bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
‘Brief Encounter, 1931’
Authors: Goldschmidt Berthold
Published: February 2010

In the Spring of 1931 the German section of the ISCM staged a small-scale festival at the old-fashioned, but horticulturally attractive spa of Pyrmont in Lower Saxony. Apart from a witty and graceful Violin Concerto by my friend and co-student from Schreker's masterclass at the Berlin Academy of Music, the Polish-American Jerzy Fitelberg (son of the renowned conductor of the Warsaw Philharmonic, Grzegorz Fitelberg), the quality of the works performed was rather poor. They were certainly lacking in colour against the background of rare azaleas and bulging rhododendrons.… My own piece, now (luckily) lost for ever – a Promenadenmusik for small orchestra, meant to flatter the ‘genius loci’ – was a flop, though Aaron Copland and Marc Blitzstein were both generous about it.
The Resurrection of Roslavets
Authors: McBurney Gerard
Published: February 2010

It can hardly have escaped the reader's attention that certain changes have taken place in Eastern Europe and beyond. In December 1980, when Lewis Foreman published his comments about Nikolai Roslavets in Tempo No. 135, discussion of the Russian modernists, of composers such as Roslavets, Lourié and Mossolov, was still largely impossible in the Soviet Union. It followed that it was extremely hard to find out what music had in fact survived in archives public and private, and even harder to get that music performed.
Tikhon Khrennikov in Interview
Authors: Heikinheimo Seppo
Published: February 2010

No-one in his right mind would want to be in Tikhon Khrennikov's shoes. He has the dubious distinction of being the number two villain of Shostakovich's memoirs Testimony, second only to Stalin. Shostakovich nicknamed him the ‘bloodhound’. But he is also a curious historical survival: the only dictator of an arts organization in the Soviet Union who was appointed by Stalin and, 42 years later, still occupies the same position, his head still on his shoulders.
Two Novellas
Authors: Karetnikov Nikolai
Published: February 2010

Before they performed my ballet Vanina Vanini in 1961, the renowned Bolshoi Theatre orchestra had never played any music that had been written in the 12-note system.

There was a lot of tension at the first rehearsal. The musicians neither understood or accepted the music. Their heads turned in bewilderment every time a phrase was taken up by a different instrument to the one that had begun it. It gradually dawned on me, and the musicians themselves, that they were simply incapable of playing the piece.
Giya Kancheli: an Introduction to his Music
Authors: Moody Ivan
Published: February 2010

Born in 1934, Georgiy (Giya) Kancheli has begun to receive attention in the West rather later than Alfred Schnittke, who was born one year earlier. Kancheli, who comes from Tiflis (Tbilsi), in Georgia – and who should not therefore be described as Russian – studied piano and composition (with Ilya Tuskiya) in the Conservatory of his native town between 1959 and 1963, and he has himself taught there since 1970. Since 1971 he has also been musical director of the Rustaveli Theatre in Tiflis. He has received recognition as a People's Artist of the USSR, and been a State Prize winner, and following his emergence into the consciousness of countries outside the USSR interest in his music has spread considerably.
Vagn Holmboe: Quartet Composer at Work
Authors: Finney Ian
Published: February 2010

Vagn Homboe, born in Horsens on the Jutland peninsula in 1909, is the doyen of Danish composers. Although he celebrates his eightieth birthday on 20 December, he remains formidably productive: his new Twelfth Symphony was premièred by the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra in Cardiff on 21 October. A prolific composer in many genres, his reputation rests securely on the twin pillars of his symphonies and his even more numerous string quartets.
Tributes to Dallapiccola
Authors: Lutyens Elisabeth , Henze Hans Werner , Wood Hugh
Published: February 2010

I first met Luigi Dallapiccola in 1946. The annual Festival of the ISCM—lapsed during the war—took place in London that year, giving an opportunity of renewing old acquaintances and meeting new colleagues.

My first sight of Dallapiccola—no one, not even his wife, Laura, ever calls him Luigi—was of a tiny figure of great vitality and dignity on which was poised a large, noble head (then black-haired) tilted at a strange angle when looking up into the faces of those he was speaking with. The speech was always accompanied by many gestures from his large, expressive hands.
The Abolition of Thematicism and the Structural Meaning of the Method of Twelve-Tone Composition
Authors: Spinner Leopold
Published: February 2010

The structural significance of the Method of Composing with Twelve Tones is expressed in the following statements by Arnold Schoenberg in ‘Composition with Twelve Tones’ (Style and Idea, Williams & Norgate Ltd., London, p. 107):

After many unsuccessful attempts during a period of approximately twelve years, I laid the foundation for a new procedure in musical construction which seemed fitted to replace those structural differentiations provided formerly by tonal harmonies. I called this procedure Method of Composing with Twelve Tones which are related only with one another.
Catching on to the Technique in Pagoda-Land
Authors: Mitchell Donald
Published: February 2010

The prince of the pagodas, Britten's only ballet score (his only mature score originally composed for the ballet, that is), and that comparatively rare bird in the 20th century, afull-lengthballet, was first performed at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 1957, on the first day of the new year, with the composer conducting. The choreographer was John Cranko and the scenery was designed by John Piper.
Philip Grange
Authors: Williamson Clive
Published: February 2010

