Showing papers in "19th-Century Music in 2011"

Jammin' an Ending: Creativity, Knowledge, and Conduct among Jazz Musicians

Abstract: Research into musical creativity has hitherto involved highly disparate approaches and has taken place largely at the level of the individual. As a result, creativity has tended to be interpreted in terms of either expressive behaviour(s) in performance or ineffable innovation. In the meantime, however, a tranche of interdisciplinary research has moved towards a more collaborative understanding of creativity. With reference to that research, this article analyses the performance of a jazz standard played at a jam session in London. In exploring this unplanned moment of collaborative creativity, the study looks at the relationship between the mundane shaping of an ending and its occurrence within a cultural tradition that demands inventiveness on the part of performers. From an examination of the different sets of cultural knowledge on which musicians draw and an analysis of the momentary interactive conduct of the performers we obtain a view of creativity as an emergent amalgam – a shifting blend of knowledge and conduct that works to bring a song to a close.

‘the true fundamentals of composition’: haydn's partimento counterpoint

Abstract: In his autobiographical sketch Joseph Haydn claims to have learned the ‘true fundamentals of composition’ from Nicola Porpora. Porpora (1686–1768) was a student of Gaetano Greco at the Conservatorio dei Poveri in Naples and later himself became a maestro at the Conservatorio di San Onofrio, where Francesco Durante also taught. That Haydn's teacher Porpora came from the centre of the partimento tradition, which has attracted increased scrutiny by music theorists in recent years, justifies examining Haydn's relationship with this long-standing pedagogical method and compositional practice. In this essay I analyse the sources that shed light on Porpora's relationship to the partimento tradition and on Haydn's relationship to Porpora. Focusing on partimento counterpoint, I examine several of Haydn's fugues in contrasting genres in order to illustrate how the principles of thoroughbass and partimento help to explain particular structural procedures in Haydn's music, as well as the compositional processes that produced them.

Scene through the Press: Rock Music and Underground Papers in London, 1966–73

Abstract: In the years around 1968 London was home to a sizeable community of writers, musicians, artists, and political activists whose countercultural attitudes are expressed in the publications of the ‘alternative’ or ‘underground’ press – magazines such as International Times, OZ, INK, Friends (later Frendz), Time Out, Gandalf's Garden, The Black Dwarf, and The Hustler. That most of them had at least some pages devoted to music reflected the crucial role of rock in particular in summing up the community's aspirations, focused less on political or social than on cultural transformation. This article seeks to chart in these underground publications the changing attitudes towards music and its revolutionary potential. Initially the alternative press portrayed popular music as sharing with avant-garde tendencies a basic equation between new creative means and their would-be disruptive effects on society as a whole. However, there soon arose contradictions between the radical social potential of music and its growing commercialization, contradictions stemming not only from the co-optation of rock by market forces and record companies but also from the underground's own lack of a coherent ideological agenda. Paradoxically, it was precisely when popular music began to be considered a form of ‘high’ culture – just as the alternative press advocated – that its perceived effectiveness as part of the revolutionary, countercultural project began to diminish.

Appendix: Fundamental Issues of Musical Listening (1925)

Abstract: When Hugo Riemann wrote his 1873 doctoral dissertation, ‘On Musical Listening’, he felt himself part of the innocent atmosphere of a self-contained musical tradition. Back then, a topic that was so general could lead without further ado into fundamental questions of Classical and Romantic harmony. Today we can no longer view issues such as the opposition of major and minor or relationships of consonance and dissonance as genuine matters of principle, and physiology and mathematical acoustics seem to us to be even less suitable bases for explaining musical phenomena. If we take up Riemann’s theme again today, this must necessarily mean taking other approaches, both to our subject matter and to methodology. The musical situation has changed too much in the meantime. A tradition that is in any way self-contained no longer exists. In musical creativity, as in theoretical contemplation, things once taken for granted have now been put in question to a degree hardly ever recorded in music history. The naı̈ve feeling of living in the heyday of a unified tradition is past, Viennese Classicism has been stripped of its absolute dominance, and the figure of Richard Wagner is on the point of slipping from immediate potency into historical distance. In their place – alongside the new rhythms and colours of the nigger jazz band [sic] – early

