bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Chapter 15 The Show Must Go On
Authors: Salzman Eric , Desi Thomas
Published: January 2010

This chapter discusses Songspiel and vaudeville, show music, and other popular musical theater forms; Kurt Weill in Europe and Kurt Weill in America; “theater opera” on Broadway in the 1930s and '40s starting with the Thomson/Stein 4 Saints in 3 Acts and continuing with the work of Weill, Gershwin, Britten, Menotti, Rodgers & Hart and Rodgers & Hammerstein. The American works of Weill are discussed including Love Life and the so-called concept musical with its long range influence on Blitzstein, Bernstein, William Bolcom, Anthony Davis, and others, including many pop and jazz musicians. The Kurt Weill influence was brought back to Europe by Robert Wilson and Tom Waits in their Black Rider. Limited European influence can also be traced in the work of East German composers, Henze, the Vienna group around Kurt Schwertsik and HK Gruber, Heiner Goebbels, and Christoph Marthaler.
Chapter 16 The Art of the In-Between
Authors: Salzman Eric , Desi Thomas
Published: January 2010

This chapter discusses certain forms of music theater, particularly in the United States and in France dominated by stage directors or choreographers acting as auteurs (rather than composers). It considers how much experimental theater has evolved towards the condition of music theater over the years; the term melodrama — originally a spoken or declaimed theater accompanied by continuous music — and many modern examples found in the work of Schoenberg, Cage and others; and other forms of in-between art involving jazz, percussion, and noise.
Chapter 17 Extended Voice
Authors: Salzman Eric , Desi Thomas
Published: January 2010

This chapter discusses Roy Hart, the Roy Hart Theater, and the roots of extended vocalism; widening of vocal range and inclusion of non-traditional vocal sounds and techniques; the American monologists; Meredith Monk, her techniques, vocal esthetic, and music-theater works; other well-known performers; and Quog Music Theater and the American Music Theater Festival.
Chapter 18 New Media and Music Theater
Authors: Salzman Eric , Desi Thomas
Published: January 2010

Technology has a long history in both music and theater, and music theater may be the most technological of all the arts. The arrival of new technologies has always provided a focus as well as themes for new work: the history of the relationship of opera and music theater on the one hand; film, video, and television on the other. Robert Ashley's video work, various uses of technology in music theater works, and digital interactivity are discussed. A final section discusses theater itself as a medium in the work of Heiner Goebbels.
Chapter 20 Notation versus Improvisation?
Authors: Salzman Eric , Desi Thomas
Published: January 2010

This chapter discusses the impact of the growing constraints of notation (to achieve ensemble togetherness) on operatic performance. Solutions include text declamation over chordal punctuation, dry recitative (recitativo secco) or spoken text alternating with set musical numbers; also the introduction of improvisation, embellishment, and performance flexibility. It considers some recent works created with the collaboration of the performers and without a fixed score — as in dance or jazz; the whole range of possibilities for improvisation and performer involvement from modified strict notation to free improvisation; and the implications that follow such as the notion of music and music theater as play. Audiences do not always recognize improvisation, but all theater needs the aura of improvisation in order to convey a performance that lives in the moment.
Chapter 21 Popular or high art?
Authors: Salzman Eric , Desi Thomas
Published: January 2010

This chapter addresses the following questions: Do we need an art class structure? Is there a continuing dialectic between low-brow and high-brow? Has middle-class art passed from the theater to the interactive domain of club culture? Does a serious popular music theater still exist?
Chapter 22 Is Anyone Listening?
Authors: Salzman Eric , Desi Thomas
Published: January 2010

This chapter contrasts the audience for contemporary music theater with the audience for traditional opera, arguing that a given performance in a certain place with a certain audience can totally change the reality of a piece or its performance. It addresses the following questions: What brings an audience into the theater? Are audiences now more global than local? What is the relationship between audiences, media and performance space? How have the changes in technological culture affected the relationship between the audience, the performer, and the work?
Swing Along
Authors: Carter Marva
Published: January 2010

