Showing papers in "Nineteenth-century music review in 2017"

Toward a Post-Humanist Organicism

Abstract: Recent critiques of organicism in music studies have assumed that such features as part–whole integration and end-oriented development are essential to comparisons between music and the organic realm. Yet if what is thought to constitute organicism varies with perspectives on organisms in general, then perhaps it is time to take a different view of organicism’s historical legacy. What if the problem is not with the impression that music presents a semblance of the organic, but with the models of the organism brought in to give content to that semblance? In light of novel accounts of organic life currently being formulated by both scientists and thinkers affiliated with post-humanism, I propose to imagine an organicism that dispenses with humanistic conceits and prompts creative reflection on the points of connection between music and organic processes. To that end, this essay first dismantles conventional notions of wholeness and development before going on to consider aspects of the Western musical tradition through the twin lenses of self-organization and the systems theory of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. In sum, the essay seeks to conserve affinities between music and the organic domain intuited by nineteenth-century listeners while transposing organicism into a register more in tune with contemporary scientific and philosophical thought. By adding new nodes to a critical network established over two centuries ago, this article argues that a post-humanist organicism challenges us to think afresh about what our bodies, our sociality, and our creativity share with non-human entities and ecologies.

Re-examining Czerny’s and Moscheles’s Metronome Marks for Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas

Abstract: Shortly after Beethoven’s death, several of his closest associates provided performance indications for editions of his works. Previous discussions of Carl Czerny’s and Ignaz Moscheles’s metronome marks for Beethoven’s piano sonatas have highlighted the importance of these indications for our understanding of the intended performance practice of these works. Nevertheless, the provenance and meaning of these metronome marks have remained unclear, which has led to some confusion in the literature.By presenting new evidence, including the discovery of what are most likely the metronome marks intended for the missing sonatas from the first ‘complete’ edition by Tobias Haslinger, the article presents a more complete overview of the indications in these editions, as well as their chronology. In addition, it also discusses to what degree the editors seem to have influenced each other, which indications are most likely representative of Beethoven’s intended speeds, as well as why the metronome fell out of favour later in the nineteenth century. Finally, it discusses the meaning of these metronome marks for modern performers, and how these editions give options to disentangle the author from the text.

Franz Schubert - Hungarian Melody for Piano in B minor, D. 817 - Piano Sonata in G major, D. 894 - Moments musicaux, D. 780 - Allegretto for Piano in C minor, D. 915 - Impromptus for Piano, D. 935 - Piano Sonata in B flat major, D. 960 - András Schiff pf - ECM 2425–26, 2015 (2 CDs: 146 minutes), $28

Abstract: original performers of these works would have used. Timbral variety – in both the horn and piano – is another delightful feature of this recording. This feature presents itself from note to note as Scott varies the amount of stopping used to control pitch and vary colour. The period piano, while less varied in timbre from register to register than a fortepiano, also exhibits a spectrum of tonal possibility, revealed beautifully by Devine. The album is recorded intimately, as if the listener were attending a recital in a small yet flattering hall, with the horn’s presence fairly forward on the soundstage and the piano placed a bit in the background. Scott’s liner notes are impeccably researched and show sensitivity to the programming of repertoire, historical research and thoughtful storytelling. Replete with quotations from periodicals of the era and detailed analyses of each work, her accompanying essay helps to bring the entire recorded performance to life. Overall, this collection – the performances, programme, instrument choice, liner notes, even the album artwork depicting the Théâtre Italien during Gallay’s heyday – provides a delightful and comprehensive representation of the zenith of this repertoire, presented at the highest levels of musical, technical and scholarly sophistication. A listener whose ears are open to the artistic and timbral possibilities of an instrument taken to its absolute peak during a period of technological upheaval cannot find a better reward than this fascinating recording.

