bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Necrotising fasciitis complicating Haemophilus influenzae type b epiglottitis in an adult
Authors: Chalmers C
Published: November 2009

Objective:

To present the first reported case of Haemophilus influenzae type b epiglottitis leading to necrotising fasciitis.

Method:

Case report and review of the literature regarding the association of necrotising fasciitis with Haemophilus influenzae infection and with epiglottitis.

Case report:

A previously well, 64-year-old woman presented with epiglottitis, and subsequently developed necrotising fasciitis of her chest wall. The cause of both infections was Haemophilus influenzae serotype b. This organism has frequently been implicated in epiglottitis, but has not previously been reported to cause simultaneous necrotising fasciitis. The patient became critically ill, requiring intensive care management, but following surgical debridement and antibiotic treatment she made a full recovery.

Conclusion:

Although increasingly uncommon, clinicians must continue to be proficient in the diagnosis and management of epiglottitis, and to be aware of its full range of possible complications. This case report highlights a previously unknown and potentially fatal complication of Haemophilus influenzae type b epiglottitis.
Hyoid bone fracture identified only with nasal Valsalva manoeuvre
Authors: Spielmann P M , Hathorn I F , Clarke J K V , Denholm S
Published: November 2009

Objective:

We present two cases of a hyoid bone fracture identified through careful clinical examination with a Valsalva manoeuvre during nasendoscopy.

Method:

Case reports and review of the literature, with emphasis on technique during nasendoscopy.

Results:

The first patient had sustained a blow to the neck with a stick, six months prior to presentation with a globus sensation. External examination and standard nasendoscopy were unremarkable. The second patient had been struck across the neck by a wire whilst riding a motorbike at low speed. Endoscopy revealed swelling of the supraglottis. He recovered and was asymptomatic at review one month later. Computed tomography scans on both patients were unremarkable. During nasendoscopy, both patients were asked to forcibly expire with their mouths closed (the so-called nasal Valsalva manoeuvre), and the hyoid bone was seen to swing into view on the side where the first patient complained of symptoms, and in the second case where swelling had been noticed previously.

Conclusion:

We would not ordinarily have reached a diagnosis in these patients, as radiography and examination were otherwise unremarkable. The use of the nasal Valsalva manoeuvre during routine nasendoscopic examination is recommended, as unusual pathology may be demonstrated and the need for direct laryngoscopy under general anaesthesia may, in some instances, be avoided.
Investigation of benthic community change over a century-wide scale in the western English Channel
Authors: Capasso E. , Jenkins S.R. , Frost M. , Hinz H.
Published: November 2009

Since the early part of the 20th Century the impact of a range of anthropogenic activities in our coastal seas has steadily increased. The effect of such activities is a major cause for concern but in the benthic environment few studies exist that date back more than a few decades. Hence understanding long term changes is a challenge. Within this study we utilized a historic benthic dataset and resurveyed an area west of Eddystone reef in the English Channel previously investigated 112 years ago. The aim of the present work was to describe the current benthic community structure and investigate potential differences between 1895 and 2007. For each of the four major phyla investigated (Polychaeta, Crustacea, Mollusca and Echinodermata), multivariate community analysis showed significant differences between the historic and contemporary surveys. Echinoderm diversity showed a clear reduction between 1895 and 2007. The sea urchins Echinus esculentus, Spatangus purpureus, and Psammechinus miliaris and large star-fish Marthasterias glacialis showed reductions in abundance, in some cases being entirely absent from the survey area in 2007. Polychaetes showed a shift from tubiculous species to small errant and predatory species such as Glycera, Nephtys, and Lumbrineris spp. Within the group Mollusca large species such as Pecten maximus and Laevicardium crassum decreased in abundance while small species increased. Crustaceans in 1895 were dominated by crab species which were present in similar abundances in 2007, but, the order Amphipoda appeared to show a significant increase. While some of the differences observed could stem from differences in methodologies between the surveys, in particular increases of small cryptic species, the loss of large conspicuous species was judged to be genuine. The study area is an important beam trawling and scallop dredging ground; the differences observed are concomitant with changes generally associated with disturbance from demersal fishing activities such as these.
Molecular data on two mitochondrial genes of a newly discovered crustacean species (Lightiella magdalenina, Cephalocarida)
Authors: Sanna Daria , Addis Alberto , Carcupino Marcella , Francalacci Paolo
Published: November 2009

Cephalocarida is a rare and poorly known class of small benthic crustaceans, consisting of only eleven species belonging to five genera. Thus far, only one species (Hutchinsoniella macracantha) has been studied at molecular level. We report the partial sequences of two phylogenetically important mitochondrial genes (Cytochrome c Oxidase I and Cytochrome b) from the newly discovered Mediterranean species,Lightiella magdalenina. The genetic relationships between the two cephalocarid species are discussed.
Portraits of a Sonata
Authors: Hopkins Bill
Published: November 2009

