bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Characteristics
Authors: Kennedy Michael
Published: November 2023

The tendency for discussion of Mahler’s music to move into realms of philosophical and psychological verbiage is perhaps familiar to readers. His music lends itself easily to extra-musical analysis, indeed it is among the most autobiographical music ever written, and to pretend that it exists only in terms of musical procedures is to miss an element which Mahler explicitly commanded us to take into account. Each of his symphonies is an extension of his personality, an exploration of himself, and in his case, as in Elgar’s and Berlioz’s, it is not possible – in fact it is wrong – to separate the music from the life of its composer as though it was an isolated activity. At the same time one must guard against a too-literal association of life and music and make due allowance for the creative imagination.
Wunderhorn Symphonies
Authors: Kennedy Michael
Published: November 2023

The Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies are usually classified as the Wunderhorn symphonies because of their links with Mahler’s settings of poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. This could apply equally to the First Symphony, for the words of Das klagende Lied and the Gesellen cycle are Mahler’s pastiche of the Wunderhorn poems, proving how deeply embedded in his mind were the style and spirit of the anthology. Mahler’s first settings of Wunderhorn poems were for voice and pianoforte, although obviously conceived for orchestral accompaniment, and were written in the late 1880s. Twelve more, originally entitled Humoresken, date from 1892 to 1901. They alternate between a charming fairy-tale delicacy and a grimly ironic, nightmarish realization and interpenetration of the moods of military bluster and nocturnal mystery. They are outstanding for the quivering sensitivity of the composer’s response to the text of each poem and, once again, for the beauty and aptness of sound with which this response is matched. The cornerstones of Mahler’s style were cross-reference, variation and development, and even in such small-scale works as the songs the constant change enacted gives them a scope beyond the ordinary. Even in such an overtly simple and ‘innocent’ (though seductive) song as Rheinlegendchen, the range of tonality beyond the nominal home key of A major is remarkable. In Das irdische Leben the development by means of major-minor contrasts gives the song its psychological depth. Mahler’s exploitation of contrast, his genius for savage juxtapositions, can be heard at their starkest in the ‘duologue’ Wunderhorn songs such as Der Schildwache Nachtlied.
Symphonies 9 and 10
Authors: Kennedy Michael
Published: November 2023

Mahler’s last two symphonies and Das Lied von der Erde are already barnacled with romantic mythology. Because they were performed for the first time after his death, because he died comparatively young, leaving a beautiful young widow (and, better still, an unfinished symphony), because he regarded them as excessively difficult to conduct, and because he had been under medical sentence of death, they have invited every kind of subjective interpretation, to some extent justified by their elegiac nature. While I would not suggest that the subject of death was not present in his mind from 1907, I doubt if it obsessed him to the pitch of morbid superstition which has led to statements that he dreaded the idea of performances of Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth Symphony. I do not believe there is any portentous significance in the fact that Mahler did nothing to promote performances of these two works. Here are the practicalities:
The Music 1831-1841
Authors: Macdonald Hugh
Published: November 2023

The stay in Italy was a distraction rather than an inspiration. Italian music, whether by Palestrina, Bellini or anyone else, had an entirely negative effect, for Berlioz disliked it all, and he devoted his fifteen months to walking and exploration more than to composition. The three-week interlude in Nice produced another Shakespeare work, the Roi Lear overture, inspired by his reading of King Lear in Florence, but it reverts to the model of the Les francs-juges overture, with a slow introduction and extended Allegro, rather than to the fantasy form of La tempetê. Like the first movement of the Symphonie fantastique (which it closely resembles) it is in C major, but it gains an extra breadth in the opening Andante by slipping tacitly into 12/8. This is especially noticeable when the oboe’s dolce C major melody is repeated on the trombones in E flat, a passage of almost Wagnerian grandeur. The opening theme itself looks forward more to Liszt, setting a fashion for emphatic rhetorical openings in the bass; Tchaikovsky’s Hamlet is one such offshoot of Roi Lear. Whether it portrays Lear himself, and the oboe theme Cordelia, is not clear; all we can assert with confidence is that the mood and character of the play are contained in the music, and one passage - the timpani solos at the end of the introduction -is known, from one of Berlioz’s letters, to depict the king’s entry into his council chamber, in imitation of a similar drum signal used at the court of Charles X to announce the King’s entrance.
1838–44
Authors: Radcliffe Philip
Published: November 2023

The next few years were spent for the most part at Leipzig and involved much musical activity. The concerts flourished; there was an enterprising historical series, including works by composers as unfamiliar as Naumann, Righini and Vogler; there were performances of Beethoven’s little-known cantata Der glorreiche Augenblick and of Felix’s own setting of Psalm XLII. Much music was written in I 838, including the Cello Sonata in B flat, op. 45, the String Quartets in E flat and D from op. 44 and the setting of Psalm XCV. On 7 February 1838 his first son, Karl Wolfgang Paul, was born; Cecile was seriously ill and caused Felix acute anxiety. In June he conducted the Lower Rhine Festival at Cologne, and the rest of the summer was spent very happily in Berlin. This was Cecile’s first meeting with the rest of the family.
1845–7
Authors: Radcliffe Philip
Published: November 2023

