bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Mozart-Da Ponte Operas
Authors: Steptoe Andrew
Published: November 2023

Mozart’s collaborations with the librettist Lorenzo da Ponte led to the composition of three of the greatest masterpieces in all opera, Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosìfan tutte. The aim of this book is to guide the reader to deeper understanding and enjoyment of these enigmatic works, not so much through detailed musical analysis as through setting the scene for their composition. The author examines the cultural and social context in which they were written, the sort of audience who might have attended, and their tastes and expectations. He considers Mozart’s own intentions and aspirations for these works, composed over a period of rapid intellectual and political change, during which his beliefs, ambitions, and position in society changed radically. At a musical level, Mozart’s work underwent crucial stylistic developments that are manifest in these three operas. We are also given clues to da Ponte’s view of opera and the type of entertainment he set out to create. Finally, the author looks at the practicalities of opera production in Mozart’s time, all of which would have influenced the final creation of these works.
Introduction
Authors: Barclay Robert
Published: November 2023

In order to explore and express to the maximum the music of any period, the mu sician must make himself at home in the composer’s workshop. He must be well aware of what tools the composer had at his disposal; what he could and could not do. It is the obligation of the musician to make every effort to hear and understand the music as the composer did. Of particular importance, the musician must be at home with the virtues and limitations of the contemporary instruments. An adequate realization of the composer’s intentions can only be approached when thorough attention is given to authenticity in instrumentation and technique. This is especially so in the case of early music for the trumpet, whose true renaissance still lies in the future. The modern trumpet and its pre-industrial forebear, the natural trumpet, vary so widely mechanically and acoustically, and require playing techniques at such wide variance, that they might almost be regarded as different instruments.
Conclusion
Authors: Barclay Robert
Published: November 2023

Now that we have followed a reasonably detailed description of how a trumpet maker of several centuries ago might have constructed and finished an instrument, we are left with the general question ‘why’? Why should the systematic analysis of early technique be of value to the instrument-maker and player of today? Why should this information be of more than simply academic interest? By illustrating the previous chapter with photographs and drawings of processes recreated in a twentieth-century workshop, there is the quite obvious intention of demonstrating the practical possibility of constructing instruments in a thoroughly authentic fashion. But if this were all this book had set out to achieve, it would conclude half fulfilled.
Women Musicians of Venice
Authors: Baldauf-Berdes Jane L
Published: November 2023

This book opens a door long closed on an important era in the history of Venice. It presents, for the first time, an introductory, contextual study of three centuries of musical activity at the four major eleemosynary foundations of the former Republic of Venice: the ospedali grandi. It provides a comprehensive account of the institutional, social, religious, and civic dimensions of these welfare complexes, with particular reference to their musical subsidiaries, or cori. Involving over 300 external professional male composers and music teachers and over 800 internal professional women musicians, the history of the cori also incorporates a vast repertory of over 4,000 original works – sacred and secular, vocal and instrumental, solo and choral – little know today but recognized as key elements in the historical evolution of musical genres. Responsible for this phenomenon through their association with the ospedali and the figlie del coro were such figures as Lotti, Legrenzi, Vivaldi, Hasse, Galuppi, and Cimarosa, to name but six. It is their relationship to the ospedali and the concert series in the churches and music salons annexed to them that Dr Berdes explores. In the process she proves the significance of the cori as reflectors of a range of cross-disciplinary scholarship from the history of art and architecture to the history of culture and social policy, as well as medical care and aspects of women's, children's, and Venetian studies. Amassing a wealth of information from primary sources, this book constitutes a repository of information and references for a multitude of new investigations. Above all, it will facilitate rediscovery, performance, and analysis of the repertoire commissioned for, and first performed by, the women musicians of the cori, a repertoire of unique richness which may be seen as the mirror of a lost Venetian civilization.
Sleeping Beauty The First Production
Authors: Wiley Roland John
Published: November 2023

Tchaikovsky sent the score of each act of Sleeping Beauty to Petersburg as he finished it, where at least two repetiteurs rehearsal scores) were prepared. The holograph score lHol), the one surviving ré pétiteur lRep), and printed piano reductions of the music lPR-1, PR-II) used by Nikolai Sergeyev, régisseur of the Petersburg ballet from 1903 to 1918, are the principal sources from which we can learn about the performance version of Sleeping Beauty.All changes in the music found in these four sources are listed in Appendix H.
The Early Flute
Authors: Solum John , Smith Anne
Published: November 2023

With the growing interest in recent years in the use of period instruments for recordings, live professional performances, and amateur music-making, the old-style transverse flutes are experiencing a remarkable comeback. The Early Flute is the first book in modern times to deal exclusively with the flutes used in the Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical eras. The book details the history of the transverse flute from 1500 until the early nineteenth century. Advice is given on acquiring instruments and on their care and maintenance. Additional chapters guide the reader to sources about relevant technique and style, recommend repertoire, and give general advice to the modern player. The text is enhanced by numerous photographs of important historic flutes.
Syntagma Musicum
Authors: Crookes David Z
Published: November 2023

