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Dr Cooke’s Protest: Benjamin Cooke, Samuel Arnold, and the Directorship of the Academy of Ancient Music Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-18 BRYAN WHITE
In 1789, the Academy of Ancient Music replaced Benjamin Cooke with Samuel Arnold as its musical director. This article offers a detailed analysis of an autograph copy of the address Cooke delivered to the Academy responding to their action, and of a letter to Cooke from Arnold countering accusations made regarding his conduct in the affair. Both documents are annotated by Henry Cooke, who used them
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How Music and Our Faculty for Music Are Made for Each Other Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-18 JAMES PARAKILAS
This study relies on the prevalence of certain structures that largely distinguish the creation and reception of music from that of language – namely, temporal grids, scalar grids, and segments with their repetitions – to construct a model of the human cognitive faculty for music that allows humans to make music the way they do. The study draws on research and thought in philosophy (including phenomenology)
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Szymanowski’s Third Piano Sonata and First String Quartet and the Artistic Theory and Practice of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz: ‘Pure Form’, Subjectivity, and the Burlesque Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-11 STEPHEN DOWNES
Karol Szymanowski and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz were leading figures in Polish modernism. A thorough review of their relationship and an examination of Witkiewicz’s theory of ‘pure form’ and its applicability to music (via Witkiewicz’s literary portraits of Szymanowski, his attempts at composition, and the critical and theoretical extensions of his work by Konstanty Regamey) provides the basis for
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A Matter of Hono[u]r: Editing and Performing Beethoven’s Late Quartets in 1840s London Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-10 NICHOLAS MARSTON
The importance to reception history of the first complete cycle of Beethoven’s string quartets, given in London in 1845 by the Beethoven Quartett Society, is securely established. Less well recognized is the significance of the complete edition of the quartets prepared by the cellist Scipion Rousselot and published in London in 1846. This article offers the first close examination of Rousselot’s edition
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Letting Beethoven’s Hair Down: Dancing and Musicking in Vienna Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-09 NATASHA LOGES
It feels fitting to have worked on this review in Baden bei Wien, in which Beethoven spent many summers. This pretty town southwest of Vienna boasts not only a Beethoven-Haus, but also a Beethoven-Panoramaweg, Beethoven-Rundwanderweg, Beethoven-Spazierweg, and even an imposing Beethoven-Tempel, offering a scenic view; notions of decentring, decolonizing, or even critically engaging with Beethoven’s
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Reflections on Women in Music Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-09 SUSAN WOLLENBERG
Four substantial volumes dedicated to women in music, all published within the past couple of years, give welcome indication of the continuing growth of this area of study.1 Following some general background, I first survey the books, then consider each individually. That I select chapters to discuss in detail does not mean that others would not deserve comparable attention. I can give only a glimpse
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Sonic Figurations for the Anthropocene: A Musical Bestiary in the Compositions of Liza Lim Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-09-09 JOSEPH BROWNING, LIZA LIM
This article presents a musical bestiary, a collection of creatures found in the work of the composer Liza Lim. It is a thought experiment, meant to unsettle current ways of thinking about music and its relationship with the world. Centring our discussion on sonic figurations rather than on a composer’s works, we experiment with alternative musical ontologies and consider their lessons for understanding
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Was Carlo Gesualdo’s Honour Killing Liturgical? Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-15 JEFFREY LEVENBERG
In recent years, musicologists have dropped the murder charges against Carlo Gesualdo because criminal law in Renaissance Italy permitted cuckolds to execute their unfaithful wives. As Annibale Cogliano has expounded, Gesualdo had the right to perform an ‘honour killing’. Still, the known facts of this case are few, and the extent to which Gesualdo premeditated his attack has remained a mystery. Through
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Wagner’s ‘Bridal Chorus’ from Lohengrin and its Use as a Wedding March Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-03 MATTHIAS RANGE
The ‘Bridal Chorus’ of Wagner’s 1850 opera Lohengrin is one of the most recognizable pieces of music in the world. This article explores how it became so inextricably associated with wedding ceremonies – real ones, or on stage and in film. Furthered by its use at several British royal weddings the music was especially popular at wedding ceremonies in Britain and the USA. Notwithstanding that the chorus
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Childhood’s Charms and Nature’s Enchantments: Listening to Enescu’s Impressions d’enfance Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-08 JAMES SAVAGE-HANFORD
Enescu’s Impressions d’enfance is notable for the ways in which it evokes a childlike fascination with the world. This article considers not only how this experiential mode is constructed, but also how the topic of childhood overlaps with Enescu’s conception of an enchanted dwelling-place, particularly in the context of how humans interact with the natural world. I argue that exploring such ‘strategies
