bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Zenith of the Cantatas Popularity
Authors: Tunley David
Published: November 2023

It was three years after the appearance of Clérambault’s cantatas of 1710 that the anonymous critic in the Mercure de France was to complain that society was being ‘suffocated by cantatas’ (see Chapter 1), and it may well have been the quality of his works which led to the mounting enthusiasm for the form throughout France during the next twenty years. The third decade of the century witnessed the pinnacle of the cantata’s popularity, and while some of the finest examples had been written much earlier, the form as a whole was now borne along on the rising tide of that musical activity which was outlined in the first chapter of this study.
The First Performance of Purcell’s Funeral Music for Queen Mary
Authors: Wood Bruce
Published: November 2023

Purcell’s Funeral Music has suffered the same sad fate as Albinoni’s Adagio-attaining classic status in a guise which is in one way or another thoroughly bogus. But unlike the Albinoni, it is at the same time the object of assiduous efforts to perform it, and particularly to record it, in the most authentic manner possible-an ironic comment on the uneasy relationship between the recording industry and scholarship.
An Interpretation of Musical Dreams: Towards a Theory of the Mozart Piano Concerto Cadenza
Authors: Drabkin William
Published: November 2023

THIS essay considers a single aspect of Mozart performing practice, one that has received rather less attention than it has deserved in the recent search for authentic performing styles: the question of what the soloist should play immediately after the 6-4 chord that interrupts the final tutti in the first movement, i.e. the cadenza.1 This is potentially a wide field of enquiry. Most sources indicate only the point at which the cadenza occurs, without specifying what should actually be played;2 this implies that it is the performer’s task to devise a stretch of appropriate music, or find someone else to do the job.
Learned Style and the Rhetoric of the Sublime in the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony
Authors: Sisman Elaine R
Published: November 2023

ON 30 December 1780, Mozart wrote to his father from Munich that the third act of Idomeneo was nearly finished, and that it ‘will turn out to be at least as good as the first two-in fact, I believe, infinitely better-and I think that it may be said with truth,finis corona! opus’. That the end crowns the work is surely one of the most historically significant features of his ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, which, with its density of musical utterance in the finale, looks forward to such ‘teleological’ works as Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth symphonies. But the mere fact of a weighty conclusion has been less important in the reception of the work than the high seriousness of fugal technique impinging upon a sonata design, especially the dazzling display of double fugue and canon in the coda. Mozart’s last symphony has not lacked for interpreters, among the most recent being A. Peter Brown and Neal Zaslaw.2 This study seeks to refocus the enquiry into the :Jupiter’ finale by revising the terms of discussing the ‘learned style’.
When Mozart Revises: the Case of Guglielmo in Cosìfan tutte
Authors: Heartz Daniel
Published: November 2023

OF the seven completed operas from Mozart’s last decade the composer revised Idomeneo, Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni for productions subsequent to the first, mainly to accommodate different singers. He had, apparently, nothing to do with the several revivals of Die Enifuhrung aus dem Serail staged in Vienna and elsewhere while he still lived. In the case of the last three operas, of 1790-1, he did not live long enough to witness further productions; and only on the first of them, Gosz fan tutte, can he be seen performing radical surgery before the first production.
On revient toujours: Satie’s Last Ballets
Authors: Whiting Steven Moore
Published: November 2023

On 23 January 1920 Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, and Philippe Soupault-directors of the new avant-garde review Littérature hosted an event to honour the arrival in Paris of Tristan Tzara, the Romanian Jew who, four years earlier, had helped to found Dada at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and who was now, for the moment, the uncontested leader of the movement.
Vivaldi
Authors: Talbot Michael
Published: November 2023

Vivaldi has emerged during the last decades as a truly major composer of the early eighteenth-century. Taking account of recent research, to which he himself has made important contributions-including the discovery in 1973 of an unknown set of violin sonatas-Michael Talbot examines the life and works of this remarkable musician in their Venetian, Italian, and international settings.
The instrumental music
Authors: Talbot Michael
Published: November 2023

Vivaldi’s music for instruments falls into three broad genres: sonata, concerto and sinfonia. If one takes the catalogue of works in Appendix B as the basis of computation, discounting variants and excluding lost and incompletely preserved works, one arrives at a total of 92 sonatas (including two works with lute entitled ‘Trio’ and the Sinfonia al Santo Sepolcro, which is generically a sonata), 474 concertos and 14 sinfonias. This count includes some works recognized by many as spurious and – perhaps rather artificially – sinfonias not preserved independently of the larger vocal work to which all, presumably, originally belonged. By and large, I have followed Ryom’s system of classification, but a word of warning is needed: Ryom’s criteria of authenticity are bibliographical rather than stylistic, which means that provided that at least one original source names Vivaldi as the composer, the attribution is likely to stand regardless of any musical incongruity, unless another composer’s name appears in a concordant source whose reliability is thought at least equal. Without doubt, several unauthentic works are listed by Ryom as genuine. Conversely, one concerto (RV Anh. 91, for violin and cello) is regarded by Ryom as of uncertain authorship despite its evident (to me) genuineness. For statistical purposes, however, I shall treat as genuine all works presented as such in the most recent Ryom catalogue.
Playing in tune
Authors: Campbell Murray , Greated Clive
Published: November 2023

