bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Chanting Service and Double Tune
Authors: Wilson Ruth M
Published: November 2023

The object of saving time could have been more readily attained, and a far better effect produced, by reserving certain portions of the work to be sung in harmony; and chanting, either in unison or harmony, the rest. Such a course would have been ... more in accordance with the primitive model; and would also afford great opportunity for the development of modem genius. For Short Services, this idea may not be without value to future composers for the Church, should any such arise. The task of the church-music composer to provide suitable and acceptable liturgical music for the ‘daily round’ has often required new approaches and special techniques, whether the primary object was to respond to a historical imperative, to satisfy some theological or aesthetic prescription, or simply to save time. The chanting service and the double tune represent two quite different approaches to musical performance in the liturgy, and both had their antecedents in earlier forms of service music. Some of these developed in the sixteenth century, in the wake of the far-reaching liturgical reforms of the Reformation. .
Music and Liturgy in the Episcopal Church of Scotland
Authors: Wilson Ruth M
Published: November 2023

As for our Solemn Devotions, they were no other than the Common Prayers & Liturgy of the Church of England, pure, & unmixed with any Addition of ours. And, it is humbly conceived, this could occasion no Jealousies, nor give any Offense, at least, not till that excellent Liturgy has, once again, had the same hard Fate in England, that Episcopacy has had in Scotland, which, I pray God, may never happen. The main outlines of the history of the Episcopal Church in Scotland in the eighteenth century are well known, but the relationship between episcopalian parties is less clear. For over a century, Episcopalians in Scotland were divided by a physical and jurisdictional ‘Schism’. Neither body conducted its public worship under the concurrent sanction of both church and state. The nonjuring congregations were governed by the remnant of Scottish Bishops descended from the pre-Reformation church, and they met for most of the eighteenth century under the threat of a series of Penal Laws, which outlawed their public and private worship. The qualified chapels belonged to no episcopal jurisdiction, although they were allowed by the government to worship publicly, if they used the English Book of Common Prayer and prayed for the Hanoverian royal family.
The Manuscript Sources
Authors: Brookes Virginia
Published: November 2023

University Library, King's College, Aberdeen Printed book 7t 7841 Arc. This is a printed edition of Arcadelt's II primo libro de madrigali a quatro voci (1561) with 14 unrelated pages of MS keyboard music inserted between the alto and the tenor parts. The keyboard pieces may be of French origin.
Squares and Grands
Authors: Komlós Katalin
Published: November 2023

Bartolomeo cristofori, keeper of instruments at the Medici court in Florence, was a man of inquisitive mind and ingenious technical imagination. He experimented with keyboard mechanisms and produced special types of instruments. The ‘gravicembalo col piano e forte’ (c.1698) was only one of these inventions, but it was the only one that eventually played a decisive role in the history of keyboard instruments.1
Aesthetics of Sound
Authors: Komlós Katalin
Published: November 2023

Certainly no justification is required here for saying that the tone--quality of an instrument is of fundamental importance for any serious player, up to the present day. Contrary to the more or less uniform sound ideal of our uniform modern world, however, the instruments of bygone centuries had much more character and variety of sound.
Piano Tutors and Treatises1
Authors: Komlós Katalin
Published: November 2023

The nomenclature of the instruments in keyboard tutors published in the last two decades of the eighteenth century is more or less uniform. With few exceptions, English and French treatises offer instruction in ‘harpsichord or pianoforte’ playing, while German ones deal with the art of the Clavier. Generic as the latter term is, it still primarily indicates the clavichord.
Aesthetics of Performance
Authors: Komlós Katalin
Published: November 2023

The first generation of pianoforte players started its keyboard activity on the older types of instruments. The harpsichord and the clavichord were the most likely choices, although the organ should by no means be excluded. To name only the greatest: W. A. Mozart professed the organ to be his favourite instrument,1 and the young Ludwig van Beethoven had an organist’s position in Bonn.
1831-1848
Authors: Macdonald Hugh
Published: November 2023

Berlioz left Paris on 30th December 1830 and went to his home in La Cote-St-Andre for a month. His health was not good and the separation from Camille irked him: his exchange of letters with Hiller, in Paris, touched on her easy-going acceptance of his departure and on ‘mysteries’ which he felt unable to reveal. His parents were welcoming, and proud of his success, but leaving Paris weighed heavily on him. He took the boat down the Rhone from Lyons and stayed in Marseilles a few days, awaiting a crossing to Italy. This was his first sight of the sea, the ‘sublime monster’, as he called it, and it evoked his childhood dreams of travel and distant lands; he discovered the pleasures of clambering around the rocks. Eventually he secured a passage on a Sardinian boat crossing to Leghorn with a bunch of Italian revolutionaries, one of whom enticingly claimed to have known Byron. The voyage began to resemble a Byronic adventure when the ship was caught in a sudden storm and the foolhardy captain ran them close to disaster. The onslaught of the elements, which he survived without being sea-sick, brought a realistic note to his idealized view of the sea. He may have had this experience still in mind many years later when he tested his son’s wish to join the navy and when, in Les Troyens, Aeneas’s soldiers grumble about the hardships of sea life.
Berlioz’s style
Authors: Macdonald Hugh
Published: November 2023