Travelling to Paris in September 1964, the French Government having enabled me to present myself at the Conservatoire as a prospective pupil of Messiaen, I brought with me the ambition to meet Jean Barraque. He was, above all else, the composer of a Sonata, to a recording of which I had listened repeatedly, intently, and with an overwhelming apprehension of living greatness. If music meant anything today, only here was that meaning fully grasped, and it was to a like ideal that my own work falteringly aspired.
Holst – Astrology and Modernism in ‘The Planets’
Authors: Head Raymond
Published: November 2009

The subject of modernism in early 20th-century British music is rarely examined: partly because it is often thought that British composers were not interested in the Modern Movement before World War I, and partly because in discussing Modernism (a convenient umbrella term for the whole cultural avant-garde whose components included Expressionism, Futurism, Primitivism and Surrealism) one must be prepared to engage subjects which, in this country, are normally considered Verboten. There is no doubt, for instance, that the development of the Modern Movement on the Continent was partly inspired by a widespread awareness of Theosophy, and the interest, which it encouraged, in such esoteric areas as Indian philosophy and astrology. In this article I want to look at this aspect of Modernism in relation to Gustav Hoist, and especially in The Planets (1914–16): his, and British music's, first striking testament to the Modernist outlook. The very bases of this work are Hoist's understanding of astrology, his friendships of the time, and his Theosophical upbringing.
Maxwell Davies's ‘Resurrection’: Origins, Themes, Symbolism
Authors: Warnaby John
Published: November 2009

Peter Maxwell Davies originally conceived the opera Resurrection in 1963, in response to the commercialism he encountered while studying in the United States. He regarded it as a sequel to Taverner, even before the completion of his first opera. Despite the intervention of two important chamber operas (The Martyrdom of St. Magnus and The Lighthouse), his decision to settle in the Orkney Islands, and the various changes in his compositional style – encouraged by his involvement with the writings ot George Mackay Brown – Maxwell Davies has retained the main elements of his inspiration. There appear to have been several attempts to complete the opera in response to the prospect of its reaching the stage, but the final impetus came from an increasing awareness, during the 1980s, of the corrosive effects of Thatcherism on British culture and society. Consequently, Resurrection became the focus of 25 years of endeavour, all the changes contributing to its ultimate fruition. It extends the philosophical and theological ideas adumbrated in Taverner, but explores these themes in the context of contemporary society, as opposed to the earlier opera's concern with events surrounding the English Reformation.
Courtesy towards the things of Nature: Interpretations of Messiaen's ‘Catalogue d'oiseaux’
Authors: Freeman Robin
Published: November 2009

Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux is most often programmed as individual pieces: which is as it should be, since it is not a cycle like the Vingt regards sur I'enfant Jésus but a collection from which to select what, and how much, one wants to play or hear at a particular time. All the more important to have complete recordings of it, so what we listen to has a consistent interpretative grain. In addition to the style oiseau there is of course the style Loriod, an essential point of reference, above all for the rendering of certain percussive effects; but, once these have become technical second nature, the margins of fantasy seem as comfortable as with any other composer. In fact what Bertrand Poirot-Delpêche calls le paradoxe flaubertien would seem especially applicable to music so full of precise detail: plus les détails s'accumulent, plus il faut rêver leur sens.
A New Left-Wing Radicalism in Contemporary German Music?
Authors: Warnaby John
Published: November 2009

‘Communism is dead’, crowed a recent Prime Minister, little realizing that the shaky condition of capitalism would precipitate her downfall in short order. ‘Socialist art is a phenomenon of the past’, pronounced many post-modernist critics, who equated creative expressions of radical politics with a modernist aesthetic they had already consigned to their re-interpretation of history. Yet as the developed economies totter from one crisis to the next, interspersed with stock market upheavals or corruption scandals, and the ‘new world order’ fails to materialize, a new left-wing idealism is beginning to assert itself in the work of several German composers, and the growing number of discs of their music testifies to the existence of a substantial international audience for their output. It is a movement of considerable diversity, but also genuine sophistication, for it takes account of the limitation of modernism, and is not averse to encompassing expressions of radicalism from the ‘romantic’ era, where appropriate. Thus, it does not shun post-modernism, but incorporates those features which have not been sucked into the new world chaos, or into the prevalent nostalgia, usually associated with the banner of ‘pluralism’. Above all, the new radicalism reaffirms certain fundamental truths, respected by socialism, which have been overlooked both by postmodernists and proponents of the ‘new world order’. It also asserts the importance of artistic integrity at a time when consumerism is undermining creative values.
Preserving the Scelsi Improvisations
Authors: Uitti Frances-Marie
Published: November 2009

Giacinto Scelsi was a master improviser. He created hundreds of hours of music, which he originally recorded on tape and then had transcribed for various instruments. These transcriptions were made in collaboration with various musicians: the majority by Vieru Tosati, but also Alvin Curran, Sergio Caffaro and myself.
‘I'm not ill, I'm nervous’ – madness in the music of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies
Authors: Welten Ruud
Published: November 2009

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's fascination for madness is clearly reflected in at least three of his works: Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969), Miss Donnithonie's Maggot (1974) and Caroline Mathilde (1991). What are the consequences of this fascination for his music? How can madness in Davies's oeuvre be understood? In this article I will argue that, in spite of all his modernistic aspirations, Sir Peter's work shows a postmodernist tendency expressed iii the regular occurrence of the theme of madness, and the way it is disseminated through his music.
The Panorama of Michael Finnissy (I)
Authors: Pace Ian
Published: November 2009