From Music to Noise: The Decline of Street Music

Abstract: The history of live street music is the history of an endangered species, either suppressed or trivialized as little more than ‘local colour’. Five hundred years ago the streets of Elizabethan London were rich with the sounds of street vendors, ballad-makers and musicians, and in general the worst that might be said of the music was that the same songs were too often repeated – what we would now call ‘on high rotation’. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the poet Wordsworth and advocate of the ‘common man’ was describing street music as ‘monstrous’, and throughout that century vigorous measures were being applied to suppress such sounds, which were now categorized as noise. By the twenty-first century, live street music has been virtually silenced but for the occasional licensed busker or sanctioned parade. Paradoxically, this process of decline is intersected by a technologically sustained ‘aural renaissance’ that can be dated from the late nineteenth century. This article explores the reasons for the gradual extinction of live street music and the transformation of the urban soundscape. It argues connections with issues of class, the rise of literacy, the sacralization of private property and the formation of the politics of modernity.

French Music Criticism and Musicology at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: New Journals, New Networks

Abstract: This article examines the efforts of French musicologists to create a specialized journal at the turn of the twentieth century that would clearly associate music criticism and musicology. Using as case study a set of music journals, from La Revue d’histoire et de critique musicales to the Mercure musical and the Revue S.I.M. that followed, I establish the connections that brought together the nascent musicological milieu, the musical press and the artistic affinities among the principal actors in their attempt to create a new network of music critics guided by musicological exigencies. Jules Combarieu, Romain Rolland, Louis Laloy, Jean Marnold, Emile Vuillermoz and Jules Ecorcheville are some of the musicologists engaged in this project between 1900 and 1914. But historical contingencies make this project a relative utopia, and requirements of the young musicology hardly meet that of a music criticism divided between disciplinary tradition and the necessity to support contemporary music. After the war, with the founding of a new Revue musicale, Rene Prunieres, prudently, would not hire musicologists to develop a music criticism. Instead, he took up the characteristically Republican project of promoting musical culture, and thus responding to the interests of both the cultivated bourgeoisie and the musical, literary and artistic milieus through diffusion of music knowledge.

‘The Worst Oratorio Ever!’: Colonialist Condescension in the Critical Reception of George Tolhurst’s Ruth (1864)

Abstract: The oratorio genre was regarded amongst the most edifying and instructive artforms of the Victorian era, and it was to these lofty ideals that George Tolhurst (1827–1877) aspired when composing his 1864 oratorio Ruth . The first work of its kind written in the British colony of Victoria, Australia, Ruth received an initially favourable local reception; Tolhurst was urged by the Melbourne press to aim higher and present his work to a wider and more discerning audience. Consequently, he took his work to London where it was roundly criticized, widely mocked and eventually dubbed ‘the worst oratorio ever’. It might be assumed that a work so poorly received in the cultural metropolis of London would be, like so much other Victorian music, immediately forgotten. However, through its notoriously bad reception, Ruth – in what Percy Scholes describes as a ‘succes de ridicule’ – found a cult following that has spanned from the nineteenth century to the present day. This article examines the critical reception of Ruth through the lens of colonial social relations, arguing that the treatment of Ruth in both London and Melbourne is emblematic of broader trends in the nineteenth-century relationship between parent state and settler colony. It also explores the surprising phenomenon of twentieth- and twenty-first-century consumption of Ruth in Britain, questioning whether the legacies of certain Victorian social and cultural prejudices relating to the artistic products of the colonies have been mitigated. Aesthetic and representational decisions made in recent revivals of Ruth suggest that cultural hierarchies forged during the Victorian era continue to be reinforced in the present day.

Nationalisms, Modernisms and Masculinities: Strategies of Displacement in Vaughan Williams’s Reading of Walt Whitman

Abstract: At the time of his death in 1892, the paradigmatic American poet Walt Whitman was more widely celebrated in Britain than in his own country, having received the vocal support of the likes of Tennyson, William Michael Rossetti, John Addington Symonds, Swinburne (for a time) and Edward Carpenter. For these writers, Whitman’s political egalitarianism – expressed through notions of ‘manly love’ and comradeship – presented a powerful alternative to prevailing Victorian forms of political and social relations. Whitman also provided significant inspiration for British composers at the turn of the twentieth century, with settings by Holst, Delius, Grainger, Scott, Gurney, Bridge, Stanford, Wood, Vaughan Williams and others. Yet while Whitman’s transatlantic literary reception has come to be seen as a moment of crystallization in the formation of contemporary notions of homosexuality, his reception among British composers is viewed as having been highly circumscribed, focusing more on the democratic and mystical implications of Whitman’s poetry. This article suggests a different account of Vaughan Williams’s reading of Whitman, and explores the implications of this reading for our broader understanding of the relationship between several notions of nationalism, masculinity and modernism. This examination aims to complicate, inter alia, the narrative of rupture associated with the transition to modernism, by demonstrating how the continuity of intellectual concerns across aesthetic, national, and sexual spheres has been obscured by strategies of displacement.

