Showing papers in "Journal of the American Musicological Society in 1970"

Beethoven's Pianos versus His Piano Ideals

Abstract: N THE COURSE of a broader study of performance practices in Beethoven's piano music, knotty questions have kept arising as to what pianos Beethoven actually used, when he used them, which ones he preferred, and what his ideal really was in a piano action and sound. Unlike similar problems in the keyboard music of J. S. Bach and Mozart, this problem has enjoyed surprisingly little attention and that little largely emphasizes what now seems least important about the problem. Although new documentary evidence is hard to discover in the oft-combed sources for Beethoven, re-examining the known evidence does suggest certain conclusions quite contrary to those usually stated. It will serve the present discussion best to start by stealing its own thunder, so to speak-that is, by summarizing at least its main conclusions at the outset-and then to go on to such arguments and defenses as can be adduced. The chief among the few discussions to date that concentrate on Beethoven's pianos are two short articles, "Von Beethovens Klavieren" by Theodore von Frimmel, and "Beethovens Klaviere-Der Klavierbau und Beethovens kiinstlerische Reaktion" by Keisei Sakka.2 Both articles give main space to the three of Beethoven's pianos that are still extant today-the French Plrard in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum, the English Broadwood in the Budapest National Museum, and the Austrian Graf in the Bonn Beethovenhaus. One conclusion reached here is that

The Ludus super Anticlaudianum of Adam de la Bassée

Abstract: ~tNATURE IS NOT SATISFIED with her works, and desires to make a perfect man . ."1 Here is the subject of the long Latin poem entitled Anticlaudianus by the twelfth-century poet Alan of Lille. The plot, as it were, concerns Nature's formation of the body, Prudence's journey to Heaven to request a soul from God, the uniting of body and soul by Concord, and the bestowing of their gifts upon the newly-created man by the Virtues and the Arts.

Beethoven's Sketches for the Scherzo of the Quartet Op. 18, No. 6

Abstract: DURING HIS LIFETIME, Beethoven preserved his sketches with the same compulsive zeal he brought to everything he did. His death freed them. Together with a large number of autographs and Beethoven's library of music by other composers, the sketches were auctioned on November 5, i827. As Kinsky observed in his discussion of the Nachlaf3, this auction was largely a local affair.' The principal buyers, the publishers Artaria and Haslinger, were included among the men responsible for staging the auction, and doubtless their desire was to keep publicity at a minimum. Advertising was confined to the Vienna papers. As a result, the manuscripts remained in Vienna, most of them in the hands of the local publishers, a few in the collections of private individuals. It was only subsequently that sketches and autographs from the auction began to be acquired, as gifts or purchases, by collectors outside Vienna. By a strange metamorphosis, yellowed and scarcely legible pages in the master's hand, worth pennies at the auction, became treasures, and as European culture reached relentlessly into once-primitive regions, samples of the sketches followed. Today most of the manuscripts are still assembled in a few large collections in the capitals of Europe. But in smaller numbers they may be found from Moscow to California, and while it remains a mild exaggeration to claim that the sun never sets on the Beethoven sketches, the prodigious day when this will be true is probably close at hand. The present report, then, issues from one extremity of the body of Beethoveniana, focusing on a single folio in the Music Library of the University of California at Berkeley. It is one of the few surviving worksheets for the Quartet in Bb, Op. i8, No. 6, composed in 1799i8oo. Four others of the set, the Quartets in D, F, G, and A (Nos. 3, 1, 2, and 5), are sketched extensively in the earliest surviving sketchbooks, Grasnick I and 2, and on a few loose sheets.2 Apparently, no sketches for

More on the Tuning of the "Archicembalo"

Abstract: SEVERAL DISCUSSIONS OF THE TUNING of Nicola Vicentino's archicembalo' have not succeeded in clarifying all the problems connected with this instrument. With the aid of a seventeenth-century treatise by Lemme Rossi, his Sistema musico overo musica speculativa,2some additional light can now be thrown on the question. Vicentino's instrument is provided with two keyboards, each containing three ranks or orders of keys, placed in removable frames. There are sixty-nine jacks in the first keyboard and sixty-three in the second, making a total of one hundred thirty-two keys in all. The accompanying diagram -(Figure 1)3 shows the disposition of the six orders of keys within the two keyboards and the notation used by Vicentino for each sound. The names of the notes make clear the progression from one order to the next, the denomination of each note in the succeeding orders being derived from the name of the note in the first order that served as its

Revisions in the Autograph of the Missa Solemnis Kyrie

Abstract: THE RECENTLY PUBLISHED facsimile edition of the autograph score of the Kyrie from Beethoven's Missa Solemnis presents an opportunity to study the role played by this score in the composition of the work.' The facsimile is a close replica of the original score: it is the same size, accurately reproduces the color of the original, is bound according to the original foliation,2 and includes all pages of the score, even those that are blank, those that have been entirely crossed out, and the re-

A Japanese Procrustean Bed: A Study of the Development of Danmono

Abstract: strong orientation toward literature, a tendency which to various degrees is reflected in all of its musical genres. Most frequently this concern results in the use of the voice, in which case literature, often taken from classical sources of the highest quality, is directly involved. Examples may be found in the dramatic music of the n6, kabuki, and puppet theatres, the epic recitations with biwa accompaniment, and the lyric compositions of the koto and shamisen repertoires. Even instrumental music is not entirely free from literary associations: certain pieces for shakuhachi are quite programmatic, while poetic titles frequently determine the mood of gagaku compositions. Yet, although it may be safely stated that an overwhelming majority of traditional Japanese music is more or less strongly allied to literature, purely musical tendencies are not entirely absent. In tegotomono, an important subdivision of the shamisen and koto repertoires developed primarily during the nineteenth century, relatively short vocal-instrumental sections are interrupted by purely instrumental interludes of such magnitude and self-sufficiency that the involvement of the voice seems to be hardly more than the fulfillment of conventional demands for vocal ( literary) participation in the composition. Very few compositions are completely independent of literary influence; among these the most important are a group of compositions for koto solo, danmono or shirabemono, which probably were composed sometime around the second half of the seventeenth century. From the entry "Danmono" in the authoritative Japanese music encyclopedia Ongaku jiten (Tokyo, 1959), III, 1816, the following definition may be extracted: