Notes articles from December 1995

Notes archives from December 1995

The Gustav Mahler-Alfred Rose collection at the University of Western Ontario.
December 1, 1995... When Alma Mahler-Werfel and her husband, the Austrian writer Franz Werfel, fled Vienna in the spring of 1938 after the Nazi Anschluss, she left the better part of Mahler's papers and correspondence in the library that occupied the top floor of...

A checklist of the manuscript sources of Henry Purcell's music in the University of California, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles.
December 1, 1995... The extent of the manuscript holdings of Henry Purcell's music in the University of California, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, has hitherto not been revealed in print.(1) Some of the Purcell sources are mentioned in the...

Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.
December 1, 1995... Rap music has, since its appearance in the mid to late 1970s, attracted a lion's share of attention in the popular music world and in the popular press. Once the sole domain of lower and working class African-American and Afro-Caribbean youth in...

Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place.
December 1, 1995... This fine volume considers how various facets of musical expression - like instrumentation, style, and performance practice -comprise variable markers of social identity, as constructed within and emblematic of specific locales. As Martin...

Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music.
December 1, 1995... Susan McClary, in "Foreword: Ode to Cecilia," and Susan C. Cook and Judy S. Tsou, in "Introduction: Bright Cecilia," present the ten essays in Cecilia Reclaimed: Feminist Perspectives on Gender and Music as a showcase of feminist perspective and...

Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn.
December 1, 1995... Few cities have as large a scholarly literature on concert life as does eighteenth-century London. This literature runs from C. F. Pohl's Mozart und Haydn in (Vienna: C. Gerold, 1867; reprint, New York: Da Capo, 1970) to Robert Elkin's Old...

Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation.
December 1, 1995... Much of the literature on jazz improvisation falls short on two counts. First, it has been mostly concerned with the individual improviser without regard for the performer's response to context. Second, it has given short shrift to what the...

May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music.
December 1, 1995... This is a wonderful account of the non-art music of Bulgaria from about 1919 to 1989, how it was practiced, and how the practice changed. It is ethnomusicology at its best. Timothy Rice mastered the bagpipe himself, adding his perspective to the...

Begriff und Asthetik der "Neudeutschen Schule": Ein Beitrag zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts.
December 1, 1995... Within the last decade, the writings of journal editor Franz Brendel (1811-1868) have become a focal point for scholars attempting to understand the aesthetic, cultural, and political world in which Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, and the New German...

Robert Schumann und Richard Wagner im geschichtsphilosophischen Urteil von Franz Brendel.
December 1, 1995... Within the last decade, the writings of journal editor Franz Brendel (1811-1868) have become a focal point for scholars attempting to understand the aesthetic, cultural, and political world in which Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, and the New German...

Dionysos Rising: The Birth of Cultural Revolution out of the Spirit of Music.
December 1, 1995... Dionysos Rising is the second volume of Michael Jones's tripartite critique of modernity. It is cultural odyssey representing a conservative Catholic interpretation of the birth of modern music and the alleged subsequent culture wars, the genesis...

Passport to Jewish Music: Its History, Traditions, and Culture.
December 1, 1995... Irene Heskes, the seemingly indefatigable bibliographer and promoter of Jewish music study, provides a sampling of the fruits of "several decades of dedicated study and scholarly labors in the field of Jewish music," (p. ix). The volume contains...

The New Langwill Index: A Dictionary of Musical Wind-Instrument Makers and Inventors.
December 1, 1995... For over fifty years collectors and scholars of wind instruments have been indebted to Lyndesay G. Langwill's researches. Initially this was by private circulation of lists, and then from 1960 by publication of his Index of Musical...

Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris.
December 1, 1995... Traditionally, scholarship on tropes and sequences has focused on problems of terminology, chronology, and genetic relationships. Margot Fassler's Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences, and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris offers a...

Orlando di Lasso: Prachthandschriften und Quellenuberlieferung; aus den Bestanden der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek Munchen.
December 1, 1995... With the help of historical perspective one could argue that the Netherlander Orlando di Lasso, and not Richard Strauss, was Bavaria's most famous composer. For thirty-eight years - under Dukes Albrecht V and Wilhelm V, from 1556 to his death in...

"Say Can You Deny Me": A Guide to Surviving Music by Women from the 16th Through the 18th Centuries.
December 1, 1995... In this comprehensive guide to locating early music composed by European and American women, Barbara Garvey Jackson, historian, performer, editor, publisher, and professor emerita of musicology at the University of Arkansas, offers the results of...

