bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Composer on Composition (1911)
Authors: Tilmouth Michael , Kimbell David , Savage Roger
Published: November 2023

The appearance of Sir Charles Villiers Stanford’s little treatise on Musical Com position [London: Macmillan, I 9 II] means far more than the inauguration of ‘The Musician’s Library’, excellent as that series promises to be. It is the first treatise for three centuries in which composition has been treated by a com poser whose own works have claims to live. Certainly since the Compositions Regeln of Sweelinck1 no work on composition can claim any such authority of practical mastery, wide musical and general culture, rhetorical power of melody and harmony, and unswerving devotion to the purest artistic ideals as this latest opus of the composer of Eden, the Irish Symphony, Shamus O’Brien, and that noble choral symphony the Stabat Mater.
Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787)
Authors: Tilmouth Michael , Kimbell David , Savage Roger
Published: November 2023

Christoph Willibald Gluck, the operatic composer, German by birth, French by his place in art, (was born in the Upper Palatinate on 2July1714. His father was gamekeeper to Prince Lobkowitz. At the age of 13 or 14 he went to Prague, where he maintained himself by hand-to-mouth musical jobs, sometimes at village fairs and dances. Prince Lobkowitz introduced him to the best families of the Austrian nobility; and when in the 1730s he proceeded to Vienna he was hospitably received at his protector’s palace.
Note on the Text
Authors: Tilmouth Michael , Kimbell David , Savage Roger
Published: November 2023

The lectures survive in the form of typed transcriptions deposited in the Tovey Archive, Reid Library, University of Edinburgh (the Beethoven series being from the collection of Mrs Mary Firth): the result of typing-up after the event from the note-pads of a very competent stenographer, or succession of stenographers, who tried to get down everything Tovey had to say. The standard of recording and transcription seems to be high, though there are a few fairly obvious mistakes of hearing or typing (‘Fidele’ for ‘Fidelio’, ‘falline stanza’ for ‘four-line stanza’ etc.), some passages in the Beethoven lectures where the recording angel simply did not grasp what Tovey was talking about, and several lacunae where she or he was defeated by some recherche word of the speaker’s and left a gap.
The Enjoyment of Music (1901)
Authors: Tilmouth Michael , Kimbell David , Savage Roger
Published: November 2023

In these days of incessant concerts and incessant production of novelties, musical culture becomes a very different matter from what it was fifty years ago. In one sense the common report is true, that musical culture is much more universal than it used to be-that is to say, that there are enormous masses of per sons who now take a more or less intelligent interest in good modern music, whose representatives in former generations could not have listened with pleasure to anything beyond the poorest type of sentimental song.
Dame Ethel Smyth: Two Introductions (1928, 1931)
Authors: Tilmouth Michael , Kimbell David , Savage Roger
Published: November 2023

Dame Ethel Smyth has, on previous occasions elsewhere, supplied notes on her works. These notes are given here. They are extremely terse and, at the same time, masterly in their completeness. Interpolations would be an impertinence; but some introductory remarks seem desirable, since the composer has instinctively avoided anything that could be construed as self-praise or even as egoism. The first thing that must be grasped about this music is that we have no business to take it seriously as the work of a woman. Our business is to take it seriously as music.
The BBC Symphony Orchestra in Edinburgh (1937)
Authors: Tilmouth Michael , Kimbell David , Savage Roger
Published: November 2023

The present programme displays the wide range of music that we have learnt to expect from the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with the important exceptions that it does not represent what may be called the pre-orchestral period before Haydn and Mozart, nor the ‘romantic’ period that lies between Beethoven and the most recent times. But one of the most important of recent tendencies takes the form, consciously or unconsciously, of a ‘return to Bach’; that is to say, a return to a musical texture in which every note is necessary in its own melodic right and never merely accessory to complete the harmony.
The Pleasure of Hearing
Authors: Maconie Robin
Published: November 2023

Some basic distinctions: Music: the idea behind or beyond the sound. A musical composition: the idea in sound, usually but not always imagined in terms of musical instruments. Music, the performance: the sound which actually emerges from an interpretation of the composer’s instructions, and which may aspire to communicate the composer’s original idea. The sound of music: a listener’s perception of the idea conveyed by a musical performance or expressed in a feature of the sound environment.
Sounds Like Reality
Authors: Maconie Robin
Published: November 2023

In order to prove that music takes its imagery from the world of sound as painting and sculpture do from the visible world we have to know something of how the world of sound is actually perceived and manipulated in real life. Not all that much is recorded. Stereophonic recording has contributed some insights into how an illusion of aural space may be created artificially. Clement Ader’s demonstration of stereophonic transmission at the Paris Exhibition of Electricity in 1881, transmitting from spaced telephone pick-ups on the Opéra stage to ear-pieces several blocks away, set in motion a lengthy process of research and development which was eventually to lead to the launch of commercial stereophonic recording in the late 1950s. However, because industi:y rather than science was the driving force behind much of this research, it tended to be guided more by intuition than by science, and on occasion products were launched which did not prove to be based on as complete an understanding of aural perception as the industry and its publicity machine affected to claim.
Time
Authors: Maconie Robin
Published: November 2023

