Music and Letters - recent issues

Nigel Fortune Retires After 28 Years as Editor of Music & Letters

Olleson, E. — 2008-04-25

Richard Dering's Few-Voice 'Concertato' Motets

Wainwright, J. P. — 2008-04-25

Richard Dering (c.1580–1630) was one of the first English composers to be influenced by early seventeenth-century Italian concertato techniques. This article focuses on the Latin motets for one to three voices and basso continuo (the subject of a forthcoming volume in the series Musica Britannica). The motets were especially popular in England after 1625 and had such widely differing performance contexts as the private chapel of Queen Henrietta Maria (Charles I's Roman Catholic queen) and the chambers of Oliver Cromwell. The musical heritage of the motets is explored—locating them in relation to early seventeenth-century Roman and Venetian music in particular—and, following an examination of the sources of Dering's motets, a number of additions to the accepted canon is proposed. The article concludes with an examination of the dissemination and publication of the motets.

Beethoven Instrumentalized: Richard Wagner's Self-Marketing and Media Image

Vazsonyi, N. — 2008-04-25

Wagner's ‘theatricality’, his tendency to make a production of himself, has been explained as evidence of his megalomania and as an attempt at self-aggrandizement. In this article Wagner's extravagant behaviours and utterances are placed on a different discursive plane, as imaginative and highly successful forms of self-marketing. Beethoven, central to Wagner's iconoclastic historiography of music and legitimation of his aesthetic project, was also a crucial element in Wagner's effort to create his own distinct persona and to establish a ‘unique’ niche for his works. A close reading of Wagner's novella A Pilgrimage to Beethoven (1840) and an analysis of his publicity campaign to attract and prepare the Dresden audience for his 1846 performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony reveal both the complexity and the mechanics of Wagner's highly constructed self-image and talent at drawing a crowd. They also explain how and why Wagner's instrumentalization of Beethoven needs to be viewed from this perspective as well.

Who is the Father? Changing Perceptions of Tallis and Byrd in Late Nineteenth-Century England

Cole, S. — 2008-04-25

The extensive prefatory material of the Cantiones sacrae of 1575 casts Tallis and Byrd jointly as the parents of English music, but during the nineteenth century Tallis's position as ‘Father of English Church Music’ was undisputed, while Byrd's music was relatively neglected. The turn of the twentieth century, however, saw the beginning of a re-evaluation of the respective merits of the two composers. This article examines the nineteenth-century reception of Tallis and Byrd, paying particular attention to the change in attitude that occurred towards the end of the century, and to the role of Roman Catholicism in the early twentieth-century Byrd revival.

Loyalty and Longevity in Audience Listening: Investigating Experiences of Attendance at a Chamber Music Festival

Pitts, S. E., Spencer, C. P. — 2008-04-25

There is currently much concern among arts organizations and their marketing departments that audiences for classical music are in decline, yet there has been little investigation so far of the experiences of long-term listeners that might yield insights into audience development and retention. This paper presents a case study of the Music in the Round chamber music festival, conducted over a three-year period that included the retirement of the host string quartet, the appointment of a new resident ensemble, and associated changes in audience attitudes and priorities. Questionnaire and interview data revealed the challenges faced by audience members in shifting their loyalty to a new ensemble and reappraising their own listening habits and stamina. The interaction between individual listening and collective membership of an audience is discussed, and the potential considered for understanding classical concert-goers as ‘fans’ or ‘consumers’.

Music in Medieval Europe: Studies in Honour of Bryan Gillingham. Ed. by Terence Bailey and Alma Santosuosso.

Hornby, E. — 2008-04-25

The Musical World of a Medieval Monk: Ademar de Chabannes in Eleventh-Century Aquitaine. By James Grier.

Hornby, E. — 2008-04-25

William Byrd and his Contemporaries: Essays and a Monograph. By Philip Brett and ed. by Joseph Kerman and Davitt Moroney.

Neighbour, O. — 2008-04-25

J. S. Bach's Concerted Ensemble Music: The Ouverture. Ed. by Gregory Butler.

Talbot, M. — 2008-04-25

Explaining Tonality: Schenkerian Theory and Beyond. By Matthew Brown. * Structure and Meaning in Tonal Music: Festschrift in Honor of Carl Schachter. Ed. by L. Poundie Burstein and David Gagne.