Renowned today as a prominent African-American in music theater and the arts community, composer, conductor, and violinist Will Marion Cook was a key figure in the development of American music from the 1890s to the 1920s. This book looks at his life’s story, drawing on his unfinished autobiography and his wife Abbie’s memoir. A violin virtuoso, Cook studied at Oberlin College (his parents’ alma mater), Berlin’s Hochschule für Musik with Joseph Joachim, and New York’s national Conservatory of Music with Antonín Dvořák. Cook wrote music for a now-lost production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, and then devoted the majority of his career to black musical comedies due to limited opportunities available to him as a black composer. He was instrumental in showcasing his Southern Syncopated Orchestra in the prominent concert halls of the United States and Europe, even featuring New Orleans clarinetist Sidney Bechet, who later introduced European audiences to authentic blues. Once mentored by Frederick Douglas, Will Marion Cook went on to mentor Duke Ellington, paving the path for orchestral concert jazz. Through interpretive and musical analyses, the book traces Cook’s successful evolution from minstrelsy to musical theater. Written with his collaborator, the distinguished poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Cook’s musicals infused American musical theater with African-American music, consequently altering the direction of American popular music. Cook’s In Dahomeym was the first full-length Broadway musical to be written and performed by blacks. Alongside his accomplishments, Cook’s contentious side is revealed—a man known for his aggressiveness, pride, and constant quarrels, he became his own worst enemy in regards to his career. The book also sets Cook’s life against the backdrop of the changing cultural and social milieu: the black theatrical tradition, white audiences’ reaction to black performers, and the growing consciousness and sophistication of blacks in the arts, especially music.
Boyhood
Authors: Carter Marva Griffin
Published: January 2010

This chapter discusses William Mercer Cook as he grew from child to adolescent. It explains several important points in his life, from the death of his father, his journey with his mother, and the life that he had when he stayed with his relatives. It also narrates Will’s decision to pursue his latent desire to study music at Oberlin College. It adds that his artistic ability was undoubtedly inherited from his paternal grandfather, who once organized an orchestra in Detroit, wherein he played the violin and clarinet. It then explains that the violin was to become the instrument upon which Will would choose to express his musicality.
Removing The “Minstrel Mask”
Authors: Carter Marva Griffin
Published: January 2010

This chapter discusses how a group of black contemporary intellectuals and artists elevated the content, form, and style of the Negro as theatrical writer, composer, and performer. It shows that Will Cook used compositional techniques that were employed by both black and white contemporary composers. It shows that Cook used the African themes, ethnic humor, and coon variety stereotypes that were common among black songwriters, but he also wrote songs about love, women, patriotism, nostalgia, and themes that were also common in the songs by whites. It clarifies that the ultimate purpose of masking was for deception, which for blacks was a method of coping with their dual role in a multiracial society. It highlights that in unmasking the musicals of Will Cook, African Americans came closer to revealing the truth about themselves and others in their pursuit of social justice and equality.
“A Hell of A Life”
Authors: Carter Marva Griffin
Published: January 2010

This chapter discusses the life of Will Cook during his latter years. It narrates that Will died on July 24, 1944 at the age of 75, after battling against several diseases such as tuberculosis, pancreatic cancer, and a heart condition. It discusses that Will Cook began to write his autobiography, A Hell of a Life, during his latter years. It explains that his autobiography shows that he recognized that his shortcomings in life were not brought by his complexion, but rather by his uncontrollable actions or reactions to the real or imagined wrongs. This chapter also tells of several versions of the story why Cook did not pursue his career as a violinist. It highlights that history is indebted to this troubled man of genius for pioneering black musical comedies, syncopated orchestra achievements, and uncompromising fight for racial equality.
Postlude
Authors: Carter Marva Griffin
Published: January 2010

This chapter discusses the final rites for Will Cook. It explains that his final rites were simple for Will himself requested it. The chapter also talks about how Will was admired by many of whose careers he advanced for he served as father, mentor, teacher, and tutor to black and white artists alike. It describes Will as someone who did not maintain a traditional family lifestyle, but someone who was a surrogate father to his orchestral members and close friends. It characterizes Cook as someone who had a knack for recognizing talent and providing the appropriate channel for its development. It notes that Will Cook tried to foster and implement racial consciousness and pride through agitation. It underlines his memoirs, revealing his ultimate challenge to destroy wrongs, and at the same time write beautiful music.
The Lost Eden: Noli me Tangere
Authors: Goldoftas Barbara
Published: January 2010

This chapter describes the ecological costs of over-logging, particularly the rapid clearing of the once-vast Dipterocarp lowland forests, and distinguishes between unregulated commercial logging and small-scale illegal logging. It features two case studies that contributed to a rise in the Philippine environmental movement. In San Fernando, Bukidnon, Mindanao, in the 1980s, in response to growing ecological decline that followed large-scale commercial logging, the community held protests until the logging permits were suspended. The chapter also describes the background and aftermath of a devastating mudslide in Ormoc, Leyte, which has become a symbol of the unnatural disasters and destruction that deforestation can bring.
To Get a Feeling for a Place: Naninibago
Authors: Goldoftas Barbara
Published: January 2010