In this chapter we consider the reasons why specific intervals and scales are used as the basis for musical composition in most Western music and also the significance of tuning variations in musical performance. We have already seen that pitch is essentially determined by frequency, although loudness also plays a minor role. The question is, why do certain combinations of frequencies sound more pleasing to the ear than others? This whole subject is one which is still quite unsettled and it is known that the answer as to whether a particular interval sounds consonant or dissonant to a listener is very much a question of musical training. However, in the Western world at least, certain intervals, namely the octave, perfect fifth, and major and minor thirds, are generally considered as consonant provided that the notes are tuned within certain limits.
Bowed and plucked stringed instruments
Authors: Campbell Murray , Greated Clive
Published: November 2023

In this chapter we shall study the bowed and plucked members of the chordophone family. By far the most important group in this section is the violin family, so this will be considered first in some detail. The violin family originated in Italy during the Renaissance (1400–1600) alongside another similar group of instruments known as the viols. The violins did not evolve from the viols, but rather the two groups emerged from similar sources, the violins coming about a century later. In the early years the great composers wrote prolifically for both groups of instruments and there was keen rivalry between them. Gradually the violins, with their more powerful sound, found increasing favour amongst composers and virtuoso performers until eventually they reigned supreme for symphonic music.
Igor Stravinsky
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

‘In borrowing a form already established and consecrated, the creative artist is not in the least restricting the manifestationsof his personality. On the contrary, it is more detached, and stands out better, when it moves within the limits of a convention.’’
The Nameless Hero: Reflections On A Child Of Our Time
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

When any of you hear A Child of Our Tune for the first time, the most obvious thing to strike you will be the five Negro spirituals, which come at certain important moments in the story. I might call this the folk element in the work—folk-music and folk-poetry. The spirituals are appropriate only because the whole oratorio is not so much the record of an individual or personally peculiar experience, but of a common, or folk experience. What our forefathers might have called, even, a mythological experience. There are indeed ancient myths very similar to the underlying story of A Child of Our Time. Mythological heroes usually had names, though not really personal ones. (Apollo, for instance, probably means the wild apple.) But contemporary myths just have no names. A Child of Our Time, from its very title, has the anonymity of ‘The Unknown Soldier’, on the faceless Cenotaph. There was once a real story behind A Child of Our Time, just as there was a real soldier, whose body is buried at Westminster Abbey. We can never know the Unknown Soldier’s name-and whoever in fact played out the drama of A Child of Our Time to its tragic end, there is no name in the oratorio text.
The Resonance Of Troy: Essays And Comment Aries On King Priam
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

In 1956, two continental theatrical companies came to London. One was the Berliner Ensemble with plays and productions of Bertolt Brecht. I found this visit exciting. I had read Brecht and his theories about his epic theatre, but had never seen the results on the stage. So it was a rewarding experience. The second company was that of Jean-Louis Barrault, and I saw their production of Paul Claudel’s Christophe Colombe, with music by Milhaud. This also exercised a decisive influence on me at a time when I was still searching for the right material for a second opera.
The Stage
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

My first direct experience of professional opera was when I was a student in the 1920s and took part as an extra in a performance of Die Meist.ersinger at Covent Garden. Standing there amongst an immense chorus, I was impressed first of all by the sheer size and depth of the stage. What also became imprinted on my memory was the image of the man in the prompt—box-only visible to us performers—continuously conducting and mouthing words. The dimensions of the Covent Garden stage affected my thinking when, decades later, I embarked on The Midsummer Marriage. Maybe I tended too much then to discount the possibilities of those smaller theatres where, as it has turned out, all my operas have since been presented with some success: though; to be fair, regional opera companies in Britain had not acquired the stature they have now.
Madrigals, Songs, and Sacred Music
Authors: Williams Peter
Published: November 2023

Singers improvising music and composers notating it must always have known that they could respond effectively to (attract attention to) a text by introducing notes outside the prevailing mode or key. The later sixteenth century’s printed vocal music—a massive and dominating repertory—developed such chromaticism explicitly and systematically, producing both chromatic lines that wandered through the keys and wandering harmonies that produced chromatic lines. A German theorist of 1600 commenting on chromatics in music of Lassus (seep. 60) was merely identifying expressive out-of mode notes long known about and explored much farther than he knew.
Nineteenth-century Stage Music
Authors: Williams Peter
Published: November 2023

The long, slow falling bass line of C Bb Ab G for the opening chords of Mendelssohn’s Overture to Ruy Blas is archaic enough to signify a period tale, the musical equivalent of ‘Once upon a time .. .’, as too, perhaps, in the ‘Scotch’ Symphony. 1 The harmonies and their portentous scoring in Ruy Blas put one in the right frame of mind for the play that follows, and when Mendelssohn chromaticizes the bass for a dramatic theme later in the overture (Ex. 9.1), he has found what is probably his most original chromatic fourth.
Some Later Reminiscences
Authors: Williams Peter
Published: November 2023

