bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Robert Simpson's Ninth Symphony
Authors: Pike Lionel
Published: February 2010

Throughout his life Robert Simpson has been fascinated by two aspects of the music of the great Viennese classical composers: their handling of large-scale tonality, and their handling of rhythm. It has been his abiding ambition to recapture the sense of energy that Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven produced, and which has been largely lost since then. He has wanted, for example, to discover what makes a Beethoven Adagio or Scherzo, or a Haydn Finale, so utterly characteristic rhythmically. As a means of exploring this he has set himself various tasks. He wrote his First Symphony, for example, with a basic pulse throughout, upon which contrasting tempi are achieved by varying the pace of thought. This method is found in subsequent works, for example the Second, Seventh and Eleventh String Quartets, the second movement of the Third Symphony, and most of the Sixth. In these works tonality, as it is generally understood, is a potent force.
Roger Sessions: a personal portrait
Authors: Olmstead Andrea
Published: February 2010

Driving north up the Connecticut River on Route 47 from Hadley, Massachusetts, one is led by signs to the local historic site, ‘Forty Acres’, or the Porter-Phelps-Huntington House. During summer months a dollar buys a guided tour of the museum-house built in 1752 and the possessions of six generations of families who lived there. With its deeds and diaries dating from the French and Indian Wars, a 178-year-old grandfather clock which keeps perfect time, former slaves' quarters, a Southern veranda (the ‘Stoop’) looking out onto the River, a secret stair-case, tales of a ghost, antique furniture, and portraits of ancestors who entered the clergy, taught at Harvard, or fought in the Revolution, the House radiates continuity with the past. One of its most famous residents, the Bishop of Central New York, the Rev. Dan Huntington, had a daughter named Ruth who grew up and met her future husband—her second cousin Archibald Sessions—at ‘Forty Acres’. Research on the biography of one of America's foremost composers, their son Roger, leads to ‘Forty Acres’, for he is a direct descendant of these New Englanders.
The Songs of Ned Rorem
Authors: Miller Philip Lieson
Published: February 2010

To be America's leading song writer at a time when practically nobody is writing songs may seem on the surface like no great distinction. But to have over a hundred songs in print, many of them sung and recorded by leading artists, is a real achievement. And to have accomplished this with a serene disregard for the fads and trends of the time, with no interest in novelty for its own sake is, to say the least, remarkable. But lest there be any mystery about Ned Rorem or his music, he is the author of some eight volumes of diaries, journals and essays in which his frankness has gained him readers while losing him friends, and his lucid discussions explain as well as possibly could be done the workings of his own musical mind.
Thoughts on a Modern Quartet
Authors: Wood Hugh
Published: February 2010

George Rochberg's Third Quartet is a curious piece. To come to it with an absolutely Innocent Ear would be very disconcerting: that is, if your innocence extended to a complete ignorance of all the tortured twists and turns which musical thought (if you care to call it that) has been undergoing in the last dozen years. But the person so strong-minded that he can resist reading a sleeve-note before putting on a record has not yet been born. And after reading the prolonged, convincing and very well-written pièce justificative which Mr. Rochberg has provided for this record-cover, you will have learned a good deal of Mr. Rochberg's musical autobiography as well as his intentions for this piece. This raises the old problem of programme-note writing: should you be told what to think? But in this case, such a detailed exposé may well rebound on its author's head: for you eventually find yourself discussing the validity of the composer's intentions and the gap between them and their execution, rather than the music itself. No worthwhile composer would want this: and I am pretty certain that is not the way to listen to, or to think about, music.
Andre Jolivet (1905–1974)
Authors: Schiffer Brigitte
Published: February 2010

Andre Jolivet died in Paris in December 1974 at the age of 69. His untimely death caused deep distress to his numerous friends. For the French musica world it meant the loss of an important, original and imaginative composer, and there was, at least, the usual acknowledgment from official quarters. Otherwise it hardly caused a stir; and the press, which had always been so responsive to his music, remained strangely silent. This is all the more surprising as Jolivet, during the last thirty years, had been a frequent guest at international and national festivals, had been widely performed and acclaimed in the Western world, and was considered representative of a certain kind of new French music (though overshadowed by his friend and near-contemporary Olivier Messiaen).
Xenakis and the Performer
Authors: Hill Peter
Published: February 2010

The techniques and aesthetic of Xenakis's music have been widely discussed in books and articles—many by the composer himself. These issues belong to the ‘outside time’ characteristics of music which Xenakis has defined in his article ‘Towards a Metamusic’ (TEMPO 93). So far, however, there has been little or no detailed discussion of the ‘inside time’ aspect of his music, namely the problems relating to its performance, although it is generally known that many of his works—especially those where solo players are involved, such as Nomos Alpha, Mikka, Eonta, Herma, Evryali, Synaphai-Connexites—are exceptionally difficult to play. These problems are important and must be solved not only for the sake of satisfactory performances of Xenakis's music, but also because they raise wider questions concerning the further exploration of instrumental technique.
The Anti-Formalist ‘Rayok’ – Learners Start Here!
Authors: MacDonald Calum
Published: February 2010