Over the last dozen or so years the musical landscape has been changed significantly by the revival of early instrumental music. People are now making and playing many Renaissance and early baroque instruments which until recently were not even mentioned in standard dictionaries. Praetorius's De Organographia, first published in 1618, can be called the book behind the revival. While it has long been an essential tool for musicologists, it is now exercising a wider, more popular appeal as the growing multitude of instrument makers and players seek to base its efforts on this documentation Praetorius has provided. De Organographia is beyond argument the most important period book on musical instruments ever to be written. No comparable work gives us the wide range, the clarity of description, and above all the scale drawings that we find in Praetorius.
Aida
Authors: Budden Julian
Published: November 2023

One of the more pleasant by-products of Don Carlos was, as we have seen, the warm friendship that sprang up between the Verdis and the du Lodes. In the years that followed the Parisian premiere du Lode never despaired of tempting Verdi back into another collaboration. But the late 186os were difficult times for the composer, with one misfortune following another: the death of his father, then of his father-in-law and benefactor Antonio Barezzi, and the stroke which condemned his faithful librettist Piave to eight years of a vegetable existence.
Songs Of Mortals, Dialogues Of The Gods
Authors: Stein Louise K
Published: November 2023

This is the first comprehensive survey of seventeenth-century Spanish theatrical music to be written in any language. While particular aspects of the field have been explored before, no previous single study has succeeded in defining the place and function of music in the Spanish theatre, and the nature of the extant repertory. This book explains the development of the various musical-theatrical genres of the period (such as the semi-opera, opera, court plays), details the origins of the zarzuela, and looks at the anomalous production of three operas during the seventeenth century. It is based on a thorough study of the primary sources (musical sources, text of plays, archival documents), and the author combines history of music, history of theatre, politics and literary and musical anlysis to build a complete picture. In addition the book answers questions concerning the nature of the Spanish musical baroque and its relationship to European musical and theatrical developments. As such, it will be welcomed by musicologists, hispanists, students of Spanish culture, and historians of the arts and ideas.
Music Therapy for the Autistic Child
Authors: Alvin Juliette , Warwick Auriel
Published: November 2023

Music Therapy for the Autistic Child was first published in 1978, and was the first book of its kind to analyse the effect of music therapy on the whole development of the autistic child. It contained detailed accounts of the music therapy techniques found to be effective with different types of autistic children, and it illustrated these with case-studies drawn from the author's original research. This second edition retains all the text of the first and adds three new chapters, reflecting the depth of research music therapy has received over the last ten years and its important position within the whole therapy of autistic children. Written by Auriel Warwick, herself a music therapist and student of Juliette Alvin, these chapters describe how mothers can be involved with their autistic children in the therapeutic process, and illustrate the problems and rewards found in the musical and personal relationships which evolve.
The Restoration of Medieval Chant
Authors: Hiley David
Published: November 2023

After the period of perpetual revision and new composition it was perhaps inevitable that the idea should have gained ascendancy of returning to the plainchant as it had ‘originally’ been. Several factors determined the course that events would take.
The Early Mandolin
Authors: Tyler James , Sparks Paul
Published: November 2023

This is the first book to be devoted exclusively to the two main types of early mandolin - the mandolino and the Neapolitan mandoline. It illustrates the rich and varied musical history of these instruments and the full extent of their repertoires, which include music by Handel, Vivaldi, Alessandro Scarlatti, Beethoven, and by Sammartini, whose recently discovered sonata for mandolin is published here for the first time. The book aims to provide the basis for an understanding of the nature and historical performance practice of the instruments and thereby to enable players of today to achieve satisfying performances of the music.
The Compact Disc Handbook
Authors: Pohlmann Ken C
Published: November 2023

This is a new edition, in paperback, of Ken Pohlmann's classic survey of the compact disc world, The Compact Disc: A Handbook of Theory and Use, and celebrates the tenth birthday of possibly the most successful consumer electronics product ever introduced. The phenomenal success of the compact disc-currently over a billion copies are sold each year-has encouraged rapid development of compact disc technology and spawned entirely new applications for it. The text of this new edition has been thoroughly overhauled to take note of all these developments; in addition there is more information on the laboratory origins of the compact disc and the principles underlying the format. It remains a comprehensive and authoritative handbook by an acknowledged expert on digital audio and related topics.
Genre Rules
Authors: Frith Simon
Published: November 2023

