Showing papers in "Music & Letters in 2008"
TL;DR: In this article, a case study of the Music in the Round chamber music festival, conducted over a three-year period that included the retirement of the host string quartet, the appointment of a new resident ensemble, and associated changes in audience attitudes and priorities, revealed the challenges faced by audience members in shifting their loyalty to a new ensemble and reappraising their own listening habits and stamina.
Abstract: There is currently much concern among arts organizations and their marketing departments that audiences for classical music are in decline, yet there has been little investigation so far of the experiences of long-term listeners that might yield insights into audience development and retention. This paper presents a case study of the Music in the Round chamber music festival, conducted over a three-year period that included the retirement of the host string quartet, the appointment of a new resident ensemble, and associated changes in audience attitudes and priorities. Questionnaire and interview data revealed the challenges faced by audience members in shifting their loyalty to a new ensemble and reappraising their own listening habits and stamina. The interaction between individual listening and collective membership of an audience is discussed, and the potential considered for understanding classical concert-goers as ‘fans’ or ‘consumers’.
43 citations
TL;DR: One of the major figures in twentieth-century Latin American literature, the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier was closely involved with members of the musical, as well as literary, avant-garde during his creative apprenticeship in the inter-war years.
Abstract: One of the major figures in twentieth-century Latin American literature, the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier was closely involved with members of the musical, as well as literary, avant-garde during his creative apprenticeship in the inter-war years. Placed as much between the vocations of music and literature as between the cultures of Europe and Latin America, he mounted the first concerts of new music in 1920s Havana, established himself by writing music criticism, and engaged in several musical collaborations with his compatriots Amadeo Roldan and Alejandro Garcia Caturla. After being forced to flee Havana owing to his political activities and the repressive policies of Machado's dictatorship, Carpentier established himself in Paris, where he became associated with an impressively wide circle of composers, including Varese, Villa-Lobos, Milhaud, and the now little known Marius-Francois Gaillard. He was also acquainted with Carlos Chavez and knew Jolivet through Varese. Involving himself in further musical collaborations during his eleven-year residence in Paris (1928–39), a creative cross-fertilization took place between Carpentier and the composers with whom he shared both friendship and artistic kinship.
43 citations
TL;DR: In conversations that took place between 1986 and 1994 Ursula Vaughan Williams told the author that she and Vaughan Williams had become lovers soon after they first met, in 1938, and did not believe that Ralph's crippled wife Adeline had ever suspected this; in any case the two women became friends despite Ursula's jealousy of Adeline who, she realized, still occupied a place in Ralph's life and affections that could not be challenged as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: In conversations that took place between 1986 and 1994 Ursula Vaughan Williams told the author that she and Vaughan Williams had become lovers soon after they first met, in 1938. She did not believe that Ralph's crippled wife Adeline had ever suspected this; in any case the two women became friends, despite Ursula's jealousy of Adeline who, she realized, still occupied a place in Ralph's life and affections that could not be challenged. The author attempts to sort out rumours about the effect on Adeline of the death of her cousin Stella Duckworth, to whom she was very close, which occurred at the time of her engagement in 1897. The background to an offer of marriage that Ursula said she had received from Tippett not long after Ralph's death is also explored.
21 citations
TL;DR: A new reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet 128, whose much-deprecated cruxes and mixed metaphors are read not as authorial oversights but as a significant elaboration of contradictions in the English discourse on musical performance, particularly when undertaken by women.
Abstract: From the Tudor period on, keyboard skills were a staple in the education of girls of 'quality'. However, theoretical admiration of music and musical skill always co-existed with wariness of actual performers and performances. The hyperbolic musical metaphors for love and marriage contrast with a near-complete absence of harmony and edification in representations of actual music-making. Those two main literary uses of music represent the period's acutely ambivalent discourse on music as well as women, both of which may be perceived as divinely admirable or hellishly tempting. Literary references to keyboard playing favour the latter: the virginals are regularly associated with lewdness and sexual availability. This general discursive and historical background as well as the literary tropes associated with the virginals inform a new reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet 128, whose much-deprecated cruxes and mixed metaphors are read not as authorial oversights but as a significant elaboration of contradictions in the English discourse on musical performance, particularly when undertaken by women.
13 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider the historical significance of Walton's first symphony and read it as a presentation of views on authentic community and the place of England in the twentieth century.
