bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Sackbut ( 19I8-1921)
Authors: Smith Barry
Published: November 2023

The manner of Philip’s return to London that summer seems to indicate that he wanted it to be known that he had created a new image whilst in Ireland. Gray recalled meeting him at the station early one hot August morning. Philip was ‘wearing a thick fur coat with the collar turned up, a large, sinister black hat, with the brim turned down, dark blue spectacles and a huge unkempt beard which, though real, looked as if it were false. He looked, in fact, like an exaggerated caricature of a Bolshevik and a German spy combined.’1 If the military authorities had been on the look-out for Philip, they would have had little difficulty finding him arrayed in such garb, but by that time the war was practically over and deserters and draft-dodgers were no longer being hounded with any degree of enthusiasm.
Fundamentals of Digital Audio
Authors: Pohlmann Ken C
Published: November 2023

The essence of digital audio lies in its numerical basis. A digital audio system converts an analog waveform into numbers, stores, transmits, or processes those numbers, and then converts them back to an analog wave-form. These steps may be divided into the digital audio recording of a music performance, the storage of that performance on a compact disc, and the reproduction of the performance with the CD player. The digital audio chain, from the recording studio or concert hall to your living room, is predicated on several basic phenomena. First, the analog waveform must be discrete-time sampled at a precise, unvarying rate. This divides the waveform into discrete intervals. With sampling, the signal must be filtered to prevent aliasing, a form of distortion. Next, each sample must be converted to a number; this is the process of quantization. To minimize an inevitable error associated with quantization, a dither signal must be introduced. In many digital audio recorders/reproducers these steps take place in a linear pulse code modulation system. This chapter examines all of these fundamental elements.
CD Player Design
Authors: Pohlmann Ken C
Published: November 2023

A compact disc player is perhaps the most sophisticated and electronically complex piece of home entertainment equipment to ever reach the consumer. Yet even the most advanced products often have humble origins. For example, when Sony set out to design the first portable CD player, chief engineer Kozo Ohsone made a block of wood about 5 inches square and 1½ inches high and presented it to the design team, informing them that the portable player would be that size. To make sure that none of the wily engineers tried replacing it with a bigger block, he signed his name on the bottom.
The Value Problem in Cultural Studies
Authors: Frith Simon
Published: November 2023

It was my third night in Stockholm, a very cold February night, and I’d gone to have supper with old friends, people I see maybe every two years, usually at conferences. There was one other guest, the professor in the department in which I was a visiting scholar, a man I hadn’t met before. A few years older than I am, I’d guess; just as Johan Forn äs and Hillevi Ganetz are a few years younger. We talked, we ate, and about halfway through the main course, Johan said, “Let me play it to you!” and jumped over to the CD player.
Rhythm: Time, Sex, and the Mind
Authors: Frith Simon
Published: November 2023

What all music offers us is a way of being present; what “music listening” means is the experience of “inner time.” This, argues Alfred Schutz, is “the very form of existence of music”; it is what makes musical communication possible.

The flux of tones unrolling in inner time is an arrangement meaningful to both the composer and the beholder, because and in so far as it evokes in the stream of consciousness participating in it an interplay of recollections, retentions, which interrelate the successive elements.
Songs as Texts
Authors: Frith Simon
Published: November 2023

Most contemporary popular music takes the form of song (even acid house), and most people if asked what a song “means” refer to the words. In examining what the words do mean we can follow two obvious strategies, treating songs either as poems, literary objects which can be analyzed entirely separately from music, or as speech acts, words to be analyzed in performance. But in listening to the lyrics of pop songs we actually hear three things at once: words, which appear to give songs an independent source of semantic meaning; rhetoric, words being used in a special, musical way, a way which draws attention to features and problems of speech; and voices, words being spoken or sung in human tones which are themselves “meaningful,” signs of persons and personality. In this chapter I will focus on words and rhetoric; in the following chapter I will consider the voice.
1921-1945
Authors: Stevens Halsey
Published: November 2023

The 1920’s were marked by the resumption and intensification of Bartók’s concert career, now deliberately expanded to an international scale. His letters, postmarked London, Paris, Malvern Wells, Aberystwyth, Venice, Palermo, Basle, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Seattle, indicate the widening scope of his activity. Thus, in a sense, he carried out Oscar Bie’s suggestion, though it is unlikely that it was as a result of Bie’s advice. The territorial limits of Hungary had shrunk to a third of her former size; even Pozsony, where Paula Bartók still lived, was in a foreign country, and elaborate formalities had to be complied with whenever Bartók wished to visit her. Though he retained his post at the Academy of Music, the contracted area of Hungary permitted no significant concertizing, and it was natural that he should look to western Europe, and eventually to America, for an audience.
The Concertos
Authors: Stevens Halsey
Published: November 2023