Philip Grange has been an outstandingly successful young composer by any standard. He has a large number of works to his credit, commissions which look like occupying him for some time, and his works are receiving regular performances. Critically he has been described as a ‘distinctive … bright new talent, with a strong music concept beautifully worked out’ (Times, June 1980) and ‘a new and individual compositional voice’ (Daily Telegraph, January 1981). These were both descriptions of the work with which he first attracted attention in London. Cimmerian Nocturne was composed in 1979, commissioned by The Fires of London, and received a performance on the 7 August as part of the Proms season.
Leopold Spinner: A List of his works
Authors: Busch Regina
Published: February 2010

When René Leibowitz was preparing the first performance of the Piano Concerto op.4 in 1949 (it was for this occasion that Spinner made the transcription for chamber orchestra, which is the only version of the piece that is known, printed, and performed), he asked Spinner for some details about his work and himself. The answer was characteristic:

…Nun schliesslich, Sie würden gerne Einzelheiten von mir wissen: Ich bin 42, habe eine Frau und ein Kind (Margaret, 6 Jahre), das ist ganz privat narürlich (aber für mich sehr wichtig, darum erwähne ich es)! Ich habe bei Webern studiert. Was ich bis jetzt geschrieben habe, fängt mit der Sonate für Violin und Klavier op.1 an, dann ein Streichquartett op.2, eine Sonate für Klavier op.3. Op.4 kennen Sie bereits.
Gordon Crosse: Towards a Style
Authors: Blacker Terry
Published: February 2010

Quoted in Christopher Ford's profile of the composer, Crosse was referring—with characteristic wit—to the need to find his own personal style in order to escape classification as merely a disciple of a ‘Maxwell Davies School’. Crosse's Renaissance techniques and motivic delineation had always differed significantly from Davies's and in the 12 years since that article appeared, as if to prove this point, Crosse has pursued a different direction, centred on the drama and contrasts possible in the concerto or ‘concertante’. The development of his now highly personal style can be recognized as a synthesis of his earlier experiments in serial procedures. Between 1972 and 1977 Crosse wrote three concertantes: Ariadne, for oboe and 12 players (1971–2), Thel, for flute, two horns, and double string septet (1974–6), and Wildboy, for clarinet, cimbalom, and seven players (1977); pieces which share similar origins and musical processes, and provide explicit examples of his compositional methods. To illustrate this personal style, I will compare the origins and musical materials of the first two concertantes and fit them into the context of his output in the period from 1972–7.
On the Horizontal and Vertical Presentation of Musical Ideas and on Musical Space (II)
Authors: Busch Regina
Published: February 2010

The difficulties connected with the idea of synthesis do not originate with the fact that as soon as he starts to elucidate the laws that have been formulated in general terms, Schoenberg postulates a musical space that only has two dimensions, the horizontal and the vertical. The scientific origin of these concepts could tempt one to think of this space (strictly geometrically) as a plane surface, and then to imagine it as comprising the paper on which music is notated, the dimensions then comprising the directions of the notation itself or of reading. But this is not yet musical space, and only if one tries to imagine a synthesis on this plane surface does one tend towards the concept of a diagonal. The inadequacy of the ‘diagonal’ seems to have been sensed by those authors who directed attention to the temporal aspect of music and who (perhaps by a popularizing analogy with the idea of time as the fourth dimension) attempted to locate the synthesis within the domain of ‘time’—say, the rhythmic domain. Schoenberg—and Webern followed him in this—distinguishes with terminological exactitude: wherever vertical and horizontal appear as concepts on their own, the explanation is always added: ‘The elements of a musical idea are partly incorporated in the horizontal plane as successive sounds and partly in the vertical plane as simultaneous sounds’; or: ‘In accordance with this [law], harmony and melody, vertical and horizontal, form a musical unit, a space, in both of whose dimensions the musical substance is deposited’, and similarly in the draft for the Princeton lecture. The conception of the dimensions of musical space is therefore connected with ‘harmony and melody’—without ‘vertical’ and ‘harmony’, or ‘horizontal’ and ‘melody’, thereby being identical. But how do matters stand on this plane with the ‘unit(y)’ that primarily interested Schoenberg and with the ‘synthesis’ upon which Webern apparently directed his attention?
Aschenbach's Wilderness
Authors: Docherty Barbara
Published: February 2010

Our hunting fathers and Death in Venice stand respectively at the beginning and end of Benjamin Britten's voice-and-orchestra output. Important works (Sinfonietta, A Boy was Born) preceded op. 8, and (Phaedra, String Quartet No. 3) following op. 88, but Our Hunting Fathers (1936) and Death in Venice (1973) are a signpost and a summation. The (presumably fortuitous) symmetry of the opus numbering almost suggests that what was considered in Our Hunting Fathers was to be considered again in Death in Venice, with doubled intensity, and analysis of their respective texts reveals this to be so.
The Translator Speaks …!
Authors: Graubart Michael
Published: February 2010