Meanwhile he had been approached by the Philharmonic Society in London, who were eager to engage him as conductor for the 1844 5 season. This he accepted gladly, making it clear that he could not come till after Easter, and he arrived in London early in May, staying with Klingemann. He had intended to perform Schubert’s C major Symphony, but the orchestra refused to take it seriously, and in the finale their behaviour became so uproarious that Mendelssohn indignantly withdrew the work and, along with it, his own Ruy Blas overture. This, however, was the only blot on an otherwise brilliant and successful season.
Symphonies
Authors: Radcliffe Philip
Published: November 2023

The thirteen symphonies for strings of 1821 3 throw fascinating light on the early stages of Mendelssohn’s development. The first five, which can be examined as a group, contain three movements, of which the first and last are all in a binary form that comes far nearer to the Baroque suite than to the classical sonata. The texture is solidly contrapuntal, in a style which would have sounded academic and old-fashioned at the time.
Works for a solo instrument with orchestra
Authors: Radcliffe Philip
Published: November 2023

Mendelssohn’s earliest experiment with the concerto is that in D minor for violin and string orchestra. It was composed in 1822, a year after the early Sonata in G minor for piano. The two works have points in common: in both of them the outer movements are influenced by Haydn and Mozart, and the slow movement is more individual than the rest; but the Concerto is the stronger and more interesting work. The first movement gives ample evidence of Mendelssohn’s love for Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor, which he often played with great success. Structurally the most original feature is the recapitulation; there is no pause for a cadenza, and the two main themes reappear in reverse order, the second going through some impessive modulations. The Finale is more Haydnesque, especially in the resourcefulness with which its single vivacious theme is treated.
New frontiers
Authors: Samson Jim
Published: November 2023

Biographies are histories, and like other histories they adopt strategies for ordering events and interpretations into a coherent narrative. The subdivision of a composer’s life into periods is one way of making sense of it, but such periods remain at best impositions, even abstractions, and they carry additional penalties when the ‘life’ is considered in tandem with the ‘works’.1 The ‘Warsaw Period’ is an inevitable construction in a Chopin biography, just as the journey from Warsaw to Paris is an inevitable metaphor. But these interpretations are at the very least in search of qualification. There was no abrupt change of attitude and outlook when Chopin left Poland in November 1830. His in loneliness and depression in the months following his departure were in some ways a continuation of the acute emotional stress he had already suffered during his final year in Warsaw, when he came close to what we would describe nowadays as a nervous breakdown.
‘A rebirth of pianistic art’
Authors: Samson Jim
Published: November 2023

The chronology of Chopin’s early music is anything but well established. The broad outlines are clear, of course, but there remain many imponderables. For numerous works there is no surviving autograph, and even where autographs are extant they do not always yield an accurate date, despite the advantages of recent paper research. Nor is contextual evidence always available. Difficulties are especially acute in the works of the Warsaw period, but they persist even in the music of the Vienna and early Paris years. It will be worth scotching some of the more common misconceptions at the outset. It has already been noted that Brown’s attribution of Op. 10, Nos. 8-11 to the Warsaw period is unsupported by reliable evidence. Only the first four of the Etudes can be dated accurately. Early copies of Nos. 1 and 2 were signed and dated ‘2 November 1830’, just before Chopin left Warsaw for Vienna, while the autograph of No. 4 was signed and dated ‘Paris, 6 August, 1832’ and No. 3 ‘Paris, 25 August 1832’.
‘A new world for myself’
Authors: Samson Jim
Published: November 2023

When Chopin composed his Two Polonaises, Op. 26 he effectively created a new genre. In the early nineteenth century the polonaise, like the mazurka, already carried a nationalist charge in dramatic works by Polish composers (Stefani’s Cud mniemany was the exemplary work), but that charge was very much less potent in keyboard stylizations. There its energy was largely diffused by the general conformity of the post-classical keyboard style, and also, paradoxically, by the underlying cosmopolitanism of national dance pieces. Chopin himself, after all, composed three ecossaises, a bolero, and a tarantella without, one assumes, any intention to promote nationalist causes in Scotland, Spain, or Italy. His Warsaw-period polonaises accepted for the most part the conventions of the ‘brilliant’ concert or salon dance piece, and in general style they are heavily indebted to polonaises by non-Polish com¬ posers, above all Hummel and Weber.
Fight Against Illness (1823-1824)
Authors: McKay Elizabeth Norman
Published: November 2023

‘Pain sharpens the understanding and strengthens the mind.’ 1821 and 1822 were years of crisis in Schubert’s personal life; in the years 1823 and 1824 he had to come to terms with the deterioration of his health, both physical and mental, and specifically the destabilization of his position in society which resulted from syphilis. It was almost inevitable that, as a creative artist of great sensuality living in an artistic and intellectual climate in which the importance and the spiritual freedom of the individual were especially valued, he would find it necessary eventually to break free from the restrictive disciplines and morality in which he had been nurtured. Only then was he in a position to develop his independence and personal identity, to fulfil his artistic promise, to create his own musical language, style, and sounds and, through them, to express in music his genius. Before turning to a detailed look as Schubert’s life during 1823 and 1824, it is worth pausing to establish an overall picture of his health, his professional career, and his relationships with friends.
Henry Lawes
Authors: Spink Ian
Published: November 2023