Much of what follows concerns itself with issues which are inevitably (and properly) extra-musical. But the musical significance of the recently-exhumed and now partially recorded ork by Dmitri Shostakovich which seems to be called (or thought of as) Antiformalisticheski Rayok is worth stressing at the outset. This little cantata ‘for reader, four basses, mixed chorus and piano accompaniment’ could hardly be claimed as one of the Soviet master's major utterances: it is, rather, a particularly bitter and subversive satirical squib – much of its fascination stems from the explicitness and political discomfort of the attack, and the identity of its targets. On the other hand, it is a not unimportant contribution to a specifically Russian tradition of musical satire: it can be seen to be taking its place in – and rendering more intelligible – the development of Shostakovich's personal commitment to that tradition, as he moved from the zany and anarchic grotesquerie of his early film, ballet and theatre scores to the oblique but devastating critique of officialdom and philistinism that underlies such enigmatic pieces as the Preface to the Complete Edition of My Works, op. 123 and his very last song-cycle, the Verses of Captain Lebyadkin, op. 146. Rayok belongs in their company, but is neither oblique nor enigmatic: it represents, in an extreme vitriolic form, an aspect of Shostakovich's musical humour that could only express itself publicly through a protective mask of irony. The vitriol is here undiluted, because Rayok was written with no thought of publication: was indeed unpublishable at the time, and in the political conditions, under which it was conceived.
Strauss's ‘Intermezzo’
Authors: Hamburger Paul
Published: February 2010

Of Strauss's three large-scale autobiographical works, Intermezzo is surely the sincerest and the best. It avoids the grandiosity of Ein Heldenleben and the coyness of parts of the Sinfonia Domestica, and approaches bathos only in the final duet of reconciliation between the composer and his wife. For the rest, the story and music give an unvarnished account of the Strausses' menage, and in particular of one incident, taken from life, when Mrs. Strauss wrongly suspected her husband of infidelity after opening an incriminating letter from a Berlin demi-mondaine that was intended for another conductor with a similar name.
The Early History of ‘Koanga’
Authors: Threlfall Robert
Published: February 2010

Koanga was the third of Frederick Delius's operas to be completed (in 1897), but the first to be staged (in 1904); it was also the first of his earlier works to achieve the distinction of posthumous publication (in 1935). The long-awaited release of the recent recording, by turning our thoughts anew to this colourful score, provides a suitable occasion to review the earlier history of the work.
Berthold Goldschmidt: A Biographical Sketch
Authors: Matthews David
Published: February 2010

Berthold Goldschmidt is 80 this year. It would be pleasant to record that his birthday was being celebrated with widespread performances of his music, but sadly this is not the case. His adopted country—Goldschmidt has lived in England since 1935 and took British nationality in 1947—has remained largely indifferent to him as a composer. None of the works he has written in this country has yet been published, and the most ambitious of them, the opera Beatrice Cenci, has not been performed. This article, together with forthcoming articles on Goldschmidt's music to be published in a future issue of TEMPO, will, it is hoped, do a little towards the rehabilitation of a scandalously neglected composer.
Towards the Infinite Expansion of Tonal Resources
Authors: Rapoport Paul
Published: February 2010

Over the whole of the historical period of instrumental music, Western music has based itself upon an acoustical lie. In our time this lie—that the normal musical ear hears twelve equal intervals within the span of an octave—has led to the impoverishment of pitch usage in our music.
Kodály in England: A Documentary Study (II: 1928–1945)
Authors: Breuer János
Published: February 2010

After the success of the Psalmus Hungaricus, His Master's Voice accepted M. D. Calvocoressi's suggestion that it should make recordings in Budapest of the finest pieces of the Hungarian Folk Music cycle, with Béla Bartók as pianist and the best Hungarian Kodály singers. Thus the first recordings of Kodály works were inspired by an English source.
Geoffrey Poole: an introductory note on his music
Authors: Burn Andrew
Published: February 2010

Like his contemporaries Nigel Osborne and John Casken, Geoffrey Poole (born 1949) is among the most promising voices of his generation. Yet he is not so well known as either of them—despite commissions from the BBC, Hallé, and Kings' Singers, the recording of a major work, many broadcasts, and his winning the Clements Prize and a Radcliffe Award. Possibly this situation arose because Poole didn't gain a publishing contract early in his career, but that has had its advantages since it allowed him the opportunity to develop his personal style away from the limelight.
Howard Ferguson in 1983
Authors: McBurney Gerard
Published: February 2010

‘It is Held, Upon all Hands’, wrote Lionel Johnson, ‘that to write about the works of a living writer is a difficult and delicate thing’. How much more difficult and delicate then to write of a composer who is very much living, and working, but no longer composing. As Howard Ferguson's decision to stop composing after 1959 would suggest, his music is the product of the fiercest self-criticism applied as much to the craft of composition as to the meaning. It is music of high purpose and devoted attention to the problem in hand.
On the Horizontal and Vertical Presentation of Musical Ideas and on Musical Space (I)
Authors: Busch Regina
Published: February 2010