BartÓK’S follow work in the concerto mold was not originally intended as a concerto at all. The Rhapsody, opus 1, was written for solo piano, and later rewritten for piano and orchestra in preparation for his Paris visit in 1905 to compete for the Prix Rubinstein. Dated November 1904, the original differs in certain respects from the version with orchestra, chiefly in the addition of a rather extended introduction, as well as in the amplification of several internal passages in order to provide balance.
Transition and Change
Authors: Smallman Basil
Published: November 2023

WHILE the closely knit group of César Franck’s successors (not only Schmitt and D’Indy, but also Pierné, Vierne, Roger-Ducasse, and others) continued, during the first decades of the new century, to exploit the ‘symphonic’ type of piano quintet, with its peculiar emphasis on thematic unification and extreme richness of texture, Faure, with his two contributions to the genre—Op. 89 in D minor and Op. 115 in C minor—pursued an altogether more independent line, in which purity of style and classical poise were the distinguishing traits. Enlarging on the highly personal musical language created during his first period, not least with his piano quartets, he provided in these works of his maturity a new intensity of vision, unfailingly emotional, but couched always in terms of moderation and restraint. Eugene Ysaÿe, who, with his quartet and Faure as pianist, gave the first performance of Op. 89, in Brussels in 1906, precisely described the essential nature of the composer’s thought when he referred to his ‘total rejection of showmanship’ and his ability to create ‘absolute music in the purest sense of the words’.
The Relationship of Style to Scoring
Authors: Smallman Basil
Published: November 2023

NOT infrequently, in scoring for strings and piano, it is the distribution of themes and their accompaniments, and the attainment of blend and balance between the tonally non-equivalent ‘sides’ of the ensemble, which present the greatest technical challenges. And since scoring forms an integral part of the creative process—and is thus an important aspect of the composer’s personal style—the solutions to these common problems tend naturally to be numerous and varied. The most effective types of scoring are arguably those in which themes and accompaniments can be exchanged, immediately or at long-range, between the different ‘sides’ of the ensemble; and those in which the accompaniments themselves, so far from being neutral patterns which simply supply harmony, reveal genuine motivic significance. These ‘ideal’ types of scoring, however, may be relevant only to a limited number of styles. In the case of music of a different nature—more homophonic, perhaps, or more theatrical—quite another manner of scoring may be appropriate, one concerned more with drama and rhetoric than balanced discourse, and thus involving more extended solo writing, more antiphonal interplay, and even a larger amount of straightforward doubling. It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that apart from moments of striking finesse on the one hand, or of miscalculation on the other, scoring cannot meaningfully be judged in isolation, but only in relation to the wider musical style which it serves.
1950–1961 ‘My Silly Selfish Self-Indulgence’
Authors: Gillies Malcolm , Pear David
Published: November 2023

Although Grainger wanted to believe that he belonged to the ageless, that old age which he so feared was slowly creeping up on him. The 1950s would be, for him, a decade of cancers and failing abilities first physical, then mental which left him wildly bitter at what he would now never achieve. But, despite frequent bouts of whingeing and self-accusation, he did continue until his final months to promote his music, to lecture and to play in concerts. He also managed to order his Melbourne museum, to tie up loose compositional ends and to make important advances with his ‘Free Music’ machines. The circle of his intimate correspondents declined markedly between 1950 and 1953 with the deaths of such close friends as Balfour Gardiner, Roger Quilter, and Karen Kellermann. Only his wife, Cyril Scott, Herman Sandby, and Grainger’s stepdaughter Elsie Bristow remained to share the more confidential news of his final years.
Sound Recording Practice
Authors: Borwick John
Published: November 2023

In this invaluable book, a broad range of contributors—musicians, acousticians, electronic engineers, and broadcasters—share their specialized expertise on the equipment used to record, transmit, and reproduce speech and music and the operational techniques that have evolved over half a century in the sound recording industry. This fourth edition, newly revised and comprehensive, emphasizes the array of new technologies and techniques such as rapid advances in recording techniques, computer-controlled equipment, new digital recording formats, and the proliferation of consumer audio/video media. Addressing the user rather than the designer or manufacturer, Sound Recording Practice offers a stimulating, informative, and comprehensive guide to each aspect of recording.
Studio planning and installation
Authors: Munro Andy
Published: November 2023

Studio planning encompasses many disciplines, including some not immediately associated with the business and operation of recording studios. Installation is simply the execution of the planned schedule of works, and success or failure is almost entirely a result of the technical competence and experience of the studio ‘designer’.

