bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Origins
Authors: Tyler James , Sparks Paul
Published: November 2023

The small, pear-shaped, round-backed instrument, which was the ancestor of the mandolino, may have been known in medieval Europe from as early as the tenth century. Together with the ‘ud’ (developed later in Europe as the lute), the smaller instrument was one of the many introduced to Europe through western Islamic culture in Spain and southern Italy, legacies of the Arab world which have enriched our own.
Other Instruments Related to the Mandolino
Authors: Tyler James , Sparks Paul
Published: November 2023

The soprano lute is a small but fully proportionate Renaissance lute used in the late sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is a rarely encountered instrument, usually having six or more courses which are meant to be tuned to the standard lute intervals of a 4th, a 4th, a major 3rd, a 4th, a 4th.
The Mandoline in France
Authors: Tyler James , Sparks Paul
Published: November 2023

The eighteenth century was for France a period of massive economic decline, with the French people becoming increasingly unwilling to foot the bill for royal extravagance and for the disastrous series of wars in which the country was engaged. By the end of the Seven Years War (1756-63) fought against Britain and Prussia, France was virtually bankrupt.But against this backdrop of national insolvency, the elegant life of the titled and wealthy continued unabated, refusing to recognize the mounting economic crisis in France. Art, and in particular music, was eagerly patronized by the privileged strata of society. Opera thrived, as did instrumental concerts, the most celebrated being the regular concerts of the Concert Spirituel in Paris,1 which were held on days of religious significance when opera was considered unsuitable. This patronage encouraged singers and musicians throughout Europe to try their fortune in Paris (and in Lyon which was the second city of France),
The Mandoline elsewhere in Europe
Authors: Tyler James , Sparks Paul
Published: November 2023

The mandolino was introduced into Britain early in the eighteenth century when Fr. Conti (see Chapter 3) performed at Mr Hickford’s dancing room in James Street, London, on 2 April 170T ‘The Signior Conti will play upon his great Theorbo, and on the Mandoline, an instrument not known yet’.1 This instrument enjoyed aristocratic patronage in subsequent decades, as Philip Mercier’s portrait of the Royal Family testifies. In this painting (National Gallery, London; reproduced in Tyler 1981a), Princess Caroline is depicted playing the mandolino.
Introduction
Authors: Merwe Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

Composers of the kind described as ‘serious’ were inclined to agree with Lord Peter, and even to concede that the fat man might have a point. As ‘long as they stuck to the diatonic scale, the familiar chords, regular bar rhythms and the rest of it, their music had a tiresome way of sounding as though it might have been written before 1900. Try as one might to be modern, one walked in fetters of convention. Such was the predicament of the serious composer. Meanwhile, non serious composers, whose indifference to musical theory often took the drastic form of complete ignorance, continued to use those hoary old formulas, and yet somehow their music was of the twentieth century, No one could mistake a Noel Coward waltz for a Strauss one. Think what one might of Gershwin or Cole Porter, one could not accuse them of sounding like Schubert or Hugo Wolf, Massenet or even Puccini. As for jazz, it was as typical of the 1920s as cloche hats or bathtub gin.
Europe
Authors: Merwe Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

The European musical background presents unique difficulties, partly because it involves unique developments, both musical and social, and partly because anyone brought up in the European tradition is likely to find the very familiarity an obstacle to a clear view. The traditional attitudes of the musical establishment have not helped. To the naive ‘music lover’ there are only two kinds of music that really count. One is classical music, produced by geniuses, invariably isolated, towering figures who are misunderstood by their contemporaries, starve in garrets, and probably die young. The other is folk music, which is mysteriously evolved by illiterate peasants untouched by the nastiness of urban civilization. Nothing else is of any consequence. This view, though admittedly a caricature, is not far from that held in sober earnest by many good people; and it is also not far from that set forth in almost every book on ‘serious’ music up to about 1960.
North America
Authors: Merwe Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

For Over three and a half centuries black and white Americans have been living, working, and making music together, or at any rate within hollering distance of each other. It would be a miracle if there had not been profound mutual influence, and such influence there undoubtedly was. But before analysing this in detail it seems well to look at the social background against which it took place.
Wholeness
Authors: Merwe Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

Once we get away from the familiar terrain of the major-minor system the question of what constitutes a musical whole arises. If it seems a simple question, this is because European classical traditions have simplified it for us. In European classical music from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century there is almost invariably a pre-ordained end. The movement executes a design, and once the design is finished the piece comes to an end.
The Blues Mode and the Twelve-Bar Form
Authors: Merwe Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

Many of the typical features of the blues can be removed without destroying the basic, unmistakable quality of bluesiness. We can take away the twelve-bar structure, the typical chords, the bent notes, the shuffling triplet rhythms, the half-speaking vocal quality—in fact we can remove the voice part altogether—and still be left with blues. And when we have eliminated the unessential features, what remains? What is the essence of the blues? All blues tunes have two things in common: one is syncopation, and the other is a mode, which is in fact not merely a mode, but a particular kind of modality, dominating and controlling the whole style in much the same way as a particular kind of tonality dominates the Classical style.
The Talking Blues
Authors: Merwe Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