Music is an experience of transience. Sounds do not last. Silence attracts the same apprehensions as townspeople used to feel about the untamed countryside: surrounded by it, we soon begin to seek anxiously for evidence of human occupation, whether the elegant and magisterial intelligences overseeing a Gainsborough landscape or the naturalized toilers in the field of a Constable. Silence, like Nature, is tireless and invincible: however grand a sound we make, silence will invade and inexorably overwhelm it. If silence is to be kept at bay, sound must be constantly renewed. But if sound did not die away, we would not have the option of repeating, or better still, replacing it with something different. Without silence there could be no music.
Grandmother’s Footsteps
Authors: Thomson Andrew
Published: November 2023

Paul Marie Theodore Vincent d’lndy was born with the blood of military and public service in his veins; the course of his long and active musical life revealed how loyal he remained to the patriotic, idealistic spirit of his ancestors. The family can be traced as far back as 1388, when Enguerrand Indy was Governor of the Dauphine; the junior branch established itself at Annonay in 1490. Little subsequently is remarkable until the era of the Napoleonic wars, which gave Vincent’s great grandfather and grandfather the opportunity to show their mettle. Joseph d’lndy was Prefect of the Ardeche in 1814, remaining faithful to Louis XVIII during the ‘Hundred Days’ of Napoleon’s return from Elba, but rewarded in 1819 with dismissal from his post by Decazes, the King’s minister.
Morally Bracing Mountain Air
Authors: Thomson Andrew
Published: November 2023

D’lndy was definitely enjoying more success than many of his friends and colleagues, some of whom, like Franck and Fauré, were sorely pressed by their economic circumstances. By comparison with the well-received Le Chant de la cloche, Fauré’s Symphony in D minor, which d’lndy conducted at Anvers on 14 October 1885, must have been a failure, for the composer destroyed it afterwards; he had doubtless been following a false trail in this instance, but he was by no means alone.
Breaking the Boundaries
Authors: Thomson Andrew
Published: November 2023

All his friends could call on d’lndy for fatherly advice at times of difficulty and crisis. He himself well understood the dark night of the soul through which the creative artist must pass in order to arrive at a clearer knowledge of himself and his capabilities. Writing to de Breville, afflicted by a mood of total discouragement, he advised him that his state of mind seemed to indicate a musical transformation:
Webern and the Lyric Impulse
Authors: Shreffler Anne C
Published: November 2023

This study provides a new view of a composer long considered to be one of the century’s most rigorously intellectual creators, Anton Webern. By examining a central pre-twelve-tone work, the Trakl cycle, Op 14, in the context of the Viennese intellectual and artistic climate, Professor Shreffler shows how Webern’s responses to Trakl’s complex verse enabled him to expand his musical vocabulary. The author’s emphasis on Webern’s compositional process is of particular importance: whether because of the anxiety of creating a new musical language, or because of an innate hyper-perfectionism (or both), Webern rejected most of what he composed. A close examination of the manuscript sources—fragments, sketches, and fair copies—of Webern’s comparatively neglected middle-period lieder enables her to shed light on Webern’s musical language and his working methods. A focus on the sources also helps to modify the view that his music progressed steadily in the direction of the twelve-tone technique. The works reveal instead a concern with expressing the essence of the text; this lyricism, rather than articulating a substantially different aesthetic from the later works, provides a better understanding of the consummate lyricism of all his music, however compressed or fragmented its utterance in the `classic’ twelve-tone works.
Evolution of the Completed Trakl Songs (Op. IJ No. 4 and Six Songs, Op. I4)
Authors: Shreffler Anne C
Published: November 2023

This chapter will focus on how each of the six completed songs of Op. 14 and ‘Ein Winterabend’ from Op. 13 was composed, according to evidence in the manuscript sources, ending with some observations about the premiere of Op. 14 and its performance history and practice. The published version of each Op. 14 song is preceded by at least five manuscript stages: a continuity draft sketch, a fair copy (in score), a printer’s copy, sketches for a piano/vocal reduction, and a piano/vocal reduction. For Nos. 1 and 6, as we have seen, Webern also made many preliminary sketches before the continuity draft.
The cori of the ospedali
Authors: Baldauf-Berdes Jane L
Published: November 2023

I had … very sanguine expectations from [Venice], with regard to the music of past times as well as at present. The church of St. Marc has had a constant supply of able masters, from Adriano, Zarlino’s predecessor, to Galuppi, its present worthy composer. Venice has likewise been one of the first cities in Europe that has cultivated the musical drama or opera: and, in the graver stile, it has been honoured with a Lotti and a Marcello. Add to these advantages the conservatories established here, and the songs of the Gondoleri … , and it will appear that my expectations were not ill grounded.
Conclusions and Speculations
Authors: Baldauf-Berdes Jane L
Published: November 2023

