bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Gloriana
Authors: Evans Peter
Published: November 2023

Two Covent Garden premières of full-scale operas only eighteen months apart must constitute a record in recent times—one that seems unlikely to be wrested from Britten. After the introverted action and music of Billy Budd, he had turned to an undertaking of an unprecedentedly ‘public’ nature in choosing to provide an opera in honour of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation and in basing it on incidents in the reign of her illustrious namesake.
A Midsummer-Night’s Dream
Authors: Evans Peter
Published: November 2023

No great imaginative leap is required for us to see how each one of Britten’s operas before A Midsummer-Night’s Dream (not excluding the coronation pageant, Gloriana), can be interpreted as the composer’s commentary on recurrent patterns of human behaviour, most commonly relations between individuals and the society to which they belong.
Later Instrumental Works
Authors: Evans Peter
Published: November 2023

The Second String Quartet, Op. 36, was first performed on 21 November 1945, the 250th anniversary of Henry Purcell’s death. On the following evening, also in the Wigmore Hall, Britten and Pears gave the first performance of Op. 35, the cycle of Donne Sonnets. Not surprisingly, both works are heavily influenced by the composer’s admiration for his great predecessor, but it is in setting texts that Britten has learnt the more profoundly. The quartet’s tribute lies chiefly in its final Chacony, its first two movements inviting comparison rather with the classical quartet literature.
Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Roman Catholic History in England
Authors: Zon Bennett
Published: November 2023

As the revival of plainchant and the revival (or emancipation) of the Catholic community in England were very much bound up with one another, an examination of the plainchant revival would be incomplete without providing a picture of the social context of Catholics of the time. Below, therefore, are presented various aspects of Catholic history which not only formed English Catholic identity but also either directly or indirectly influenced the progress of the revival of plainchant.
Background to the Revival
Authors: Zon Bennett
Published: November 2023

The Anglican plainchant revival is to some extent the aesthetic realization of high churchmanship within the Established Church, the most obvious manifestation of which is Tractarianism or the Oxford Movement. The name Tractarian was one associated with those individuals adopting a theological stance evinced in the pages of theTracts for the Times (1833–41), the principal organ of the Oxford Movement. The main figures of the movement, and hence of theTracts, were John Henry Newman (1801–90), John Keble (1792–1866), and Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800–82). The movement itself was begun nominally in 1833 when Keble preached an assize sermon entitled ‘National Apostasy’ in the university church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, and from then onwards Oxford was always associated with the movement. Numerous well-known figures like Thomas Belmore (1811—90),John Mason Neale (1818—66), and Walter Kerr Hamilton (1808-69) fell under its sway as Tractarianism and Oxford became inextricably linked. The first of the Tracts for the Times was written in 1833 by Newman, who roundly defends the doctrine of apostolic succession, or in this case the belief that the hierarchy of the Church of England represented an unbroken lineage with the Apostles and Christ.
At Home
Authors: Poznansky Alexander
Published: November 2023

Letter to Anatoly Brandukov— cellist, Tchaikovsky’s student at the Moscow Conservatoire, and a close friend of the composer; he was the first to perform the Pezzo capriccioso (1887), which Tchaikovsky also dedicated to him. As I wrote to you, my new symphony is completed. I am now working on the scoring of the (third) concerto for our dear Diemer. When you see him please tell him that when I proceeded to work on it, I realized that this concerto is of depressing and threatening length. Consequently I decided to leave only part one which in itself will constitute an entire concerto. The work will only improve the more since the last two parts were nothing very much.
Hope
Authors: Poznansky Alexander
Published: November 2023

By Saturday morning all choleraic attacks had indeed disappeared and [Tchaikovsky] had been rescued from cholera proper. He had recovered to the point that after the disinfection process it became possible to allow his friends into the patient’s room. They came and shook his hand, and he, smiling, responded with a feeble handshake. . . . The physicians made the visitors wash their hands in a solution of mercuric chloride as they left, but primarily as a formality, for they were quite confident that the infection, already driven out of the patient, had been completely eliminated.
Aftermath
Authors: Poznansky Alexander
Published: November 2023

Today I read [Modest] Tchaikovsky’s description of the illness and death of his celebrated brother. Here is a reading helpful to us: sufferings, cruel physical sufferings, fear: can it be death’? Doubts, hopes, an inner conviction that it is death, and still, all the while, unceasing suffering and exhaustion, a dulling of the senses and almost a reconciliation and oblivion, and, just before the end, a kind of inner vision, an elucidation of everything-‘So that’s it“-and ... the end. Here is for us a necessary, a good reading. cSo that’s it”—and . . . the end. Here is for us a necessary, a good reading. Not that we should think only of this and not live, but rather we must live and work, yet constantly with one eye seeing and remembering this source of everything steadfast, true, and good.
‘The Hieroglyphics of Love’: The Torch Singers and Interpretation
Authors: Moore John
Published: November 2023

