bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Albert Herring
Authors: Evans Peter
Published: November 2023

Eric Crozier, who had produced Lucretia, provided the libretto for Britten’s next chamber-opera, which followed within a year and was also first pre sented at Glyndebourne—though now by the English Opera Group. Crozier took his story from Maupassant’s Le Rosier de Madame Husson, but trans planted it to a Suffolk environment, where every person could become a familiar kind of English ‘character’ and local jokes could do duty for Maupassant’s barbed ironies. Instead of the studied symmetries of the Lucretia casting, Britten was presented with a large number of individuals who find identity in the community.
The Prince of the Pagodas
Authors: Evans Peter
Published: November 2023

If we count the church parables among Britten’s operatic scores, then there is no gap in the succession as great as that between The Turn of the Screw (1954) and A Midsummer-Night’s Dream (1960). After The Screw, with some six full-length operas completed in less than ten years, the composer might justifiably have decided to cultivate quite other fields for a time, perhaps consolidating that brief return to purely instrumental problems he had made in Lachrymae and the Metamorphoses.
Owen Wingrave
Authors: Evans Peter
Published: November 2023

The three church parables, Britten’s chief dramatic music of the sixties, were of the greatest importance for his stylistic development, while their use of rigorous limitations to stimulate expressive precision placed them among his most powerfully cogent works. Yet as the composer returned to the type for a third work, one might have feared that he had abandoned the opera house.
Death in Venice
Authors: Evans Peter
Published: November 2023

It was possible to regret that Britten and Myfanwy Piper returned to Henry James for their second collaboration since they chose to adapt a story that is a good deal less compelling than The Turn of the Screw. With their last adaptation of story into opera, however, they showed a daring, and an imaginative power to justify it, fully equal to those exhibited by the first James opera. Britten’s Death in Venice was completed in short score in December 1972, and in full score early in 1973, for performance at the Aldeburgh Festival of that year. Because of the composer’s illness, he was unable to take part in the preparations for this production; Steuart Bedford conducted and Colin Graham produced the opera.
Introduction
Authors: Zon Bennett
Published: November 2023

The revival of plainchant in England was very much a result of contemporary events and trends. In the Roman Catholic Church it was the effective relegation of the penal laws in the latter half of the eighteenth century which spawned a renewed zeal for the external accoutrement of worship. In the Anglican Church it was probably conceived in the ethos of the Oxford Movement and realized by the Cambridge ecclesiologists. There are, moreover, key elements which are identical to both revivals—the notion of authority through antiquity or tradition, the belief that Gregorian music is inherently congregational, and the idea that it enhances spirituality, to name but a few. Even the circumstances of the revivals are remarkably similar, in both cases following a period of relative abatement in the practice of a given faith. Many of the religious doctrines surrounding the revival are interchangeable, particularly as regards the nineteenth century, and in some instances it is not clear whether a plainchant book of that period is Anglican or Catholic. Non-partisan or non-denominational aspects of history, such as the nineteenth-century singing movements of Mainzer, Hullah, and Curwen, also had their influence on the revival, and concomitant philosophies of morality no doubt played a part in the evolution of apologetical thinking of the 1840s to 186os.
Introduction
Authors: Zon Bennett
Published: November 2023

The revival of plainchant in the Roman Catholic Church in England was to some extent a function of an easing political situation. For much of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Catholics in England subsisted under an exacting penal code, outlawing the practice of their faith and undermining their economic and social position at large. With the accession of James II in 1685, however, there came a brief period of remission and a consequent flourishing of Catholic life. The Catholic press, by this time long underground, published openly for the first time, and worship likewise became public. Such freedom as had been granted Catholics under James II was not maintained under the rule of William and Mary, and from 1689 Catholicism once again came under the restrictions of a penal code. By the 1720s, however, there came a less stringent application of the penal laws, and before long Catholics were attending their services more openly and publishing religious works in complete disregard of the law. By 1778, when George III and his parliament dismantled the most extreme elements of the penal code, the laws themselves had already lost their meaning and were all but moribund in practice.
A General Introduction to Post-Tridentine Liturgical Books and Plainchant in Europe
Authors: Zon Bennett
Published: November 2023

The Council of Trent was convened officially by Pope Paul III (1534-49) in a bull of 22 May 1542. On I 3 December 1545 the Council assembled for the first time, attended by a rather small group including ‘three legates, one cardinal, four archbishops, twenty-one bishops, and five generals of orders’. Over the next eighteen years the Council convened for twenty-five sessions until its last meeting on 4 December 1563. Decrees concerning music occurred late in the proceedings, namely at sessions 22, 23, and 24, on 17 September 1562, 15 July 1563, and II November 1563 respectively. Amongst the many concerns addressed at these sessions were ‘the curtailment of liturgical texts, the unintelligibility of the sacred words, the insertion of non-churchly songs, and worldly and lengthy organ compositions’ . Of these issues it was the curtailment of liturgical texts, particularly in regard to the hymns of the Breviary, which would directly affect the development of plainchant.
The Works of John Francis Wade
Authors: Zon Bennett
Published: November 2023