Partly because African speech is itself so songlike, the boundaries between speech and song are often vague in Africa. A singer may drop into a speaking tone for a few notes, or work up from speech to song, or regularly alternate between a speaking and singing delivery. Or there may be long stretches of something intermediate between the two, variously called ‘sing song’, ‘recitative’, ‘sprechstimme’, and ‘melodic speech’. There are two aspects to this ‘sing song’, the rhythmic and melodic. If both are slightly regularized, the result is merely a stylized speech; if both are made completely songlike, the result is song. If one is regular and the other free, the result is a delivery which is either rhythmically strict but melodically free, or melodically strict but rhythmically free.1 Both these types are found in Africa, and both have passed into black American usage.
Why twelve bars? Why blues?
Authors: Merwe Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

When W. C. Handy showed the publishers his ‘Memphis Blues’ back in 1912, he found that they were bewildered by the twelve-bar form. It struck them as lop-sided. We can hardly blame them, because this form was something completely new in music. Never before had there been a three-part tune-type, which derived its strength precisely from being in three parts. There had been twelve-bar tunes, but these were consciously asymmetrical. They were satisfying in spite of being in twelve bars; the phrasing lent a certain piquant irregularity to the effect. In any case, like the British twelve-bar tunes we have examined, they were probably essentially two-part rather than three-part structures.
Life in London as a Music Critic (1914-1915)
Authors: Smith Barry
Published: November 2023

Although he did not realize it at the time, the war was to have a catastrophic and destructive effect on Philip’s life. On his return from his brief holiday, he lost no time in moving to London and by October 1914 was happily settled in colourful new surroundings in Cartwright Gardens, Bloomsbury, near St Pancras station, where he rented a ground-floor bed-sitter for 17s. 6d. a week. He described the area to Delius as ‘a very jolly part of London …the neighbourhood is thoroughly alive—which is essential, for my liking—and unrespectable: at night the streets swarm with whores and hot potato-men and other curious and interesting phenomena: and the darkness which the fear of hostile aircraft has enforced upon the city, makes everything doubly mysterious, fascinating and enchanting’.
The Compact Disc Systen1
Authors: Pohlmann Ken C
Published: November 2023

Storing audio information places great demands on a digital medium. A 60-minute musical selection, recorded in stereo with PCM (pulse code modulation) at a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz and with 16-bit quantization, generates over 5 billion bits. Error correction, synchronization, and modulation are required for successful storage. The total capacity required is over 15 billion bits (that’s 15 thousand million). In addition, a commercially popular music storage medium requires random access, small size, convenience of use, robustness, low cost, and ease of replication. Clearly, digital audio’s requirements are considerable.
The Land Without Music?
Authors: Kennedy Michael
Published: November 2023

When Ralph Vaughan Williams was born at Down Ampney on 12 October 1872, English music was still drifting down the years of the Victorian era, leaderless and bereft of a sense of purpose. Music in England, on the other hand, was thriving. August Manns, at his Crystal Palace concerts, and Charles Halle, at his Manchester concerts, were introducing new works and had changed the nature of symphony concerts from a miscellaneous selection of music of varying types into a more selective and substantial evening’s listening. Christine Nilsson, Emma Albani, Trebelli, Santley, Reeves, and Tietjens-these were among the singers at festivals and the opera. London was still a vital port of call for all the great celebrities of the day. Joachim, von Bulow, and Rubinstein were among the frequent visitors from the ranks of the virtuoso instrumentalists. Anton Bruckner played at the inauguration of the Royal Albert Hall organ. If the Germans’ jibe that England was the land without music ever had any truth it can only have accurately referred to the state of our native creative production. To understand the background of Vaughan Williams’s youth, it is necessary to look closely at the generation of composers which preceded him.
1872-1895
Authors: Kennedy Michael
Published: November 2023

Vaughan Williams has written, inimitably, his own account of his musical upbringing. No great composer ever had a stranger one. His first composition, which still exists, was a four-bar pianoforte piece called ‘The Robin’s Nest’. This was shown to some musically inclined visitors to Leith Hill Place, one of whom inquired whether Ralph had learned any thorough bass. Shortly after this, his aunt-his ‘very maiden maiden aunt’ as Frances Cornford put it-Sophy Wedgwood, instructed him in this mystery from The Child’s Introduction to Thorough Bass in Conversations of a Fortnight between a Mother and her Daughter aged JO Years Old (1819). Next was Sir John Stainer’s Harmony and, when he was eight, he took a correspondence course in music at Edinburgh University and passed two examinations. He was taught the piano, which he did not like, and the violin. His first violin lessons were from ‘a wizened old German called Cramer’ and they were continued at his preparatory school at Rottingdean by the Brighton teacher W. M. Quirke. Pianoforte lessons continued from a visiting teacher, C. T. West, to whom Vaughan Williams was always grateful for the gift of Novello’s Bach Album, Bach was not played at Leith Hill Place. At a concert at Rottingdean, Ralph played Raff’s Cavatina, but it was Bach’s music which must even then have filled his mind.
1953-1958
Authors: Kennedy Michael
Published: November 2023

