Notes articles from December 1 1993

Notes archives from December 1 1993

Edward N. Waters: notes of a career.
December 1, 1993... Fortunately for us, there were no teaching positions available to the precocious young graduate of the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music in June 1928. To support himself and his young wife, he returned to his parents' town,...

An ancient crisis in music bibliography: the need for incipits.
December 1, 1993... To book-lovers, the name of Gutenberg is sacred. To music bibliographers, however, his magnificent achievement may contain an element of dissonance. Owing to sheer numbers, the methods of conservation for books have established conventions for...

The Angel's Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera.
December 1, 1993... Michel Poizat's The Angel's Cry begins and ends with his transcript of a conversation with a group of opera fans whom he met in January 1985 on the front steps of the Palais Garnier (the "old" Opera) in Paris, where they were waiting through...

The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire.
December 1, 1993... Michel Poizat's The Angel's Cry begins and ends with his transcript of a conversation with a group of opera fans whom he met in January 1985 on the front steps of the Palais Garnier (the "old" Opera) in Paris, where they were waiting through...

''Music of the Highest Class'': Elitism and Populism in Antebellum Boston.
December 1, 1993... We all welcome the growing scholarly attention, at last, to local music history in the United States. Given its dominant position today, there should be a natural curiosity about the events that led to America's musical prowess. Earlier...

Russkaia mysl' o muzyke v XVII veke.
December 1, 1993... This slim volume by Vladimir Vasil'evich Protopopov, the distinguished Russian scholar who has written widely on Russian and Western music, returns to one of his most important areas of expertise: the music of seventeenth-century Muscovy. The...

Franz Schubert's Music for the Theatre.
December 1, 1993... Franz Schubert's music for the stage has traditionally had a poor press, and it is a delight to be able to state that the situation is changing. Nothing can make up for the lack of practical experience of the theatrical conditions from which...

Silent Temples, Songful Hearts: Traditional Music of Cambodia.
December 1, 1993... Silent Temples, Songful Hearts is a promising and even innovative addition to the growing body of music education aids for teaching non-Western musics in the classroom. In general I have strong reservations about many music educators' guides...

The Politicized Muse: Music for Medici Festivals, 1512-1537.
December 1, 1993... The stated objective of Anthony Cummings's aptly titled volume in Princeton's distinguished series is to attempt a reconstruction of the principal Medicean festivals with prominent musical components that occurred in Florence and elsewhere...

Singing the Glory Down: Amateur Gospel Music in South Central Kentucky, 1900-1990.
December 1, 1993... The history of gospel hymnody, broadly defined as the vernacular evangelical song of American Christianity, is a remarkably complex narrative that draws both Euro-American and African-American cultures into its tangled embrace. Descended from...

The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church.
December 1, 1993... The history of gospel hymnody, broadly defined as the vernacular evangelical song of American Christianity, is a remarkably complex narrative that draws both Euro-American and African-American cultures into its tangled embrace. Descended from...

The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideology.
December 1, 1993... As a rubric for everything from medieval chant to minimalist opera, "classic" or "classical" music is indeed a peculiar locution. Disciplines other than music normally reserve the term for genuine antiquities, preferring "neoclassical" to...

Hans Pfitzner: Briefe.
December 1, 1993... In 1924, on the centenary of the death of Carl Maria von Weber, Hans Pfitzner delivered an address entitled "Was ist uns Weber?", in which he eulogized Weber as the founder of German opera, a representative of values in danger of being...

The Music of Hans Pfitzner.
December 1, 1993... In 1924, on the centenary of the death of Carl Maria von Weber, Hans Pfitzner delivered an address entitled "Was ist uns Weber?", in which he eulogized Weber as the founder of German opera, a representative of values in danger of being...

Musik aus dem Altertum der neuen Welt: Archaologische Dokumente des Musizierens in prakolumbischen Kulturen Perus, Ekuadors, und Kolumbiens.
December 1, 1993... The noted German scholar Ellen Hickmann has written a praiseworthy book that will probably become one of the principal sourcebooks for the archaeomusicology of South America, especially of the Andean region. The title explains the subject...

