Notes articles from June 1995

Notes archives from June 1995

The fonds Boulanger at the Bibliotheque Nationale. (musician Nadia Boulanger)
June 1, 1995... Nadia Boulanger hoped that after her death her home would become the seat of a foundation that would preserve her collection of books, scores, and papers in its original setting, surrounded by her pictures, furniture, and memorabilia. When after...

The autograph manuscript of Franz Liszt's 'Ab Irato.'
June 1, 1995... In 1987 David Crawford announced, in the pages of this journal and elsewhere, that the University of Michigan had acquired the previously unknown autograph manuscript of Franz Liszt's piano etude Ab Irato.(1) A gift of Mrs. Burr Eddy Taylor, Jr.,...

William J. Weichlein: an appreciation. (musicologist and educator)
June 1, 1995... One of the Music Library Association's major crises was resolved when, in 1965, the Association's immediate past President, William J. Weichlein, became its Executive Secretary and moved the Business Office from New York City to Ann Arbor,...

Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology.
June 1, 1995... In 1988, in what might by now be seen as a historic moment of recent musicology, Maynard Solomon revealed what he proposed was a subtext of homosexual codes in Franz Schubert's letters. Since then, Solomon's theories, published in his "Franz...

Rocking the State: Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia.
June 1, 1995... Sabrina Petra Ramet's collection joins a tiny library of publications concerned with the growth and significance of popular music in socialist Eastern Europe. Specifically, this text chronicles the sociohistorical engagement of rock music with...

Die Debatte um Hanns Eislers "Johann Faustus": Eine Dokumentation.
June 1, 1995... Hanns Eisler's libretto to his opera "Johann Faustus" was published by Aufbau-Verlag Berlin in 1952. It runs to seventy-six pages of text and represents one of the most extended and complex creative efforts of his life. Completion of the opera...

The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg: 1893-1908.
June 1, 1995... Walter Frisch's The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg 1893-1908 is a landmark study - the first book published in English exclusively devoted to the music of Arnold Schoenberg's youth and first maturity (p. xiii). Frisch describes his work as "a...

Katalog der Musikdrucke des Johannes Petreius in Nurnberg.
June 1, 1995... German-speakers contributed significantly to the early history of music printing and publishing. Aside from the immense impact they had on the printing of chant from woodblocks during the second half of the fifteenth century, German-speakers...

Musical Poetics.
June 1, 1995... Joachim Burmeister's Musica Poetica (1606) is a music-theoretical watershed: the culmination of a didactic German tradition of "musical poetics" traceable from Nikolaus Listenius (1537) through Heinrich Faber (1548) and Gallus Dressler (1563)...

The Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical Judgement from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century.
June 1, 1995... The history of musical acoustics, taken in its broadest sense to include aspects of mathematics, physics, physiology, psychology, and philosophy, is one of the most underdeveloped areas of study. Moreover, because of the cross-disciplinary nature...

Moving away From Silence: Music of the Peruvian Altiplano and the Experience of Urban Migration.
June 1, 1995... Thomas Turino's ethnographic contexts are the altiplano district of Conima, Peru and the urban sprawl of Lima, in both of which regions he pursued fieldwork in 1984-86, having previously (1977, 1981-82) pursued research in Cuzco and Puno....

Encyclopedia of Keyboard Instruments, vol. 1, The Piano.
June 1, 1995... Over the past three hundred years pianos have been built in astonishing numbers and with a bewildering variety of cabinet designs. Paralleling the steady increase in the piano's production has been the appearance of an array of literature about...

A Conductor's Repertory of Chamber Music: Compositions for Nine to Fifteen Solo Instruments.
June 1, 1995... Conductors are not usually associated with chamber music but there are many compositions sufficiently complex or requiring a large enough group of solo instrumentalists that a conductor's direction is beneficial or even necessary. William Scott's...

Suspended Music: Chime-Bells in the Culture of Bronze Age China.
June 1, 1995... This book has been awaited for several years by specialists in both Chinese archaeology and the study of earlier Chinese music; and it will inevitably establish itself as a landmark in the field. Much previous work on ancient Chinese music was...

The Manuscript Cod. lat. 5539 of the Bavarian State Library.
June 1, 1995... The manuscript Cod. lat. 5539 of the Bavarian State Library (D-Mbs), also known as MuC, contains a variety of monophonic and polyphonic works along with an assortment of theoretical treatises. The miscellaneous nature of its contents along with...