Edward ElgarChandos 5140, 2014 (2 CDs: 124 minutes), $32

Abstract: Programme annotators have often embraced an uncomplicated narrative of Sir Edward Elgar’s career in which the composer sprang overnight from provincial obscurity to international fame with the 1899 premiere of his Variations on an Original Theme op. 36, now known as the Enigma Variations. Unsurprisingly, the historical narrative is more complex: Elgar’s reputation was already growing thanks to a series of acclaimed choral works, including The Black Knight op. 25 (1892), Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf op. 30 (1896), The Banner of Saint George op. 33 (1897) and Caractacus op. 35 (1898). All of these scores were highly successful at their first performances; British choral societies took them up rapidly – singers delighted in the challenges posed by the music, while both audiences and critics relished Elgar’s brilliant orchestration. It is clear, however, that the composition of the Enigma Variations gave Elgar insights into his own creative process that had a marked and lasting effect upon his music: a greater richness, consistency, technical mastery and expressive depth. This change is evident in the works that appeared immediately after the Enigma Variations, particularly the orchestral song-cycle Sea Pictures op. 37 and the oratorio The Dream of Gerontius op. 38 (1900). Comparing two recent recordings from Chandos best illustrates the differences between Elgar’s music before and after the Enigma Variations. One of these features Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf and The Banner of Saint George, while the other includes Sea Pictures and

Modelling the Public’s Taste: Local Habits, Ethnic Pluralism and European Music in Bucharest (1821–1862)

Abstract: This article attempts to describe the shift in the Romanian public’s musical taste brought about by musical borrowings and imports from the West. It focuses on the period between the end of Phanariot rule (1821) and the establishment of Romania’s capital in Bucharest (1862). These decades of change yielded rich intercultural encounters and fusions, whereas the years that followed – from the 1870s to the outbreak of the First World War – show a more unified phase of assimilation of Western music. After looking at the boyar class and the bourgeoisie of Bucharest (the social segment from which an opera- and concert-going public emerged in the last quarter of the century), I move on to the everyday musical practices of the population of Bucharest, using musical examples and travellers’ accounts as a descriptive means. Finally, I analyse the shifts in musical tastes that took place in the upper layers of society as a complicated process of exclusion, inclusion and assimilation of various musical influences; as we shall see, the mixing and hybridization of musical practices not only shaped the tastes of music lovers, but also influenced the creation of Romanian music, which entered a new phase.

‘Unmistakeable Sauerkrauts’: local perceptions of itinerant German musicians in New Zealand, 1850–1920

Abstract: Although largely forgotten today, bands of German musicians (generally from the Westpfalz region) were regular visitors to New Zealand’s shores from the 1850s up until the outbreak of World War I, making them among the earliest professional European musical ensembles to be heard in the country. Plying their trade on the streets and in other public spaces, German bands were also routinely hired to perform for garden parties, school sports days, dances and boat trips, as well as on countless other occasions. Yet despite their apparent popularity, contemporary comment published in newspapers of the day demonstrates that reactions to their performances were decidedly mixed. While some members of the public clearly enjoyed the contribution German bands made to local musical life, others were less than delighted by their (often noisy) presence. In 1893, for example, one Wellington resident complained that ‘a German Band … may be heard braying at every street corner at all hours of the day and night’, while noting also that ‘It is the genuine article, all the performers being wanderers from the “Vaterland”, unmistakeable “sauerkrauts”’ Within weeks of the outbreak of World War I, ten members of a German band had been arrested in Auckland and taken to Somes Island in Wellington harbour, where they were interned for the duration of the conflict. This article examines the New Zealand public’s changing perceptions of this particular brand of street musician from colonial times until shortly after the end of the First World War.