There was a program on a college radio station in Ithaca when I was living there in early 1991 which described itself as “Pure American folk from singers who defy labels;” and this self-contradictory statement can stand as the motto for this chapter, in which I will examine the role of labels in popular music and consider the seemingly inescapable use of generic categories in the organization of popular culture. These are so much a part of our everyday lives that we hardly notice their necessity—in the way bookshop shelves are laid out (novels distributed between romance, mystery, science fiction, horror, popular fiction, contemporary fiction, classics, and so on); in the way TV program guides classify the evening’s entertainment (sitcom, game show, talk show, crime series, documentary); in the ways films are advertised and videos shelved (comedy, Western, horror, musical, adventure, adult); in the way magazines are laid out at newsagents (women’s, children’s, hobby, general interest, fashion, computers, music).
Masses on Plainsong Cantus Firmi
Authors: Planchart Alejandro Enrique
Published: November 2023

Introduction Contemporary sources attribute five masses based upon plainsongs to Josquin des Prez: Gaudeamus, Ave maris stella, De beata Vi’1;gine, Da pacem, and Pange lingua. The first three were published by Ottaviano Petrucci, one each in his Misse Josquin (Venice, 1502), Missarum Josquin fiber secundus (Venice 1505), andMissarum Josquin fiber tertius (Fossombrone, 1514). Da pacem was pub lished in 1539 by Johannes Ott with an ascription to Josquin, but the earliest source (Munich 7) ascribes it to Noel Bauldeweyn, and Edgar Sparks showed that it is a work of Bauldeweyn. Pange lingua is ascribed consistently to Josquin. Gaudeamus appears to be the earliest of these masses. It looks back to the style of a previous generation, although its earliest source is Petrucci’s publication of 1502, followed closely by the copy in Vatican CS 23, copied between 1503 and 1512.Ave maris stellais probably a later work; it was published in 1505 and the early manuscript sources date from approximately the same time.
Mass Sections
Authors: Sherr Richard
Published: November 2023

Among the works attributed to Josquin des Prez are a few isolated settings of the Ordinary of the mass. Most of these were printed by Petrucci in 1505 in the collection entitled Fragmenta missarum (a compilation of settings of single movements of the Ordinary by a number of composers). In the Petrucci print, the Josquin settings are all grouped together. In addition, there are a three-voice G/,oria de beata Vi,;gine ascribed to Josquin in St Gall 463 (‘Tschudi Liederbuch’) and a Credo setting ascribed to him in Cambrai 18. The mass sections are listed in Table 7.1. Most of these works have conflicting attributions or are unica. In one case of conflict Petrucci’s attribution is almost certainly wrong: the ascription of the Missa de feria to Johannes Martini in a Ferrarese source would seem to clinch that matter, and this work has been omitted from the following discussion. Also excluded is the Gloria in St Gall 463, for which only the superius survives. For the other works with conflicting attributions and for the unica the case is less clear.
Missa Da pacem and Missa Allez regretz
Authors: Sherr Richard
Published: November 2023

The preceding chapters have covered those masses and mass sections that are now by common consensus considered to be by, or at least possibly to be by, Josquin des Prez. Omitted from those chapters are two masses for which a consensus used to exist, but does no longer. Both were published in the Josquin Werken and were accepted as authentic by Osthoff, but subsequently their authenticity was so seriously contested that it seemed plausible to omit discussion of them from this book. Some explanation, however, is warranted. Nothing demonstrates the contention of Rob C. Wegman in this Companion about the ‘force of opinion’ better than the fate of the Missa Da pacem at the hands of modern scholarship. This mass was not merely accepted as a work of Josquin’s, but as one of the best examples of his ‘late style’ until the 1970s. The mass even exists in more than one modern edition (the Werken and Das Chor werk ), a distinction shared only by the two most famous masses of Josquin, the Missa Pange lingua and the Missa de beata Vi1lJine. Based on the antiphon Da pacem Domine, the mass is attributed to Josquin in three of its five sources, all three post-dating his death by about twenty years.
Analysing Josquin
Authors: Milsom John
Published: November 2023

My teacher Josquin ..never gave a lecture on music or wrote a theoretical work, and yet he was able in a short time to form complete musicians, because he did not keep back his pupils with long and useless instructions but taught them the rules in a few words, through practical application in the course of singing. And as soon as he saw that his pupils were well grounded in singing, had a good enunciation and knew how to embellish melodies and fit the text to the music, then he taught them the perfect and imperfect intervals and the different methods of inventing counterpoints against plainsong. Ifhe discovered, however, pupils with an ingenious mind and promising disposition, then he would teach these in a few words the rules of three-part and later of four-, five-, six-part,etc, writing, always providing them with examples to imitate. Josquin did not, however, consider all suited to learn composition; he judged that only those should be taught who were drawn to this delightful art by a special natural impulse. IN this eyewitness account of musical pedagogy in the early sixteenth century we come as close as contemporary sources will allow us-and itis neither as close nor as authoritative as we might wish -to hearing the words Josquin des Prez himself used in order to illuminate the theory and practice of his art. Nothing in the anecdote lies beyond credibility. On the contrary, Josquin emerges as a teacher without obvious idiosyncrasy who adheres closely to the standard tutorial curriculum of the day.
1881-1905
Authors: Stevens Halsey
Published: November 2023