A translator is not supposed to mind his own business – only that of his author. But when the translator of Regina Busch's brilliant, wide–ranging, and stimulating essay ‘On the Horizontal and Vertical Presentation of Musical Ideas and on Musical Space’ has to struggle not only with the intractable nature of the problem of discussing subtleties of linguistic usage through the medium of language itself – and a different language at that – but with his own linguistic and musical practices; and when these last have been conditioned, on the one hand, by his early training as a physicist and, on the other, by his present activities as a composer of music in the tradition of Schoenberg and Webern; then a certain transgression of the translatorial proprieties may, perhaps, be allowed.
Erik Bergman: The Recent Music
Authors: Hayes Malcolm
Published: February 2010

Erik Bergman has long been regarded in his native Finland as one of his country's senior composers, but his music has been slow to make its way abroad. Some of the obstacles are understandable: choral music, for instance, constitutes a large slice of Bergman's output, and the fact that many of his texts are in Finnish or Swedish has obviously (if erroneously) been off-putting for foreign choirs. But the real problem is one of perception. Bergman's music has a particular kind of originality and character which, while in one sense typically Scandinavian, simply does not conform to the expectation that has been conditioned by the more exportable aspects of 19th-century nationalism.
Cage—Eckhart—zimmermann
Authors: Fox Christopher
Published: February 2010

Walter Zimmermann (b. 1949) is one of the most interesting figures in German music today, interesting not only because of his own music but also because of his enthusiastic advocacy of a wide range of other musics. In Cologne, where Zimmermann was based from his student days until his recent move to West Berlin, he founded the Beginner Studio where he promoted a concert series that embraced everything from improvisation to minimalism, from the avantgarde to ethnic musics. In particular he used the Beginner Studio as a venue to introduce many of the more ‘experimental’ American composers whose music he had encountered in preparing his book of interviews, Desert Plants.
Colin McPhee's Music: (II) ‘Tabuh-Tabuhan’
Authors: Young Douglas
Published: February 2010

In his prefatory ‘Note’ to the full score of Tabuh-Tabuhan (eventually published by AMP Inc. 1960), McPhee wrote:

Tabuh-Tabuhan was composed in Mexico in 1936 and first performed by Carlos Chavez and the National Orchestra of Mexico City. It was written after I had spent four years in Bali engaged in musical research, and is largely inspired, especially in its orchestration, by the various methods I had learned of Balinese gamelan technique. The title of the work derives from the Balinese word tabuh, originally meaning the mallet used for striking a percussion instrument, but extended to mean strike or beat… Tabuh-Tabuhan is thus a Balinese collective noun, meaning different drum rhythms, metric forms, gong punctuations, gamelans, and music essentially percussive. In a subtitle I call the work Toccata for Orchestra and two pianos.
Friedrch Cerha: A Sketch
Authors: Knessl Lothar
Published: February 2010

He was characterized long ago by his own specific set of adjectives: enigmatic, introverted, unwordly, ironical, cranky. We are speaking of Friedrich Cerha whose great moment—according to the criteria of the culture industry—came in 1981: first performance of Baal at the Salzburg Festival; first performance of Netzwerk under his direction during the Vienna Festival, at the Theater an der Wien; conducting Alban Berg's Lulu at the Styrian Autumn in Graz (Cerha had completed the third act of that work, which Berg left as a fragment, in 1978). These were just the biggest rewards of Cerha's Year, which catapulted the composer—until then known internationally only to connoisseurs and amateurs of music—into the consciousness even of politicians and culture buffs. Is that what he wanted? Does it tally with the abovementioned adjectives? He must have wanted it to some extent, for no composer could seriously wish to prevent the performing of his work. And on occasion he may even fit in with the cultural obligations, which, sensibly, do not always seek to ruin creative talents.
Looking into the Mirror: Fragments from diaries, reports, and manifestos
Authors: Schwertsik Kurt
Published: February 2010

[A selection from Schwertsik's writings was made in 1980 by Harriett Watts for a projected Tempo article, and translated by her in collaboration with Schwertsik. Even though the present expanded and updated selection is once again intended as a general introduction to the composer, it takes account of a marked change in his reputation during the past seven years: neither his detractors nor his friends from the Darmstadt era can any longer echo the ironic words with which he began one of his own poems: ‘We have lost all trace of him./His very existence remains doubtful’.

below left: self-portrait by Schwertsik; below right: Schwertsik on location for Eine Reise nach Mu, a TV-film about him directed by Barrie Gavin for Hessischer Rundfunk TV, Frankfurt, in 1983.]
Jonathan Lloyd's Music
Authors: Cole Hugo
Published: February 2010

Jonathan Lloyd, born in 1948, received his first lesson in composition from Emile Spira, a former pupil of Anton Webern. After this Lioyd was a junior exhibitioner at the RCM, then went on to study composition with John Lambert and Edwin Roxburgh. While at College he worked with the Twentieth Century Music Ensemble, and in due course won the Mendelssohn scholarship, thereafter attending classes given by Pousseur, and street muisician before taking up a Composer-in-Residence appointment in the Dartington theatre department in 1978–79. Several of his early works were played while he was still at the RCM, including Cantique for small orchestra. In 1981, Toward the Whitening Dawn, a 10-miniute piece for chorus and chamber orchestra written in memory of John Lennon, was performed at a BBC Concert conducted by Michael Gielen. With that work Lioyd be said to have ‘arrived’ as a compiser of unusual talent and promise.
Shades of the Double's Original: René Leibowitz's dispute with Boulez
Authors: Kapp Reinhard
Published: February 2010

