Notes articles from December 1996

Notes archives from December 1996

The origin of Brahms's 'In Stiller Nacht.'
December 1, 1996... Johannes Brahms's two interpretations of the enigmatic folk song In stiller Nacht are among his best known and most beloved folk-song settings, a reputation justly deserved, for in each a poem is united with music of equal simplicity and...

Preservation at the Sibley Music Library of the Eastman School of Music.
December 1, 1996... Ideas, styles, and motifs of the past may lose their appeal in a certain period or climate of opinion, but this must not be final, for they may regain their validity at another time and under different conditions. It is therefore important to...

Trends in the price of music monographs and scores as reflected in 'Notes,' 1991-1995.
December 1, 1996... This article is the second in a series of annual price trend analyses based on data drawn from the "Book Reviews," "Books Recently Published," "Music Reviews," and "Music Received" features in Notes. The first article in this series presented...

Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance.
December 1, 1996... One of the most famous passages in the Talmud describes a heated debate about the ritual cleanliness of the so-called "oven of Akhnai," constructed out of broken fragments. After failing to persuade the other sages of his point of view, Rabbi...

The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers.
December 1, 1996... The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers (hereafter, Women Grove) has been long anticipated by all who have an interest in the study of women and music. Although this is not the first dictionary of its kind, it reflects a high standard of...

Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent.
December 1, 1996... During the late sixteenth century music composed by Italian women began to appear in print, and by the end of the seventeenth century more women had emerged as composers in Italy than in any previous period in Western music history. While several...

A Handbook of the Troubadours.
December 1, 1996... The fact that there exists no adequate introduction to troubadour song in English is a handicap oft lamented by different disciplinary specialists interested in incorporating a prestigious song repertory into their classes or their research. A...

Music in the Theater: Essays on Verdi and Other Composers.
December 1, 1996... Pierluigi Petrobelli has long been an indispensable member of the international musicological community. A scholar of varied interests, with authoritative publications on musicians as disparate as Giuseppe Tartini and Luigi Dallapiccola to his...

Briefwechsel mit Arnold Schonberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg und Franz Schreker.
December 1, 1996... With this most welcome volume Germany's leading scholar of Alexander Zemlinsky presents a veritable treasure trove of information, and its insights are bound to affect our understanding of that historically unique musical phenomenon, the...

Lyrebird Rising: Louise Hanson-Dyer of Oiseau-Lyre, 1884-1962.
December 1, 1996... Louise Hanson-Dyer (nee Smith), wealthy patroness of musical activities in her native Australia and founder of Les Editions de L'Oiseau-Lyre in Paris and of the recording company of the same name, died in Monaco in 1962 at the age of...

The Violin Family and Its Makers in the British Isles: An Illustrated History and Directory.
December 1, 1996... The history of the violin is notoriously difficult. Much more has been written on the subject over the last 150 years than on any other instrument - the relevant bibliographies in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London:...

The Dissemination of Music: Studies in the History of Music Publishing.
December 1, 1996... Various kindly appreciations of the life and work of Hans Lenneberg, who died in 1994, have appeared in the musicological press. In reading them, and in studying their subject's legacy, one soon realizes that Lenneberg, notwithstanding that his...

I manoscritti polifonici della Biblioteca musicale L. Feininger.
December 1, 1996... Lorenzo Feininger is known to musicologists mainly for his editions in original clefs of Masses on the L'Homme arme tune and of the cycle of Mass propers he attributed to Guillaume Dufay. A learned man of many interests, manuscripts, books, and...

Le fonti liturgiche a stampa della Biblioteca musicale L. Feininger presso il Castello del Buonconsiglio di Trento.
December 1, 1996... Lorenzo Feininger is known to musicologists mainly for his editions in original clefs of Masses on the L'Homme arme tune and of the cycle of Mass propers he attributed to Guillaume Dufay. A learned man of many interests, manuscripts, books, and...

SongCite: An Index to Popular Songs.
December 1, 1996... Do music librarians and other reference librarians need more song indexes? Those frontline librarians attending the reference refresher session at the February 1996 Music Library Association meeting answered with a strong affirmative because of...

Song Finder: A Title Index to 32,000 Popular Songs in Collections, 1854-1992.
December 1, 1996... Do music librarians and other reference librarians need more song indexes? Those frontline librarians attending the reference refresher session at the February 1996 Music Library Association meeting answered with a strong affirmative because of...

Papal Patronage and the Music of St. Peter's: 1380-1513.
December 1, 1996... In his introduction to Papal Patronage and the Music of St. Peter's, 1380-1513, Christopher A. Reynolds admits to having been occupied with St. Peter's basilica in Rome for twenty years. Since 1981 he has regularly published the results of his...