The Sinfonia Antartica was played for the first time at a Halle Concert in Manchester on 14 January 1953. At the last minute it was discovered that the spelling ‘Antarctica’ was incorrect in Italian and was amended. The occasion attracted wide publicity and the hall was full. As Richard Capell succinctly wrote in the Daily Telegraph’. ‘The composer was present, and when his tragic but uplifting music was over he received one of the great ovations of his long career.’ On the whole the critical verdict was favourable, although there was much debate whether it was a symphony. Colin Mason, in the Manchester Guardian, forthrightly called attention to the work’s ‘masterly and completely unified symphonic form’ and stressed the originality of its design and the symphonic logic of the treatment of the material.
Performing Rites
Authors: Frith Simon
Published: November 2023

Who’s better? Billie Holiday or P. J. Harvey? Blur or Oasis? Dylan or Keats? And how many friendships have ridden on the answer? Such questions aren’t merely the stuff of fanzines and idle talk; they inform our most passionate arguments, distil our most deeply held values, make meaning of our ever-changing culture. In Performing Rites, one of the most influential writers on popular music asks what we talk about when we talk about music. What’s good, what’s bad? What’s high, what’s low? Why do such distinctions matter? Instead of dismissing emotional response and personal taste as inaccessible to the academic critic, Simon Frith takes these forms of engagement as his subject - and discusses their place at the very centre of the aesthetics that structure and colour our lives. Taking up hundreds of songs and writers, Frith insists on acts of evaluation of popular music as music. Ranging through and beyond the twentieth century, Performing Rites puts the Pet Shop Boys and Puccini, rhythm and lyric, voice and technology, into a dialogue about the impact of popular aesthetics on our lives. How we nod our head or tap our feet, grin or grimace or flip the dial; how we determine what’s sublime and what’s `for real’-these are part of the way we construct our social identities, and an essential response to the performance of all music. Frith argues that listening itself is a performance, both social gesture and bodily response. From how they are made to how they are received, popular songs appear here not only meriting aesthetic judgements but also demanding them, and shaping our understanding of what all music means.
Masses Based on Popular Songs and Solmization Syllables
Authors: Blackburn Bonnie J
Published: November 2023

When Petrucci produced his first publication devoted to a single author, the Misse Josquin printed on 27 September 1502, five masses of the master suddenly became available in the form of part books. Hitherto the customary format for masses was the large church choirbook, sometimes very large indeed, that allowed all singers to read from the same book, placed upon a lectern. The new format, with a small oblong booklet for each voice part, first began to appear in manuscript anthologies of mostly secular music towards the end of the fifteenth century. In deciding to issue Josquin’s masses in partbooks Petrucci made a very shrewd calculation, for it meant that the music could easily come into the hands of small choirs and even individuals. The books could be used for rehearsal and carried to different locations. And the music could be performed with whatever combination of voices and instruments was at hand. (There were, however, drawbacks, for important aspects of the original notation were lost, as will be demonstrated below.) Petrucci’s turn to partbook format for sacred music marked the threshold of a new era, in which professionals, amateurs, and connoisseurs had equal (or at least easier) access to notated music.
Masses Based on Polyphonic Songs and Canonic Masses
Authors: Bloxam M Jennifer
Published: November 2023

JosQurn was probably born in the 1450s, the very decade in which Dufay composed theMissa Se la face ay pale, one of the earliest extant cyclic masses based on a cantus firmus extracted from a polyphonic song. By the time Josquin died in 1521, polyphonic songs (including both chansons and motets) had become a favourite source of material for a new compositional technique in mass writing known today as parody or imitation, in which the entire contra puntal fabric of the model is reworked in the mass. Crecquillon, Gombert, and Willaert, all young men at the beginning of their careers when Josquin died, established the parody mass as the principal type of mass composition in the six teenth century. The six masses attributed to Josquin based on polyphonic songs thus span a critical time in the development of the polyphonic mass, indeed in the develop ment of musical composition in the West.
Two Hymns and Three Magnificats
Authors: Sherr Richard
Published: November 2023

The composers ofJosquin’s generation, unlike those who came before or those who would come after, were not much interested in hymns and Magnificats. They leave a few settings of these genres, it is true, but nothing to rival the hymn cycle composed by Du Fay or the cycles of hymns and Magnificats that were to proceed from the pens of Elzear Genet, Costanzo Festa, Adrian Willaert, and many others. The reluctance, at least in the matter of the hymns, may in fact have been due to the success of the Du Fay cycle; in the papal chapel, for instance, the cycle served as the basis of the repertory of poly phonic hymns for about 100 years. Settings of two hymn verses are ascribed to Josquin in Vatican CS 15 in the midst of the large complicated collection of all the hymns of the church year that opens the manuscript. This collection incorporates Du Fay’s hymn cycle but adds many other settings and includes chant so as to provide for alternatim performance of all the verses of the hymns. The new cycle was copied in the late fifteenth century, possibly between 1495 and 1497, therefore very close to Josquin’s time in the papal chapel. It would seem to represent the workaday hymn repertory of the papal singers, providing them with music not only for hymns sung at the few papal Vespers in the Sistine Chapel but also for the daily Vespers that they were required to sing in the smaller chapel in the Vatican palace, the chapel of St Nicholas (later the Cappella Paolina).
Josquin and Musical Rhetoric: Miserere mei, Deus and Other Motets
Authors: Macey Patrick
Published: November 2023