This chapter profiles the political and economic contexts that fostered the expansion of the commercial logging industry and logging concessions in the Philippines in the 20th century. It addresses the role played by the American colonial government, including the involvement of Dean Worcester and Gifford Pinchot, and draws parallels between the US conservation movement and the Philippine environmental movement. It also tells the story of Nerilito Satur, one of dozens of forest guards deputized by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to safeguard local forests, and who were murdered for their work.
“No Need Cement”
Authors: Goldoftas Barbara
Published: January 2010

In the mid-1990s, a proposal by the Pangasinan Cement Corporation to build a cement plant and sprawling industrial center in Bolinao, Pangasinan, split the fishing town, which is the home of the University of the Philippines Marine Science Institute. The undersecretary responsible for the case at the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Antonio La Vina, focused the decision about the necessary Environmental Compliance Certificate on the principal of social acceptability: whether or not the rapid industrialization would be acceptable to the community. This case study provides an important example of how difficult decisions about sustainable development can be made at the local level, how they can be made with transparency and community involvement, and how a community may respond to the potential changes brought about by rapid industrialization.
Nameless Solidarity: Quedan Kaisahan
Authors: Goldoftas Barbara
Published: January 2010

This chapter analyzes the broad repercussions of the concentration of land ownership in the Philippines: on the path that development has taken, on the misuse of natural resources, and on the social and political unrest. It relates the case of a single land-tenure conflict on the island of Negros Occidental, where vast sugar plantations have, over generations, enriched the sugar growers while most of the population remained landless and impoverished. Under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program, enacted under Corazon Aquino, the Department of Agrarian Reform was not able to accomplish broad land redistribution, and the program motivated some landowners to stop investing in their land. The chapter also illustrates the difficulty of life in a poor province like Negros, and the complexity of the land-reform process.
Introduction
Authors: Yoshida Takashi
Published: January 2010

This introductory chapter outlines what the following twelve chapters will discuss. It argues that the image of Nanjing as the site of particularly brutal atrocities is a more recent construction. It also stresses that the story of Nanjing in historic memory only begins with an understanding of chronology.
Japan: Mobilizing the Nation, Sanitizing Aggression
Authors: Yoshida Takashi
Published: January 2010

This chapter traces the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre in Japan from 1937 to 1945. Although accounts that escaped censorship did record and condemn the random killings, looting, and rape in Nanjing, at the height of hostilities with China, such brutalities seemed almost indistinct from the rest of the fabric of enmity, nationalism, and war. In the immediate aftermath of the outrages at Nanjing, only the most attentive observers in Japan were aware that they had even happened.
China: Intolerable Atrocities
Authors: Yoshida Takashi
Published: January 2010

This chapter examines the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre in China from 1937 to 1945. During this period, the atrocities in Nanjing were by no means the main symbol of Japanese aggression. The Nanjing atrocities were most prominent in local rather than national awareness. The Guomindang government focused more intensively on indiscriminate bombings and chemical warfare rather than on the Nanjing Massacre.
United States: The “Rape of Nanking”
Authors: Yoshida Takashi
Published: January 2010

This chapter discusses the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre in the United States from 1937 to 1945. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the brutalities in Nanjing symbolized for Americans the cruelty and barbarism not just of the Japanese military, but of the Japanese people as a whole.
United States: Rebuilding Japan
Authors: Yoshida Takashi
Published: January 2010

This chapter examines the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre in the United States from 1945 to 1971. Because new foreign enemies of the United States emerged after Japan's defeat, the Nanjing Massacre received scant attention from the American public in the aftermath of the war. The previously monolithic image of the fanatical Japanese began to acquire more diverse and human faces.
Japan: From “Victim Consciousness” to “Victimizer Consciousness”
Authors: Yoshida Takashi
Published: January 2010

This chapter discusses the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre in Japan from 1971 to 1989. International media coverage of the Vietnam War and domestic attempts by the Japanese government to influence the official public understanding and teaching of the Nanjing Massacre gave rise to significant turning points in the literature of Nanjing.
China: Nationalizing Memory of the Nanjing Massacre
Authors: Yoshida Takashi
Published: January 2010

This chapter analyzes the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre in China from 1971 to 1989. The year 1982 was a turning point in the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre in China. Fears of so-called spiritual pollution by Western influences prompted the government to stress the teaching of the history of the Anti-Japanese War.
United States: Focus on Japanese Denials of the Past
Authors: Yoshida Takashi
Published: January 2010

This chapter traces the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre in the United States from 1971 to 1989. During this period American media rediscovered the Nanjing Massacre, but the number of journalists and other writers who participated in this revival of interest was still quite small.
United States: Rediscovery of the Nanjing Massacre
Authors: Yoshida Takashi
Published: January 2010

