Notes articles from September 1994

Notes archives from September 1994

The Paul Bekker collection in the Yale University music library. (German music critic)
September 1, 1994... Posterity is not kind to music critics. Their writings are quickly consigned to a limbo reserved for period documents, curiosities of limited perspective whose relative value is gauged against present prejudice; critical missteps are the subject...

An Internet primer for music librarians: tools, sources, current awareness.
September 1, 1994... In "Electronic Information and Applications in Musicology and Music Theory" Mary K. Duggan observes that "the impact of electronic information goes beyond research on music and writings about music to the processes of creating, notating,...

Notes for 'Notes.'
September 1, 1994... The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica, California has acquired the archive of David Tudor, the American pianist and composer (b. 1926). Beginning with his American premiere in 1950 of Pierre Boulez's Second...

The Literature of Music Bibliography: An Account of the Writings on the History of Music Printing and Publishing.
September 1, 1994... Bibliography, as a mode of enquiry, is one of the most curious of humanistic fields, always in danger of remaining at one remove from study of the contents of the book. The art historian and the student of poetry, working with a printed source,...

Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde.
September 1, 1994... Modernism, like every intellectual or artistic movement, has thrived on myths of its own invention. By now, we should all know these myths by heart: the story of Modernism's teleological pursuit of progress; the story of Modernism's repudiation...

Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930.
September 1, 1994... Once a low-down form of music associated with swiveling hips, bootleg gin, and dark cellar dives, jazz today has moved into an airy penthouse on the top floor of the cultural establishment. Proclaimed a "national treasure" by an act of Congress,...

Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue and Beauty in Mozart's Operas.
September 1, 1994... Stimulating and at times idiosyncratic, both these books bring welcome new energy to the literature on Mozart's operas, grown somewhat lethargic since the "Mozart Year." Although differing widely in scope and approach, each work tries in its own...

Khorovoto delo v Bulgariia (ot sredata na XIX v. do 1994 g.)
September 1, 1994... Khorovoto delo v Bulgariia traces the origins and development of the splendid amateur choral singing tradition in Bulgaria in the fullest social context the author could assemble. Agapiia Balareva has gathered more details about the early times,...

Alec Wilder: A Bio-bibliography.
September 1, 1994... Alec Wilder (1907-1980) remains to this day, almost fourteen years after his death -- and as he was during his lifetime--a somewhat enigmatic and still far-too-little appreciated figure in twentieth-century American music. An "outsider," a...

"The Wood That Sings": The Marimba in Chiapas, Mexico.
September 1, 1994... Laurence Kaptain's The Wood That Sings is a very useful addition to the literature on Mexican regional music traditions. Chiapas (closely linked geographically and culturally with Guatemala) is Mexico's southeastern-most state. According to the...

Nuchterne Briefe aus Bayreuth: Vergeblicher Versuch im Jahre 1876, Zeit und Geister Richard Wagners zu bannen.
September 1, 1994... These "sober letters from Bayreuth" (subtitled a "futile attempt to exorcise the times and spirit of Richard Wagner in the year 1876") represent yet another drop in the ocean of Wagnerliteratur. The astonishing volume of that literature --...

Robert Gerhard i la seva obra.
September 1, 1994... The music of the Catalan composer Robert Gerhard (Valls, 1896--Cambridge, 1970) has been the object of increasing attention from both audience and critics. With several recent doctoral theses and numerous monographs and articles devoted to him...

Love, Janis.
September 1, 1994... Janis Joplin emerged as an iconoclast amidst iconoclasts in the turbulent youth culture of the late 1960s. She figures as the sole female -- alongside Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison -- in the tragic triumvirate of talented but self-destructive...

The Interpretation of Music: Philosophical Essays.
September 1, 1994... What can musicians learn from what contemporary philosophers have to say about music? These two books can help answer that question. Diana Raffman's Language, Music, and Mind focuses on the question of music's often alleged "ineffability," on...