‘His Own Attempts at Explanation, just like his compositional work, lend themselves to misunderstanding’. This opinion dominates Webern literature now as in the past, though naturally not always in this formulation of Dohl's. Sometimes we read of contradictions, of imprecisions; errors of fact or of mental processes can be ‘demonstrated’; and, depending on the particular author's field of interest and study, these are treated with indulgence or gentle annoyance, with indignation or knowing dismissal. Who could expect of a composer—a composer, moreover, like Webern: naive, at times culpably naive, withdrawn from reality; with a music so ‘abstract’, so in need of help or redemption by means of interpretation—who could expect of such a composer pertinent and consistent, or at least apt, music-theoretical concepts or utterances? Hardly anyone, in fact, seems to have dared to expect this kind of thing of Webern so far. That this might indeed involve some daring can be recognized from the conditions, the fuss, and circumstance with which Webern is approached. Whether they have sprung from the soil of serial music or not, all the systematic investigations, the numbering of note-rows, classifying of pitches, durations and so on, considerations of ‘structure’ (many investigations, too, of ‘form’, of symmetries)—they all seem like precautions against the music. Since the music is not trusted, the traditional music-theoretical concepts presented by Webern (and Schoenberg, too) are also regarded as unsuited for coping with the music. Instead, attempts are made using, for instance, the idea of a cell (usually a three-note basic cell) and its metamorphoses—an idea which is at least as anachronistic as the traditional ones, is scarcely strong enough to bear the burden of explication, and is exactly as vulnerable to criticism on scientific and ideological grounds as a serious preoccupation with Webern's own statements is alleged to be.
A Survivor of the Vienna Schoenberg Circle: an Interview With Paul A. Pisk
Authors: Antokoletz Elliott
Published: February 2010

The Passage of Time naturally removes us from first-hand personal experience with significant historical events and/or important persons that were part of those developments. Since the musical aesthetics and techniques of Arnold Schoenberg and his circle originated and began to develop in Vienna over 75 years ago, future students will have to rely on written rather than direct personal sources of information to gain insight into the music of that era. Our loss of primary contact with the Vienna Schoenberg circle is further complicated in that its members generally met and worked in intimate and esoteric situations. These conditions were in large part due to the conservative tastes of the Viennese public, so that new works in all the arts were generally not able to find public support.
Bruno Maderna: from the Cafe Pedrocchi to Darmstadt
Authors: Fearn Raymond
Published: February 2010

Among the Musicians in Umberto Grossato's band, which appeared regularly in cafés and restaurants around Venice in the 1920's, playing on board the ferry which at that time plied between Venice and Mestre, and occasionally even in the prestigious Café Pedrocchi in Padova, was the bandleader's young son Brunetto, a child-prodigy whose violin-playing did much to increase the popularity of the band. Ever since his grandfather had given him a violin when he was four, with a nail put in its neck to mark a left-hand position, he had tried to live up to his grandfather's dictum that ‘even if you later become the greatest of gangsters, you will still end up in heaven if you are a violinist.’
Hans Keller 1919–1985
Authors: Mitchell Donald
Published: February 2010

I Apologize for reading from these notes. But in saluting Hans I don't want unduly and inappropriately to fumble or stumble. I'm conscious as I speak of his unique ability to think aloud in perfectly articulated and continuous sentences, something I could not hope to match. And in saluting Hans, I am also saluting Milein, and remembering her fortitude during this last week and recent months.
Roger Sessions: A Commemorative Tribute
Authors: Carter Elliott
Published: February 2010

Everyone who came to know Roger Huntington Sessions and to admire his music was always deeply impressed by his integrity as man and musician. For us his high moral stand revealed itself in every aspect of his mature life: in his music, in his teaching, in his essays, in his moments of light-hearted humour in social gatherings. This quality has been evident to me ever since I heard his First Symphony performed by the Boston Symphony in 1927.
Trans–Cultural Composition in the 20th Century
Authors: Craig Dale A.
Published: February 2010

The most remarkable development in 20th-century music has been the gradual rise of transcultural music to status as the dominant activity of composers. Interaction between musics of various types within the same culture, and between cultures (including those separated from us in historical time), has been more important than the conventionally-recognized classifications of 20th-century musical activity such as expressionism, atonality, impressionism, neo-classicism (in its purist, Eurocentric stance), serialism, total serialism, chance, and minimalism (when it poses as an intellectual movement without cross-cultural referrents).
Reich And Wittgenstein: Notes towards a synthesis
Authors: Cowan Robert
Published: February 2010

To try to establish a relationship between the terse linguistic philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the deceptively simple minimalist music of Steve Reich might at first seem a little ambitious, if not downright misguided. Yet a synoptic survey of the two men's work reveals a series of formal and conceptual correlations that is often quite striking. I hasten to add that my comparisons apply mostly to those of Reich's compositions where melodic and harmonic ideas are ‘phased’ and developed over the ground of a constant pulse, rather than to works such as The Desert Music where poetic texts substantially influence the form and design of Reich's music. I tend to draw more on Wittgenstein's later thought – especially the Philosophical Investigations than on his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, although Reich himself has quoted from the latter in discussing his own artistic style.
On the Horizontal and Vertical Presentation of Musical Ideas and on Musical Space (III)
Authors: Busch Regina
Published: February 2010