The word ‘studio’ is taken generally to mean any area associated with the technical or artistic procedures involved in the recording process. It may be argued that, to some clients, the quality of a studio’s facilities in terms of catering and recreation are just as important as the quality of the studio acoustics or mixing console. However, a successful studio design is invariably the result of interpreting the exact requirements of the client, who presumably (but by no means always) has an equal understanding of his own (and his customers’) recording and business philosophy.
Digital mixing
Authors: Lidbetter Paul S
Published: November 2023

Digital audio systems have come a long way in recent years. There have been major advances in audio performance, the use of software control systems, and economic effectiveness, all of which have resulted in the appearance of increasing numbers of digital audio consoles and systems for both music recording and post-production applications. The driving force is, as always, higher integration on silicon and higher storage densities. One such example is the use of interactive graphics technology which has evolved on the wave of the PC-based Windows environment and is continuing to evolve as technology gears up for multimedia applications. Another is the ever-increasing computer processing power that is available from embedded systems along with trends towards the ease of interprocessor communications through networks.
Maintenance
Authors: Atkin Malcolm
Published: November 2023

As the audio industry has matured, there has been a great increase in the number of small manufacturing companies producing an ever-wider range of equipment for studio use. This in turn has meant a changing role for the maintenance engineer. He may no longer be asked to build an in-house mixing console, but he will be expected to have wide experience ranging from antique musical instruments to the merits of the latest software updates. He will also be the person whom everyone calls upon when things go wrong.

A professional studio should have a fully qualified technical engineer available at any time that a session is in progress. Whilst breakdown cover can be provided by mobile service engineers, this should not be a substitute. A true recording studio is always being modified and re-equipped as tastes and methods change, and a full-time engineer who has intimate knowledge of the installation and operation of all the equipment in the studio is a tremendous asset to the company.
Classical music
Authors: Revill Adrian
Published: November 2023

The techniques involved in recording classical music are different from those used to record other types of music, and this is largely because the philosophy behind the production of the recordings is different. The record industry uses the term ‘classical music’ to encompass many types of music, not just the strictly classical works of Mozart or Haydn but also Romantic works by composers like Tchaikovsky and Wagner, twentieth-century music, and a growing catalogue of early music. The styles and the sound of this repertoire are very diverse but the philosophy common to the recording production is to capture a perfect performance and give the listener the impression of hearing it from a perfect seat in the concert hall. The producer and engineer keep this ideal in mind even when hundreds of takes need splicing together from sessions recorded in a venue with non-ideal acoustics. The purist approach is to use a single microphone (or stereo pair) and record the music in long continuous takes with no editing; indeed for some people this is the only valid approach. However, it must be said that the majority of classical recordings are not made in this way. Many different microphone techniques are used and, to understand how these have evolved, it is necessary to consider the parameters which contribute to the sound of a classical recording.
The Monteverdi Vespers Of 1610
Authors: Kurtzman Jeffrey
Published: November 2023

This is a thorough-going study of Monteverdi’s Vespers, the single most significant and most widely known musical print from before the time of J.S. Bach. The author examines Monteverdi’s Vespers from multiple perspectives, combining his own research with all that is known and thought of the Vespers by other scholars. The historical origin as well as the musical and liturgical context of the Vespers are surveyed; similarly the controversial historiography of the Vespers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is scrutinized and evaluated. A series of analytical chapters attempt to clarify Monteverdi’s compositional process and the relationship between music and text in the light of recent research on modal and tonal aspects of early seventeenth century music. The final section is devoted to thirteen chapters investigating performance practice issues of the early seventeenth century and their application to the Vespers, including general and specific recommendations for performance where appropriate. The book concludes with a series of informational appendices, including the psalm cursus for Vespers of all major feasts in the liturgical calendar, texts, and structural outlines for the Vespers compositions based on a cantus firmus, an analytical discography, and bibliographies of seventeenth-century musical and theoretical sources.
A Philosophical Note on Historical Performance Practice
Authors: Kurtzman Jeffrey
Published: November 2023

Performance of the Monteverdi Vespers, whether of individual pieces or as a complete vesper service, raises numerous problems that every ensemble director must address and resolve in one way or another. The final part of this volume is devoted to an exploration of historical performance practices as they are applicable to the Vespers and to assisting performers in approaching this music in an informed way.
Continuo Instruments
Authors: Kurtzman Jeffrey
Published: November 2023

The normal continua instrument for music in church was the organ. Harpsichords were used on rare occasions, such as when organs were in disrepair, or during Holy Week, when the use of the organ was proscribed. Occasionally one finds evidence of the employment of both organs and harpsichords in large-scale, multi-choir works; the harpsichord may in some instances have been the sole keyboard continua instrument for one of the choirs, but there is also evidence of organ and harpsichord serving simultaneously as continua instruments for one or more choirs in polychoral compositions. In any case, the descriptions make clear that these were special events employing unusually large vocal and instrumental resources. Even with the combination of organ and harpsichord, there is no evidence known to me that suggests the alternation of the two instruments in the same composition other than between separate choirs of polychoral works.
Continua Realization
Authors: Kurtzman Jeffrey
Published: November 2023

