bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Vinyl disc processing
Authors: Hughes (Revised by Robin Allen) Jim
Published: November 2023

So well established is the practice of disc record manufacture that this chapter nearly became called ‘Beyond the Melba Stone’. For the curious, the ‘Melba Stone’ was laid by Dame Nellie Melba in 1907 during the building of the old Gramophone Company’s factory at Hayes in Middlesex. The stone has since been moved and now stands in front of the modern automated vinyl disc and music cassette factory of EMI Music Services (UK), through whose courtesy the following account of vinyl disc processing took shape.
Television
Authors: Fisher Dave
Published: November 2023

The broadcast chain in television is in many ways similar to that in net work radio. Of course, pictures add an extra constraint, because in general the pictures and sound must match one another in perspective at least. This is not to say that the pictures or sound must be compromised, but rather that they should fit together harmoniously.

An image of the scene is focused on to a photo-sensitive pickup device in the camera. It is easy to imagine this as a mosaic-like set of elements (Figure 26.1). Originally cameras used vacuum pickup tubes, but modern cameras use CCD (Charge Coupled Device) sensors. In order to achieve 625-line quality, about 570 elements are needed for each line of the picture. The brightness of each element cannot, therefore, be sent to a monitor simultaneously without a very large number of wires, so they are sent sequentially, using a scanning system which produces a single signal whose voltage represents the brightness of the scene. The picture is scanned from left to right and top to bottom. Each row of elements produces one line of picture signal. When the elements from all lines have been sent, the process starts again at the top. To portray movement without jerkiness it is necessary to send 25 complete sets of elements per second; this is called a picture or frame.
Video
Authors: Webster Trevor
Published: November 2023

It might be supposed that sound for use with pictures is produced in much the same way as sound by itself, for radio or records. Although there are obvious parallels, and some of the same equipment is used, the differences are in fact very considerable. There are basically two ways of recording moving pictures, either of which can be used to originate programmes for subsequent TV broadcasting or videotape distribution. First, they can be recorded directly on to light-sensitive film inside a film camera. Second, they can be picked up by an electronic television camera (a video camera) and fed as an electrical waveform (the video signal) down wires to a videotape recorder. Sometimes these wires are only a few inches long as the recorder is mounted on the back of the camera to form a camcorder.
Legal rights and sound recordings
Authors: Rann Nick
Published: November 2023

There are a number of contributors involved in the creation of a sound recording, and each of those contributors may acquire a variety of legal rights. Anybody wishing to make, copy, or otherwise exploit sound recordings must ensure that all necessary rights have been obtained from these contributors. In order to explain more about those rights and those who enjoy them, let us look at the process of making a sound recording of pop music.
Four Songs (I958) George Newson (born I 932) [CT] Text by L. T. Smith
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

There is much to admire in Newson’s gift for writing lyrically, even romantically, and yet simply for the voice, and in his special awareness of the subtle resonances that give bloom and radiance to specific vowels at certain pitches. The composer clearly has a sensitive ear as well as a natural feeling for the vocal mechanism. The result is an unerring judgment in the creation of lines which never cause strain. The strong alliterative element in the texts evokes an appropriate response with music of instant appeal.
Five Cabaret Songs (I985) Keith Humble (horn I927)
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

These songs represent the lighter side of one of Australia’s most distinguished musicians, and they make an attractive recital item. They are immensely subtle and full of unexpected twists; they show an innate and effortless sensitivity, together with the exceptional musical polish and flair that would be expected from someone with such a broad knowledge and experience of the 20th century’s rich resources.
Dear Emily (I973) Alison Bauld (born I944) Text by William Blake and Alison Bauld
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

Alison Bauld’s tremendous flair and feeling for the theatre, based on professional experience as an actress, is evident in all her works. The musical idiom is relatively straightforward, although many modern conventions of notation are used. In the passages without time signatures, seconds are indicated (these need not be timed with a stop watch), giving the performer extra freedom.
Meditation (1960) Gunther Schuller (born 1925) Text by Gertrude Stein
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

This interesting sample of vocal writing from one of the leading composers in the United States is contained in New Vistas in Song, a splendid volume. Although the musical idiom is atonal, the extreme clarity of the writing should allow piano cues to be heard with ease, and the sinewy vocal lines give the singer much opportunity to aim and poise notes neatly. It is always pleasing to find such precision of language, and the work instantly appeals to the eye as well as to the ear.
Three Auden Songs (1983) Hans Werner Henze (horn 1926) Text by W. H. Auden
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

Today’s major composers are now returning to the medium of voice and piano after a time of comparative neglect. Many have tended to regard the piano’s resonances as unsuitable for a contemporary sound and too strongly evocative of the 19th century; they preferred to leave it in the hands of composers of a more determinedly conservative bias.
Five Songs on English Poems (1974) Daniel Manneke (born 19 39)
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