A Michael Finnissy work is like a journey from one point to another, along which there are any number of digressions off the ‘main path’, some of them extended. By the end of this journey, one realizes that the digressions were far more interesting than the conclusion: indeed the journey primarily served the purpose of enticingone into the space in question. As a ‘guide’ through the near 200 works that occupy Michael Finnissy's catalogue in the year of his 50th birthday, I shall take the liberty of constructing ‘paths’ of my own: after all, there are an infinite number of such paths, and though none will lead us through the oeuvre in its entirety, I wish to give some impression of the sheer scope and stimulation of Finnissy6s body of work.
‘Nixon in China’: An Interview with Peter Sellars
Authors: Daines Matthew
Published: November 2009

Most critical commentary concerning John Adams's 1987 opera Nixon in China focussed on the opera's first act, a parodistic reenactment of the well-known ceremonial scenes associated with the China visit. It appears that Nixon in China is an opera in the traditional mould as Richard Nixon steps down the gangway of the Spirit of 76 to a hero's welcome. Yet beneath this veneer of realism lie rich subtexts. It emerges that what is really going on is a parody (in the satiric sense) of a grand opera, a parody in which issues of cultural representation and gender politics are worked out. These themes are brought to the fore in Acts II and III but have been ignored in most critical commentaries.
Mensagens: Portuguese Music in the 20th Century
Authors: Moody Ivan
Published: November 2009

These lines of Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), the great poet of Portuguese modernism, may seem at first sight to invoke the principal element of fado, Portugal's national music: the element represented by that famously untranslatable word suadade, implying longing, nostalgia, homesickness … However, they hide far deeper resonances. Mensagen (Message), the poetic sequence from which they come, is a profound exploration of Portugal's history, a modern counterpart to Camoens's great 16th-century epic The Lusiads. It is connected to the nationalist Integralismo Lusitano movement, and to Sebastianism. Other poets, particularly Mario Sa-Carneiro (1890–1916), and plastic artists, notably Amadeo de Sousa Cardoso (1887–1918) and Jose de Almada Negreiros (1893–1970), similarly reflect the strength of these patriotic and mystical ideas in Portugal during the country's deepening social crisis in the early part of the century. But Pessoa, who famously split himself into several persons, each with their own name, style and poetic output, may also stand as a symbol of the different currents Portuguese composers have ridden in search of their national identity.
Catalan Folk Sources in ‘Soirées de Barcelone’
Authors: White Julian
Published: November 2009

What might have happened to Roberto Gerhard had he not left Spain at the end of the Spanis Civil War will remain one of the great imponderables of his career. His voluntary exile to Britain released him from the role of ‘responsible artist of the Spanish Republic’ – and from the many activities (musicological, literary, pedagogical and administrative) which however vital to the cultural politics of Catalonia had inevitably limited his composing time. He came to view exile as a ‘blessing in disguise’ and eventually took up British citizenship.
Ligeti the Postmodernist?
Authors: Searby Mike
Published: November 2009

The stylistic changes in György Ligeti's music since 1960 have in some ways mirrored those in the wider contemporary music world. In his music of the 1960s he displays an experimental and systematic approach to the exploration of sound matter which can also be seen in the contemporaneous music of composers such as Xenakis, Penderecki and Stockhausen. In the 1970s his music shows a more eclectic approach, particularly the opera Le Grand Macabre (1974–7) in which there is much plundering of past styles – such as allusions to Monteverdi, Rossini, and Verdi. From this work onward there would appear to be a complete break from the approach in his works on the 1960s.
Icarus Soaring: the music of John Pickard
Authors: Rickards Guy
Published: November 2009

Although John Pickard's music has received a good many performances and radio broadcasts over the past decade, it was the relay of his dazzling orchestral tone poem The Flight of Icarus (1990) during the 1996 Proms1 which brought him to the notice of the wider concert–going and –listening public. There is some justice in that piece attracting such attention, as it is one of his most immediate in impact, while completely representative of his output at large. That output to date encompasses three symphonies (1983–4, 1985–7, 1995–6) and five other orchestral works, three string quartets (1991, 1993, 1994; a fourth in progress), a piano trio (1990), sonatas for piano (1987) and cello and piano (1994–5), vocal and choral works, pieces for orchestral brass (Vortex, 1984–5) and brass band – the exhilarating Wildfire (1991), which crackles, hisses and spits in ferocious near–onomatopoeia, and suite Men of Stone (1995), celebrating four of the most impressive megalithic sites in Britain, one to each season of the year. There are other works for a variety of solo instruments and chamber ensembles, such as the intriguing grouping of flute, clarinet, harpsichord and piano trio in Nocturne in Black and Gold (1983) and the large–scale Serenata Concertante for flute and six instruments of a year later. Still in his mid-thirties – he was born in Burnley in 1963 – Pickard has already made almost all the principal musical forms of the Western Classical tradition his own, with only opera, ballet and the concerto as yet untackled.
‘Dark Fire’: Simon Holt and his Music
Authors: Seabrook Mike
Published: November 2009