The first law of love is subjective: subjectively, jealousy is deeper than love, it contains love’s truth. This is because jealousy goes further in the apprehension and interpretation of signs. It is the designation of love, its finality. Indeed, it is inevitable that the signs of a loved person, once we ‘explicate’ them, should be revealed as deceptive: addressed to us, they nonetheless express worlds which exclude us and which the beloved will not and cannot make us know…Love’s signs…are deceptive signs which can be addressed to us only by concealing what they express: the origin of unknown worlds, of unknown actions and thoughts which give them a meaning. They do not excite superficial, nervous exaltation, but the suffering of a deeper exploration. The beloved’s lies are the hieroglyphics of love. The interpreter of love’s signs is necessarily the interpreter of lies.
‘Everybody’s Lonesome for Somebody’: Age, the Body, and Experience in the Music of Hank Williams
Authors: Leppert Richard , Lipsitz George
Published: November 2023

‘He was so ordinary he merges with the crowd in my memory.’ (Mrs Lilly McGill, teacher, Georgiana, Alabama, on her former pupil, Hank Williams.) Houston Baker locates the blues at the crossroads of lack and desire, at the place where the hurts of history encounter determined resistance from people who know they are entitled to something better (Baker 1984: 7, 150). Like the blues singers from whom he learned so much, Hank Williams (1923 to 1953) spent a lot of time at that particular intersection. There he met others whose own struggles informed and shaped his music. Williams’s voice expressed the contradictions of his historical moment—post-Second World War America—a time when diverse currents of resistance to class, race, and gender oppressions flowed together to form a contradictory, but nonetheless real, unity of opposites. Standing at a crossroads in history, at a fundamental turning point for relationships between men and women, whites and blacks, capital and labour, Williams’s songs about heartbreak and failed personal relations indentified the body and the psyche as crucial terrains of political struggle in the post-war era.
Introduction
Authors: Mcgee Timothy J
Published: November 2023

All musicians understand that for much of the repertory there is a substantial difference between music as it appears on a page and as it sounds in performance.’ Regardless of how detailed the notation, in all repertories there is always something a performer must add in order to bring a composition to life, the amount and the nature of the additions varying according to the repertory. For the music of the Middle Ages the gap between the written form and the performed version is substantial. The problem of conceptualizing the sound of medieval music is compounded for the modern scholar by three elements: the early notation system that is still only partially understood; a complex: and involved tradition of extemporized ornamentation; and a vocal style that is basically different from the one currently employed for art music.
Graces
Authors: Mcgee Timothy J
Published: November 2023

The ornaments described in this chapter under the general heading of ‘graces’ are those to be added directly to a particular note, as differentiated from those added between notes, which are discussed in the next chapter. All ornaments discussed here were to be improvised, both their content and placement: there are no marks or signs in the music for their addition. Information about the nature of the ornaments, the technique of performance, and their placement is found only in theoretical writings. Much of what is discussed here is an exten sion or variation of the kinds of vocal techniques and nuances that were a part of the execution of the written ornaments discussed in Chapter 3.
The Early and Mid-Renaissance Periods 1500-1580
Authors: Spring Matthew
Published: November 2023

The first eighty years of the sixteenth century would appear to lack coherence as a chapter unit of English lute history. The period is not circumscribed by any change of monarch, specific historic event, or easily defined stylistic change. Yet we have seen that, as regards the lute, fundamental change was occurring on the Continent, particularly in Italy, with the introduction of new making and playing techniques in the years up to and around 1500. It is after this point that these changes took hold in England, as they did throughout much of western Europe. The years 1578 –9 saw the appointment of Mathias (or Mathathias) Mason and John Johnson as royal lutenists and, in the following years, the appointment of several more lutenists of note, and the instigation of a specific consort of lutes among the Queen’s Musick. Johnson is the first native English lutenist composer of real merit, and his appointment marks a turning point.
Under the Ear and Far Away
Authors: Beamnt Jams
Published: November 2023

We have to learn to play, but we must also learn to listen, and there are odd beliefs about listening, apart from those about ‘tone’. Experienced players may judge an instrument almost entirely by exploring its responsiveness to bowing, but they usually ask for the opinion of listeners and often like to listen while others play it. Performers believe that some instruments ‘project’ better than others, meaning that some can be heard well in an auditorium, and there are also explanations for some odd ideas that audiences have about hearing solo instruments.
The Early Piano I
Authors: Cole Michael
Published: November 2023

