Notes articles from March 1994

Notes archives from March 1994

Computer Applications in Music: A Bibliography, Supplement 1.
March 1, 1994... This bibliography is enormously useful for musicians and music scholars involved with computer applications. The first volume provides a portrait of the growth of the field between the early 1960s and 1985. It covers writings in many languages...

The uses of existing music: musical borrowing as a field.
March 1, 1994... in memory of Howard Mayer Brown, teacher and friend Musicologists have studied musical borrowings for over a century, writing on every aspect from cantus firmus and variation to less overt procedures such as allusion and structural...

A bibliography on musical borrowing.
March 1, 1994... This article gives a brief account of an ongoing project whose ultimate aim is to create a comprehensive, indexed, and annotated bibliography of published materials and theses relating to the use of existing music in the tradition of Western...

The music thesaurus: function and foundations.
March 1, 1994... In her recent article, "American Music Libraries and Librarianship: challenges for the Nineties," Mary Wallace Davidson's discussion of "access" focused on the notion of contextual searching. Indeed, contextual searching helps users "cope with...

A mirror of ages past: the publication of music in domestic periodicals.
March 1, 1994... Thousands of songs and piano pieces have been published in the pages of nonspecialized household magazines issued throughout Europe and the Americas, yet an overall history is lacking for this large repertory of music published in periodicals...

Music and Musical Thought in Early India.
March 1, 1994... From some points of view Indian historical musicology must seem a very strange business, in which scholars investigate sometimes extremely detailed textual accounts of theoretical musical structures, and on the basis of these attempt to...

Sangitasiromani: A Medieval Handbook of Indian Music.
March 1, 1994... From some points of view Indian historical musicology must seem a very strange business, in which scholars investigate sometimes extremely detailed textual accounts of theoretical musical structures, and on the basis of these attempt to...

Musorgsky: Eight Eassys and an Epilogue.
March 1, 1994... Considering the almost gurulike status that Modest Musorgsky has acquired during the last half century, it is surprising that there are so few books on him. Those that appeared during the Soviet period were inevitably a regurgitation of...

Worlds of Music: An Introduction to the Music of the World's Peoples, 2d ed.
March 1, 1994... Ethnomusicologists' research, based on in-depth, long-term fieldwork in a particular place, yields local knowledge but not a comparative perspective. As a consequence, few ethnomusicologists have tried to create a unified introduction to the...

Re-Envisioning Past Musical Cultures: Ethnomusicology in the Study of Gregorian Chant.
March 1, 1994... The title of this book suggests that it is a primer on the relation of ethnomusicology to the study of Gregorian chant. That impression is not entirely accurate. Apart from introductory and summary chapters, the body of the book, comprising...

The Life and Legend of Leadbelly.
March 1, 1994... Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell's The Life and Legend of Leadbelly tells the amazing story of Huddie Ledbetter, known as Leadbelly (1888--1949), the black songster, blues singer, and self-proclaimed "King of the Twelve-String Guitar." The son of...

Fragment or Completion? Proceedings of the Mahler X Symposium, Utrecht 1986.
March 1, 1994... The series Mahler Studies opens with two valuable contributions to the current scholarship on Gustav Mahler. As evident in their titles, the books contain papers given at recent symposia on Mahler's Eighth and Tenth Symphonies. This forum...

A "Mass" for the Masses: Proceedings of the Mahler VIII Symposium, Amsterdam 1988.
March 1, 1994... The series Mahler Studies opens with two valuable contributions to the current scholarship on Gustav Mahler. As evident in their titles, the books contain papers given at recent symposia on Mahler's Eighth and Tenth Symphonies. This forum...

Kulturgeschichte der Maultrommel.
March 1, 1994... Karl Eulenstein, the last truly great Western European Jew's harp virtuoso, died on 8 January 1890, at the age of 88. Although he had not played the instrument since 1834, he represented an era when the Jew's harp was regarded as something...

Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades, A Biography.
March 1, 1994... Dylan enthusiasts and music historians can rejoice at the recent spate of publications that address in some substantive way the life and creative output of Bob Dylan. Clinton Heylin's Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades is no shallow retread of the...

Dylan, A Man Called Alias.
March 1, 1994... Dylan enthusiasts and music historians can rejoice at the recent spate of publications that address in some substantive way the life and creative output of Bob Dylan. Clinton Heylin's Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades is no shallow retread of the...

Bob Dylan, American Poet and Singer: An Annotated Bibliography and Study Guideof Sources and Background Materials, 1961-1991.
March 1, 1994... Dylan enthusiasts and music historians can rejoice at the recent spate of publications that address in some substantive way the life and creative output of Bob Dylan. Clinton Heylin's Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades is no shallow retread of the...