La Sequenza medievale: Atti del Convegno Internazionale Milano 7-8 aprile 1984.
June 1, 1995... As the title indicates, this volume contains the texts of twelve papers presented at a colloquium devoted to the medieval sequence, held in Milan in April of 1984. The specialists came from such distant centers as Stockholm, Rome, London, Padua,...

Chants for the Saints Cyril and Methodius in Neumatic Sources from the 12th-20th Centuries.
June 1, 1995... In this reviewer's opinion Bozidar Karastojanov is the best connoisseur of the neumatic notation in the early- and late-medieval Russian musical manuscripts. His numerous studies are published mostly in Bulgarian musicological periodicals. This...

In Harmony Framed: Musical Humanism, Thomas Campion, and the Two Daniels.
June 1, 1995... Although well informed and frequently informative, this monograph still bears the marks of its origins as a dissertation. After a somewhat choppy preamble lightly sketching several kinds of background, part 1 catalogues various projects for...

Musick Fyne: Robert Carver and the Art of Music in Sixteenth Century Scotland.(Brief Article)
June 1, 1995... The subtitle of this book is likely to convey more to the reader than the title itself. James Ross is an enthusiastic apologist, not to say polemicist, for Robert Carver's music, together with that of Robert Johnson, David Peebles, and lesser...

John Tucke: A Case Study in Early Tudor Music Theory.
June 1, 1995... I vividly recall collecting up some stray undergraduate notes after a lecture and my chagrin at seeing the way my words had been encapsulated for posterity. I vowed never again to trust either Anonymous IV or what the soldier said, and to try to...

The Provision and Practice of Sacred Music at Cambridge Colleges and Selected Cathedrals c.1547-c.1646: A Comparative Study of the Archival Evidence.
June 1, 1995... Ian Payne's documentary study provides a meticulous and cogent archival tour of the least-known aspect of Tudor and Stuart church music, choral foundations outside London. Essentially a prose calendar and interpretive summary of musical entries...

Reed Design for Early Woodwinds.(Brief Article)
June 1, 1995... This welcome book provides practical instructions for the making of double reeds for historical woodwind instruments from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries. Its author, David Hogan Smith, is an experienced and informed...

L'Opera a Paris au temps de Louis XIV: histoire d'un theatre.
June 1, 1995... The subtitle "histoire d'un theatre" explains the nature of this book. It is not about music or drama and only tangentially about spectacle. Rather, it is the history of an institution - the Academie royale de musique, known informally as "the...

Kadenz und Klausel in der Musik von J.S. Bach: Studien zu Harmonie und Tonart.
June 1, 1995... Enthusiasm generated by the music of Bach shows no sign of diminishing, if the three works under review are any indication. Whether the authors' enthusiasm has led to illuminating insights about the music is another matter. In all three cases...

J.S. Bach's 'The Art of Fugue': The Work and Its Interpretation.
June 1, 1995... Enthusiasm generated by the music of Bach shows no sign of diminishing, if the three works under review are any indication. Whether the authors' enthusiasm has led to illuminating insights about the music is another matter. In all three cases...

The Riddle of Bach's Last Fugue: 'Contrapunctus XIX' Theologically Considered with a Completion.
June 1, 1995... Enthusiasm generated by the music of Bach shows no sign of diminishing, if the three works under review are any indication. Whether the authors' enthusiasm has led to illuminating insights about the music is another matter. In all three cases...

Bach: Mass in B Minor.
June 1, 1995... Like no other work of Johann Sebastian Bach, the B Minor Mass has enjoyed constant scholarly attention for many decades, enabling it to become the touchstone for Bach research. Since the redating of the Art of Fugue, the Mass has been...

Johann Sebastian Bach: Messe H-Moll "Opus ultimum" BWV 232: Vortrage der Mesiterkurse und Sommerakademien J. S. Bach, 1980, 1983, und 1989.
June 1, 1995... Like no other work of Johann Sebastian Bach, the B Minor Mass has enjoyed constant scholarly attention for many decades, enabling it to become the touchstone for Bach research. Since the redating of the Art of Fugue, the Mass has been recognized...