Seventeenth-Century English Keyboard Music: Benjamin Cosyn.
December 1, 1995... Benjamin Cosyn (ca. 1570-1653) was an English organist and composer, whose most important posts were at Dulwich College, London (1622-24) and the Charterhouse (1626-43). Cosyn was also a collector and scribe of contemporary keyboard works, and...

British Harpsichord Music, vol. 1, Sources.
December 1, 1995... Benjamin Cosyn (ca. 1570-1653) was an English organist and composer, whose most important posts were at Dulwich College, London (1622-24) and the Charterhouse (1626-43). Cosyn was also a collector and scribe of contemporary keyboard works, and...

Vivaldi, vero e falso: Problemi di attribuzione.
December 1, 1995... This collection of essays represents the outcome of the international conference organized at Poitiers, France on the 250th anniversary of Antonio Vivaldi's death in 1991. The conference was mainly concerned with problems of authenticity in the...

Johann Sebastian Bachs "Kunst der Fuge": Ideologien - Entstehung - Analyse.
December 1, 1995... The present volume, billed as "an unconventional new view" of Johann Sebastian Bach's last keyboard work, in fact belongs to a tradition of German writings on the subject that includes several by Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, to whom it is dedicated....

Studien zur Kunst der Fuge von Johann Sebastian Bach: Untersuchungen zur Entstehungsgeschichte, Struktur und Auffuhrungspraxis.
December 1, 1995... This excellent study, inspired by Pieter Dirksen's particular interests in the mirror fugues and the canons in J. S. Bach's Art of Fugue, has as its main concerns the complicated genesis of the collection, its cyclical nature, and Bach's...

Aspects of Keyboard Music: Essays in Honour of Susi Jeans on the Occasion of her Seventy-fifth Birthday.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1995... Susi jeans was an important figure in the revival of Baroque-style organs in England; this book was published in her honor. According to a note on page [4], "The first edition of this Festschrift, in typescript form, was presented to Lady jeans...

Italienischer Vers und musikalische Syntax in Mozarts Opern.
December 1, 1995... This book sets out to answer several questions, some of which are stated clearly in the introduction, and some of which emerge from the body of the book. Those mentioned in the introduction are: With what techniques does Mozart set Italian text?...

Le Poeme symphonique et la musique a programme.
December 1, 1995... Due to the scarcity of books and studies devoted to program music, any new endeavor deserves to be saluted warmly. Michel Chion attempts a comprehensive treatment of the topic, from Greek antiquity to 1991. It surpasses its closest predecessor,...

A History of Pianoforte Pedalling.
December 1, 1995... It can be argued that the sustaining pedal is the one feature that has given the piano its most characteristic music. The use of this pedal is so deeply ingrained in all pianists who have passed the beginning stages that it is practically...

Weber-Studien, vol. 1.
December 1, 1995... Carl Maria von Weber's ambiguous historiographical status has long been evident in the apparent imbalance between his high reputation and the meager scholarly attention afforded him. While textbooks consistently single out Weber as the cardinal...

Method for Cor Alto and Cor Basse.
December 1, 1995... Louis-Francois Dauprat's Method, written in 1824 and unavailable for one hundred and fifty years, is the most complete and valuable method ever written on how to learn the natural horn. Birdalone Music has given us a beautiful edition of this...

'La Muette de Portici': Kristische Ausgabe des Librettos und Dokumentation der ersten Inszenierung.
December 1, 1995... La Muette de Portici was premiered on 9 February 1828, and marks the beginnings of grand opera. The collaboration between Daniel-Francois Esprit Auber, Eugene Scribe, Germain Delavigne, and the artistic skills of the Acadamie royale de musique...

Wagner's "Das Rheingold."
December 1, 1995... With the publication almost ten years ago of the Wagner Werk-Verzeichnis (Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke Richard Wagners und ihrer Quellen, ed. John Deathridge, Martin Geck, and Egon Voss [Mainz: Schott, 1986]) the status of the surviving...

Bamboula! The Life and Times of Louis Moreau Gottschalk.
December 1, 1995... A major Gottschalk biography has been high on the American music desiderata list, for reasons having to do as much with the sources and the sentiment as with the rather exotic man and his music. The wonderous abundance of documentation and loving...

The Russian Piano Concerto, vol. 1, The Nineteenth Century.
December 1, 1995... The reader can gain a great deal of insight into Jeremy Norris's study of the Russian piano concerto in the nineteenth century from comments on his first and last pages: "I have tried to avoid an overly academic approach" (p.1) and, "Seen in...

Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900-1916.
December 1, 1995... This book is just the sort of text to place in the hands of an advanced undergraduate, graduate student, or interested reader embarking on a study of modernism. Accurate and up-to-date, this study offers a comprehensive picture of the modernist...