A Tradition of Three Tropes.
December 1, 1993... Joseph A. Diamond's A Tradition of Three Tropes is not only a study of three Agnus Dei tropes, but also a general essay on source criticism. It is divided into six loosely connected chapters. The first is devoted to a consideration of the work...

Jerome de Moravie: un theoricien de Ia musique dans le milieu intellectuel parisien du XIIIe siecle.
December 1, 1993... The fourth to appear in the series Rencontres a Royaumont, the present book consists of eight articles having to do with various aspects of the Tractatus de musica of Jerome of Moravia. Revised in the last years of the thirteenth century, the...

Tractatus et compendium cantus figurati.
December 1, 1993... These two treatises were first edited by Edmond de Coussemaker as Anonymous XII in the third volume of his Scriptorum de musica medii aevi novam seriem a Gerbertina alteram collegit nuncque primum edidit (4 vols., Paris: Durand, 1864--76;...

Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music.
December 1, 1993... Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music is a collection of forty-nine rather brief essays divided among six broad categories: (1) the music of the past and the modern ear; (2) aspects of music and society; (3) questions of form and style;...

Plainsong in the Age of Polyphony.
December 1, 1993... Preoccupied with questions of origins and early dissemination, Western chant scholars have seldom contributed to the discussion of plainsong's role in musical culture generally. The editor of the second volume of Cambridge's performance...

Luca Bati madrigalista fiorentino: Con I'edizione moderna del Secondo Libro de Madrigali a cinque voci (1598).
December 1, 1993... At first glance, Piero Gargiulo's volume appears to be a musicologist's dream. It presents an edition of a single madrigal book by a somewhat obscure composer, preceded by extensive scholarly commentary that not only places the music and the...

The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion, and the Arts in Early Modern Europe.
December 1, 1993... The Crannied Wall is a collection of ten essays originally presented at a conference, held in 1990 at Amherst College, that was sponsored jointly by the Departments of Religion and of Music. For publication amplified footnotes and other...

German Sacred Polyphonic Vocal Music Between Schutz and Bach: Sources and Critical Editions.
December 1, 1993... German Sacred Polyphonic Vocal Music will be of use to scholars as well as to performers, for it brings together a substantial repertory of music from the second half of the seventeenth century. In order to contain the unwieldiness of their...

Zur Geschichte der weltlichen Solokantate in Neapel im fruhen Settecento: Die Solokantaten von Domenico Sarro, 1679-1744.
December 1, 1993... Naples emerged as an important center for cantata composition between the years 1680--1740 with such composers as Francesco Provenzale, Alessandro Scarlatti, Francesco Mancini, Nicola Fago, Domenico Sarro, Nicola Porpora, Francesco Feo,...

Katalog der Sammlung Anthony van Hoboken in der Musiksammlung der Osterreichischen Nationalbibliothek, vol. 9, Joseph Haydn, Vokalmusik (Hob. 20/2-31).
December 1, 1993... Karin Breitner's catalogue of vocal music by Joseph Haydn completes the documentation (in volumes 6--9 of the larger series) of 1,643 Haydn prints from Anthony van Hoboken's matchless collection. Accordingly it includes not only the last 269...

Giovanni Paisiello: A Thematic Catalogue of His Works, vol. 1, Dramatic Works.
December 1, 1993... Karin Breitner's catalogue of vocal music by Joseph Haydn completes the documentation (in volumes 6--9 of the larger series) of 1,643 Haydn prints from Anthony van Hoboken's matchless collection. Accordingly it includes not only the last 269...

Music and the French Revolution.
December 1, 1993... In July of 1989, an international conference devoted to music in the French Revolution was held at the Center for Eighteenth-Century Musical Studies at the University of Wales in Cardiff. The essays in the resulting volume appear here divided...