The Beginnings of Romanian Composition: Between Nationalism and the Obsession with Synchronizing with the West

Abstract: Romanian composition in the nineteenth century went through rapid changes, moving from a Greek-oriental sound world to a Western European one. It is interesting to examine, in this context, the musicians’ quest for a ‘national’ sound and identity. Analysis of piano miniatures or vaudeville, the favourite genre of the Romanian audience in the first half of the century, shows eclectic combinations of urban folk music with sources of inspiration borrowed from popular foreign melodies. The second half of the century seems to be marked in modern scholarship by premieres: some composers are included in Romanian history just for the merit of writing the first Romanian symphony, the first string quartet, the first opera, and so forth. Their work led towards the constitution of a ‘national language’ adapted to genres borrowed from contemporary Western European music. In addition to demonstrating these ideas in the work of a number of Romanian composers (Josef Herfner, Ioan Andrei Wachmann, Anton Pann, Alexandru Flechtenmacher, Ludwig Anton Wiest, Carol Miculi, George Stephanescu, Constantin Dimitrescu, Gavriil Musicescu, Eduard Caudella, George Dima, Ciprian Porumbescu, Iacob Muresianu, Dumitru Georgescu Kiriac, Alfonso Castaldi, Eduard Wachmann), the present article also encompasses two case studies. The first is Franz Liszt’s tour through the Romanian Countries, which offers a clearer image of the popular ideas circulating within the musical scene of the time. Liszt’s initiative to emphasize the national spirit through folk quotations reworked in rhapsodies should have inspired Romanian musicians; we will see whether this actually happened. The second case study concerns the musical life of Bucharest around 1900, when the directions of Romanian modern music were being traced, and cautious and selective steps were made toward harmonizing with Europe began.

Street music in London in the nineteenth century:: ‘Evidence’ from Charles Dickens, Charles Babbage and Lucy Broadwood

Abstract: What evidence is there that street music was widespread, problematic and immoral in nineteenth-century London? This article re-examines a substantial literature that has been used to build a case or argument of the pervasive notion that street music was a curse in nineteenth-century London. Looking at a variety of sources afresh the article argues that historical evidence has often been misunderstood, misread or misconstrued in establishing historical narratives about street music in nineteenth-century London.

Irish Nationalism, Print Culture and the Spirit of the Nation

Abstract: Recent investigations into the survival and dissemination of traditional songs have elucidated the intertwining relationship between print and oral song traditions. Musical repertories once considered distinct, namely broadside ballads and traditional songs, now appear to have inhabited a shared space. Much scholarly attention has been focused on the print and oral interface that occurred in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.Less attention has been paid, however, to music in Ireland where similar economic, cultural and musical forces prevailed. Yet, Ireland’s engagement in various nationalist activities throughout the nineteenth century added a distinctly political twist to Ireland’s print–oral relationship. Songbooks, a tool for many nineteenth-century nationalist movements, often embodied the confluence of print and oral song traditions. Lacking musical notation, many songbooks were dependent on oral traditions such as communal singing to transmit their contents; success also depended on the large-scale distribution networks of booksellers and ballad hawkers. This article seeks to explore further the print–oral interface within the context of Irish nationalism. Specifically, I will examine how one particular movement, Young Ireland, manifested this interface within their songbook, Spirit of the Nation. By examining the production, contents, and ideology of this songbook, the complex connections between literature, orality and nationalism emerge.

Johannes Brahms, The Piano Trios Christian Tetzlaff vln, Tanja Tetzlaff vc, Lars Vogt pf Ondine 1271-2D, 2015 (2 CDs: 83 minutes), $19

Abstract: the Ninth has been associated with death and farewell for a number of reasons, including the fact that it was premiered in Vienna, a year after the composer’s death, by his friend and former assistant BrunoWalter. Mahler’s ownmarkings in the full score draft (‘Oh Youth! Vanished! O love! Scattered! Farewell!’) and in the published score (‘dying away’), as well as the kinship of the Adagio’s melodic descent (bar 3) with the beginning (marked ‘Lebe wohl’) of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 26 in E-flat major (Les Adieux), all participated in suggesting this elegiac program. The early reception of the work emphasized this context, and later, Bernstein championed a reading of the Ninth as Mahler’s swan song. Since then, this interpretation has been challenged, as scholars have become more circumspect in conflating biography and sketch studies with musical analysis. But there is a difference between making the Ninth an autobiographical work (Mahler’s own farewell to the world) and acknowledging that ideas of departure and death are, on many levels, crucial interpretive insights. And this is what Fischer does, musically translating his verbal interpretation of Mahler’s Ninth as a ‘fading awareness’ of theworld,without falling into the trappings of a biographical reading. Fischer’s recording with the BFO is indispensable, not only because it offers a new vision of Mahler’s last completed work, but also because of the highly distinctive sound of the Budapest Festival Orchestra under Fischer’s baton.

