bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Violin Fraud
Authors: Harvey Brian W , Shapreau Carla J
Published: November 2023

Instruments of the violin family are well known to be exceptionally valuable if they are the work of an Italian master such as Stradivari or Guarneri. Unfortunately, in common with many other antique articles of value, the forger, the defrauder, and the thief operate in the world of the violin in a very conspicuous way. With varying degrees of skill, labels are altered, certificates of origin are spuriously created, instruments are even made from new but disguised to look old and to reproduced the features of an old master. Buyers, dealers, and even auction houses can easily make distressing and very expensive mistakes. Many people who own instruments, or who are interested in buying them, want to know more about the dangers, the pitfalls, and the case histories of previous disasters. The law itself is widely misunderstood and its wide ambit not appreciated. Those who contravene the law risk actions for civil damages as well as criminal prosecution, primarily by the ever more vigilant Trading Standards Department of local authorities. It is the intention of this book to detect the background to this fraudulent activity and to explain how the law applies to it. Much of what is said applies to the antique world generally, but there are specific and pressing problems relating to to string instruments which have not been analysed in detail before and with which this book is particularly concerned. This new edition includes an account of American law as it relates to to violin commerce, including a discussion of violin theft, fraud, and contract issues, product disparagement, and slander, auction issues, tax issues, secret commissions, ethics, and intellectual property theft.
Misdescriptions and False Labels
Authors: Harvey Brian W , Shapreau Carla J
Published: November 2023

Anyone who has made anything of a study of the violin family knows that the label often to be found by peering through the bass soundhole is quite likely to be false or misleading. Some would say that counting all the German and French ‘factory’ violins bearing Gothic ‘Stradivarius’ facsimile labels and the like, well over half of all labelled instruments are likely to be ‘wrong’ rather than ‘right’. No experienced appraiser looks at the label other than, at most, for confirmation of his educated guess at the maker and date of the instrument. It is the shape of the back and the table, the manner of the scroll and soundholes, the look of the varnish, and the size and ‘feel’ of the instrument (amongst other detailed ‘fingerprints’) which lead to the attribution.
Fakes and Forgeries - the Problem of Attribution
Authors: Harvey Brian W , Shapreau Carla J
Published: November 2023

In any discussion as to false trade descriptions of articles of antique value the question is inevitably raised as to how a judge would ‘know’ that a description was false. ‘Were you there when the instrument was made?’ might be a reasonable question for a judge to ask a witness, but it casts a smokescreen over the real·point. It is essential to understand that no court can claim infall ibility of judgment. This hardly needs to be said after such well publicized miscarriages of justice as have occurred in the prose cution of alleged IRA terrorists. But it must be remembered that in all these cases it was actually the jury that came to the wrong conclusion on the facts, though the jury may well have been encouraged to do so by the remarks of the judge in guiding the Jury.
Breach of Contract and Warranties
Authors: Harvey Brian W , Shapreau Carla J
Published: November 2023

If a buyer purchases a violin and later finds out that the violin is a fake, or has a hidden defect, such as a sound post crack that might significantly reduce the value of the violin, or the violin fails in some other material way to meet the reasonable expectation of the buyer, the buyer may have a claim for breach of contract or breach of express or implied warranties. In most states the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) governs disputes involving the sale of ‘goods’, which includes instruments of the violin family as well as paintings, prints, and sculpture.
The Hazards of Secret Commissions and the Duty to Disclose
Authors: Harvey Brian W , Shapreau Carla J
Published: November 2023

It is common practice in the USA for teachers to receive secret commissions from violin dealers in whose direction the student has been steered. This practice also occurs in England, as mentioned by Brian Harvey in Chapter 5 and in Appendix I. The harm of secret commissions is felt not just by the student, who may unknowingly be paying for his or her teacher’s commission through an inflated sales price. In addition, violin makers and dealers who refuse to engage in this industry custom may suffer competitive injury when teachers choose to send their students to those who pay such commissions.
Criminal Liability
Authors: Harvey Brian W , Shapreau Carla J
Published: November 2023

Criminal liability for some of the misdeeds referenced in this book may be the basis for prosecution by the authorities and punishable by fines and/ or imprisonment under federal and/or state law. For example, when one transports in interstate or foreign commerce instruments of$5,ooo value or more, knowing that the instrument has been stolen, converted, or taken by fraud, one may be found guilty of violating the National Stolen Property Act.1 Liability under this statute may also be premised on activities such as inducing another to transport a stolen instrument, or otherwise causing the transport of such a stolen instrument, or in the concealment of a scheme to defraud a per son of property. Considerable fines and/ or imprisonment may be the punishment ordered for violation of this statute. Similarly, one who knowingly receives, possesses, conceals, stores, barters, sells, or disposes of instruments that have crossed a state or USA boundary after being stolen, unlawfully converted, or taken may also be found liable under federal law.2
Ethics
Authors: Harvey Brian W , Shapreau Carla J
Published: November 2023