That rhetoric played a central role in Renaissance culture is undisputed. It functioned as one of the agents, along with a new emphasis on philology, for restoring the lost eloquence of classical Latin, the language that provided the vehicle for the revival of learning. In particular the work of Petrarch in the fourteenth century signalled a movement to rekindle the ashes of classical culture, which had gone cold through centuries of neglect during the intervening Middle Ages. In Petrarch’s view, classical Latin had been reduced through the arid dialectical methods of the scholastics to a mere technical tool for demonstrating logical proofs and absolute truths, truths that came to have increasingly little relevance to the everyday experience of people living in the fourteenth century. Petrarch sought to capture in his prose and poetry another reality, the immediate reality of daily experience, with all its confusing variety and paradox; to accomplish this he needed to restore to Latin its classical subtleties and eloquence. By means of this newly honed instrument hegrappled with and articulated the manifold nature of quotidian experience.
Afterword: Thoughts for the Future
Authors: Fallows David
Published: November 2023

My very title looks hubristic. In Josquin studies, as in any research, most people build gently on what has already been done; and that seems the correct recipe. Iconoclastic studies that cut through swathes of unconsidered material are rare, difficult, and unpredictable though everybody wants them. When there are areas that remain relatively untouched that is rarely because nobody has thought of them but rather because nobody is yet in a position to tackle them. Even so, the editor’s invitation to glance at the tealeaves was flattering enough to be irresistible. It is easiest to start on solid ground with the NewJosquin Edition, planned at thirty volumes and likely to take at least another twenty years. Already in tl1e preface to the last fascicle of the Smijers edition (1969), Eduard Reeser had announced that plans were afoot for ‘a new edition of Josquin in which the greatly increased source material will be dealt with anew according to the now customary critical methods’. Two years later at the New York Josquin conference of 1971, there were more detailed discussions; and the project was properly launched in 1973 with the first meeting of the editorial board. Some fifteen years of often difficult activity later, the first volume appeared (1988, but with a copyright date of 1987). Ten years later still, as these words are being written, only three further volumes have been published. With teething problems resolved there is every hope that progress will now become faster; but the task will never be easy.
Church Music
Authors: Holman Peter
Published: November 2023

WHEN Charles II returned to claim his kingdom in 1660 there had been little but simple psalm singing in England’s churches for eighteen years. In 1642 Parliament had ordered such part of the Common Prayer and service as is performed by singing men, choristers, and organs’ to be wholly forborn and omitted’; services were to be done in a reverent, humble and decent manner with out singing or using the organs’, and in 1644 an ordinance was issued for the speedy demolishing of all organs, images and all matters of superstitious monuments in all Cathedralls, and Collegiate or Parish-Churches and Chapels, throughout the Kingdom of England and the Dominion of Wales’. Most organs were destroyed or dismantled, and church musicians were forced to fend for themselves. A generation grew up in the 1640s and 1650s that knew nothing of the great repertory of cathedral music. Samuel Pepys (b. 1633) wrote on 8 July 1660 that he had heard very good Musique’ at Whitehall, the first time that I remember ever to have heard the Organs and singing-men in Surplices in my life’; on 4 November he wrote after a visit to Westminster Abbey that it was the first time that I ever heard the organs in a Cathedrall’.
Theatre Music
Authors: Holman Peter
Published: November 2023

ONE of Charles H’s first acts on his return to London was to authorize the reopening of the theatres, closed since the beginning of the Civil War in 1642. On 21 August 1660 Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Davenant, the leading survivors of the pre-war London theatre, were granted a patent allowing them to form two companies under the patronage of the king and the Duke of York. This was something new. There had been companies under court patronage in Elizabethan and Jacobean times, and Charles I granted Davenant a patent to build a theatre in 1639, a project never realized. But from 1660 the two companies enjoyed a monopoly of theatrical activity in London (it persisted until the nineteenth century, despite many vicissitudes and attempts to circumvent it), and they were supported by the king, who took an interest in their affairs, and regularly patronized them in person. His father, by contrast, had never set foot in a commercial play house.
1906-1921
Authors: Stevens Halsey
Published: November 2023

Back from Paris, Bartók boded himself in work. Dung me next year he traveled to widely separated areas of Hungary, from Transdanubia in the west to Transylvania in the east, setting down the songs of the peasants. Because of this and his increasingly active concert schedule he completed no original work in 1906.
The Chamber Music: II
Authors: Stevens Halsey
Published: November 2023