Henry Lawes (1596-1662) has long been acknowledged as the most important and prolific English songwriter between the death of John Dowland in 1626 and the birth of Henry Purcell in 1659. He is celebrated as Milton's collaborator in Comus (1634). Although he wrote some church music, Lawess significance as a composer lies in his settings of many of the choicest lyrics by Cavalier poets such as Carew, Herrick, Suckling, and Waller-who, like Lawes himself, belonged to the brilliant court of Charles I. This book combines an account of his life with a study of his development as a songwriter during this fascinating historic period. Following the execution of the King in 1649, Lawes played an important part in establishing concerts in London during the 1650s, and was one of the composers of the first English opera, Davenant's The Siege of Rhodes (1656). At the Restoration he set Zadok the Priest for the coronation of Charles II, but died the following year. The last book on Lawes appeared in 1940, since when the importance of his songs has been increasingly recognized-thanks in part to Ian Spink's own previous study, English Song: Dowland to Purcell (1986), and his edition of Cavalier Songs: 1625-1660 for Musica Britannica.
Beginnings
Authors: Spink Ian
Published: November 2023

HENRY LAWES was born in 1596 and died in 1662. His place of birth was Dinton in Wiltshire, a village nine miles west of Salisbury, just beyond Wilton.1 His parents, Thomas and Lucris, were married there on 3 February 1594, and Henry was christened on 5 January 1596.2 ‘Lawes Cottage’, where he is supposed to have been born, still stands and is owned by the National Trust. Close to the church—about half a mile away—was the house where Henry Hyde lived, and where Edward, later Earl of Clarendon and Lord Chancellor of England, was born in 1609. At Wilton, Henry Herbert, second Earl of Pembroke, had his seat. Henry, indeed, might be an auspicious name.
Lawes and the Cavalier Poets
Authors: Spink Ian
Published: November 2023

IN the previous chapter Lawes’s songs were divided for the purpose of broad analysis into three basic types: (1) those in common time, (2) those in triple time, and (3) those beginning in common time but ending with a final couplet or stanza in triple. On the whole common time implied the declamatory style, whereas triple time invariably meant tuneful strophic settings often employing dance rhythms. A more subtle distinction must now be made between various types of common-time song. The first (1a) comprises those that are either tuneful or mildly declamatory, and strophic; that is, the same music serves for all stanzas. (These have sometimes been called ‘ballads’, and though the term is too ambiguous to be of much use, it seems appropriate to a song like Sir John Suckling’s ‘Out upon it, I have lov’d’.) The second (lb), typified by Robert Herrick’s ‘Whither are all her false oaths blown’, comprises those that are more highly declamatory and through-composed; what we may now regard as the ‘declamatory ayre’ proper.
The Civil War
Authors: Spink Ian
Published: November 2023

BY the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 Lawes had reached a peak. His settings of lyrics by Herrick, Carew, Waller, and other cavalier poets had seemingly achieved an ideal, one which the poets themselves acknowledged and fellow musicians accepted as a model. It would be wrong to say that from then on he was content to repeat himself—there was the matter of recitative and its application to opera to explore—but in other respects it was a period of consolidation, and even, to some extent, of retreat.
Arcangelo Corelli
Authors: Allsop Peter
Published: November 2023

The first full-length study for forty years, Arcangelo Corelli offers a much needed reassessment of the seminal composer’s life and works. His current historical perspective is still largely conditioned by the opinions of Burney and Hawkins in the late 18th century who saw him as the consolidator of past trends rather than an instigator--a view fully endorsed in the two biographies of the present century. Neither of these writers was truly in a position to make such judgements if only because neither was aware of the contsributions of the Roman School to which Corelli emphatically affirmed his allegiance. Extensive archival research over recent years now dispels much of the anecdote and hearsay accumulated over the centuries and makes possible a more balanced evaluation of Corelli’s true status in the development of the prime instrumental genres, accounting for his phenomenal success both during his lifetime and in the creation of musical canon in the decades after his death.
Rome: The Early Years
Authors: Allsop Peter
Published: November 2023

1675 was a propitious year for Roman musicians: Pope Clement X Altieri had declared it a Holy Year to be marked ,vith splendid festivities in the city’s main churches--much more to the Pope’s liking than the secular celebrations of carnivals and comedies of his predecessor. Among these events, between January to March, fourteen oratorios commissioned by a soci ety of Florentine gentlemen were perfonned at the Oratorio della Pieta of the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini. For Antonio Masini’s S. Eustachio, given on 3 February, a distin guished concertina of soloists had been selected from the best players of Rorne--Carlo Mannelli (violin), Leho Colista (lute), Bernardo Pasquini (keyboard), Gasparo Contarelli and Francesco Maria Benedettini (violone)-but in a humbler capacity among the violini del con certo grosso appears the simple entry ‘Il Bolognese’.
The Free Sonatas a 3 (1)
Authors: Allsop Peter
Published: November 2023

