bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Obbligato Instruments
Authors: Kurtzman Jeffrey
Published: November 2023

In three compositions of the 1610 Vespers, Domine ad adjuvandum, the Sonata sopra Sancta Maria, and the Magnificat a 7, Monteverdi calls for specific obbligato instruments, while in two others, Dixit Dominus and Ave maris stella, notated instrumental parts are provided for ritornellos without any indication of what instruments might be used.
Instrumental Doubling and Substitution for Vocal Parts
Authors: Kurtzman Jeffrey
Published: November 2023

The practice of doubling voices with instruments and/or using instruments to substitute for voices in both secular and sacred music was widespread and well established in Italy long before the turn of the seventeenth century. Although the evidence is more ubiquitous for masses and motets than it is for psalmody in the sixteenth century, there is also firm evidence for instrumental doubling in vesper psalms. The Venetian theorist Nicola Vicentino had declared as early as 1555 that to make a large sound (intonatione) in spacious churches and other large places, ‘one can compose masses, psalms, and dialogues and other things to play with various instruments, mixed with voices’. The title-page of Ippolito Camatero’s Salmi corista a otto voci of 1573 describes the contents as ‘convenient for the voices, accompanied as well with every sort of musical instrument’.
Three Theatrical Songs (1946) Milton Babbitt (born 1916)
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

These delightfully simple and original show songs are a real pleasure to sing. They are especially welcome from this distinguished composer whose impressive vocal output is otherwise too difficult to be included in this book (but is to be warmly recommended to singers of outstanding musicianship). As Babbitt says in the introductory note, the songs come from an entirely different side of his musical life and represent his prodigious knowledge, love and understanding of the great American show-song tradition, symbolised by such figures as Rodgers, Kern, Porter, Berlin and Gershwin.
Chamber Music Book I (1981) Barry Seaman (horn 1946) Text by James Joyce
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

Barry Seaman belongs to the group of young composers who, mindful of the fact that much contemporary music falls outside the scope of the layman, aim to rectify this by quite deliberately writing music that is essentially simple, modest in its demands and capable of being sung and appreciated by keen amateurs.
One and All (I975) Karl Aage Rasmussen (born I947) Text by Paul Borum
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

The beautiful understatement of Rasmussen’s elegant style has a charm all its own. Any voice will sing the cycle with comfort, but the lightness of touch found in the higher voices (soprano and tenor) is perhaps most suitable for the purity and clarity of line and detail that is so important here. As is typical of this composer, there are elements of pastiche in the music.
May Rain (1941) Lou Harrison (born 1917) Text by Elsa Gidlow
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

This enchanting piece by one of the senior figures of American music forms an ideal introduction for a newcomer to a more experimental idiom without posing any musical problems. The piano is prepared by inserting a screw between two of the three strings attached to each of six specified pitches to produce ‘harmonics and a gong-like resonance’.
Two Songs (1977) Peter Racine Fricker (1920-90) Text by T. E. Hulme
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

The songs show the expertise that is typical of this fine and unjustly neglected composer. No singer should find them either musically or technically difficult and the piano part is equally undemanding. The vocal writing is smooth and shows Pricker’s sensitivity to timbre. The musical idiom is fairly traditional with neo-classical elements. With great economy of means, the songs come across strongly and clearly and are beautifully integrated. The steady movement of the first, shorter song is contrasted with a more extended second song which is mainly in waltz rhythm with fluctuating tempos. The songs are an ideal choice for a comparative beginner.
A Suite o’ Bairnsangs (I953) Thea Musgrave (horn I928) Text by Maurice Lindsay
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

These witty and vivacious settings of Scottish nursery rhymes are a delightful introduction to the work of this fine composer. The poems are aptly characterised in music of a most approachable style with rhythmic twists in an unmistakably Scottish folk tradition.
The Exiled King (1984) Brian Dennis (born I 94I) Text by Li Yin (937-978) Translated by Brian Dennis
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

Brian Dennis, a singer-composer, has written a large body of highly original vocal music and it exhibits his special understanding of the medium. Progressing through several styles which reflect his constant awareness of the changing face of contemporary music, he has, over the past Io years, forged an appealing and most accessible personal idiom, well suited to the economical but emotionally charged language of the ancient Chinese texts with which he first began working in the late I96os.
Anerca (1966) Harry Freedman (born 1922) Translation by Knud Rasmussen
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

These songs, by a senior Canadian composer, are fine examples of the best vocal writing of the 1960s. Although the lines are often more luxuriant than those in Webern’s music they do show a similar delicacy of touch and a natural unforced shapeliness. The singer will find them delightfully easy and most flattering.
Something Rich and Strange (1976) Trevor Hold (born 1939) Text by William Shakespeare
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

