Notes articles from December 1994

Notes archives from December 1994

Comprehensive discographies of jazz, blues and gospel.
December 1, 1994... smaller; were the minimum number of citations lowered substantially, it would expand. We also have a different set of wonders about this study. Crawford and Magee write that "Everyone agrees, then, that there is such a thing as a repertory of...

Gender and the Musical Canon.
December 1, 1994... What are the proper contents of canons, and who should determine such contents? These questions have been a matter of rigorous debate in the academy for some time now, and the music disciplines are no exception. In her important and timely new...

Western Plainchant: A Handbook.
December 1, 1994... The repertory of thousands of liturgical chants that developed across Western Europe during the millennium ending with the thirteenth century is an enormous body of material for study. With the purpose of providing a book of reference for this...

Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the English Court, 1540-1690.
December 1, 1994... Peter Holman's Four and Twenty Fiddlers is a very special book, its aim even grander than the subtitle indicates nothing less than an explication of all the musical activity touched by the violin family and its players over a century and a half,...

Nineteenth-Century Music and the German Romantic Ideology.
December 1, 1994... One rarely sees a book title these days with an advertisement nobler than this one, whose cover promises an insight into the gamut of nineteenth-century music in its relationship to the enormous breadth and diversity of thought that is, or was,...

The Seventh Stream: The Emergence of Rocknroll in American Popular Music.
December 1, 1994... By Philip H. Ennis. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1992. [xii, 445 p. ISBN 0-8195-6257-2 (pbk.). $29.95.] These two volumes are alpha and omega points in writing about rock. The Seventh...

Rock, the Primary Text: Developing a Musicology of Rock.
December 1, 1994... These two volumes are alpha and omega points in writing about rock. The Seventh Stream: The Emergence of Rocknroll in American Popular Music is at its best when chronicling the rise of rock through the 1940s and 1950s. Rock: The Primary Text...

We'll Understand It Better by and by: Pioneering African American Composers.
December 1, 1994... What is gospel music? That question is not easily answered, though the contributors to this book make valiant efforts to do so, from the first pages of the introduction, "Gospel [music] is both a repertoire and a style of singing", through the...

Makers of the Piano: 1700-1820.
December 1, 1994... As the tercentenary of the piano's invention by Bartolomeo Cristofori draws near, historical pianos have as never before become objects of intensive attention from scholars, players, collectors, and makers. This resurgence parallels the revival...

Anthologies of Music: An Annotated Index, 2d ed.
December 1, 1994... We know that when studying, writing, or lecturing about music, supporting score and audio examples illuminate what words express and express what words cannot. And those examples must be perfect in their roles, whether as entire compositions or...

Music and War: A Research and Information Guide.
December 1, 1994... In the preface to Music and War, Ben Arnold writes that this subject provides "the opportunity to look at music's ability to represent, depict, suggest, or symbolize through various means war and the intended death and destruction it...

I libretti italiani a stampa dalle origini al 1800: catalogo analitico con 16 indici.
December 1, 1994... By Claudio Sartori. Cuneo: Bertola & Locatelli, 1990- .[6 vols. to date. No ISBN. L.250,000 per vol.] It is a pleasure to witness the completion of both of these reference works, which bear the fruits of long-sustained labors begun in the...

Catalog of Venetian Librettos at the University of California, Los Angeles.
December 1, 1994... It is a pleasure to witness the completion of both of these reference works, which bear the fruits of long-sustained labors begun in the 1970s and which will undoubtedly nurture researchers for generations to come. Both will enable the study of...

Die Motetten der Madrider Notre-Dame-Handschrift.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1994... This book is a published version of the author's dissertation completed in 1987 at Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich. It deals with the motets in Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional MS 20486, a mid-thirteenth-century manuscript that Friedrich Ludwig...

Die Motette: Beitrage zu ihrer Gattungsgeschichte.
December 1, 1994... Die Motette: Beitrage zu ihrer Gattungsgeschichte represents the results of a conference held in honor of Ludwig Finscher on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. It is a fitting tribute, since Finscher wrote the motet article for Die Musik in...