Hearts for Sale: The French Romance and the Sexual Traffic of Musical Mimicry

Abstract: This article argues that veiled practices of gender mimicry facilitated the meteoric commercial success of the French romance in Paris during the July Monarchy. The romance was commonly characterized as a feminine genre particularly suited to women9s amateur proclivities. Many critics were quick to emphasize women9s putative obsession with romances while downplaying (or altogether neglecting to comment on) the extensive participation of men in the same musical venture. Men composers and poets who sought to pen marketable romances capitalized on aesthetic idioms and values that contemporary writers explicitly appraised as feminine. This article sets out to examine the following: first, critical dialogues surrounding the proliferation of romances during this period of social upheaval; second, the Parisian bourgeoisie9s valorization and fetishization of female amateurism; third, the poetics, politics, and economics of gender mimicry in the romance industry; and lastly, the challenges of music criticism and analysis with regard to the ambivalent significations of so-called easy music. Underlying each of these investigations is an attempt to understand the ways in which romancier s and romancieres learned to perform femininity in their quests to become professionals in the lucrative business of musical amateurism.

The Operatics of Detachment: Tosca in the James Bond Film Quantum of Solace

Abstract: I argue that Quantum of Solace , the 2008 James Bond movie, marks a change in the conception of the opera visit in film, which typically shows opera in an idealizing light. Quantum 9s opera visit, which may be a “first” in an action film, signifies detachment and encapsulates the subjective isolation of the protagonist. The scene9s distance comes from the floating operatic venue (Bregenz Festival), the voyeuristic production (“techno-opera”), the frenetic montage in much of the sequence, and the work itself ( Tosca ), which has parallels with the filmic story. Detachment is further promoted by a dry sound environment, a rearranged temporal scheme, and opera music that approaches underscore in its distance from operatic idioms. Comprised of slow harmonic rhythm and considerable repetition, the two musical excerpts—the Te Deum ending act I and the instrumental music after Scarpia9s murder in act II—are noticeably static and impose a groundedness that separates the scene from the film9s other set pieces, which are extremely fast in music, sound, and image. The disposition of the operatic music points up the cinematic bent of Puccini9s score and its remarkable ability to accommodate the needs of the film. Although Quantum 9s opera visit is cynical toward opera culture, it captures the postmillennial malaise of the long-running Bond franchise and forms the high point of a film that disappointed critics and fans alike. But while opera may “redeem” the film9s larger narrative, the protagonist remains aloof from opera9s transforming qualities as he shuns engagement with the spectacle and the resonant music on the soundtrack. Bond9s detachment is embodied in the symbol of the set9s iconic Big Eye, which not only reverses opera9s scopic dynamic by gazing at the audience more than the audience gazes at the stage, but also represents mediated looking at opera in general, as in the Metropolitan Opera9s HD cinecasts. While an operatics of detachment may seem like a contradiction, Quantum of Solace persuades us that it can be a vibrant reimagining of the special filmic ritual that is the opera visit.

Recurring dreams and moving images: The cinematic appropriation of Schumann's Op. 15, No. 7

Abstract: Schumann's music took its place alongside that of many other nineteenth-century composers in the lexicon of silent-film accompaniment. Evidence of early-twentieth-century scoring practices indicates that “Traumerei” quickly proved to be an especially popular choice for scenes of pathos and romance. This appropriation is viewed in the context of the piece's general reception history and the tradition of its concert performance in isolation from the rest of op. 15 (and in any number of instrumental arrangements) that had come to a peak at this time. The assumption of “Traumerei” into the world of film is explored with reference to the aesthetics and changing cultural economies of Schumann's own compositional activities, the nineteenth-century Bieder-meier Hausmusik tradition, and the “child” topos. The emergence of a “Traumerei” protocol in film scoring is uncovered in an examination of its continued appearance in animated and live-action sound cinema from the 1930s to the present day. The risks of semantic impoverishment of the music through cliched film usage are assessed.

Grand Opééra——Petit Opééra: Parisian Opera and Ballet from the Restoration to the Second Empire