To ears brought up on the German classics, as most still are, Berlioz’s music strikes a strange and sometimes jarring note. It is immediately obvious that his procedures and sonorities are not those of Bach or Mozart, nor even of Schumann or Chopin, and this will either estrange or fascinate the newcomer to his world. It is often said that his music is like nobody else’s, but no composer is entirely without debts to his traditions; even allowing Berlioz full measure of original­ ity as an inventor, we must recognize that it is the tradition as a whole that is strange and not this one member of it. Since the music to which he was first introduced and which aroused his earliest admiration is now rarely heard, we have to make special efforts to unearth the roots of style.
1831–3
Authors: Radcliffe Philip
Published: November 2023

Meanwhile Felix was working hard upon a more serious and less spontaneous work, the ‘Reformation’ Symphony, which was intended for the tercentenary of the Augsburg Protestant Confession. At this time there were frequent arguments in the family circle about the political situation in France; according to Devrient Felix’s views, compared with those of his very conservative father and brother-in­ law, seemed positively revolutionary. Early in 1830 the University of Berlin founded a new professorship of music, which it was hoped Felix would take. However, he declined it, probably with wisdom, as he was too highly strung and volatile to be a good teacher; at his suggestion the professorship was given to Marx.
Oratorios
Authors: Radcliffe Philip
Published: November 2023

The development of the oratorio during the eighteenth century was curiously chequered. Those of Handel were a kind of extension of his stage works; many of them have a strong narrative interest, and the problems of choral counterpoint often resulted in a powerful dramatic tension that is seldom to be found in the operas. Still less does it appear in the oratorios of Handel’s successors. The greatness of Haydn’s Creation is of a very different kind, Beethoven’s Christus am Oelberge was an early by-product and Spohr’s musical personality was far too amiable for him to be able to deal adequately with subjects as formidable as The Last Judgment or The Fall of Babylon. Mendelssohn was an earnest student of the works of both J. S. Bach and Handel, and in his oratorios we can see him clearly trying to emulate the introspective profundity of the one and the dramatic force of the other.
Other choral works
Authors: Radcliffe Philip
Published: November 2023

Apart from the oratorios the most interesting choral work is undoubtedly the setting of Goethe’s Die erste Walpurgisnacht. It dates from 1831-2, but was subsequently revised in 1842—3. It is not all equally good, but the finest things in it are a notable expansion of a mood that appeared on a smaller scale in the songs Hexelied and Neue Liebe, dealing with the more formidable aspects of fairyland. For the overture Mendelssohn, influenced perhaps by Haydn’s The Seasons., wrote a stormy movement entitled Das schlechie Wetter which leads to a quieter passage depicting the approach of spring and eventually leading into the first chorus.
Music for the Stage
Authors: Radcliffe Philip
Published: November 2023

Mendelssohn’s interest in the stage was considerably livelier than might have been expected from the comparatively small amount of music that he wrote for it. His rather priggish comments on Auber’s Fra Diavolo show that he had decided views on what was suitable for stage presentation, and he was continually on the watch for a libretto; if he had made the right choice he might have written an admirable opera, but much would have depended on the choice. By the time Mendelssohn was 14 he had completed four works in the Singspiel tradition, all for performance at home to librettos by the young Berlin doctor Johann Ludwig Casper. Even the earliest of them Die Soldatenliebschaft, dated November 1820, was preceded by two other attempts at dramatic composition, pointing to his interest in the genre from his earliest creative years.
‘A virtuoso in his own right’
Authors: Samson Jim
Published: November 2023

The music Chopin composed during these years in Warsaw ranges from trivial childhood efforts to mature compositions widely regarded today as among the most significant achievements of the Romantic era. In examining this music collectively we need to bear in mind that the genres and styles of early nineteenth-century music were shaped to a marked degree by the characteristic functions associated with specific venues. Three relatively distinct styles might act as a framework for such an examination. First there is post-classical concert music-’brilliant’ polonaises, fantasies, variation sets, and independent rondos-composed above all for display and geared either to the salon concert or to the demands of the competitive, commercial world of the public benefit con¬ cert. Secondly there is the much simpler style associated with amateur music-making in the bourgeois and aristocratic drawing-room, including easy dance

pieces, songs am volkston, and short character pieces. And finally there is the so-called ‘Viennese’ classical style of the sonata and the cyclic chamber work, regarded even at the time as privileged and directed more to like-minded fellow musicians than to the wider public. These are by no means watertight categories, but they serve at the very least as useful reference points.
‘The perfection of art
Authors: Samson Jim
Published: November 2023

During his first summer in Nohant (1839), Chopin composed three of the Op. 41 Mazurkas, the second of the Two Nocturnes, Op. 37, and the F sharp major Impromptu, Op. 36. More ambitiously, he completed the B flat minor Sonata, Op. 35. In the tranquillity of George Sand’s country home he brought to fruition a phase of creativity which had been initiated in Majorca with the second Ballade, the C minor Polonaise, Op. 40 No. 2, and the twenty-four Preludes, and had continued in Marseilles with the C sharp minor Scherzo. Nohant offered Chopin ideal working conditions, and it is telling that he composed, or at any rate completed, very little during the ensuing eighteen months in Paris. It is likely that other works were at various stages of gestation during this creative ‘interregnum’, but it was only on his return to Nohant the following summer (1841) that he felt able to embark on a further period of sustained composition.
Songs
Authors: Watson Derek
Published: November 2023