John Francis Wade (1711/12–86) is perhaps best known as the composer and author of the Christmas carol ‘Adeste fidcles’ (‘O Come All Ye Faithful’). He was almost certainly a convert to Roman Catholicism and attended the Dominican college at Bornhem (Belgium) where, presumably, he learnt to copy plainchant. His extant works date from 1737 to 1774 and divide into three types: plainchant manuscripts, printed books with hand-notated plain-chant, and printed liturgical books without plainchant. The manuscripts, which substantially outnumber his other works, serve a wide range of functions and include Antiphonals, Graduals, Vesperals, Offices for the Dead, and books of diverse chants. Not only were they used extensively in their own time, but numerous later influential Catholic volumes were based on his work. The graphic quality of his manuscripts, often in a wide range of colours and metallic pigments, attests consistently to a scribe in complete command of his calligraphic and miniature decorative art. Wade’s printed books with plainchant comprise a gradual, psalter, and confraternity handbook. His liturgical books without plainchant include two vesperals—one for general use and another for Holy Week. Evidence internal to the manuscripts proves that they were used in practically all London’s foreign embassy chapels, and by extension it can be assumed that Wade’s manuscripts circulated amongst many Catholic aristocratic families.
Manuscripts by Scribes other than Wade
Authors: Zon Bennett
Published: November 2023

The manuscripts described in this chapter are included here because of their similarity to Wade manuscripts. In some cases they were copied in part or in toto from his work. Some are particularly relevant because they link Wade to Douai, as with ‘Arttiphonale Romanum-Franciscanum’. Others, like ‘The Abergavenny Gradual’ and ‘The Abergavenny Antiphonale Roman um’, are significant in the documentation which surrounds them, more perhaps than the manuscript itself In some instances Wade’s influence is fairly small, as in the hymns of AAR1799, but in others, such as CDMan or UCB similarities are so abundant that one must assume that their scribes copied them directly from either Wade manuscripts or sources identical to those used by Wade. In either case the ubiquity of Wade’s manuscripts and possibly Wade-related sources is confirmed by the fact that his or a similar influence is found in books stemming from such wide geographical and chronological backgrounds as those discussed in this chapter. The graphic quality of these manuscripts is decidedly lower than Wade’s and highlights the general decline of plainchant calligraphy in English and Continent sources of the period. None of the manuscripts examined below appear to have had any wider influence than that of their own sphere, and in some cases their historical and/or ecclesiastical context remains elusive.
Roman Catholic Plainchant Apologetics: the 1840s to 1850s
Authors: Zon Bennett
Published: November 2023

Of the many Catholic periodicals and newspapers which commenced in the 1830s and 1840s, four covered the issue of chant and sacred music extensively: The London & Orthodox journal (founded 1835)The Dublin Review (1836), The Tablet (1840), andThe Rambler (l848). The earliest of these to do so was The Dublin Review, beginning its long interest in sacred music with its inaugural issue of May 1836 in an article reviewing George Hogarth’s Music History, Biography, and Criticism: being a General Survey of Music, from the earliest period to the present time (1835). Far more a defence of church music than merely common book review, the article presents an almost syllogistic apologetic for the preservation and revival of sacred music. Like all church music apologetics, it is premissed on the absolute belief that

The noblest employment of music is in conjunction with the exercises of religion. Its power, in exciting those feelings of awe, reverence, and love, with which man ought ever to approach his Creator and Preserver, has been felt in all ages of the world; and its use, in expressing those feelings, not only appears to have been silently dictated by God himself, in the act of constituting the human mind, but has received his express authority and sanction.
Death
Authors: Poznansky Alexander
Published: November 2023

His breathing grew more shallow, though he could still be brought to consciousness, it seemed, by asking him whether he wanted to drink: he no longer responded with words, but only with affirmative or negative sounds. Suddenly his eyes, which up until then had been half-closed and glazed, opened wide. An indescribable expression of full consciousness appeared. He rested his gaze in turn on the three people who were standing near him, then lifted it towards the sky. For a few moments something in his eyes lit up and then faded with his final breath. It was a little after three in the morning.
Hearsay
Authors: Poznansky Alexander
Published: November 2023

Soon after Pyotr Ilyich’s death there appeared, and for a while persevered, a legend that he had died not from cholera, but because he had voluntarily poisoned himself. I personally started to believe in this leg end without much difficulty after I became acquainted with the Sixth Symphony, the content of which seemed to provide enough reason to do so. Indeed, the general sombre mood that permeates all movements of the symphony, one may say, ‘smells of death’.... In the last movement of the symphony (Adagio lamentoso) the very first notes emanate utter hopelessness and irreparable anguish.
The Golden Age, Part I: 1580–1603
Authors: Spring Matthew
Published: November 2023