Abstract: The emergence of grand opeera around 1830 resulted in large-scale works in five acts setting libretti largely based on historical subjects that dominated much European stage music until the First World War. But these shifts in generic paradigm came at a price. The repertoire of the Paris Opeera was based as much on ballet-pantomime as on opera, and until 1830 both genres would share the stage in a single evening. Although the aesthetic impulses behind grand opeera made programming new opera and ballet henceforth impossible, the state required the Opeera to maintain the balance between opera and ballet in order to reserve the institution9s ““pompe et luxe,”” a situation that called forth a number of responses from its management during the period that all Parisian opera houses were controlled by license (1806/7 to 1864). In the short term, the Opeera continued using older smaller-scale works to accompany ballet as part of the same evening9s entertainment, but despite the canonic pressures this exerted it was a practice that could not be sustained indefinitely. A second alternative was to shorten up-to-date grand opeera , to bring them down to dimensions at which they could be performed with ballets; the best-known example of this procedure is the reduction of Rossini9s Guillaume Tell from four acts (1829) to three (1831). A third possibility was the process of morcellement : the extraction of individual acts or pairs of acts from grand opeera and their performance alongside ballet. A longer-term strategy, and one so far entirely ignored in modern scholarship, was the development of a new type of stage music specifically to accompany ballet: petit opeera . Emerging from two closely related works at the same time as the birth of grand opeera , Rossini9s Le Comte Ory (1828) and Auber9s Le Philtre (1831), petit opeera was the direct result of institutional pressure from the state for the Opeera to mount productions of both opera and ballet, the preference of the institution and its audiences for evenings with both opera and ballet, and the indirect aesthetic pressure engendered by the appearance of grand opeera . The tradition of composing petit opeera continued up to the end of the licensing period in 1864 and encompassed, among such foreign imports as Weber, Verdi, and Donizetti, works by Haleevy, Adam, Thomas, Auber, and Rossini; two of the best-known casualties of the complexities surrounding the genre were Berlioz9s Benvenuto Cellini (1838) and Wagner9s scenario for Le Hollandais volant . Petit opeera was characterized by libretti in two acts with a limited number of musical compositions, a clear distinction between composed number and following recitative (a decisive break with grand opeera ), a limited number of characters and a comic register; it developed a set of conventions that remained consistent from its origins ca. 1830 to its latest presentations in Alary9s La Voix humaine (1861) and Massee9s La Mule de Pedro (1863).

Beethoven Overcome: Romantic and Existentialist Utopia in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker

Abstract: The very last scene of Andrei Tarkovsky9s film Stalker (1979) portrays a young girl who moves glasses around on a table just by fixing her eyes on them. As she performs this magical act the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven9s Ninth Symphony, alongside the sound of a passing train, briefly appears on the soundtrack. This brief but poignant appearance of Beethoven9s music is both arresting and perplexing, but although the scene has received a number of critical readings, it is often noticed without further considerations. The present article concentrates on this overlooked aspect in order to reread the scene and examine the role played by Beethoven9s music in it. I argue that Beethoven9s music has a symbolic function within the scene and, furthermore, that it can most plausibly be understood as representing the scientific revolutions, the political projects, and the ideological struggles of modern history. I also argue that this symbolic meaning is effectively recoded within the filmic context of the last scene, turning what can be understood as two of the master signifiers of modern civilization9s technological, political, and ideological triumphs into powerful representations of the transitory and ultimately meaningless dimension of those triumphs. In the last part of the article I examine a particular phenomenon in the film: the regular return of the compound sound-image consisting of classical music and the sound of running trains. Departing from an interpretive strategy developed by musicologist Lawrence Kramer, I attempt to show that the iteration of this sonic figure amounts to a particular structural trope in the film, namely what Kramer would call an expressive doubling. This eventually leads me to the conclusion that one very rewarding way of looking at Stalker is to see it as expressing or enacting a central tenet of the utopian aesthetics of early Romanticism: the idea of transcendence.

Non-Nationalists and Other Nationalists

Abstract: We have discussed Russian music in terms of its Russianness long enough. A short history and analysis of that discourse, its double standards and its contradictions, is given, focusing on the seminal writings of Vladimir Stasov, and an account of its migration westward, at first through the writings of Rosa Newmarch. The article ends with a call for de-exoticizing Russian music in the discourse of musicology.

“Ein seltsam Spielen”: Narrative, Performance, and Impossible Voice in Mahler's Das klagende Lied

Abstract: A quest, a murder, and musical retribution through a dead body part that sings: these are the elements of the folktale known as “The Singing Bone,” a traditional narrative that appears in numerous versions in both oral and literary European traditions. For decades, this tale has drawn the special attention of folklorists because of the remarkable and indeed sensational role played in it by music: its narrative reflects a fascinating ideology of the cultural power of music as the voice of the oppressed, while its musical interludes, chilling spectral songs sung by the bone of the murder victim, invoke the potent and at times unsettling effects of musical performance. Gustav Mahler's first large-scale work, Das klagende Lied , takes up this extraordinary narrative and translates its exceptional features into poetry and musical sound in a manner that especially foregrounds and amplifies the effects of a performing presence in both textual and musical dimensions. Mahler's narrative ballad is a multivoiced text whose temporal and vocal shifts create oscillations between narrative and drama, telling and enactment, giving rise to a remarkable instability of utterance from which repeated evocations of sound and voice emerge. Its musical setting delivers a discourse that similarly exhibits explicit moments of performance, temporal suspension, and sonic dislocation in both voices and orchestra. This extreme volatility of utterance and its resultant effects of presence become the means of the work's embodiment of its own narrative content, such that, in performance, it evokes an experience of the radical sonic rupture that is the story's theme—a theme that reverberates powerfully throughout Mahler's oeuvre.