There is a bitter irony in the fact that not one of the Hun·garian towns in which Béla Bartók spent his youth is now within the boundaries of Hungary. The Treaty of Trianon, in June 1920, stripped Hungary of two-thirds of her territory and half of her population, allotting to Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia land that had been Hungarian for more than a thousand years.
The Chamber Music: I
Authors: Stevens Halsey
Published: November 2023

There is no better way to approach the music of BC!, Bartók, and certainly no better way of understanding the processes of growth that his music underwent, than through the string quartets. This was the only form which held Bartók’s attention from his student days to the very end of his life: his first quartet,1 later suppressed, was written (according to Kodláy) in 1899, when he was eighteen years old; and in December 1944, less than a year before his death, he was planning to write a new quartet,2 of which only a few motives were sketched. Between are the six quartets which mark not only successive culmination points in Bartók’s career, but also in a sense the culmination of twentieth-century activity in the form.
The Dramatic Music
Authors: Stevens Halsey
Published: November 2023

I the nationalist ferment of the 1840’s, the Hungarian public was ready to greet with acclaim any art-work that embodied the political philosophies of the time. Ferenc Erkel took advantage of the Hungarian state of mind to produce in the early years of that decade his operas Báthori Mária and Hunyadi L á szló, which laid the foundations for a national lyric theater. Their immediate success was somewhat clouded by the dark years following the collapse of the 1848 revolution and the exile of Kossuth, but Hunyadi L á szló in particular retained a place in the repertory. Erkel’s later operas, B á nk B á n and others, though still performed, never attained a comparable success.
Prelude
Authors: Kennedy Michael
Published: November 2023

On 13 December 1921 Elgar confided to his friend Sir Sidney Colvin: ‘I am still at heart the dreamy child who used to be found in the reeds by Severn side with a sheet of paper trying to fix the sounds and longing for something very great. I am still looking for this ⃛ but as a child and as a young man and as a mature man no single person was ever kind to me.’

Elgar was sixty-four when he wrote this letter. He was acknowledged to be the foremost English composer of his time; nearly every kind of official honour had come his way; self-taught, he had risen from provincial obscurity to international fame; he had achieved in his music the ‘something very great’. Yet he still regarded himself as an ‘outsider’ and looked back on his early struggles not with self-satisfaction but with bitterness. What did he mean when he said that no one was ‘kind’ to him? Biographical facts prove that he was offered many a helping hand. Nevertheless he spoke and wrote often of the discouragement he received from his friends and of their slighting attitude to his music. ‘One’s ownfriends are the people to be most in dread of,’ he wrote shortly before Froissart was performed, ‘I have always been wrong hitherto’.
Wand of Youth
Authors: Kennedy Michael
Published: November 2023

Edward William Elgar was born in the village of Broadheath, just outside Worcester, on 2 June 1857. He was the fourth (or perhaps the fifth) child of William and Ann Elgar. They had married in 1848, and she had become a convert to Roman Catholicism in 1852 her husband was not baptized as a Roman Catholic until he was on his deathbed in 1906. He is said to have ‘detested’ papism and — jocularly—to have threatened to shoot his daughters if he saw them going to confession. A Dover man born in 1821, William Elgar settled in Worcester in 1841. He had served a musical apprenticeship with Coventry and Hollier of Dean Street, Soho. This firm was approached by the Comptroller of the Household of the Queen Dowager, Adelaide (widow of William IV), to provide a piano-tuner for the instruments at Witley Court, Worcestershire, where Adelaide took up residence in 1844.
War
Authors: Kennedy Michael
Published: November 2023

Ernest Newman, writing in the Musical Times of September 1914 on ‘The War and the Future of Music’, remarked that in England Elgar was still ‘the one figure of impressive stature’. It was nearly fifteen years since the Variations had first been played and the English musical scene in that time had been transformed. Yet much remained the same. Parry was still director of the Royal College of Music, Stanford still taught there and was still Professor at Cambridge, Mackenzie was still Principal of the Royal Academy of Music, Brodsky was still Principal of the Royal Manchester College of Music and still active enough as a soloist to have played the Violin Concerto in Vienna in 1913 under Franz Schalk. But Elgar’s name and fame surpassed them all. He stood aloof from ‘schools’ of music, he had no academic position, he exerted no direct influence on the young. He had seen new names come into prominence but none challenged his supremacy. Bantock had his admirers, Josef Hol¬ brooke enjoyed a brief spell of attention, and Delius was regarded almost as a foreign composer. Of a younger group the most successful and admired was Vaughan Williams, whose A London Symphony, first played in March 1914, owed something to Elgar’s example. His friend Gustav Holst was known only to a restricted circle. Ethel Smyth, J. B. McEwen, Frank Bridge, Arnold Bax, Cyril Scott, York Bowen, Percy Grainger—all had work to their credit but some had yet to make their mark and others, though they did not realize it, had already made what mark was within their capacity. One thing was common to all the younger men: they could face the world of music bravely and confidently, and this they owed, as much as to anything, to the vantage-point won for them by Elgar.
The Music of Brahms
Authors: Musgrave Michael
Published: November 2023