Positively Bob Dylan: A Thirty-Year Discography, Concert, and Recording Session Guide, 1960-1991.
March 1, 1994... Dylan enthusiasts and music historians can rejoice at the recent spate of publications that address in some substantive way the life and creative output of Bob Dylan. Clinton Heylin's Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades is no shallow retread of the...

Essays on Cuban Music: North American and Cuban Perspectives.
March 1, 1994... Few Latin American countries can claim the concentration of talent and level of organization that characterizes the investigation of music in contemporary Cuba. In this collection of thirteen essays by Cuban and United States scholars, Peter...

Die Orgel im byzantinischen Hofzeremoniell des 9. und des 10. Jahrhunderts: Eine Quellenuntersuchung.
March 1, 1994... For the most part, the study of Byzantine music concerns itself exclusively with the vocal music--manuscripts, paleographical problems, liturgical considerations--for the highly complex and ritualistic Divine services of the medieval Eastern...

Music and Merchants: The Laudesi Companies of Republican Florence.
March 1, 1994... In recent years, Oxford University Press has published several important studies of music in the context of specific cities in early modern Europe: Ferrara (Lewis Lockwood's Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 1400--1505, 1984); Bruges (Reinhard...

Musical Humanism and Its Legacy: Eassys in Honor of Claude V. Palisca.
March 1, 1994... Three things are often said about Festschrift volumes. The first is that they are a graceful survival of an earlier era marked by collegial feeling and by respect for sustained achievement in academic research as exemplified by a distinguished...

The Interpretation of Early Music.
March 1, 1994... The theory and practice of what we have come to call "performance practice" have reached an intriguing turn. The findings of the field have become so influential that they are being heeded, at least in part, even by many players on modern...

Performing Baroque Music.
March 1, 1994... The theory and practice of what we have come to call "performance practice" have reached an intriguing turn. The findings of the field have become so influential that they are being heeded, at least in part, even by many players on modern...

Tonal Allegory in the Vocal Music of J.S. Bach.
March 1, 1994... Eric Chafe seeks in this book to reveal a connection between J.S. Bach's use of tonality and the underlying spiritual dimensions in his vocal music. Chafe's method lies mainly in the application of traditional Lutheran hermeneutics, in the...

IIustracion musical en el Pais Vasco, 2 vols.
March 1, 1994... Jon Bagues Erriondo's University of Barcelona dissertation, published without the 227 pages of music it contained when it was defended 2 March 1990, was written under Francesc Bonastre's supervision. Although bibliography abounds concerning the...

Haydn's Ingenious Jesting with Art: Contexts of Musical Wit and Humor.
March 1, 1994... Joseph Haydn's music has been loved by generations of concertgoers for its lively wit and abundant good humor. Yet these same qualities have contributed to the traditional image many preserve of him as a jovial, though somewhat naive...

The Mozart Myths: A Critical Reassessment.
March 1, 1994... Published during the Mozart bicentennial year, The Mozart Myths offers description and evaluation of various theories put forward during the last two centuries about Mozart's death and the years immediately preceding it. William Stafford begins...

The Decline of the English Musician 1788-1888: A Family of English Musicians in Ireland, England, Mauritius, and Australia.
March 1, 1994... Practical concerns loomed large in the lives of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British musicians, whose careers seem to have been inspired by social and economic, rather than artistic, aspirations. As a result, scholars of...

Beethoven Forum 1.
March 1, 1994... In the decade since the demise of the misnamed Bonn Beethovenhaus Beethoven-Jahrbuch series (misnamed in that only ten volumes were published between 1953 and 1983), and since Alan Tyson's Beethoven Studies (three volumes: W. W. Norton, 1973;...

Ignacy Feliks Dobrzynski and Musical Life in Nineteenth-Century Poland.
March 1, 1994... Poland in the nineteenth century, divided up by its neighbors, was made illustrious by the virtuoso musicians who escaped it, from Maria Szymanowska and Frederic Chopin through Henryk Wieniawski and Carl Tausig to Ignacy Paderewski. The names...

Frederic Chopin: Eine Lebenschronik in Bildern und Dokumenten.
March 1, 1994... Students of Frederic Chopin have not exactly been champing at the bit for another iconographical compilation devoted to the composer. Not only have they been blessed for over a quarter century with the superb documentary examination of Chopin's...

Ballads Without Words: Chopin and the Tradition of the Instrumental Ballade.
March 1, 1994... In Ballads without Words James Parakilas has made a heroic attempt to define the ballade as an instrumental genre. There is no doubt about its origin: it was invented by Frederic Chopin, whose first specimen was published in 1836. But since the...

