bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Arthur Benjamin and the French Public
Authors: Changeur Jean-Paul
Published: February 2010

“How will the public react to it?” is a question that arises when an opera is about to have its first performance in a foreign country

Arthur Benjamin's opera Primadonna does not seem a difficult one to “export,” mainly because of its subject-matter. One might expect the action of a British opera to take place in some remote part of Old England (as in Peter Grimes, the most famous of English operas with us French) whose ways are so unfamiliar as to risk leaving the general public quite untouched. Here, however, there is no such risk: we are in Venice, the courtly Venice of the 18th century, and the characters, the déecor, the whole atmosphere belong to the cultural heritage of all Europe.
Ballet Theatre after Fifteen Years
Authors: Austin R. J.
Published: February 2010

This year Ballet Theatre celebrates its fifteenth anniversary with a three-weeks' season in April at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York. After fifteen years it still remains one of the greatest companies in the world, and if the New York City Ballet has become more widely accepted as America's leading company, there can be no doubt that the influence of Ballet Theatre has been decisive in establishing the popularity of ballet throughout the United States.
Glyndebourne on a Metropolitan Scale
Authors: Koegler Horst
Published: February 2010

While Glyndebourne pursues its summer festival, Carl Ebert, its Artistic Director, looks back on the first nine months of his activities as Intendant of the West-Berlin Städtische Oper—a post he held already once before 1933. Ebert's come-back last September was an occasion of unusual promise. Berliners were expecting nothing less than a marvel from him. But while they gave him unlimited spiritual credit they were much more cautious about any more substantial help. The operatic warfare between the heavily state-fed East-Berlin Staatsoper and the definitely less municipally subsidised West-Berlin Städtische Oper has revealed to the greater public what an awkward position it must be to function as a West-Berlin Intendant who is easily outbought by the greater means of the people beyond the Brandenburger Tor. Nevertheless Ebert, through his rare talent for diplomacy, has emerged triumphantly from this fracas and his position is now stronger than any time before.
Notes Concerning Bartók's Solo Vocal Music (I)
Authors: Weissmann John S.
Published: February 2010

September will mark the tenth anniversary of Bartók's death. The excitement provoked by the newness of his art has long since calmed down, and the time now seems convenient to attempt a sober and balanced evaluation of his creative work. It is to be free, of course, of uncritical and unsubstantiated enthusiasm, but equally free of that speculative and aphoristic conscience-searching based on dubious postulates which has recently become fashionable. What is wanted is not a definitive biography—the distance of ten years is too short for that—but a just assessment of the various facets of his music and his personality, and a well-grounded correlation of his art to his life. Though publication of his correspondence began some years ago, little systematic attention has been paid to other documentary evidence of his life and activities.
Chamber Opera on a Big Stage
Authors: Erhardt Otto
Published: February 2010

Giant theatres like the Colón, with six tiers (five of them fitted with boxes) and holding over 3,000 people, are in themselves not really suitable for chamber operas. On the other hand, this wonderful building has absolutely ideal acoustics which allow even the tenderest piano to make its effect. There is an intimacy overcoming the vast distances which suits chamber opera, and every one who looks out from the empty stage is conscious of this and feels the contact with the auditorium.
New Opera Houses
Authors: Koegler Horst , Raeburn Christopher
Published: February 2010

Within six weeks of each other two rebuilt German opera-houses opened their doors: on September 4th the East-Berlin Deutsche Staatsoper, Unter den Linden; on October 15th the Hamburgische Staatsoper. Two more contrasting examples of differing architectural approaches are hardly imaginable. These are the facts:

The Berlin Staatsoper, erected in 1743 by Frederick the Great through his architect Knobelsdorff and several times unsatisfyingly renovated until it was heavily bombed for the second time in February, 1945, has been rebuilt according to the original plans, except for some alteration of the interior. This means: early classical facades (definitely Prussian in character) with rooms inspired by sober Prussian rococo-elements originating in the Potsdam palaces. The house has plenty of room for halls, staircases, foyers, passages, cloakrooms; the auditorium seats about 1,500 persons, distributed over stalls and three galleries. The impression is one of festive intimacy. Every technical facility for pit and stage has been installed. The stage measures 85 by 75 feet (plus backstage space 38 by 73 feet). Comfortable backstage dressing-rooms have been gained through the removal of all accommodation not directly connected with the actual performance to a separate nearby building. The costs of the rebuilding of the opera-house alone amount to £3 million.
Igor Strawinsky: Canticum Sacrum Ad Honorem Sancti Marci Nominis
Authors: Stein Erwin
Published: February 2010

Among the works Strawinsky has written in his late contrapuntal style, the Canticum Sacrum is the most representative so far. In accordance with the importance of the subject he has chosen, the scope of the music is wide, and the apparatus needed for performance comprises two soloists (tenor and baritone), a mixed chorus (including descant instead of soprano), organ and a large orchestra, though without violins, cellos, clarinets, horns and percussion. These resources are, however, very economically employed. In a short Dedicatio to the city of Venice and its Patron Saint the two soloists are accompanied solely by trombones. The five movements that follow form the Canticum Sacrum proper and are based on texts of the Vulgate, i.e. they are in Latin. They include quotations from the Old and the New Testament, viz. from the gospel of St. Mark, St. John's first Epistle, the Song of Songs and the Psalms. Strawinsky imparts a great variety to his pieces of sacred music, but closely integrates the musical material by divers means of tonality as well as of the serial method of composition with twelve notes.
How Western Music Came to Japan
Authors: Yoshida Takatoshi
Published: February 2010

To begin this article, I ought to give a picture of the condition of Japanese Society a century ago, when European culture was first introduced into Japan.