Just about the strongest, most honest and individual composing talent anywhere. It's music that gets one by the ears, by the throat, by the nerve-ends, and never leaves one the same after as before hearing it – all without obvious rhetoric, and with no attempt at stylistic hectoring, sledgehammering or attempting to take any sort of political, social, moral or even artistic stance. It's music which is complete of itself; it doesn't go out of its way to court or manipulate the listener – the listener is drawn in, if at all, by the music's own pure poetry. Especially his own is the duende quality, the dark fire, the quasi-demonic impishness that all his music has…
Being Elgar
Authors: Payne Anthony
Published: November 2009

I have been asked on a number of occasions recently whether I felt a heavy weight of responsibility during my work on Elgar's Third Symphony, and if this was an inhibiting factor. The question put me in a rather awkward situation, since a truthful answer was going to show me in a very immodest light. The fact is, my work on the project seemed to lie outside any feelings of awe and moral responsibility – because, quite simply, I was in love with the music and laboured for the sheer joy of it, without thought of ethical issues.
‘Elgar/Payne’
Authors: Johnson Stephen
Published: November 2009

Before the private première of Anthony Payne's ‘elaboration’ of the sketches for Elgar's Third Symphony last October there was a fair amount of opprobious wrangling about whether it should have been attempted at all. I had my arguments ready, but now that I've actually heard the Symphony there is clearly only one response to those who carp at it – why, in God's name, should the world be denied such a stirring, life-affirming experience? Three months after that private first performance in BBC Maida Vale Studio I am still certain that it was one of the great musical experiences of my life. To have been a small part of it (I interviewed Payne and conductor Andrew Davis before the performance) was, simply, a privilege.
Bartók and Boosey & Hawkes: The American Years
Authors: Gillies Malcolm
Published: November 2009

By mid-1940 Bartók had decided to live in the United States. For how long and under what conditions, he did not really know. But, from his short tour of April and May 1940, he had come to believe that the prospects for his performing, compositional and ethnomusicological work werebrighter in New York than in Hungary, where a Nazi take-over seemed only a matter of time. The Bartóks' departure from their homeland was an unhappy affair, not just because of the myriad hassles of arranging visas and boxing up a lifetime's work, but also because of a lastminute quarrel with Kodály over unexpected directions which Bartók had taken in their joint project on Hungarian folk music. The two would, in fact, never again directly communicate.
Shostakovich and the LASM
Authors: Kovnatskaya Ludmila
Published: November 2009

In the 1920s there were plenty of new opportunities for young composers to meet colleagues of all ages in the many circles, societies and associations which were then in existence. The most interesting, though short-lived of them was the Leningrad Association of Contemporary Music (LASM), which declared itself to be ‘a gathering of everyone connected with music today’. The Association was planned as a local branch of the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM) and of the central Moscow association. But in fact the LASM acted quite independently. Its founders were people who were already well-placed and even high-ranking in the country's musical life: the musicologists and critics Boris Asafyev (Igor Glebov), Vyacheslav Karatigin, Alexander Ossovsky and Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov, the composers Yuliya Weysberg, Alexander Zhitomirsky, Andrey Paschenko, Yuriy Tyulin, Maximilian Shteinberg, Lyubov Shtreikher-Bikhter and Vladimir Shcherbachev. Their first meeting took place on 15 April 1925 at the home of Rimsky-Korsakov and Weysberg.
‘Der Weg der Verheissung’ and the Prophecies of Jeremiah (I)
Authors: Drew David
Published: November 2009

A vast epic of the Jewish people in four Acts (or Parts), Der Weg der Verheissung is Kurt Weill's only collaboration with the poet, playwright, and novelist Franz Werfel (1890–1945). The text was written in Austria in the spring and summer of 1934, and the score was drafted during the second half of the same year – mostly in the village of Louveciennes outside Paris. The musical perspectives are exceptionally wide: on the one hand they afford a view of all Weill's major compositions from the Mahagonny opera (1927–29) to Tlie Seven Deadly Sins and the Second Symphony (1933); on the other, they look forward to his very last stage work for Broadway, the ‘Musical Tragedy’ Lost in the Stars (1949) which he and Maxwell Anderson based on Alan Paton's anti-apartheid novel, Cry, the Beloved Country.
‘Only a composer’: Reflections on the Eisler Centenary
Authors: Silverman Julian
Published: November 2009

37 years since his death, and the bourgeois music world still hasn't much more time for Hanns Eisler than he had for it! But things have moved on. The work of the one who, above all others, has come to be regarded as the very emblem of the revolutionary communist composer does fill a useful gap in the market. To that extent, there can be generosity in victory. Among its new trophies, Berlin Classics has come across and re-released a near-exhaustive collection of recordings of Eisler's music. Some of these, such as Ernst Busch's searing declamations, are documents of a lost age, more hairraisingly alive than anything happening today.
Elliott Carter: Towards the Tenth Decade
Authors: Caltabiano Ronald
Published: November 2009