BECAUSE this study is concerned with a significantly large number of musicians who happen to be women, it is necessary to focus briefly on women’s status in Venice in the last three centuries of the history of the Republic. Assertions by historians that female rights were non-existent in Venice are met by contrary claims that Venetian women were freer than women elsewhere in European society in centuries past. The experience of the women of the cori bears out the latter assertion. As one visitor observed: ‘The great indulgence which the Venetian Ladies meet with prevents them from making a bad use of their liberty. ‘2 Venetian women had property rights for their dowries. The figlie del coro were given added opportunities for economic independence-that is, to earn income, to invest their earnings, and to bequeath their property when they died.
From Abyss to Recovery
Authors: Hirshberg Jehoash
Published: November 2023

The four years of World War I left Palestine in a shambles. The Jewish community shrank from 85,000 in 1914 to 56,000 in 1918, and those who stayed suffered hunger, epidemics, and deprivation.
From Pan-Europe to the Palestine Orchestra
Authors: Hirshberg Jehoash
Published: November 2023

The creation of the Palestine Orchestra was a milestone in the history of music in Palestine which was effected with dramatic international reverberations. The new orchestra revolutionized the musical scene, provided the infrastructure for professional musical education and for local composition, and marked the culmination of the process of the professional stratification of music institutions in Palestine. It soon set a model of institutional tenacity and stability in troubled times.1
Inventing a Tradition of Folksongs
Authors: Hirshberg Jehoash
Published: November 2023

The New Yishuv, a mostly secular and ethnically heterogeneous immigrant society, was in urgent need of a set of unifying cultural symbols, and the local composers were expected to form them. The vision of the return to and resettlement in the biblical Land of Israel required that they be oriented to the past, whereas the drive to build a new, better society called for. future-oriented symbols. Consequently, both folk and art music were heavily loaded with ideological expectations.
In the Cause of Jewish Music
Authors: Hirshberg Jehoash
Published: November 2023

Joel Engel’s premature death and Jacob Weinberg’s emigration in 1927 dealt a heavy blow to the publication and performance of Jewish music in Palestine. The international operations of Juwal publishing house were taken up by Hanigun society in Palestine,1 while the violinist and com poser Joseph Achron sponsored Jibneh publishing house in Vienna which concentrated on Jewish art music. Both were soon taken over by Universal Edition, which, however, dispensed with its Jewish department in 1933. Subsequent attempts to sustain publication of Jewish music did not get off the ground.2
The Semiotics of the East
Authors: Hirshberg Jehoash
Published: November 2023

The semiotics of all arts, music, and letters in Palestme during the r92os and early 1930s was grounded in the representation of rhe Yishuv’s collective spirit. Topics ranged from the romanticized countryside scenery to pioneer heroic deeds.1 Difficulties arose as soon as the flowery ideology had to be put into practice by way of concrete musical patterns.
Sources: Style
Authors: Solum John , Smith Anne
Published: November 2023

One of the pleasures of playing baroque and classical music on period instruments is that it leads us again and again into considerations of style. Because we do not have recordings from the pre-Romantic era (except what is revealed to us by mechanical musical instruments such as barrel organs), we are therefore largely dependent upon contemporary written information to tell us how music was played or sung. (We can also determine certain things from the instruments themselves, from pictures and engravings, and especially from a careful study of the written music.)
Nabucco
Authors: Budden Julian
Published: November 2023

The failure of Un Giorno di Regno was the bitterest moment of Verdi’s career: a career which, up till then, had been far from easy. The Milan Conservatoire had rejected him. His time as Director of the Music School at Busseto was poisoned by faction. He had had to wait at least three years for the production of his first opera. Now it seemed that the progress so hardly achieved had been wiped out, and this just after he had lost the wife for whose sake he had remained at Busseto when he might have been furthering his career as an opera composer. Meanwhile time was passing. At twenty-seven Bellini, Rossini and Donizetti had all established themselves as masters or at least beyond the power of an occasional fiasco to do them harm. Verdi had been king for a day. Now it seemed that day was over. His feelings could indeed be similar to Beethoven’s at the time of the Heiligenstadt testament.
Ernani
Authors: Budden Julian
Published: November 2023

With the double success of Nabucco and J Lombardi, Verdi had won his spurs, and offers of contracts came pouring in. Unwilling to tempt providence with another premiere in Italy’s leading opera house* he decided in the teeth of all Merelli’s blandishments to accept a commission from the Marquis Nani Mocenigo, President of the Gran Teatro la Fcnice in Venice, La Scala’s biggest rival in Northern Italy. In the seventeenth century Venice had been the cradle of public opera; two hundred years later there was no city in all Italy more clamorous in its operatic enthusiasm. It was here that Rossini had first won international fame with Tancredi and L’ Italiana in Algeri. Here too he closed his Italian career in a blaze of glory with Semiramide-wreaths flung into the water, a flotilla of gondolas escorting the maestro to his lodgings, and a water-borne band regaling him with a selection from his score. A Venetian triumph had a rare flavour of its own.
Alzira
Authors: Budden Julian
Published: November 2023