This chapter analyzes the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre in the United States from 1989 to the present. Publicity regarding the atrocities was fanned by a combination of events and anniversaries. An unprecedented number of individuals in the United States began to take interest in Japan's wartime atrocities in China.
Entering the World of U.S. Law
Authors: Mertz Elizabeth
Published: January 2010

This chapter takes the reader into the law school classroom, stepping into the shoes of law students who are beginning to learn legal language and are initiated into a new way of thinking and talking about the conflicts with which they will be asked to deal as attorneys. Much has been written about the first year of law school. There have also been many attempts to define core aspects of U.S. legal reasoning. This book considers these two issues together, using a study of the initial law school experience to shed light on legal worldviews and understandings. One focus of this research is the content of U.S. legal epistemology (that is, distinctively legal ways of approaching knowledge), as revealed in the training of initiates into the world of law. The study uses close analysis of classroom language to examine the limits that legal epistemology may place on law's democratic aspirations. It also asks whether legal training itself may impact the democratization of the legal profession.
Law, Language, and the Law School Classroom
Authors: Mertz Elizabeth
Published: January 2010

This chapter provides a brief overview of scholarship that has examined the role of language in society and culture, in socialization practices, and in education. It concludes with a discussion of the role of language in law, legal reasoning, and legal education. The resulting synthesis of insights from multiple disciplines provides the foundation for the model of language in social context used in this study. It is through language that social problems are translated into legal issues. At the broadest level, this study brings together two related inquiries. First, whether there is a distinctive approach to translation embodied in the canonical legal language taught to law students. If so, how people learn to use that distinctive language as they become legal professionals—in their first months of training to be the lawyers and judges whose voices and writings perform the act of legal translation. To address these questions, work in linguistics, anthropology, legal theory, social theory, educational research, and psychology is considered.
Study Design, Methodology, and Profile
Authors: Mertz Elizabeth
Published: January 2010

This chapter outlines the particular synthesis of methodological approaches used in the study of language used in law schools. In addition, it describes the site selection process and the trajectory of the research as it developed. Finally, it outlines some of the complexities involved in coding turn-taking in law school classes. Anthropologists pioneered the use of participant observation, a method that relies on researchers to immerse themselves as much as possible in the setting they wish to understand. The kind of study that is produced by this intensive and systematic observation over an extended period of time is called an ethnography, also developed primarily out of the discipline of anthropology, which has used this approach to study and understand cultures. In sum, this study combines multiple methods in assessing the first-year law school classroom experience. The set of classrooms studied contains more diversity in race and gender of law professors than is found in the average first-year law school classroom and spans the range of law school status rankings.
Learning to Read Like a Lawyer: Text, Context, and Linguistic Ideology
Authors: Mertz Elizabeth
Published: January 2010

This chapter examines the shared underlying approach to reading that is conveyed in first-year law school training across otherwise diverse classrooms. The discussion begins with a close study of the discourse for which law school is famous: classic Socratic method of teaching. This analysis reveals some core metalinguistic traits of legal epistemology, traits that are encoded in Socratic pedagogy. In the second half of this chapter, these features are examined as they emerge in the universally shared “internal” categories of a legal reading: the labels that natives to the system themselves use in describing the genre, such as “facts”, “law”, and “policy arguments”. This chapter argues that learning to think like a lawyer is in large part a function of learning to read, talk, and write like a lawyer; all this involves a distinctive approach to written texts and textual interpretation.
Professorial Style in Context
Authors: Mertz Elizabeth
Published: January 2010

This chapter examines the context underlying the different teaching styles of professors in law schools. One of the most fascinating aspects of law school classroom discourse uncovered by this study is the combination of underlying structural similarities with, on the surface, a remarkable array of diverse teaching styles. At one end of the spectrum, one can find the most highly stylized classroom that uses the Socratic method dominated by heavily structured dialogue. More common are mixed formats of various kinds, such as a combination of dialogue, lecture, and conversation. For example, in modified Socratic classrooms, professors loosen the ongoing questioning, provide some answers, and do some lecturing. There are also a number of classrooms in which an almost conversational give-and-take is occasionally allowed, although question- answer sequences controlled by the professor nonetheless provide a strong structural backbone even in these settings.
Student Participation and Social Difference: Race, Gender, Status, and Context in Law School Classes
Authors: Mertz Elizabeth
Published: January 2010

This chapter discusses student participation in the law school classroom, with particular attention to race and gender as well as status and context. The implications for our understandings of diversity, both in the law school classroom and beyond it, are examined. A threshold question is that of the effect or importance of student participation profiles in terms of students' overall experience. In other words, what difference does student participation make? On the one hand, the typical first-year law school class is graded almost entirely on the basis of written work; it is unusual to find class participation playing much of a role in professors' grading schemes. On the other hand, researchers in other educational settings have found a link between class participation and students' sense of self-esteem, their overall performance, and their sense of inclusion in the wider communities and professions into which they are supposedly being socialized.
Mind the Gap
Authors: Haynes Bruce
Published: January 2010

