November 2023

Open any popular music paper and you will find interpretative comment on pop singers, records, and concerts. Tune in to any pop radio or TV programme and, again, opinion and evaluation frame the music. In a myriad less documented encounters, people of every kind and taste engage every day in dialogues about popular music’s meanings and effects. And, as Simon Frith has pointed out (Frith 1996, chapter 1), academics—in their role as music consumers—are just as likely to be involved as anyone. Yet if we ask how far this involvement has fed through into the academics’ professional work, the answer is surprising. Textual analysis has been a subsidiary strand in the expanding field of popular music studies; at the same time, much of the work has been marked by methodological hesitations which suggest deep-lying doubts about the viability of the enterprise itself. There are several reasons for this state of affairs, many of them to do with the particular histories of musical scholarship and of the way in which the study of popular culture has entered the academy. Underpinning all of them, however, is the simple issue—simple, but running deeply through the tissue of modern societies—of the interrelationship of elite and vernacular values. The threat of Pseud’s Corner awaits anyone who dares to mention, say, ‘aeolian harmonies’ or ‘pandiatonic clusters’ in connection with a popular song; yet a street-conscious ‘switch off your mind and boogie’ is hardly more likely to succeed in closing the cultural rift. At the same time, the claims of ‘the popular’, as an ideological category, exert an inescapable pull on the analytical enterprise, outlawing any yearning for disinterested objectivity; a song, once identified as ‘popular’, cannot avoid having this effect (of course, there may be other claims made as well—of ‘art’, of ‘politics’, of ‘entertainment’, etc.).
Listening to Peter Gabriel’s ‘I Have the Touch’
Authors: Fiori Umberto
Published: November 2023

The very existence of popular music research in its various aspects can be considered, with its investment of attention, as a general value judgement on the music’s potentialities. Moreover, we should not forget that a serious interest in popular music research would probably not have been possible without the emergence of more ambitious musical products testifying to a need for emancipation. Even so, perhaps because of a bitter awareness of its own roots in the same cultural and political processes, popular music research has somehow more and more tended to ignore ‘quality’ products in the field, whether because of their decline since the 1970s, or for the sake of some ‘scientific’ suspension of value judgement.
Genre, Performance, and Ideology in the Early Songs of Irving Berlin
Authors: Hamm Charles
Published: November 2023

Irving Berlin’s 200-odd songs written between 1907, the date of the first one, and late 1914, when his first complete show for the musical stage (Watch Your Step ) opened at New York’s Globe Theatre, are virtually identical to one another in their published piano/vocal format. Like other Tin Pan Alley songs of the early twentieth century, most of them consist of a brief piano introduction, a few bars of vamp, then several verses, each followed by a chorus. All are in major keys and most have a tempo marking of moderato. Piano introductions are drawn from either the first or last phrase of the chorus, the vamp anticipates the melodic beginning of the verse, and both verse and chorus are usually made up of four 4-bar phrases in – or four 8-bar phrases in other metres.
The Quest for Voice: Resituating Musical Autonomy
Authors: Goehr Lydia
Published: November 2023

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

(Keats2)

Music does not exist for the purpose of emphasizing … something which happens outside its own sphere. Musical expression only begins to be significant where words and action reach their utmost limits of expression It is only that which cannot be expressed otherwise that is worth expressing in music.
Music and Musicians in Exile: The Romantic Legacy of a Double Life
Authors: Goehr Lydia
Published: November 2023

The day I received the invitation to give the Bloch Lectures at the University of California, I happened to be writing about Ernst Bloch. I thought it quite fortuitous until I realized I was thinking about the wrong Bloch-the philosopher not the composer. But since I was writing about issues of double identity anyway, I decided to keep working on the one Bloch even as I was honouring the other. My decision subsequently turned out not to be too serious, because my lectures and then this book ended up focused on neither Bloch, but on Wagner, the composer to whom both Blochs were deeply devoted.
Passaggi
Authors: Mcgee Timothy J
Published: November 2023

