Music

Its performing traditions lost to time, early music has become the subject of significant controversy across the world of classical music and presents numerous challenges for musicians, composers, and even listening audiences. The studies of instruments and notes on early manuscript pages may help to restore early music to its intended state, yet the real process is interpretive, taking place within performers themselves. This book is about historical performance practice in its broadest sense. The book begins by identifying the most common performing styles, using and comparing sound recordings from the past. To help musicians distinguish between Period and Romantic styles, the book engages with the most current and controversial topics in the field in defining the differences between them. Throughout, it presents many compelling arguments for using pre-Romantic values as inspiration to re-examine and correct Romantic assumptions about performance. From Werktreue and the Urtext imperative to formality in ritualized performances and authenticity as an industry standard, this book offers straightforward explanations of the most significant questions in the field. Two chapters compare Baroque expression through rhetoric and gestural phrasing to the Romantic concept of autobiography in notes. The book argues that performances are more pleasing and convincing to contemporary performers and listeners not through the attempt to return to the past, but rather by endeavoring to revive as best we can the styles and techniques that originally produced the music.

Ancient beliefs in the power of music gained urgency during the mid to late 18th century. The period saw an efflorescence of Orpheus-themed musical works, including operas by Gluck, Mozart, and Haydn. Orpheus as archmusician also emerged as a key trope in aesthetic, literary, critical, and historical thought. Yet this widespread interest in musical utility (called Orphic discourse) seems to conflict with the notion of aesthetic autonomy that emerged around the same time. The confluence of these apparently antithetical positions casts doubt on the widespread view that there was an aesthetic-philosophical break between the 18th and 19th centuries. Instead, this book exposes the hidden instrumentality that is typically disavowed by aesthetic disinterest and concludes that musical utility is a site of discursive continuity within modernity. Focusing on the English traveler and music historian Charles Burney's 1772 journey through the Netherlands and central Europe — soon to be the home of aesthetic autonomy — the book examines the scholarly discussions and social practices that characterize the Enlightenment as an age of Orpheus. It argues that aesthetic autonomy went hand in hand with the late 18th-century insistence on music's moral, social, and political utility. It argues that the foregrounding of alterity, like the new historicization of music, arose within the context of the late 18th century's increased mobility and its burgeoning cross-cultural encounters. The traveler's exposure to new listeners and new musical vernaculars posed critical challenges to classical ideas about what music could do. Understanding the broader function of Orphic discourse thus necessitates a transnational approach that coheres with the cosmopolitan character of serious music and music scholarship. Such an approach exposes the ways in which Orphic discourse made claims about music acting at the margins in order to promote specific class, professional, and national interests.

Granddaughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Fanny Hensel (1805–47) was an extraordinary musician who left well over four hundred compositions, most of which fell into oblivion until their rediscovery late in the 20th century. This book offers a compelling, authoritative account of Hensel's life and music, and her struggle to emerge as a publicly recognized composer.

This book is the first-ever biography of one of Spain’s greatest musicians in the modern era. Composer, conductor, and impresario Federico Moreno Torroba (1891–1982) had a long and productive career, during which he witnessed many dramatic changes in the social, political, and cultural life of his homeland. And yet, despite the vicissitudes of Civil War, dictatorship, and the gradual return of democracy and prosperity, he remained firmly committed to his goal of composing Spanish music rooted in the fertile soil of regional folklore and the daily life of his fellow Spaniards, especially in his native city, Madrid. Torroba composed over seventy works for the stage and nearly a hundred works for the guitar, among a wide variety of other vocal and orchestral compositions. Not only was he prolific, but his works for the stage and the guitar have also found a permanent place in their respective repertories. Torroba’s music has enduring appeal precisely because it exhibits the passion and verve of the songs and dances that inspired it, whether a Cuban habanera, a Castilian seguidillas, or an Andalusian bulerías. And yet, despite its accessibility and popular appeal, Torroba’s music reveals consummate craftsmanship and a true maestro’s careful attention to dramatic and musical detail. This biography tells not only the story of Torroba’s life but also of his native land and its music during some of the most turbulent and intensely creative decades in Spanish history.