The role of accompanying foundation instruments and the realization of continua parts were much less consistent in the early seventeenth century than they came to be after many decades of development and gradual standardization. Manuscript and printed accompanying parts were not limited to the single bass-line which eventually became the norm, but ranged from full scores, duplicating precisely the polyphonic texture of all the vocal or instrumental parts, to short scores with bass and one upper part or more, tablatures with bass-line and upper parts arranged according to the capacities of a particular type of instrument, and single bass-lines either derived from one or more of the vocal or instrumental parts or independent of these parts. Each of these types of manuscript and printed accompanimental parts poses different problems in its execution and realization, and all, with the exception of tablature, are represented in the bassus generalis of Monteverdi’s Vespers. In my edition of the Vespers, all of the parts printed in the bassus generalis have been included in a separate appendix.
Liturgical (and Paraliturgical) Music in the Papal Chapel towards the End of the Fifteenth Century: A Repertory in Embryo
Authors: Roth Adalbert
Published: November 2023

With these words in the arenga of the first bull of privileges in favour of the college of the papal chapel, published in June 1473, Sixtus IV became the first pope in the fifteenth century to express his contentment with the musical services of the most consistent corporate group in his court chapel.1 Never before in an official document of the Holy See had a pope referred explicitly to the musical duties of his singers.2 This is not merely the rhetoric of some versatile papal secretary, but the pope himself who speaks to us, as the history of the papal chapel during the second half of the fifteenth century clearly testifies.
Music of the Raj
Authors: Woodfield Ian
Published: November 2023

Music of the Raj is a study of musical life in late eighteenth-century Anglo-Indian society, based on the unpublished correspondence of an extended network of families. The writers of these letters — amateurs with a passionate commitment to the art of music — provide a perceptive commentary on many of the major issues of the day: the stylistic change from Baroque to Galant, the replacement of the harpsichord with the pianoforte, the establishment of the musical canon, and the growing economic and cultural influence of women musicians. Among the topics discussed are the transport, tuning and maintenance of instruments, the relationship between amateur pupil and professional teacher, the conduct of the domestic musical soirée, the role of glee singing in courtship, and the musical education of children. An account is also given of the growth of an expatriate musical culture among the European inhabitants of early colonial Calcutta, and the musical tastes of major Anglo-Indian figures such as Robert Clive, Warren Hastings, and Sir William Jones are assessed. English attitudes to Indian music is an important theme, especially as manifested in the fashion for the Hindostannie airs, transcriptions of Indian melodies in European musical language. The study concludes with an examination of the musical lives of wealthy nabobs back in England, where they immersed themselves in Indian musical culture, taking the Grand Tour, supporting opera at the Kings Theatre, and employing fashionable Italian teachers for their children.
The Male Dilettante
Authors: Woodfield Ian
Published: November 2023

Male attitudes to musical accomplishment come across very clearly indeed in Anglo-Indian letters of the late eighteenth century. Being on the whole free from external pressures to acquire musical ability, the requirement to ‘peak ‘ during the years of young adulthood was much less intense than it was for women, whose marriage prospects might be adversely affected by any perceived lack of accomplishment. Lack of motivation was rather the problem. Reading through accounts of the Anglo-Indian male at his music, one is persistently struck by a general lack of urgency.
The Early Cantata Composers (iii) Campra, Bourgeois, La Guerre, And Others
Authors: Tunley David
Published: November 2023

Unlike the other composers so far studied, Andre Campra (1660-1744) turned to the writing of cantatas after his reputation had been firmly established, especially following the success of his ballet L’Europe galante (1697). While the latter work has its scenes set in France, Italy, Spain, and Turkey, there is no doubt that despite the touches of ‘local’ colour and the excellent Italian parody (see Ex. 8b) the music comes from the pen of a Frenchman. So too when Campra brings together elements from French and Italian musical styles in his first book of cantatas (1708) we are aware that the composer’s bias towards the Italian style is less pronounced than in the cantatas discussed up until now.
Louis-Nicolas Clérambault
Authors: Tunley David
Published: November 2023

If today Louis-Nicolas Clérambault (1676-1749) is best known through his organ music, in his own day it was his cantatas that were given pride of place in the esteem and affection of his admirers. To judge by the only extant portrait of the composer, it would seem that Clerambault himself placed these above all his other works, for in it he chose to be pictured and remembered as if he were composing his most celebrated piece, the cantata Orphée. And if in his own estimation his cantatas were the most highly prized of his compositions, so too did French opinion place Clerambault above all other cantata composers in that country.
Conclusion
Authors: Tunley David
Published: November 2023

Like opera, the cantata was late in taking root in French soil. Nearly a L century was to elapse before French composers followed the lead given by the Italians in the early seventeenth century, by which time men like Carissimi and Scarlatti were bringing the form in their country to its height. Inspired by models such as theirs, the French cantata, unlike the tragedie-lyrique, did not evolve through the transformation of an existing national form but was born, so to speak, fully fledged. Thus, some of its earliest examples are mature works. In this respect we are reminded strongly of the Italian-inspired English madrigal, the history of which has a number of points in common with the eighteenth-century French cantata.
Original Sets of Parts for Restoration Concerted Music at Oxford
Authors: Holman Peter
Published: November 2023