The ornaments referred to here as passaggi are those that were used to connect written notes, or in some cases to replace what was written. The number of notes in a passaggio can vary from one to dozens, and there are statements in theoretical treatises that describe where and how they should be added. Petrus dictus Palma ociosa defines them very clearly when he speaks of them as flowers, and states that they consist of many sounds performed in the place of one. Arnulf of St-Ghislain mentions the addition of diminutions in a number of different contexts. In his description of musicians of the second class, for example, he notes that clerics add virtuoso passages to instrumental compositions (15:32):
Conclusions
Authors: Mcgee Timothy J
Published: November 2023

The theoretical treatises of the late Middle Ages describe an involved system of vocal practices and embellishment that extends to all types of music: sacred and secular, monophonic and polyphonic, vocal and instrumental. In order to present the breadth of the subject as well as the nature of the instructions, initially it was necessary to gather together as much information as possible on each subject area. This often meant pooling information from treatises written centuries apart and/or in widely separated locations, and without regard to the repertory to which any one theorist was referring.
The Vibration of Strings
Authors: Beamnt Jams
Published: November 2023

Terms have these meanings until developed further in the text:Frequency: the rate of vibration; the number of repetitions or cycles in a second. The frequency of violin open A is 440 cycles per second.Pitch: the characteristic of musical sound which enables the hearer to refer it for a scale of pitches.A note: the complete played sound of the simplest unit of music as produced by an instrument, which consists of a starting transient at the beginning followed by a sustained sound of constant pitch and loudness.
The Violin Body
Authors: Beamnt Jams
Published: November 2023

To many people a violin is a beautiful object; to a physicist it is a hideously complex shape. It would be difficult enough to predict its behaviour if it were made of uniform material symmetrically stressed. The complexity of its vibration is revealed by the striking pictures obtained by holography, but these do not explain anything. When the electron microscope first magnified fragments of animals many thousands of times, the pictures were enthralling but they did not explain how the bits worked or whether the structural complexities were significant in how they worked. We find in Chapter 5 that bowed instruments could not work unless they did vibrate in complex ways; that does not mean that any particular way is necessarily significant.
How Glue Works
Authors: Beamnt Jams
Published: November 2023

Glue is as essential a component of instruments as wood, yet little is written about it. The glue always used is derived from the inedible parts of animals and is often called Scotch glue. It is found in ancient Egyptian furniture and, apart from a casein glue derived from milk, it was the only adhesive known to woodworkers, including the first violin makers. During the past fifty years synthetic chemistry has created. a wide range of new adhesives, and there would be no reason for luthiers to continue using animal glue if any of the new products were better suited to the task. But animal glue has several properties which are of exceptional value both for instruments and in the making process, and which are not found in any other glue. This has nothing to do with tradition; one cannot foresee that any product is likely to replace it. In this chapter, ‘glue’ means this animal glue in water, unless qualified by a descriptive adjective.
Keyboard Instruments in Germany and Austria, 1770-1790: An Overview
Authors: Cole Michael
Published: November 2023

HavingDescribed The instruments of Johann Andreas Stein and some of the smaller hammer-action instruments, this might be an appropriate point at which to give a general view of the range of options open to the musician in Germany and Austria during what we might call the Mozartian period.
In Vienna
Authors: Cole Michael
Published: November 2023

On6 March1763 a relatively inconspicuous concert at the Burgtheatr in Vienna included a performance by an obscure musician called Johann Baptist Schmid on ‘a new instrument made like a harpsichord through which one may imitate the Pantalon’ . Despite all the attention that has been turned upon the origins of the Viennese piano, this remains the earliest known reference to such instruments in the imperial capital. The concert was mainly comprised of vocal items, and the diarist who noted this unusual instrument was unable to give it a precise name. Two months later, on 13 May, a similar evening’s entertainment saw the return of this performer, whose instrument is now said to be called Piano et Forte. No other information about the player or the instrument has come to light. This inaugural appearance (if that is what it was) and the form of the name when finally given exactly parallel the French experience, for, as we have previously noted, the piano first came before the public in Paris in the early 1760s as a harpsichord-like instrument given the name piano et forte. There is a very strong probability that Schmid’s instrument was of the Silbermann type, and we should not be surprised if other notices should come to light of similar debut concerts in other cities where court influence favoured French language and culture.
World Musics in Context
Authors: Fletcher Peter
Published: November 2023