At least one professional American group has established ethical rules for its members. The American Federation of Violin and Bow Makers has created a ‘Code of Ethics’ and ‘Principles of Professional Conduct’ (Code) which set minimum levels of acceptable conduct and are formally binding on members. Those ethical rules are set forth in Appendix 3. Membership in the AFVBM is by election only and members must meet high standards requiring a particular level of training, skill, and time in the profession before entry into the group.
Shostakovich as Reflected in his Letters to Ivan Sollertinsky
Authors: Mikheyeva-Sollertinskaya Lyudmila
Published: November 2023

The letters written by the great composer to his close friend Ivan lvanovich Sollertinsky form a unique document. To begin with, there is the fact that they exist at all. Shostakovich and Sollertinsky lived in the same town, indeed for many years on adjacent streets, and parted company only after the beginning of the Second World War. One would have thought they had enough direct contact with each other, yet over one hundred and fifty of Shostakovich’s letters to Sollertinsky have survived, which shed light on many hitherto unknown details of the composer’s life, and often on particular traits of his character. So far as we can judge from the published correspondence, nothing comparable is to be found in any of the letters he addressed to the wide circle of his other correspondents—family members, friends, and acquaintances. In their sincerity, candour, and level of detail, their flashes of frequently ironic humour, their tone by turns bitter, anxious, and solicitous, they reveal just how dear and intimate a friend was their addressee, and how close the ties of friendship that bound them together.
Shostakovich’s Anti-Formalist Rayok
Authors: Yakubov Manashir
Published: November 2023

The originality of the Anti-Formalist Rayok should be assessed not only from the point of view of its place within Shostakovich’s legacy, but in the context of the broad traditions of satire in Russian culture. Russian musical satire is an organic and deeply original part of Russia’s spiritual culture. It is a legacy that is a thousand years old, and one that continues to thrive today: from the crude Slwmorokhi lampoons of the tenth to seventeenth centuries to the obscene modern-day chastushki about Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev and the political songs of Galich and Vysotsky: from Dargomyzhsky’s ‘The Worm’, Borodin’s ‘Pride’, Musorgsky’ s ‘The Seminarist’, ‘The Classicist’, and ‘The Flea’, Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan, Kashchei the Immortal, and The Golden Cockerel to Prokofiev’s The Buffoon, Mosolov’s Newspaper Announcements, Shos takovich’s secret anti-Soviet works, Shchedrin’s Bureaucratiada, and Schnittke’s Life with an Idiot. Musorgsky’s Rayok and Shostakovich’s Anti-Formalist Rayok, two masterpieces of Russian musical satire, occupy a special place in this sphere of denunciatory laughter. A whole century separates them. Musorgsky wrote his Rayok in 1870, and Shostakovich finished the last scene of his work at the end of the 1960s. They nevertheless have much in common. The object of the satire in these works is the relationship between art and power, and therefore art itself and also ultimately the artist.
Shostakovich, Tsvetaeva, Pushkin, Musorgsky: Songs and Dances of Death and Survival
Authors: Emerson Caryl
Published: November 2023

The title of this essay combines so much Russian genius in a single sentence that one hesitates to pronounce it The issues it addresses, however, are more modest: first, how Shostakovich’s penultimate song cycle, op, 143, Shest’ stikhotvorenii Mariny Tsvetaevoi [Six Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva], represents an especially dense cluster of Russian cultural myths about the appropriate life and death for poets; and second, how this cycle differs in message and in ‘aesthetic consciousness’ from another intonationally-based song cycle by a composer who was dear to Shostakovich’s heart, namely, Musorgsky’s masterwork from the 1870s, Pesni i pliaski smerti [The Songs and Dances of Death]. Musorgsky was Shostakovich’s constant life companion. Tsvetaeva, however, was discovered late, during the composer’s final decade;1 Shostakovich was reading her verse and the memoirs of her daughter Ariadna in July 1975, the summer of his death.
Taking Steps: 1900—1918
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

John Cage’s statement that ‘today’s music is characterised by a multiplicity of ways to do things’ might seem no more and no less than any composer could have said down the ages. It is difficult to imagine any composer, even one devoted to technical and aesthetic ideals of unity and consistency, supporting the proposition that the creative process always involves doing precisely the same thing in exactly the same way. Similarly, the claims of musicologist Robert P. Morgan that ‘the rootless and fragmented nature of current music is ultimately inseparable from the rootlessness and fragmentation of contemporary life’, and that ‘the pluralism of contemporary music mirrors the lack of consensus in the political, social and religious attitudes that govern how we live, act and interact’ could equally well be applied to some if not all earlier eras, each of which would have had its own standards for the governing concepts of’rootlessness and fragmentation’, as well as ‘pluralism’ and ‘lack of consensus’.
The Spread Of Serialism
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

