Music & Letters articles from November 1998

Music & Letters archives from November 1998

Celestial Airs of Antiquity: Music of the Seven-String Zither of China.(Review)
November 1, 1998... Transcriptions and CD, ed. Bell Yung. 'Recent Researches in the Oral Traditions of Music', v. (A-R Editions, Madison, 1997, $61.60 + $19.95 (CD). ISBN 0-89579-313-X.) If it hasn't already, the music of the Chinese qin (pronounced 'chin';...

Giuseppe Verdi: 'Don Carlos'. Dossier de presse parisienne (1867).(Review)
November 1, 1998... Ed. by Herve Ganioux. pp. 270. (Lucie Galland, Heilbronn, 1997, DM59. ISBN 3-925934-31-6.) This collection of press responses to the premiere of Verdi's Don Carlos at the Paris Opera in 1867 is a recent addition to what has become a...

Bruckner Studies.(Review)
November 1, 1998... Ed. by Timothy L. Jackson & Paul Hawkshaw. pp. xv + 301. (Cambridge University Press, 1997, [pounds]40. ISBN 0-521-57014-X.) This book has its origins in the International Bruckner Conference 'Perspectives on Anton Bruckner: Composer,...

Anton Bruckner: III. Symphonie D-moll. Revisionbericht.(Review)
November 1, 1998... By Thomas Roder. pp. vi + 453. (Musikwissenschaftlicher Verlag der Internationalen Bruckner-Gesellschaft, Vienna, 1997, [pounds]22. ISBN 3-900270-15-5.) In providing this long-awaited revision report of the three printed versions of...

Anton Rubinstein and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov: Selected Operas. Proceedings of the International Musicological Convention in Vorzel (Ukraine), May 4th-6th, 1994.(Review)
November 1, 1998... Ed. by Yelena S. Zinkevich. pp. 83. (Lucie Galland, Heilbronn, 1997, DM29. ISBN 3-925934-29-4.) This collection of essays, based on papers given at a conference commemorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Rimsky-Korsakov and the...

Giacomo Puccini's 'La fanciulla del West': Eine neue Opernkonzeption im (Euvre des Komponisten).(Review)
November 1, 1998... By Miriam Rosenthal-English. pp. 204. 'Musicologica berolinensia', iii. (Ernst Kuhn, Berlin, 1997. ISBN 3-928864-52-1.) Long before Miss Kitty longed to ride off into the sunset with Matt Dillon, David Belasco's Dick Johnson (a.k.a....

Music and Nationalism in 20th-Century Great Britain and Finland.(Review)
November 1, 1998... Ed. by Tomi Makela. pp. 243. (yon Bockel, Hamburg, 1997. ISBN 3-928770-99-3.) The papers in this volume were originally presented at a symposium at the Finnish Institute in London in December 1992. Two major contributors, Stephen Ban...

Darius Milhaud: Modality and Structure in Music of the 1920s.(Review)
November 1, 1998... By Deborah Mawer. pp. xxiii + 408. (Ashgate, Aldershot, 1997, [pounds]49.50. ISBN 185928-249-0.) Deborah Mawer is justified in claiming that her book is 'the first major analytical study of a significant portion of Milhaud's music' (p....

New Music and the Claims of Modernity.(Review)
November 1, 1998... By Alastair Williams. pp. xi + 163. (Ashgate, Aldershot, 1997, [pounds]40. ISBN 1-85928-368-3.) 'Philosophy says what art cannot say, although it is art alone which is able to say it: by not saying it.' This comment from Adorno's...

Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven. Selected Writings on Theory and Method: A.B. Marx.(Review)
November 1, 1998... Ed. and trans. by Scott Burnham. pp. xvi + 197. 'Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis', xii. (Cambridge University Press, 1997, [pounds]40. ISBN 0-521-45274-9.) A. B. Marx used to be known in the Anglo-American theoretical...

Enclosure 3: Harry Partch.(Review)
November 1, 1998... By Philip Blackburn. pp. 523. (American Composers Forum, St Paul, 1997. ISBN 0-9656569-0-X.) There is a worrying correlation between artistic genius and disagreeable behaviour. If, in Vienna in the early nineteenth century, Beethoven was...

Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for American Music.(Review)
November 1, 1998... By Judith Tick. pp. xiv + 457. (Oxford University Press, New York & London, 1997, [pounds]29.50. ISBN 0-19506509-3.) In a recent biography of Charles Ives (Charles Ives: a Life with Music, New York, 1996) Jan Swafford notes that 'One of...