In this welcome addition to the low-voice repertory, Manneke (a Dutch composer) employs space-time notation for the first three songs. Full explanatory notes are provided in the score. The fourth song uses conventional notation and, in the last song even greater freedom is employed in notating the voice part.
Scotch Minstrelsy (I982) Judith Weir (born I954) Text adapted from Scottish folk ballads
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

The dashing wit, variety and characteristic brilliance of Scotch Minstrelsy makes it a most attractive addition to the tenor repertory. The clearly presented music (a model in this respect as all instructions are to the point and immensely helpful) even looks appetising on the page and instantly tempting to the performer.
Three Songs (I955) Donald Martino (born I 93 I) Text by James Joyce
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

These three brief songs are Webernian in the delicate conciseness and richness of expression that is concentrated within a modest framework. The composer is acutely sensitive to subtle sounds of syllables, and how they can be used as an aid to effective vocalising.
The Voice of Love (I966) Nicholas Maw (born I935) Text by Peter Porter
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

This particularly satisfying and substantial song cycle rewards the careful study required to master its difficulties. It represents the composer at his most passionate and compelling, and the eight songs provide a fine chance to display the widest ranges of mood, character and vocal timbre. Variety of timbre is especially important, as a fairly long work such as this can be made to seem dull if sung in a monochrome tone, however beautiful. A composer who writes so lusciously for the voice may suffer for it. Singers are sometimes apt to neglect the more subtle dynamics and pour out a uniformly warm mezzo-forte while they inwardly relish their own sound.
Celebration of Divine Love (I96I) Malcolm Williamson (horn I 931) Text by James McAuley
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

Malcolm Williamson’s most exciting (and neglected) song cycle is a tremendous tour de force for both singer and pianist. (The composer himself is a formidable player.) The visionary and fervently religious text is matched by music of the greatest variety of mood and texture, full of character and dynamic rhythms. Although the work runs continuously, its many subsections are clearly defined and the interest never flags.
Peripheral Visions (I984) George Nicholson (born I949)
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

It is a pleasure to find a lighthearted work which is satisfying on many different levels and is unerringly tasteful; its humour is never mis judged or heavy. Nicholson’s piece is delightful, and both a joy and a challenge to sing. As well as the usual devices found in a song written in a contemporary idiom there are a few special effects: breathiness and inhaling audibly, for example. These are clearly indicated in the music.
Cantata II -Three Lovescapes (1967) Jonathan Harvey (born 1939) Text by F. T. Prince
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

Jonathan Harvey’s substantial settings of Prince’s visionary texts are an important addition to the repertory.
La Onina, Gauguin (1978) John Casken (born 1949) Text by John Casken
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

This is one of the most exciting and powerful songs it has been my pleasure to perform. It repays every bit of the considerable effort needed to master the composer’s detailed markings and frequently innovative vocal devices. The whole soprano range is used with tremendous skill, making the cycle a marvellous vehicle for a singer of commitment and high standard of musicianship. Many of the technical feats are used with great originality and they illustrate superbly the extremely effective conception.
The Papal Chapels and Italian Sources of Polyphony during the Great Schism
Authors: Bacco Giuliano Di , Nadas John
Published: November 2023

It is our aim in the present essay to develop the documentation and ideas first presented in a study of the late fourteenth-century papacy that focused essentially on the administrative history of the papal chapels and, in particular, the early careers of the composers Johannes Ciconia and Antonio Zacara da Teramo.1 Here we wish to explore the implications of the documentary evidence even further, assessing in more detail the consequences of the presence of the papal chapels in Italy in the early years of the Great Schism (1378-1417): the creation of a musical repertory and its circulation in manu script sources of the period.
Corelli’s Orchestra
Authors: Spitzer John , Zaslaw Neal
Published: November 2023

Rome in the seventeenth century resembled Paris in several respects. Like Paris, it was a capital city. The Pope ruled as temporal and absolute sovereign over the Papal States, stretching from Rome and the Campagna across the Apennines to Bologna and on to the Adriatic. In addition, Rome functioned as the capital and administrative center for the worldwide operations of the Catholic Church. Rome, like Paris, was a magnet for wealth. Money flowed into the papal coffers from taxes and duties within the Papal States and also from the sale of ecclesiastical offices and papal dispensations. Besides the income of the Pope, money came to Rome from the religious orders, whose headquarters were located in the city, and from foreign countries that maintained embassies there.
The Orchestra in France
Authors: Spitzer John , Zaslaw Neal
Published: November 2023

In France the orchestra began in the seventeenth century as a de facto royal monopoly. Only Louis XIV, the Sun King, had the resources to combine string bands, winds, keyboards, and lutes into large, unified ensembles on an ongoing basis. The orchestra at the Academie Royale de Musique was an explicit monopoly: by the King’s edict of 1672, only the Opera was allowed to have an orchestra containing “more than six violins or other instrumentalists” (see Ch. 3). As a royal monopoly, the orchestra represented and symbolized the French monarchy and the absolutist system to the world-not only through its size, but also by its variety, discipline, repertory, and performance practices.
The Life and Times of an Eighteenth-Century Orchestra Musician
Authors: Spitzer John , Zaslaw Neal
Published: November 2023