As ‘the Second Viennese School’, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern are conventionally accorded collective credit for the establishment of the twelve-note technique as an important factor in twentieth-century music, and the story of composition since 1950 is largely one of reactions to that factor—positive, negative, equivocal. Whereas Webern, and Schoenberg in some of his late works, indicated the basis for a fuller exploration of the conjunction between strict serial technique and atonal expressionism, Schoenberg’s earlier serial pieces, and all those by Berg, opened up the very different prospect of associations between traditional forms and procedures and twelve-note methods which involved tension as well as connection. The continued influence and development of twelve-note composition after 1950 therefore helped to intensify the already vigorous pluralism of style and aesthetic that had been evident in twentieth-century music from the beginning, and most composers of significance who have emerged since mid-century have been concerned to some extent with the basic principle of consistently ordered pitch structuring (though often with fewer, or more than twelve notes) that lies at the heart of the Schoen-bergian concept. Such composers will feature in all the later chapters of this study, illustrating the extreme diversity to which types of serial thinking, in a post-tonal context, can give rise.
Musics Of Change: Seven Europeans
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

Change of focus from America to Europe inevitably involves some change of aesthetic and technical perspective. It is not that the composers considered in this chapter have escaped all contact with the distinctively iconoclastic radicalism found in Cage, Feldman, and Nancarrow. But in their attitudes to traditional genres, and their relations with well-established forms of public music-making and promotion, the seven (very different) composers considered here offer powerful confirmation of the adaptability of modernism, and its ability to contribute to a rich and diverse twentieth-century ‘mainstream’. The distance between the unambiguous commitment to symphonic music found in Lutoslawski and Henze and the innovative projects of Xenakis or Stockhausen is, self-evidently, immense, and the co-fertilization between radicalism and a sense of ritual is no less palpable here than in the composers actually considered under those headings. Inevitably, my groupings are as much a matter of convenience as of coherence. A relatively restricted range of birth-dates (1913 to 1928) may promote an elementary feeling of connection among the seven Europeans, but, in the end, the polarities cannot be suppressed.
Polarities, Pluralities
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

The consistent pursuit of truth, of what Elliott Carter has termed an ‘emancipated discourse’, as personal, authentic, has had priority in twentieth-century music over attempts to create something whose primary characteristic was its ‘beauty’. The late twentieth-century composer may still work by a set of values, however recondite and austere, and some can still declare hostility to what Brian Ferneyhough perceives as ‘the present state of value-free pluralisrn’.2 Composers may even reach the point of concerning themselves exclusively with ‘rigidly constructed denial, with the exclusion of what appears to me as listening expectations pre-formed by society’. This radical declaration was made by Helmut Lachenmann and applies, he claims, to his compositions since TemA (1968) and Air (1968–9).
The Lyric Berlioz
Authors: Rushton Julian
Published: November 2023

The central place of the romance in Berlioz’s musical culture is disguised by his avowed ambition towards ‘higher’ —less domesticated, larger—genres. But he was preoccupied with simple song forms up to the drinking song in Béatrice et Bénédict, and a retrospective collection of ‘Mélodies’ with piano accompaniment was published in 1863, although this collection includes choruses and two cantatas, Chant des chemins de fer and Le cinq mai, printed like vocal scores convenient for rehearsal, since their impact is heavily dependent on the orchestra (see Chapter 3).
Berlioz Dramatist
Authors: Rushton Julian
Published: November 2023

‘Expression is not the only objective of dramatic music. It would be as crude as it is pedantic to despise the purely sensual pleasure we find in particular aspects of melody, harmony, rhythm, and orchestration, independently of all connection to depiction of the feelings and passions of the drama.’ Berlioz’s comment, made in the context of a discussion of Gluck’s Alceste, should encourage us to seek for musical enjoyment in his dramatic works, as well as truthfulness of dramatic expression.
Nineteenth-Century Bands: Making a Movement
Authors: Herbert Trevor
Published: November 2023

The growth of brass bands in Victorian Britain can be viewed as something of a watershed. It represents an important manifestation of change in popular music culture, and even though it is but one aspect of the wider phenomena underlying the rise of popular music, it possesses features which make it special. It provides a prime example of the fusion of commercial and philanthropic interests and attitudes; of art music and vernacular musical practices; of technology and ‘art’; and of dominant and emergent ideologies. It could also be regarded as one of the more important aspects of British art music in the nineteenth century, and certainly an element which impacted in a lasting manner on the broad infrastructure of British music: its industry, institutions, and even styles.
‘What is Wrong with Brass Bands?’: Cultural Change and the Band Movement, 1918–c.1964
Authors: Russell Dave
Published: November 2023