Ovid, in his first book of the Metamorphoses, describes the four ages of man, of which ‘The Golden Age was first; which uncompelled, And without rule, in faith and truth exceelled’. Under the reign of Saturn this age experienced no wars, no laws, no seasons, and there was no work to be done. Peace, justice, and equality were universal. Virgil in his fourth Eclogue spoke of the dawning of a new golden age for Rome under Augustus, when civilization and the arts would flourish. This poem was later reinterpreted by Constantine, with the virgin goddess Astraea, who ushers in the new golden age, identified as the Virgin Mary. John Foxe, in his Book of Martyrs, the most influential and popular book of Elizabethan times after the Bible, drew a parallel between Constantine’s ending of religious persecutions, and the accession of Elizabeth after the repression and burnings of the Marian period. The new Astraea was personified by Elizabeth I, whose favourite personal device was the phoenix. Like Augustus in the early days of Imperial Rome, she was seen to have re-established justice, and to have provided a rule under which peace and the arts could flourish. This point was made by Sir John Davies in his Hymnes of Astraea (1599), referring to Elizabeth as she who: ‘Hath brought againe the golden dayes, And all the world amended.’
Sound and Vibration
Authors: Beamnt Jams
Published: November 2023

There are three simple ways of producing pitched sound: hitting something making air in a tube vibrate and plucking a stretched string. The string started with a disadvantage for on its own it produces tiny sound, but this was sufficiently intriguing for man to experiment for thousands of years, to find ways of increasing the sound by attaching strings to pieces of wood. Bowing was invented only hundreds of years ago, and gave the string an ability long the preserve of using air in tubes: producing a sustained sound. At first it was bowed on instruments evolved for plucked strings; the violin emerged from them.
Resonance and Response
Authors: Beamnt Jams
Published: November 2023

The reader with an eye for elegant English may feel that the word ‘vibrate’ has been used ad nauseam, and the author should have rung the changes with ‘oscillate’, ‘reverberate’, or ‘resonate’. One problem of scientific writing is that each of these words has a specific meaning, and the right one must be used in a given context. ‘Resonate’ is misused more frequently than it is used correctly in ordinary speech; resonance so intrigues physicists that it seems sometimes to prevent them from seeing the wood for the trees.
The Bow
Authors: Beamnt Jams
Published: November 2023

The violin would not exist but for the discovery of bowing. People who do not play sometimes ask why the left hand was chosen to do the intricate things while the right hand just pushes a stick with some horsehair on it up and down. It may stem from the notion that the left hand is ‘making the notes’; televised pictures of soloists enhance this view. Richard Wilson relates that when he was a viola student at the Guildhall School of Music, he had a poor instrument and despaired of producing a reasonable sound. William Primrose visited the School and, to illustrate something in a seminar, picked up this viola and played. None of them had ever heard such wonderful sound.
Real Strings
Authors: Beamnt Jams
Published: November 2023

We have only obtained some idea of how violins work in the latter part of the twentieth century. The basic laws which determine the pitch of strings have been known for more than three centuries, but the technology which made it possible to apply them fully has only been developed in the past fifty years, producing a string-making revolution. A wide range of strings with very different properties is now available; it has proved to be a mixed blessing. Few people would dream of modifying their instrument or bow, but strings are changed and mixed with abandon. Players need not know how a violin works, but there are several things they should know about strings.
Conclusions
Authors: Beamnt Jams
Published: November 2023

The production of sound by a violin might be represented by the sequence: player bow string bridge body sound hearing perception. If we assume uniform bowing, we can obtain a generalized picture of the vibration of the string and of the events up to the point where sound is produced in the air. But these physical steps are not independent because the string interacts with the bow, and the body interacts with the string via the bridge. We can relate basic aspects of bowing to basic features of the sound. The picture is limited to sustained sound because that is what uniform bowing produces.
Americus Backers and the English Grand Piano
Authors: Cole Michael
Published: November 2023

DuringThe Operaseason when J.C. Bach presented his first works at the King’s Theatre, Americus Backers set up his workshop in the first house at the eastern end of Jermyn Street. In those days Great Jermyn Street ended at this point where Little Jermyn Street, no more than a short alley, connected it to Haymarket, not far from the theatre. A glance at a map of the area shows just how close these two establishments were: a minute’s walk from the theatre would bring you to Backers’ house. If this simultaneous co-location of Bach and Backers was not contrived it was certainly fortuitous. With no known past Backers was plummeted into the theatre and concert world of London and was soon taken up by some of the most influential people.
The English Grand, 1778-1805
Authors: Cole Michael
Published: November 2023