After the prodigious success of Ernani in 1844 one of the first people to approach Verdi for a new opera was Vincenzo Flauto, impresario of the San Carlo theatre. Together with La Scala and the Fenice, the San Carlo made up the trio of leading theatres in Italy; and it had a far longer and more glorious tradition than either of the other two. During the eighteenth century Naples had been the cradle of classical opera, serious and comic. Its composers, mostly from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and all trained at its Conservatories, had carried the latest operatic developments throughout Europe. But as so often happens the progressives of one century had become the diehards of the next; and by the early years of the nineteenth century Naples presented as conservative a face to the operatic world as could be imagined.
Il Corsaro
Authors: Budden Julian
Published: November 2023

The Corsair figured very early amongst Verdi’s operatic schemes, as did a number of Byron’s works. It had been considered along with The Bride of Abydos and The Two Foscari as a candidate for the Venice Carnival season of 1844, only to be dismissed since no baritone of the order of Ronconi was available, whether for the hero or the villain is not clear. That same year The Two Foscari came to fruition in Rome. All this suggests that like many of his generation Verdi was going through a Byronic phase at the time. It was a young man’s enthusiasm; and he grew out of it much faster than Liszt or Berlioz (if the latter can be said ever to have grown out of it at all). When Il Corsaro first became a practical possibility Verdi was hot on the scent; when he actually came to compose it the trail had to some extent gone cold.
Un Ballo in Maschera
Authors: Budden Julian
Published: November 2023

Among the new friends and acquaintances that Verdi made in Venice at the time of La Traviata was the lawyer and playwright Antonio Somma, his senior by three years. Though completely forgotten today Somma’s works enjoyed a considerable vogue in his lifetime, especially a Parisina and a Cassandra written for the great Italian actress Adelaide Ristori and performed by her in Paris in 1859. Well known for his patriotic sentiments he had been appointed secretary to the Assembly of the short lived Venetian republic of 1849. Could this be the great national poet to whom Carcano had urged Verdi to unite his genius? Verdi himself apparently thought so; and when in the spring of I 85 3 Somma offered him amongst other ideas a Sordello to set to music, Verdi was in principle delighted. ‘Nothing could be better, nothing dearer to my heart than to join your great name to mine.’ But Sordello would not do; it was too gloomy and severe.
Salamone Rossi
Authors: Harrán Don
Published: November 2023

Salamone Rossi (c.1570-c.1628) occupies a unique place in Renaissance music culture: he was the earliest outstanding Jewish composer to work in the European art music tradition. In the field of instrumental music, he established the trio sonata as a standard combination of voices for 17th-century chamber music and developed the sonata into a vehicle of virtuoso display. In his vocal works, he wrote music to texts of some of the most fashionable poets of his day, including Battista Guarini, Gabriello Chiabrera, and Ottavio Rinuccini. The mannerist poet Giovan Battista Marino particularly captured his attention: with 33 settings of Marino’s verses, among them the remarkable Canzone de’ baci in eight strophes, Rossi stands in the vanguard of contemporary literary developments. Rossi composed a book of duets and trios (Madrigaletti) that paved the way for similar chamber works by Agostino Steffani and others from the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Last but not least, Rossi carved out his own niche in the history of sacred music by composing the first and only collection of polyphonic settings of Hebrew texts (his ‘Songs of Solomon’) before the mid-nineteenth century. As a Jewish composer working for the Gonzaga dukes in Mantua, yet remaining faithful to his own religious community, Rossi has a biography fraught with difficult and often exciting questions of a socio-cultural order. How Rossi solved, or appears to have solved, the problem of conflicting interests is a subject worthy of inquiry, not only because we want to know more about Rossi, but also because Rossi can stand as a paradigm for other Jewish figures who, contemporary with him, moved between different cultures.
From Composition to Performance
Authors: Harrán Don
Published: November 2023

In the following chapter a line will be drawn from the composition of Rossi’s works to their performance. The treatment is far from inclusive, for it neither touches on the special problems, mainly liturgical, that relate to the Hebrew ‘Songs’, nor does it deal with any more than a select number of musical parameters from within the secular vocal and instrumental collections. This is not an essay, then, on early seventeenth-century performance practice in the full panoply of its interpretative associations. Rather, the discussion narrows to questions raised with particular urgency by Rossi’s collections in certain well-defined areas: accidentals, metres, the continua, melody instruments, alternative ensembles, tuning, transposition, tempo, dynamics, and the ordering of dances into suites. Most of the questions are familiar from other late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century composers’ works, yet Rossi’s force us to re-examine them in a renewed search for their elucidation.
Parents
Authors: Alvin Juliette , Warwick Auriel
Published: November 2023

The cases discussed in this book have all been treated by the author for continuous periods of at least four years. None of the children was hospitalised at the time. Each of them was well cared-for at home and had one or two siblings, in a fairly normal family environment. The inclusion of hospitalised cases would have broken the unity of a comparative study. The family environment plays an important part in the behaviour of the autistic child who is so much influenced by factors outside himself. Moreover, the family is usually much disrupted by the presence of such a child, and the hospital is not.
The Mandola/Mandolino in the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Tyler James , Sparks Paul
Published: November 2023