An important factor in understanding the two kinds of presentation is that – seen historically – one or other has at different times moved into the foreground; moreover, that in connexion with the development of music and as a consequence of the continually progressing ‘conquest of the pitch-domain’, a mixing of the two kinds of presentation was arrived at. Here Webern above all follows Adler, who speaks in his book Der Stil in der Musik (1911) of ‘immensely multifarious intermediate and transitional stages from homophonic to polyphonic voice-leading’, of their mixing, of a ‘to and fro rich in variety, … continual exchange of the two basic kinds, homo – and polyphony’ (p. 246). As has already been said, Webern, going beyond this, assumes that the mixing up is caused by a tendency, on the part of the two kinds of presentation, ‘mutually (to) permeate each other more and more’ (Lecture IV).
Bad Resolutions or Good? Ives's piano ‘Take–Offs’
Authors: Alexander Michael J.
Published: February 2010

In a Moment of Reflection Ives asked himself, ‘Are my ears on wrong?’ Like so many composers he had to contend with periods of self-doubt, and during the first two decades of this century, when his mature works were written, he was presented with very few opportunities to hear them played in public. Yet he continued to jot down a muddled host of experimental ideas; his imagination fuelled by personal experience. From childhood in Danbury Connecticut Ives had possessed a phenomenal memory: for the kinds of literature that he read, the people that he met and the music-making that he heard. All these impressions were later collated and presented in his Memos. Dictated in the 1920's and 1930's, they make fascinating reading, both in terms of their vivid accounts of local bandcalls, revivalist singsongs, barn dancing, blacked-up minstrelsy, and ad hoc performance practice together with the composer's opinions about American musical life as he knew it. However, none of this was mere objective note-taking: Ives often expresses himself in the vernacular and doggerel of his boyhood.
‘Authenticity’ in Contemporary Music
Authors: Hill Peter
Published: February 2010

It used to be said that we study history for the lessons we can learn for the present: ‘plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose’. But now that the music of the past occupies the centre-stage—with contemporary work getting the walk-on parts—perhaps we should reverse this, and ask how far the past can be illuminated by what happens today.
Eisler and Austrian Music: Notes for the Almeida Festival
Authors: Drew David
Published: February 2010

In West Berlin on 8 September 1987, Fischer-Dieskau is to give a recital of Hanns Eisler's songs, with Aribert Reimann at the piano. A tribute at this level to Eisler's achievement within and around the Lieder tradition was long overdue. Since the concert is sponsored by the Berliner Festwochen—which this year is handsomely celebrating the city's 750th anniversary—it is assured international attention, which it deserves for a variety of reasons, not least because it is impossible to construct a complete and balanced programme of Eisler Lieder without somehow calling in question the very idea of official blessings, from whatever quarter.
Spinner's Violin Sonata – Why op. 1?
Authors: MacDonald Calum
Published: February 2010

Leopold Spinner composed his Sonata for Violin and Piano at the age of 30, in Vienna, in late 1936, while Studying with Webern. It was performed in Vienna on 22 November of that year under the auspices of the Austrian Section of the ISCM. In 1940—having in the meantime been forced to emigrate to this country—he made a slightly revised version of the work, which seems to have remained unheard until this year.
English Song and the German Lied 1904–34
Authors: Docherty Barbara
Published: February 2010

If it is Indeed the case that there is a landscape of the soul which song inhabits, few would dissent from the view that in England in 1900 it was a dead land. The ‘aesthetic tension’ between poetry and music which had stimulated Schubert, Schumann, and Wolf seemed entirely absent, and there was no English Eichendorff or Mörike. Stephen Banfield has asserted that English composers at this time aspired only to produce a ‘frictionless entity’ by providing a ‘pianistic’ accompaniment to Rupert Brooke's or Mathew Arnold's words.
The Achievement of Andrzej Panufnik
Authors: Truscott Harold
Published: February 2010

NEARLY THIRTY YEARS AGO I wrote an article for this magazine introducing Andrzej Panufnik, as a worthwhile composer then new to me. Since then he has grown tremendously, in range and in stature. He is Polish, and that bulks large in his music, as it does in the work of any Polish composer; but he is more than that—he is a world artist, and it seems propitious now to examine some of the music that has proved this increase in stature.
At the Doors of Kranichstein: Maderna's ‘Fantasia’ for 2 Pianos
Authors: Fearn Raymond
Published: February 2010

THE TIME will almost certainly arrive when historians of the music of the present century will speak of the ‘Darmstadt School’ of composers—that group of musicians many of whose earlier works were first heard at the Summer School in that city. Indeed, the phrase has already gained some ground, even if it has not yet entered general parlance. When the term ‘Second Viennese School’ was invented, some years after the ‘school’ had in fact broken up for its vacation, there may have seemed to be some justification for giving it such a name, since it had at least consisted of a teacher and his pupils; only now, perhaps, are we able to see that the ‘classes’ were somewhat unruly ones, and neither the pupils nor their most un-academic teacher had managed to invent even the most elementary ‘syllabus’ or even ‘ethos’ for the establishment. If we dare to speak of a ‘Darmstadt School’, then we shall certainly search in vain for its more than temporary guiding spirit, or for an ethos which was universally accepted.
The Music of John Lambert
Authors: Pettitt Stephen
Published: February 2010