Any newcomer to contemporary music, however inexperienced, will find this delectable cycle an excellent introduction to the field. Most audiences will probably know the Shakespeare texts, and the economy and suitability of the settings inspire confidence from the outset. The moods of the texts are expertly caught in the music, and the simplest vocal devices are used with skill and unfailing accuracy. The strong resonances of the middle song are admirably framed by the two contrasting faster ones. Trevor Hold writes extremely well for the voice, as can be seen from his many other vocal works, all of which are worthy of much greater prominence in the repertory.
I Hate Music! (1943) Leonard Bernstein (1918-90) Text by Leonard Bernstein
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

The dazzling gifts and versatility of Leonard Bernstein are demonstrated here in this captivating and lighthearted cycle of highly amusing and original songs. It is a perfect party piece for a young singer and her pianist, and great fun for the audience too. A youthful timbre is appropriate, but the composer states quite firmly in his introductory note that the temptation to adopt a falsely childlike manner, or to become arch is to be rigidly resisted.
Extravaganzas (I963-9) Peter Dickinson (born I 934) Text by Gregory Corso
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

This cycle of brief songs to evocative, disturbing and ironically humorous texts by the American Beat poet Gregory Corso makes a fine contribution to the recital repertory. Highly entertaining and full of variety, the songs are especially well tailored to the needs of the singer.
Escape at Bedtime (1983) Corey Field (born 1956) Text by Robert Louis Stevenson
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

This young American composer’s exqms1te setting of Stevenson’s enchanting poem captures perfectly the glistening radiance of the night sky depicted in the text. It is especially well suited to a young and naturally high, bright-voiced singer using a light and well-open head voice. Considerable technical control and poise are needed to maintain the almost unbroken series of shimmering legato lines which cover a wide range and arch gently within the dynamics, which are never louder than piano.
Four Songs (I970) Robert Heppener (born I 925) Text by Ezra Pound
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

This set of songs by the distinguished Dutch composer, Robert Heppener, allows a really accomplished singer to display virtuosity and a versatile technique. The vocal line is appealingly wide ranging, mellifluous and richly expressive; in some places it is quite physically demanding. Sprechstimme is used, together with other spoken devices, including whispering. The four songs are agreeably contrasted to each other.
Evening Land (I98I) Anthony Payne (born I936) Text by W. H. Auden
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

This song cycle has an exceptionally strong and immediate appeal to the widest possible variety of listener. Despite its length, it never fails to hold the attention, largely because the words are set so that they can be heard with complete clarity and never fail to make their full impact. The audience can thus easily follow the poet’s spiritual journey of discovery as it unfolds through a succession of nine songs which are joined together in a single span.
Poems of Tagore I (1970) Naresh Sohal (born 1939) Text by Rabindranath Tagore
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

The fascinating originality of this Indian composer’s work gives his short scena strong and immediate appeal. The vocal writing inevitably shows the influence of an Eastern tradition and upbringing. The full vibrato of Western singing is inappropriate here and is not to the composer’s personal taste, as I know from working with him.
The Turning Wheel op. 95 (1979) Johnjouhert (born 1927) Text by Ruth Dallas
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

Joubert’s substantial and moving cycle alternates between mellifluously comfortable vocal writing and passages of forceful energy. The latter are somewhat taxing for the soprano voice because of the number of words that are sung loud at the top of the stave.
Beata l’alma (1966) David Blake (born 1936) Text by Herbert Read
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

Beata l’alma is an important addition to the vocal repertory and it deserves to be heard more often. It makes considerable demands on the singer and the piano part is also a tour de force (the compo,ser is an excellent player). Some very high passages contain awkward strings of syllables and they may be more easily and smoothly negotiated by a tenor. Diction could certainly be a problem at first. A good deal of preliminary work is needed for the piece to fall naturally into place, but the effort is well rewarded. Many special, expressive effects and changes of vocal timbre have to be mastered with patience, and the practice sessions should not be too lengthy because of the risk of tiring the voice. The work is through-composed in one long span. A piano solo divides the two poems of the text, and there are several sub sections where the music varies greatly in character.
i am a little church (I976) Malcolm Singer (horn I 953) Text by e. e. cummings
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

The high grading of this piece may seem surprising at first glance, but to perform such harmonically static music as this requires the highest skill. There is a real danger of the singer’s throat seizing up through tension caused by having to repeat notes at a medium to high tessitura. (E is a particularly difncult note in this respect.) Vocal ease is not per haps the composer’s top priority in this ingenious and delightful piece, but it is however fun to work out and audiences will be enchanted by it.
Enitharmon (1973, revised 1984/5) Gwyn Pritchard (born 194 8) Text by William Blake
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

Enitharmon is an extremely appealing and sensitive example of a style of vocal writing which was pioneered in the 1960s by Berio and others. Proportional notation is employed and the composer’s guidelines in the front of the score give dear answers to most of the questions that might arise from a first perusal of the music. Close study of this introductory page is essential and it ought to prove reassuring to anyone unacquainted with such notational methods and symbols.
Howard Mayer Brown (1930-1993)
Authors: Haar James
Published: November 2023

