bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Postwar Jazz: An Arbitrary Roadmap (1945–2001)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

The initial idea was to create an overview of jazz (and jazz-related) records from 1900 to 2001, by choosing one work to represent each year. After several weeks of revelatory listening to music from the dark ages— rags, marches, cakewalks, blues, minstrel and music hall turns—in an attempt to find appropriate tracks for 1900 to 1920, I realized that the project would have to be abbreviated. I had bit off more than I could chew or the Village Voice could accommodate. This particular fit of madness has now passed, and I don’t expect to fill in the missing years any time soon. Even with the narrower scope of 1945 to 2001, I spent nearly five months groping for solutions to the labyrinth I was intent on building; the writing was, relatively, a snap as compared to the process of selecting representative recordings, given my self-imposed rules, about which more anon. I wanted, for my own illumination, to posit a jazz map. By opting for one track (always a track, never an album, though albums on which the tracks are found are noted at the end of each entry) per year, I hoped to offer a purview that would balance achievement and innovation. Given my rules, however, I soon realized that nothing remotely like objectivity studio. Nash, the soul of sideman dependability, presented this memorable quintet in at least one New York concert, but it survives as a recorded feat of genre-defying eclecticism—a bright idea, brightly done. Debussy’s clarinet exercise is augmented by Nash’s resourceful voicing and an instrumentation that cannot help evoking tangents.
Where’s Waldo? (JVC 2002)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

A brief July 9 press release about the flagship event that ran from June 16 to June 29 begins with an announcement from George Wein (“CEO of Festival Productions, Inc.”): “The 2002 JVC Jazz Festival–New York was the most successful JVC festival ever held in New York.” It was also the least jazz-like. JVC, whether good or ill or, per usual, in between, does not always reflect what is actually going on in the jazz world. This year it did—not musically, but culturally and economically as concerns what remains of jazz central in these United States. Fading away, like Uncle Tom in an episode excised from Duke Ellington’s Jump for Joy, Uncle Jazz lies on his deathbed while producers and CEO’s frantically administer adrenalin to keep him alive. It isn’t necessarily his music they hope to preserve, but his name, a valuable brand on seven continents. Never in my experience has JVC presented so little jazz, or so few thematic and imaginative concerts. Even re-creations, with which we are admittedly surfeited, vanished from the bill. There was nothing novel, original, or newsworthy. A cursory look at the events scheduled for The Hague, Montreal, and other international jazz sites reveals the singularity of New York’s drought. Of eight concerts presented at Carnegie Hall, which according to a press release had a 90 percent ticket sale (that’s the source of the “most successful” claim), only half were undeniably jazz. Of the others, Joao Gilberto and Eddie Palmieri remain tangential, though they have now become deservedly admired JVC traditions; make the audience beg and beg and beg for the encores? After one belated bow, DeJohnette walked to the drums only to learn that there had not yet been enough begging and then had to walk off stage; after the next bow, Peacock made the same mistake. OK, it’s a small price. Jarrett and company, at least, know what they’re doing. I’m not sure about JVC. If this year’s financial success breeds another year with as little resourcefulness, as little jazz, there won’t be much point in covering it. We will already have heard almost all of it worth hearing—year round, in the clubs.
At the Summit (Sonny Rollins)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