John Lambert, who celebrated his 60th birthday in 1986, is known better as a teacher than as a composer, and despite a formidable list of past pupils, which includes the likes of Javier Alvarez, Simon Bainbridge, Gary Carpenter, Oliver Knussen, Jonathan Lloyd, Ian McQueen, and Mark-Anthony Turnage, that is a situation he and many others view as slightly unfair. His output is not especially prodigious—excluding the chamber opera, A Family Affair, to be performed at the Brighton Festival this year the numbered oeuvres run to 26 in all—yet the quality and frequently the bold originality of his music, readily acknowledged by colleagues like Ligeti and Dutilleux, surely merits wider acknowledgement than it has as yet received.
Ernst Roth: A Personal Recollection
Authors: Newman George
Published: February 2010

FIFTY YEARS AGO, in March 1938, Hitler invaded Austria. I left Vienna and came to London. Now, half a century later, I look back on forty years of music publishing, first of all in the 1950's in the production department of Boosey & Hawkes, and later setting up my own business for the engraving and copying of orchestral full scores and instrumental parts for international music publishing firms.
Sentence into Cadence: The word-setting of Tippett and Britten
Authors: Docherty Barbara
Published: February 2010

When Addressing a text to be set a composer will, at the extremes, offer it violence or reverence, and a sharp-edged exchange was committed to print in the 1960's concerning the correct relation between parole and musica when sentence (or stanza) is made cadence. In his Conclusion to Denis Stevens's A History of Song, Michael Tippett stated that one of the attributes of the song-writer was the ability to destroy all the verbal music of the poetry he set and to substitute ‘the music of music’. Five years later, in his contribution to the Festschrift for Tippett's 60th birthday, Peter Pears made a spirited denial of this ‘Mantis-like’ proposition: the composer should court his text, designing a musical structure compliant to his purpose while according the words the care of the poet whose art they first were. Behind this genteel shadow-boxing lay a wider issue: whether there were definable canons for the setting of English text (as exemplified by Benjamin Britten, since it was against his vocal works that the felicities and inflations Pears discerned in Tippett's 1943 cantata Boyhood's End and 1951 song cycle The Heart's Assurance were implicitly being measured) and whether Tippett's practice flouted them.
Barry Anderson, 1935–1987
Authors: Montague Stephen
Published: February 2010

Barry Anderson died in Paris on 27 May 1987, a few hours after the first performance of his new chamber work, ARC. His hectic life-style with its incessant demands had burned him out. The immediate cause of death was heart failure, but the real cause was exhaustion from years of overwork as a composer, teacher, concert organizer, ‘ghost’ writer, and pioneer in the dissemination of electro-acoustic music in this country. He was 52 years old and, sadly, just beginning to be recognized as a composer of international stature.
Sir William Glock At 80: A Tribute
Authors: Heyworth Peter
Published: February 2010

WhenHeLearnt of William Glock's appointment as the BBC Controller of Music, Walter Legge wrote to his former colleague (in earlier days both men had been critics), ‘I feel as though I were a citizen of sixteenth century Wittenburg and Martin Luther had been elected Pope’. The astonishment was wellnigh universal, for up to that point Glock had seemed an outsider on the British musical scene.
The Music of Alfred Schnittke
Authors: Moody Ivan
Published: February 2010

In recent years, Alfred Schnittke has seemed to provide a point of focus for interest in Russian music which has been absent since the death of Shostakovich in 1975: not least because he appears in some respects to be the latter's natural successor. Many of Shostakovich's aesthetic as well as technical preoccupations have played a significant part in Schnittke's work. Schnittke has developed these preoccupations, in fact, to a further extreme: his principal inheritance from Shostakovich, the sense of irony and alienation, has become the most obvious trait in the music of a composer who has consistently followed his own star quite independently of any stylistic clique.
‘Now sleeps the crimson petal’: Britten's other ‘Serenade’
Authors: Mitchell Donald
Published: February 2010

Britten's Serenade, op.31, for tenor, horn, and strings, was first performed at the Wigmore Hall, London, on 15 October 1943, with Peter Pears, Dennis Brain and an ad hoc orchestra conducted by Walter Goehr. It was dedicated to Edward Sackville-West.
Villa-Lobos in Israel
Authors: Peppercorn Lisa M.
Published: February 2010

Heitor Villa-Lobos's sole visit to Israel, in 1952, was significant in several ways. During a stay of a few days, he presented himself as conductor of his own works, lectured on his pedagogical ideas by explaining and demonstrating his manosolfa system, and was inspired to compose a symphonic poem based on his impressions of Israel, which he dedicated to that country. Seven years later, in 1959, it was in Israel that Villa-Lobos's Concerto for Harmonica and Orchestra, a work commissioned by John Sebastian, the American virtuoso harmonica player, was first performed.
The Kodály Concept of Music Education
Authors: Winters Geoffrey
Published: February 2010