LEIBOWITZ IS DEAD, but the hostility smoulders on, and one wonders what, beyond personal involvement, lay behind it. Boulez, too, has long been relegated to the unending line of historical cases—as can be seen from the ‘dated’ impression made by the second volume of Musikdenken heute. It seems difficult to revert to an earlier stage of musical theory, let alone one even earlier than that, without invoking purely ‘historical interest’. But the pre-history of the serial movement, which has left its traces on everyone's consciousness, could explain both its signal success and its ignominious failure. Its collapse has been total; the ostensible reasons for the abandonment of the movement were no less threadbare than for its inception. Leibowitz, the ‘classic dodecaphonist’, left some theoretical loopholes, but one can hardly make him the scapegoat for errors lying outside his responsibility. Even in retrospect, his mowing down by ‘progress’ cannot be justified; but it is not merely an act of reparation if one still, or once more, gives him serious consideration.
Willi Reich's Webern
Authors: Bailey Kathryn
Published: February 2010

THE WORLD'S VIEW of the later works of Webern has been influenced to a significant degree by the personal recollections of Willi Reich. In studying Webern materials one frequently come across letters to Reich and notes that represent his record of conversations or lessons with Webern. The latter are sometimes very curious, and, because of their declared provenance (it is difficult to justify questioning or disregarding what purport to be Webern's own utterances), they bear a considerable responsibility for the confusion that persists concerning certain of the late works. One of the most widely known of these, the op.27 Variations for piano, has been subjected to perhaps more frequent and less likely explanations than any other.
Holst and India (III)
Authors: Head Raymond
Published: February 2010

In the two previous articles in this series (TEMPO 158 and 160) I examined how Holst became involved in Indian studies, and how his involvement essentially reflected a pattern of growing awareness of India in the West. The vedic hymns were a revelation to him, and obsessed him for several years. During this period (the first decade of the 20th century) Holst's ideas about music began to change: partly because he was in the process of rejecting his immediate musical past, and partly because he had discovered that an investigation of folksong and renaissance music might help him develop a more personal style. For a time the old and the new co-existed, often uneasily, as is especially evident in two of his major ‘Indian’ works—the opera Savitri, and the cantata The Cloud Messenger.
Malcolm Lipkin and his recent music
Authors: Headington Christopher
Published: February 2010

Well, yes, of course: Schoenberg's famous remark was made in America about Charles Ives, not in Britain about Malcolm Lipkin. I actually believe that Lipkin (a genuinely modest man) would be shocked to be called a great composer, and that he is too gentle in outlook to be capable of contempt towards anyone. But Schoenberg's second sentence fits him will, for here is an individual musical personality that has developed over the years into a strong voice. Those years may now be counted in some number, and indeed when Schoenberg wrote those lines on Ives some 45 years ago Lipkin was already studying music with that fine piano teacher Gordon Green (1905–81), and in 1949 he entered the Royal College of Music where he studied counterpoint and harmony with Bernard Stevens and piano with Kendall Taylor.
‘Bachianas Brasileiras’ in Performance
Authors: Round Michael
Published: February 2010

The 1987 centenary celebrations of the birth of Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959) produced the first readily available complete recording in this country of the Bachianas Brasileiras. These nine suites, though containing some of his most popular pieces, are nevertheless very incompletely known, and deserve some examination. What follows is not a review of the EMI recording, but a use of it to shed light on the urgent need for a proper critical edition of this important composer's major works.
Notes on Pop Music
Authors: Souster Tim
Published: February 2010

“I haven't heard a good new opera or a good new symphony for—eighteen months.” Thus Kit Lambert the pop impresario in Tony Palmer's television film All my Loving, making, one would think, no outrageous claim, that is if one allows that he has not heard of Harrison Birtwistle and Cornelius Cardew. But one must realise that Lambert's view is the basis of a total dismissal of modern ‘classical’ music; for him pop is new heir to the classical tradition. A like view is held by Mr. Palmer, who on the strength of a moderately successful film (success of course was inherent in its subject-matter) and of some pretentious writing in the Observer, has been endowed with a certain ‘authority’. For him, the Pink Floyd outdo Cardew and Stockhausen in ‘modernity’, and even the Who's ‘Magic Bus’ (an inferior reworking of their brilliant ‘Talking about my generation’) puts Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements in the shade. I shall not waste space on these comparisons, but mention them as an illustration of how the pop world can be blinded to what lies outside it. Lambert and Palmer are the victims of their own high-power distribution techniques whereby nothing gets through without a hard sell. The commercial basis of pop has two important consequences in this context. First, the common ground which exists between genuine musicians in the pop and ‘straight’ fields is being obscured to the detriment of every one by promotional smokescreens.
Shostakovich's String Quartets
Authors: O'Loughlin Niall
Published: February 2010