Giacomo Meyerbeer: Eine Biographie nach Dokumenten.
March 1, 1994... A full-length biography of Giacomo Meyerbeer is badly needed. Although he was one of the most successful opera composers of all time, scholars have only recently begun to investigate his music more closely and reevaluate the negative judgments...

The Wagner Compendium: A Guide to Wagner's Life and Music.
March 1, 1994... The scope, richness, and complexity of Richard Wagner's legacy as dramatist, composer, polemicist, and cultural icon defy the capacity of any one scholar to absorb and comprehend all of the strands that emanate from him. Recognizing this fact,...

Wagner Handbook.
March 1, 1994... The scope, richness, and complexity of Richard Wagner's legacy as dramatist, composer, polemicist, and cultural icon defy the capacity of any one scholar to absorb and comprehend all of the strands that emanate from him. Recognizing this fact,...

Wagner: Race and Revolution.
March 1, 1994... Even though much of the literature about Richard Wagner glosses over the matter of the composer's anti-Semitism in a few sentences (as does even John Deathridge and Carl Dahlhaus's The New Grove Wagner [New York: Norton, 1984]), a considerable...

Herve: Un Musicien paradoxal :1825-1892.
March 1, 1994... Because the music of Jacques Offenbach has commanded the lion's share of attention given over to the repertory of nineteenth-century operette and opera bouffe, it is easy to lose sight of the contributions of others to the genre--the work of,...

Hugo Wolf: The Vocal Music.
March 1, 1994... Behind Susan Youens's modest title Hugo Wolf: The Vocal Music lies a quite extraordinary achievement. The title prepares one for the immediate breadth of her study--the glance beyond the lied to ballad and opera--but not for the scope of her...

Mahler: Symphony No.3.
March 1, 1994... The recent publication of two monographs on Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony attests to the undiminished interest in Mahler's music among concertgoers and scholars alike. Both are worthy additions to the burgeoning Mahler literature. Despite...

Gustav Mahlers III. Synphonie: Welt im Widerbild.
March 1, 1994... The recent publication of two monographs on Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony attests to the undiminished interest in Mahler's music among concertgoers and scholars alike. Both are worthy additions to the burgeoning Mahler literature. Despite...

Richard Strauss's Elektra.
March 1, 1994... Richard Strauss's sketches and other manuscripts, in particular those kept by his family in the Richard-Strauss-Archiv, are providing a rich, virtually unexplored mound of materials for source specialists investigating how the composer...

Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and His Work.
March 1, 1994... The position of Richard Strauss in North-American musical life is a curious one. While his works occupy a prominent place in the repertories of orchestras and opera companies, and his lieder and certain chamber works are favored by many...

Richard Strauss and His World.
March 1, 1994... The position of Richard Strauss in North-American musical life is a curious one. While his works occupy a prominent place in the repertories of orchestras and opera companies, and his lieder and certain chamber works are favored by many...

Twentieth-Century Music.
March 1, 1994... As the end of the present century approaches, a number of authors have recently tried their hand at writing a history of its music. Given the revolutionary and diverse nature of the subject matter it is not surprising to find that the...

New Perspectives on Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern.
March 1, 1994... Eileen Southern's extraordinary career in musicology exemplifies the paradoxes and possibilities that have faced scholars of African-American music. In the Festschrift collection New Perspectives on Music the editors have grouped the essays...

American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle, 2d ed.
March 1, 1994... No serious scholar of American musical theater labors unaware of the major contributions of Gerald Bordman to the field. His ability to observe the telling detail and to extract the perfect summarizing quotation is unequaled in the ranks of...

Harvard Composers: Walter Piston and His Students, from Elliott Carter to Frederic Rzewski.
March 1, 1994... In 1862, the great American composer John Knowles Paine began what would be a forty-three year professional association with Harvard University. Following a then usual period of study in Europe (in Paine's case in Berlin, with the respected...

The Correspondence of Roger Sessions.
March 1, 1994... It was fortunate for Roger Sessions that during the last fifteen years of his life the musician and scholar Andrea Olmstead became keenly interested in his work. Her industry resulted in three publications: Roger Sessions and His Music (Ann...

Introducing American Folk Music.
March 1, 1994... Kip Lornell has attempted something that is probably impossible: to write a comprehensive introduction to American folk idioms. To use a baseball metaphor, he has hit a triple, but it is a triple in a game where home runs probably do not exist,...

A Passion for Polka: Old Time Ethnic Music in America.
March 1, 1994... The polka has largely been ignored as a subject of scholarly inquiry and, as a result, there has been shockingly little research published. Thus it is fortunate that in the past year two significant books have appeared with the word "polka" in...