The recent issue in this country of a 36-page textbook entitled The Kodály Concept of Music Education by Helga Szabó, accompanied by a set of three LP records, prompts me to examine the place such a scheme might have in the schools of this country. Kodály's ‘Choral Method’ has of course been available in this country for some years, and is now in the process of being reissued with new and improved texts for English speaking children by Geoffry Russell Smith. Mme Szabó's clear and vivid exposition will help to increase appreciation of its value. The book and records trace the use of the method from pre-school music activities to music college level, and the emphasis throughout is squarely placed on the development of aural ability through the use of the voice and solfa. The first musical example, on Side A, is of a two-year-old Hungarian singing a nursery rhyme; the last, on Side F, is of Kodály's Hymn of Zrinyi, sung by the choir of the Central Ensemble of the Ironworkers' Union. Each record is adequately banded, so that it is easy to locate any example, and in addition to the detailed commentary in the text book, each example is announced helpfully before it is performed. The quality of recording is lively, although somewhat marred by echo and pre-echo, and the stereophonic balance is realistic, especially in the circular games on Side A.
Karl Amadeus Hartmann's ‘Klagegesang’ and the re-emergence of his early music
Authors: Warnaby John
Published: February 2010

Since the Bavarian composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann died in 1963, his music has probably not received the recognition it deserves as one of the most important continuations of the German symphonic tradition in the 20th century. This is partly due to the fact that, despite studying briefly with Webern in 1942, Hartmann did not adopt the serial method espoused by his younger contemporaries (whom he materially assisted by organizing the famous Musica Viva concert series in Munich), but preferred to draw upon a variety of styles. In the ‘post-Modern’ hindsight of the last decade or so this creative approach has now assumed complete respectability. Hartmann's cause has also been strengthened by the scholarship of Andrew D. McCredie, who has compiled the thematic catalogue of the oeuvre and, in the process, drawn attention to the considerable significance of the composer's early output.
Thematicism in Stravinsky's ‘Abraham and Isaac’
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: February 2010

Style, in music where pitch alone is serialised, stems from decisions about repetition. The set can be used in such a way that, even if restatements of one particular form are frequent, a different register, rhythm and timbral distribution will make it difficult to hear the restatement as repetition, at least before close analysis. Serial composers who retain the essentially traditional, pre-serial method of melodic or motivic identity are perhaps more likely to use repetitions which possess a clear similarity of shape as well as an explicit element of variation. Such a method can ensure the audibility of the evolving structure of a serial work, and also enable a composer to use designs involving tonal emphases without recourse to triadic formulae.
Serialism for Today
Authors: Smalley Roger
Published: February 2010

The occasion for this article is the recent appearance of revised editions of two important works on serialism—Josef Rufer's Composition with Twelve Tones, first published in English in 1954 (now Composition with Twelve Notes, Barrie and Rockliff, 35/–), and George Perle's Serial Composition and Atonality (subtitled ‘An Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern'), which originally appeared in 1962 (Faber, 55/–). In addition I shall be referring to two recent events in London which proved to be stimulating contributions to the discussion of serialism: the seminars given by Milton Babbitt during the third SPNM Composers' Weekend, and a talk entitled ‘Schoenberg and the future’ given by Pierre Boulez as part of the South Bank Summer Music festival.
Wrong Notes in Contemporary Music
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: February 2010

My title is, of course, a begging of at least half the question: we first have to diagnose the right notes as right before we can say that any of them are wrongly played—diagnose rather than merely find: no longer does the fact that a composer puts down a C on paper necessarily mean that he cares two hoots if a C sharp is played instead, or a C-semi-sharp for that matter. And even if he thinks he cares, one takes leave to doubt the profundity of his worries when, in rehearsal, one notices that he does not perceive the difference between the alleged right note and the wrong note he gets instead. Such tone-deafness may indeed be temporary, traumatic—especially if the composer is young, unused to rehearsal, frightened, nervous. But if it happens again and again, in all conceivable circumstances, the least that can be said on the sceptical side is that he must be overestimating the significance of his C qua C.
Copland and Stravinsky
Authors: Matthews David
Published: February 2010

I recently heard Sir Michael Tippett acknowledge Stravinsky as his master. I think Aaron Copland would do the same: for both men Stravinsky is in many ways an ideal, a hero-figure. He has shown that it is possible for the twentiethcentury composer to create his own tradition; both Tippett and Copland have succeeded in creating their own traditions, the one against the background of an English musical life still very insular in its outlook, the other against the musically barren background of American urban society, and both must have drawn strength and direction from Stravinsky's example. For Copland (as for many of us) Stravinsky is also an enigma, his music a mystery: it ‘seems to exist on a suprapersonal plane, in an aural world of its own … One thinks of the Mass, the Canticum Sacrum, or of Threni… these works, in some curious way, seem strangely removed from everyday ‘events’, and yet they remain for the most part profoundly human.’ Copland concludes ‘The essence of the man… the sum total of his extraordinary individuality, has never to my knowledge been adequately described, let alone imitated. Despite the widespread influence of his music Stravinsky as a composer remains a singularly remote and removed figure, a composer whose passport to the future needs no signature other than his own.’
Aspects of Copland's Development
Authors: Kay Normal
Published: February 2010

