Music & Letters articles from May 1997

Music & Letters archives from May 1997

Orchestration as structural determinant: Mozart's deployment of woodwind timbre in the slow movement of the C Minor Piano Concerto K.491.
May 1, 1997... Casting an eye back through the analytical literature, one might perhaps acquire the impression that it once mattered little to an analyst whether a piece was a symphony or a sonata, an opera or a concerto, as long as it was a masterpiece....

Unification and tonal absolution in 'Der Freischutz.'
May 1, 1997... In his well-known 1817 review of E. T. A. Hoffmann's Undine, Carl Maria yon Weber claims that the test of an operatic composer's greatness lies in 'whether he has been able to create a great work that will remain in our hearts, or whether he...

The origin of Liszt's simplification of his 'Grand Galop Chromatique.'
May 1, 1997... Although previously known to exist, two minor items by Liszt have become much more accessible through the publication in 1985 of a volume in the complete edition of his works.(1) The two items are the Galop de bal (S.220) and a simplified...

Studi di musica bizantina in onore di Giovanni Marzi.
May 1, 1997... Giovanni Marzi's most important work, the book Melodia e nomos nella musica bizantina (Bologna, 1960), belongs to a long tradition of Byzantine research in Italy going back at least to the mid eighteenth century, and it is reassuring to know...

Fifteenth-Century Dance and Music: Twelve Transcribed Italian Treatises and Collections in the Tradition of Domenico da Piacenza, 2 vols.
May 1, 1997... Ten years ago the serious student of fifteenth-century Italian dancing had no alternative but to consult the original texts in half a dozen Italian libraries as well as in Paris and New York, or to send for microfilm copies of each of them....

English Choral Practice: 1400-1650.
May 1, 1997... The 'Cambridge Studies in Performance Practice' series is intended to transmit 'the most important current research [to] a wide range of musicologists, performers, teachers, and all those who have come to regard questions of performance...

Performing the Music of Henry Purcell.
May 1, 1997... The essays in this collection were for the most part presented as papers at the Oxford Purcell Conference in 1993. The conference, which Michael Burden organized, was a stimulating prelude to the riches of the tercentenary year 1995; and the...

Bach's Modal Chorales.
May 1, 1997... Most students who have been through the pedagogical mill of the Bach chorale will doubtless have encountered several modal examples. Many model 'problems' can be easily circumvented by treating them in another 'key', and one may sometimes be...

Bach Studies, vol. 2.
May 1, 1997... This is a collection of studies more or less centred on the music of J. S. Bach (with some contributions angled towards other members of the Bach family), though the connections are sometimes tenuous. Some of the contributors are well known,...

Handel.
May 1, 1997... Any earlier contributor to the 'Master Musicians' series must feel envious of Donald Burrows for having persuaded OUP to allow him 491 pages, but Handel was such a many-sided and productive composer that anything less would have been a tight...

Studies in Music History: Presented to H.C. Robbins Landon on His 70th Birthday.
May 1, 1997... H. C. Robbins Landon has contributed more to our knowledge of and familiarity with the music of Joseph Haydn than anyone in the past two centuries, and it is most fitting that his friends should honour him on the occasion of his 70th birthday...

Music in Eighteenth-Century Austria.
May 1, 1997... Music in Eighteenth-Century Austria consists of twelve essays derived from a conference organized by the University of Wales's Centre for Eighteenth-Century Musical Studies in July 1991. Instead of focusing on the bicentenary of Mozart's death,...

Mozart: A Musical Biography.
May 1, 1997... Konrad Kuster's book was first published in German in 1990, and this English translation is very welcome. It is not a conventional biography of Mozart's life but, rather, a companion to his artistic development. The aim is to show how Mozart's...

Performing Beethoven.
May 1, 1997... In his general introduction to Performing Beethoven, Peter Williams frets that the 'firm, affirmative statement' and the 'confident statement' - bread and butter of scholar and performer respectively - have a way of 'killing the dialectic' and...

The 'Galitzin' Quartets of Beethoven, Opp. 127, 132, 130.
May 1, 1997... This book blends the unpredictable and the predictable. Its unpredictability consists in its being an extended and detailed analytical study of Beethoven's three 'Galitzin' quartets, Opp. 127, 132 and 130/133 (Chua rightly places the new finale...

Beethoven in German Politics: 1870-1989.
May 1, 1997... What do the following events have in common: the 1848 revolutions on the continent of Europe, the Franco-Prussian War, the consecration of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, May Day celebrations of the German Social Democratic Party,...

Rosamunde: Drama in funf Akten von Helmina von Chezy; Muzik von Franz Schubert. Erstveroffentlichung der uberarbeiteten Fassung; mit einer Einleitung und unbekannten Quellen.
May 1, 1997... The recent discovery of a copyist's manuscript of Helmina yon Chezy's play Rosamunde, although in a revised version, and rather different from that which Schubert knew, has provided a lively new background to his incidental music for the play....

Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism.
May 1, 1997... I am not sure in general that it is in our best musical interests to regard music first and foremost as an object of understanding - I have come to distrust our breezy confidence that interpretation controls how we experience music, at least to...

Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History and Musical Genre.
May 1, 1997... Chopin at the Boundaries assembles seven previously published essays by Kallberg on aspects of Chopin that for me are more centre-stage than the book's title suggests. Kallberg's moderate voice, particularly in the more recent essays, is that...

Beethoven's Kiss: Pianism, Perversion, and the Mastery of Desire.
May 1, 1997... It seems to be a strange but true fact that a connection exists between pianism, whether amateur or professional, and sexual orientation and performance. Andre Gide and Roland Barthes were homosexual amateur pianists who, Kopelson argues,...

French Organ Music from the Revolution to Franck and Widor.
May 1, 1997... This book will most likely take its place as a valuable tool for study and reference alongside such works as Fenner Douglass's Cavaille-Coll and the Musicians (Raleigh, North Carolina, 1980) and Rollin Smith's Toward an Authentic Interpretation...

Brahms: The Vocal Music.
May 1, 1997... A. Craig Bell's 'new' book is mostly not new at all. Part I is a barely altered reissue of the author's earlier The Lieder of Brahms (Darley, Harrogate, 1979); the publishers of the current version are at best disingenuous in failing to mention...

A Mammal's Notebook: Collected Writings fo Erik Satie.
May 1, 1997... Over the past decade, Ornella Volta has published a major contribution to Satie scholarship at least once a year, and her latest volume - 'the largest selection (in any language) of Erik Satie's writings yet to appear' - shows no signs of...

Charles Ives and His World.
May 1, 1997... This is music from the bowels of the earth; bewildering music, at times powerful, tender, evocative, witty, at others incomprehensibly clumsy . . . One could not help feeling that at one time Ives had in his power the solution of the great...

The Music of Conlon Nancarrow.
May 1, 1997... At the end of the 1981 album Tinsel Town Rebellion, following a live performance of 'Peaches en Regalia', the late Frank Zappa exhorts his audience to applaud a number of named individuals. Many - including the guitarist Warren Cucurullo and...

Gyorgy Ligeti: Jenseits von Avantgarde und Postmoderne.
May 1, 1997... There is a pressing need for a comprehensive, authoritative account of Ligeti's life and work. His 70th birthday year, 1993, passed with no significant assessment. Now, at last, this study by Constantin Floros offers a useful survey, neither...

Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture.
May 1, 1997... Following in the wake of Adorno's Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge, 1993), Max Paddison's second book contributes to the belated musicological engagement with Adornian critical theory and seeks to provide orientation in 'unfamiliar terrain' (p....