bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Organs
Authors: Campbell Murray , Greated Clive
Published: November 2023

In this chapter we shall be concerned with the traditional pipe organ, or church organ as it is sometimes called, and also a group of instruments which can loosely be classed as reed organs. This covers the regal, harmonium, American organ, accordion, concertina and harmonica. The acoustic principles on which these operate are in the main the same as for the woodwind instruments and these have already been described in Chapter 8. Despite the similarities, however, there are many special features which will need to be discussed as they arise.
Arnold Schoenberg
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

On 7th December 1917, slightly less than two months after his forty third birthday, Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was finally discharged from the Austrian Army. His first period of military service had lasted from December 1915 until October 1916 and this second short spell had begun in September 1917. The disruption to his creative work was considerable.
The Spread of Serialism
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

The irony of Stravinsky’s adoption of twelve-note technique is often remarked on, since it came so soon after Schoenberg’s death. A deeper irony lies in the failure of Stravinsky’s late conversion to win yet more converts to serialism. In both America and Europe the possibilities of ‘total’ serialism had begun to be ventilatcil even before Schoenberg’s death.
The Radical Aesthetic
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

Convenient categorization of the mass of composers, from Satie to Stockhausen, who are neither consistent upholders of the traditional tonal forms nor totally committed to the twelve-note technique, is virtually impossible. Basic distinctions can still be made between stylistic features and techniques, but in most cases it is the confrontation between different, if not opposing, tendencies which has produced memorable music: increasingly, to be a radical is to be an eclectic.
Towards The Condition of Music
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

There is a knowledge concerning art, and this knowledge is something quite different from the immediate apprehension of works of art, even from whatever insight we feel we have gained by perceiving and responding to works of art. A simple statement such as ‘Art must be about something’ is innocent enough till we want to give a name to this something. Then invariably we delude ourselves with words, because with our discursive or descriptive words we cross over into the field of writing or talking about art. We have reversed ourselves.
Charles Ives
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

Charles lves’s music became known in Britain very gradually—mainly through discs and BBC broadcasts. Most of his work has been recorded, and is discussed in many books on music and monographs. One of the best and most influential was Wilfrid Mellers’s Music in a New Found land, which illuminated many connections between American history, literature, and music. What emerges from all this is a sense of lves’s place in the formation of an American tradition, if such a national tradition were thought at all possible or viable in our age. (The problems of an English, or British, national musical tradition in relation to a comparable area to the west, and (to my mind) much smaller, but more intensive region of Europe to the east, are different and, for the moment, much less clear-cut.
Skchor A Modrn Oratorio
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

This solo is ‘rhythmic translation’, either a sort of recitative, or sung speech, rising to specific points of expression by the slight use of purely musical means. The alto voice is conceived as a personification of the soul, the anima, descended into the deeps of chaos, whence she has drawn the gods after her. The great price paid for the necessary advance in empirical science is the severance of the spiritual union with the anima. Hence the accumulation of unconscious, dark, destructive powers that burst up in man as a disease, war, revolution, and so forth. Man, by bringing the gods down from heaven, has brought them into his own passions and body. As yet he does not comprehend this, and so the ‘Living God’ is a gnawing pain in the vitals. This section is as yet simply a statement of the position; the prologue in heaven.
St Augustine and His Visions
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

My interest in St Augustine goes back a long way: I probably read his Co,ifessions in my youth. What brought me back to his writings subsequently was reading an essay by Gilles Quispel, one of a series of papers presented at the Eranos meeting of 1951, devoted to the theme of ‘Man and Time’.1 (Since their inception in 1933, these meetings have been held regularly at the home of Frau Olga Frohe-Kapteyn, on the shore of Lake Maggiore, near Ascona, in Switzerland. They were organized in an attempt to bring together a range of scientific thinkers to take stock of the world, away from the pressures of immediate, everyday situations. From the outset, the dominant figure was Jung. From the mid-thirties onwards, I read the annual proceedings, or Eranos Yearbooks, initially published in German; but the 1951 papers appeared in English translation.) In his essay Qµispel sets Augustinian theology in its historical context-noting, however, that every one of Augustine’s important doctrines was based on an error in the translation of the Bible! None the less, what attracted me was his account of Augustine’s theory of visions, which embodies profound psychological insights. Quispe! shows that Augustine’s subjective notion of time and of visions as products of the memory are consistent with the rest of his thinking, all of it with a strong emphasis on inwardness.
Aspects of Belief
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

Although I speak now as an individual person hoping to convey to you what J believe, and though I must indeed speak with my own particular voice recognizably different from all the other fifty million or so voices of my countrymen; yet it is obvious that I am only a person whose individual characteristics and beliefs are embedded in a tremendous background of given racial and cultural traditions, of special aptitudes and disabilities I share with all the thousands of my musical colleagues, and of particular ways of thinking and feeling forced on me by my psychological type.
The Composer and Pacificism
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