Die deutschen Chorbucher aus der Hofkapelle Friedrichs des Weisen: Ein Beitrag zur mitteldeutschen geistlichen Musikpraxis um 1500.
December 1, 1994... A magnificent collection of large choir-books in Jena, Germany has put this small industrial city on the map for scholars interested in music written by the Netherlands composers around the turn of the sixteenth century. This unparalleled...

The Bandora: Its Music and Sources.
December 1, 1994... The bandora (sometimes "pandora") is an intriguing instrument from the English Renaissance. A finger-plucked instrument with brass wire strings, larger than a lute, and used in the bass and partly doublebass registers, its rich and resonant sound...

'Goostly psalmes and spirituall songes': English and Dutch Metrical Psalms from Coverdale to Utenhove, 1535-1566.
December 1, 1994... Because of their uniform structures we naively see the psalters of the Protestant churches of the sixteenth century as entities that were created whole and in a single moment, with little internal differentiation of author, origin, and contents....

Neither Voice nor Heart Alone: German Lutheran Theology of Music in the Age of the Baroque.
December 1, 1994... Theologians and church musicians of the period 1580 to 1730 wrote many volumes on the value of music in the Lutheran service. These writers were well known to contemporary church musicians, but most are unheard of today. Joyce Irwin has evaluated...

The Oratorio in Modena.
December 1, 1994... In his preface Victor Crowther states that his aim is "to show how circumstances peculiar to Modena sustained a thriving oratorio tradition in the late seventeenth century". The historical background for the oratorio begins with the Este family's...

Women Musicians of Venice: Musical Foundations, 1525-1855.
December 1, 1994... The musical lives of Anna Maria of the Pieta, Elisabetta Mantovani of the Incurabili, Anna Cremona of the Mendicanti, and Bortola Anzoloti of the Dereletti, to name but a few, have long awaited narration. The title to this book promises to...

La Danse noble: An Inventory of Dances and Sources.
December 1, 1994... In La Danse noble: An Inventory of Dances and Sources musicologists Meredith Little and Carol Marsh have made a significant contribution to the bibliographical description of and access to the extant court and theater dances of the French noble...

The Musical Dilettante: A Treatise on Composition by J.F. Daube.
December 1, 1994... Ever since Leonard Ratner called attention to him nearly forty years ago, Johann Friedrich Daube (ca. 1730-1797) has been an object of interest to students of eighteenth-century music ("Eighteenth-Century Theories of Musical Period Structure,"...

Gretry et l'Europe de l'opera-comique.
December 1, 1994... Edited by Philippe Vendrix. (Collection Musique/Musicologie.) Liege: Pierre Mardaga, 1992. [389 p. ISBN 2-87009-483-3. FB1,593.] Gretry et l'Europe de l'opera-comique contains the proceedings for the 1991 conference in Liege celebrating the...

L'Opera-comique en France au XVIIIe siecle.
December 1, 1994... Gretry et l'Europe de l'opera-comique contains the proceedings for the 1991 conference in Liege celebrating the 250th anniversary of Andre-Ernest-Modeste Gretry's birth. The goal of this conference was not so much to present biographical...

Rotunda Music in Eighteenth-Century Dublin.
December 1, 1994... Recent research has made available a wealth of information about musical life in London, in the English provinces, and in Dublin in the eighteenth century. The parallels between the practices in these different areas are striking. In general,...

An Outward Show: Music for Shakespeare on the London Stage, 1660-1830.
December 1, 1994... Who might benefit from a study of the music written for London productions of Shakespeare from the Restoration through the first third of the nineteenth century? Randy L. Neighbarger has set out to write "a broad survey," "a concise overview of...

L'Accademia filarmonica di Bologna: fondazione, statuti, e aggregazioni.
December 1, 1994... By Osvaldo Gambassi. ("Historiae Musicae Cultores" Biblioteca, 63. Settore Musica e Teatro, 4.) Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1992. [x, 471 p. ISBN 88222-3930-X.] A decade ago, reviewing the development of musicology in this country, Joseph...

La Capella musicale di S. Petronio: maestri, organistri, cantori e strumentisti dal 1436 al 1920.
December 1, 1994... By Osvaldo Gambassi. ("Historiae Musicae Cultores" Biblioteca, 64. Settore Musica e Teatro, 2.) Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1987. [viii, 512 p. ISBN 88-2223474-X.] A decade ago, reviewing the development of musicology in this country, Joseph...