Two styles of performing music are Period style and Modern style. The other one, Romantic style, was in full sway at the beginning of the 20th century but is heard now only on recordings. Romantic style began to mutate after World War I toward the accuracy and precision of Modern style, to a degree that eventually changed its identity. Modern style is thus the direct descendent of Romantic style; being the product of its time, it shows the typical attributes of Modernism, following written scores quite literally and being tight-fisted with personal expression. The Modernist spirit had been a disastrous blight on the music of the latter part of the 20th century. Within these three general types, there are many variants. Aside from the three musical styles, this chapter discusses authenticity in music, the adoption of Period instruments, and musical rhetoric.
Changing Meanings, Permanent Symbols
Authors: Haynes Bruce
Published: January 2010

Most music in the world is communicated orally from musician to musician (that is, by ear). Western concert music is exceptional in depending on writing for transmission. If most classical musicians cannot play by ear and need a written page in front of them, the page itself takes on importance. Thus the way music is written down and the way we understand the writing have an important effect on the music that results. The issues of what was intended by the writing and what should be read back out of it become central to our musicking. Over time, however, the meaning of written musical symbols has gradually shifted. This chapter examines how the writing and reading of music has changed in fundamental ways, especially around 1800. It discusses descriptive notation and prescriptive notation, the incomplete musical score, written music's oral element, the essential in rhetorical music, implicit notation, Strait style and the neutral “run-through” style of music versus interpretation, and composer-intention before the Romantic period.
Ways of Copying the Past
Authors: Haynes Bruce
Published: January 2010

The Renaissance principle of imitation was two separate concepts. One was the imitation of Nature (Mimesis), the other involved imitating earlier works. The second type is generally known nowadays as “the imitation of art.” When a Renaissance artist or writer copied an already-existing work, they might do it in different ways. The most common were: translatio, absolute copying or replication; imitatio, or eclectic borrowing; and emulatio or emulation, copying with improvement or enhancement. This chapter discusses emulation and replication, imitation in the canonic system, style-copying and work-copying, the shelf life of historical evidence regarding music of the past, and anachronisms.
Conceptions of Children’s Musical Play
Authors: Marsh Kathryn
Published: January 2010

The musical play of school children encompasses many different forms that are owned, spontaneously performed, and orally transmitted by children and usually involve text, movement, and rhythmic elements. These forms may be associated with an ongoing oral tradition or derive from performance styles experienced by children within their current environment, as with the sporting cheers and dance routines that accompany popular music, in addition to more impulsive and unstructured musical utterances. In this introductory chapter, the rationale for the study of children's musical play as a phenomenon is explained. It discusses the relationship of children's playground singing games to current music education practices and reviews studies of children's playlore as they relate to educational and ethnomusicological thought. The chapter thus considers adult views of children's musical play and the historical and philosophical influences on their formation.
Children’s Musical Creativity and Oral Transmission
Authors: Marsh Kathryn
Published: January 2010

This chapter investigates the largely pedagogical literature on children's musical creativity as a precursor to developing an understanding of creativity in children's musical play in school playgrounds. Theories of oral transmission and their relationship to children's creativity are also explored, along with factors influencing creativity such as intentionality, social interactions, and social situatedness. Some of the most influential studies of children's musical creativity have endeavored to provide models that predominantly focus on children's composition or improvisation. The models they present are seen to apply to all forms of children's composition or improvisation, in much the same way as early ethnomusicological studies of children's music propounded the idea that general structural elements underlie all children's songs, and studies of children's playlore focused on universal characteristics.
The Playing Fields
Authors: Marsh Kathryn
Published: January 2010

This chapter examines the socio-cultural contexts of children's playground singing games in Australia, Norway, England, Korea, and the United States. School organization and characteristics of the school community, particularly in regard to ethnicity, are outlined. In Australian schools, social conditions such as attendance, nutrition, and the development of English literacy skills have a significant effect on children's behavior in the playground. In Australia as well as in England, Norway, and the United States, play clearly formed an essential part of school life, and musical play was a conspicuous component of playground activity among children.
Teaching and Learning in the Playground
Authors: Marsh Kathryn
Published: January 2010