Who was an orchestra musician in the eighteenth century? What kind of life did he lead? Where did he live? What did he wear? How much money did he make? Who were his friends? What was his social standing? Answers to questions like these vary according to individual circumstances and also with place and time. The life of a violist in Salzburg in 1720 was very different from the life of a first violinist in Milan in 1750, different again from a London oboist in 1790. Yet there were similarities too. The life of the Salzburg violist was not all that different from that of instrumentalists in Bonn or Eszterhiza or other German court Kapellen.
The Meaning of the Orchestra
Authors: Spitzer John , Zaslaw Neal
Published: November 2023

When it was born in the late seventeenth century the orchestra was a novelty. Never before had people heard music so loud, so grand, and so forceful. The orchestra, moreover, represented a new kind of social organization: a large number of people doing the same thing at the same time in precisely the same way. Because the orchestra was new and different, people found it hard to characterize in words. Sebastiano Locatelli, an Italian traveler, struggled to describe the French string band that he heard in Lyons in 1664: “The music in this region is made by, how should I say it, an assembly [radunanza] of players on violins, violas, and basses, as many as 40 or 50 at a time.
The Stimulus
Authors: Tunley David
Published: November 2023

The period between the Age of Racine and the Age of Voltaire was once described by the French writer Paul Hazard as a ‘vague tract, a sort of dubious no-man’s land in which all kinds of discoveries and unlooked-for adventures may await the explorer’. Coinciding with the declining years of Louis XIV’s reign it witnessed the resurgence of that characteristically restless European spirit which had been for a time ‘lost in contemplation’, to use Hazard’s phrase, of the graceful classical age it had created towards the middle of the seventeenth century. By the end of this century the first blows at the Sun King’s proud edifice had been struck.
Stylistic Traits in French and Italian Vocal Music of the Baroque Era
Authors: Tunley David
Published: November 2023

So far our study has attempted to uncover some of the social roots of the eighteenth-century French cantata; it is now time to turn to the major musical influences that generated its growth. Inevitably this must lead to an examination of French and Italian styles as they manifested themselves in music of the late seventeenth century, for the cantata was the result of one of the attempts in French music to reconcile the two. Not that iris the intention here to review the polemical literature which so diverted the musical public of that time-this has been adequately covered by other writers but, rather, to analyse some of the national musical characteristics which have a particular bearing upon the style of the French cantata, although space precludes anything more than a brief study of their melodic, harmonic, and structural elements.
The Early Cantata Composers (i) Jean-Baptiste Morin And The Emergence Of The Eighteenth Century French Cantata
Authors: Tunley David
Published: November 2023

To the minds of eighteenth-century writers on the subject there was no doubt that the paternity of the French cantata could be traced to Jean Baptiste Morin (1677-1745), ordinaire de la musique in the household of the Duke of Orleans. The Duke’s enthusiasm for Italian music may have been kindled by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, who taught composition to the future Regent of France,1 and, as has been mentioned earlier, the royal pupil in turn encouraged his musicians to compose and perform in the Italian style. The House of Orleans seems to have been a veritable incubator of musical Italianism in France, and it is therefore not at all surprising that the first three French composers to publish books of cantatas inspired by the Italian form were attached in some way to Philippe Ill’s household.
Performing Mr Purcell’s ‘Exotick’ Trumpet Notes
Authors: Downey Peter
Published: November 2023

On 9 November 1686 Nicholas Staggins, Master of the Music, was paid ‘for faire writeing of a composition for his Majesty’s coronation day from the originall in score the 6 parts, [and] for drawing ye said composition into forty several parts for trumpetts, hautboyes, violins, tennors, [and] bases’. While the composition itself has not survived, the payment record supplies some very illuminating information. Assuming that he was the composer rather than the arranger, Staggins’s piece, which was performed on 23 April 1685, holds the honour of being the earliest recorded example of English scoring for full Baroque orchestra, anticipating by almost five years the orchestra used by Henry Purcell in the Yorkshire feast song (Z333) of 1690. Although it is often suggested that the ‘composition’ was, in fact, one of the coronation anthems performed on that date-Purcell’s ‘My heart is inditing’ (Z30) has been proposed, despite the major scoring and textual mismatches -it seems to have been a purely orchestral work which was performed separately from the coronation service itself The casual manner in which the scoring details are given suggests that the inclusion of trumpets was not so remarkable at this time. In addition, the instruments are listed in an order which mirrors that found in similarly scored English works which date from the 1690s.
Ornamentation in the Keyboard Music of Henry Purcell and his Contemporaries
Authors: Johnstone H Diack
Published: November 2023