Liszt’s importance as a song composer has been re-appraised in recent years. Apart from a handful of popular items, his songs suffered long neglect: quite unjustly, for the best of them are very good indeed. Liszt had a natural lyric gift, his vivid imagination was often fired by literature, and when he succeeded in finding music of poetic appropriateness and sensitivity then his settings rank among the finest of the nineteenth century. An encouraging sign is the number of distinguished international singers who have recorded his songs in the last decade.1 Scarcity of scores and lack of modern reprints have hindered the dissemination of his songs.
Overture
Authors: Kinderman William
Published: November 2023

No composer occupies a more central position in musical life than Beethoven. Changes in taste and in the role of art in society have in no way blunted the appeal of his music on many levels-from ubiquitous popularization in television advertising to the most exemplary professional performances. If the fascination Beethoven exerted in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was tied to his heroic, revolutionary image, the last half-century has increasingly demonstrated the universal scope of his legacy. Beethoven’s deep roots in the Enlightenment lent qualities to his art that cannot be adequately understood in terms of a merely personal or national style. His restless, open vision of the work of art reflects a modern and essentially cosmopolitan aesthetic attitude. Flexible principles and not fixed preconceptions guided Beethoven’s artistic process, as is minutely documented in the thousands of pages of his surviving musical sketches.
The Path to Mastery 1792–1798
Authors: Kinderman William
Published: November 2023

Beethoven could hardly have imagined when he left Bonn in late 1792 that he would never again see his birthplace, or that the reign of the elector would be swept away in the wake of the French occupation less than two years later. The conditions of his entry into Vienna were auspicious; he immediately came under the wing of music-loving aristocrats who supported him generously.
Chronology
Authors: Ferguson Howard
Published: November 2023

The limited size and compass of early instruments gave little encouragement to duet-playing on a single keyboard. That of a 16th-century virginals measured roughly two feet from end to end, so two players would have been far from comfortable playing on it side by side, particularly in the voluminous clothing of the period.
Technique
Authors: Ferguson Howard
Published: November 2023

When two people first play duets together each invariably accuses the other of taking up too much room. Their complaints echo down the years from as far back as 1777, when Dr Charles Burney wrote in the preface to his pioneering Four Sonatas or Duets for Two Performers on One Pianoforte or Harpsichord: ‘Though, at first, the near approach of the hands of the per formers may seem awkward and embarrassing, a little use and contrivance with regard to the manner of placing them, and the choice of fingers, will soon remove that difficulty.’ Burney might also have mentioned the position of their seats.
Concerts, Publications, Operas
Authors: Spink Ian
Published: November 2023

WITH the execution of the king on 30 January 1649 and the proclamation of a Commonwealth and Free State the following May, the Chapel Royal and the King’s Musick were no more. In practice they must have ceased to exist when the king gave himself up to the Scots in 1646, though money owing to them continued to be paid. A warrant made out to Lawes by the Parliamentary Receiver-General in April 1647 for £6 13s. 4d. was no doubt welcome, but it underlined the fact this was the end of the road. The future must have looked bleak. He was now dependent on the Egertons, and conceivably might have been satisfied with such an existence-as a number of his ex-colleagues from the Royal Music were, John Wilson among them-but Lawes threw himself into London musical life, which was about to enter a period of rapid expansion. As the leading song composer of the time and with a wide circle of aristocratic and literary acquaintances, setting himself up as a fashionable teacher seemed an obvious line to take. Hardly surprisingly, his name appears at the top of a list of ‘excellent and able Masters For the Voyce or Viole’ printed by Playford in his Musical! Banquet (I 65 I).
Dissemination
Authors: Allsop Peter
Published: November 2023

Beyond his dealings with the courts of Neuburg and Berlin and the agency of Muffat, the paths of dissemination of Corelli’s music in Germany and Austria are singularly ill-defined.1 There is no clear documentation of a stream of pupils eager to make the pilgrimage to Rome, and those whose names have in the past been associated with Corelli’s-Christoph Raupach and Johann Georg Storl-hardly contribute to our knowledge of the Corellian idiom in Germany. There is little evidence of a ‘cult of Corelli’ or sudden rash of Corelli mania as there was for a time in France and for a century and more in England. In the northern monarchies the advent of Corelli’s music coincided with particular moments in the process of Italianization, but the Germanic lands had long been exposed to the infiltration of Italian music and musicians.
Dragonetti’s Venetian Connections
Authors: Palmer Fiona M
Published: November 2023

