Notes articles from September 1995

Notes archives from September 1995

Critics of disenchantment. (assessing new musicologists)
September 1, 1995... In a recent essay devoted to "the new musicology," Charles Rosen added his voice to the swelling chorus of those decrying the presuppositions, methods, and conclusions of such socially conscious scholars as Susan McClary, Lawrence Kramer, and...

The new 'Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart': first impressions.
September 1, 1995... "Eine Enzyklopadie wird nicht fur den Augenblick abgefa[Beta]t," wrote Friedrich Blume in 1951,(1) taking a tone at once lofty and pragmatic: such an enterprise, best conceived as a potentiality, can come to a halt but not to completion. And...

The sixteenth-century motet: an update on published catalogues and indexes in progress.
September 1, 1995... The forthcoming revision of Barry Brook's classic Thematic Catalogues in Music is a testament to the enduring usefulness of this genre of reference works.(1) One especially noteworthy example is Harry Lincoln's The Latin Motet: Indexes to...

The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body.
September 1, 1995... It is by now no longer news that the study of Western art music has begun -- irrevocably, with any luck -- to merge with both cultural studies and critical theory. One way to describe the result in critical musicology is to say that it seeks...

A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London: 1660-1800.
September 1, 1995... A Biographical Dictionary of Actors (hereafter, BDA) is a staggering accomplishment, representing several decades of good, old-fashioned data-collecting (on five-by-eight-inch cards) coupled with consistent, thorough entry writing by three of...

The English Musical Renaissance, 1860-1940: Construction and Deconstruction.
September 1, 1995... This publication constitutes an important reassessment of the origins and accomplishments of the English musical renaissance, that period in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music history when British composers are said to have...

Musical Life in a Changing Society: Aspects of Music Sociology.
September 1, 1995... Kurt Blaukopf is one of Europe's most influential music scholars. Born in Austria in 1914, he has pursued most of his teaching and research career at the Vienna Institute of Music and Performing Arts, where he established the first institute...

Melodramma, specttacolo e musica nella Firenze dei Lorena: Francesco I, Pietro Leopoldo, Ferdinando III (1750-1800): Repertorio, 2 vols.
September 1, 1995... In the introduction to their book Robert and Norma Weaver deplore the duplication of effort involved in the more-or-less simultaneous production of these two exhaustive chronologies of Florentine musical theater in the second half of the...

A Chronology of Music in the Florentine Theater, 1751-1800: Operas, Prologues, Farces, Intermezzos, Concerts, and Plays with Incidental Music.
September 1, 1995... In the introduction to their book Robert and Norma Weaver deplore the duplication of effort involved in the more-or-less simultaneous production of these two exhaustive chronologies of Florentine musical theater in the second half of the...

Verdi: A Biography.
September 1, 1995... Mary Jane Phillips-Matz's highly anticipated biography of Giuseppe Verdi portrays the "bear of Busseto" as an eccentric member of the family who only reluctantly tells old war stories, but when he does, they are enhanced for effect. Another...

Singers of Italian Opera: The History of a Profession.
September 1, 1995... A synthetic and precise definition of this book is offered by John Rosselli in his "Note on Further Reading": "The first book on the subject defined by its title and subtitle." Not an obvious remark when the special relevance of the subtitle...

New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton's Cultural Critique.
September 1, 1995... The center of Ronald Radano's argument in this study of composer and multi-reed instrumentalist Anthony Braxton, is the decenteredness of Braxton and his music, his uniqueness as a black, free jazz radical on the one hand, and a...

Foundations in Music Bibliography.
September 1, 1995... This book makes me very sad -- when it does not make me downright angry. Sad that the proceedings of a conference that took place in 1986 reached publication only in 1993, and that not a single gesture has been made to bring its contents...

Opera Mediagraphy: Video Recordings and Motion Pictures.
September 1, 1995... Sharon Almquist's Opera Mediagraphy gives us yet another listing of opera performances available on video. The book lists operas issued on videotape (VHS) or laser disc and released in the United States in the American television standard for...

The Best Concords: Polyphonic Music in Thirteenth-Century Britain.
September 1, 1995... One of the curiosities of British musicology is its apparent need to aggrandize its own national heritage. Instead of revelling in the myriad racial and intellectual streams that melded into the culturally rich nation that Britain is today,...