Abstract: The debt of Walton's First Symphony to Sibelian models of symphonic form is often acknowledged, but the debt's wider implications are seldom considered. The inter-war English idolization of Sibelius may help to explain why Walton should use characteristic Sibelian procedures such as rotational form, heavy dependence on pedal points for structural purposes, and focus on a sound-sheet or Klang —however individually Walton treats these devices—but it does not account for all that is interesting in this moment in British musical history. In this article a richer context is drawn by locating Walton's Sibelianism in a more general contemporary artistic concern with what Michael Saler calls 'the myth of the North': an inter-war emphasis on the industrialized north of England. This 'myth', a development of modernist preoccupations with the relationship between technology and humanity, is reflected both in what Jed Esty calls an 'anthropological turn' in writers such as Eliot and Woolf (a turn to a romantic nationalism), and in Heidegger's philosophy of art—connections that open up a range of ethical and political considerations. After presenting an analysis of the Sibelian technique of Walton's symphony alongside discussion of its thematic treatments of nation, cultural, and geographic environment, and the changing antagonisms of late modernism, this article reconsiders the historical significance of Walton's music, and reads it as a presentation of views on authentic community and the place of England in the twentieth century.
11 citations
9 citations
TL;DR: The motets were especially popular in England after 1625 and had such widely differing performance contexts as the private chapel of Queen Henrietta Maria (Charles I's Roman Catholic queen) and the chambers of Oliver Cromwell.
Abstract: Richard Dering ( c .1580–1630) was one of the first English composers to be influenced by early seventeenth-century Italian concertato techniques. This article focuses on the Latin motets for one to three voices and basso continuo (the subject of a forthcoming volume in the series Musica Britannica). The motets were especially popular in England after 1625 and had such widely differing performance contexts as the private chapel of Queen Henrietta Maria (Charles I’s Roman Catholic queen) and the chambers of Oliver Cromwell. The musical heritage of the motets is explored—locating them in relation to early seventeenth-century Roman and Venetian music in particular—and, following an examination of the sources of Dering’s motets, a number of additions to the accepted canon is proposed. The article concludes with an examination of the dissemination and publication of the motets.
7 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present evidence that Elizabeth Rogers herself received training in composition, transposition, and ornamentation, practices not heretofore associated with young women in England during the mid-seventeenth century.
Abstract: Evidence in Elizabeth Rogers hir virginal book suggests that Elizabeth Rogers herself received training in composition, transposition, and ornamentation—practices not heretofore associated with young women in England during the mid-seventeenth century. The manuscript also represents a trend towards blurring the line between professional and amateur sources: it is one of the earliest manuscripts in England that challenges modern assumptions about what constitutes an amateur's manuscript and what a professional's, and, by extension, what repertory belongs in a woman's manuscript. Elizabeth Rogers contains a diverse repertory that includes up-to-date foreign pieces, but not modern English music, characteristics that further mark it as atypical. Copied in the 1650s, the volume demonstrates a move towards a more current, competitive market in which, by the end of the century, amateur sources can no longer be easily distinguished from professional manuscripts.
6 citations
TL;DR: Schoenberg's development may be summarized in general terms as leading from the religious syncretism of Die Jakobsleiter, via Zionism (Der biblische Weg), to the negative monotheism of Moses und Aron as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: This essay follows Schoenberg's path from Die Jakobsleiter to Moses und Aron, with particular reference to these works and to his spoken drama, Der biblische Weg. Schoenberg's development may be summarized in general terms as leading from the religious syncretism of Die Jakobsleiter, via Zionism (Der biblische Weg), to the ‘negative monotheism’ of Moses und Aron. It is a journey strongly influenced by Schoenberg's German, Lutheran inheritance, his Judaism, and, most importantly, the problematical yet productive interplay between these influences. An alternative understanding of this path, centred on the compositional and philosophical dialectic between freedom and organization, is also examined, in the context of the claim that these are ultimately two formulations of the same problem. These dialectics are played out in an arena that is theological, political, and aesthetic, questioning the acceptability and indeed possibility of artistic representation and ‘effect’. Such questioning is in turn related to broader issues concerning modernism.