The Bassanos: Venetian Musicians and Instrument Makers in England, 1531-1665.
December 1, 1996... The Bassanos (with their cousins, the Laniers) were one of two families that dominated English Court music, ca. 1530-1665. During this time, certainly from 1550, family members formed the Court recorder consort, and, in the seventeenth century,...

Cross, Sword and Lyre: Sacred Music at the Imperial Court of Ferdinand II of Hamburg, 1619-1637.
December 1, 1996... In Cross, Sword and Lyre, Steven Saunders provides a concise summary of the sacred music at the court of Ferdinand II, following his election as Holy Roman Emperor in 1619, providing a useful continuation to Hellmut Federhofer's Musikpflege und...

La musica a Roma attraverso le fonti d'archivio: Atti del Convegno internazionale Roma 4-7 giugno 1992.
December 1, 1996... Archival studies of music in Rome have not until recently drawn the same interest over most of the present century as those for other major cities in Italy. In a sense, the history of music at the Vatican has been left to speak for the whole of...

The Livrets of Jean-Baptiste Lully's 'Tragedies Lyriques': A Catalogue Raisonne.
December 1, 1996... At long last, this meticulously prepared catalogue has appeared. While the wait has not fundamentally altered the relevance of the catalogue's contents, the production delay - beyond Carl Schmidt's control - has impeded other research dependent...

Johann Sebastian Bach as His World Knew Him.
December 1, 1996... In 1935, Otto Bettmann fled Nazi Germany with few possessions other than a trunk filled with photographic negatives that he had collected while working as a librarian at the Prussian State Art Library. Those negatives were to become the...

Handel and His Singers: The Creation of the Royal Academy Operas, 1720-1728.
December 1, 1996... At the outset of this study Steven LaRue announces that his "interest has been in analysing the composer's creative process," an aim for which George Frideric Handel makes a good test case because of the number of preserved autograph manuscripts...

Handel's Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought.
December 1, 1996... "Clearly, the early-eighteenth-century audience had preconceptions about the way a biblical text or a text dealing with biblical or other religious topics should be set" (p. 48), writes Ruth Smith in Handel's Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century...

Eighteenth-Century Music in Theory and Practice: Essays in Honor of Alfred Mann.
December 1, 1996... There's more than one way to skin a cat - or to read a Festschrift. Many readers consult such collections to find only those articles devoted to a specific topic, but there are others (in addition to this reviewer) who read these volumes in their...

Tu felix Austria nube: Hochzeitsfeste der Habsburger im 18. Jahrhundert.
December 1, 1996... Probably the most sustained and influential association between an opera librettist and a European court was that between Pietro Metastasio and the Austrian Habsburgs, which lasted from 1730 until the poet's death in 1782. The uses he made of...

Opera and the Enlightenment.
December 1, 1996... It is doubly fitting that a volume of essays dedicated to Daniel Heartz should concern opera and the Enlightenment. Not only has Heartz himself devoted much illuminating scholarship to the eighteenth century, but the numerous books and articles...

400 lettres de musiciens au Musee royal de Mariemont.
December 1, 1996... 400 lettres de musiciens au Musee royal de Mariemont offers documentation and features well beyond the normal expectations of transcriptions of correspondence. Malou Haine and her associates involved in the project have created a richly...

The Piano Quartet and Quintet: Style, Structure, and Scoring.
December 1, 1996... Basil Smallman, author of The Piano Trio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), has written a survey of piano quartets and quintets spanning the years 1733 to 1990. He has taken a "broadly historical point of view . . . to explore, in a...

Amy Fay: America's Notable Woman of Music.
December 1, 1996... This slender volume presents itself as a biography of Amy Fay (1844-1928), the American pianist best known for her book Music Study in Germany (Chicago: McClury, 1880), describing her study with Franz Liszt and musical life in Europe. Actually,...

French Organ Music: From the Revolution to Franck and Widor.
December 1, 1996... This collection of eleven essays, by scholars well known in each area of focus, presents a wealth of information, much of it new, that qualifies as must reading for seasoned performers and students of nineteenth-century French organ music. The...

Cajkovskij-Studien 1: Internationales Cajkovskij-Symposium Tubingen 1993.
December 1, 1996... This collection of essays (twenty in German, five in English) constitutes the first volume of a projected series on Peter Illych Tchaikovsky issued in conjunction with the new Gesamtausgabe, published by Muzyka and Schott, of his music and prose....

Germaine Tailleferre: A Bio-Bibliography.
December 1, 1996... During the past half decade musicologists have found renewed interest in writing about the group of French composers called Les Six. In addition to Jean Roy's book Le Groupe des Six (Paris: Seuil, 1994), Francis Poulenc has been amply represented...

Satie Remembered.
December 1, 1996... "Fumez mon ami: sans cela, un autre fumera a votre place" wrote Erik Satie in his Memoires d'un amnesique (reprinted in Rollo H. Myers, Erik Satie [London: Dennis Dobson, 1948], 135). Usually translated as "Smoke, my friend: otherwise, another...