In the course of the twentieth century, the brass band movement has followed two separate trajectories. On a purely artistic level, it has made enormous strides in terms of technical competence and of range and scope of repertoire. At the same time, it has ultimately lost the powerful—in some areas, central-position that it had held in popular musical culture. While this chapter is intended as a fairly wide-ranging discussion of bands in this period, its primary aim is to examine the second of these developments and to trace the process through which, by the 1950s and perhaps even earlier, the brass band had simply become yet another specialist pastime within an ever more variegated pattern of popular leisure.
Aspects of Performance Practices: The Brass Band and its Influence on Other Brass-Playing Styles
Authors: Herbert Trevor , Wallace John
Published: November 2023

There has been little systematic research into the performance practices of brass bands. Anyone wishing to undertake a comprehensive study of the subject (and this chapter has no pretensions to pass as such) would find it difficult. Not only are there comparatively few sources for performance practices in the past dating from before the twentieth century, primarily because performance practices and styles have been communicated through largely aural, rather than written, means; but also, the richest vein of source materials pertains to the very best brass bands, and this group is but a tiny part of the mass practice of brass banding.
Music Theory in Seventeenth-Century England
Authors: Herissone Rebecca
Published: November 2023

The fundamental changes that resulted in the development of the Baroque style around the turn of the seventeenth century also had a profound effect on music theory. As musicians began to adopt new approaches to composition, authors gradually became aware that the theories on which they relied, some of which dated back to medieval times, were largely obsolete. Thus, over the course of the seventeenth century, there occurred a complete transformation in almost every aspect of theory: by the 1720s, many of the principles being described bore close relation to those still used today. Nowhere was this metamorphosis clearer than in England where, because of a traditional emphasis on practicality, there was much more willingness to accept and encourage new theoretical ideas than on the continent. By tracing the progress of both rudimentary and more advanced compositional theories in English treatises, Dr Herissone provides a detailed and comprehensive commentary on musical developments during the period.
Just how ‘Scottish’ is the ‘Scottish’ Symphony? Thoughts on Form and Poetic Content in Mendelssohn’s Opus 56
Authors: Schmidt-Beste Thomas
Published: November 2023

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s Third Symphony in A Minor, Op. 56 is—and always has been—the ‘Scottish’ Symphony: this idea seems to be one of the eternal truths of Mendelssohn scholarship, so obvious that any discussion about it would appear superfluous. Until very recently, every study dealing with the work has taken the title and all its associations for granted, not only as a label but as a starting point for any number of theories concerning the programmatic or poetic content of the piece—some rather generic, others quite detailed, treating the piece movement by movement.
On Stylistic Affinities in the Works of Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy
Authors: Todd R Larry
Published: November 2023

As relatively unusual as prodigies are in Western history, the instances of musical sibling prodigies represent even more rare phenomena. One could argue as the most extraordinary example the children of J. S. Bach, and one would also include, of course, Wolfgang and Nannerl Mozart, celebrated during their English tour of 1764 as infant ‘prodigies of nature’ (‘Wundern der Natur’). But the list does not extend much further; indeed, it is conspicuous for its exclusion of such figures as the Haydn brothers, who were certainly celebrated composers, but not child prodigies. Nor does the list include avuncular relationships, such as those of the Gabrielis or the Couperins in the seventeenth century.
Music and Narrative in Recent Theory
Authors: Butler Christopher
Published: November 2023

In looking at the relationship between music and literature I intend to follow a rather simple model and make some admittedly polemical objections to current theory. I ask how one or two of the basic concepts of literary understanding and interpretation fare when they are applied to music. These apparently simple questions lead to quite surprisingly complex considerations. To put it very simply, literary critics analyse stories in which characters do things, conveyed to us in narratives that use language in certain ways. But what can we say about our ideas of narrative and language when they are applied to music? Music seems, at least minimally, to be a sequence of relatively discrete events, of which earlier ones often seem to imply later ones, which in turn often fulfil our expectations. In some cases at least, these events have strongly emotional qualities which lead to a sense of ‘character’ in the music. This is perhaps some way towards narrative.
Statement
Authors: Dell’Antonio Andrew
Published: November 2023

The spectre of a ‘New Musicology’ has recently been haunting musicological discourse, making its way from the USA to Europe and beyond. ‘New Musicology’ may or may not be a peculiarly North American phenomenon; it certainly draws upon both European and local hermeneutical traditions, following developments in ‘sister disciplines’ such as philosophy, anthropology, ‘New History’, cultural studies, sociology, lesbian/gay/queer studies, and feminism. In the last decade musicologists have drawn freely from such developments, and their readings (and wilful misreadings) have yielded interpretative strategies that seek to redefine our field. While such approaches have been disparate in scope and in some cases explicitly contradictory, both proponents and critics have seen fit to invoke the umbrella term ‘New Musicology’ to describe this phenomenon.
Response
Authors: Bent Margaret
Published: November 2023