A History of Western Musical Aesthetics.
September 1, 1994... The steady proliferation of modern writings in the field of music theory has probably served to extend the particular field of music aesthetics more than any other. Such familiar concepts as "imitation," "rhetoric," "expression," and "content"...

For an Audience: A Philosophy of the Performing Arts.
September 1, 1994... Paul Thom's For an Audience is a concentrated philosophical study of the conceptual--artistic and aesthetic--content of different forms of performance. The study relies explicitly on the Austinian/ Searlean account of performative acts and, more...

From Confucius to Kublai Khan: Music and Poetics Through the Centuries.
September 1, 1994... This strange, expensive book is presented as a scholarly study; but, like many other surveys of Chinese music history that have appeared over the past hundred years, it is strictly an amateur compilation; and it is riddled with so many errors and...

The Oldest Extant Part Music and the Origin of Western Polyphony, 2 vols.
September 1, 1994... The Oldest Extant Part Music and the Origins of Western Polyphony is the latest in Hendrik van der Werf's series of self-published monographs on and editions of various repertories of medieval music. The first four chapters of volume I consider...

The Theory of Music, vol. 4, Manuscripts from the Carolingian Era up to c. 1500 in Great Britain and in the United States of America.
September 1, 1994... After a six-year hiatus, the RISM sub-series devoted to the sources of medieval music theory progresses to its fourth volume with a catalogue of the manuscripts and fragments now located in Great Britain and the United States. This important work...

Les Chansons de Claude Goudimel: Analyses modales et stylistiques.
September 1, 1994... Claude Goudimel is today perhaps best remembered as a composer of polyphonic settings of French Psalm translations by Clement Marot and Theodore Beze. But Goudimel also composed over six dozen secular songs and chansons spirituelles, works that...

Aural Images of Lost Traditions: Sharps and Flats in the Sixteenth Century.
September 1, 1994... The title of Robert Toft's book well describes its contents and purpose. The "lost traditions" are the verlorene Selbstverstandlichkeiten posited by German writers at the beginning of this century, which today are widely if inaccurately known as...

Sources manuscrites en tablature, luth et theorbe (c. 1500-c. 1800): Catalogue descriptif, vol. 1, Confoederatio Helvetica (CH), France (F).
September 1, 1994... The failure of Wolfgang Boetticher's 1978 RISM catalogue of manuscript lute and guitar tablatures (Handschriftlich uberlieferte Lauten- und Gitarrentabulaturen des 15. bis 18. Jahrhunderts [Munich: Henle]) can now be seen as a turning point in...

Monteverdi's Tonal Language.
September 1, 1994... Of all the repertories of early music, it is historically Claudio Monteverdi's music that has most often represented a touchstone for defining the origins of tonality; the term itself was coined around 1810 in France to refer to Jean-Philippe...

Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti: A Guide to Research.
September 1, 1994... The garnering of the Scarlatti harvest has so far proceeded in a lamentably haphazard and dilatory fashion. We still await a complete thematic catalogue for either of the two most important composers in the family, Alessandro and Domenico, while...

Roger North's 'The Musicall Grammarian,' 1728.
September 1, 1994... What enthusiast of the music of Restoration England has not sampled the keen and colorful observations of Roger North on the musical life and practice of the time? In a review in these pages of John Wilson's admirable 1959 anthology, Roger North...

Entfesselte Natur in der Musik des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts.
September 1, 1994... Two of the most prominent themes in eighteenth-century writings on the aesthetics of music are nature and representation. The relationship of music to nature and the idea of "the natural" play at least some role, either implicitly or explicitly,...

Compositional Theory in the Eighteenth Century.
September 1, 1994... The formula "compositional theory" neatly defines the perimeter of Joel Lester's acutely perceptive and engaging Compositional Theory in the Eighteenth Century. It permits the author to circumvent such issues as temperament, improvised...

Rousseau, musician des Lumieres.
September 1, 1994... The "dialogue" that is the subject of Cynthia Verba's Music and the French Enlightenment coincided with the Querelle des Bouffons, but originated in exchanges between Jean-Philippe Rameau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, and Denis...

