People's History and Socialist Theory.

The revival of the Baroque violin, as part of the early music movement, was based on the idea that music is best expressed by using the instruments and aesthetic ideals from the time period of the music that is to be performed. For violinists playing music before the mid-nineteenth century, this would entail playing on a non-modernized instrument and a pre-Tourte bow. This anti-evolutionary stance was a confrontational position to take, and it was an enormous undertaking for the Baroque violin pioneers to revive equipment which had been so successfully “improved” through the centuries. Archival research and interviews with ten of the oldest living Baroque violinists have challenged the accepted historiography of the movement. Viewing the Baroque violin revival as an “invented tradition” did not undermine the pioneers’ achievements, but provided a new framework in which to view them. Although it is impossible to claim that these violinists were able to reproduce the sounds and musical ideals of an earlier period, their use of historical equipment and their creation of a new musical aesthetic - both strikingly different from the prevailing models - was indeed revolutionary. They brought the Baroque violin back onto the concert stage, codified and disseminated their ideas of style and technique and turned this new approach into a profession. In this rewritten history of the Baroque violin revival, a a new narrative is revealed, new connections to nineteenth-century experimentations are made and forgotten figures are reestablished.

The revival of the Baroque violin

Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914

The Exotic in Western Music

Making Music in the Polish Tatras: Tourists, Ethnographers, and Mountain Musicians. By Timothy J, Cooley. [Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005. Pp, viii + 293, ISBN 0-253-34489-1) What impact do we have on those in the "field" of our research? Two decades of self-examination have explored the nature of fieldwork as an increasingly participatory, self-reflexive and dialogic process built on personal relationships and commensality. In a post-colonial, postmodern, global world, we are becoming increasingly aware of the range of implications that our work has inspired among the peoples and cultures we study. Timothy Cooley compellingly addresses such issues in his insightful examination of "outsider" involvement in the Podhale region of southern Poland. Located on the northern side of the Tatra Mountains that form part of the Carpathian Mountain crescent which extends from southern Poland into the Balkans, Podhale is home to the Gorale (Highlanders) and has a long history of association with outsiders despite its relatively isolated geographic position. In this book, the author explores constructions of ethnicity and music-culture as a direct corollary of the impact of tourists (long attracted to this mountainous region) and ethnographers (similarly attracted to a rich folk culture) in a study drawn from over ten years of research and fieldwork, and built on a dissertation and several published articles. Locating his work in the tradition of Anderson (1991) and Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), Cooley suggests that over a period of two centuries, tourists and ethnographers have joined with longtime residents of Podhale in imagining and inventing Gorale as a distinct ethnic group within Poland and the music-culture with which they are associated (4). Though isolation is the most frequently cited reason for the Gorale people's distinct cultural identity, Cooley builds upon this as an irony by suggesting that "outside interest also stimulated the very invention of Gorale ethnicity and that it now provides, through the tourist industry, an important motivation for maintaining this ethnicity"(8). He goes on to detail the instrumental music, songs and dances that have come to identify the Gorale of Podhale as both sound/ gesture and idea, and the way these have contributed to making and maintaining the Gorale as a distinct ethnic group. Making Music in the Polish Tatras comprises seven chapters in addition to an introduction and epilogue. These chapters fall into two main parts: the first three provide a historical orientation to the region, people, music-culture and scholarship; the second four revolve around the concept of the village in today's world and provide ongoing examples of change and adaptation. Each chapter situates the discussion within an expansive theoretical framework to contextualize specific ethnographic work within larger issues relevant to ethnomusicology, folklore, and anthropology in general. These include concerns with locality and place, tourism and ethnography, music and identity, nationalism and transnationalism--all within an ethnomusicological tradition engaged with the epistemological goal of understanding rather than explaining music-culture (Titon 1997). Chapter 1 (Podhale) introduces the reader to this small region and people before focusing on the music-culture itself. Here Cooley provides a comprehensive and systematic overview of the distinctive music associated with the Gorale. Dividing it into vocal and instrumental genres, music for dancing, and dance genres, he provides transcriptions and recordings based on his own field research as well as published collections. This presents a fine introduction to a little-known repertoire about which there is a dearth of information in English (see also Wrazen 1988). (A brief observation here serves to illustrate some of the idiosyncrasies of ethnoaesthetics and local terminology in presenting repertoire: I have been told that the bass pattern defining Figure 1. …

Making Music in the Polish Tatras: Tourists, Ethnographers, and Mountain Musicians

The broad strokes of economic and political globalisation in Central Europe and the concomitant flows of people in the current fin-de-siecle manifest themselves as shifts in the practice of ‘classical’ music in Vienna, a practice itself the legacy of analogous processes during the previous fin-de-siecle. Music in the Mozart Year 2006 reveals emergent multivalent possibilities in the transformation of classical music as cultural practice and is viewed through the rubrics of tradition, tourism, branding and the popular. This article argues that ultimately, the practice of classical music in Vienna continues to serve as a site for experiments in cosmopolitanism.

Eric Martin Usner

Papers

‘The Condition of Mozart’: Mozart Year 2006 and the New Vienna