It is not new to be new. We had the ars nova, the nuove musiche, New Music; the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; the New Look, the New Philology, the New Criticism, New Labour. Most of it soon becomes old and dated. Even The New Grove Dictionary is being radically revised after less than two decades. Interpretations of Wagner march through Nietzsche, Shaw, Lorenz, Adorno, Donington, Dahlhaus, Abbate, and many others, reflecting the philosophy, politics, psychology, and critical trends that conditioned the thinking of each writer’s own times and that eventually define their work as period pieces. Musicology has changed and expanded radically since I have been involved with it, nearly always with a sense of newness, excitement, and controversy. Yesterday’s ‘new’ is today’s ‘old’. Truth claims denied to the latter cannot simply be asserted for the former. If complex interpretative arguments and hypotheses have in the past been presented with some sense of certainty, this is paradoxically no less true of the assertions of some postmodern writers, who are content to use ‘findings’ that turn out to be biographically or culturally relevant, quick to dismiss those that are not. Again, paradoxically, simplistic use of or assumptions about such ‘facts’ are sometimes more incautious or indeed positivistic than would have been entertained by those who advanced them. Work of lasting importance, whether past or current, such as some of our speakers, both on the panel and from the floor, have raised above the current new/old divide, is that which survives such labelling. Some shifts over the years have been incremental, some large, some internal, some as tidal waves from outside musicology, broadly defined to include any branch of the history, theory, or sociology of music. This is clearly one of the large ones.
Response
Authors: Locke Ralph P
Published: November 2023

The two position papers, for all their obvious differences, have in common the working assumption that we should be focusing in this Round Table on a certain set of approaches that have been actively pursued in recent musicology, especially in the USA, and exploring its relationship to more traditional or normative work.1 Stefano Castelvecchi names only one representative (Lawrence Kramer) of this supposed ‘New Musicology’ (or ‘Critical Musicology’, as some of its proponents have dubbed it in the UK), while Andrew Dell’Antonio names none at all.2 But both clearly are thinking also of such widely published scholars as Susan McClary, Suzanne Cusick, Philip Brett, Richard Leppert, Eva Rieger (to mention one prominent non-Anglo-American), Robert Fink, and Tricia Rose.3
Music from an Anthropological Perspective
Authors: Kalisch Volker
Published: November 2023

Music as an entity is not usually a matter of much concern: it just exists. We tend to take music for granted to the extent that questioning it seems artificial to most of us. Certainly we discuss the music of different cultures, we are interested in specific genres or works, we study the history of music, or reflect upon the musical output of a composer, his social background, or his aesthetic orientation. Even methods of producing music, its performance practice, its cultural value, or our approach to it in general may sometimes become a topic of discussion, but music as such, as a phenomenon which combines all these fields in itself, does not usually figure in musicological considerations. Music just exists for us; it appears in different contexts as a phenomenon divided into aesthetic, historical, sociological, and cultural branches of interest. This provides reason enough for most musicologists merely to go along with the conviction that the existence of music is to be described and explained-particularly from the sociological point of view-in terms of its conditions of usage or culturally defined influences on human beings.
The Sociology of Music as Self-Critical Musicology
Authors: Vieira Mario , Carvalho De
Published: November 2023

In a Round Table devoted to sociology and musicology as sister disciplines there is one preliminary point we cannot avoid considering: the sociology of musicology as part of the sociology of knowledge. In other words, we cannot discuss different contextually situated understandings of music without being aware of different contextually situated understandings of understanding. This in turn requires consideration of the problem of scientific understanding in general, which means that the discussion of this preliminary point must be situated within the framework of the debate on the so-called modern and postmodern paradigms of scientific knowledge.
New Music and Philosophy
Authors: Rowell Lewis
Published: November 2023

As sister disciplines, musicology and the philosophy of music have at least one thing in common: the scholarship produced under their aegis has been concerned mostly with the music of the past, only to a very small extent with the music of the present, and--on the grounds that it is bound to be unpredictable, disagreeable, or both-hardly at all with the music of the future. One of the first decisions taken in planning this Round Table was that it should include a consideration of what today’s music can tell us about what music may be like in the distant and not-too-distant future.
‘Absolute Music’ and the ‘New Musicology’
Authors: Kivy Peter
Published: November 2023

Introduction

In 1980, in a book entitled The Corded Shell, I wrote that description of music is in a way unique. When it is understandable to the nonmusician, it is cried down as nonsense by the contemporary musician. And when the musician or musical scholar turn their hands to it these days, likely as not the nonmusician finds it as mysterious as the Cabala, and about as interesting as a treatise on sewage disposal.1
Four Philosophies of Musical Interpretation
Authors: Cumming Naomi
Published: November 2023