Tippett on Music.
December 1, 1996... Those libraries owning both of Michael Tippett's earlier published collections of writings may understandably question the need to acquire the present volume. Within the twenty-eight chapters of Tippett on Music one will find thirty-one...

American Composers and Their Public: A Critical Look.
December 1, 1996... American Composers and Their Public is a companion volume to Art Music in the American Society: The Condition of Art Music in the Late Twentieth Century (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1987), in which Nicholas Tawa looked at many aspects of the...

Opera Workshop: Studies in Understanding and Interpretation.
December 1, 1996... "Pace is a quality that every operatic composer and conductor needs to know about, and every producer and singer to respect, for it is a fragile virtue, easily lost if there is a wrong timing on the stage or in the pit" (p. 162). This concise...

Jazz Research and Performance Materials: A Select Annotated Bibliography, 2d ed.
December 1, 1996... This enumerative bibliography of books on jazz is a second edition of Eddie Meadows's Jazz Reference and Research Materials: A Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1981). When reviewing the first edition for Annual Review of Jazz Studies (1 [1982]:...

A Guide to Popular Music Reference Books: An Annotated Bibliography.
December 1, 1996... The preface suggests three audiences for this guide: librarians seeking books to answer reference questions in the field of popular music, library users seeking starting points for new research projects, and librarians charged with selecting...

Race of Angels: The Genesis of U2.
December 1, 1996... A dozen books have been devoted to U2 in ten years. Why offer another volume on the four men who have been dubbed (not unfairly), the world's most pretentious rock band? John Waters points out the obvious reason: the previous U2 tomes are not...

Nimbus: Technology Serving the Arts.
December 1, 1996... The tone of this, the official biography of a very unusual record company, is set at the beginning with the early career of Nimbus's maverick founder, Count Numa Labinsky, who headed the firm until his death in 1994. As a singer he occupied an...

Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment.
December 1, 1996... In this cogent study of the place of music in eighteenth-century theorizing about the origins of natural language and culture, Downing A. Thomas takes us on a fascinating and challenging journey through a number of key issues that engaged some of...

Sounds and Society: Themes in the Sociology of Music.
December 1, 1996... Peter J. Martin begins Sounds and Society by asking why music has come to occupy "such a prominent place in our world" (p. 2). While the author does not answer that question with any degree of specificity, he does provide the reader with a cogent...

The Beatles with Lacan: Rock'n'Roll as Requiem for the Modern Age.
December 1, 1996... In the preface to The Beatles with Lacan, Henry Sullivan proposes the following thesis: "If the 'Modern Age' - the one that arose with the European Renaissance circa 1500 - had fizzled out by the middle of the twentieth century, true could argue...

Cruising the Performative: Interventions into the Representation of Ethnicity, Nationality, and Sexuality.
December 1, 1996... Culled from one of the most fascinating and improbable conferences of the decade, "Unnatural Acts," held at Riverside, California (like Egypt, the gift of a river and, like Thomas Mann's Venice, a most "improbable city"), these thirteen essays...

An Introduction to Classical Music. (Software Review)(Evaluation)
December 1, 1996... By and large, musical hypermedia programs have tended to explore individual works. Typically, such a package will comprise an essay providing musical and cultural background to the piece and biographical information about the composer, along with...

So I've Heard: A Collector's Guide to Compact Discs. (Software Review)(Evaluation)
December 1, 1996... By and large, musical hypermedia programs have tended to explore individual works. Typically, such a package will comprise an essay providing musical and cultural background to the piece and biographical information about the composer, along with...

All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis. (Software Review)(Evaluation)
December 1, 1996... This CD-ROM is an important milestone. It was created by a significant composer and includes a multimedia work that was composed specifically for the CD-ROM medium. This work is not actually the title piece, but a shorter work derived from it...

Double Bassist.
December 1, 1996... Taking as its model The Strad, this journal offers news and articles of interest to bass players. The editor, Paul Cutts, notes, in a thin column of about twenty-eight spaces placed on the table of contents page, that the issues of The Strad that...

Harmony: Forum of the Symphony Orchestra Institute.
December 1, 1996... The Symphony Orchestra Institute states as its mission: "to address the organizational issues of symphony orchestra organizations with a view to improving their effectiveness and thereby helping them to provide greater value to the communities...

Lennox Avenue: A Journal of Interartistic Inquiry.
December 1, 1996... Named for Harlem's Lenox Avenue, a street famed for jazz clubs and the Savoy ballroom, the inaugural issue of this annual features two namesakes as frontispieces: a lithograph by Sargent Johnson and a ballet suite by William Grant Still to a...