It Would Hardly be overstating the case to say that before the advent of the early classical era, even as late as 1765, the pianoforte had barely any influence on musical composition or performance. For all practical purposes—in the performance of instrumental music, the accompaniment of songs, in the opera-house, the theatre, the home, and in any kind of quasipublic concert—the overwhelmingly popular choice of keyboard instrument was the harpsichord. Its limitations as an expressive instrument, in that its plucking action could not produce the subtle variations of dynamic level that were so essential in the performance of songs or violin music, were generally overlooked (or at least forgiven), since its virtues-clear articulation and a sonorous tone—were more than sufficient to compensate. In fact, in 1765 the great days of harpsichord making had arguably only just begun.
Into the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Cole Michael
Published: November 2023

DuringThe Firstdecade of the nineteenth century much of the diversity in pianoforte design disappeared as instrument makers and their customers developed clearer ideas of the sort of designs that provided good instruments. Pianoforte tone was now universally recognised to be something much mellower than a harpsichord’s. Further, if the full capability for wide dynamic variation was to be achieved, instruments needed an escapement action and soft leather hammer coverings. Hybrid and aberrant forms such as the Tangentenflugel, the harp-shaped Pantalon, and the Clavecin Royal died a natural death with the harpsichord itself. Players in the new century had no further use for harpsichords, combination instruments, or anything that recalled the jingling tones of former times.
Albergati’s La Beata Caterina da Bologna (1697)
Authors: Crowther Victor
Published: November 2023

This oratorio, like Perti’s Beata Imelde (see Chapter 11) and Albergati’s L’iride di pace o sia il Beato Nicolo Albergati (1690), was composed in honour of a Bolognese saint. The embalmed body of Caterina de’Vigri had a place of honour in an ornate chapel in the church of the Poor Clares, Corpus Domini. Pirro Albergati, whose family palace lay in the same quarter of the city, com posed his oratorio about Caterina when the Catholic Church venerated her as a ‘Beata’. She was canonized and rose to the rank of ‘saint’ in 1712. That is why the composer, when he published the oratorio as part of his opus 10 in 1714, altered its title to Santa Catterina Vigri da Bologna.
South East Asia
Authors: Fletcher Peter
Published: November 2023

The area now known as South East Asia consists of the two archipelago republics of Indonesia and the Philippines, and of a land mass that tails off in a long peninsula. The landmass separates southern India from southern China. Throughout its history, this area has been one of migration, trade, and conflict, involving such peoples as the Malays, Chams, Khmers, Mons, Pyus, Burmans, Laos, Shans, and Thais, as well as traders, or would-be conquerors, from China, India, West Asia, Europe, and, more recently, the USA. The mainland now comprises Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Singapore, and Malaysia.
Europeans North of Mexico
Authors: Fletcher Peter
Published: November 2023

Few Would have thought, when a motley bunch of British adventurers landed on a swamp in Chesapeake Bay in 1607, that their settlement would mark the start of a new and momentous chapter in colonial history. The survivors of this expedition named their settlement, optimistically, Jamestown, after their king. Earlier, Elizabethan n1ariners had explored this stretch of North An1erica ‘s eastern seaboard and named it Virginia, after their then queen. Before them, in 1540, a Spanish land expedition from Mexico had penetrated as far north as the border of what is now Nebraska, in search of the ever-elusive ‘Seven Cities of Gold ‘; and before the Spanish even, as early as 1504, Bretons had started fishing the cod banks off Nova Scotia, and moving inland up the St Lawrence River to trade in furs. Fur generated income; but fur was not gold. For almost two centuries after Cortes first plundered the wealth of Mexico, settlement north of Mexico was seen as inferior to settlement further south.
The Postmodern West
Authors: Fletcher Peter
Published: November 2023

For some four centuries-not a long span in human history-educated Europeans believed their political, cultural, and artistic systems were superior to any others, a belief reinforced by the spread of these systems in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. That these systems were built on knowledge and skill generated by much earlier civilizations in Africa and Asia was neither recognized nor understood. When the USA assumed leadership of the Western world after the Second World War, Europe still held most of its Afro-Asian empire. European civilization, believed to have its roots in the unique cultural achieven1ents of Ancient. Greece, appeared to demonstrate a level of social and scientific advance with which the rest of the world would forever he struggling to catch up.
The Science of Music
Authors: Maconie Robin
Published: November 2023

Apart from providing an outlet for human emotions, does music have a use? Is a Mozart symphony intelligent, and is music a language? If so, what does it say and how does it say it? In this perceptive and revolutionary sequel to The Concept of Music, Robin Maconie teases out the musical science underlying subjects as diverse as Pythagoras’s theorem, Plato’s city state, mysteries of religion, myth, and folklore, theories of the mind, and key insights of Newton, Freud, and Wittgenstein. Western civilization is based on a foundation of universal laws derived from acoustics and hearing. Music is not only the product of that civilizing process but also the key to understanding the hidden structures and rituals of established belief. Beneath the surface of mass entertainment lie musical notations, images, instruments, and ensemble interactions to be understood afresh as models and mind games in an ongoing programme of scientfic discovery, information management, and social organization. That understanding is exciting in itself, has important educational and cultural implications, and is essential for future progress in musical composition.
Consciousness
Authors: Maconie Robin
Published: November 2023

