Music & Letters articles from August 1994

Music & Letters archives from August 1994

Morley's keyboard music. (musician Thomas Morley)
August 1, 1994... IN 1959, Thurston Dart published a two-volume edition of all the known keyboard music (thirteen pieces) of Thomas Morley ([circa].1557--1602).(1) According to Dart, this edition 'assembles Morley's keyboard music for the first time so that...

The taiheg, the pira and other curiosities of Benedetto Vinaccesi's suonate da camera a tre,' op. 1.
August 1, 1994... IF OUR interest in Italian music from the age of Alessandro Scarlatti centred more on church music than on opera, we would be more likely to have heard of Benedetto Vinaccesi, a prominent figure in the musical life of Venice during the first...

Vincent Novello's autograph album: inventory and commentary.
August 1, 1994... HISTORICAL SETTING VINCENT NOVELLO'S AUTOGRAPH ALBUM presents a tangible record of individuals prominent in the musical, literary, theatrical and art worlds of the early to mid nineteenth century. The variety of its coverage can be...

Giordano's 'Mala vita': a 'verismo' opera too true to be good.
August 1, 1994... WHEN HE WAS STILL A STUDENT at the Naples Conservatory, Umberto Giordano submitted an opera, Marina, to the contest for new operas which the publisher Edoardo Sonzogno sponsored in 1888 and which launched Cavalleria rusticana. The selection...

The Music of Bela Bartok.
August 1, 1994... THE SEEMINGLY NEVER-ENDING SUPPLY of divergent analytical texts from fine theoretical minds seeking to explain the music of Bartok is a testimony to the composer's rich and complex language. Paul Wilson's recent book, the central concern of...

The Lyrics of Richard de Semilli: a Critical Edition and Musical Transcription.
August 1, 1994... At first sight this would seem to be an absolutely ideal edition of a minor trouvere, one whose attributed songs all survive with a melody and to whom an eleventh song, though tuneless except for the last few notes and anonymous for the same...

The Harp in the Middle Ages: The Symbolism of a Musical Instrument.
August 1, 1994... Because of its association with King David, the harp has been pictured in countless religious manuscripts. Its inclusion in various iconographic compositions, however, was often not meant to represent actual music making, but instead carried...

Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music.
August 1, 1994... According to the editors, this Companion is not 'another methodological survey' but, rather, 'a group of thoughts by a range of musicians and researchers'. As such, it attempts to be neither systematic nor comprehensive, yet its scope is wide...

The Rudiments of Music (Rudimenta musices, 1539).
August 1, 1994... The brilliant music pedagogue Martin Agricola (1486--1556), music master at the Lateinschule at Magdeburg from c.1525 to his death, opened his career as a writer with a historic series of three treatises in German, published in 1528--32, that...

A Correspondence of Renaissance Musicians.
August 1, 1994... Giovanni del Lago was an ineffectual priest who spent his entire career at the small and poor parish church of S Sofia in the Cannaregio district of Venice, rising only as far as the middle level of the tiny parish hierarchy less than two...

Byrd Studies.
August 1, 1994... There was a time when I would have had doubts about the value of a compilation of miscellaneous essays by different authors, but life on the Celtic fringe has changed my mind. The scope of these essays goes beyond 'narrow' Byrd studies, with...

Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the English Court 1540-1690.
August 1, 1994... Some 35 years ago, when I was cutting my musicological teeth, it was customary to read that the violin made little headway in English music until after the Restoration. Basing their comments on the accounts of Anthony Wood, Roger North,...

Brass Bibliography; Sources on the History, Literature, Pedagogy, Performance, and Acoustics of Brass Instruments.
August 1, 1994... The entries in Mark Fasman's Brass Bibliography have been compiled from the 'Brass Bibliography' series which appeared serially in Brass Quarterly from Vol. 1/ii to Vol. 7/iv, covering the period 1820--1962; Music Index 1962--January 1988;...

Catalogue des imprimes musicaux anciens du Conservatoire Royal de Musique de Liege.
August 1, 1994... The conservatory at Liege, founded in 1826, was the first in Belgium, predating that in Brussels by six years. The latter's large and important library has long been well known to the musicological world through its catalogue by Alfred...

Rhythmic Alteration in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Music: 'Notes inegales' and Overdotting.
August 1, 1994... Perhaps no issue relating to historical performance practice has engendered so much controversy during the past three decades as the subject of this volume. An extensive and often polemical series of articles by Frederick Neumann, Robert...