One aspect of children's traditional forms of play that has most intrigued adults is the way in which a game is passed on from one child or group of children to another. In school playgrounds, children teach and learn games prolifically, so that games may be passed through a large population at quite remarkable speed. This chapter looks at conversations and experiences that give insight into the mechanisms of oral transmission and discusses examples of the transmission of playground games and other forms of musical play as observed in different schools. Perhaps the most illustrative metaphor used by children to describe the process of transmission is that of “catching” the games. The metaphor of catching the games pervades many of the children's descriptions of the way they teach and learn the games.
Changing the Tradition
Authors: Marsh Kathryn
Published: January 2010

This chapter examines the ways in which the tradition of singing games in a range of school playgrounds is changed through the influences of interethnic transmission, audiovisual and written media, classroom transmission, and material from other sources external to the school. Conditions that affect these processes of transmission are also discussed. One of the most important changes in performance practice that occurs during the transmission of games from one ethnic group to another in the playground is in the use of language. In one example, the freedom to perform games in unfamiliar languages may be attributable to the “psychological safety” provided by friendship groups. It is possible that children who are becoming bilingual may develop highly sophisticated listening skills that enable a more accurate oral transmission of text. What is clear is that transmission and variability are inseparably linked in musical play performed by children in the playground.
Conclusions and Pedagogical Implications
Authors: Marsh Kathryn
Published: January 2010

This chapter compares the repertoire, compositional strategies, modes of teaching and learning, and social grouping found in playground practice and classroom practice with respect to children's musical play. Both pedagogical and ethnomusicological implications are drawn from the results of investigations of various school playgrounds. International observations of children's musical play in many school playgrounds over fifteen years support the view that performance practices and processes of oral transmission and generation used by children in their play demonstrate a complexity that is often discounted in educational settings. The analysis of playground singing games collected worldwide rejects the assumptions associated with the “playlike” features attributed to children's musical play that include spontaneous movement as an embodiment of enjoyment, and simplicity of form, rhythm, and melody. In pedagogical terms, “playlikeness” incorporates movement to assist in the development of musical understanding.
The Organ Music of Johannes Brahms
Authors: Owen Barbara
Published: January 2010

Influenced by Robert and Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim, Johannes Brahms not only learned to play the organ at the beginning of his career, but also wrote significant compositions for the instrument as a result of his early counterpoint study. He composed for the organ only sporadically or as part of larger choral and instrumental works in his subsequent career. During the final year of his life, however, he returned to pure organ composition with a set of chorale preludes—though many of these are thought to have been revisions of earlier works. Today, the organ works of Johannes Brahms are recognized as beautifully-crafted compositions by church and concert organists across the world and have become a much-cherished component of the repertoire. Until now, however, most scholarly accounts of Brahms's life and work treat his works for the organ as a minor footnote in his development as a composer. Precisely because the collection of organ works is not extensive, the pieces—composed at different times during Brahms's lifetime—help to map his path as a composer, pinpointing various stages in his artistic development. In this volume, the author offers the first in-depth study of this corpus, considering Brahms's organ works in relation to his background, methods, and overall artistic development, his contacts with organs and organists, the influence of his predecessors and contemporaries, and analyses of each specific work and its place in Brahms's career. Her expert history and analysis of Brahms's individual organ works and their interpretation also investigates contemporary practices relative to the performance of these pieces. The book's three valuable appendices present a guide to editions of Brahms's organ works, a discussion of the organ in Brahms's world that highlights some organs the composer would have heard, and a listing of the organ transcriptions of Brahms's work.
The Organ in the Life of Brahms
Authors: Owen Barbara
Published: January 2010

This chapter discusses Brahms's involvement with organ music. From all evidence, Brahms had relatively little contact with organists and organ composers. With the exception of the Bach organ works, which he may have practiced in the 1850, it is unlikely that Brahms ever actually played much of this music, except perhaps on the piano. In the case of the Baroque works, however, he doubtless studied some of them.
Bach, Counterpoint, and Chorales
Authors: Owen Barbara
Published: January 2010

This chapter shows that Brahms's interest in playing the organ seems to have burned out rather quickly after only two or three years in the 1850s, never to revive. With the exception of his performance of piano transcriptions of Bach organ works, his interest in organ music, too, appears to have lain largely dormant for nearly four decades. This period did, however, see the publication, in 1864 and 1882, of two earlier organ works that he had gone to some trouble to revise, as well as his occasional provision of organ parts to the orchestral scores of at least two of his own larger choral works, along with works by Bach, Handel, Mozart, and others. By no means dormant, however, was Brahms's interest in the music of the Baroque period, counterpoint, and the Lutheran chorale. The contrapuntal skills he had honed so conscientiously in the few short months of his exchanges with Joachim in 1856 continued to mature, along with his expertise in orchestration, songwriting, and other facets of his art. Even in his later years, he continued to exhort budding composers to sharpen their skills by diligently studying counterpoint.
Brahms as Revisor
Authors: Owen Barbara
Published: January 2010