Romantic Music: Sound and Syntax.
December 1, 1993... The centrality of sound for the musical experience is self-evident. That sound per se has figured only peripherally in historical inquiries of musical style is difficult to fathom but true. Leonard Ratner's Romantic Music: Sound and Syntax...

Beethoven: Studies in the Creative Process.
December 1, 1993... For more than twenty years Lewis Lockwood, now the Fanny Peabody Professor of Music at Harvard University, has published essays on the music of Beethoven of unprecedented perspicacity, lucidity, and imaginative scholarship. With Beethoven:...

Donizetti in the Light of Romanticism and the Teaching of Johann Simone Mayr.
December 1, 1993... This is the book of an enthusiast, by one unhampered by any particular need to make logical connections. If a reader has some taste for feeling the tingle of the pulses, the panting of the spirit, here one can find such unreasoning passion...

The Early Works of Felix Mendelssohn: A Study in the Romantic Sonata Style.
December 1, 1993... Greg Vitercik's study places Felix Mendelssohn into perspective in the history of nineteenth-century instrumental style. The title may mislead, for the music discussed is not really "early" for Mendelssohn. Except for a relatively brief...

Robert Schumann und seine Geister-Variationen: Ein Lebensbericht mit Notenbild und neuen Dokumenten.
December 1, 1993... Robert Schumann's so-called "Geistervariationen" have long piqued the curiosity of biographers because of their close association with the composer's mental breakdown in early 1854. Several weeks before he attempted suicide by jumping into the...

Johannes Brahms: An Annotated Bibliography of the Literature Through 1982.
December 1, 1993... Thomas Quigley's Johannes Brahms: An Annotated Bibliography is an essential research tool for all Brahms scholars. Quigley has chosen to include literature written before 1983, the sesquicentennial of the composer's birth. While that...

Fromental Halevy: La Juive, Dossier de press parisienne 1835.
December 1, 1993... In recent years the scholarly community has become increasingly aware of the great importance of the nineteenth-century press as an instrument of musicological research. This vast documentary source is of particular significance in the study of...

Georges Bizet: Carmen.
December 1, 1993... We pride ourselves on the tastes that we have acquired with difficulty: oysters, the fiction of Gertrude Stein, the Rosary Sonatas of Heinrich Biber. Things that are adored by everyone, effortlessly and immediately--such as chocolate sundaes...

Edvard Grieg: The Man and the Artist.
December 1, 1993... The year 1993 has not only commemorated the sesquicentennial of the outstanding Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg's birth, but also marked the completion of a significant first chapter in the rebirth of meaningful and accurate Grieg scholarship....

The Songs of Edvard Grieg.
December 1, 1993... The year 1993 has not only commemorated the sesquicentennial of the outstanding Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg's birth, but also marked the completion of a significant first chapter in the rebirth of meaningful and accurate Grieg scholarship....

L'arcano incanto: II Teatro Regio di Torino 1740-1990.
December 1, 1993... L'arcano incanto was the title of a major exhibition celbrating the 250th anniversary of the founding of the Turin opera house in 1740, and its chief published result is this massive catalogue, weighing in at seven pounds and printed on more...

Catalog of Pre-1900 Vocal Manuscripts in the Music Library, University of California at Berkeley.
December 1, 1993... As the title indicates, this catalogue of some 700 vocal manuscripts represents only a part of the impressive manuscript collection developed in the twenty-five years following World War II by Berkeley's music librarian, Vincent H. Duckles....

Gustav Mahler und seine Zeit.
December 1, 1993... If, judging from the title of this volume, readers anticipate an attempt to present a fresh synthesis of Gustav Mahler's life and works in their historical and cultural context, this work may at first seem a disappointment. It is in fact a...

Sergej Rachmaninoff, 1873-1943, zwischen Moskau und New York, Eine Kunstlerbiographie.
December 1, 1993... Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda's exemplary Sergej Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music (New York: New York University Press, 1956) and Robert Threlfall and Geoffrey Norris's Catalogue of the Compositions of S. Rachmaninoff (London: Scolar...

