Music

A few weeks after the reunification of Germany, Leonard Bernstein raised his baton above the ruins of the Berlin Wall and conducted a special arrangement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The central statement of the work, that “all men will be brothers,” captured the sentiment of those who saw a brighter future for the newly reunited nation. This now-iconic performance is a palpable example of “musical monumentality” — a significant concept which underlies our cultural and ideological understanding of Western art music since the nineteenth-century. Although the concept was first raised in the earliest years of musicological study in the 1930s, a satisfying exploration of the “monumental” in music has not yet been made. The author sets his focus on the main players of the period within the Austro-German repertoire as he unpacks a two-fold definition of “musical monumentality.” The author generally attempts to examine how German music emerges as a unified cultural and musical brand.

Georg Philipp Telemann provided a rich legacy of instrumental music from the 18th century. Though considered a definitive contribution to the genre during his lifetime, his concertos, sonatas, and suites were then virtually ignored for nearly two centuries following his death. Yet these works are now among the most popular in the baroque repertory. Music for a Mixed Taste considers Telemann’s music from stylistic, generic, and cultural perspectives. It investigates the composer’s cosmopolitan “mixed taste”—a blending of the French, Italian, English, and Polish national styles—and his imaginative expansion of this concept to embrace mixtures of the old (late baroque) and new (galant) styles. Telemann had an equally remarkable penchant for generic amalgamation, exemplified by his pioneering role in developing hybrid types such as the sonata in concerto style (“Sonate auf Concertenart”) and overture-suite with solo instrument (“Concert en ouverture”). The book examines the extramusical meanings of Telemann’s “characteristic” overture-suites, which bear descriptive texts associating them with literature, medicine, politics, religion, and the natural world, and which acted as vehicles for the composer’s keen sense of musical humor. It then explores Telemann’s unprecedented self-publishing enterprise at Hamburg, and sheds light on the previously unrecognized borrowing by J. S. Bach from a Telemann concerto. Music for a Mixed Taste further reveals how Telemann’s style polonaise generates musical and social meanings through the timeless oppositions of Orient-Occident, urban-rural, and serious-comic.

This book examines the rich musical environment of Fryderyk Chopin's youth and places Chopin's early works in this milieu. It provides a historiographic perspective that allows a better understanding of Poland's cultural and musical circumstances. Chopin's Warsaw emerges from the pages of this book as a vibrant European city that was home to an opera house, various smaller theaters, one of the earliest modern conservatories in Europe, several societies which organized concerts, musically active churches, spirited salon life, music publishers and bookstores, instrument builders, and for a short time even a weekly paper devoted to music. The city was aware of and in tune with the most recent European styles and fashions in music, but it was also the cradle of a vernacular musical language that was initiated by the generation of Polish composers before Chopin and found its full realization in his work. Significantly, this period of cultural revival in the Polish capital coincided with the duration of Chopin's stay there — from his infancy in 1810 to his final departure from his homeland in 1830. An uncanny convergence of political, economic, social, and cultural circumstances generated the dynamic musical, artistic, and intellectual environment that nurtured the developing genius and provided the specifically Polish experience so central to his musical style.

Based on documentary and archival research, this book provides a study of the rise of music at a vital center of Italian Renaissance culture, focusing on the patrons and musicians whose efforts gave Ferrara a primary role in European music during the 15th century. The successive rulers of the Italian city-state, members of the Este dynasty, brought to Ferrara some of the most important composers of the period, including Guillaume Dufay, Johannes Martini, Jacob Obrecht, and Josquin Desprez. Moreover, Ferrara has long been famous as the seat of activity of three of the most important poets of the period — Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso — as well as for its school of painting and manuscript production and illumination. In this book Ferrara, the city-state, steps forward as a major musical center as well.

This book provides a first look at the ideological dilemmas and methodological anxieties that pervaded the discipline of musicology (in German, Musikwissenschaft, encompassing music theory, analysis, and the study of music history) at the time and place of its academic institutionalization. Engaging in close readings of key contributions by Eduard Hanslick, Heinrich Schenker, and Guido Adler, all leading pioneers in the field, it argues against the widely held assumption that German musicology of the period was characterized, first and foremost, by a positivist endeavor to transform the discipline after the model of the natural sciences. Instead, it suggests that the work of its three central figures was shaped not only by progressivist ideologies of scientific positivism but also, and just as profoundly, by the skeptical pronouncements of Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and other critical observers of modern culture. It furthermore suggests that some of the most pressing questions regarding musicology's disciplinary identities in the present day—about the relationship between musicology and criticism, the role of the subject in analysis and the narration of history, and the responsibilities of the scholar to the listening public—have points of origin in the discipline's conflicted and largely forgotten beginnings.

This book explains musical instruments in their various forms: how they work, what they can do, and how they came to be the way they are. It concentrates on instruments of western music built to play in musical traditions transmitted in large part by notated scores and parts. The recent growth of early music performance is reflected in an emphasis on the historical development of the main types of instrument. For each class of instrument, the underlying acoustical principles are outlined and the commonly found members of the family are described. Their manufacture, playing techniques, and performance practice are treated.

This book is a cultural history of the Philippines from 1898 to1998, outlining the role of music in defining nation and the influence of national-level politics on shaping musical expression. The work traces three themes that suffuse the musical articulation of nation and nationalism. The first is a broad concern with modernism as an impulse in the development of Philippine national character in a postcolonial setting and, more specifically, how modernism becomes apparent in music. The second theme is the inescapable condition of hybridity that pervades nationalistic expression as much as it does other aspects of individual, community, and national identity. The third theme deals with cultural politics, including the tensions between official statements and the multifarious expressions of artists that are variously in compliance with and in contestation against the aims of the state. The main topics of the book include nationalist composers of the early twentieth century; folkloric performance of the nation by the Bayanihan Philippine Dance Company; the institutionalization of culture through the Cultural Center of the Philippines under the Marcos regime; the musical ambassadorship of the Philippine Madrigal Singers; alternate expressions of nationalism during the first People Power Revolution of 1986; and the products of musical nationalism created for the 1998 centennial of independence from Spain.

This book examines the powerful but often overlooked presence of the organ in synagogue music and the musical life of German-speaking Jewish communities. The author chronicles the history of the organ in Jewish culture from the earliest references in the Talmud through to the 19th century, by which time it had established a firm and lasting presence in Jewish sacred and secular spaces in central Europe. She demonstrates how the introduction of the organ into German synagogues was part of the significant changes that took place in Judaism after the Enlightenment, and posits the organ as a symbol of the division of the Jewish community into Orthodox and Reform congregations. Newly composed organ music for Jewish liturgy after this division became part of a cross-cultural music tradition in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, when a specific style of organ music developed that combined elements of Western and Jewish cultures. Concluding with a discussion of the organ in Jewish communities in Israel and the USA, the book presents case studies which illustrate how the organ has been utilized in the musical life of specific Jewish communities in the twentieth century. Based on extensive research in the archives of organ builders and Jewish musicians, it offers descriptions of specific organs as well as portraits of Jewish organists and composers. The book's extensive companion website features full color illustrations and over 200 organ dispositions.

Because it has always represented a rich collaboration of the music, art, architecture, handicraft, and science of its day, the organ, more than any other instrument, continues to reflect the spirit of the age in which it was built. This book considers the instrument's historical and cultural significance, and reflects the efforts of twenty scholars of the organ. The book chronicles the history of six organs in Scandinavia and Northern Germany, at least one specimen for every century from 1600 to the present. By considering their original contexts and their histories since they were built, as well as the extraordinary coincidences that link them together, the book offers a unique perspective on the cultural history of northern Europe.