Notes articles from September 1997

Notes archives from September 1997

Edward MacDowell, Arthur P. Schmidt, and the Shakespeare Overtures of Joachim Raff: a case study in nineteenth-century music publishing.
September 1, 1997... Among the thousands of Americans who studied music in Germany during the second half of the nineteenth century, few stayed as long or developed ties as strong as Edward MacDowell (1860-1908). During a decade in Germany (1878-1888) he attended the...

Music periodical indexing in general databases.
September 1, 1997... Use of electronic periodical indexes in libraries - whether on CD-ROM, tape loaded on a local system, or accessed through the Internet - continues to multiply. A 1992 article by Martin Goldberg noted that, despite their continued growth, there is...

Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Milan.
September 1, 1997... Gender continues to be a hot topic in musicological circles. Over the last twenty years or so, the number of books and articles pertaining to women in music has multiplied rapidly. Earlier studies were uneven in quality; amidst some fine...

Giovanni Gabrieli (ca. 1555-1612): A Thematic Catalogue of His Music with a Guide to the Source Materials and Translations of His Vocal Texts.
September 1, 1997... Very often a thematic catalogue for a major composer refines, consolidates, and systematizes previous research, sometimes serving to codify generations of scholarship. Richard Charteris's new thematic catalogue of Giovanni Gabrieli's music is...

The Early Pianoforte.
September 1, 1997... In a series of articles on the history of the early piano, published over the course of more than two decades, Stewart Pollens researched deeply the rare survivors and the archival evidence, expanding and integrating earlier scholarship. He was...

Die asthetischen Grundlagen der Instrumentalmusik Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdys.
September 1, 1997... Carl Dahlhaus remarked in the seminal collection of essays published as Das Problem Mendelssohn, (Regensburg: Gustav-Bosse-Verlag, 1974) that despite the substantial increase in musical and scholarly attention to Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy since...

The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1997... Perhaps it is time to reconsider describing two of the most important English creative personalities of the nineteenth century as "Gilbert and Sullivan." Such a shibboleth may simplify the task of categorization, but it does grave injustice to...

W.S. Gilbert: A Classic Victorian and His Theatre.
September 1, 1997... Perhaps it is time to reconsider describing two of the most important English creative personalities of the nineteenth century as "Gilbert and Sullivan." Such a shibboleth may simplify the task of categorization, but it does grave injustice to...

Denkmalpflege und Musikwissenschaft: Einhundert Jahre Gesellschaft zur Herausgabe der Tonkunst in Osterreich (1893-1993).
September 1, 1997... In 1993 the Gesellschaft zur Herausgabe von Denkmalern der Tonkunst in Osterreich (Society for the Publication of Monuments of Music in Austria) reached its centenary year, having produced 149 volumes of the DTO and, in the process, constantly...

Gypsies and Flamenco: The Emergence of the Art of Flamenco in Andalusia.
September 1, 1997... Handsomely printed and well illustrated, this book summarizes the lifelong research of French gypsiologist Bernard Leblon into the origins of Spanish flamenco music. In prose accessible to a general audience Leblon argues that Spain's gitanos are...

International Directory of Music and Music Education Institutions, 1996: Details of Higher Music and Music Education Qualifications at 3,182 Institutions in 146 countries, 2d ed.
September 1, 1997... Graham Battle summarizes his aim as the provision of the name, address, telephone number and fax number... of post-secondary music schools, academies, colleges, conservatories and university music departments offering a degree, diploma or...

Symphonic and Chamber Music Score and Parts Bank Thematic Catalogue and the Barry S. Brook Facsimile Archive of 18th and Early 19th Century Autographs, Manuscripts, and Printed Copies at the Ph.D. Program in Music of the Graduate School of the City University of New York.
September 1, 1997... The Barry S. Brook Facsimile Archive is a collection of more than 2,000 compositions by 424 composers. Gathered under Brook's direction over a period of about twenty years, the microfilms and photocopies come from a variety of sources: European...