Studien zur Kirchenmusik Franz Xaver Richters (1709-1789), 2 vols.
September 1, 1994... This is an outstanding study, one that sets high standards for thorough, knowledgeable research on the music of the Classical period. Its author, Jochen Reutter, is one of the two principal staff members of the "Forschungsprojekt Mannheimer...

The Evolution of Mozart's Pianistic Style.
September 1, 1994... In The Evolution of Mozart's Pianistic Style Mario Mercado has attempted the herculean project of investigating Mozart's entire oeuvre for piano: solo works, chamber music, and concertos. The title initially raises the expectation of a narrow...

Schubert and the Symphony: A New Perspective.
September 1, 1994... Some fifteen years ago, on the occasion of the Franz Schubert anniversary year 1978, Brian Newbould presented what is doubtless the best performing version of the E-major Symphony, D. 729 (now available from University of Hull Press, 1992), and...

The Cambridge Companion to Chopin.
September 1, 1994... Research into the life and music of Frederic Chopin has grown significantly in the last decade, thanks to the efforts of a small and dedicated group of scholars, prominent among whom is Jim Samson, the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Chopin....

Confraternity and Carnevale at San Giovanni Evangelista, Florence: 1820-1924.
September 1, 1994... The field of nineteenth-century Italian sacred music remains largely untilled. Exceptions have tended to be of the type that proves the rule, with most of the attention going to a small number of sacred compositions by Gioacchino Rossini and...

Alexander Borodin: Sein Leben, seine Musik, seine Schriften.
September 1, 1994... Alexander Borodin--composer, research chemist, medical doctor, and pedagogue -- is represented on the shelves of many music libraries with a mere handful of books in Western European languages, the most recent of which is likely to be the...

Gustav Mahler and Hungary.
September 1, 1994... In the course of Gustav Mahler's career as a conductor, he advanced from temporary work in provincial theaters to the directorship of the Court Opera in Vienna. The three seasons he spent as director of the Royal Hungarian Opera in Budapest...

Saint-Saens and the Organ.
September 1, 1994... The organ has played an important role in the lives and artistic development of many nineteenth- and twentieth-century French composers. The French Romantic school of organists, initiated principally by Cesar Franck, Camille Saint-Saens, and the...

Satie et la Danse.
September 1, 1994... In the decade wracked by World War I, two Parisian musical events stand out as seminal: the first performance of Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees on 29 May 1913, and the performance of Erik Satie's Parade...

Sorabji: A Critical Celebration.
September 1, 1994... How times have changed! If I had been told in 1977, when my interest in Kaikhosru Sorabji really began, that sixteen years from then a comprehensive book about him would appear, my reaction would have been one of total disbelief. Back then,...

The Music of Edmund Rubbra.
September 1, 1994... Since the critical revisionism of the 1950s and 1960s, British musical scholarship has been torn between its progressive leanings and the embarrassing facts of its conservative past. That period saw the downfall of Ralph Vaughan Williams's...

William Walton: A Source Book.
September 1, 1994... Anyone who has felt the exhilaration of the First Symphony, who has been entertained by the wry satire of Facade, or who has exulted in the splendor of Belshazzar's Feast must find the relative void of scholarship on William Walton, one of...

Silent Cinema Music in the Netherlands: The Eyl/Van Houten Collection of Film and Cinema Music in the Nederlands Filmmuseum.
September 1, 1994... "The fact remains that the silent movie needed music as a dry cereal needs cream." So wrote Kurt Weill in 1946 (reprinted in Charles Hofmann, Sounds for Silents [New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1970], [unpag.]), but through the following...

Modernism in Russian Piano Music; Skriabin, Prokofiev, and Their Russian Contemporaries, 2 vols.
September 1, 1994... Peter Deane Roberts plants a fertile seed in Modernism in Russian Piano Music, opening up a host of unfamiliar Russian composers and compositions to those eager for an introduction to the works of this historical period. The first of the two...