Opera Observed: Views of a Florentine Impresario in the Early Eighteenth Century.
June 1, 1995... Opera Observed is well worth reading, not least for the entertainment value of the materials on which is it based: correspondence, spanning some six decades, between the Florentine impresario Luca Casimiro degli Albizzi (1664-1745) and a host of...

Francesco Geminiani: (1687-1762).
June 1, 1995... This is the first modern study of the life and works of Francesco Geminiani, a student of Arcangelo Corelli and London colleague of George Frideric Handel, who is well known by name but whose music has remained relatively little explored or...

Handel Collections and Their History.
June 1, 1995... Handel has long been a (perhaps the) favored composer among bibliophiles, and one can readily see why. His music and his life were both richly endowed with a cosmopolitan dignity, which collectors understood as validating their own magnanimous...

The Pleasures and Perils of Genius: Mostly Mozart.
June 1, 1995... The year 1991 witnessed a flood of conferences devoted to celebrating the bicentenary of the death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: a musical master renowned today not only as one of the greatest Western composers, but also as a "hero" of the...

The Rioplatense Guitar: The Early Guitar and Its Context in Argentina and Uruguay.
June 1, 1995... The guitar is probably the most ubiquitous instrument in Latin America, both in performance and in compositional use. To undertake a study of this important instrument a regional approach must be used so that the particular characteristics of...

"... richtiges Licht und gehorige Perspektive....": Studien zur Funktion des Orchesters in der Oper des 19. Jahrhunderts.
June 1, 1995... The title, especially in its abbreviated form on the spine of the volume, does not immediately reveal the full breadth of Ursula Kramer's book. Her study, originally a doctoral dissertation at the Johannes-Gutenberg Universitat in Mainz, includes...

Modest Musorgsky and Boris Godunov: Myths, Realities, Reconsiderations.
June 1, 1995... This latest addition to a growing body of work on Modest Musorgsky makes a major contribution. The authors, veterans in the field, have approached Musorgsky's masterpiece from multiple directions, attempting to correct long-standing errors, to...

Guillaume Lekeu correspondance.
June 1, 1995... "To die at the age of twenty-four and to leave a permanent mark in the Book of Art, of itself bespeaks genius." Thus wrote Oscar Sonneck about the Belgian composer Guillaume Lekeu in an early, and very perceptive, study ("Guillaume Lekeu...

Ecrits sur la musique.
June 1, 1995... Our preoccupation with the minutest of details surrounding the lives and works of a handful of early twentieth-century composers active in Vienna has tended to obscure the tremendous artistic achievements of their French contemporaries. It also...

Harpsichord and Clavichord Music of the Twentieth Century.
June 1, 1995... Harpsichordist Frances Bedford, professor of music at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, has collected a treasure trove of twentieth-century repertory for harpsichord and clavichord in her comprehensive, international bibliography, which...

American Choral Music Since 1920: An Annotated Guide.
June 1, 1995... American Choral Music Since 1920: An Annotated Guide completes David DeVenney's four-volume bibliographic survey of this repertory. The earlier publications are Early American Choral Music: An Annotated Guide (Berkeley: Fallen Leaf Press, 1988),...

Coherence, Counterpoint, Instrumentation, Instruction in Form.
June 1, 1995... As early as 1911, Arnold Schoenberg had planned to write a series of texts that would cover "my entire activities as a writer on music" (p. xxiii). Six years later, in April of 1917, Schoenberg composed a series of notes under the working title...

Early Twentieth-Century Music.
June 1, 1995... These two books are complementary in the twentieth-century musical literature they address and in their approach to presenting analytic essays. Jonathan Dunsby has collected seven essays from prominent contemporary theorists on current trends...

Musical Form and Transformation: 4 Analytic Essays.
June 1, 1995... These two books are complementary in the twentieth-century musical literature they address and in their approach to presenting analytic essays. Jonathan Dunsby has collected seven essays from prominent contemporary theorists on current trends in...

Soundpieces 2: Interviews with American Composers.
June 1, 1995... Composer interviews were the subject of several exchanges on the AMSLIST during the fall of 1994. Some questioned why such information was excluded from major print publications such as The Journal of the American Musicological Society. Without...

This I Remember.
June 1, 1995... At first glance the title This I Remember, subtitled Memoirs of a Life in Music, strikes one as a rather stilted summation of the contents of an autobiography of one of the giant figures of American musicology. As soon as one ventures into the...