The American tours of five visiting virtuoso pianists — Leopold de Meyer (1845-7), Henri Herz (1846-50), Sigismund Thalberg (1856-8), Anton Rubinstein (1872-3), and Hans von Bülow (1875-6) — are examined in this book in regard to their management, itinerary, repertoire, performance style, and reception. The transformation of audiences from boisterous to reverent, the gradual acceptance of the piano recital, the establishment of a canon of masterworks for the piano, and the evolution of concert-giving into a highly organized commercial enterprise are documented. Appendices include the itineraries of these five pianists, totaling almost one thousand concerts in more than one hundred cities, and the repertoire of Rubinstein and Bülow.

Music in the California missions was a pluralistic combination of voices and instruments, of liturgy and spectacle, of styles and functions—and even of cultures—in a new blend that was nonexistent before the friars made their way to California beginning in 1769. This book explores the exquisite sacred music that flourished on the West Coast of America when it was under Spanish and Mexican rule; it delves into the historical, cultural, biographical, and stylistic aspects of California mission music during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Aspects of music terminology, performance practice, notation, theory, sacred song, hymns, the sequence, the mass, and pageantry are addressed. The book explores how mellifluous plainchant, reverent hymns, spunky folkloric ditties, “Classical” music in the style of Haydn, and even Native American drumming were interwoven into a tapestry of resonant beauty. The book examines such things as style, scribal attribution, instructions to musicians, government questionnaires, invoices, the liturgy, architectural space where performances took place, spectacle, musical instruments, instrument construction, shipping records, travelers' accounts, letters, diaries, passenger lists, baptismal and burial records, and other primary source material. Within this book one finds considerable biographical information about Junípero Serra, Juan Bautista Sancho, Narciso Durán, Florencio Ibáñez, Pedro Cabot, Martín de Cruzelaegui, Ignacio de Jerusalem, and Francisco Javier García Fajer. Furthermore, it contains five far-reaching appendices: a Catalogue of California Mission Sources; Photos of Missions and Mission Manuscripts (with more than 150 color facsimiles); Translations of Primary Texts; Music Editions (that are performance-ready); and an extensive bibliography.

This book continues the stories presented in The Baroque Clarinet and The Clarinet in the Classical Period. Now attention is turned to large size clarinets—clarinet d'amour, alto clarinet, basset horn, bass clarinet, contra alto, and contra bass. Each chapter is devoted to a specific instrument or instruments and offers a meticulously researched history and insider's look at terminology, definitions, design features, documentation, makers, composers, musicians, and music. Research illustrates how makers experimented with instruments to address the specific musical needs of composers and players for chamber ensembles, wind bands, and opera orchestras. Brought to life are the people surrounding the instruments— the virtuosi, soloists, and orchestral and band musicians, as well as the instrument makers and composers from F. J. Gossec to Smetana who wrote for them and, the instruments themselves become characters in the story. Based on careful study of primary sources—musical compositions, patents, memoirs diaries, and many historical instruments—the presentation is nothing short of exhaustive. There are black and white photographs, tables, and musical examples. There are four appendices.

The increasing popularity of the field of Sound Studies marks the sonic turn in cultural studies since the millennium. This compilation draws on a number of diverse fields, including journalism, history, cultural studies, music, architecture, and art history, to ask what Germany sounds like. The book is divided into five sections, organized thematically. The first section, “New Sounds in the Twentieth Century,” considers the rise of urban sound in the early 1900s and the radio play in the post-war years. Section two, “Defining Space through Sound,” focuses on the interactions between sound and space, particularly the very different soundscapes of the battlefield and the concert hall. Section three considers the divergent sounds of East and West Germany, through interviews and literature, and section four, “The Politics of Sound,” deals with music in socialist East Germany and the power structures inherent in acoustic surveillance. Finally, “Soundscapers of the Millennium” looks at sound art and hip-hop as two examples of the creative and political possibility of sound. Together the chapters consider the acoustic fingerprint of Germany, the cultural significance of sounds and space in the German context, spanning more than a century from the development and rise of sound-recording and sound-disseminating technologies in the early 1900s to today. This book is designed as an introduction to the topic and is accompanied by online teaching materials.