“Give yourself a gift,” Marcus Aurelius advised, “the present moment.” Aldous Huxley populated his island paradise Pala with parrots that fly around squawking, “Here and now, boys, here and now!” All the wise men agree: The key to a healthy life is alertness—a refusal to smother the brief candle with ruminations or apprehensions, an avowal to wake up and keep waking up. In art, the existential dilemma translates into devotion to the elusive light of inspiration, a challenge enacted nowhere with greater clarity and urgency than in jazz—where the composer composes in the arena, without benefit of eraser, white-out, tape dubs, or retakes—and by nobody with a more exhilarating sense of adventure than jazz’s finest living practitioner, Sonny Rollins. It was a remarkable week: Verizon colluded with the Jazz Standard to present five solo piano recitals; Jazz Alliance International jammed the same room with a dozen or so trumpeters in tribute to Fats Navarro, and Clark Terry proved it’s what you play and not how much that wins the day; Tony Bennett sang his heart out for an hour and a half at Carnegie Hall (also for Verizon); Lincoln Center remembered Art Blakey; and Ted Nash reconvened Odeon. But when Rollins returns to town, after an all too typical two-year absence, time must have a stop; the present moment is suddenly lit in boldface italics, and after hanging on every measure for 95 minutes, one is disinclined to get the clock rolling again, even though it would trigger a dreamy post mortem on the immediate past. Because his records are sometimes rush-jobs proffering material that hasn’t yet been (in his words) road-tested, and because spontaneity is his shield against cliché and ennui, a Rollins concert is a gift, and when he plays as well as he did at B. B. King’s Blues Club and Grill on September 21, a miracle, too.
Purely Piano (Ethan Iverson / Vijay Iyer / Jason Moran)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Mid-September’s 2002 Verizon Music Festival—note the absence of the J-word—offered little to the J-audience beyond McCoy Tyner and Tony Bennett, at least in the big halls. But a week of solo piano recitals at the Jazz Standard filled me with more optimism about the J-future than anything else this year. Though dramatically different from each other, three pianists born in the ‘70s indicated a united front in their unconventional approaches, filtering of influences, and involvement with the music of their time. Each has devised an emphatic solo style—a purely pianistic music, as opposed to trio music without the trio. Several times I wondered whether Ethan Iverson, Vijay Iyer, and Jason Moran were playing jazz at all, but I never really cared. This was no less true of 41-year-old Matthew Shipp, whom I will catch up with when Equilibrium is released in January. I assume it was also true of 47-year-old Fred Hersch (whom I missed), knowing his intermingling of jazz and classical techniques. But I doubt that Hersch accessed one ingredient connecting the other four, especially in their new or imminent albums: hip-hop beats.
Point Counter Point (Dave Holland)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Musical reductions are commonplace, expansions less so. Nineteenthcentury virtuosos displayed their wares in keyboard adaptations of symphonies; Gershwin later created a player-piano version of his rhapsody. Occasionally, a Stokowski would reverse the process and make a chamber work symphonic. But either way the result tended to generate the dubious respect accorded gimmicks. In jazz, reduction and expansion seem more fluid, but only when the composer of the original is responsible. We don’t give a second thought to Ellington taking a piece created for a small group, enlarging it for the big band (or vice versa), and additionally reworking it as a piano solo, piano-bass duet, or any other configuration that came to hand. But we can live without an augmented version of, say, the Miles Davis Nonet; many shuddered at the very notion of orchestrating A Love Supreme. Would Hal Overton’s elaborations of Monk have been as readily countenanced if Monk had not been his pianist? Of course, adaptations of noted jazz solos by bands or vo-before they charge down the hillside. What Goes Around was recorded in January 2001, and a second volume is already in the works. On the evidence of the new music heard at Birdland—including the impressionistic ballad, “A Rio” (impressive Mark Gross), and the contrapuntal fanfares and astonishing Holland display of “Happy Jammy” (the last movement from his “Monterey Suite”)—this looks like the start of something big.
Jazzman of the Year: 2002 (Clark Terry)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Dear CT, It’s that time of year again—holidays, wrap-ups, and your birthday, number 82 on December 14, which undoubtedly seems more incredible to observers like me than to you, living with courage and style, and still playing with a gleaming ingenuity that spits in the eye of mortal ailments. I believe in choosing one’s own savior, and this year, like it or not, I choose you. You inspire me, emboldening me with the desire to embrace and hear music anew. Since your phoenix-like recovery from serial ills—one of the more astonishing and upbeat stories of the year— I’ve found myself thinking a lot about what you have meant and continue to mean to jazz. To be honest, last winter I feared you had finally put the flugelhorn away for good. The daughter of your great friend and mighty trumpet player Jimmy Maxwell had called to say she had heard you were in troubled health and was worried. You may not know that she and I were in college together. In fact, the first time I caught you live was when the Clark Terry–Bob Brookmeyer Quintet, or a version thereof, came to Grinnell, Iowa, during our freshman year. Anne later told me that until that evening (given the excited conversation that anticipated and followed it), she didn’t realize that her father was famous or that you are one of the jazz gods. Of course, your casually infallible technique and comic esprit sometimes suggest that you don’t know it either—but then true modesty is often inherent in true wit. I’ve never forgotten a moment that occurred after the concert, when the musicians were packing up. You and Bob had brought a pickup trio from Chicago, and they did their best. Right before leaving the stage, you walked over to the pianist, shook his hand with a wide smile, and said, “Don’t think it hasn’t been a gas just because it hasn’t.”
Satchuated (Louis Armstrong)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Years ago, watching a clip of bungee jumpers, I thought, It’s just like writing a biography—the long drop into the abyss, then the sudden jerk of salvation. Later I realized that was wishful thinking. There is no jerk, except yourself, plunging into the depthless mire of research, until finally you are obliged to concede, “Hold, enough!” However many bones you unearth, you know there are more, buried a little deeper. And when the boneyard is truly bare, bones already baking in the sun will be endlessly re-excavated. Otherwise there wouldn’t be hundreds of biographies of Alexander, Napoleon, and Lincoln, each presuming to varnish or grind into dust its predecessors. I have never attempted a full-dress biography of Louis Armstrong, but I have written a short life and several essays, enough to feel some confidence in understanding him, his genius, and his times. Yet seconds after curator Michael Cogswell ushered me into the Louis Armstrong House & Archives for a recent visit, I felt I was plunging down the rabbit hole.
Prologue
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

Margret Reed spread out a buffalo robe for her children and then covered them with a shawl. It was snowing—’’great feathery flakes,’’ as one of the youngsters remembered—so every few moments Reed would rouse herself and shake the accumulation from their makeshift bedding, lest she and the children be buried alive in a muffling layer of white.
Vexatiously Slow
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