Seventeenth-century concerted music for voices and instruments survives in two main forms. On the Continent, church music and secular vocal music were commonly published in sets of part-books, while theatre works were copied in score and were sometimes published in that form. In England, by contrast, the music publishing industry was relatively undeveloped until the 1 690s, so sizeable works for voices and instruments rarely got into print. Nearly all Restoration odes, symphony anthems, masques, and operas survive only in manuscript score. These two formats--scores and sets of part-books-are so familiar to us that we tend to forget that they rarely convey all the information we need to recreate the composers’ intentions. Neither format normally tells us exactly how many performers to assemble or how many to allocate to each part, and scores frequently obscure the precise role of instruments by conflating vocal and instrumental bass parts or by leaving out supporting instrumental parts altogether in choral sections. Similarly, we must be wary of assuming that printed sets of parts were actually used for performance and are reliable guides to the size and disposition of the performing forces. Their main function would have been to transmit repertory to musicians outside the orbit of the composer, and they often need to be supplemented by duplicate parts, printed or manuscript, before they can be used. Indeed, I suspect that many purchasers thought them too precious to be used in performance, and treated them as repositories from which manuscript parts were copied.
The Great Qyartet in Idomeneo and the Italian opera seria Tradition
Authors: Mcclymonds Marita p.
Published: November 2023

Mo ZART took great pride in the quartet that he composed for Idomeneo. On 27 December 1780 he wrote from Munich to his father, ‘The more I think of this quartet, as it will be performed on the stage, the more effective I consider it So far there is nothing in my opera with which I am so pleased as with this quartet’.1 During the eighteenth century quartets were uncommon in Italian opera seria but by no means unknown. They were especially rare during the first half of the century, though one can occasionally be found near the end of a third act.
Introduction
Authors: Whiting Steven Moore
Published: November 2023

In Le Coq et l’arlequin (Cock and Harlequin), Jean Cocteau praised the composer who had lately set his ideas to music in Parade: Erik Satie had blazed the trail away from Wagner’s grandiosity and past Debussy’s preciosity towards the modest ideal of a ‘music for every day’. In the same tract Cocteau espoused the French variety theatre as one prototype for a renewal of French musical art. It seems strange that he did not put the two together.
Introduction
Authors: Whiting Steven Moore
Published: November 2023

The years of Satie’s professional involvement in Parisian popular music (from 1888 to c.1909) witnessed rapid changes in, and exchanges among, the various locales of such entertainment. While some cabarets continued to harbour the semi-private gatherings of bohemian poets and artists, others were transformed into elegant chamber theatres (thé  âtricules), where actors and singers hired from the troupes of the larger houses held the stage with chansonniers from Montmartre.
Satie at the Chat Noir
Authors: Whiting Steven Moore
Published: November 2023

Montmartre was, circa 1885, what Montparnasse would be in the 1920s and Saint-Germain-des-Pres in the 1950s: a world teeming with ideas, where one rubbed elbows with geniuses, a nursery of failures, a market for every pleasure, a village where one became famous in a single night. But unlike Montparnasse and Saint-Germain, Montmartre was exclusively French with a Rabelaisian side, a ferocious humour.
Satie and the Divan Japonais
Authors: Whiting Steven Moore
Published: November 2023

On 27 October 1888 the Chat Noir announced an event that, for the Parisian entertainment world, was not without novelty: the Divan Japonais, a modest cafe-concert at 75, rue des Martyrs (just off the boulevard Rochechouart), had been purchased by, of all people, a poet. In cabaret circles the attitude towards the cafe-concert was generally scornful. Salis, when his audience failed to appreciate one of his sallies, would drily remark, ‘You’ll find the Concert European in the rue Biot!’ implying that their stunted tastes might be better served by such an establishment.
Satie at the Auberge du Clou
Authors: Whiting Steven Moore
Published: November 2023

When Dominique Bonnaud first entered the Chat Noir one autumn afternoon in 1893, he found the place as empty and imposing as a museum. ‘The swarms of artists, writers, and bohemians for whom this had long been the sole rallying point, had taken their tumultuous gatherings to other brasseries.’ One of the most frequented of these new ‘rallying points’ was the Auberge du Clou.
Satie and Hyspa
Authors: Whiting Steven Moore
Published: November 2023

Vincent Hyspa’s career as a chansonnier began in February 1892. After a hiatus of three years, he had returned to the Chat Noir, and Salis invited him to perform at the next goguette. Hyspa, yielding to ‘serious pecuniary reasons’, appeared at the cabaret on Sunday morning and recited a poem indebted for its theme to Mac-Nab’s ‘Vae soli’, which Hyspa would surely have performed in his colleague’s stead before leaving the Chat Noir.
Of Pantomimes and Pears
Authors: Whiting Steven Moore
Published: November 2023

Once employed by Hyspa, Satie did not stop working for himself He entered into collaborations with two other bohemian friends, Jules Depaquit and Contamine de Latour, and produced a string of works that all came to little or nothing, at least during his lifetime. The score of Jack in the Box may never have left the flat in Arcueil, to judge from the account of Darius Milhaud. Entering the dingy room after Satie’s death, Milhaud discovered the manuscript behind the piano; Satie had claimed to have lost it in a bus.
Introduction
Authors: Whiting Steven Moore
Published: November 2023