People come to pacifism for many reasons. My own conviction is based on the incompatibility of the acts of modern war with the concept I hold of what a man is at all. That good men do these acts, I am well aware. But I hold their actions to spring from an inability or unwillingness to face the fact that modem wars debase our moral coinage to a greater degree than could be counterbalanced by political gains; so that the necessity to find other means of political struggle is absolute. That was certainly my conviction during the Second World War. My refusal to take part was thus for me inescapable, and my punishment with a relatively light term of imprisonment logical.
Too Many Choices
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

The precise beginning for the essay, the moment when my mind became aware of a seemingly new way in, was a half-sentence by the painter Kokoschka. Kokoschka wrote a kind of manifesto at the end of the last war, which he entitled ‘A Petition from a Foreign Artist to the Righteous People of Gt Britain for a Secure and Present Peace’. It is a considerable petition, and quite early on appears the half-sentence, printed in bold type: ‘⃛ a fallacy is blurring the clear distinction between what is in and what is out of the mind.’ I am puzzled by the word ‘fallacy’, but on enquiry> Kokoschka sent me a message that it is what he meant; there is no question of mistranslation, for he wrote his petition in English. If we discard the word ‘fallacy’ and think again of those names in the last chapter, Einstein and Freud, we can sense that whether we turn our eye into space or into the psyche, we are con fronted with ambiguity and relativity.
Patterns of Influence
Authors: Meconi Honey
Published: November 2023

This final chapter explores certain patterns of influence during La Rue’s lifetime and after his death, taking as subjects two composers whose example affected the way his music sounded, the paths by which his music became known in the sixteenth century, the writers who cited him and his music from the late fifteenth into the seventeenth century, and the renewal of awareness first prompted by the stirrings of musicology at the end of the seventeenth century and continuing up to our time.
J. S. Bach
Authors: Williams Peter
Published: November 2023

Few composers show a more sustained interest in the chromatic fourth than]. S. Bach, and as is the case with Mozart, examples taken from his work represent the most developed and varied forms of their period. In the second example the composer altered what he had first written, presumably to reflect the words (see Marshall 1970: 209-10). In the third example, a set of variations includes a lamento-bass amongst the many changes it rings, as well it might, being an early work full of old-fashioned motifs. (A nice detail is that the chromatic line springs from the hymn-tune’s opening semitone.)
Lev Ivanov’s Life
Authors: Wiley Roland John
Published: November 2023

Lev Ivanov was 11 when he entered the theatre school on 8 April 1845.1 His professional life officially began when he turned 16, on 18 February 1850. To count the onset of service from a student’s sixteenth birthday was an administrative policy of the time; Ivanov did not graduate from the theatre school until 20 March 1852, the last event recorded in his service record for the next six years.2
The Tulip of Haarlem
Authors: Wiley Roland John
Published: November 2023

That The Enchanted Forest was incidental to Ivanov’s duties as second balletmaster is implied by his work on another project whose origins were earlier, production later, and preparation concurrent with it. It was a grand ballet, and speaks yet again of the importance the direction attached to Ivanov within a year of his appointment as second balletmaster.
Operatic Interludes
Authors: Wiley Roland John
Published: November 2023

Over two years separate Cupid’s Pranks at the Maryinsky Theatre from Ivanov’s next ballet there, The Nutcracker on 6 December 1892. It was not a rich period in his life or art. Hisfinances were bleak, causing him to ask for advances on salary three times since the management’s refusal of his request in 1890. Petipa, officially at the helm, was suffering health problems again, and found himself on the sick list three times between December 1891 and August 1892; in the autumn of 1892 the elder balletmaster submitted to exhaustive medical examination, whence a diagnosis of the debilitating skin lesions that would plague him to the end. Petipa’s woes increased with the death of his daughter Evgenia on 26 August 1892.
Boris Godunov: Composition and Production
Authors: Brown David
Published: November 2023

Ithout Nikolay Karamzin Russian Literature Might have evolved very differently. In the dying years of the eighteenth century the young Karamzin sought self-consciously to transform the Russian written language, giving it a Gallic elegance, converting French words and phrases into Russian, banishing increasingly archaic Slavonic words, lightening the syntax, and bringing a French sensibility to bear upon his subjects. Poor Liza, his sentimental story of a girl seduced, then abandoned, who finally drowns herself, became a cult bestseller. In verse, too, he refined the Russian language and began probing man’s inner emotional world; as D. S. Mirsky put it, his reforms ‘facilitated the coming of an age of classical poetry: the ultimate justification of Karamzins language is that it became the language of Pushkin’.
Life alongside Boris II: KhovanshchinaBegun
Authors: Brown David
Published: November 2023