Drabkin, W. — 2008-04-25

Society, Culture and Opera in Florence, 1814-1830: Dilettantes in an 'Earthly Paradise'. By Aubrey S. Garlington.

Budden, J. — 2008-04-25

Franz Liszt and his World. Ed. by Christopher H. Gibbs and Dana Gooley.

Loya, S. — 2008-04-25

Schumanns Albumblatter. Ed. by Ute Jung-Kaiser and Matthias Kruse.

Tunbridge, L. — 2008-04-25

Vincent d'Indy et son temps. Ed. by Manuela Schwartz with the assistance of Myriam Chimenes.

Hart, B. — 2008-04-25

French Music since Berlioz. Ed. by Richard Langham Smith and Caroline Potter.

Hart, B. — 2008-04-25

Enrique Granados: Poet of the Piano. By Walter Aaron Clark.

Christoforidis, M. — 2008-04-25

Debussy and the Fragment. By Linda Cummins.

Code, D. J. — 2008-04-25

Theodor W. Adorno and Alban Berg: Correspondence 1925-1935. Ed. by Henri Lonitz. Trans. by Wieland Hoban.

Chadwick, N. — 2008-04-25

Sergey Prokofiev: Diaries 1907-1914. Prodigious Youth. Ed. by Anthony Phillips.

Fairclough, P. — 2008-04-25

Lou Harrison. By Leta E. Miller and Fredric Lieberman.

Dickinson, P. — 2008-04-25

Remembering the Future. By Luciano Berio.

Earle, B. — 2008-04-25

Sing, Ariel: Essays and Thoughts for Alexander Goehr's Seventieth Birthday. Ed by Alison Latham.

Mark, C. — 2008-04-25

Arsenio Rodriguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music. By David F. Garcia.

Baker, G. — 2008-04-25

Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music. By Wendy Fonarow.

Moore, A. F. — 2008-04-25

Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience. By Aden Evens.

Gritten, A. — 2008-04-25

Claude le Jeune, Livre de melanges 1585. Ed. by Isabelle His. * Paschal de L'Estocart, Sacrae Cantiones 1582. Ed. by Annie Coeurdevey and Vincent Besson. * Jacotin, Chansons. Ed. by Frank Dobbins and Marie-Alexis Colin. * Eustache Du Caurroy, Missa pro defunctis. Ed. by Marie-Alexis Colin.

Freedman, R. — 2008-04-25

Alban Berg, Sonate fur Klavier op. 1 UE33070. Ed. by Klaus Lippe.

Chadwick, N. — 2008-04-25

Notes to Contributors

2008-04-25

'Music & Letters' Awards

2008-04-25

Books Received

2008-04-25

The Gaze of the Listener: Shakespeare's Sonnet 128 and Early Modern Discourses of Music and Gender

Trillini, R. H. — 2008-01-30

From the Tudor period on, keyboard skills were a staple in the education of girls of ‘quality’. However, theoretical admiration of music and musical skill always co-existed with wariness of actual performers and performances. The hyperbolic musical metaphors for love and marriage contrast with a near-complete absence of harmony and edification in representations of actual music-making. Those two main literary uses of music represent the period's acutely ambivalent discourse on music as well as women, both of which may be perceived as divinely admirable or hellishly tempting. Literary references to keyboard playing favour the latter: the virginals are regularly associated with lewdness and sexual availability. This general discursive and historical background as well as the literary tropes associated with the virginals inform a new reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet 128, whose much-deprecated cruxes and mixed metaphors are read not as authorial oversights but as a significant elaboration of contradictions in the English discourse on musical performance, particularly when undertaken by women.