What Were the So-Called ‘German Bands’ of Pre-World War I Australian Street Life?

Abstract: ‘The ‘German band’ as a concept remains integrally associated with German ethnicity in the Australian public mind though such things as the extroverted oom-pah music of present-day Oktoberfest, or the live and recorded oom-pah music in German or ‘Bavarian’-themed venues. However, the costumed ‘German bands’ that were a feature of nineteenth-century British street and seaside resort life also began to appear ubiquitously in various gold-rush era Australian population centres and remained a fixture of Australian street entertainment until the First World War. Gold-rush era chronicler William Kelly described their music as being able to ‘drive swine into anguish’. Yet they had an opposing reputation for excellence in playing Strauss waltzes, polkas and other popular dance music of the era. They were sought after by dance venue, circus and other theatrical entertainment proprietors and were furthermore hired for private balls, picnics, showgrounds and racetrack entertainment. By appearing at German social functions and venues they buttressed pan-German cultural identity and traditions and, for non-Germans, the sight and sound of a disciplined, groomed and costumed German band provided a mildly exciting cultural tourism experience. In blaring street, circus parade or showground mode they, in fact, conformed to the present-day global stereotype of the Bavarian Biergarten oom-pah band. Through foundation research, this article attempts to apply some social, cultural and musicological ‘flesh and bones’ to what has more or less remained the ‘myth’ of the ubiquitous ‘German bands’ (and their not-always-German bandsmen) that sometimes entertained and charmed pedestrians while at other times represented a social and sonic blot on the streetscapes and public spaces of pre-World War I Australia.

Musical and Literary Networks in the Weekly Critical Review, Paris, 1903–1904*

Abstract: Published in 1903 and 1904 the Weekly Critical Review was a typical ‘little magazine’: it was produced on a shoestring with a small readership, with big editorial ambition. Its uniqueness lay in its claim to be a literary tribute to the entente cordiale (and it enjoyed the imprimatur of King Edward VII), but more importantly, it was a bilingual journal, which was rare at the time even for a little magazine. The Weekly Critical Review aimed to produce high-quality criticism and employed at least a dozen high-profile English and French writers and literary critics including Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915), Arthur Symons (1865–1945) and H.G. Wells (1866–1946). It also published articles and musical news by four leading music critics: English critics Alfred Kalisch (1863–1933), Ernest Newman (1868–1959) and John F. Runciman (1866–1916) and the American James Huneker (1857–1921). Why did these critics write for the Weekly Critical Review? What did the articles in the WCR reveal about Anglo-French relations, about the aspirations of the English and French music critics who wrote for it, and about the scholarly style of journalism it published – a style that was also characteristic of many other little magazines? And in what ways were those who wrote for it connected? As a case study, I examine the ways in which Ernest Newman’s literary and musical networks brought him into contact with the journal and examine the style of criticism he sought to promote.

Re-sound Beethoven - Symphony No. 1 in C major op. 21 - Symphony No. 2 in D major op. 36 - Orchester Wiener Akademie, Martin Haselböck cond - Alpha 470, 2015 (1 CD: 57 minutes), $19

Abstract: With our interpretations wewish to offer youmusic in the sound of its own time: we want to add to the possibilities of historical instruments the sound and the aura of the concert halls in which the composer himself conducted and experienced his works. At every step in Vienna one encounters places and signs of a great musical past: to make historic architecture echo with great music and to communicate that perceived authenticity [gefühlte Authentizität, which might perhaps, less ambiguously, have been translated as ‘sensual authenticity’] to modern ears – that is the ultimate goal of Re-sound Beethoven.