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Sibelian Formal Principles in the First Movement of Malcolm Arnold’s Fifth Symphony Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-04-04 RYAN ROSS
Malcolm Arnold’s symphonies have persistently divided critical opinion because of their problematic relationship with traditional genre expectations. This is especially the case in works that eschew sonata-style tonal conflicts and formal markers in favour of theme- and timbre-driven processes. In these respects, Sibelius, rather than members of the Austro-German symphonic tradition, was an important
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Enter Children, with Childhood Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-02-01 T. F. COOMBES
Anglo-American musicology is having a childhood moment. The foundation of the American Musicological Society’s Music and Childhood Study Group marked this moment most clearly, together with the launch in 2021 of an accompanying website maintained by Susan Boynton and Ryan Bunch.1 Not that children and childhood are anything new as a topic of enquiry in music studies: since the mid- to late twentieth
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Possibilities of the Interval: Heidegger and the Reimagining of the Interval in Luigi Nono’s A Carlo Scarpa Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-02 JOHN BARTON
From 1976, the works of the Venetian composer Luigi Nono (1924–90) are marked by a noticeable change in both his philosophical and his political outlook. What results is a decade (1980–9) of compositions that feature poetry in librettos, live electronics, the spatialization of sound and a prominent use of microtonal pitches. Together these create completely novel soundscapes that are noticeably different
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‘On which they (merely) held drones’: Fugitive Tapes from the Theatre of Eternal Music Archive, 1963–6 Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-02 PATRICK NICKLESON
Between 1963 and 1966, John Cale, Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and a handful of other collaborators rehearsed together on a daily basis. Held since then in the archive at Young and Zazeela’s Church Street apartment in New York City, the tapes of the Theatre of Eternal Music have become obscure objects of fascination and mystery for experimental music fans. They have also been at the
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Universal Neumes: Chant Theory in Messiaen’s Aesthetics Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-02 JONAS LUNDBLAD
Gregorian chant exerted a pivotal influence on Olivier Messiaen’s spiritual and musical universe. Scholars have noted his theological preference for this repertoire and its central role in his organ playing, and have observed how some of Messiaen’s melodies contain obvious traces from chants. Recent analytical work has ventured further and shown how plainchant in fact served as a melodic and formal
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Approaching Incidental Music: ‘Reflexive Performance’ and Meaning in Till Damaskus (III) Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-02 LEAH BROAD
Incidental music of the early twentieth-century has received little musicological attention, despite its widespread use during this period of history. Theatres were a popular means by which audiences could interact with new music, and composers could experiment with new ideas and build collaborative relationships. Using a 1926 Swedish production of August Strindberg’s Till Damaskus (III), directed
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By Myself but Not Alone. Agency, Creativity and Extended Musical Historicity Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-02 ANDREA SCHIAVIO, KEVIN RYAN, NIKKI MORAN, DYLAN VAN DER SCHYFF, SHAUN GALLAGHER
In this paper we offer a preliminary framework that highlights the relational nature of solo music-making, and its associated capacity to influence the constellation of habits and experiences one develops through acts of musicking. To do so, we introduce the notion of extended musical historicity and suggest that when novice and expert performers engage in individual musical practices, they often rely
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Round Table: A ‘Musical League of Nations’? Music Institutions and the Politics of Internationalism between the Wars Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-02 SARAH COLLINS, BARBARA L. KELLY, LAURA TUNBRIDGE
This round table grew out of two gatherings in 2018–19 that endeavoured to bring musicologists into dialogue with recent revisions in the history of international relations.1 Our specific focus was the interwar period, more often discussed in terms of nationalism – or perhaps at best transnationalism – than within the context of internationalism, a principle that lay behind the foundation of elite
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Performing Internationalism: The ISCM as a ‘Musical League of Nations’ Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-02 GILES MASTERS
After the First World War, some musicians embraced ‘international’ identities in novel ways, requiring novel strategies.6 During the 1920s, internationalist initiatives were launched in musicology, music education, folk music and more, joining a more general proliferation of institutions devoted to cultural internationalism.7 In the domain of Western art music, the most high-profile internationalist
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Worker Internationalism, Local Song and the Politics of Urban Space Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-02 HARRIET BOYD-BENNETT
At the height of the strikes and factory occupations that marked Turin’s biennio rosso (‘two red years’, 1919–20) a series of songs circulated among the workers. I will focus on two of these songs – La guardia rossa and Miśeria, miśeria – to listen to the particular stories they tell about the experiences of the city’s labouring classes: the ways in which the songs functioned as vehicles of political