Alice Shortcake, Jenny Pluckpears, and the Stratford-Upon-Avon Connections of Vaughan Williams's 'Sir John in Love'

Savage, R. — 2008-01-30

Although Vaughan Williams's opera Sir John in Love (after Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor) was largely written in the 1920s, much that is central to it resulted from the composer's time in August 1912 and spring 1913 as musical director of the Benson Company—seasoned Merry Wives players—at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Things Stratford-connected in Sir John probably include the libretto's broad approach to the adaptation of Shakespeare's comedy (with some detailed matters of theatrical ‘business’ as well), the provenance and deployment of the inset song texts that characterize the opera, the introduction of the big Jonsonian masque in the last act, and the folk-music inflection of several parts of the work. (A Stratford summer school of Cecil Sharp's surrounded the Memorial Theatre with folksong and dance in August 1912.) The opera is further coloured and shaped by ideas aired in essays Vaughan Williams was writing around that time, especially in matters of the proper functioning of English musical communities and the importance of ballad opera to the native operatic tradition, tempered albeit with the need to avoid insularity and Merrie Englandism.

'An honest contrivance': Opera and Desire in 'Moonstruck'

Citron, M. J. — 2008-01-30

Opera can circulate through many layers of a mainstream film and set in motion desires inside and outside the fiction. Moonstruck (1987) sports a special tone that Pauline Kael has characterized as contrivance that plays against the real thing, without producing irony. Opera's exaggeration, artifice, and ritual figure prominently in the special tone, and the music and story of La Bohème play a major role. Excerpts make up a substantial portion of the soundtrack, the protagonists attend a performance of Bohème and display affinities with the opera's characters, and Bohème's connection with the Metropolitan Opera is underlined. A close reading of how Puccini's music is used, incorporating Werner Wolf's theories of intermediality, examines why certain cues are taken verbatim and others are instrumental arrangements, and the consequences for desire. Two major diegetic engagements with Bohème receive extended treatment: at an actual performance, and at the phonograph (one of the latter creating the climax of the film). The prominence of opera in the film at so many levels reveals an urge towards the genre of opera-film. Moonstruck fulfils spectators’ desires, ambivalent though they may be, for recognizing and yielding to the kitsch qualities already present in La Bohème: a prime example of how film can reveal something fundamental about an opera.

Arnold Schoenberg's 'Biblical Way': From 'Die Jakobsleiter' to 'Moses Und Aron'

Berry, M. — 2008-01-30

This essay follows Schoenberg's path from Die Jakobsleiter to Moses und Aron, with particular reference to these works and to his spoken drama, Der biblische Weg. Schoenberg's development may be summarized in general terms as leading from the religious syncretism of Die Jakobsleiter, via Zionism (Der biblische Weg), to the ‘negative monotheism’ of Moses und Aron. It is a journey strongly influenced by Schoenberg's German, Lutheran inheritance, his Judaism, and, most importantly, the problematical yet productive interplay between these influences. An alternative understanding of this path, centred on the compositional and philosophical dialectic between freedom and organization, is also examined, in the context of the claim that these are ultimately two formulations of the same problem. These dialectics are played out in an arena that is theological, political, and aesthetic, questioning the acceptability and indeed possibility of artistic representation and ‘effect’. Such questioning is in turn related to broader issues concerning modernism.

Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice. By Robert Fink.

Skipp, B. — 2008-01-30

Il 'concerto grosso' romano: Questioni di genere e nuove prospettive storiografiche. By Agnese Pavanello.

Talbot, M. — 2008-01-30

Eighteenth-Century Russian Music. By Marina Ritzarev.

Jensen, C. R. — 2008-01-30

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A Biography. By Piero Melograni.

Steptoe, A. — 2008-01-30

Mozart: The First Biography. By Franz Xaver Niemetschek, trans. by Helen Mautner.

Steptoe, A. — 2008-01-30

Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early-Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera. By Naomi Andre.

Walker, L. — 2008-01-30

Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries. Ed. by Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Downing A. Thomas.

Tcharos, S. — 2008-01-30

Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth. Ed. by Susan Boynton and Roe-Min Kok.

Cooper, B. — 2008-01-30

George Onslow, Gentleman Compositeur. By Viviane Niaux.

Rushton, J. — 2008-01-30

Nietzsche and Music. By Georges Liebert.

Spitzer, M. — 2008-01-30

Reflections on Liszt. By Alan Walker. * The Cambridge Companion to Liszt. Ed. by Kenneth Hamilton.

Saffle, M. — 2008-01-30

The Ballets of Maurice Ravel: Creation and Interpretation. By Deborah Mawer.

Bhogal, G. K. — 2008-01-30

Edward Elgar, Modernist. By J. P. E. Harper-Scott.