Latin American Classical Composers: A Biographical Dictionary.
September 1, 1997... The meaning of certain terms is often taken for granted. Consider, for instance, "Postmodernism": we use it, but given the vagueness of our understanding, we are not certain of its connotations. Something similar happens with the term "Latin...

The Ragas of Early Indian Music: Modes, Melodies and Musical Notation from the Gupta Period to c. 1250.
September 1, 1997... One of the central concepts of classical Indian music is raga, the melodic formulas that make up the material for every classical performance. A raga is usually performed in a series of pieces, some composed and some extemporized, within a highly...

The Exultet in Southern Italy.
September 1, 1997... The Exultet in the Beneventan region of southern Italy is recited on three adjacent notes. Why, then, would an expert on the liturgical chant of Benevento devote an entire book to this subject? Art historians have studied the luxurious...

Le concert des voix et des instruments a la Renaissance: Actes du XXXIVe Colloque Internationale d'Etudes Humanistes Tours, Centre d'Etudes Superieures de la Renaissance, 1-11 juillet 1991.
September 1, 1997... This volume is a collection that represents a fair sprinkling of nuts confronted by a veritable armory of sledgehammers. I suspect this is the inevitable consequence when the contributions to a large colloquium are set down in book form. The...

An Early Music Dictionary: Musical Terms from British Sources, 1500-1740.
September 1, 1997... The size (8 1/2 by 12 1/2 inches) and weight (3 lb.) of this tome coupled with its main title may deceive casual shoppers into believing that it is something like Jerome and Elizabeth Roche's Early Music Dictionary, from the Troubadours to...

The Purcell Companion.
September 1, 1997... The proliferation of books about Henry Purcell, published to coincide with the 1995 tercentenary of his death, has been something of a two-sided coin. (By my rough count a dozen books appeared from about 1994 to 1996, not to mention editions,...

Handel.
September 1, 1997... Donald Burrows's Handel is the first biography of the composer to take full advantage of the vast amount of scholarly work and specialist writing to have been undertaken since the anniversary of Handel's death in 1959. Paul Henry Lang's George...

Polite or Commercial Concerts? Concert Management and Orchestral Repertoire in Edinburgh, Bath, Oxford, Manchester, and Newcastle, 1730-1799.
September 1, 1997... "Few periods in musical history [are] so shrouded in misconception and misinterpretation as eighteenth-century England," observed Paul Henry Lang at the start of his essay "The Composer," in Man versus Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Six...

De Clavicordio II: Proceedings of the International Clavichord Symposium, Magnano, 21-23 September 1995.
September 1, 1997... The clavichord and its music are receiving unprecedented attention at the biennial conferences held at Magnano, Italy. A hitherto relatively minuscule literature is being significantly expanded by the papers delivered at these sessions, where...

Gluck: An Eighteenth-Century Portrait in Letters and Documents.
September 1, 1997... In her introduction to this collection of eighteenth-century documents concerning the life and works of Christoph Willibald Gluck, Patricia Howard insists that she has not written a biography. Certainly, no comprehensive exegesis accompanies her...

Music in Eighteenth-Century Austria.
September 1, 1997... This collection of essays, originally presented as papers at a 1991 conference held at Cardiff, contributes to the steady stream of publications generated by scholarly activity during the Mozart year. The present volume stands out from others...

The Keyed Flute.
September 1, 1997... While the works of Johann Joachim Quantz, Leopold Mozart, and C. P. E. Bach are most frequently cited on subjects of importance to instrument makers and performers, especially flutists, the three instructional works of Johann Georg(e) Tromlitz...

Early Lithographed Music: A Study Based on the H. Baron Collection.
September 1, 1997... Michael Twyman is highly respected among printing historians for his Lithography, 1800-1850 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), and Early Lithographed Books (London: Farrand Press and Private Libraries Association, 1990), which has a chapter...