The particular distribution ofCorelli’s published works suggests a seemingly obvious chrono logical order of treatment by scoring and function, to which most commentators, past and present, have subscribed. Despite the accumulation of apocryphal works and the obvious fact that date of publication may bear little relationship to date of composition, this approach still recommends itself as the most practical, although it is not entirely without its drawbacks and pitfalls. Pincherle equated genre with scoring, grouping all a 3 works into a single category, despite the fact that in Opp. I and 3 an organ continuo is obligatory while for Opp. 2 and 4 no continuo instrument is required. Some degree of caution is also necessary in the custom ary functional distinction of these sonatas a 3 into sonate da chiesa (Opp. r and 3) and sonate da camera (Opp. 2 and 4), for while he recognized the latter category, the former was not a designation he ever employed, and it remains to be proven whether he did envisage a specific ‘da chiesa’ function for the odd-numbered opera.
Introduction
Authors: Palmer Fiona M
Published: November 2023

Within these pages it is Dragonetti’s English years (1794-1846) that are examined and interpreted. The wealth of primary material relating to this part of his life has never before been comprehensively researched and analysed. His impact on music-making in nineteenth-century England was considerable; his consummate mastery of a seemingly clumsy and limited instrument was a rev elation to English audiences, and became a fundamental aspect of musical life for nearly half a century. He was, of course, in good company. Like Paganini and Liszt, who irreversibly and publicly broke down technical barriers on their instruments by their unprecedented virtuosity, Dragonetti displayed diversity of expression and complexity of technique and so heightened expectations of his instrument.
The Ancient Concerts
Authors: Palmer Fiona M
Published: November 2023

While the Ancient and Philharmonic Concerts last, and are properly managed, music will be in no danger of sustaining any permanent injury from the caprices of fashion; although there will always be some to cry out, that Handel is gothic, and Haydn superannuated.

The Antient Concerts offered stability and moral propriety at a time when they feared that musical life was becoming corrupted with novelty and luxury. The concerts stood for a whole gamut of musical, moral, and artist tic principles; ... they institutionalised an ideology.
Provincial Engagements: Music Festivals
Authors: Palmer Fiona M
Published: November 2023

The third concert was decidedly the most attractive, the Senate House being crowded to excess soon after the doors were opened. It was with difficulty the performers could force their way into the orchestra, and in this dilemma an entrance was effected through a window at the upper end of the room, by which Madame Catalani, Madame Pasta, as well as the Bishop of Limerick, and several other persons of distinction, were admit ted. Some confusion prevailed among the band, the double basses of Dragonetti and Taylor being broken in removal from the church, and Lindley being in great consternation having left a concerto at Bath, which he meant to play here.

During the remaining months of the year, as summer turned to autumn and winter, Dragonetti took provincial engagements. Public music-making in major towns centred upon music festivals. Many sprang up, only to disappear very quickly; others, perhaps most notably the Three Choirs Festival, founded in r 7r 5, continue to flourish today.
F
Authors: Clinkscale Martha Novak , Watson John R
Published: November 2023

Fabian, J. (fl. c.1850—60). Piano manufacturer in London at 53 Upper Baker Street, Portman Square. (Parkinson/ VICT, 93) Fairchild,Joseph (ft. 1846—52). London maker listed at 30 Grafton Street, Fitzroy Square; in 1849, and at 200 High Holborn.
J
Authors: Clinkscale Martha Novak , Watson John R
Published: November 2023

Jackson, G. W. (fl. c.1845). Piano maker in Uttica, NY. See OLIVER, Charles, &G. W.Jackson. Jackson,Jamesjun. (fl. 1849—58). Partner ofWilliam Howe Geib in a New York dealership. No information has been discovered about Jackson’s origins. See GEIB in Clinkscale/MAKERS i. 118; and also Groce/NY, 60.
Keyboard Instruments in Eighteenth-Century Vienna
Authors: Maunder Richard
Published: November 2023

Although eighteenth-century Viennese keyboard music, especially by such composers as Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, is among the most popular ever written, there has been surprisingly little serious research into the instruments for which it was composed. Consequently myths and guesses abound, while accurate and reliable information is hard to come by. This book fills that gap. Based on evidence from primary source material, much of it previously undiscovered or neglected, Maunder traces the history and development of the various keyboard instruments available in Vienna throughout the eighteenth century—harpsichords, clavichords, and pianos—and their use by composers and performers. There are detailed descriptions of many surviving Viennese instruments, several of which have only recently come to light; contemporary newspaper advertisements for over 1200 keyboard instruments are reproduced, in the original German as well as in English translation; and an alphabetical list of eighteenth-century Viennese makers includes much newly-discovered biographical information as well as some previously unknown names.
Terminology
Authors: Maunder Richard
Published: November 2023

A Difficulty with documentary evidence such as newspaper advertise ments is the interpretation of eighteenth-century German terminology for the various keyboard instruments. Although some words, such as Clavicor, Spinet, and Fortepiano, are reasonably specific, others appear to be less so. In particular, the potential ambiguity of Fliigel, which on the face of it simply means ‘wing-shaped instrument’, has led to some misunderstanding. Despite the overwhelming weight of evidence that the term was used by eighteenth-century musicians only for the harpsichord (see below), it is sometimes suggested that it might also have included the similarly shaped fortepiano.1 And Clavier is notorious for its variety of not always consistent meanings. To add to the confusion, in modern German Klavier has come to mean ‘piano’, and Flugel ‘grand piano’.
Germany, 1685-1706
Authors: Burrows Donald
Published: November 2023