The remainder of Badók’s chamber music is in several categories, but with the exception of two late works it is entirely for string instruments with or without piano. While he was still a student at Pozsony he had written a piano quartet which was played there in 1898, to celebrate the name day of the director of the Gym-nasium; the following year in Budapest he was working on a quintet, but it is not clear whether this was ever completed, Koessler advising him to abandon it because of its inadequacies. A sonata for violin and piano was played in Vienna by Rudolf Fitzner, having first been heard in a concert of student compositions in Budapest on 8 June 19C3, and the following year Bartók wrote a piano quintet, which he played in Vienna in November 1904, with the Prill Quartet.
The Orchestral Music
Authors: Stevens Halsey
Published: November 2023

BartÓK began his creative career full of high hope for the future. His symphonic poem Kossuth, written when he was but twenty-two years old, not only was greeted with acclaim in Budapest but also brought about his first visit to England when it was played by Hans Richter in Manchester early in 1904. The First Suite for large orchestra achieved success when Ferdinand Loewe conducted the first three movements in Vienna late the following year. With these performances behind him, it would be easy to imagine that Bartók was on his way to the production of a long list of orchestral scores, and that his fame would soon spread throughout Europe and the New World.
Apprentice
Authors: Kennedy Michael
Published: November 2023

The ‘Paris’ quadrilles of 1880 were a souvenir of Elgar’s first visit abroad, when he went to the French capital with Charlie Pipe, who was to marry Lucy Elgar the following year. They heard Saint-Saens play the organ at the Madeleine and saw Moliere’s Le Malade Imaginaire. Edward evidently had another brief preoccupation for in 1933, when Elgar visited Delius in France, after he left Grez-sur-Loing the scent of the countryside ‘recalled a romance of 1880 … I decided to go to Barbizon, but when I passed the cross-roads the longing had passed away. That belonged to the romance of 1880, now dead.’1 He returned to Worcester, to his teaching and his work at the asylum; he took the Royal Academy of Music’s local examination in violin and ‘general musical knowledge’, passing with honours in company with the blind musician William Wolstenholme, then aged fifteen; and he was promoted to the first violins at the Worcester Festival, where the orchestration of Mackenzie’s cantata The Bride impressed him. This led in the following year to his engagement to play in the first violins of W. C. Stockley’s orchestra in Birmingham. Stockley’s Popular Concerts were a well-established Midland event and he was also chorus-master for the Birmingham Triennial Festival.
Retreat from London
Authors: Kennedy Michael
Published: November 2023

The years 1889 to 1899 are the most important in Elgar’s life. In this decade he went from obscurity to fame, by way of cruel discouragement. These are the years which explain how the composer of Salut d’ .·-1mour turned into the composer of the Enigma Variations. He did not, as has often been implied, become a great composer overnight in one work. No artist in any art in the history of mankind has done that. The seeds and roots of greatness grow obscurely sometimes, but their progress is traceable and recognizable.
‘Gerontius’: Disaster and Triumph
Authors: Kennedy Michael
Published: November 2023

Elgar was asked in November 1898 for a work for the 1900 Birmingham Triennial Festival. He wrote to Littleton of Novella’s: ‘Now I have to consider the subject, which must be sacred: can you suggest anything? and will your firm want the work? I want to make this my chief work ⃛’ Littleton did not trouble himself to reply. At first, Elgar considered St Augustine as a subject. He told Joseph Bennett, the critic of The Dairy Telegraph, in January 1899 that this idea had been rejected as ‘too controversial: this is as I feared’ .1 (The controversy can only have related to Augustine’s relations with women, not to his theology.) Elgar said he was considering ‘a purely scriptural thing, but have not fully decided’. Dorabella says2 that she heard ‘a good deal’ of the piano score of The Dream of Gerontius while on visits to Craeg Lea and Birchwood in May, June and July 1899, but her dates are wrong and she meant 1900. On one visit she heard the Introduction to Part II and ‘Praise to the Holiest’ in nearly complete form. When Elgar asked her what she thought of the latter she replied: ‘It gives me the impression of great doors opening and shutting.’ ‘Does it?’ Elgar said. ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’
Friends and Relations
Authors: Kennedy Michael
Published: November 2023

After the second Düsseldorf Dream of Gerontius, Alice Elgar wrote an account of the performance and of Strauss’s tribute for her mother-in-law, who had barely three months more to live. No reply survives, but one written in 1899 still applied. From the music-shop home in Worcester High Street, Ann Elgar had said: ‘What can I say to him the dear one—I feel that he is some great historic person—I cannot claim a little bit of him now he belongs to the big world.’