Dragonetti passed the evening with us ... he came to seek his beloved wife, alias his double bass, which he had left in our care for these past two months. He has refused a sum, which few men would for their wives, and perhaps which few wives would value namely [£]800. It has been in his possession for 40 years and upwards, and belonged to the nuns of La Pieta at Vicenza An English nobleman had offered room guineas for this celebrated double bass, but Dragonetti, who coveted it also, won the father confessor to his side, who finally succeeded in persuading the nuns that it would be sacrilege to sell this valuable instrument to a heretic who could not give voice to it, and refused to hear their confessions until they acceded to his wishes, and the instrument became Dragonetti’s who alone is worthy to possess it.
Dragonetti ‘s English Years
Authors: Palmer Fiona M
Published: November 2023

I hope this will find you in good health. I merely write these few lines in order to remind you that I am here, & that you promised if you did not go to the Continent, to come to this place, where I am sure if you are fond of music you will be delighted, for I sometimes play the 1st Violin instead of the double Bass by way of a change-I have written this early in con sequence of hearing the opera closed last night. Captain New boy is here & begs to be remembered to you-Mori came down for one day, but was obliged to leave in consequence of the opera not being closed.
The King’s Theatre
Authors: Palmer Fiona M
Published: November 2023

Though the parallel may appear rather ludicrous, yet we cannot avoid comparing this theatre to some fen-farms, which, if productive once in every four or five years, pay enough to enable the tenant to bear the losses he sustains during the unsuccessful intervals. Now and then we have a good season at the Opera House, but it comes about as often as a fine sum mer, once in an Olympiad, and helps us in our musical chronology, as the celebration of certain games assisted the Greeks in marking the periods of their history.
The Position of Women in Popular Music
Authors: Bayton Mavis
Published: November 2023

The world of popular music is highly structured in terms of gender. Traditionally, women have been positioned as consumers and fans, and in supportive roles (wife, mother, girlfriend) rather than as active producers of music: musicians. When they have been on stage, on TV, on record, it has nearly always been as singers. They have sometimes written their own lyrics, rarely their own music, and there are very few women playing instruments. Currently, women’s lives are accompanied by a male soundtrack. This has important implications, for popular music permeates modern life and helps to make us the people we are, both reflecting existing gender differences and also actively helping to construct them. Young women and men learn how to be feminine, masculine, and heterosexual through listening to rock’ music, and observing the clothes, bodily gestures, and general performance of rock musicians as they simultaneously perform gender, sexuality, and music.
Routes into Rock
Authors: Bayton Mavis
Published: November 2023

There are many factors which make it possible for women to become rock musicians, despite all the obstacles so far described. For any one person often more than one factor is at work and no one variable is, by itself, a necessary or sufficient explanation: there is no single ‘typical’ female route into rock music-making. Moreover, the relationship between these variables in the lives of women musicians will probably be as inextricably complex as in the analysis of educational achievement or delinquency. Why should it be otherwise? Bearing this in mind, I shall now outline the few variables which stand out as enabling women to evade or overcome the social and cultural constraints which I have already described. Other writers have held up youth subcultures as the major source of resistance to cultural tramlines (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Willis 1978), but, once the question of gender is raised, it is obvious that women are just as marginal and subordinate in subcultures as elsewhere (McRobbie 1980; Frith 1983; Thornton 1995). The relevant point, here, is that most musicians (male or female) do not come out of youth subcultures. From my own empirical research, I have concluded that the only youth subculture which provided a route was punk, since it offered young women more cultural space than previous youth groups. In contrast to subcultural theory, I have found that the following are the significant routes into music-making: a musical family, a classical music training, an art education, involvement in drama, gender-rebellion, musician boyfriends/husbands, higher education, accessible female role models, feminism, and lesbianism.
Punks, Feminists, Lesbians, and Riot Grrrls
Authors: Bayton Mavis
Published: November 2023

The single largest surge of women into rock music-making in the UK was in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a result of two phenomena: the ‘moment’ of punk rock and 1970s second wave feminism (then known as the Women’s Liberation Movement). This sudden increase in the number of women playing in rock bands was recognized by the media at the time in a flurry of articles about ‘women in rock’. Similar media excitement greeted the Riot Grrrl phenomenon of 1993 but, in Britain unlike America, Riot Grrrl remained little more than a label lazily applied by journalists to any and every young women’s rock band and rejected by all but a handful. Insofar as Riot Grrrl did exist beyond its media fabrication, it can be seen as the boisterous youthful offspring of punk and feminism which I shall discuss after dealing with its far more significant parents.
I
Authors: Clinkscale Martha Novak , Watson John R
Published: November 2023

Ibach. A distinguished firm of German piano manufacturers; founded in 1794 byJohannes Adolph Ibach (b Lüittringhausen near Barmen, 20 Oct. 1766-dBarmen, 14 Sept. 1848) in Barmen, near Di.isseldorf. According to Dolge/PIANOS, 222 £, Johannes Adolph was educated at the monastery in Beyenburg (later Barmen). He learned his craft and worked apparently independently in Beyenburg in 1794, in Rittershausen in 1801, and Wupperfeld in 1806. In 1816 he had expanded by opening a new shop on the Alleestraße in Unterbarmen. His sons, Carl Rudolflbach (b 22 Feb. 1804—d Barmen, 26 Apr. 1863) and Richard Ibach (b 1812—d 24 Oct. 1889), continued as heads of the factory. In 1869 Richard concentrated on the organ division. Carl Rudolf’s son Rudolf (b 30 Jan. 1843-d 31July 1892) was early in his career employed by his uncle, Richard, but from 1869 he alone was responsible for bringing the firm to international prominence under the name Rudolf Ibach Sohn.
P
Authors: Clinkscale Martha Novak , Watson John R
Published: November 2023