Unlike Beethoven and Bartók, Shostakovich turned to the string quartet comparatively late in his career. He had already reached his Fifth Symphony, in 1937, before the Quartet No. 1 appeared, almost as a diversion—an isolated work composed only on a modest scale. Any influences that it was to have on the later quartets (and these are by no means negligible) could hardly have been foreseen. It was not until after the great Seventh and Eighth Symphonies that Shostakovich really felt the continued creative need for the outlet of the string quartet. Since then this medium has taken a very firm place in his output, and this longlasting creative attention to such an intimate form of expression has brought its rewards both for the composer and for the listener. Indeed, Shostakovich's gradual mastery of form in general and unity in particular is one of the notable features of these works.
Popular Elements in Copland's Music
Authors: Cole Hugo
Published: February 2010

The musical climate of the 1920s, when Copland came to maturity, was not favourable to the use of popular or traditional material or idioms in ‘serious’ composition. Nationalism was no longer a powerful force in the Western world. Increased respect for folk-musics as cultural relics inhibited composers from using them freely as composition sources. Popular music was associated with commercial exploitation and the wooing of a mass audience on the lowest common level, serious music with uncompromising devotion to Art for Art's sake. The leaders of revolutionary movements—Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Hindemith, each in different ways—upheld the negative principle that one must not walk where men had walked before. The melodic and harmonic idioms of serious and popular music were growing steadily apart, serious music concentrating its meanings, increasingly concerned with a microstructure in which every detail was to be personal and expressive, popular music freely accepting melodic and harmonic cliché as an integral part of the language. Serious music rejected exact repetition as a means of driving home the message, popular music was heavily repetitive. Serious music often depended on intellectual construction-methods not to be appreciated by the unprepared listener; popular music demanded that all meanings should be immediately apparent.
The Contemporary Problem
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: February 2010

(1) Past, (2) present, (3) future. (4) Development, (5) progress, (6) historical validity. (7) Out-of-dateness, (8) what one must, can, and can't do today. I hope my list gives an accurate picture of the contemporary whirlwind of critical and historical concepts, including those implied criteria on the basis of which composers praise and damn each other and each other's exponents and denigrators. Stop the whirlwind while we clear the concepts, one by one.
The Contemporary Problem
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: February 2010

Apropos of Birtwistle's Punch and Judy and its libretto, Gordon Crosse, in Tempo 85, submits that “an opera is a fusion of word, music and action in which, perhaps, only the music can bear separate scrutiny. W. H. Auden once described librettos as ‘private letters to the composers', and so they are”. On reflection and inspection, Gordon Crosse is much righter than Auden; as a matter of fact, he could hardly be righter. I'll take up the ‘hardly’ a little further down; for the moment, I want to rejoice that somebody has, at long last, said it. Crosse's may sound a slightly commonplace statement once it's out, but that is true of many propositions which hit the truth right at the centre.
Zoltán Kodály
Authors: Bartók Béla
Published: February 2010

The most important musical event of the present musical season took place on the evening of January 10th, when Zoltán Kodály's Two Songs were performed for the first time at the Philharmonic Society's concert. A large part of the daily press ‘appreciated’ Kodály's art by criticising it in the most vitriolic terms while one paper even launched a personal attack on him.
The Contemporary Problem
Authors: Keller Hans , Hopkins G. W.
Published: February 2010

My new system of air-conditioning, then. It's easy, once you know all about the hot air that has to be conditioned. Thereafter, it's a matter of using a filter with the right devices, two of them. But first let me start right in the middle—of my last article, that is. David Simmons, it will be remembered, made the contemporary composer ask, ‘How in this age of ubiquitous noise, violence, change and conformist pressures can I maintain and express my intuitions?’ In the last issue, I dealt with this question logically. Now, I propose to examine it psychologically.
Stravinsky's New Work
Authors: Mason Colin
Published: February 2010

Stravinsky's latest published work is called A Sermon, A Narrative, and a Prayer—a cantata for alto and tenor soloists, speaker, chorus and orchestra (consisting of flute, bass flute, 2 oboes, clarinet, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, 3 gongs, piano, harp, and strings—8, 7, 6, 5, 4). It is in three movements, and the duration is given in the score as circa 16 minutes. Its first performance will be at Basel on 23 February, 1962, under Paul Sacher, who commissioned it.
Carlisle Floyd's ‘Wuthering Heights’
Authors: Sabin Robert
Published: February 2010

Carlisle Floyd's Wuthering Heights is not only a deeply moving and dramatically convincing treatment of a mercilessly demanding subject—it is a real opera, in the sense that we have always understood opera. Here is music that is immediately accessible without being cheap or superficial; music that follows traditional paths in an original and confident manner; music that recognizes the basic laws and needs of the theatre. I emphasize this point because the far-out composers are getting all the critical attention, these days. Anybody who dishes up a serial score to a freakish libretto is more likely to be publicized than a composer like Floyd, who is not ashamed to be part of the mainstream of musical development and who is primarily concerned with communication to the best of his ability rather than with wild experimentation.
Peter Maxwell Davies: Towards an Opera
Authors: Waterhouse John C. G.
Published: February 2010