A patron among peers: dedications to haydn and the economy of celebrity

Abstract: Between 1784 and 1809 more than forty composers dedicated works to Haydn, resulting in the largest group of offerings to a single composer in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whilst Horst Walter has suggested that certain of these works reveal the ways in which composers received Haydn's style, a study of the larger collection of dedications illuminates the broader nature of Haydn's fame and the ways in which other composers and their publishers both contributed to and capitalized on that fame. Making Haydn into a kind of pseudo-patron, the title-pages, advertisements and dedicatory epistles for these works allow for an exchange of various types of capital ranging from the material to the symbolic, ultimately enabling both dedicator and dedicatee to improve their reputations in the eyes of the consuming public.

Listening to the Self: The Shawshank Redemption and the Technology of Music

Abstract: Music has often been used to symbolize and express ontological experiences. This article explores a mode of nineteenth-century self-audition where music captures a glimpse of the freedom that lies at the core of the subject. This mode of listening has intensified with the development of modern technology and is still prevalent in constructing the identity of the self. The opera scene from the Shawshank Redemption not only is an example of this special effect, but provides a narrative of how music achieves this affect, creating an ideal and virtual self through sound technology.

‘to make of lisbon a new rome’: the repertory of the patriarchal church in the 1720s and 1730s

Abstract: The elevation of the Portuguese Royal Chapel to the rank of Patriarchal Church in 1716 was part of a larger process of ‘Romanization’ – that is, of assimilation and adaptation of Roman models within Portuguese music and culture. This involved the training of numerous chaplain-singers and young Portuguese composers in Rome, as well as the importation of chant books, ministers, singers and even the maestro di cappella of the Cappella Giulia, Domenico Scarlatti. According to the anonymous ‘Breve rezume de tudo o que se canta en cantochao, e canto de orgao pellos cantores na santa igreja patriarchal’ (Brief summary of all that is sung in plainchant and polyphony by the singers at the holy Patriarchal Church) – a document written at some point between 1722 and 1724 – the repertory of the Patriarchal Church was a varied mixture of works by thirty-two identified composers, mostly Italian and Portuguese, from a period ranging from the sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century. Some of the repertory for Holy Week is also extant in three large choirbooks prepared by a copyist from the Patriarchal Church in 1735 and 1736 for use in the Ducal Chapel in Vila Vicosa. These include ‘modern’ additions to late sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century pieces and also some curious reworkings, made with the purpose of adjusting older works to newly ‘Romanized’ performance conditions and aesthetic ideals. The sources examined in this article thus show that Portuguese ‘Romanization’, far from being a simple transplantation of ideas and practices from the centre to the periphery, was a dynamic process of acculturation and adaptation rooted in emerging forms of historical consciousness.

Blinding us with science? man, machine and the mass in b minor

Abstract: If, as seems likely, J. S. Bach intended the Mass in B minor as his musical testament, we must think it a distressing irony that the work survives in a form that not infrequently obscures the intentions of its composer.1 Bach left the Mass in an autograph score largely written towards the end of his life.2 Whether for the density of its corrections or because of the ink with which he wrote it, the manuscript – especially the Symbolum Nicenum, or Credo – proved unusually hard to read even within a few years of his death. Figure 1, a detail from a copy of the Mass written by the Berlin musicus Johann Friedrich Hering and an unknown text scribe in the mid-1760s, gives us a sense of the problem. Hering found himself compelled to leave the tenor in the first bar blank, obliging Bach‟s son Carl Philipp Emanuel, who owned the autograph, to decipher what Hering couldn‟t read and fill in the missing notes accordingly.