This book contains a wide-ranging survey of musics of the world, in historical and social contexts, from ancient times to the present day. It starts by describing aspects of musical style and function in relation to the early developments of civilisations, as background to a study of later transformations. It then describes, in some detail, musical traditions of Africa and Asia, in relation to history/geography and to other aspects of culture. European music is subsequently treated similarly, and in relation to music-cultures elsewhere. A further section examines the consequences of Europe's appropriation of the Americas, and describes popular musical styles in both Latin America and the USA. The final section considers the nature of tradition and change, examines some African and Asian musical styles in their colonial and post-colonial contexts, and considers, in broad historical perspective, the effects of Westernisation. A concluding essay examines the consequences for the West of global Westernisation, and of increasing cultural interchange. The book includes a Foreword by Laurence Picken, an essay that presents a unique view of music and ethnomusicology by one of the most distinguished scientists and musicologists of our time. In part a compendium of information currently available, in part a dialectical examination of musical causation and function, this book aims to lead students, teachers, and those who practise Western music towards a deeper understanding of the various musical traditions that contribute to the modern, multi-cultural environment. The author's aim throughout has been to achieve clarity in the writing and to make the book accessible to those with no training in ethnomusicology.
Unison
Authors: Maconie Robin
Published: November 2023

The most interesting philosophical question [Jacques de Liege] addresses (in Speculum musicae I.26} is whether two notes sounded in unison can be called ‘different sounds’.
Instruments
Authors: Maconie Robin
Published: November 2023

ALL musical instruments are transducers. A transducer is a device that converts one kind of energy, the physical input of a performer, into another form of energy, which is radiated chiefly as sound. In a musical context what is normally of primary interest to a listener is the quality and beauty of instrumental tone, in itself and in rela tion to the music composed for it; appreciation of performing artistry follows close after that. A listener can give due considera tion to an expert performance given artistic terms of reference, and these are embodied in the structure and techniques required of a musical instrument, and in the musical information to be con veyed.
‘Perks’ Joins the Frankfurt Gang
Authors: Bird John
Published: November 2023

The SS Gera was a small and very comfortable ship and Percy found the voyage an exciting experience. It reinforced his already strong passion for ships and the sea. He joined in all the deck sports and spent some of his time teaching himself German. The Graingers disembarked at Genoa and made the remainder of their journey to Frankfurt am Main by train in order that they might see a little of Europe before Rose found it necessary to settle down and earn a living.
Packed Houses and Zulu Warriors
Authors: Bird John
Published: November 2023

Ada Crossley and her touring party, consisting of Grainger, Jacques Jacobs (violin), W. A. Peterkin (bass-baritone) and Benno Scherek (accom¬panist doubling as tour manager), left England on the RMS Omrah of the Orient Pacific Line during the first week of August 1903. Grainger was able to practise his repertoire on the piano of the ship’s lounge, and before they arrived in Adelaide on September 7 the entire party had given several concerts for the ship’s passengers.
‘Your mad side has ruined us’
Authors: Bird John
Published: November 2023

During the early part of 1922 there was a distinct deterioration in Rose’s health. A two-month tour of the Pacific coast and Canada had been arranged by Antonia Sawyer. It was to begin early in March and promised to be the most lucrative of Grainger’s career.
Beatless Music, Blue-Eyed English and a Nordic Princess
Authors: Bird John
Published: November 2023

Grainger determined that the only way he could accommodate the grief of his mother’s death would be by submerging himself in hard work, and he immediately set himself to planning his involvement with the Evanston Music Festival, a five-week teaching session at the Chicago Musical Col¬lege and his European tour. He slept and ate as much as he could and the few moments of rest he allowed himself were given over to reading the works of his friend Edgar Lee Masters.
Anton Webern
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

About 1911 I wrote the Bagatelles for String Quartet (Op.9), all very short pieces, lasting a couple of minutes–perhaps the shortest music so far. Here I had the feeling, ‘When all twelve notes have gone by, the piece is over’ In my sketchbook I wrote out the chromatic scale and crossed off the individual notes. Why? Because I had convinced myself, ‘This note has been there already’ The inner ear decided quite rightly that the man who wrote out the chromatic scale and crossed off individual notes was no fool.…In short, a rule of law emerged; until all twelve notes have occurred, none of them may occur again.
Time in Indian Music
Authors: Clayton Martin
Published: November 2023