Symbolic Scores: Studies in the Music of the Renaissance.
September 1, 1995... The book under review is in some ways a supplement to Willem Elders's Studien zur Symbolik in der Musik der alten Niederlander (Bilthoven: A. B. Creyghton, 1968), though it differs in important respects. The earlier book is a systematic survey...

Berliner Lautentabulaturen in Krakau: Beschreibender Katalog der handschriftlichen Tabulaturen fur Laute und verwandte Instrumente in der Biblioteka Jagiellonska Krakow aus dem Besitz der ehemaligen Preussischen Staatsbibliothek Berlin.
September 1, 1995... Berliner Lautentabulaturen in Krakau is a description and inventory of twenty-seven manuscript tablatures for lute and related instruments that were part of the once magnificent collection of the Prussian State Library in Berlin. The story of...

A Bach Tribute: Essays in Honor of William H. Scheide.
September 1, 1995... This Festschrift for American musicologist, collector, businessman, and patron of music and scholarship William H. Scheide (b. 1914) contains nineteen essays by as many contributors. Among the writers are some of the most influential names in...

J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier: In-Depth Analysis and Interpretation, 4 vols.
September 1, 1995... For close to two centuries the preludes and fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC) have occupied a central position in the canon of piano pedagogy. Scores, if not hundreds of books, whether for performers or analysts, provide all sorts of...

Jean Girard, musicien en Nouvelle-France: Bourges, 1696-Montreal, 1765.
September 1, 1995... Canadian musicologist-harpsichordist Elisabeth Gallat-Morin has made a major contribution to the history of musical life in colonial Canada with her monograph on Jean Girard (1696-1765), a Sulpician cleric-musician, who was sent by his order...

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Beitrage zu Leben und Werk.
September 1, 1995... This volume is the third anthology of essays to appear in connection with the two hundredth anniversary of the death of C. P. E. Bach. As with the two earlier collections, C. P. E. Bach Studies, ed. Stephen L. Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press,...

Opera and Libretto II.
September 1, 1995... This is the second volume of essays on opera and librettos that the Fondazione Cini has published, and it includes selected papers from meetings that the Foundation sponsored over a three-year period: six from "Exoticism and Foreignness in...

The Beethoven Sonatas and the Creative Experience.
September 1, 1995... Kenneth Drake has set himself a difficult task in this his second book about the sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven. Music tends to defy verbal description. It is a highly detailed and specific language of form, emotion, and color, one quite...

American Musical Life in Context and Practice to 1865, vol. 1, Essays in American Music.
September 1, 1995... "What's in a title?" -- to paraphrase the Bard. Well, quite a lot, actually. The title should give clues as to what a book is about. If the tide is fanciful, a subtitle should at least clarify the work's intent. In the present case the tide...

A History of the Concerto.
September 1, 1995... Given the ubiquity of the concerto over the past four centuries, it is somewhat surprising that so few books have appeared that deal with it in an overall way. Not since Abraham Veinus's The Concerto (London: Cassell, 1948; rev. ed. New York:...

Adelina Patti: Queen of Hearts.
September 1, 1995... Nineteen ninety-three, the year John Frederick Cone's Adelina Patti appeared, was the 150th anniversary of the singer's birth. Such was Patti's fame that the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s were known as "The Age of Patti." She was the darling of...

C. Hubert H. Parry: His Life and Music.
September 1, 1995... With the exception of some Anglican church music and a few of the larger orchestral works of Edward Elgar, the music of Victorian and Edwardian England has been largely ignored or, more frequently, impatiently dismissed as second- or even...

Arthur Sullivan: A Victorian Musician, 2d ed.
September 1, 1995... With the exception of some Anglican church music and a few of the larger orchestral works of Edward Elgar, the music of Victorian and Edwardian England has been largely ignored or, more frequently, impatiently dismissed as second- or even...

Charles T. Griffes: A Life in Music.
September 1, 1995... For more than three decades, Donna K. Anderson has been engaged in the study of the music and life of Charles T. Griffes (1884-1920). There can be no doubt that her outstanding contributions have added immeasurably to a resurgence of interest...