Utwardly Musorgsky ’S Existence for the Remainder of 1872 was uneventful. A modest promotion at work was cheering, and during the summer he often spent the weekend very pleasantly with Stasov and the history professor Platon Pavlov at Pargolovo, and the round of musical soirees continued. In July Rimsky-Korsakov’s wedding to Nadezhda Purgold took place, Musorgsky acting as best man.
Sorochintsy Fair
Authors: Brown David
Published: November 2023

Or Most Outsiders Nikolay Gogol Is The Most Russian of Russian writers. Born in 1809 at Sorochintsy, near Poltava, in 1831-2 he published a collection of eight tales, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, which brought him instant fame. Rooted in Ukrainian folklore (and with a leaven from German romance), with language that could be colourful, teeming with vivid imagery, and brimful with atmosphere, the stories told of communities peopled by simple souls (or sup er naturals) caught up in situations or events that might be comic, pathetic, touchingly human, fantastic, creepy—but almost all, in their own ways, fun.
Final Years
Authors: Brown David
Published: November 2023

He Faltering, Then Failing, History Of Sorochintsy Fair is paralleled in the everyday course of Musorgsky’s own last years, his life now unfolding fitfully, mostly chaotically; there is, for us, a final terrible sense of what might have been that is as total and dispiriting as with the opera itself His creative course during this last period (the composition of Khovanshchina, Sorochintsy Fair, and the last songs) has been charted in preceding chapters, though there were to be a few minor additions. On 14 July 1877 he signed the vocal score of a choral-orchestral piece, variously known in English as Joshua or Jesus (or Hsus) Navin, based on a text that Musorgsky himself devised from the Old Testament on Joshua’s defeat of the Amorites; the first part was a call to action from Joshua, the second the women of Canaan’s lament (first from a soloist, then the chorus), finally a shout of praise to Joshua, then Jehovah.
Early Vocal and Choral Music
Authors: Evans Peter
Published: November 2023

If the last few instrumental scores before Britten emerged as an opera composer betrayed the effect of his recent experience of word-setting in their unequivocal re-creation of definable emotional states, his earliest large-scale work for voices was evidently fashioned according to structural and textural procedures commonly thought proper to ‘absolute’ instrumental composition. How consciously the nineteen-year-old Britten conceived the choral variations as a tour de force is already to be seen in the theme (see Ex. 1).
The Five Canticles
Authors: Evans Peter
Published: November 2023

Apart from the few early songs without opus number that have been published, most of Britten’s activity as a song writer was channelled into the composition of the cycles discussed above. Though these are never of the linked narrative type familiar in Schubert and Schumann, we have seen that they may approach a single subject from a variety of angles suggested by an anthology of different poets’ works (the Serenade, A Charm of Lullabies and the Nocturne could even be regarded as pursuing aspects of one subject through three works) or they may consider many subjects through the words of a single poet.
Plainchant in the English Catholic Church, 1748—1799
Authors: Zon Bennett
Published: November 2023

While in the Catholic countries of Europe plainchant evolved without hindrance, in England the situation was entirely different. As the Reformation progressed Catholic publishing became essentially an underground enterprise, and liturgical books were particularly affected. By the beginning of the seventeenth century the publication of all such books was concentrated in the presses of English monastic or collegiate institutions abroad, although a small stream of prayer-manuals, confraternity handbooks, and devotionals continued to be published surreptitiously in England. None of these or their Continental counterparts bare any relation to Sarum or other English sources, and it would seem from the evidence that exiled Catholics simply adopted local diocesan or locally influenced Roman sources. Beginning in the 1720s, with the gradual easing of their political and social circumstances, English Catholics returned to publishing liturgical books of their own. Books without plainchant were taken exclusively from Roman sources, and those with plain-chant, from local Continental sources.
Introduction
Authors: Zon Bennett
Published: November 2023

With the dawning of the nineteenth century, the position of Catholics in England improved. The second repeal of the penal laws in 1791 led to a feeling of distinct political optimism amongst Catholics, and this, in combination with a host of political and moral factors, led inexorably to issues of full Catholic emancipation. Catholic agitation for change was soon redoubled, and in 1805 a ‘claim to the elective franchise’ was put forward by Lord Grenville in the House of Lords regarding the ‘Catholic Question’. Over the next four teen years and after some thirty-two bills and motions had been laid before each House, a Roman Catholic Emancipation Act was ratified in 1829 in both Houses, ensuring Catholics the fullest entitlement of civil liberties then to date. This ultimately afforded Catholics the prospect of a re-established ecclesiastical hierarchy, which, after Roman consent, was effected in 1850.
English Catholic Plainchant: The Beginning of the Nineteenth Century to the 1850s
Authors: Zon Bennett
Published: November 2023