It was Maurice Ravel who would bring Satie out of bohemian obscurity into the limelight of Parisian concert life. The two had kept in touch over the years, since their first meeting c.l 893 at the Nouvelles Athenes. Ravel had introduced Satie to other members of his circle, eventually dubbed the Apaches: the pianist Ricardo Vines (at a Chevillard concert in December 1900) and the composer Florent Schmitt. Satie and Schmitt must have hit it off rather well.
Autour de Cocteau, or the Uses of Popular Music
Authors: Whiting Steven Moore
Published: November 2023

For better and for worse, the last decade of Satie’s career was to be dominated by the poet Jean Cocteau. In Cocteau’s case, the designation poet stood for many other roles: librettist, dramatist, novelist, caricaturist, and film-maker; also propagandist, theorist, intriguer, and concert organizer. During the war years Cocteau completely displaced Ravel as Satie’s guardian-angel. Satie had learnt, from experience, to be wary of those who promoted him; but it is not difficult to explain why he fell in with Cocteau. Ravel, by touting him as a ‘precursor of genius’, had found a worthy place for Satie in the musical past.
Musical Performance Studies as a ‘Discipline’
Authors: Dunsby Jonathan
Published: November 2023

I trot out the term ‘discipline’ of musical performance studies as if it clearly existed, but it is as well to state that this term at present stands merely for ‘subject’ or ‘topic’. ‘Discipline’ carries the implication of a received body of knowledge and an orderliness in whatever is conducted in its name, however subversively. I shall repeatedly comment on the fact that this does not really seem to have been the case in musical performance studies.
The Sound of Music
Authors: Dunsby Jonathan
Published: November 2023

Clearly, I am going to try to do something more here than reassert that the hills are alive with it-though the sound of music be impossible to convey in words. I stick to my insistence that music makes us think in performance or as per formers, and it is certainly no less the sound than other of its aspects that stimulates our pondering, speculation, desire to understand. Studies of this particular aspect, apart from the ecstatic ones, naturally tend to veer either towards the minutiae of acoustics, which for the specialist is an endlessly fascinating subject, or towards the psychology of perception.1 These poles will always be within sight in what follows in this chapter, but viewed from the middle path of practical considerations.
The path to rediscovery
Authors: Talbot Michael
Published: November 2023

By the ‘rediscovery’ of a composer we seldom mean much more than his rescue from a presumably unmerited neglect, and sometimes as little as the dutiful revival of some of his major works on the anniversary of his birth or death. Vivaldi is one of the very few important composers to whom the notion of rediscovery applies in the most literal sense. He died over two and a half centuries ago, yet until about 60 years ago the musical world was totally unaware of the existence of the great majority of the works, totalling over 770, that can today be ascribed to him. Until then not one opera, not one sacred vocal piece, had, it seemed, survived for scholars to inspect and audiences to hear. Now scarcely a year passes without the announcement of some fresh discovery: one might mention a partly autograph set of 12 violin sonatas (seven hitherto entirely unknown and the rest known only in incomplete or variant form) as well as two violin concertos unearthed in Manchester in 1973, and a highly original sonata for violin, oboe and obbligato organ, also autograph, preserved in Dresden, which was brought to light as recently as 1976.
Vivaldi’s musical style
Authors: Talbot Michael
Published: November 2023

Many listeners must have discovered how much easier it is to mistake one Vivaldi composition for another than to identify its composer wrongly. To say this is neither to endorse Stravinsky’s supercilious observation, inherited from Dallapiccola, that Vivaldi could ‘compose the same form so many times over’,1 nor to make an obvious deduction from the fact that he borrowed copiously from his own works but sparingly from those of other composers. Even by the standards of his age, when plagiarism from other composers was frequently castigated by critics but self-borrowing raised hardly a murmur, his style remained remarkably constant. It was almost fully formed in op. 1 (1705) and complete in its essentials in op. 2 (1709); thereafter it underwent little change except in its more superficial melodic characteristics, which evolved continuously to keep abreast of current fashion. Had his style been half as malleable as that of his contemporary Telemann (1681-1767), who began as a neo-Corellian and ended as an immediate precursor of the Classical style, he would hardly have countenanced including his contributions to the 1714 revival of Ristori’s Orlando furioso in his own Orlando of 1727, or using movements from the original version of Farnace (1727) in the ill-fated score for Ferrara of 1738.
The Musician’s Guide to Acoustics
Authors: Campbell Murray , Greated Clive
Published: November 2023

The Musician's Guide to Acoustics
Stringed keyboard instruments
Authors: Campbell Murray , Greated Clive
Published: November 2023