This chapter focuses on how Brahms seems almost never to have left any musical form alone without experimenting with several examples. Virtually everything he ever published, even some relatively short works, appears to have undergone gestation periods of varying length. He is also known to have rearranged and transformed earlier compositions into a quite different mold. A classic example is the Piano Concerto in D minor (op. 15), which began life as a piano duet in 1854. Brahms then unsuccessfully attempted to work it into a symphony before discarding a few tentative movements as it metamorphosed into its ultimate concerto form in 1859. One of the discarded symphonic movement sketches was preserved, however, to eventually provide material for something very different—the second movement of the later Requiem, begun in 1861.
The Eleven Chorale Preludes
Authors: Owen Barbara
Published: January 2010

This chapter argues that Brahms's Eleven Chorale Preludes are a fitting summary to the whole of his work in the vast field of musical art, an act of supreme homage from a musical poet to the sacred poetry of the canticles. Brahms's friends were warm in their approval of the early organ works that were given to them in manuscript, but of the two that were eventually published in his lifetime, little or nothing is known about their reception by the musical world at large. Ironically, the opposite is true of the posthumous Elf Choralvorspiele, op. 122. Although the first seven had been prepared for publication by Brahms's copyist in the summer of 1896, and apparently even sent to his publisher, Fritz Simrock, they were not published until five years after the composer's death, following a certain amount of litigation with regard to Brahms's estate. By this time, four additional chorale preludes had been discovered among Brahms's papers and edited by Eusebius Mandyczewski to accompany the first seven.
Slavemaster President
Authors: Dusinberre William
Published: January 2010

This book examines both the social and the political history of slavery. James Polk — President of the United States from 1845 to 1849 — owned a Mississippi cotton plantation with about fifty slaves. Drawing upon previously unexplored records, this book recreates the world of Polk's Mississippi plantation and the personal histories of his slaves, in what is arguably the most careful and vivid account to date of how slavery functioned on a single cotton plantation. Life at the Polk estate was brutal and often short. Fewer than one in two slave children lived to the age of fifteen, a child mortality rate even higher than that on the average plantation. A steady stream of slaves temporarily fled the plantation throughout Polk's tenure as absentee slavemaster. Yet Polk was in some respects an enlightened owner, instituting an unusual incentive plan for his slaves and granting extensive privileges to his most favored slave. By contrast with Senator John C. Calhoun, President Polk has been seen as a moderate Southern Democratic leader. But this book suggests that the president's political stance toward slavery — influenced as it was by his deep personal involvement in the plantation system — may actually have helped to precipitate the Civil War that Polk sought to avoid.
Introduction
Authors: DUSINBERRE WILLIAM
Published: January 2010

The spirit that infused the antebellum slave system was vigorously entrepreneurial. Although Polk inherited some of his slaves, he bought most of them from strangers to improve his own financial prospects. Polk's long struggle from 1831 into the 1840s to make a financial success of his plantation enterprise, and to impose order on his often unruly bondpeople, colored his stance on slavery-related political issues. When in 1846 he provoked the Mexican War, President Polk's concerns were not to extend slavery beyond Texas; but he sought to make slavery secure in the states (including Texas) where it already existed. However, he had persuaded himself — in what may have been a disastrous miscalculation — that slavery could not be secure in the Southern states unless the North gave substantial recognition to slavemasters' rights in the western territories too.
1 A Market for Labor Power
Authors: DUSINBERRE WILLIAM
Published: January 2010

Polk was caught up in the expansive, entrepreneurial ethic of the cotton frontier, and his principal impulses as a slavemaster were acquisitive rather than paternalist. He sought, successfully, to keep his purchases of slaves after the presidential election of 1844 completely secret. Polk and his wife had inherited thirteen “family slaves” and they bought others from members of his family. But by 1844, Polk had already purchased fourteen other slaves from strangers, nearly always to secure labor for his undeveloped cotton land. Between the election of 1844 and his death in 1849, Polk secretly bought nineteen more slaves. Thirteen of these were children between the ages of ten and seventeen, who were separated from their parents.
2 Flight (I)
Authors: DUSINBERRE WILLIAM
Published: January 2010