At almost every scholarly conference I have attended I can re all saying, or hearing others say, ‘has Howard arrived yet?’. And sooner or later he usually did show up, providing us a kind of signal that it was all right to go ahead. These are just the conferences I went to; there have been many others I didn’t attend but Howard did, and whether he read a paper or not his presence was a sort of guarantee, both that the conference would be all right and that everyone would have a good time. His combination of seriousness of purpose with an inimitable wit, his cosmopolitan yet deeply American per sonality, somehow set the right tone for us all.
Josquin in Rome: Some Evidence from the Masses
Authors: Haar James
Published: November 2023

IT would be gratifying to be able to announce that I have new documentation concerning Josquin des Prez’s service in the papal chapel, a period thought to extend from June 1489 until some time in 1495 or perhaps longer, with some internal gaps.1 Unfortunately I do not. My purpose here is more indirect and more modest; I wish to suggest that some of Josquin’s masses were known in Rome before their printing by Ottaviano de’ Petrucci, and that regardless of their date of copying in Roman manuscripts they were known in versions differing from Petrucci’s sources, in a few instances versions that may lay claim to being specifically Roman and thus possibly close to the composer himself.
Palestrina at Work
Authors: Owens Jessie Ann
Published: November 2023

IT is surprising, given Palestrina’s prominence in his own time as well as his place in history, that little attention has been paid to the question of how he composed. The only scholar to have considered this issue at any length was Raffaele Casimiri, who discussed some of the revisions in Rome, San Giovanni in Laterano, Archivio musicale lateranense, Cadice 59, a manu script largely in Palestrina’s hand.1 While Casimiri’s study continues to be use ful, in part because of the access it offers to the manuscript,2 the question of Palestrina’s working methods deserves further consideration. There is additional evidence not considered by Casimiri: the Mantuan correspondence con cerning Palestrina’s Santa Barbara masses as well as three other autograph manuscripts.
Supplying the Market
Authors: Woodfield Ian
Published: November 2023

By the 1780s, supplying Anglo-Indians with music and instruments had become a lucrative business. London publishers and manufacturers recognized the growing value of this market, and special deals for retailers in India were not uncommon. It was easy enough to arrange for the export of small instruments, such as the flute and violin, but keyboard instruments, because of their size and delicacy, posed particular problems. Harpsichords and pianos could be smashed during storms at sea, ruined by the sea air, or damaged during disembarkation. The next stage in the journey was just as hazardous, often involving a voyage up the Ganges. If an instrument survived all this, the Indian climate could still wreck it overnight, as the intense heat and humidity began to affect the soundboard. Armies of termites, which dispatched most of the organs installed in Indian churches, could only rarely have had the chance to get to work on a harpsichord or pianoforte in pristine condition. Yet, although keyboard instruments were frequently advertised as possessing features suiting them to the climate of India, most of the causes of failure were beyond the control of the manufacturer, and firms could thus sell in this market without fear of reproach.
Professional Musicians in India
Authors: Woodfield Ian
Published: November 2023

In the early seventeenth century, the first English factories in India had access to a regular supply of visiting professional musicians on shore leave from East India Company ships. Once this source began to dwindle, it became necessary to consider whether musicians should be employed permanently in India. By the early eighteenth century, the Governor of Madras had started to maintain a regular band of musicians. The nature of this ensemble is not certain, but it seems likely that it was a string band. From the mid-century, there are periodic references to groups of fiddlers in the service of the leading political personalities. Before the Battle of Plassey, Clive sent his players to Orme in Madras, who acknowledged their safe arrival: ‘I have received your consignment of Fiddlers. I pay them. They get victualls with the Governor ‘s band. The origins of the string band in Calcutta are not known, but, by the time of the occupation of the city in 1756, there were six musicians. A list of inhabitants who bore arms at the siege of the city on 1 July includes: ‘Fidlers: Ling, Tuball, Hilmbrat, Janniko, Heneriko, John. Of these, one (Janniko) is identified as having been killed, another (Lyng) as having been in the group which escaped to the ships. A third (John) was described ten years later as having served seven governors of Bengal.
The Encounter with Indian Music
Authors: Woodfield Ian
Published: November 2023

The background to the intense fashion for Indian songs and instruments that swept through Anglo-Indian society in the 1780s lies in the expansion of the East India Company ‘s interests into the central and northern provinces of lndia. It is noteworthy that although Indian tunes were performed and published in Calcutta, they were rarely collected there. Calcutta was perceived as what it was—an English creation. To experience truly ‘authentic ‘ Indian culture, it was widely recognized that a journey inland would be necessary, and an ideal location existed—the kingdom of Oudh. A voyage of two or three months up the Ganges, at the leisurely tourist rate of progress, would bring the visitor to the historic cities of Benares and Luck now, the Company’s most important inland stations. The strategic importance of the kingdom of Oudh grew even as the Mughal Empire waned. At first, the Company regarded Oudh as a valuable buffer state, which offered protection to its possessions in Bengal from the potentially serious threat posed by the Marathas. A delicate balance had to be maintained. Oudh needed to be strong enough to hold up the advance of an aggressor, yet not so strong as to pose a threat itself to the Company in Bengal. One solution was to maintain troops in the region, which the Company began to do during the reign of Shuja-ud-Daulah. His successor Asuf-ud-Daulah was a weaker ruler, who came to be regarded by the English as a libertine with no aptitude for serious government. Company officials thus began to assume a much more active role in ordering the affairs of state. The maintenance of a public show of good relations was now regarded as a top priority, and social intercourse with the Indian nabob and his chief ministers became an important symbol of policy.
The Return to England
Authors: Woodfield Ian
Published: November 2023