The pace could drive a man mad. The column creaked along at two miles an hour. Men could walk faster. They might stop by the trail to write a letter or butcher a fresh kill, and then an hour or two later they would rise and pocket their pencils or their hunting knives and, with a bit of brisk walking, catch the ponderously rolling wagons. Progress, one man said, was ‘‘vexatiously slow.’’ ‘‘Covered wagons’’ became the symbol of the journey, but in fact the rigs used by the emigrants were typically small and simple, not the huge Conestoga freight wagons of the movies. The beds were four or five feet wide and perhaps twice as long, a size that allowed them to maneuver through the canyons and forests and mountain passes the emigrants would eventually face. The running gear was simple: wooden axles and wheels, although strips of iron were wrapped around the wheels to serve as tires. There were no brakes. Going downhill, a wheel or two would be locked with a chain to take off some speed, or a felled tree would be dragged behind, the deadweight serving as a kind of land anchor. Typically, there was no seat for the ‘‘driver.’’ Instead, he walked along beside the draft animals, controlling them with nothing but a whip and voice commands.
A Low Situation
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

Four days after the Forlorn Hope walked away from the lake cabins, Milt Elliott appeared out of the snow like a specter from a wintry hell. More than a week had passed since Elliott and Noah James, another teamster, set off for the Alder Creek camp. A blizzard kicked up the day they left and blew for five straight days, so the logical conclusion was that they were dead. ‘‘Thinks they got lost in the snow,’’ Patrick Breen wrote in his diary.
Terror, Terror
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

James Reed looked up into the sky and felt an abiding dread seize his heart. The sky was darkening, portentous clouds rolling up over the peaks. At this elevation, the clouds pressed close, looming down on a man like a monster from a nightmare.
Nature and Culture
Authors: Novak Barbara
Published: November 2023

In this richly illustrated volume, featuring more than fifty black-and-white illustrations and a beautiful eight-page color insert, Barbara Novak describes how for fifty extraordinary years, American society drew from the idea of Nature its most cherished ideals. Between 1825 and 1875, all kinds of Americans--artists, writers, scientists, as well as everyday citizens--believed that God in Nature could resolve human contradictions, and that nature itself confirmed the American destiny. Using diaries and letters of the artists as well as quotes from literary texts, journals, and periodicals, Novak illuminates the range of ideas projected onto the American landscape by painters such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Asher B. Durand, Fitz H. Lane, and Martin J. Heade, and writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Frederich Wilhelm von Schelling. Now with a new preface, this spectacular volume captures a vast cultural panorama. It beautifully demonstrates how the idea of nature served, not only as a vehicle for artistic creation, but as its ideal form. “An impressive achievement.” --Barbara Rose, The New York Times Book Review “An admirable blend of ambition, elan, and hard research. Not just an art book, it bears on some of the deepest fantasies of American culture as a whole.” --Robert Hughes, Time Magazine.
Das Rheingold
Authors: Millington Barry
Published: November 2023

Vorabend (preliminary evening) of Der Ring des Nibelungen, in four scenes, set to Wagner’s own libretto; first performed in Munich, at the Königliches Hof-und Nationaltheater, on 22 September 1869. The first performance as part of the Ring cycle, was at Bayreuth’s Festspielhaus, on 13 August 1876. The first Wotan was August Kindermann; Fricka was sung by Sophie Stehle. Loge was Heinrich Vogl; Froh, Franz Nachbauer; Mime, Max Schlosser; and Fafner, Kaspar Bausewein. For the 1876 cast, see Der Ring des Nibelungen.
Staging Wagner from 1876 to the Present Day
Authors: Millington Barry
Published: November 2023

The history of the staging of Wagner’s operas reflects a contradiction inherent in the works themselves. The aesthetic tradition to which Wagner considered himself the heir was that of Goethe and Schiller, in which art was elevated above the mundane, sordid realities of everyday life. Yet Wagner’s works, with their insistent social critiques and dissolving of regular metrical patterns into freely expressive ‘musical prose ‘, themselves exemplify the new spirit of realism, which came to pervade all branches of the arts in the 19th century. The characteristic deployment by Wagner of myths and symbols is the perfect embodiment of that contradiction: underlying social realities are thereby objectified in the sphere of fantasy. In the Ring, for example, we are presented, at the surface level of plot, with gods, dragons, and sleeping beauties. It does not require exceptional perspicacity to realize that such types are merely the dramaturgical representations of the plutocrats, labourers, and other products of the bourgeois capitalist society so detested by Wagner.
Luminism: An Alternative Tradition
Authors: Novak Barbara
Published: November 2023

As I have suggested, Durand was not the only Hudson River artist who achieved a revelation of Emerson’s “spirit in the fact” through the development of certain aspects of luminist style. A similar development can be seen even more markedly in the works of John F. Kensett, who, like Durand, painted in the Hudson River salon style, who also produced pieces executed in a proto-Impressionist mode, such as Bash-Bish Falls (fig. 5.1), and an even larger number of serene landscapes that fall into the general category of luminism. Indeed, of all the Hudson River men, Kensett was the most clearly luminist in sensibility. In paintings such as View from Cozzen’s Hotel, Near West Point (plate 5), with its exquisitely subtle tonal modulations of golds, browns, and grays, proto-Impressionist scumble becomes a delicate equivalent for foliage, while vitrescent water confronts the spectator with no reference through stroke to the artist’s presence. As Jarves wrote of Kensett’s later works, “there is a phantom-like lightness and coldness of touch and tint, which gives them a somewhat unreal aspect. But they take all the more hold on the fancy for their lyrical qualities.”
Thomas Eakins: Science And Sight
Authors: Novak Barbara
Published: November 2023

When Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) visited the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1867, he was more interested in the locomotives and machinery than in the art. This curiosity about mechanism, with its concomitant respect for fact, led him into serious anatomical studies—like the Renaissance masters who dissected to use knowledge as an instrument of truth. With Eakins, this desire for knowledge—an almost obsessive one in his case—extended to the use of the machine as tool (photography) and into mathematics. His art thus belongs, in many of its aspects, to the mensurational, machine- connected aesthetic that characterizes much American art before and after him. In his grave attempts to reconcile knowledge with art, he was perhaps the most philosophical and conscientious of American artists.
Acknowledgments
Authors: Suskin Steven
Published: November 2023

Summer camp visiting day, 1962. All of the kids—and all of the fathers—are swarming toward one of the dads, who happens to be the head coach of the division-champ New York Giants. All except one nine-year-old, that is. I had learned that Ronnie Ramin’s dad was the orchestrator of West Side Story and Gypsy; while I didn’t know what an orchestrator was, I knew both cast albums by heart.
The Dreyfus System
Authors: Steven Suskin
Published: November 2023

Any discussion of Broadway’s major orchestrators—the earliest and most influential ones, at least—is incomplete without first understanding the framework within which they thrived and the Machiavellian master sitting behind the rolltop desk who pulled the strings. And, if you will, the reeds and brass as well.
Valued Members of the Music Department
Authors: Steven Suskin
Published: November 2023

Space constraints prohibit including extended biographical information about the many other orchestrators, arrangers, and musical directors who have made their mark upon Broadway. Many of them, though, have done too much influential work to be overlooked. There follows apologetically brief biographical information on thirty-four additional music makers, accompanied by a list of their musicals.
Assessing Orchestrators
Authors: Steven Suskin
Published: November 2023

For more than a half-century, Broadway’s most active and most well-known orchestrators—or, I should say, the orchestrators with the most well-known shows—were unquestionably Bennett, Walker, and Lang. While Bennett worked on more than the others—perhaps as many as 200 from 1922 through 1975—much of this activity was in the early Harms/Chappell period, when orchestration was by committee. Walker worked on fewer shows, but seems to have done more as a principal orchestrator than anyone else in Broadway history. (For our purposes, this includes shows split between two orchestrators.) With partiturs and invoices missing on so many musicals, it is impossible to compile accurate statistics; even so, of the 550 musicals for which I have found definitive proof of authorship, Walker was principal orchestrator on about 93; Bennett clocks in at around 70.
The Arrangement
Authors: Steven Suskin
Published: November 2023

It all starts with the song, which can be described—in words borrowed from Walker—as a musical idea developed into a complete and stable form.
Meet the Colors
Authors: Steven Suskin
Published: November 2023

Before the orchestrator can begin to assign the composer’s notes to the instruments, the makeup of the pit band must be determined. Spialek, at the beginning of our discussion, compared orchestration to painting. If orchestration is indeed the combination of colors into harmonies and dissonances, instrumentation can be seen as the selection of the fifteen or twenty tubes of paint with which to work. Paint can be blended in any variety of colors, yes; but it can be seen that there is a difference in the palettes of Van Eyck and Van Gogh, and, further, that Van Gogh’s sun-drenched Arlesienne fantasies differ from his indoor, brown-and-muddy potato eaters. So, too, is the difference between Walker’s Carousel and Fiddler on the Roof, or Lang’s Li’l Abner and Carnival.
The Listings
Authors: Steven Suskin
Published: November 2023

Invoices indicate: Walker (32%), Spialek (24%), Paul (18%), Ginzler (10%).
Lincoln and His Admirals
Authors: Symonds Craig L
Published: November 2023

In 1952, T. Harry Williams wrote the classic study, Lincoln and His Generals. Half a century later, Craig Symonds will write its necessary follow-up, Lincoln and His Admirals - a much-needed history of the Union navy during the Civil War. Given the wealth of books on the military history of the Civil War, surprisingly little has been written about the role of the navy. As Symonds shows, Abraham Lincoln began his presidency as well as the war with virtually no knowledge of naval affairs, lacking both exposure and interest given his upbringing in the Midwest. Despite his inexperience, he quickly came to preside over the largest national armada of the century, not eclipsed until the World War I. This was a remarkable feat given the poor shape, at least by European standards, of the Union navy in 1861. As Symonds argues, Americans had previously viewed the U.S. navy with some skepticism, regarding navies as essentially aristocratic bodies, or, worse, tools of empire. Symonds’s book outlines the four factors that explain Lincoln’s success in building a strong Union navy - his pragmatism, his willingness to judge men based on performance rather than politics, his command of new technology, and his deft hand at diplomacy. Mostly, however, this book will be a compelling portrait of the naval officers and their relationships to Lincoln, as well as a lucid argument for the role of the navy in securing victory for the Union.
Ouidah
Authors: Diouf Sylviane A
Published: November 2023