The history of plainchant in Europe in the nineteenth century is of course dominated by the various attempts at scholarly restoration. Up to the middle part of the century these efforts were centred almost exclusively in France, although similar demands for revival were being voiced by Italians such as Pietro Alfieri, in his Saggio Storico Teorico Pratico del Canto Gregoriano O Romano per istruzione degli ecclesiastici (Rome, 1835) and Prodromo sulla restaurazione de’ libri di canto ecclesiastico detto gregoriano (Rome, l 857). In Germany the plainchant revival is very much bound up with the Cecilian movement, founded by F. X. Witt (1834-88) in 1868, and promulgated through two music periodicals, Fliegende Blätter für katholische Kirchenmusik (from 1 866) and Musica sacra(1868—1937).
Nineteenth-Century Anglican Plainchant Sources
Authors: Zon Bennett
Published: November 2023

The history of the Anglican-Gregorian plainchant revival could be said to stretch as far back as Thomas Cranmer’s a Letanie with suffrages, to be said or songe in the tyme of the said processyons, included in a publication of I 544 by Thomas Berthelet. Although there were sources of perhaps earlier date, this appears to be the earliest work known by nineteenth-century Anglican plainchant enthusiasts to have been based on Gregorian music. Cranmer’s English processional had been intended to be designed along the lines of its Latin equivalent for use in ‘national processions during the war with France’, but the work seems to have progressed no further than the litany.
Introduction
Authors: Poznansky Alexander
Published: November 2023

The little that at first sight seems plausible about the suicide theory de rives from two premisses, which need to be examined and refuted: first, that late nineteenth-century Russia ,vas a sexually repressive society in which sexual conduct that did not conform to the established standards was sternly penalized; and second, that Tchaikovsky all his life, and more than anything else, feared the exposure of what he allegedly saw as his abnormal, as well as immoral, inclinations. As a result, it is argued, under the threat of punishment and disgrace, the highly neurotic composer would have been compelled to take his life.
Prince: Harmonic Analysis of ‘Anna Stesia’
Authors: Hawkins Stan
Published: November 2023

Musically, it (Lovesexy ) is probably the most complex and unconventional body of work he (Prince) has ever produced. The dense undergrowth of twists and disjunctures to which even the most structured songs are subjected brings to mind once again the extended jam rehearsal technique Prince has always favoured. (Hill 1989: 210) ‘Anna Stesia’, off the album Lovesexy (1988), offers up a wealth of innovative and thought-provoking harmonic ideas for analysis. My purpose is to explore the harmonic thread running through the musical fabric of this song, with a view to exposing a number of techniques that govern and control it. Through a series of analytical procedures it is my intention to examine the intrinsic harmonic qualities of the song, and to assess the effects these have on its meaning.
Analysing Popular Music: Theory, Method, and Practice
Authors: Tagg Philip
Published: November 2023

One of the initial problems for any new field of study is the attitude of in-credulity it meets. The serious study of popular music is no exception to this rule. It is often confronted with an attitude of bemused suspicion implying that there is something weird about taking ‘fun’ seriously or finding ‘fun’ in ‘serious things’. Such attitudes are of considerable interest when discussing the aims and methods of popular music analysis and serve as an excellent introduction to this essay.
The Golden Age, Part II: I603-I625
Authors: Spring Matthew
Published: November 2023

True it is, I have lien long obscured from your sight, because I received a Kingly entertainment in a forraine climate … yet I must tell you, as I have beene a stranger; so have I againe found strange entertainment since my returne; especially by the opposition of two sorts of people that shroude themselves under the title of Musitians. The first are some simple Cantors, or vocall singers, who though they seeme excellent in their blinde Division-making, are meerely ignorant, even in the first elements of Musicke, and also in the true order of the mutation of the Hexachord in the Systeme, (which hath hen approved by all the learned and skilfull men of Christendome, this 800 yeeres,) yet doe these fellowes give their verdict of me behinde my backe, and say, what I doe is after the old manner: but I will speake openly to them, and would have them know that the proudest Cantor of them, dares not oppose himselfe face to face against me. The second are young-men, professors of the Lute, who vaunt themselves, to the disparagement of such as have beene before their time, (wherein I my selfe am a party) that there never was the like of them.
Postscript
Authors: Spring Matthew
Published: November 2023

This book was written in the last decade of the twentieth century, a century which witnessed a gradual revival of interest in and understanding of the lute, in contrast to its obsolescence in the century before. This took place in the context of a revival of early music in general. Since the r960s there has been a successful revival of the lute with centres of activity established across the globe. New technology has meant that the real costs of printing short-run editions in the form of new tablature or facsimile has plummeted such that even more obscure lute music can be made available to those who are interested. There are now significant organizations and even internet sites and e-mail discussion groups dedicated to the lute and its music, and it is fair to say that it has reclaimed an identity that was almost completely lost in the nineteenth century. Britain’s part in this renaissance has been consider able. The south of England in particular has as high a concentration of lute players and makers as anywhere in the world, and London is arguably the performance capital of the lute world. England can boast some two dozen fully professional lute makers, and there is now in place a younger generation of players who developed their skills on dedicated courses at London conservatories, many without ever having studied the classical guitar. Indeed if the guitar was their starting point, it is as likely to have been electric or folk guitar. British composers as diverse as Alan Ridout, James Erber, Stephen Dodgson, and Howard Skempton have also produced a number of new lute works, inspired or commissioned by today’s professional players. The break with the past is that these composers are not them selves lute players, as was the norm for lute composers of old.
Varnish and Varnishing
Authors: Beamnt Jams
Published: November 2023