Purcell’s keyboard music is generally regarded as one of the less important areas of his output, and so it is, in terms of quantity at any rate; his true genius lay elsewhere, especially in his wonderful setting of English words. Nevertheless, what we do have--eight harpsichord suites, some thirty-odd miscellaneous pieces, and a mere five (or is it sixã) organ voluntaries-is by no means to be despised; some of it, indeed, is very fine, and in the manner of its performance, its ornamentation in particular, is subject to certain conventions which are not only interesting in themselves, but are still, even in these days of historically enlightened stylistic awareness, by no means universally understood.1 Time was, and not so very long ago either (as witness Thurston Dart’s edition of the Matthew Locke keyboard works published by Stainer and Bell in the late 1950s), when it was thought expedient to translate the ornament signs used by post-Restoration English composers into their nearest and rather more familiar eighteenth-century equivalents. Such a procedure is entirely unnecessary, however, in that the system of stenographic sigla used by Purcell and his contemporaries must surely be considered one of the most logical and visually coherent ever devised.
Voice Ranges, Voice Types, and Pitch in Purcell’s Concerted Works
Authors: Morris Timothy
Published: November 2023

Searching for evidence of pitch standards for secular music in the Baroque period is often like trying to find the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. Each time you think you can see it before you, and head confidently towards it, you find that it has moved on ahead of you. From every viewpoint, the evidence leads to a different conclusion. Surviving instruments often tell conflicting stories, even where the pitch of an instrument can be accurately determined. But this is often not possible-with stringed instruments, for example-and many instruments have been altered at a later date. In any case, it is usually impossible to identify the occasions on which a particular instrument was played or the music for which it was intended. To attempt to identify the pitch of vocal lines, without considering other related evidence, might seem an impossible task.
Calling Up Genius: Purcell, Roger North, and Charlotte Butler
Authors: Savage Roger
Published: November 2023

How did Dioclesian go down at its premiereã ‘It gratify’d the Expectation of Court and City.’ And King Arthurã ‘The Play and Musick pleas’d the Court and City.’ What about The Fairy-Queenã ‘The Court and Town were wonderfully satisfy’d with it.’ If we can believe John Downes, who was Dorset Garden Theatre prompter at the time, patrons in pit, box and, quite possibly, gallery as well hugely enjoyed the new ‘semi-operas’ of the early 1690s for which Purcell provided the music. That is good to know; but we know next to nothing about what it was those courtiers and citizens specifically and especially relished, or how they ‘read’ what they saw and heard. How illuminating it would be if just a dozen relevant letters, diary jottings, and memos survived to supplement the evidence of playbook, press-puff, theatre score, songsheet, act-tune collection, and the recollections of Downes himself when one is trying to call up the particular genius of those shows. One joins the band of mourners lamenting that Samuel Pepys had given up writing his shorthand diary so long before; after all, he was still alive, well, and living in Westminster in Purcell’s last years.
Purcell’s Dioclesian on the Dorset Garden Stage
Authors: Muller Julia , Muller Frans
Published: November 2023

The original title for Henry Purcell’s first semi-opera, written in 1690, was The Prophetess: or, The History of Dioclesian (Z627), It was adapted ‘after the manner of an opera’ from the Fletcher and Massinger play The Prophetess of 1622 by Thomas Betterton, actor-manager of Dorset Garden Theatre, and a full score was printed by Heptinstall the following year. After Gottfried Finger’s The Virgin Prophetess appeared in 1701, the Purcell opera was often referred to as Dioclesian, which title has also been used by the Purcell Society. A full discussion of its provenance can be found in Henry Purcell’s First SemiOpera Dioclesian which was written with the intention of contributing to a scrupulous production of this neglected work. However, it soon became clear that to stage an early opera properly, far more research would have to be done on the non-musical and non-verbal aspects of the work, including the theatre architecture, stage design, costume, gesture, choreography, and their contemporaneous connotations. Technical research into the construction of Dorset Garden Theatre, where the semi-operas were first staged, has led to new insights, and contemporary illustrations have contributed to a reconstruction of the original stage picture.
Trembleurs and Cold People: How Should They Shiverã
Authors: Sawkins Lionel
Published: November 2023

‘that exquisite piece called the freezing piece of musick’. In a report of the 1990 annual meeting of the National Early Music Association, we read that ‘the question of tempo led to a rather nebulous discussion, and the only thing that all agreed on was that tempo could never be a definite quantity despite metronome markings, ... being influenced by factors such as the type of occasion, the acoustics and the size of the performing group’. But, while the ‘factors’ just listed may sometimes be valid enough to modify tempos, they cannot be an excuse for ignoring the contemporary evidence, especially when that evidence does provide ‘definite quantities’, and may be directly linked to the composer whose music is being performed. Yet apparent ignorance of the evidence is manifest not only in many performances and recordings of French baroque music but also in relation to at least one Purcell work. Equally important to any interpretation that the composer might recognize, were he to drop in on the tercentenary celebrations of his demise, is the question of tempo relationships. At the very least, we should surely be asking: how persistent were the traditions of mensural notation and relationships in the late seventeenth century,3 and what evidence is there in prefaces and theoretical treatises of the time, especially in Purcell’s own writings, for both ‘definite’ tempos and their relationshipsã If we attempt to answer these questions, we may find that the answers to many others relating to performance practice become clearer.
Court, Government and Society in Mozart’s Vienna
Authors: Beales Derek
Published: November 2023