Until a century ago Japan had been ruled by Shogun Tokugawa, an administrator of the feudal age, under whose policy of isolation we had no possibility of assimilating either European or Oriental civilisation. In the year 1867 a civil war against the Shogun brought to an end the feudal system in Japan. The revolutionary army, which was supporting the Emperor, established a new government and opened up the country to foreign commerce. To make up for the backwardness caused by three centuries of isolation, they took an extreme course and europeanised the country in a very short time. Not only did they send a great number of young scholars to Europe to be trained there, but they also invited European advisors into government and many other important posts. Eagerly the upper classes set about changing the ancient customs of their country: they took a special pride in wearing European dress and discarding all signs of traditional Japanese life. In fact, very soon Japanese aristocrats vied with each other to appear at the soirées of the European Diplomatic Corps in the most fashionable European dress, dancing to European music minuets and waltzes instead of traditional Japanese dances and Japanese music, and speaking French. Soon the progressive middle classes tried to imitate this zest for europeanisation. They wore kimonos with European shoes and bowler hats, smoked big cigars, and sang ‘Home Sweet Home’ in English in the street.
Opera in Miniature: Growth of an English Genre
Authors: Shaffer Peter
Published: February 2010

The only permanent opera houses in England are both in London. This is perhaps the main reason why, since the war, the operatic life of this country has been characterised by the appearance of tiny companies dedicated to performing opera in what novelists of the last century would have called “reduced circumstances.” It is the nature of the reduction in each case that distinguishes one little group from another: it can mean complete opera in concert performance; truncated opera in stage performance; excerpted opera, and opera designedly miniature in its creation. In no instance are the functions of the leading London-based companies precisely duplicated.
Composer and Librettist
Authors: Tenschert Roland
Published: February 2010

For the glimpse into the workshop of composer and librettist which is the subject of this article, the writer is indebted to his work on the publication of the correspondence between Richard Strauss and Josef Gregor comprising 350 documents.
Shakespeare Festival Music
Authors: Mellers Wilfrid
Published: February 2010

As long as I can remember, the music at Stratford has been restricted to the Edwardian musical-comedy genus—and I am afraid that Stratford was by no means unique in its musical insensitivity.
At the Ballet: Americans at Covent Garden
Authors: Brahms Caryl
Published: February 2010

The American Ballet Theatre has held its first London season at that Mecca of every ballet-company outside Soviet Russia, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

Ballet Theatre is, for the most part, a young, long-limbed and eminently adaptable company, presenting the classics with a rather touching wariness and their own creations with zest.
Film Music
Authors: Irving Ernest
Published: February 2010

George edwardes was a great man. He was not in any sense an artist, and was curiously insensitive to music, being unable to whistle correctly any of the tunes from his numerous successes. Some of the things he did to music were atrocious, for example the amputation of the opening music from Gypsy Love and the casting of Joe Coyne for the part of Prince Danilo in The Merry Widow.
Concerning “Sprechgesang”
Authors: Wood Ralph W.
Published: February 2010

In part III of Schönberg's Gurrelieder there is a section, Des Somtnenvindes wilde Jagd, that is described as a “melodrama” and that constitutes the only appearance in the work of the character listed among the soloists as “The Speaker.” The words of this number are written under what would appear to be a normal vocal line (though perhaps of rather unusually simple nature), except that crosses are used instead of note-heads:

There are no directions in the score as to how the part is to be rendered.
Broadcast Music
Authors: E. C.  , C. M
Published: February 2010

This subject is a new one in Tempo, and it is hardly necessary to add that it has forced its way into these pages by reason of the BBC's Third Programme. For the benefit of our growing body of overseas readers it should be explained that the new programme, which is on the air daily from 6 p.m. to midnight, is devoted exclusively to serious music, drama, and talks, and is avowedly directed to the more intelligent members of the community. There are no news bulletins, and the clock hardly counts—single items lasting from one to three hours are a normal occurrence, and there is no “fading out” when a programme over-runs its allotted time.
Benjamin Britten's Second Quartet
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: February 2010