Between Political Engagement and Aesthetic Autonomy: Fernando Lopes-Graça's Dialectical Approach to Music and Politics

Abstract: In this article the highly contested relationship between art and politics in the twentieth century is discussed by way of the life and work of the Portuguese composer Fernando Lopes-Graca (1906–94). Lopes-Graca, who described himself as ‘a communist from birth’, lived for almost fifty years in Salazar's ‘New State’, a Fascist-type dictatorship, which emerged from a military putsch in 1926 and lasted until 1974. His experience as a communist under a right-wing regime was therefore very different from that of either communist composers living in Western democratic countries or those active in the Eastern bloc. Lopes-Graca stood apart from most other party intellectuals in his resistance to the doctrine of socialist realism. Yet from 1945 onwards he composed revolutionary songs in which his communist engagement is directly evident. Understanding this apparent tension within his output requires both a careful and nuanced understanding of his own personal position and a clear distinction between political engagement in music on the one hand and socialist realist or neo-realist tendencies on the other. It is that latter distinction – between (in the composer's own terms) ‘lived action’ and ‘imagined action’ – that accounts for the seemingly contradictory coexistence in Lopes-Graca's thinking of aesthetic autonomy and political commitment, and in his music of (to adopt categories posited by Heinrich Besseler) both ‘presentational’ music (for conventional concert settings) and ‘colloquial’ music (to be sung and played ad libitum in political meetings, at demonstrations, in the home, or even in political prisons).

Mixing with Mozart: Aesthetics and Tradition in Helmut Lachenmann's Accanto

Abstract: Accanto (1975–6), for clarinettist and orchestra, constitutes a turn towards historical reflection in the work of the distinguished German composer Helmut Lachenmann, providing a meeting point for the practitioner and the theorist. This article examines how Accanto's dialogue with Mozart's Clarinet Concerto relates to topics such as recording conventions, performance practices, and compositional trends, particularly in the 1970s. It also demonstrates how Lachenmann's conception of musical material is rooted in an understanding of the Western art music tradition, especially with regard to the issue of the ‘language-character’ of music. In doing so, it investigates Lachenmann's aesthetics of beauty in connection with performance practices, sociological models of musical subjectivity, and Adorno's understanding of tradition. In general, the article argues that compositional practice in Accanto is shaped in response to the situation of classical music, especially in the 1970s.

‘Alte Musik’ or ‘Early Music’?

Abstract: An attempt to distinguish between ‘alte Musik’, as German musicians used to conceive it, and ‘early music’, as is now the common phrase in English, provides a new – and perhaps better – lens through which to view the old historical schisms of twentieth-century music. The recourse that musical innovators have always had to ancient precedents, as inspiration and as validation, has many variations, and these variations are reliable reflectors of aesthetic attitudes.

Haydn's forgotten quartets: Three of the 'Paris' symphonies arranged for string quartet

Abstract: In 1787 Artaria, Haydn's publisher in Vienna, issued three versions of The Seven Last Words: the original orchestral version, a quartet arrangement prepared by the composer and a keyboard arrangement sanctioned by him. A year later, in September 1788, Artaria issued three of the recent ‘Paris’ Symphonies, Nos 84, 85 and 86, in an arrangement for quartet. While the quartet version of The Seven Last Words has always been accepted as part of the canon, the three quartet arrangements of the symphonies have been ignored. Sympathetic consideration of a range of evidence, including the bibliographical, historical and text-critical, suggests that Haydn may have been the author of these three quartets.

Francoism and the Republican Exiles: the Case of the Composer Julián Bautista (1901–61)

Abstract: Exile studies in musicology have generally focused on Central European exiles fleeing from Nazism; at the same time studies of the Republican exile following the Spanish Civil War have tended to deal primarily with writers rather than musicians. This article intends to address both these areas of neglect by focusing on the composer Julia´n Bautista, who settled in Buenos Aires in 1940. In the late 1950s, after more than a decade of oblivion in his home country, Bautista, like other anti-Francoist exiles, started to become the object of interest again in Spain, an interest which continued after the composer’s death in 1961. By exploring Bautista’s presence in the Francoist musical press and in high-profile, state-sponsored events such as the Festivales de Musica de America y Espana, I shall explore the reasons for his rehabilitation – reasons that, far from amounting to straightforward liberalization, seem to have been closely aligned with the strategies of the regime, and the cultural values and historical narratives that underpinned them.

Modifying the da capo? through-composed arias in vocal works by bach and other composers

Abstract: Among the many unique features of the vocal music of Johann Sebastian Bach is the use of what has been called ‘free’ or ‘modified’ da capo form in roughly a third of the movements that have an overall ternary design. Bach's reason for adopting this distinctive form, used in duets and choruses as well as arias, has been the subject of frequent speculation by scholars, who have found precedents in works by Alessandro Scarlatti and parallel examples in the music of Handel. Through close analysis of text and music in numerous examples, this study demonstrates that Bach's version of this design is a defining element of his style; although it resembles early types of sonata form, it is distinct from anything in the music of his predecessors and contemporaries. No single explanation can account for his use of it, but most examples demonstrate Bach's close attention to particular formal or rhetorical features of their poetic texts. I propose a new term, ‘through-composed da capo form’, for this design. Its prominence in Bach's music is a product of his emergence as a composer during a period when German poets and musicians were adopting new approaches derived from the Italian tradition of opera seria but had not yet reduced them to formulae.