There are three distinct types of stringed keyboard instruments in common usage, the clavichord, the harpsichord and the piano. These have their origins in the dulcimer and the psaltery which originated about a thousand years ago and are closely related to the harp. Both of these early instruments consist of strings of varying length stretched on a frame over a soundboard. They have no mechanical action, the strings being plucked on the psaltery and struck with light hammers or beaters, held one in each hand, in the case of the dulcimer. Various forms of dulcimer are used today in school percussion and folk groups.
Woodwind instruments
Authors: Campbell Murray , Greated Clive
Published: November 2023

The woodwinds are part of the aerophone class of instruments. There are two distinct types of woodwind, those where the resonance is excited by a mechanical reed and those where the excitation is by an air reed mechanism. Mechanical reeds can be either of the single type, as in the clarinet and saxophone, or the double, as in the oboe and bassoon. The air reed instruments are essentially the flutes, recorders and ocarinas.
The musical environment
Authors: Campbell Murray , Greated Clive
Published: November 2023

The acoustics of the room or auditorium in which music is played greatly influence the sound which a listener hears and consequently his feeling of satisfaction or otherwise. The quality of musical performance can also be affected very significantly, so much so that there are many orchestras, bands and solo artists who will not play in certain auditoria which do not have acoustics to their liking. The acoustical characteristics considered to be most desirable are dependent to a great extent on the type of music being performed and also on the subjective assessment of different users. What may suit a rock band, for example, would possibly be quite unacceptable for a solo flautist. Up until the turn of this century concert hall designs were based solely on the experience gained from previous constructions.
Opera
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

Attempts to argue that opera in the modem age is an anachronism have never carried much purely musical weight. Composers who represent all the diverse styles of the present have felt drawn to some kind of ‘music theatre’, even if they reject the term ‘opera’ as such, and even amongst opera composers who retain tonality and remain relatively close to nineteenth-century forms and idioms, ample variety and vitality can be observed.
The Chromatic Fourth During Four Centuries of Music
Authors: Williams Peter
Published: November 2023

Despite its rather forbidding name, the `Chromatic Fourth' is one of the most familiar short themes in virtually all western music over the four hundred years before the middle of our century. It is a sequence of six notes that can be heard in a huge variety of ways, most originally, effectively, and beautifully in the work of the greatest composers, from the madrigalists to Stravinsky, from Byrd to Bartók, with telling examples in the operas of Monteverdi, Mozart, and Wagner, or in the keyboard music of Bull, Bach, and Schubert. Although the existence of the chromatic fourth has long been recognized, and occasionally mentioned by music historians, this is the first thorough-going attempt to trace its likely origins and its evolution over four hundred years. With over 200 music examples, Peter Williams demonstrates the theme's wonderful variety, and shows that it was used by composers not only as a means of emotional expression, but also as a structural device.
Handel to Haydn
Authors: Williams Peter
Published: November 2023

Like any German composer of his time, Handel followed conventions in his use of the chromatic fourth, whether for certain texts or as an adaptable line in counterpoint, or both. Scarlatti too used it in counterpoint, but also for the marked Affekt it can bring to more galant music. His handling is deft and astute, like Frescobaldi’s, though seemingly offhand and without pedantry.
Pianists and Violinists
Authors: Williams Peter
Published: November 2023

Some indication of how a majority of musicians—countless music teachers and organists—continued to harmonize or compose according to formulas is given from time to time by pupils, or pupils of pupils, of J. S. Bach. Such habits provided a constant and fertile background. J. G. Milthel (d. 1788) was one of many to continue using the chromatic fourth in harmonizing organ chorales, such as ‘Jesu, meine Freude’, aJesus-hymn now brought up to date by being marked ciffettuoso. J.P. Kimberger, a Bach pupil from the late Leipzig period, relayed Protestant tradition for two or three generations of Berliners, thus over the first period of the Bach Revival as well as during Beethoven’s later years.
Introduction: Opera and the Culture of Fascism
Authors: Tambling Jeremy
Published: November 2023

The philosopher must be the evil conscience of his age-but to this end he must be possessed of its best knowledge. And what better guide, or more thoroughly efficient revealer of the soul, could be found for the labyrinth of the modern spirit than Wagner? Through Wagner modernity speaks its most intimate language: it conceals neither its good nor its evil; it has thrown off all shame. And conversely, one has almost calculated the whole of the value of modernity once one is dear concerning what is good and evil in Wagner. I can perfectly well understand a musician of today who says, ‘I hate Wagner but I can endure no other music.’ But I should also understand a philosopher who said: ‘Wagner is modernity in concentrated form.’ There is no help for it, we must first be Wagnerites.
Verdi and Imperialism: Otello
Authors: Tambling Jeremy
Published: November 2023