Britten's latest string quartet, No. 2 in C, Op. 36, was composed in “Homage to Henry Purcell.” It is in three movements. The first (Allegro calmo senza rigore), is in sonata form and elaborates three themes, while the other two—a Scherzo (Vivace) and a ‘Chacony ’ (Sostenuto)—are essentially monothematic.
Music and the American Radio
Authors: Heinsheimer H. W.
Published: February 2010

Broadcasting in the United States is a business—and a very big one. Radio stations are privately owned and are operated for profit. Broadcasting is just as much a business as is running a theatre on Br adway or making a picture in Hollywood. The state and the government have nothing to do with it. To be sure, the Federal Communications Commission in Washington lays down certain rules of operations, and controls and allots wavelengths to the various networks and stations. But after the F.C.C. has given you a licence and a wavelength, and as long as you comply with their rules and conduct yourself accordingly, you can buy a piece of ground to-morrow, build a station and go into the radio business. And it is a good business to be in.
The News from Switzerland
Authors: Reich Willi
Published: February 2010

Sweden apart, Switzerland is, I think, the only country in which the continuity of European musical life was preserved during the recent war. This fortunate situation made it unnecessary to start afresh, as it was, for example, in Austria and Czechoslovakia, and has permitted Swiss music to continue its steady evolution on firmly established lines.
Film Music
Authors: Irving Ernest
Published: February 2010

It is my opinion, frequently expressed, that good music cannot damage a film, but that not all films need or can stand up to good music. In an article written a short time ago for a leading trade journal I discussed the question of how far a really musical score could be of service to a film, under the title that heads this paragraph. There was not enough bass-drum-and-cymbals about this heading for the Editorial Department, who substituted a bit of blatant braggadocio that “roared and thundered in the index” with the exact blare that I later on deprecated in criticizing American ‘title music’
Peter Grimes and Albert Herring
Authors: Hawkes Ralph
Published: February 2010

The first-night audience for Peter Grimes at La Scala, Milan, was not unprepared for Benjamin Britten's opera. Fragments had been performed at the Venice International Festival last September, to be followed by two complete radio performances from Rome under Fernando Previtali. Yet on March nth, as the curtain rose—the rebuilt auditorium victoriously obliterating memories of bomb-havoc in a symphony of white and gold—one sensed an atmosphere of keen curiosity concerning this rare phenomenon, an English opera.
An Indian Dancer
Authors: Squire W. H. Haddon
Published: February 2010

The late Professor Collingwood claimed that the dance is the mother of all languages in the sense that every kind or order of language (speech, gesture, and so forth) is an offshoot from an original language of total bodily gesture; a language which we all use, whether aware of it or not—even to stand perfectly still, no less than making a movement, is in the strict sense a gesture. He also relates the dance to the artist's language of form and shape. He asks us to imagine an artist who wants to reproduce the emotional effect of a ritual dance in which the dancers trace a pattern on the ground. The emotional effect of the dance depends not on any instantaneous posture, but on the traced pattern. Obviously, he concludes, the sensible thing would be to leave out the dancers altogether, and draw the pattern by itself.
Arnold van Wyk's ‘Five Elegies’
Authors: Ferguson Howard
Published: February 2010

Arnold van Wyk's Five Elegies for String Quartet, of which miniature score and parts have recently been published, were written during 1940–41 and were first performed in 1942 at the National Gallery Concerts in London.

The title alone might suggest a set of five separate pieces cast in a uniformly grey mood. Such an impression would be false, however, for the work is essentially a single whole, and it covers an unexpectedly wide emotional range. This is perhaps less surprising when one considers how different are one's reactions at different times to the thought of impermanence and decay. (It may be worth remembering, in this connection, that the work was written in wartime London, at the height of the Blitz.) Indeed, the Elegies contain all the variety, in themselves and between one another, that one would expect in a work lasting eighteen or nineteen minutes. But this diversity is always unified by an underlying elegiac mood.
Music in Italy To-Day
Authors: E.R.
Published: February 2010

Even, a lightning visit to Italy reveals the almost overwhelming musical activity in that country. Italy used to be one of the most conservative musical domains in Europe. A peculiar organization of concert and operatic life did not allow for a great influx of foreign works, particularly of a type to which the public taste would be unlikely to respond easily. As the Fascist regime fell more and more under the influence of national-socialist ideas of ‘cultural bolshevism’ the country became increasingly excluded from developments outside the totalitarian sphere and the war years cut what ties still remained. Now, as in Germany, a young generation is at work trying frantically to make up for the loss and to gain contact, aided by a general feeling that Italy, as the cradle of European music, must regain its place in the front ranks of musical developments.
Opera Production
Authors: Guthrie Tyrone
Published: February 2010

When an opera goes into rehearsal the script conveys a relatively complete idea of the poet's and composer's intention. In the text of a play there is nothing but the words and some stage directions—in Shakespeare very few, in Barrie quite long and elaborate—but in no case do they give more than the sketchiest description of how to act the parts.
Delius and Nietzsche
Authors: Squire W. H. Haddon
Published: February 2010