The World Centre for Jewish Music in Palestine, 1936-1940: Jewish Musical Life on the Eve of World War II.
September 1, 1994... In 1936, two visionaries who came to Palestine with the wave of immigrants from Germany after the Nazis assumed power in 1933 decided to launch a grandiose project: to found a World Center for Jewish Music in Palestine. With extraordinary drive,...

Spanish Music in the Twentieth Century.
September 1, 1994... North-American audiences, musicians, and musicologists remain unfamiliar with twentieth-century Spanish music. Most concert goers identify Spanish music with the folkloristic tunes associated with such composers as Isaac Albeniz, thus construing...

Wie die elektronische Musik "erfunden" wurde ...: Quellenstudie zu Werner Meyer-Epplers musikalischem Entwurf zwischen 1949 und 1953.
September 1, 1994... The physicist Werner Meyer-Eppler (1913-1960) founded, together with the composers Herbert Eimert and Robert Beyer, the electronic music studio at the Cologne radio (at that time called the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk--NWDR, later simply WDR) in...

Kagel ... /1991.
September 1, 1994... The flood-tide of new compositions by Mauricio Kagel, and the accompanying surge in publications both by the composer himself and a committed following of commentators continues unabated. In Kagel's scores and performances, so also in the stream...

Synthesizer Performance and Real-Time Techniques.
September 1, 1994... Jeff Pressing, a well-known performer, composer, and writer, has published extensively on a wide range of subjects, including psychoacoustics, synthesis, computer-aided composition, improvisation, and real-time performance; for five years he...

Minds and Machines: Journal for AI, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science, vol. 2, no. 4.
September 1, 1994... Like many emerging fields, studies in artificial musical intelligence -- those paradigms and algorithms that (hypothetically) make it possible for computer programs to simulate musical thought, musical processes, and musical activities -- issue...

Representations of Musical Signals.
September 1, 1994... For many years, computer music researchers have relied on a relatively small number of techniques for the analysis and resynthesis of sound, for the most part designed for maximal computational efficiency, in the face of significant hardware...

Musikalische Interpretation.
September 1, 1994... The Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, under the general editorship of Carl Dahlhaus, was initially conceived as a series of ten volumes: seven on the history of European music from antiquity to the twentieth century, two on non-European...

Orgelschulezur historischen Auffuhrungspraxis: Eine Einfuhrung in die "alte Spielweise" anhand ausgewahlter Orgelwerke des 16. bis 18. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols.
September 1, 1994... With the increased interest in historical performance styles, the task of writing (and indeed reviewing) a method in organ technique and performance has become considerably more complex. On the one hand, the incipient performer needs guidance in...

The Cambridge Companion to the Violin.
September 1, 1994... The Cambridge Companion to the Violin consists of fifteen chapters written by various authors. It constitutes a worthy attempt to be all things to all violin enthusiasts. As Robin Stowell writes in his preface, "The principal objective has been...

The Early Flute.
September 1, 1994... The publication of these two books at the beginning of the 1990s is a reflection of major changes in our attitude toward two members of the flute family during the last twenty-five years. Eve O'Kelly writes about the use of that archetypically...

Orgelbau und Orgelmusik in Russland.
September 1, 1994... Jerzy Golos's work on the Polish organ and its music has spanned many decades and has concerned itself with far more territory than that contained within Poland's pre-1939 borders. In particular, Golos's earlier books Z dziejow muzyki polskiej...

The Harpsichord and Its Repertoire: Proceedings of the International Harpsichord Symposium, Utrecht 1990.
September 1, 1994... In his preface to The Harpsichord and Its Repertoire, Pieter Dicksen compares the abundance of conferences and publications on the organ and its music with the scarcity of those on the harpsichord. He suggests that, even if in principle early...

French Pianism: An Historical Perspective.
September 1, 1994... In one respect, French Pianism: An Historical Perspective parallels Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger's Chopin: Pianist and Teacher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). By tapping a large range of sources it builds up a mosaic-like picture of a...