Conversation with the Blues.(Review)
November 1, 1998... By Paul Oliver. pp. xvi + 208; CD. (Cambridge University Press, 1997, [pounds]35. ISBN 0-521-59181-3.) This is a welcome and handsomely produced second edition of a title first published in 1965, when it quickly established itself as a...

George Benjamin.(Review)
November 1, 1998... By Risto Nieminen, Renaud Machart & George Benjamin. Trans. by Julian Anderson & Michael Durnin. pp. 90. (Faber & Faber, London & Boston [in association with IRCAM, Paris], 1997 [1998], [pounds]9.99. ISBN 0571-19151-7.) 'What is the use...

Politics and Popular Culture.(Review)
November 1, 1998... By John Street. pp. x + 212. (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1997. ISBN 07456-1214-8.) John Street begins the conclusion of this excellent, challenging and important book with a quotation about the great Mississippi blues guitarist Albert...

Schubert's Vienna.(Review)
November 1, 1998... Ed. by Raymond Erickson. pp. xvi + 283. (Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1997, [pounds]25. ISBN 0-300-07080-2.) Schubert's Vienna originated in a three-week gathering at Rutgers University in the summer of 1993 devoted to a...

Das Gloria in Beethovens 'Missa solemnis.'.(Review)
November 1, 1998... By Birgit Lodes, pp. 383. 'Munchener Veroffentlichungen zur Musikgeschichte', liv. (Hans Schneider, Tutzing, 1997, DM136. ISBN 3-7-79520853-X.) What distinguishes Birgit Lodes's research into the Missa solemnis is her attention to...

Mozart: The 'Haydn' Quartets.(Review)
November 1, 1998... By John Irving. pp. vii + 105. 'Cambridge Music Handbooks'. (Cambridge University Press, 1998, [pounds]8.95. ISBN 0521-58561-9.) Long memories will recall that the excellent Cambridge Music Handbooks had a precursor in the 'Musical...

Mozart's Piano Sonatas: Contexts, Sources, Style.(Review)
November 1, 1998... By John Irving. pp. xx + 215. (Cambridge University Press, 1997, [pounds] 35. ISBN 0-521-49631-4.) Mozart's solo keyboard music has aroused little scholarly interest. One can point only to a few now woefully out-of-date monographs by...

Haydn's Keyboard Music: Studies in Performance Practice.(Review)
November 1, 1998... By Bernard Harrison. pp. xi + 418. 'Oxford Monographs on Music'. (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997, [pounds]48. ISBN 0-19-816325-8.) It is more than 40 years since the first modern book concerned with late eighteenth-century keyboard...

Marx's 'Lehre' and the science of education: towards the recuperation of music pedagogy.
November 1, 1998... 'I am trying to psychologise the instruction of mankind.' Johann Pestalozzi(1) This study explores A. B. Marx's composition treatise, Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, in the light of various pedagogical theories of the...

Puccini's 'work in progress': the so-called versions of 'Madama Butterfly.'.
November 1, 1998... The history of Giacomo Puccini's operas is not least a history of continual revisions. This is true not only of the early pieces, Le villi and Edgar, nowadays virtually forgotten, but also of the mature works, which have remained among the...

Aspects of narrativity and temporality in Britten's 'Winter Words.'.
November 1, 1998... In recent years, theories of narrative have captured the attention of writers in the fields of historical musicology and music theory, as well as in other disciplines outside literary criticism. Within the past ten years, poststructural and...

Moving in decency: the music and radical politics of Cornelius Cardew.
November 1, 1998... One of the most memorable graffiti I have seen was a rubber-stamp message on a wall in the Music Library at Yale University: NOT ART Judgements about what is and what is not art are not easily made, of course, and they are seldom as...

All you need is theory? The Beatles' 'Sgt. Pepper.'.
November 1, 1998... 'SO MAY I INTRODUCE TO YOU . . .' The publication of Allan Moore's fascinating and thought-provoking handbook on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band comes in the aftermath of the release of the Anthology recordings, and at...

The Beatles: 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.'.(Review)
November 1, 1998... 'SO MAY I INTRODUCE TO YOU . . .' The publication of Allan Moore's fascinating and thought-provoking handbook on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band comes in the aftermath of the release of the Anthology recordings, and at...