Throughout much of the eighteenth century, the terms mandala and mandolino were interchangeable, always referring to the small, high-pitched instrument tuned in fourths. Our study of the instrument in the eighteenth century begins with an examination of a highly interesting manuscript found in Paris (F:Pn Res Vmb ms. 9) entitled ‘Libra per la Mandala dell Illussm0m Sig.re Matteo Caccini a di p.0 Agosto 1703’. Nothing is known about Caccini (who was the owner/compiler of the manuscript rather than the composer of its music), but his famous surname suggests a connection with the family of Florentine musicians and composers of the same name.
Naples and the Origins of a New Instrument
Authors: Tyler James , Sparks Paul
Published: November 2023

The entry of Charles Bourbon into Naples in 1734 at the head of his Spanish army signalled the beginning of a golden age of Neapolitan culture. Although Naples was the third largest city in Europe (after London and Paris), and the Neapolitan kingdom comprised the whole of the south of Italy (including Sicily), the region had languished under foreign rule for centuries until Charles established an autonomous kingdom and encouraged the emergence of a distinctive Neapolitan style in art and music. The next few years saw the building of the San Carlo opera house, the porcelain factory at Capodimonte, and the enlargement of the Palazzo Reale, while increased artistic patronage led to a flowering of Neapolitan painting.1
A Guide to Playing the Neapolitan Mandoline*
Authors: Tyler James , Sparks Paul
Published: November 2023

Several of the Paris tutors give illustrations of the mandoline; Leone, Denis, and Corrette (see Illustrations 6–9). The Corrette example is quite unlike any known instrument of the period and seems to be simply the result of poor drawing; however the other three drawings offer us a great deal of in formation.
Instruments Related to the Neapolitan Mandoline in the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Tyler James , Sparks Paul
Published: November 2023

The instrument was advertised by its inventor as being ideal for vocal accompaniments, and the six free bass strings, which give a total range of three and a half octaves, overcome the problem of high tessitura discussed earlier with regard to the mandolin. The bissex did not ever achieve widespread popularity. There is a surviving example in the Musee Instrumentale, Conservatoire de Musique, Paris. For further reading on the instrument, see Vannes (1951) and Baines (1966): the latter book contains an illustration of the bissex (nos. 320-1).
Origins of the Popular Style
Authors: Merwe Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

Here, for the first time, is a book which analyses popular music from a musical, as opposed to a sociological, biographical, or political point of view. Peter van der Merwe has made an extensive survey of Western popular music in all its forms - blues, ragtime, music hall, waltzes, marches, parlour ballads, folk music - uncovering the common musical language which unites these disparate styles. The book examines the split between `classical' and`popular' Western music in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shedding light, in the process, on the `serious' music of the time. With a wealth of musical illustrations ranging from Strauss waltzes to Mississippi blues and from the Middle Ages to the 1920s, the author lays bare the tangled roots of the popular music of today in a book which is often provocative, always readable, and outstandingly comprehensive in its scope.
Europe and the Near East
Authors: Merwe Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

‘The Old High Culture.’ With this ringing phrase Alan Lomax describes the chain of settled communities that existed some three or four thousand years ago from the Nile to the Pacific, while northern Europe was still the domain of wandering and illiterate tribes.1 The tide is certainly deserved. North Europeans take a perverse delight in depicting their remote ancestors as even more barbarous than they really were, but it is after all true that civilization, however you define it, spread northward from these Asian lands. Musical civilization, at any rate, certainly did.
Instrumental Music
Authors: Merwe Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

Some time during the 1690s the Revd Thomas Teakle was so shocked to discover that dancing had been going on in his house—at the very hour of the Sabbath service, too—that he took the offenders to court. The revellers on this deplorable occasion were his daughter’s friends. The fiddler was a slave. There is no reason to think that there was anything novel about this situation; it was only the Revd Teakle’s outraged piety that happened to place the event on record. For another two hundred years the black fiddler was a prominent figure in the American musical landscape. Sometimes he performed as a soloist, but very often he was teamed with the banjo.
Afro-American Rhythm
Authors: Merwe Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

Ever since the pioneering work of Ward and Hornbostel in the 1920s the Great African Rhythm Controversy has rumbled on in learned books and journals. Two peculiarities have marked the discussion: firstly, the quite disproportionate amount of space devoted to what others have already said on the subject, and secondly the equally disproportionate concentration on one small part of the African continent. More has probably been written on the rhythms of the southern Gold Coast (now known as Ghana) than the rest of Africa put together. This at least means that these rhythms are by now fairly well understood. How good a guide, we must ask, are they to West Africa as a whole? The answer seems to be that in their basic principles they are entirely characteristic of the whole area from Senegambia to Angola.
British Origins of the Blues
Authors: Merwe Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