With Aaron Copland's maturity as a composer, American music gained a conscious identity, a persona, a style. Large claims, admittedly, but historically justified, even if it may be argued that they tell us little about the intrinsic quality of his work. About one thing, however, there can be no doubt: when Copland returned from his Parisian studies with Nadia Boulanger (1924), there was no style which could readily be accepted as quintessentially American—as a distillation of experience which belonged to that continent and to no other. There had been a number of brave attempts—composers who had seen the need to swing away from traditional European polarities—but no single figure had bridged the gap between his internal imagination and the responses of the outside world. This didacticism is necessary because of the extraordinary figure of Charles Ives—that enormous image that will loom over American music as long as it is played. Ives, an intrinsically richer personality, more copiously gifted, failed where Copland succeeded. The contrast between their personalities tells us more about the America they both idealised than any separate survey of their works could do. They are, in fact, the antitheses of American music. Both had the rare courage to bring their initially unwelcome attitudes into the full glare of public light, so that their impact could be openly assessed—a fact which would certainly not have been applicable to the many composers who were still vacillating between the accepted quasi-European language, and a kind of regressive provincialism.
The Sketchbook of the Rite of Spring
Authors: Smalley Roger
Published: February 2010

‘In the winter [of 1910–11 Stravinsky] went with Maurice Ravel to Varese, an Italian town not far from Como, found in a stationer's shop an exercise book and, tempted by its presentation and the quality of the paper, he and Ravel bought one copy each.’ For the next two years Stravinsky carried this book from ‘The Lindens’, a pension in Clarens, to Monte Carlo, Paris, Venice, to his summer home in Ustilug in Russian Volhynia and finally back to the Hotel du Châtelard in Clarens, and in it he wrote the first draft of The Rite of Spring.
The Music of Gordon Binkerd
Authors: Shackelford Rudy
Published: February 2010

Klaus George Roy, in a profile of Gordon Binkerd's Harvard mentor, Walter Piston, spoke of that composer's musical ‘mental health’, of his work as ‘sane and un-neurotic; he does not hand on to us his problems, but his solutions’. Although these are scarcely qualities one acquires by classroom study, they have proved equally characteristic of Binkerd himself. He recalls that the knowledge of Bach fugues gained under Piston's tutelage was ‘the most decisive single factor in my preparation as a composer’. Binkerd came to Harvard as a candidate for the Ph.D. in musicology, directly after the end of World War II and naval service in the Pacific theatre. Earlier, he had worked with Bernard Rogers, ‘that orchestral genius’, at Eastman, and with Russell Danburg and Gail Kubik at Dakota Wesleyan University. He was born 22 May 1916 on the Ponca Indian Reservation in Lynch, Nebraska, a few miles below the South Dakota border. Grandparents on both sides of his family had homesteaded in the Sand Hills during the 1860's, and Binkerd's parents lived in various small towns in Nebraska before moving to the Rose Bud Sioux Reservation at Gregory, South Dakota.
Kodály in English
Authors: Howes Frank
Published: February 2010

Why does the story, which has not been told before, have such a familiar ring to us in Britain? The biography of Zoltán Kodály, written in 1956 by László Eősze has now been well translated into English (Collet's, 35/–), and brought up to date to include Kodály's last visit to this country (1960) and the composition of his Symphony in C (1961). In 1961 there also appeared in an English version, with a special preface for English readers, his authoritative book Folk Music of Hungary (Barrie and Rockliff, 35/–), which also struck a responsive chord in the minds of English readers. True, they had had Bartók's book on the same subject on their shelves for thirty years and so had realized that the tunes of Liszt, Korbay, Magyary Imre and Hungarian restaurants were not true Hungarian folksongs. No, it is not previous knowledge of what happened in Hungary, now presented to us in full detail, that makes it all familiar, it is that we have had the same experience here ourselves.
Stravinsky and Debussy
Authors: White Eric Walter
Published: February 2010

‘Dear Stravinsky, you are a great artist. Be with all your strength a great Russian artist. It is so wonderful to be of one's country, to be attached to one's soil like the humblest of peasants! And when the foreigner treads upon it, how bitter all the non-sense about internationalism seems.’
Stravinsky and Neo-Classicism
Authors: Mitchell Donald
Published: February 2010

Stravinsky himself has argued that neo-classicism embraced not only his own works but those of his great contemporaries: “Every age,” he observes, “is a historical unity. It may never appear as anything but either/or to its partisan contemporaries, of course, but semblance is gradual, and in time either and or come to be components of the same thing. For instance, ‘neo-classic’ now begins to apply to all of the between-the-war composers (not that notion of the neo-classic composer as someone who rifles his predecessors and each other and then arranges the theft in a new ‘style’). The music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern in the twenties was considered extremely iconoclastic at that time but these composers now appear to have used musical form as I did, ‘historically’. My use of it was overt, however, and theirs elaborately disguised. (Take, for example, the Rondo of Webern's Trio; the music is wonderfully interesting but no one hears it as a Rondo.) We all explored and discovered new music in the twenties, of course, but we attached it to the very tradition we were so busily outgrowing a decade before.”
Richard Strauss and Munich
Authors: Trenner Franz
Published: February 2010