AmericusBackers Unrivalledposmon in grand piano making meant that his early death in January 1778 left a void in London’s musical scene at the very moment when the pianoforte was finally and irrevocably accepted in concert life. Those who had bought instruments from Backers, or were contemplating such a purchase, then had to look for a successor. The man who took up the mantle of Backers was Robert Stodart. Stodart is believed to have been born in southern Scotland in the 1735-40 period. Arriving in London c.1765, he was employed for some years in Shudi’s workshop, where he learnt harpsichord making under the supervision of his compatriot, John Broadwood. After Shudi’s death in 1773, Stodart made plans to set up his own workshop, which he accomplished when he took the lease of a house in Wardour Street in 1775. Part of his plan was to exploit the potential of combining the harpsichord and pianoforte in one instrument. In November 1777 Stodart patented a type of combination grand piano and harpsichord which did not infringe Joseph Merlin’s patent of three years earlier. Merlin’s concept was of a down-striking set of hammers applied to what was in essence a harpsichord: Stodart’s, on the contrary, was a piano-forte with an up-striking action wherein two harpsichord jacks replaced the usual damper.
The Upright Pianoforte: The Genesis of Upright Forms
Authors: Cole Michael
Published: November 2023

It1s Easyto imagine that the development of upright pianos is merely an answer to the need to save space in a domestic environment. During the twentieth century such a perception was plainly evident: the best type of piano was the grand, but for those who needed to save space or expense, the upright must suffice. In former times it was different.Throughout the period covered by this study the pianoforte came principally in two forms: the square piano and the grand. Economy was effected by choosing the square. When such an instrument cost as little as one-third of the cost of the grand, it is quite obvious that an upright, however cheaply manufactured, could yield no advantage in terms of price. In terms of floor space, the five-octave square piano was so unobtrusive that any small reduction that the upright might offer would not be a significant factor.
Envoi
Authors: Cole Michael
Published: November 2023

InThe Lastdecade of the eighteenth century the harpsichord experienced a dramatic loss of esteem, which a few well-chosen numbers may illustrate. In 1785 the Shudi & Broadwood workshop was selling harpsichords at 70 guineas in a market that appeared to be unaffected by the rival claims of the pianoforte. Yet, within three years production had declined alarmingly. The last known harpsichord (signed by John Broadwood alone) was dated 1793. Kirckrnan’s workshop continued to turn out a few harpsichords until 1800, as did the firm of Longman & Broderip, but as the century drew to a close, trade in such instruments was all but dead. Prices for second-hand harpsichords also fell alarmingly.
Bologna, Second City of the Papal States
Authors: Crowther Victor
Published: November 2023

Expressions of pride in Bologna’s spiritual heritage were a notable feature of oratorios produced in the city in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When called upon to celebrate the deeds of Bolognese saints, oratorio librettists responded to local sentiment fulsomely.
The Foundation of the Oratory in Bologna
Authors: Crowther Victor
Published: November 2023

The founding father of the Congregation of the Oratory, Filippo Neri, died in Rome at the age of 80 in 1595. Revered by all for his apostolic zeal, capricious good humour and determination to spread the joys of Christian spirituality to the laity, particularly the youth of Rome, Filippo rekindled such hope among Italian Catholics that priests and laymen throughout the peninsula were beginning to gather together under the easy yoke of the Oratorian Rule by the end of the century.
Foreword
Authors: Picken Laurence
Published: November 2023

The context in which musics of the world are here to be examined is that of geography, history (in the old-fashioned sense of who did what to whom and when), and social structure (in the basic sense of who were at the bottom of the heap and who on There are those who will say that so simple-minded a project should never have been attempted in a post-Claude-Levi-Straussian-and-Charles-Seegerian world. Evidently, to attempt a necessarily brief account of the history of any one of the great cultural zones of the planet is hazardous in the extreme. Specialists themselves will differ about both ‘facts ‘ and their ‘interpretation ‘; specialists, as they read, may wish to qualify virtually every statement made. Old charges once preferred in the history of ethnic-music studies will be revived.
Introduction
Authors: Fletcher Peter
Published: November 2023

Awareness of musical traditions other than those of Europe and North America has increased greatly in recent years: tourism has led to familiarity with once-distant lands and peoples, while ever-advancing technological developments have facilitated the wide dissemination, on tape, video, and film, of the sights and sounds of other lands and peoples. Irresistibly, different musics of the world have been forced on our awareness through radio and television. Simultaneously, the ethnic mix of peoples that now exists in most countries of the western world has created its own inoperative, necessitating the adoption of a global view of cultures and their musics. This book adopts such a view.
Elemental Features of Music
Authors: Fletcher Peter
Published: November 2023

From time immemorial, music has been one of humankind ‘s rr1ost important resources. It has eased the burden of and coordinated its rhythms. It has helped people in love, and calmed their fever. It has cemented social rituals, recalled ancestral history, and shaped codes of conduct. It has been held to appease gods and ancestral spirits, and to induce rain, or drive it away. Nor are such attributes mere relics of ancient superstition. Music still soothes the spirit in sickness or in love. It can still condition human behavior. It still has strong historical associations. All over the world, people still sing or listen to music as they work, and they still celebrate their harvest in elaborate ritual. And music is still one of the most fundamental elements in religious and social ceremony. As technology makes musical from all over the world accessible to us, their fundamental similarities are as evident as their differences.
Aspects of Civilization
Authors: Fletcher Peter
Published: November 2023