Quaderni musicali marchigiani.
December 1, 1996... Recent years have seen a wealth of new, high quality journals from Italy, and this is no exception, although its focus is much narrower than those typically reviewed in these pages. Quaderni musicali marchigiani is devoted to the music of one...

Schumann Studien.
December 1, 1996... Published under the auspices of the Robert-Schumann-Gesellschaft in Zwickau, its headquarters being the house in which Schumann was born, this journal is the organ of the former German Democratic Republic's (DDR) equivalent to the...

The Wanley Manuscripts.
December 1, 1996... The scholarly importance of this edition of English-rite liturgical music from the reign of Edward VI (1547-1553) can scarcely be overestimated. In conjunction with a general renewal of interest in the political and devotional importance of Tudor...

Il primo libro de madrigali a quatro voci.
December 1, 1996... By Jessie Ann Owens's count, over thirty thousand madrigals were published between the years 1530 and 1630. This statistic is staggering, and, understandably, only a fraction of these madrigals are available in modern editions. True, we are in...

Madrigali a cinque voci.
December 1, 1996... By Jessie Ann Owens's count, over thirty thousand madrigals were published between the years 1530 and 1630. This statistic is staggering, and, understandably, only a fraction of these madrigals are available in modern editions. True, we are in...

Libro primo de canzoni ... a quattro voci.
December 1, 1996... The period spanning the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is a crucial one for the development of instrumental music as a separate genre largely independent of vocal models. Every music student who passes the required music history...

Capricci, overo canzoni a quattro ... libro terzo.
December 1, 1996... The period spanning the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is a crucial one for the development of instrumental music as a separate genre largely independent of vocal models. Every music student who passes the required music history...

Fantasie overo canzoni alla francese per suonare dell'organo et altri stromenti musicali, a quattro voci.
December 1, 1996... The period spanning the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is a crucial one for the development of instrumental music as a separate genre largely independent of vocal models. Every music student who passes the required music history...

Il primo libro delle musiche.
December 1, 1996... The period spanning the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is a crucial one for the development of instrumental music as a separate genre largely independent of vocal models. Every music student who passes the required music history...

Canzonas and Capriccio.
December 1, 1996... The period spanning the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is a crucial one for the development of instrumental music as a separate genre largely independent of vocal models. Every music student who passes the required music history...

Two Offices for St Elizabeth of Hungary: Gaudeat Hungaria and Letare Germania.
December 1, 1996... Rhymed offices are among the most neglected genres of medieval liturgical music, due in part to the lack of reliable editions. Until Andrew Hughes's recent publications (Late-Medieval Liturgical Offices: I. Texts; II. Sources and Chants, Subsidia...

Choice Ayres, Songs, and Dialogues, Books 1-2.(Brief Article)
December 1, 1996... Within the limitations of reproducing printed musical materials that were originally modest popular publications, replete with occasionally slipshod typography, these facsimiles of songbooks from Restoration England (1673-87) are editions de...

The Theater of Music.
December 1, 1996... Within the limitations of reproducing printed musical materials that were originally modest popular publications, replete with occasionally slipshod typography, these facsimiles of songbooks from Restoration England (1673-87) are editions de...

African American Theater.
December 1, 1996... During the decades immediately following the Civil War, the precarious transition from slavery to mainstream society affected all genres of African-American cultural expression. Accordingly, African-American music from this epoch struggled to...

Sir Charles His Pavan for Orchestra.
December 1, 1996... In this his sixty-second year, with over three hundred works to his credit, Peter Maxwell Davies continues to compose at a formidable rate. He has written in most genres: chamber works for various combinations of instruments, large symphonic...

Strathclyde Concerto No. 7 for Double Bass and Orchestra.
December 1, 1996... In this his sixty-second year, with over three hundred works to his credit, Peter Maxwell Davies continues to compose at a formidable rate. He has written in most genres: chamber works for various combinations of instruments, large symphonic...

Music for Small Orchestra.
December 1, 1996... This is the first volume of Music of the United States of America (MUSA), a projected series of forty volumes published by A-R Editions under the auspices of the American Musicological Society's Committee on the Publication of American Music...

Sange med klaver.
December 1, 1996... The 226 songs by the Danish composer Peter Heise (1830-1879) comprise a distinguished contribution to Scandinavian song and a repertory that has been largely ignored. With the increased interest in regional cultures, Heise's contribution to the...

Four ... Parts of a World: Song Cycle for Soprano and Piano from Poems by Wallace Stevens.
December 1, 1996... The poetry of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) has served as a continuing source of inspiration for American composers of art music since the middle of this century. Around the time of Stevens's death in 1955, Arthur Berger and Vincent Persichetti...

Five Poems of Wallace Stevens for Baritone and Piano.
December 1, 1996... The poetry of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) has served as a continuing source of inspiration for American composers of art music since the middle of this century. Around the time of Stevens's death in 1955, Arthur Berger and Vincent Persichetti...