Pachl, Johann (Karl) (b Pest, ?-dPest [Budapest], 1870; fl. from 1827). Piano builder and dealer in Pest. Pachl held master’s status in 1833 (according to Gabry/MEISTER: 1830) and became a citizen of Pest in 1840. In 1836 he worked with three journeymen under J6zsef Chmel. In 1846 Pachl’s pianos won a prize for their ‘ringing tone’ in the Pest exhibition. From 1845 to 1855 Pachl was director of his guild. After 1849 he gave up piano building and became only a dealer in Hungarian and imported pianos. (Fontana/PEST, 176) Pachl’s daughter, Henriette Zapf, was also a piano dealer in Pest, from 1869 to 1892.
R
Authors: Clinkscale Martha Novak , Watson John R
Published: November 2023

Raay, Joannes van {fl. c.1820s) Piano maker m Amsterdam. Date: 1827 Style: Square Compass: 6 Oct.: Ff-F Length: 171.5 Width: 65.5 Depth: 26.5 Height: 89.5 Case: Mahogany with inlaid satinwood borders, nameboard of bird’s-eye maple; four square tapered legs inlaid with brass adjustment screws; comers angled and decorated with brass laurel wreaths and leaf and flowered ornament on ebony ground, brass ornamented keyhole INSCRIP’TION:]. van Raay on nameboard; top key: no.24; elsewhere: 31; damper rod at left: 11Juni 1827 STRINGS: Double-strung throughout SCALE: c2=29.8 NATURALS: Ivory: 13.8 long SHARPS: Ebony: 9.4 long ACTION: English with intermediate lever, moving jack, crank dampers PEDALS: 3 (only 1 functional) art. to lyre: lifts dampers; original pedal on leg now missing) PRESENT OWNERS: The Netherlands/The Hague: Gemeentemuseum, no.
Y
Authors: Clinkscale Martha Novak , Watson John R
Published: November 2023

Youatt, George (fl. 1846-92). London maker at 3 Stanhope Street, Hampstead Road. (PO 50) In 1864 his address was given as 105 Prince of Wales Road, while he was at 148 Regent Street in 1865, and 128 Regent’s Park Road in 1872. George Youatt and Son were listed in 1886, and Victor Youatt in 1892.
Harpsichords, Spinets, and Clavichords
Authors: Maunder Richard
Published: November 2023

The instruments described in this chapter are all Viennese-made or at least, in the case of unsigned ones, recognizably in the same tradition (for information about imported instruments, see Chs. 6 and 7). About half of them have been inspected by the author, but for further details I have relied on published data and, especially, information kindly supplied by museum curators and others in response to my enquiries.
Music and Instruments before 1770
Authors: Maunder Richard
Published: November 2023

It is clear from Chapter 4 that the Viennese tradition of harpsichord making was well established by the beginning of the eighteenth century. How were composers and performers of the time using these as well as, perhaps, imported instruments? What of spinets and clavichords-or even pianos? To what extent does the music take account of the characteristic ‘Viennese’ multiple-broken short octave, or throw any light on its evolution? What was happening around 1.700 depends, of course, on developments in the seventeeth century.
Music and Instruments, 1770-1800
Authors: Maunder Richard
Published: November 2023

THE first sign that times were beginning to change was an advertisement on 4 August 1770 by van Ghelen, publisher of the Wienerisches Diarium, for nearly a whole column’s worth of music imported from Paris. It included keyboard works by the London composers J. C. Bach and C. F. Abel, as well as ‘6 Airs Opera Comique’ by Mlle Bayon. The music by Bach and Abel was exclusively for ‘clavicembalo’ or ‘clavecin’, but a repeat advertisement for Bayou’s ‘Airs’ adds that they were ‘arranges pour le Biano forte ou le Clavecin’: this is apparently the first music advertised in Vienna that was intended for the new instrument. Van Ghelen continued for the next few years to advertise music published in Paris and elsewhere; the bookseller Kruchten quickly followed his lead, and by 1776 (possibly 1774) was advertising music from London publishers as well (see App. D). Much of this imported music named the piano as an alternative to the harpsichord, 1 the former instrument being well established in London, and probably also Paris, by the early 1770s.
Music For Germany And Italy, 1706-10
Authors: Burrows Donald
Published: November 2023

Handel’s earliest efforts at composition are lost, though we could make some guesses about their genres and style from the works of those composers that he studied during his musical education - Zachow, and the composers represented in his 1698 copy-book. His earliest surviving musical autograph is of the F major setting of Laudate pueri, Dominum (HWV236).
The Transitional Decade I: Competition, 1732-7
Authors: Burrows Donald
Published: November 2023

Until April 1732 Handel’s London theatre programmes, which were the centre of his career, had consisted entirely of Italian operas. After 1741 he never gave another Italian opera in London: his theatre programmes were based on English works performed in the oratorio manner.
The Music, 1732-41
Authors: Burrows Donald
Published: November 2023