It must be understood that the third is not a fixed note in the folk-scale, as it is in both of the modern scales. The English folk-singer varies the intonation of this particular note very considerably. His major third is never as sharp as the corresponding interval in the tempered scale, to which modern ears are attuned. On the other hand, it is often so flat that it is hardly to be distinguished from the minor third. Frequently, too, it is a ‘neutral’ third, i.e., neither major nor minor, like the interval between the two notes of the Cuckoo’s song, when the Spring is waning. Apparently, the folk-singer, not having any settled notions with regard to the pitch of the third note of the scale, varies it according to the character of the phrase in which it happens to occur.
The Twelve-Bar Blues: Frankie and Others
Authors: Merwe Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

If one examines the twelve-bar blues songs of the early twentieth century, it is hard not to be struck by the importance of one particular tune family. This is the one to which the ballads ‘Frankie and Johnny’ and ‘The Boll Weevil’ belong. The Frankie family alone exists in literally hundreds of variants.
Blues Harmony
Authors: Merwe Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

The twelve-bar blues has been associated with many harmonic schemes, of which the simplest is the one-chord form mentioned in chapter 18. To this one-chord scheme either a subdominant or, at the final cadence, a dominant chord can be added. In Charley Patton’s ‘Pony Blues’ (Ex. 60), for instance, the only chord other than the tonic is the subdominant at the beginning of the second phrase. Or both subdominant and dominant may be used in a I IV I V I pattern, the exact fit of harmony to tune being variable, especially in the early blues.
The Riddle of the Twelve Bar Blues
Authors: Merwe Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

Imagine that you are a cultivated, well informed European musician. The year is 1900. Like so many of your friends, you spend a great deal of time wondering about the future of music. What will the new century hold? Your views on this point depend on your individual inclinations. You may be one of the growing band of brave young revolutionaries, or on the other hand you may be a member of the old guard. Possibly, if you are an Englishman or a Hungarian, say, you may be an enthusiast for the folk music of your country. Your prophesies, coloured as always by wishful thinking, will vary accordingly.
The Parlour Modes
Authors: Merwe Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

Anyone who thinks that the intellectual’s scorn for popular music is something recent should read Sir Hubert Parry’s denunciation of the music-hall in Style in Musical Art (1911). After comparing music-hall songs with Cockney speech (‘the result of sheer perverse delight in ugly and offensive sound’) and, worse, women’s fashions, he embarks on a lengthy analysis of their disregard for musical grammar, in particular unresolved leading notes, the tritone between leading note and subdominant, and consecutive fifths.
Parlour Harmony
Authors: Merwe Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

The old libel about popular composers using the outworn cast-offs of their musical betters comes closest to the truth with harmony. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at any rate, popular harmony is usually an echo of what serious composers had been doing several decades before. The lush Romantic chromaticism of the years between 1830 and 1850 took half a century to reappear in the parlour ballads of the 80s and 90s, just as, in the next century, Impressionist harmonies turn up a few decades later in jazz. From early times serious composers had sought the striking progression, the telling, unusual chord. The popular composer had no such ambitions, sharing the ‘courage in using without hesitation the obvious commonplace phrase, of words or music’ that Cecil Sharp admired in the folk musician.
Ragtime
Authors: Merwe Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

A Few years before the end of the nineteenth century, genuine black American music became a lucrative commercial property. For generations it had gradually been making its way up in the world; now, suddenly, it managed to attract the attention of big business. Like all apparently sudden historical developments, however, this was really a more gradual affair than appears in retrospect. Comic black characters, speaking a pseudo-Negro dialect, were a feature of English ballad operas, which were also popular in America. What was later to be called the ‘coon song’ was familiar to late eighteenth-century English audiences; one, of 1790, actually mentions the banjo. There is no evidence that the popularity of these characters had anything to do with genuine Afro American music.
The Eynsford Years (1925-1928)
Authors: Smith Barry
Published: November 2023

Philip was thoroughly delighted with Eynsford, an unspoilt, ancient village in completely rural surroundings on the river Darent. It was a place he found ‘peaceful and congenial for work’1 and had the added advantage of being within commuting distance of London, a mere 20 miles away, as well as having 27 pubs within a 4-mile radius. However, travelling back late at night in the last train after a binge in London sometimes presented problems, should he fall asleep during the journey, as he often did.
The End (1930)
Authors: Smith Barry
Published: November 2023

When philip moved to Bramerton Street in April he had intended to stay only a short while but, apart from the two weeks spent in Bramdean, he remained there until September, when he finally found a basement flat that suited him. Assisted by a £30 advance from his mother and the loan of a Bechstein piano from Moeran, he and Barbara Peache now moved to 12A Tite Street in Chelsea, which was destined to be the last of his many London addresses.1 Thanking his mother for the loan, he told her that he found the flat ‘quite exceptionally pleasant and sympathetic …I am sure I shall be able to do good work there.’
The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams
Authors: Kennedy Michael
Published: November 2023