In these moving words are an ironic tribute, for though he was an historic person belonging to the big world, the dichotomy of his life in the years to follow was the conflict and contrast of Elgar the Historic Person with Elgar of Worcester. The London Elgar and the Country Elgar were very nearly two different people except that the personality at the heart of both was complex, so that parts of one mixed with the other, not always to happy effect. The results show plainly in his music.
Full Orchestra
Authors: Kennedy Michael
Published: November 2023

Elgar’s mature orchestral output after the Variations, its origins, and its varying reception by the public, is best looked at as a whole. But, in returning to the year after the failure of Gerontius at Birmingham, it is salutary to recall that not everybody reacted to his music as recalcitrantly as the majority of that festival audience. Bernard Shaw, in his famous Music and Letters essay in 1920, remembered his own scepticism ‘when the excitement about Gerontius began ⃛ But when I heard the Variations (which had not attracted me to the concert) I sat up and said “Whew!”. I knew we had got it at last.’ Arnold Bax, in his teens, became an admirer on the strength of the vocal scores of King Olaf and Caractacus. ‘Two years later to this admiration was added reverence, for The Dream of Gerontius took utter possession of what religious sense I have.’
Submission
Authors: Kennedy Michael
Published: November 2023

The last fourteen years of Elgar’s life are a long and slow diminuendo. Towards the end, the old energy tried to reassert itself but it was too late: by then, not only the mind but the body was tired. He did not retreat from the world and shut himself away after Alice’s death, but her departure from the scene had deprived him of a prime motivation. As he wrote to Boulton 5 August from Brinkwells: ‘I am lonely now & do not see music in the old way & cannot believe I shall complete any new work—sketches I still make but there is no inducement to finish anything;—ambition I have none …’ When he returned to ‘cold and empty’ Severn House he found interest and amusement in his microscopes and in games of billiards with his old friend and benefactor, Hugh Blair, whom he had never deserted in the hard times which had come upon him. Elgar’s life from now onwards could almost take as its motto the passage from Antony and Cleopatra: ‘“The music, ho!” “Let it alone; let’s to billiards”.’
1914–1922 ‘My Adorable, Adoredest Mum’
Authors: Gillies Malcolm , Pear David
Published: November 2023

On 4 August 1914 Britain declared war on Germany. Within barely a fort night Grainger and his mother had moved out of their London home, stored many of their possessions, and postponed the coming months’ engagements. Early in September they left ‘for a short trip to America, to give mother a change’, as Grainger wrote to his Uncle Frank. The Graingers, however, would never return to reside in Britain. Within months of his arrival in the United States Grainger had established himself in the first tier of New York’s concert life, advancing considerably on his London status.
1940–1949 ‘The All-Round Man’
Authors: Gillies Malcolm , Pear David
Published: November 2023

The Graingers visited England and Scandinavia during the summer of 1939, returning home in August, just before war broke out in Europe. Although the United States had not yet entered the war Grainger feared invasion. He hurriedly set about copying and dispatching to several different locations the more important musical and personal items in his possession at White Plains.
Digital theory
Authors: Mornington-West Allen
Published: November 2023

The sounds which we hear come to the ear as a continuously changing variation in the ambient atmospheric pressure. These small changes are the very ones which we aim to pick up using a microphone. The output of the microphone is an electrical signal (voltage) which is related to the pressure changes which move the microphone diaphragm. This signal is thus an analogue of the originating pressure changes, and hence it is referred to as an analogue (sometimes spelt analog) signal. The principal characteristic of an analogue signal is that it is continuous in time and that there are thus no discontinuities. Indeed, if we use a conventional oscilloscope to trace out the shape of the signal’s size or amplitude with respect to time then we might see something such as Figure 3.1. This trace we would refer to as its wave shape. We can contrast this shape with the mathematically much simpler one of a sine wave, as in Figure 3.2.
Sound processing
Authors: Elen Richard
Published: November 2023

‘Sound Processing’ is an excellent catch-all phrase. Once the signal has entered the recording chain, and before it reaches the final medium—the Compact Disc, record, cassette, or whatever—virtually everything that happens to it can be described as ‘sound processing’. Even level control is a form of processing. But, fundamentally, we are concerned here with techniques of altering the sound’s character. This can be done in a number of ways, and the primary techniques to consider are those involving the frequency spectrum, dynamics and time and spatial localization.
Loudspeakers and monitoring
Authors: Veale Edward
Published: November 2023

Studio monitoring is very subjective and emotive. What we hear is the result of the process of hearing, and this is based upon our individual learning and experiences of different sounds and sound patterns. Because no two people are likely to have had precisely the same experiences, we all tend to interpret sound in different ways. For these reasons, it is difficult to gauge what another person is hearing or interpreting from a pattern of sound. Also, the response, texture, and quality of the sound reproduced by a loudspeaker is affected by the construction of the drive units, the enclosure within which the units are mounted, and the room or space within which the reproduction is heard. With so many personal and physical variations, it is little wonder that recorded sounds are given different interpretations by different people and, furthermore, that they actually sound different from one room to another. In fact, one may marvel that any similarity is achieved at all.
Digital Recorders
Authors: Spencer-Allen Keith
Published: November 2023