6 citations
TL;DR: The reception of Haydn's early string quartets is chequered Professional performers tend to avoid the quartets before Op 20 (1772), but more usually with Op 33 as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The reception of Haydn's early string quartets is chequered Professional performers tend to avoid the quartets before Op 20 (1772) In scholarship, essential features of 'Classical' string quartets are typically thought to be in place at the earliest with Op 20, but more usually with Op 33 This essay contributes to a critique of these assumptions, and offers an alternative view of the earlier works The slow movements in particular, with their solo 'arias' for first violin, have been considered especially problematic From a historical perspective, however, these movements can be understood to exemplify a fundamentally new mode of expression that was extolled by mideighteenth century theorists: that of the tableau This concept was discussed, for example, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, and was brought to the stages of Vienna and Eszterhaza in the ballets of Jean-Georges Noverre and the operas of Gluck and Haydn, among others As sonic tableaux, or instrumental 'arias', movements from Haydn's early string quartets epitomize a dramatic mode that was of fundamental importance to music of the Classical era
6 citations
TL;DR: The ITPRA theory of expectation as discussed by the authors is a framework for understanding the encounter with an event in terms of one's expectation and response, which is described as a five-step process divided into two phases: imagination and tension fall under the rubric "pre-outcome" response; the "postoutcome' response consists of prediction, reaction and appraisal.
Abstract: DAVID HURON’S AMBITIOUS new book is a study in the psychology of expectation delivered in the form of a skilful, seamless amalgam of music theory, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology. It combines painstaking statistical analysis of a large amount of data with speculations regarding the origins and developmentçthe ‘psychogenesis’, to use a term in vogue in the nineteenth centuryçof such common forms of behaviour as anticipating a desired outcome, freezing at a sudden and troubling surprise, or reassessing the significance of a misread stimulus. Throughout the book, data analysis and speculation serve the twofold goal of substantiating a general theory of expectation on the one hand while illuminating fundamental aspects of the listening experience on the other. The speculations are cast pretty much within the net of Darwinian and neoDarwinian thought, behaviourçincluding musical behaviourçbeing understood first and foremost as adaptive (or as a legacy of adaptive strategies). The theory itself is the result of Huron’s own distillation of decades of research, some of it his own, on the psychology of expectation. It is lucidly presented at the beginning of the book and conveniently recapped at the end.The theory is in essence a framework for understanding the encounter with an event in terms of one’s expectation and response. This encounter is described as a five-step process divided into two phases: imagination and tension fall under the rubric ‘pre-outcome’ response; the ‘postoutcome’ response consists of prediction, reaction, and appraisal. The five-step process is dubbed ITPRA, after Imagination^Tension^Prediction^Response^Appraisal (hence the ‘ITPRA theory of expectation’). ITPRA is in essence a plotting of the psychophysiological processes involved in expectation and is especially designed to account, in Huron’s words,‘for the many emotion-related elements of expectation.The [ITPRA] theory attempts to explain how expectations evoke various feeling states, and why these evoked feelings might be biologically useful.’ In this vein, imagination or, in Huron’s somewhat incongruous words, ‘imagination response’ allows one to experience ‘some vicarious pleasure (or displeasure) as though that outcome has already happened’. As such, imagining an outcome, and fearing or cherishing the thought of its consequences, functions as a motivator.Tension prepares one for the imminent event through arousal
TL;DR: Vaughan Williams's opera Sir John in Love as mentioned in this paper was largely written in the 1920s, and much that is central to it resulted from the composer's time in August 1912 and spring 1913 as musical director of the Benson Company seasoned Merry Wives players at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.
Abstract: Although Vaughan Williams's opera Sir John in Love (after Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor) was largely written in the 1920s, much that is central to it resulted from the composer's time in August 1912 and spring 1913 as musical director of the Benson Company seasoned Merry Wives players at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Things Stratford-connected in Sir John probably include the libretto's broad approach to the adaptation of Shakespeare's comedy (with some detailed matters of theatrical 'business' as well), the provenance and deployment of the inset song texts that characterize the opera, the introduction of the big Jonsonian masque in the last act, and the folk-music inflection of several parts of the work. (A Stratford summer school of Cecil Sharp's surrounded the Memorial Theatre with folksong and dance in August 1912.) The opera is further coloured and shaped by ideas aired in essays Vaughan Williams was writing around that time, especially in matters of the proper functioning of English musical communities and the importance of ballad opera to the native operatic tradition, tempered albeit with the need to avoid insularity and Merrie Englandism.