Philosophy, said a great thinker, is the product of wonder. With even more assurance that may be said of art. The basic weakness of all art criticism is that it can analyse everything but the “wonder” of a work. Art is certainly never the product of explanation. Picasso has complained that everybody wants to “understand” painting. ‘Why’, he asked, ‘do they not try to understand the songs of birds? Why are they content to love the night, a flower, everything around them, without seeking to understand such things ? Whilst painting they must understand’. Those who try to explain a work of art, he added, are nearly always on the wrong track. He might have dropped the “nearly”. If one wants to know the time it is scarcely necessary to take the clock to bits.
Britten's Beggar's Opera
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: February 2010

It would seem upon reflection that the most important thing about Britten's version of The Beggar's Opera is Britten's version of The Beggar's Opera. We therefore propose to dispense with the by now customary Overture-Potpourri on Gray, Pepusch, Hammersmith, Brecht-Weill, Dent and the rest, and to plunge instead straight into the Overture of Britten's realization, after reminding ourselves that, like Lucretia and Herring, this work is scored for chamber orchestra, i.e., solo wind- and string-quintets plus harp and percussion.
Report from Budapest
Authors: Weissmann John
Published: February 2010

At the festival of contemporary music one had a comprehensive vista of new music in Hungary. The performances were, on the whole, better than average, with a few outstanding productions. Among these I would include the Gala-performance of Bartók's three stage-works; The Wonderful Mandarin under László Somogyi was especially noteworthy. Of the other Bartók performances I mention particularly Doráti's reading of the Concerto for Orchestra, and István Antal and Paul Kadosa's interpretation of the Concerto for 2 Pianos and Orchestra.
Britten's Saint Nicolas
Authors: Holst Imogen
Published: February 2010

Hearing Britten's Saint Nicolas sung by village choral societies in the overcrowded parish church at Aldeburgh last summer was an exhilarating experience. To begin with, there was the enormous satisfaction of being allowed to join in the singing of both the hymns in the cantata. Audiences are often given the courtesy-title of “congregation” when they turn up to listen to a concert in a church, but they are very seldom given the chance of justifying their existence. This was only one of the barriers that Saint Nicolas removed during the afternoon. There was also the appropriate absence of any rigid boundary between sacred and secular music. It would have been impossible for the listener to feel dismayed at the violent contrasts in the work: there seemed nothing in the least incongruous in the mixture of the gurgling of the bath-water and the contemplation of man's solitary wilderness of doubt and despair.
Kirstein, Balanchine and Others
Authors: Beaumont Cyril
Published: February 2010

Now is a suitable time for considering in retrospect the summer visit—their first—of the New York City Ballet to Covent Garden. The company consists of some forty-four dancers, led by Maria Tallchief, with Jerome Robbins as guest artist. The soloists are Janet Reed, Tanaquil Le Clercq, Melissa Hayden, Patricia Wilde, Beatrice Tompkins, Nicholas Magallanes, Francisco Moncion, Herbert Bliss, Todd Bolender, Harold Lang, and Frank Hobi. The artistic director and principal choreographer is George Balanchine; the general director is Lincoln Kirstein. It is to these two men that the company owes its inception and its long gestation, for although the New York City Ballet has only been in existence since 1948, it has a genealogical tree which goes back some fifteen years, when George Balanchine, a graduate of the Russian State Academy of the Dance and choreographer to the Diaghilev Ballet from 1925 to 1929, met Lincoln Kirstein in London in 1933, who, desirous of founding an American Ballet, persuaded him to establish a School of American Ballet in New York, where Balanchine, with a teaching staff consisting of Pierre Vladimirov, Anatole Obukhov, Muriel Stuart—long a member of the Pavlova Company—and Kyra Blanc, began the work of training young American dance aspirants who would provide the human material for a permanent company, with which it was intended to present ballets resulting from the collaboration of the most distinguished American composers, designers, and writers—and, later, American choreographers.
Britten's “Let's Make an Opera!”
Authors: Holst Imogen
Published: February 2010

It is only eighteen months since the first performance of Let's Make an Opera!, but it is not surprising to learn that this “Entertainment for Young People” is already being produced as far away as in Tel-Aviv, for it has been greeted with enthusiasm by audiences of all ages, wherever it has been performed. One of the most outstanding achievements of the opera has been the remarkable way in which it transforms the expression on the faces of the grown-ups in the audience during the interval in which the four Audience Songs are rehearsed. Before this interval, their expressions may have shown polite and intelligent interest in the experiment, but by the time the rehearsal is over they look so radiant with triumph that it is difficult to recognise any resemblance to the passive listeners of twenty minutes ago. And yet how painfully embarrassing this experiment might have been if it had not been managed so skilfully. One thinks with horror of other attempts at “group activity”—self-consciously determined efforts to make unwilling audiences “join in all together.” Britten avoids any such pitfalls by taking it for granted that the audience will be needed as an essential part of the opera, just as he avoids the pitfall of making his child-performers sound like a prize elocution class by giving them, as a matter of course, the things that they will most enjoy doing. They enjoy doing them so much that they achieve an almost fanatical seriousness of purpose which prevents any hint of preciousness from creeping into the production.
Music and the Great Exhibition
Authors: King George J. S.
Published: February 2010