Peter Maxwell Davies has now reached an important turning-point in his career: like more than one other young British composer he is working on an opera. He has been contemplating this for at least seven years, but until recently he has hesitated to start work on it because he felt that his style was not yet suitable. He felt that he should wait until he had achieved a sufficiently ‘theatrical’ musical language—“just imagine an opera like St. Michael!” he is said to have exclaimed once, when criticising Nono for basing part of Intolleranza 1960 too closely on the style of II Canto Sospeso. Few would doubt the wisdom of his decision. An opera in the manner of St. Michael or Prolation would have been an alarming prospect.
Pax Orcadiensis
Authors: Davies Peter Maxwell
Published: February 2010

During a visit to Scotland in 1970, I went for a holiday to Orkney: really just to see the things that everybody goes to see, such as the prehistoric stone circle remains and above all the Cathedral of St. Magnus in Kirkwall—which, apart from being an extraordinary architectural monument, has musical associations. Those of us who have done music at university are familiar with the 12th-Century ‘Hymn to St. Magnus’, which was composed for that building. And so I went there and it was rainy and rather grim; but that you expect and put up with.
On Behalf of Gustav Mahler
Authors: Britten Benjamin
Published: February 2010

Most young American and English musicians have been encouraged, I think, to disregard Mahler. At least I myself was. Always coupled with Bruckner, he was supposed to be a purely local composer. For Germans, I was told, he had a certain sentimental attraction, though even on the Rhine and the Danube, the academicians preferred Brahms, the glamour-seekers Strauss, and the modernists Schönberg and Berg. He was long-winded and formless—the bright intellectuals cited him as an example of a romantic self-indulgent, who was so infatuated with his ideas that he could never stop.
Walter Piston 1894–1976
Authors: Rapoport Paul
Published: February 2010

Walter Piston, the American composer and teacher, died aged 82 on 12 November 1976. As a young amateur he learned to play nearly all the instruments, but he did not begin academic study of music until he was 25 He graduated from Harvard University with highest honours in 1924, studied for two years in France with Nadia Boulanger, and returned to teach at Harvard for over three decades, retiring in 1960. Among his pupils were Leonard Bernstein and Elliott Carter. His three main text books (Harmony, Counterpoint and Orchestration) have been, widely used for many years.
Pasternak as Composer and Scriabin-Disciple
Authors: Barnes Christopher
Published: February 2010

These words come from a letter written by the Russian poet and author Boris Pasternak in late January 1917, addressed to his student friend Konstantin Loks. When Pasternak wrote the letter nearly eight years had elapsed since he abandoned music—he had meanwhile read philosophy at Moscow University before graduating in 1913 and embarking on a professional career in literature. Later on in life Pasternak was to write two autobiographies,Safe Conduct(1931) andAn Essay in Autobiography(1957), in which he devoted generous space to the musical studies of his youth. He described his musical background, his study of composition and piano, and his meetings with Scriabin; he also recounted the circumstances which eventually prompted him to give up music.
What's Happening to the London Orchestras?
Authors: Henderson Gavin
Published: February 2010

Cause and effect? London is where more music is made than any other city in the world; it is also where there would seem to be more criticism of the orchestral diet. We are blessed with enough orchestras to create a shy, at which critics may hurl their balls—but never take home a prize, for they have come to the wrong stall. Indeed, when a prize is offered they themselves are too shy to accept. Coconuts seldom jump off perches of their own free will, just as orchestral managements are fearful of stamping their feet with frustration for fear of being asked—'now, now! how many should there be?'. But several recent occurrences tempt me to look over the edge.
Footnotes to Stravinsky Studies: ‘Le Sacre du printemps‘
Authors: Morton Lawrence
Published: February 2010

Stravinsky said that he dreamed regularly, that his dreams were ‘the ground for innumerable solutions in my composing activity’. But it is just these composerly dreams about which he has been reticent. Instead, he has recalled the ‘time dreams and counting dreams [which] are common with me, and … dreams in which people shout, but inaudibly’. And again, ‘I am forever trying to tell the time and forever looking at my wrist watch, only to find it isn't there’. Then there was the dream of being a hunchback, which presaged an attack of intercostal neuralgia brought on by nicotine poisoning; another about the scent of Debussy's Eau de Cologne; and one more about his passport, ‘very yellow’. There are no musical portents in these dreams; but of the ones thataremusical, the most practical was the one that prescribed the instrumentation of the Octet; and the most bizarre, even Freudian, was the pink dream (‘I often dream in colour’), during the time he was composingThreni, about the two warm, gelatinous, testicular eggs supporting ‘an elastic substance stretching exactly between the two notes [of an interval] I had composed.’ The tension of the stretched substance assured him that his interval was the right one.
Alexander Tcherepnin: a short Autobiography (1964)
Authors: Tcherepnin Alexander
Published: February 2010

My father, Nikolai Tcherepnin, was an outstanding Russian composer, a brilliant conductor, an illuminating pedagogue. My mother had a beautiful mezzo-soprano voice; but because she was extremely timid she became a ‘soprano domestico’, and I was the only one to accompany her singing of German lieder, Russian romances, and French songs, an experience I treasured.
‘Façade’ Revisited
Authors: Driver Paul
Published: February 2010