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From the History of Jazz in Europe towards a European History of Jazz: The International Federation of Hot Clubs (1935–6) and ‘Jazz Internationalism’ Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-02 MARTIN GUERPIN
‘Hot clubs’ proliferated all over Europe and the United States during the 1930s. For a brief period (1935–6), they joined forces in an International Federation of Hot Clubs (IFHC), the main purpose of which was to link together devotees in search of American hot jazz recordings at a time when they were difficult to find and buy in Europe, since that sub-genre was less popular and commercially successful
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Music and Internationalism in Nazi Germany: Provenance and Post-War Consequences Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-02 IAN PACE
In October 1945, five months after the end of the Second World War in Europe, German critic Edmund Nick wrote the following in the American-sponsored Munich newspaper Neue Zeitung:
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Reconstructing a ‘Special Relationship’ from Scattered Archives: America, Britain, Europe and the ISCM, 1922–45 Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-02 KATE BOWAN
In an account of the early history of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) for a 1946 BBC broadcast, president of the ISCM Edward Dent recounted the ‘two main reasons’ why London was proposed as the society’s initial headquarters at that first meeting in 1922 in Salzburg. Firstly, he maintained, ‘it stood apart from all the quarrels and jealousies of the Continent’, and secondly
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Difference in Contact: Early Music, Colonialism and the Archive Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-02 WILLIAM FOURIE, GEORGE K. HAGGETT
Towards the middle of 2021, the world felt like a shattered place. The fatigue of a little more than a year of social distancing was perhaps at its most acute and resuming a more immediate form of academic exchange seemed all but impossible. It was during this time that we were approached by this Journal’s then newly appointed reviews editor, Amanda Hsieh, to co-author a review article. It was an intriguing
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Variations on the Musical Sublime Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-02 KATHERINE FRY
It can sometimes seem as if musicology is perpetually running late. At least, that is the impression that emerges from two new histories of music and the discourse of the sublime in European culture and aesthetics. Both books stress an imbalance between music and other scholarly fields as a premise for revisiting the long history of the sublime, charting its rise to prominence in the late-seventeenth
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The Influence of Narcoculture on Popular Music: A Critical Look at Reggaeton’s Narco-Messages and Narco-Representations Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-05-16 OMAR RUIZ VEGA
In this study, I take a critical look at the presence of narcoculture in reggaeton using as a case study the music video of the remix of ‘Somos de calle’. Specifically, I evaluate whether and to what extent reggaeton’s narco-messages and narco-representations – when they converge with other variables – could potentially influence an individual’s modes of thinking and behaviour. The study does not aim
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Music and Identity in Paraguay: Expressing National, Racial and Class Identity in Guitar Music Culture Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-04-04 SIMONE KRÜGER BRIDGE
This article illustrates, with particular focus on Rolando Chaparro’s rock fusion album Bohemio (2011), the way in which music operates in expressing Paraguayan national, racial and class identity. It first reviews the literature on music and identity generally, as well as more specifically in relation to Paraguay. It then explores expressions of nationalism and paraguayidad (Paraguayanness) in folkloric
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Re-examining Salon Space: Structuring Audiences and Music at Parisian Receptions Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-03-11 NICOLE VILKNER
Historians have viewed nineteenth-century music salons in Paris as concert-like environments where performers and audience gathered in a designated music room. Architectural studies and first-hand accounts, however, show that the music salon incorporated multiple reception rooms, and that guests frequently listened to musical performances from adjoining spaces. While conceptual space has been a subject
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Histories of Hearing Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-03-09 KARIN BIJSTERVELD
In January 2019, the Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage (CRAL) at L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris presented the conference Sound and Music in the Prism of Sound Studies.1 A spectacular video announces the event: a heavy-metal band screams about the conference’s themes and cries out each speaker’s name, which is in turn spelt out on screen in gothic-bloody
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Music in Radio Drama: The Curious Case of the Acousmatic Detective Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-03-09 KENNETH SMITH
This article explores music’s role in radio drama. While musical aspects of early experimental radio dramas have often been explored, the music that figures in the Anglo-American radio play tradition has remained under-theorized. Borrowing interpretative tools from audiovisual discourses can help to elucidate some of the subtleties of the medium, but methodological inadequacies soon become apparent