Beethoven Briefe, vols. 1-3.
September 1, 1997... At last two much-awaited new editions of Ludwig van Beethoven's correspondence have been published. Since 1865 historians have struggled to assemble all the letters. The many new documents uncovered in the past twenty years and the unabated...

Letters to Beethoven and Other Correspondence.
September 1, 1997... At last two much-awaited new editions of Ludwig van Beethoven's correspondence have been published. Since 1865 historians have struggled to assemble all the letters. The many new documents uncovered in the past twenty years and the unabated...

Chronologisch-thematisches Verzeichnis samtlicher Werke von Daniel Francois Esprit Auber (AWV).
September 1, 1997... Herbert Schneider's thematic catalogue represents an important step forward in the ongoing efforts of scholars to bring order to the vast sources for nineteenth-century French music. His efforts may also renew interest in a composer now on the...

Fromental Halevy: His Life and Music, 1799-1862.
September 1, 1997... Renewed interest in nineteenth-century French opera in recent decades has largely bypassed the life and music of the French-born composer Fromental Halevy, despite his leading positions at the Opera-comique and Paris Opera and the century-long...

The Lied: Mirror of Late Romanticism.
September 1, 1997... The nineteenth century was the era of song. In this important book, Edward Kravitt, who has spent a lifetime learning about and living with the German lied, dazzles us with the development of the solo song, the song cycle, and finally, the...

The Second Practice of Nineteenth-Century Tonality.
September 1, 1997... In The Second Practice of Nineteenth- Century Tonality, William Kinderman and Harald Krebs have put together a collection of wide-ranging but remarkably compatible essays by Jim Samson, Kevin Korsyn, Patrick McCreless, the late Christopher Lewis,...

Anton Bruckner Chronologie.
September 1, 1997... In Anton Bruckner Chronologie Franz Scheder has attempted, quite successfully, to assemble an exhaustive chronological accounting of Anton Bruckner's life. Beginning even before Bruckner's birth (two pages are devoted to Bruckner's forebears) and...

Carnival Canboulay and Calypso: Traditions in the Making.
September 1, 1997... John Cowley's book is, as the title suggests, a study of early carnival history in Trinidad focusing primarily on the period from 1783 to 1920. His work is based on exhaustive archival research in Trinidad and Tobago, France, the United States,...

Aspekte der Schlussgestaltung in den sinfonischen Dichtungen und Buhnenwerken von Richard Strauss.
September 1, 1997... For nearly two decades, anyone interested in the music of Richard Strauss has kept a watchful eye open for the next issue in the series of distinctive blue volumes that is a cornerstone of Strauss research, the Veroffentlichungen der Richard-...

Last Cavalier: The Life and Times of John A. Lomax, 1867-1948.
September 1, 1997... Toward the end of his finely written, fascinating, and thoroughly researched biography, Nolan Porterfield quotes from a letter sent to John Lomax in 1947 by a lifelong friend, Edgar Witt, who "upbraided" Lomax for the growing bitterness of his...

Benjamin Britten.
September 1, 1997... Benjamin Britten's work was his life. As composer, pianist, conductor, and director of an important arts festival, "he was unhappy and restless when not working. . . . His holidays were almost invariably working ones" (Oliver, p. 9). A biography...

Benjamin Britten: A Guide to Research.
September 1, 1997... Benjamin Britten's work was his life. As composer, pianist, conductor, and director of an important arts festival, "he was unhappy and restless when not working. . . . His holidays were almost invariably working ones" (Oliver, p. 9). A biography...

The Music of Conlon Nancarrow.
September 1, 1997... A thorough study of expatriate American composer Conlon Nancarrow's music is overdue. The handful of composers, scholars, and enthusiasts who have championed the cause have recognized in Nancarrow a major thinker whose ideas about musical time,...