Vivaldi: Voice of the Baroque.
August 1, 1994... The French have a good expression, haute vulgarisation, for the category into which this book falls. It is based on genuine scholarship but is not itself scholarly in an active sense. Rather, it sees as its mission to communicate to a broader...

The Opera Theater of Count Franz Anton von Sporck in Prague.
August 1, 1994... It was not until nearly a century after the first public opera house opened in Venice that a similar commercial venture was attempted in Prague. In 1724 Count Franz Anton von Sporck, a leading nobleman of German ancestry, founded an opera...

A.-E.-M. Gretry: Lettres autographes conservees a la Bibliotheque Royale Albert I.
August 1, 1994... Yves Lenoir published descriptions of these nineteen autograph documents--but not their texts--in his fine exhibition and source catalogue entitled Documents Gretry dans les collections de la Bibliotheque Royale Albert [I.sup.er] (1989;...

Andre-Ernest-Modeste Gretry: Douze chapitres inedits des 'Reflexions d'un solitaire.'
August 1, 1994... Love it or hate it, the connoisseur of music and letters can hardly ignore it: Gretry, having achieved fame in composing music, spent much of the last two decades of his 72 years writing books. The Memoires, ou Essais sur la musique remains...

The Fine Art of Repetition: Essays on the Philosophy of Music.
August 1, 1994... Peter Kivy's new book consists of nineteen essays spanning, as the publishers say, a period of nearly 30 years, though seventeen of them date from the past decade. All but three have previously appeared in print, but in a wide variety of...

W.A. Mozart: 'Idomeneo.'
August 1, 1994... With his 1981 volume on Don Giovanni, Julian Rushton helped set a high standard for the newly launched series of Cambridge Opera Handbooks. As an expert on Gluck, and eighteenth-century French opera generally, he is well equipped to undertake...

The Pianist as Orator: Beethoven and the Transformation of Keyboard Style.
August 1, 1994... If the title of this highly original book gives little dea of the precise subject matter, the same is certainly true of the five chapter headings, which include such all-embracing concepts as 'Time: the Body' and 'Inflection: the "Speaking...

Beethoven: Symphony No. 9.
August 1, 1994... The Cambridge Music Handbooks are designed to 'present essential information on the historical and musical context, the composition, and the performance and reception history of each work... as well as critical discussion of the music'. The...

The Early Works of Felix Mendelssohn: A Study in the Romantic Sonata Style.
August 1, 1994... Central to this monograph is what Carl Dahlhaus dubbed 'the Mendelssohn problem': a tangled web of incongruities in the life, works, and contemporary and posthumous reception of Mendelssohn, a central figure in western European musical life...

The Cambridge Companion to Chopin.
August 1, 1994... Jim Samson, who has already contributed so much to the poetic, analytic and aesthetic study of Chopin in two earlier books, has now added two further volumes to his formidable output on the composer. The Cambridge Companion to Chopin...

Chopin: The Four Ballades.
August 1, 1994... Jim Samson, who has already contributed so much to the poetic, analytic and aesthetic study of Chopin in two earlier books, has now added two further volumes to his formidable output on the composer. The Cambridge Companion to Chopin...

Ballads without Words: Chopin and the Tradition of the Instrumental 'Ballade.'
August 1, 1994... There is a feast of information in this book. We are taken down some of the byways of nineteenth-and twentieth-century music, where we may chance upon piano ballades by the likes of Fontana, Kullak and Rubinstein, to say nothing of orchestral...

Frederic Chopin: Esquisses pour une methode de piano.
August 1, 1994... Anyone who has read Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger's Chopin: Pianist and Teacher as Seen by his Pupils (Cambridge, 1986) will be tempted to rush out and buy his latest book in the hope that it offers the same sorts of insights into Chopin's playing...

Saint-Saens and the Organ.
August 1, 1994... 'We have had the very best organists here', wrote the organ blower at the Madeleine in L'orgue et les organistes in 1924, 'but only M. Saint-Saens could make such beautiful effects with very little wind.' This is a perceptive and resonant...

Musorgsky: 'Pictures at an Exhibition.'
August 1, 1994... Any who retain doubts about the fastidious care with which Musorgsky--often so impetuous, instinctive, fearless and furious when in the act of creation--fixed the form of his finished work need look no further than the facsimile score of his...

True Artist and True Friend: A Biography of Hans Richter.
August 1, 1994... Hans Richter is remembered first and foremost as a Wagnerian: the first conductor of Der Ring des Nibelungen at Bayreuth in 1876, amanuensis to Wagner at Tribschen in 1866 making a fair copy of the score of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, and...