Grieg: The Pianist's Repertoire: A Graded Practical Guide.
September 1, 1995... "The Pianist's Repertoire" is a series of practical guides for the solo piano. This volume is a companion to the author's earlier works on Frederic Chopin and Joseph Haydn. The main purpose of the series "is to help pianists find pieces...

Heitor Villa-Lobos: The Search for Brazil's Musical Soul.
September 1, 1995... This concise biographical and analytical study of the life and works of Heitor Villa-Lobos has its scope carefully limited by Gerard Behague to provide maximum information on the composer's life and excellent analyses of fifty-two musical...

Rutland Boughton and the Glastonbury Festivals.
September 1, 1995... In a field so often dedicated to the rescuing of neglected figures, Michael Hurd is surely the Good Samaritan of twentieth-century British music scholarship. The author of the superb and moving biography The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney" (Oxford:...

Fritz Reiner: A Biography.
September 1, 1995... Although Fritz Reiner has been dead for more than thirty years, his reputation has been kept fresh and glowing by his recordings, many of them reissued on CDs. A biography of him has been overdue. Philip Hart, who knew him well, is an ideal...

A Talent for Genius: The Life and Times of Oscar Levant.
September 1, 1995... Biography is a peculiar literary form. It is justified on two counts. First it must meet the criteria of accuracy and elegance of literary style. Having met or failed these, the work must then be subjected to the question of whether or not the...

Music and the Moderns: The Life and Works of Carol Robinson.
September 1, 1995... Carol Robinson, (1889-1979), was an American pianist, teacher, and occasional composer. Glenda Dawn Goss's choice of the title, Music and the Moderns for her useful presentation of the life and work of this relatively little-known musician is...

Howard Hanson: A Bio-Bibliography.
September 1, 1995... In recent years we have seen a proliferation of "Bio-Bibliographies," "Research and Information Guides," and similar publications. While we may be tempted to question the value of filling our shelves with so many of these works, invariably we...

Elliott Carter: A Bio-Bibliography.
September 1, 1995... In recent years we have seen a proliferation of "Bio-Bibliographies," "Research and Information Guides," and similar publications. While we may be tempted to question the value of filling our shelves with so many of these works, invariably we...

Charles Wuorinen: A Bio-Bibliography.
September 1, 1995... In recent years we have seen a proliferation of "Bio-Bibliographies," "Research and Information Guides," and similar publications. While we may be tempted to question the value of filling our shelves with so many of these works, invariably we...

Leslie Bassett: A Bio-Bibliography.
September 1, 1995... In the reference genre of bio-bibliography we are beginning to see books on composers who have not become household words among classical music listeners, as have Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Gian Carlo Menotti. Because biographies of...

Ulysses Kay: A Bio-Bibliography.
September 1, 1995... In the reference genre of bio-bibliography we are beginning to see books on composers who have not become household words among classical music listeners, as have Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Gian Carlo Menotti. Because biographies of...

John Alden Carpenter: A Bio-Bibliography.
September 1, 1995... In the reference genre of bio-bibliography we are beginning to see books on composers who have not become household words among classical music listeners, as have Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Gian Carlo Menotti. Because biographies of...

Peter Sculthorpe: A Bio-Bibliography.
September 1, 1995... Peter Sculthorpe (b. 1929) is widely viewed as one of the most significant and prolific Australian twentieth-century composers. Therefore, it is both necessary and appropriate that more source material be available about him. Peter Sculthorpe:...

Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest.
September 1, 1995... It has become common to disparage certain jazz writers of earlier decades for their "amateurism," their tendency to focus on personalities rather than music, and their sometime fascination with melodrama. Much earlier criticism was indeed the...

Let the Good Times Roll: The Story of Louis Jordan and His Music.
September 1, 1995... Louis Jordan was a very well-known big band and small combo leader, sax player, and singer. His long career spanned several decades, beginning in the early swing era and lasting well into the rock era. Jordan is considered to be an important...

A Guide to the Blues: History, Who's Who, Research Sources.
September 1, 1995... Louis Jordan was a very well-known big band and small combo leader, sax player, and singer. His long career spanned several decades, beginning in the early swing era and lasting well into the rock era. Jordan is considered to be an important...