Essays on the Nature of Singing.
September 1, 1994... Cornelius Reid stakes out an exclusive position for himself among vocal pedagogues and voice researchers: "Not only the majority of voice teachers, but scientists as well, have failed to direct their energies toward an understanding of natural...

Training Tenor Voices.
September 1, 1994... Richard Miller, in his new book Training Tenor Voices, offers the vocal world a first: a manual that demystifies the existence and development of the voice accurately termed on the dust jacket "a mystery to most audiences and teachers alike."...

Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family's Claim to the Confederate Anthem.
September 1, 1994... Daniel Decatur Emmett (1815-1904), a popular figure in the nineteenth-century minstrel theater, has long been the acknowledged composer of "Dixie," a song of enormous appeal that has achieved the status of an icon below the Mason-Dixon Line....

Follow Me: The Life and Music of R. Nathaniel Dett.
September 1, 1994... Follow Me is a lengthy and substantive book on a man about whom only one monograph has been written previously, namely Vivian Flagg McBrier's R. Nathaniel Dett: His Life and Works 1882-1943 (Washington: Associated Publishers, 1977). The R....

The Memory of All That: The Life of George Gershwin.
September 1, 1994... The hagiographies by Isaac Goldberg (George Gershwin: A Study in American Music [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931]) in Gershwin's time and Edward Jablonski (Gershwin: A Biography [New York: Doubleday, 1987] in ours have been countered only by...

Noel and Cole: The Sophisticates.
September 1, 1994... Songwriters have traditionally hunted in pairs--lyricist and composer. As such they have occasionally shared a biography, as with George and Ira Gershwin or Rodgers and Hammerstein (see, e.g., Deena Rosenberg's Fascinating Rhythm: The...

Music from the Road: Views and Reviews, 1978-1992.
September 1, 1994... Those who regularly produce criticism in America's journals and newspapers face a number of challenges. Today's critics must contend with a generally low level of musical literacy, the peripheral position of the Western concert tradition in our...

Jazz al sur: La musica negra en la Argentina.
September 1, 1994... Jazz al sur is a proud, nationalistic history of jazz in Argentina. The author, Sergio Pujol, a professor of history at Universidad Nacional de la Plata, is an active music critic for the newspaper El Dia and several magazines. The subtitle "la...

Pee Wee Russell: The Life of a Jazzman.
September 1, 1994... Pee Wee Russell remains the most enigmatic jazz clarinetist in the history of the idiom. His growling, crying, immediately emotional sound pushed to the limits the conservative style of New Orleans jazz with which he is nonetheless associated....

A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz.
September 1, 1994... Norman Weinstein is a poet and jazz critic whose writings on music, several of which are reprinted here, have appeared in Downbeat, The Village Voice, The Absolute Sound, and Jazziz. His stated purpose in A Night in Tunisia "is not simply to...

Jazz Spoken Here: Conversations with Twenty-Two Musicians.
September 1, 1994... Books based upon interviews with jazz musicians tend to fall into two categories. In the first group are texts in which excerpts from interviews are freely arranged by the compilers alongside interpolations of social, historical, or biographical...

Sassy: The Life of Sarah Vaughan.
September 1, 1994... Sarah Vaughan possessed one of the most remarkable voices in jazz--a voice of great beauty, suppleness, flexibility, and power. She had a full two-octave range, perfect pitch, and an improvisatory ability the equal of any instrumentalist. She...

Volks-und Popularmusik in Europa.
September 1, 1994... This is the twelfth and final volume of the monumental Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft edited by Carl Dahlhaus and, after Dahlhaus's death, by Hermann Danuser. It is a major accomplishment, as is the entire series, which is in certain ways...

Stability and Variation in Hopi Song.
September 1, 1994... Over the past thirty years the tone and substance of writings on American Indian music have changed considerably. Comparative research and other systematic studies have greatly declined, and the ideal has clearly become writing that considers the...

Thumri in Historical and Stylistic Perspectives.
September 1, 1994... Peter Manuel's book on the Hindustani light classical vocal genre thumri is an ambitious and successful attempt at characterizing a fundamental component of contemporary North Indian musical practice--ambitious because of the mercurial nature of...