Handel was born on 23 February 1685 in Halle, a German city on the river Saale, a substantial tributary of the Elbe. The birthdate is not recorded on the entry in the register recording his baptism (as Georg Friedrich Handel) on 24 February at the Ober-Pfarr-Kirche zu Unser Lieben Frauen (the Rectory Church dedicated to Our Lady, which stands in Halle’s market-place), but it is attested by other biographical sources from Handel’s lifetime.
London: The First Decade, 1711-19
Authors: Burrows Donald
Published: November 2023

According to Mainwaring, Handel had secured his post at the court of Hanover in 1710 through the support of Johan Adolf Freiherr von Kielmansegge, the elector’s deputy Master of the Horse (and husband of the elector’s half-sister).
The ‘Academy’ Years, 1720-32
Authors: Burrows Donald
Published: November 2023

Thus Handel began a letter from London to his brother-in-law in Halle on 20 February 1719. The ‘unavoidable business’ on which Handel’s future depended was the formation of a new opera company at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, plans for which had been under discussion in London for some time. If Handel felt impatient with progress in February 1719, he probably did not foresee the long haul that lay ahead: the first performance from the new company did not take place until April 1720, and it was another six months after that before it was running with the intended cast of first-rate Italian stars.
The Music Of The 1740s
Authors: Burrows Donald
Published: November 2023

The first half of 1749 marked for Handel the culmination of a creative period that had seen oratorio-type masterworks follow each other with an almost predictable efficiency that bears exact comparison to his best bursts of operatic composition. It is difficult to make relative qualitative judgments between, for example, Samson, Semele, Belshazzar and Susanna -large-scale works with a close similarity of musical style, yet individual in their subject matter and in the roles they portray.
Compositional Context and Critical Reception
Authors: Cooper John Michael
Published: November 2023

‘Great is the power of steady misrepresentation’, wrote Charles Darwin in the sixth edition of The Origin of Species (the last edition published during his life-time). Although Darwin’s words were intended to help correct a number of distortions of the claims he had advanced with his theory of natural selection in 1859, they apply equally well to the Symphony in A Major of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Like Darwin’s theory advancing natural selection as the mechanism for evolutionary change, Mendelssohn’s masterpiece of 1833-4 continues even today to fall prey to a dense web of misrepresentations, misconceptions, and generalizations born long ago of ill-founded assumptions and fallacious stereotypes, and of the conspicuously ignoble politics of late nineteenth-century historiography.
Composition, Revision, and Early Performances
Authors: Cooper John Michael
Published: November 2023

The problems posed by the compositional history of the ‘Italian’ Symphony have proved baffling from the very beginning of the work’s posthumous reception. As discussed in the Preface to this book, the composer’s friend Julius Rietz simply chose the wrong score as the basis of the first edition, and that version of the work has until very recently been the sole version by which it has been known. Numerous other scholars, working with that version and an incomplete picture of the work’s genesis and sources, have viewed the symphony from a perspective that effectively shows what the work was at one point in its history, but ultimately reveals little about what it became or how it signified the compositional labours of its creator.
Rhythm
Authors: Bazzana Kevin
Published: November 2023

Gould’S Penchant For extreme tempos, apparent throughout his career, has received much comment and criticism. Though many of his tempos fell within the limits of common practice, he often exceeded those limits, sometimes strikingly, and he was willing to depart from a composer’s tempo directions as well as from documentation on historical performance practice. Tables 6.1 and 6.2 show some of his more extreme tempo choices, at both ends of the spectrum, and Table 6.3 shows that he often chose significantly different tempos in repeat performances of a piece.
Articulation and Phrasing
Authors: Bazzana Kevin
Published: November 2023

As A General rule, Gould preferred articulation that can best be described as non-legato or detache (I consider these terms interchangeable). His desire for clarity, so basic to his musical personality, extended to his rendering of phrases and even individual notes. Landowska once remarked that even her staccato was legato; Gould had the opposite priority: even his legato was detache.
Ornamentation
Authors: Bazzana Kevin
Published: November 2023

In The Matter of ornamentation, Gould differed from most performers in the degree to which he avoided generic solutions to individual problems. Adapting ornamentation to articulate a musical event, or to suit the general character of a work, he often permitted himself to depart significantly from conventional and historical practices. While his ornamentation could only occasionally be described as analytical in motivation, it did often contribute to the unity of an interpretation.
Lutos ławski’s Sound-World: A World of Contrasts
Authors: Rae Charles Bodman
Published: November 2023