IN this paper I shall discuss aspects of the political, social and intellectual situation in Mozart’s Vienna-aspects which are of real importance to Mozart scholarship but which have been neglected or actually misrepresented. In particular, I shall take up certain issues that are unsatisfactorily handled in the catalogue of the great bicentenary exhibition in Vienna, Zaubertone: Mozart in Wien981-1791. My main purpose is to show what a peculiar, or exceptional, place Mozart’s Vienna was, and to suggest that his attitudes and career can be understood only by reference to that peculiarity.
Sketches during the Process of Composition: Studies of K.504 and K.414
Authors: Somfai László
Published: November 2023

IN the present state of Mozart studies-when the individual volumes of the NMA have given access to the existing sketches in their reconstructed or presumed musical chronological context, but a systematic and unbiased edition of the sketches according to the sources still awaits publication-there are two ways in which Mozart’s sketches may usefully be considered. One, of course, would be through a comprehensive and systematic study of the complete sketch material, without preconceived theories, using every kind of method to collect and classify data in order to understand the compositional process and to distinguish characteristics of Mozart’s working habits from features of individual cases.
‘To Serve the Private Pleasure’: Expression and Form in the String Ouartets
Authors: Allanbrook Wye J
Published: November 2023

THE proper end of chamber music, states Heinrich Christoph Koch in the Musikalisches Lexikon, was originally ‘to serve the private pleasure of the regent or the court’,1 an end that involved certain predictable consequences for the development of the chamber style. Since chamber works were intimate entertainments for the connoisseur, they could support ‘more development and finer nuance’ than could the public monuments composed for those other two important eighteenth-century venues, the church and the theatre.
Catalogue Arias and the ‘Catalogue Aria’
Authors: Platoff John
Published: November 2023

‘SUCCESS has a thousand fathers, while failure is an orphan’.1 This saying may help us understand the widespread interest in proposing models or antecedents—’fathers’, if you will—for Leporello’s ‘Catalogue Aria’ in Act r of Da Ponte and Mozart’s Don Giovanni. In a recent history of opera, for example, it is stated that a patter catalogue aria in Haydn’s Orlando paladino ‘must surely be ranked as the forerunner of Leporello’s ... aria’:2
Introduction
Authors: Dunsby Jonathan
Published: November 2023

Because for the first time in my publications I write deliberately in the first person, I begin with a story that seems to me to stamp the whole enterprise. ‘Whole’ is not written extravagantly, for after all this is a deliberately controlled number of pages, readable in one sitting by those who have the luxury of it, or in snatched time by busy students or people on commuter trains. The modern academic tendency to equate number of pages with extent of thought is some thing I do not claim to comprehend or find historical evidence for.
Venice
Authors: Talbot Michael
Published: November 2023

By the early eighteenth century, when Vivaldi was just beginning his career, Venice’s once considerable economic power had ebbed to a point where culture rather than trade or manufacture was her most characteristic field of activity. Like a magnet she drew visitors in huge numbers from all over Europe, who observed her institutions, admired her buildings, wondered at her ceremonies, thronged to her theatres and gaming houses, and frequently departed with a memento, perhaps a painting or a musical score. The dependence of Venetian painting and music on foreign patronage, which we can date very roughly from the beginning, around 1660, of that custom known as the Grand Tour, obviously benefited the Republic’s exchequer and for a long while stimulated creativity, although eventually it was bound to devitalize the arts by cutting them off from the roots of their inspiration. Just as the favourite genres of settecento Venetian painters – portraits and views of the city – seem ‘made for export’, so too composers came to put more and more of their effort into readily exportable types of music (for example, the opera and the concerto) at the expense of genres serving local needs.
Introduction
Authors: Campbell Murray , Greated Clive
Published: November 2023

The sound of applause dies away, and the audience in the concert hall waits in expectant silence. The pianist seats himself at the instrument; the conductor’s score is open at the first page of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.5. As the dramatic piano arpeggios well up out of a majestic sustained orchestral chord, the genius of the composer, the technical and interpretative skills of the performers and the rapt attention of the listeners combine once again to weave that magic spell we call music.