Marching Along: Recollections of Men, Women and Music.
December 1, 1995... The original edition of John Philip Sousa's autobiography Marching Along was published in 1928 by Hale, Cushman & Flint of Boston. Much of the material had appeared three years before as a series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post entitled...

Franz Schreker, 1878-1934: A Cultural Biography.
December 1, 1995... Christopher Hailey has gone in search of the nearly forgotten Austrian composer, conductor, teacher, and writer Franz Schreker. The resulting biography explores the reasons for a famous composer's eclipse and virtual exclusion from post-World War...

The Furtwangler Record.
December 1, 1995... John Ardoin, music critic for the Dallas Morning News, is well known as the author of The Callas Legacy (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1991), a definitive survey of the recordings of soprano Maria Callas. The Furtwangler Record is an equally...

Irving Berlin: A Daughter's Memoir.
December 1, 1995... Irving Berlin did not go gentle into that good night when he died in 1989 at the age of 101. For most of the nearly forty years after his final Broadway hit Call Me Madam (1950) he was acknowledged, even by his eldest daughter and advocate Mary...

Music and Color: Conversations with Claude Samuel.
December 1, 1995... This translation of the 1986 Editions Belfond imprint provides an important English-language oral history document to be read by Olivier Messiaen scholars and cherished by the composer's congregants, The discussion with Claude Samuel covers many...

Marcel Moyse: Voice of the Flute.
December 1, 1995... Tackling an account of Marcel Moyse's life and assessing his impact as a performer and teacher is a daunting task for even the most stalwart biographer. So much of the lore surrounding this figure is couched in overstatement and conflicting...

Clarinet Acoustics.
December 1, 1995... Clarinetists have traditionally gathered information about various clarinet makers by word of mouth. A painfully slow and usually incomplete method of learning, the only alternative has been to read Lee Gibson's own long-standing column,...

Cello Music since 1960: A Bibliography of Solo Chamber, and Orchestral Works for the Solo Cellist.
December 1, 1995... This bibliography is an essential reference work for librarians, collectors, and music trade professionals. It also fills a significant need for performers and teachers, giving them a chance to view the wealth of cello music written in the last...

The Organist as Scholar: Essays in Memory of Russell Saunders.
December 1, 1995... In October 1991, many students, colleagues, and friends of Russell Saunders gathered in Rochester, New York, to celebrate his twenty-fifth year as professor of organ at the Eastman School of Music. Among the gifts presented to him that weekend...

Sir Ernest MacMillan: The Importance of Being Canadian.
December 1, 1995... A cultural epoch without biographical accounts is an epoch forgotten. The facts and legends about Hector Berlioz, Frederic Chopin, or Richard Wagner have created and spread an image of the Romantic musician and his time far beyond the ranks of...

John Weinzweig and His Music: The Radical Romantic of Canada.
December 1, 1995... A book-length study of the life and music of the Canadian composer John Weinzweig has long been overdue. Over a period of more than fifty years, Weinzweig know in his early eighties) has not only earned a reputation as one of Canada's most...

Bebop: The Music and its Players.
December 1, 1995... Both for the specialist and the general reader, Thomas Owens's. Bebop: The Music and Its Players is an informative and highly readable treatment of this major development in jazz history. Of particular interest to trained and practicing musicians...

Sounds of the South.
December 1, 1995... This volume contains papers selected from a 1989 conference in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, celebrating the opening of the University of North Carolina's Southern Folklife Collection. This important book has been egregiously neglected in the...

Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing.
December 1, 1995... My earliest experience of Western swing was during the summer of 1943. A recording of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys playing Jesse Ashlock's "Please Don't Leave Me Anymore Darlin" was on a jukebox in a cafe in Aguila, Arizona, and apparently...

Overview: An Introduction to Music History, 2d ed.
December 1, 1995... Publication of this book presents a threat to what is still called higher education." Several things, among them the ridiculous title, immediately strike the eye as odd. The title page identifies the author only as "Professor of Music." He is not...

Write All These Down: Essays on Music.
December 1, 1995... "Write all these down" is a phrase from a song by William Byrd, a song that Joseph Kerman particularly admires. Write All These Down contains five essays on Byrd and his contemporaries, as well as four essays on music criticism, four on Ludwig...

World Beat. (Software Review)(Evaluation)
December 1, 1995... World Beat is a nicely designed, user-friendly CD-ROM that focuses primarily on the popular and fusion musics found in recent decades in approximately seventy-five large and small countries around the world. The opening screen has as its center a...

Computer Quest. (Software Review)(Evaluation)
December 1, 1995... Composer Quest announces itself as a "valuable learning tool that draws parallels between the arts, history and music." Op-code's promotional information further indicates an audience range from the ten-year-old to the adult. In certain ways such...