Carl Nielsen, Danskeren: Musikbiografi.
December 1, 1993... Carl Nielsen is much neglected on the concert circuit today. His richly textured, complex symphonies are part of the repertories of only a few major orchestras. One finds devotees of Nielsen among the fans of Jean Sibelius and Gustav Mahler,...

Farewell, My Youth and Other Writings.
December 1, 1993... Lewis Foreman has been an active champion of early twentieth-century British music for well over twenty years. The author and editor of books on Arthur Bliss, Havergal Brian, Percy Grainger, and Edmund Rubbra, he is particularly identified with...

Le Jardin retrouve: The Music of Frederic Mompou.
December 1, 1993... Artistic renewal has been a persistent theme in the work of Wilfrid Mellers. His Studies in Contemporary Music (London: Dobson, 1947), which contained some of the first truly insightful writing on Gabriel Faure and Albert Roussel available in...

Les Compositeurs et leurs oeuvres.
December 1, 1993... Ernest Ansermet (1883--1969) is primarily known to the world of music for his work with the baton. In this capacity he was not only a principal conductor for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, but he was the founder of the Orchestre de la...

The Music of Lennox Berkeley.
December 1, 1993... Lennox Berkeley has been overshadowed by other composers of his generation. In his study The Music of Lennox Berkeley, the English composer and musicologist Peter Dickinson tries to address this neglect, asserting that Berkeley belongs with...

Formel-Komposition: Zu Karlheinz Stockhausens Musik der siebziger Jahre.
December 1, 1993... More than twenty books on Karlheinz Stockhausen have appeared to date. Considering his eminence as a composer, this hardly comes as a surprise; nor, considering his articulateness, is it surprising that nearly half are either interview books or...

What's the Matter with Today's Experimental Music? Organized Sound Too Rarely Heard.
December 1, 1993... Leigh Landy, an American who has been teaching many years at the University of Amsterdam, enters an impassioned plea here for a renewal of the energetic explorations conducted by certain European and Amerian composers in the twenty years...

The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music.
December 1, 1993... Most people actively involved with music and its study have probably, at one time or another, been frustrated by the angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin quality of traditional music aesthetics. To the music historian, for instance, there is something...

Music and Text: Critical Inquiries.
December 1, 1993... In his introduction to Music and Text, Steven Scher declares that its fourteen essays "demonstrate how musical and literary studies can combine forces effectively on the common ground of contemporary critical theory and interpretive practice"...

''When Beauty Fires the Blood'': Love and the Arts in the Age of Dryden.
December 1, 1993... The study of poetic texts rendered in music, including those for the stage, has proven a broad area for scholarly work. Recent inquiries revealing a text's ability to transmit views on aesthetics or gender have only shown this reservoir to be...

Psychanalyse Freudienne du fait musical: De l'affect a l'acouee.
December 1, 1993... For the past fifty years, Andre Michel has been pursuing a detailed study of musicology in relation to the concepts developed in the field of psychoanalysis. The present work is the distillation, on the one hand, of a thesis presented in 1962...

The Jazz Scene.
December 1, 1993... The Jazz Scene scarcely needs a review. As Eric Hobsbawm explains, he first published the book in 1959 under the pseudonym Francis Newton, as a tribute to the swing trumpeter Frankie Newton and in an unsuccessful attempt to divorce his jazz...

Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965.
December 1, 1993... In Hard Bop, the poet and critic David Rosenthal sets out to investigate important trends in the jazz of the 1950s and 1960s. Such an inquiry is of particular relevance just now, for the language of hard bop has enjoyed a notable revival in...

Swing City: Newark Nightlife, 1925-50.
December 1, 1993... Barbara Kukla's Swing City: Newark Nightlife, 1925--50 is an enlightening book that documents the entertainment scene in Newark, New Jersey, from the Jazz Age through the Swing Era and into the bebop years. Kukla is the editor of "Newark This...