One of the accepted benefits of analogue recording has been the stability and universality of the recording formats and standards. It is possible to find compatible machines for the mainstream formats anywhere in the world. Further, those same formats have changed very little over the last twenty years in the case of multitrack recording and far longer in the case of stereo. Even if the format is not a precise match, there is every likelihood that, provided the tape width is the same, something audible can be extracted from the recorded information.
Popular music
Authors: Ross-Trevor Mike
Published: November 2023

This chapter describes the basic guidelines for recording live music in the recording studio. This falls into two main categories: (a) orchestral music with rhythm section as used for easy listening albums, musicals, TV background music, and commercials; (b) small ensemble rock and pop groups aimed at the popular music charts. These guidelines can in no way be described as definitive, as the methods and ideas of today’s producers and engineers vary considerably. We shall concentrate on the recording of live musical instruments as opposed to the computer and MIDI-based areas of recording. The approach can of course be modified to suit individual situations and requirements.
Post-production
Authors: Turner Ben
Published: November 2023

Before the advent of the compact disc in 1982, and indeed the introduction of digital recorders from a few years earlier, recording studios mixed down to analogue stereo masters, which would then be edited into the correct running order. This tape was then taken into a cutting-room, where level changes and equalization would usually be applied at the time of transfer to lacquer disc. A simultaneous tape copy, reflecting any changes made to the original programme, could also be made. This copy was used as a ‘production master’ from which further copies could be taken. The arrival of the compact disc along with the Sony digital 1610 U-matic format, and later the Fl Betamax format, meant that digital editing, digital EQ, and final PQ encoding of the CD master could take place only at specialized and relatively expensive facilities houses.
Compact disc processing
Authors: Reynolds Gerald , Halliday Jonathan
Published: November 2023

The technology of digital, optically read discs has given rise to a manufacturing process of a new order of complexity. The Compact Disc is a precision moulding carrying detail of truly microscopic size, yet at the same time it is a mass-produced product. Figure 24.1 indicates the main dimensions and features of the disc. As a further indication of the relative complexity of producing CDs rather than LPs, it may be mentioned that the CD tracks are a mere 1.6 µm wide, whereas LP grooves are about 125 µm (see Plate 39).
Radio broadcasting
Authors: Fisher Dave
Published: November 2023

In a short space it is very difficult to do justice to so wide a subject as broadcasting, which embraces many engineering and operational disciplines. Therefore I shall try to describe the main differences between broad casting and the rest of the sound recording industry.

The following differences are generally true throughout broadcasting:

Broadcasting can be live. This means that studios, equipment, and operational procedures need to be designed for the possibility of live transmission, even though many programmes are recorded.

The absolute technical quality of a programme may take second place to its production ‘feel’, particularly if it is live. For instance, audience noise (including applause) at a live concert may add more than it detracts from a live transmission.
Songs and Piano Music
Authors: Musgrave Michael
Published: November 2023

Just how Brahms’s creative life might have developed without the impact of the meeting with the Schumanns and the equally traumatic effect of Schumann’s attempted suicide and decline is a matter for conjecture. Even before Schumann’s death, however, Brahms was taking stock of his position and looking to the future. He had reached a point at which his ambitions towards extended chamber and orchestral composition lay beyond his immediate powers of realization, as the problems of medium and form in the Piano Quartet in C sharp minor and the Sonata/Symphony in D minor clearly demonstrate; even the Piano Trio in B was subsequently to be radically revised.
Choral Music
Authors: Musgrave Michael
Published: November 2023

The remarkable scope of historical reference achieved in the keyboard works of the second period would have represented adequate evidence of a vital new attitude to the past by itself, and one quite sufficient to enrich greatly an extensive output of chamber and orchestral music. Yet the relationship seems very immediate when compared with the much more distant world he evokes in his output of choral music. For here the link between historical exploration, performance and composition is at its clearest, especially in the works written between the beginning of his period of intense study, from 1855, and the appearance of his first mature chamber and piano works from 1862.
Choral Music
Authors: Musgrave Michael
Published: November 2023

By the third period, the technical and professional motives which had stimulated so much smaller-scale choral music in the second period had disappeared. With his retirement from the Gesellschaft concerts in 1875, Brahms undertook less choral conducting and the preoccupation with strict counterpoint was more for pleasure than necessity: ‘When I don’t feel like composing, I write some counterpoint,’ he is quoted as stating. Thus, Brahms wrote very much less choral music. The depth of his commitment to the medium is, however, abundantly clear from its quality and individuality
Stile brillante
Authors: Samson Jim
Published: November 2023

The concertos were not Chopin’s first attempts at writing for the orchestra. He had already made his mark outside Poland with his performance in Vienna of the ‘La ci darem’ Variations, the work which elicited Schumann’s famous ‘Hats off, gentlemen! A genius.’ He began the work in 1827 and by the following year he had completed not only the variations but two other works for piano and orchestra, the Krakowiak-Rondo Op.14 and the Fantasy on Polish Themes Op.13. The rondo was performed at the second of his 1829 Vienna concerts and both works were given at several concerts in Poland before his final departure.
Baroque reflections
Authors: Samson Jim
Published: November 2023