This is the authoritative account of Vaughan Williams's musical life - the story of a great composer's career, and at the same time the story of music in England over half a century and more. Kennedy considers the principal works in chronological order, outlining the main features of each and discussing details of the music's structure, often illuminating his point with a musical quotation. He also provides a good deal of biographical data, and so builds up a picture of the composer, as well as providing thumbnail sketches of many of Vaughan Williams's friends and colleagues. Kennedy's extensive knowledge of Vaughan Williams's output also enables him to refer back and forth across the works to pick out lines of development and influence. The book includes a full classified list of Vaughan Williams's works. Michael Kennedy has provided a new preface.
1895-1906
Authors: Kennedy Michael
Published: November 2023

When Vaughan Williams re-entered the Royal College of Music in 1895 he was in many respects a more self-confident man as a result of his Cambridge days. He was determined to determined to widen his training as a musician, no doubt influenced by stanford who never made the mistake of thinking that composers could be made by theory alone. He therefore became organist at St. Barnabas, South Lambeth-’I never could play the organ,’ he wrote later, ’but this appointment gave me an insight into good and bad church music which stood me in good stead later on’ (when he came to edit the English Hymnal and Songs of Praise). Not many other methods of gaining practical musical experience were open to young men in those days unless, like Elgar and Holst, they played in an orchestra.
1943-1952
Authors: Kennedy Michael
Published: November 2023

The fifth symphony was eagerly taken up by orchestras in Britain and played at concerts thronged by music-hungry members of the Services as well as by civilians. It was soon recorded, by the Halle Orchestra conducted by John Barbirolli, who had returned to England in June 1943 to revitalize the musical life of the North. The United States swiftly showed an interest.
Chansons for Three and Four Voices
Authors: Litterick Louise
Published: November 2023

Some six dozen secular works for three and four voices appear under Josquin’s name in music sources compiled during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, most preserved in at least one source that circulated during his lifetime. A large percentage of these compositions survive with a French text, incipit, or title. This chapter will concentrate on these ‘French’ works. Compositions with more than one independent attribution to Josquin are relatively few in this repertory. Moreover- important recent advances notwithstanding-uncertainties concerning the composer’s biography, and in some cases also the provenance and dating of sources carrying ascriptions, make difficult the task of evaluating any given attribution. For present purposes, in this chapter I proceed on the basis of reasonable doubt. Pieces attributed to Josquin in a single source for which there is no compelling reason to mistrust the credibility are treated, if tentatively, as works by Josquin des Prez.
Three Settings of Italian Texts and Two Secular Motets
Authors: Sherr Richard
Published: November 2023

Three pieces with Italian texts are ascribed in manuscripts and in Petrucci’s frottola publications to someone whose first name was Josquin. One of these, Scaramella fa la guerra, was not printed by Petrucci, but is attributed in two Florentine manuscripts to ‘Josquin’ and is anonymous in a third Florentine manuscript. This work (WW, no. 54) is based on a popular tune concerning a figure ofltalian folk legend (there is also setting by Compere).3 The melody can be deduced from the polyphonic settings (see Ex. 14.1). The text set by Josquin consists of two stanzas. He keeps the bouncy triple metre of the tune, and divides the set ting into two sections of eighteen bars, each containing one full statement of the melody. Each section also embodies a different way of treating the cantus prius factus. In first section (bb. 1-18), the tune begins clearly onf’ (as in Ex. 14.1)
Symbolism in the Sacred Music of Josquin
Authors: Elders Willem
Published: November 2023

Josquin’S musical compositions were for the greater part conceived for performance in Christian worship, and in numerous cases were based on biblical and/or liturgical texts. To the composers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries many of these texts meant more than they do to most present day historians of music, for besides their obvious literal sense, they were also believed to contain spiritual or symbolic meaning. The search for symbolism in the scores of these compositions ought therefore to take its starting point in medieval and Renaissance exegesis, which was largely allegorical. The terms ‘allegory’ and ‘symbol’ are used over and again in scholarly publications,1 and the choice between them for the title of the present chapter was not an easy one. Early musical treatises, incommunicative as they are about these forms of musical expression, do not give any help. Yet the concept of a symbol as a doorway to knowledge, and possessing multiple meanings, certainly applies to the various forms of symbolism in the music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Purcell’s Musical World
Authors: Holman Peter
Published: November 2023

HENRY PURCELL was still a baby when, in the spring of 1660, the English republic collapsed, and Charles II returned to England in triumph. England’s musical life had been severely disrupted in the Interregnum. The court, the nation’s largest musical institution, had broken up in confusion in 1642 at the beginning of the Civil War, leaving its musicians to fend for themselves. A few, like William Lawes and Henry Cooke, joined the Royalist army. Some went abroad. But most turned to teaching, or just slid into obscurity and retirement. A list in John Playford’s A Musical Banquet (1651) of ‘excellent and able Masters’ available in London to take pupils includes many past and future court musicians, including Henry Lawes, Charles Coleman, and Henry Cooke under the heading For the Voyce or Viole’, and Christopher Gibbons, John Hingeston, and Benjamin Rogers under the heading For the Organ or Virginall’.
Domestic Vocal Music
Authors: Holman Peter
Published: November 2023