A century ago the history of the Crystal Palace began brilliantly with a mighty outpouring of music—and music was to be a consolation and a saving grace in the many disappointments and failures of its old age. The story of the Crystal Palace was a story of melodious achievement from the almost miraculous speed of its birth to the even greater rapidity of its destruction.
Fifty Years of Music Criticism
Authors: Stuart Charles
Published: February 2010

Every age considers that its own problems, musical and other, are the toughest in human annals. Even so, we who have lived all or part of the way from 1900 to 1950 may reasonably claim that the half-century behind us was one of the most perverse and teasing that music critics, whether professional or amateur, have ever endured.
Richard Strauss's “Metamorphosen”
Authors: Kusche Ludwig , Wilhelm Kurt
Published: February 2010

Germany 1944: aerial bombardment; retreating troops already at the frontiers; total restriction of all cultural activites; the theatres closed down. People in Germany cowering ever closer together under the daily lash of this mad war frenzy, questioned the very meaning of existence. They could only wait for Zero-day. The collapse. The future lay in darkness.
A Note on Richard Strauss's Waltz “Munich”
Authors: Schuh Willi
Published: February 2010

The second version of Richard Strauss's Waltz Munich had its first performance at the opening concert of the 4th International Music Festival in Vienna. Fritz Lehman conducted, as Dr. Karl Bohm had been taken ill.
Howard Ferguson's Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra
Authors: Russell John
Published: February 2010

When the musical historian of the future writes his Chronicle of Twentieth Century Musical trends, he will surely head one chapter in that sombre document “The Undeniable Popularity of the Piano Concerto.” He will also have something to say about the String Orchestra, that melodious, economic, and scholarly medium through which so many players and conductors have lately reached their public. Then the thought must occur to him that it was indeed strange that the union of these picturesque and profitable activities should have been so relatively barren in result. “Where,” he will ask, “was a suitable piece of work for ‘after the interval’; for the second appearance of the visiting solo pianist who has already given his Bach or his Mozart (not without a recurrent pang of regret that Mozart's seldom-granted permission to dispense with oboes and horns has been gratefully acknowledged by the string-orchestral conductor), and who would rejoice to give his audience further evidence of his ability?” Works for piano and string orchestra which can fill this bill are surprisingly few; suitable contemporary British ones are almost unheard-of. Those which are at present available tend to fall into two categories: the spare, neo-classic concerto grosso, with keyboard part “apt for pianoforte or harpsichord,” and the mock-Rachmaninoff, with the piano “fat and well-liking,” bulging grossly over a collar of string-tone which in itself cannot nearly rise to adequate heights of sumptuousness.
Two Interpretations of ‘Gloriana’ as Music Drama: A re-affirmation
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: February 2010

The younger one gets—the more, that is, one sheds those inevitable, almost instinctive prejudices with which one's civilization, especially if it happens to be an old one, has burdened one almost from birth—the more easily things go right for one when they go wrong for the civilization in general and for the critic in particular. Criticism tends to misfire in proportion as it is civilized, as it instinctively, pre-consciously judges the present in terms of the past: the law of precedent is the death of art—or, if art survives its application, the death of criticism. What is an opera? 1 don't know: it all depends on the next one, not the last one.
Two Interpretations of ‘Gloriana’ as Music Drama: A new impression
Authors: Walsh Stephen
Published: February 2010

For those of us who were too young to see any of the original Covent Garden performances of Gloriana, the Sadler's Wells production on October 21 was a genuine revelation—not necessarily of a work of ineffable stature, but of one which had been almost completely misrepresented by the ebb and flow of reaction in the thirteen years since its composition. So far as judging the opera on its own terms is concerned, the criticisms of that gala première can be discounted, though one might register some distress that they were not confined to the distinguished diplomatic guests (whose musical opinions would naturally be suspect), but were echoed, in similar terms, in many corners of the informed press. Gloriana's submergence was practically a political event. Its subsequent rescue was thus bound to be accompanied by panegyrics of the work and polemics of its critics. Sadler's Wells did it proud, with one of the most spectacular and accomplished of its recent productions (by Colin Graham). QED: the work is a masterpiece.
The Music of Leopold Spinner: A Preliminary Study
Authors: Graubart Michael
Published: February 2010