Street Music in the Nineteenth Century:: Histories and Historiographies

Abstract: This article highlights the paucity of musicological scholarship on street music in the nineteenth century but examines narratives of noise, music and morality that are situated in studies of street music in related literature. The article argues that a new history of street music in the nineteenth century is overdue and charts ways in which such studies may be undertaken given the substantial primary source material to work with and the proliferation and usefulness of theoretical studies in related disciplines.

Fryderyk Chopin, Chopin’s Polish Letters, trans. David Frick (Warsaw: Fryderyk Chopin Institute, 2016). 552 pp. €60,00.

Abstract: their retreats into quietude seemed to fit perfectly with Joachim’s personality. The Phantasie, one of Schumann’s final commentaries on virtuosity, incorporates the virtuosic, if uncultivated, style hongrois. Schumann blended the style hongrois with serious German music, making a statement about virtuosity and cultivation, though Stefaniak hesitates ‘to interpret the Phantasie as an assimilation narrative that restrains and Germanizes Joachim’s “Hungarian” virtuosity’. Instead, he believes both showpieces highlighted Joachim’s ‘historicism, Germanness, and seriousness’ (p. 236). While the late concertos earned Schumann a place in the canon, his earlier works are usually thought to be stronger. Ironically, they only entered the canon after his compositional style shifted in the 1840s, many of them only becoming standards in the years since his untimely death. Even though Schumann couldn’t offer definitive solutions to the problems presented by the virtuosity discourse, Stefaniak shows just how important his voice was in the conversation.

Aimée Boutin, City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015). 208 pp. £18.99.

Abstract: space for discussion.) The risk is, otherwise, that we fall back into the domain of the self-contained musical work; or, alternatively, that we excavate the internal dialectics of both operas and society and then map them onto one another, by calling on somewhat elusive reverberations. In this sense, the moments in the book which I found most fascinating often came towards the end of each chapter (theMefistofele and Boccanegra ones are good examples). It is here that Campana opens up the greatest room for the encounter of the aesthetic with the political. Partly such moves are the result of her tightening up her argument, of her weaving together the various threads of her discourse. But they also show a conscious effort to foreground connections that, if as yet still laconic, are both intellectually and ethically worth pursuing. For, as Campana explains early on, what is at stake when we approach opera as a medium that exists in response to and anticipation of shifting public identities is ultimately the possibility that we confront enduring myths and cultural stereotypes, revoking at least some of their assumed impermeability to the fluctuations of time and history. Aesthetics, then, would disclose its politics twice over. And we, at once actors and spectators, would become even more integrally part of the performance.

Mariano Castro de Gistau (d 1856) and the Vogue for the Spanish Guitar in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract: This article reconstructs the biography of a musician of Spanish-French background whose name and existence have hitherto been unknown, the guitarist and singer Mariano Castro de Gistau (c. 1800–1856). He arrived in Britain around 1829, during the relatively brief period when the guitar was widely fashionable there. The article discusses the factors that created this fashion as well as some of the principal forces that would soon challenge the instrument’s position and complicate the life of musicians like Castro (such as the rise of a canonical repertoire performed in concert halls built ever larger). Castro remained in the British Isles until his death in 1856, with a career unfolding mainly in provincial centres like Edinburgh, Dublin, Aberdeen and Cheltenham. Contemporary reviews show that he was a highly respected musician who appeared in concerts both as a guitarist and singer, often accentuating his Spanish background in the choice of repertoire. In addition to giving singing and guitar lessons, he was teaching the French language (increasingly so in later years when the guitar had lost much of its status) and after 1845 he was also engaged as a teacher in various private schools and academies.

Schubert (Re)Inventions - Ensemble Palladino: Alberto Mesirca gui, Ursula Langmayr sop, Eric Lamb fl, Firmian Lermer vla, Martin Rummel vc - Paladino Music 58, 2015 (2 CDs: 133 minutes), $28