The Clotilda Weighed Anchor a mile and a half from shore at Ouidah on May 15. At 4 P.M., a man in a canoe came alongside the ship and asked what the captain’s business was. The American responded that he wanted “to exchange commodities” and wished to see the “prince and officials.” He was ready to go ashore but the sea was rolling “at a fearful height.” A large pirogue, sixty feet long, manned by twenty rowers who made a game of the high waves, took Foster in and landed him on the beach, where an interpreter assigned three men to take care of him. Since the city was located three miles from the shore, north of a lagoon, through woods, and at the end of a bad road, visitors and dignitaries were carried there. Hammocks were the favorite mode of portage for the elite. A ten-foot net was hung to a long bamboo post carried on its ends on the heads of two men. A canopy protected the passenger from the sun. This is how William Foster entered Ouidah.
Arrival in Mobile
Authors: Diouf Sylviane A
Published: November 2023

The Clotilda Entered The Mississippi Sound on Sunday, July 8, 1860. The crew anchored off Point-of-Pines in Grand Bay. There were a few things for the captain to do: according to his account, William Foster had to meet Timothy Meaher, who would have the crew’s pay; tug the Clotilda up the Alabama River; and lastly, go to the discreet spot already selected to land the Africans. Foster knew exactly what to do because he and Timothy Meaher had put together an elaborate plan four months earlier. Every detail had been taken care of. Once the Africans had landed and Meaher had paid the crew, he and his men were to sail further south to Tampico, a port on the Pánuco River in Mexico.There, the Clotilda was to reinvent herself one more time. The once innocuous schooner that had crossed the ocean as a slave ship would turn back into an innocent vessel. Foster would see to it that all traces of the jail it had been for six weeks were scrubbed away.
Slavery
Authors: A.Diouf Sylviane
Published: November 2023

Their Very Existence Disregarded by President James Buchanan, the men, women, and children of the Clotilda were hardly more acknowledged by their owners. They were not people with life stories, families, and personalities, but generic “slaves” who were expected to shed their identity and respond only to their assigned status, starting with new names. When they had first arrived and did not know what was going to happen, the shipmates had decided to be cautious. They thought it prudent not to disclose anything about themselves to hostile strangers. But their names said who they were: who they were named after, how they were born (feet first, for example), if they came after twins, if they were twins, if their mother died at birth, what people they belonged to, what religion they followed, or the day they were born, which meant something too. In their homelands when people said their name, an important part of their identity was revealed. To be on the safe side, during their early days in Mobile, they did not call one another by their real names: they invented new ones, or used other people’s names. It was a precaution that made sense, in case someone was listening and was bent on doing something harmful with the information. Although no other instance has come to light, it is quite possible, and actually probable, that other Africans deported to the Americas did the same. It was a logical safety measure that others most likely took.
Oberto, conte di San Bonifacio
Authors: Parker Roger
Published: November 2023

Verdi’s first opera has a chequered history. As we first hear of it in 1836, it was called Rocester, with a libretto by Antonio Piazza. After unsuccessful attempts to have the work put on in Milan and Parma, and after a lengthy hiatus during which the composer was employed in his home town of Busseto, Verdi-with the help of the librettist Temistocle Solera-revised and renamed the opera for its La Scala premiere. Oberto was moderately successful and was revived a number of times during the next three years, Verdi taking the opportunity to add various new numbers to the score. For Milan (1840) he supplied a new cavatina for Cuniza and a replacement duet for Cuniza and Riccardo, and adapted the role of Oberto for baritone; for Genoa (1841) he wrote a replacement duet for Leonora and Oberto and new music for the chorus ‘Fidanzata avventurosa’; and for Barcelona (1841-42) he supplied a new first-act aria for Oberto, the cabaletta of which (‘Ma fin cheun brandovindice ‘) later became associated with Ernani.
Luisa Miller
Authors: Parker Roger
Published: November 2023

Melodramma tragico in three acts set to a libretto by Salvadore Cammarano after Friedrich von Schiller’s play Kabale und Liebe; first performed in Naples, Teatro San Carlo, on 8 December 1849. The cast at the premiere included Marietta Gazzaniga (Luisa), Achille De Bassini (Miller), Antonio Selva (Walter), and Settimio Malvezzi (Rodolfo). Verdi’s relationship with Naples, never entirely happy, continued inaus piciously during the late 1840s: in 1848, despite his efforts to withdraw, the Neapolitan authorities held him to a long-standing contract for a new opera at the San Carlo. The librettist was to be Salvadore Cammarano, resident poet at the theatre and a man of vast experience in both the practical and the artistic side of operatic production.
Stiffelio
Authors: Parker Roger
Published: November 2023