The Global Jukebox: The International Music Industry.
September 1, 1997... Since the initial appearance in 1979 of basic music business texts by David Baskerville (Music Business Handbook and Career Guide) and Dick Weissman (The Music Business: Career Opportunities and Self Defense), there has been a proliferation of...

Musicam in subtilitate scrutando: Contributi alla storia della teoria musicale.
September 1, 1997... All of the contributors to this rich quasifestschrift collection of thirteen essays are graduates of the Scuola di Paleografia e Filologia Musicale dell'Universita di Pavia. While meant to be snapshots of recent research in music theory, the...

Experiments in Musical Intelligence.
September 1, 1997... David Cope is perhaps the most successful of the many scholars who have worked in the area of computer-assisted style synthesis. Cope begins his latest book with an interesting discussion of the history of recombinant approaches to musical...

Il primo libro delle fantasie a quattro: 1608.
September 1, 1997... It is a commonplace of historiography that a subject continues to define itself even as it is being studied. The complete works (Opere complete) of Girolamo Frescobaldi appearing as part of the series Monumenti musicali italiani of the Societa...

La Semiramide riconosciuta. Dramma per musica in drei Akten von Pietro Metastasio.
September 1, 1997... The history of opera might well be recounted as a series of battles drawn between innovation and convention, in which the role of hero is most often assigned to those dubbed "reformers." In this context, the opera seria of Christoph Willibald...

Les Surprises de l'amour: version 1757-1758.
September 1, 1997... Jean-Philippe Rameau's Le Surprises de l'amour marks the first volume published in the composer's new Opera omnia, announced by the general editor Sylvie Bouissou as the first publication to present the musical works of Rameau, the greatest...

Divertimenti zu funf und mehr Stimmen fur Streichund Blasinstrumente.
September 1, 1997... The two volumes of the complete edition of Joseph Haydn's works under consideration here present a repertory of music with simple, light textures, much of it intended for social occasions such as dances or an evening's music-making. Ironically,...

Tanze und Marsche.
September 1, 1997... The two volumes of the complete edition of Joseph Haydn's works under consideration here present a repertory of music with simple, light textures, much of it intended for social occasions such as dances or an evening's music-making. Ironically,...

Werke fur kleines Orchester und fur Streichorchester.
September 1, 1997... As one of the more promising Swiss composers of the twentieth century, Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957) has been compared with such noted international figures as Arthur Honegger and Frank Martin. His music is well known in Europe, especially...

Villancicos i canciones.
September 1, 1997... In the history of the Spanish villancico, two prints of secular pieces by Juan Vasquez (ca. 1500-after 1560) join the Cancionero de Upsala (Villancicos de diversos autores, 1556) as important links between the courtly villancico, represented most...

Quintet for Piano and Winds.
September 1, 1997... The presiding genius of Elliott Carter's Quintet for Piano and Winds is Mozart: "The thought of the masterpiece by Mozart for this combination," the composer declares in his program note, "led me to consider very seriously its range of expressive...

Quintetto per pianoforte, due violini, viola, e violoncello.
September 1, 1997... The presiding genius of Elliott Carter's Quintet for Piano and Winds is Mozart: "The thought of the masterpiece by Mozart for this combination," the composer declares in his program note, "led me to consider very seriously its range of expressive...

Quintett fur Klavier und vier Blaser.
September 1, 1997... The presiding genius of Elliott Carter's Quintet for Piano and Winds is Mozart: "The thought of the masterpiece by Mozart for this combination," the composer declares in his program note, "led me to consider very seriously its range of expressive...

At Recess, We Play: For Chamber Ensemble.
September 1, 1997... Contemporary American music has long relied on its strong relationship with the dedicated publishing house of C. F. Peters in New York. For years, Peters on its own or as the selling agent for publishers such as the Henmar Press has consistently...