Abstract: Franz Schubert’s alliance with the guitar is a cause that has often been celebrated, most typically by guitarists eager to find a confederate in one of Europe’s most celebrated composers. A.P. Sharpe, for instance, in his Story of the Spanish Guitar, suggested that the instrument was Schubert’s near-constant companion: ‘For many years Franz Schubert, not possessing a piano, did most of his composing on the guitar which hung over his bed and on which he would play before rising’. Sharpe’s enthusiasms notwithstanding, there is actually rather little evidence that the composer had any knowledge of or involvement with the guitar beyond what might have been expected of most musicians living in Austria in the early years of the nineteenth century. While it is true that Schubert provided a guitar accompaniment for an 1813 vocal trio to celebrate his father’s name day (‘Zur Namensfeier meines Vaters’, D. 80), this hardly makes him a dedicated guitarist: the accompaniment, while competent enough, is rather clumsy in places, bespeaking a lack of familiarity with idiomatic writing for the instrument. And while it is also true that many of Schubert’s songs were published with guitar accompaniments during his lifetime, there is no evidence that he viewed such arrangements as anything other than a strategy employed by his publishers to increase sales. This leaves us with the rather confusing situation created by the work with which Ensemble Palladino opens this two-CD collection of Schubert’s music featuring the guitar: the Notturno in D major for guitar, flute, viola, and cello (D. Anhang II/2). Although the work (here and elsewhere) is attributed to Schubert, that claim is rather tenuous, as the Notturno is simply an arrangement Schubert made in February 1814 of a trio for guitar, flute and viola composed by Wenzel Matiegka, first published by Artaria in 1807. The attribution surely will not do any lasting harm to our understanding of either Schubert’s or Matiegka’s legacy – Schubert did, after all, add the cello part and substantially alter the viola part of Matiegka’s composition – but inasmuch as the guitar part is left almost completely untouched the work provides no evidence that Schubert’s friendship with the guitar was anything more than of the most passing sort. Abandoning the notion that Schubert had any close affiliation with the guitar in no way diminishes the value of reimagining his works through arrangements for the instrument. It does, however, put this volume of Ensemble Palladino’s (Re)Inventions in a somewhat different light: where previous recordings in the series found flautist Eric Lamb and cellist Martin Rummel reinterpreting keyboard works by J.S. Bach (PaladinoMusic 39), and a range of instrumental and vocal compositions byW.A.Mozart (PaladinoMusic 50), Schubert (Re)Inventions is

Marie Sumner Lott, The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music: Composers, Consumers, Communities (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2015). xviii + 310 pp. $55.00.

Abstract: have been nice to see at least a few photographs reproduced in the volume. There are also several errors in editing, including missing spaces and extra words, such as ‘rejection of’ (p. 53) and ‘but the two of the subsequent shows’ (p. 64). As Mullen’s conclusion reiterates, this book is primarily about the wartime music hall in Britain. His description of other commercial music genres in Chapter 2 provides a context for understanding the position of music hall in British society and musical life, but these other genres rarely come up later in the book. Moreover, the summary of non-commercial song types in Chapter 6 and foray into hymn, folkmusic and soldiers’music seem like an odd add-on to a book that is really about the music hall on the urban British home front during the war. But Mullen himself admits that ‘there is much room to research other non-commercial repertoires of the time’ (p. 217). He rightfully calls for others to explore the music hall in big cities of the Empire, such as Toronto and Melbourne and encourages more comparisons with contemporary American popular music. Overall the strength of this study lies in its attention to social context, a multi-faceted wartime music industry, and summary of an enormous body of literature that is largely unknown. One will not walk away from this book knowing how these songs sound in terms of melody, harmony, and so forth. Mullen is not a musicologist; his discipline is British studies, and this volume certainly reflects that. What one will learn is what these songs are about, the style of their lyrics, where theywere performed, and perhapsmost importantly for Mullen, how the songs registered with audiences of the time.

John Carnelly, George Smart and Nineteenth-Century London Concert Life (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2015). 329 pp. £60.00

Abstract: that musicians in the city had might prove an effective counterpoint to the German-dominated musical culture of the north. These points only serve to demonstrate how vital Shadle’s book is to our understanding of American music history. When a book stimulates its readers to ask more questions and to consider more deeply the matters it addresses, it proves its success. Orchestrating the Nation redefines how musicologists tell the story of American music. Shadle’s unremitting exploration of major concepts through exhaustive research sets a new standard for cultural analysis, fusing elements that signal a new understanding of not only American music, but music history in general. That he manages to do so in such an engaging manner yields a remarkable example of scholarship that will be seen as exemplary for future work in the field.