Les Cahiers du Jazz.
December 1, 1995... Published with the cooperation of the Centre national des lettres, and supported by a large "comite d'etude et de lecture," this journal presents a more substantive and scholarly appearance than many jazz organs, and is clearly aimed at a more...

Dirty Linen.
December 1, 1995... Although not a new title, this magazine has only recently come to the attention of this writer. Prior to issue n it had the title Fairport Fanatics. Its scope embraces folk, electric folk, traditional, and world music in a lively and personal...

East European Meetings in Ethnomusicology.
December 1, 1995... Dedicated to the study of East European ethnomusicology, this Rumanian journal is intended to reach an international audience, and to draw articles from scholars around the world. The editor intends to publish articles only in English. The...

Il Saggiatore Musicale.
December 1, 1995... This new musicological journal, which takes its title from Galileo (Saggiatore..., 1623) and Francesco Algarotti (Saggio sopra l'opera in musica, 1755) was formed with the purpose of nourishing the trends of critical musicology. Its wide-ranging...

The Sondheim Review.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1995... The masthead of this glossy fanzine declares that it is dedicated to the work of the musical theater's foremost composer and lyricist." As might be expected, therefore, the tenor of the issue is praise of Sondheim and his music, with little, if...

Le Magnus liber organi de Notre-Dame de Paris, vol. 1, Les quadrupla et tripla de Paris.
December 1, 1995... Only three years after his impressive publication of Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, fr. 146 (Roman de Fauvel [New York: Broude Brothers, 1990]) Edward Roesner has presented us with his edition of the Notre-Dame tripla and quadrupla. This major...

Oberon: Konig der Elfen.
December 1, 1995... G. Henle's sleek, elegant series Die Oper is a unique undertaking. Although its carefully edited and sumptuously printed scores are all located firmly within the Western canon, the series deliberately sidesteps the two paths followed by similar...

Orchestral Music in Salzburg: 1750-1780.
December 1, 1995... Information concerning Salzburg's eighteenth-century musical past has burst forward in a flood of recent articles, books, editions, and recordings. Much of this material has had to do with music of the symphonic variety, such as the five volumes...

Nine Settings of the "Litanies de la Vierge."
December 1, 1995... Few composers have benefited more from the Baroque revival of the last two decades than Marc-Antoine Charpentier. From a mere casual reference in Donald J. Grout's History of Western Music (New York: Norton, 1960) and Manfred F. Bukofzer's Music...

Vesperpsalmen, op. 3.
December 1, 1995... Although Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer (d. 1746) is well known for his keyboard works - his Ariadne musica neo-organoedum (1702) and Blumen-Strauss (1732) were published in 1901 as part of a complete edition of his keyboard works - he is...

Tanez belych dew.
December 1, 1995... Following a prolonged, politically motivated neglect, the work of Nikolai Andreevich Roslavets is steadily attracting more and more attention. The three publications under review contribute to an ongoing revival of the composer's oeuvre - a...

Sonate fur Violoncello und Klavier: 1921.
December 1, 1995... Following a prolonged, politically motivated neglect, the work of Nikolai Andreevich Roslavets is steadily attracting more and more attention. The three publications under review contribute to an ongoing revival of the composer's oeuvre - a...

The Anvil Chorus for Percussion Solo: 1991.
December 1, 1995... While fundamental to musical cultures throughout the world, percussion instruments have only recently been received, perhaps reluctantly, as near equals with other Western musical instruments. Relegated, since their entry into the orchestra in...

Sonata for Unaccompanied Timpani: 1979.
December 1, 1995... While fundamental to musical cultures throughout the world, percussion instruments have only recently been received, perhaps reluctantly, as near equals with other Western musical instruments. Relegated, since their entry into the orchestra in...

Blue Too for Solo Drum Set: 1981-83.
December 1, 1995... While fundamental to musical cultures throughout the world, percussion instruments have only recently been received, perhaps reluctantly, as near equals with other Western musical instruments. Relegated, since their entry into the orchestra in...

Piano Sonata No. 3: 1952.
December 1, 1995... Burill Phillips (1907-1988) wrote four sonatas for piano: all exist in manuscript at the Sibley Library. of Rochester's Eastman School of Music where Phillips studied with Howard Hanson and Bernard Rogers and where he later taught, but only the...

A Dance Pageant: Renaissance and Baroque Keyboard Dances.
December 1, 1995... A Dance Pageant is a practical performing edition of approximately fifty Baroque and Renaissance keyboard dances from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The dances are categorized according to type: courante, minuet and passepied,...