The Crooked Stovepipe: Athapaskan Fiddle Music and Square Dancing in Northeast Alaska and Northwest Canada.
June 1, 1995... The Crooked Stovepipe is an enjoyable book concerned with music and dance forms developed by Upriver Gwich'in-speaking Athapaskan Indians after contact with Europeans. Contact was mainly with Orcadian employees of the Hudson's Bay Company during...

Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music.
June 1, 1995... Andrew F. Jones has succeeded in providing the interested reader of popular culture with a well-documented and thoroughly researched study of indigenous popular music in the cultural and, most important, political arenas of mainland China. The...

Carnatic Music and the Tamils.
June 1, 1995... Carnatic (often spelled Karnataka) music is the classical art music of South India. It is simultaneously a virtuoso performance tradition of "absolute" music revelling in pure sound and a Hindu devotional tradition in which sahityam (text) is...

Media Policy and Music Activity.
June 1, 1995... While Media Policy and Music Activity stands on its own, it is best understood as a sequel to these authors' Big Sounds from Small Peoples: The Music Industry in Small Countries (New York: Pendragon, 1984). The authors found that while the...

Rock and Popular Music: Politics, Policies, Institutions.
June 1, 1995... In an era when the arts and media are subject to increasingly explicit government interventions, this volume needs little justification. Its topic is the relationship of public policy to the production of popular music, and its scope is fairly...

My Music.
June 1, 1995... My Music is the product of a series of undergraduate and graduate seminars at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the 1980s called the "Music in Daily Life Project." Participants in the project conducted around 150 interviews with...

Community of Music: An Ethnographic Seminar in Champaign-Urbana.
June 1, 1995... My Music is the product of a series of undergraduate and graduate seminars at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the 1980s called the "Music in Daily Life Project." Participants in the project conducted around 150 interviews with...

Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in Country Music.
June 1, 1995... Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in Country Music makes a lively and long overdue contribution to the growing body of scholarship on women in American popular music. In the past decade or so, books devoted entirely to women in blues, gospel,...

Secondo convegno Europeo di Analisi Musicale: Atti.
June 1, 1995... The known range of analytical methodologies has been greatly increased by the liberation of scholars in Eastern Europe and the former U.S.S.R. Similarities between interests that are pursued in England, France, and Italy respectively become more...

Camilla.
June 1, 1995... Giovanni Bononcini's opera Il trionfo di Camilla was aptly named: it triumphed at its first appearance in the Naples 1696-97 season and continued triumphantly across Italy with twenty-three revivals in as many years - an unprecedented record....

Anthems: II.
June 1, 1995... Samuel Sebastian Wesley (1810-1876) was a composer of genius, one of the few from the past who are still largely unknown to musicians and audiences. This beautifully produced volume may serve to introduce him to some new admirers, thereby...

Antologia polifonica practica de la epoca de los Reyes Catolicos.
June 1, 1995... Among the happiest outcomes of the quincentenary commemoration of Columbus's 1492 arrival in America, Miguel Querol Gavalda's 218-item anthology of songs for three and four voices composed during the epoch of the Catholic kings promises...

Canconer del Duc de Calabria (1556): setze exercicis sobre els vuit tons modals.
June 1, 1995... Among the happiest outcomes of the quincentenary commemoration of Columbus's 1492 arrival in America, Miguel Querol Gavalda's 218-item anthology of songs for three and four voices composed during the epoch of the Catholic kings promises maximum...

Keyboard Music at Castell'Arquato, vol. 2, Masses, Magnificat, Liturgical Works, Dances and Madrigals.
June 1, 1995... The Corpus of Early Keyboard Music (CEKM) series continues to unfold, gradually presenting us with kaleidoscopic repertory of sacred and secular works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Perhaps owing to the tremendous scope of the...

Keyboard Compositions.
June 1, 1995... The Corpus of Early Keyboard Music (CEKM) series continues to unfold, gradually presenting us with kaleidoscopic repertory of sacred and secular works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Perhaps owing to the tremendous scope of the...

Neue Ausgabe samtlicher Clavier- und Orgelwerke, Bd. I: Libro Secondo (1649).
June 1, 1995... In addition to helping establish the keyboard dance suite in French style, Johann Jacob Froberger (1616-1667) was influential in spreading the Italian idiom he had learned from Girolamo Frescobaldi throughout Europe. Among the many musicians...