Fossil finds in East Africa suggest that the genus Homo emerged there some two million years ago. Modern humans are thought to have originated in Africa some 100,000 years ago: fossil finds in South Africa, Ethiopia, and Israel attest to the success and widespread dispersal of a new species. These early humans made effective tools and weapons, and were probably able to communicate through some form of spoken language. ·with the later Stone Age (or ‘Upper Palaeolithic ‘) of sorr1e 40,000 years ago, such activities as orderly burial of the dead, and painting of wildlife scenes on cave walls and rock faces, bear witness to a more advanced capacity for structured thought. The development of language, the medium for such thought, may then be associated specifically with the development of Homo sapiens sapiens (anatomically modern humans).
Early Oligarchies in Mesopotamia and Egypt
Authors: Fletcher Peter
Published: November 2023

Civilization appears first to have developed in what is known as the ‘Fertile Crescent ‘ of Mesopotamia. The name Mesopotamia means ‘between rivers ‘, and indicates the land drained by the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. The irrigation techniques needed to control these rivers had evolved elsewhere; but it was in Mesopotamia that writing first developed, and writing enabled the peoples of this area to create the administrative apparatus needed for a political structure of evolving city states, and thus to meet the challenge of their physical environment. Writing also enabled a record to be left of a remarkable understanding of the relationships between string lengths and pitches in the generation of musical sound.
West Asia
Authors: Fletcher Peter
Published: November 2023

The most conspicuous cultural feature of West Asia today is Islam. Between a sixth and a seventh of the total population of the globe now adhere to this faith. The majority of Muslims are presently to be found, however, not in west Asia but in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, India, and Egypt: ‘“\west Asia ‘s vast areas of desert, mountain, and high plateau make it a sparsely and unevenly populated part of the world. Nevertheless, \Vest Asia is Islam ‘s heartland. It was here that Islam arose, that its formative caliphates were situated, and from whence the spread of the faith-along with the Arabic language—led to the formation of a distinctive Islamic civilization. Islam brought a measure of unity to many diverse cultural systems, the dynamics of which had been shaped in the ancient world. The religion itself was based largely on Judaic and local nomadic traditions. In Africa, South Asia, and South East Asia, Islam contributed to existing cultural systems, but was ultimately assimilated by them. 1n Egypt, the Levant, Iraq, and Iran, it blended with the cultural systems of Persia and Byzantium. As Islam spread, it absorbed elements of Zoroastrian, Hellenic, Christian, and Hindu thought. In the end, it was a synthesis of all these elements, and in that lay its appeal: Islamic culture transcended the religion that generated it.
East Asia
Authors: Fletcher Peter
Published: November 2023

The most remarkable feature of Chinese civilization is its continuity. Aspects of Chinese culture, still functional today, date back some 4,000 years. Social and governmental systems were integrated by a written language, of which the symbols (the ‘characters ‘) were standardized in 221 BC, and still form the basis of the Chinese script. The social and governmental systems themselves, codified towards the end of the first millennium BC, were perpetuated with little essential change until the death of the last empress in 1908; many elements are part of received custom to this day. The roots of this remarkable continuity derive, in part at least, from the use made by Confucius of song-texts with a historical content in teaching the sons of the nobility. Confucius—a sage, but to his countrymen a saint—ived from c.551 to 4.79 BC.
New Horizons
Authors: Fletcher Peter
Published: November 2023

In the year 1400, a group of Florentine businessmen returned from a visit to Constantinople with a copy of Ptolemy ‘s Guide to Geography, a second-century text that described the world then known to the Greeks. Little of that world was known to Europeans of the early fifteenth century. Included in the Guide was the already familiar Ptolemaic understanding of the universe: the sun, the moon, the planets, and ‘fixed ‘ stars circling around the earth, with the ‘ideal ‘ realm beyond them. But the Guide also listed some 8,000 place names in Europe, Africa, and Asia; and it demonstrated the use of grid lines of longitude and latitude, and the calculation of geographical positions within them by astronomical means. Ptolemy ‘s geography was far from accurate, but his Guide brought to European cartography a new, scientific, method of viewing the world as an entity. Metrification of the earth ‘s surface enabled all points on a map to be placed proportionately distant from each other, and even unknown locations could be given coordinates.
Enlightenment
Authors: Fletcher Peter
Published: November 2023

Just off London ‘s Strand is a house built by John Adam in l 754 for the Society of Arts. The Society—now the Society of Arts, manufactures, and Commerce-still occupies it. On the panels of its Great Room, a series of paintings by James Barrie, Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy, provides insight into the attitudes and beliefs of the merchant gentlemen who were its members. The purpose of these paintings—in the artist ‘s words—was to illustrate ‘one great maxim or moral truth, that the obtaining of happiness ... depends on cultivating the human faculties ‘. Man is shown beginning ‘in a savage state, full of inconvenience, imperfection and misery ‘. He then ‘progresses through several gradations of culture and happiness, which ... are finally attended with beatitude or misery ‘.
Pitch
Authors: Maconie Robin
Published: November 2023