Time in Indian Music is the first major study of rhythm, metre, and form in North Indian rag, or classical, music. Martin Clayton presents a theoretical model for the organization of time in this repertory, a model which is related explicitly to other spheres of Indian thought and culture as well as to current ideas on musical time in alternative repertories-including that of Western music. This theoretical model is elucidated and illustrated with reference to many musical examples drawn from authentic recorded performances. These examples clarify key Indian musicological concepts such as tal (metre), lay (tempo or rhythm), and laykari (rhythmic variation). More generally, the volume addresses the implications of performance practice for the organization of rhythm and metre. Written in a clear and accessible style and illustrated with 102 music examples and diagrams, it will appeal to anyone interested in Indian aesthetic forms and the study of musical time. The book contains a free CD of authentic recorded performances closely referred to in the text.
Introduction
Authors: Clayton Martin
Published: November 2023

Before any performance of rāg music in North India can begin, a number of rituals are enacted, marking the time from the entrance of the performers to the sounding of the first pitch of the recital. Performers must be introduced-often with a lengthy speech, in which the speaker (on behalf of the programme’s patron) charts the lineage and lists the achievements and honours of the soloist (and, to a lesser extent, accompanists) whose services have been secured for the event. Musicians may be presented with garlands, which they will accept gratefully before removing as a gesture of humility. Accompanists take the stage, standing respectfully until the soloist makes his entrance, acknowledges the audience’s welcome, sits and gestures to his colleagues that they should do likewise.
Theoretical perspectives I: musical time in Indian cultural perspective
Authors: Clayton Martin
Published: November 2023

I turn now to the wider cultural context within which Indian rhythmic organization operates-and to a critical discussion of how, if at all, cultural ideology, patterns, and norms may be reflected in music. As I noted in Chapter 1, a relationship is often postulated between ideology and cultural norms on the one hand and musical theory and practice on the other.
Lay: tempo and rhythmic density
Authors: Clayton Martin
Published: November 2023

Lay is one of the most important rhythmic concepts in Indian music. It has long been recognized as the principle which regulates musical time; it has also been appreciated that lay is partly responsible for the aesthetic character of music. Lay is a difficult concept, however, because its meaning and significance have changed substantially over history. It is an ancient concept which may be only imperfectly applicable to modern music, and from this fact arises considerable ambiguity in meaning.
The bandiś
Authors: Clayton Martin
Published: November 2023

The fixed composition, called either bandis’ or c-zz in vocal genres and either bandis’ or gat in instrumental genres, holds a position of central importance in North Indian ,āg performance. The vocal bandis’ is essentially a song-a text set to ,āg and tāl-which exists both as a piece of music in its own right, and as the basis of further musical development. In instrumental music the composition is either an imitation or adaptation of such a vocal bandis’, or a piece based instead on idiomatic stroke patterns, in which case it is called a gat (the term bandis’ is used in the discussion which follows to cover all kinds of compositions).
The Relaxant Finale
Authors: Talbot Michael
Published: November 2023

The relationship of any finale to its companion movements is partly one of similarity, partly one of difference. If it is totally similar, it loses its raison deter as a separate movement; if it is totally different, it violates the broad principle of unity or (if one prefers) coherence. In a conventional three-movement or four-movement plan its relationship to the first movement is crucial for two reasons: the two movements are both fast (a factor that makes their direct comparison appropriate), and they occupy strategically equivalent (though, as we saw, very different) positions framing the rest of the work To a lesser extent, a finale has to position itself visavis the interior movements, and in particular the minuet, scherzo, or similar movement in a four-movement cycle. Its relationship to the minuet (etc.) is naturally most conspicuous when the two movements are adjacent: that is, when the minuet comes third rather than second, as it does most often from Haydn onwards until the late nineteenth century.
‘Cette diablerie philosophique’: Faust Criticism in Paris c.1830
Authors: Hibberd Sarah
Published: November 2023