There is a line of thought, at least in his own country, that Elliott Carter's music has gone through a tidal change in the last ten years; that he had finally given up on his crusade to demand Olympian feats of mental and aural skill to enjoy his music, that he had begun to give way – if only a little – to the trend toward simplicity that started with the neo-tonality of the late 1970s and the neo-Romanticism of the 1980s. In essence, that his music had finally become expressive in the traditional sense. Yet there has been no such sea change; instead we have witnessed the careful, focussed growth of the imagination and intellect of a musical giant.
Roy Harris's Symphonies: an Introduction (I)
Authors: Robertson Malcolm D.
Published: November 2009

The American symphonic output of the 20th century is still, for the vast majority of the music-loving public, a largely unexplored territory. Although in the past few years there has been some renewal of interest in this area of modern music, we remain in ignorance of some of its most characteristic composers. None more so than Roy Harris (1898–1979), whose birth centenary fell on 12 February this year and who used often to be described as America's leading symphonist. Certainly his Third Symphony is one of the few internationally recognized American works in the genre, yet most of the rest of his works remain virtually unknown, even in the USA.
Jón Leifs (1899–1968)
Authors: Pickard John
Published: November 2009

This year sees the centenary (on 1 May) of the birth of the composer Jón Leifs. Had it fallen just a few years earlier the occasion would have attracted virtually no attention outside his native Iceland, but over the past four years a series of CD recordings, mainly from the Swedish label BIS, has done much to establish Leifs as a figure of far more than local significance. His output included three string quartets, piano music, songs, choral works (both accompanied and unaccompanied) a sizeable number of short orchestral works, an organ concerto, oratorios and the first ever symphony composed by an Icelander. The creative personality emerging with each new recording is among the most radical and original of the 20th century and this article is intended as a short introduction to the music of this remarkable composer.
Heinz Holliger at Sixty
Authors: Palmer Peter
Published: November 2009

When I referred to Heinz Holliger's ‘maximalist’ oeuvre in a recent review, I was unaware that his Swiss colleague Armin Schibler (1920–86) had used the term ‘Maximal Music’ to describe his own stylistic catholicity. On reflection, however, the epithet seems apposite to each of these two uncommonly searching composers. Like Michael Tippett, whom he admired, Schibler was sometimes accused of squandering his talents in a constant quest to enlarge his range. Holliger's music, too, has been deemed wanting in individual personality because of its apparent preoccupation with extended techniques. It is a music which may alienate as much as it attracts, and which could not be further removed from Heinz Holliger's public persona as a virtuosic oboist. There are fine performers whose compositions have proved to be disappointingly second-hand. But not only are Holliger's inimitable (for which his heroic interpreters must sometimes be thankful!); every bar that he writes is the product of an expressive need.
Der Weg der Verheissung: Weill at the Crossroads
Authors: Drew David
Published: November 2009

According to Weisgal's detailed account of the origins of The Eternal Road, Reinhardt had no inkling of his plans until their November 1933 meeting in Paris. Weisgal began by outlining the idea of a biblical drama that would for the first time evoke the Old Testament in all its breadth rather than in isolated episodes. At the end of his account, according to Weisgal, Reinhardt sat motionless and in silence before saying – very simply –
Charting the Extremes: Performance Issues in the music of Henryk Górecki
Authors: Harley James
Published: November 2009

As a young pianist, whenever I listened to a recording by Artur Rubinstein, the music always sounded wonderfully convincing. But then, when it came down to studying the score, it was somewhat disturbing to find that he often performed the music in ways that were contrary to the score. This experience provoked many thoughts and discussions regarding ‘authenticity’, artistic ‘greatness’, and the changing contexts of performance practice.
Henri Dutilleux and Maurice Ohana: Victims of an Exclusion Zone?
Authors: Rae Caroline
Published: November 2009

Until recently, the music of Henri Dutilleux and Maurice Ohana was largely overlooked in Britain, despite both composers having achieved widespread recognition beyond our shores. In France they have ranked among the leading composers of their generation since at least the 1960s and have received many of the highest official accolades. In Britain, the view of French music since 1945 has often been synonymous with the music of Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez, to the virtual exclusion of others whose work has long been honoured not only in France and elsewhere in Europe but in the wider international arena. These ‘others’ include Dutilleux and Ohana. Developing an innovative and forward-looking approach, independent from the preoccupations of their contemporaries who congregated at Darmstadt, both Dutilleux and Ohana were excluded from representation at the concerts of the Domaine musical. As a result, their music was neglected in Britain throughout the years when the programming policies of Boulez and Sir William Glock were at their most influential. Undoubtedly, Boulez is one of the most phenomenal figures in music of the last 50 or so years and the position of his erstwhile teacher Messiaen is secure as one of the giants of the 20th century. Yet, however significant their respective contribution, Boulez and Messiaen represent only one facet of French music since 1945.
‘La Chanson c'est pour tout le monde’: an introduction to the music of Georges Brassens
Authors: Keefe Simon P.
Published: November 2009