Bernard Dudot, Renault Sport’s engine designer, once explained the complex process by which one [Formula I] team worked out how many revs per minute another team’s engine achieved. It entailed making a recording of the rival car at maximum speed and comparing its frequency to the frequency of his own engine.
Death and Transfiguration
Authors: Maconie Robin
Published: November 2023

And [Samson] turned aside to see the carcase of the lion: and, behold, there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcase of the lion ... Out of the strong came forth sweetness.
Doctors and Dustbin Lids
Authors: Bird John
Published: November 2023

For a time Rose and Percy continued to live in Oxley Road, and the piano lessons which Rose gave to other people’s children seem to have been lucrative enough for them to have retained one maid during this period-Martha was her name and Percy was devoted to her. From time to time they also took in a boarder whose rent helped them to survive.
Grettir the Strong Flexes his Muscles
Authors: Bird John
Published: November 2023

By his mid-teens the attitudes which Grainger was to hold for the rest of his life were all but crystallized. He still thought of himself as ‘Grettir the Strong’ and was by now developing an acute sense of dis¬ crimination between those elements in European culture which had Nordic or Anglo-Saxon roots and those which owed their existence to the cultures of Ancient Rome and Athens. The former he clung to, enshrined and worshipped; the latter he rejected out of hand. His life was to be ruled by Odin rather than Zeus or Jupiter. His concept of ‘race’ was as absolute as it was naive. His belief that he was the product of a racially mixed marriage had already become something of a burden¬ some complex.
‘I am an Australian, not a Corsican!’
Authors: Bird John
Published: November 2023

On his return to England Grainger once more took up his duties as a pianist to London’s aristocracy. He had now come to accept his role with a detached and cynical tolerance. The frantic address-changing which had marked his life in Melbourne and Frankfurt-am-Main continued relentlessly in London. Within four years of his arrival in London he and his mother had changed their home as many times.
‘I shall go back to the joys of my teen-years’
Authors: Bird John
Published: November 2023

The 1940s were for Grainger a decade through the first half of which he staggered and from the second half of which he began to emerge phoenix¬ like into a world more ready to accept his compositions. The war years put a temporary halt to many of his plans and he saw little financial return for the enormous amount of concert work he undertook. Performing royalties in Australia were largely turned over to his more needy relatives and English royalties were redirected to Cyril Scott, whose music had been suffering over the last decade from the adverse trends of fashion.
‘Your loving but defeated, Percy’
Authors: Bird John
Published: November 2023

In the last years of his life, Grainger continued with his plans of steadily reducing the frequency and demands of his concert engagements. The condition he had earlier determined to apply of refusing to appear as a concert pianist without there being a performance of some of his own music on the same programme was now absolute.
Between ‘Social Demands’ and the ‘Music of Grand Passions’
Authors: Barsova Inna
Published: November 2023

The problem of the relationship between Soviet artists and the authorities in the l<:J30S is still a long way from being completely clarified. Many things complicate the picture of cultural life during that period. First of all there is the contradictory way in which the regime itself behaved with regard to the implementation of its cultural policy, since it at times created an impression of possible liberalization (a phenomenon analysed in detail in Lazar Fleishman’s article on Pasternak and Bukharin in the 1930s). Secondly, there was no unanimity of feeling on the part of the Soviet people: the faith in the ideals of communism cherished by some was very far removed from the bitter insight of others. A third complication is the closed nature of people’s behaviour in the 1930s, which expressed itself in particular in the ‘verbal theatre’ that permeated their everyday speech. Adopting verbal ‘masks’ was one of the most important ways in which people communicated with representatives of authority and with each other. A final complication is due to the coded nature of existence at that time, and the presence of a subtext in the language of art itself in certain specific cases where there was no possibility for operating differently. Such artistic works are now viewed rather simplistically as attempts to co-operate with the regime, as they are interpreted with hindsight, and from the point of the view of the omniscient and fearless present.
Tāl in practice: quantitative, qualitative, and cyclic functions
Authors: Clayton Martin
Published: November 2023

About 20 tāls are commonly used in North Indian music at the present time: although rather larger numbers are often cited, these would include many rare tāls used mainly in drum solos and offer a misleading picture (in truth, even several of those listed in Example 5.1 are rarely heard). The common tāls comprise binary, ternary, quintal, and septimal structures as well as combinations of the above (i.e. compound metres, such as ektāl, which combines binary and ternary features) and a few apparently anomalous structures, including some apparently conceived as arithmetical progressions (e.g. matta tāl of 9 mātrās, usually split 2 3 4). Many tāls are associated with particular genres, and most are limited in the range of tempi at which they may be performed.
Development techniques and processes
Authors: Clayton Martin
Published: November 2023