Opera in three acts set to a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave after Emile Souvestre’s and Eugene Bourgeois’ play Le Pasteur, ou L’Evangile et le fayer; first performed in Trieste, Teatro Grande, on 16 November 1850. The cast at the premiere included Gaetano Fraschini (Stiffelio), Marietta Gazzaniga (Lina), and Filippo Colini (Stankar). As was becoming the pattern, Verdi’s April 1850 contract for the work that became StifJelio was signed not with a theatre but with a publisher, in this as in most other cases Ricordi. The librettist was again to be Piave, who himself suggested an adaptation of Le Pasteur, a French play that had received its premiere only the previous year but was already available in Italian translation. It was a bold choice, a far cry from the melodramatic plots of Byron (fl corsaro, f due Foscari) and Hugo (Ernani): modern, ‘realistic’ subjects were unusual in Italian opera, and the religious subject matter seemed bound to cause problems with the censor. Giovanni Ricordi decided to have the premiere staged at Trieste-the theatre that had recently given such a lukewarm reception to fl corsaro-and, true to expectation, the local censors insisted on a number of important changes, in particular muting the action of the final scene so as (in the composer’s view) to make it ridiculous. The work’s reception was better than that accorded fl corsaro, although there were reservations about the opera’s novel shape and subject matter. Stijfelio had occasional revivals in subsequent years, but it was continually dogged by censorship difficulties; in the mid-185os Verdi decided to ‘rescue• his music by revising it to fit a different, less sensitive plot: Araldo.
The Operas
Authors: Rushton Julian
Published: November 2023

Intermezzo in three acts, K38, to a Latin libretto by Father Rufinus Widl; first performed in Salzburg, at the Benedictine University, on 13 May 1767, with the five-act Latin tragedy Clementia Croesi by Widl.

Mozart’s first stage work is an intermezzo, written to a text by the Gymnasium (school) teacher of syntax, for performance by students, some of them as young as the composer. The god Apollo (boy alto) and the wind god Zephyrus (boy alto) are rivals in love with Melia (boy soprano), daughter of Oebalus (tenor), King of Lacedonia—sanitizing the Greek myth in which Apollo is homosexually attracted to Hyacinth. In Widl’s version Hyacinthus (boy soprano), the son of Oebalus, is fatally wounded by Zephyrus to incriminate his rival and win Melia for himself. Melia denounces Apollo, but the dying Hyacinthus reveals the truth. Zephyrus is banished, Apollo and Melia marry, and the god turns Hyacinthus into the flower that bears his name.
Explaining The Early Decisions: The United States and the French War, 1945–1954
Authors: Lawrence Mark Atwood
Published: November 2023

All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” So proclaimed Ho Chi Minh on 2 September 1945, at the outset of his epochal speech declaring Vietnam’s independence from French colonial rule. The Vietnamese leader, speaking before thousands in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square, chose his words carefully. By quoting from America’s 1776 Declaration of Independence, Ho hoped to draw parallels between U.S. and Vietnamese history and thereby to encourage Americans to back the Vietnamese revolution. Above all, he wanted the United States, clearly destined to be the preeminent power in Asia after the Second World War, to block any French effort to reclaim the territory. Ho Chi Minh was, of course, badly disappointed. Over the next decade, Washington not only permitted the restoration of French colonialism in Indochina but also spent $3 billion trying to help the French military crush Ho’s fledgling state, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). In 1954, Washington grudgingly accepted its failure in that effort, but it hardly gave up the fight against the Vietnamese revolution. On the contrary, the United States stepped into the role of the defeated French and worked strenuously over the next two decades to create a viable Vietnamese state capable of resisting Ho Chi Minh and all that he represented.
“No Place To Fight A War”: Laos and the Evolution of U.S. Policy toward Vietnam, 1954–1963
Authors: Jacobs Seth
Published: November 2023

The presidential transition from Dwight D. Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy occurred during one of the tensest periods in the history of American foreign policy. Many crises competed for the chief executive’s attention: Fidel Castro had established a communist beachhead ninety miles from Florida; Washington and Moscow clashed over a UN-sponsored peacekeeping mission to the Congo; and Nikita Khrushchev was threatening to force the Western allies out of Berlin. Most portentously, Ngo Dinh Diem had just barely survived a coup attempt that exposed the precariousness of the South Vietnamese government despite six years of lavish American support. Yet Eisenhower and Kennedy did not talk much about Cuba, the Congo, Berlin, or Vietnam when the outgoing president briefed his successor the day before Kennedy’s inauguration. Instead, the two men discussed Laos. A three-sided civil war in that country among the U.S.–backed Royal Lao regime, the communist Pathet Lao, and a neutralist front seemed about to conclude with the communists on top—an outcome which, Eisenhower warned, would make it impossible to prevent the rest of Southeast Asia from slipping behind the iron curtain.
Henry Kissinger and American Grand Strategy
Authors: Suri Jeremi
Published: November 2023