Il Concerto Palatino della signoria di Bologna: cinque secoli di vita musicale a corte, 1250-1797.
December 1, 1994... A decade ago, reviewing the development of musicology in this country, Joseph Kerman reminded his readers that work in the field had once been a largely local affair--with each scholarly community concerned chiefly with the music of its...

The Pianist as Orator: Beethoven and the Transformation of Keyboard Style.
December 1, 1994... The Pianist as Orator skillfully blends three approaches to understanding Ludwig van Beethoven's keyboard style: performance practice, musical signification, and the phenomenology of time-keeping. The book is impressive chiefly as a historical...

Ole Bull: Norway's Romantic Musician and Cosmopolitan Patriot.
December 1, 1994... This welcome book is an English version of Ole Bull: romantisk musiker og kosmopolitisk nordmann (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1992). I say "version" rather than "translation" because both have been written by Einar Haugen, the uniquely qualified...

Dvorak in America: 1892-1895.
December 1, 1994... Edited by John C. Tibbetts. Portland, Ore: Amadeus Press, 1993. [x, 447 p. ISBN 0-931340-56-X. $32.95.] Antonin Dvorak's sesquicentennial occurred in 1991, and the hundredth anniversary of his tenure as director of the now defunct, but...

Dvorak and His World.
December 1, 1994... Edited by Michael Beckerman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. [x, 284 p. ISBN 0-691-00097-2. $55.00.] Antonin Dvorak's sesquicentennial occurred in 1991, and the hundredth anniversary of his tenure as director of the now defunct,...

Antonin Dvorak, My Father.
December 1, 1994... Antonin Dvorak's sesquicentennial occurred in 1991, and the hundredth anniversary of his tenure as director of the now defunct, but formerly influential, National Conservatory in New York (1892-95) is upon us. A range of conferences and...

The Piano Master Classes of Hans von Bulow: Two Participants' Accounts.
December 1, 1994... Richard Louis Zimdars here provides the first English translation of Theodor Pfeiffer's Studien bei Hans von Bulow (Berlin: Luckhardt, 1894) with its Nachtrag (supplement) by Jose Vianna da Motta (Berlin: Luckhardt, 1896), a popular book in the...

Jacques Offenbach, ou La Gaite parisienne.
December 1, 1994... After a long sojourn in the "light music" ghetto, Jacques Offenbach is at last obtaining recognition in "serious" music circles as a composer worthy of respect, and, therefore, of genuine study. A thematic catalogue of his works (over six...

Portrait de Cecile Chaminade.
December 1, 1994... In the last decade, women composers have been receiving long overdue attention. The music of Frenchwoman Cecile Chaminade (1857-1944), once a favorite of aspiring pianists and singers, is enjoying renewed interest, with reprints, recordings,...

Charles Munch, un chef d'orchestre dans le siecle.
December 1, 1994... In her biography of Charles Munch (1891-1968), Genevieve Honegger has chosen to present her subject in the mirror of his correspondence. Taking her cue from Philippe Olivier's Charles Munch: Une biographie par le disque (Paris: Pierre Belfond,...

Reggie: The Life of Reginald Goodall.
December 1, 1994... Reginald Goodall (1901-1991), a maddening bundle of contradictions both musical and personal, came to full flower in the autumn of his life. At age 67, he conducted a series of Meistersingers in English at the Sadlers Wells Opera that became the...

Frank Bridge: A Bio-bibliography.
December 1, 1994... By Karen R. Little. (Big-bibliographies in Music, 36.) New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. [xii, 263 p. ISBN 0-31326232-2. $45.00.] A great deal of attention is currently being given to composers of the English Musical Renaissance through...

John Ireland: A Catalogue, Discography, and Bibliography.
December 1, 1994... By Stewart R. Craggs. With an introduction by Geoffrey Bush. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. [xviii, 161 p. ISBN 0-19816317-7. $42.00.] A great deal of attention is currently being given to composers of the English Musical Renaissance...

Herbert Howells: The Manuscripts in the Royal College of Music Library.
December 1, 1994... A great deal of attention is currently being given to composers of the English Musical Renaissance through recordings, live performances, publications of music, and monographs. Three of the composers associated with this movement, Frank Bridge,...