Such as are not acquainted with the personal character of Handel, will wonder at his seeming temerity, in continuing so long an opposition which tended but to impoverish him; but he was a man of a firm and intrepid spirit, no way a slave to the passion of avarice, and would have gone greater lengths than he did, rather than submit to those whom he had ever looked on as his inferiors: but though his ill success for a series of years had not affected his spirit, there is reason to believe that his genius was in some degree damped by it; for whereas of his earlier operas, that is to say, those composed by him between the years 1710 and 1728, the merits are so great, that few are able to say which is to be preferred; those composed after that period have so little to recommend them, that few would take them for the work of the same author. In the former class are Radamistus, Otho, Tamerlane, Rodelinda, Alexander, and Admetus, in either of which scarcely an indifferent air occurs; whereas in Parthenope, Porus, Sosarmes, Orlando, Aetius, Ariadne, and the rest down to 1736, it is a matter of some difficulty to find a good one.
The Final Decade I: The Last Major Works, 1749-51
Authors: Burrows Donald
Published: November 2023

During the summer of 1749 Handel completed only one new oratorio, instead of the pairs that he had composed the previous two summers: the draft score of Theodora was begun on 28 June and finished on 31 July. This was not necessarily a sign of declining creative stamina.
Wiser’s Codices and the Absconditus Binchois
Authors: Gozz1 Marco
Published: November 2023

The oldest Trent Codices (Tr 87 and Tr 92) are the most important repositories of the sacred works of Binchois. The first part of Table 6. reveals that only three of the known Ordinary sections are not preserved in those manuscripts. On the other hand, the more recent Trent Codices (Tr 90, 88, 89, and 91), copied mainly by Johannes Wiser, have very few ascriptions and the name ‘Binchois’ never appears. If we consider the Ordinary pieces in the perfectly ordered collection of Tr 93, copied by Wiser into Tr 90,1 we observe that only five items in 132 are ascribable to Binchois, and these only by means of concordant sources.
International Recognition (1937-9)
Authors: Mccabe John
Published: November 2023

THERE are several clear influences, or at least kinships, to be detected in Rawsthorne’s music, and a number are cited with fair regularity; some ( the Baroque in general, and Handel in particular, as well as Haydn) are discussed elsewhere in this volume. His music certainly shows a high regard for Prokofiev and Roussel, though this emerges only subtly and very occasionally. Among the few overt references are the opening of the Second Violin Concerto, whose solo violin theme has a clear relationship with that of Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto (a favourite of Rawsthorne’s) extending to register, style (single, uniformly spaced notes), and the outline of common chords as part of the melodic shape.
The 1950s (1951-8)
Authors: Mccabe John
Published: November 2023

IF the First Piano Concerto was Rawsthorne’s definitive homage to the Baroque, with its toccata (the Capriccio ), chaconne, and gigue (the Taran tella), the Second might be regarded as his tribute to Brahms, especially since it comes as perhaps the culminating point of his post-war romanticism. His relationship with Brahms is difficult to fathom. Some friends, such as Denis Matthews, thought he detested the music of Brahms, while others found his views varying from youthful enthusiasm to at least some degree of disregard. In the case of his Second Piano Concerto there are good grounds for thinking that, whether he liked Brahms’s music or not, he had sufficient respect or even admiration to find his own source of inspiration in it.
The Last Years (1967-71)
Authors: Mccabe John
Published: November 2023

RAWS THORNE ‘s last work in concerto form, the Concerto for Two Pianos, was much terser in expression than the Cello Concerto. It was commissioned by the BBC for the 1968 Proms, where it was given its premiere by John Ogdon and Brenda Lucas. It was subsequently revised, as usual with his major works, the finale’s introduction being omitted (even before the first performance) and the ending extended. Rawsthorne wrote that a difficulty lay ‘in the appalling number of notes one has to contend with. Such is the. range of the keyboard and the agility with which it can be manipulated that two grand pianofortes plus a symphony orchestra present an array of resources which can at times become bewildering.’His response, however, is typically resourceful, and in many passages he responded to the challenge with vitality and imagination.
The ancestry. Keyboard concertos before mozart
Authors: Hutchings Arthur
Published: November 2023

In his fifth deal of ‘Brandenburg’ instruments, Bach raises the continuo player to chief performer. It is notable that the bass of the harpsichord part is figured only where the right hand stave is empty; it is therefore probable that the functions of Cembalo Concertato and Cembalo Continuo were invested in one keyboard; it is also possible, but not probable, that Mozart’s audiences remembered seeing a continuo player doing his duty even when a clavier soloist was to the forefront. Mozart’s clavier remembers its humble origin, though its memory fades until in the last three concertos it sometimes fails to provide its own bass. But in Mozart solo and orchestra are in mutual liaison. It is mistaken to declare that, in concerto, Beethoven set the orchestra free. He set the piano free--so free that players long for support while practising. The Mozartian performer, doubling orchestral bass as he should when not playing a concertante section, rattling away in memory of Domenico Alberti, or arpeggiating orchestral harmony, is not an accompanied soloist; he is sparring partner to the band. His part never anticipates that of the Grieg Concerto, which one can play at home quite happily without a pocket orchestra or a second piano.
Movements In Variation Form
Authors: Hutchings Arthur
Published: November 2023