The late 1960s mark a historical divide. In nearly every society, the tenor of life changed. Social and cultural traditions endured concerted attack. Authority figures faced direct challenges from “ordinary” citizens. Fears of worldwide chaos replaced assumptions about international order. Like balls of yarn, the stable lines of postwar geopolitics came undone as people pulled at them from multiple directions. This was an era of global revolution—from within and without.
The Weight of Conquest: Henry Kissinger and the Arab–Israeli Conflict
Authors: Yaqub Salim
Published: November 2023

If a single drive motivated Henry Kissinger’s entire approach to the Arab– Israeli conflict, it was to shield Israel from pressure to withdraw from all or most of the territory it had occupied in the 1967 Arab–Israeli War. From 1969 to 1973, when Kissinger served as Richard Nixon’s national security advisor, much of that pressure came from the State Department, which promoted a comprehensive settlement involving Israel’s withdrawal from nearly all of the occupied territory. Kissinger strongly opposed this policy on the grounds that it would reward America’s Cold War adversaries and place intolerable strains on the U.S. –Israeli relationship. Nixon, for his part, officially countenanced the State Department’s approach but refused to implement it, a response that had as much to do with domestic American politics as with the effectiveness of Kissinger’s internal critique.
The Danger of Geopolitical Fantasies: Nixon, Kissinger, and the South Asia Crisis of 1971
Authors: McMahon Robert J
Published: November 2023

It was the most boisterous, near-ecstatic crowd New York’s Madison Square Garden had seen in many a year. Nearly 40,000 fans fortunate enough to secure tickets packed the legendary arena for a landmark one-day event: an afternoon and evening concert featuring ex-Beatles George Harrison and Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Ravi Shankar, and several other luminaries from the ordinarily separate worlds of rock and roll and traditional Indian music. The artists were performing free of charge in order to raise funds for, and call attention to, the desperate plight of millions of East Bengali refugees who had recently fled their East Pakistan homeland to escape a raging, government-initiated civil war.
From Atlantic History To A Continental Approach
Authors: Wood Peter H
Published: November 2023

For several centuries, chroniclers of the North American experience before 1800 have faced a basic dilemma—so basic, in fact, that it is rarely recognized or stated. Put bluntly, the familiar but vexing paradox is this: Should “early American history” concern the growth and expansion of European colonies, particularly those English-speaking ones along the east coast that eventually combined to form the United States and to push westward across the continent? Or should it concern all parts of the North American continent, and all the people living there before 1800?
Essays on Descartes
Authors: Hoffman Paul
Published: November 2023

This is a collection of Paul Hoffman’s wide-ranging essays on Descartes composed over the past twenty-five years. The essays in Part I include his celebrated “The Unity of Descartes’ Man,” in which he argues that Descartes accepts the Aristotelian view that soul and body are related as form to matter and that the human being is a substance; a series of subsequent essays elaborating on this interpretation and defending it against objections; and an essay on Descartes’ theory of distinction. In the essays in Part II he argues that Descartes retains the Aristotelian theory of causation according to which an agent’s action is the same as the passion it brings about, and explains the significance of this doctrine for understanding Descartes’ dualism and physics. In the essays in Part III he argues that Descartes accepts the Aristotelian theory of cognition according to which perception is possible because things that exist in the world are also capable of a different way of existing in the soul, and he shows how this theory figures in Descartes’ account of misrepresentation and in the controversy over whether Descartes is a direct realist or a representationalist. The essays in Part IV examine Descartes’ theory of the passions of the soul: their definition; their effect on our happiness, virtue, and freedom; and methods of controlling them.
Introduction
Authors: Hoffman Paul
Published: November 2023

When I began my serious study of Descartes a Pedeciding to write a dissertation under the supervision of Robert Adams on Descartes’s concept of matter, I did not, I believe, approach the text with any particular interpretative claims in mind. I took it as a sufficient goal just to try to Hgure out what Descartes was saying. As my work progressed, I fell into the camp of those scholars, mainly French, who had found it illuminating to try to understand Descartes in light of his scholastic-Aristotelian heritage. I noticed that he was saying various things that, given his revolutionary aims, sounded surprisingly Aristotelian, things that English-speaking commentators tended to ignore and many French-speaking commentators tended to dismiss as not being fully sincere.
Descartes’s Theory of Distinction
Authors: Hoffman Paul
Published: November 2023

I would like to raise and to attempt to answer some questions that will help us understand Cartesian dualism. These questions shed light on what Descartes means in asserting that mind and body are really distinct and on his argument for that conclusion. Real distinction between mind and body is my primary interest, and I will be defending an interpretation that is consistent with the claim I have made elsewhere that Descartes thinks the composite of mind and body is itself one substance.1 But I have broader interests as well. Real distinction is only one of three kinds of distinction recognized by Descartes, the others being modal distinction and rational distinction. The Hrst group of questions I will raise concerns Descartes’s entire theory of distinction. They involve the relations among the notions of distinctness, separability, number, and non-identity. I believe that they reveal that his theory of distinction as a whole merits more attention than it has received.
The Passions and Freedom of Will
Authors: Hoffman Paul
Published: November 2023