Leopold Spinner a composer in a unique position. Can there be another living composer of comparable integrity, mastery and imagination who is so little known and so seldom performed? At the age of 68 he is, I believe, one of the outstanding composers of today; and yet those who have had only a cursory glance at his published scores seem to have dismissed them as mere imitations of his master, Webern. This view misses the point completely; nevertheless one can understand why cursory glances lead to such conclusions. To quote Spinner himself: …more important for me and much more difficult to comment upon is the ‘first and simplest answer’ which ‘leaps from the pages of my published scores’, namely that I revere Webern's music. Yes, this is quite true; I do, very much; and I don't see why it should be a gross impertinence to ask such a question, even if the answer does already leap from the pages of my scores. However, I also have the greatest admiration for the music of Mozart and Haydn, Bach, Beethoven and Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, Bruckner and Mahler, Schoenberg and Berg…. Might it not be that such more or less common characteristics [between related composers of the same period] are not only the expression of personal implications, but are also the reflection of fundamental historical considerations determining the evolution of purely musical concepts? I believe that if the true historic significance of Webern's music were better understood in all its aspects—for instance, the predominance and total engagement of motivic obligation as the structurally unifying factor in a complete fusion between traditional homphonic concepts and the strictest polyphonic presentation—then perhaps it might be possible to refer in factual terms to purely musical concepts and leave all reverence and admiration to take care of themselves.
The Second Piano Concerto
Authors: Bartók Béla
Published: February 2010

I wrote my first piano concerto in 1926. I regard it as a successful work, although its texture is slightly difficult—indeed one might say very difficult—both for the orchestra and for the audience. This is why in my second piano concerto, some years later (1930–31) I wanted to write a kind of complementary piece to the first, with fewer difficulties for the orchestra, and more attractive in its thematic material. This is the reason for the lighter tone and more popular cut of most of its themes. In its light-heartedness it is sometimes almost reminiscent of one of the works of my youth, the orchestral suite Op. 3 (1905).
Tonality in Britten's Song Cycles with Piano
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: February 2010

As an harmonic technique, expanded tonality may act either as a decisive stage in a composer's approach to atonality, or as a means whereby he can preserve the essential hierarchies of tonality itself in a context of pervasive chromaticism. For Schoenberg, the expansion of tonality was a process which did not stop until tonality had been ‘exploded’, chromaticism ousting diatonicism just as new types of chord ousted major and minor triads. For Bartók, as, later, for Britten, tonality could survive even without the triad, without fundamental diatonicism. The use of tonal centres—a tonality of single notes—is the hallmark of Bartók's third string quartet, and the tonal centres control the chromaticism, harmonic progressions functioning non-systematically but logically in terms of the schemes of tonal conflicts and relationships appropriate to the work.
About my ‘Autumn Music’ and ‘Universal Prayer’
Authors: Panufnik Andrzej
Published: February 2010

Although my compositions are extremely diverse in character, I approach each new one in the same manner. I feel somewhat like an architect, tackling my work in three stages, always in the same order: first the purpose, or reason for which the work is composed; then the architectural structure; then the material of which it is to be built. The purpose of writing my ‘Autumn Music’ was to compose a work in memory of a friend, who, after a long, incurable illness, experienced her last autumn in 1960. Writing this work, I was responding to the end of a suffering human life, and to the season of autumn, with all its manifestations in nature. I made a choice of certain instruments which I found most suitable to express my ideas and feelings. These are: three flutes, three clarinets, a selection of pitched and unpitched percussion, piano, harp, violas, violoncelli and double basses—so in this small orchestra, I have excluded brass instruments and violins. I had two reasons for not using violins—firstly the colouristic factor, because I wished to emphasize the lower register of strings—and secondly, my wish to achieve a transparency of sound, allowing the woodwinds to be rather prominent.
Stravinsky in Interview
Authors: White Eric Walter
Published: February 2010

When Stravinsky left Russia and came to Western Europe, he was often interviewed, not only by specialist critics writing for musical periodicals, but also by newspaper journalists. The results were sometimes disastrous. In the mid-thirties he decided to put the record straight by writing a Chronicle of his Life. In his introduction to the first volume he recalled:

In the numerous interviews I have given, my thoughts, my words, and evenjacts, have often been disfigured to the extent of becoming absolutely un-recognisable.
Second Viennese School?
Authors: Donat Misha
Published: February 2010

The term ‘Second Viennese School’ arose as a convenient way of collectively referring to Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. It was at once adopted by writers on the music of these three composers, and is still widely current. In fact, it is only recently that the concept of a second Viennese school has been questioned: if there is such a ‘School’, where is its predecessor? Certainly, Mozart and Haydn became friends—they played in quartets together—and when two such geniuses meet, an interchange of ideas is inevitable. But both Mozart and Haydn were mature composers at the time of their first meeting, and there's no question of a master-pupil relationship between them. Beethoven did, it is true, take a few composition lessons from Haydn; but these were highly unsatisfactory to both teacher and student, and in fact nothing that Beethoven learnt from Haydn came from their meetings. As for Schubert, he was too shy ever to approach Beethoven.
England, Spring 1945
Authors: Gerhard Roberto , Seiber Mátyás
Published: February 2010