The singer-songwriter Georges Brassens (1921–81) is one of the most critically lauded and commercially successful French musicians of all time. The author and composer of text and music for around 150 songs, with LP sales of over 20 million, Brassens is perhaps the most widely disseminated French ‘popular’ musician of the post-war era, particularly in French-speaking countries. Regarded by many as a cultural and musical icon, he is seen as a standard bearer for liberal French values, and – transcending standard distinctions between ‘popular’ and ‘serious’ styles – as a pivotal figure in the history of French music, credited with ‘revitaliz[ing] the French post-war song’ by ‘accomplishing the synthesis of popular song and true poetry’.
Addendum
Authors: Harley James
Published: November 2009

I am writing to provide further information in response to inquiries about my recent article on performance issues in Gorecki's music (Tempo 211). The symposium I referred to, at which the composer was present, was titled ‘The Gorecki Phenomenon’, and, in addition to my own, included presentations by Adrian Thomas, Luke Howard, David Kopplin, Mark Swed, and Maria Anna Harley, who organized and chaired the event (and translated the commentaries of Mr Gorecki, who had much to say). This session, along with entire ‘Gorecki Autumn’ at the University of Southern California, was organized to celebrate the endowement of the Directorship of the Polish Music Reference Center by Dr Stefan and Mrs Wanda Wilk, founders of this important resource on Polish music in North America (the website can be consulted at http://www.usc.edu/dept/polishmusic/). A book collecting the research presented at this symposium, along with the lectures and interviews given by the composer during his time in Los Angeles, is forthcoming, edited by Ms Harley.
Music at the Bauhaus, 1919–1933
Authors: Jewitt Clement
Published: November 2009

It is a curious fact that there is very little crossover between studies on the visual arts and those on the auditory. There are general cultural histories, to be sure, but even in those the two are generally treated separately, following the habitual trend. There appear to be few people who can think equally easily in or with respect to both modes, despite honourable exceptions such as Richard Arnheim and Raymond Head. Yet there are grounds for thinking that music is intrinsic to the human psyche, starting with the obvious fact that, barring severe pathology, everyone includes music one way or another as an important component in their lives: the inference is that it is necessary. But this is material for wider study (as for example Zuckerkandl: Sound and symbol, Blacking: How musical is man, Tomatis: The conscious ear).
Keeping up with Carter
Authors: Schiff David
Published: November 2009

What next indeed! Since his 90th birthday in December 1998, Elliott Carter has turned out a stream of works that are as personal and inventive as ever – if not more so. In addition to significant miniatures for solo piano, solo violin and string quartet, Carter has written his first settings of Italian poems (Tempo e tempi), his first concerto grosso (Askö Concerto) and, most surprising of all, his first opera, What Next? with a libretto by Paul Griffiths. (And a Cello Concerto – for Yo-yo Ma – is well underway.)
Roy Harris's Symphonies (Part II)
Authors: Robertson Malcolm D.
Published: November 2009

The first part of this article outlined Roy Harris's symphonic output up to Symphony No.6 of 1944, the period of his greatest popularity after the phenomenal success of the Third, still often referred to as the greatest American symphony. I now turn to the latter half of Harris's copious, symphonic output, works which – with the similarly meteoric decline in his critical standing after the early 1950s – have (with the exception Symphony No.7) been seldom heard and seldom accorded much critical consideration: a state of affairs which is certainly unjust.
Judith Bingham: some recent works
Authors: Conway Paul
Published: November 2009

Judith Bingham is currently one of the most sought-after composers in Britain. Following the breakthrough occasioned by the première in 1993 of her first orchestral work, Chartres (1988), she received commissions from organizations such as the BBC Philharmonic, the Proms, Hereford Three Choirs Festival, the Northern Sinfonia and Westminster Abbey. Although one of her most successful works is undoubtedly her elegiac Piano Trio entitled Chapman's Pool (1997), which has already received over seventy performances, she has produced a series of impressive large-scale compositions which build on the qualities that made Chartres such a triumph. They all possess a heightened sense of atmosphere – usually centred on a specific place – a fine ear for orchestral colour and an ability to create an immediate impact, either through massive pounding tuttis or by means of wraith-like chamber textures. It is especially frustrating that none of Judith Bingham's works for large forces are available on disc: a serious omission I hope will soon be rectified.
The rhetoric of the shadow: a semiotic study of James Clarke's Isolation
Authors: Kanno Mieko
Published: November 2009

A musical work can tell a story as beautifully as a work of literature can. In music we may not easily grasp the meaning of the story but there is nevertheless a fascination about its semantic potential. The type of narrative such a work expounds can be described as allegorical, because of the ambiguity of its semantic definition. We are free to interpret it in whatever ways we like, but one of the interests in a narrative is the way in which it encodes specific strategies of interpretation for the listener. As long as there is a story there are always characters involved who act as the reader, the narrator, and the author behind the work, regardless of whether they really exist as actual people. This discussion focuses around the role of the reader-listener: its aim is to show that the reader-listener's contribution is a fundamental element in understanding not only the process of narration but also the work's aesthetic scheme itself.
Tonality and Modality in Sibelius's Sixth Symphony
Authors: Pike Lionel
Published: November 2009