My aim in this essay is to gain a clearer understanding of Descartes’s account of how the passions influence our behavior and how this influence affects our freedom. I will begin by examining human action that Descartes considers to be fully free. I will then investigate at what points and in what way Descartes thinks the passions can intervene in the process by which bodily movements are produced. Finally, I will try to answer the question of how such interventions affect our freedom.
From Antiquity to the Enlightenment
Authors: Goehr Lydia
Published: November 2023

It is not implausible to view the history of Western music as a struggle on the part of musicians to have their practice regarded as a bona fide part of whatever at a given time counted as good, serious, or civilized living. From the earliest times, theorists have distinguished respectable and valuable activities from ones judged merely entertaining and pleasurable. Usually the distinction has forced a division between what we now label elite and popular values. John Calvin was just one of many to apply the distinction directly to music. He decreed in his Geneva Psalter of 1543 that songs must have ‘weight and majesty’ and not be ‘light and frivolous’, for there is ‘a great difference between the music one makes to entertain men at table and in their homes, and the psalms which are sung in the Church in the presence of God’.2 Whatever material changes in musical and political hegemonies have taken place, in whatever terms the basic distinction between respectable and unrespectable music has been expressed, the distinction has never for a moment been discarded.
10. Countess Greffulhe as Entrepreneur Negotiating Class, Gender, and Nation
Authors: Pasler Jann
Published: November 2023

Countess Elisabeth Greffulhe, immortalized by Marcel Proust as the Duchess de Guarantees, was arguably the most important patron of modern music in the early twentieth century. The principal form of her patronage, however, was not salon concerts or artistic commissions but rather entrepreneurship. Even if she was a woman of the aristocracy, born the Belgian Princess de Caraman-Chimay, she emerged from the private domain to undertake, organize, and manage public concerts.
The Political Economy of Composition in the American University, 1965–1985
Authors: Pasler Jann
Published: November 2023

There is no more significant determinant of the cultural musical life of our country, no more significant indication of the cultural re- orientation of music in this country, and its new intellectual status, than the fact that a great majority of American composers are university-trained and are university teachers. Now this makes our life a very different life from that of our European counterparts.
Three Case Studies
Authors: Cooley Timothy J , Meizel, Katharine , Syed Nasir
Published: November 2023

In this chapter we ask how changing technologies of communication and information dissemination reshape our understanding of fieldwork in theory and practice. As Timothy Rice reminds us in this volume, the “field” in which we work is a metaphor. There is no “there” to which we must go. Maybe some of our metaphorical fieldwork is better done at home in front of our computers, watching a television program, listening to a radio broadcast, and so forth—all technologies that can be included in research methods we include under the rubric “virtual fieldwork.” With three independently authored case studies from three very different projects, we demonstrate the varying ways virtual fieldwork is redefining ethnographic method.
Fieldwork at Home European and Asian Perspectives
Authors: Stock Jonathan P J , Chiener Chou
Published: November 2023

Many ethnomusicologists, possibly the majority worldwide, carry out fieldwork in their home societies. This chapter focuses on the experiences of two such field-workers, one from England and one from Taiwan. As partners, we have carried out much of our fieldwork together in recent years, comparing findings and sharing interpretations, each of us casting a shadow across the other’s fields of inquiry, a point we return to at the end of this chapter. Jonathan Stock undertook the writing-up, so his work is described in the first person and Chou Chiener’s in the third person, but this is very much a joint account.
The Ethnomusicologist, Ethnographic Method, and the Transmission of Tradition
Authors: Shelemay Kay Kaufman
Published: November 2023

However else they may identify themselves and each other, fieldworker and subject are first and foremost human beings. It is this shared identity that makes fieldwork, with both its problems and its accomplishments, a meaningful mode of mutual learning.
Theories Forged in the Crucible of ActionThe Joys, Dangers, and Potentials of Advocacy and Fieldwork
Authors: Seeger Anthony
Published: November 2023

Along with the fishhooks, fish line, ceramic beads, writing implements, “field” banjo and guitar, recording tapes, batteries, and memories of Claude Le´vi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques that my wife and I took with us to study the cosmology, social organization, and music of the Suya´ Indians in Mato Grosso, Brazil, thirty-five years ago, I carried a conviction that knowledge should be used for practical purposes, as well as to produce more knowledge. This position was reinforced by my fieldwork experiences. I have spent large parts of my professional career doing a combination of what might be called “applied” and “theoretical” ethnomusicology. I believe the two strengthen one another. Combining them can also profoundly affect the nature of our field research and experience, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.
Beckett and Paul Auster: Fathers and Sons and the Creativity of Misreading
Authors: Campbell Julie
Published: November 2023

Morton Feldman Once declared: “I never liked anyone else’s approach to Beckett” (qtd. in Albright 149). This statement makes a good starting point for my exploration of Paul Auster’s creative misreading of Samuel Beckett, whose presence can be strongly sensed in the American writer’s work. In this essay I focus both on the ties binding Auster to the literary father who influenced his development as a writer and on the family bonds, especially the bond (or, more pertinently, the lack of one) between father and son that both writers explore with poetic intensity.