The four contributors to this Round Table present quite different perspectives on the question of how to engage philosophically with issues relating to musical interpretation. Peter Kivy, a philosopher in the analytical tradition, encapsulates briefly some arguments he has made at greater length elsewhere, suggesting that semantic interpretations of non-texted instrumental music are ill-founded. In this forum, he seeks to show how these arguments may be used to refute the interpretative enterprise of some ‘New Musicologists’. Ruth Katz draws both on her experience of a German hermeneutic tradition in interpretation and on her knowledge of Nelson Goodman’s theory of language in order to defend the idea that some musical content may be established by the traditions of a community, rather than encoded in (and extracted from) notational forms. She is implicitly more sympathetic towards some attributions of ‘meaning’ to music than Kivy, although she emphasizes the need to establish the criteria by which judgments of content are made. Eero Tarasti comes from a tradition in French structuralist semiotics strongly influenced by the theories of Algirdas Greimas. He has formerly been committed to a view which reads semantic content from musical structure, without extensive reference either to the historical context of composition or to the subjective position of an interpreter, but in this paper he modifies his position in response to his recent readings in existentialist philosophy. Finally, Lewis Rowell, a musicologist and ethnomusicologist with extensive experience in interpreting Indian musical philosophies, considers how established means for forming common musical values may be compromised in contemporary and future music when familiar categories such as ‘composer’, ‘genre’, and ‘work’ are put in question.
Beethoven’s Ironies
Authors: Nestrovski Arthur
Published: November 2023

Passages like that in Example r appear fairly frequently in Beethoven’s music. Here, at the end of the introduction to the first movement of the Seventh Symphony, the music stops on one note, or rather on one special sound. When heard out of context, these six bars could belong to some work by the contemporary composer Giacinto Scelsi, known for his single-note pieces. It is precisely the context, of course, that establishes the difference between them and redoubles our interest in such moments of suspension in Beethoven’s music.
Ethnography, Ethnomusicology, and Post-White Theory
Authors: Wong Deborah
Published: November 2023

Cultural Politics and Theory: Locating Public Intellectuals As Philip Brett pointed out in his paper delivered to this Round Table, music has always been political-it is only particular scholarly practices that separate music from culture and politics. ‘Cultural’ politics are different from politics plain and simple: the politics of culture point to fundamental matters of values and belief, and to issues of control over the expression and formation of culture itself. I suggest that some theoretical approaches are far more useful than others if we want to take a serious look at how particular musicians wield cultural politics in mindful and constructive ways. In other words, cultural politics surround, shape, and emerge from musicians’ activities, and I am here concerned with the intersection of theory and the politics of race in musicians’ efforts. Postmodernist and post-structuralist theory may help locate cultural politics and cultural critique, but I am not convinced that they facilitate social change or provide tools for social action. Certain constructs have consistently emphasized the connection between theory and social praxis while others have not. Accordingly, I consider ‘high’ theory to be a social construct. I do not argue that all high theory is white and apolitical, but I believe the colour line in twentieth-century high theory is not difficult to identify. Its foundation lies in different models of social responsibility, and locating this reality for certain musicians has essentially changed the way in which I am able to write about them.
Musical Data And Computer Applications
Authors: Howard John B
Published: November 2023

In introducing the two Study Sessions devoted to the theme of computer applications (see also session 49 below), Arvid Vollnes pointed out that tools for the analysis of textual data are ubiquitous and taken for granted, whereas the analysis of data representations of musical data poses numerous problems and challenges. Each presentation in this session was designed to demonstrate a strategy for musical data analysis.
Keyboard Organology: Past, Present, And Future
Authors: Koster John
Published: November 2023

John Koster surveyed the history of keyboard organology, defined as the study of historical organs and stringed keyboard instruments. The first substantial work was Michael Praetorius’s De organographia (Wolfenbiittel, 1619), which contains important technical information about fourteenth- and fifteenth-century organs. Despite much scholarship since then, especially concerning organs, keyboard organology is still in a state like that of musicology a century ago, when the works of the great masters were collected and questions of authenticity and dating began to be considered in a scientific manner. Modern scholarship on stringed keyboard instruments began with three general surveys: D. H. Boalch, Makers of the Harpsichord and Clavichord (London, 1956); R. Russell, The Harpsichord and Clavichord (London, 1959); and G. O’Brien’s Ruckers: A Harpsichord and Virginal Building Tradition (Cambridge, 1990).
Rapporti Tra Testo, Musica E Scena Nello Spettacolo A Napoli Nel Settecento
Authors: Greco Franco Carmelo
Published: November 2023

II Settecento teatrale napoletano scopre di poter trasferire ad una competenza di carattere artistico ed estetico l’uso di quel linguaggio della scena che precedentemente pareva appartenere ad una sfera solamente morale e ad una gestione politica. II teatro si libera di tutte le tutele e si fa veramente profano. Portatori di queste acquisizioni furonooltre al barocco Andrea Perrucci, autore alla fine de! Seicento di un’ Arte rappresentativa-il pittore e regista Andrea Belvedere, ii letterato e commediografo Niccolo Amenta, e soprattutto ii regista e drammaturgo Domenico Luigi Barone, marchese prima e poi barone di Liveri, ciascuno con gradualita e diversita di contributi e coscienza. La citta, non solamente attraverso la commedia in musica, ma piu ancora attraverso la commedia dialettale di costume in prosa, veniva posta in scena, percorsa in lungo e in largo.
Study Session 42
Authors: Gwynn Dominic
Published: November 2023