Of all movements longer than a song or dance, the set of variations is the most democratic, for the simple can follow its high roads while the musically learned investigate its subtleties. In a variety entertainment a set of easy but showy variations gets applause from both the impressed and the amused; queues for Queen’s Hall concerts in prewar days had many a copper charmed from them by a great natural artist, an unshaven Haydn called Old Moke, whose virtuosity upon the penny-whistle reached its climax with a set of variations on ‘Pop goes the Weasel’.
1782. Early Vienna Concertos
Authors: Hutchings Arthur
Published: November 2023

The following remarks summarize the most important developments to be observed in the 1782 concertos: 1. The first of the three concertos, K. 413 in F major, despite the advance in workmanship, shows a retrogression in style from the last Salzburg works, particularly K. 271 in E flat. We must seek some explanation.
Concerto In E Flat, K. 449
Authors: Hutchings Arthur
Published: November 2023

Mozart and his newly married wife were found at various addresses, and he had become the favourite piano player in the capital. The years 1784-6 must have been among his happiest; he enjoyed acceptance as a virtuoso, the new married life, the success of The Seraglio, in Vienna and many other cities, the stimulation of the six quartets he was dedicating to Haydn, and the interest of the older contrapuntal music, particularly of Bach and Handel, which was favoured at Baron van Swieten’s Sunday ‘academies’. His wife urged him to write fugues. He gave private concerts. He held a ball in one of his lodgings, and we may read a list of names of the lions who graced it.
Concerto In B Flat, K. 450
Authors: Hutchings Arthur
Published: November 2023

The second of the group of three, K. 449-5 I, was written less than five weeks after its predecessor, so the work needs no extra bio graphical notes. Mozart’s letter explaining that the wind parts were essential to its performance, whereas K. 449 could e played with strings alone, should not lead us to suppose that it is the more interesting work orchestrally; the strings in the E flat work are used as never before in a concerto-far more passionately and colourfully than in this work, which is essentially for the keyboard virtuoso, for Mozart himself and not Friiulein von Plover.
Concerto In D, K. 451
Authors: Hutchings Arthur
Published: November 2023

There are signs that make one hope for honoured places in concert programmes for many a neglected Mozart .concerto. One can hardly hope for performances of this D major Concerto except in a series of concerts which follows the complete list of mature concertos, including this specimen along with its two predecessors of March-April 1784.
Concerto In G, K. 453
Authors: Hutchings Arthur
Published: November 2023

The second of Mozart’s concertos for Barbara Ployer is one of those few concertos in the series wherein each of three movements reaches a supreme level of excellence; pejorative criticism is not always unfair when it declares that a slow movement, or a finale, is unworthy of its fellow movements in the same concerto. In on or two examples one cannot explain this fact only by the taste of Mozart’s audiences or by the necessity to write lightly after preceding movements.
Concerto In C Minor, K. 491
Authors: Hutchings Arthur
Published: November 2023

The similarity of the opening theme (Ex. r57) to that of C. P. E. Bach’s Concerto in F minor (see Ex. 15 above and also the quotation here, Ex. I 55) makes one wonder if Mozart knew Bach’s fine work, which his own concerto resembles in spirit. The second of Mozart’s two concertos in a minor key is quite unlike the first in D minor; it is as passionate, but less stormy and more spacious. Of all classical concertos, it would be the most spacious were it not rivalled by K. 503 in C major or Beethoven’s in E flat.
Benjamin Britten Talks To Edmund Tracey (1966)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

TRACEY: It is a great honour and pleasure for us to have you back at the Wells after twenty-odd years. I wonder if you could throw your mind back to the occasion of’Peter Grimes’, your first opera for the Wells: when you started to write it, had you had any sense of musical tradition or direction or did you just trust your own instinct?BRITTEN: The history of the first performance of’Peter Grimes’ at the Wells is really too well known for me to go into it now, but the actual background of the performances there is perhaps rather interesting. I did feel at that time that there was a great void in English opera. English operas had been written in the previous fifty years, but none of them meant much to me--and I had to find my own language. But I had a great piece ofluck, and that was that I was able to go to rehearsals and performances of virtually the whole of the repertoire of theWells at that time. I had friends who were singing in the Company and as I was planning ‘Grimes’ and actually writing it, I made use of the opportunity of getting to know the repertory extremely well. I learned a tremendous amount, particularly from ‘The Magic Flute’, ‘Traviata’, ‘The Bartered Bride’ and ‘The Barber ofSeville’. I felt particularly sympathetic to these, but I also learned a lot from the ones to which I was not so sympathetic. But there was something else: at that time I was very much involved with institutions like, for instance, Morley College,2 where Michael Tippett was Musical Director and we were both tremendously sympathetic to the music of Purcell, from whom I learned an enormous amount about the setting of the English language, about its rhythms, its sonorities. That gave me a greater sense of confidence and of not being quite so alone as I might have felt.
Tribute To Zoltan Kodaly (1967)
Authors: Kildea Paul
Published: November 2023