Facade is in need of revaluation. If it achieves it, it will have taken nearly 60 years for the proper appraisal to come about; but then this work has throughout its growth demanded long perspectives: a full 30 years, for instance, before the definitive ordering of items was settled and a published score produced; 55 before many of the original items were made known to the public. During this time numerous chroniclers sought to describe and place the extraordinary creation, but nearly all of them found in it little more than charm and precocity, a remarkable upbeat to the composer's serious achievement yet sharply to be distinguished in worth from the Symphony, the Viola Concerto. Some writers went further to disparage Façade, one of them a former editor of this journal:

The desire for laughter in the concert hall is only a naughty whim which will soon pass, for music is not meant to make jokes consciously as in Façade, any more than unconsciously as in Rossini's William Tell Overture. Parody must always be as vulgar as what it parodies … When sanity is reestablished Façade will be recognised as no better Walton than the Musical Joke is good Mozart.
Carl Ruggles: Two Early Works and ‘Sun-Treader’
Authors: Babcock David
Published: February 2010

In his excellent book Charles Ives and His America (Victor Gollancz Ltd., London, 1976) Frank R. Rossiter presents the most thorough psychosociological study yet made of the life and times of this frequently misunderstood composer—dismissed as a hack by many, elevated to cult figure status by others, realistically appraised by comparatively few. Several chapters examine Ives's personal and musical relationships with other advanced composers working in America during his lifetime. Though he had virtually stopped composing by the 1920's and early 30's, Ives helped finance concerts for the Pan American Association of Composers—whose more active membership included Edgar Varèse, Wallingford Riegger, Henry Cowell, and Carl Ruggles—and the publication of much of their music in Cowell's New Music edition. Thus he became acquainted with these composers, in whose work is found ‘the American counterpart to the rich experimentalism of the Viennese school’. His relationship with them ranged from bitter antagonism (of Varèse) to close friendship (with Cowell and Ruggles). Before the recent ‘complete’ recording of his music, Ruggles remained comparatively unknown even in America, except to those fortunate enough to stumble across his name and music via Ives.
Bartókiana (some recollections)
Authors: Doráti Antál
Published: February 2010

His piano pieces For Children were composed two years before my six-years-old fingers played them, proudly, at any time to anyone who was willing to listen. They were somewhat strange to my ears at first, not like any other music that I had played or heard until then, and immensely stimulating: certainly not as frightening as my previous acquaintance with Bartók's name had made me expect.
A Finzi Discography
Authors: McVeagh Diana
Published: February 2010

Only two commercial records of Finzi's music were made during his life—one of Dies natalis, under the auspices of the British Council, the other, in the coronation set ‘A Garland for the Queen’, of his partsong White-flowering days. Though he conducted his own musicin concerts and broadcasts, he was not invited to record it—understandably, because of the 1939-45 War, and then his early death.
The Tonal Structure of Brian's ‘Gothic’ Symphony
Authors: Pike Lionel
Published: February 2010

The performance of Havergal Brian's huge and rarely-heard First Symphony, The Gothic (?1919–27), on 25 May 1980 gave us a further opportunity to assess its value. In the past, adulation of the Symphony has been blended with strong criticism. Among the detractors have been those who were unable to follow the logic of a symphony that starts in D minor and ends in E major without (if one believes all that one reads) any good reason; and there have been those who found the opening movement too slight and episodic, too unsymphonic, for the weight cast upon it. It is time to re-examine these criticisms.
The Electronic Music
Authors: Davies Hugh
Published: February 2010

Gerhard was not only the first important British composer to adopt electronic music techniques; it seems probable that he was, by a few months, the creator of the first British score to involve tape. From 1954 to 1959 his electronic music consisted of nearly a dozen works of incidental music for theatre, radio, and film, initially to provide special effects as an extension of the possibilities of a chamber ensemble—such as piano sounds played backwards (e.g. in the radio play A Leak in the Universe, 1955). By 1958 he had assembled sufficient equipment to make up a very small studio, apparently little more than a couple of tape recorders, at his home in Cambridge. It remained very small until his death in 1970.
Kodály in England - A Documentary Study (I: 1913–28)
Authors: Breuer János
Published: February 2010

The significant role which England played in Kodály's international career is so well-known that it virtually borders on a commonplace. His works found outstanding performers, a comprehending public, receptive critics and also publishers in these islands. It is also well known that the Hungarian master drew upon English musical practice. In his music pedagogy he applied John Curwen's Tonic Sol-Fa method. In choral culture he regarded the practice in England as a direct example.
Antal Doráti: Composer: A catalogue of his Works
Authors: MacDonald Calum
Published: February 2010

To say that Antal Doráti is unquestionably one of the most distinguished conductor-composers active today is maybe in itself no great accolade: there is not sufficient competition to make it so. I wish here, therefore, to concentrate exclusively on the ‘composer’ side of the equation—on that substantial body of works whose very existence is unsuspected by the vast majority of concert-goers, and whose surprising extent is at least indicated by the following catalogue.
Glazunov and the String Quartet
Authors: Abraham Gerald
Published: February 2010