It was Mme de Stael who first introduced Goethe’s Faust (1808) to the French, in a chapter of her highly influential De l’Allemagne, a work that defined the German nation and its culture for a generation of Europeans, and presented the ideas of German Romanticism in a coherent way to the French for the first time. Although completed (in exile) in 1810, the book was banned by Napoleon as German propaganda and was not published in France until 1814. However, during the next few years it went through five editions and its reception benefited from the contact with other countries that France was beginning to enjoy after the end of the Empire.
Bodies at the Op éra: Art and the Hermaphrodite in the Dance Criticism of Th éophile Gautier
Authors: Clark Maribeth
Published: November 2023

When Théophile Gautier wrote reviews about dancers whose beauty he thought near perfection, he referred to classical figures in paintings, cameos, frescoes, and ancient Greek sculpture not so much to capture the unique image in prose, but to provide the reader with a sense of the indescribable ideality of the beauty.
The Musical Revolution of the Mid-Nineteenth Century: From ‘Repeat and Twiddle’ to ‘Precision and Snap’
Authors: Gammon Sheila
Published: November 2023

In 1928 Gustav Holst composed A Moorside Suite for brass band. This work was important as the first composition expressly written for brass band by a ‘major’ English composer, and it is significant that it was the test piece at the National Championship at Crystal Palace that year. Subsequently, the inter-war years saw brass band works by Elgar, Bantock, Howells, Bliss, and others. At last art-music composers were taking the brass band seriously.
Instruments and Instrumentation of British Brass Bands
Authors: Myers Arnold
Published: November 2023

The first all-brass bands of the r 83os departed from the centuries-old band tradition of accompanying melody played on woodwind with harmony played on brass. The common wind band instrumentation of clarinets with horns and other brass instruments was varied to produce the brass band: cornets as principal melody instruments, accompanied by a variety of brass instruments of middle and low tessituras. The widespread adoption of the new instrumentation would seem to have been a matter of taste: a preference for the sound of concerted brass instruments made possible by the inventions of the early years of the nineteenth century. The price lists of D’ Almaine and Jordan (Appendix r) show that the expense of equipping a band with cornets would have been slightly more than for providing the same number of clarinets.
Time
Authors: Herissone Rebecca
Published: November 2023

THE stylistic changes which defined the boundary between Renaissance and Baroque music were probably the major cause of the decline of mensural notation and the rise of the modern ‘orthochronic’ system in which each note value is an independent, discrete unit.1 As melodically conceived, interweaving imitative textures began to be replaced by more harmonically orientated melody-plus-bass styles, so a musical notation which relied on the use of part-books in performance had to be superseded by one which would allow score form. Because in mensural notation values were sometimes changed by the presence of neighbouring notes, it was very difficult to compare different parts against one another vertically.
Italy: The Creation of the Repertory
Authors: Tyler James , Sparks Paul
Published: November 2023

The last quarter of the sixteenth century saw the invention of alfabeto notation that was used in conjunction with vocal music—both the light, three-voice forms (villanelle and canzonette) and the late sixteenth-century monodies with Italian and Spanish texts. By the end of the sixteenth century alfabeto was well established, and by the early seventeenth could be found in one of the chief sources of classic monody, 1-FcMS C. F. 83, ‘Codex Barbera’.
The Guitar 1750-c.1800: Practical Information
Authors: Tyler James , Sparks Paul
Published: November 2023

As we have seen during the three previous chapters, the guitar evolved very differently in Spain, Italy, and France during this period, and performers whose primary interest is complete authenticity should ideally either concentrate on the music from one of those countries or else have three instruments at their disposal. Most surviving guitars from the eighteenth century are now in museums or private collections, and (although original examples in a playable condition are still occasionally offered for sale in auction houses) the majority of players will need to acquire modern reproductions. The following paragraphs summarize the main differences between typical Spanish, Italian, and French (especially Parisian) guitars of the late eighteenth century, give some measurements of typical instruments, and suggest detailed sources that can serve as a starting point for luthiers intending to build modern reproductions.
Selling Britten
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