A heavily pregnant woman lies on a couch in an antenatal clinic while the theme tune from the soap opera Neighbours is relayed to her unborn baby though a speaker taped to her abdomen. As it plays, every movement the baby makes and its heart rate are monitored by ultrasound. Research was car ried out on 70 women at Belfast’s Royal Maternity Hospital, half of whom regularly watch Neighbours. When the theme was relayed to the foetuses of the soap’s watchers, they became significantly more active. But when an unfamiliar tune was played to them, or the Neighbours theme was played to foetuses who had not been previously exposed to it, there was no such response. ‘This shows foetuses of this age have a memory and can recognise familiar tunes,’ Professor Hopper said.
Speech
Authors: Maconie Robin
Published: November 2023

We can be deeply stirred by hearing the recitation of a poem in a language of which we understand no word; but if we are then told that the poem is gibberish and has no meaning, we shall consider that we have been deluded-this was no poem, it was merely an imitation of instrumental music.
Number
Authors: Maconie Robin
Published: November 2023

Aristotle represented the Pythagoreans as believing that ‘all things are number’. What the proposition ‘all things (the world) are number (numbers)’ is capable of meaning depends on what the Pythagoreans themselves may have meant by ‘the world’ and ‘number’. The universe, or the world, meaning the totality of cre ation, can mean everything knowable in human terms, or it embraces both the humanly knowable and the humanly imagin able, by sense and by intellect. The meaning of’number’ is another matter altogether. Number in the singular is a term of relationship; numbers in the plural is merely a term for quantities. One is pure mathematics, the other merely accounting.
Organization
Authors: Maconie Robin
Published: November 2023

Harmony is about multiplexing. Multiplexing is information management. For Edison, it was sending more than one telegraph message down a wire at the same time. In music, it is combining several lines of information in such a way that they can be followed independently. Music recognizes a variety of forms of multiplex ing, the most basic being voices or instruments in unison, and extending via heterophony (playing the same tune but with indi vidual decoration) through polyphony (playing the same music, but different parts) to counterpoint (multiple parts in call and answer mode based on a melodic model). For harmony to exist there has to be more than one message in transmission. The art of harmony lies in encoding multiple messages so that they do not interfere with one another in transmission and may be successfully decoded as separate strands by whoever is at the receiving end.
Melos
Authors: Maconie Robin
Published: November 2023

Plato required of melody that it consist of fixed and distinct pitches, be fit for singing, and noble in character. An approved melody is sung in tune and without deviating from the chosen mode; it respects the compass of the singing voice, and expresses the character consistent with the mode. Noises and gliding pitches (portamenti) are forbidden, extremes of range (which may distort voice quality) are discouraged, and a discriminating choice of mode (the heroic modes referred to in The Republic) is to be preferred. Plato regarded melody as an abstract ideal, in contrast to Aristoxenus, for whom melody was a natural form of expression to be rationally investigated. Plato’s attention is focused on the system within which a melody may be free to act; Aristoxenus is more concerned with the human motives that lead to expression in melody, and thus to the dynamics of a musical line. ‘Virtually all Aristoxenus’s harmonic laws are expressed as rules of progression’ (Barker 1991: 152).
The Little Half-Viking
Authors: Bird John
Published: November 2023

In a short essay written in 1938 Grainger described his knowledge of and feelings for Grieg’s music before he met the composer: In my childhood in Melbourne I heard a great deal of Grieg played by my mother and our dear friend R. Hamilton Russell-the first exquisite pianist in my life. Indeed my mother played more Grieg than any other music in the years 1888-1895.
‘Adieu Old World! I would hail a New World’
Authors: Bird John
Published: November 2023

The Graingers’ decision to leave London was made hastily. Only three weeks before they left, Grainger wrote to Delius saying that he had been chosen to play his friend’s piano concerto on February 8, 1915 with the London Symphony Orchestra. The penultimate sentence in his letter was ‘Here everything is normal, no signs of war.’ The Great War was then six days old, and with matters quickly worsening, Rose became tormented with worry over her son’s career prospects.
Intentional and Innocent Misdescriptions
Authors: Harvey Brian W , Shapreau Carla J
Published: November 2023

When a seller makes incorrect statements regarding a violin’s authenticity, value, provenance, condition, or title, several potential claims may arise, including claims for fraud (intentional mis representation), negligent misrepresentation, breach of contract, or breach of express and implied warranties. As discussed by Brian Harvey in Chapter 2, violin makers and dealers have long engaged in the practice of making and selling copies of well known violins. Such efforts are sometimes innocent, and some times not.
Shostakovich and Chekhov
Authors: Bartlett Rosamund
Published: November 2023