Lutos ławski’s sound-world, that synthesis of the conceptual and the compositional, is essentially one of contrasts: contrasts of intervallic character and interval combinations; contrasts of harmonic density; contrasts between clarity and blurring; contrasts between the static and the motoric (both in the treatment of motifs and the rate of harmonic change); contrasts of gesture (the expansive against the intimate); as well as obvious contrasts of tension against relaxation. Most of these characteristics, of course, apply to his music in general, not only the pieces for orchestra; but it is particularly through the medium of the orchestra, in which he was able to paint on a large canvas, with a full palette of instrumental colours, that we hear the full range of the composer’s expression and experience the full potency of his ideas, including those of contrast.
Considerations of Symphonic Form in the Music of Lutos ł awski
Authors: Harley James
Published: November 2023

I am often included among the avant-garde and this gives me pleasure. But on reflection the pleasure is somewhat superficial.’ This remark by Witold Lutosławski may seem ofthand, but is, in fact, a remark ably apt description of his aesthetic orientation as a contemporary symphonic composer. At the same time, it serves as touchstone for a consideration of the elements-musical, personal, and historical-that have shaped Lutos ławski’s conception of form.
On the Types of Chain Connections in the Late Music of Lutos ł awski: Some Remarks on Chain 1 for Chamber Ensemble and Chain 3 for Orchestra
Authors: Nikolska Irina
Published: November 2023

Lutosławski worked on the rules of ‘chain’ form, as he himself called it, through out his creative life. By the term ‘chain’ he meant a basic formal principle which links segments of a work with each other. The titles of his three compositions: Chain 1 for chamber ensemble (1983), Chain, Dialogue for violin and orchestra (1984-5), and Chain3 for orchestra (1986) indicate the use of the chain technique, which consists of the overlapping of different musical layers so that they do not start or end at the same time.
Accidentals in Binchois’s Songs
Authors: Brothers Thomas
Published: November 2023

In the course of a survey of late medieval chansons, it seemed to me that there were good reasons to question the commonly held assumption that chromatic inflections were ‘self-evident’ —that is, that they were universally understood by composers, scribes, and singers to such a degree that they did not need to be notated.1 It seemed possible that, at least in some cases—some manuscripts, some pieces, some repertories, some composers, and, as will be the special focus of this study, some functions—notated chromatic inflections were to be taken literally, with no expectation that unnotated inflections would be supplied. The scant commentary from writers of the period offers little help in solving this problem of performance practice. There must be further ways, still unexplored, for making sense of the notated record. The present study explores a quantitative method for doing so, with evidence drawn from the notated record for Binchois’s songs.
Making a Career (1935-8)
Authors: Mccabe John
Published: November 2023

OVER the next few years, Rawsthorne concentrated on composing and trying to make a career for himself (he is reputed to have worked for a short while in a piano showroom, as John Field had done over a century earlier). Gordon Green commented that he ‘fulfilled many routine commissions, scoring other people’s music for this or that combination and gaining valuable experience thereby. In particular, he made arrangements for the Adolph Hallis Quintet, one of those ensembles favoured by the BBC at the time, playing, excellently, music that was both light and good.’
The Salzburg Concertos
Authors: Hutchings Arthur
Published: November 2023

The Salzburg trumpeter Schachtner, friend of the Mozart family, tells how Leopold Mozart examined some ink blobs made by his child, and was astonished at the ‘correct observance of rules’; Wolf gang was four years old and declared that he was writing a concerto for clavecin. This fact proves that he had grown up in a world wherein clavecin concertos were familiar, though the boy knew more of the concert world than of other fields of musical activity. The concerto ,vas the form par excellence for a fashionable concert; sonatas were home music in those days, and the composer who wished to shine in a public concert had to be a performer, so that in the concerto he fulfilled his public obligation of double virtuoso.
Concerto In D Minor, K. 466
Authors: Hutchings Arthur
Published: November 2023

This concerto was selected for examination in Chapter I, since no concerto by Mozart is better known; for many generations it has enjoyed this popularity. Leopold Mozart liked it so much that he tried to perform it with a circle of musical friends in Salzburg, and wrote to tell Wolfgang of his difficulties with the text. Young Beethoven’s fine cadenzas are now almost as sacrosanct as the main concerto, and as there are no original cadenzas available there seems no reason for substituting any other effort for Beethoven’s, unless one is a purist and plays a very short extemporization and a shake.
Concerto In C, K. 467
Authors: Hutchings Arthur
Published: November 2023

Letter of Leopold Mozart, 14 January 1786: ‘Indeed the new concerto is astonishingly difficult. But I very much doubt whether there are any mistakes, as the copyist has checked it. Several passages simply do not harmonise unless one hears all the instruments playing together.’ Since K. 467 was written four weeks after K. 466, there is no biographical material to add to that which concerns the former concerto.
Concerto In C, K. 503
Authors: Hutchings Arthur
Published: November 2023

Each concert season since Mozart’s removal to Vienna brought its concertos; K. 503 is the twelfth of the mature series. It is also a kind of summit among the fourteen, for though they show no decline in mastery, with the exceptional poor movement which, unfortunately, may crop up anywhere with Mozart, they are less ambitious than K. 503; but the chief reason for this view is that, after K. 503, con certos were no longer composed steadily for the winter concerts. The year 1786 had seen the birth of three concertos, as had its predecessor. From K. 503 to the ‘Coronation’ D major Concerto, written in a style which would show its ‘occasional’ purpose did we not know of it from external evidence, there is an interval of a year and a quarter, and from the D major to the last concerto, in B flat, the interval is of three years. Thus K. 503 marks the end of Mozart’s period of ‘stardom’ as Vienna’s performer-composer.
Concerto In B Flat, K. 595
Authors: Hutchings Arthur
Published: November 2023