Polka Happiness.
March 1, 1994... The polka has largely been ignored as a subject of scholarly inquiry and, as a result, there has been shockingly little research published. Thus it is fortunate that in the past year two significant books have appeared with the word "polka" in...

The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945.
March 1, 1994... Gunther Schuller's The Swing Era is the second of a projected three volume history of jazz (the first volume, the slimmer Early Jazz [1968] is also available from Oxford University Press). In the course of his research, Schuller reports, he...

A Satisfied Mind: The Country Music Life of Porter Wagoner.
March 1, 1994... "Few country music spectacles were more surreal than Porter Wagoner's syndicated television show," writes John Morthland in The Best of Country Music (Garden City, N.Y.: Dolphin Books, 1984, 303--4). "The gangly star would stride out wearing...

Salsiology: Afro-Cuban Music and the Evolution of Salsa in New York City.
March 1, 1994... Salsiology includes essays by diverse authors on a variety of subjects, and its methodologies, sources, and styles range from the rigorously scholarly to the anecdotal and journalistic. Vernon Boggs states in his preface that the book "is...

The Rationality of Feeling: Understanding the Arts in Education.
March 1, 1994... The Rationality of Feeling is a revised and extended version of David Best's Feeling and Reason in the Arts (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985). Except for a new first chapter, the book retains its original structural organization. However, the new...

Linguistics and Semiotics in Music.
March 1, 1994... Linguistics and Semiotics in Music is a valuable introduction to the growing field of music semiotics. As a member of the International Musical Signification Project (founded in 1985 by Eero Tarastic of the University of Helsinki), Raymond...

Psychoanalytic Explorations in Music.
March 1, 1994... Third in a series of volumes dedicated to applied psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Music is the first such collection on musical subjects. Research into the roles and manners of music perception, training, and especially creation...

Premiere und Pogrom: Der Judische Kulturbund 1933-1941.
March 1, 1994... Shortly after the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933, the young Jewish percussionist Kurt Sommerfeld was fired from his position at the Stadtische Oper in Berlin. "That's not so bad," he was told at the employment office, "go to the Jewish...

Geschlossene Vorstellung: Der Judische Kulturbund in Deutschland 1933-1941.
March 1, 1994... Shortly after the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933, the young Jewish percussionist Kurt Sommerfeld was fired from his position at the Stadtische Oper in Berlin. "That's not so bad," he was told at the employment office, "go to the Jewish...

Mein "C'est la vie"-Leben: Gesprach uber ein langes Leben in einer bewegten Zeit.
March 1, 1994... Shortly after the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933, the young Jewish percussionist Kurt Sommerfeld was fired from his position at the Stadtische Oper in Berlin. "That's not so bad," he was told at the employment office, "go to the Jewish...

Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany.
March 1, 1994... There can be no doubt that Michael Kater's Different Drummers is a remarkable contribution to research on the culture of the Third Reich. A scholarly documentation of jazz before and during the Nazi era is long overdue (Mark Zwerin's La...

Bartolomeo Cristofori und die Anfange des Hammerclaviers: Quellen, Dokumente, und Instrumente des 15, bis 18, Jahrhunderts.
March 1, 1994... Around the turn of the eighteenth century Bartolomeo Cristofori, keeper of harpsichords for the Grand Duke Ferdinand at the Medici court, turned his restless intellect to the problem of creating a harpsichord whose dynamics would respond to...

Erich Kleiber: A Discography.
March 1, 1994... These volumes survey the legacy of three conductors born in Austria or Germany in the 1890s who actively promoted new music during their careers. Their legacy of commerical recordings, however, does little to reflect the range and depth of...

Hans Rosbaud: A Bio-bibliography.
March 1, 1994... These volumes survey the legacy of three conductors born in Austria or Germany in the 1890s who actively promoted new music during their careers. Their legacy of commerical recordings, however, does little to reflect the range and depth of...

Hermann Scherchen, 1891-1966: Phonographie. Deutsche Rundfunkproduktionen, Industrietontrager, Eigenaufnahmen.
March 1, 1994... These volumes survey the legacy of three conductors born in Austria or Germany in the 1890s who actively promoted new music during their careers. Their legacy of commerical recordings, however, does little to reflect the range and depth of...

William Kapell: A Documentary Life History of the American Pianist.
March 1, 1994... Each of these recent books chronicles the development of an extraordinary pianist's career. Harold Schonberg's Horowitz is a full-scale biography that had its origins in a memoir-writing project undertaken in 1983 with Schonberg's assistance...