Violin varnish has excited enormous interest and is associated with myths which are still promoted. This chapter may help to explain how some of the nonsense came about. Varnishing-putting a protective layer on a violin-would not be difficult but for the convention, established by classical makers, of making it look like furniture. Long before violins were made, fine furniture was finished by colouring wood and then protecting it with a clear varnish. Trying to imitate that causes a multitude of difficulties for one simple reason. Furniture on which it is worth producing a fine finish is made of hardwood. If colour is required, the wood can be stained before applying the varnish. There are dyes which, once attached to wood, are unlikely to fade under the conditions in which fine furniture is usually kept. Coloured wood can be enhanced by a clear varnish, the simplest of which is just boiled linseed oil. Because it is transparent, it need not even be uniformly thick.
The Early Piano II
Authors: Cole Michael
Published: November 2023

Al Though The Earlyhistory outlined in the previous chapter may appear to be comprehensive and complete, it is in fact only half the story. Quite separate from what has been reported so far is another history running in parallel, yet to be described, without which it would be impossible to understand the later history of the piano either in its musical uses or in its technical development.Up to this point, all the instruments described can be said to be derived more or less directly from Cristofori’s pioneering work. Though we have noted some quite significant differences between the pianos made in Portugal and those made in Germany, the prototypes for both forms originated in Florence, and what unites them—the Cristofori action—was conscientiously preserved in both traditions with barely any deviation from the Florentine model. Each has the Cristofori escapement mechanism, the intermediate lever, the wire¬ mounted check, and even the same type of damper. There are also good reasons for saying that the pianos that were produced in Spain and England before 1760 can be traced to this same root. But this is emphatically not the whole picture. The pianoforte as we know it today, the manner in which it is played, and its history even before 1760 would have been very different had there not been a very productive hybridization, in which Cristofori’s invention was combined with another, quite distinct musical instrument whose history we now need to examine.
Pianoforte or Pantalon? The Origins of German Tafelklaviere
Authors: Cole Michael
Published: November 2023

WheReas The Adventof the English square piano can be dated with some precision, and its invention attributed to one man, the origins of similar instruments in Germany are exceedingly vague. There is a dearth of contemporary references to such instruments prior to 1770, leaving a silent void which has been filled only too often with highly speculative statements that, under closer scrutiny, are found to have no basis in fact. Compounding the problems, we find that surviving instruments are also frustratingly uninformative, due to the reticence of their makers, who often omitted to sign or date their work. So, an answer to the question ‘W’ho made the first square pianos in Germany?’ may never be forthcoming. In fact, when the constructional details of surviving instruments are compared and analysed, it becomes clear that a search for the origins of such instruments does not suggest any convergence towards a single source. Instead, we find ourselves following separate trails for several distinct types, suggesting that, in contrast to the English history, we may not be looking for ‘an inventor’, or even for a group of craftsmen working within a small geographical region, but for two, three, or more separate ‘inventors’, whose various concepts were developed and propagated in widely separated localities.
Cazzati’s annunciation cantata, Del Soυrano Regnante (1668)
Authors: Crowther Victor
Published: November 2023

This spiritual cantata, entitled ‘Per l’ Annontiatione della Beata Vergine’, was published as the last item (no. 18) in Cazzati’s Diporti o cantate spirituale a 1, 2, 3, e 4 υoci, opus 49 (Bologna, 1688). The collection was the seventh set of Italian chamber cantatas published by Cazzati in Bologna, and the second to treat texts of a spiritual nature. The composer dedicated the edition to Laura d’ Este, duchess of Modena. She was a devout Catholic, which may account for the ascetic tone of many of the titles affixed to the cantatas (e.g. no. 7, ‘The vanity of this world’, or no. 17, ‘The fragility of human life’).
The Perti Era, 1696-1730
Authors: Crowther Victor
Published: November 2023

The death of Colonna in November 1695 gave the Fabbriceria in San Petronio a breathing-space in which to review the organization of the cappella. Constrained by the urgent need to repair the roof of the basilica, the senators decided to disband the regular cappella and hire musicians on an occasional basis. The only salaried musicians employed from 1696 to 1700 were the organist, Domenico Scabazzi (at L20 per month), and the newly elected maestro, Giacomo Perti (at L50 per month). During these years of austerity Perti continued to hire as many as fifty musicians for the patronal festival, but he had to wait until 1701 for the reinstatement of a regular cappella. Twenty four musicians (i.e. fourteen singers and ten instrumentalists) were appointed or reappointed. Salaries were greatly reduced from those enjoyed by musicians under Colonna, cutting total monthly expenditure on the cappella from L458 (1695) to L200 (1701).
Perti’s S. Petronio (1720)
Authors: Crowther Victor
Published: November 2023