Samtliche Freie Orgel- und Clavierwerke.
June 1, 1995... In addition to helping establish the keyboard dance suite in French style, Johann Jacob Froberger (1616-1667) was influential in spreading the Italian idiom he had learned from Girolamo Frescobaldi throughout Europe. Among the many musicians he...

Klavierubung I: 6 Partiten. Band 1: BWV 825-827. Band 2: BWV 828-830.
June 1, 1995... A new edition of a widely available classic such as J. S. Bach's keyboard partitas is justified if it offers a substantially and critically revised text or fulfills a previously unmet practical or pedagogic need. The present edition does neither....

Symphony No. 10: First Movement.
June 1, 1995... Anyone who remembers the brief international flap precipitated in 1988-89 by Barry Cooper's performing edition of the "first movement" to Ludwig van Beethoven's "Tenth Symphony" will also realize that little has been heard of this speculative...

My Ends Are My Beginnings for Clarinet in B-flat (Bass Clarinet) Solo.
June 1, 1995... C. F. Peters has recently released two compositions by Milton Babbitt, My Ends Are My Beginnings (1978) for solo clarinetist (Bb clarinet doubling bass clarinet) and Soli e Duettini (1989) for two guitars. They are presented in handsome...

Soli e Duettini for 2 Guitars.
June 1, 1995... C.F. Peters has recently released two compositions by Milton Babbitt, My Ends Are My Beginnings (1978) for solo clarinetist (B[flat] clarinet doubling bass clarinet) and Soil e Duettini (1989) for two guitars. They are presented in handsome...

Freeman Etudes for Violin Solo XVII-XXXII, vols. 3-4.
June 1, 1995... In 1977 John Cage (1912-1992) embarked on the ambitious project of composing thirty-two virtuosic etudes for solo violin. The work, commissioned by the art patron Betty Freeman, resulted from close collaboration with the violinist Paul Zukofsky....

Quintext: Five Textures for String Quartet and Bass.
June 1, 1995... American-born James Tenney, now teaching in Toronto, has proven to be one of contemporary music's most creative thinkers, both in his writings (META-Hodos [New Orleans: Inter-American Institute for Musical Research, Tulane University, 1964)...

Three Indigenous Songs for 2 Piccolos, Alto Flute, Bassoon or Tuba, and 2 Percussion.
June 1, 1995... American-born James Tenney, now teaching in Toronto, has proven to be one of contemporary music's most creative thinkers, both in his writings (META-Hodos [New Orleans: Inter-American Institute for Musical Research, Tulane University, 1964] and A...

Quartett fur Klavier, Violine, Viola und Violoncello, op. 20.
June 1, 1995... It is easy to welcome both of these scores back to the catalogue. The repertory of cello sonatas and piano quartets has never been especially large, and these works win no doubt attract performers tired of more standard fare. In addition,...

Sonate fur Violoncello und Klavier, op. 10.
June 1, 1995... It is easy to welcome both of these scores back to the catalogue. The repertory of cello sonatas and piano quartets has never been especially large, and these works will no doubt attract performers tired of more standard fare. In addition, these...

Federico's Little Songs for Children for Soprano, Flute (Piccolo, Alto Flute, Bass Flute) and Harp.
June 1, 1995... George Crumb's Federico's Little Songs for Children is in certain respects a glance backward. The composer returns to the poetry of Frederico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) for the first time since Ancient Voices of Children (1970), which was the...

Apparition: Elegiac Songs and Vocalises for Soprano and Amplified Piano on Texts from Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."
June 1, 1995... George Crumb's Federico's Little Songs for Children is in certain respects a glance backward. The composer returns to the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) for the first time since Ancient Voices of Children (1970), which was the...

Songs for Low Voice and Piano.
June 1, 1995... Contemporary American art song is a repertory that has been known to strike fear into the hearts of impressionable and overly cautious recital singers. Many of their fears are justified: audiences tend to be less receptive, the songs may be...

Four Songs for Voice and Piano.
June 1, 1995... Contemporary American art song is a repertory that has been known to strike fear into the hearts of impressionable and overly cautious recital singers. Many of their fears are justified: audiences tend to be less receptive, the songs may be...