In the Mainstream: 18 Portraits in Jazz.
December 1, 1993... As indicated by its subtitle, In the Mainstream presents profiles of eighteen jazz musicians and, as the title suggests, each of them is a performer closely linked with traditional jazz or swing. The book is similar in approach and format to...

Music for Hire: A Study of Professional Musicians in Washington, 1877-1900.
December 1, 1993... The ubiquity of music in contemporary life is not unique to the age of electronics. American life in the nineteenth century, and urban life in particular, was accompanied by a profusion of musical performance by both amateurs and professionals....

He Heard America Singing: Arthur Farwell, Composer and Crusading Music Educator.
December 1, 1993... As a composer of substance--and, more peripherally, as an educator and writer about music--Arthur Farwell (1872--1952) has at last begun to receive sustained attention from performers and scholars. Unfortunately, Evelyn Davis Culbertson's He...

Born in the U.S.A.: The Myth of America in Popular Music from Colonial Times to the Present.
December 1, 1993... Inspired by Bruce Springsteen's song "Born in the U.S.A." (1984) and intrigued by its mixed message of proud affirmation and critical indictment of the United States (p. viii), Timothy Scheurer goes looking for the myth of "America" in popular...

Rythm Oil: A Journey Through the Music of the American South.
December 1, 1993... When reading Stanley Booth, one may have difficulty, to paraphrase William Butler Yeats, telling the dancer from the dance. Typical of a new breed of journalists, Booth is very much a player in this collection of essays on the southern music of...

Javanese Gamelan: Traditional Orchestra of Indonesia.
December 1, 1993... It is a pleasure to read an engagingly written, succinct introduction to Central-Javanese gamelan. So often readers with a new interest in the subject are subjected to either tantilizing but factually empty descriptions of gamelan music as the...

Salsa and Related Genres: A Bibliographical Guide.
December 1, 1993... In Salsa and Related Genres, Rafael Figueroa laudably attempts to satisfy the need for a basic bibliography of folk and popular musics of the Hispanic Caribbean (variously called "Afro-Hispanic," "Antillean," "Salsa," "Latin," etc.). In his...

Kansanmusiikin tutkimus: Metodologian opas.
December 1, 1993... The study of folk music has been an integral part of Finnish music education for more than a decade. The Sibelius Academy established a folk music division in the late 1970s, originally led by the renowned folk musician Martti Pokela, in order...

Mastering Piano Technique: A Guide for Students, Teachers, and Performers.
December 1, 1993... Written over a thirty-year period, Mastering Piano Technique is a manual of exercises and explanations that presents a carefully formulated approach to the physical aspects of piano technique. Seymour Fink's guiding belief--an uncontroversial...

The Choral Music of Latin America: A Guide to Compositions and Research.
December 1, 1993... Suzanne Tiemstra's The Choral Music of Latin America provides conductors and scholars with a much-needed and long-overdue guide to Latin-American repertory and research materials. In addition to a succinct history of Latin-American music from...

International Directory of Contemporary Music, 1991, 2 vols.
December 1, 1993... Although the title of the International Directory of Contemporary Music seems to imply that these volumes comprise an encyclopedic catalogue of recent music, the directory is actually a list of holdings of two organizations devoted to...

Headbangers: The Worldwide MegaBook of Heavy Metal Bands.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1993... For some years now, the prominence of heavy metal in public debates over culture and censorship and over its importance to millions of fans has been leading academics to begin serious investigation of the music and its meanings. Mark Hale's...

Hudba v Olomoucke katedrale v 17.a 18. stoleti.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1993... For some thirty years Jiri Sehnal has combed Moravian archives for every conceivable evidence of the musical life of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century villagers, clerics, and townfolk. In Central Europe he is widely revered as an authority on...

Senzace peti stoleti v kramarske pisni: Prispevek k dejinam lidoveho zpravodajskeho zpevu.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1993... English lacks a term of any longstanding use for the category of semi-improvised song devised as a vehicle for news or tales and performed on public thoroughfares (Bankelsangerlieder, kramarske pisni), though the solution of "streetsong" has...