Notwithstanding the practical obstacles to keyboard-playing in India, Margaret Fowke stuck to her objective of becoming a ‘finished ‘ pianist. The true level of her accomplishment by the time of her return to England is difficult to assess. Her reputation in Calcutta was certainly good, but standards of performance in India generally were low. Her family ‘s assessments are of course inadmissible as evidence of any actual level of attainment, but they are revealing of attitudes towards the musicianship of a young woman. Joseph ‘s appraisal of his daughter ‘s progress by the time that she was about to return to England was at least straightforward:
The Orchestra in Italy
Authors: Spitzer John , Zaslaw Neal
Published: November 2023

By the time of Corelli’s death in 1713 many Italian instrumental ensembles had taken on attributes of an orchestra. They were based on violin-family instruments; they used several players on each part; they played as unified ensembles. A distinctive repertory of music was beginning to emerge for such ensembles-concertos, sinfonie, and concerted sacred music-and instrumental ensembles were beginning to assume their own identities, distinct from singers and other musical personnel. Corelli’s ensembles in Rome had been pioneers and leaders in these developments, but they were not alone. Ensembles with some or all of these characteristics could be found in Bologna, Turin, Venice, and several other Italian cities.
The Orchestra in England
Authors: Spitzer John , Zaslaw Neal
Published: November 2023

Theorchestra in England, as elsewhere in Europe, arose in the second half of the seven teenth century in the context of a royal court. But in England the orchestra was far less a creature of the court and of aristocratic culture than it was in Italy, France, or Germany. The English court and its culture were decisively interrupted by the Puritan revolution and the Commonwealth. When the King returned and the court resumed in 1660, he was constrained by the continuing divisions between Catholic and Protestant, Whig and Tory, City and Court, and by the continuing vigilance that Parliament exercised over the budget. King Charles II, like his mentor and financial backer, Louis XIV, had Twenty-Four Violins, but they played in the theaters and at public concerts as well as at court.
Un Embarquement pour Cyth ère
Authors: Tunley David
Published: November 2023

The popularity of the French cantata has sometimes been attributed to the idea that it was a kind of miniature opera. While this description may be true of the later Italian form, it is doubtful if it accurately fits the French one. When Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote ‘Cantatas nowadays are veritable dramatic works involving several actors, and differing from opera only in that the latter are performed in the theatre while cantatas are performed at concerts’ , he was, in fact, describing the contemporary Italian scene. Neither his words nor the description ‘opera in miniature’ are really relevant to the eighteenth-century French cantata..
Henry Purcell: Towards a Tercentenary
Authors: Kenyon Nicholas
Published: November 2023

We all pay lip service to Henry Purcell, but what do we really know of himã The words are those of Ralph Vaughan Williams, in the Foreword to Eight Concerts of Henry Purcell’s Music, given during the Festival of Britain in 195 1. More than forty years on, are we much the wiserã We know little more of Purcell’s life now than we did then, in spite of strenuous researches. His personality is, save for a few enigmatic clues, a shadowy, elusive thing onto which we can project almost anything we choose. In our understanding of Purcell’s music and its manner of performance, we may claim some signal advances, but who is to say whether they have brought us closer to the composer or merely closer to the taste of our own times in dealing with his musicã Many composers have been celebrated with conferences during their anniversary years, and the idea of those organizing ‘Performing the Music of Henry Purcell’ to hold it in advance of the tercentenary was an excellent one for it has helped to set the agenda for 1995 in the broadest possible terms. Performance and scholarship are as much of a ‘blest pair of sirens’ as words and music, and their imperatives frequently pull in different directions. But this conference showed players and directors and dancers and scholars all pulling together to establish the most fruitful lines of enquiry for the future. If the Purcell tercentenary achieves nothing else, this blueprint for future research and development will have been set. There is certainly more to be discovered (where is the elusive record of Purcell’s birthã!), and what we think we know already would benefit from further analysis. Many stimulating arguments of recent years, notably that over the dating of Dido and Aeneas chronicled in the pages of Early Music, depend on a heady mixture of factual hypothesis and stylistic analysis, which require further exploration.
Mozart’s Personality and Creativity
Authors: Steptoe Andrew
Published: November 2023