Allegorical Play in the Old French Motel: The Sacred and the Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony.(Review)
November 1, 1998... By Sylvia Huot. pp. xi + 236. 'Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture'. (Stanford University Press, 1997, [pounds]30. ISBN 08047-2717-1.) Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet is an intensive study of verbal texts in the large repertory of...

Bristol: Records of Early English Drama.(Review)
November 1, 1998... Ed. by Mark C. Pilkinton. pp. xxvi + 382. 'Records of Early English Drama'. (University of Toronto Press, 1997, [pounds]94. ISBN 0-8020-4221-X.) The serious study of urban history in Britain began later than in other European countries....

The Chromatic Fourth during Four Centuries of Music.(Review)
November 1, 1998... By Peter Williams. pp. 262. 'Oxford Monographs on Music'. (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1997, [pounds]40. ISBN 0-19-816563-3.) This is a fine and fascinating book on a subject which, as far as I am aware, has never previously been treated,...

Musical Languages.(Review)
November 1, 1998... By Joseph P. Swain. pp. x + 230. (Norton, New York & London, 1997, [pounds]25. ISBN 0-393-04079-8.) Anyone who has taught aesthetics and theory to university students knows that these are danger areas for the independent of mind, happy...

The Maynooth International Musicological Conference 1995. Selected Proceedings, parts 1 and 2.(Review)
November 1, 1998... Ed. by Patrick F. Devine & Harry White. pp. 444; 409. 'Irish Musical Studies', iv-v. (Four Courts Press, Dublin, 1996. [pounds]39.50 each vol. ISBN 1-85182-260-7; 1-85182-261-5.) The two handsomely produced volumes which comprise more...

Die Musikbibliothek des Hamburger Kantors und Musikdirektors Thomas Selle: 1599-1663.(Review)
November 1, 1998... By Jurgen Neubacher. pp. 128. 'Musicological Studies & Documents', lii. (American Institute of Musicology, Hanssler, Neuhausen, 1997.) The study of public and private libraries has long been recognized as an important means of...

Stimmungen im 17. und 19. Jahrhundert: Vielfalt oder Konfusion?(Review)
November 1, 1998... Ed. by Gunter Fleischhauer, Monika Lustig, Wolfgang Ruf & Frieder Zschoch. pp. 159. 'Michaelsteiner Konferenzberichte', lii. (Stiftung Kloster Michaelstein, Blankenburg, 1997. ISBN 3-89512-101-0.) Anyone who failed to take note of the...

Zur Entwicklung, Verbreitung und Ausfuhrung vokaler Kammermusik im 18. Jahrhundert.(Review)
November 1, 1998... Ed. by Gunter Fleischhauer. pp. 152. 'Michaelsteiner Konferenzberichte', li. (Stiftung Kloster Michaelstein, Blankenburg, 1997. ISBN 3-89512-100-2.) Anyone who failed to take note of the unification of Germany at the start of the present...

Telemanniana et alla musicologica; Festschrift fur Gunter Gleischhauer zum 65. Geburstag.(Review)
November 1, 1998... Ed. by Dieter Gutknecht, Hartmut Krones & Frieder Zschoch. pp. 274. 'Michaelsteiner Forschungsbeitrage', xvii. (Institut fur Auffuhrungspraxis Michaelstein, Oschersleben, 1995. ISBN 3-928703-67-6.) Anyone who failed to take note of the...

Dramma per musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century.(Review)
November 1, 1998... By Reinhard Strohm. pp. x + 326. (Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1997, [pounds]30. ISBN 0-300-06454-3.) This book, like Professor Strohm's Essays on Handel and Italian Opera (1985), is a collection of previously published...

A History of Music for Harpsichord or Piano and Orchestra.(Review)
November 1, 1998... By John M. Harris. pp. xiii + 473. (Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Maryland, & Folkestone, 1997, [pounds]66.05. ISBN 0-8108-3257-7.) John Harris's book traces the history of the keyboard concerto (excluding works for organ) from its origins...

The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. New Edition.(Review)
November 1, 1998... By Charles Rosen. pp. xxx + 533; CD. (Faber & Faber, London, 1997, [pounds]25. ISBN 0571-19287-4.) Few books on art music can have had the impact, both immediate and sustained, of Charles Rosen's The Classical Style. It comes as a...

New light on William Byrd.(composer)
November 1, 1998... Since the publication of my William Byrd: Gentleman of the Chapel Royal (Aldershot, 1997; henceforth WB) it has proved possible to add to or revise some of the information contained therein. The following material, by its nature, lacks a...