Michael Musgrave presents a contemporary view of Brahms 150 years after his birth, seeing him not simply as the `conservative' figure so often stressed in the past, but as one who creatively reinterpreted a wider range of historical elements than any composer of his time. Brahms absorbed his studies directly into his music-making and composition and in so doing helped to evolve not merely a personal language which was regarded as progressive and sometimes difficult by a range of contemporaries and successors, but also helped to establish an ethos of historical reference which anticipates the twentieth century. The book concentrates on the music, with Brahms's life discussed briefly in the introduction. The works are considered in four phases according to genre, with an emphasis on connection and on the development and elaboration of a unified language. The list of works includes a recent discoveries and a calendar outlines the pattern of his musical life, including relevant information concerning performances.
The Music of Chopin
Authors: Samson Jim
Published: November 2023

The lasting popularity of Chopin’s music has reached ‘from salon to slum’. He captured and expressed the spirit of the age of Romanticism, its ardour and idealism, its longing and restlessness, its love of spontaneity, with an authority his contemporaries immediately recognized and which successive generations have admired and loved. Much of the Chopin literature in English is biographical, but this book is a critical study of the music itself and of the creative process which is central to the life of any composer. Professor Jim Samson provides a detailed analysis of the style and structure of the music in the light of recent Chopin scholarship on the one hand and recent analytical methods on the other. The early chapters deal mainly with the sources and the characteristic profile of Chopin’s musical style, relating his music to a wider context in social and stylistic history. Later chapters look rather at the structure of his music and how it functions, with many examples highlighting the discussion.
Pitch and Transposition
Authors: Kurtzman Jeffrey
Published: November 2023

For sixteenth- and seventeenth-century music the question of pitch standards is complex, and reliable information is limited. The only certainty is that there was no uniform pitch standard from country to country, from city to city, and not necessarily even between two organs in the same church. To quote Arthur Mendel: It is clear that absolute pitch could have had relatively little importance to the musician before the late 18th century To musicians before 1750, the notes on the staff, and the names by which they were referred to, represented degrees in a gamut that had no permanent anchor at a standard pitch level, but was freely movable up and down according to the nature of the voices or instruments involved on any given occasion.
New Vocal Repertory
Authors: Manning Jane
Published: November 2023

Jane Manning, a leading singer of 20th century music, has chosen over 70 songs to serve the singer as an introduction to contemporary vocal music. She briefly describes each song and gives advice on its performance, showing where potential problems lie and how best to approach them. Around 100 music examples illustrate the text. Jane Manning also makes suggestions on how to programme each piece in a concert. An appendix indicated from where scores can be obtained. This book is useful both as a guide to choosing repertory and as a tutor on the practicalities of performance.
Strange Obituaries: The Historical Uses of the perobitum Supplication
Authors: Starr Pamela f.
Published: November 2023

When the Renaissance musician breathed his last, we must hope that he died at peace, surrounded by mourning colleagues and family; perhaps, as Du Fay had planned, to the cadences of his own specially chosen polyphony. But it is also likely that the onlookers included some one less concerned with final farewells than with passing along information of the decease to a person with a fast horse to Rome. Even as the obsequies were in progress, it is likely that a petition was being rushed to the papal court with a request for an ecclesiastical benefice that had been held by the deceased musician. If the petition reached the curia and was processed before any other petition for the same benefice, its success was probable.
The Woman Amateur
Authors: Woodfield Ian
Published: November 2023

Much thought, tempered by experience, was given to the question of how keyboard instruments should be transported within India. The growing population of Anglo Indians lived in closely-knit settlements, and so the transport requirements tended to be either for very short distances (within a settlement) or for much longer distances (between settlements). Indian servants were employed to carry pianofortes short distances:I supped last night with Mrs Plowden, and spent the evening very agreeably. I sent for my Pianoforte there, which can be brought at any time in three minutes; this is very pleasant, for hers is not kept constantly in tune. I seldom play upon anything else in the evenings; I have it always brought into the veranda at night on account of the cool ness. My touch upon this instrument is much improved-when I am playing upon it and the sweet south wind is blowing upon me, how impatient I am in the thought that many, many days must pass before we enjoy these pleasures together.1
Pre-orchestral Ensembles
Authors: Spitzer John , Zaslaw Neal
Published: November 2023