Alignment, absorption, animation: pantomime ballet in the lombard illuminismo

Abstract: This article investigates the theme of statuary animation within pantomime and language reform, particularly in Milan between the 1760s and the 1790s. Its focal point is a little-known work created by Florentine choreographer Gasparo Angiolini for the new Teatro alla Scala in 1782: his didactic ‘philosophical ballet’ La vendetta spiritosa, based on the Traite des sensations by Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (in Venice the work was given as La vendetta ingegnosa o La statua di Condilliac [sic]). During the last decades of his career, informed by French linguistic theory and by Milanese writers such as the Verri brothers and Cesare Beccaria, Angiolini aimed to create an unmediated music-gestural language that could overcome linguistic and even political boundaries. The project had significant implications for the use of representative sound, both in music and in language. I examine the development of the impulse towards gestural mimesis and through-composition within scores for the danza parlante, including by Angiolini himself.

A Ukrainian Tune in Medieval France: Perceptions of Nationalism and Local Color in Russian Opera

Abstract: This article is based on the key-note lecture given at the conference “Non-Nationalist” Russian Operas, Leeds, U.K., on 17 November 2010. It engages with the conference9s distinction between the “nationalist” and “non-nationalist” and proposes six potential situations for when an opera might be described as “Russian”: by composer9s intention, by reception, by interpretation, by association, by blood or culture, and by emanating from the nationalist school. Given that these six categories of Russianness (some of them mystificatory) form a network of conflicting claims upon any opera, there is no straightforward method for assigning operas to Russian or non-Russian categories. Therefore an alternative approach is proposed: to revive the older concept of “local color,” which figured prominently in nineteenth-century Russian discourse on opera, and to use this as a lens through which almost any nineteenth-century Russian opera can instructively be viewed. After examining how the concept was understood by leading Russian critics, Serov and Cui, the author offers a selection of her own examples to elucidate the use of “Russian” local color. It is emphasized that there are certain limits beyond which this color cannot be applied: characters of noble birth, even when Russian, are rarely portrayed in Russian colors; scenes that take place outside Russia usually have their own, appropriate color, e.g., “Polish” or “Oriental”; most importantly, themes that are considered universal, such as love or death, are usually exempt from Russian coloring. Examples from the late operas of Rimsky-Korsakov demonstrate his conscious and sometimes obsessive efforts in creating appropriate colors, Russian and otherwise. This approach allows us to set aside preconceived notions of which composers were truly national, especially when we generalize that local color denotes any distinguishing device designed to evoke a specific time and place, as well as the social identity of a character. Thus Tchaikovsky9s operas, often criticized for their lack of “Russianness,” display a subtle understanding of appropriate coloring: Eugene Onegin , for example, uses an idiom based on the parlor song of the Russian gentry, while The Queen of Spades takes up eighteenth-century idioms—in both cases lending the drama an appropriate color. The article concludes that local color, a much-used device in nineteenth-century opera across Europe, was an almost obligatory requirement for Russian opera composers who adopted an aesthetic of the characteristic, along the lines proposed by Victor Hugo in his Preface to Cromwell . The concept proves to be a valuable critical tool that allows us to deal with nineteenth-century Russian opera without becoming ensnared in essentializing distinctions between “nationalist” and “non-nationalist.” At the same time, it allows us to put Russian color in perspective, as one color among many cultivated by opera composers.

Who Killed the Concert? Heinrich Besseler and the Inter-War Politics of Gebrauchsmusik

Abstract: By examining the ideas expressed by the German musicologist Heinrich Besseler in his 1925 essay ‘Grundfragen des musikalischen Horens’, this article attempts to find precedents in Weimar Germany for a contemporary social conception of music, and to trace the effects of this conception on music history between the wars. Although Besseler's position is seen to be complex and not wholly consistent, from his ideal of music as an expression of community (Gemeinschaft) arose two influential claims: that the concert was in crisis because it could no longer correspond to that ideal, and that the real source of communal vitality lay in Gebrauchsmusik, music for everyday use. The article explores the immediate political and musical consequences of these claims, both for the German youth music movement (Jugendmusikbewegung) and for Gebrauchsmusik as composed by Weill, Hindemith, and Eisler. It argues that the social aims of the Gebrauchsmusik movement were in fact best met when combined with an earlier understanding, rejected by Besseler himself, of the concert's own ‘community-forming power’ – a theoretical combination that was to lead outside Europe to the American musical and the Soviet symphony. By contrast, the sidelining of such ideas in post-war Germany was reflected in Adorno's outright rejection of musical community, a move which served to confirm only Besseler's first, negative claim – thereby establishing as normative an ‘autonomous’ conception of concert music and leaving musicology unable to give any positive account of the concert's social role.