Immune to the spell, a curious visitor from outer space sits unobtrusively at the back of the hall observing this fascinating human activity. Focusing his superior vision on the orchestral players in turn, he notes that the majority are scraping tensed horsehair back and forth over metal wires attached to wooden boxes of various sizes. Others are blowing air into or over tubes of wood or metal; one is hammering a plastic sheet stretched on a metal hemisphere. The soloist is operating a complicated system of wooden levers whose purpose is not immediately apparent. The melee is controlled, it seems, by hand signals from the conductor. Consulting the dials on a little black box which he is holding, the visitor detects small but very rapid fluctuations in the pressure of the air in the hall. These fluctuations have no obvious pattern; he dismisses the speculation that they are perhaps connected with the purpose of the ceremony, which remains obscure to him.
Hearing musical sounds
Authors: Campbell Murray , Greated Clive
Published: November 2023

In Chapter 1 we saw that the player of a musical instrument creates sound by setting the instrument vibrating; the sound is then transmitted out wards in the form of a wave. What happens when the wave reaches the ear of a listener is the subject of the present chapter.

It is worth remarking on the complexity of the task faced by the human ear in a musical situation. In the first chord of the ‘Emperor’ Concerto seventy instruments may be playing simultaneously, at eight nominally different pitches. Sound waves generated by these instruments converge on the listener.
Anatomy of a musical note
Authors: Campbell Murray , Greated Clive
Published: November 2023

At the opening of the overture to Wagner’s ‘Rienzi’ a solo trumpet plays a single note, starting pianissimo, swelling to forte and dying away. On the title page of Deryck Cooke’s book The Language of Music (Cooke 1959) this brief extract is quoted as we have shown in Fig. 3.1, with an enigmatic question mark appended. The question which Cooke implies, and which his book courageously attempts to answer, is a very fundamental one: what did Wagner intend to convey to his audience by this note, and how does the audience understand it?
Music since the First World War
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

This survey of the most significant modern composers and their techniques has become a standard work on the constantly shifting musical developments during the greater part of the twentieth century.
Anton Webern
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

‘About 1911 I wrote the Bagatelles for String Quartet (Op. 9), all very short pieces, lasting a couple of minutes - perhaps the shortest music so far. Here I had the feeling, “When all twelve notes have gone by, the piece is over”…. Inmy sketchbook I wrote out the chromatic scale and crossed off the individual notes. Why? Because I had convinced myself, “This note has been there already”. … The inner ear decided quite rightly that the man who wrote.
Three Individualists
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

Michael Tippett (born 1905), Olivier Messiaen (born 1908) and Elliott Carter {born 1908) are all highly regarded for their integrity and individuality. They have little enough in common with their most prominent fellow-countrymen and virtually nothing, in terms of style, with each other, beyond an ability to shape and direct highly or namented melodic lines in the context of substantial musical forms.
A Composer’s Point Of View
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

As a musician my sharpest sense is that of sound. I cannot help listening to things. Living as I do in the country, I notice every year when the nightingales have begun to sing again in the wood down the road. They sing, of course, in the daytime but I am more often indoors playing the piano. So it is at night, when other birds are silent, that I hear them with startling clearness, especially when the night is still. The peculiar, liquid tone of their song can sound like someone sobbing from heart-break, which makes us respond deep down inside. It may only be for a moment, when some quality in the night and the sound of the bird-song combine to make a specially intense image. At such time we respond. It is as though another world had spoken by some trick of correspondence between the outside and the inside. For the ‘thing’ inside only works if the proper image is offered from the outside.
Art and Anarchy
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

When listening to the 1960 Reith Lectures on BBC Radio (before I read any of them) I felt I was continually stimulated by new bits of knowledge—that is, new to me. Thus almost a whole lecture centred on the technique of ascription in cases of unsigned or debatable paintings, and round the extreme forms of connoisseurship to which this problem, or passion, of ascription might lead. This was all so new and interesting to me, as a musician and not a painter, I probably paid more attention to it than to the argument deduced from it: which was that we are in danger of being persuaded by this connoisseurship to overvalue the fragmentary and immediate sketch above the finished and studied painting; and that, as a consequence, we tend to ask only for the fragmentary and immediate in contemporary art: thus reinforcing, as by a kind of concealed patronage, the general marginal condition of art in our time.
Schoenberg
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

For Schoenberg, at least (as for Freud) there was never any doubt. The bitterness of the struggle around his name is witness to his entire lack of compromise. Like Freud, he was an idealist driven by a daemon. As with Freud, his daemon drove him down a road of over-simplification, towar a dogma-the law of the twelve-tone system. Like Freud, I think, it was just the consequent sense of estrangement from fellow professionals and the public that caused him to draw the bonds of his pupil circle so tight. That he exercised a tyrannic fascination over them all is not in doubt. That they induced in him a God-the-father attitude is equally apparent. He paid a heavy price to his daemon for his gifts. But it is not the prices they pay but the work they do which determines the scientists’, the artists’ permanent value. If we keep our eyes firmly fixed on what these controversial figures were being driven to do and refuse to be side-tracked by prejudice or gossip, I think we can begin to see certain constants. The sequence runs something like this: a revolt against Victorian (or, if you prefer, bourgeois) complacency and sham; a passionate search for truth, however distasteful; a dogmatic attitude to the truth uncovered; a need for an inner esoteric brotherhood of initiates.
Holst
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