Barbershopping: Musical and Social Harmony.
September 1, 1995... In 1938, a national organization with the self-explanatory tide Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, Inc. began. It has grown and prospered so that, today, affiliated groups are active in...

Club Date Musicians: Playing the New York Party Circuit.
September 1, 1995... This is an engaging study about music professionals in the New York area who play club dates. Musicians sometimes refer pejoratively to a club date band as a wedding band because that's a common kind of job and not everyone enjoys doing them,...

Zouk: World Music in the West Indies.
September 1, 1995... Jocelyne Guilbault's Zouk: World Music in the West Indies is the first book in English to give an ethnographic treatment of zouk, a dance music popular in Creole-speaking Caribbean. The book focuses on the various local and international...

Ensemble! A Rehearsal Guide to Thirty Great Works of Chamber Music.
September 1, 1995... Abram Loft's Ensemble! is an impressive volume in both content and graphic layout. The text has no musical illustrations, but the wide borders contain measure numbers corresponding to those in the urtext scores used by the author to guide...

Performing Twentieth-Century Music: A Handbook for Conductors and Instrumentalists.
September 1, 1995... "Artists, like scientists, are always seeking new principles, which will be little understood at first. The problem for musicians... is to discover which are the true and lasting principles, and which will pass with the moment. It is not a...

The Musician's Guide to MIDI.
September 1, 1995... At a Music Library Association chapter meeting a decade ago, a community college faculty member gave a well-received presentation on his institution's nationally known program in music technology. During the question period, he was asked how...

Case Studies in Music Therapy.
September 1, 1995... Case Studies in Music Therapy is a new offering from Kenneth Bruscia and his publishing firm, Barcelona Publishers. His earlier publication Defining Music Therapy (Phoenixville, Penn.: Barcelona Publishers, 1989) was an overview of music...

Vom padagogischen Umgang mit Musik.
September 1, 1995... This fine collection of essays was produced as a Festschrift for internationally acclaimed music educator Sigrid Abel-Struth. The book was planned for her sixty-fifth birthday but, unfortunately, she passed away before this event could be...

Bix: An Interpretation of a Legend.
September 1, 1995... Fantasy has been the overriding theme in jazz film biographies. The Fabulous Dorseys (1947), Young Man with a Horn (1949), The Glenn Miller Story (1953), The Benny Goodman Story (1955), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), and New York, New York...

The Last of the Blue Devils: The Movie About Kansas City Jazz.
September 1, 1995... Fantasy has been the overriding theme in jazz film biographies. The Fabulous Dorseys (1947), Young Man with a Horn (1949), The Glenn Miller Story (1953), The Benny Goodman Story (1955), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), and New York, New York...

Texas Tenor: The Ilinois Jacquet Story.
September 1, 1995... Fantasy has been the overriding theme in jazz film biographies. The Fabulous Dorseys (1947), Young Man with a Horn (1949), The Glenn Miller Story (1953), The Benny Goodman Story (1955), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), and New York, New York...

Jacques Offenbach.
September 1, 1995... This video presents a French production of Les Contes d'Hoffmann using the newly-published critical edition by musicologist Michael Kaye. Kaye spent several years studying more than a thousand pages of previously unknown manuscript sources...

Hector Berlioz.
September 1, 1995... The story of the discovery of an autograph manuscript of Berlioz's Messe solenelle, a work the composer claims to have destroyed, has by now been broadly disseminated. The booklet that accompanies this video contains notes by three of the...

Digital Musical Instruments and the World of MIDI.
September 1, 1995... It has been more than ten years since MIDI appeared on the musical landscape. What started out as a way to couple two synthesizers together so that one could control the other has revolutionized every area of music making. It is not just...

Claude Le Jeune.
September 1, 1995... Claude Le Jeune was certainly the most prolific French composer of the late sixteenth century, remembered by his contemporaries for his subtle approach to rhythm and his fine sense of melody. Thanks to the work of Henry Expert and D. P....

Claudoio Merulo.
September 1, 1995... Claudio Merulo (1533-1604) might well have been one of those legendary organist-composers, like Luzzasco Luzzaschi, Francesco Cavalli, George Frideric Handel, or Anton Bruckner, whose exceptional skin as a performer we can only imagine....