Thanks chiefly to the notorious events of 1936, Shostakovich was able to complete only two operas in his lifetime, and the projected Wagnerian-style tetralogy which was begun with Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was to remain forever unfinished. It was as an opera composer, however, that Shostakovich had originally wished to make his name, and the fact that he never gave up the idea of writing further operas after the traumas of 1936 is testament not only to his abiding interest in the medium but also to the inescapable truth that opera composition was his true métier. The Nose and Lady Macbeth, the two operas which Shostakovich composed while still in his twenties, were both settings of famous short stories by nineteenth-century Russian writers, and it was Russian literature which continued to inspire the composer with ideas for operas in later years. At the beginning of the 1940s, for example, Shostakovich began work on a treatment of Gogol’s play The Gamblers, working much as Musorgsky had done in the nineteenth century, by trying to write music to Gogol’s text without changing a single word.
A case study in rhythmic analysis: instrumental vilambit and madhyalay gats in the repertoire of Deepak Choudhury (Maihar hara na )
Authors: Clayton Martin
Published: November 2023

I will now apply the principles and theories outlined thus far in a case study, not only in order to back up my theoretical speculations with a more concrete example, but also to show how such analysis can shed light on issues of wider significance. I would like to suggest not only that it is possible to characterize a specific repertoire in considerable detail in terms of its rhythmic parameters; more importantly, that analysis can throw considerable light on issues of great importance to theorists and historians of Indian music, including the historical development of Hindustani music and the relationships between the various genres and styles.
North Indian rhythmic organization in cross-cultural perspective
Authors: Clayton Martin
Published: November 2023

I suggested earlier that any study of rhythm in a specific repertoire ought to generate observations which contribute to the development of rhythmic theory in general. In this light, a number of questions present themselves immediately. Might it be possible, by pulling together data and analysis from many different music cultures, to develop generally applicable theories of rhythmic organization, according to which each individual system is shown to have certain fundamental features, explicable in general terms? Could each rhythmic system be described in terms of general parameters founded on psycho-physiological universals, with limits for each parameter determined locally? Or, on the contrary, is musical rhythm’s boundless diversity beyond the reach of such general or comparative study.
First Thoughts
Authors: Talbot Michael
Published: November 2023

In His School of Practical Composition Carl Czerny endeavored to demonstrate how the finale of a sonata might suitably differ from its first movement. He begins with an affirmation that despite their possible similarity of tempo and temper, the character of their respective opening themes ought to be different. We have already observed that the commencement of the first movement of a Sonata may be either energetic, or melodious; excited, or soft and tranquil. The same may be said of the Rondo or Finale; but there must be a palpable difference between the two, in regard to the description of the leading idea: for rarely would a suitable commencement for a first movement, serve also for the theme of a Finale.
The Valedictory Finale
Authors: Talbot Michael
Published: November 2023

It would not be wrong to regard the valedictory finale as a, deviant, variant of the summative finale. Like the latter, it resolves unfinished business rather than initiating new business-and in this important respect it differs from the relaxant finale, which insists (albeit without precluding thematic connections with other movements) on its autonomous status. In an aesthetic sense, however, it could not differ more sharply from both other types. It is slow rather than fast, calm rather than agitated, introverted rather than extroverted, soft rather than loud. It favors regression as against cumulating, simplicity as against artifice.
Hybrid Solutions
Authors: Talbot Michael
Published: November 2023

Hybridity in finales comes in two main forms. One is the movement di mezzo carattere that exhibits concurrently features belonging to more than one type of finale. We have already spoken of the many symphonies, concentrated in the second half of the nineteenth century, that are summative by virtue of weight and length but not according to content or hermeneutic import. About some of these it would be possible to debate at length, without certainty of an agreed conclusion, whether the summative or relaxant model was uppermost.
The Professional Dilettante: Ludovic Vitet and Le Globe
Authors: Walton Benjamin
Published: November 2023

The third edition of Grove’s Dictionary passes the following judgement on Baron Henri Blaze de Bury, son of Castil-Blaze: ‘in literary skill he surpassed his father; in musical knowledge he was decidedly his inferior’. As sentence length summaries go, this may be fair enough. But the way the judgement is presented is significant, the two halves causally balanced as though any increase of literary ability will occasion a decrease in musical expertise. The assessment thereby hints at an academic bias that has only become more familiar since: suspicion of the musical amateur.
Ceremony, Celebration, and Spectacle in La Juive
Authors: Newark Cormac
Published: November 2023

Fromental Hal é vy’s La juive, famously one of the most spectacular and crowd pleasing productions of Parisian grand opéra, was criticized for being more like circus than opéra, dubbed an ‘opéra-Franconi’, after the owners of the Cirque-Olympique. Yet it proved particularly popular with audiences at the Opera, increasingly familiar with, and appreciative of, the delights of suppos edly less high-brow theatres.
God’s Perfect Minstrels: The Bands of the Salvation Army
Authors: Herbert Trevor
Published: November 2023