When Holst’s daughter, Imogen, and I were students at the Royal College of Music in the early 1920s, Holst was at the centre”point of his public success. This success had been occasioned by the appearance in 1919 of The Planets (without ‘Venus’ and ‘Neptune’) and in the following year The Hymn of Jesus. Both works were publicly performed in London by the Royal Philharmonic Society. The Hymn of Jesus was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece. According to The Times, Holst had ‘achieved the position, rare for an Englishman, of being a really popular composer’. Such success disconcerted him: he wrote to a friend, ‘Woe to you when all men speak well of your But for those of us embarking on a musical career at that time, it was all part of the exciting spectrum of English musical life—later to be described as a ‘second Renaissance’ in English music.
The Score
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

If you look at a printed copy of one of my large-scale works, such as one of the symphonies, you are likely to regard it as a finished entity. It has many pages; it has many thousands of notes. Now those notes have been invented by me as a series of instructions to enable people with the requisite skills to perform the work. I have, in principle, nothing to do with the performance: my concern is simply with invention. The instructions must of course be accurate, precise to the last possible detail—though on reflection that last detail is not totally realizable. There are limits to which music can be considered an exact science; there are many pitfalls in the intermediary processes between invention and realization. Far more so than the context and manner in which a painter’s canvas is exhibited—size of room, companion pictures (if any), methods of lighting, and so forth—music enters a somewhat indefinite region when it is performed. Many factors will remain outside the composer’s control: the acoustics of the hall, the extent of the performers’ accomplishment and commitment to the highest ideals, and so on. In theory, the matter could be solved partially by a series of legal injunctions, supetvised by the composer and publisher while still alive, and by appointed trustees during a designated period after his or her death. Some have taken that course. But what an atmosphere it creates! The guide-lines I am offering here are meant not to restrict but to stimulate: to give some background information that facilitates an informed approach to the scores and helps illuminate certain matters of style.
The Grande chapelle and Musical Life at the Habsburg- Burgundian Court
Authors: Meconi Honey
Published: November 2023

Now that it seems unlikely that La Rue was the same musician as Peter wander Straten, the Habsburg-Burgundian court assumes even greater significance in his career. Placing La Rue in context within the court chapel requires an understanding of the chapel’s functions and duties, an overview of his colleagues who were also composers of polyphonic music, some thought as to what music the chapel had at its disposal, and a re-evaluation of the received understanding of La Rue’s significance to the chapel and its rulers. Each of these components is treated in turn in this chapter.
Aspects of the Sacred Music
Authors: Meconi Honey
Published: November 2023

Sacred music occupies the largest portion of La Rue’s output, and was even noted in his epitaph as being responsible for his ‘noble name’. We see here some of his most significant contributions to the changing face of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century music: the move to a texture for more than four voices, pioneering especially in works for six voices; the frequent exploration of ranges outside the gamut, with a unique emphasis on low ranges and an evident pleasure in the sound of many low voices together; a preference not merely for imitation but for strict canon; an apparently systematic exploration of the possibilities of parody technique, including the use of all motifs of a polyphonic model; a (for us, frustrating) fondness for obscure models, most often drawn from chant, that are then further disguised by a penchant for paraphrase and ongoing motivic transformation; and an evident desire to fill perceived gaps in the polyphonic liturgy of the court.
Aspects of the Secular Music
Authors: Meconi Honey
Published: November 2023

La Rue’s secular music presents a very different picture from his sacred music, and not merely because the latter was used for devotional purposes. In contrast to the masses and mass movements, the secular music seems to have circulated much less widely, even though there are slightly more total pieces (probably between forty one and forty-three secular works, in contrast to a probable thirty-eight or thirty nine masses and mass movements, though the sacred pieces are obviously far more commanding in length).
Laments and Operas
Authors: Williams Peter
Published: November 2023

Since Chapter 2 has advanced well into the eighteenth century for certain keyboard music, Chapter 3 must return to the point at which music for voices also began to make systematic use of the chromatic fourth. with respect to both practice and theory, a watershed period appears to have been the 1590s: music for keyboards and for voices now turns to the chromatic fourth more regularly, and a theorist briefly refers to it.
Mozart
Authors: Williams Peter
Published: November 2023

From his earliest work to his latest, Mozart left striking examples of the chromatic fourth, conventional in broad terms but inventive in harmony, melodic paraphrase, and Ajfekt. Several early works provide typical examples and suggest some of the background influences on the young composer. The first minuetto of the Sonata in F major Kr 3 has its melody coloured chromatically in Haydn’s style, and is marked at this point by being slurred.
The Sorrows of Richard Wagner
Authors: Tambling Jeremy
Published: November 2023