TL;DR: Wagner's "theatricality" has been explained as evidence of his megalomania and as an attempt at self-aggrandizement as discussed by the authors, and Wagner's extravagant behaviours and utterances are placed on a different discursive plane, as imaginative and highly successful forms of self-marketing.
Abstract: Wagner’s ‘theatricality’, his tendency to make a production of himself, has been explained as evidence of his megalomania and as an attempt at self-aggrandizement. In this article Wagner’s extravagant behaviours and utterances are placed on a different discursive plane, as imaginative and highly successful forms of self-marketing. Beethoven, central to Wagner’s iconoclastic historiography of music and legitimation of his aesthetic project, was also a crucial element in Wagner’s effort to create his own distinct persona and to establish a ‘unique’ niche for his works. A close reading of Wagner’s novella A Pilgrimage to Beethoven (1840) and an analysis of his publicity campaign to attract and prepare the Dresden audience for his 1846 performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony reveal both the complexity and the mechanics of Wagner’s highly constructed self-image and talent at drawing a crowd. They also explain how and why Wagner’s instrumentalization of Beethoven needs to be viewed from this perspective as well.
TL;DR: Monteverdi's choice of Cruda Amarilli to open his fifth book of madrigals (1605) is most obviously related to the book's narrative design, which it initiates as a dialogue, followed by O Mirtillo, but it also serves to highlight the importance of one of the works most criticized by Giovanni Maria Artusi after he heard the piece in Ferrara in 1598 as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Claudio Monteverdi's choice of Cruda Amarilli to open his fifth book of madrigals (1605) is most obviously related to the book's narrative design, which it initiates as a dialogue, followed by O Mirtillo , but it also serves to highlight the importance of one of the works most criticized by Giovanni Maria Artusi after he heard the piece in Ferrara in 1598. When compared with settings of the same text by Benedetto Pallavicino and Giaches de Wert, Cruda Amarilli also aligns Monteverdi with Marenzio's setting of the same text in his seventh book for five voices (1595). Monteverdi's choice of model has greater significance in the light of other works published in the fifth book, which have texts in common with Marenzio's seventh; also significant is the narrative organization of the seventh book, which I argue Monteverdi took as a starting point for that of the fifth. The strong association Monteverdi sought to establish with Marenzio's work, and the apparently deliberate rejection of the Mantuan models it implies, is consistent with his attempt to present himself as a cosmopolitan composer, who, like the older master, is comfortable with contemporary literary culture, and in particular with the discussions surrounding Guarini's Il pastor fido . It also reflects his intense interest in the late 1590s in the progressive activity of the Ferrarese court of Alfonso II. Indeed, the ridotto at Antonio Goretti's house where Artusi heard Cruda Amarilli and other Monteverdi madrigals, all on Pastor fido texts, may have been devoted entirely to such discussions, centred around the play and Monteverdi's settings exclusively. They were probably modelled on similar evenings at the home of Cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini, Marenzio's patron in the early 1590s, at which Guarini himself had been a guest. Monteverdi's ultimate purpose, in the aftermath of Alfonso's death, may have been to position himself as worthy of the succession to the post of maestro di cappella at Mantua, for which he was passed over in 1596 in favour of Pallavicino.
TL;DR: Moonstruck (1987) sports a special tone that Pauline Kael has characterized as contrivance that plays against the real thing, without producing irony as mentioned in this paper, and opera's exaggeration, artifice, and ritual figure prominently in the special tone, and the music and story of La Boheme play a major role.
Abstract: Opera can circulate through many layers of a mainstream film and set in motion desires inside and outside the fiction. Moonstruck (1987) sports a special tone that Pauline Kael has characterized as contrivance that plays against the real thing, without producing irony. Opera's exaggeration, artifice, and ritual figure prominently in the special tone, and the music and story of La Boheme play a major role. Excerpts make up a substantial portion of the soundtrack, the protagonists attend a performance of Boheme and display affinities with the opera's characters, and Boheme's connection with the Metropolitan Opera is underlined. A close reading of how Puccini's music is used, incorporating Werner Wolf 's theories of intermediality, examines why certain cues are taken verbatim and others are instrumental arrangements, and the consequences for desire. Two major diegetic engagements with Boheme receive extended treatment: at an actual performance, and at the phonograph (one of the latter creating the climax of the film).The prominence of opera in the film at so many levels reveals an urge towards the genre of opera-film. Moonstruck fulfils spectators' desires, ambivalent though they may be, for recognizing and yielding to the kitsch qualities already present in La Boheme: a prime example of how film can reveal something fundamental about an opera.