Your temptation will be to play what is pleasing, what will bring out the music, what will impress the people with its charm—and with the ability of those who produce it. But beware! Let us have good music, but music which has a message in it. Tunes that whenever and wherever they are sung will bring God, and Calvary, and Eternity nearer. In January 1992, a press release was issued from the International Head-quarters of the Salvation Army in London: ‘The Salvation Army, after more than a hundred years, is scrapping the regulation, which has prevented its instrumental music from being sold to, or performed by, non-Salvation Army musicians. For too long The Salvation Army has had a ghetto mentality when it comes to music.’ It went on to announce the abolition of all restrictions on the sale and consumption of Salvation Army music. This meant that, for the first time since the opening decade of the Army’s existence, anyone was free to buy and perform music which the Salvation Army published, or for which it.
The Brass Band in the Antipodes: The Transplantation of British Popular Culture
Authors: Bythell Duncan
Published: November 2023

When we speak of an international popular culture today, especially in music, we are likely to think of an American-dominated world whose origins lie in the gramophone record and whose current symbols are the transistor and the personal stereo. But at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a rather different European-derived musical popular culture, whose essence lay in making music rather than merely listening to it. Amateur bands playing popular works by contemporary European composers, on various combinations of cheap, mass-produced wind instruments, were a major element in this culture, which was carried round the world not by the airwaves or in electronic devices, but in the heads, hearts, and hands of tens of thousands of ordinary European emigrants who took their home-grown customs, institutions, and pastimes with them when they put down new roots in strange places. The British strand within this transplanted popular culture was particularly important, and it was best able to thrive unchecked and little-changed in those small and distant communities where immigration from places other than the United Kingdom was negligible, and where cultural links with the ‘Old Country’ were kept strong by being continuously renewed. Not surprisingly, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada met these conditions perfectly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Harmony
Authors: Herissone Rebecca
Published: November 2023

IN the early seventeenth century enormous leaps forward were made in the theoretical understanding and codification of practical changes which were at the heart of the Baroque style. The development towards harmonically rather than melodically conceived music led to movement away from the contra-puntal composition rules of the Renaissance towards simpler harmonic instructions. This, in turn, encouraged theorists to consider harmony as more than just the superimposition of two-part intervals, resulting in the new concepts of the triad and chordal inversion. As these ideas became established, an organizational system developed on the basis of only two modes, differentiated harmonically according to the third above the key note, rather than just melodically, as had been the church modes. This complete transformation in the way in which music was written and understood is traced in the next three chapters.
France: The Royal Guitarists
Authors: Tyler James , Sparks Paul
Published: November 2023

During the mid-sixteenth century, musicians, printers, and poets associated with the French court developed a sizeable repertory for the four-course guitar that was both charming and distinctive, and the instrument enjoyed a decades-long period of immense popularity. By the dawn of the seventeenth century, however, the guitar had fallen so out of fashion that it had to be virtually reintroduced—this time as the five course Spanish guitar, and this time, it seems, by a Spanish guitarist, Luis de Briceño.
Germany and the Austrian Empire
Authors: Tyler James , Sparks Paul
Published: November 2023

In the early seventeenth century the Spanish guitar was virtually unknown at the courts of Protestant north Germany, Catholic south Germany, Austria, and her Bohemian possessions.1 In the north the earliest mention of the guitar apparently refers only to the four-course instrument. The source of this citation is Michael Praetorius (c.1572-1621), and it appears in his famous encyclopedic music treatise of 1614-19, Syntagmamusicum…tomussecundusdeorganographia …(Wolfenbüttel, 1618/i9).
1750-69: The Emergence of the Six-Course Guitar
Authors: Tyler James , Sparks Paul
Published: November 2023

When PhilipV (the newly crowned Bourbon king) entered Madrid with his entourage in 1701, he brought with him all manner of international influences into the Spanish capital. French was soon being spoken at court to a far greater extent than before, and the Italian musical style became strongly favoured (not just in royal circles but also by the fashion-conscious Spanish middle classes), while national expression was generally held in low esteem and was even regarded with suspicion as a potential focus of Spanish resistance to foreign domination. By mid-century the publication of new Spanish music had been largely suppressed (the court repeatedly forbade the establishment of a dedicated music press, so most eighteenth-century Spanish music existed only in manuscript form), and the guitar had all but vanished from fashionable middle-class theatres, where it had formerly been used to accompany short pieces such as entremeses.
1790 to the Early 1800s: The Triumph of the Six-String Guitar
Authors: Tyler James , Sparks Paul
Published: November 2023