A great man has gone from us. Not only a great musician but a great human being, and a very contemporary one. By that I do not mean necessarily a fashionable contemporary composer-Kodaly was beyond & above that. But he was a man who was able to make sense of contemporary life. He was there. He did not avoid problems. He remained and triumphed.And out of the problems he produced solutions which have changed our way of thinking. He made sense. He lived a long life, but to the end, kept his vitality, & his faculties. In Budapest when we saw him, late in the Autumn of last year, he was as lively as I have ever seen him. He talked animatedly about musical education, Ansermet’s recent provocative essays on science & music, the Winterreise, the reaction of the present day, urban, young to folksong. He was awareness itself about the problems of contemporary art. It is difficult to realise that he is no longer among us. But what a legacy he has left. Superb choral works, the Psalmus Hungaricus, stage works which still hold the stage, Hary Janos, & excellent chamber music, and, what I perhaps personally cherish the most-a volume of two hundred pages-folk-songs, collected by him & Bartok, arranged for childrens voices. They are of an originality, simplicity yet richness, which is startling. We can all learn from these, from their beauty of sound, freshness, their multum in parvo. One is reminded of his famous words ‘nobody is too great to write for children; in fact he should try to become great enough for it.’ Not only did he leave these endless miniature masterpieces for children, but he worked for & re-planned their musical education-new methods of sight reading & vocal training, new curricula. One result of his educational efforts is that at this moment over 80 of the state schools in Hungary (& I do not mean the musical schools) have one hour’s general music period every day. And with excellent young [young] men & women to teach the youngsters-I have seen some of them at work.
Calendar and Chronology 1671–1685
Authors: Mckenzie D F , Bell Maureen
Published: November 2023

John Warburton to [Roger Kenyon], concerning a promise by the recipient’s brother of a stipend and a deposit of 30 s. towards Mr Poole’s Contraction of the Critticks. The book has been withheld, as has part of the promised salary. Newsletter, reporting that on the 5th the King gave order ‘for the printing of the famous manuscript of Jecla’s Bible, which was writt before our Saviour’s time, and has bin kept in his library for this many years past, of which some part is begun and in little time will all come forth, being much desierd in the world . . .’
Introduction: Modern Beginnings
Authors: Baldick Chris
Published: November 2023

We may begin with Ursula Brangwen, the restless heroine of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920). She has thrown up her job as a schoolteacher and, without her parents’ blessing, hurriedly married Rupert Birkin, with whom she has begun a new life of uncharted wandering on an Alpine holiday at a hotel near Innsbruck. Passing a cowshed among the mountains, she is reminded uncomfortably of the farm on which she grew up in the English Midlands.
Modern Poetry
Authors: Baldick Chris
Published: November 2023

The critical priorities of ‘modernism’ in some accounts of this period’s literature have encouraged a general assumption that English poetry underwent a profound revolution between about 1910 and the mid-Twenties. Such assumptions, though, mistake revolutionary intentions for revolutionary results, confusing innovation and iconoclasm, for which there is patchy evidence, with an actual overturning of centuries-old traditions in verse, for which there is none. They also tend to rely upon a further conflation of the interconnected but still distinct tradition of American verse, which had indeed been more radically experimental, with that of verse in Britain and Ireland, which more readily obeyed the gravitational pull of tradition. One of the aims of this chapter in its brief survey of leading figures and trends in the period’s poetry is to qualify the legend of heroic modernist insurrection by placing its novelties within a larger context of continuities. Another is to propose that the salient tendency of poetic practice in England between 1910 and 1940 is not adequately to be described in terms of ‘modernism’ at all.
Modern Drama
Authors: Baldick Chris
Published: November 2023

New Words, 1910–1940

The widening division evident in this period between minority art and majority entertainment was most visibly entrenched in the theatre. As in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, so in these decades the English theatre was a large and generally prosperous business offering a harmless evening’s diversion to urban middle- class audiences, principally in the forms of light comedy and melodrama. Until the advent of radio drama (1924) and of the talking pictures (1928), it still enjoyed with the music hall a comfortable duopoly of dramatic entertainment; and in London at least, it man- aged to withstand the competition of these new rivals through the 1930s while the music hall succumbed to it. The theatre was commercially strong enough to make fortunes for astute producers, and sometimes even for playwrights, but this very prosperity and institutional solidity weighed heavily against the kinds of creative risks that poets or novelists could take. Playwrights were hemmed in both by the commercial caution of theatre managers and by an official censorship that restricted the treatment of sensitive religious, political, and sexual subjects.
Modern Short Stories
Authors: Baldick Chris
Published: November 2023

The youngest of the recognized literary forms, and in other ways the most ‘modern’ in tendency, was the short story. Introducing her anthology, The Faber Book of Modern Stories (1937), Elizabeth Bowen highlighted this youthfulness, likening it to that of the cinema: The short story is a young art: as we now know it, it is the child of this century. Poetic tautness and clarity are so essential to it that it may be said to stand at the edge of prose; in its use of action it is nearer to drama than to the novel. The cinema, itself busy with a technique, is of the same generation: in the last thirty years the two arts have been accelerating together.