This concerto is the first work whose completion dates from the year of its composer’s death; in 1791 it occupies a similar position to that of the D major Concerto in 1788. Mozart’s chief works during his last years are as follows: 1788. D major Concerto, the three great Symphonies, E flat, G minor, and C, waltzes and other dances for the imperial court to which he was now chamber musician, orchestrations of Handel’s oratorios for Van Swieten.
The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles
Authors: Raven James , Forster Antonia , Bending Stephen
Published: November 2023

This historical bibliography provides an entirely new foundation for the literary history of the late eighteenth century and the Romantic age. Offering a fresh assessment of the work of all novelists of the period, the two volumes address problems faced by generations of literary scholars and historians concerned with the development of the English novel. This first volume records full details of all known prose novels in English first published in the British Isles in the final three decades of the eighteenth century. They include many new discoveries, attributions to an extraordinary range of novelists and the first English translations of much Continental popular fiction. The bibliography firmly establishes publication details for many novels now apparently without any extant copies. A leading feature of the bibliography is its examination of a copy of every identified surviving novel. Research by James Raven, Antonia Forster, and many other international collaborators, has allowed a reconstruction of the full cast of British novelists of the period, their publishers and reviewers. A full transcription of titles and imprint lines is given, together with much other bibliographical and historical information, including contemporary reviews (with generous quotation), dedications, and pricing and printing details. Shelf-mark, microform and other library references assist readers to consult the surviving novels in modern library and research collections all over the world. In an introductory historical essay, James Raven considers the different themes embraced by the novel, profiles of popular authorship, translation, the economics and circumstances of novel production and design, and the scope of literary circulation and reception. By revisiting this history of the novel, identifying rare books now scattered across the world, and reconstructing the history of popular literature now lost, the volume challenges existing literary canons and refines our understanding of the range of imaginative writing and authorship in a critical period of English literature.
An Historical Bibliography of Prose Novels in English First Published in the British Isles 1800-1829
Authors: Garside Peter , öwerling Rainer Sch , Skelton-Foord Christopher , ünsche Karin W
Published: November 2023

London:Printed for the Authour,at the Minerva-Press,by William Lane,Leadenhall-Street,1800.[251p;II 269p,12mo,7s(Bent03).covery:CME 3-628-47869-3;ESTC t129873(B[ BL;NA CaAEU,MH-H).Notes.List of subcribers(8 pp.unn.)at beginning of vol. 1. including c.145 names.
Samuel Johnson: Dead Met Aphors And ‘Impending Death’
Authors: Ricks Christopher
Published: November 2023

It has itself become something of a clichê that Johnson’s best poetry finds its force in a renovation of cliché. The excellent criticism of T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavisl was developed by Donald Davie in Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952), which showed that the metaphorical life in the poems of Johnson is often a matter of invigorating dead or flat metaphor, of using clichês so that their pristine force is recreated or so that they are seen in a new perspective. In The Vanity of Human Wishes, the defeated Xerxes ‘gains’ the sea——and that is all he does gain, the clichê sardonically intimates. In London, ‘Greenwich smiles upon the silver Flood’, not simply because this is a pastoral moment of ‘transient calm’, but because silver grimly refuses to stay put as just a pastoral word—in London ‘smiles are sold’. Such a use of metaphor is a corollary of Johnson’s convictions about life and literature. ‘What is new is opposed, because most are unwilling to be taught; and what is known is rejected, because it is not sufficiently considered, that men more fre quently require to be reminded than informed’ (The Rambler, No. 2, 24 March 1750). If this begins by recognising the role of those who proclaim the new, its ‘tonclusion reveals that Johnson’s own heart was more in the latter duty, of ‘reminding’ men.
William Wordsworth 2: ‘A Sinking Inward Into Ourselves From Thought To Thought’
Authors: Ricks Christopher
Published: November 2023

‘He has no style.’ It would be a mistake simply to identify the nineteenth—century Wordsworth with Matthew Arnold’s Wordsworth, but Arnold did succeed in limning the poet with intense recognisability. Twentieth—century criticism has mostly been better at engaging with one half of Arnold’s Wordsworth than with the other. There has been a challenge to one aspect of Arnold’s subtle abnegation: ‘The Wordsworthians are apt to praise him for the wrong things, and to lay far too much stress upon what they call his philosophy.’ The academic study of English literature has since seen to it that there are even more Wordsworthians; the best of them have convincingly vindicated ‘what they call his philosophy’. But the other half of Ar nold’s Wordsworth has proved less amenable. ‘Wordsworth’s poetry, when he is at his best, is inevitable, as inevitable as Nature herself. It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but wrote his poem for him. He has no style.’
Thomas Lovell Beddoes: ‘A Dying Start’
Authors: Ricks Christopher
Published: November 2023