By 1790 the six-course guitar had become the most common form of the instrument in Spain. Most Spanish makers were now building only this type of guitar, and the numerous advertisements in the Madrid press throughout the decade reflect this change: Older five-course Spanish guitars were still being played and traded, but even some of these began to be modified to accommodate an extra course. This was not difficult to do, because (for the sake of symmetry) the head of a five-course instrument usually had two rows of five tuning pegs, but only nine strings were fitted to them (because of the preference for a single chanterelle). Therefore, if a single hole for an extra tuning peg was drilled between the two rows (and the bridge and the zero fret were adjusted to squeeze six courses into the space previously occupied by five), it became possible to fit eleven strings onto what had hitherto been a five-course instrument.
The Impresario and the English Opera Group
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

The history of opera in this country is curious and complicated; it is also very characteristically English in its mixture of amateurish enthusiasm, professional indifference, occasional bright ideas without the least sense of planning for the future, commercial routine and-from the general public-complete ignorance and bewilderment. For Britten himself, this triumph meant something more than the immediacy of being an internationally recognised composer. It meant for him that he was now willing in himself, and, indeed, determined to be, within the 20th century, a professional opera composer. While touring Canada with the English Opera Group in I 957, Britten was asked by a music critic to describe the difference between The Rape of Lucretia and The Turn of the Screw. ‘The title is different, and the story ’, replied Britten. ‘ Oh yes, of course, but the music, Mr. Britten-what would you say was the difference between the music of “The Rape of Lucretia “ and “The Turn of the Screw “? ‘ ‘The notes are the same, but they are in a different order. ’ The comparison between the two works is a profitable one, although not in the sense intended by the music critic, nor in Britten ‘s precise if dismissive reply. The Rape of Lucretia, Britten ‘s first opera after Peter Grimes, owed its presentation at Glyndebourne in 1946 to private patronage. Britain then was just beginning to explore the institutionalization of national culture through its new Arts Council.
‘Indessen wollte ich mich Ihnen gern gefällig beweisen’: On Some Occasional Works, with an Unknown Composition by Mendelssohn
Authors: Hellmundt Christoph
Published: November 2023

My investigation was prompted by a composition by Mendelssohn that has remained virtually unknown until now, and which in my estimation should be considered an ‘occasional work’. What does this term mean? In general, one designates as ‘occasional works’ compositions written for a specific occasion (usually rather hastily) and which achieve no great significance, either in the composer’s œuvre or in musical life in general. Sometimes these are largescale works, but usually they are smaller. If the suggestion or request for the composition comes from an external source, the composer’s own personal impetus plays a subordinate role, since he feels obligated to compose something.
Scholarship, Authenticity, Honesty
Authors: Williams Bernard
Published: November 2023

The invitation to address this congress was a strange one, but not one to be resisted. Certainly it was an honour to think it might be supposed that I would have something of interest to say to so many representatives of a distinguished scholarly field which is very far from being my own. To love music (as I certainly do)-or rather, I should say, to love quite a lot of music, since there is a lot I do not know, and some I am indifferent to; and there is some, as there is for any sensible person who cares about it, that I hate-does not mean that even in an amateurish way one grasps much of the musicologist’s various crafts. The converse, too, is at least conceivable, that mastery of the musicological crafts does not necessarily imply a love of music. Certainly there are classicists-I have known a few-who, if they ever liked much of Greek or Latin literature, long ago stopped doing so. There are Shakespearean scholars who detest Shakespeare-with the more unusual feature, in their case, that some of them pursue their profession by saying so. There are even some art historians (but not many, in my experience) who do not really like looking at pictures.
Brain and Music: An Electrophysiological Approach
Authors: Besson Mireille , Regnault Pascaline
Published: November 2023

What is the brain doing when one listens to music? This general question provides the focus of the research presented in this paper. Specifically, the experiments described here were designed to study the electrophysiological correlates of music perception. Listening to music involves a number of complex computations, from sensory to perceptive and cognitive analysis, that underlie the pleasure and emotions we feel. Of course, these computations need not be conscious. More often than not, we are unable to explain or describe why one piece of music evokes such pleasant, peaceful, and happy feelings while another evokes such fearful, unhappy, and unpleasant ones. We seem to be far from understanding the mechanisms responsible for the intricate feelings that accompany music perception. However, largely owing to the work of researchers in music perception, important progress has been made in our understanding of the basic perceptive and cognitive processes involved.
The Music of Rhetoric
Authors: Sisman Elaine
Published: November 2023

The title of this paper will seem deliberately to have inverted its terms: the rhetoric of music seems familiar (indeed, ‘the rhetoric of X’ has become a virtually obligatory formation in every field); but the music of rhetoric? My aim is to suggest that, far from being a necessarily ‘literary study’, rhetoric as an art of the ‘means of persuasion’ and of ‘display’ may be itself inherently musical. Indeed, the same sources are read over and over again by scholars in literature, music, and the visual arts, not to mention students of actual oratory, and the sources speak differently to different disciplines. Moreover, such inversions reveal the slipperiness of the subjects: to explore the problems posed by rhetoric and music seems at times like wrestling with a jellyfish which might then turn into a boa constrictor.
Response
Authors: Stenzl J ü rg
Published: November 2023