This chapter is something of a scrapbook, a brief selection of unexceptional (if often unique) examples taken from music after Wagner and before 1950. They are offered hesitantly because, more often than is the case with earlier music, not everyone will hear a chromatic fourth in them or agree that it might be there even ‘accidentally’. But I think that the examples in this chapter give at least the glimpse of a musical thread unravelling after more than three hundred years; and with luck, others alerted to the theme will hear better examples than mine, particularly as many areas of twentieth-century music are barely represented here.
Ivanov’s First Ballets
Authors: Wiley Roland John
Published: November 2023

Known by any other name, such as ‘Lise and Colin’, ‘The Deceived Old Woman’, or ‘Vain Precautions’, and despite local variants in matters of names and staging, Dauberval’s ballet has always turned on the same plot. Girl loves boy, but is engaged by her avaricious mother to a rich but foolish rival. Mother berates daughter for persisting in her love, and keeps her locked up to protect her virtue. This is the vain precaution (in Russian the title is in the singular), for when the mother lets down her guard, which allows the beloved to enter the house and hide, it leads to a tryst. The couple are discovered, and the hint of compromise implicit in their meeting confounds the matchmaking, whereupon girl and boy are al¬ lowed to marry.
Krasnoe Selo
Authors: Wiley Roland John
Published: November 2023

Ivanov’s duties in the theatre at Krasnoe Selo involved making ready two or three ballet presentations a week in a season which could last from late June to early August. They were typically divertissements made up of numbers from a broad repertoire, current to long unperformed, which drew on his extraordinary memory.
The Nutcracker
Authors: Wiley Roland John
Published: November 2023

The popularity of The Nutcracker today is so removed from the negative response to its first production that we do not suspect, let alone are we concerned about, the work’s long road to respectability. The ballet and the mores surrounding it have changed: it has become a Christmas ritual, an idea which had no particular currency in the imperial theatres, and we accept it in versions with significant adjustments in the story.
Between The Nutcracker and Swan Lake
Authors: Wiley Roland John
Published: November 2023

On 12 December 1892, six days after the first performance of The Nut¬ cracker, Vsevolozhsky sent a memorandum to the Minister of the Imperial Court:
St Petersburg
Authors: Poznansky Alexander
Published: November 2023

During what turned out to be our last meeting in this world, one that I remember especially clearly, I persisted in renewing a topic of conversation I had already raised repeatedly with Pyotr Ilyich concerning his opera The Maid of Orleans. The charming first two acts of this opera had been a great success in their time, but the second half of the opera was considerably inferior to them and even spoiled one’s general impression of the opera. Neither Joan’s scene with Dunois, nor the scene in the cathedral, nor the Finale with Joan’s execution had been successful. All this I expressed frankly to Tchaikovsky, urging him to rework the second part of the opera. I spoke enthusiastically and warmly of the beauties of the beginning of the opera, and hummed for Pyotr Ilyich the melodies from my favourite passages, such as, for example: the marvellous hymn in the first scene; the lovely song of the minstrels in the second scene, Tn unbroken file we all hasten towards the grave’; the Cardinal’s arioso during the peal of thunder after Joan’s speech at court: ‘One must keep silent before the Word of Heaven!’ Tchaikovsky became interested in what I was saying.
Illness
Authors: Poznansky Alexander
Published: November 2023

Upon returning home early on Thursday morning, Tchaikovsky felt the first signs of a stomach disorder, which continued throughout the night. Not suspecting anything dangerous in the developing illness, which Pyotr Ilyich put down to a simple upset stomach, he took the notorious purgative Hunyadi-Janos, which, according to the doctor, can have an extremely bad effect on the stomach during cholera; this remedy, as it turned out, only added fat to the fire. By morning Tchaikovsky still felt well enough to set out to visit Eduard Napravnik; but before reaching the home of the latter he was compelled to return home in a cab, having begun to feel ill.
Randy Newman’s Americana
Authors: Winkler Peter
Published: November 2023

This essay is a study of the musical style of Randy Newman, one of the most intriguing singer-songwriters in the United States today. Since Newman’s is hardly a household name, let me begin with a biographical note. Born in New Orleans in 1943, Randy Newman moved to Southern California at the age of five and has lived there ever since. While still a teenager he became staff songwriter for a small publishing company, and in 1966 achieved his first commercial success with a song recorded by Judy Collins, ‘I Think It’s Going to Rain Today’. He began recording for Warner Brothers/Reprise in 1968, and has released an album every two or three years since then. Except for one hit, ‘Short People’ (1977), his music has appealed to a relatively small but devoted following. Unlike many contemporary songwriters, Newman is classically trained, and is a skilled orchestrator who writes his own arrangements, as well as arrangements for other artists and occasional film scores.
Popular Music Analysis and Musicology: Bridging the Gap
Authors: Middleton Richard
Published: November 2023