The Russian string quartet has a considerably longer history than the Russian symphony; Alyabiev wrote his first string quartet in 1815, to say nothing of the three quartets by a certain Taneev—possibly an ancestor of one or both of the two late-nineteenth-century Taneevs—published by Breitkopf at the end of the eighteenth century, of which the last traceable copies seem to have been destroyed in the Dresden holocaust of 1945. Yet the quartet has never achieved the importance in Russian music that it enjoys in other countries; numerically there are plenty of quartets but they are the stepchildren of Russian music. The Balakirev circle was in its early days actively hostile to chamber music, though Borodin eventually conquered his friends by his two fine compositions. Tchaikovsky's three are not as bad as seems to be commonly supposed but they can hardly be reckoned among his masterpieces, and the world would be little poorer if it were for ever deprived of the quartets of Glinka and Rimsky-Korsakov. The only nineteenth-century Russians who took the quartet seriously enough to write a whole series of them were Glazunov and S.I. Taneev (whose unrelated or only distantly related namesake, A. S. Taneev, also produced three respectably written but very lightweight quartets), and their only twentieth-century successors have been Myaskovsky and Shostakovich.
Aaron Copland (I)
Authors: Cole Hugo
Published: February 2010

We identify the iceberg with the tenth of its bulk that is visible above water, the composer with that fraction of his total output that we happen to know. For those of us who first made contact with Copland's music through the works of the thirties and forties (from, say, the Piano Variations to Appalachian Spring), the personality that emerged was strong and definite; nor was it too hard to describe a predominating tone of voice, characteristic procedures—the vigorous, self-contained themes (statements rather than unanswered questions) with their assertive thirds, fourths, and fifths; the athletic vitality of the rhythms, the combination of open-textured triadic harmony with sharply dissonant elements; over all, a plainness that avoided sumptuous sounds and rhapsodical outpourings, in favour of a rigorous sticking to the business in hand.
Stravinsky's Chords (II)
Authors: Hopkins G. W.
Published: February 2010

In The Soldier's Tale there were instances of musical parody which could not possibly be elucidated by simple harmonic analysis within the work's own stylistic terms of reference; for example, it was necessary to allude to Bach's style in order to discuss the harmonies of Stravinsky's chorales. While it is not always correct to view neo-classical works as parodies, generically they present a ‘gloss’ on earlier styles—so that it becomes impossible to analyse such works without reference back, sometimes even to a particular work of a particular forerunner. Clearly an extended study of the use of classical harmonic functions in the works of Stravinsky's middle period would be an undertaking worthy of some months of research and several chapters of exegesis. Here I shall content myself with some instances of his use of cadential formulae.
Shostakovich at the Crossroads
Authors: Souster Tim
Published: February 2010

The story of the composition of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony at the height of the Lady Macbeth affair (1935–6), its withdrawal at an advanced stage of rehearsal (avowedly because of the composer's dissatisfaction with the finale) and the subsequent proffering of the Fifth Symphony as “a Soviet artist's reply to just criticism“, is well known. But only since the recent re-emergence of the Fourth Symphony has it been possible to discover to what extent this work represents “the path not taken”, and to assess whether the jolt that his music suffered at this period was fundamentally beneficial, or harmful, or neither.
The Origins of Stochastic Music
Authors: Xenakis Iannis
Published: February 2010

Art (and especially music) has a fundamental catalytic function, which is to effect sublimation by all its means of expression. It should aim to lead by constant points of reference towards that total exaltation in which, unaware of self, the individual will identify with an immediate, rare, vast and perfect truth. If a work of art achieves this even for an instant, it has fulfilled its purpose. This massive truth does not consist in objects, nor feelings, nor sensations; it lies beyond them, as Beethoven's Seventh lies beyond music. For this reason, art is capable of leading to those regions still occupied by certain religions.
Stravinsky as a Russian
Authors: Souvtchinsky Pierre , Warrack John
Published: February 2010

What can one say, with what words should one address Igor Feodorovich Stravinsky on his eighty-fifth birthday, a day for the greatest rejoicing both in his personal life and in his life as an artist? We must express infinite gratitude to him (but can it be expressed in words?), for it is essential that he should know that notwithstanding his world-wide recognition, he is, and always will be, both as a man and as a composer, one of the great mysteries of world culture, and in particular of Russian culture, a mystery that will live forever, that will always be subject to fresh interpretations and that will always be needed. His secret—which cannot really be explained—is first and foremost the secret of his genius, the mysterious unexpectedness and the marvel of his appearance in the music of Russia and the world. As Tolstoy said: “Genius is that which cannot be called anything else but genius!” Its basic characteristics, moreover, are unpredictability and self-evidence.
Listening to Stravinsky's Music in the 1920s
Authors: White Eric Walter
Published: February 2010

I first heard some of Stravinsky's music as a schoolboy of eighteen, in the course of a concert at the old Colston Hall, Bristol on 15th February 1924. It was The Firebird suite conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham; and I remember sitting in the gallery, listening entranced, and then to my astonishment finding that part of the audience was upset and scandalised by what they had heard. The impression was so strong that thereafter I began to look out carefully for opportunities of hearing other works by him.