The subject-matter of the oratorio is the appointment of St Petronius as bishop of Bologna by Pope Celestine I in AD 432. The librettist alludes to important historical events and theological controversies at the end of Celestine’s reign (AD 422-32) but his main purpose is to emphasize that the appointment of Petronius to the See of Bologna was an act of divine predestination.
Diverging Traditions 1: South and Central Asia
Authors: Fletcher Peter
Published: November 2023

within present-day Europe and the USA, there is widespread appreciation of the music and culture of the Indian Subcontinent. Although this is a recent phenomenon, its roots lie in nineteenth-century European linguistics. following the discovery of affinities between the dead languages of Sanskrit, Latin, and Ancient Greek in 1786 (by Sir William Jones, serving in India at the High Court of Calcutta), subsequent linguists, mistakenly equating language with ‘race ‘, held Indian culture to have derived from the ‘Aryans ‘. The ‘Aryans ‘ came to be imagined as a superior ‘race ‘ of conquering nomads from the Central Asian highlands, ancestors of both Europeans and Brahmans. The German natural history professor J. I(Blumenbach first publicized the idea that they were descended from the ‘Caucasus ‘ in 1795.5) Subsequently, German romantics imagined the ‘Aryans ‘ as a blond, blue-eyed ‘master-race ‘, originating in northern Europe. Such imaginings are all nonsense; but they remained popular into the second half of this century, and still persist in the popular imagination. The origins of Indian civilization, and of Hinduism, the direct source of India ‘s classical traditions of music and dance, are still worth investigating, if only briefly.
Africa
Authors: Fletcher Peter
Published: November 2023

It is fitting that this survey of traditional musics should start with Africa, for Africa gave birth to the first human beings and-we way assume-to the first human song. Africa also gave along the Nile, to one of the first civilizations. Africa retains some of the o1dest extant musical traditions, features of which have been used to reinvigorate tired musical traditions in the West; and, as Africans throughout the Diaspora have united, aspects of African and European music have combined to form new styles of popular music throughout the globe. Africa is a huge and varied land mass, larger than China and India added together. Throughout recorded history, the Sahara desert, spanning the width of the northern bulge of Africa, has caused the peoples to the north and the south to develop separately and--to that extent-· differently. To the north now lie Muslim states, the African identity of which has been, in various degrees, overlaid by cultural influences from West Asia; to the south, Muslim and Christian states, the majority of whose peoples follow a way of life still heavily conditioned by indigenous religion.
Westernization and National Musical Identity in Africa and Asia
Authors: Fletcher Peter
Published: November 2023

New technologies, and the new experiences occasion, affect different societies in different ways, according to prevailing, local, cultural traditions. The new musical technologies and experiences introduced to many countries of the world as a consequence of western colonization tended to weaken native musical traditions (though the responses differed, in various parts of the globe); but when new technologies of the twentieth century brought far-flung peoples and their musics into both visual and aural contact with each other—creating the impression of a world that is shrinking-it enhanced senses of national cultural identity among different peoples, and led to a revival of ‘national ‘ musical styles. It also encouraged the formation of ‘national ‘, popular styles that mixed local melodies, instru1nents, and timbres, with Western 1nusical characteristics—rather as, in nineteenth century, countries in northern and Eastern Europe attempted to fuse ‘national ‘ folk styles with the dominant Austro—German tradition. In order to understand more fully the variety of musical interrelationships that exists throughout the world today, it will be instructive to examine the ways in which various societies haveresponded both to colonialism and to the impact of electronic media.
Intermittency
Authors: Maconie Robin
Published: November 2023

Does music matter? The short answer is yes it does. Music mat ters because it would have happened anyway. What does it matter? Music is a blanket term for human activities in organized acoustics. These activities include passive listening as well as active creation and performance. Acoustics matters because human beings can hear,just as chemistry (oenology, medicine) matters because people can and do recognize smells and in consequence develop the knowledge to do something about them. The same motivation to organize sense experiences produces the discriminations that nur ture art, literature, and, dare I say it, philosophy. The relatively dis tinguishing feature of music is that perceptions of the sound world organize themselves rather differently from visual, olfactory, or grammatical perceptions. So music is interesting because it reveals the distinctive priorities of audition and auditory reasoning, and especially interesting in a cultural context that finds it necessary or amusing to ask such a question.
Doubt
Authors: Maconie Robin
Published: November 2023

I had meant to ask you about the following problem, but did not want to keep you longer than necessary.
Ratio
Authors: Maconie Robin
Published: November 2023