Since their beginnings, popular music studies have conducted an implicit (sometimes explicit) dialogue with musicology. To be sure, the musicological side of this conversation has more often than not been marked by insult, incomprehension or silence; and popular music scholars for their part have tended to concentrate on musicology’s deficiencies. But musicology is changing (more about this later); at the same time, recent work on popular music suggests a new confidence, manifesting itself in part in a willingness to engage with and adapt mainstream methods. I believe each needs the other.
Die Meistersinger: Wagner’s Exemplary Lesson
Authors: Goehr Lydia
Published: November 2023

Soon after the tenor began the ‘Prize Song,’ I heard a quick drawn breath and turned to my aunt. Her eyes were closed, but the tears were glistening in her cheeks, and I think, in a moment more, they were in my eyes as well. It never really died, then—the soul which can suffer so excruciatingly and so interminably; it withers to the outward eye only; like the strange moss which can lie on a dusty shelf half a century and yet, if placed in water, grows green again.
The Indian Subcontinent
Authors: Fletcher Peter
Published: November 2023

Of all the civilizations that evolved in the wake of the agrarian revolution, that of India has proved the most durable. Hinduism, the glue that bonded India ‘s diversity of peoples and beliefs, had its origins in pre-Aryan times, and is still a major social indeed, in India today, ancient rituals are still to be observed accompanied by chant in the Sāmavedic tradition, dating back to the second millennium BC (see pp. 102–3). Ageing men may still forsake family and worldly goods to become sādhus: eternal wanderers, in search of spiritual, who carry but a bowl, a staff and a blanket. Cows are still venerated to the extent that they have right of way on major roads. Highly intelligent medical men may deny all the science they ever learned to drink the muddy waters of the sacred Ganges and so purify their souls. Today, throughout the world, and in capital cities, exquisite performances of music and dance take place, aspects of which were first described in the Natyāshāstrā, a treatise on drama com piled during the first half of the first millennium AD.
Cultural Mix in Latin America
Authors: Fletcher Peter
Published: November 2023

The appropriation of the Americas by Europeans was one of the most significant occurrences in human history. It marked the first stage of European hegemony over a large part of the planet. It involved the near elimination of urban, agrarian, and hunter-food gathering societies that had evolved over some 2,000 years, in two entire continents. It brought into the same environment peoples of African, Asian, and European stocks. within a period of little more than fifty years, the New World became host to a lasting mix of peoples, the interaction of which-or lack of it-has had profound consequences for the history of humankind. Such interaction has also profoundly affected the subsequent. course of music. The early colonization of Latin America involved an extraordinary degree of serendipity. When Christopher Columbus, an Italian, alighted on the island of San Salvador in the Bahamas in 1492, he believed he had reached the mainland of Asia; he therefore referred to the native inhabitants as ‘Indians ‘.
Africans North of Mexico
Authors: Fletcher Peter
Published: November 2023

It is some indication of the degree of racial segregation that has characterized US history that US Africans are still referred to as ‘black ‘. Throughout Latin America, there was a long history of intermarriage between Europeans, Africans, and American Indians: in Brazil and the Caribbean in particular there developed large mixed populations. In the northern USA, by contrast, marriage between peoples of European and African descent was-·as it has remained-comparatively rare. A survey conducted throughout the USA in 1970 showed that only 1.5 per cent of every 1,000 US marriages were between blacks and whites; in 1990, the figure had only risen to 4 out of every 1,000.1 In the plantation states, during colonial times, a rather different situation developed. Particularly in the area around Chesapeake there was a shortage of women, both African and European: this gender imbalance, coupled with the harshness of frontier life and the need to procreate, caused n1ixed marriages to become more com1non there than in the North. To colonial whites, however, intermarriage between Africans and Europeans threatened the continuance of slavery, for slavery was justified on the presumed inequality of the two ‘races ‘. Early US legislators decided, therefore, that any person with even a drop of black blood should have the same legal status as a pure African.
The Twisted Genius and the Dinkum Aussie
Authors: Bird John
Published: November 2023

Ferruccio Busoni was in his thirty-seventh year when he encountered Grainger. Italian born and German influenced, this charismatic figure was already being accorded respect and often awe in cultural centres as widely separated as Boston and Moscow. As a composer he has never been given the recognition that some have considered his due, but as a pianist it is generally regarded that he took his art to unprecedented heights. His career as a touring virtuoso had brought him to England in 1903.
Shostakovich’s Literary Style
Authors: Savenko Svetlana
Published: November 2023