When an old man looks back on his life, it is natural that memory should soften disagreeable incidents and recall only the pleasant. This is perhaps the reason why Richard Strauss, too, confessed that the happiest memories of his life were connected with the town of his birth. He spent more than a quarter of his life within the city limits of Munich, and whenever he retired to his Garmisch eyrie or left it for his travels throughout Germany, Europe and America, to conduct the works of his great predecessors or interpret his own, his way always led him through his home town.
Richard Strauss as I Knew Him
Authors: Henderson Robert L.
Published: February 2010

On the occasion of the world-wide celebration of the centenary of the birth of Richard Strauss, Tempo has asked me to recall some memories of this great musician who honoured me with his friendship, and who, even in times of difficulty always retained his admiration for France and the French spirit.
Ginastera: A Discography
Authors: Foreman Lewis
Published: February 2010

This discography includes all recordings I have been able to trace containing music by Ginastera. Many of the records are listed unseen, but the most authentic sources have been preferred when there have been conflicts of information. Entries are in alphabetical order by title of the works listed. Cross-references have been provided where parts of works are well-known on their own, or where Spanish and English titles are both in general use. Thus the popular song ‘Triste’ will be found under (5) Canciones Populares Argentinas. (Numbers have been ignored in alphabetization).
The British Contemporary Music Network: An American View
Authors: Fromm Paul
Published: February 2010

I Read with great interest the symposium on Britain's Contemporary Music Network which appeared in the December issue of TEMPO. I had known about this programme but became more intimately acquainted with it when I met Annette Morreau during her visit to Chicago last November. However, at the time, I had not realized just how strong a link the Network has been forging between the composer and the performer in Britain. Now, after reading the list of works performed—and the ensembles who have played them—during the Network's five-year history, and noticing in the printed schedule for the remainder of this season how often a single programme is repeated—as many as eight to twelve times, in some cases—I am particularly struck by the contribution the Network is making to the life expectancy of individual musical works.
‘Le Sacre du Printemps’: The Revisions
Authors: Craft Robert
Published: February 2010

The 1921 orchestra score of Le Sacre du printemps, the first to be published, differs greatly from the original (1913) version. In a letter to an unidentified French correspondent, 9 January 1918, Stravinsky says that the printing of the first edition was interrupted by the war, and that he possesses only one copy of the proofs. A year later, answering a request by Felix Delgrange to perform the Sacre, the composer writes says

…105 musicians are required and you have only 80. Also, it is necessary to follow my markings. Furthermore, the only orchestra parts in existence are in my possession. (Letter of April, 1919)
Maxwell Davies's Symphony—an introduction
Authors: Pruslin Stephen
Published: February 2010

Even given that the birth of a first full-fledged symphony must be a symbolic moment in the life of any composer, Peter Maxwell Davies has approached the word ‘symphony’ with an impressive caution not unreminiscent of his illustrious predecessor Johannes Brahms. The fact that few composers are writing symphonies these days does not in itself explain his delay in using the term, since he has given us numerous works of symphonic weight and proportions. Nor is it simply a case of taking a ‘trial run’. It is one thing to have tested the water with the Second Taverner Fantasia but quite another to have tested it with the Fantasia and then Worldes Blis, St. Thomas Wake and Stone Litany. Since the Second Taverner Fantasia is a symphony in everything but the name, we are left with a double question: why is the new symphony called a symphony and why is the Second Taverner Fantasia not called one?
Peter Maxwell Davies's ‘Five Klee Pictures’
Authors: Knussen Oliver
Published: February 2010

The music which Peter Maxwell Davies was writing immediately before his appointment as Director of Music at Cirencester Grammar School in 1959 was of quite startling originality, and after 20 years the shock effect has scarcely diminished. Perceptible beneath the austerely note-against-note composition of St. Michael (1957) and Prolation (1958) there is, as John C. G. Waterhouse pointed out as far back as TEMPO 69 (Summer 1964), a latent dramatic gift. But despite the high degree of tension inherent in his language, Maxwell Davies seems almost obsessively to avoid opportunities for attractive orchestral dress. One is reminded of his revealing off-the-cuff remark of 1965 (quoted by Bayan Northcott in TEMPO 121): ‘The young composer's only salvation in today's stylistic chaos lies in submitting to the most stringent technical disciplines; then if anything individual comes through at all, at least he will know that it is his own’. Today we can recognize that the harmonic language of Prolation is much more characteristic of its composer than the almost Nono-like appearance of the printed page. But the fact remains that the precisely interlocking multiple Klangfarbenmelodien of St. Michael (section four), like the various rhythmic intricacies of Prolation, are still extremely difficult to bring off in performance, and almost as difficult to hear even when played well.