Sibelius began planning his Sixth Symphony, op. 104, in 1918, before the Fifth reached its final, definitive version: the Sixth took virtually five years to complete, and was first performed in 1923. It immediately attracted attention, and critics began at once to explore its structure. Sibelius seems to have been genuinely surprised at some of the revelations of the analysts and is recorded as saying that though investigators might find several interesting things going on in the work, ‘most people forget that it is, above all, a poem’. Sibelius's warning – typical of most composers, who generally seem content to forget the scaffolding of a work once it is completed – has done nothing to prevent analysts from probing into the Symphony.
Ligeti's ‘third way’: ‘Non–atonal’ elements in the Horn Trio
Authors: Searby Mike
Published: November 2009

It is perhaps curious that only a year after this exchange took place in 1981, Ligeti completed his Horn Trio – which uses traditional ternary form, a passacaglia (although a disguised one), a strong melodic focus, and a harmonic language which contains clear triads and dominant sevenths in abundance. In spite of his assertions above, it does seem as if Ligeti, in addition to rejecting the Avant-garde, is looking to the past for major elements of his musical language.
A Search for Identity: Hans Schaeuble and hisMusik, op. 18
Authors: Plummer Annalise
Published: November 2009

In my experience, Swiss nationals who have heard of Hans Schaeuble are limited to certain musicologists and elderly contemporaries of the circa-war Swiss musical scene. Yet, in his prime, Schaeuble was perhaps the most internationally renowned of several promising young Swiss composers. He had a publication contract with Bote und Bock, and hisSymphonische Musik für grosses Orchester(1937) was premièred by the Berlin Philharmonic under Carl Schuricht in 1939. Schaeuble's degree of acclaim in 1930s Germany and his subsequent relative obscurity in Switzerland share, in part, a common cause: the student Schaeuble moved away from his native Switzerland as soon as he was able, and in 1931, chose to launch his career in Berlin.
The ‘True Relationship’: Schoenberg's Analysis of ‘Unity’ in the Op. 9 Kammersymphonie
Authors: Doran Mark
Published: November 2009

Composers, so the conventional wisdom has it, tend to be bad analysts – too ready to find things that aren't there (and to overlook or undervalue things that are), if the result will help to make their own creative preoccupations seem legitimate, important or necessary. Nor is conventional wisdom inevitably wrong on this point: as a trawl through half-a-century's worth of certain journals will speedily affirm, consciously or unconsciously self-serving 'analysis' has in some composing circles been more the rule than the exception.
Egon Wellesz: An Opera Composer in 1920s Vienna
Authors: Ward Philip
Published: November 2009

The music of Egon Wellesz, largely forgotten since his death in 1974, is slowly being rediscovered. The last three years have seen the premiere of his Third Symphony in Vienna (reviewed in Tempo 213), a concert devoted to his chamber music at the Wigmore Hall, and several new recordings, among them a forthcoming release from Orfeo which will mark the first appearance on CD of any of his stage works, the 1931 opera Die Bakchantinnen.
Marginalia quasi una Fantasia: on the Second Violin Sonata by Alfred Schnittke
Authors: Smirnov Dmitri
Published: November 2009

The Second Violin Sonata for violin and piano (1968), subtided Quasi una Sonata, is one of Alfred Schnittke's most popular works, and it is one of my personal favourites among his pieces (alongside his First Symphony, First String Quartet, First Hymn, Second and Third Violin Concerti, Three Madrigals, etc). I discovered Schnittke's music in April 1969 at an underground concert given in the Gnessin Institute in Moscow by Alexei Lyubimov (piano), Boris Berman (piano), Lev Mikhailov (clarinet) and a few string players. This half-forbidden concert, organized by Alexander Ivashkin, was all that remained of a whole festival, which had been cancelled at the last moment by the authorities. The concert was split into three parts, the first two of them dedicated to the music of the Soviet avant-garde, with compositions by the likes of Edison Denisov, Tigran Mansurian, Valentin Silvestrov, Viktor Ekimovsky and Kuldar Sink etc. At the end of the second part there was a perfonnance of Schnittke's Serenade for five musicians. This very cheerful and fanny piece, entangled with hundreds of short quotations, sounded very different from the rest of the program. The final part of the concert contained works of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, played for the first time in Brezhnev's Soviet Union.
Péter Eötvös in conversation about ‘Three Sisters’
Authors: Willson Rachel Beckles
Published: November 2009

Apologia

When Péter Eötvös was in Brussels in October 2000, conducting Janáćek's The Makropouhs Case at the Theatre de la Monnaie, I met him one morning to discuss his opera Three Sisters. The conversation, which took place in Hungarian and which I recorded, lasted for over 90 minutes.
Killmayer Fragments (a birthday offering)
Authors: Drew David
Published: November 2009