Studien zum russischen Musikdenken um 1920.
December 1, 1994... If Commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky likened the 1917 Revolution to a "grandiose symphony," the musical response itself was more akin to free jazz, as the halls and theaters resounded with quarter-tone experiments, imported and domestic atonality,...

Studi su Luigi Dallapiccola: un seminario.
December 1, 1994... With one exception the articles collected here were written by students in a graduate seminar on the music of Luigi Dallapiccola given by Pierluigi Petrobelli at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in 1986-87. Nine papers are grouped under three...

International Piano Competitions, 3 vols.
December 1, 1994... Competitions are inherently dramatic events: the results are unpredictable; there is a public testing of skills, eventually resulting in one winner and, by implication, a number of "losers"; new world records reflect the extension of the limits...

Moving Within the Circle: Contemporary Native American Music and Dance.
December 1, 1994... Intended as a textbook for use in American Indian Studies, world music, and music education courses, this book succeeds in being both highly readable and reasonably informative. It is, as Bryan Burton suggests, not a comprehensive study but...

The Radif of Persian Music: Studies of Structure and Cultural Context, rev. ed.
December 1, 1994... The Radif of Persian Music comprises a group of essays originally published separately over fifteen years. It approaches the radif, the corpus of melodic models that constitute the core of the classical Persian repertory in the view of a given...

The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science, and the Natural Order of the Universe.
December 1, 1994... If enthusiasm and stylistic flair were enough to make a good book, this would be an outstanding one. Unfortunately, in the case of The Music of the Spheres, Jamie James has let a passion for his subject matter run well ahead of his grasp of it;...

Musik und Malen in der therapeutischen Arbeit mit Suchtkranken.
December 1, 1994... The authors offer an addition to music therapy literature in an area of clinical practice that is not well documented: music therapy with substance abuse disorders. This book is a welcome attempt to close the gap, at least in the German-based...

Arguing for Music, Arguing for Culture.
December 1, 1994... Samuel Lipman, master of musical invective, unleashes another volume in his series of essays culled from the pages of the New Criterion. Lipman, practitioner par-excellence of the argument ad hominem and paralipsis in the service of reactionary...

New periodicals.
December 1, 1994... This semiannual column lists newly-issued periodicals, describes their objectives, formats, and contents, and provides information about special issues, title and format changes, mergers, and cessations. Blue Suede News: House Organ of the...

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Klavierkonzerte fur Klavier und Orchester.
December 1, 1994... There is no question that the time is right for a new edition of Mozart's piano concertos: most earlier editions are problematic with respect to their source evaluations and editorial methods, and even the best modern editions, published by the...

Orazio Vecchi: The Four-Voice Canzonettas.
December 1, 1994... Orazio Vecchi (1550-1605) has long been recognized as one of the greatest composers of Italian secular vocal music of the late Renaissance. He is the master par excellence of the light secular genres. He is also a skillful composer of serious...

Henry Butler: Collected Works.
December 1, 1994... Henry Butler has come up quickly in the world. Forty years ago, his was just a name attached to some viola da gamba music in Durham Cathedral Library manuscripts and in a few other sources, identity otherwise unknown. Thirty years ago, documents...

Benedict Schultheiss: Muth- und Geist-Ermuntrender Clavier-Lust, 1679-1680.
December 1, 1994... With this publication Richard Hudson adds to the American Institute of Musicology's Corpus of Early Keyboard Music Benedict Schultheiss's Muth- und Geist-Ermuntrender Clavier-Lust, first issued in two parts, in 1679 and 1680. Schultheiss...

A Score for the Lord's Masque by Thomas Campion.
December 1, 1994... Thomas Campion's masque celebrating the marriage of Frederick V to the "royally descended" Lady Elizabeth issued from the press in 1613, shortly after the festive and (without question) costly event took place. The Lords' Masque, the title by...

Georg Friedrich Handel: Flavio, Re de' Langobardi.
December 1, 1994... One of the most memorable of the bon mots attributed to Handel was probably spoken during rehearsals of the opera Flavio, Re de' Langobardi. The tenor Alexander Gordon, who sang the part of Ugone, complained about the way Handel was accompanying...

Andre Campra: Le Carnaval de Venise; comedie lyrique.
December 1, 1994... Introduction by James R. Anthony with a section on stage designs and costumes by Jerome de La Gorce. (French Opera in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 17.) Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1989. [Intro., pp. vii-xliii; libretto...