‘It is a blessing’—a friend once told me—‘that as a rule you musicians should be inarticulate.’ I need hardly add that my outspoken friend was himself a literary man. The answer, which of course did not then occur to me, might have been: ‘Well, what of it? if we take it that the only thing worth bothering about is the ineffable,’ though I doubt whether my friend could have agreed. He went on: ‘Look at all the nonsense your best people have uttered as soon as they generalize upon characteristics and, above all, upon the merits of their own or other nations’ music. From Rousseau, if you take him to be one of you, to Debussy's Monsieur Croche Anti-dilettante, one could make a staggering anthology, and that is leaving contemporaries in peace.’ True enough. Clearly, we must needs take the literary man at his word, but who would dream of taking a musician at his? ‘The English: that unmusical nation par excellence’, is a notion still deeply rooted in Continental minds. English music since Delius leading the world in ‘quality and quantity’ is a more recent view, propounded by no mean authority on this side of the Channel. The extremes, I suppose, compensate and cancel each other. Still, one often wishes to exclaim with Swift: ‘I have hated all nations, professions and communities, and all my love is for individuals.’
Taverner: Thoughts on the Libretto
Authors: Josipovici Gabriel
Published: February 2010

‘Jemand musste Josef K. verleumdet haben.’—‘Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K.’ So begins Franz Kafka's The Trial. But had someone been telling lies about Joseph K.? The phrase, as it stands, is ambiguous. We read on, however, expecting sooner or later to find out the truth. But the novel provides no answer, either for us or for Joseph K. himself.
Bartók as Man of Letters
Authors: Suchoff Benjamin
Published: February 2010

Bartok's literary efforts range from books and monographs to shorter essays. According to recent findings, there were no less than 119 extant works. Some of them were written in collaboration with Zoltán Kodály or Sandor Reschofsky; others were originally drafted as lectures which were for the most part given on the radio or at educational institutions.

Bartók's first essay apparently appeared in print in Budapest in 1904. It is interesting to note that except in 1907 and 1915, at least one of his writings was published each year of his life, in a considerable number of languages, and frequently in widely-known journals. His essays may be divided, according to their topics, into eight basic categories (although there is some overlapping): I. The Investigation of Musical Folklore; II, National Folk Music; III, Comparative Musical Folklore; IV, Book Reviews and Polemics; V, Musical Instruments; VI, The Relation Between Folk Music and Art Music; VII, The Life and Music of Béla Bartók; and VIII, Bartok On Music and Musicians.
The Music of Claudio Spies
Authors: Lansky Paul
Published: February 2010

Claudio Spies was born in Chile in 1925; he has lived in the United States since 1942 and became an American citizen in 1966. Raised by parents of German-Jewish origin he speaks fluent English, Spanish, German, Italian and French, and has made great compositional use of these linguistic skills. He has set texts in all these languages but French, and has also set texts in Latin. Half of his output, in fact, consists of vocal music, and is marked by careful attention to prosody and the characteristic rhythms and syntax of the language being set.
Sergei Rachmaninoff 1873 – 1943
Authors: Walsh Stephen
Published: February 2010

Sergei Rachmaninoff has never attained serious consideration in the numerous dictionaries and symposia covering music in the century since his birth on 20 March (o.s.) 1873. And yet his music has survived where that of some of his more experimental contemporaries has had to be revived. Scriabin, one of Rachmaninoff's fellow-pupils in Zverev's class at the Moscow Conservatory, is an obvious example of a composer whose music was considered audacious and modernistic during his lifetime but fell into comparative oblivion after his death. It still remains to be seen whether interest in Scriabin will long survive the second death which often follows centenary celebrations. But Rachmaninoff's centenary finds his reputation neither in eclipse nor even, as it was ten years ago, resting more or less stably on half-a-dozen popular works. For some time most of his music has been attracting attention; there is little reason to suppose that the trend will prove temporary or insignificant, and frankly I hope it will not.
An Instrumental Problem in ‘Pulcinella’
Authors: Keller Hans
Published: February 2010

Stravinsky knew little about violin technique. It happens in the best circles. Schumann, on the evidence of his highly substantial string quartets, knew as much about string playing as I know about the cimbalom. Brahms and Tchaikovsky wrote great violin concertos against the violin. And Mahler's auditioning of violinists was a joke: ‘He attached the greatest significance to the steadiest possible bowing in sustained notes’, Carl Flesch recounts,

and therefore considered the beginning of the third act of Siegfried [Flesch means the beginning of Act III, Scene 3] a touchstone for the bowing technique of an orchestral violinist … He first asked me to play a Mozart Adagio, and then set the Siegfried passage in front of me. As my bow glided over the strings with the phlegmatic calm of a world-weary philosopher, he seemed greatly pleased, wanted to nail me down to the post of leader at once, and accompanied me himself to the administration building …
Bruce Cole and ‘Fenestrae Sanctae’
Authors: Potter Keith
Published: February 2010

Bruce Cole is a 26 year-old English composer who, though a fairly late starter, has a number of substantial pieces to his credit. He studied with Harrison Birtwistle at the Royal Academy of Music from 1968 to 1972, having previously been engaged in such varied activities as playing piano in a rock group and free-lancing as a motor mechanic.