Spain: 1550-1830.
September 1, 1995... Performers of early music are usually confronted with two types of musical editions: those in which the music has been edited using modern (and often anachronistic) standards, and urtext editions, which present the music as found in its...

Ausgewahlte Lieder fur Singstimme und Klavier.
September 1, 1995... One of the most significant consequences of the growing interest in feminist musicology is the unearthing of information regarding forgotten women composers. The initial thrust of these investigations focused on biographical information and on...

Songs for Pianoforte: 1836-1837.
September 1, 1995... One of the most significant consequences of the growing interest in feminist musicology is the unearthing of information regarding forgotten women composers. The initial thrust of these investigations focused on biographical information and on...

Orgelkompositionen.
September 1, 1995... The volume of the Leos Janacek Critical Edition containing his organ works is a curiously slim one. The organ appears so frequently in Janacek's life that it seems unlikely that it could cut such a negligible figure in his works. But, in fact,...

Jeaux d'eau; Sonatine fur Klavier.
September 1, 1995... Shortly after the start of the First World War the French publisher Durand initiated its "Edition Classique," a series of affordable editions of popular "classical" works. For this repertory the firm had previously relied on Peters, the German...

Miroirs fur Klavier.
September 1, 1995... Shortly after the start of the First World War the French publisher Durand initiated its "Edition Classique," a series of affordable editions of popular "classical" works. For this repertory the firm had previously relied on Peters, the German...

Jeaux d'eau (for) solo piano.
September 1, 1995... Shortly after the start of the First World War the French publisher Durand initiated its "Edition Classique," a series of affordable editions of popular "classical" works. For this repertory the firm had previously relied on Peters, the German...

Menuet sur le nom d'Haydn; Prelude; A la maniere de ... (for) solo piano.
September 1, 1995... Shortly after the start of the First World War the French publisher Durand initiated its "Edition Classique," a series of affordable editions of popular "classical" works. For this repertory the firm had previously relied on Peters, the German...

Approche de la musique contemporaine au violon.
September 1, 1995... Jacques Ghestem's introduction to contemporary violin music aims both to familiarize students with common notations and to afford them practice in the new and often daunting physical demands made by music of the last several decades. The...

Sen I for flute.
September 1, 1995... Toshio Hosokawa is a prominent representative of the current generation of Japanese composers. Born in 1955 in Hiroshima, his music has received recognition in major venues throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. His works show a mature,...

Sen V for accordion.
September 1, 1995... Toshio Hosokawa is a prominent representative of the current generation of Japanese composers. Born in 1955 in Hiroshima, his music has received recognition in major venues throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. His works show a mature,...

Vertical Time Study I for clarinet, violoncello and piano.
September 1, 1995... Toshio Hosokawa is a prominent representative of the current generation of Japanese composers. Born in 1955 in Hiroshima, his music has received recognition in major venues throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. His works show a mature,...

Piece pour piano et quatour a cordes.
September 1, 1995... Composed in 1991, Piece for piano and string quartet is one of the last works Olivier Messiaen wrote before his death on 27 April 1992. In this brief and dynamic composition, commemorating the ninetieth anniversary of Alfred Schlee and...

Rain Tree Sketch II - In Memoriam Olivier Messiaen, for piano.
September 1, 1995... Composed in 1991, Piece for piano and string quartet is one of the last works Olivier Messiaen wrote before his death on 27 April 1992. In this brief and dynamic composition, commemorating the ninetieth anniversary of Alfred Schlee and...

A Charlie Parker Study Album.
September 1, 1995... As every music librarian knows, jazz is an oral tradition, preserved and disseminated by the thoroughly twentieth-century technology of sound recording. Still, notation has its obvious advantages. As jazz continues to find its niche in music...

A Louis Armstrong Study Album.
September 1, 1995... As every music librarian knows, jazz is an oral tradition, preserved and disseminated by the thoroughly twentieth-century technology of sound recording. Still, notation has its obvious advantages. As jazz continues to find its niche in music...

A Thelonius Monk Study Album.
September 1, 1995... As every music librarian knows, jazz is an oral tradition, preserved and disseminated by the thoroughly twentieth-century technology of sound recording. Still, notation has its obvious advantages. As jazz continues to find its niche in music...