The Literary and Musical Rhetoric of Apostrophe in Winterreise

Abstract: In Winterreise , poet Wilhelm Muller frequently used apostrophe, the rhetorical device of “turning aside” to address absent, abstract, or nonhuman listeners. In his songs Schubert responded to the poet9s use of this evocative figure of speech. Schubert probably studied a contemporary treatise on rhetoric, the anonymous Institutio ad eloquentiam , and his awareness of direct address and apostrophe are suggested by his use of them in his own writing. Modern literary critics have neglected apostrophe, with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Jonathan Culler). Music scholars have explored the persona speaking in a poem and song, but less so who or what is being addressed. Studies of Muller ignore the poet9s use of apostrophe. The most extensive discussions of Schubert9s Winterreise (Feil, Youens) do not discuss literary or musical apostrophe as such. Fourteen instances of apostrophe occur in eleven of the twenty-four poems of Winterreise . In nine of these, the wanderer turns to address nonhuman objects. In three, the wanderer speaks to himself. In two, the wanderer apostrophizes other people. In four others, Schubert9s music approximates rhetorical address. In nearly every instance, Schubert9s music changes significantly for the apostrophic address, e.g., in mode, melodic style, register, texture, dynamics. Apostrophe is often characterized as an intensifier, and Schubert9s gestures unquestionably add musical weight to the effect of the literary conceit. Schubert9s music even implies apostrophic address in some instances where none is explicit in the poetry. It is the rhetorical figure as much as the verse9s affective content—the persona9s vocative rather than his descriptive mode—that triggers the musical changes. Such response to apostrophe can also be heard in other Schubert9s songs. Isolating apostrophe and bringing it to the foreground enriches our discourse about Schubert and the Lied.

Dream Analysis: Korngold, Mendelssohn, and Musical Adaptations in Warner Bros.' A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)

Abstract: In his first film score, Erich Wolfgang Korngold adapted the works of Felix Mendelssohn so that the music seemed to interact and respond with the visual editing of the film, A Midsummer Night9s Dream (Warner Bros., 1935). By detailing the facets of this unusual production, which range from Korngold9s presence on the set to the publicity department9s efforts to spotlight Mendelssohn9s music and Korngold9s arrangements, I argue that the score for Dream played an important role in elevating film music and film composers within the hierarchy of Hollywood production and publicity. Not only was the Mendelssohn-Korngold score given greater consideration during the film9s making, but also audiences were reminded to listen to the film9s music, a facet rarely acknowledged in other contemporaneous publicity drives. Importantly, these changes were effected and rationalized through the self-conscious foregrounding of the music, principles, and rhetoric of nineteenth-century Romanticism. Documents at the Warner Bros. Archive reveal how the confluence of these factors not only established the unusual tenor of Korngold9s career within the Hollywood studio system but also helped construct the film composer9s public image as an incongruously independent artist working within an otherwise collaborative medium.

High Anxiety: New Venues, New Audiences, and the Fear of the Popular in Late Imperial Russian Musical Life

Abstract: Russia9s social and economic transformation at the beginning of the twentieth century was accompanied by profound cultural and artistic transformation. In particular, Russian cultural elites struggled to control and contain what they saw as threats to Russia9s national culture. At the same time, however, they sought ways to bring the working classes into a closer cultural accord with educated society. Although these efforts continued a long process of intelligentsia efforts to shape Russian society by controlling the development of “the people,” industrialization and urbanization had already begun to fundamentally restructure the relationship between the educated and popular classes. In musical life, the intelligentsia struggled with two somewhat contradictory impulses: first, to simultaneously protect musical and song traditions from the threat of contamination by new urban genres; and second, to develop “rational recreations” that would appeal to the peasantry and the urban working classes. To those ends, they created, among other activities, accessible (obshchedostupnyi) concerts, temperance choirs, and singing classes in a wide variety of locations across the Russian Empire. These musical projects were part of a much larger, somewhat utopian effort by educated society to create an ideal Russia by eliminating its supposed social, cultural, economic, and political backwardness relative to Western Europe. Nevertheless, the consequences for Russian musical life proved significant. Not only did these efforts lay the moral and intellectual foundation for Soviet-era interventionist and utopian cultural policies, but they also in the short term significantly diversified and democratized musical life in the last decades of tsarist rule.