20 September 1870, Italian troops entered Rome by PortaPia, and the imperial city joined with the emergent nation-state. The Italian parliament first met in Rome on 27 November the following year. It was headed by a constitutional monarchy: Vittorio Emanuele II until 1878, Umberto till 1900, and Vittorio Emanuele Ill until 1946. It was a kingdom and monarchy which satisfied few, and successive governments seemed to contain in themselves the seeds that would produce Mussolini’s march on Rome at the end of October 1922. And the founding of Mussolini’s organization the Fasci ltaliani di Combattimento (on 23 March 1919), which became a party in November 1921, seems to belong to a narrative set in place by 1871. Its constitutive elements and discursive structure were never so self-consciously articulated as by Nietzsche in the German case, but I want to examine these elements, which add up to a culture of fascism, through late Verdi and Puccini.
Daughters of Kundry: Salome and Elektra
Authors: Tambling Jeremy
Published: November 2023

The music is the ultimate in modernism. Nobody has ever gone beyond it. Strauss’s so-called ‘progress’ is all twaddle. Every one of them continues to feed and draw on Parsifal What a terrifyingly expressive art! The accents of contrition and torment that he practised all his life achieve their ultimate intensity only here. Tristan’s longing pales beside this Miserere. Piercing details, gripping moments, the most refined and ardent cruelties. It happened that the first Austrian performance of Salome, conducted by the composer himself, was to take place in Graz, the capital of Styria, in May 1906. Adrian and Kretschmar had gone to Dresden to see its actual premiere, and he told his teacher... that he wanted to be present at this gala performance, and hear again that successful revolutionary work whose aesthetic sphere did not at all attract him, but which of course interested him in a musical and technical sense, particularly as the setting to music of a prose dialogue.
Conducting from the Right: Strauss, Kitsch, and Nihilism
Authors: Tambling Jeremy
Published: November 2023

Strauss operas involve questions of kitsch and camp, and the differences between these two. Adorno, considering Wagner, put kitsch and camp together: if Strauss’s operas art kitsch, they offer little to offset the culture of fascism (which showed its opinion of Hofmannsthal when his statue in Salzburg was destroyed by the Nazis in 1938 and his books were banned). But in so far as they are camp, they suggest at least the existence of a gender politics to contest the reactionary discourse about women and femininity I have referred to already and which I summarized under the name of Weininger. They may subvert quasi-fascist discourse from the inside. In this chapter, I want to go into these issues again, by considering Hofmannsthal / Strauss operas later than Elektra, and then by looking at one detail–the nihilism Strauss was forced into in the 1930s, which is traceable in his encounter with Zweig, his collaborator after Hofmannsthal, and with the Nazis, who made him a collaborator.
Post-Opera? After Brecht
Authors: Tambling Jeremy
Published: November 2023

On1y opera persists in its ‘splendid isolation’. The opera-going public still represents a closed group seemingly removed from the large theatre-going public. ‘Opera’ and ‘theatre’ are still treated as two completely separate concepts. In recent operas the dramaturgical style employed, the language spoken and the subjects treated would all be completely unthinkable in contemporary theatre. And one still hears, That might work in the theatre, but not in opera!’ Opera was established as an artistic genre of the aristocracy, and everything one calls ‘operatic tradition’ only underlines the class basis of this genre.
Wheatstone’s English Concertina: The Standard Instrument at Mid-Century
Authors: Atlas Allan W
Published: November 2023

In his excellent and admirably concise article on the concertina in The New Oxford Companion to Music, Julian Pilling distinguishes between the two national traditions of concertinas—English and German—and then proceeds to describe the three different types of concertinas within the English tradition: the Wheatstone English (or just ‘English’), the somewhat unfortunately named Anglo (or ‘Anglo-Continental’ or ‘Anglo-German’), and the equally misleading named duet (this last also developed by Sir Charles Wheatstone, who called it the ‘double’ concertina).1 And though the Wheatstone English is our main subject, a brief, even oversimplified, description of the other types is helpful, if only to highlight the characteristics that make the Wheatstone English concertina stand out among the others.
Childhood and Early Years
Authors: Brown David
Published: November 2023

T Has Been Observed That For A Russian To Claim Ryurik as his ancestor is akin to an Englishman boasting descent from William the Conqueror. In 862—so the twelfth-century Russian Chronicle records—the inhabitants of Novgorod, being weary of political turmoil, invited this Varangian prince to restore stable government. And so Ryurik took charge of the city and region, establishing a dynasty that quickly spread its domain south past Moscow to Kiev and the Black Sea. For some seven centuries it controlled much of what we still think of as Russia until, with the death in 1598 of Fyodor, the feeble-witted son of Tsar Ivan IV (the Terrible), the dynasty itself expired.
Boris Godunov: The Music
Authors: Brown David
Published: November 2023

Chaikovsky’s eugene onegin and musorgsky’s boris Godunov, for most musicians the two greatest of nineteenth-century Russian operas, have much in common. Both are founded upon major poetical works by Pushkin; in both the scenarios and libretti were devised by the composers themselves, using Pushkin’s text as far as it suited their requirements. And both operas run as a series of stage pictures, sometimes spectacular, sometimes intimate, each presenting a single crucial stage in the drama with perhaps massive time gaps between. Though these may require the spectator to guess at intervening events, in practice this proves no more of a problem than do the equally discrete moments in a strip cartoon.