Thomson, A. J. — 2008-01-30

Variations on the Theme: Galina Ustvolskaya. By Simon Bokman. Trans. by Irina Behrendt.

Fanning, D. — 2008-01-30

Music, Theatre and Politics in Germany: 1848 to the Third Reich. Ed. by Nikolaus Bacht.

Whittall, A. — 2008-01-30

Benjamin Britten: The Spiritual Dimension. By Graham Elliott.

Venn, E. — 2008-01-30

Music in Educational Thought and Practice: A Survey from 800 BC. 2nd edn. By Bernarr Rainbow with Gordon Cox.

Paynter, J. — 2008-01-30

The Discourse of Musicology. By Giles Hooper.

Gritten, A. — 2008-01-30

The Spanish Song Companion. Devised and translated by Jacqueline Cockburn and Richard Stokes.

Hess, C. A. — 2008-01-30

The Musical Human: Rethinking John Blacking's Ethnomusicology in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. by Suzel Ana Reily.

Stock, J. — 2008-01-30

Notes to Contributors

2008-01-30

'Music & Letters' Awards

2008-01-30

Books Received

2008-01-30

The Sense of Touch in 'Don Giovanni'

Rumph, S. — 2007-10-19

While Don Giovanni has fascinated posterity, the Commendatore perhaps resonated more deeply with Mozart's age. Living statues haunted the late Enlightenment imagination, expressing, among other values, the new primacy of touch. For post-Cartesian thinkers, touch supplanted reason as the bedrock of cognition and aesthetics. Touch plays the same veridical role in Giovanni, above all in the famous handshake of Giovanni and the Commendatore. Three scenes are analysed, illuminated by the psychological theory of Berkeley, Condillac, and Herder. Zerlina's ‘Vedrai carino’ traces an integrative path from sight to touch. Her discourse recedes from conventional poetic and musical rhetoric into more immediate bodily representations. In ‘Là ci darem la mano’, conversely, music and poetry grow increasingly stylized as the false taking of hands proceeds. The banquet scene enacts another integration of representation and reality, as the Commendatore forces Giovannni to engage an older linguistic paradigm. This reading, grounded in the senses and signs, can temper more allegorical readings.

Another Mass Attributable to Giovanni Rovetta

Drennan, J. R. J. — 2007-10-19

This article examines the authorship of an a cappella mass for four voices, which survives in several sources and is presented under various names, including Roeton, Ruetton, and Natale Monferrato—maestro di cappella of S. Marco (Venice) during 1676–85. The true author is the Venetian Giovanni Rovetta (c.1596–1668), maestro Claudio Monteverdi's distinguished assistant (1627–44) and successor (1644–68) at S. Marco.

Lutoslawski, 'Akcja' , and the Poetics of Musical Plot

Reyland, N. — 2007-10-19

Hitherto unknown or, at best, forgotten lectures delivered by Witold Lutoslawski in the early 1960s contain revelatory passages concerning his attempts to inculcate substance and plot-like directionality in his music: what the composer, through the development of his personal compositional poetics, came to term his music's akcja (‘plot’). The revelations contained in the lectures ‘Problems of Musical Form’ and ‘Pitch, the Interval and Harmonic Aggregate’ are outlined in this article in the hope that scholars, musicians, and listeners concerned with Lutoslawski's music will find it both useful and stimulating to engage critically with each lecture's key concepts and the interpretations offered herein. The article then makes a number of suggestions concerning ways in which one might begin to adapt ideas derived from the recoverable traces of Lutoslawski's poetics of musical plot to the analysis and interpretation of his music, before presenting analytical sketches of scores including his Concerto for Orchestra (1950–4), Concerto for Cello and Orchestra (1969–70), Chain 2 (1984–5), and Symphony No. 4 (1988–92). It concludes by assessing the potentially revisionist implications of a fuller understanding of akcja for the wider critical debates concerning the scope and successfulness of Lutoslawski's art.

From Sketch to Score: A Facsimile Edition of Boulez's 'Le Marteau Sans Maitre'

O'Hagan, P. — 2007-10-19

Music and Ideas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. By Claude V. Palisca, Ed. by Thomas J. Mathiesen.

van Orden, K. — 2007-10-19

The Royal Chapel in the Time of the Habsburgs: Music and Court Ceremony in Early Modern Europe, Ed. by Juan Jose Carreras, Bernardo Garcia Garcia, and Tess Knighton. Trans. by Yolanda Acker.