In 184—9 poison achieved what the razor had failed to achieve the year before. Thomas Lovell Beddoes succeeded in killing himself. Failure seemed to have become what Beddoes was best at. True, he had started out a success: he published his first book of poems, The Improvisatore, in 1821 when still a freshman at Oxford, and a year later The Brides’ Tragedy appeared to wide applause. But life withered. He published little else. His most passionately idiosyncratic enterprise, Death’s Jest—Book, which he had drafted by 1829, was never published during his life time, partly because the friends to whom he sent it paltered and doubted. Self—exiled to Germany, where he went to study medicine, Beddoes had neither the amateur fame of a poet nor the professional achievement of a scientist.
Geoffrey Hill 2: At-One-Ment
Authors: Ricks Christopher
Published: November 2023

The poems of Tenebrae (1978), like Geoffrey Hill’s version of Brand (1978), put up a profound resistance to a central tenet of Hill’s inaugural lecture, ‘Poetry as ‘‘Menace’’ and ‘‘ Atone-ment”‘ (also 1978).1 The poems resist the tenet, partly because it is the way of poems to resist even the best of tenets, and partly because this particular tenet does not hold firm. ‘Ideally’, said Hill, ‘my theme would be simple’; but then he allowed the reservations intimated by the conditional ‘would’ and the un conditioned ‘Ideally’ to sidle away: simply this: that the technical perfecting of a poem is an act of atonement, in the radical etymological sense—an act of atonement, a setting at one, a bringing into concord, a reconciling, a uniting in harmony; and that this act of atonement is described with beautiful finality by two modern poets: by W. B. Yeats when he writes in a letter of September 1936, to Dorothy Wellesley, that ‘a poem comes right with a click like a closing box’ and by T. S. Eliot in his essay of 1953, ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’:
Lies
Authors: Ricks Christopher
Published: November 2023

The epigraph for the 1975 conference of the Northeast Modern Language Association, on ‘Language, Literature, and Change,’ was this: In every culture, language and literature have served both to cause and to reflect economic, political, philosophical, social changes. The conference will explore the relationship of language and literature to cultural change. Such considerations are, among other things, anthropological in the interplay of the human condition and a cultural con dition or conditioning. Taking heart from the fact that Raymond Firth said that ‘One of the functions of anthropology is to ask questions about the obvious,’ I should like to ask some questions about a particular instance of the obvious: that lie in English means both to say something false while knowing it to be so, and to. rest or (expressive of bodily posture) to be in a prostrate or recumbent position. A pun, after all, is likely to be a compacting or a constellating of language and literature, of social and cultural circumstance.
The Poetics of Sensibility
Authors: Mcgann Jerome
Published: November 2023

Jerome McGann's exciting new work represents the most significant intervention in Romantic studies since his own The Romantic Ideology. It takes as its prime aim the reading of neglected poetry, principally by women, which qualifies as either poetry of sensibility or poetry of sentiment. It is certain to provoke discussion among anyone interested in the hundred years of poetry it considers. Writers discussed include: Ann Batten Cristall, Benardin, Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Gray, Francis Greville, Felicia Hemans, William Jones, Keats, Ossian, Mary Robinson, Schiller, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Ann Yearsley.
Composite Editions Aal [1948]
Authors: Kirkpatrick B J
Published: November 2023

p. [vi] copyright note, reservation rights, printer’s note; pp. [vii-ix numbered v-vii] Contents; p. [x] blank; p. [xi] dedication; p. [xii] blank; p. [xiii] acknowledgments; p. [xiv] blank; p. [xv] fly-title; p. [xvi] blank; pp. (17-65 numbered] 11-59 text; p. (66] blank; pp. [67-91 numbered] 61-85 text; p.
Contributions To Periodicals And Newspapers
Authors: Kirkpatrick B J
Published: November 2023

Review OF Next-Door Neighbours, by W. Pett Ridge.Guardian, 4 January 1905, 36. Unsigned. Reprinted in: The Essays, Vol. 1, [1986].
Introduction: Last Things First
Authors: Stevenson Randall
Published: November 2023

‘1960–2000: The Last of England?’ Surely England is more durable than that title suggests? It certainly still seemed so, twenty years before this period began, even at the height of the Second World War. ‘Worlds may change and go awry’, Ross Parker and Hughie Charles warned in their popular wartime song, only to reaffirm that ‘there’ll always be an England’. Such confidence is not necessarily contradicted in this volume of the Oxford English Literary History— not entirely, at any rate. ‘The Last of England’ of its title is in one way less doom-laden than simply descriptive, referring to the last or most recently produced literature in England: the last phase of the millennium-long tradition the History describes. Yet no study of the later twentieth century, doom-laden or not, could overlook how far sureties failed, even in the brief gap between the end of the war and 1960.
Counter-movements and Modernist Memories: 1960 to the 1980s
Authors: Stevenson Randall
Published: November 2023

Indifferent to the revival of the 1960s, Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s introduction to The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982) was scarcely readier to acknowledge— and eventually dismissed—other recent directions contrary to the Movement. Some of these had been highlighted twenty years earlier—almost before they were fully apparent in English poetry—in A. L. Alvarez’s 1962 debate with Donald Davie, described at the start of Chapter 5.