The five accounts of the birth of the orchestra summarized in Chapter 1 agree more or less on chronology: the orchestra began to emerge in the second half of the seventeenth century, and the process of its birth stretched over the next hundred years. This does not mean that there were no large instrumental ensembles before 1650. Reports from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries document many instances in which large numbers of instrumentalists were assembled in the same place at the same time and played together, or at least played in coordination with one another. These “pre-orchestral” ensembles were made up of different instruments than orchestras of later times; they were organized according to different principles, and they played different roles in the events in which they participated.
The Birth of Orchestration
Authors: Spitzer John , Zaslaw Neal
Published: November 2023

In an article on “Accompaniment” published in 1791, the French critic Jean-Baptiste Suard makes a pronouncement that contradicts a century or more of writing and thought about music. “The human singing voice,” says Suard: doubtless has a special charm that no instrument can equal; but the possibilities of the voice are limited in comparison to those of a large instrumental ensemble whose diverse timbres, wider range, and greater freedom and precision of execution lend infinite variety to the colors and shadings of the composer’s palette. Indeed there are a multitude of effects [une multitude d’effets] that can be produced only by instrumental music.
Some Chronological Problems in Mozart: the Contribution of Ink-Studies
Authors: Arthur John
Published: November 2023

IN the establishment of a surer chronology for Mozart’s works surviving in autograph, Schriftchronologie (the study of the chronology of the handwriting) and paper-studies—as practised by the late Wolfgang Plath and by Alan Tyson respectively—have unquestionably proved effective. But while these disciplines have been responsible in recent years for the redacting of many of Mozart’s compositions, it must also be acknowledged that there are numerous autographs whose chronological secrets have, to a greater or lesser extent, remained impenetrable. It is my purpose here to discuss some abidingly problematical works of Mozart, and to demonstrate that help in the task of clarifying their chronological circumstances can be drawn from a largely underestimated quarter: the inks in which their autographs are written.
Mozart’s Reception in Vienna, 1787-1791
Authors: Edge Dexter
Published: November 2023

Upon arriving in Vienna in 1781, Mozart rapidly became the darling of the upper aristocracy. During the first five years of his life in the imperial capital, he was in continual demand as a performer and teacher, he composed a popular Singspiel, and he earned a great deal of money. Then, about the time of Le nozze di Figaro in 1786, things began to go sour. Perhaps because of aristocratic uneasiness over the supposed revolutionary sentiments of Figaro and the moral ambiguity of Don Giovanni, or perhaps because of Mozart’s refusal to accept his ‘place’ as a common entertainer, his popularity declined precipitously: his music went out of fashion, invitations to perform disappeared, and his income plummeted.
Mozart, Da Ponte and the Ensemble: Methods in Progress?
Authors: Carter Tim
Published: November 2023

TRADITIONAL approaches to issues of tonality and structure in the three Mozart-Da Ponte operas have come under criticism in recent years. The long-range tonal planning and tonal resolutions conventionally extolled in commentaries on these works have been shown by James Webster often to be little more than none-too-analytical wishful thinking. And judging by recent remarks from Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, even Mozart’s much vaunted use of the structures and dynamics of sonata form in his ensembles is coming under threat.1 The Act 2 finale of Le nozze di Figaro, once, nay still, thought an epitome of the opera buffa finale, is proving particularly vulnerable to this post-modernist dismembering of conventional views of Mozart.
Operatic Plotting in Le nozze di Figaro*
Authors: Waldoff Jessica , Webster James
Published: November 2023

Plot is so basic to our experience of reading, and indeed to our very articulation of experience in general, that criticism has often passed over it in silence, as too obvious to bear discussion. Yet the obvious can often be the most interesting, as well as the most difficult, to talk about.1OUR premise is that plot is equally basic to the experience of opera. Every opera acts out a story; every opera involves characters in action on the stage, who have motivations and goals, who become embroiled in conflicts that depend for their resolution on the course of events; and every opera turns on discoveries, reversals, climaxes, denouements and other standard features of dramatic plots. But plot is more than a matter of story alone:
Operatic links between Rome and Vienna, 1776-1790
Authors: Pirani Federico
Published: November 2023

IN the period between Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail and Le nozze di Figaro, Mozart saw the return to favour of Italian opera, when the Emperor Joseph II restored it to the Burgtheater after the popular failure of the German National Singspiel, which had used the house since 1778. In a letter dated 7 May 1783,1 Mozart told his father of the new company’s performers and performances and of his readiness to measure himself against an Italian opera. The new court librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, was currently writing a text for Salieri (to be II ricco di un giorno), and could not at the moment supply a completely new libretto; undeterred, Mozart had read his way through some hundred librettos, he said, without finding anything to his satisfaction.
The Cabaret artistique
Authors: Whiting Steven Moore
Published: November 2023