A rough distinction may be drawn in the post-bandiś phase of performance, between development with a strong rhythmic and/or textual component and that which focuses overwhelmingly on the presentation, variation, and embellishment of melodic material. The most important techniques are classified in this way in Table 9.1.
The Idea of a Movement
Authors: Talbot Michael
Published: November 2023

To HAVE a last movement, one must first have a piece of music divided into separate movements. So much is obvious, but it is important to accept from the outset that the existence of a multimovement (or cyclic) work is not an eternal, given,: it is one particular form of packaging music (among many) that has come into being at a specific point in history, initially only in certain genres, and even today enjoys only a provisional status. It is not hard to imagine a future situation in which, following the convergence of Western (but by then global) art music and commercial popular music, nearly an musical compositions became single movements that one could couple freely with others in the
Codas and Finales
Authors: Talbot Michael
Published: November 2023

Are finales simply codas writ large? Are codas simply finales writ small? The questions are not idle, since in this study parallels have repeatedly been drawn between the two. Both strive for closure, for balance, and for the resolution of tensions. Both use the powerful effects of cumulation and regression to these ends. Both are partial to humorous or extravagant effects and easily accommodate modal shifts. The two even have a common origin (albeit in the finale’s case not a unique origin) in the closing sections of multisectional instrumental works composed during the Renaissance and early Baroque periods.
Opéra Comique: Identity and Manipulation
Authors: Charlton David
Published: November 2023

In this essay I investigate shifting sands: the artifice of genre, invisible managements, critical manipulations, and an unidentifiable public. The study is mainly about critical responses to opéra comique, the genre that France re invented and exported in the mid-eighteenth century, and which thereafter became a staple that did not cease as an institution until 1971. In the nineteenth century and after, however, it often seems to have served as an Aunt Sally, an object of random vilification, and so (for us) a genre whose very criticism might reveal a wide variety of social, musical, and aesthetic fractures. There is the added historiographical problem that one famous critic, Berlioz, had a particularly virulent attitude towards it, one that has helped to colour subsequent attitudes. But the same critic wrote a rather comprehensive essay on the genre which, in a singularly lucid way, analysed the problematic reltion between opéra comique’s historical past, its institutional present, and its audiences both as they were in 1836 and as they might be in the future.
A Dilettante at the Opera: Issues in the Criticism of Julien-Louis Geoffroy, 1800-1814
Authors: Ellis Katharine
Published: November 2023

February 1800 marks a watershed in the history of French music criticism. On the sixth of that month, the Bertin brothers’ Journal des debats printed the first review of an opéra (Mehul’s Adrien) in the new critical form of the feuil leton-the ‘little page’. Separated by an emphatic horizontal line from the political (and thus censored) news above it, the feuilleton ran, uncensored, in its own domain across the bottom of the paper.
Robert le diable and Louis-Philippe the King
Authors: Petrey Sandy
Published: November 2023

Two important studies of grand opéra in its social context disagree radically over the contribution of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable to the genre’s development. William Crosten’s French Grand Opera: An Art and a Business sees Robert’s premiere on 21 November 1831 as a watershed moment with monumental impact on what followed: ‘This decisive work certified beyond doubt that a new epoch had arrived, and by so doing it became the piece, which set the tone in the French lyric theatre for the rest of the nineteenth century.’ Forty years after Crosten, Jane Fulcher’s The Nation’s Image flatly dismissed his assessment.
Pitch Structure
Authors: Herissone Rebecca
Published: November 2023

IN the latter half of the sixteenth century the rudiments of pitch were still taught to students according to theories which had been invented in medieval times. According to this system—which was usually attributed to Guido of Arezzo—notes were divided into six-note scales, or hexachords, with the intervallic pattern tone-tone-semitone-tone-tone. Each degree of the scale had associated with it a solmization syllable, designed to help students to learn the intervals. These syllables were, respectively, ut, re, mi, fa, sol, and la, terms derived from the first word of each line in the hymn to St John, Ut queant laxis.
Compositional Rules
Authors: Herissone Rebecca
Published: November 2023

ALTHOUGH the rules governing the harmonic organization of a piece of music were revolutionized during the seventeenth century, instructions for writing note-against-note counterpoint and progressions showed little development in English theory, and many remained closely related to those of the Renaissance. This principle is aptly demonstrated by Campion’ s New Way of Making Fowre Parts in Counterpoint. As we have seen, this book included the earliest references in English theory to triadic inversion, and it also portrayed harmonic tonality for the first time, as described in Chapter 6 below. When it came to ‘ the taking of all Concords, Perfect and Imperfect’ , however, Campion was quite happy just to translate the relevant parts of Calvisius’ Melopoeia, from 1592, and, though he claimed that ‘ somewhat I wil adde, and somewhat I will alter’ , as Davis has shown, the annotations and changes are in fact very few.
Italy: La Chitarra da sette corde
Authors: Tyler James , Sparks Paul
Published: November 2023