The writings of composers represent material of enduring interest. As is well known, Schumann, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, Prokofiev, and a whole host of other musicians were also active as journalists, philosophers, poets, or librettists, and their literary legacies have traditionally been made the subject of scholarly enquiry along with their musical compositions. It is also hard to overestimate the importance of personal writings such as letters and diaries for establishing a rounded picture of the creative personality. It should be noted, however, that composers’ writings are usually treated as biographical material rather than as works of art in their own right, and are only rarely subjected to scholarly analysis—of the kind which attempts to make a connection between the everyday, mainly colloquial, language of personal documents and the elevated style of deliberately artistic expression. Not all letters and diaries can sustain this level of close study, but in certain instances it can yield interesting results, and Shostakovich’s writings certainly fall into this category.
Shostakovich, LASM, and Asafiev
Authors: Fay Laurel E
Published: November 2023

Biographers have tended to tread gingerly around the issue of Shostakovich’s relations with the Association of Contemporary Music (ASM). While many history books routinely include his name in a long list of ASM’s members, his activities as a member and the extent of his allegiance to the ideals of the organization—at least as those ideals came to be articulated ex post facto in the mid-1930s—are frequently minimized; the fact of his membership in ASM is mitigated by his contributions to the proletarian cause, chiefly through his work in the Teatr rabochei molodezhi (TRAM). That this subject remains shrouded in confusion and misunderstanding, however, is demonstrated by the unequivocal declaration in a recent study that Shostakovich ‘was never an ASM member or even a close associate’.
Performance Practice and Rhythm in Hindustān-music
Authors: Clayton Martin
Published: November 2023

Rhythm in North Indian music is generated by the application of a variety of idiomatic processes or techniques of development, either precomposed or (more commonly) realized in extemporized performance. Rhythm is generated at a local level, although shaped by a sense of progression both within improvised ‘episodes’-within which particular musical ideas are stated and developed, and which must lead back to the fixed composition-and more loosely, over the performance as a whole. Any formal scheme which may be identified by means of synchronic analysis implies not so much an overall structural plan, as general tendencies in the performance process-typically of episodically organized development, expansion, increase, and intensification.
Damnation and After
Authors: Rushton Julian
Published: November 2023

Early biographers identified a writing block between Les Nuits d’étè and the major change in Berlioz’s life brought about by the success of his first tour in Germany as an advocate for his own work. Adolphe Boschot called 1841–2 ‘les annees mystérieuses’.1 This period is treated cursorily in the memoirs, whereas the reprinted ‘open letters’ from Germany, supplied to the Paris press, cover the first two tours in as much detail as one could desire. Marital breakdown and his affair with the singer Marie Récio, whom he eventually married after Harriet’s death, may explain his reticence about what, when he began to compile the memoirs, was still recent history. As he insisted, he was not writing confessions.
Architecture, Patriotism, and the End of the World
Authors: Rushton Julian
Published: November 2023

Berlioz sought employment in the theatre and the Conservatoire, but never in the Church, and his pronouncements about religious music are the aesthetic views of an increasingly unbelieving outsider. The Messe solennelle is one of three large-scale liturgical works in Latin, completed at twelve-year intervals. It shows signs that his taste was already developing in directions he later maintained. But his attitudes were not yet fully formed, although they were: hardly novel and had a direct source; for Jean Mongrèdien, Berlioz’s first article on religious music (1829) ‘seems almost to have been dictated by Lesueur’.
The Idea of a Finale
Authors: Talbot Michael
Published: November 2023

Viewed naively, and of course quite improperly, as a belletristic text, the Ordinary of the Mass reveals many oddities, not to say shortcomings. The start is propitious: three statements of, Kyrie eleison,, three of, Christe elision,, and three more of, Kyrie eleison,. Here, there is economy of utterance and perfect ternary proportion on two levels. Were it not for a Trinitarian scruple that makes the subject of the second, Kyrie eleison, the Holy Spirit, in contradistinction to God the Father in the first, even more composers would have chosen a purely ternary musical structure for the movement. The Gloria is more problematic. Its eighty-four words and lack of simple repetition (although some phrases show parallelism) mean that unless special measures are taken, its length will greatly exceed that of the Kyrie, possibly with adverse consequences for the overall balance. From the Baroque period onwards, the Gordian knot is often cut, in that the Gloria is segmented to become sometimes as many as ten or eleven movements (as against the three of the Kyrie). Most pre-Baroque settings retain the Gloria as a single movement (albeit one often subdivided into sections) and adopt various expedients to cut down its length: severe rationing of melisma and word repetition, homophonic texture or imitation at exceptionally dose time intervals, and in extremis simultaneous presentation of different portions of text.
Mourning the Due d’Orl é ans: Donizetti’s Dom S
é bastien and the Political Meanings of Grand Opera
Authors: Smart Mary Ann
Published: November 2023

The march Donizetti describes here with characteristic wit-and perhaps with a hint of uncharacteristic pride-began life in the third act of his last opéra, Dom S é bastien . Mostly forgotten during the last century, Dom S é bastien has recently reappeared on the stage in performances at Bologna’s Teatro Comunale, where many listeners may have been surprised to hear in this funeral march a single familiar tune, a melody that appears lightly dis guised in the central section of Mahler’s ‘Die zwei blaue Augen von meinem Schatz’, the last song from the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (1883) (see Exx.
England, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia
Authors: Tyler James , Sparks Paul
Published: November 2023