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Before Pan Awoke: A Quiet Beginning for Mahler’s Third Symphony Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-03-04 MILIJANA PAVLOVIĆ
In the genesis of Mahler’s Third Symphony, the composition of the first movement occupies a particularly interesting and important position. The first in the symphony but the last to be composed, this movement had a complex structural development from the mere introduction that it was originally supposed to be to the gigantic and extraordinary construction that we know today. As it is, every new piece
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‘A crazy clutter of the mediaeval, medical mind’: Ken Russell, Peter Maxwell Davies and Modernist Medievalism in The Devils Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-03-04 ALEXANDER KOLASSA
Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils is a shocking historical drama which, eclipsed by its own battle against censorship, has only recently had a critical revival. A landmark musical collaboration central to that film remains unexplored: Peter Maxwell Davies wrote the score, which is heard in tandem with ‘period’ performances from David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London. Though ostensibly
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Foundations, Market Failures and the Funding of New Music Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-03-04 ERIC DROTT
In 1965, a short article entitled ‘On the Performing Arts: An Anatomy of their Economic Problems’ appeared in the American Economic Review, the flagship journal of the American Economic Association.1 Written by two Princeton-affiliated economists, William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, the article laid out in eight short pages a powerful explanation for why the operating costs of so many performing
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‘Piano ou Clavecin?’ Joaquín Nin’s Feud with Wanda Landowska’s Harpsichord Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-01-10 SONIA GONZALO DELGADO
Wanda Landowska and Joaquín Nin were, in the context of the Parisian Schola Cantorum during the first decade of the twentieth century, two of the leading artists performing the harpsichord repertoire. This established them as pioneers of its concert practice, but their irreconcilable attitudes to performance – Landowska’s supposedly historical/reconstructive (employing the harpsichord) and Nin’s updated
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Listening for Realism in Charpentier’s Louise Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-11-08 FLORA WILLSON
On 2 February 1900, Gustave Charpentier’s opera Louise premièred at Paris’s Opéra-Comique. Set in contemporary Montmartre, the work was discussed ubiquitously by its earliest critics as réaliste (translatable as both ‘realistic’ and ‘realist’) – a tendency that has continued in more recent musicological writing. In this article, I focus on Louise and discourse around it in order to re-examine the complex
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Transubstantiating Miserere: James MacMillan’s Compositional Theology Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-11-04 ARIANA PHILLIPS-HUTTON
The Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan (b. 1959) is a vocal proponent of contemporary sacred music, yet little scholarly analysis looks beyond the surface to explore how theological themes and language influence his work. This article offers a fresh perspective on the relationship between theology and music via an analysis of MacMillan’s characterization of his compositional process as ‘transubstantiation’
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Between Hoffmann and Goethe: The Young Brahms as Reader Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-10-15 REUBEN PHILLIPS
This article provides a critical account of Brahms’s early collection of quotations, aphorisms and poems commonly known as Des jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein in the context of the composer’s youthful engagement with German literature. Drawing on archival materials housed in Vienna, it evaluates the 1909 publication of the Schatzkästlein by the Deutsche Brahms-Gesellschaft and traces Brahms’s path
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Music, Noise and Conflict: Sociotechnical Imaginaries, Acoustic Agency and Ontological Assumptions about Sound Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-10-08 LUIS VELASCO-PUFLEAU
In a 1969 interview, the Italian composer Luigi Nono stated that, ‘If a score cannot provoke or incite revolution, it can contribute to it by participating in intellectual and revolutionary hegemony.’1 Drawing on the work of Antonio Gramsci, Nono considered composers as intellectual workers with a responsibility to catalyse or amplify the social struggles of their times through the technical means
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Constructing the Public Concert Hall Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-10-08 NEIL THOMAS SMITH
In the current discourse surrounding classical music institutions, issues of inclusion and diversity are regularly to the fore. There is pressure to prove the relevance of orchestras and ensembles to wider society, with outreach work in educational settings and in communities already an established part of their output. Using data gathered from a research project with the International Music and Performing
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Beethoven Biography at the 250th Anniversary Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-10-07 ERICA BUURMAN
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Summer’s Gone: Late Style and Popular Music Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-09-16 STEPHEN GRAHAM