Polk had established a small cotton plantation in West Tennessee for three years, before selling up in 1834 and moving on to new cotton land in Mississippi. He had been inexperienced at plantation management and was uncertain about how best to impose discipline on his slaves. He depended on an overseer, Ephraim Beanland, whom Polk's brothers-in-law came to regard as a brutal tyrant, and who drove, within an eleven-week period, five of Polk's nine adult male laborers into temporary flight. While attempting permanent escape Chunky Jack hit the pursuing Beanland with a stick, whereupon Beanland stabbed him twice. Five months later Chunky Jack escaped for the second time to the Arkansas territory, but was recaptured and sold. When Polk transferred his plantation operations to Mississippi he felt he must impose strict discipline, and reappointed Beanland to manage the new plantation.
3 Flight (II) The Mississippi Plantation
Authors: DUSINBERRE WILLIAM
Published: January 2010

During a nineteen-year period after Beanland had finally been dismissed, more than half of the adult men at the plantation (at least thirteen out of 25 adult males) fled at least once. These fugitives fled, on average, on more than three separate occasions. Thus, the total number of flights was at least forty during the same period. Occasionally a fugitive voluntarily turned himself in to a well-disposed white man who he hoped would protect him from a brutal overseer. Flight was dangerous — one fugitive received buck shot in his thigh when he returned at night to fetch clothes for a comrade; sleeping out in the woods led more than once to serious illness. Recapture was normally punished by a severe whipping. Flight never, apparently, led to permanent escape. Yet it was the principal safety valve that gave Polk's slaves a vent for their discontent.
4 Profit
Authors: DUSINBERRE WILLIAM
Published: January 2010

Polk's plantation enterprise was a risky business. The first years of his Mississippi venture were discouraging, and Polk considered selling out in 1838. But he ended up by buying out his business partner, thus greatly increasing his investment in plantation land and slaves. Although he wavered again in 1843, he continued buying additional slaves when he felt he could afford it. By persisting in the face of difficulties, Polk established a splendid (from his own point of view) source of income for himself and later for his widow, the average annual profit rate of which was virtually 11 percent during the thirteen years from 1845 to 1857. This was much higher than the 6 percent return he received from investing some of his presidential salary into U.S. Treasury certificates.
5 The Nature of the Regime
Authors: DUSINBERRE WILLIAM
Published: January 2010

Polk was a product of the entrepreneurial, fast-developing society of middle Tennessee. His father, Sam Polk, his father's cousin Colonel William Polk, and James Polk's brother-in-law James Walker were all hard-headed businessmen, who combined land speculation and other business enterprises with the ownership of slave plantations. They managed their plantations with the same keen eye for maximizing the return on their capital investments in land, enslaved labor, and equipment that they employed in their other business enterprises. The slave-labor system of this society was vastly different from the wage-labor system of the North, but in other respects the entrepreneurial ethos and the productive system were so similar that the South's might well be denominated a “semi-capitalist slave society”.
7 Births and Deaths
Authors: DUSINBERRE WILLIAM
Published: January 2010

The health of Polk's slaves was poor. Child mortality at this plantation, up to the age of fifteen, was at least 51 percent: thus even greater than the norm for other Southern slaves. Of the twenty-one young adult women at the plantation (1835 to 1849), at least one-third died by the age of forty, usually during their twenties. The mortality rate of young adult males — 21 percent — though not so bad as for females, was also grim. The low-lying plantation land may have been unusually unhealthy; and the fact that Polk was an absentee planter meant that he was not regularly present to curb overseers' propensity to push slaves too hard.
8 Family and Community
Authors: DUSINBERRE WILLIAM
Published: January 2010

Like slaves elsewhere, Polk's bondpeople established as strong family and community lives as was feasible. But the strength of their family institutions was weakened by the prevalence of “abroad” marriages; by the discontent that impelled many married males to flee the plantation; and by the influx of newly purchased slaves, usually cut away from all of their previous family links. Fifteen years after the plantation had been established, the strength of community life also remained attenuated because many of the bondpeople had been only very recently purchased. By 1860, fewer than half of the twenty-one slaves originally deported to the plantation in 1835 were still there: eight had already died, and four more had been sent away, leaving only nine slaves from the original group to carry on a sense of community.
9 Privileges
Authors: DUSINBERRE WILLIAM
Published: January 2010

As early as 1844, Polk extended to his plantation slaves the unusual privilege of raising some cotton of their own, by voluntarily working during their free time, especially on Sundays. This put an average of just over $6 into the pocket of each overtime worker. The sums were minuscule compared to Polk's own plantation revenues, but the scheme seems for some time to have allayed the slaves' discontent. For several years before 1848, Polk extended to Blacksmith Harry (his most privileged slave) the extraordinary favor of allowing Harry annually to find his own employer, so that he could live near his wife and children, some thirty miles south of the plantation. Harry's satisfaction with this arrangement led him into remarkable demonstrations of fealty to his master. These grants of privilege, however, did not alter the fundamental inhumanity of the slave system for the great mass of Polk's bondpeople.