Although English publishers and aristocratic amateurs showed interest in the four-course guitar and its French repertory during the mid-sixteenth century, there is little evidence that the five-course instrument was known in England before the 1640s. Of course, it is likely that the exotic instruments played by the band of Gypsies in Ben Jonson’s 1621 court masque, The Gypsies Metamorphosed, were Spanish ‘guittars’.
Carrying Music to the Masses
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

There is no sign as yet of the one man who is both of sufficient character and sufficient inventive genius to alter the stream of music today definitely and conclusively. This is perhaps only to be expected; nature is not in the habit of throwing up a Titan every 50 years or so ... ... I have completed the Canadian work which I suggested to you a long time ago and about which Heinsheimer has always seemed so keen I dare sayyou will hear from him direct whether he thinks it will suit the American market or not. You see how commercially minded I am growing. The last century was a good time for children of shopkeepers. Politicians, intellectuals, Olympic athletes, and musicians of every kind emerged from behind the most unlikely counters. Edward Elgar, for example, died in 1934, whiskered, well fed, ennobled, and financially secure. His humble Worcester background was usually hidden behind his considerable achievements, although it was given the occasional airing---the gesture of a self-made man. To Siegfried Sassoon, Elgar ‘s appearance was that of a retired Victorian army officer, and his outlook that of an aristocrat-‘the Due D ’Elgar ‘. Although Elgar never became prime minister, the fate and fortune of one woman of background similar to Elgar ‘s, he did once consider becoming a Tory candidate for parliament and he met with Edward VII ‘s warm approval. He was appointed Master of the King ‘s Musick in 1924-a suitably archaic title for a position occupied by this status-conscious composer.
Britten and the BBC
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

Your tweeny maid or cook-general may be addressing a meeting at the Albert Hall on ‘How I would Govern Asia. ‘ ... You are enjoying, after long inductional training, an organ sonata by Sorabji. You cannot play it very well, as it is a trifle tricky, but you are revelling in a broadcast version from an organ with saxophones as pipes, and a jacquard-loom mechanism as interpretative artist. Your maid comes back tired, in spite of the ovation she has received, and says: ‘Ere, I can ’t abide that stuff; carn ’t yer switch over to Leipsic and get “Wink yer eye, Molly “ which is real good music? ‘ According to the democratic ... idea, she is just as good a judge as you are, and there is no such thing as an educated musician, or a musician at all.As broadcasting goes on, the technique of special composition for wireless will be explored more fully; but however thoroughly this art-in some aspects an entirely new one-is developed, the same root principles will always lie at the bottom of the best broadcast music: strong melody and simple texture. When Swinburne presented his socialist reverie to the Musical Association in December 1926, the British Broadcasting Company had only twenty-four days to live. The Crawford Committee, established in 1925 to evaluate the first few years of Britain ‘s broadcasting monopoly, recommended in March 1926 that the Company become a Corporation, and that it be granted a ten-year charter. Evidence presented to the Crawford Committee by interested parties listed the many objections to broadcasting: fewer people attended fewer concerts; popular songs endured less than six months where once they had lasted twelve; orchestras in hotels were being replaced by wireless sets; and performers were fast becoming consumers---content to sit and listen to the radio rather than practise their art.
Aldeburgh ‘s Court Composer
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

And yet-there was something absurd about travelling so far to win success with British operas that Manchester, Edinburgh and London would not support. The cost of transporting forty people and their scenery was enormously high: despite packed houses in Holland, despite financial support from the British Council in Switzerland, it looked as if we should lose at least three thousand pounds on twelve Continental performances. It was exciting to represent British music at international festivals, but we could not hope to repeat the experiment another year. ‘Why not, ’ said Peter Pears, ‘make our own Festival? A modest Festival with a few concerts given by friends? Why not have an Aldeburgh Festival? ‘ The above account of the Aldeburgh Festival ‘s origins, if not apocryphal, is not without mythical tinges. Like most classical myths, it has appeared in many guises since its first publication in 1948-its portentous words given more significance as each year passed and the Festival ’s achievements increased in number and scale. Like many myths, the delineation between good and evil is clear: the artist on one side, an indifferent society on the other. And although protestations of modesty underpinned Pears ’s suggestion, the idea of a festival in a town without an opera house, in a county without extensive rail networks, and in a country then with few motor cars was almost hubristic-with Pears as the self-styled Icarus, joining feathers together with wax before flying towards the sun. Where once Arachne had spun herself into hubris, Pears and Britten countedseats and measured the stage of Aldeburgh ‘s Jubilee Hall; this done to their satis faction, and the economic rationale for a festival in place, the revenge of the insulted goddess (Athene) was surely only a season away.
Editorial Problems in Mendelssohn’s Organ Preludes, Op. 37
Authors: zappalà Pietro
Published: November 2023