Apollo was so potent as a cultural and political symbol that the love-poet Propertius could hang his whole account of Actium around the god’s role. It was in Phoebus Apollo’s bay that the cosmic struggle took place (Elegies 4.6). The enemy fleet was damned in advance by the deified Romulus, Augustus blessed by Jupiter. Apollo leaves Delos to stand above Augustus’ prow; he lays aside his lyre and his role as god of music and poetry, and takes up his terrible guise as the avenger of piety and purity, who with his arrows once struck plague into the camp of Agamemnon.
Saint and Sinner
Authors: Bird John
Published: November 2023

The years spent in Frankfurt saw the emergence of three marked devel¬opments in Percy Grainger’s character and music. They were to become the nuclei around which the rest of his life and personality growth revolved and for this reason these years must be considered as the most crucial period of his life. In the order of importance given to them by Grainger himself, these three elements were: the development of unorthodox and colourful sexual appetites, the evolution of a highly idiosyncratic personal philosophy based on the concept of ‘racial charactology’, and the maturing of an individual musical style.
Unto Brigg Fair
Authors: Bird John
Published: November 2023

It could never be said of Grainger that he engaged in any activity with the undeviating singlemindedness which characterizes the lives of so many other composers. He never found appealing the idea of specialization and took pride in being an ‘all-round man’ with several irons in the fire at any one time. This inability to undertake long bouts of concentrated work was perhaps a handicap that prevented him from scoring more unqualified artistic triumphs than he did. Nevertheless, the years between 1904 and 1910 saw his most intense compositional activity, his emergence (though not recognition) as the most important folk-song collector of his day and the beginning of his fame as an international concert pianist.
‘Poor put-upon Percy’
Authors: Bird John
Published: November 2023

For a short period in 1907 Grainger and his mother lived at 26 Coulson Street, in a quiet row of small Georgian houses running parallel to the King’s Road near Sloane Square. The following year he heard for the first time a chamber work of the French composer Gabriel Faure and in March, when the Frenchman was staying in London; his host John Singer Sargent arranged a meeting with Grainger.
A Case Study in Supply and Demand - the Violin Scene
Authors: Harvey Brian W , Shapreau Carla J
Published: November 2023

In December 1740 at Tom’s Coffee House, on Ludgate Hill in London, one of the first recorded auctions of musical instruments took place. The instruments came from the estate of London’s first concert promoter, an enthusiastic amateur called Thomas Britton. The inventory as it relates to musical instruments is interesting and runs as follows:. A fine Guitar in a case. 2. A good Dulcimer. 3. Five instruments in the shape of a fish. 4. A curious ivory Kitt and bow in a ase. 5. A good Violin by Ditton. 6. Another very good one. 7. One said to be a Cremona. 8. An extraordinary Rayman. [Jacob Rayman dwelt in Bell-Yard, Southwark about the year 1650. The tenor violins made by him are greatly valued.] 9. Ditto. IO. Ditto. II. Ditto. 12. One very beautiful one by Claud Pieray of Paris, as good as a Cremona. 13. One ditto. 14. Another very good one. 15. Another ditto. 16. A very good one for a high violin. 17. Another ditto. 18. An excellent tenor. 19. Another ditto by Mr. Lewis. 20. A fine viol by Mr. Baker of Oxford.
Liability for Misdescriptions - An Overview of the Civil and Criminal Law
Authors: Harvey Brian W , Shapreau Carla J
Published: November 2023

All the fraud and misdescription cases discussed so far have involved civil actions for damages and reimbursement. A civil action is a private action by one person against another with the object, usually, of claiming damages. Criminal trials, in con trast, are brought in the name of the sovereign and are publicly financed. From I July 1991 the County Court deals with civil actions involving claims up to £25,000 (or up to £50,000 depending on complexity); ‘small claims’ of up to £3,000 are referred to arbitration involving a simplified County Court pro cedure and lower costs. Otherwise the High Court is involved and this has unlimited jurisdiction. Over the last century since Hodges v. Chanot was decided, the civil law has been refined but not radically changed.
Shostakovich and Britten: Some Parallels
Authors: Kovnatskaya Lyudmila
Published: November 2023

The juxtaposition of the two names in the title of this article will come as no surprise to those who know of the personal relationship that existed between these two outstanding composers, or to musicians who have performed their works. But even if nothing was known about their meetings, or about their having dedicated compositions to one another, the attentive and musically informed reader will already have realized that there exists a fruitful field of study here, and will sense how organic, serious, and potentially rich this comparison is. At the same time, it is clear that these were two individuals who came from entirely different worlds and cultural traditions, and whose works revealed the fundamental disparities between their conceptions of art, ideology, and politics, their socio-cultural attitudes towards music, and their perception of musical genres in the context of their respective national schools of composition.
Igor Stravinsky: 1913—1951
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