From a European point of view, ‘New Musicology’ is part of US home politics. As Andrew Dell’Antonio put it, a new approach means taking up new, alternative ideas from ‘sister disciplines’. Musicology has always been conditioned by ‘sister disciplines’, especially by the history of art. Likewise, philosophical concepts generally functioned as much more than mere ‘sisters’: ‘Restoration’ was, for example, a ‘big brother’ of Cecilianism, of the Solesmes editions of Gregorian chant, and of a large part of musicology during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. French right-wing extremism and anti-Semitism were ‘sisters’ to Vincent d’Indy’s music history at the Paris Schola Cantorum, just as nationalistic and fascist ideas conditioned parts of French and Italian musicology between 1920 and 1945. Structuralism had its impact on French musicology in the 1970s, not to mention the impact of Hegel and, later on, the influence Adorno’s synthesis of philosophy, sociology, and music has had on German musicology since 1950.
Response
Authors: Subotnik Rose Rosengard
Published: November 2023

These days, when I think about the direction of musicology, I keep coming back to concerns voiced by one of my students, then an opinionated undergraduate, named Jacob, and by one of my teachers, the cultural historian Jacques Barzun. Let me start with Jacob. A few years ago, Jacob began paying visits to my office at Brown University, where I serve as adviser to undergraduates majoring in music. Jacob was thoroughly dissatisfied with the education he was getting. He railed against his music professor, an old-fashioned historian and man of letters who expected his students to acquire a close formal mastery of some very sizable ‘great Western compositions’. And he resented the professor who taught Shakespeare’s plays as occasions to ‘consider the cultural construction of gender, race, nation, sexuality, and class in early modern England’.

As the semester wore on, I became
Difficolta della storiografia dell’opera italiana
Authors: Seta Fabrizio Della
Published: November 2023

La storiografia dell’opera italiana e un settore di studi che si presta singolarmente bene a illustrare ea sviluppare alcuni dei temi individuati nei lavori preliminari di questa tavola rotonda. Da una parte, non v’e dubbio che !’opera italiana appartenga a pieno titolo al ‘canone’ della musica colta occidentale;.
Musical Practices and Hidden Musicians: A Perspective from Sociology and Anthropology
Authors: Finnegan Ruth
Published: November 2023

Christian Kaden rightly starts off his scene-setting paper above by referring to the ‘social’ nature of music.1 My paper picks up one dimension of that statement: the idea that music is essentially made by people and that the variegated conventions through which they achieve this are worth studying. So, rather than attempting any overall survey (as Kaden has already done), I will instead focus on a case-study of the musical activities carried out by certain ‘hidden’ musicians within our own culture. This draws on my own research on a contemporary English town as a way of illustrating some of the insights which a social perspective can bring to the study of music.
Musicology and Sexuality: The Example of Edward J. Dent
Authors: Brett Philip
Published: November 2023

Imagine for a moment that music is a social problem. Or rather that it has for centuries been an outlawed or suspect activity whose practice leads to severe disapproval, sometimes punishment, except under certain circumstances which are, in a remarkable reversal, highly validated. Imagine, too, that in a newly industrialized society, driven by capital and depending for its stability on religion and the development of middle classes, no one quite knows how to deal with the rogue desire for music ingrained in each person.
Berlioz Et Autour De Berlioz: Un Artiste En Son Temps
Authors: Bloom Peter
Published: November 2023

Designed to offer views of Berlioz based both on his own writings and on those of others in his circle, this Study Session, conducted in French, included papers by six scholars from six countries, and a response (in English) from the dean of Berlioz studies, Hugh Macdonald.
Musicology And Biography
Authors: Olleson Philip
Published: November 2023

In a congress whose main theme was musicology and sister disciplines it seemed particularly appropriate to devote a session to musicology and biography. Although not strictly speaking a discipline in its own right, biography has an important, if untidy, relationship with musicology. Moreover, it is in the musical biography that musicology steps outside the specialist arena and addresses a wider public. Although musical biography may not have achieved the popularity of literary biography, it is none the less widely read, and a major new study can play a significant part in establishing or altering the way in which its subject’s life and career are perceived; furthermore, its impact can be particularly pervasive as the picture is more widely disseminated through journalism, broadcasting, and programme and sleeve notes.
Theorizing The Transnational
Authors: Shelema Kay Kaufman
Published: November 2023

The two broad aims of this session were to consider what transnational theoretical paradigms have to offer musical scholarship and, conversely, to ask what musical scholarship has to offer transnational theories. The session, organized by Kay Kaufman Shelemay, addressed these issues through five case-studies spanning widely diverse geographical areas and historical continua.