The Beach Boys’ 2012 album That’s Why God Made the Radio is typically nostalgic, filled with seemingly sunny reminiscences and retreads that hark back to the 1960s. And yet other parts of the album look back in a more critical fashion, exploring unresolved melancholy through a rich musical language. What makes this even more complicated is the fact that it is possible to hear these two ‘sides’ of the
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Notating Deconstruction: What Can Ethnomusicological Transcription Learn from the Notational Practices of Contemporary Composers? Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-26 MATTHEW WARREN
Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s (1981) approach to deconstructing Platonic dichotomies, this article argues that any notational system is inherently structuring and should be subjected to deconstructive efforts. Further, my contention is that this deconstruction can be realized in how notation itself is used, in what I refer to as ‘deconstructive notation’. This article looks at how notation has been
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‘Yet another guitar recital filled the Wigmore Hall’: The Popularization of the Classical Guitar in Britain, c.1950–c.1970 Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-08-13 DAVE RUSSELL
The popularity of the classical guitar in Britain surged between 1950 and 1970. The virtuosity of elite professionals led by the pioneering Andrés Segovia and the new stars Julian Bream and John Williams earned the classical instrument considerable purchase within the wider culture. Above all, it inspired thousands of largely middle-class, male, relatively young and urban amateur players, attracted
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Processes, Paradoxes and Illusions: Compositional Strategies in the Music of Hans Abrahamsen Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-06-17 DANIEL MARCH
Hans Abrahamsen’s recent music has been the subject of much critical and public acclaim, with his output of the last decade finding a new directness of expression even as it incorporates and develops elements of his musical language that have remained consistent over many years. This article examines the use of compositional processes within a number of these large-scale works – Schnee (2008), Wald
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Popular Song and the Poetics of Experience Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-06-17 ROSS COLE
This article argues that songwriting can be an autobiographical activity. I trace a long-standing mistrust of self-expression in popular music through a branch of scholarship fixated with performance and personification, demonstrating its underlying affinities with post-structuralism and modernist dreams of impersonality. What we have lost as a result of this undue insistence on mediation is an awareness
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Groove in Cuban Son and Salsa Performance Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-06-17 ADRIAN POOLE
Using a combination of ethnography, empirical measures of microtiming between rhythm-section musicians and ethno/musicological analyses, this article examines and measures groove in three real-world performances of the popular dance tradition of Cuban son and salsa. The findings paint a complex picture of groove that is shaped by rhythmic-harmonic structure, shared concepts of timing, individual preferences
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On the Politics of Performing Wagner Outdoors: Open-Air Opera, Gesamtkunstwerk and the Third Reich’s ‘Forest Opera’, 1933–45 Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-06-17 KIRSTEN PAIGE
This article explores the politics of performing Wagner outdoors, focusing on the Waldoper in Sopot, Poland, and its operations under the Third Reich. Festival literature suggests that the Reich combined climatic deterministic logic with established open-air theatrical practice to implicate experiencing Wagnerian sounds outdoors as inculcating völkisch character in Poles, positioning the festival within
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‘Remplis l’air d’alegresse pour ce seigneur chery des cieux’: Music in the Entries of Nobility and Other Dignitaries in Late Renaissance France (c.1585–c.1615) Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-06-17 ALEXANDER ROBINSON
Although royal entries have long been studied by scholars, those undertaken by nobles and other political figures have generally attracted less attention. This is particularly true in musicological literature, a fact undoubtedly attributable to the paucity of surviving documentation on this topic. Yet music often played an important part in these spectacles, both by underlining the dignitary’s status
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Black Opera, Operatic Racism and an ‘Engaged Opera Studies’ Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-06-17 KAREN HENSON
Naomi André’s Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement is a call for recognition and inclusion. Over the course of nearly 300 pages, André covers a range of subjects, from long-forgotten concert performances, to opera, Broadway and opera film, to contemporary operatic composition and practice. As she does, she moves between the United States and South Africa – a striking way of approaching her material
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The Birth of ‘Modern’ Vocalism: The Paradigmatic Case of Enrico Caruso Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-06-16 BARBARA GENTILI
In the decades spanning the turn of the twentieth century Italian opera singing underwent a profound transformation and became ‘modern’. I explore the formative elements of this modernity and its long-term effects on the way we sing today through the paradigmatic case of the tenor Enrico Caruso. I frame Caruso’s vocal evolution within the rise of verismo opera, comparing selected recordings, reviews
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Alienated Entertainment: Ludwig Berger’s Meistersinger Film Der Meister von Nürnberg (1927) Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-05-27 ÁINE SHEIL