HENRY PURCELL has always been particularly admired as a song composer. Henry Playford wrote in the preface of Orpheus Britannicus, i (1698) that The Author’s extraordinary Talent in all sorts of Musick is sufficiently known, but he was especially admir’d for the Vocal, having a peculiar Genius to express the energy of English Words, whereby he mov’d the Passions of all his Auditors.’ In a poem printed a few pages later Henry Hall, fellow choirboy in the Chapel Royal and organist at Hereford, wrote that his friend ‘ach Syllable first weigh’d, or short, orlong, I That it might too be Sense, as well as Song.’ Playford described Orpheus Britannicus on the title-page as A I COLLECTION I OF ALL I The Choicest SONGS I FOR I One, Two, and Three Voices, I COMPos’n I By Mr. Henry Purcell’, and the publisher rightly claimed in the second edition (1706; repr. 1721) that it excelled any Collection of Vocal Music yet Extant in the English Tongue, and may Vie with the best Italian Compositions’.
The Life and Music of Béla Bartók
Authors: Stevens Halsey
Published: November 2023

First published in 1953, Halsey Stevens's The Life and Music of Béla Bartók was hailed as a triumph of musicology and quickly established itself as the classic text. Stevens combined an authoritiative, balanced account of the Hungarian composer's life with candid insightful analyses of his numerous works. To Stevens, the high point of Bartók's genius was the chamber music, which he assessed was of a quality unrivalled by any other composer of the early twentieth century. But he evaluated Bartók's entire output with mastery, picking out the composer's strengths and weaknesses and conveying the essence of his compositional techniques. Stevens's views have greatly influenced the study of Bartók and Hungarian music over the last four decades. Issued in a revised edition in 1964, Stevens's work now appears in a third edition, prepared by the Bartók scholar, Malcolm Gillies. A comprehensive chronological list of works is added, together with a select bibliography and discography. Minor revisions to the text are suggested in a new Introduction, and the text is enhanced by eight pages of photgraphs, some of them little known.
Unfinished Trilogy
Authors: Kennedy Michael
Published: November 2023

This was Elgar’s position in 1901–2: he was nearing forty-five, he had had a success with the Variations, a failure with The Dream of Gerontius. He had had riotous success with two Pomp and Circumstance marches and the Cockaigne overture. At a time when choral singing in Britain was at its zenith, it was his orchestral works. which had taken him to the top. King Olaf remained the most frequently performed of his choral music, The Black Knight had never established itself. As Jaeger wrote to him in 1901, it ‘doesn’t move much for some reason or other, chiefly no doubt because the subject is a bit gruesome & the music ends poetically pp. I have thought that if we could do something with the work for orchestra alone, we might make it better known ‘All of which seems to contradict the theory that Elgar was prevented from writing the orchestral music that really interested him because the taste of the time was for choral works, religious if possible. Elgar himself supported the theory when, in 1933, he told Delius that he wrote his choral works because it was ‘the penalty of my environment’. This may have been true in the mid-1890s, the period of Lux Christi and The Black Knight.
The Ascendancy of Brahms
Authors: Smallman Basil
Published: November 2023

AN intense capacity for self-criticism, and what Schumann called ‘another genius—that of modesty’, were typical of Brahms from the start of his career. His modesty, though often well concealed from the outside world, is evidenced by the letters he wrote to his closest and most knowledgeable friends—Joachim, Clara Schumann, Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, and Theodor Billroth—repeatedly seeking advice and assurance about his latest compositions as they progressed; and his self-criticism, by his destruction of numerous early works which failed to satisfy him, among them a Phantasie Piano Trio in D minor, a String Quartet in B flat, and a Violin Sonata in A minor, all written before 1853. It was not, therefore, ease of creation, but a hard-won maturity that provided him with the sovereign technical command, apparent eventually over the whole range of his published chamber music. With the loss of his apprentice works there now remain few clues to the nature of his early difficulties—none, certainly, comparable to those afforded by the sketch-books of Beethoven, or the uncompleted manuscripts of Schubert. But there are two works, from a later period, which provide valuable insights.
1922–1939 ‘An Untamed Buffalo’
Authors: Gillies Malcolm , Pear David
Published: November 2023

In August 1922 Grainger returned to Europe, for the first time since 1914, in an attempt to regain something of places and times once shared with his mother. He resuscitated the plans of 1914 to collect Danish folk music in Jutland and gave concerts in Scandinavia and Holland.

American Hotel, Amsterdam, Oct 21, 1922

Cyril dear,

In a day or two I will be sending you the photo of my beloved mother that I like best & (if I can find a copy) one of her & me together playing the English Dance that is dedicated to you, last sum mer. You say you have a small postcard of us both. Will you tell me its number on the charts I am sending you, & which I wish back after wards? Do you like the look of 13 or do you prefer 24, the latter looks much better in the real photo than on the chart.