Balinese Music.
September 1, 1994... One finds a miscellany of tourist-oriented publications in book stores throughout Indonesia, from Jakarta to Bali with such titles as Asmat Art, Court Art of Indonesia, Balinese Textiles, Masks of Bali, Modern Indonesian Art, Art of Indonesia,...

Forty Years of Steel: An Annotated Discography of Steel Band and Pan Recordings, 1951-1991.
September 1, 1994... Published discographies devoted to popular musical forms of the Anglophone Caribbean can be counted on a single hand. Two that come first to mind are Hermann Moter's Reggae Discography (Pfungstadt, Germany: Minotaurus Projekt, 1982) and Rebekah...

African Music: A Bibliographical Guide to the Traditional, Popular, Art, and Liturgical Musics of Sub-Saharan Africa.
September 1, 1994... John Gray, an indefatigable bibliographer of African and African-American expressive culture, has provided us with the first reasonably up-to-date map of a vast and widely scattered body of literature. Although his bibliographic guide to African...

The Bach English-Title Index.
September 1, 1994... The impetus for compiling The Bach English-Title Index began with a reference call requesting a Bach cantata score by an English title. Finding it impossible to identify the original work, Ray Reeder began compiling an index to lead users from an...

The Heritage Encyclopedia of Band Music: Composers and Their Music, 2 vols.
September 1, 1994... Throughout history, band music has largely been part of a vernacular tradition falling within the realm of utilitarian music-making, mostly by amateurs or military units. Serious composers rarely, if at all, turned their creative efforts to the...

Saturday Afternoons at the Old Met: The Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts, 1931-1950.
September 1, 1994... For sixty-three years New York's Metropolitan Opera has broadcast its Saturday matinee performances to a nationwide audience. As early as 1910 Lee de Forest aired the voices of Enrico Caruso, Olive Fremstad, Pasquale Amato, and Emmy Destinn in...

Can I Play You My Song? The Compositions and Invented Notations of Children.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1994... "Children . . . weave music into their play as an integral part of their communication with one another," Jon-Roar Bjorkvold reminds us. "It is deeply embedded in their spontaneous, muse-ical mother tongue. The richer this material in the early...

Tawanda: Music and Musical Instruments in the Life of an African Child.(Young Adult Review)(Brief Article)
September 1, 1994... Though usually beyond Notes' already capacious reach, the approaches to theory and practice in pedagogical and juvenile materials have undergone directional changes no less momentous than elsewhere in the published record of current musical...

A Sound Education: 100 Exercises in Listening and Sound-Making.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1994... R. Murray Schafer's famous exploration of acoustic ecology The Tuning of the World (New York: Knopf, 1977) parades a varied list of admirers--architects and psychologists as well as composers and performing artists--for whom that fundamental mode...

George Enescu: His Life and Music.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1994... The veritable whirlwind George Enescu (or Georges Enesco in the Gallic sphere with which he is often identified) has not lacked for admirers in the Anglophone world--Gerald Abraham pronounced the operatic masterwork Oedipe to be "as subtly...

Erwin Schulhoff: Die Referate des Kolloquiums in Koln am 7. Oktober 1992.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1994... One would be hard-pressed to nominate a stranger case in the history of musical modernism than that of the composer, pianist, and painter Miroslav Ponc (1902-1976). An active member of the progressive 1920s circles of "Der Sturm" and "Devetsil"...

Proceedings of the Second British-Swedish Conference on Musicology: Ethnomusicology.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1994... The first IMS symposium to be held in Asia, "Tradition and Its Future in Music" (July 1990) convened some 350 scholars representing a host of music disciplines. The charge inherent in the general theme, conceived as "a challenge from an Asian...

The Leonardo Almanac: International Resources in Art, Science, and Technology.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1994... Leonardo, The International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology, takes especial interest in artists who work in the interstices between traditional media and the technological cutting edge; that is, where telecommunications, industrial...