Der Meister von Nürnberg is a silent film adaptation of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg remembered chiefly for the protests it generated on its release in 1927. Several authors refer to it briefly in reception histories of Die Meistersinger, but the film has not yet attracted sustained attention either within Wagner scholarship or within literature on opera and film. Der Meister von Nürnberg
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Victims of Compromise: The Elizabethan Psalm Tunes Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-04-19 NICHOLAS TEMPERLEY
The music of The Whole Book of Psalms (first printed in 1562) was not a product of English tradition, but a new congregational system brought home from Geneva. Psalm tunes in Edward VI’s time had been secular, iambic and based on dance rhythms; in so far as Thomas Sternhold’s metrical psalms were sung in church, they were chanted by choirs to Sarum tones. The tunes created for congregational use by
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Oh, What a Musical War! A Retrospective after the First World War Centenary Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2021-03-22 MICHELLE MEINHART
As Emma Hanna notes in the opening line of Sounds of War, ‘In parallel with studies of the poetry of the Great War, Britain’s musical history of the conflict has focused on a small group of elite composers’ (p. 1). Indeed, musical interest in the war has tended to focus on the likes of Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams and George Butterworth just as literary enquiry has traditionally centred on
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Satire, Empire and Chromaticism in Dargomyzhsky’s Orchestral Fantasias Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2020-11-13 KIRILL ZIKANOV
In 1863, Alexander Dargomyzhsky hatched plans for a gallery of humorous fantasias that would depict nationalities residing on the western border of the Russian Empire, including Baltic Germans, Poles, Ukrainians and Finns. On the one hand, this gallery of satirical portraits was an effective way of capturing the attention of domestic audiences, since the western borderlands were at the forefront of
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The Examiner and the Evangelist: Authorities of Music and Empire, c.1894 Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2020-11-13 ERIN JOHNSON-WILLIAMS
In the 1890s, two musicians travelled between Britain and South Africa. One was the first examiner to travel abroad to examine for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, Franklin Taylor. At the same time as Taylor’s arrival in the Cape in 1894, a black South African composer, John Knox Bokwe, prepared to republish a tonic sol-fa hymnal containing many hymns that eventually became popular
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‘A Perfectly Self-Contained Tetralogy’: Mahler’s Tragicomic Inspirations Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2020-11-13 LEAH BATSTONE
This article examines Mahler’s Fourth Symphony and its role in what the composer called his ‘perfectly self-contained tetralogy’. Previous explanations for this phrase include the first four symphonies’ shared song quotations and ideological content, but the dramas of ancient Dionysian festivals present a better model: three serious tragedies and a comic satyr play, a performance grouping also known
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Amateur Recording on the Phonograph in Fin-de-siècle Barcelona: Practices, Repertoires and Performers in the Regordosa-Turull Wax Cylinder Collection Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2020-11-13 EVA MOREDA RODRÍGUEZ
The Regordosa-Turull wax cylinder collection, held at the Biblioteca de Catalunya, Barcelona, is unique among early recording collections. It contains 358 cylinders recorded by the textile industrialist Ruperto Regordosa, mostly at his Barcelona home, featuring prominent Spanish and non-Spanish singers of opera and zarzuela, as well as the composer Isaac Albéniz. This article aims to establish the
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Scaramouche, Scaramouche: Sibelius on Stage Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2020-11-13 LEAH BROAD
Sibelius’s only balletic pantomime, Scaramouche, composed in 1913, remains one of his least-known works, even though it is one of his longest dramatic scores and belongs to his period of compositional re-evaluation. This article explores the pantomime in the context of its first production, performed in 1922 in Denmark and 1924 in Sweden. It argues that the pantomime’s reception both illuminates the
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‘Der mächtigste Tanzmeister des Kaiserreiches’? Offenbach at 200 Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2020-11-01 MARK EVERIST
The year 1863 was one of the few in which Jacques Offenbach premièred no major stage work. And while it is true that he contributed music to the comédie by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy entitled Le Brésilien, his public output that year was overshadowed by the establishment by the Académie Française of the Prix Montyon, to be awarded ‘to French authors of works most beneficial for morality and commendable
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The Ambiguous Ethics of Music’s Ineffability: A Brief Reflection on the Recent Thought of Michael Gallope and Carolyn Abbate Journal of the Royal Musical Association (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2020-08-03 MARTIN SCHERZINGER
Michael Gallope’s book Deep Refrains is an in-depth study of the ineffable core of musical experience.4 But it engages ineffability without eliminating the pragmatic material of music’s economic, technological and even ethical mediations; and it posits a synergistic relationship between these realms. Gallope casts equal doubt on the determinism that construes music’s ineffability as wholly absorbed