Horowitz: His Life and Music.
March 1, 1994... Each of these recent books chronicles the development of an extraordinary pianist's career. Harold Schonberg's Horowitz is a full-scale biography that had its origins in a memoir-writing project undertaken in 1983 with Schonberg's assistance...

Daniel Barenboim: A Life in Music.
March 1, 1994... Each of these recent books chronicles the development of an extraordinary pianist's career. Harold Schonberg's Horowitz is a full-scale biography that had its origins in a memoir-writing project undertaken in 1983 with Schonberg's assistance...

Music Manuscripts at Harvard: A Catalogue of Music Manuscripts from the 14th to the 20th Centuries in the Houghton Library and the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library.
March 1, 1994... Anyone who has tried to determine the scope and specific content of Harvard University's collection of music manuscripts has, until now, been faced with a time-consuming task. Notwithstanding Craig Wright's excellent introductory article "Rare...

Computer Applications in Music: A Bibliography.
March 1, 1994... This bibliography is enormously useful for musicians and music scholars involved with computer applications. The first volume provides a portrait of the growth of the field between the early 1960s and 1985. It covers writings in many languages...

A Dictionary of Electronic and Computer Music Technology: Instruments, Terms, and Techniques.
March 1, 1994... Dictionaries have been printed since Robert Cawdry published the first English one in 1604. By then Johannes Gutenberg's press had been operating for over a century, bringing with it both enlightenment and, apparently, puzzlement over what some...

Dictionary of Musical Technology.
March 1, 1994... Dictionaries have been printed since Robert Cawdry published the first English one in 1604. By then Johannes Gutenberg's press had been operating for over a century, bringing with it both enlightenment and, apparently, puzzlement over what some...

Microsoft musical instruments. (CD-ROM drive) (Hardware Review) (Evaluation)
March 1, 1994... The opening title screen of this "interactive journey into the world of musical instruments" is followed by a "Contents" window that groups information in four partitions: 1. Families of Instruments, 2. Musical Ensembles, 3. Instruments of the...

Jazz: a multimedia history. (Electronic book) (Evaluation)
March 1, 1994... Lewis Porter is a shining light in recent jazz scholarship; his two books on Lester Young are essential reference works, as is his doctoral thesis on John Coltrane. Porter's recent collaboration with Michael Ullman and Edward Hazell, Jazz from...

Finale, ver 3.0. (Music software) (Software Review) (Evaluation)
March 1, 1994... The love-hate relationship between Finale and its users that has followed its steep learning curve since version 1.0 was released on September 16, 1988 has taken another evolutionary step with release of version 3.0. Some of the features found...

Cecilia Bartoli: A Portrait.
March 1, 1994... Side one of this laserdisc is a documentary film introducing us to the rising young Roman mezzo, Cecilia Bartoli. Although it is clearly a promotional effort on the part of Bartoli's record company, she is certainly an artist worth promoting....

Britten: Death in Venice.
March 1, 1994... This production of Britten's last opera was filmed in a television studio for broadcast on BBC. In a work so tied to the city of Venice, and produced in this case for television, it seems a pity that the attempt was not made to break out of the...

Carnegie Hall Presents Robert Shaw: Preparing a Masterpiece, vol. 2, A Choral Workshop on Beethoven's Missa Solemnis.
March 1, 1994... This video was produced over the course of a six-day workshop conducted by Robert Shaw in New York City in January 1992. 215 choral and orchestral conductors and singers from around the country came together to form a chorus for the study and...

Corigliano: The Ghosts of Versailles.
March 1, 1994... This is the Met's much talked-about premiere of the 1991/1992 season, recorded live in performance during January of 1992, a month after its opening night in December 1991. It has received a lavish production with a stellar cast. Labelled by...

Delibes: Lakme.
March 1, 1994... Lakme is a work of great charm and melodiousness that deserves to be seen more often than it is. The Australian Opera deserves praise for having mounted this production. Unfortunately Dame Joan Sutherland, in the title role of Indian maiden and...

Manuel de Falla: Nights in the Garden of Spain; Master Peter's Puppet Show; When the Fire Burns, A Documentary on the Life of Manuel de Falla.
March 1, 1994... This video, produced by a consortium of European and Canadian broadcasting companies, contains three discrete segments, the first two being complete performances of Nights in the Gardens of Spain and Master Peter's Puppet Show (El Retablo de...

Mozart: Die Zauberflote.
March 1, 1994... This recording preserves for posterity, along with a number of excellent performances, the wildly colorful sets of David Hockney, an odd mixture of postmodernism and naive art. Francisco Araiza is still in top form as Tamino, though he was...