At the end of the nineteenth century Britain was a country without an opera culture, and in the concert halls the Austro-Germanic symphonic repertory reigned supreme. In the following fifty years the art-music culture changed dramatically. Radio, the gramophone and the recording industry, government arts subsidies, Covent Garden, and a post-war resurgence in national and civic pride which contributed to the spread of music festivals, were the agents of change. Born in 1913, Benjamin Britten was well placed to take advantage of these market forces, which he did consistently and skilfully from the 1930s onwards. His relationships with Boosey Hawkes, Decca, Covent Garden, the Aldeburgh Festival, the English Opera Group, and the Arts Council, had a huge influence on the music he wrote. This book explores the effect of these commercial and national institutions on the music of one of the foremost British composers of the twentieth century.
Introduction
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

Underneath the ceaseless speechifying about new starts, the dominant dream is of a Venetian twilight: a golden-grey steady state where staid arts and moderate politics join to preserve the tenor of things English. The true impulse is not really to ‘catch up ’ with the greater, evolving world outside, but to hold one ‘s own somehow, anyhow, and defend the tribe ‘s customs and weathered monuments. The story is about a recording engineer who is a frustrated composer. A woman comes to make a recording (with her manager), he falls in love with her and is inspired to write a masterpiece. There are several complications but the story does not have a happy ending--composer does not get woman.Before the 1950s or so classical or art musicians in Britain were notorious Luddites. Each technical advance or innovation was quickly derided, each threat to the status quo vilified. Part of this was snobbery: many musicians ‘ vision of English culture was incompatible with growing industrialization. A pasture was the minimum constituent of a pastoral symphony-and not one cluttered with tractors. Larks did ascend, but certainly not in inner cities. Music critics were complicit in the promotion of this vision: in 1945 H. C. Colles wrote that ‘English musicians must be glad to see their art enshrined in company with “Shakespeare “, “The English Public School “, “Cricket “, and other matters which are part and parcel of our national inheritance ‘-a list that doesn ‘t mention by name, but surely invokes in spirit, spinsters cycling to church, warm English ale, and the Henley Regatta.
The Arts Council ’s Pursuit of ‘Grand Opera ’
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

It will be the first task of Fascism in the cultural plane to elevate the public taste by releasing the national culture from the tyranny of commercial standards. Gone is the old aristocracy, which in the 18th century-to their honour! patronised such men as Dryden, Pope, and Samuel Johnson. Fascism must take over this duty of patronage, and with as generous a hand. Poor old English opera. For so long the play-ground of amateurs and dabblers. By drawing heavily on an article in the Fascist Week in support of his call for a British Ministry of Fine Arts, Henry Welsh added an unexpected voice to a then familiar argument. Where successive governments had ignored the value of British arts, Fascism could offer Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists, with his assured cultural pedigree. Where Viscount Snowden ( ‘with whom we have little in common ’) had failed in his attempt to fund grand opera in England in the early 1930s, the ‘Fascist scorpion will be more grievous than the Snowden whip, and the Philistines will be belaboured into building for us one of the finest opera houses in the world ’. The year 1934-in which talk of Fascism infiltrated the bucolic pages of the Musical Times-was in fact Fascism ‘s ‘Indian Summer ’ in Britain; events in Spain only two years later were to turn public opinion against the Fascist cause, its doctrine largely discredited. Significantly, the extreme right ’s advocacy of a British Ministry of Fine Arts, balanced on the left by Communism ’s ‘Art for the People ’, helped to keep the argument for state patronage beyond the pale of mainstream politics.
Mendelssohn’s Two Infelice Arias: Problems of Sources and Musical Identity
Authors: Cooper John Michael
Published: November 2023

One of the central issues that has emerged in the resurgence of Mendelssohn scholarship since the Second World War is the need for critical editions of the composer’s complete works. The decades immediately following Mendelssohn’s death witnessed not only new editions of works that had been published during his lifetime, but also first editions of many previously unpublished compositions; all were ultimately included, along with still more works not previously released, in the series of Mendelssohns Werke published by Breitkopf & Härtel between 1874 and 1877 under the general editorship of the composer’s friend Julius Rietz.
Kindred Spirits: Mendelssohn and Goethe, Die erste Walpurgisnacht
Authors: Prandi Julie D
Published: November 2023