WHAT sort of person was Mozart? An extraordinary range of views has been put forward over the last two centuries. Some have regarded Mozart as a feckless, immature ‘natural’, a child of nature and almost an idiot savant, while others have emphasized his sober dedication to the Enlightenment. The Romantic portrait of a divinely inspired genius, unrecognized in his time but composing for posterity, has given way to an emphasis on his pragmatic craftsmanship; the fact, reiterated constantly through the bicentennial year, that Mozart wrote music only for specific purposes.
Prospects for a Theory-based Analysis of the Instrumental Music
Authors: Agawu Kofi
Published: November 2023

DOES Mozart analysis exist? In an assessment of recent Mozwt literature on the operas published a year before the bicentenary, James Webster made passing reference to ‘literally thousands of published analyses of Mozart’s instrumental music’.1 Those who might be inclined to doubt the accuracy of that claim may be puzzled further by an apparent omission from another discussion of the Mozart literature published during the same year in the authoritative Mozart Compendium. There, Alec Hyatt King surveys ‘analytical and critical studies’ without mentioning Heinrich Schenker, Felix Salzer, Leonard B.
Beaumarchais, Paisiello and the Genesis of Così fan tutte
Authors: Brown Bruce Alan
Published: November 2023

OUR only first-hand information on the conception of Cost fan tutte is a letter of rather dubious authenticity from Mozart, inserted in the Extract from the Life of Lorenzo da Ponte, in which the composer requests a new libretto from his collaborator specifically on account of the success in Prague of Don Giovanni.1 It is far more likely that Mozart and Da Ponte’s last opera was born out of competition with pieces written expressly for the Viennese operatic troupe, their own included.2 Indeed, they advertised the connection to Le nozze di Figaro in the very title Cost fan tutte, and in the Presto section of the overture, where one hears the same neighbour-note phrase to which Basilio had sung these words in the earlier opera.
Recall and Reflexivity in Così fan tutte
Authors: Clark Caryl
Published: November 2023

WITH these words Ferrando and Guglielmo open the stage action of Cosifan tutte. Their quatrains are as rich in character definition as they are in presuppositional strategy. They pique our curiosity by placing us in medias res; prior conversation in the Neapolitan cafe with the still (publicly) silent Don Alfonso has prompted these defensive statements. Of what Dorabella is incapable we are not tmmediately sure; only by retrospectively interpreting Guglielmo’s more revelatory assertion about Fiordiligi are we able to construe that both women are suspects for betrayal.
From Caf’Conç;’ to Music-Hall
Authors: Whiting Steven Moore
Published: November 2023

The Folies-Bergére, founded in May 1869, became the first Parisian music-hall avant la lettre when Leon Sari assumed the directorship in 1872 and began to offer circus attractions and ballets after the model of the Alhambra in London. In 1886 the new owners of the Folies, the Allemand family, inaugurated what would become the distinguishing feature of Parisian music-hall entertainment, the revue a grand spectacle.
Waltz, Cakewalk, Theatre Song
Authors: Whiting Steven Moore
Published: November 2023

In BN 9600, just after the accompaniment to Hyspa’s ‘Les Elephants’, one finds a symbolic page: at the top, an unbarred string of chords, most of them semibreves and breves, evidently a practice run at the ‘Verset la’ique & somptueux’ (5 August 1900); at the bottom, a waltz melody (see Ex. IO.1). Both are in red ink, as if Satie perceived a cardinal significance in the juxtaposition of the pompously ecclesiastical with the overtly popular, of an old manner with a new one. Such were the stylistic extremes between which Satie was choosing in the summer of 1900. On the next few pages, he pursued his uneasy com promise, The Dreamy Fish.
The Composer as Playwright
Authors: Whiting Steven Moore
Published: November 2023

In the milieu of the fin-de-siécle cabaret, the arts mingled as freely as the artists themselves did. Several of Satie’s musician friends at the Chat Noir-Albert Tinchant, Leopold Dauphin, Georges Fragerolle-were also poets. The artists George Auriol and Jules Depaquit were also humorists whose short stories vied with those of Allais for zaniness.
The Writer’s Position
Authors: Dunsby Jonathan
Published: November 2023

Here I put forward basic ideas about what the musician is probably doing. ‘Probably’ indicates that this is an earthy outset, not a deliberately philosophical one. In my experience many people come to music without having had the opportunity or encouragement to ‘think through’ what their engagement with this art may mean. Perhaps for the listener this is of no great moment, since life is too short to reflect on sheer enjoyment, earplugs or no earplugs (I shall return to this). Any technical entanglement with music, however, all the way from getting a sense of what ‘tonic’ might mean to mastering a Paganini Caprice on the violin, brings an inevitable pondering. Musicians think hard. Whether ‘think’ is quite the right word is debatable. We might prefer to say that they ponder on what they do as musicians, ‘ruminate’ and so on. The important point is that they do not usually work in some sort of unreflecting musical trance.
Brass instruments
Authors: Campbell Murray , Greated Clive
Published: November 2023

One of the most striking visual features of a symphony orchestra is the array of polished golden bells and glittering tubing which characterises the brass section: it is clear why the section is so named. In a jazz big band, trumpets and trombones are joined by a phalanx of saxophones of equal metallic splendour; yet the saxophone is technically not a ‘brass’ instrument, but a ‘woodwind’. In fact, what distinguishes the brass and wood wind families is not the material of contruction, but the method of sound generation.
The human voice
Authors: Campbell Murray , Greated Clive
Published: November 2023