Steeped in sorrows and grandeur, like the nineteenth-century that he so perfectly epitomises, thus does the intellectual figure of Richard Wagner appear to me. Mann, Pro and Contra Wagner Relationship is everything. And if you want to give it a more precise name, it is ambiguity. Mann, Doctor Faustus In Doctor Faustus (1947), the party of visitors who go to Linderhof, Ludwig Il’s pastiche palace in Bavaria, call the nineteenth century ‘dull and melancholy’. Linderhof Mann describes in his Wagner lectures as exemplifying the Romantic ‘primacy of the night’ over the day, this being ‘expressed in the very proportion of the rooms’ (Pro and Contra Wagner, p. 125).
Puccini and the Swish of Tosca’s Skirts
Authors: Tambling Jeremy
Published: November 2023

Puccini was promoted by Ricordi as the successor to Verdi. But the differences between the two reflect a shift in Italian politics and discourse. One way of describing the differences comes in Mosco Carner’s view of the two composers, which is everywhere present in all his writings on Puccini. He takes Verdf s timbre as masculine, Puccini’s as feminine.
Swan Lake
Authors: Wiley Roland John
Published: November 2023

At the time of Tchaikovsky’s death, preparations for Zolushka were under way. The new ballet, with the Christmas season to follow, meant that 17and 22 February 1894 were the earliest feasible dates to give a Tchaikovsky memorial concert, considering that all its numbers were to be staged, some for the first time. There are hints that theinitial steps to mount Swan Lake in St Petersburg were taken while Tchaikovsky was still alive. Costume drawings by Ponomaryov for Odile and for a swan maiden survive from 1892. A sketch of the first lakeside scene in Petipa’s hand suggests that he had begun to work out the initial appearance of the swans before Ivanov was assigned that scene for the memorial concert.1 And music orchestrated by Drigo from Tchaikovsky’s piano pieces for use in the revival was published with the indication that thecomposer himself approved the choice.2
An Instrument for All Classes
Authors: Atlas Allan W
Published: November 2023

In 1860, the London music publisher, J. J. Ewer issued a catalogue of the music available in his firm’s large circulating library.1 Included under the heading ‘Music for the Concertina’-and Ewer meant the Wheatstone English concertina-were no fewer than 447 items by thirteen composers and arrangers. And though the overwhelming majority of the titles were for concertina and piano, there were also works for unaccompanied concertina, concertina and flute, concertina and harp, two concertinas (with and without piano), and even three concertinas.2 The repertoire, moreover, was extremely diverse, extending from large-scale concertos, sonatas, and ‘Fantasias on ... ‘,
The Concertina on the Concert-Platform: Players—Repertoire—Reception
Authors: Atlas Allan W
Published: November 2023

On 18 July 1831, a child-prodigy guitarist, the 8-year-old Giulio Regondi, having already won critical acclaim at Paris one year earlier, made his London debut at the Adelphi theatre.1 The reviews were glowing. The Harmonicon wrote: The reviewer for the Athenaeum was equally impressed, referring to his ‘refined taste and judgment . . . exquisite taste and feeling . . . Paganini . . . has expressed to us his most unqualified astonishment and delight at young Regondi’s performances’.3
Notes on the Music in the Edition
Authors: Atlas Allan W
Published: November 2023

This final chapter is a collection of miscellaneous comments on the five pieces included in the Edition. The comments may include (1) biographical notes about the composer; (2) information pertaining to such matters as the background of the work, notable performances, or its reception; (3) remarks about performance problems; and, in the case of No. 1, (4) references to borrowed material. In short, I have written about whatever it is in each work that seems interesting.
The Making of a Composer II
Authors: Brown David
Published: November 2023

T Might Seem There Could Be No Chance That A Composer whose background had included no formal training in technique, whose skill in many basic compositional tasks was still patently defective, and whose original compositions were as few in number as mostly they were slight in content, should gain a hearing in what was still the only series of professional orchestral concerts in Russia.
St John’s Night on the Bare Mountain: More Songs
Authors: Brown David
Published: November 2023

Rimsky-Korsakov’s memory was far from faultless, but this provides some of the best overall information we have on Musorgsky’s musical life in the period following the creation of Savishna. Its glimpse into the situation within the kuchka confirms what earlier evidence had suggested: that though it still convened, as a coherent group it had fallen apart and that, as the two youngest members, Rimsky and Musorgsky were now looking more to each other for stimulus and support.
Khovanshchina
Authors: Brown David
Published: November 2023

T Is Said that In 1682 The Future Tsar Peter The Great, on hearing of a challenge to his authority, uttered a single word: ‘Khovanshchina!’ The word is untranslatable, but in the context in which it was uttered it probably meant: ‘The Khovansky plot!’ Peter was a mere ten years old, though in physical stature and mental maturity more like sixteen, and a variety of people were struggling for power and control. To become absolute Tsar,1 he would need to dispose of such challenges. During the years following he did exactly that.