Edward Elgar: A Guide to Research.
August 1, 1994... Recent trends in Elgar studies have seen a welcome move away from the preoccupations of the enigma solvers towards the confrontation of musicological and cultural issues of more significance to our understanding of the composer and his...

Sibelius: Symphony No. 5
August 1, 1994... Cambridge University Press's claim that the 'Cambridge Music handbooks provide accessible introductions to major musical works... with the concert-goer, performer and student in mind' sits oddly with this book. The contents page promises...

The Harold E. Johnson Jean Sibelius Collection at Butler University: A Complete Catalogue.
August 1, 1994... How much unnecessary spadework musical biographers are forced to put in, either in ignorance of large private collections of source materials, or under the usually correct assumption that such collections are jealously guarded and will...

Les Bulles du Parcier.
August 1, 1994... The prolificacy of Ornella Volta never ceases to amaze. If these two books are taken together with her intervening Satie et la danse (Paris, 1992; reviewed in Music & Letters, lxxiv (1993), 609--10), she is now producing a new book on Erik...

Satie/Cocteau: Les Malentendus d'une entente; avec des lettres et des textes inedits d'Erik Satie, Jean Cocteau, Valentine Hugo et Guillaume Apollinaire.
August 1, 1994... The prolificacy of Ornella Volta never ceases to amaze. If these two books are taken together with her intervening Satie et la danse (Paris, 1992; reviewed in Music & Letters, lxxiv (1993), 609--10), she is now producing a new book on Erik...

Modernism in Russian Piano Music: Skriabin, Prokofiev, and their Russian Contemporaries, 2 vols.
August 1, 1994... Peter Deane Roberts's study has as its principal focus the flowering of modernist music in the generally sympathetic climate that immediately preceded and followed the Russian revolution of 1917. Skryabin and Prokofiev, whose reputations have...

Legendary Voices.
August 1, 1994... After the wooly, opinionated and misleading twaddle on singing uttered by self-styled 'experts' in last autumn's BBC TV 'Singer of the Year' programme--where the wretched listener was never allowed to hear any song in full because the...

Models of Musical Analysis: Early Twentieth-Century Music.
August 1, 1994... This is the second volume to appear in the 'Models' series, and it necessarily differs from Mark Everist's distinguished collection of analyses of music from before 1600 (reviewed in Music & Letters, lxxv (1994), 63--66). Modern music tends...

Undertones of Insurrection: Music, Politics, and the Social Sphere in the Modern German Narrative.
August 1, 1994... The front cover design is made up of two illusrations. One is a painting of about 1930. It shows a top-hatted, near-naked cabaret performer who has perched herself upon the piano of a black jazz combo. Over this is set what the caption calls...

Aspects of British Song: A Miscellany of Essays.
August 1, 1994... The period from October 1991 to October 1992 was designated 'British Song Composer Year' by the British Music Society, and Aspects of British Song consists of a series of essays brought together to celebrate that event. The subjects of the...

The Seventh Stream: The Emergence of RocknRoll in American Popular Music.
August 1, 1994... How to write the history of rock music? It is difficult to decide, first because it is less than clear what exactly rock is, and second because, whatever it is, it is clearly an exceptionally complex socio-musical phenomenon. The sociologist...

Bangsawan: A Social and Stylistic History of Popular Malay Opera.
August 1, 1994... Today bangsawan is promoted by the Malaysian government as a form of traditional theatre with plots 'set in Malay courts and [using] Malay costumes, dances, and music', to quote Tan Sooi Beng's book (p. 1). Indeed, this engaging book opens...

The Motet as a Formal Type in Northern Italy ca. 1500, 2 vols.
August 1, 1994... Jon Banks's Oxford D.Phil. thesis is one of seven new titles appearing in the Garland series 'Outstanding Dissertations in Music from British Universities' (to give it its formal title; the catalogue more soberly lists it as 'British Music...

The Provision and Practice of Sacred Music at Cambridge Colleges and Selected Cathedrals c.1547-c.1646: A Comparative Study of the Archival Evidence.
August 1, 1994... Reviewing other 'outstanding dissertations' in this series, I have complained about poorly photographed typescripts, lack of indexes and a time-lag between date of original submission and eventual publication that meant that contents had...

Seventeenth-Century English Keyboard Music: Benjamin Cosyn, 2 vols.
August 1, 1994... In trying to claim too much the title says too little. The author explains the thinking behind it at the beginning of his preface, and amplifies it in the process. 'It would have been incorrect to have entitled this thesis "The keyboard music...