Singing is the most natural and commonplace of all musical activities. Yet in many ways it is also the most remarkable. A professional singer is required not only to display the finest degree of pitch control, a wide range of tone colours and a volume sufficient to dominate a symphony orchestra, but also to render intelligible the words of the text being sung. In order to understand how singers cope with these sometimes conflicting demands, scientists have conducted many experiments using both professional and amateur performers. In particular, studies carried out at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm by Johan Sundberg over the last fifteen years have contributed greatly to our understanding of the singing process. Although many aspects of this complex subject remain to be explored, it is now possible to provide an acoustical foundation for some of the principles of traditional voice training.
Electronic instruments
Authors: Campbell Murray , Greated Clive
Published: November 2023

There are two distinct ways in which electronics are used in the production of musical sounds (Ernst 1977; Crowhurst 1975). In the first of these the electronic circuits are used simply to amplify the signal from some form of pick-up or microphone which is placed on or near an instrument. In this case the musical tones are generated by a vibrating mechanical system or air mass rather than by electronic circuits. We shall deal with arrangements of this type only very briefly. In the second way, electronic circuits are used to generate and shape the waveforms themselves before they are passed to a power amplifier and ultimately to loudspeakers. These are the true electronic instruments and what we shall be primarily concerned with in this chapter.
Introduction
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

Soon after the outbreak of the First World War, Ernest Newman wrote: ‘How, we musicians may ask, can we contemplate without alarm and regret a possible set-back to the culture that, be its faults what they may, has given us Wagner and Brahms and Strauss and Hugo Wolf?
Béla Bartók
Authors: Whittall Arnold
Published: November 2023

Béla Bartók (1881-1945) completed his Second String Quartet in October 1917, and Halsey Stevens rightly says that ‘the whole direction of Bartók’s later writing might be deduced from this one work’.’ Then in his thirty-seventh year, Bartók had gradually developed a personal style from two principal sources: other composers, most notably Liszt, Strauss and Debussy; and folk music, which played a vital part in his life from 1905 onwards. Of all his earlier works it was probably the one-act opera, Bluebeard’s Castle (1911), which marked the most decisive stage in the establishment of this style, which, for all its various impressionistic, expressionistic and nationalistic components, clearly involved a reinforcement of tonality at precisely the time when Schoen berg was confirming his abandonment of it, and even Stravinsky (in The King of the Stars) seemed to be bracing himself to follow suit.
Stravinsky and Les Noces
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

Stravinsky’s life span covered a quite unprecedented period of change and upheaval. So our first duty, always, is to try to imagine what it was like to grow up in Czarist Russia before 1900—or rather, because that is more important here, what it meant to be thirty years old, a composer in Paris, in 1912. Secondly, when we come to consider a work like Les Noces, we must first remember that it is dedicated to Diaghilev: and it simply isn’t possible to understand how Les Noces came to be written at all without some account of that extraordinary man: how he revolutionized ballet and the musical theatre, and how he set the young Stravinsky on a royal road.
Purcell
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

Holst and Vaughan Williams, and other composers of their generation, were very drawn towards folk-song and the music of the Elizabethans. But it was my generation, including, of course, Britten, that found a new source of inspiration and a fresh example in Purcell. We were not taught Purcell in the Consetvatoire: we discovered him independently for ourselves. When I went to study at the Royal College of Music in London in the early Twenties, Purcell’s music was much less played than it is these days. It seems to me incomprehensible now that his work was not even recommended in composition lessons as a basic study for the setting of English. I may have been unlucky, but I think the omission was general. However, when I was 19, I began to conduct small amateur choirs with the object of studying in action, as it were, the English madrigal school—a repertory equally neglected in my Royal College training. Thus, when much later I found out about Purcell, I already had a good ear for the setting of English by his predecessors. Byrd, Tallis, Gibbons, Dowland, were no longer names in a history book, but composers of living music. Through their works, these composers were as alive to me as their great contemporaries Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, and Sidney.
Britten
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

I first met Benjamin Britten during the war, when I was musical director at Morley College. We wanted a tenor soloist for the Purcell verse anthem ‘My beloved spake’. Walter Bergmann, who was then chorus master at Morley, suggested Peter Pears, recently returned from America. When Pears came to rehearsal, Britten came with him. I can recall the occasion very clearly. I had in fact seen Britten before the war at the first public performance of A & J was Bom at a Lemare concert in the Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill.1 I had no intuition then that the slim figure walking down the gangway to take his bow before the public would become so decisive and beloved a personality in my life. But I have an unusually vivid mental picture of that moment.
Hindemith and Ludus Tonalis
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