‘In borrowing a form already established and consecrated, the creative artist is not in the least restricting the manifestations of his personality. On the contrary, it is more detached, and stands out better, when it moves within the limits of a convention.’ These comments were included in the Autobiography of Stravinsky ghost-written by Walter Nouvel and first published in 1935—6. They can stand as a declaration of that neo-classic aesthetic whose elements may already have been latent within the ‘profoundly traditional’ attitudes to ‘cultural outlook’ and ‘musical technique’ of The Rite of Spring and the works which preceded it, and such attitudes became even more decisive when explicit reference to actual, ‘classical’ (earlier) stylistic and structural elements began to emerge.
Symphonic Music: II
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

Chapter 3 dealt principally with composers who, in respect of date of birth, were the seniors of Schoenberg, Bartók, and Stravinsky. This chapter gives its main emphasis to those who were born between 1890 and 1910 and therefore came to creative maturity after the principal issue of early twentieth-century music—to retain or reject tonality—had already been raised. Hindemith, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich all ultimately opted to retain tonality, although (as with Bart6k, Stravinsky, Britten, and many others) it was often an intensively chromaticized tonality with properties appropriate to the kind of ‘modern classicism’ that attached great importance to the preservation of the traditional genres of symphonic music. Particular modal alternatives to diatonicism, like the octatonic scale, were a fruitful source of ambiguity, and the effect of their use was to challenge, if not seriously undermine, the relative stability, and tonal unity, of modern classicism, rather than, more radically, to prevent the establishment of such unity and stability in the first place.
Arnold Schoenberg
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

On 7 December 1917, slightly less than two months after his forty-third birthday, Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was finally discharged from the Austrian Army. His first period of military service had lasted from December 1915 until October 1916 and this second short spell had begun in September 1917. The disruption to his creative work was considerable. He was able to write the fourth of the Orchestral Songs Op. 22, in July 1916 (Nos. 1–3 had been composed while he was still in Berlin, between October 1913 and January 1915), but his main project during the war was the oratorio, Die Jakobsleiter. He completed the first draft of the text as early as January 1915 and began the music of Part One in June 1917, only to be interrupted by the second call-up three months later. Although he returned to the score as soon as his final discharge came through, and continued to work on it until 1922, the work was never finished. But for the wartime interruptions, the oratorio might stand–complete–as the most mighty and absorbing of transitional works. Certainly there is an element of tragedy in the picture of a genius at the height of his powers forced to let a major composition languish while providing a potboiler like ‘The Iron Brigade’, the march for piano quintet which Schoenberg wrote for a ‘festive evening’ at his army camp in 1916. From his early years as an orchestrator of other men’s operettas to his late years as a university teacher in America, Schoenberg suffered from the supreme frustration: the regular necessity to set his own work aside and perform other tasks in order to support his family. The sympathy for, and efforts on behalf of, other composers in a similar plight which his letters reveal are therefore as understandable as his often extreme irritation and impatience with bureaucracy and officialdom in all forms. For Schoenberg, in life as in music, inflexible systems were anathema.
Radicals And Rituals
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

One of the attractions of ‘radicalism’ as a critical concept is its flexibility, the questions it raises about what it means. Since the 1920s, has it been more radical for composers to attempt to ignore traditional styles and systems, or more radical to aim at conserving those styles and systems as completely as possible? Radicalism is always relative, and matters of perspective are no less significant when other general terms, such as avant-garde and experimental, are brought into the debate. Within the twentieth century as a whole, it is probably the case that the initiatives most generally recognized as radical have been those which distanced themselves most dramatically from contemporary norms, as in the work of John Cage and his followers after 1940, which aimed to dispense with the accepted image of the art-work by facilitating the production of parallel events and experiences—comparable to, yet very different from, events and experiences normally associated with art.
The Minimalist Experiment
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

Contrasts between relative simplicity and relative complexity, between the exploitation of repetition and attempts to avoid it, have been part of twentieth-century music from the beginning. But it was only around 1960, in the United States, that an approach of such consistency, and techniques of such evident reductiveness, emerged that commentators sensed the need for a new label. Alongside the experimentalism of Cage and his followers, minimalist music seemed to offer an alternative to the twentieth century’s persistent concern with preserving or extending earlier stylistic and generic traditions, and with devising complex, avant-garde alternatives to those traditions. Even if, from a late-century perspective, all it appears to have offered is ‘the mystical rationalism of serialism in a new guisen that newness has proved sufficiently substantial and long-lasting to establish an immense gulf between it and the sounds and stylistic qualities of ‘old’ serialism. Minimalism cannot simply be equated with anti-modernism, however, and the paradoxes and ambiguities soon accumulate when the two phenomena are considered together. Such consideration suggests that the principal factor in this alternative music is not so much its ‘minimal’ content as its experimental attitude, confronting the need to win a place for its products within the existing institutional framework of concerts and recordings, and therefore to challenge mainstream modernism on its own ground.