TL;DR: This article examined the nineteenth-century reception of Tallis and Byrd, paying particular attention to the change in attitude that occurred towards the end of the century, and to the role of Roman Catholicism in the early twentieth-century Byrd revival.
Abstract: The extensive prefatory material of the Cantiones sacrae of 1575 casts Tallis and Byrd jointly as the parents of English music, but during the nineteenth century Tallis’s position as ‘Father of English Church Music’ was undisputed, while Byrd’s music was relatively neglected. The turn of the twentieth century, however, saw the beginning of a re-evaluation of the respective merits of the two composers. This article examines the nineteenth-century reception of Tallis and Byrd, paying particular attention to the change in attitude that occurred towards the end of the century, and to the role of Roman Catholicism in the early twentieth-century Byrd revival.
TL;DR: A number of devotional manuscripts and commonplace books made by William Byrd's patrons have been found in the Bodleian Library of the University of Cambridge as mentioned in this paper. But none of them have been published.
Abstract: We are fortunate to have a number of devotional manuscripts and commonplace books made by William Byrd's patrons. Henry Howard, earl of Northampton, to whom Byrd dedicated the Mass and Office Propers of the 1605 Gradualia , produced a large collection of pseudo-liturgical 'offices', a self-contained ritual universe that little resembled either the Roman or the Anglican rite. John, Lord Lumley, Elizabethan bibliophile and patron of Byrd's 1591 Cantiones sacrae , kept a pocket-sized devotional notebook featuring Savonarola's meditation Infelix ego , set to music by Byrd and published in the motet book dedicated to Lumley. Documents of this sort shed some new light on Byrd's Latin-texted music and its patrons, their preoccupations, and their often divided religious loyalties.
TL;DR: The editors of the Music & Letters journal as mentioned in this paper were known to be notoriously litigious and had a reputation for being prone to legal action, such as a dispute over an unfavourable review of a well-known scholar who was also unknown to us at the time.
Abstract: EDITING is rarely a grateful job. If all goes well, then the authors rightly take the credit; if something goes wrong, then the editors take the blame. It can occasionally be a dangerous one. When Denis Arnold and I took over Music & Letters following the death of Sir Jack Westrup in 1975 we inherited, unknowingly, a dispute over an unfavourable review of a well-known scholar who was also, equally unknown to us at the time, notoriously litigious. My innocent letter expressing regret at the evident hurt that had unwittingly been caused was immediately pounced on as an acknowledgement of liability and provoked a threat of legal action. It all blew over in due course, but still leaving an unpleasant taste in the mouth. Nigel Fortune joined me in 1980, when Denis Arnold stepped down, and he has been with Music & Letters ever since until his retirement in 2008, an unchanging pillar in its architecture while co-editors have rotated round him. It was different then from the well-ordered journal it is now. We were still labouring to catch up the backlog left by Westrup’s sudden death and a change of printers. Editorial procedures were doubtless in some respects disgracefully lax by today’s standards, although not so loose as they had been under Westrup, who seems to have run the show as a one-man band without reference to anyone else. At least there were two of us. Not all incoming submissions were invariably refereed as a matter of course: if we liked them, we printed them, even at the risk of controversy. For the editors alone to take it upon themselves to adjudicate on subjects on which they may have had no specialist knowledge may seem a questionable practice, but it had its advantages. It occasionally allowed unorthodox views to be aired which, if submitted to received expert opinion, would have been shot down without further consideration. I still regret what may amount to the effective loss of the freedom to publish the maverick (who may turn out to be tomorrow’s visionary). But it left the editors alone in the firing line. Instances that remain in the memory from Nigel’s time include a pair of Handel articles that provoked indignation from two eminent British scholars. Of course we published the protests in the correspondence column, but we remained (and remain) unrepentant. In those days, without the benefit of computer setting, editing was laborious. Makeup was done by the editors from old-fashioned galley proofs, literally by scissors and paste, with a keen eye to the costs that amendments would incur. Records were kept by means of carbon copies, for some years produced on a manual typewriter. Reviews were tracked on index cards in triplicate, by author, reviewer, and date due (the last of these being by far the most often referred to). Secretarial assistance (for several years from Sir Jack Westrup’s former secretary, who knew the ropes) amounted to one