This session investigated aspects of the siting (Timothy Easton), nature (Dominic Gwynn), use (John Harper), and repertory (John Caldwell) of the early sixteenth-century English organ, taking advantage of recent discoveries and research.
Music, Healing, And Culture: Towards A Comparative Perspective
Authors: Gouk Penelope
Published: November 2023

In the true spirit of the theme of the Congress, only one of the speakers at this Study Session (Gary Ansdell) came from a university music department. The others embodied a cross-section of ‘sister disciplines’: Charles Burnett (a medievalist) and George Rousseau (a scholar of eighteenth-century literature) are based at institutes for the humanities, while Penelope Gouk and Lynette Schumaker are formally historians of medicine in the early modern and twentieth-century periods respectively.1 The occasion provided an ideal setting for reflecting on the problematic relationship between musical and medical theory, as well as practice, and on how professional disciplines themselves shape our understanding of what might constitute musical healing.
Session 14: Music and Society around 1700
Authors: Cowart Georgia
Published: November 2023

In the late seventeenth century the French high nobility, disenchanted with the increasingly autocratic and moralistic rule of Louis XIV, appropriated the genial hedonism of Venetian carnival as a symbol of their own status in opposition to the monarchy. As the king withdrew from the society he had created at Versailles, the public space of the Paris Opera became one of the most important venues for the increasing self-consciousness of this disgruntled social group. A group of operas and opera-ballets, beginning with Andre Campra’s L’Europe galante (1697) and ending with his acclaimed Les fetes venitiennes (1710), drew on the popular culture of carnival and the commedia dell’arte to reflect a social elite who defined themselves by the acts of leisure and of being entertained.
Session 25: Seventeenth-Century Topics
Authors: Orden Kate van
Published: November 2023

This paper studied an equestrian ballet choreographed by Antoine de Pluvinel for the wedding of Louis XIII. Pluvinel ran France’s first state-financed military academy (established in 1594), where aristocrats trained in equitation, gymnastics, fencing, dance, mathematics, painting, and the lute in preparation for courtly life and combat. My reconstruction of Pluvinel’s ballet from engravings, paintings, descriptions, and a manuscript score permits a glimpse of this spectacular art-form and its musical idioms. Furthermore, the horsemanship displayed in the ballet reflects the actual practices of battle: with the rise of gunpowder-based warfare, heavily armoured individuals were replaced with collectivistic light cavalry based on rapidity, high manoeuvrability, and thus on co-ordinated efforts acquired through disciplined training to music. I showed how the equestrian ballet celebrated the traditional technical basis of aristocratic supremacy-chivalry and horsemanship-at the same time as it accommodated the rituals of the noblesse d’epee to the shifting sands of early modern warfare and absolutist government. Pluvinel’s ballet fetes a new monarchy and a new nobility educated in the harmonic polity demanded of them at court and on the battlefield.
Session 36: Nationalism
Authors: Milin Melita
Published: November 2023

The main tasks of general (world) histories of music are to compare simultaneous developments, to make distinctions between significant and less important contributions, and to explore influences; but it is clear that few musicologists can boast sufficient knowledge for such an undertaking. This explains why minor cultures are usually dealt with briefly if at all, in final chapters where surveys on groups of countries are usually given, and with only a few sentences devoted to each. Moreover, such coverage often contains serious mistakes because of the uncritical use of other sources. On the other hand, general histories of music written by musicologists from peripheral cultures tend to overestimate the domestic contribution to world history. From this it follows that international teams of renowned musicologists should be asked to read all such books before publication and should have the authority to ask authors to revise some parts if necessary.
Misinterpreting Verdian Dramaturgy: History and Grand Opera
Authors: Ashman Mike
Published: November 2023

Verdi’s choice of librettos was radical. He accepted neither endlessly recycled versions of sub-Metastasian Greek and Roman mythology nor sentimental peasant comedy stretched beyond brealci.ng point to fit preordained (and dating) musical structures. He only flirted at arm’s length with that brand of instant, melodramatic, unhistorical history from which Scribe and his less talented imitators created and maintained French Grand Opera. His desire to set Shaleespeare, Hugo, Schiller, Byron, and Gutierrez was provocative, Romantic, and thoroughly modern. Moreover, correspondence and reported conversation confirm that in both creating and giving the premieres his works Verdi was concerned pre-eminently with their dramatic meaning and their stage interpretation.
Ornamenting Verdi’s Arias: The Continuity of a Tradition
Authors: Lawton David
Published: November 2023