Guitar music is first encountered in Italy on the final pages ofMelchiore de Barberiis’s fifth lute publication, Opera intitolata contina (Venice, 1549). Barberiis (fl. c.1545-50) was a priest at Padua Cathedral, the town’s principal music centre, and, according to the book’s title page, was a most excellent lute player (‘sonator di Lauto eccellentissimo’). Regrettably, apart from the sparse information found in his own publications, we know almost nothing about Barberiis’s life; however, we do know a great deal about the cosmopolitan town in which he lived and worked.
1770-89: The First Six-String Guitars
Authors: Tyler James , Sparks Paul
Published: November 2023

The subject of string-making has received little or no attention in most histories of the guitar, yet the development of the instrument cannot be fully appreciated without an understanding of the innovations that were taking place at the same time in the manufacture of musical strings. The luthier and the string-maker have always been dependent upon each other’s skills, and the following paragraphs offer a concise summary of the ways in which they have influenced each other. This necessitates briefly stepping back in time to investigate the way that strings were made in earlier periods, but the detour is worthwhile because it will allow us to see how modifications in string manufacture came to affect the development of the guitar in the second half of the eighteenth century.
‘It seems to have been lost’: On Missing and Recovered Mendelssohn Sources
Authors: Wehner Ralf
Published: November 2023

The British Library holds an important source of Mendelssohn’s Melusine Overture. This copyist’s manuscript, containing some entries in Mendelssohn’s hand, is extremely valuable for our understanding of the work. In a letter from Mendelssohn to Karl Klingemann the composer requests that his friend, who lived in London, ‘retrieve in my name the score the Philharmonic has of it, and burn it’. And he emphasizes: ‘but it is very important to me that the old score be destroyed. I would also be happy if you could burn Horsley’s piano score of it, but if you think that they would not like that, then let it be. Attwood has an old score of it, a sort of sketch; you can allow that one to live.’
‘So kann ich es nicht componiren’: Mendelssohn, Opera, and the Libretto Problem
Authors: Hennemann Monika
Published: November 2023

‘I cannot compose it like that’ : Felix Mendelssohn’s typical reaction to opera libretti presented to him goes some way to account for his failure to complete a mature opera and thus even suggests that a more accurate title of this chapter might read ‘Mendelssohn, no opera, and the libretto problem’. It might initially seem odd to discuss the relationship to opera composition of a composer who never completed mature work in the genre. However, Mendelssohn’s attempts at opera composition constitute such a significant part of his compositional career that they deserve to be investigated, particularly when we take into account his constant preoccupation with this challenge and his promising start in the genre. By the age of 20, he had seen a total of six of his own Singspiele and Liederspiele performed, and definitely planned to compose further dramatic works. In the course of the following years, he considered more than fifty subjects, was in contact with prospective librettists, and received a large number of unsolicited libretti.
Music and Affect: Empirical and Theoretical Contributions from Experimental Psychology
Authors: Krumhansl Caroll.
Published: November 2023

Musicology and philosophy offer extensive theoretical discussions of emotional responses to music. Wide-ranging proposals consider how musical structures produce emotions, the role of experience in establishing extra musical associations, the historical and cultural contexts that shape emotional responses, the status of musical emotions from the perspectives of aesthetics and philosophy of mind, and the role of expressive performance in communicating emotions. It might, therefore, seem surprising that basic psychological research on emotion rarely considers music.1 The fundamental issues in this literature include such questions as whether there are basic emotions and whether these are universal, the function of emotions (which is often discussed in evolutionary terms), the antecedents and consequences of emotion, the social communication of emotion, individual differences in responses, the existence of emotion-specific physiology, and the relationship between emotion and cognition. These issues are rarely discussed in connection with music.
Strong Experiences of and with Music
Authors: Gabrielsson Alf , wik siv lindstrom
Published: November 2023

Many people remember an occasion on which or a situation in which they had an especially strong experience elicited by or associated with music. It stays in their memory as a unique experience and may generate a strong motivation to search for similar experiences and/or to devote one’s life to music. Despite their obvious relevance for music psychology, research on such experiences is scarce. Practically the only example is a little-known investigation by Robert Panzarella, inspired by Abraham Maslow’s concept of ‘peak experience’ .1 Panzarella obtained reports on peak experiences, defined as ‘intense joyous experiences’, from 103 people, of which about half pertained to music, the other half to art. Using a combination of content analysis and the statistical technique known as factor analysis, he arrived at a description of those experiences in terms of four basic aspects: motor-sensory ecstasy, fusionemotional ecstasy, withdrawal ecstasy, and renewal ecstasy. Motor-sensory ecstasy and fusion-emotional ecstasy were more common in connection with music than with art, while withdrawal ecstasy was about equally common for music and art, and renewal ecstasy was more common for art.
Critical Editions and Performance
Authors: Gossett Philip
Published: November 2023

In an article in Opera News in 1995, Will Crutchfield lamented the loss of ‘one of my favourite examples of the power of melody in Italian opera’.