In discussing Felix Mendelssohn’s setting of Goethe’s ‘Die erste Walpurgisnacht’, we have ample opportunity for illustrating the composer’s willed affinity with the poet as well as the natural similarity in artistic temperament. There is a remarkable convergence of aesthetic sensibility in the way both artists encompass classical and romantic forms, which can be observed in the close correspondence of Goethe’s thought and feeling as expressed in the poem and Mendelssohn’s rendering of it in musical terms. But equally if not more important is that Mendelssohn’s ethical views correspond so well to Goethe’s.
Ethnomusicology and Music Sociology
Authors: Bohlman Philip V
Published: November 2023

Ethnomusicology and music sociology should be obvious sister disciplines, but they are not. Ethnomusicologists and sociologists of music should be joined in conversation, but they rarely talk with each other. Because both have embraced ‘text and context’, ethnomusicology and music sociology might well have forged common methodologies for determining the interrelationships between musical and social practices, but they have rarely done so. As ethnomusicology has in recent decades concerned itself increasingly with modernity and music in urban contexts, it might well have drawn on sociology’s historical concern for the structure and institutions of the city. Again, it did so only exceptionally. As music sociology increasingly sought to broaden its understanding of what music really could be by intensifying its concern for popular musics, it might well have drawn on ethnomusicology for the broadest possible ontology of music. Instead, it persists in defining ‘popular music’ in much narrower terms than ethnomusicology.
Study Session 20 Semiotics, Structural Semantics, Rhetoric: Musical Language Sciences In Contemporary Musicology
Authors: Grabó;cz Marta
Published: November 2023

Bernard Vecchione (F) pointed out in his abstract for this Study Session that one of the most characteristic features of late twentieth-century musicology is its interest in the aptitude of the musical phenomenon as a language.1 Following on from investigations in philosophy and linguistics, the sciences of semiotics, semantics, narratology, and rhetoric are now being brought to bear on the question of musical language.
Interpreting Performance: Chopin-Playing In Perspective
Authors: Rink John
Published: November 2023

Performance studies has established its lf in recent years as a subdiscipline of musicology incorporating research into historical performance practices, analysis and performance, and performance psychology. This session’ s six speakers fused these areas by focusing on Chopin performance while undertaking both exposition of performance-related theory and practical application thereof, in a progression from historical through analytical to psychological topics. It was an exceptionally far-ranging but well-grounded session.
Study Session 44race And Culture In The Aesthetics Of William Grant Still (1895-1978)
Authors: Smith Catherine Parsons
Published: November 2023

In his commitment to promote racial progress through his art, William Grant Still (1895-1978) was very much a part of the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro movement. Indeed, he lived in New York City between 1919 and 1934, the years of the Renaissance, and in that period orchestrated both black and white musical theatre and early radio shows in addition to his study with Varese. He sought to represent his position as an African American to elite (largely white) audiences by composing music that blurred the barriers between concert music and opera on one hand and commercial, popular, and folk music, with which he was also deeply involved, on the other. Still supplemented his own experience of African-American music by seeking materials on African music in public libraries, at the same time accumulating his own collection of such sources. Rather than use these in his own compositions, however, he quite consistently devised new themes that reflected the styles he sought both to convey and to transform.
Fascism And Music
Authors: Brinkmann Reinhold
Published: November 2023

With regard to the role of music in National Socialist Germany, Bernd Sponheuer discussed the importance-unprecedented in modern history-of art in the political legitimation of the state. The ability of art to divert from everyday life made it a powerful means of effecting consent and subordination. Both the historical conditions that allowed for this aestheticization of politics and the disturbed process of modernization in Germany stemmed from nationalism and cultural religion. Already in the nineteenth century music, as the most ‘absolute’ and ‘German’ of the arts, gained the authority to solve problems and impart meaning-from which developed the hope of redemption from alienation and misery. With the First World War and its consequences, the dire extremes of order or chaos became the sole possibilities, politically as well as musically. The strategy of the National Socialists involved an interplay of terror (through enforced conformity and purging) and aestheticization (with the aim of building consent and community). With the former, the principle of total control, including concessions like jazz, was more important than total indoctrination. The aestheticization also depended on a form of control: by virtue of its observance of ‘eternal laws’, art brings about subordination and obedience in much the same ways as do the Fiihrer, Volk, and Reich. Music in rituals and rallies was effective in elevating reality to the level of the solemn and the mythical, giving an illusion of the building of community.
Session 35: Music and Literature: Twentieth Century
Authors: Sciucca Marco della
Published: November 2023