Vavoulis, V. — 2007-10-19

The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Ed. by Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon.

Cardamone, D. G. — 2007-10-19

The Art of Commedia: A Study in the Commedia dell'Arte 1560 1620 with Special Reference to the Visual Records. By M. A. Katritzky.

Heck, T. F. — 2007-10-19

'To Fill, Forbear, or Adorne': The Organ Accompaniment of Restoration Sacred Music. By Rebecca Herissone.

Diack Johnstone, H — 2007-10-19

The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and Eighteenth-Century Musical Style. By W. Dean Sutcliffe.

Ife, B. — 2007-10-19

Recognition in Mozart's Operas. By Jessica Waldoff.

Steptoe, A. — 2007-10-19

Die Opera seria bei Joseph Haydn: Studien zu Form und Struktur musikalischer Affekdramaturgie und Figurentypologiesierung in Armida und L ' Anima del filosofo ossia Orfeo ed Euridice. By Bernhard Waritschlager.

Rice, J. A. — 2007-10-19

The Symphony in Beethoven's Vienna. By David Wyn Jones.

Cooper, B. — 2007-10-19

E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Aesthetics. By Abigail Chantler.

Riley, M. — 2007-10-19

Bruckners Neunte im Fegefeuer der Rezeption, Ed. by Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn.

Horton, J. — 2007-10-19

Jumping to Conclusions: The Falling-Third Cadences in Chant, Polyphony, and Recitative. By Richard Hudson.

Hornby, E. — 2007-10-19

Les Offices historiques ou 'historiae' composes pour les fetes des saints dans la province ecclesiastique de Reims (775 1030). By Jean-Francois Goudesenne.

Hiley, D. — 2007-10-19

The Old French Ballette: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308. Ed. and trans. by Eglal Doss Quinby and Samuel N. Rosenberg. Music Editions and Commentary by Elizabeth Aubrey.

Leach, E. E. — 2007-10-19

Instruments a claviers expressivite et flexibilite sonore: Actes des rencontres internationales harmoniques, Lausanne 2002. Ed. by Thomas Steiner.

De Val, D. — 2007-10-19

Fromental Halevy: La Reine de Chypre. Dossier de presse parisienne (1841). Ed. by Anne-Sophie Meterie.

Pottinger, M. A. — 2007-10-19

Republican Morality and Catholic Tradition in the Opera: Massenet's Herodiade and Thais. By Clair Rowden.

Huebner, S. — 2007-10-19

Victorian Songhunters: The Recovery and Editing of English Vernacular Ballads and Folk Lyrics, 1820 1883. By E. David Gregory.

Scott, D. B. — 2007-10-19

Taffanel: Genius of the Flute. By Edward Blakeman.

Smith, R. L. — 2007-10-19

The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840 1910: Class, Culture and Nation. By Phyllis Weliver.

Richards, J. — 2007-10-19

The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815 1930. By Susan Rutherford.

Wilson, A. — 2007-10-19

Music Theory and Analysis in the Writings of Arnold Schoenberg (1874 1951). By Norton Dudeque.

Simms, B. R. — 2007-10-19

Dmitri Shostakovich: A Life in Film. By John Riley.

Heine, E. — 2007-10-19

Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (New Edition). By Elizabeth Wilson.

Fanning, D. — 2007-10-19

Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film. Ed. Phil Powrie and Robynn Stilwell.

Citron, M. J. — 2007-10-19

Edgard Varese: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary. Ed. by Felix Meyer and Heidy Zimmermann.

Nicholls, D. — 2007-10-19

Voices in the Wilderness: Six American Neo-Romantic Composers. By Walter Simmons.

Nicholls, D. — 2007-10-19

Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures 1964 1987. Ed. by Chris Villars.

Gresser, C. — 2007-10-19

True to the Roots: Americana Music Revealed. By Monte Dutton.

Hill, S. — 2007-10-19

Music in Brazil: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture. By John P. Murphy.

Budasz, R. — 2007-10-19

The Westrup Prize

2007-10-19

Notes to Contributors

2007-10-19

Books Received

2007-10-19