ROBERT O. GJERDINGEN MUSIC IN THE GALANT STYLE New York: Oxford University Press, 2007 pp. ix + 514, isbn 978 0 19 531371 0

Abstract: Robert Gjerdingen’s Music in the Galant Style was published more than three years ago, and has not only already been acknowledged in numerous reviews, but has meanwhile also become a classic of contemporary music-theoretical discourse. In the following, therefore, I am not so much concerned with portraying Gjerdingen’s method faithfully yet again as with highlighting a few central aspects of his theory and engaging with them productively. The book is an event. Anyone working through its almost five hundred pages will see the music of the eighteenth century with different eyes, and hear it with different ears. And it is indeed a case of ‘working through’ the book: it cannot simply be read passively. Its content must be actively acquired: one needs to play it, to have the countless examples in one’s ear, in order to follow Gjerdingen’s argument, which is by no means always simple. Wilhelm Seidel once emphasized the notion of ‘galant’ as above all an ‘attitude’ (‘Galanter Stil’, in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, second edition, Sachteil, volume 3 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1995), 983–989), and Gjerdingen likewise makes a point of avoiding any historical restriction: ‘My focus is thus on “galant” as a code of conduct, as an eighteenth-century courtly ideal (adaptable to city life), and a carefully taught set of musical behaviors’ (6). This ‘code of conduct’ becomes compositionally and technically concrete in ‘a particular repertory of stock musical phrases employed in conventional sequences’ (6). Gjerdingen then takes the galant style as an example within which to develop his well-known theory of musical schemata, which is the book’s primary content. His analogy between the musical ‘galant style’ and ‘educated’ courtly discourse, with its cultivated forms of interaction, may at first glance seem overly simple and direct; one central aspect of the galant, after all, is that of a courtly code of behaviour breaking the social boundaries of its origins, to the point that it virtually embodies the zeitgeist of an era and, above all, becomes the model for a new aesthetic. Johann Mattheson already speaks explicitly of a ‘galant musical science’ (galante Musicalische Wissenschaft), demonstrating the adaptation of the term in an early Enlightenment, bourgeois context (Johann Mattheson, Das Neu-Eröffnete Orchestre (Hamburg: author, 1717), 3). That categories of the bourgeois and the aristocratic merge in the galant is something that Gjerdingen concedes, but barely emphasizes. Just as one has to participate musically – with the piano constantly at one’s side – while reading the book, so Gjerdingen’s occasionally generalized statements take on increasing detail and internal differentiation as one progresses: while it is difficult to offer a concise definition of the term ‘galant’, it does become clear what Gjerdingen has in mind by the time one reaches the end of the book. Perhaps his initial focus upon the ‘courtly’ is somewhat misleading: around the middle of the book, he describes the (new) bourgeois spirit emanating from a string quartet by Wanhal in didactic terms: ‘He [Wanhal] was in part teaching them [the Eighteenth-Century Music 8/2, 307–348 © Cambridge University Press, 2011

TOMASO GIOVANNI ALBINONI (1671–1751), ED. MICHAEL TALBOT THE CANTATAS FOR SOPRANO AND BASSO CONTINUO IN THE STAATSBIBLIOTHEK ZU BERLIN Launton: Edition HH, 2010 pp. xv + 164, isbn 978 1 905779 41 3

Abstract: to flip through the book until one locates the numbered list (336). A better copy-editor could also have prevented some unnecessary inconsistencies and errors: citations waver between ‘Eubanks Winkler’ and ‘Winkler’; McGeary’s name does not appear with the first citation of his 1998 Philological Quarterly article, but three notes later (360); Lowerre’s own dissertation is not identified until page 304 and does not appear in the bibliography, though there are constant references to it for fuller discussion. Lowerre provides not only a musical/theatrical context for the ‘genius’ of Henry Purcell but a discussion of how the theatres moved beyond his death in 1695 and how the music establishment prepared the way for, or alternatively resisted, the introduction of fully-fledged Italian opera. If she has stuck resolutely to a ‘who, what, where and when’ format, rather than applying cultural studies to her subject, she has nevertheless pinpointed the utility of music to London theatre in this crucial ten-year period. judith milhous