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s Three Preludes and Fugues for Organ, Op. 37 were published either in the last days of 1837 or at the beginning of 1838. As was customary at the time, the collection appeared simultaneously in two editions, by Breitkopf & Härtel in Germany and by Novello in England. A close comparison reveals that the two editions differ in many places, and although most variants are relatively minor and concern matters not particularly essential to the musical text, there are enough of them—more than one hundred in the preludes alone—to raise some important questions: Why are there so many differences between the two editions? How did these differences arise? Which edition offers the more reliable text? The editorial problems posed by Op. 37 preludes are exemplified in the primary sources.
Mendelssohn’s Cycles of Songs
Authors: Seaton Douglass
Published: November 2023

In the history of the lied it is generally understood that Felix Mendelssohn did not compose song cycles—unlike a number of his immediate predecessors and his contemporaries, most notably Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann. Nevertheless, the issue of cycles among Mendelssohn’s songs is one worth opening, and some phantom cycles might be detected from the evidence of the manuscripts, the song texts, and the music itself. The following discussion considers some of the grounds for regarding certain groupings of Mendelssohn’s songs as cycles. It begins by taking some straightforward cases among the composer’s part songs as models and then proceeds to examine some more problematic cases among his solo Lieder.
Music, Politics, And Patronage In Spanish And Portuguese Dominions In The Early Modern Period
Authors: Stein Louise K
Published: November 2023

This session brought together a group of scholars who study aspects of early modern Iberian, New World, and colonial music. In her introductory remarks, Louise Stein articulated and amplified the premiss upon which the session was predicated: that our fields of study are in need of renovation through the employment of new methodologies and through the embracing of disciplines beyond traditional music history.
Chant And Palaeography
Authors: Hiley David
Published: November 2023

This session opened with a summary of David Hiley’s keynote paper, which had been distributed in advance and which provided the main focus for discussion. Hiley first articulated the need to separate scientific study of chant notations from the aims of early palaeographers who wished to demonstrate the continuity of melodic tradition from early neumes to later pitch-specific notation. Secondly, he continued, it is important to consider the semantic purposes responsible for the development of various notational types in the context of scholarly debate over the oral transmission of chant. Thirdly, detailed palaeographical studies of the notations of individual regions are needed, especially for those regions where a high number of surviving manuscripts may demonstrate the transition from oral transmission to ‘partial’ (neumatic) notation and finally to ‘full’ (stave, i.e. pitch-specific) notation. Other points made in Hiley’s introduction were examined in greater detail by subsequent papers.
Music Between East And West: The Work Of Lutoslawski, Penderecki, And Gorecki In The Context Of Culture And History
Authors: Tomaszewski Mieczyslaw
Published: November 2023

The three composers named in the title of this session are well known both in Western Europe and in the country from which they come. Although the development of their music followed different paths, all three were shaped by a similar cultural and geopolitical situation. The objective of the Study Session was to present and to provoke discussion about this situation, that of a country in which influences from West and East clashed and in which, during the last half a century, creative activity had to take place in the framework of a totalitarian system.
Study Session 39‘To The Ends Of The Earth’: Refugee Musicians In East Asia And Latin America, 1933 1945
Authors: Weber Horst
Published: November 2023

The exodus of musicians from Europe initially caused by the Nazi takeover in Germany reached not only other parts of the Western hemisphere but also East Asia and Latin America. That migqtion was a very important step in a historical development we call today the globalization of Western music. The countries investigated in this Study Session-Argentina, a country of agrarian structure, and Shanghai, an international free port; Mexico, a left-wing country at that time, and Japan, later the ally of Nazi Germany-were selected for their different ethnic, political, and cultural backgrounds as well as for the different effects the immigrants had on musical life.
Study Session 45 Redefining The Low Countries
Authors: Kogle Karl
Published: November 2023

Musicological research about the Low Countries continues to be heavily influenced by ideas formulated in the early nineteenth century by historians such as Raphael Georg Kiesewetter and Frarn;:ois-Joseph Fetis.1 As a result, it is heavily slanted in favour of complex polyphony, while marginalizing other areas of musical creativity; it tends to focus on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries at the expense of other periods; it privileges Flanders over other parts of the region; and the incorporation of scholarship from adjacent disciplines such as art history, literary history, architecture, and archaeology has been: minimal. This Study Session challenged the traditional picture by highlighting recent research in a number of hitherto under-represented areas of inquiry. Barbara Haggh pointed out that the majority of music manuscripts to survive from the region are chant books, and that the disciplines evolving around them, such as hagiography, codicology, palaeography, and church and art history, had and still have scholars from the Low Countries among their leading practitioners. None the less, the Low Countries remain marginal to chant research. Disentanglement of the various chant traditions coexisting in the region and an in-depth study of early chant notations from the area are urgently needed and would, in the long run, also enhance our understandingof complex polyphony.
Session 15: Nineteenth-Century Topics
Authors: Strasser Michael
Published: November 2023