Hindemith’s Iudus tonalis was one of his most substantial compositions of the early 1940s. Written for piano solo, it comprised a set of twelve fugues, with eleven linking interludes and a postlude which are mirror images of each other. (If you turn the last three pages of the printed copy upside down, imagining the clef signs and accidentals the right way up and in their accustomed places, then they would read as the first three pages.) On the title-page, Hindemith has given it the following subtitle: Studies in Counterpoint, Tanal Organisation and Aano Playing.
Shostakovich
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

Shostakovich’s Testimo was addressed to his countrymen, not the West—which is Shostakovich’s name for Europe and America. He was a Slavophile, not a Westerner. He disliked the West intensely, and he seems concerned in this book to make certain truths known to a future generation of Soviet com posers. In order to do this, he felt that he must send his manuscript illegally to the West, so that after his death—since the manuscript, if discovered in Russia, might have been destroyed—it could be ‘returned’ for a kind of ‘pub lication’. The mechanism is that the Russian version of the manuscript would be beamed back to Russia by radio and there picked up and transcribed by devoted listeners who type it on to samizdat. It’s a method which in principle has been used in Russia since Tolstoy. It was even for security purposes used by Krushchev.
T. S. Eliot and A Child Of Our Time
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

It was quite by accident that I came into contact with T. S. Eliot. Yet soon he was to tum into a sort of artistic mentor. I met him through Frank Morley, an American colleague of Eliot’s. Morley was seconded from Harcourt Brace, the New York publishers, to Faber & Faber in London, where Eliot worked in the afternoons. Morley’s younger son, Oliver, then about 6, while musically very gifted, was virtually inarticulate verbally. If he spoke at all, he would make remarks like: ‘That dog barks in B flat.’ This was a real headache for the family. Morley asked W. H. Auden for advice. Auden recommended me, as someone musically well versed and interested in psychology. Thus it came about that Morley visited me at my tiny cottage (two up, two down) in Limpsfield, Surrey, on his way home to Crowhurst, further south down the road. The notion was that I should ‘teach’ Oliver at the piano about his obsessively beloved music, in order to tempt him to speak. Terms were discussed and agreed: and all the time I could see through the window, mooching about the minute grass frontage, the famous figure in the clerical hat-Eliot himself.
Dreams Of Power, Dreams Of Love
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

The question is often posed to me: with which of your operatic characters do you most identify? The assumed answer is usually Mangus, in The Knot Garden—the modem reincarnation of Shakespeares Prospero as a psychiatrist. At the start of the opera, his dream is to be the ‘man of power I He puts them all to rights’. The romantic notion of the creative artist as someone who can solve mankind’s problems, as Shelley’s ‘unacknowledged legislator’, dies hard. Poland once elected Paderewski, a pianist, as Prime Minister; post-Cold War Czechoslovakia has a writer, Vaclav Havel, as President; and all Greece recently mourned the loss of its most charismatic film-star politician, Melina Mercouri. Personally, though, I lean more towards the irony of Gore Vidal, whose encapsulation of the ex-B-movie star Ronald Reagan as the ‘acting President’ seems just about right for all such figures.
The Mask of Time
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

Many artists have felt impelled, towards the end of their lives, to give expression to the transcendental in some aspect or other. We can find this in Blake, in Yeats’s last poems, in a painting like Gauguin’s U’ho are We? ft’lzere do we come from? ft’lzere are we going? In The Mask of Tune, I tried to crystallize some of my own mature responses to the most fundamental matters bearing upon man, his relationship with time, his place in the world as we know it and in the mysterious universe at large. The gestation period for such a work was, of course, a long one, dating back to the early l970s—almost a decade before I actually put down any notes.
A Composer and His Public
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

It is an act of faith to address an invisible audience. Is that faith anything to do with the much deeper faith, the faith in the ultimate virtue of the creative act, which a composer must have to write music at all in this time? What, in this matter of the composer and his public, has been there always and what is new? We have been for centuries used to receiving letters through the post, sheets of lines and blobs on paper, which when taken out of the envelope tell us things, and often in such a tone that we can imagine the loved (or hated) voice speaking out of the ink. This is the primeval miracle of any communication at a distance.
The Artis T’s Mandate
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

Holderlin is a moving example of the Socratic madness which I speak of in this chapter. For he enjoyed the divine madness of poetic creation, yet suffered long periods of alienation into a clinical madness. If I am right in suggesting, in a previous chapter, that the artist’s job as such carries with it the constant, though for most of us mild, danger of impairing the sense of reality, then Holderlin’s real madness was in some way connected with his divine madness. But how, we do not know.
‘Dreaming On Things To Come ⃛’
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

At the end of a filmed interview in Paris in 1994, I was asked a final throw away question: Do you think it possible for there to be another Tippett in the next millennium? My reply, perhaps rightly, was dismissive: one is enough! But then I began to think what indeed might be the future for a composer embarking on a career, as I had early in this century, with high aspirations and ideals and a determination to sustain them through thick and thin. Of course, I could not predict the course of world events in a century I might be just lucky enough to glimpse, though not to experience to any degree.
Biography
Authors: Meconi Honey
Published: November 2023