Lady Mondegreen's Dances: For Flute (Alto Flute), Clarinet (Bass Clarinet), Violin, Violincello, Percussion and Piano.
September 1, 1997... Contemporary American music has long relied on its strong relationship with the dedicated publishing house of C. F. Peters in New York. For years, Peters on its own or as the selling agent for publishers such as the Henmar Press has consistently...

A Serenade for Six: For Flute, Clarinet (Bass Clarinet), Violin, Violoncello, Percussion and Piano.
September 1, 1997... Contemporary American music has long relied on its strong relationship with the dedicated publishing house of C. F. Peters in New York. For years, Peters on its own or as the selling agent for publishers such as the Henmar Press has consistently...

Dream Sequence: For Chamber Ensemble.
September 1, 1997... Contemporary American music has long relied on its strong relationship with the dedicated publishing house of C. F. Peters in New York. For years, Peters on its own or as the selling agent for publishers such as the Henmar Press has consistently...

Fierce Tears I and Fierce Tears II for Oboe and Piano.
September 1, 1997... Oxford University Press has recently published four works for various instrumental ensembles by the British composer Michael Berkeley that explore the emotions of pain and anger created by death. Born in London in 1948 and educated at the...

Keening for Alto Saxophone and Piano.
September 1, 1997... Oxford University Press has recently published four works for various instrumental ensembles by the British composer Michael Berkeley that explore the emotions of pain and anger created by death. Born in London in 1948 and educated at the...

Coronach for Strings.
September 1, 1997... Oxford University Press has recently published four works for various instrumental ensembles by the British composer Michael Berkeley that explore the emotions of pain and anger created by death. Born in London in 1948 and educated at the...

Between Tides for Violin, Cello, and Piano.
September 1, 1997... Internationally acclaimed and at the highpoint of his career, Toru Takemitsu was beginning work on his first opera when he died of cancer on 20 February 1996 at the age of 65. As the foremost representative of postwar Japanese music, Takemitsu is...

A Bird Came Down the Walk for Viola Accompanied by Piano.
September 1, 1997... Internationally acclaimed and at the highpoint of his career, Toru Takemitsu was beginning work on his first opera when he died of cancer on 20 February 1996 at the age of 65. As the foremost representative of postwar Japanese music, Takemitsu is...

Air for Flute.
September 1, 1997... Internationally acclaimed and at the highpoint of his career, Toru Takemitsu was beginning work on his first opera when he died of cancer on 20 February 1996 at the age of 65. As the foremost representative of postwar Japanese music, Takemitsu is...

Chasm: For Organ Solo.
September 1, 1997... Born in Gary, Indiana in 1944, William Albright is a composer, organist, and pianist of international reputation. A composition student of Olivier Messiaen, George Rochberg, and Ross Lee Finney, Albright has been the recipient of numerous...

Symphony for Organ: Organ Solo with Percussion.
September 1, 1997... Born in Gary, Indiana in 1944, William Albright is a composer, organist, and pianist of international reputation. A composition student of Olivier Messiaen, George Rochberg, and Ross Lee Finney, Albright has been the recipient of numerous...

Die Schopfung = The Creation.
September 1, 1997... "Haydn confessed to me that when he heard Handel's music in London, he was so struck by it that he began his studies all over again as if he had known nothing until that time" (Haydn: Two Contemporary Portraits, trans. Vernon Gotwals [Madison:...

On Stellar Magnitudes for Mezzo-Soprano and Five Instruments.
September 1, 1997... It may seem that, as Milton Babbitt once was, so is Brian Ferneyhough now in danger of becoming the sort of contemporary composer whose music is more often talked about than it is listened to and appreciated. If this were truly to become the case...

Il primo libro de madrigali a cinque voci: 1608.
September 1, 1997... It is a commonplace of historiography that a subject continues to define itself even as it is being studied. The complete works (Opere complete) of Girolamo Frescobaldi appearing as part of the series Monumenti musicali italiani of the Societa...