Berlin, May 2002: around a wooden table in a pleasantly overgrown garden, friends and neighbours had been discussing with an English visitor some recent and imminent events — Blair's 50-minute interview on prime-time German TV, George W. Bush's coming visit, the World Cup, and so forth. The conversation turned to Berlin and the performing arts — the deficits, the new appointments, the expected disappointments, and the prospects for next season. G., the conductor of an enterprising church choir, spoke of his next autumn festival and the one to follow. There were plans for an Anglo-German festival, sensibly exploiting official civic partnerships. Given the musical interests of almost everyone present, a surprising number of English composers, from Dunstable onwards, proved unfamiliar to all but the conductor and the visitor from abroad. It was already dusk, and H. and B., the hosts, suggested a move indoors, where names and dates could be checked in the umpteen volumes of their 1970 edition of Brockhaus.
Through the Spectrum: The New Intimacy in French Music (II)
Authors: Pugin Tristan
Published: November 2009

The first part of this article, a consideration of a number of younger ‘post-spectralist’ French composers as llustrated by some of their recorded works (the recordings are detailed in an annexe to this part) appeared in Tempo 212. That part concluded with a discussion of Pascal Dusapin and his expressive programme ‘to draw a wracked lyricism from his material through sensuously tangible strategies of constraint. As we shall soon see, younger composers have been quick to take this up to their advantage …’)
Haflidi Hallgrímsson: A Personal Account
Authors: Mackay Neil
Published: November 2009

The Icelandic composer Haflidi Hallgrímsson has lived in Edinburgh since 1977.

Never to be forgotten: my first meeting with Haflidi Hallgrimsson's music. In 1987 at the Edinburgh Festival the astonishing Helsinki Junior Strings (astonishing because they execute each note as if their lives were at stake) with conductor Géza Silvay played Hallgrimsson's Daydreams in Numbers. Here was a unique aural imagination and intensity of transforming workmanship. Music which stretched its virtuosic young performers to their limits but which was immediately accessible. Physically exciting music, incorporating folkloric elements yet entirely unnostalgic: purged, unsentimental, full of Northern lights and colours of all temperatures. The lullaby was sung at the glacier, the winged horse rose from the sea. These pieces breathed the fresh ‘air of other planets’. They moved in fluid dreamtime: utterly strange, entirely new, yet paradoxically familiar and friendly.
Bartók and Boosey & Hawkes: The European Years
Authors: Gillies Malcolm
Published: November 2009

‘This contract is certainly my greatest success as a composer, so far’, commented Bartók in 1918 on contracting with the Viennese publisher Universal Edition. After years of hit-and-miss publishing with two Budapest firms, Rozsnyai and Rózsavölgyi, Bartók was proud at having caught, with the 1917 Budapest première of his ballet The Wooden Prince, the attention of Universal Edition's director, Emil Hertzka. Hertzka was renowned for his cultivation of such musical talents of central Europe as Mahler, Schoenberg, Janáœk, Berg and Szymanowski. Until about 1926, when Hertzka developed heart troubles and took a lesser role in managing the firm, Bartók was generally happy with his Viennese publishing connexion. Universal Edition had quickly moved to bring out the considerable backlog of his compositions, had strongly promoted his works through its new house journal Muskiblätter des Anbruch, and had often spurred his imagination with complimentary scores, suggestions and in-house gossip. But then, from 1926 to 1932, when Hertzka died, Bartók's dealings with Universal Edition became progressively less personal, less prompt and sometimes even chilly, although his compositions did continue to appear regularly from the publisher and to receive a quite reasonable level of exposure. Thereafter, as the Depression and financial difficulties led to more serious publication delays and breakdowns in communication, Bartók grew bitter and imperious. Several times after 1932 he threatened to terminate his contract with Universal Edition.
Thoughts for the Future
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2009

Among many other even less important things, the 20th century has been the Age of Musicology. If music as the object of historical and theoretical enquiry began to impinge on the Academy well before 1900, it has taken the 20th century to explore its full potential for various kinds of systematic, even scientific analysis. And so a problem has emerged, for although most musicologists accept that compositions are at least a part of their subject-matter, they have difficulty with the proposition that composition – the creative act – itself is a part of musicology. In a sense, therefore, it is entirely logical for the British Academy to consider ceasing its financial support for postgraduate courses in composition.
Sallinen's Seven Symphonies
Authors: Weitzman Ronald
Published: November 2009

The instinct to compose ‘symphonically’ – insofar as we understand what this designation has come to mean – has taken a battering in our century: a century still licking wound after wound inflicted by the calculated havoc of war wreaked on whole populations, and compounded by a premeditated serial cruelty unprecedented in world history. As if in anticipation of this unleashed depravity, and then as its indirect consequence, the nucleus of unshackled symphonic creativity shifted from the centre of Europe to selected geographical ‘outer frontiers’ of the continent. Scandinavia's star was modestly ascending many decades before the 19th century drew to a close. Then, for the first quarter of the 20th, there emerged the towering figure of Sibelius, implanted in a small country which won its autonomy during his years of productivity. Compositional talent in Finland has reasserted itself during this century's last quarter. And from within that tenacious nation the most commanding figure presently endowed with the ability to rethink and put symphonic syntax to advantage is Aulis Sallinen (born 1935), though his international reputation rests upon the new life he has injected into the art form of opera.