For centuries, the word cabaret had designated a simple tavern or corner bistrot. Qualified as artistique in the early I 8Sos, the cabaret became something else: part literary cafe, part artists’ haunt, part caveau, and part goguette. The early clientele was correspondingly varied. Before long, the motley customers became part of the show, as cabaret owners capitalized on the allure of the unconventional, idealistic, and sordid lives reputedly led by students, painters, and poets, so that they might attract those who wished to appear progressive or who wished to get a close look at latter-day vie de Boheme.
Archetypes Of Congert Music
Authors: Bowen Meirio
Published: November 2023

In the present period, the traditional titles for instrumental forms have often been found confusing. Small wonder that younger composers have tended to eschew such titles altogether, the impulse of the avant-garde being to exclude all received procedures or nomenclature. In any case, actual received terms such as ‘symphony’, ‘concerto’, ‘sonata’, and ‘suite’ really are imprecise terms for the music written today. They need re-examination and re-definition. Such imprecision and the confusion that it causes are not absolute; nor should the rejection of received titles be automatic.
Pierre de la Rue and Musical Life at the Habsburg- Burgundian Court
Authors: Meconi Honey
Published: November 2023

Pierre de la Rue, composer at the grande chapelle of the Habsburg-Burgundian court for nearly a quarter of a century, composed for one of the leading musical institutions of his day. Serving successive rulers Maximilian I, Philip the Fair, Juana of Castile, Marguerite of Austria, and the future Charles V, La Rue surpassed a dozen composer colleagues in his creation of polyphony to meet the needs of the court and its extravagant liturgy. Honey Meconi presents the first ever study in English of la Rue’s life and career, exploring aspects of his compositional output and highlighting the reawakening of modern scholarship to his unique contribution. Extensive documentation of the events of his life and a complete record of the transmission of his music across Europe make this study essential for everyone studying the musical court in Europe at the turn of the 16th century.
Opera and the Culture of Fascism
Authors: Tambling Jeremy
Published: November 2023

This study looks at nineteenth - and early twentieth-century opera as part of a culture which produced fascism as a crisis-state, and threatened to extinguish the genre as an influential and contemporary high form of art altogether. Jeremy Tambling highlights the themes of the cultural crisis through a detailed discussion of some dozen operas and a general overview of the works of Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, Strauss, and others, drawing on the writings of Nietzsche, Adorno, Benjamin, and Heidegger, for an understanding of the ideological background. Reading fascism as a political, intellectual, and psychological phenomenon, the author draws on the works of Bataille, Theweleit, and Kristeva, for discussion of proto-fascist and fascist thought, and for its relation to gender-politics. Resisting the clichés about Wagner or Strauss’s relationship to the Third Reich, Tambling takes the opera out the hermetically sealed-off state in which it is normally discussed, and presents it as both complicit in, and in opposition to, the reactionary and regressive pressures that made up the ‘culture of fascism’, and those that tried to make opera part of the ‘fascism of culture’.
The Life and Ballets of Lev Ivanov
Authors: Wiley Roland John
Published: November 2023

The Life and Works of Lev Ivanov is the first book-length study in any language about this Russian artist - Marius Petipa’s colleague and Tchaikovsky’s collaborator - who is widely celebrated and yet virtually unknown. It follows Ivanov from his infancy in a St Petersburg foundling home through his training in the Imperial Theatre School and his celebrity marriage, to a career as a dancer, régisseur, and choreographer in the St Petersburg Imperial Ballet. Ivanov’s artistic world is described, as is his legacy - some dozen works, including Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and the famous dances from Prince Igor - which inspired Mikhail Fokine in the next generation. The book is richly documented, including the first complete publication of Ivanov’s memoirs, and hundreds of citations, many published here for the first time, from state documents, reminiscences, and criticism.
The Wheatstone English Concertina In Victorian England
Authors: Atlas Allan W
Published: November 2023

The Wheatstone English concertina was enormously popular in Victorian England. Developed around 1830 by the physicist Sir Charles Wheatstone, the instrument quickly found a home on the leading concert stage and in upper-class salons. It attracted such composers as Macfarren, Benedict, Barnett, and molique, who supplied its repertory with concertos, sonatas, character pieces, and chamber works. It two great virtuosos, Giulio Regondi and Richard Blagrove, drew the plaudits of audiences, and critics alike. This is the first comprehensive book about the instrument, its players, audiences, and reception. An appendix contains an edition of five pieces for the instrument.
Early Orchestral Music
Authors: Evans Peter
Published: November 2023

Despite the extreme sensitivity Britten had revealed in setting texts as unexpected and heterogeneous as those of Auden, Rimbaud and Michelangelo, until he returned from America it would have seemed reasonable to assume that instrumental composition was to form the core of his work. Of a slightly older British generation, William Walton had shown this emphasis still more pronouncedly, and Alan Rawsthorne was setting out on a comparable course. Before them both Elgar and Vaughan Williams had gone far towards transferring the focus of English musical aspirations from the chorus to the orchestra.
His Name was in Lights: Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’
Authors: Taylor Timothy D
Published: November 2023