Historians of French music have uniformly viewed the Franco-Prussian War as a turning-point in musical attitudes and style in France. However, the seeds of these changes were planted during the reign of Louis Napoleon. While Paris was preoccupied with lavish spectacle in the city’s theatres, ‘a new generation formed’, according to Romain Rolland, which was ‘serious, reflective, [and] attracted less to the theatre than to pure music’. The composers of this new generation manifested the growing disillusionment of intellectuals with French society. Their attraction to ‘pure’ German music likewise reflected the view, prevalent among many critics of the Second Empire, that Germany offered a virtuous alternative to the decadence of mid-nineteenth-century France. Through an examination of writings by Ernest Renan, Hippolyte Taine, Gustave Flaubert, and others, this paper traced the intellectual origins of the movement toward ‘serious’ music in Second Empire Paris.
Session 17: Gluck and Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics
Authors: Martina Alessandra
Published: November 2023

Le due Iphigenie di Gluck, ‘_vere’ tragedie per musica, costituiscono ii banco di prova ideale per saggiare ii ruolo della retorica nel melodramma e la differenza dai corrispondenti meccanismi della tragedia recitata. Nella scena Ill.6 di Iphigenie en Aulide Clytemnestre immagina di vedere la figlia sull’ara sacrificale. L’inventio (la scelta dei motivi e degli argomenti) étratta dal modello raciniano, ma la disposizione ed elocuzione de! testo risultano alterate: in particolare si privilegiano le figure che rendono tangibile l’immagine evocata (ipotiposi), mentre la disposizione de! testo segue una curva emozionale autonoma. Ne!complesso ii montaggio de! testo serve a costituire un discorso funzionale alia dinamica ed alia gestione musicale dell’espressivita (‘retorica musicale’). Percid vengono inglobati e abilmente miscelati solo i passi di Racine in cui i meccanismi di articolazione del testo sono diretti all’espressione delle passioni.
Session 26: Eighteenth-Century Instrumental Music
Authors: Monk Dennis C
Published: November 2023

The study of the history of music in eighteenth-century Vienna has suffered from the lack of reliable information about composers contemporary with Haydn and Mozart. One such composer is Franz Asplmayr (1728-86), who was well known in his time for his ballets, Singspiele, symphonies, string quartets, and other chamber music. Asplmayr and Haydn were colleagues at the court of Count Morzin, and the former participated as violinist in the first public reading of the latter’s op. 33 string quartets. There is evidence that a significant number of Asplmayr’s string quartets predated Haydn’s op. 9 quartets. This paper, based on a study of the existing manuscripts and prints, presented the most recent information concerning these string quartets. It offered observations regarding the style of the quartets, and concluded with comments on the relationship between Asplmayr’s style and that of Haydn, including the possibility of influence.
A Rubber Band
Authors: Elder Mark
Published: November 2023

The way we might make a bridge between the twenty-first century and a living tradition of music-making so inadequately handed down to us is an enormous topic. But one of the exciting aspects of the search is that our sense of inadequacy gradually becomes diminished. As time goes by we learn a bit more. Julian Budden’s books about Verdi, for example, came out some while ago, yet they still mean a great deal to me and my generation of Verdi performers; for the first time we had a reliable reference book to which we could turn for answers to some of our doubts, to learn more about Verdi’s compositional process and how to tackle performance—things we could apply directly at 10.30 in the morning, in the theatre, faced with singers.
Legitimation Crisis
Authors: Prendergast Christopher
Published: November 2023

Ingres did another portrait of Napoleon. It is a coronation picture of Napoleon seated on the imperial throne (Napoléon ler sur le trône imp érial) (Plate 4). Although we shall be staying with the coronation, it is perhaps wise not to dwell for very long on Ingres’s depiction of it. Napoleon stares out at you as if he were Jupiter (Ingres himself will propose just this analogy, Jupiter’s posture in the later Jupiter et Thétis being an almost exact replica).
The Moment of History Painting
Authors: Prendergast Christopher
Published: November 2023

To speak of the ‘moment’ of history painting is potentially to speak of many things, to move between several levels of reference and meaning. One is external, the moment of history painting in the historical sense, though here the meaning will oscillate between singular and plural-the plural designating the history of history painting as a series of moments (periods), the singular designating rather the idea of a privileged moment, the high point, the period when the cultural conditions most favourable to the genre are in place. Another level is internal and concerns the moment in history painting, the moment of action (or inaction) selected for representation.
Painting War (I)
Authors: Prendergast Christopher
Published: November 2023

If the Napoleonic period is short on cultural coherence, it certainly leaves us with a plethora of curiosities attesting to its dynamic inventiveness, especially of the sort that confound the distinctions and taxonomies from which a sense of cultural coherence is normally built. A particularly telling example of the cultural bric-à-brac of Empire was created on the heels of that other extended exercise in symbolic bricolage, Napoleon’s imperial investiture: in the week following the coronation ceremonies at Notre-Dame and the Invalides, Napoleon attended a gigantic and protracted reception at the Louvre for the armed forces.