With Birtwistle, Cole started from the beginning: he entered the Academy still undecided as to what he should do and actually took composition as a second study for his first term (with piano as first study). He had no previous training in composition, but Birtwistle's teaching methods—described by Cole as ‘building in a straight line’—served as an excellent catalyst.
Colin McPhee: a composer turned explorer
Authors: Oja Carol J.
Published: February 2010

Prophetic words written by the Canadian-American composer Colin McPhee to his friend Aaron Copland, after McPhee had returned to Bali in 1937 from a hiatus in his eight-year stay there. The Balinese gamelan, with its shimmering sounds and supple swing, became the center of Colin McPhee's life long before the study of musical exotica came into fashion for Western composers. McPhee's work in the East was pioneering, not just in the considerable substance of his Bali-inspired research, writings, and compositions, but in the ecumenical attitude that it helped to inspire about Asian musics and the rich potential they hold for the West. McPhee, together with Henry Cowell, Henry Eichheim, Harry Partch, and a few other Americans of his generation, took decisive steps across Western boundaries and into the whole world of music.
Sondheim's ‘Sweeney Todd’—The Case for the Defence
Authors: Blyton Carey
Published: February 2010

As both lyricist and composer, Stephen Sondheim has proved to be the most original and innovative force on Broadway since the late 1950's, when he first attracted attention as the lyricist for some of the songs in Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story (1957), including ‘Maria’ and ‘Tonight’. Few composers for the musical stage have such a record of success as Sondheim. In addition to these lyrics for Bernstein, he also wrote all the lyrics for Jule Styne's Gypsy (1959); then, as composer as well as lyricist, he wrote a number of musicals over the next two decades: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Anyone Can Whistle (1964), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Pacific Overtures (1976), Sweeney Todd (1979), and Merrily We Roll Along (1981).
Interviews with Soviet Composers
Authors: Polin Claire
Published: February 2010

(On 21 May, while in Moscow for the International Festival of Contemporary Music (see TEMPO 150), a young New York violinist of the Citizen Exchange Council group and I met Alfred Schnittke, whose music is published in the West and who is, with Edison Denisov, probably the best-known contemporary Soviet composer outside the USSR. His styles swing a pendulum between free atonality and the neo-Romantic tonalism found in some parts of western Europe and America nowadays; his Fourth Violin Concerto, premièred in Berlin, will be played in Cleveland soon. Our conversation took place in a Moscow park, and was translated by Carlos Juris, a graduate student in piano of Moscow Conservatory.)
An Afterword on Britten's ‘Pagodas’: The Balinese Sources
Authors: Mitchell Donald
Published: February 2010

I must apologize first of all for having mis-described one of the principal sources of the gamelan music in The Prince of the Pagodas. In n.19 of my earlier contribution on this subject (TEMPO No.146, September, 1983, pp.13–24: ‘Catching on to the technique in Pagodaland’) I referred to the overture ‘Kapi Radji’: this should read ‘Kapi Radja’. If this were all I had to report, I should not be troubling the readers of TEMPO with the news. But in fact, as I shall explain below, there is a whole history attached to ‘Kapi Radja’, which has a direct bearing on Britten's ballet and of which I was unaware when I wrote my original article.
The Last Meeting: ‘Die Liebe der Danaë’ Reconsidered
Authors: Birkin Kenneth W.
Published: February 2010

The Strauss Operas of the Gregor collaboration, Friedenstag (1935/6), Daphne (1935/7), and Die Liebe der Danaë (1936/40), have sadly failed to establish themselves in the international repertoire. They are, indeed, often dismissed out of hand as products of an inspirational lapse on the composer's part; as works which, standing outside the main stream of his development, represent a musical ‘backwater’ into which he was driven by the exigencies of his times. Careful study of these operas, however, marks them not only as consummate examples of Strauss's musical craftsmanship, but also as documents of considerable significance in relation to the rest of his creative oeuvre.
Steve Reich's ‘Different Trains’
Authors: Fox Christopher
Published: February 2010

Steve Reich's Different Trains is a 27–minute work for string quartet and tape, written in 1988 to a commission from the Kronos Quartet. It has already enjoyed a wide circulation: the Kronos have toured it extensively (in Britain they premièred it in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a performance that was recorded for a subsequent television broadcast) and recorded it for Nonesuch. Reich's reputation has never been confined to ‘serious’ new music circles and the combination of. his (so-called) ‘crossover’ credentials with those of the Kronos (and the pairing on record of Different Trains with Reich's Electric Counterpoint, written for the equally cultish Pat Metheny) is the stuff of record company executives' wilder dreams. If one assumes that the meaning of any musical work owes as much to the means of its production and dissemination as to the sounds themselves, then Different Trains is a contemporary cultural phenomenon whose significance is quite different from that of most new music and almost certainly unique amongst new works for string quartet. The present article is an attempt to explicate that significance, not so much through a note-to-note analysis of the music as through an analysis of the ideas the music articulates.