Chuck Berry recorded ‘Johnny B. Goode’ in December 1957 and it has since become one of his best-known songs. The reasons for its lasting popularity are varied, and one of the goals of this essay is to elucidate and discuss them. But the main purpose is to raise ‘Johnny B. Goode’ as an example of the choices and problems Berry faced in his career as an African-American musician in the 1950s and 60s and the ways he dealt with them in this tune. In short, he made compromises, but these changed over time. To appeal to a white audience Berry made certain career moves early on—the decision to play ‘white’ hillbilly music is the most important—but later in his career he attempted to court a broader white audience. Two recorded versions of ‘Johnny B. Goode’ point out those changes, and I will consider them, the original one for Chess, and another, nine years later, for Mercury.
Pity Peggy Sue
Authors: Bradby Barbara , Torode Brian
Published: November 2023

The sociologist Simon Frith identifies rock and roll as a hybrid music, which emerged in the American South of the mid-1950s as a grafting of puritanical ‘white’ country and western lyrics on to sexually explicit ‘black’ blues rhythms. While acknowledging cross-fertilization between black and white music ‘since at least the middle of the nineteenth century’, he states that since the Second World War, It is as dance music that black music has developed its meanings for white users. The most obvious feature of dancing as an activity is its sexuality…Whereas Western dance forms control sexuality with formal rhythms…black music celebrates sex with a directly physical beat and an intense, emotional sound.
Structural Relationships of Music and Images in Music Video
Authors: BjÖrnberg Alf
Published: November 2023

In the course of the last decade, the body of writing on music video has grown to sizeable proportions. The reason for the present addition to this bulk of literature, in spite of the subject seemingly approaching the state of exhaustion, is that musical semiotics are still rarely applied to the field. It is a fact that pop and rock music have always been heavily infused with socially determined meaning such that an autonomous musical aesthetics appears clearly insufficient to explain their significance; however, to what extent and how this significance is linked in with particular musical structures as such is still largely uninvestigated. In my view, music video may perhaps be less interesting as a phenomenon in itself than as source material for an ‘empirical semiotics’ of popular music, shedding light on signification processes of a more general applicability. Furthermore, the distinctive features of music video may arguably be better explained on the basis of an understanding of the syntactical characteristics of popular music than by prevalent theories of postmodernism; the latter appear problematic not only due to their speculative and unsubstantiated nature with regard to media reception processes (cf. Frith and Horne 1987: 11), but their explanatory value as regards syntactic features of music video also seems to be limited (cf. Frith 1988: 207).
Introduction
Authors: Goehr Lydia
Published: November 2023

What is musical meaning? Where does it reside and how can it be known? Does it make a difference to its meaning if the music is composed with or without words, as a symphony or as a song? Why is it thought that music can express human feelings with an immediacy not possible in other languages or arts? What is contained in the claim that music is autonomous, or that it is prophetic and can articulate a ‘politics for the future’? These are some of the questions the German Romantics asked about music. In this book I try to answer these questions by focusing on the view that music means something, not just because it is a well-formed symbolic language, but because when human beings engage with this language they express something about themselves as human beings. That something, in Romantic terms, approaches a subjective freedom expressed within and against objective constraints.
The Pianoforte In The Classical Era
Authors: Cole Michael
Published: November 2023

In a period of only thirty years in the second half of the eighteenth century European musical culture underwent a remarkable transformation. In 1765 the harpsichord was the indispensable item in almost every concert and in every home where music was practised; the sound of the pianoforte was virtually unknown to most music lovers. Yet by 1795 the situation was entirely reversed. The pianoforte was indispensable and the harpsichord had become all but obsolete—except in the most backward and conservative establishments. Three hundred years of harpsichord dominance had ended, and workshops that had been busy producing them either ceased trading or switched hurriedly to the new hammer-action instruments. What precipitated this amazing capitulation was, of course, new styles in musical composition and performance. While baroque counterpoint might be ideally suited to the harpsichord, the new keyboard music required above all expression. Not only loud and soft sounds, which the harpsichord could be contrived to imitate, but diminuendi and crescendi, sudden accents and an arresting quietness, which it was powerless to perform; these became the essential elements in any accomplished performance. For song accompaniments, too, the pianoforte was found to be ideal, with a sweet tone that supported the voice, and a dynamic flexibility that permitted it to follow the vocal line or to prepare the appropriate effect. The Pianoforte in the Classical Era charts the progress of this revolution in musical aesthetics and experience, detailing the extraordinary variety of sounds and musical resources built into the keyboard instruments in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Wherever possible the author returns to original sources—a wide variety of previously unreported documents, as well as surviving instruments—to reconstruct a history of the pianoforte that departs radically from earlier theories of many of the most fundamental issues. A wide range of instruments, each carefully described, is placed in a precise chronological and cultural setting. New insights are offered into the parameters that governed the performance of keyboard music in the Classical Era.