The Grande Polonaise was a coda in another sense. For Chopin the orchestra held little attraction other than as a conventional enhancement of solo virtuosity, and his creative involvement with it ended with this work. It was his last big ‘public’ display piece, but not quite his farewell to the stile brillante. Some of the music which he produced during his early years in Paris still belongs firmly to that world. He completed the Rondo Op.16 (begun in Warsaw) and composed a set of Variations Brillantes Op.12 on a theme of Hérold, his last essays in the genres so beloved of the benefit concert.
Salons
Authors: Samson Jim
Published: November 2023

Apart from the polonaise and the mazurka, the one dance piece which attracted Chopin repeatedly was the waltz. It is not surprising that his earliest attempts should have followed hard on the heels of the youthful polonaises, for the waltz craze swept across Europe at an astonishing rate in the early nineteenth century. The composers who laid its musical foundations, Josef Lanner and Johann Strauss the elder, became the idols in turn of Vienna, the Austrian Empire and the wider world, and very soon their waltzes were mimicked by other composers of functional dance music.
German dialogues
Authors: Samson Jim
Published: November 2023

The bulk of Chopin’s mature output admits no contradiction between the popular and the significant. His waltzes, designed for the salon, lose little in sophistication to the more ambitious ballades and scherzos, too profound for the salon, yet drawing much of their energy from the waltz. There are, however, works which stand a little way outside this integrated world, with its constant mediation between the cultivated and the vernacular. On the one hand we have works such as the Bolero, the Tarantella and the Op.12 Variations which meet the demands of the salon on its own fairly shallow terms. At the other end of the spectrum lie the sonatas, where popular materials play only a modest role, subordinated to the demands of the historical archetype. The sonatas are Chopin’s most direct response to the achievements of the German Classical tradition.
Ballades
Authors: Samson Jim
Published: November 2023

Broadly characterised, the scherzos, like the polonaises, build extended structures from simple designs, where the larger divisions are clear, sections are contrasting and closure is optimised. The ballades, on the other hand, favour through-composed, directional structures, where transformation and variation are seminal functions, integration and synthesis essential goals. Within the terms of this generalisation we might add that the Second Scherzo leans towards the condition of the ballades and the Second Ballade towards the condition of the scherzos.
Introduction
Authors: Kurtzman Jeffrey
Published: November 2023

Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine, published together with his Missa in illo tempore, has been a familiar item in music histories and the subject of intense interest among early music performers and enthusiasts for many years. And well it should be, given the grand dimensions, vocal and instrumental virtuosity, musical colour, and extraordinary variety characterizing the collection of fourteen compositions subsumed under the title Vespro della Beata Vergine in the composer’s Bassus Generalis part-book. The importance of this publication to Monteverdi himself is underscored by its dedication to Pope Paul V2 Interest in the Vespers has led to several modern editions and innumerable performances and recordings, some of very high quality, employing historical instruments and up-to-date knowledge of early seventeenth-century performance practices.3By now, the Vespers of 16m are truly in the public domain, familiar to large numbers of musicians and music-lovers.
A Preliminary Note on Analytical Method and Terminology
Authors: Kurtzman Jeffrey
Published: November 2023

Monteverdi’s music has long been considered to span the watershed between the late Renaissance and early Baroque, between the decline of polyphony and the medieval modal system and the beginning of the functional harmonic system and modern tonality that only became fully established in the late seventeenth century. In this sense he has been viewed as a ‘transitional’ composer, helping to define the criteria of the transition and to move it toward further stages of development. Yet Monteverdi’s role in this historical process should not be overestimated. His use of cadentially directed melody and harmony, the scales and ostinatos in his bass-lines, his circle-of-fifths bass movement, his homophonic textures, his melodic and harmonic chromaticism, his variation techniques, and his tonal organization in large structures were shared in some measure or another by the vast majority of composers of his era. Moreover, many of these stylistic features trace their origins well back into the sixteenth century, in some cases as far as the fifteenth century.
Compositions Based on a Cantus Firmus: The Response and Psalms
Authors: Kurtzman Jeffrey
Published: November 2023

In the Bassus Generalis part-book, at the head of Domine ad adjuvandum, the rubric appears Vespro delta B.Vergine da concerto, composto sopra canti fermi (Vespers of the Blessed Virgin in concerto, composed on cantus firmi). Of the fourteen compositions aside from the Missa in illo tempore in Monteverdi’s 1610 print, ten are ‘composed on cantus firmi’. These comprise the response, all five psalms, both Magnificats, the hymn Ave maris stella, and the Sonata sopra Sancta Maria, the latter based on the Litany of the Saints. Only the four few-voiced motets are without a cantus firmus.
Organs and Organ Registration
Authors: Kurtzman Jeffrey
Published: November 2023

Italian organs of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, most often comprising a single keyboard with a compass of thirty-eight to fifty-three keys, were rather simple in comparison with the larger instruments of northern Europe. Approximately fifty to fifty-three keys were common, but the lowest octave was usually a short octave, devoid of chromatic half-steps and often containing even less than a full diatonic octave.