Joseph-Francois Salomon: Medee et Jason; tragedie en musique.
December 1, 1994... French Opera in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Pendragon's projected series of seventy-five volumes containing about one hundred works, will provide an invaluable overview of a repertory that seems more central with each passing...

Franz Schubert: Fantasie in f-Moll D 940 fur Klavier zu vier Handen.
December 1, 1994... Fantasie in f-Moll D 940 fur Klavier zu vier Handen: Entwurf in The Pierpont Morgan Library New York; Eigenhandige Reinschrift in der Musiksammlung der Osterreichischen Nationalbibliothek. Faksimile-Ausgabe. (Veroffentlichungen des...

Franz Schubert: "Reliquie" Sonate in C fur Klavier D 840.
December 1, 1994... A picture of Franz Schubert, as not only an acclaimed master of the German art song but also one of the great composers of instrumental music, continues to come into sharper focus, thanks to the ongoing series of publications issued by the...

Serge Garant: Plages (pour orchestre), 1981.
December 1, 1994... Saint-Nicolas, Quebec: Editions Doberman-Yppan (C. P. 2021, Saint-Nicolas, Quebec, Canada GOS 3L0), 1986. [Big. in Fr., Eng., p. 3; instrumentation, notation, p. 4; score, pp. 5-23. DO 78/ISBN 2-92027464-3. $35.00; duration: cat 14'. Orchestral...

Andre Prevost: Scherzo pour orchestre a cordes, 1960.
December 1, 1994... These two compositions are in many respects typical of the school of composers that came to the fore of Montreal's musical life in the years following the Second World War. Serge Garant (b. 1929) studied with Claude Champagne at the Conservatoire...

Cristobal Halffter: Concierto para piano y orquesta, 1987.
December 1, 1994... Born in Madrid in 1930, Cristobal Halffter is one of Spain's most prolific and outstanding contemporary composers. Brought up in a musical family (his uncles Ernesto and Rodolfo Halffter were both renowned composers), Halffter has composed...

Tristan Murail: Les Miroirs etendus pour ondes martenot et piano, 1971.
December 1, 1994... Paris: Editions Musicales Transatlantiques (151, Avenue Jean Jaures, 75019 Paris), 1992 [c1977]. [Notes in Fr., 2 p.; score, 19 p.; duration: 10'45".] The early electronic instruments, hailed fifty years ago as exemplars of the modern era,...

Andre Jolivet: Ouverture en rondeau pour 4 ondes martenot, 2 pianos et percussion, 1938.
December 1, 1994... The early electronic instruments, hailed fifty years ago as exemplars of the modern era, are likely today to seem as quaint and antiquated as the sackbut or the arpeggione. The ondes martenot, introduced by its inventor, Maurice Martenot, at the...

Denis Bedard: Sonate pour flute et piano, 1984.
December 1, 1994... Saint-Nicolas, Quebec: Editions Doberman-Yppan (C. P. 2021, Saint-Nicolas, Quebec, Canada GOS 3L0), 1988. [Score, 27 p. and part; DO 96/ISBN 2-920274-83-X. $12.00; duration: ca. 14'30".] When Hugh MacLennan penned his novel Two Solitudes...

Denis Gougeon: L'Oiseau blesse, 1987.
December 1, 1994... Saint-Nicolas, Quebec: Editions Doberman-Yppan, 1988. [5 p.; DO 109/lSBN 2-920274-88-0. $7.00; duration: ca. 4'30".] When Hugh MacLennan penned his novel Two Solitudes some fifty years ago, little could he have guessed the extent to which...

Francois Morel: Duolet pour deux flutes traversieres, 1982.
December 1, 1994... When Hugh MacLennan penned his novel Two Solitudes some fifty years ago, little could he have guessed the extent to which its title would so aptly describe Canada at the end of the twentieth century. Yet with two constitutional crises in less...

Henri Lazarof: Necompe - Eight Soundscapes for Eight Percussionists, 1992.
December 1, 1994... Sixty-three years ago, Edgard Varese's Ionisation, now generally acknowledged as the first important work in the history of Western art music for an ensemble of percussion instruments alone, was heard. It has now become a "classic" in the...