Si intende indagare un topos mai sufficientemente spiegato in term1111 analitico-interpretativi: la musicalita de! verso come elemento strutturante de! Poema paradisiaco di D’ Annunzio (fondamentale e la lettura orale della poesia). La magnifica orchestrazione ritmico-contrappuntistica de! Poema paradisiaco puo essere Jetta partendo dai valori metrico-accentuativi e versali dell’opera fino a considerarne l’organizzazione sonora e timbrica minima de! singolo fonema. Ma non basta un’indagine formalista: un’analisi anche contenutistica evidenzia come l’elemento musicale de! verso si traduca spesso in semantema. Secondo un procedimento inverso a quello della semantizzazione dell’elemento musicale e quindi della sua realizzazione verbale, D’ Annunzio opera la sonorizzazione e tematizzazione <lei semantemi tipici dell’estetica simbolista e decadente del Paradisiaco. La meta-musicalita (musicalita nei contenuti) si rende ancor piu presente con le immagini musicali vere e proprie, che hanno funzione estetica specifica di coronamento ideale di quella simbiosi verso-musica di cui qui si tratta.
Staging Verdi’s Operas: The Single, ‘Correct’ Performance
Authors: Hepokoski James
Published: November 2023

Thirty years ago, the following would have been an astonishing claim: should we wish to do so, we could reconstruct the original costumes, sets, and staging of Verdi’s operas from 1855 (Les Vêpres siciliennes) to 1887 (Otello). This is especially true of the later works, whose original stage images we could re-create with remarkable accuracy: what everyone wore, where everyone was to stand, what their stage motions were, even (in cases such as Otello) their arm and hand gestures and facial expressions.
On Staging that Matters
Authors: Rosen David
Published: November 2023

James Hepokoski argues that the Ricardi disposizioni sceniche (production books) should be studied by scholars and performers alike-after all, they sometimes ‘provide plot information left unspecified in the libretto’-and he is sympathetic to the notion that, in the wide range of stagings we see today; the ‘original staging, with its unique concerns and special authority; might throw its hat into the ring from time to time’. He warns us, however, that we should not expect to recapture ‘the long-forgotten aesthetic heart of the work’ by doing so.
Commonplace Learning
Authors: Hotson Howard
Published: November 2023

Ramism was the most controversial pedagogical movement to sweep through the Protestant world in the latter sixteenth century. While its origins in France, its impact in colonial America, and its influence in England, Scotland, and Ireland have been studied in detail, its uniquely warm reception in central Europe – where the great majority of posthumous reprintings of Ramus’s work appeared – has never been synoptically studied. This book, the first contextualized study of this rich tradition, therefore has wide-ranging implications for the intellectual, cultural, and social histories not only of the Holy Roman Empire but also of the entire Protestant world in the crucial decades immediately preceding the advent of the ‘new philosophy’ in the mid-seventeenth century.
Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s
Authors: Sutton Emma
Published: November 2023

Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s is an interdisciplinary study of the influence of the operas, writing, and personality of Richard Wagner (1813-1883) on the work of Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898). Examining Beardsley's drawings and prose of the 1890s the study considers the ways in which Wagner's works were appropriated by this seminal figure of the British decadent movement. Despite recent critical interest in Beardsley and the 'fin-de-siècle', and considerable research on Wagnerism, Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagernism in the 1890s is the first study in English to consider at length Wagner's presence in Beardsley's work. Beardsley combined allusions to the German composer with many of the touchstones of decadent art - the exotic, the morbid, the erotic, and the mannered. In exploring Beardsley's often iconoclastic versions - or perversions - of Wagner's work Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagernism in the 1890s aims to investigate the role of Wagnerism with 'fin-de-siècle' British culture, in particular the relations between Wagnerism and contemporary decadence.