In recent years, scholars have made significant contributions to our know ledge of various aspects of the vocal and instrumental performance of Verdi’s operas. The critical edition of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi, published by the University of Chicago Press and Casa Ricordi, has led the way Research connected with the preparation of each volume (Rigoletto.Ernani. Nabucco. Messa da Requiem. Luisa Miller. Il trovatore. Alzira. La traviata. Il eorsaro. and, most recently, I masnadieri) has provided new insights into Verdi’s autographs and other contemporary musical sources, which are of great value to performers. Although the historical introductions and critical commentaries with every score furnish the user with the most up-to-date research, there is much that remains to be done in the area of performance practice.
An Avenue Unexplored: The Divertissement and the Opéra-Ballet
Authors: Jurgensen Knud Arne
Published: November 2023

The ballet music of the last century and, more particularly, the dramaturgical role of theatrical dance in a larger operatic context is from many points of view a scholarly area yet to be cultivated. The main reason is that studies in this field require not only a broad background in musicology but an equally detailed knowledge of ballet history and the canon of nineteenth-century choreography.
Drawing the Audience in: The Theatre and the Ballroom
Authors: Smith Marian
Published: November 2023

Knud Arne Jürgensen has made some valuable points about Verdi’s ballets and has given some important guidelines for future research. I should like to respond not by criticizing him but by suggesting that there are other ways in which this repertory might be approached. As background, one might begin by attempting to explain why Parisians insisted on putting ballets in operas in the first place-in spite of the preferences of Verdi and Wagner, among other foreigners, who found the practice vastly annoying. It was because of this Parisian habit, after all, that Verdi wrote most of his opera-ballets (to use Jürgensen’s term for ballets within operas).
Introduction: Wagnerism in Britain in the 1890s
Authors: Sutton Emma
Published: November 2023

The Ring,with all its gods and giants and dwarfs, its water-maidens and Valkyries, its wishing-cap, magic ring, enchanted sword, and miraculous treasure, is a drama of today, and not of a remote and fabulous antiquity. It could not have been written before the second half of the nineteenth century, because it deals with events which were only then consummating themselves.
The Pathology of Pleasure: Decadent Sensibility and Affective Art
Authors: Sutton Emma
Published: November 2023

The affective power of Wagner’s music is, notoriously, one of the most controversial aspects of his work. Amid disparate, often contradictory, assessments in the nineteenth century, its ‘emotional, exciting’ properties were almost unanimously acknowledged.2 For some, the emotive and compelling characteristics of what Baudelaire called his ‘ardent despotic’ music were a celebrated source of ecstatic aesthetic experiences; for others, evidence of Wagner’s problematic ‘designs on us’.
Antiquarianism and National Identity: Under the Hill
Authors: Sutton Emma
Published: November 2023

I know not by what mischance the writing of epistles dedicatory has fallen into disuse, whether through the vanity of authors or the humility of patrons. But the practice seems to me so very beautiful and becoming that I have ventured to make an essay in the modest art, and lay with formalities my first book at your feet. I have, it must be confessed, many fears lest I shall be arraigned of presumption in choosing so exalted a name as your own to place at the beginning of this history; but I hope that such a censure will not be too lightly passed upon me, for if I am guilty it is but of a most natural pride that the accidents of my life should allow me to sail the little pinnace of my wit under your protection....
Concluding the Cycle: Das Rheingold
Authors: Sutton Emma
Published: November 2023

Beardsley’s plans to produce a work based on Das Rheingoldwere as ambitious as those for the also incomplete Tannhiiuserproject; from April 1896 until the end of 1897, just a few months before his death, his letters include references to the prodmtion of drawings and a prose version of the music drama. In a letter of September 1896, Beardsley informed Smithers that he was writing ‘an elaborate version of Das Rheingold,called The Comedy of the Rhinegold.
The New Reign
Authors: Woolrych Austin
Published: November 2023

It will (I hope) be clear by now that Charles’s inheritance was by no means an impossible one, but that success in managing it would depend very much on his personal qualities. That was true of all monarchies in an age when the sovereign’s power of decision was so great, but Charles’s throne was particularly vulnerable because he ruled over three disparate kingdoms, and because in England successful government depended to a degree then unusual on consent. The task before him called for insight, judgement, tact, flair, and dedication. He possessed the last quality in abundance, but he was short of all the others.
Three Kingdoms in Crisis
Authors: Woolrych Austin
Published: November 2023

When Charles arrived in Edinburgh on 14 August 1641 he was delighted by the warmth of his reception. He did not yet appreciate that most Scots believed they had already won the substance of what they had fought for in the Treaty of London, and expected to secure the rest in the course of his visit. After his ceremonial entry into parliament on the 17th he made a gracious speech which seemed to confirm their hopes. But when he offered to touch the acts passed by the parliament in 1640 with his sceptre, the traditional way of conferring the royal assent, a pretext was found for requesting him to delay the ceremony. Parliament, it transpired, was not prepared to acknowledge that his assent was necessary, and he allowed the acts to be published a few days later without it. After what he had conceded earlier in the year he could hardly do otherwise, but this was more than a symbolic defeat for him.