Until recently, the question ‘who was Pierre de la Rue?’ seemed an easy one to answer. Any thorough synopsis of his life would have gone as follows: he was almost certainly born in Tournai, probably around 1452, and started employment as a part-time singer (a tenor) in Brussels (1469). Additional employment was found in Ghent (1471–2) and then Nieuwpoort (1472 to before 2 February 1477), and at one unspecified time he held a canonicate at St Ode.
The Laughter of Falstaff: Comedy and Italian Politics
Authors: Tambling Jeremy
Published: November 2023

Verdi’s music, or, rather, the libretti and plots of the plays set to music by Verdi, are responsible for a whole range of ‘anificial’ poses in the life of people, for ways of thinking, for a ‘style’. ‘Artificial’ is perhaps not the right word, because among the popular classes this artificiality assumes naive and moving forms. To many common people, the baroque and the operatic appear as an extraordinarily fascinating way of feeling and acting, a means of escaping what they consider low, mean, and contemptible in their lives and education, in order to enter a more select sphere of great feelings and noble passions. Serial novels and below-stairs reading (all that literature which is mawkish, mellifluous, and whimpery) provide the heroes and heroines.
From Madama Butterfly to Turandot: The Crowd and the Gamble
Authors: Tambling Jeremy
Published: November 2023

Death by a man-whether they do it themselves, like Butterfly, or are stabbed, like Carmen, the provenance of the knife, or the choking hand, or the fading breath, is a man, and the result is fatal. So Catherine Cfoment comments on the ‘undoing of women’ in those most famous operas Otello, LaBohhne, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot. In the last two, women fit with those themes of Orientalism noticed in discussing Otello. Madama Butterfly is relevant for Puccinian politics in dealing so plainly with areas of racial and sexual exploitation which unite in the death of the woman.
lvanov’s Memoirs
Authors: Wiley Roland John
Published: November 2023

To all appearances, Lev lvanovich Ivanov was a quiet, introspective man. Unlike his elder colleague Petipa, or any number of famous dancers, he never granted an interview with the press. An obligation to speechmaking came with his promotion to second balletmaster, when he would salute the artist of the hour at benefit performances. Even here emotion or shyness could render him mute. Thus, at the farewell performance of ballerina Evgenia Sokolova,
Charles Wheatstone Invents the Concertina
Authors: Atlas Allan W
Published: November 2023

We should pause in our discussion of the concertina in order to consider the life and career of its inventor, Sir Charles Wheatstone.1 Born at Gloucester on 6 February 1802 into a family whose connections with the music business as both publishers and manufacturers of wind instruments extended back to around 1750 (they set up in London in 1806),2 Wheatstone displayed his scientific precocity as early as 1817, when, as a 15-year-old, he read and then duplicated Alessandro Volta’s experiments in electricity. At about the same time, he began to develop his interests in acoustics and sound conduction,3 and, in a more practical vein, to judge from his ‘Harmonic Diagram’ of 1824 (see Ch. 4 below), tunings and temperaments.
Musorgsky
Authors: Brown David
Published: November 2023

This is not only the first life-and-works on Musorgsky in English for over half a century but also the largest such study of the composer ever to have appeared outside Russia. Mussorgsky was one of the towering figures of nineteenth century Russian music - but also one of the most tragic. Largely an amateur with no systematic training in composition, he nevertheless emerged in his first opera, Boris Godunov, as a supreme musical dramatist, presenting here (and in certain of his piano pieces in Pictures at an Exhibition) some of the most startlingly original of all song composers, with a prodigious gift for uncovering the emotional content of a text. His failure to complete his two remaining operas, Khovanshchina and Sorochintsy Fair, before his premature death from alcohol poisoning is one of music's greatest tragedies.
The Making of a Composer I
Authors: Brown David
Published: November 2023

N October 1856 It Chanced That The Seventeen-Year-Old, newly commissioned Musorgsky found himself duty officer at the second military hospital in St Petersburg where the duty doctor was the twenty-two-year-old, also newly qualified Alexander Borodin. The two men were quickly on good terms, and that same evening were invited to a soiree at the home of Popov, the hospital’s chief doctor. ‘At that time Musorgsky was totally callow, very elegant—to be exact, a mere sketch of an officer,’ Borodin recalled in his brief memoir of Musorgsky written in April 1881, only days after Musorgsky s death: Borodin̓s precise sketch is precious for, taken in conjunction with the photograph of the same year (see plate 1), it affords a vivid image of the teenage Musorgsky.
Salammbô
Authors: Brown David
Published: November 2023

Ne Consequence of The Phenomenal Expansion of Music history studies since World War II has been the toppling of those titans who were once confidently credited with having, unaided, created a form or founded a movement. No one today asserts, as some did within living memory, that Monteverdi invented opera, Haydn (or C. P. E. Bach) devised sonata form, or that Beethoven created Romanticism. Yet to say that Mikhail Glinka singlehanded laid the foundations of the Russian musical tradition as a distinct component of Western music is nothing other than the truth.