Music as Social Text.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1993... Although this book is a gathering of previously published material dating back more than a decade and a half, the sum of its contents represents a seminal, if proselytizing, late twentieth-century statement about what the study of music and the...

The Little Slaves of the Harp: Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteenth Century Paris, London and New York.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1993... Southern Italians were the national group most associated with itinerant music-making in metropolises of the last century, and a great many of the street harpists, barrel-organists, violinists, and fifers were children uprooted from rural areas...

Metaphor: A Musical Dimension.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1993... Recent discourse in the fine arts and philosophy lifts the communicative functions of metaphor and analogy up for especial scrutiny, and explicators of music have like-wise, from numerous perspectives, begun to explore the figurative language...

L'Ethnomusicologie en Europe: Repertoire des institutions et ressources.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1993... Of the several directories for musicians and music scholars issued within the last year, these very different titles merit more than the usual attention for their seriousness of purpose. Some 200 institutions in twenty-five countries are...

Musik-Almanach 1993/94: Daten und Fakten zum Musikleben in Deutschland.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1993... Of the several directories for musicians and music scholars issued within the last year, these very different titles merit more than the usual attention for their seriousness of purpose. Some 200 institutions in twenty-five countries are...

Die Schrammeln in ihrer Zeit.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1993... Conspicuous in the panorama of Gesell-schaftsmusik of late-imperial Vienna, the quartet of two violins (Johann and Josef Schrammel), high clarinet in G or F (Georg Danzer), and contraguitar (Anton Strohmayer)--they can be seen amusingly posed...

Das Werk der Bruder Schrammel: Einfuhrung und Verzechnis, Folge 1, Die Marsche, 1, Lieferung.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1993... Conspicuous in the panorama of Gesell-schaftsmusik of late-imperial Vienna, the quartet of two violins (Johann and Josef Schrammel), high clarinet in G or F (Georg Danzer), and contraguitar (Anton Strohmayer)--they can be seen amusingly posed...

Lost and Only Sometimes Found: A Seminar on Music Publishing and Archives.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1993... A recent entry in the British Music Society's active publication schedule, this seminar proceedings offers in effect an overview of the concerns of music librarians and others in the United Kingdom who interest themselves in the preservation...

BBC Music Magazine.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1993... In this new reviewing source that comes with an original CD, the editor vows "to give equal weight to all aspects of classical music: broadcast, live and recorded." Articles in a recent issue include a profile of soprano Jessye Norman, a...

Contemporary Music Forum.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1993... This publication presents papers read at the New Music & Art Festivals held annually at Bowling Green State University. Although the first festival was held in 1980, it was not until the tenth festival that paper sessions were included. This...

Experimental Musical Instruments: Newsletter for the Design, Construction and Enjoyment of Unusual Sound Sources.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1993... Although not "new" anymore, Experimental Musical Instruments is too good and too substantial a newsletter to let escape these pages. The articles range from the serious to the simply delightful and once again prove the value of humor as a force...

International Journey of Arts Medicine: IJAM.
December 1, 1993... A new addition to the growing body of literature dealing with the medical problems of performing artists, IJAM is the offical organ of the The International Arts Medicine Association (IAMA) and The International Society for Music in Medicine...

Listen to Norway.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1993... Since the inaugural issue coincides with the 150th anniversary of Edvard Grieg's birth, it is fitting that many of the articles in this new journal dedicated to promoting Norway's music be devoted to her best-known composer. The articles,...

Opera Now.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1993... This glossy, colorful, slightly oversized (8 1/2 x 12 inches) magazine brings news of the opera world and feature articles to operagoers and opera participants. Although international in scope, its emphasis is on the United Kingdom, and, to a...

The Performing Songwriter.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1993... "This magazine was started as a way to provide... songwriters with a vehicle to get their names out to other parts of the country and to enlighten all of you music lovers to some of the best sounds around," states editor Hutchinson in her...